Is there anything good about the modern era?

What a crazy question most people would say. Of course, there is. We are wealthier, healthier and have more understanding about the world than ever before. But to the spiritual eye we live in a time of unremitting evil in which our governments are attacking freedom, our scientists no longer seek truth, our churches deny God and our artists hate beauty. The list could be extended. Nothing does what it is supposed to do and often actively works against what it is supposed to do. Could there be anything good about any of this?

The answer is yes. God can always bring good out of evil and what he may be doing now is allowing the world to become so insane and corrupted (which it will inevitably do when separated from God who is truth) that more and more people will wake up and turn to him in response to the evil. When it gets so dark that you can't see, you reach out for the light. God is essentially saying "You think you can do without me? Very well, try it and see." Of course, some people are so far gone in their rejection of divine reality that they will never come to their senses. This may be through pride or it may be that they have simply killed their own souls through neglect and denial. But for those who are redeemable, now is their chance. This, I suspect, is only the beginning. The situation will rapidly deteriorate. It is only recently that the results of atheism have really kicked in as the legacy of religion has supported us for a certain time after religion itself was rejected. But we have now lived in a materialistic society for 100 years, give or take, and have used up our spiritual capital. True religion is followed by only a very few.

But this is good because it means that if and when we return to religion we do so because we want to and therefore we take it seriously. It's not just what people do. It's what we actively want to do, need to do.  Our religion will not just be a formal observation but a serious choice that determines our life and permeates all our thinking.

The present evils do not come from God. According to my understanding they are demonically driven and their main purpose is the corruption of souls which is a tragedy. But souls must choose God. That is the reason for us being in this world. We are given every opportunity but if we reject the opportunity that is our own choice. So God is not responsible for the evil in any way but he can use it as a means to wake us up as/if we react against it. The responsibility for this, though, is ours. We must learn to see evil as evil and that means recover a spiritual view of life which tells us that evil as not just doing bad things in a worldly sense. It is rejecting God and the idea of oneself as a spiritual being. In the final analysis, the spiritual view is the only one that makes any kind of sense but we have been deceived into thinking it is false because we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by over a century of propaganda. But what the last year has made abundantly clear is that you cannot trust authority. It's all been bought and paid for. God is telling you that your only hope is in him. Accept this gift and you will be free.

Loss of Trust

The events of the last year have underlined an important fact. It's something we already suspected but is now undeniable. Trust is dead. For a long time we haven't trusted politicians though that is partly because the very nature of democracy makes politicians inherently untrustworthy as they are always more concerned with vote-catching than anything else. Appearance is what counts and reality comes a long way behind. We haven't trusted journalists or the media for a while either as they are all seen to be in hock to the money and pursuing a good name in the eyes of the world. We trust politicians and the media less than ever but now we don't even trust scientists or the medical establishment. The Covid crisis has shown that all of these groups lie or avoid the truth (not entirely the same thing). Clearly, this doesn't apply to every member of these groups but in terms of them as groups, it certainly does.

Once trust has gone a society cannot sustain itself for very long. Its cohesion will unravel. That is what is happening now and the process is hurried along by the absurd error, so absurd it's hard to believe it wasn't deliberate, of multi-culturism in which incoming groups are given the same right to their own identity as the native population. This can only divide and separate. No longer was assimilation and respect to indigenous culture demanded of incomers. The process was actually reversed and respect to the incomers' culture was demanded of the indigenous. A society cannot last if it splits into component parts, each one vying for dominance. It must have something to unite around. The best thing is religion but a sense of national unity will also serve, and this sense of self is something most countries in the West have lost as they have given up their identity and history in order to allow new entrants to assert theirs. Why? It seems to me that if you want to come to a new country it is your obligation to adopt its ways and fit in with its traditions and culture. That was always the basic understanding but it has been abandoned over the last 2 or 3 decades. Welcoming new people is one thing but they for their part need to integrate fully and respect the ways of the country to which they have come.

What was presented to us as kindness has turned out to be weakness, the weakness displayed by a dying civilisation that had lost confidence in itself and disguised that loss as though it were compassion. But the result of that shallow and easy compassion is increasing chaos as structural safeguards to order are dismantled and thrown away. I would say that all of this comes ultimately from the loss of religion. When there is no sense of the transcendent, which is just a fancy way of saying no sense of God, then meaning and truth disappear to be replaced by greed and expedience. This is the world we have made for ourselves and we have done it out of crass stupidity. Warning voices have sounded for at least 100 years but we have ignored them. The result is the loss of trust.

This is not the whole story by any means. It describes the negative effects of wrong-thinking and bad decisions resulting from the giving up of faith but there is also an active attempt to corrupt and destroy that has gone along side it. This has involved the encouragement and stimulation of wrong-thinking, outwardly by certain thinkers, philosophers, politicians, artists and other in the public eye, inwardly by demons engaged in the attempt to return cosmos to chaos. But the 'mind viruses' released by these people have only been able to gain entry into human consciousness because our spiritual immune system has been so weakened. They then weaken it further and the process continues.

The only remedy for this is to regain trust. But this time it must be trust in God. The world situation has gone too far. There is no turning back from where we are now. These are the End Times when the poison has spread throughout the world system, unrecognised by most but no less deadly for all that. Those who want to be saved can be but you have to want it to the degree that you are prepared to give up this world. You are not going to be able to have the world or the good opinion of the world and God. You must choose which you want more and when you have chosen put all your energy and attention into living that choice. Put your trust in God and you will be given strength to sustain you during the inevitable coming difficulties.

Purification of the Mind

The modern mind has been darkened by over a century of materialism and atheism. These appeal to superficial minds because they simplify, apparently explaining everything in terms of what can be readily perceived. An atheistic mind is a shallow mind and I don't care how clever it may be in worldly terms. It is fundamentally ignorant and self-enclosed. By the same token, a culture that is materialistic and atheistic, as ours has effectively been for decades, makes for shallow minds, minds that are given no chance to grow upwards and expand beyond the world of appearance. What are we to do about this? We have created an intellectual (never mind spiritual) prison that boxes us in and makes us not only dull but little people.

The mind must be given the opportunity to grow in directions that are not currently acknowledged, ones that are dammed up by the dense obstructive nature of materialistic atheism. That much is obvious. When a door is closed tightly shut you cannot go through it and the situation is worse if you don't even see that there is a door that could potentially be opened. And yet this is not enough. The mind must also  be purified. This is because an atheistic mind is a heavily clouded mind, one that has been corrupted with a lie which then spreads throughout the whole of a person's being, tarnishing everything from imagination to sensitivity to motivation. The corruption probably even manifests physically. You purify a darkened mind by exposing it to light and there is no brighter and more cleansing light than that of Christ so I would suggest that the mind can be purified by reading the gospels, specifically the Gospel of John which shines a light from a higher plane.

However, it's not just a matter of reading. It's also how you read. This should be in a properly receptive state with critical faculties in the background and imagination to the fore. Let your imagination be kindled by the story of Jesus, his birth, life, death and resurrection, and also by his words and how he dealt with situations he encountered. Whether that was with suffering humanity or casting out devils or the serpentine mind of the Pharisees that tried to entrap him with their mechanical and empty cleverness. In every situation he responds with intelligence, deep insight, spontaneity and love. There is never the slightest suggestion of a formulaic approach. Everything just flows out of him with complete naturalness.

Unfortunately, the modern mind has become so materialistic that even when it is introduced to spiritual ideas it still retains a lot of its materialism and looks at them through the prism of the materialistic position instead of on their own terms or from the vantage point of the human soul as a spiritual being rather than the product of material forces. This often means that spirituality becomes something to acquire and display for the good of the earthly ego or it has to fit into a pre-existing worldly ethos. Again, this requires purification which can be done through prayer and practising the presence of God but also through reading of works from the past (not just scripture or overtly religious works) written from the assumption that we live in a creation and there is a Creator.

This is the most important thing. Know that there is a Creator and he has a purpose for mankind. He has a purpose for you and that purpose can only be fulfilled when you acknowledge him and open your heart to him. This opening of the heart is actually the expansion of the heart and the mind will follow. The converse is also true. A closed heart produces a closed mind. It is probable that our atheism arose from pride and a self-centred desire to bow to nothing and no one. This we are allowed to do but we must suffer the consequences, and the consequence of denying spiritual reality is that we shrink. We shrink spiritually, of course, but also morally, intellectually and creatively. If we want to rule our own roost, that roost will contract and we will contract with it. As we have done.

We made the mistake of trying to understand eternal realities from a lower frame of reference, the material frame of reference. But matter can never understand spirit and a completely different approach is needed. You cannot begin to understand spirit through material science, through physics or biology or through human-based psychology or analytical philosophy. You must approach it on its own terms and that means you must allow for the possibility of revelation. God has certainly revealed himself in many ways and continues to do so. But the most direct revelation, the one in which the divine manifested in this world without impediment, was in Jesus. Jesus will purify any mind that opens itself up to receiving him.

The Three Evils

My blogging companions Bruce Charlton, Frank Berger and Wm Js Tychonievich have all written some excellent and illuminating articles recently on the threefold nature of evil as defined by Rudolph Steiner, here, here and here.  According to this systemisation, evil can be personified as three beings or types which are Lucifer, Ahriman and Sorath in which, borrowing Frank's definitions, Lucifer is passionate, selfish, lustful, tormented and short-term, Ahriman is cold, controlling, systematic/bureaucratic, power-hungry and mid to long term and Sorath is the pit into which they all eventually fall (unless they repent) being purely negative, destructive, hateful and desirous of annihilating both creation and, eventually, itself.

It strikes me that these can be considered as evil manifesting on the emotional, intellectual and spiritual planes which is why they can all come from Sorath originally and then all return to 'him' eventually. As our focus moves through the various levels of being we may be prone to manifesting particular sorts of evil if we distort the qualities associated with those levels, evil only ever being a distortion of good and having no authentic existence itself.

 Luciferian evil is selfish above all, unable to control itself or its passions. It relates to the self as a creature of desire. It wants to be fed. I know a Luciferian type person who is abusive, angry, fiery. Lucifer is a hot evil.

Ahriman is almost the opposite to this and that is one reason we don't see it as evil now when it is the dominant evil insofar as it is the one having most impact on the world. But we still see evil primarily as a Luciferian thing, though with tinges of Ahriman and Sorath. I also know someone who is a very pure Ahriman type but  he lives almost like a monk. He is highly intellectual, self-denying in terms of material goods and, by his own standards, very moral, meaning in a leftist everybody must have equal access to everything way. He is fully on board with lockdowns and would like to extend that to combat climate change. But he gives the impression of being cold and dead inside. There is a spiritual void. He is not a conventionally bad person by any means and genuinely believes he is an upright individual  working for the good of humanity. But he has no time for God or the idea that we live in a created world with laws and principles that go beyond those of mathematics and physics. Ahriman is a cold evil, and if Lucifer is a corruption of quality, inasmuch as it relates to the passions and desires, then Ahriman is the idolisation of quantity. Everything can be measured and must be controlled. According to Tolkien, Sauron started off as someone who wanted to improve the world through control. His rings were chiefly means for him to do that. He seems to be a typical Ahriman figure but, and this may be the destiny of all such types who do not turn round and repent, he eventually ended up in the black hole of Sorath.

Sorath seems to be something like non-being that, as it were, comes into mental form when being is manifested in creation. It is not a thing in itself but inevitable in a dualistic world in which everything  has an opposite just as light is the reality and darkness is merely the absence of light. So, Sorath is not actually real but gains a certain reality given to it by conscious beings becoming conscious of their own consciousness and freedom to deny what is. Sorath is the void, a cosmic dustbin into which everything goes that denies God. Neither hot nor cold but dead. As life necessarily implies death in the world but life is the reality so Sorath is the non-reality that arises as a potential when reality becomes actual. 

Steiner apparently thought that Lucifer and Ahriman served an evolutionary purpose but I disagree. I think they are just distortions of the good, possible because God has given us the freedom to deny divine reality which freedom he has given us in order that we might consciously choose divine reality and so bring about a creation of active good rather than simple sterile perfection.

A Reader's Question

I recently received an email from a private correspondent which I think expresses feelings many people are currently experiencing and so, with permission, I include it here together with my response.

"I must say this corona virus time is not a walk in the park for me and I guess that is true for many many other people.

I am suffering more than ever before. I cannot go into details, but sometimes the tension and pain seem to be unbearable. The worst is also that despite my prayers and meditations, I seem to stay in the midst of a dark night of the soul. Sometimes I can understand those folks talking about ascension, especially in the US because I too feel these symptoms. There is, they say, a huge transition taking place to another dimension. We are evolving from a carbon body to the light body. Many scientists-pioneers in different fields like Candice Pert, Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, Rupert Sheldrake, Lynn Mc Taggart, Erwin Laszlo, David Wilcock. Masaru Emoto etc seem to come to the same conclusion of the some spiritual traditions, that there is a unifying field of consciousness at the basis of all this and that everything is ONE. Again, I am confronted here with the question how this relates to my Christian faith. Another issue is the evolution of consciousness. And still another the wisdom traditions. 

Cynthia Bourgeault, Richard Rohr, Raimundo Panikkar, Teilhard de Chardin etc are all going into a seemingly other direction through these ideas. There is also an amazing work by a Catholic, published anonymously but subsequently shown to be by Valentin Tomberg , with an afterword by the great theologian Hans von Balthasar. The different spiritual opinions can be confusing.

I see people around me laughing and enjoying things and that I compare them with my situation. I would like to know your opinion about all this."

My reply was as follows:

"I'm sorry to hear that you are going through a time of suffering but I really do think that for all spiritually inclined people this present period is like a baptism by fire. We know that the world is mad and even evil at the moment, now more than ever, but still we are caught up in it. We have to accept that it is our destiny and God's will that we go through this time. I can tell you that there are several things in my own life that are difficult now. It comes to us all, I fear. It is a big mistake to think that we can experience some kind of permanent spiritual state of consciousness in this life. This life is for learning not for joy. Joy comes sometimes and should be treasured but we cannot expect the fullness of joy until after we have left this world. That would simply stop the learning process. This is something that does actually happen to many spiritual people. They think they have reached the goal and thereafter they stagnate and that means they go backwards.

I don't think we are evolving out of our physical bodies into light bodies just yet. That lies way off in the future. Even the greatest of saints rarely experience this and saints are few and far between. I know some of the names you mention but I'm not that interested in them except Tomberg whose book is a classic. For me they fall into the New Age category which I feel is now slightly out of date. It arose at a time when people wanted to explore spirituality beyond Christianity but many of them lost Christ in the process as he got swallowed up in a generic mysticism. The problem with that is that you start to see yourself as the source of your own divine power and lose touch with the real God. Tomberg is good precisely because he avoided this error.

Anyhow, try to stay cheerful. Cheerfulness was one of the qualities the ancient yogis were supposed to cultivate and everyone knows the value of positive thinking. The spiritual counterpart, hope, is one of the three theological virtues. This may be a dark time but there really is light at the end of the tunnel for those who stay spiritually hopeful and true. We have to be tested to be found spiritually worthy, and the trials may be hard but the rewards are eternal.

Yes, people are laughing and enjoying things but I expect they were just before the Flood too. I am not predicting that but still most people are quite oblivious to the reality of the situation. Those of us who are aware of the spiritual disaster zone that is the 21st century should be grateful that we are so aware. What is worse? To be aware and to suffer or to be ignorant but content and carry on sinning which is what most do even if the sin is "only" neglecting God. When it comes down to it that may be the greatest sin of all."

Be Serious

The modern world is fundamentally superficial. I am not simply talking about the childish obsession of many adults with an ever more degraded popular culture, and nor do I just refer to the ordinary person though I include him. I am talking about present day thinkers, the intellectual class, the movers and shakers in all areas of life. Hardly any of these people are really serious. They are just playing games, more concerned with power, fame, money and influence than truth.

A serious person thinks about life and death and grapples with what those might mean because the meaning of death is directly related to the meaning of life. If you say that death has no meaning, it's just the end, curtains, goodbye, then you have washed your hands of spiritual responsibility. You have trivialised life because you have denied death, and, yes, you have denied it because you have reduced it to nothing and you can only do that by rejecting what it is to be human. For a human being is like an iceberg though with this important difference. It's an upside down iceberg with the perceived part the lowest part and the hidden part, which nevertheless supports the whole, stretching up above and beyond what is seen and known. The boundary between the two can be melted occasionally in life but is only fully crossed at death.

Human beings come into this world because, unlike in the spiritual domain from whence we derive, we do not know God directly here. We have to find him. We have to choose him. Everything in nature obeys God's laws automatically except man. We have a natural part which does obey as it must but a human being is also a person so there is necessity but there is also freedom. God has renounced his supreme power to give us some power and he has done so because of love in which there can be no compulsion.

There are fewer and fewer serious people these days, people really willing to think for themselves and look life squarely in the face. We are too distracted by phenomena and the shiny trinkets of modern technology to try to understand what a human being really is. Some people do seek a spiritual answer but the fact is not all forms of spirituality are equally valid. There are some forms that seek to reduce human beings purely to a kind of naked spirit, void of form and individuality. But this is a return to our origins without having learnt the lessons of creation and the material world, and if God had wanted this for us he would never have bothered sending us out into this world, separated from him in order to find him again and know him consciously for who and what he is. There is a higher form of spirituality which includes the spiritual and the individual and the fruits of this are love and creativity, something that pure spirit does not know. For the love that advocates of the pure spirit path talk of is not really this spiritual love at all. They have borrowed the concept from theistic religion while rejecting what makes it possible. Their love is impersonal but impersonal love is a contradiction in terms. God's love is not impersonal and directed equally to everything. He loves more what opens itself more fully to his love and reflects it back.

As the world progresses further and further into what is effectively chaos it is critical that people become serious. Don't accept what you are told by authority without submitting it to a thorough intuitive assessment. Even if everyone you know goes along with the agenda that is no reason for you to follow. Hold up everything you are told to the truth of Christ and see whether it stands or falls in that light. The time is coming when Christ will be the only serious thing left.

Ancient Aliens

I have been watching a series of programmes called Ancient Aliens that I came across by chance on an obscure channel. It discusses the theory that human civilisation was initially seeded by extraterrestrial beings who visited this planet when we were in a primitive state and, so to speak, jump-started our evolution, giving us the rudiments of technology and culture. It is even suggested that these beings manipulated our DNA to advance us intellectually and in terms of our conscious awareness of life. Constructions and artefacts from around the world are brought in to support the theory ranging from the Mexican pyramids at Teotihuacan to the rock cut Kailasa temple at Ellora in India and many other places. Myths and legends are also examined to help give credence to the idea. The programmes even investigate the possibility that there were extraterrestrial bases on Mars which may have been destroyed in massive thermonuclear explosions for which there is apparently some physical evidence.

It's all very intriguing though I wish the subject wasn't presented in the sensationalist manner it inevitably is. It is a sensational idea, of course, but it doesn't need portentous music, melodramatic commentary and over-the-top graphics to make its point. Some of the people interviewed, experts in their fields, are interesting even if they are only allowed short bursts in which to speak. All of which is to say that while there may be some substance in the programmes they are tabloid in style. 

But what about the theory? I suppose it goes back to Eric Von Daniken whose books were bestsellers in the 1970s though I haven't read them. As I recall, even at the time they were shown to be full of errors and false assumptions. I don't necessarily dismiss the theory on that account. Von Daniken may just have been over-enthusiastic in presenting it and seeing evidence for it all over the place through eyes that wanted to see it. But, as these programmes make clear, there are a lot of unexplained mysteries about the past, and when you factor in the many contemporary reports of UFOs and alien abductions from all over the world, it is obvious that something is going on which our modern worldview cannot explain.

But what? My understanding is that flying saucers and so-called extraterrestrial visitors, where they are real, come not from another part of this physical universe but its inner dimensions. They can materialise at certain times and under certain conditions but not for very long. This is why they appear and disappear suddenly. I believe there are many beings that exist on different levels (planes) of the material universe (using the world material to include non-physical realms outside the true spiritual world) and some of these may belong to what we might perceive as advanced (compared to us) civilisations. But this does not make them spiritual in the true sense. They may have great knowledge, psychic powers, occult abilities. They may have technologies beyond our knowledge and they may even, as one of the programmes claims, be trying to psychically inspire us to develop these technologies through impressing our brains with ideas. But that does not make them spiritual. Indeed, let me tell you that real spiritual beings have no technology. They do not need it. Technology is a material thing.

I notice that none of the programmes mention God, still less Jesus. They do mention higher states of consciousness, paranormal powers, inner dimensions of being, advanced evolution, that sort of thing, all of which is dubbed spiritual which most people think it is. However, I would say that these things can be grouped under the category of occult rather than spiritual. They are not necessarily bad but they relate to the non-physical levels of the material world rather than the true spiritual levels that we associate with God, Christ and heaven. They can be accessed by developed mind power regardless of spiritual or moral state and are to do with knowledge rather than the spiritual heart. Hence they fall into the category of "ye shall be as gods". 

Does this give us a clue as to what might be going on here? I am sure that true spiritual beings, angels from God, have been with humanity from the beginning, inspiring us and trying to move us along the spiritual path. But we know that demons have also been present from the beginning and they too seek to influence us in their way. Both operate through the mind but at different levels. In early times both may have been physically present in the world. Mythology alludes to both and sometimes it can be hard to prise them apart. But we know that Christ is the touchstone to which all things must relate to be true. As far as I am concerned, if these higher, supposedly more advanced beings do not reflect the real light of Christ, they are not spiritually healthy. I am not saying they are all evil. Some are demons but others may just be beings from other dimensions of the universe who have their own agenda as we humans would too if we encountered other beings, indeed as we did when we explored the globe and different peoples encountered each other. They might be good, bad or indifferent but they are not messengers from God.

Apparently this television series premiered in America on the History Channel in 2010 and has had 16 series with well over 100 episodes so far. I can't really recommend it because of its tabloid style and uncritical stance but it does have some interesting points to make.

A Time Against Race

I was recently called a racist because I don't believe there are no differences between ethnic groups or ancestral populations as is the official dogma these days. (Forgive the double negative but it serves a purpose here). But when I asked the person so dubbing me to define what she meant by racism I got no clear answer. Just the response that I was a racist because I would never have thought such a thing if I wasn't a racist.

Martin Luther King famously looked forward to the day when a man would be judged by the content of his character rather than the colour of his skin. Who could disagree with that? Not me. However, what if some of the content of a man's character (some, not all) was, to a degree, determined by the colour of his skin meaning his ethnic background? If a modern anti-racist was asked to wager his family's life on the results of an IQ test sat by 50 people from China and another 50 of West African origin being equal or random or the results of a 100 yard race between the same two groups being similarly equal or random, would he accept the challenge? Obviously environmental factors would have some influence on the outcomes but it is now largely accepted that there are also important genetic factors involved. Yes, both groups could be improved through training but the differences would not vanish.

The modern desire to erase race (except where white people are concerned, let's face it, they are always bad) might be based on a desire for fairness and a wish to correct past injustices, but to frame belief around and to build policy on what is untrue will never work. When foundations are not sound the building collapses as one suspects it is beginning to now. This will end up benefitting no one. It is far better to accept the truth and then build a future with compassion and fairness based on that truth. To deny truth always leads to disaster. The edifice so constructed will break under the pressure of reality.

If there are racial differences (and there must be as evolution didn't stop when anatomically modern human beings came about), some of them would be unimportant (such as skin colour) while others might be significant, giving an advantage to one group over others in certain areas of life. But let's look at this from a spiritual perspective, specifically a Christian one. Firstly, we do not deny truth on any level. This is important. Then the differences may exist but there is no Jew nor Greek in Jesus Christ. We are all one in God. This is the first fact on which all the others must rest. However, it is not the only fact. Just because there is no Jew nor Greek in Jesus Christ does not mean Jews and Greeks no longer exist. They do, and God has made them so or, at least, he has made a world in which Jews and Greeks can arise. This is the situation and we must have the maturity and wisdom and humility to deal with it as it is and not as we might want it to be. Falling into the arms of the equality dogma is childish evasion. There is no equality in nature or life in general (see here) but all things contain God even if they contain him in different ways and to different degrees. This gives extra richness to life though, again, it does not mean that all things are on the same spiritual level.

It is my impression that many of the current woke brigade, like many leftists of the last few decades, live according to ideology rather than common sense, natural instinct, reason or perception of reality. They believe what they want to believe, and what they want to believe is often the outcome of their own personal defects such as resentment, fear, insecurity and a sense of inferiority. If they worked to overcome those one would feel compassion for them and seek to help them, mainly through awakening them to the reality of God who can cure all such ills. But I condemn them because instead of seeking to overcome their failings they impose these failings on society. Their beliefs are not free and true but prompted by their own inadequacies which they project onto others who must then be made to bear their burdens through the resultant dogmas and policies. We are called to help the suffering but not to justify sinners in their sins. It is not uncompassionate to point to sin and weakness with the aim of establishing the truth of God in the world. It is cowardly to enable these things for fear of seeming nasty according to worldly standards.

The modern world has grown far away from God and so it must create its own religion to satisfy the deep spiritual need all human beings have whether they admit to it or not. When this need is blocked from going in the true direction it will create a false one. That is what the worshippers of equality have done, mistaking the doctrine of the oneness of life in Christ for a doctrine of all men being equal here and now and whatever they think or believe or are. This is a worldly or material parody of the spiritual truth and because corruptio optimi pessima est it acts as a barrier to the real truth by counterfeiting it. The fraud must be exposed. God loves humanity but because of that love he wants us to come up to him where we will find our true fulfilment. To pretend that Earth is Heaven is to deny Heaven.

We think that our denial of racial differences is a mark of our enlightenment. It is actually a mark of materialism because it seeks to reinterpret what is real in the world of spirit according to the world of matter which is a different world with different factors in play. You cannot bring spirit down to you. You must go up to it. Because we don't know real love we invent a pretended love which denies truth, something that real love can never do. A better world will never come by denying truth.

What is Evil?

 Bruce Charlton has written another one of his perceptive posts about the nature of the world today. In it he examines how the modern world has no proper understanding of evil and therefore has sunk deeply into it, more deeply than at any time before. He starts off by quoting someone who points out that "it is not right to say, as many do, that it has always been like this", and I commented that I constantly hear this too. But even in my lifetime it has not always been like this. I accept I have become more aware of evil as I have become more aware of the reality of God, but even so the fact is that never before have so many people, almost everyone, in fact, actively embraced ideas, thoughts, actions and systems that work directly against God and the principles of creation.

We don't understand evil because we view it purely in materialistic terms as violence, murder, rape, poverty, starvation and so on. These are evils but they are only one sort of evil and actually not the most important sort. They are evils of the body but there are evils of the soul as well and it is these latter we have succumbed to today. Evils of the soul are those that deny or downplay the reality of God and the spiritual purpose and destiny of the soul. This is Good. Anything that works against Good is evil so evil does not necessarily mean being nasty or even cruel as we see those things in a worldly sense. Some of the most evil people today are highly moral in their own terms. If that statement shocks you it means you do not understand the spiritual reality of good and evil.

This generation is fully aware of evils of the past and often exaggerates them because of its one-sided approach to life, a fear and hatred of any kind of material suffering. But this has led it into a massive blindness with regard to its own evils. These arise from an ignorance of the true good. You cannot know good if you do not know God. This is not just a glib saying. It is the fundamental truth. Good is spiritual good, it is what works to bring the human soul into closer relationship with God. Evil is what works to sever this relationship and separate Man from God and one of the ways it does this is through undermining the principles of creation, one of the most basic of which is the nature of the two sexes, man and woman. In a sense, these are the principles of creation and not just in the obvious material sense but in a spiritual one too where they represent spirit and matter whose union and interaction lies behind all manifested life. The contemporary attack on the principles of the masculine and feminine, through feminism, legitimisation of homosexuality and now the pretence that one sex can simply become another just because it wants to, is one of the more obvious forms evil takes today even though it is almost universally regarded as a good.

Coincidentally (or probably not because these things are on the minds of all right-thinking people just now),  Francis Berger has also written a very good post on how many modern Christians have bought into worldly evil. He calls these System Christians, an excellent term. These are Christians who really take their moral instruction from this world. They are too spiritually weak to see that what is good in the eyes of the world is often spiritually destructive. They may be well-meaning but they are also keen to appear right in the eyes of the established powers and are unlikely to suffer for their faith. They are really just materialists with a religious colouring who think religion exists to make us better men whereas it exists to make us entirely new men. And their idea of universal love boils down to acceptance of the world on its own terms while spiritual love means seeing the world in God's terms. I read a recent Easter message by a Church of England bishop that epitomised these people. There was no mention of what death and resurrection really means in a spiritual sense just some purely secular talk about the power of forgiveness and compassion during a pandemic. Basically, let's all be nice to each other.

What is evil? Evil is anything that works against real spiritual good. This means that even compassion can be evil if it is misdirected and supports sin, sin being defined as what separates us from God. God is misunderstood in a democratic age as being in everything equally. He is not. He is in everything as life but he is in some things more than others and our task as spiritual aspirants is to accord ourselves to that reality, always to enter more deeply into the good, the beautiful and the true. We must reject evil in all its forms, even those that dress themselves up as good which many do these days.

Increasing Clarity

 The events of the last 20 years, but specifically the last 12 months, can be looked upon as a spiritual good. Obviously in themselves they are a great spiritual evil because they have all involved the separation of man from God and the principles of creation. However, the good that can come out of them is in the reaction they may provoke in souls who might have gone along happily with a low-level materialism such as previous generations, who still lived in the light of past Christianity, experienced, but who are brought to their senses by the actual consequences of the assumption that there is no God and man can make his own reality in any way he likes. 

The worse things get, the more likely we are to wake up. As long as we do not really suffer from the absence of God, largely because we still live in a culture initially formed on a religious understanding of life, we can do without him - or so we think. But as soon as what a God-shaped void in our lives really means becomes apparent then we may start to realise what we have done. Once the mental derangement that is the outcome of this kicks in, once we realise that there is nothing to protect us from the self-interested powerful or, worse, the void of existential meaninglessness, once we actually face the truth of ourselves without God, then we might turn back to him. Currently we live in a comfortable (materially speaking) illusion but that may not last for very much longer. The more official propaganda is enforced, the more absurdly people behave, the more extreme the demands of the mentally unstable become, the more likely it is that normal people will cry "Enough is enough. We didn't know what we had until we threw it away." 

That does rather depend on a fundamental sanity and right orientation at the core of one's being, and it seems that many people may have largely lost this. Caught up in the worldly chaos, their spiritual instincts have so atrophied that they may not be able to revive them. Innate faults have been brought out and stimulated by atheistic materialism and it may be too late for some. But for all those in whom right thinking has not yet entirely departed there is the hope and the possibility that they might wake up as the madness increases and the effects of spiritual denial become clear. As the darkness spreads the need for light becomes more urgent, and the light is still there even though we ourselves have obscured it.

Christ and Christianity

Christianity is the only thing that can save us from the increasingly dystopian and evil world that is coming into being. It alone carries enough truth to overcome the lies with which we are bombarded on a daily basis as the vice of materialistic atheism is tightened. Or, at least, Christ does. Because Christianity itself as it has come to be nowadays has all too often degenerated into a religion that exists only along horizontal lines. This is to say it is understood as relating to the interaction between human beings on the earthly plane. It is becoming more of a social than a spiritual thing involving how we treat our neighbour, seeing him as an earthly being in a material light and not as a soul in need of salvation. But real Christianity relates to our relationship with God and is therefore to be understood vertically. Everything else flows from that. There is a horizontal dimension but it is very much secondary to the vertical just as matter is secondary to spirit, quite clearly so since it only exists as an expression of spirit.

The materialistic focus of much modern Christianity has imitated the general moral focus of the post-modern world. This is because so many church leaders are bureaucrats rather than saints or even aspiring saints. So they follow rather than lead, and they follow fashion rather than truth. What is the motivating force behind atheistic morality (or pseudo-morality)? It is something like harm avoidance. So it is less concerned with the soul and how to bring the soul into closer alignment with God than it is with comforting, supporting and sustaining the earthly man. Equality is not mentioned in the Bible but it is the obsession of contemporary morality and the churches have fallen in with this, thinking it a good above all others. This is because they have misunderstood love and that is because they don't know love except as an ideological theory, something they feel they ought to have. They have failed to see that equality is really a spiritual evil because what it inevitably does is reduce the high to the level of the low. You can have quality or equality. You can't have both, not in this world and not, in fact, in any world. Even the angels and the saints are hierarchically ordered. 

Equality is only possible with complete oneness which means either the chaos of unformed matter or the Night of Brahma when the universe has returned to an unexpressed, unmanifested state which is basically non-being. Creation is a disruption of oneness which breaks the perfect equality of non-being. Inequality is the essence of manifested life, the very foundation of the world, and the current movement to erase qualitative distinction and differences is an attempt to destroy cosmic order and reduce light to darkness. An inequality where the higher preys on the lower is obviously bad but this should not be used as an excuse to throw out the very notion of higher and lower for that is the basic principle of the structure of the universe, both in its material and spiritual forms.

Christianity as an organised religion flourished during the latter stages of humanity's childhood. It guided and instructed as a loving parent. Of course, many individual souls had moved beyond the childhood stage and these were often the ones who formed and tended Christianity, but the masses of people were in the childhood stage, spiritually speaking. However, over the last few centuries this has begun to change and you might now see the majority of people as being in a condition equating to adolescence. This is notoriously a very difficult time, one in which the individual rebels, throwing off the shackles, as he perceives them and as they may indeed be, of external authority. He is becoming an individual but unless he submits that individuality to a higher inner guidance he risks losing his way, and this is exactly what we have done. We should have moved beyond unquestioning spiritual obedience to an awareness of divine truths based on inner perception but we have refused to move out of our adolescent phase into adulthood. Our very culture reflects that. And official Christianity has not been able to keep up with the change.

The solution is in Christ as, of course, it always was. The only way out of the confused mess we have made for ourselves is to rededicate ourselves to him which means turn to the reality he represents. The reality of Christ is beyond any church though the church has guarded and protected the spiritual flame for two millennia and even independents like me must accept that without this protection our spiritual independence would not be possible. I can only know Christ inwardly because the church has kept his fire burning in the world. But now is the time when we must look for Christ first and foremost within our own hearts rather than the church. This is moving from childhood to spiritual maturity.

It is not too far-fetched to see the world as going through a kind of crucifixion at the moment. I anticipate things will become worse. We will lose our humanity because we have lost the sense of ourselves as spiritual beings and with that gone there is no longer truth. There is no longer even the idea of truth. There is only constructed ideology formed from the whims of the moment and the requirements of those who set themselves up as our masters. We will see ourselves purely in materialistic terms and when that happens we are easily manipulated as we are now by fear. Things will get worse but I am not pessimistic. Heaven awaits those who reject the lies of the world, all-powerful as they may seem to be, and realise that today, Easter Sunday, records the most glorious, most wonderful and truest event in the history of the planet. Christ's resurrection from death really did take place and it is something we can all share in. We too will be raised from material death into spiritual rebirth once we open up our hearts to the love of Christ. 

Good and Bad People

 I was thinking of all the people busily engaged in constructing the nightmare world of tomorrow, all the politicians, the scientists, the university lecturers, the media people and so on. It's unlikely they think they are bad people and doing harm. Bad people never do. Hitler and Nero probably thought they were doing good, on some level at least. Have you not noticed that bad people usually think they are good but good people don't think that of themselves. They are always aware of ways in which they are not good.