Protection from Lies

 I was asking myself recently that if I knew I was going to die in a few days' time what would I tell my children in an attempt to protect them from what is to come in the future. I mean by that the spiritual ravages that have been ongoing in their present form for several decades but, from being on the periphery, have now moved centre stage and are becoming ever more embedded in the culture like a cancer that spreads and eventually take over its host's body. What can protect against this? When almost the whole world is infected with lies where can we find truth? Human beings are often reluctant to go against prevailing good opinion but that is what we absolutely must do to have any hope of salvaging our souls from the darkness of the present times.

All parents know that, try as they might, however they bring up their children these are going to be subject to many other influences. This can be a good thing but in this day and age it rarely is. The culture is decadent. We assume we are more advanced than our ancestors, and in some ways we are, but the fact is that all the signs of the times point to dissolution. Liberalism is taken as a mark of an enlightened society but historically it always occurs in a dying and degenerate culture that has lost touch with reality, a civilisation that has become spoilt and inwardly rotten and is consequently unable to discriminate between right and wrong. The blurring of the boundaries between the sexes, now regarded as progressive but actually a clear indication of separation from nature (and don't forget that when we reject nature we reject God who is the author of nature) is another phenomenon that occurs regularly when a civilisation falls in on itself, having cut itself off from higher reality because of its advancements have deluded it into thinking it is spiritually self-sufficient.

It can be tiresome when people like me go on about how bad the world is getting. I'm 67 and older people are always accused of moaning about how things aren't how they used to be. But I don't look back to the time of my youth as a golden age. It certainly was not. On the other hand, the separation from God and Nature, though well underway, had not progressed as far as it has now. Most people don't know this because material wealth and technological advancements insulate us from the spiritual poverty in which we live. In the first world we are better off than ever before with access to all kinds of things our forefathers could not have imagined but this is very much a two edged sword because it cuts us off all the more from reality.

We live in a collapsing world and yet few people realise it. This is all part of the test humanity is undergoing. The collapse is like a refiner's fire. How do we react when the culture tells us obvious lies? Firstly, we must hold fast to the truth but we must also avoid the corruption of the world affecting our own hearts by responding to it with anger and hatred. At least, some anger and hatred is not only permissible but actually right because if you love truth you must hate lies. But these emotions should not be allowed too much sway or they will overwhelm you and drag you down into the very negativity you are condemning. Therefore, let your love of truth or love of God be the defining tenor of your mind and everything else spring from that. What I mean is hatred of evil should never become stronger than love of good and should only be used in the service of that love.

What could I tell my children to help protect them in the future? The answer is obvious. Read the Gospels.  Get to know Jesus. Familiarise yourself with the truth and wisdom to be found in the New Testament and you will have all the protection you need. There is more, of course. You have to bring Christ into your own heart and mind, and the true Christ not some man-made image of him, but this is the foundation of a proper spiritual life.

The Materialisation of Spirit and the Spiritualisation of Matter

 So much that is called religion does the opposite of what religion is supposed to do. What religion should do is elevate the material to the spiritual. What it often does do is reframe the spiritual in the context of the material. It pulls spirit down to the level of matter. The bizarre absurdity of the prosperity gospel in which faith in God translates to wealth and power in this world is just the most extreme example but anything that regards the earthly human as the focal point of spiritual endeavour also falls into this category. Spirituality is not about feeding the hungry or healing the sick. Does that shock you? I am not saying these things should not be done but they are not what spirituality is about. Yes, Jesus did feed the poor and he healed the sick. He even raised the dead. But this was to show God's power. It was not the point of his mission or else why did he not do it a lot more?

Nor is religion about saving the worldly man. That is to say, it is not about change but transformation. If the earthly man is saved he is still earthly, still a material being on the inside. No one is saved who does not transform his mind which you do through faith and a complete turning around of focus. I would suggest even the physical atoms of the brain are affected by this. In fact, the whole body is, becoming more sensitive. This might be regarded as the first stage of the eventual transformation of the physical body into a body of light which for most people, if it happens at all, happens only after death but is something that can be seen in the lives of certain saints while still in this world. What else does a halo represent?

The materialisation of spirit means bringing the truths of spirit down from their proper level and applying them to the material level in the context of the material with that as central. Spiritual truth should be brought down to the material level but without losing its spirituality. The incarnation of Christ is a perfect example of that. He, spirit, became man, matter, and lived in this material world. But he lost nothing of his 'spiritness'. And he did this precisely so as to spiritualise matter. Spirit became matter so that matter could be brought back up to spirit, infused with spirit. But if matter tries to trap spirit to itself, as so many spiritual approaches do, if it pulls spirit down to itself and interprets spirit within a material framework, it kills it. It will not rise.

This spiritualisation of matter is the meaning of Christmas. People now say that Christmas is really a pagan festival that the Christians appropriated. Not so. Some aspects of Christmas may have their origins in paganism but these have been baptised and raised up from matter to spirit though the power of the light shed by the Incarnation. Christmas is indeed the birth of light in darkness but Christ is spiritual light and his presence at this time grounds and gives full reality to a hope, an aspiration, a yearning that was present but not fully realised in pagan myth. Christ is the substance that lies behind these myths and makes them come alive. They are like dreams but he is those dreams come to waking reality and given concrete form.

Christmas comes at the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year but also the time when the light starts to return. In terms of a wider cycle we are living through very dark times, a period in history when mankind is further away from spiritual light than it has ever been though many of us don't recognise that because this very spiritual darkness has, for the time being anyway, this may not last, allowed for a certain efflorescence of material well being as energies are concentrated in that sphere of life. Is it too much to hope for that a tiny glimmer of light may start to reappear in human hearts at this point in time and inspire us to look heavenwards once more for the true meaning and purpose of life? At any rate, this is the Christmas message. However dark it seems, the light will come again.

Always Be Suspicious of Anything that Ends in '-ism'

 William James Tychonievich has a good "Look, the Emperor has no clothes" post on his From The Narrow Desert blog pointing out that racism is a fake sin. He makes the obvious but we cannot say it point that "noticing racial differences and the actions of racial interest groups is smart. Acting in accordance with that information -- "discrimination" -- is rational and good. Stereotypes and generalizations are useful, necessary, and unavoidable. Preferring the company of one's own people is natural. Love and loyalty for one's own people is praiseworthy. Agree? Congratulations, you're a racist!". Evils may come from that, hatred, injustice, cruelty, exploitation of the weak by the strong, but then jealousy can come from love. Does that make love a sin? If I prefer to be with my wife rather than another woman does that make me a bad person? According to the current ideology which puts racism at the top of the pile of evil (or the bottom, both make sense) that would seem a logical corollary.

No spiritual tradition condemns racism as a sin. As far as I know, it's hardly ever discussed. You might say that the races didn't mix much in the days when these traditions evolved but they certainly did in 1st century Palestine. The neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female quote of St Paul's does not mean that Jews and Greeks and men and women do not exist but that all differences are transcended in Christ for he comes to all. I mean, that's obvious, isn't it, especially as elsewhere this same St Paul tells servants to obey their masters?

If racism means hating others it is wicked because hatred is a sin. But if it means recognising there are different types of human groups and they are different in many ways, it is entirely rational. In fact, it is crazy not to see this. It is normal and natural to prefer one's own sort and to want a homeland where one's own sort can live and grow and express themselves and their culture in a way which accords with their preferences and traditions and without outside intervention. This certainly does not mean you reject others or do not find interest and instruction in other cultures but you want to maintain your own. If that is racism then so is protecting your family.

Always be suspicious of anything that ends in '-ism'. It's an ideology not a truth.

Heaven, Hell and What's In Between

How do we square the idea of evolving consciousness, to which I subscribe, with the doctrine that if we reject Christ we suffer a spiritual consequence in the afterlife, traditionally known as damnation or hell? Let me first of all say that nobody is sent to hell. You send yourself there and you do so by closing off your mind to Heaven. I would also go along with Dante's vision that there are different hells equating to different sins because I believe that in the afterlife the principle of like attracts like operates with one's outer environment reflecting inner consciousness. The universe is a thought. Life is Mind and in the spiritual world what you think is what you are and where you go. Thus, there may be hells which are not necessarily that unpleasant, at least not to those who go there, but which are nevertheless deprived of God and real goodness and real beauty. So, of course, they are unpleasant to the reasonable person whose consciousness has not been perverted by a misdirected will.

This world is a world of choice. You choose whether or not to believe in God and you also choose what sort of God you believe in. You choose or don't choose to acknowledge Christ and you also choose what sort of Christ to believe in because many people believe in their own version of Christ, a Christ who is a projection of their own thoughts and desires. There is the real Christ to whom you respond in the heart through the spiritual imagination, aided, of course, by scripture and even art (that is art's highest function), and there is a human created image of Christ who may be modelled on aspects of the real Christ but has some extra elements superimposed  as well as important elements missing. It is a mental version of a spiritual reality and, depending on its approximation to the real Christ, does only limited good. It may even do harm if the image departs too much from the reality and reflects more of social or political or personal concerns than spiritual truth.

Hell is separation from God. There are many degrees of separation and different souls will have separated themselves to different degrees. Some will be a long way off while others may retain some kind of connection to some aspect of God, maybe a love for beauty or concern with right behaviour. For them there is a way back if they will take it but it will mean opening closed areas of the heart and mind and that may be more difficult in the post-mortem state as we may then have solidified choice meaning the occasion for choosing is past as the specific conditions which form the test under which you make a choice no longer prevail.

It may be that souls who refuse to accept Christ's offer of Heaven are held back on lower levels of being while others progress onwards and upwards. They don't have hell in the traditional sense but nor do they have Heaven. It may also be that there are many such souls alive now because this is a time of reckoning when final chances are offered to souls who have turned down previous offers. Between Heaven and Hell there are many other spiritual states which are, returning to Dante, forms of limbo which was Virgil's region in the afterlife. Now, Virgil represented the best of humanity without God. He was virtuous and wise but he did not know Christ so he could not enter Heaven. (As an aside, I believe that all those born before Christ are given the opportunity to know Christ either through being reborn in this world or else in some other way so I would expect that a soul of the quality of Virgil is in Heaven now as are all other worthy pagans.)  Thus, non-believers do not necessarily go to Hell but they are barred from Heaven by their own lack of acceptance of it.

Evolving consciousness is one thing but accepting God is another. In reality both are necessary but you can have one without the other. The devil has a highly evolved consciousness. There are also simple souls who believe in God but are not able to express very much of him. Evolution means we can understand more of God and we can become more like him in terms of love, creativity and intelligence. This is the destiny we are called to. We must grow but we can only grow as we should when we grow according to the pattern of God. To grow according to that pattern is heaven. Not to do so, however evolved you are, is hell.

A New Creation

 At the end of my last post I mentioned that what Christ offers to those who follow him is a new Creation - worth capitalising I think. I would like to pursue this thought here. It's hardly a new thought but it has relevance in the context of a general spirituality v. Christianity debate which is pertinent in our time. I have written on several occasions about how the teachings and person (because the two are linked) of Christ go further than any other form of spirituality, including those of the Buddha. This idea of a new Creation gets to the heart of it. The Buddha saw the reality of suffering and showed a way to escape that. The way involved leaving a fallen creation behind. Basically, it entailed rejecting the goods of creation for entry into the non-created or pre-creation state. We tend to overlook the fact that original Buddhism was a monastic religion. This is a valid response to the evils of this world and/or the demands of the spiritual quest but it is not the only one or even the best one. The best is that offered by Christ in which matter and spirit or creation and uncreated divine being are joined together to make something new. Here matter is sanctified rather than rejected. Latter forms of Buddhism approach this idea but they never fully embrace it. Other spiritual traditions incorporate elements of this approach but they all have a fundamental drawback. They lack Christ, and it would be my contention that it is only through Christ that one can fully enter the new Creation. I firmly believe he is present in other religions to the extent that they are open to his spirit but he can never be as fully present as he is in Christianity where he stands revealed as himself.

This difference has never been more important than it is today in the context of the world as it is now. That is because we are in the middle of a battle between good and evil. A general spirituality which seeks to rise above the world will either be neutral in the face of this battle, beyond good and evil as those aiming at spiritual transcendence might put it, or else it will be sucked into evil. In fact, as genuine neutrality is no longer possible, if it ever was, they will inevitably be drawn onto the side of evil. Now, if you don't stand against evil, you stand with it, and if you would stand against evil you can only really do that by standing with Christ. Why can't you be good without Christ? Because he is goodness. It resides in him as the face and form of God. Other forms might approach or echo that but he is the living template. If you understand what the Good is you must see it is centred in him and the more it is separated from him the less good it is.

The new Creation came into being when Christ defeated the Prince of this World which is what he did with his life and death. This is why there was no path to it before his time. It didn't exist. This means that any form of spirituality which originated before Christ does not offer a path to it unless, as I say above, that form has opened itself to the spirit of Christ. This is a controversial position to take in the modern world because the egalitarian dogma has spread into every area of life including religion. Also, because we in the West reacted to human misinterpretations and distortions of Christianity either by turning to atheism or by seeking spiritual nourishment elsewhere. But go back to Christ himself and the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will discover a spiritual truth that goes beyond all others, one that does not just offer a way out of the material world but purifies that world so rendering it capable of being lifted up into spirit and becoming something new, a new Adam, a new Jerusalem, a new world.

When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven it was this new Creation he spoke of. Heaven is not just the oneness of spiritual consciousness. It is that but it goes beyond that because it brings to that oneness the qualities and colours of creation. And it brings relationship to oneness which means it brings love. Love existed before Christ but it did not exist in the same way as it did after him because he made it possible for the self, hitherto a centre of egotism which could only be escaped from, to be holy. No self means no love. Christ made the individual spiritually beautiful and potentially godlike instead of being a disturbance in the placid waters of divine oneness. Heaven is full of individuals because it is the abode of love and this was the new Creation brought by Christ. 

Consciousness and Christ

 According to standard esoteric teachings, human souls come to this Earth to evolve their consciousness, this being the perfect environment in which to do that given the sense of separation to be found here. It's somewhat like a child being turfed out of the secure family home where everything is done for it in order to make its own way in the world and as a result become a mature, responsible adult able to engage with life creatively and actually contribute to the world in a positive manner. These teachings assume reincarnation and say we come back here many times, seeking experience and means of expression to grow as souls. This is linked to the doctrine of reaping what you sow with the consequence that everything we do, and possibly even think, sets up a flow of psychic energy which we must deal with. It may manifest materially as external circumstances and conditions or internally as character traits but we are responsible for all that we are. This is not to punish but to teach. We evolve in this way until we are able to raise our consciousness to the spiritual level while in an earthly body. It's more complicated than that but this is the in a nutshell version.

Sometimes these teachings picture us as similar to cells in the body of a greater being which would be the spirit that stands behind our sun. This being or Solar Logos is also evolving and would be part of a Galactic being who, in turn, would form part of the being who stands behind the whole universe who would, I suppose, be God. There is a pleasing symmetrical order to this scenario and it makes sense on an intellectual level. I believe it to be broadly speaking correct with the solar and stellar spirits as something like great archangels and so on upwards.

There is a problem with this vision though. It doesn't really fit in with Christian teaching. Esotericists realise this and, as a result, tend to jettison Christianity, reducing Christ to a great spiritual teacher or Head of a Spiritual Hierarchy that oversees humanity or else picture him as the Solar Logos and say this was what was meant by Son of God. You can absorb most other spiritual approaches into this one which is what its partisans generally do, but you cannot really absorb Christ, not without making him something other than what he said he was or altering his teachings to mean something other than what he says they meant. Christ didn't talk about evolving consciousness and he was not inclusive. He said he (underlined) was the Way, the Truth and the Life. That is unequivocal. He is not part of some all-purpose spirituality but goes beyond mere spirituality to something higher, deeper and truer, something approaching proper holiness. Christ taught that we should love God whom we could see revealed in him. This is extreme to say the least but it is what he taught and if we believe in Christ we must believe that.

Is it possible to reconcile these two teachings? Many people don't bother. They believe one or the other but I find myself in the tricky position of believing both. I do believe that human souls are supposed to be evolving their consciousness and this Earth serves as the background for that, a kind of playpen in which we can build things though what we are really building is ourselves. But I also believe that Christ goes beyond that. This means that spirituality and evolving consciousness is one thing but Christ is another. He comes to the worldly and the spiritual alike and offers them both something more. The spiritual may be further along the path to God as things stand but the wonder of Christ is that anyone can come to him from any background and is accepted by him if they give themselves heart and soul to him, and this acceptance will transform their soul to a higher degree than any self-pursued spirituality can ever do. You may be building a humble village church or a grand cathedral but both are hollow structures without the light of Christ illumining them from within.

Could it be that before the advent of Christ scenario 1 operated? Human souls reincarnated after a period in the spiritual realms to further their spiritual evolution and this proceeded in a certain direction, developing all aspects of the whole being, unless brought to a close by the attainment of Buddhist Nirvana meaning a complete disidentification with the phenomenal world and, in a sense, rejection of creation. But Christ came to bring a higher understanding, one in which the soul could be made like him by allowing him into itself. Any soul on any evolutionary level could do this though naturally the more developed the soul, the more of Christ it could absorb and express. Thus, the path of spiritual evolution exists and so does the path of Christ but this latter brings more of divine reality to the picture. For instance, an evolving soul might, in esoteric parlance, have opened all its psychic energy centres including that at the crown of the head, but unless it has fully accepted Christ it is still operating in the spiritual world rather than the true Heaven of Christ which is a new creation containing more of divine being than can ever be attained just through evolution.

I realise a lot more has to be done if one is to develop a proper understanding of how Christ impacts and goes beyond standard issue spirituality but this is my attempt at a start.

Your Nationality and What You Are

 When I lived in India I knew an Englishman, Vic Tate by name, who had been born in India in around 1915. I say he was an Englishman because all his ancestors had come from England but he had only visited the country once, in the 1950s. Otherwise he had lived his entire life in India, having stayed on as a coffee planter after Independence in 1947. He was an Indian citizen but thought of himself, as he was, as an Englishman. 

I also knew an Italian born around the same time as Vic. He was called Tito Simonelli which you will agree is a typical Italian name. And he was a typical Italian though, like Vic, he had only visited Italy once. His father had been chauffeur to the Maharajah of Mysore and Tito was an engineer who had an Alfa Romeo, also typically Italian. He was also a lover of the fair sex, even in his late sixties when I knew him. Also, well, you know!

The point is both these men were Indian citizens who had lived in India their whole lives and had been born there. But they thought of themselves, and were regarded by everyone else, as English and Italian respectively. They knew what people nowadays seem to forget that your ancestry matters more than your passport.

An old lady has got in trouble and been hung out to dry by her spineless employers, anxious to cover their backs, because she asked someone with an African name, and who, from a quick search on Google, seems to favour wearing African style clothes, what part of Africa she came from. Maybe she was a little insensitive, given the state of things today, but the reaction to her minor faux pas is out of all proportion to the thing itself. Of course, the media has no moral standards and just loves to whip up hysteria, anything to sell copy, but the people who fan the flames of this non-incident and pander to the anti-racism grievance industry are, to put it bluntly, wicked. If ever you wanted to see how a country destroys itself, look no further.

The impressive Cardinal Robert Sarah, himself an African, had this to say recently. "Europe has lost the sense of it origins. It has lost its roots and a tree without roots will die. I'm afraid that the West will die. There are plenty of signs. You are invaded, still, by other cultures and peoples, who will progressively dominate you by their numbers and change your culture, your convictions, your morality." This latest absurdity illustrates the wisdom and truth of his words.

The Reign of Equality

 When I submitted By No Means Equal to the publisher I was asked to name another book it might be compared to. I imagine this was to position it in the market. I hadn't thought about this and at first couldn't come up with anything. It had no obvious influences though, of course, many things had fed into it. But then I thought about equality and how that actually meant focus moved from spirit/quality to matter/quantity and that reminded me of the famous book by René Guénon called The Reign of Quantity. It's been 20 years since I read that book and, to be honest, I can't remember much about it but I do remember that his broad theme is the materialisation of consciousness and how that has impacted the modern age which is an age in which quantity supersedes quality. This is more or less what my book is about and so when it came to the time to write a 'blurb' for the back cover this is what I came up with.

"Equality is the rock on which our modern Western liberal democracies are built. When we talk of Western values this is the one that underlies the rest. But what if this rock is made of sand? This book explores the idea of equality and suggests it is an ideological belief with no foundation in reality. It may seem a progressive belief from the political point of view but in reality its acceptance is spiritually damaging with consequences for the evolution of the soul.

The Traditionalist writer René Guénon said that we live in an age of quantity, one in which nothing is allowed to exist that cannot be measured. This is the age of equality which directly opposes the idea of the individual soul as a spiritual reality.

The equality myth pervades almost everything these days so while the first part of the book examines this myth from various angles, the second part looks at how it has influenced and adversely affected the spiritual search. We go back and look at first principles from a metaphysical perspective and even consider the nature of God. Then there is the opportunity to see how this idea impacts on the end times scenario.

The book is similar in construction and focus to Remember the Creator and Earth is a School, and in that respect could be considered the third part of a trilogy."

As I say, I hadn't thought of Guénon when writing the book but there certainly is crossover between our two approaches to the vexed question of the modern world. The difference is that he appeared to retreat to the past and became a Muslim, albeit one heavily influenced by the metaphysics of the Vedanta, whereas I believe that the modern consciousness is part of proper human development, simply one that has gone wrong. It is like a fruit that has become poisoned rather than a poison in itself and once we are able to submit it to the light of God it will prove to have many benefits. If human beings are on a path to becoming gods themselves, which in my view is part of the divine intention, then the phase of self-consciousness is a necessary stage to go through. The modern consciousness was a risk but one that can bring great spiritual progress if handled correctly. Of course, that is just what is not happening on the collective level but God always works with individuals and, on that level, who can know how much success his experiment is having?

By No Means Equal - Reclaiming the Soul

 I mentioned in June that I was finishing off a book to be called By No Means Equal. See the post here. The book was accepted for publication and the production process has been completed though the book won't be published until next October because, the publisher says, "It takes ten months (sometimes more) for information about your book to circulate through the trade worldwide, and this is essential to maximize your prospects of long-term success. Budgets for buying in new titles in the chain retailers are set many months in advance – they will not look at titles coming out before then. Some key catalogues, like the NBN sales catalogue in North America, the bumper Bookseller Spring and Autumn editions in the UK, cover six months of titles; they need the information on ISBN, page extent, price, sales copy and cover three months before that, so ten months only just gives us enough time." Luckily the book is not topical!

The book is actually called By No Means Equal - Reclaiming the Soul because although it started off as a discussion about how the idea of equality was founded on a false metaphysics, it became clear early on that this metaphysics is based on a denial of the spiritual component of man, even a denial of the very notion of individuality. So it turns out that the rejection of equality is actually an assertion of spirituality and, far from equality being humanistically grounded as it is generally portrayed as being, it is in fact a profoundly anti-human doctrine. Thus, the book is not just about equality but also a plea for the recognition of spirit and soul.

Here is the front cover. As with the covers of my previous books it shows a place I have lived, in this case the Shevaroy Hills in South India. 

And here are the chapter headings. Some of these chapters have appeared as posts on this blog, though have been edited and sometimes expanded for the book, but many are new.

Introduction

Part I

Liberty and Equality

No Rational Basis for Equality

We Are All One

Quality and Equality

Don't You Want to Live in an Equal Society?

What Is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

An Attack on Cosmic Order

What Is the Devil Most Seeking to Destroy?

The Elizabethan World Picture

The Descent of Man and the Prophecy of Hermes

Against Inequality

Body, Soul and Spirit

 

Part II

Secular Spirituality

God, Man and Woman

The Humanitarian God

Ideology and Freedom

A Vulgar Age

End Times

Technology Is Not Neutral

I Am God

Why I Am Not a Conservative

Tolerance and Humanism

The Lowest of the Low

The Most High

Death, the Great Equaliser?

Good and Evil, Spirit and Matter, Creator and Creation

Extreme Times

Demons

A Universe of Persons

Conclusion

Reaping What You Sow

 It hasn't taken long for the results of the foolish decisions taken in early 2020 to make themselves felt. Anyone who ignored the evidence, perfectly clear early on, that the sickness was by no means as severe as presented and who allowed themselves to be terrorised by propaganda and went along enthusiastically with the home imprisonment, should now accept without complaint the inflation, the higher taxes, the whittling away of the value of their savings that are the inevitable consequences of these decisions. When you shut down an economy and splurge huge sums of money on paying people to do nothing what do you expect?

The lockdowns are not the only cause of the current monetary malaise. The fact that the financial crisis of 2008 was never properly addressed but merely had its cracks papered over is also significant. But the events of 2020 brought everything to a head. That may even have been their purpose or part of their purpose. Acclimatising a population to loss of freedom was also important. The question is what do those of us who are aware of the lies that brought us here and the reasons for us being in the current situation actually do? 

The first thing is to understand that the lies will continue. They have a purpose. They will take different forms but the underlying direction they are pushing us towards is the same. This is the afore-mentioned loss of freedom. That is what lies behind the increased control, the future reduction of people's financial independence and the obligatory medical interventions. You should know that information about everything from war to the weather is manipulated and has an agenda behind it and then you will keep yourself relatively free. Outwardly you may find your freedom restricted but inner freedom is what matters. Preserve that.

Secondly, the only way to protect yourself from what is to come is to focus on the spiritual. What is to come will come. You can't affect that. How you react to it is your task. And the only way to react correctly is to live in the spiritual world. It is true that this world is part of the spiritual world for, ultimately, everything is spiritual. But it is part of the spiritual world that has been invaded by anti-spiritual forces, something that is possible because of the nature of the material realm, the material being the spiritual at a distance from itself. God divides being into spirit and matter or subject and object in order to create, and he creates to reveal himself and become more. But this means there is God and not God or, better put, God as God and God as not God, and, though the latter is still part of God, it has the potential to lose connection to divine reality. When this happens only those who are able to recognise that it has happened can preserve their spiritual integrity.

This is what we must do now. As the outer world falls into darkness we must work hard at maintaining our link to the inner light. It is a standard ploy of the darkness at such times to present itself as light but we must not be deceived. The true light does not have its source in this world and it does not seek to ratify this world or the ways of this world. You will find that there is no institution in the world that is uncorrupted now but that is a necessary thing because it forces you to go within and to grow as a result. I do not say that the current evil is created or wished by God but he is able to use it for divine ends.

Ideally, the outer would reflect the inner. In a fallen world that doesn't happen very often. Today it is not happening at all. But that means that all those who understand what is going on must make even more of an effort to express the inner and to do that we must live as much as possible in the inner. Everyone reaps what they sow. To reap the spiritual we must sow the spiritual.

I find it extraordinary that so many people refuse to see what is taking place in front of their eyes and go along with the dismantling of their world. You could say that once you deny the spiritual then pretty soon everything falls to pieces and that is correct. You have no proper yardstick against which to measure what goes on. But it is not just this. People will not wake up because they are too lazy. It would mean a radical reassessment of their whole lives. It's hard to admit that you are wrong and have based your life on a lie but the longer you put this off the more painful it will be when you eventually have to face reality. As always the key to spiritual awakening is repentance. Far too many people nowadays adopt a surface spirituality that is little more than an adjunct to their worldliness as opposed to  being a replacement for it. These people are easily duped by the anti-spiritual forces currently running the world so make sure you are not one of them. You reap what you sow.

Metaphysics and Science

 Bruce Charlton made a comment on a recent post of his which you can find here. (The comment is at the bottom.) He said "Metaphysics is prior to science, therefore science cannot 'inform' it." This is something I have long thought, ever since the days when there were popular books linking mysticism and quantum mechanics and the like, and there was much excitement that science was confirming the wisdom of the ancients about the nature of reality and consciousness. I thought then and I think now this was a mistake. You see, metaphysics to be truly spiritual in content must be founded on intuition and insight, direct perception. It comes from above to the below, from the spiritual. Science is just the opposite. It comes from the physical or material. Please don't tell me scientists have intuitions. That isn't the point. It's the primary level of awareness that matters, the plane of insight. The true metaphysician thinks from the metaphysical level. The scientist speaks from the physical or mental which is part of the material.

Science may, using its own language, confirm some of the insights of the metaphysical but this is of no spiritual use because it comes from below. Science might "prove" in some way that God exists but this would be spiritually meaningless and spiritually worthless. It would just create a thoughtform of God on the mental level and would have nothing to do with the real God who is spirit and must be worshipped/approached in spirit and in truth. The commenter to whom Bruce was responding said that reality is one and the divisions in knowledge are human artefacts but this is wrong. Reality may be one but the divisions in reality are real. The different levels of consciousness, at their most basic, the spiritual and material, operate in quite different ways. What operates materially, as science does, can never inform the spiritual. It can describe it in its own terms but it cannot enter into it. It remains forever outside unless it approaches it on its own terms. The lesser can never encompass the greater though the converse is true.

Science is a noble pursuit because it seeks to uncover truth. (At least, it used to. It's hard to have the same positive attitude these days and even harder post 2020.) However, it always remains outside the metaphysical because it only relates to the phenomenal world. It can approach the spiritual when rightly oriented but the scientific method is of no use when seeking to understand the spiritual in the proper sense. You can only understand the spiritual spiritually. A scientific understanding of the spiritual is by definition materialistic. You cannot comprehend music in terms of the shape of the notes even if you theorise that the notes are expressing something more than their physical form. If science really wants to get to grips with the metaphysical world it must humble itself and knows its limits. Then it might start to go beyond them but it will be transformed into something else in the process.

This is not saying science is a waste of time in terms of the pursuit of knowledge (I'm not talking about its technological applications) or a futile endeavour. It may well be that by having gone through the scientific mode of thought spiritual understanding if and when one gets to it will be richer. The mind will have been sharpened and therefore more receptive to higher truth than it might otherwise have been even if this higher truth can never be known by science as it is in itself.

Arguing with Ideologues

 Fate has decreed that I have a close and ongoing association with a couple of people who might be described as hard left in their outlook. That is, they are thoroughgoing egalitarians whose morality is based on materialistic utilitarianism. I have nothing in common with these people but I am grateful that I have had this association because I have learnt a lot from it, and one of the things I have learnt is that if someone is wedded to a particular ideology there is literally nothing you can say that will shake them from that. Both these people (atheists, of course) pride themselves on being rational and scientific but both of them are emotionally bound to their ideology and use reason only when it supports that. Reason, in the limited form it is viewed today, can be made to support the leftist, egalitarian ethos but that is only because vast swathes of reality have been ruthlessly cut out of the picture. It is unreasonable to deny the spiritual, it is unreasonable to deny nature and biology and it is unreasonable to deny God but for these people and people like them a circular argument is all that is required. We cannot see spirit by material means therefore spirit cannot exist. What?

What do you do when you are confronted by people driven by ideology? First of all, you cannot argue with them. Any argument will generate a lot of heat but no light. You are operating from totally different root assumptions. Your first principles have nothing in common and unless that is acknowledged you will get nowhere. If it is acknowledged you have to ask them what their first principles are based on. They will probably say they are based on humanity. Then you might ask what is humanity? The point is that unless humanity has a spiritual origin it is of no consequence, a random assemblage of mindless forces with no coherent centre or actual integrity. What happens to such a thing simply doesn't matter because it isn't in any serious way real. If it is agreed humanity does have a spiritual origin then you must ask whether that should determine how we live and think and act. Does it mean we see our destiny in this world or is there a wider purpose which goes beyond this world and how we see ourselves at present? If spiritual is what we ultimately are then spiritual understanding is what we should be working towards and that means seeing everything in the light of the spiritual not its own light. Materialists are like people who only live at night and insist the moon is the source of its own illumination.

But really all this is irrelevant. People believe what they want to believe and if they don't want to believe in God then they won't. Leftists don't want to believe in God. Even when they do adopt a form of spirituality you will find that it is centred in the human being and how to bring benefit to that. I am not saying it is wrong to seek happiness. We are bound to do that. It is right and healthy to want to do so. But this should be in the light of the reality of God not as a personal agenda. The true spiritual believer wants to bring his soul into conformity with the reality of the Creator and his creation. The leftist, whether believer or not, wants to bring creation into conformity with the desires of his soul and will do everything to further that end. In this sense the leftist is always a materialist even when he follows a spiritual path.

You can't talk to ideologues because their ideology is their idol, their replacement for God. They will accuse the believer in God of having his own ideology and being no different to them, and nothing will persuade them that there is a world of difference between opening up the mind and heart to reality and creating one's own version of reality in line with one's own desires, one that may support and enable flaws in your character and in which sins are not sins. I realise that the believer will always bring something of himself to his beliefs but adding a few decorative touches to a building whose foundations are grounded in solid rock is not the same as building in sand. Some ideologies can contain elements of reality but they are still mental constructs not perceptions of truth and their mental aspect always dominates the reality aspect.

When all is said and done it is probably only experience that can change someone whose mind has been contaminated by an ideology. Arguing is useless. Example might be better but really it is only the consequences of wrong thinking that will help to bring about right thinking. However, bear in mind that most ideologues have adopted their ideology to rationalise and justify a character defect. This is an uncomfortable truth and why it can be hard to argue with a leftist without, in the end, getting personal. So it is best avoided.

Reparations

I see that the latest British Prime Minister has suggested that his government might be prepared to pay 'climate reparations' to developing countries that claim to have suffered environmental distress as a result of Western industrialisation. This at a time of high inflation and massive increase of energy prices at home. But I say fine. Let's do this. However, there should be a little proviso that the countries rewarded in this fashion do not avail themselves of any of the advances associated with the Industrial Revolution including, but not restricted to, cars, fertilisers, medical advancements, electricity and any product made in a factory.

Taking this further, Britain needs to pay reparations to its former colonies but, of course, the same rules would apply. These ex-colonies should not be so hypocritical as to take advantage of any of the benefits brought by the West. And if Britain needs to fund this it should naturally go to Italy (Rome) and France (Normandy) to seek its own reparations.

Just a thought.

Note: My blog must be more widely read than I thought. Reparations have apparently been ruled out according to a report in the Daily Telegraph published an hour after this post went live.

No More Grey

 Yesterday I said to an acquaintance that the climate change conference is surely pointless (I was being diplomatic) since Russia, India and China weren't even going to be there. He, triple pecked, of course, looked at me with real hatred as someone deviating from the party line so naturally I had to ask him why he thought excess deaths in England and Wales are currently higher than they were you know when. See here. The article hedges its bets but the comments seem to have a good idea. That tipped him over the edge and he literally snarled at me saying he listened to experts not gossip and hearsay. Follow the science. 

People are certainly doubling down in their wrong choices now. It seems that something inside them of which they aren't consciously aware is telling them that the only way they can prove to themselves they are right is to entrench themselves even more deeply in their wrongness. Darkness hates light and always wishes to depict it as the real darkness to justify itself. 

This implies that on some level every sinner knows he is a sinner. And they are sinners because the litmus tests (® Bruce Charlton) are actually bringing out the spiritual sickness within souls. Bad people are making bad intellectual choices. That is not to say that those making the right choices are good but they are at least facing the right direction and not bad. I know this sounds very black and white and that is not a popular way to think about people in the modern world. It does appear though that it is how things are increasingly becoming. Anything that was grey must now become either black or white. With every day that goes by the division between sheep and goats is becoming more marked.

Love and Compassion

Love and compassion are often confused these days but they are not the same thing and it is important to distinguish between the two or love will be reduced to compassion and thereby diminished considerably.

Compassion is usually directed towards suffering, seeking to relieve that or, at least, support the one who suffers. This means it is focussed on what a person is experiencing here and now. It responds to what a person is.

Love aims to encourage a person towards realising what he could and should be. It doesn't necessarily support the person as he is now, enabling that person to be happy and not suffer in his current state. It may even see that suffering is what is necessary to move that person on to a better, more evolved place, a place in which he is more what he should be. This implies that we are not all right as we are now. There is something we should be growing towards. Love is directed towards realising that.

There is no love outside of God. He is the source of love and what our love should be principally directed towards. Without him love would not exist. (Nor would anything, of course, but that's a different matter.) If God is love does he not love us? And yet we suffer. How can this be? It is because God loves us that we suffer. I am not saying he causes it but he allows it and he does so in order that we may become more like him. Love wants the good of the beloved. Good is spiritual. There is no good without the spiritual. Therefore love is always pushing for spiritual growth. Compassion would leave a person where he is, only removing the suffering, but love wants to bring a person up to where happiness is exchanged for joy and compassion/empathy for divine love. Compassion would heal the pain of material suffering. Love wants the caterpillar to become a butterfly even if that hurts.

Note: The point here is not that you should have love instead of compassion. You should have both but compassion should be seen in the light of love not in its own light.

Near Death Experiences

For some decades now there have been books published about people who have seemingly died but come back to life with accounts of what they have experienced during the period they were technically speaking dead. Like many tales of adventures beyond this physical world they seem to me to combine truth and falsehood or, better put, truth and illusion. I have not made a study of these stories principally because they do not come from saints and sages but ordinary people, and, without casting aspersions on ordinary people, that is not the quarter from which you would expect great spiritual insight. I am not doubting the honesty or integrity of these people nor the validity of the experiences, but how able are they really to process all this in a way to do it proper justice without a deeper spiritual understanding?

As I say, I have not made a serious study of NDEs as they are called but I have read a little about them and they seem to follow a roughly similar pattern. To begin with, the subject leaves his body and finds himself still conscious but outside the corporeal frame. Gradually he is aware of others coming to meet him, deceased friends and relatives who comfort and reassure him. Before this he may have gone down a tunnel or crossed a bridge, obviously symbolic of going from one plane of consciousness to another. He finds himself in a beautiful location bathed in light which does not come from an external source such as the sun but is part of the fabric of the region in which he now exists. Here what are generally described as beings of light take him through a review of his past life though in a completely non-judgemental way. He feels that he is surrounded by love and beauty, and when he is obliged to return to the physical world there is a great sense of loss and regret.

What could be wrong with that? Does it not confirm that we live in a universe of goodness and love and that we shall all be rewarded once we leave this sorry vale of tears? It does, but that is the problem I have with these accounts. They are all sugar and no salt let alone vinegar. Are we to believe that everyone goes to heaven after death, regardless of how they have lived their life, believer and atheist, saint and sinner alike? This is how a God of love would behave, or so goes the modern attitude with its egalitarian ethos. But I find this approach to be one in which quantity rather than quality is determinative, and that is a materialistic approach, quantity relating to matter as quality does to spirit. It is also quite at odds with the teachings of Jesus and the Christian tradition. We might think that actual experience trumps that but what exactly is this experience? Note that nobody actually dies for they all come back. They may appear to die but their experience is interrupted and we cannot know how it would have proceeded in the event of a permanent death.

For what it's worth I do believe these experiences are genuine as far as they go but I also think they give a faulty impression or, at least, an incomplete one. I am sure that we are surrounded by love in the afterworld and when we are judged, as we surely are, that is without condemnation. But it is not without consequence. Nobody gets to heaven, the real heaven rather than some astral version of it, without rigorous purification which I would compare to the episode in C.S. Lewis's book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when the insufferable brat Eustace, who has turned into a dragon, is stripped of his reptilian scales by Aslan who literally digs his claws into Eustace's body and tears them off. This is agonising. Similarly, when we are stripped of our sins there will be pain and suffering. This is the essence of purgatory. Moreover, it is not everyone who goes to heaven. I would surmise that what most of these NDE people experience is not heaven at all but what is known as limbo which is certainly a more ethereal level of consciousness than than that of the physical world but is still outside the true spiritual world.

One must also be careful about the beings of light. As every Christian knows there are many different sorts of spirits, good and bad, and Satan is specifically described in 2 Corinthians as someone who masquerades as an angel of light. That is not to say these beings are demons but the spiritually illiterate, which, to be frank, is what most modern people are, should be careful of accepting anything on the face of appearance alone. The average soul newly transitioned to the next world has not much more understanding of his environment than a baby just arrived in this world. Certainly such a soul would have the benefit of an adult mind but it would be a complete neophyte with regard to the structure of the world and its inhabitants. It would also not necessarily know that the lower levels of the next world are the ones in which lesser beings are most likely to operate. One shouldn't make the opposite error, which some Christians do and assume that all spirits are demons but one should exercise caution and discrimination without having a closed mind.

Death is the most important part of life and we should take it very seriously. It's not like children going away to the seaside for a holiday. There are weighty matters involved. All religions recognise this and the modern spiritual but not religious tendency to wrap it in pink cotton wool is a mistake. Yes, the higher worlds are worlds of love, beauty, glory and magnificence but God is not a fairy godmother. Aslan is not a tame lion. That makes the beauty far more beautiful and the love far more intense but it also means that the soul must become perfect if it is to enter into the realms of glory, and this spiritual perfection is not automatically gifted to everyone regardless but requires hard work and sacrifice. It must be earned. God does bestow his grace on everyone but only the fully opened flower can properly receive the rays of the sun.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man

 In the spirit of shameless self-promotion I thought I would bring attention to a book published a couple of years ago that drew together the posts I saw as most representative of the thinking behind this blog. It's not one of the three on the right of this page, all of which are proper books i.e. written as such. It is just posts from the blog. These are arranged in various sections such as God, Truth, Christ, The Spiritual Path and Spiritual Practice, Love, Masculine and Feminine, Modern Times plus a few more, and the overall theme is given in the title.

It can be found in paperback and Kindle versions on Amazon UK here and here and for the American market here and here. I mention it now for any newcomers to the blog who might like to explore its past in an easier form, or what I regard as an easier form, than that permitted by the blog itself or else might appreciate a ready reference, something I would value from some of my favourite blogs. It is, in effect, a compilation or 'best of' of the blog up to the beginning of 2020, just before everything took a turn for the worse.

Here's an extract from the introduction.

"After the publication of my first book Meeting the Masters I started a blog of the same name to develop themes from that book, and they have developed, sometimes in ways I hadn't anticipated. My second book Remember the Creator was the product of that. But the blog has continued and it has been suggested that I gather together some of the posts in book form. It is true that old posts on a blog tend to be consigned to history like old newspapers and no one ever looks at them again. But if they are not topical, and most of mine aren't, they can still be relevant. For the few that were vaguely topical I have put the date of their composition.

So here I have assembled essays under various subjects though there is some overlap. Most of them were written after the end of 2017 when the last book was prepared for publication so they represent a kind of continuation of that, in some cases possibly even a progression.

In case anyone reading this is unfamiliar with what started me on a spiritual course let me briefly set out here what is more fully described in Meeting the Masters. Between 1979 and 1999 I was spoken to by spiritual beings who told me, when I asked them who they were, to think of them as messengers from God. Going by their manner and what they said that is exactly what they were. They spoke to me through a medium who acted as a kind of oracle for them. But they told me that they also communicated to me through mental impression and would continue to do so when the other method stopped which it did when the medium died in 1999. I feel this is the case and that they do inspire me with their knowledge. However, this inspiration has to come through my own mind and is subject to my own limitations and prejudices so it is not going to be anywhere near as pure as the source. Nevertheless, I have always tried to respond to thoughts that come to me 'cleanly' and without subjecting them to personal opinion. I am certainly not claiming any kind of divine inspiration for anything written here. It is my work not the Masters and I am the one responsible for it. At the same time, I would be lying if I said I thought they had nothing to do with it. They probably do the best they can with me, as I am sure they do with many others who may not be aware of them, but they have to cut their coat according to the cloth there is at hand.

I have called this book The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man because that is what we are currently going through. It is made worse by the fact that it is largely unrecognised. People talk of environmental problems, social problems, political problems, problems to do with climate change, with capitalism, the relation between the sexes and so on. It is all fundamentally a spiritual problem. Resolve that and the rest will fall into place. A more accurate title might have been The Spiritual Crisis of Post-Modern Humanity but that is a bit of a mouthful and sounds like the title of an academic treatise whereas this is meant as a call to spiritual arms."

Empathy

 Can you have too much empathy? Most people would agree you can have too little but can you also have too much? My answer would be yes, you can indeed. If empathy is not balanced by intelligence and wisdom or, at the very least, common sense, it becomes destructive.

This is true even insofar as real empathy is concerned. How much more true it is for the fake empathy we have these days. Jesus said in Matthew 9:5-8, “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men … but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your father who is unseen.” The hypocrites here are like the modern empathisers who display their empathy as a way to feel good about themselves and show off their virtue. This is hardly news. It is human nature, or a symptom of the fallen part of it, and just takes new forms. The underlying character weakness remains the same.

But let's forget about that and assume all empathisers feel real empathy. Unless this emotion, for that is what it is, is counterbalanced by proper discernment it simply opens the door to being taken advantage of and used. A culture that over-emphasises empathy will soon be destroyed because it lacks a functioning immune system. It will allow anything to enter its body without discriminating between the good and the bad, the healthy and the unhealthy, the nutritious and the poisonous. To the pathologically empathetic this will sound wicked and cruel but they forget we need the wisdom of the serpent as well as the innocence of the dove, and sometimes a dove's innocence is an excuse for evading moral responsibility.

It's pleasant to feel empathy but to a certain psychological type it is also an indulgence, a wallowing in sentiment. In life we need steel as well as silk and too much of either leads to imbalance and disharmony. A virtue exaggerated or exercised without its complement is a vice and one the devil well knows how to exploit for his own ends.

Dreams of the Future

You have probably heard of experiments in which people are hypnotised and taken back to previous lifetimes they have lived on Earth. They often describe those lives in very compelling terms and sometimes even report on various aspects of life in the past that are only confirmed by subsequent historical research. You can believe or not believe these accounts or you can, like me, hedge your bets and think there might be something in them but they are not necessarily literally true. Either way, they do pose important questions unless you have decided in advance that they cannot possibly be true because human beings only have one life.

Now imagine you could do an experiment in which you hypnotise a large group of people and get them to progress to a future lifetime to report on what might be the state of the world then. A ridiculous fantasy? Perhaps but this has actually been done and the results published in a book called Mass Dreams of the Future written by a psychologist called Chet Snow who was carrying on the work of another psychologist, Dr Helen Wambach. I haven't read the book, which I believe was based on work carried out in the 1980s, but I have read an account of the experiment and it raises some interesting points.

First of all, we have to ask if the future is fixed. Common sense rebels against this as do one's innermost feelings. The universe is not a machine and anyone with an ounce of spiritual sensibility must acknowledge free will. No free will means no humanity, it's as simple as that. Therefore, the most logical thing is to see the future as something like a cloud of potential which will coalesce into a particular hard reality according to individual human decisions plus the acts, thoughts and behavioural patterns of other forms of life. The future cannot be predicted with precision, though the nearer one gets to it, the more it can be, but various possibilities can be predicated. They are there on a mental level in an inchoate form and the one that solidifies in the physical world is determined by what goes on in the present. I suspect that very advanced forms of life can foresee the future up to a point but I think it unlikely that the actual future has happened on any level before it really does happen. Yes, it will be there in the mental world but it is not fully realised until it takes physical reality and until it does do that it is subject to change and alteration. It's rather like an idea taking shape in your mind before you write it down. That idea arises in the thought world but the form it takes in the physical world can be adjusted right up to the moment it takes form.

It seems that 2,500 people took part in the future lifetime experiment and when their reports of the future were studied it was found that they contained several points of divergence but also some of agreement. Most significant of the latter was that virtually every one of them said that the earth's population had decreased dramatically. It had become considerably smaller than it was at the time (this was in the 1980s, remember). No future date seems to have been given, at least not in the account that I read, but it is safe to assume that the future envisaged has not yet arrived. I think it represents a new age or cycle and we are still living at the tail end of the old one.

The disagreements were over what sort of future we can expect. They split into four categories which were as follows. One was a sterile, technological world of space stations and synthetic food. Another was the exact opposite, a return to nature kind of existence in which people lived in harmony with the natural world and pursued spiritual development. A third was a science-fictiony mechanical world of underground cities and artificial environments enclosed in domes. And the fourth was a post-apocalyptic world of small groups of survivors eking out a living as best they could in the shattered remains of a destroyed civilisation. Futures 1 and 3 were described as 'bleak' and 'joyless'. Future 4 doesn't seem much better. Future 2 seems the best option.

The question is how much of this comes from ideas about the future already existing in the subjects' minds at the time? Quite a lot, I would say. These scenarios are all well known and were in the '80s too, and individuals may have subconsciously picked the one they were most in sympathy with. On the other hand, you cannot rule out the possibility that all these scenarios do exist as potential futures and the real one is yet to be determined. Nor can you rule out the possibility that the actual future is none of these. We can envisage these types of existence now but no one in the 16th century could have envisaged the world as it is today in the 21st. What I do find convincing is the point of agreement about the reduction in population. I think we all know that the situation cannot continue as it is and already, although world population is increasing, the birth rate is dropping in many parts of the developed world. That not withstanding, my feeling is that a great number of souls are being gathered together today to experience a critical time in earthly development but when that phase has worked itself out there will be a return to a lower level of population.

Perhaps these hypnotised subjects tuned into the psychic plane in which the future is gestating but if they did so they did it from the point of late 20th century humans which is to say they were only able to bring through what they could comprehend within the limited framework of their own minds and so they interpreted what they saw according to their own understanding. They didn't see reality (if they saw anything, of course, and it wasn't just fantasy), they saw symbols and patterns which they then formed into images based on what they already knew. So there was an element of projection there. And even within these limitations what they saw were potential futures not actual ones. The 30 plus years since the experiment will have changed much.

The future is a cloud that is taking shape. At a certain point one can detect several patterns in this cloud but the final one in which, so to speak, the cloud descends to earth and takes a concrete form cannot be known until it does that. That is why both free will and destiny are true. Just like you and me, the world has a destiny. It was set up from outside by God and his helpers to go through a certain pattern of development but that pattern is constantly modified from the inside by us.

I don't believe these people saw the future. Given they all saw different futures that's hardly surprising. But they may have tuned into a level of reality in which possible outcomes are beginning to form as mental images. The one that actualises could be any one of these or even something quite different if new information enters the field. What we think and do now determines the future or certainly has an impact on it. This is why one should never give up but always strive for the best.

Pitfalls on the Path

The devil has snares for everyone whatever their beliefs or approach to life. Readers of this blog will be well aware he has snares for materialists, atheists and all those for whom the world, the flesh and the devil are the focus of attention. But he also has snares for religious or spiritual people of all types. Anything to which one gives intellectual or emotional allegiance can be used as an instrument of corruption if the thing, whatever it is, becomes more important than God, and religion can be a vessel for human sin just as much as anything else. 

It's easy to see how those who deny God can be led into sin. But those who accept him can be too. For instance, people who reject modernity can become attached to traditionalism forgetting that God makes all things new and that while tradition serves to preserve the best of the past it must always be revitalised if it is not to fall into sterile rigidity. Those who see the errors of feminism can fall into the opposite error and believe that a return to the way men and women interacted in the past is required, failing to take into account that consciousness has evolved and all human beings, male and female, have become more cognisant of themselves as individual beings with purpose and agency. This is in line with the growth of the soul and means that the past ways are defunct and cannot, should not, be revived. We need a new approach. Which is not to say the modern ways are right for the new should grow out of the old rather than completely uproot and replace that just as grace perfects nature instead of crudely destroying it. The modern ways are wrong but not because they represent change. They are wrong because they are founded on materialistic humanism whereas we need a spiritual response to the new forms of consciousness. 

Catholics (not to single them out, this can apply to anyone of any persuasion) can believe their religion is greater than truth which must conform to their religion. Naturally, they would respond that their religion is truth but no worldly institution can do more than point the way. Catholicism is a magnificent pointer but it does not contain all truth anymore than a sunbeam contains the sun. 

Esotericists can believe they have cracked the cosmic code and that their elaborate intellectual systems and techniques will bring them to the heart of reality. But if they take their ideas too literally they fall back into the mental world which is part of the material order. Buddhists and followers of advaita can take their philosophies to be not simply descriptions of reality formulated at a particular time and place but reality itself. By focusing on one aspect of the whole of life (the absolute/the one/pure being) they lose connection to the wider picture which includes the full reality of the many and the world of creation.

Everyone is tempted through what they have given their heart and mind to and if it is not God but an approach to God they will be led off the path into distraction and error. There are sins of the mind as well as those of the body and the desire nature but these are often disguised, at least to the individual who falls victim to them which is all of us to a certain extent. As a matter of fact, mental error is more prevalent and has a greater impact on the soul in the modern age than before simply because we are more mentally polarised.

Really, the only way to guard against these pitfalls is through a mixture of discernment and humility. But sometimes we have to fall victim to them because the experience of doing so will uncover and expose faults in our character. Through suffering the consequences of succumbing to the faults we may learn to overcome them.

The Spirituality of Buddhism

 It must be the Libran influence in me. Every time I write a post emphasising a certain aspect of a particular subject I feel obliged to look at the opposing side of the question. This only applies to matters that contain a large element of truth to begin with. In much of today's world the corruption, of institutions, of philosophies, of art, of politics etc, has totally overcome any initial kernel of of truth and to seek balance in these cases is to justify and rationalise falsehood.

So, with that in mind, let me say that in one sense Buddhism is the purest of religions for it strips away everything except naked spirit. All the extraneous elements of the spiritual search were seen by the Buddha as obscuring the central reality of existence, the underlying causeless cause of the countless worlds of phenomenal manifestation. He realised that the world was in a condition of constant decay and sought the pristine state of incorruptible being that could never be violated by change or loss or evil. By sheer force of spiritual will coupled with absolute purity of motive and integrity of mind he broke through the many veils overlaying consciousness and entered into the innermost sanctuary of life where darkness and light have not yet been divided. He attained the perfect knowledge that comes from merging individual being with the universal  I AM. His supreme achievement opened a door between the created and uncreated worlds allowing others who were spiritually developed enough to follow in his footsteps. But he was the first to scale this spiritual Everest.

Those who have been to a South Indian temple will know that the outer sections contain halls and courts with carved pillars and statues in which all the important elements of life are represented, both material and spiritual. The decoration is elaborate and profuse showing the almost profligate abundance of life, every aspect of which is celebrated to the consternation of some early European visitors. But in the innermost part of the temple there is a sparsely decorated or even bare cell-like chamber without window or light. This is called the womb chamber and is where the image of the presiding deity stands. There the Murti or earthly embodiment of the god or goddess (Christians would call it an idol forgetting that there are representations of Jesus, Mary and the saints in Christianity too) is tended by the priests and worshipped by the faithful. However,  what many of the ordinary worshippers might not be aware of is that this dark and empty space, void of decoration and without form of any kind, that houses the deity and from which the deity might be said to take its rise represents Purusa which in the Hindu tradition is pure spirit, the essential reality of all things. The Buddha focussed his attention entirely on this, going beyond all the paraphenalia of the temple, all the ritual, even beyond the deity itself, to the very ground that gives birth to creation.

The Buddha was the apostle of enlightenment which is the perfection of wisdom. He introduced this wisdom into the oversoul of humanity, its collective superconsciousness, enabling those who followed him and who were responsive enough to build it into their own minds. When Christ came he introduced humanity to the spiritual quality of love allowing those who attuned themselves to his divine nature to partake of this love themselves. Christ went further than the Buddha because he sanctified matter, including the human self, and original Buddhism did not do this. It left it behind as corrupt. But this is in no way to denigrate Buddhism since the Buddha was the one who struck the first blow against the corruption inherent in the material world since the Fall, opening up a path out of matter into spirit. Christ then came to heal the sickness in matter so it could be reunited with spirit but it is possible that he might not have been able to do this without the Buddha's initial opening of the way to spirit. Might one even see these two great beings working in tandem for the upliftment of humanity? This is not to deny Christ's uniqueness as the Son of God but in order to do his work he needed the spiritual ground to be prepared and this it was not just by the teachings of the Hebrew prophets from the Old Testament but by all the spiritual endeavours of humanity up to that point, the greatest of which was that of the Buddha.

The Materialism of Buddhism

 William James Tychonievich recently had a very interesting post on his From the Narrow Desert blog about the materialistic influence of Buddhism. It's here. This also drew Bruce Charlton's attention and he reacted here. I commented on the first post as below.

"I do believe that the Buddhist rejection of God can easily become a rejection of spirit with spirit being rarified matter rather than matter being condensed spirit which is closer to the truth. You might think there is no fundamental difference between these two concepts but there surely is if you project the qualities of matter onto spirit instead of vice versa. This is why Western atheists can be drawn to Buddhism. They don't have to change much."

While much admiring Buddhism I have long felt there are serious problems with it especially when imported into the West. This goes back to my early days of spiritual exploration when I went to a Buddhist meditation centre in London to be told that there was no such thing as the self. I know that Buddhists will say that the Buddha neither affirmed nor denied the reality of the individual self and that's true enough as far as it goes. But the effective reality of the Buddhist path is that the self is denied. That's undeniable!

I left this centre convinced that their philosophy was mistaken. I understood the idea that there is a supernal state of consciousness beyond the limitations of the ego but this does not mean that the individual human being has no reality. According to the Christian view which goes much more deeply into the question (it really does), the individual soul is the whole point of creation, and note that if Buddhism were correct there would be no point to creation, no meaning in it. It is through the soul's experience in this world in which subject and object have been split apart that it can reach a state, Heaven, that is beyond the condition of pure spiritual oneness in that it is a state of loving relationship both with God, the supreme I AM of the universe, and with other souls. This would not be possible or even desirable in pure Buddhism but is actually a far richer, more meaningful and more creative state than resting in the changeless perfection of Nirvana.

Without God the tendency is to make gods of ourselves. The two approaches to that are those of Satan and the Buddha though in no way am I comparing the two. Satan fell into evil and the exaltation of self while the Buddha went beyond good and evil into the denial of self. But God created the world and saw that it was good. It is to bring to reality the qualities of goodness, beauty and love that God created the world and human beings. We can go back to the primeval uncreated state, which is Buddhism, and we can go forward through creation into Heaven which brings together in holy matrimony the perfection of the One, Spirit, and the beauty of the Many, matter.

I realise that calling Buddhism materialistic, or potentially materialistic, might seem strange when I also say it denies the material world aka creation and retreats into pure spirit. But could it be that its rejection of God means it misconceives both spirit and matter, seeing them as philosophical abstractions rather than concrete realities and life as made up of energies rather than beings? Buddhism transfers the impersonal nature of matter onto spirit but the Christian view sees the nature of spirit as fully, gloriously, magnificently personal and it brings that down into creation as typified in the figure of Christ himself.

Added note: The title of this post is not saying that Buddhism is materialistic but that there are elements of materialistic thinking in it in the sense that for the Buddhist nothing has an abiding centre, everything is in flux and human identity is ultimately non-existent. This is influenced by materialism even if it is a spiritualised version of it.

The Clever and the Wise

 Clever people engage with reality through thought or reason, regarded spiritually as the functioning of the material mind, but the foolish and the wise meet on common ground because they engage with reality as it is, just as they see it. The wise see more deeply and with more understanding but both foolish and wise engage with reality at first hand. Nothing comes between them and their perception of things and beings. Their understanding is not analytically derived but direct.

Thought divides and separates. Clever people exist outside the true reality of life because they work through conceptual thinking, living in a world of abstraction and theory rather than what is. For them nothing is seen as it truly is but as theory presents it. They don't see the thing but the image of the thing, a representation. This is a world of duality in which the individual and the world are completely sundered. The individual then  projects his own interpretation of the world onto all reality and that includes his own reality. He is cut off from life and lives in a fantasy world of his own manufacturing.

There are a lot of clever people in the world today which is why the world has fallen so far into ignorance. These are people who live through the lower mind which gives them the power to manipulate the material world but completely cuts them off from the spiritual which they end up either denying or interpreting according to their limited concepts. The only way out of the mess they have created for themselves, often, it must be said, out of intellectual arrogance, is for them to simplify. Simplicity in this sense means looking rather than calculating and becoming responsive to the mind in the heart in which feeling and thinking are united and taken to a higher place, higher as in embracing more of reality.

The path of evolution involves human beings developing their own sense of themselves as full individuals. The clever stage is therefore one that must be gone through but it is a stage not a destination. We must move beyond it and not become becalmed in it but that is exactly what has happened to large sections of humanity especially in the Western world though increasingly in the East too. It's like being stuck in adolescence and refusing to grow up. We need to grow up.