Materialism is a Kind of Immaturity

 Have you ever wondered whether people who don't believe in God or, at the very least, the reality of a spiritual world might actually be incapacitated in some way? Because if you aren't alive to the reality of spirit it means you have no real sense of the good or the beautiful or of glory or nobility or mystery. If you think these are just human constructs you can't be aware of them at all. 

You truly think there is nothing beyond what you can see and touch, and that human beings are sacks of meat with bodies that are just machines and minds that are only like computers? If you have any real sensitivity you must be at least somewhat aware of the fact of spirit. Even if you can't quite believe in God because the religious presentations of him are outdated in many ways you should have some kind of sense of the spiritual behind the everyday. The problem of evil often brought up as a stumbling block to spiritual acceptance makes no sense. What about the far greater problem of good?

Are materialists people who simply lack imagination? Or do they just need to grow up? A bit of both, I would say. Then, of course, there are some who don't want to believe in the spiritual and we will leave their motivations for another time.

The Secular and the Spiritual

Sometimes in today's materialistic world in which traditional values have been turned on their head and good and bad redefined, a person who approaches the spiritual path might be confronted with some version of the following question. This question might come from someone else or it might even come from within oneself. We have all been brought up in the modern world and its attitudes cannot help but rub off on us. We are taught that certain beliefs are moral and good and others are immoral and wrong so if and when we turn to the spiritual path we already have preconceived ideas about good and bad derived from the world. It is important to know whether spirituality is supposed to build on these or to supersede them, putting them in a different light.

The question is this. "What is your position with regard to (any or all of these) homosexuality, racism & feminism?" These issues have become sacred cows of the modern age and usually when the question is put there are inbuilt assumptions as to the correct answer but I would like to approach this question from a spiritual level rather than the secular one from which it it is posed because that is the only way to answer it properly. Consequently, I would respond to it along these lines.

You are thinking in terms of a materialistic society and what seems good for human beings as they are in this world.  However, you need to change your fundamental principles and think in terms of God, the soul and creation. Then either those questions will answer themselves or they will have no meaning. I can't answer them because, coming at it from a secular position even if it is a spiritualised secular position, you would not understand my answers.

You must know that people can have wrong views because of compassion or what they think is compassion. Compassion is good but doesn't make what is wrong right. This compassion is human rather than divine, being mixed with human emotions and understanding. This is where problems can arise, and I would ask you something in return. Are we here to be happy in our mortal lives or to grow spiritually? The correct answer to that question will answer your original question.

The fact of the matter is that these are issues raised by a secular worldview that sees human beings in terms of their material selves only. This view is, if not actively anti-spiritual, certainly non-spiritual so cannot be responded to in the way you want from a spiritual perspective. 

Essentially, these are questions based on a false understanding of life, and would have to be completely reframed to have any spiritual relevance. I might even suggest  that they are distractions into which are poured the energies of the moral impulse after the loss of proper religion and the sense of the transcendent. They are false trails as is clear when you understand the reality of God and the laws of creation. Everyone should be treated with the dignity and fairness appropriate to his station but spiritual truth cannot bend to human emotions and desires.

A big problem today in the spiritual world is that people turn to it while retaining Enlightenment values which values came about in a world that denied spiritual truth. It certainly downgraded revelation and took human reason, cut adrift from spiritual discernment, faith and intuition, as the only guide to knowledge. The Enlightenment was based on rationalism and empiricism and had no truck with the spiritual unless it could be incorporated into that mindset. But the spiritual cannot be incorporated into anything worldly. So indoctrinated are we with Enlightenment values and the Enlightenment definition of what is good that we take those with us when we adopt a spiritual worldview or pursue a spiritual path without realising that the spiritual changes everything. It's as though we have accepted a 4 or 5 dimensional world but continue to have a 3 dimensional attitude towards it, cramming those greater dimensions into our constricted box.

The best direct answer to the question posed is to say that God is love but he is also truth. For him love and truth are one. Seek truth in love and love in truth and you will know the answer.

Earth is a School article

This is an article I was asked to write recently by the publisher of Earth is a School in order to promote the book. I am not sure where it ended up so I include it here.

Why are we here in this world? Probably most people nowadays think there is no reason. We just are here and that’s all there is to it. We should try to live as happy and fulfilled a life as possible and when we die, we cease to exist. Religious people would go further and say that we should follow the guidance of our religion and hope for an afterlife in heaven or paradise or maybe get reincarnated in a better position than we are now with the eventual aim of breaking the cycle of manifested existence and being reabsorbed into the All. It depends whether we are materialists or spiritual believers. The former would say life on Earth is for living as best you can, here and now. You have only one life so make it count. The latter in practical terms often don’t seem so very different though they theoretically have one eye on the next world.

 

I would like to consider another possibility. It requires seeing the human being in a different light from the one to which we are normally accustomed. For a start, it takes the pre-existence of the soul as a basic fact. Then it envisages that soul taking birth in the material  world in a physical body for reasons to do with its own aims and goals, those of a spiritual being, not for the incarnate person’s development and fulfilment in material or worldly terms.

 

In this scenario the spiritual individuality, which is a created being, descends to the physical world to advance its evolution. It’s like a seed that is planted in the ground to germinate. The word descends is appropriate because the process is a falling away from the unity of the source into separation and limitation. At the same time, those two characteristics force the soul to develop in certain ways that would not be possible on its own natural level of oneness with the source where there is no conflict or challenge. The material environment provides both of these, as we know all too well. Here we can truly become an individual self, forced to rely on ourself and to make our own way. As the evolution referred to is to make fully conscious creative gods, true reflections of their divine source, out of unselfconscious spiritual babes, beings bathed in peace and bliss but purely passive, that individuality is an essential requirement.

 

Earth, by which I mean this physical world, is a school designed with a purpose. The purpose is to brings souls to maturity. If we were to remain as pure discarnate spirits we would certainly never know pain or suffering but then again we would not know real love either for real love requires a solid sense of self which is something that can only develop in a world of separation, a material world in which spirit and matter have been sundered. Our task is to put them back together again, consciously reassemble them, and from this marriage of Heaven and Earth arises something new which is the god we mentioned earlier. This is a being that can wield the powers of creation in full consciousness. I will add something more for those who might think that love can be known by souls that have not experienced the material world. Not really. These souls can certainly know a kind of balmy bliss and communion which is like love but it is an infantile kind of love. True, serious, deep-feeling love can only be known and expressed by souls who have been touched by sorrow. Suffering may be the bane of our earthly existence but it is also a great spiritual gift. We cannot know it on the higher planes but through it we can enter into the lives of our fellow souls more than we ever could if restricted to those planes. It is through suffering that we come to real love.

 

The soul is created by God, the supreme I AM of the universe, out of himself. It is created in his image so has its own I am quality. It is individual but to be a true, fully functioning individual it must co-create itself. Otherwise, it would remain in spiritual bliss but spiritual ignorance. This is what the school is all about. The experience of duality is necessary for the knowledge of oneness. It is separation that leads to completion. But this oneness does not mean simply returning to God or becoming God. The whole process is to make the One many which is a spiritual enrichment of the One, and the many remain themselves even when they have completed the journey, graduated, you might say, and returned to the source. Now they can add to creation. In fact, this is something we can already do in a clumsy fashion though only the great artists do it to any real degree. And note that you can create with God or against him. Here is a lesson many, especially now in the 21^st century, have yet to learn. God is truth. What is unaligned with God is untruth and therefore evil. That’s what evil is in the greater sense. Our task is to bring ourselves into harmony with the laws of creation and then we will find real fulfilment by working with them. The fact of individuality, which necessarily implies free will, means that things can go wrong. It would appear that things have gone wrong in recent times but it may be that, viewed with the eye of history, even the spiritual darkness into which we have fallen will bring some kind of future advancement. Perhaps we have to experience the consequences of wrong thinking to know how wrong it is.

 

The scenario here sees souls coming to the Earth and being tested just as in a normal school. What is tested is the orientation of the heart. There is no choice on the higher planes to which the soul naturally belongs, no sense of separation from divine being. What is, is. But down here there is a choice. The world is very cleverly set up so that there is just enough evidence to convince those of the reality of God if they incline that way but not enough to persuade those who do not wish to believe. Here, and especially now in our day, you can follow whatever path you choose. Your heart is being examined. There is no coercion, no overwhelming evidence that would take away your free will. You show yourself for what you are. This might sound a little threatening but God is surely at least as compassionate as we are. Failure in life’s spiritual lessons may simply mean you have to repeat the course. Those who make the grade return to the higher worlds where, according to their spiritual station, they will be filled with the love and truth of God. Those who miss out on that proceed to worlds that reflect their current spiritual state which will no doubt provide them with new lessons to take them further on their journey. (Though see Bruce Charlton's comment below about the potential difficulty of changing your mind when no longer in a body.)

A Passionate Detachment is What We Need Today

 There is a risk nowadays when the world is pervaded from top to bottom with lies and deceit that those of us on the side of God and Creation may be forced into a state of perpetual opposition. We find ourselves against almost everything and may be defined by a contrary spirit. It's hard not to be trapped by this because evil, frequently posing as good, is rampant in the modern world. But a trap is what it is as constantly feeling oneself to be fighting against something can often obscure or overlay the thing one is actually for. This, of course, does not mean ignoring evil or failing to condemn it. That remains essential. But it does mean focusing on the good at all times and not allowing the darkness to take up all one's attention and energy.

The reality is God and his purpose for us as spiritual beings. Everything that does not derive from this is false. We need to point out the false and confront it when it becomes powerful but we need to do so while remaining firmly fixed in God. It is all too easy to hate evil on the human level. God hates evil. It is an affront to his being and his truth and his goodness. But he hates it without letting the hate consume him or alter him in any way. It's almost a dispassionate hate though I believe it's also passionate if that makes sense. We have to adopt the same attitude. Hate evil because we love good and not let the hate take us away from the good and everything that the good means which primarily is love.

Creation means injecting cosmic order into chaos. But matter is always working to break down the creative energies and return everything to primeval chaos. As the end of an age approaches this disintegrating process accelerates. We are far from the initial creative impulse because, even though God may be creating afresh all the time, the original act of creation is what sets the whole procedure going and gives it its life force. It is the energy that drives the whole age and it sets the pattern for that age notwithstanding the many subsidiary contributions. This means that what is happening now is just what we should expect to happen now. That is not a justification to jump on board and go with the flow. Spiritual progress is made by going against the flow at a time like this, but we cannot expect the current to go in a different direction to the one it now goes in.

What this amounts to is that the evils of the present day are inevitable. We must stand apart from them and identify them clearly but we must not allow ourselves to be caught up in them so that we start actually defining ourselves by our opposition to them. That way they have control over us. 

God and Free Will

 There are certain questions of a theological nature that I and others in my small circle of fellow bloggers disagree on. For instance, reincarnation which I believe in though I do not say that it necessarily applies to everyone. It is quite possible that different means of growth are used for different groups of souls. Speaking for myself, I am glad these disagreements exist as they make me think. They open up areas that I may not have considered sufficiently before and make me look at areas I have considered afresh. Who wants to be stuck in an echo chamber with no chance of growth or development? Not me. On the other hand, we do share basic principles such as the belief in God, in Jesus Christ as saviour, the  need to see the world as a creation which has opportunities for spiritual growth and the reality of evil which operates in a particularly devious way at the present time. That also is important. We may differ in externals but agree on fundamentals.

One of the differences which has been explored recently in posts by Bruce Charlton here and here and by William James Tychonievich here is to do with the apparent conflict between an omnipotent God and the reality of free will. If you have not already done so you will have to read their pieces to get the full extent of their thoughts on this but a crude summing up would be how can what God creates go against God? Or if God is both omnipotent and good how does evil arise? These are important questions and cannot be ignored by any spiritually concerned person. Well, perhaps they can as a simple sincere childlike faith is enough to get anyone to heaven but a thoughtful person will want to consider them.

I personally see no conflict on the spiritual level between God being the author of everything and us having complete free will. I don't see why God, that's God as God and not some kind of demiurge within an already existing reality, cannot create lots of potential little gods out of himself which then, to become actual gods, have to develop themselves which they do through their experiences in the various worlds of being and becoming, worlds of choice, of duality, of testing and of self-expression. Christians say God creates out of nothing and as he is God he can do that. That's what being God means. He is both a spiritual being and spiritual being itself, the personal Creator but also unmanifest reality. I would put this in a slightly different way and say that God creates out of himself. So, we are created out of God and in his image which means with free will. The possibility of evil arises because otherwise we would not be able voluntarily to turn to the good. That still does not answer why beings should turn to evil or why they should oppose God and creation but if free will really is free then this is always a possibility. The created want to be the creator. The fact of a free self might make some look for freedom outside God instead of within him though that just means they have become the slaves of their own egos. The doctrine of the Fall helps explain why evil arose in human terms and why both this world and human nature were corrupted to the extent that it needed the Incarnation to help put them right. However, I accept that the mystery of evil is not solved by this. It is simply pushed back into the spiritual world where first  it appeared. Consequently, we could surmise that evil is the unfortunate corollary of freedom and perhaps also of love.

As for why God does not directly create the perfect gods he wants us to become without taking the risk that we might go bad, the answer surely is that if he did that then we wouldn't be gods in our own right. We would just be clones of him. We effectively have to make ourselves gods from the raw material he gives us. You might say that if this raw material comes from him it should be him and so should not have the capacity for evil or to go wrong but that is to misunderstand the very nature of free will. If it really is free then it will have the capacity to go wrong. The idea of evil is built into the possibility of knowing the good. 

I must admit that I am constructing arguments here that support my intuitions and it is they that come first. My intuition is that God is the One without a second and that all things in heaven and earth derive from him. But free will is fundamental too. These are just basic principles for me and I am not particularly bothered if there are difficulties in reconciling them as long as there are not glaring disparities and I don't think there are. 

 

Media Corruption

 My maternal great grandfather was the editor of the Observer newspaper which was first published in 1791 making it the world's oldest Sunday paper. He did well for himself because his father was an Irish labourer who died when he was only two, a sad experience strangely enough shared by my father. My great grandfather left school at 13 and worked first as a messenger and then a clerk which is another coincidence because those were my first two jobs. However, J.L. Garvin went on to distinguish himself in journalism, becoming the Observer editor in 1908 when he was 40 and remaining there until 1942. I never knew him as he died before I was born but his influence was there to be felt when I was growing up and my mother and grandmother often spoke of him.

I say all this because I have just read a couple of articles in the Guardian which is a sister newspaper to the Observer, both journals sharing the same political perspective which traditionally was liberal. But the Guardian has long since become a parody of itself and is now not only one-sided and bigoted but seemingly motivated by hatred of anything good and true. Naturally, it depicts itself as a champion of the poor and marginalised  but it obviously just uses those to pursue its agenda of spiritual destruction and value inversion. I am sure that my ancestor would be turning in his grave if he knew what had happened to it but from where he is now he's probably got more sense than to worry about such earthly things and is looking down with sadness but in the knowledge that this world must go through a thorough cleansing which means all the evil that is present must be brought out and expressed.

The two articles are on completely different subjects. One is about the truckers' protest in Canada. It's here.  For as long as possible the media in the UK ignored this protest. Then, when they couldn't ignore it any longer, they reported on it but described it as the work of extremists, far right, of course. This Guardian article seeks to blacken it in quite extraordinary terms. Freedom is now the concern of fascist neo-Nazis, it seems. Bodily autonomy is fine if you want to kill your unborn child but not if you have doubts about an improperly tested substance with many well-documented problems, and one that doesn't work very well anyway, being injected into you when statistics clearly show you don't even need it as that which it is intended to protect against is not that dangerous for most people in the first place.

The second article is in some ways even more extraordinary. This one is here.  It's all about how Buddhism changed the West for the better and talks about compassion, equality, non-violence, materialism etc. I'm sure that the West has gained some benefits from learning about Buddhism even if there is not too much fundamental in it that the West did not already know from Christianity, albeit in a different form and with a different emphasis. One forgets or doesn't know that the famous image of the Buddha sitting crosslegged in meditation actually derived from Greek statuary as he was originally depicted only by a footprint, early Buddhism being so world-renouncing as to be little concerned with artistic representation. The human spirit being what it is, that could not last and what Buddhist artists did with the Greek influence, which came by way of Alexander the Great's incursions to the East, was all their own genius. But the point is that most people don't know how the West influenced Buddhism from early on, and particularly I would submit with the idea of the Bodhisattva who is clearly not only a Christ-like figure but actually inspired by the spirit of Christ.

I have often said in these pages that I have the greatest respect for Buddhism. I think it is possibly the greatest human achievement, with profound beauty and wisdom. But it is being used nowadays to erode the spiritual influence of Christianity in the West, and let us remind ourselves that Christianity is not a human achievement. It is a divine revelation. Buddhism contains many insights into the human condition and has developed extraordinary tools for exploring and developing consciousness which we can avail ourselves of if we wish. But it is not a replacement for the teachings of Christ which go beyond those of the Buddha in that they reconcile spirit and matter, the individual self and God, in a way that Buddhism does not and cannot. The Buddhist rejection of God is spiritually harmful for the Western psyche as that is a psyche that is supposed to include the individual, albeit in a way that eventually goes beyond itself as itself. For the Westerner it risks creating a false spirituality that is tempting because it does away with God and even, for many moderns, the idea of sin which becomes mere ignorance, a very different thing. This is not what the Buddha taught but it is what Buddhism and Buddhist derived practices often amount to when applied in the West. This article from the Guardian is a perfect example of how Buddhism is being co-opted by leftism and used as an anti-Christian tool. It now seems to be little better than a false spirituality designed to divert those who might be fed up with materialism away from true spiritual understanding into a kind of humanistic, or fake humanistic, substitute, one in which you can pretend to yourself you are spiritual but actually be further away from God than ever because you have replaced him with what amounts to yourself.

Both articles demonstrate the destruction that is being wrought on the spiritual traditions of the West from within its own institutions. For those of us alive to what is going on in the world today they bear the fingerprints of spiritual wickedness in high places. Please note that I am not saying there is anything wicked about Buddhism but a deformed Buddhism is being used as a false good to do away with a greater good. It's being used as an attack on God.

Earth is a School Extract

 Earth is a School (see right) was published three months ago now. It has not yet set the bestseller lists on fire and I'm told I should do more to market it so T shirts and mugs will be available shortly - or perhaps not. One thing I thought I could do was include an extract here so that potential readers can see what it's all about. This is from a chapter entitled Freedom.

         

If Earth is a school, what’s it a school for? The answer to that is basically simple. It’s a school for turning men into gods. In other words, it’s a school for consciousness. Consciousness just means having the ability to be conscious and there are grounds for thinking that everything has this in some degree, however limited it may be. But only humans have self-consciousness and this Earth is a school for turning that into divine awareness, in which the created soul becomes a fully-fledged creator itself, able to express the triple qualities of Will, Love and Intelligence in complete form.

A god must be self-conscious. Anything not self-conscious has no freedom and freedom is the defining characteristic of divine being. It is the source of creativity and the necessary background to love. With that in mind, let us examine this extraordinary quality a little.

Nothing else that we know of in the world is free, but a human being is. That does not mean we are totally free. We are conditioned and determined by many things, hereditary things, environmental things, our biology, our experiences and so on. Nonetheless, at the core of our being there is a freedom that is recognised by all sensible people, known instinctively to be there at a level beyond the purely phenomenal one. This is the basis of our individuality. It is what makes us who we are. It potentially makes us free of nature or matter which are determined things and offers us a way into the true and unlimited creative freedom of the spirit.

Where does this freedom come from? It cannot come from matter because everything material is conditioned by what it is made of. It's a product of other things which define it. There is no freedom in matter. No one really knows what goes on at the sub-atomic level, but it is not freedom. Therefore our freedom must be non-material or spiritual, which means it comes from God or else it is innate in spirit itself. But spirit is freedom before it is even being which is another way of saying that it is "I" not "it", personal not impersonal.

The personal nature of God or spirit (I don't really differentiate except that you could say the one is transcendent and the other immanent) has important implications for what this world is for. It is a place in which we may exercise our freedom. That is why it is a place in which suffering and evil exist. Our life is a series of choices leading up to the all-important choice of God or not God. If we choose God, we choose the creative freedom of spirit, light, love and truth. If we choose not God, we choose matter. Effectively, we choose prison and darkness but so that the choice may really be free these can be seen by the mind rebelling against God as freedom and light. However, it is freedom for the ego which is the product of the spiritual self identifying with matter. This unrepentant ego then goes to what we can call hell, but hell is only seen as hell by the soul that has chosen God and spiritual freedom. To the soul that goes there it may well be just a place of experience, albeit limited experience, like any other. The eternal privation would only be felt as such, to the fullest degree anyway, by the soul that has given itself back to God in love. For the soul that has denied God, the loss of God is not so keenly felt even though it will certainly be known on some level.

It may be that, spiritually speaking, freedom is more fundamental even than love because love is only possible as a result of freedom. It is also the case that the freer you are, the more you love but this refers to true spiritual freedom not mere self-will. The devil has self-will, but he lost his real freedom when he rejected God. Complete freedom is only possible in God because God is the Father of freedom. It is what he is.

I said that suffering and evil come about because of freedom, which raises the question as to how we may overcome the one but keep the other. The way is through Christ. That wonderful statement in the Book of Common Prayer that 'in his service is perfect freedom' sums up the truth that material bondage can only be broken when we freely align ourselves with the spiritual reality of Christ. At the moment, we have freedom, but we are still largely bound. In Christ that limited freedom becomes full and complete. At the beginning, we were one with God but not consciously so. Through being born in a place in which the ability to exercise freedom is possible, a place of duality, where inside and outside are fully separate, we can consciously choose God but this choice is not just an intellectual thing. It must be a redirection of our whole being from material to spiritual. This is why the path back to God is a hard one. It requires complete reorientation of the will.

Freedom is why God made both us and the world. It is what lies behind creativity and gives the universe its dynamic quality. Correctly used, it is our passport to becoming a god but at the moment many of us are giving it up by surrendering to evil, the very reverse of what should be. We must break the chains of material bondage and claim our freedom in the world of spirit. 

 

 

Faith is not Belief

You can believe in anything but the nature of faith, spiritually considered, is that you can only have it in something that is true.

This may not be the usual way of thinking but we are looking at faith as one of the theological virtues which are the virtues you can only get by aligning yourself with the reality of God. Faith in this sense is not an intellectual position and nor does it even come from experience as such though experience can awaken or boost it. But actually it comes from the knowledge of God in the heart. Therefore, it can only come to one who is already learning to face in the right direction.

Think of the reality of God as due north. A man while in this world can face towards any point of the compass. That's part of the nature of the earthly experience, the way things here are set up so there is room for choice. There are many alternatives on offer, some common, others less so, some no longer existing, others relatively new. But a properly organised, inwardly sound, correctly polarised human being will face north, perhaps not perfectly so at first but in that general direction. In this way he will have faith. His faith may be tentative at first, it may not arise dramatically, it will need to be worked on and developed but the seed of it will be there if he is facing in the right direction. If he is facing in the wrong direction then even if he has belief that is similar in form to the content of faith, it will not be faith because faith is spiritual and related to intuition. Intuition is the means of cognition of the soul which knows because it is. This is also how God knows. God does not think. He knows. His knowing and his being are part of each other, supremely simple in essence, and that is the state of the soul too when it is in a healthy state.

Today many souls are not in a healthy state. Indeed, many are very sick and they are so because they have turned away from God. The initial turning away is a symptom of an already present sickness in the soul and the consequent looking in the wrong direction will make matters worse. Repentance, which is the only remedy, requires reorientation, a turning round to face in the right direction. Look where your heart knows you should look and let the mind follow that instead of being the instigator of what you do or don't believe. This will retune your soul and you will have the faith which is knowledge by another name.

The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth

 It seems that a lot of people still cannot see the difference between the letter and the spirit. There remain many who believe that only those who follow a particular officially sanctioned path live an authentic spiritual life. I fully agree that there is truth and there are lies and any deviation from truth will eventually have to be accounted for. But the truth is not an outward thing. It is not a set of doctrines even though there are some doctrines that accord with it and others that don't. Fundamentally, the path to salvation is to do with the love of God and the intuitive recognition of his laws. It is to do with letting Christ into your heart, and that is a spiritual act not an intellectual one.

There are two points to consider, one that has always existed and another that is operative now. The first is that the spiritual path in its higher and more important stages is an inner path. I have no doubt that some religions reflect a greater degree of reality than others and facilitate the task of finding God better than others, but God can be followed in all serious religions by the seeker of pure heart and sincere intent. One portrait may show a better likeness of its subject than another but that does not make all the others worthless. And the portrait is still not the person.

As long as you stick to the outer path you will not find God. If you allow the finger to be more important than the moon you will never see the moon. The way to God is fundamentally through the heart and that is the only way you will find him. I repeat, this does not make the outer paths redundant. We need both but we must go beyond outer paths.

The second point concerns the time we live in. This is a time when all institutions are corrupt. God is forcing us to go beyond them if we would discover him in his true reality. We cannot hope to find God in outer things, any outer things, and if we insist on that we risk becoming like the Pharisees who refused to recognise Christ because they clung to the old ways. I am not saying that there is a new truth now but there is growth and development of consciousness and we are called upon to engage creatively with the Word of God. That Word does not change but our interaction with it can and must. 

Again, I repeat because I have to, this certainly does not mean that anything goes or we can inject our own prejudices and preferences into God's Word, adulterating it. Goodness knows, that has happened many times in the past and it happens now. I fully appreciate the concern that would protect truth from distortion. Truth must be guarded and protected in a world of spiritual greed and sin. On the other hand, God is calling those who would know him to find him in a more profound way and that means to find that the Kingdom of Heaven is indeed within (it's not only there but it is there), and if we would become members of that Kingdom we must search for it within our own hearts. As Christ said to Nicodemus, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit".