On the Other Hand....

I don't mean to be deliberately contrarian, following on the last post with this one, but just to make a point. Everything depends on definition, after all. I still maintain that humanity is on a path of spiritual evolution and therefore cannot remain as it was. I believe in progress but I believe in spiritual progress which always builds on the past, even though it may introduce new dimensions of being. However, it is organic meaning it grows from its roots. Any growth, or imagined or claimed growth, that is not from the roots is a perversion and a deviation. It is a cancer. Our vaunted modern growth, what we call progress, is, for the most part, a cancer. It is a response to stimulation from the higher worlds but a response from lower being and self-will. The sun causes coarse weeds and beautiful flowers to grow. Modern civilisation is a powerful and choking weed that has flourished in the dark heavy manure of sin and is driving out more delicate and sensitive plants. 

In the previous post I said I was not a conservative but I don't completely deny that label. A conservative such as myself values the past and is loyal to the best of the past while not being blind to its failings. He sees how the beauty and wisdom of past achievement was a sincere response to divine impulse and an attempt to express the truth and dignity of God. He also sees how much of humanity's artistic and philosophical productions of the last, shall we say, two centuries has been a response to the devil, celebrating ugliness, sin and perversion. He doesn't want to return to the past because he is a modern man with a modern man's awareness of self but he regards it, for the most part and with provisos but certainly in respect of its higher elements, as a genuine attempt to engage with the spiritual life. We are not the people we were and can never be again, nor should we be, but we can certainly recognise that we were going along a path that led, more or less, in the right direction albeit with many twists and turns, came to a fork in the road and took the wrong turning. We should have gone straight ahead but turned left and the path we took is leading downwards.

This is the sense in which I am a conservative. As someone who recognises that the past for all its faults was usually an attempt to engage with God, and that tradition sought to preserve that in a fallen world. Whereas, in the present time for all our undoubted achievements we have largely succumbed to spiritual corruption and are putting up an increasing number of impenetrable barriers in our consciousness to goodness, beauty and truth.