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.