Equality Means All Mountains Must be Levelled

Here is the Contents page for By No Means Equal to give potential readers an idea of what's inside the book. It can now be pre-ordered on Kindle as well as paperback. Kindle versions are here and here.

Contents

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

I should add that the book looks at the idea of equality from a spiritual or metaphysical position rather than a political, ideological, social or whatever stance. But that's the only way to look at anything. The reason people make mistakes in their beliefs is because they have failed to engage properly with the level of first principles. Get those right and everything falls into place. Get them wrong and everything is wrong. Even ideas that may be right in essence become wrong if your reason for holding them is based on faulty premises. 

We live at a time when the idea of equality is pushed by the establishment as a way of diminishing the individual rather than raising him up. Of course, it's the latter aspect that is presented as the driving force behind it all but the real motivation is to reduce humanity to a controllable mass dominated by a small elite served by a large bureaucracy of system enforcers who cooperate and conform for a slice of the pie. This is why such things as racism and sexism have become the deadly sins of our secular age. Anything that might resist the assault on freedom, intellectual at the moment, no doubt more later on, or stand for higher values must be attacked and shamed. Those groups best able to do this are the ones who represent a threat to the narrative and must be undermined. Things can only be equal when everything is at ground level. Equality does not mean justice. It means slavery. 

Good and Evil

 I have written on several occasions about the need for a radical revision of our ideas about good and evil and what these fundamental things might be. This gets more important by the day because the current understanding of goodness has become completely distorted with the corresponding sense of evil and what it really is almost wholly lacking in the modern mind

Basically, good is God. It's that simple. And evil is not God. And not God is effectively Satan. There is no in-between, no middle ground, and if you do not come down positively on the side of God you will inevitably, inevitably, be drawn onto the side of Satan. This sounds extremely crude, sensationalist and lacking in nuance or, a trap for the intellectually proud, sophistication. But there it is. It's just how things are. However, over the last couple of centuries or so we have been lured into the false idea that good is about worldly good which means supporting the earthly human being, often at the expense of the spiritual. Thus, good people are kind and compassionate. They are believers in humanity and the general welfare of all equally. They promote social justice and humanitarian causes. Good is doing as you would be done by and respecting your neighbour but respecting your neighbour without first loving God is not loving your neighbour, not as he really is.

Believing in God means observing his laws. If you love me, keep my commandments. Again, very simple. It's no good saying you believe in God and even thinking you do if you follow a worldly agenda that prioritises the needs and goals of this world. If you believe in God you know that his kingdom is not of this world. That doesn't mean you reject the world but it is not the focus of your main concern. You do not look at life in its light but from a higher perspective

Let me put this another way. What is important is not so much whether you are a good or a bad person in the generally accepted moral sense. I do not say that doesn't matter but it is not the main thing. What is important is which side you are on which means which way your heart inclines. Is it that of God and the priorities of the spiritual world or is it that of this world which means, in the traditional shorthand, Satan? Anything which does not put God first puts Satan first and Satan will always, without exception, throw his acolytes under the bus when they no longer serve his purpose as we are currently seeing. 

But, that aside, if you do not consciously serve God you will serve the devil in one way or another. Perhaps not deliberately as in handing over your soul for worldly advantage but if you do not swim against the worldly tide you will eventually be swept down to the sea of lost souls with all the rest.

People who are on the side of good may behave badly sometimes. They shouldn't but they may though if they do they will repent because they will see they have not lived up to the standards expected which are those of the good, the beautiful and the true. People on the side of evil, either consciously or, which is most people, unthinkingly so, may behave impeccably but they are more likely to admire themselves for doing so. Those on the side of spiritual (true) good know they are sinners. Those on the side of worldly good often think of themselves as by and large pretty decent people, but the closer you come to real good the more you see yourself for what you are because the image you have built up of yourself is being stripped bare.

All good is in God. Nothing outside God can be good. The modern world has become deeply embedded in evil because it rejects God and even when it allows him it is only on its own terms which means it doesn't allow him at all. 

I don't often write about specific current events on this blog and that's because these are almost irrelevant set against the general trends. The task of the spiritual aspirant is to put himself right on the basic level of aligning his heart and soul and will with the reality and purpose of God. Once that is done, or starts to be done, then other things will fall into place. It's all about first principles. Get those right and you will know the difference between good and evil. Get them wrong as most do and you will have no idea and can be herded and corralled by external forces that manipulate you at their will. This is why the only real freedom is in God.

Failing the Litmus Tests

I read recently that as much as 80% of spiritual communities went along with the patently false propaganda of 2020 and got masked, pecked and all the rest of it. This is a staggering proportion, given that such people should be aware of what lies behind appearance and, further, should be focussed in the eternal rather than the transitory. Why such a failure of understanding?

 As I see it, there are several reasons the people in these spiritual communities failed these litmus tests as Bruce Charlton has accurately dubbed them. First, and most obviously, they lack discernment, but why is this? I believe much of it comes down to motivation.

It is not sufficiently appreciated that the reason someone takes to the spiritual path is more important than the fact that they do. There are only two valid reasons. One is a fierce passion for truth. You know there is more out there than is generally recognised and you will not rest until you uncover as much of this as you can. People who fall into this category will not have been misled by the lies and deceit of the recent past. They may not have been able to put their finger on exactly what was going on but they will have felt a profound dissatisfaction with what was presented as fact. To put it bluntly, it smelt very bad.

The other reason for taking to the spiritual path is a love of God. In fact, these two reasons are by no means exclusive. There may be a different emphasis to begin with but the more one travels on the path, the more these two come together and become the same thing. For the person who loves God the machinations of man are evident because these machinations come from a rejection of God. The closer one gets to God the easier it is to discern worldly lies that spit in God's face.

Am I saying that people in spiritual communities who went along with the propaganda don't have sufficient zeal for truth or love for God? Yes, I am saying precisely that. They failed the test because they were more concerned with themselves than they were with God or truth and therefore they may have been in spiritual communities but they were not real spiritual people by any of the criteria that matter. I will concede that it may not have obvious to everyone straightaway what was happening in 2020, and what is happening today might also sometimes take a while to see through. But anyone whose heart and mind are in the right place should be able to tell the real from the unreal. If you can't perceive the shadow cast by demons it means you have not yet properly turned towards the light.

By No Means Equal

 My new book is set to be published on October 27th in the UK and November 1st in the US. Here is the front cover.

and here's the back with the blurb and a typically generous quote from Bruce Charlton whose suggestion it was that I bring out a book centred around some of the writings on the idea of equality that I have produced on this blog. Professor J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere was also kind enough to write a few words about the book which you will find on the Amazon listings, links to which are below.

Those writings were the seed from which the book developed but much of it is new. The theme is the modern concern with equality and how that is actually an anti-spiritual doctrine because it denies both individuality and freedom which are fundamental spiritual principles. This is not on the basis of a crude left/right perspective but something much more important which is true spiritual versus material or false spiritual which I put in the same camp. Thus, equality is a metaphysical matter not a political one. That is a trap which ensnares many people who see the insanity of so much that passes for rational understanding these days but react to it on a worldly level instead of rising above the argument to a spiritual plane which puts both sides in perspective. I am not saying that on the worldly level both sides are the same but the solution to their battle is only found by rising above them as they are in this world. Ultimately, the battle is between God and Satan, to put it in traditional terms, and there are solid grounds for thinking that everything that is not consciously and intelligently for God becomes absorbed onto the side of Satan. Equality which seems so bright and shiny on the outside becomes a means of separating human beings from their spiritual role and purpose. That is why the sub-title of the book is Reclaiming the Soul.

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon here and here. Also elsewhere, of course, but I don't have those details yet.

No More Sea

Commenters Lady Mermaid and J.M. Smith on the previous post about the oceanic feeling drew my attention to some interesting marine phrases in Revelation. The first comes from Revelation 21:1. "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea." The second reference is in Revelation 4:6 where it says "Before the throne there was as it were a sea of glass, like crystal" and then a bit further on we have Revelation 15: 2 with "I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire, and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name stand on the sea of glass with harps from God."

These two extracts refer to the end of time when good has finally ousted all evil from the world and the spiritual journey is complete. Creation is taken up into God as the New Jerusalem descends. However, they are a little different. The first is a factual statement. There is no more sea. The second doesn't seem to be meant literally. It alludes to something that looks like a sea of glass but is possibly not actually such. The image may just be used comparatively. Nevertheless, I think they are referring to a similar phenomenon and one that manifests on both the material and spiritual levels because at this stage in the operation these two have become one in the sense that the outer is now a perfect representation of the inner. The Fall has been reversed and time has fulfilled its purpose.

What does the sea symbolise? It is the primeval ocean from which life emerges once it has been fertilised by the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. As Lady Mermaid says (and she should know!), it is chaos and formlessness, and as J.M. Smith points out, it is darkness and deep which are the symbols of origin. We know now what the writer of Genesis could not have known, that life started in the sea and only emerged onto dry land once it had reached a certain state of development.  But it's all there in Genesis.

The sea is potential. It is that from which life is formed once it has been impregnated by the Word of God. Hence, no more sea means that potential has been actualised. That which began in the Mother has been born, reached maturity and returned to the Father. What does return to the Father mean here? It means grown up to become like the Father.

In a psychological sense the sea is also the subconscious, that in which monsters lurk but also a source of imagination and creativity when illumined by the Logos. No more sea from this point of view means no more subconscious and that means that the individual, or, at the end of time, the whole human race, has become fully conscious. There are no dark hidden corners in consciousness. Everything has been irradiated by light. The body itself has become light. Occultists talk of the astral plane which is made up of the thoughts, desires, fears, aspirations and so on of humanity but a spiritually ignorant humanity separate from God. It is regarded as a vale of illusion even if it contains beauty. This astral plane is also the sea and for the disciple risen with Christ it ceases to exist, being replaced by that of which it is a manmade distortion which is the quality of love/wisdom.

The sea, then, is the ground of manifested existence, both physically and psychologically. No more sea means that the journey of evolving life is complete, and I would say that the sea of glass points to a similar reality. In the second quote it is mingled with fire which suggests divine love. Watery love implies something rather soft and bland, a generalised state of sentimentalised concern with feelings. But fiery love is intense, creative, genuinely passionate. The sea of glass symbolises emotions controlled, mastered, stilled. The saints stand on it so they can use it but they are not submerged in it, and the fire shows that unstable, changeable human emotions have been transformed into divine love.

Perhaps the whole evolutionary journey is to make water into light. Life must start in the waters which contain the nourishment to make God's thoughts grow. From its depths life emerges onto dry land but then the next stage is to take flight and go through the air up to fire which is the light of God. Could we say that our current refusal to accept the reality of spirit is a refusal to take the next stage of leaving the hard material earth and soar up to the sky, figuratively speaking? Some of want to return to the sea where we will only drown. Some want to stay on the physical earth but God is calling us to mount up to the heavens.

The Oceanic Feeling

A comment from J.M. Smith on my last post referred to the so-called oceanic feeling. It went as follows:

" For all their talk of individualism, Leftists seem to find selfhood a burden they would like to discard. I think this may explain their attraction to some Buddhist doctrines. I've forgotten who it was, but someone once described this as the "oceanic feeling"--the feeling that one is dissolved in something larger, be it humanity, the cosmos, or a pantheistic god. As you say, Christianity is neither left nor right, but it offers a relationship to God that does not dissolve the self. The self is radically transfigured but it is not destroyed. I might say that Leftists think spirituality is a matter of losing oneself, whereas Christians think spirituality is a matter of finding one's self (largely through destruction of illusions.)"

I replied.

"The oceanic feeling is a real thing but I'm not sure how spiritual in the true sense it is as drugs and even mental illness can bring it about. I see it as consciousness slipping outside the boundaries of the solid core of the rational self and becoming immersed in the universal substance from which individualised consciousness is drawn but that is like the self returning to the spiritual womb rather than growing up and becoming, as you rightly put it, transfigured, thereby retaining its full individuality but expanding that into divine being."

All this prompted me to do a little research into the phrase which I first came across many moons ago in a novel by Arthur Koestler. I thought it came from Freud as a psychological (i.e. non-religious) description of religious experience but when I looked it up it turned out that it was the French writer Romain Rolland who came up with the term (which he introduced to Freud), and he coined it to describe the feelings of being one with the universe and of time being taken up into eternity that he read about in his studies of Indian mysticism, particularly from the life of 19th century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna who frequently experienced spiritual raptures. 

Ramakrishna is a very appealing figure because of his childlike innocence and transparent goodness, and he might be said to be one of the main sources for the Western discovery of Indian mysticism through his disciple Swami Vivekananda. He was certainly a genuine saint in the Indian tradition. However, his experiences have been diagnosed as possibly caused by temporal lobe epilepsy which puts them in a slightly different light to that in which they are normally perceived which is as the ecstacies of an enlightened mystic. It also raises the possibility that the search for higher consciousness in this earthly life, which is what lies behind many Westerners' attraction to Eastern mysticism, may be something of a red herring. Ramakrishna was the first Indian mystic of recent times to be seen as living in a state of heightened spiritual reality. If this state was actually or partially a result of mental illness we have to ask ourselves if the approach to the spiritual path that sees it as a search for higher consciousness might not, in fact, be a mistaken one. This is not to deny the reality of higher states of consciousness but maybe that is not what the spiritual search should be aiming at. Indeed, traditionally higher states of consciousness are regarded as completely incidental to proper spiritual practice and sometimes even positively misleading. We are meant to learn the lessons of this world whilst in this world not try to escape to a higher one, tempting as that might be.

I am not an enthusiast for the theories of Sigmund Freud who seems to me a typical 19th century materialist. Perhaps not typical but operating from the standpoint of 19th century materialism, all the same. When I first heard of the Oedipus complex I thought it complete nonsense which it is. However, some of his work on dreams and the unconscious and the various drives that determine human motivation was valuable at the time even if it is outdated now. And what he apparently thought about the oceanic feeling is also worth considering. He envisaged it as the reversion to a pre-ego state, something experienced by the infant before it becomes aware of self and other. That idea is similar to the one I mention in my reply above which postulates that the mystical sense of oneness in which the ego is blotted out is a reflection of the pre-incarnation state when the soul is bathed in the bliss of non-separation. Thus, it is not where we should be headed but where we are coming from and that means that attempts to recapture it are misguided. No doubt, it will be recapitulated on a higher turn of the spiral once the lessons of incarnation have been learnt but that will mean, as I put it above, retaining full individuality but expanding that into divine being. The oceanic feeling is entirely passive but we are called by God to be co-creators with him and that means able to wield divine powers for the benefit of all creation. The soul submerged in the oceanic feeling remains inert. We are meant to be eagles not fish.

Thoughts on the Secular Corruption of Spirituality

I sometimes get challenged about remarks in my books and online in which I condemn leftism as spiritually destructive. I realise there are many spiritual people who would define themselves as of the left, probably the majority in fact, so let me try to explain what I mean though the basis of it all is in the title of this piece. 

First of all, it doesn't imply that the political right is the way to go. Spirituality goes above and beyond all politics and wants nothing to do with any of it in the sense of identifying with any party or the aims and objectives of any party. I would put the spiritual at the apex of a pyramid that transcends both left and right on the baseline, i.e. in the material world. 

That having been said, you have to ask where did leftist ideology as it is today originate, and the answer is that it arose in the 18th century with the specific rejection of God and his replacement with humanitarianism. Now, this may have been a necessary development at the time because it reflected the growth of awareness of the self throughout all sections of society. This awakening of the consciousness soul, as Rudolf Steiner terms it, required a new approach to life and the world and human beings and their relationship with one another. 

But that should have been in a spiritually aware context. What actually happened was that God was removed from the centre and Man, humanity, put there. What should have been a dietary supplement became the main source of nourishment, and the resultant ideology was more and more focussed on this world, seeking to establish what can only be truly known in the spiritual world down here in the material. And it did this by ignoring the reality that this is a fallen world and we are sinners. I know people don't like this idea today but anyone who is honest must know it is true. There is a spiritual corruption within all of us and denying that fact changes nothing. The left tries to redeem fallen man as fallen man instead of getting him to transcend that state for a higher state of being. This transformation absolutely demands we see ourselves for what we are and the left would say we are largely ok as what we are. That is just not true. It's like telling a sick man he is not sick. 

Spiritual people when they are on the left are so because they believe that is the compassionate approach. But what is real compassion? Consolidating someone in their ignorance or giving them the wherewithal to transcend that? Most answers to most questions are given by Jesus, and if you look at his life you will see that in some respects he acted as might a left wing person and in others as might someone on the right. That's because he was neither. He went above and beyond both for both are limited ideological approaches not founded in truth. A good example is when the crowd were going to stone the woman caught in adultery. Jesus stopped the stoning and forgave her (left) but also told her to sin no more (right). So, there is forgiveness but there is also the recognition of sin as sin and the insistence on repentance. 

If you boiled left and right down to their core principles you might get something like equality and freedom and these are mutually exclusive despite the French Revolution slogan. It is actually freedom that is the deep reality of the human soul. Equality is not a real thing. It never can be except in unexpressed non-being. As I aspire to be a charitable person I would say spiritual leftists are well-meaning  but interpret spiritual reality in terms of their experience in this world when the opposite attitude is what is required if you would know truth. This does not do away with compassion but expands it by incorporating wisdom. Again, I emphasise that condemning leftism in this way does not mean recommending its opposite/rival. But I do condemn leftism or what, since definitions can be slippery, is usually thought of as that nowadays, because it separates us from God, replacing him with a man-made idol if he is allowed at all. What is the difference in most things between a spiritual leftist and a material one? Hardly anything really which means that the spiritual person is being influenced by the worldly one to see reality in terms of the priorities of this world.

I know none of this will convince anyone not already convinced but perhaps it might give some people insight into a different perspective.

I mentioned the 18^th century as the origin of leftism but you could go back further as nothing comes from nothing. Specifically, you could go back to the Reformation which introduced relativism and subjectivism into Western culture. Some of the effects of this were good or even necessary because they allowed for the greater expression of self-consciousness, as already mentioned, but there were also rather severe negative consequences which resulted in an increasingly secularized society with moral, social and even religious values centred in the worldly human being rather than the reality of God. The immanent started to drive out the transcendent. From all this came liberalism which started off seeking to free man from oppressive external authority but soon escalated to other forms until now it seeks to liberate us from both God and Nature.

 

People might say what is the left of which you speak? Surely it is just the belief that human beings should be treated with fairness and compassion and allowed to express themselves as they wish? Who could possibly not be on board with that aspiration? Perhaps this is how it presents itself but in reality in the modern world the left is purely oppositional. It is against natural law and the natural order. It is anti-white, anti-male (and anti-female or, at least, anti-feminine too if the truth be told), anti-marriage, anti-nature, anti-creation and anti-God, especially anti-God the Father. The compassion of the left is often just an excuse to deny our duty to our Creator and has more in common with an act of rebellion than true love.

It is often said that when the antichrist comes he will be a humanitarian.

Not Going Along with the Aquarian Flow

Over the last several decades since I first became interested in mysticism and the esoteric I have noticed that spiritual seekers who like to think of themselves as in some way advanced and progressive will often define themselves as Aquarians, displaying characteristics associated with that astrological sign. Hence they will be humanitarian, egalitarian, tradition rejecting, happy to involve technology in their spiritual lives, tolerant of sexual abnormalities and so on. This is in line with the idea, now firmly established in even conventional thought, that we are leaving the Age of Pisces, associated with Christianity, and entering the Age of Aquarius in which the spiritual path takes a more universal and inclusive form. Those who can be identified as Piscean in their thinking and spiritual approach will be regarded as outmoded and behind the times. Aquarians are the vanguard of the brave new world.

I do not doubt that there are such things as astrological ages which depend on the movement of the vernal point, where the sun rises in spring in the Northern hemisphere, from one constellation to another. Since each astrological constellation spans roughly 30 degrees of the sky and the whole cycle takes around 26,000 years, the so called Platonic or Great Year which is the name for the period during which all the fixed stars return to the position in the sky they occupied at the beginning of the cycle, the sun will rise in each sign for roughly 2,000 years during which time human consciousness and civilisations will be marked by the characteristics of that particular sign. In traditional astrology each sign occupies an exact one twelfth of the whole with Aries always the first sign in spring. However, because of the slight wobble of the Earth's polar axis caused by gravitational pull on the equatorial bulge, there is the phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes which means that over time the astrological signs and the physical constellations do not actually correspond any more. But that doesn't matter from the point of view of geocentric astrology because Aries in this sense is not the constellation in the sky so much as the first 30 degrees after the vernal equinox.

But the physical constellation also exists, though no one really knows where one constellation ends and another begins because the boundaries cannot be clearly identified. This is why we cannot know for sure when Pisces ends and Aquarius begins. It is clear, however, that Aquarian characteristics have been emerging since the 18th century, perhaps with the discovery of the planet Uranus which was soon seen as the new ruler of Aquarius, replacing Saturn. So, we may be in Aquarius now or we may still at the end of Pisces. Whatever it is, Aquarius represents the New Age in many people's minds and so to be Aquarian in consciousness is regarded as a good thing, a progressive thing.

However, here's a thought. Why should new be better? If you regard humanity as inevitably moving onwards into a better world then it might be, but traditional thought, whether Western or Eastern, has never seen the world in those terms. Christians have the End Times, Hindus have the Kali Yuga and, I believe there is a similar understanding in some forms of Buddhism and Native American lore. To think in an Aquarian way just means going with the flow, conforming to the zeitgeist, perhaps even limiting yourself to atmospheric conditions that prevail in the psychic world. Might the spiritual person be required to go beyond this or, at least, not allow himself to be bound by it? Is it not just like someone who slavishly obeys society's mores regardless of right or wrong, truth or higher truth? Should you not sometimes stand apart from those who simply go where the wind blows or the current takes them?

Aquarius as a sign has certain characteristics. These are not in themselves good or bad but can be expressed in good or bad ways. They would also need to be balanced by other signs to operate in a spiritually, or even materially, harmonious manner. Thus, Aquarius is innovative, egalitarian in outlook, sometimes radical, scientific, concerned with individuality and freedom. You could justifiably lay all the weirdities of wokeness at its door and some might take this as proof that these point to the future but others, like me, would simply say that this is a perversion of the Aquarian spirit, the reaction to it on a spiritually ignorant level by immature minds.

Let me come to the point. For good or ill we are entering the age of Aquarius. There is no reason though, certainly none that traditional spiritual thought would accept, that this means we are entering a bright new age of love and spiritual insight. Actually, there is little of real spiritual insight in the typical Aquarian mentality. The love is mostly on a theoretical or ideological plane and the mentality involved (Aquarius is an air sign) largely intellectual. Also, we should recall that the planetary rulers of Aquarius are Saturn and Uranus. These are both, to put it completely unscientifically, quite dodgy planets. Saturn is traditionally a malefic planet which means its influence is not regarded as benign. Nowadays, we would qualify that by saying it works for the overall good but through tough love, creating hardship in order to foster development, but still it is not sugar and butterflies. As for Uranus, he stands for independence, inspiration, originality, reform, unorthodoxy, eccentricity and so on which means he can be exciting but also unstable and disruptive. He is not safe or reliable. Consequently, both of these ruling planets have problems associated with them.

The spiritually conscious person must stand above all the influences of the day. He is not to be swept along by astrological mood swings or fall into conventional ways of thinking, whatever the conventions are. He must be centred in the eternal not the temporal. The fact that the world is entering into the age of Aquarius is irrelevant to him. Obviously, he will be affected by this as he is in the world, and to deliberately go against it is just reacting to it on a different level, but his consciousness should not be conditioned by it for it is a psychological phenomenon not a spiritual one.

Visiting Pondicherry

Pondicherry is a town in South India on the Bay of Bengal that used to be run by the French while the rest of India, other than Goa which was Portuguese, was run by the British. For that reason it has its own special character. It was also for that reason that the spiritual philosopher Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) fled there when a warrant for his arrest was issued by the British for sedition. It might be better to say that Aurobindo became a spiritual philosopher for he started off as a political activist bent on liberating India from British rule, but after a period spent in jail on charges of planning an assassination attempt on a British official (he was eventually acquitted) he abandoned all political activity and turned to exploring the spiritual life. He wrote an enormous volume of work, none of which have I ever been tempted to read though I have looked at some overviews of his writing. But my impression was that he was more of an intellectual philosopher than a true sage which is not to say he did not have genuine spiritual realisations but he does not appear to be someone of the spiritual calibre of Ramana Maharishi or Krishnamurti.

For the purpose of this article I reminded myself of his ideas by looking at his Wikipedia page (I know, Wikipedia) and that included this summing up of his spiritual position.

"Sri Aurobindo argues that divine Brahman manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence. Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Regarding the involution of consciousness in matter, he wrote that: "This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance."

I have to say that this represents an advance on the basic Indian philosophy of Advaita in which everything is one and creation has no purpose with the spiritual search being purely for enlightenment. Sri Aurobindo introduces an evolutionary element which may have been in the air at the time and has a certain similarity to the Vitalism of Henri Bergson. He was Western educated and his Integral Yoga bears the mark of Western influence, mixed in with traditional Indian mysticism. It didn't really interest me back in the day because I found the ideas better expressed elsewhere but I do see it was an authentic attempt to get to grips with new understandings about consciousness and where it should be headed.

As I wrote in the previous piece, we had several visitors from the Sri Aurobindo ashram stay in our guesthouse. One such was an Austrian called Oscar and it may have been through him that we were asked to deliver the drums of honey to the ashram canteen I mentioned before. I had been interested in visiting Pondy (as it was called) for a while and thought this was a good opportunity. Michael Lord, who was a firm Francophile as he had spent part of his childhood in Normandy, was also keen to see the place. As we were delivering the honey to the ashram they put us up in their accommodation which was the usual clean but basic setup. While there we ate very good vegetarian food in their canteen along with the ashram inmates who were the typical collection of Western seekers. However, we also visited the French quarter which was laid out like a French town and sneaked off to an excellent restaurant run by a Frenchman where we had a break from vegetarianism with some freshly caught fish. 

Garden of l'Hotel de L'Orient, Rue Romain Rolland

But the best thing I had to eat or drink while there was sugar cane juice which I had never sampled before. The street vendor with his cart on the beach would crush several sticks of sugar cane in a contraption that resembled the sort of thing with which old-fashioned laundries used to squeeze the water out of clothes and the resulting liquid was sweet but not sugary and very refreshing.

Stock photo of a drum press

Pondicherry was, and apparently still is, divided into a Black Town and a White Town with the former being typically Indian with Hindu temples and shops and general bustle while the latter was quasi-Mediterranean in atmosphere and appearance and much more sedate with many of the buildings in an attractive 19th century colonial style. The two towns were divided by a canal so there really was a pronounced division between Indian and European which seemingly bothered no one in the way it would today. This reality of two towns in one gave the place an extra character and interest and when I returned nearly 20 years later I was pleased to see it still remained.

A street in the Tamil Quarter

While there I hired a bicycle to visit Auroville which was a township set up by the ashram where people could live in love and harmony with the aim of realising human unity, whatever that is. That may sound cynical and I have to say that Auroville seems to have a better track record than most attempts to create Utopia. As far as I am aware, it lacks the sexual and financial scandals that dog similar endeavours. Nonetheless, like all such experiments its inmates will find they can take the community out of the world but not the world out of the community. There is always an air of well-meaning naivety to such projects, however well-intentioned they may be when they start out. The reality of this being a fallen world with human beings as sinners cannot be circumvented by the attempt to make a perfect environment for there is no such thing in this world and never can be. On the other hand, it is surely good to have a vision and seek to realise it. The sad truth though is that all paradises contain serpents and sometimes serpents are actually attracted to paradises.

When I was cycling back from Auroville I heard a voice shout out "Hello William!" I stopped and looked around but saw no one I recognised. Then I noticed someone waving at me. "Who's that?" I asked myself. He was a fairly heavily built European and a complete stranger as far as I was concerned. But he seemed to know me and he came up laughing. "You don't know me?" No, I had to confess. "I'm Peter" he said. I was very surprised. I did know him but the last time I had seen him was about a year ago when he was staying at my guesthouse. At that time he weighed about 100 lbs. Now he was more like 175. To tell the truth, I hadn't expected to see him again because I assumed he was going to die. 

Peter was a Swiss who had been diagnosed with stomach cancer at around the age of 25. He was told that there was not much the medical establishment could do for him other than ease his path to death. But Peter was made of stern stuff. He had decided he would try to cure himself and he would do so through diet. He had taken himself off to India to the Aurobindo ashram though he was not really interested in the spiritual side of things, but it seemed a good environment for what he was trying to do which was this. He would reduce his food intake to just fruit and just one sort of fruit at a time, whatever was in season. In the couple of months he stayed at our guesthouse in Yercaud he was eating just tomatoes and then just grapes. He drank no water, relying only on what was in the fruit to sustain him. It seems incredible but I witnessed that he did indeed do this. At this point in time I can't remember if it was his own invention or if he was following some nature cure but he did it and he stuck to it. He was quite emaciated when I knew him first but always cheery and positive. I had great respect for what he was doing. He was on his own and had very little money but a great deal of determination.

And here he was a year later, back to full health apparently. He said he had been given the all clear and was cured but was still hanging around in India because he enjoyed the life there. His diet was back to normal as proved by his weight gain, and we tucked into a large lunch together. I never saw him again after this as I went back to Yercaud and he went to goodness knows where but I will always remember him and his impressive accomplishment. Of course, I am not saying this would work for everyone. There may be all sorts of reasons for his cure, his positive can do attitude surely helped though that would not be enough on its own. But cured he was.

On my last day in Pondicherry I got up before sunrise to go down to the beach to watch the sun rise over the Indian Ocean. 

Sunrise at Pondicherry

At the time this was the furthest east I had been which seemed to mean something, especially in the context of the rising sun. Using a little imagination one could see oneself present at the birth of the world or even the beginning of creation. After all, if the lesser cycles reflect on their own level the greater ones there was a sense in which you actually were present at such a scenario. This was also a way of bookending an experience of several years earlier when I had watched the sun set over the Pacific at Malibu in California, the end of the world. These great events give you a sense of the mighty movements of creation and how both the world and time itself are guided by forces of immense wisdom and power.

Sunset at Malibu

If You Do Not Stand Against Evil, You Are Complicit With It

 I have an atheist acquaintance who will believe nothing that has not been confirmed by science, and the sort of fully materialistic science he approves of at that. 'The science'. Talking about the current transsexual craze he said he will wait for science to pronounce until making up his mind on the reality or otherwise of genuinely being able to change sex. A young man of 18 present at this conversation asked "What about basic common sense? We don't need science to corroborate that." "We certainly do", said the atheist. "Nothing can be regarded as true until scientifically proven to be so. What is called common sense cannot be relied upon". "Besides" he added "I just don't care about the gender argument. It doesn't concern me."

This person represents the kind of modern person who has so separated himself from reality, both objective reality and the reality of himself as a human being, that he doubts everything and sees meaning in nothing. This is the result of rejecting the core fact of a Supreme Being who gives reality and meaning to everything. What he is doing to himself is reducing himself to a spiritual wraith, a thin-souled being of less and less substance. He is literally wasting away spiritually. A clairvoyant might see him as surrounded by a hard shell which blocks out any incoming light. It is a sorry state to be in and requires a massive turnaround of consciousness if he is to escape his self- created prison.

Furthermore, not to care about something as important as the fundamental reality of man and woman shows a contempt for the good, the beautiful and the true. It is not sophisticated, as he appears to believe, but siding, whether consciously or not, with the agenda of evil that seeks to separate Man from God. Deny the truths embedded in creation and you deny the Creator who has put himself into creation.

I'm sure many people during the Nazi rise to power were not bothered because they were not personally affected. They turned a blind eye to moral evil. But now the situation is in many respects worse. Vast swathes of the Western population turn a blind eye to spiritual evil and are therefore complicit in its spread, enabling this black miasma to creep over human consciousness. These people are not outwardly evil but by allowing spiritual evil to spread they become part of it and their souls are damaged

At one time I thought that the mystical path was the proper end for every human soul. I still do. The spiritual light must be kindled and burst into flames within the heart. However, we are not just called to ascend to higher consciousness as in some forms of enlightenment or oneness spirituality in which we transcend the vicissitudes of this world which is then regarded as the vale of illusion. We must actively fight spiritual evil as Jesus did and if we are to do that we must recognise it. Spiritual evil is subtle and will often pose as good, worldly good, good for the fallen human being, utopian good, and many spiritual approaches of the present day can be co-opted into spiritual evil because they do not actively stand out against it. Hence the title of this post. Not to recognise good and evil in the world because everything is one or the world is a limited state in which nothing is more true than anything else is not spiritually advanced but moral relativism, and moral relativism just plays into the hands of spiritual evil which will exploit your ignorance mercilessly.

More on the Soul

 In the recent essay about the soul and what it is I drew a distinction between the soul and the earthly personality, what are sometimes called the higher and lower self, saying that it is the soul that is our real self and the earthly self is merely its representative in the material world. 

I should emphasise that this is not the same as saying that the soul is a spiritual being which has become trapped in matter, whether for reasons of karma, wrong thinking, some kind of spiritual trauma or whatever, and that the material world is therefore something to escape from. That's the Gnostic view and it is wrong. It has many modern equivalents which are all variations on the theme that somehow the soul is good and the lower self bad. That is not the case. The soul incarnates in matter, which is created by God and therefore good even if it has become corrupted, in order to further its evolution as in unfoldment of its potential. It avails itself of the possibilities of the material world to develop itself. Through separation it becomes more conscious of itself and better able to make positive choices consciously.

Our material self is not evil, illusionary or in any way wrong except when it is seen as an end in itself. It is certainly limiting but that is the whole point of it. Think of it as a constriction which focuses the attention of consciousness on an environment in which God is not obviously present. That gives it the opportunity to develop itself and the greater self from which it derives in a way that would not be possible on more spiritual levels in which conflict and challenge are not present. Through the lower self we become aware of a problem and are given the wherewithal to solve it. Or not as the case may be. For this is also a test. How does the self react to God when he is seemingly not there? This is an examination of the heart. A correctly oriented heart turns to God in some way. One of ill will, and let's remind ourselves that faith is a matter of will not intellect, does not.

The Gnostic view is half right and half wrong. We do have a spiritual self which exists in a higher plane of being but it does not become trapped in matter because of some sin or nefarious activity of evil spirits. It descends to learn, descending meaning accepting a more circumscribed state of existence. Matter is not evil although the material world is not the spiritual which means it is subject to the law of entropy. But it has a function and our appearance in it has a purpose.

While on the subject of Gnosticism I should mention the other main fallacy of that approach to spirituality. The clue is in the name. Salvation for the Gnostics comes through knowledge but no amount of spiritual knowledge will get the earthly human to heaven. Salvation actually comes through grace not knowledge, and grace is bestowed on those who make themselves worthy of it through love. Love means primarily love of God and that comes when the soul truly turns to its Creator, opening up its heart and mind. This, though, is our great problem. Our hearts and mind are closed, and they are so because we are too fixated on the material self.

But the Gnostics were also right. The pre-eminence of love, spiritual love not the earthly variety with which it is often confused by sentimentalists, is no justification for ignorance. Knowledge is also important. In fact, the more one loves God or Truth, the more one wants to understand and to know. We have a heart and mind and there are spiritual correspondences to these two. Both must be satisfied. If spiritual love is missing today so too is spiritual knowledge which is why mainstream religion is so unsatisfactory for many people. Spiritual knowledge is not just facts and figures, intellectual knowledge. It is that but it is more for it derives primarily from the intuition. Esotericists have a vast collection of knowledge about the spiritual worlds, an Alexandrian library's worth, but all this is flat until animated by an individual's own intuition.

Love and wisdom. These are the two attributes of the developed soul. Both must be pursued by the aspiring disciple until he gets to the point where he sees they are actually but two sides of the same coin.

Some Books

 I won't be posting here for a couple of weeks so this is one of my occasional reminders of the books that don't appear on the right hand side, the first of which are collections of posts compiled from the two blogs I have been involved with.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man comes from 2019. It comprises essays from this blog, sometimes expanded a bit, arranged thematically. There is more detail here.

Albion Awakening was published in 2020. This was a collaboration with John Fitzgerald based on the blog we shared with Bruce Charlton which delved into the mystical aspects of the British Isles. Details are here.

In addition to these there is my new book By No Means Equal which will be published in October. More about that here.

Give Them Your Mind and They Will Take Your Soul

 We live today in a spiritually sick society with every tradition undermined and every institution infiltrated by forces bent on destruction. It's right to reassess tradition in the light of contemporary consciousness but very foolish to do a 180 degree turnaround from it without fulling understanding it, and we don't. We just denied the reality which tradition was trying to express. We could have changed the language somewhat but kept the meaning behind it or even gone more deeply into that meaning but our intellectual pride was such that we failed to look beneath the surface of past ways of thinking.

As for our national institutions, once the process of infiltration had reached a certain stage there was a tipping point. That took place around the turn of the millennium after which time the mission became to carry through the new ideology rather than serve the best interests of the nation. Those who rose to the top in such circumstances were the ones who were most comfortable with the agenda or least hesitant to submit ambition to moral scruples. Of course, they employed and promoted like-minded people.

The rejection of tradition and the destruction of institutions built up over, in some cases, centuries, did not happen by chance. It was not simply a matter of organic change but deliberate subversion. Every Western country was affected in the same way at the same time and although it may seem as if this was simply how things turned out because of some fashionable -ism or the impact of the 1960s when class barriers tumbled and freedom and self-expression became the watchwords of the culture, that is not the case because these were only external manifestations of a spiritual revolution that was planned. When I use the word spiritual I do not mean it was good. I mean it came from non-material realms. It was all part of a demonic attempt to corrupt humanity and separate it from God, to present evil as good and blacken spiritual good as evil. This could be done because elements of real good could be taken out of context, promoted, exaggerated  and used to deny others aspects of good. If you deny the primacy of the spiritual then you can present material good as all that is required and what tends to spiritual good is dismissed as either irrelevant or even wicked because it conflicts with your material good.

The aim is control, both physical and psychological. One of the reasons the powers that be are trying to bring the era of cheap energy to a close is that they will have more control. Cheap energy gives freedom but when energy becomes expensive your individual freedom, certainly the power to exercise it, becomes much more circumscribed. Yet more important than this is control of thought. A tamed population does as it's told. This is why, starting from the 1950s, there has been this ongoing attempt to undermine men, especially men of a certain hue, and masculinity. Emasculate to control. This is why such things as feminism and egalitarianism are pushed so relentlessly with the newly invented sins of sexism and racism the worst thought crimes you can commit. It is important to realise that ideologies such as these do have, to quote Bruce Charlton, a "core insight of validity", this being the value of the free individual, each and every one. But the good in them has been deformed and made into an evil by being exaggerated and used to suppress other aspects of truth. A truth taken out of context and the area to which it applies and then applied to other areas in which it does not apply or not in the same way becomes a lie. But, because there is a certain truth nestling within the two ideologies just mentioned it is hard to argue with them as they are presented now on an either/or basis which is what the argument usually gets reduced to. You have to go above and beyond the good/bad dichotomy to find the truth about many things these days which is why we have to go outside both conventional traditional and progressive thinking to get anywhere.

What is the aim of this undermining of freedom and attempted control of thought? For some in the outer circles it may be power but for the real instigators of the process it is the separation of Man from God. Spiritual not political. This is why there are so many contemporary movements that seek to rewrite the reality of creation. Dismantle creation and you do away with God to an even greater extent than simply not believing in him. As long as you accept the natural rules of creation you retain some link to its Maker but when you no longer observe even these you have completely lost touch with reality. Then you can be moulded in whatever shape the demons who are behind all this wish. Give them your mind and they will take your soul.

Note: This is the third part of a short series.

What is Evil?

The Destruction of the West

Beekeeping in India

Here's a bit of light relief from the tone of the last couple of posts. We should, of course, be aware of what's wrong with the world but that should not blind us to the simple pleasures of life. These are the things that remain when the storm has passed.

During my time running a small guesthouse in South India in the 1980s I met several interesting people who would come up to the hills where our guesthouse was situated to escape the heat of the plains in summer. The seasons in South India are hot, hotter and hottest and, just as the British at the time of the Raj had retreated to places like Simla in the north and Ootacamund in the south (they have different names now but I'm sticking with tradition), so Europeans in India at the time I was there sought cooler climes at certain times of the year. No doubt they still do. We were 5,000 feet above sea level which was regarded as providing an ideal climate for the latitude. Locals were proud that you could grow mangoes and strawberries in the area, two fruits not normally found growing in the same place. Other products were coffee, avocados, guavas, oranges and bananas. There was also pepper and rubber.

I mention these plants because while I was there I became interested in beekeeping. There was a regional beekeepers cooperative which I joined. See if you can identify me in the group photograph.

Yercaud Beekeepers Cooperative 1982

I never had that many hives but I kept a few in the compound (i.e. garden) of our property, and one of the things I soon learned was that the taste of the honey would vary depending on which plants were in bloom. The flowers of the coffee plant in particular gave a distinctive taste to the honey and this was very noticeable because Yercaud was a coffee growing district (as Ooty, at a slightly higher elevation, was a place for tea) so there were times when the coffee was flowering that the bees went for that and nothing else. Rubber also had a strong signature. The Ayurvedic practitioners in the district would recommend different honeys for different ailments but I'm not sure how scientifically valid their theories were. I do know, however, that honey is a good disinfectant as it has anti-bacterial properties and helps in the healing of wounds.

Me with flowering coffee plants. The tie was a present.

My colleagues in the cooperative were mostly peasant farmers though there were a few higher caste people there too. Beekeeping brought them together in a way not much else did though I did notice that the hierarchy was still observed, albeit not in an unpleasant way. For instance, in the photo above the high caste people are all in the front row. The chap in the middle with the sunglasses was, as he seems, the local bigwig. He was actually very friendly to me but he made sure everyone knew he was the boss though of what I'm not sure. He was a Syrian Christian which is one of the oldest forms of Christianity in the world, dating back to the time when St Thomas, the doubting apostle, came to Kerala in the south west of India and preached the Gospel converting many of the local population, Brahmins among them which is very unusual. So Christianity has existed in India for nearly 2,000 years.

Members of the cooperative would go out into the hills in search of swarms and while on the hunt caste was set aside, all working together. I was told that the peasants were never stung. The reason was that they never washed with soap so they smelt as nature intended. Bees don't like soap, it seems. I myself did use soap but I was only stung a few times as the bees in our area were mostly gentle types who wouldn't sting you unless you really startled them. I never wore any protective equipment. Nobody did. I was taught how to put my hand, slowly, into a nest of bees and just let them cling to it after which you would gently shake them off into your collection box. As long as you had the queen the rest would follow. I can tell you the first time I did this I was pretty nervous but thought I'm representing the British here, I can't let the side down, and went ahead.

Our equipment at that time was very simple. The hive was just a wooden box into which slotted several frames. You would put your bees in there and they would build up their wax honeycombs on the frames. When you extracted the honey you would take great care not to damage the combs because it would take the bees a lot of time and energy to rebuild them, time and energy they would otherwise be putting into producing the honey which you hoped to steal from them. It's a cruel world.

The machine we used to extract the honey was cleverly designed. Essentially a metal drum or cylinder, you would place the frames full of honey in spaces on the inner part of the drum. Then you would turn a handle on the outside that would rotate the drum at high speed and centrifugal force would throw the honey out into a container at the bottom from where it was collected. When the process was complete you replaced the undamaged combs back in the hive with a request to the bees to start all over again. This may seem like straightforward robbery but in the seasons when there were no flowering plants about you would feed the bees with a sugar water mix so that the colony could survive in the lean times. Of course, you only did this so you could exploit them again. Some people, I heard, would extract honey produced by the sugar water but this was regarded as very unethical besides which the resulting honey was not nice. Far too sickly sweet.

One summer we had someone from the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry visit our guesthouse. We had actually had a few people from there before, Europeans and Americans who needed to take a break from the intensity of Indian life down in the plains. But this fellow helped run the ashram canteen and that is why a few weeks later we found ourselves on a bus to Pondicherry with several 25lb drums of honey which we were delivering to the ashram on behalf of the cooperative.

To be continued.

The Destruction of the West

 To what extent is the current elite deliberately trying to destroy the West, specifically the Christian West, and to what extent is this simply a matter of false ideology and ignorance, short termism and even misplaced good intentions? For, make no mistake, the West is being destroyed. It is being destroyed by materialism, atheism, mass immigration, which is seemingly unstoppable, feminism, which gives a whole new meaning to the traditional women and children first saying, moral relativism and several other movements and ideologies which any spiritually sane person can recognise and which are mostly interlinked and which result from the loss of the sense of the transcendent and the promotion of envy and resentment to virtues.

Just as there is a hierarchy of good so there is a hierarchy of evil. At the upper levels of this hierarchy there is intent, definite, deliberate, serious, cold, malevolent intent. At mid and lower levels, not so much, at least not so much in the sense of something planned and acknowledged. Some of these people may want to destroy but they tell themselves they are motivated by honest impulses to make a better world. No doubt there are elements of that in their psychological makeup but there are also strong feelings of anger and hatred plus the afore-mentioned resentment. They are co-opted by those at higher levels because of some personal moral defect or intellectual weakness or spiritual vacuity. They are unwitting servants of evil but they would not be co-optable if there was not this attraction to sin or spiritual blindness within them.

But we are all sinners so what's the difference? It is precisely this. Yes, we are all sinners but some of us recognise this and struggle against it while others allow themselves to be defined by it. These people justify, excuse, even celebrate their sin. They identify with it and do not allow true spiritual feeling to reveal it for what it is. It is their treasure, their pet, rather than their burden, their pride rather than their shame.

Nothing in this world is 100% one thing. None of us are perfect and none of us are wholly bad. And yet, the world is moving in a direction in which the dividing line between sheep and goats, between those who, on the whole, wish to love and serve God, the truth, the good, however they might define it, and those who, in one way or another, serve the forces of anti-God, anti-truth, anti-good, is being drawn. Tests are underway. They examine our spiritual responses to situations and ideas, but be careful of that word spiritual. It does not necessarily mean what we think it does, we who live in a decidedly unspiritual age. Thus, it is not universal loving kindness unless that is balanced with real love of real spiritual (as opposed to worldly) good. For instance, everyone would say that God loves us but what does he love?  Does he love us as we are or does he love the soul rather than the earthly personality? Both you say? Then does he love the murderer as murderer? This is an extreme example but it illustrates the point that though God loves the sinner he does not love the sinner as sinner. If the sinner will not let go of his sin he is separating himself from God's love. That will always be there should he repent and, for the sake of the soul, God will do what he can to bring that sinner to repentance but he cannot override free will.

Therefore, spiritual response means response to the reality of the world of the soul and to the values of that world. It does not mean treating the lower self as though it were the higher self but that is often the practice of worldly people, even self-defined religious and spiritual people, who lack understanding of that world and who misinterpret the truths of spirit by seeing them in the light of this world and its priorities.

The West is being destroyed, in part by deliberate plan, in part by ignorance, in part by greed, selfishness and so on. But also because its time has come. If that were not the case then the attempt to destroy it would not be succeeding as it undoubtedly is. For those who lament its passing, and I do, let me quote some words of my teachers from many years ago at a time when this process was certainly well underway but had not reached anything like its present state. They said "Nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost." When we see the destruction of goodness and truth in this world we are right to lament it but we should also remember that even this was but a shadow and pale reflection of that which inspired it and which remains inviolate in the higher worlds.

The West is under a ferocious attack by the powers of evil. This has been a long term operation, though it is coming to a head now, and for that reason people who only think in terms of human generations cannot see it for what it is. They think the desire for money or power is what motivates the corrupt elites. But these people are manipulated, their vices exploited, by supernatural powers which seek spiritual destruction and the separation of the soul from God. Only when you recognise this simple, basic fact can you understand what is going on in the world, especially the Western world, today. It is right to lament the destruction of the good but it is more important to hold fast to the vision of the divine. Our salvation never lay in this world.

Added note: To say that salvation does not lie in this world does not mean we should just accept the destruction of the good here. We should not but we should also understand that the real good is elsewhere and that will give us a proper perspective.

What is Evil?

 I've written about this before but I want to consider it again because the battle between good and evil is fundamental today. Of course, it always is but two things mark out the present time. One, the issue is confused, deliberately so, in a way it has not been before, and two, the lines are being drawn with each side becoming more defined, albeit in a way that is not immediately obvious to everyone.

What, then, is evil? The answer is simple. Evil is the rejection of God. That is it. Now, this takes various forms and manifests itself in a number of ways but the root cause of them all is that rejection. And the rejection of God is the rejection of truth because God is truth. Therefore, a God rejecter is a person of bad faith - literally. I realise this is a nasty thing to say in the context of the present day but trying to skirt round the edges of the problem just leaves it unsolved. If you deny God you are a bad person and you will do bad things and support wicked ideology. Perhaps at one time there were legitimate grounds for doubting the reality of God. Human consciousness had changed and a religion formed for the previous stage of consciousness was no longer sufficient for many even if the basics were still present. But now anyone of good faith should be able to see where the rejection of God has taken us and where it will take us. This should force any atheist or even agnostic to make a full reassessment of his position. A period of doubt is inevitable for most people in the modern world, and it's even healthy as it can lead to a deeper faith eventually as one reconsiders the nature of life, the self and the world and no longer takes religion on face value but penetrates beneath its surface. But that period should not be a destination. The healthy soul will move on to acceptance of divine truth. 

Why do I say this so confidently? Partly because God is in us and he will speak to us if we do not suppress his voice, and partly because a healthy soul seeks love, goodness and beauty and these cannot exist unless they are grounded in a God. Otherwise they are no more real than the appearance of a face formed by clouds would be. So either you accept these things are not real in which case anything goes or else you acknowledge their reality in which case you must acknowledge the existence of that which gives them reality.

Where has this rejection of God taken us? For a start, it has taken us to a world of post-truth. This had been creeping up on us for many decades but it took over around the turn of the millennium since when everything is said and done for appearance and effect. Very little simply because it is right. Recently we have seen that even science has become more a matter of consensus than truth, and as for politics, the least said the better.

Then it has taken us to the triumph of technology. Technology starts as the attempt to force Nature to human will which implies the prioritising of matter over spirit but then as it proceeds and develops it becomes the means to remake the human form changing it from being in the image of God to a self-created thing which, by definition, is a deformed thing.

All the various ideologies of the modern world which are supposedly humanistic are actually Satanic.  They are so because they reject God and try to recreate not only human society but even the human being (see above) in a form that has no need of God. The only conclusion to be drawn from this really quite obvious and undeniable fact is that modernism, the whole of it not just the more extreme parts, is evil. If that shocks you or seems excessive it is only because the full effects of the modernistic agenda have not yet been realised. But the steps to that end game have been and they are continuing to be taken. One leads to another and on we go to the inevitable conclusion though maybe there is no clear end, just a deeper and darker descent into spiritual loss and separation. In fact, there will be an end because God will not permit things to progress beyond a certain point but there is some way to go as most people are not yet fully corrupted.

To say that the whole of modernism is evil refers to its manifestation in today's world. It does not mean there was nothing good or necessary about the developments in human consciousness, largely to do with a greater awareness of self, that came about in the Western world and from there were exported and spread all over the globe. This was a spiritual advance but the energies behind it were captured and perverted by demonic forces, and the new sense of self instead of dedicating itself to pursuing divine mysteries became fixated on itself. God was rejected and into that vacant spot humanity put itself though it will find that actually what it has done is made itself the dupe of demonic forces. Now we have reached the point where to retain any aspect of modernism in any of the various forms that have come down to us is like not cutting out a canker from a plant. It will eventually spread over the whole plant, corrupting and killing it. Everything that the world believes today has to be reassessed in the light of the reality of God and his purpose for the soul. Absolutely everything.

Am I really saying in this article that people who don't believe in God are bad people? Don't we all know individuals who do not believe who are good, decent people not to mention those who do who are not? That is not the point. For a start, many people think they believe in God but they just subscribe to an image and are not awake in the heart which is where true belief is centred. That is what I am talking about here, and the test is do you see the world in the light of God or God in the light of the world? 

Then there is the further point that this is not about personal behaviour. It is about whether or not the heart is open to the source of truth and goodness. A heart that is so open is a good heart and will acknowledge God. One that is not so open is actually rejecting the source of goodness. How can you call that good? So you see it is not about whether you are good (which in the modern world means relatively tolerant and charitable and not much more) but whether you love good, actively love real spiritual good. Those who do will believe in God because one inevitably means the other. Those who don't love good will not believe in God. It's all about love. Genuine believers in God may behave badly. They shouldn't but they may. We are, after all, all sinners and repentance is an ongoing requirement. Those who reject God may lead outwardly exemplary lives but that is of small concern if their heart is turned away from their Creator. I repeat it is all about whether the heart is oriented to, open to, real goodness. Depending on circumstances, this need not take exactly the same form in all cases. I personally believe that many spiritual approaches contain pathways to God, not all but many, even if Christ remains the Way, the Truth and the Life and ultimately no one comes to the Father except through him. But people take different ways to get to him.

God is reality and God is good. If you reject God you reject the good in reality. That is evil.