The Root of Reality

What is the foundational spiritual quality? I would say it must be freedom. Others might point to love but freedom must exist first for love to be. Esotericists speak of a state beyond being. This is the primordial state of freedom.

If freedom is fundamental to spirit then that which opposes freedom is anti-spiritual. We live at a time when freedom is being increasingly curtailed though this is not always as obvious as it might be. A more evolved consciousness, such as exists in modern human beings in the sense of their greater self-awareness, requires a subtler level of control. Even so, the events of 2020 should have been obvious to anyone but, amazingly, they weren't to the majority, and even now when more and more evidence is emerging that the response to the problem was way over the top most people still won't accept it. I suppose no one likes to think they have been had.

Then there is the matter of the weather. Its changeability is being used as an excuse to bring in ever greater controls. Cost of living increases, with many foodstuffs doubling in price in the UK over the last year, serve the same purpose as does the move to replace cash with digital currency. All these thing point in the same direction. Loss of freedom.

But there is more. Almost everyone nowadays uses computers in some form throughout the greater part of their waking existence. Computers are based on a technology in which measurement, control and quantification are fundamental. Control and regulation. Despite claims to the contrary there is no real freedom in a computer and this is affecting our consciousness and the way we think. I have often written that technology is not neutral. It frames the way we view life. Our minds adapt to the technology we use. The use of computers makes us think and even perceive more like computers. This is leading to a loss of spiritual freedom and that is over and above the fact that our dependence on computers reduces our own inner powers of perception which are being replaced by external substitutes that give us more breadth but less depth. Just like the 2020 events you will either see this or you won't and if you won't might it be that you don't want to?

The greatest achievement of the rapidly dying Western civilisation was the development of human freedom. Undoubtedly, this had its negative side especially when it tipped over into self-indulgence, decadence, chaos and all the rest that we know so well. Even freedom, the greatest good, must be balanced and directed into proper channels which truth is expressed so well in the saying from the Book of Common Prayer that 'in his service is perfect freedom'. The highest freedom is to be found in Christ because that is the flowering of spiritual freedom but even this springs from the seeds of individual freedom. Without that there could be no spiritual freedom.

This, then, is what we should be watching out for. The reduction of freedom in every area of life. But remember that freedom has a purpose and that is to enable us to know God. If freedom is not directed to that end it will turn bad so our task now is, first, to resist the loss of freedom and, second, to use our freedom wisely which means to aim it towards God. For only in God is true and lasting freedom to be found.

The Guru Figure

Bruce Charlton recently sent me a link to a Youtube video about Seraphim Rose and Alan Watts. 

For those who don't know Seraphim Rose was an American Russian Orthodox priest and definitely someone who was called to holiness. Alan Watts was a populariser of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, in the 1950s at a time when the appeal of Eastern religion was strong among a certain spiritually deracinated intellectual class. I first came across one of his books around 1980 but had an instinctive dislike of the showmanship element I felt I saw in him so only read a few pages before putting the book away. It was well-written and even insightful up to a point but it was also obvious that here was someone who had the words off pat but didn't live the teachings at all, except superficially, and reading that actually does more spiritual harm than good. The video more or less confirms that this was, or became, Seraphim Rose's opinion too. He was attracted to Watts at first but soon saw through him. Bruce Charlton pointed out that Watts seems manipulative and selfish with a cold heart and that you can see this if you watch the video with the sound off. He appears to be trying to intoxicate, entrance, impress and cast a spell on his audience. 

I quote this insight of Bruce's here because this is just what so many guru figures of recent decades have done and no doubt still do, though I am not familiar with what goes in that world nowadays. The potent glamour of being seen as the spiritually enlightened master is very strong, and charismatic figures are drawn to it as a way to feed their egos and dominate lesser mortals who give them energy through their adoration. I once asked my teachers about this because it was something that troubled me in my younger days. They told me that these people were not all evil and some did good at their level. However, that implies that some are evil which does indeed seem to be the case. Such teachers use spirituality to advance themselves and they don't care about their disciples other than as satellites revolving around their sun. The following remarks about Watts from the video can be applied to others of his ilk, and that would be a significant number of prominent gurus and spiritual teachers of the last 100 years.

• His version of mysticism promised him spiritual benefits while allowing him to do whatever he wanted.
• He streamlined Zen to cater to the modern mentality of self-worship.
• He destroyed souls including his own.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you take God and the idea of sin out of the equation. Then you use spirituality as a consumer product which means as something to boost the self. I once believed these people were just in error but now I see many of them are badly motivated, predators on the spiritually naive.

In my estimation the change in human consciousness over the last 200 years, with greater individualism and freedom, means that the age of the guru is past. Of course, there is still a place for spiritual teachers of various sorts but not for the guru as the supreme dispenser of wisdom and enlightenment who must be looked up to almost as though he were God or, at least, a god. That was never a Western concept anyway but the guru became a very romantic figure in the West in the 20th century and many unscrupulous spiritual salesmen jumped on board that train. Alan Watts was by no means the worst but he was a definite type.

God, Image and Reality

Many people think they believe in God but often it is not the true God in whom they believe but a personalised image of him. That's because they see God in their terms rather than his. When you acknowledge God you must have some idea what he is and what his laws are and you must keep, or at least try to keep, these laws as God and his laws are one. You must fit yourself to him not try to fit him to you but this is just what many religious people at the present time try to do.

How can you have any idea what God is? Obviously, the first port of call would be religion and revelation but nowadays the unfolding nature of human spiritual development means we have to supplement that with our own intuition. Intuition is the knowing faculty in man and it is never wrong. It cannot be wrong because it is a direct link to reality. However, in the case of humans as we are at this stage of our spiritual development the intuition is often mixed in with the thinking and feeling faculties and so errors can be made.

A case in point is same sex marriage. This is promoted on the grounds of love but love cannot ignore the claims of truth, and the truth is that the complementarity of masculine and feminine is a basic law of creation. Laws of creation are not like human laws. They are sacred and inviolable. To break them is blasphemy, unpleasant as it may be for the human ego to hear that.

Those promoting a same sex agenda mistake human happiness for spiritual fulfilment. If they are religious their religion is a worldly religion for it seeks happiness and validation in this world. They fail to understand that seeking self-gratification and self-expression is not the work of love because love, spiritually understood, has to do with the forgetting of self not its satisfaction. This is a difficult truth and no one is worthier of respect than a person born with homosexual tendencies who does not deny this in him or herself but does not excuse or justify it either. In God's eyes there is no difference between a homosexual or a heterosexual person. He loves both. But that does not mean that the physical expression of homosexuality is in line with divine truth. It is a mischanneling of the creative energy for egotistic purposes. I repeat, homosexuality in itself is not a sin any more than any tendency is. It is the succumbing to a tendency that is the sin and, more, the denial of its sinfulness.

An image of God is one based on human thoughts, desires, emotions and fears. It can easily become an idol. Christians can have idols just as much as pagans for what many do is adjust the reality of God and Christ to fit their prejudices. One of the most important tasks of the spiritual aspirant is to learn to discriminate between true intuition and what we might call wishful thinking. Only when you start to do this can you make any progress towards the goal of knowing God, and you cannot become one with God until you start to know him as he is. Otherwise what are you becoming one with?

If God Were not a Person then Man Would be Greater than God

 Among those who believe in a spiritual reality there are those who maintain that God is personal, the great I AM of existence, and those who hold that this is a restricted view and that behind the personal God there must be an impersonal Universal Principle transcending all form and limitation, and that this is the real truth underlying the appearance of life in a phenomenal world. You might almost call these two views the Christian and the Buddhist though there is some overlap. Intellectually, you can see the attraction of the latter view. It has a kind of natural logic to it in that it might make sense that behind every thing there must be some one thing and then no thing.

And yet if no thing lies at the heart of reality and the personal is just a veil obscuring that then where does it come from? Also, what meaning would love or beauty or goodness have? Ultimately, these things would be no more than pointers to truth, to be discarded when truth was reached. To think like this is a kind of nihilism even if it's a positive kind as the no thing is not an empty void but a ground of unmanifest potential. But then even potential is something and must derive from somewhere. The fact is that if God is not a Person then he is less than a human being because, when all is said and done, it is the personal that gives meaning to existence. It turns out that the personal is in reality much more profound than the impersonal which latter is the real state of limitation. The unconditioned is like space without stars.

The Gnostic World View

 Gnosticism has a bad reputation among ordinary Christians but I believe there are elements of it that can complement conventional religious understanding. I would reject the idea of a Demiurge on a lower level of spiritual reality to the transcendent God who is responsible for the creation of the world with its inbuilt flaws. A basic truth is that God saw Creation and said that it was good. Matter is not evil but it is matter and therefore a more constricted state of being than spirit. The absolute duality of good and evil, spirit and matter, that exists in some versions of Gnosticism, most notably the Manichaean, is also based on a misconception. The world has fallen into darkness but darkness or evil has no separate reality independent of God.

Where I think some Gnostic ideas are useful is regarding the nature of the soul. For the conventional Christian souls are made (as far as I understand the matter) at conception but I think this is nonsense. Souls exist on the spiritual level, in realms of light, and come down to earth to experience life in a body and a sphere of being in which they become separated from God. This is so that they may grow, become independent and, ultimately, if all goes well, return as fully functioning members of the Kingdom of Heaven. John 3:13 says "No man has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven." Now, I know the verse goes on to say "even the Son of man which is in heaven" and I imagine this is normally understood as a reference to Jesus, but what if it can also refer to men as spiritual beings who incarnate in this world to further their evolution? The seed falls from the tree into the ground from whence it grows up and returns to the sunlight.

The Gnostic idea of man being a divine spark trapped in matter from which it must extricate itself has merit. Where I would differ from Gnosticism is in saying that this is intended. There is purpose behind it. It is not simply that the soul has fallen into darkness and ignorance but that it has come to this state in order to learn and to grow. On its own level it is perfect but passive. Bathed in bliss perhaps, but with no chance to deepen its understanding or develop its creative powers. In order to do this it must come to a world where it is thrown back on itself. This is the world of separation which is the material world.

But things are not quite that simple because this world is not only material, that is to say, outside pure spirit, it has also fallen and so is worse than it might have been. This is where the Gnostic misunderstanding comes in. Yes, the world has been damaged. No, it is not on that account evil. Evil is nothing in itself. It can only inflict harm on good. Good is the reality and evil is just the shadow of reality in a dualistic world of light and darkness. Darkness is not a thing. It is just the absence of light.

So, the soul comes down to earth in order to return to the heavenly realm but as a conscious choice rather than automatically. This act of choosing qualifies the soul to go to a higher level than that from which it emanated but it also means there is an element of risk involved. This is required because the soul needs to form itself by consciously allying itself with God and Creation. God makes the raw material but the soul then has to build itself up from that raw material if it is to be, which is the intention, a real individual hence a potential god itself. 

Gnosticism means knowledge. The soul is required to have spiritual knowledge. That much should be obvious. But which is more important, knowledge or faith? On a spiritual level they are the same thing. It is only in worldly terms that they become separated and sometimes even in conflict. But that just means that they are both very imperfect in this world. The aim is to unite them and realise they are two sides of the same coin.

10 Years On

 This blog is now 10 years old, the first post here being on February 28th 2013. I don't suppose I thought it would last that long when I started it but it has because in a changing world with more and more spiritual challenges there still seem to be things to write about. It began as an extension of the book I wrote about my encounters with the spiritual beings I called the Masters in order to develop themes from that book and it has done that but it has also gone its own way over time. That means I hardly ever write about the Masters now, and it's true that I have not had any outer contact with them since 1999 so the title might seem redundant. However, I believe they lie behind many things I do write about. They themselves said that they sought to impress ideas on my brain but this would be on a spiritual and non-verbal level which has to be translated by my own mind so it does come from me in the form it comes out but often (not always, of course) the seeds are planted by them. I should add that I am sure they do this with many people, wherever there is a receptive mind. My case is by no means exceptional.

What I am saying is that the title still applies though in an indirect way. I did consider changing it to just my name to mark the ten year anniversary but what would be the point? It is what it is and may as well remain that. Besides, if there is anything that marks this blog out it would be my experience with the Masters. For new readers who aren't aware of that I would refer them to the books on the right or else to this post which is of a talk I gave a couple of years ago, but the essential point I wish to make here is that though it may seem we are on our own in this world, that is not the case. We are guided and supported by our spiritual teachers, Christians might call these guardian angels, and they are constantly trying to influence us for the good. But their object is to bring us up to their level, possibly so that we can perform the same function as they do for future generations, and so they cannot hold our hands as though we were spiritual babies. Now every serious believer is called to be a saint and saints have to learn how to suffer. They also have to learn to be completely single-minded in their pursuit of God, a single-mindedness that should come from love.

God is all around us but he also withdraws so that we are obliged to go up to meet him. That is, go up to meet him where he truly is. This effort to meet him on his own spiritual level will develop our spiritual faculties. It is the meeting with God that is the goal of all spiritual endeavour. The Masters are just staging posts on the greater journey, as is any spiritual teacher, but staging posts can be very helpful and sometimes you can't get to journey's end without them. Their goal, as implied above, is to encourage us to develop our own relationship with God and that has a twofold aspect. There is the relationship with God the Father, the transcendent Creator of Heaven and Earth, and there is also the relationship with the God who dwells within our own hearts. If you restrict yourself to just one of these aspects your spiritual development will be limited. Your path must encompass both to be true.

Many times over the past 10 years I have written that this is a time of testing. Of course, that is always the case in earthly existence but today the work of the past 2,000 years is coming to a head. You can tell this because at no other time has there been so little awareness of God. People have always sinned and behaved badly but the culture was always religious. No longer. Now even religion is not religious for the most part. But that is good because it means we are being forced back on ourselves. We must become spiritually self-reliant if we want to become spiritually mature. This doesn't mean every man is his own pope but every man must make his own connection to God. This is not an easy task because the fallen self within us constantly gets in the way but making your own connection to God does not mean rejecting outside help in the form of scripture, religious teachings, whatever. It simply means not depending or relying on that outside help. Use it to illuminate your own soul. That is the proper goal of all spiritual endeavour.

Soul Music

I have been listening to Wagner's opera Parsifal recently. For those who are interested in such things it's the 1962 Bayreuth performance conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch, excellently recorded in stereo and featuring perhaps the last great generation of Wagner singers. I first heard orchestral extracts from Parsifal, specifically the Prelude and Good Friday music, in my early 20s but didn't listen to the whole opera until much later. I couldn't really get on with the singing and seeming longueurs then but now if I listen to Wagner it's the operas as a whole I listen to, the Ring cycle, especially Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, being my favourite with Parsifal a close second. No one can plumb the depth of Jungian archetypes like Wagner, almost literally so with the prelude to Das Rheingold. There is a spiritual intensity to his music which is quite different to the spiritual quality of, say, Tallis or, different again, Bach because it includes much more than these of the human element though less of the purely spiritual, as is only appropriate for Romantic music. You might say it goes deeper but is less elevated. Those who don't believe that human consciousness has evolved should study Western music of the last 1,000 years. From the pure simplicity of Medieval plainchant to the intricate  harmonies of Renaissance choral polyphony through the more expressive and technically sophisticated Baroque and Romantic music and on to the 20th century when it all broke down there is a clear progression with ever greater emphasis on self-consciousness. Wagner brought this to a pinnacle. After him there didn't seem anywhere left to go except for music to turn in on itself and we are still struggling with that problem. The composer Cyril Scott in his book Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages wrote that Wagner touched the buddhic plane, meaning a plane of high spiritual quality, on two occasions in his music, once with the Good Friday music in Parsifal and once with the Prize Song from The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. One doesn't have to express this in his Theosophical terms to recognise that these two pieces of music genuinely do have a spiritual quality like few others.

This is real soul music. It has always seemed ridiculous to me that what is called soul music is so called. Maybe it's a kind of inversion typical of these latter days since music of the soul is precisely what this kind of music is not. Soul, as in sensitivity to spirit and the higher dimensions of being, is just what is lacking here. It may be enjoyable music on its own terms but those terms are of physical being with input from the emotional level, not spiritual in any proper sense at all. Real music of and from the soul inclines to contemplation not sensual movement. The feelings it arouses are to do with reverence, majesty, awe, humility and the sublime not frenetic excitement of mind and body. It may be that not all people are capable of feeling these, let's call them what they are, higher feelings but it is a spiritually fatal mistake to pretend that the lower is the higher or that the two are in any way equal. They are not and if you don't recognise this you will desensitise yourself to higher reality. It's no good saying everything has its place unless you see the lower in the light of the higher. Sometimes, often, that will put it in a very different light from how it sees itself.

Spiritual and Material

  The spiritually inclined person can take one of several approaches towards this world. The extreme mystic can reject it altogether claiming all truth is in spirit and everything else is illusion but in doing this he is taking a very limited approach because he is restricting reality to one aspect of it, formless being. That may be the most fundamental part of it (it may not, we don't actually know) but this does not mean everything else is without meaning. Moreover, everyone who claims this in theory is inconsistent in practice. If you really believe this you may as well kill yourself now. You would also ignore crime, violence, murder etc, seeing them as nothing more than transient ripples on the surface of eternity. It turns out, when you analyse this approach, it is really a rather self-centred one. One, moreover, that denies the reality of God other than as a synonym for pure consciousness. Not to mention the goodness of creation or any purpose to existence beyond simply existing. As for good and evil, what's the difference?

The opposite of this is the person who claims religious or spiritual belief but interprets that in a worldly context. He seeks validation and/or fulfilment in the framework of this plane of being and for himself as he is here and now. Thus, he may either be a loyal and unquestioning member of a church (an earthly body) or he may look to spirituality to bring him peace and happiness in this life, spirituality as therapy rather than self-transcendence. Neither of these people understand that the spiritual has to do with the well-being of the soul not the earthly individual. They are not the same. Sometimes they are almost opposites.

The right attitude to take to this world is to see it in the light of the spiritual world. This means it is important as an expression of the spiritual world but not ultimately important. And yet it is part of the totality of life and has significance in that respect. The two are intertwined even if there is a hierarchal relationship between them. The material is an aspect of the spiritual and feeds back into it so what happens in this world matters - no pun intended. At the same time, the material has no true significance in and for itself.

When Christ died he showed that the material was not important for itself. But when he ascended into heaven he took his resurrected body with him and showed that the material was important as the vehicle through which spirit is glorified and can express itself. The proper attitude to this world and to the body (they are more or less the same thing) is to see them as the physical manifestation of divine being. As such, they are real but they exist to serve the purpose of divine being not for their own purpose or fulfilment. They are part of the wholeness of life, not illusion, not evil, not corrupt, not false, but they can become all of those things if they become detached from proper orientation towards spirit.

The One Deadly Sin

 I have been thinking about sin and what it is today because while we still acknowledge most of the traditional sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, sloth and gluttony, we fail to recognise the deadliest sin and this is the one that is more prevalent now than ever.

There are sins of action, robbery, murder, rape and the like, and these we continue to regard as sins though we may not use that word any more. Then there are sins of desire and emotion such as anger and envy and these we often excuse unless they have real world outcomes that lead to crime or violence. And then there are sins of thought and the only ones of these we recognise now are those that go against the ephemeral fashions of the moment and are called racist, sexist, fascist etc. None of those were traditionally regarded as sins unless they included in their make up a real sin, pride or envy, for instance, or else real hatred. However, there is a real sin of thought, a spiritual sin, and this is not only not regarded as a sin but can even be seen as a positive thing, a virtue almost. At worst it has a neutral significance.

This sin is rejection of God. The rejection of God is more than unbelief. Unbelief nowadays is generally a passive thing but rejection is active. It is a deliberate denial of God not simply a lack of belief in him. I would say that even passive unbelief is a sin because God is real and if you are not for him you are against him but it is a sin that can be forgiven, assuming repentance and acceptance, of course. But the fully conscious calculated rejection of God is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and that, so we have been told, cannot be forgiven.

I have labelled this post under free will because that is what all this is about. We are sent to this plane of being because here our innate tendencies can be brought out and this is especially true at the present time which, I would surmise, is why so many souls are alive now. This is a unique testing period in human history. Only those who actively choose to accept God will pass the test.

Unbelief Posing as Belief

 I got into trouble the other day because I described someone as an atheist. "She's not an atheist" I was told, "She believes in God". I didn't pursue the subject but what I thought to myself was "No, she doesn't, she only thinks she does."

What I meant by this was that this person, like so many, believes she believes in God because in her mind she thinks that God might exist and she would like God to exist though on her terms. But she doesn't really believe. Her behaviour is not that of a person who takes into consideration what the existence of God might actually mean. She doesn't have any kind of inner connection to the reality that is God. God is not  more real to her than this world. Worldly culture influences her far more than spiritual reality does. Her belief in God is actually a form of humanism with a small serving of God on top. He might be the cherry on the cake but he's not the whole cake.

The Pharisees thought they believed in God but they didn't. They believed in a construct of their own making not the living God at whose glance angels tremble (in love and awe not fear). The bishops in the Church of England think they believe in God but the only conclusion one can draw from their actions and words is that most of them don't. These people believe in the human race and they like to think there is some sort of spiritual component in humanity but they don't behave as if they have any understanding of the truth of God. If you don't have any understanding of God what is it you actually believe in?

To believe in God requires that you take God as the foundation of everything else you believe. He is not one ingredient among many. Everything else is seen in the light of that reality and is subsidiary to it. It also means you must have some understanding of what God is, how he expresses himself in creation and what he requires of you personally and human beings collectively. You might ask how can any mere mortal understand God? Obviously you can't completely but you can insofar as a human being can. He exists within your heart and will make his presence known to you if you listen properly, look correctly and remove, as far as possible, preconceived ideas and wishful thinking. You can understand God if you look at yourself in his light but never if you look at him in your light.

So, yes I would say that many people might intellectually acquiesce to the idea of God but they don't really believe in him. Of course, a lot of these people would feel insulted if you told them this but if they were honest with themselves they would see the justice of it. The problem for them is that until they see the truth of the accusation they will remain in illusion, thinking they have put themselves right spiritually while in fact they are as far away from the truth as any regular atheist. 

You only really believe in God if that belief overshadows, indeed determines, every other belief you have.  And nowadays if you say you believe in God but still go along with the worldly agenda, much of which grew out of the specific denial of God, then frankly you are no different from a non-believer. We live at a time of not just materialism but the assimilation of religion and spirituality to the materialistic ethos with the consequences that many of those who would call themselves believers fail to realise that believing in God means rejecting all the trappings and priorities of this world. Seeking to serve two masters they simply become absorbed by the world. Just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

You must believe in the head and you must believe in the heart. If it is just the former then what you believe in is not God. It is only an idea you have about God and that idea will be formed from things other than God, very often things of this world - just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

Astrology is a Signpost to Creation

 Anyone who makes even a half-serious study of astrology will find that the horoscope provides an accurate description of its subject. It's a system of symbols and has to be interpreted in context for the fullest understanding but creative analysis of the chart of the sky at a person's birth will always give insight into the nature and character of that person. No doubt the destiny too but I haven't investigated that side of things. I have looked at many horoscopes from the psychological perspective though and everyone one of them has given an accurate description of the person. In one case I even went back to someone to check if he had given me the right date because chart and personality didn't tally though they did for the year before. It turned out that this person had indeed been born the year before he had said. (I think this was an error on his part rather than a test). When my children were born I made a special case of noting the exact time so I could do the most accurate horoscope possible. This is because it is not just the date and place that matters but the time which is especially significant from the point of view of points on the horizon and zenith, Ascendant and Midheaven in astrological speak, the former indicating  the way you present yourself to the world and the latter showing your direction in life. I studied the horoscopes before I knew the personalities of the children and they have proved extremely accurate. I understand things about myself much better from knowing my birth chart. I believe it would benefit everyone to study their horoscope. They would have a good insight into their character strengths and weaknesses.

In Western astrology every sign of the zodiac, signs being the constellations which serve as the backdrop against which the sun, moon and planets move in the course of a year, is said to be ruled by a particular planet. This is because sign and planet share similar qualities. Thus, Aries was traditionally ruled by Mars, Taurus by Venus, Gemini by Mercury, Cancer by the Moon, Leo by the Sun, Virgo by Mercury, Libra by Venus, Scorpio by Mars, Sagittarius by Jupiter, Capricorn by Saturn, Aquarius by Saturn and Pisces by Jupiter. If you know anything about astrology you will see that some of these make sense and others not so much. You have to perform some mental acrobatics to make them fit. The reason is that there are 12 signs but only 5 planets plus the sun and the moon which are counted as planets for these purposes, a planet in astrology really being something that qualifies and represents a certain energy or, in human psychological terms, character trait. When Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered they were assigned certain qualities which, it was found, fitted much better with the signs Aquarius, Pisces and Scorpio, and this isn't just arbitrary. Astrological practice shows it works. By the way, the discovery of these planets coincided with certain changes and developments in human consciousness so here we can see how astrology is a living system with room for growth.

This leaves two planets with a double rulership which implies that there remain two planets waiting to be discovered, perhaps again coinciding with changes in consciousness. These could either be very far out on the edge of the solar system or very close to the sun.  They could even be planets which are not fully materialised. It seems obvious that Gemini and Mercury go together but Venus has affinities with both Taurus and Libra so that is harder to decide. On the other hand, Virgo seems unlikely to be ruled by Mercury. The two have little in common so I am sure this is one of the signs that awaits its true ruler. That may be the planet known by esoteric astrologers as Vulcan, a so-called veiled or hidden planet. I am undecided about the 12th sign and its true ruler though I expect those more learned in astrology than me have their ideas.

All this indicates that astrology is still a work in progress. New ways to analyse the chart are always being developed and tested but there are also new astronomical factors astrologers take into account such as the minor planet Chiron. This is not an anything goes approach because everything has to work. Nothing is arbitrary. But we are dealing with a wisdom encoded into the structure of the universe and it would be very foolish to think we have uncovered all its details.

Many Christians reject astrology as a fundamentally irreligious practice. This is a mistake though perhaps understandable given the human tendency to lapse into superstition and fatalism. Astrology is certainly not a religious practice nor any kind of substitute for proper religion but it is an excellent tool for looking at creation and understanding the psyche, and if regarded in the light of the Creator has many positive contributions to make to human development. Astrology is a signpost to the fact of creation.

Hope Is Trusting God

 It didn't seem so at the time and it might not seem so now but I believe we can say that the globalist attempt to take over the world that came into full force in 2020 and went on through the next couple of years was a relative failure. To be sure, the great majority of people submitted to the propaganda and accepted the yoke but a substantial minority did not. They didn't believe the lies, they didn't don the facial costumes and they didn't offer their arms up to be stamped. This minority may have been bigger than it appears because they are not reported on by mainstream media, other than very occasionally and then in terms that deride them as idiots, but they supported each other online and so knew they were not alone.

It is this minority that has protected the whole of humanity. Some were quite public in their pronouncements. These were usually people who had some professional knowledge or else those who had insight into the lies and manipulation of governments and other public bodies, knowing that all of these have been captured by powerful vested interests that work against freedom. We owe a debt to these people. Others acted for spiritual reasons and though these are not publicly prominent in  any way their thoughts go out into the world and have a fertilising effect on minds ready to receive truth. You might think of the mental world as a great cloud of images. The more people that focus on a particular thought, the more that thought becomes defined and accessible to other minds that may be reaching out in a certain direction. It is given stronger form and brought closer to the earthly level. 

The attempted coup in 2020 was only a partial success for the globalists. I call them that for want of a better term but they are the body of men and women operating in the physical world who seek to curtail human freedom for their own ends, sometimes to do with money and power but not exclusively so because what these people are really doing whether they know or not, and most don't, is working for discarnate powers whose goal is damnation. What I mean by that word is the spiritual consequence of the human rejection of God. Souls who fall into this unhappy state then provide energy on which the demons, these evil powers and intelligences, can feed. Demons have cut themselves off from God and the true spiritual. They cannot get life energy directly from God. To continue in existence they must therefore steal energy from elsewhere and this is why these fallen beings seek to draw weaker souls into their power through spiritual corruption. This is their ultimate end game. It is why they do not at the moment seek total collapse and destruction. The risk then is that souls turn to God but if they can keep people clinging to the physical while rejecting God and calling good evil and evil good, as we now do to a greater extent than ever before, their goals are well served.

Nevertheless, it appears that more and more people are beginning to wake up from the bad dream of the last three years and realising that this was an orchestrated attempt to enslave humanity. It nearly worked but it didn't work as was hoped because too many people saw through the lies and spoke up about it. Now, the problems with the peck are becoming harder to hide because of the excess deaths figures. The fact that the illness for which the peck was supposed to offer protection was nowhere near as bad as was painted is also becoming better known, and the home imprisonment tactic, which only worked in the first place because so many people actively enjoyed it not suspecting where it might lead, is also being shown up as harmful on many levels from economic to psychological. Not forgetting that it didn't work as a barrier to disease anyway.

However, though the globalists may not have had quite the success they wished for and though their lies are gradually being revealed, they have more tricks up their sleeves. The two main ones they are running at the moment are to do with the hysteria concerning changing weather patterns and dragging the Western world into a war which really has nothing to do with it. Again, we are being fed lies and again there is practically no mainstream publicity given to views that conflict with the official one. I suppose this could only happen because of the corruption of education over the last few decades as people are taught what to think not how to think. I'm almost embarrassed to write such a cliché but it's a fact. There is also the feminisation of thought that has taken place with feelings regarded as more important than truth and harm avoidance and equality the principal aims of policy. More clichés, to be sure, but also more facts.

If I were asked whether I am optimistic or pessimistic about the future I would say both. Despite the relentless propaganda there remains something in the human soul that is oriented towards the true good which is God. In most people this lies dormant but it is there waiting to be woken. Having said that, I don't see the mass of humanity waking up but this is a time of the testing of souls. Those who make the grade will go on to higher worlds. Those who fall short will find themselves in planes of being that correspond to their own consciousness but I believe even most of these will be given new opportunities. A soul is only truly lost when it makes a definitive and permanent decision to reject God. Until that happens there is always hope.

Albion Still Asleep

A little under 7 years ago Bruce Charlton started a blog which he called Albion Awakening to which he invited John Fitzgerald and me to contribute. It touched on a variety of subjects to do with the spiritual mission of England and Great Britain and, by extension, the whole English speaking peoples, often centred around the myths and legends of the country, its writers, poets, artists and even prophets and also the land itself. It hoped to contribute towards the stirring from deep slumber of Albion which is the spiritual counterpart to Great Britain, the soul of the land if you like. It roughly coincided with the movement for Brexit but was not directly linked to that in any way as it went beyond a simple question of national sovereignty to spiritual awakening which would be to Brexit, even in its deeper sense, what soul is to body. The blog came to an end in 2019 but is still to be found here.

It might seem that the enterprise was in vain. Brexit has fizzled out into nothing partly because most of the Establishment worked and still work against it and partly because it was wrongly motivated anyway. That is to say, the majority of the people who voted for it did so egotistically and without a sense of service to the country or an understanding of the deeper meaning behind the political and social entity that is a modern nation. However, the blog was a shot fired against the enemy which is atheistic materialism. You might also think of it if you were fancifully inclined as a flare going up into the night sky that briefly illuminates the surrounding darkness and reminds those who see it that light exists.

John and I compiled a book from our writings to which Bruce wrote the foreword.

Albion is very obviously still asleep but that is the point. It is asleep not dead. Like Arthur, and numerous others heroic figures from legend and folklore, Albion lies hidden in the land waiting to be recalled to consciousness. The question is what might prompt this awakening? The stories about sleeping kings usually say that they lie in a kind of suspended animation in a mountain or deep cavern awaiting a time when their countries are in dire need. However, I think it is not so much need that calls them forth as readiness of the country to receive them. In the case of Albion this would imply that a critical mass of the population should be spiritually receptive enough to respond to the quality of Albion. After all, if you can't respond to it then it can't help you. Ask and you shall receive remains a profound spiritual teaching. The converse to that is if you don't ask then you won't receive. The question is how many people now even want to be saved? Unfortunately, the number does not appear to be great which is why we are in the state we are in. On the other hand, every individual who does start to wake up and ask serious questions adds to the voices calling for Albion to awaken.

The paperback version of the book can be found here.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1708664955

and here 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1708664955

Kindle versions are here

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B085376XC2

and here

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085376XC2

Peck, Peck, Peck (Without Regret) *

 I had an argument with a peck enthusiast the other day. It was about the excess deaths figure which is very high at the moment both within the UK and elsewhere. I asked him if it could be the pecks that were responsible for this. He got very angry and said that this was complete conspiracy theory nonsense. He is triple pecked but has had constant cold-like symptoms for the last 3 months. He says he's never had a cold like that before and doesn't understand what could be causing it. When I questioned the virtues of the peck he got impatient and went on about "the science" and how he trusted doctors rather than weirdos on the internet before asking me what possible reason could the media and the medical establishment and the politicians have for lying to us? Then he said that I should have had enough courage to get pecked myself. I must admit this annoyed me. I said it was precisely a lack of courage, i.e. excessive fear of a disease that a little research would show to be harmless to most people who weren't very old or obese, that prompted people to take an improperly tested procedure based on a completely new technology with no long term data about its safety. I told him the reason I rejected the peck was not fear of its physical effects so much as realising that I did not need it and why would I subject myself to an untested and potentially risky intervention that I did not need? But a much deeper reason was the spiritual one. I said it was obvious that we were being manipulated and cajoled, made to take something unknown because of fear being whipped up, and I had no wish to respond to such patently devious behaviour. The psychological pressure being brought to bear made the whole thing smell bad and it was quite clear that something rotten lay below the surface.

Obviously, this remark fell on deaf ears. To a materialist, as this person is, it just sounds nonsensical. This is the problem. We can only see evil when we understand that evil exists. Otherwise we come up with the feeble why would people do such a wicked thing line. Wickedness exists and if you do not have this spiritual insight you are like a lamb to the slaughter.

The title of this post is intended to be mildly comical but I don't consider the peck to be at all funny. I'm sure its unwitting acceptance has led to many personal tragedies and my heart  goes out to people who trusted authority and have suffered a consequence. The foundational medical principle of first do no harm has been cynically betrayed or so it seems to me. I know of students at university who were almost bullied and pressured into taking this thing often under the deeply manipulative pretext of protecting others, and some of these had natural immunity anyway. To abandon responsibility for those in one's care like this because of conformity to the bureaucracy is a terrible sin.

* with apologies to Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen

The Paths of Peter and John

 It could be said that right from the very beginning there were two forms of Christianity, that of St Peter and that of St John. The former provided an ideal foundation for a public religion with a good, solid structure for orientating believers towards spiritual truth. It gave a framework for belief in the human and divine figure of Christ, moral instruction and ethical guidance that would lead souls towards salvation which is the regeneration of the soul in the afterlife. This approach emphasised faith and works which together form the two pillars of the doorway that marks the entry to the higher spiritual world. However, following this path still leaves the believer looking for spiritual authority outside himself. He is dependent on externals and remains a follower.

The spiritual approach exemplified by St John is different. This is the inner approach. Christ remains Christ but he is no longer simply the Son of God who came down from Heaven. He is also within ourselves, within our hearts, and he can be known. More, not only can he be known but we can start to become like him by opening our hearts to his light and truth which will then illuminate our souls and transform them. We will not be human believers in God or followers of Christ but become transformed into spiritual beings ourselves. It might be countered that we are always spiritual beings and it is true that we were created as such. But we are spiritual beings in embryo only until we develop properly. We are seeds and seeds must bloom and flower to fulfil their purpose.

These two approaches are not mutually exclusive but they are somewhat like body and soul, and just as in our day there are many people who are aware of themselves as minds and bodies but few who are conscious of themselves as souls, so it is with these approaches. Historically, one can say that the Petrine approach has only occasionally flowered into the Johannine but humans have evolved to the point at which Christianity can only remain relevant if the Johannine approach becomes known as the direction in which the soul should proceed. It takes the external truths of Christianity and applies them internally.

I am not talking here about the difference between exoteric and esoteric or hidden teachings revealed only to the initiated. Clearly, there are many things about God and the universe we do not know but what really matters from the spiritual point of view is the proper orientation of the heart to the good, the beautiful and the true, and the spiritually perceptive know these are summed up and embodied in Jesus Christ. But there is the Christ 'out there' and the Christ within and while John includes Peter, Peter does not necessarily include John.

Over the last several centuries humanity has entered into the fullness of self-consciousness. This has resulted in two major problems. Because we have developed a much stronger sense of ourselves we have lost a proper relationship with what is below the self and what is above it. I refer to the two worlds of nature and spirit which can be thought of as our mother and our father. The first we exploit and disrespect and the second we reject and deny. Consequently, we are in total disharmony with the universe and this is the root cause of all our problems.

The self has freed itself from that in which it was embedded. This is not a bad thing because only by doing this can it really begin to know itself, but it becomes a bad thing when the process goes too far and, as it were, solidifies. Then barriers are put up against the rest of life, both natural and spiritual. To seek to return to a union with nature, as many do seek to do, is wrong because it is a return to immature childhood. We must go on to a union of the self with spirit and then a proper relationship with the natural will be included but from the higher perspective not on its own terms. But even this approach to spirit must be the right one. At the time of the decline of the Roman Empire there was great fascination with decayed forms of the ancient mysteries. This was a kind of spiritual sensationalism indicative of a jaded palate and desire for new experience. The same phenomenon occurs today with many modern versions of mysticism and occultism which are viewed as ways to excite and expand the self but this is not where true spirituality is to be found. For us in the West that remains where it has been for the last 2,000 years, firmly centred in the reality of Christ only now our approach must be that of John more than of his brother disciple Peter.

The Journey Home

 If a picture says 1,000 words here are 2,000.

These were possible covers for my forthcoming book By No Means Equal but I didn't choose them because they are a bit cliched. I still like the spiritual message they convey though.

Time to Stand Apart

 The time has arrived when the full meaning of the saying that "He who is not with me is against me" (Matthew 12:30) has become apparent. There is no more fence sitting. You can no longer simply be a good person or even a spiritual or religious person in a generalised sense for if you are you are likely to be caught up and absorbed by the universal inversion of true spiritual values that is well underway. If you don't consciously see this for what it is and actively stand out against it you will become part of it. Remember that this inversion of values is always presented as a good thing and the acceptance of it the mark of a good person so you do have to make an active stand against the good opinion of the world though without lapsing into egotistic defiance or rebellion for the sake of it. What it does is reverse the hierarchical relationship between spirit and matter, putting the spiritual in a distorted form as existing only insofar as it reflects the requirements and priorities of the material. Good becomes this worldly good only.

We are living at a time when the human sense of individuality has reached a peak. This is at once an opportunity, a test and a real danger. It is a danger in the sense that the consequences of a developed free will mean our choices matter. In the past it may have been spiritually acceptable for our choices to be wrong if the culture in which we lived bent them that way. We were not regarded as so personally responsible because our individual sense of self had not been built up so much. Now we are responsible. The influences of the tribe, the culture, the society are no longer acceptable as extenuating circumstances. This also means that even believing the right thing is insufficient if that belief comes from outside. It must be personal, something we have reached through inner awareness.

I have speculated before that the vastly increased population of the world at the present time may be because many souls are returning to make a definitive choice at a time when that choice will be theirs and not just their culture's. Human evolution has reached the point at which our inner mettle can be tested. The test is made both harder and easier in that religion for most people in the West is no longer the default option. If we are going to believe we must actively develop that belief without the coercion of the past. But then things are also made easier because the results of atheism and materialism are more and more apparent to the unprejudiced mind. God is asking us, "Is this what you want? There is an alternative but you have to seek it out. It won't be given to you ready wrapped as before. If you want it you must look for it but if you do look for it, seriously and sincerely, you will find it."

The Spiritual Immorality of Materialist Morality

Here are some frequently repeated sayings which are believed to encapsulate the essence of good moral behaviour as far as the modern mind is concerned but which are all wrong. Sometimes only slightly wrong but it's the gap between partial and full truth that is critical. These sayings may shine superficially but if you mistake them for sound moral instruction you will stay becalmed in materialistic thought - whether or not you believe in a God or spiritual background to the universe

Number 1. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you don't harm anyone else.

This is the classic. It's the foundation stone of humanist ideological dogma which might sound good at first glance but is highly deceptive. It is certainly wrong as interpreted but it is also wrong as it stands. For it matters very much what you do if you harm yourself and there are many things you might do that may not harm others but do damage you, especially on a spiritual level. And the fact is you do not belong to yourself. You belong to God first and foremost because he created you and therefore if you harm yourself you also do harm to him.

But even if we ignore that, wrong actions and even wrong thoughts that do damage on the spiritual plane are sins, a sin being something that does harm to the spiritual self. Sexual sins, to take the most obvious example, may not directly harm anyone else if the people involved are consenting but engaging in such sins harms the culture and therefore it does harm others who may be influenced to wrong behaviour. There is physical and psychological hurt but there is also spiritual hurt and just because this is not recognised by an atheistic society does not mean it does not exist. I would go so far as to say that even unbelief harms others because it contributes to a culture of unbelief and therefore harms people influenced by the culture as we all are to some degree. Denying God does harm yourself and it also harms others, and, as God is the fundamental truth, one might say that denying God is the gravest sin even though to the secular mind it doesn't appear to harm anyone.

Besides, proper morality is not about simple harm avoidance but has to do with living in harmony with the universe on all its levels from physical to spiritual. 

Number 2. Love thy Neighbour.

The truth is love your neighbour. The distortion comes from misinterpreting what this love means. In the Bible the commandment to love your neighbour follows the one to love God and is contingent on it. This means that the love you show your neighbour must involve an awareness of God. It must be a love that supports the neighbour in his relationship with God, not exclusively but that must be an underlying factor. It does not mean universal altruism (see Francis Berger's insightful post) which is a materialistic corruption of proper love, and nor does it mean you must treat your neighbour with kindness and respect regardless of how he behaves. 

Loving your neighbour if it is not founded on the love for God may actually be immoral in that it potentially separates the soul from God which is the greatest evil. Besides, there is no proper love outside of God, certainly not in the spiritual sense and spiritual love is the root of all lesser loves. Without it these lesser loves are like one dimensional representations of a three dimensional solid.

Number 3. You don't need God to be good.

Without an awareness of God you don't even know what good is. You reduce good to material good which may well support spiritual evil. Even Jesus denied personal goodness. How much less can any one of us claim goodness? All goodness comes from God because he is the source and the very definition of it. Not only do you need God to be good, there is no goodness without God.

The point to take away from this is that any form of morality which ignores the primacy of the spiritual and the love due from a created being to its Creator is severely deficient and may actually be profoundly immoral. The word due may confuse because it implies obligation but in this context it merely means that which feeds and makes grow the soul.

Psychedelics and Religion

 I am sympathetic to the people who advocate taking psychedelic drugs to enhance consciousness and to explore inner realms. They would say this is especially beneficial in an atheistic society such as ours for it frees us from the iron grip of materialism and shines light into the dark clouds that obscure the modern mind. We are given the direct experience of something beyond standard physical plane consciousness and we can know for ourselves that we are not body but mind and that mind has multi-dimensional aspects. As a teenager I took LSD a few times so I know the transformative effect psychedelics can have, especially if you take them in a reverential frame of mind rather than for kicks, humbling yourself before the majesty of the universe.

However, sympathy does not mean approval. I believe that the use of drugs, which is very ancient, came about when early human beings began to lose natural contact with the spiritual realms as the material world closed about them. This was in line with the evolution of consciousness which requires the development of a solid centre, the self, and a rational thinking mind that can become a co-creator with God rather than a passive participant in the general spiritual flow of life. A lot of people try to get back to this flow but that is like a reversion to childhood and it is spiritually immature. We must go forward into a new and higher awareness, one in which we do not merge into the all but become full spiritual individuals, mature, responsible, creative. Sometimes people need a cold shower rather than a warm bath in order to wake them up. Drugs were and are an escape. Early man resorted to them to try to recapture what he had lost but his spiritual progress demanded that he move on and did not revert to what he had known in the past.

Drugs are not recommended and never have been recommended by any proper spiritual teacher. The reason is they are attempts to break the barrier God has placed between this world and the next by artificial means. This barrier can be broken but it should be broken by natural spiritual development if the encounter with the next world is to be authentic and psychically healthy. Drug takers may encounter non-material beings in their experiences and these beings may seem to offer guidance and advice but there are many denizens of the inner realms and you will not encounter true higher beings if you seek to take heaven by force. Your experience will be limited and you may well only experience the world of the demons, albeit often dressed up to resemble what seems a deep and exciting mystery to the unwary.

We are not here not to experience the glories of the spiritual world but to learn the lessons of the material one though with the understanding that the spiritual is primary. It is possible that in this benighted and ignorant age drugs can help guide one towards a previously dismissed and rejected higher reality but anything other than brief use will take you off the true spiritual path which is not about experience but the sanctification of the soul. 

 Since the Fall we have been cut off from Paradise. To attempt to recapture the paradisiacal state by artificial means, whether that be a drug or technique, special breathing, prolonged fasting or even excessive meditation, is an irreligious act that seeks to put you above God. The experience gained will be tainted and a counterfeit one to true mystical experience because it will be lacking the humility and purity of motive which alone guarantee truth and ascent to higher realms. It will lead the individual away from God as he really is and towards one of the many imitations that exist both in this world and the next. The fact that so many people who advocate psychedelics report encounter with pagan deities or similar supernatural beings confirms this. These, if not demons and they may well be, are leftovers from previous cycles of evolution. They continue to exist in the inner worlds but not on proper spiritual levels.

Consciousness is a spiritual thing but it is squeezed into a physical body to learn lessons which can eventually take it beyond the physical and beyond the spiritual as normally considered to the divine. In a physical body consciousness becomes severely restricted but can also be focussed and express greater powers of self-will and motivation than when not so restricted. To seek to escape this through drugs is to seek change from without but change to be real must come from within. You reach the divine by becoming inwardly divine yourself not from attempting to steal what is not yours. A truly spiritual consciousness is not the result of what you experience or even what you feel or what you know. It comes from what you are and that to be of the right stuff demands humility, love of God and openness to the spirit of Christ.

This post follows on from the one about ancient civilisations in that Graham Hancock, the most prominent mainstream proponent of that idea, is also an enthusiast for psychedelic exploration of consciousness. I just want to say you can be right about one aspect of the esoteric/mystical but completely wrong about other aspects. This is actually quite common and simply shows the importance of real spiritual discrimination and correct understanding of what the spiritual truly is. It is not higher consciousness. The devil has higher consciousness after a fashion. It is orientation of the heart to goodness, beauty and truth in their higher aspects and a humble dedication to bring one's own soul into line with that regardless of what this may cost in terms of personal sacrifice and renunciation. A tall order perhaps but that is what it is and we are all called to that path. There are no short cuts.

Talent

 So often I hear someone comment approvingly about someone else. "He (or she) has a lot of talent." Speaking as someone who has no discernible talents I might be accused of envy in what I have to say next but hear me out. I certainly wish I could draw or paint or compose music or had any one of several gifts but I do not think that having a talent is necessarily a good thing. After all, having a talent just means having an ability to do something skilfully but surely what really matters is what you do not how well you do it? When I look around at what people of talent are doing in the world today I see mostly a trail of spiritual destruction. So few talented people are spiritually creative. Most are actively destructive of higher thought, deeper feeling, elevated sensibility. 

Here's an exchange pertinent to this subject between a spiritual Master and a young artist as recounted in the book Towards the Mysteries.

"Master: People talk of art, of literature, of becoming productive—what do they know about these things? There is the dissatisfaction of discontent in the human, because humanity is not creatively constructive but creatively destructive. Creative power is used for destructive purposes. Nearly all modern arts are blasphemy.

Artist: But they are experience!

Master: Yes—mere experience. But experience is not vitally fruitful unless the absorbing element comes out of it."

What does he mean by the absorbing element? I would say it's the ability to relate the experience to a higher spiritual value and see it in the light of that reality. Any experience taken on its own terms is regarded as not vitally (i.e. spiritually) fruitful. It may even be spiritually poisonous. Similarly, talent, on the face of it a good thing, can be, and often is today, spiritually destructive. If it is not put to the service of higher understanding it is very likely to advance the ends of that which opposes higher understanding. Look at the world around you and tell me I am wrong.

Ancient Civilisations

 At one time it was thought that the world was created in 4004 BC. This was following a literal reading of the early books of the Old Testament by a 17th century Irish archbishop called James Ussher though he was not alone in giving such a recent date. Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton apparently also thought in similar terms. This seems absurd to us nowadays as scientific investigation has shown the world to be much earlier in its origin but I have to say that in my mind 6,000 years is nothing and I can't imagine how anyone ever thought like that. They didn't in India where the age of the Earth has long been envisaged in millions of years with Days and Nights of Brahma (periods of cosmic manifestation and dissolution) alternating ceaselessly. This is a much more realistic scenario.

Modern science estimates the world to be about 4.5 billion years old with life in the form of microscopic organisms first appearing about 3.7 billion years ago. Early types of humans entered the scene around 2 million years ago with homo sapiens originating about 300,000 years ago. This is the current official timeline but is always subject to change as new discoveries are made and old ones reassessed. The first civilisations are thought to have emerged a mere 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia following the development of agriculture.

I believe that last date will one day seem as ridiculous as we now think of Archbishop Ussher's date for the creation of the world. Granted, a slow development may reach a tipping point at which it suddenly accelerates, but still the length of one timeframe, that for the development of man, compared to the rapidity of the other, development of culture, should at the very least raise questions. Is modern civilisation really the first there has been on the Earth, given the vast periods involved? Or are there other possibilities concerning the life of human beings on this planet?

The author Graham Hancock has a recent series on Netflix in which he explores the idea that a great civilisation was destroyed at the end of the last Ice Age when fragments of a comet from the Taurid meteor shower hit the Earth causing massive floods that swept away all traces of that culture. It is thought to have been a seafaring, therefore coastal, civilisation, and as sea levels are supposed to have risen nearly 200 feet since the time of the presumed impact 12,800 years ago, this fact would explain the absence of any remains that could bear witness to its presence. Nevertheless, myths and tradition from all over the world speak of a global devastation by flood and the destruction of an advanced civilisation. Plato's story of Atlantis is known by everyone and, curiously enough, the date he gives coincides with the date of the presumed comet strike and the rising of sea levels. Hancock is actually only one of many people who have speculated on this subject but he has done his research and presents a good case for the open-minded which, unfortunately, is not the scientific community.

Occult tradition knows all about ancient civilisations and it speaks of not just one but several. Because these originate at different times in the Earth's evolution when consciousness is not the same as it is today, and even the material environment is different, they are not all the same type as ours. Atlantis, or the civilisation that we call Atlantis today, had technology but it was a very different sort to ours, some of it being indistinguishable to what we would think of as magic. In some ways their capabilities would be greater than ours, in others less. What seems to be the pattern though with all these civilisations is that they rise and fall, progressing to an advanced level of sophistication and then succumbing to hubris though it may be that even their genetic quality deteriorates too as ours is said to be doing since the Industrial Revolution which was a two-edged sword in that it allowed for the survival of individuals with maladaptive mutations who then go on to have children themselves. This is an emotional subject but if one looks at it logically and without judgement the facts and the consequences of those facts are clear. Abundance, a comfortable, safe and secure life, will allow for the survival and prospering of individuals who would have previously died because they were not sufficiently fit for the environment. The basic human stock will slowly deteriorate. No one can do anything about this unless one resorts to unacceptable, rightly unacceptable, actions but it helps explain why advanced societies tend to self-destruct. In a way their achievements work against them. But there is also the fact that as human beings carve out a comfortable world for themselves with wealth and power and a surfeit of pleasure to be had they lose connections to the gods, the spiritual realm, and this leads to their downfall. All the traditions speak of the flood having come about because of human arrogance and wickedness. The inevitable comparisons with the world today and the state of our civilisation, materially and technologically advanced but spiritually impoverished, must be made. Indeed, it may be that we are rediscovering this idea of destroyed ancient civilisations now as a warning.

Hancock draws attention to the stories of many societies from all around the world relating how their cultures were started off by mysterious visitors, usually from beyond the seas, who gave primitive peoples the foundation stones of civilisation, agriculture, arts and crafts, architectural skills, astronomy and so on.  These were often regarded as gods but it may be that they were survivors from the destroyed civilisations trying to sow seeds for a rebirth. At that time it is probable that primitive hunter gatherers coexisted with the advanced civilisation for there is no reason other than ideological prejudice to assume that all human groups progressed at an equal pace or were equally developed. The civilised society may have been more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe as, apart from existing in areas now submerged, they would have been less familiar with a hand to mouth existence than the hunter gatherers who could have adapted much more readily to the new circumstances.

Given the long time homo sapiens has been around, even by current estimation (it may, of course, be even longer than presently recognised), it seems very reasonable to think there have been previous civilisations that have vanished, witness to their presence being obscured by earth changes. And, in fact, that is just what myth and legend tell us. The present cycle is just that, a cycle in the ongoing evolution of the Earth, and each cycle starts afresh though with some input from the past as the survivors of the putative Atlantis are said to have kickstarted civilisations in Egypt, South and Central America and even (I would maintain) Great Britain. We have forgotten so much about our past and who we are. We have forgotten our earthly history and we have also forgotten our spiritual history. The fact that many different sources are currently trying to remind us of both of these indicates to me that there is a concerted effort to get us to wake up. Obscuring the past may once have had a purpose as it enabled us to get on with building a new present but that time is over and it is now time for humanity to rediscover its earthly and spiritual heritage. This is all the more urgent as there are several signs that what happened before with Atlantis may happen again to us. We are a civilisation that has forgotten the gods and lost its sense of reality. It is widely accepted (though publicly ignored) that we are facing economic and cultural collapse but it may be that other factors may also play their part in determining the future as they did at the end of the last Ice Age.