Apathy

Apathy is one of the besetting sins of many on the spiritual path and one you should at all times guard against. You must not become bored with the routine of your daily existence but continually make efforts to keep things fresh by putting yourself fully into spiritual life.

I was told this by my teachers many years ago and I have been reminded of it recently because I have been feeling somewhat drained of spiritual energy of late. Outwardly the world is what we know it to be and it's only going to get worse. Western civilisation is dead and we live in the ruined remains. Spiritual apostasy, materialism, mass immigration, feminism and so on have finished it off and we only fail to see this because of the legacy that was built up which keeps us going for the time being. Sometimes it seems that there is nothing to be done so why even try? 

That, dear readers, is a typical temptation of the evil influences which constantly assail the disciple and it is one we should disregard. We cannot know what our efforts in this direction might accomplish, outwardly or inwardly, and nor should we be concerned about that. Our responsibility is to fight the good fight at all times and not worry about the results. We just need to proclaim the truth as best we can and let God do the rest. But if we feel it we must in some way live it. We must never be discouraged by apparent lack of positive outcome either in our outer work or spiritual exercises. I say this because it is precisely this feeling that what we we do bears no fruit that can lead to a sense of apathy. But we should not allow ourselves to be discouraged. The sense of futility is at once a test of our resolve and our mettle, and also a ploy of the dark forces to derail us from spiritual endeavour.

Slothfulness is one of the seven deadly sins. At first glance, it doesn't seem like such a bad sin. It's not like anger or greed or lust which we might think of as fiery sins. Sloth is more of an earthy sin, a sin of weight and depression and negativity. It may be passive more than overtly active but it is no less a sin because it is rejecting God. God is life and sloth is a kind of giving in to death. There is a theological vice called acedia and this is the same thing. It is spiritual laziness that leads to inertia and that is just what the devil wants because it means he has successfully sidetracked us from spiritual effort. The enthusiasm we may once have had, an energy that fired us up for the spiritual path, has dissipated and we become discouraged to the point that we cease to strive. Our belief becomes weaker and may even fade altogether though we don't realise it. We may still lead an outwardly spiritual life but the passion has been replaced by convention and habit.

What's the solution? First, acknowledge the problem. Then reengage. Pull yourself together. Slothfulness is lack of spiritual energy so you need to reanimate yourself through meditation and prayer and concentration on the good, the beautiful and the true. These are all in hiding at the moment so you need to search them out but they will be revealed to those who make concerted efforts and do not allow themselves to fall prey to apathy. 

The Reality of the Spiritual World

  Below is an extract, very slightly edited, from my second book Remember the Creator (see right). It deals with the spiritual beings who spoke to me over a period of 20 years and who are mentioned in the title of this blog. If there is one thing I would like to get across in my writing here it would be the reality of the spiritual world and of the beings who dwell in it. These are the just men made perfect. They exist and are real and work so that we may join their company. Have every confidence in that simple but inspiring truth. 

I am writing this now because we are in this world currently surrounded by evil on an unprecedented scale. Most people would think that a ridiculous thing to say. Aren't we better off than before, with less inequality, more justice, less violence, more tolerance? Quite frankly, so what if we have traded that for our souls, and we have. There is more spiritual evil, as in denial of spiritual reality, than there ever has been and so I would like to draw attention to spiritual reality as it is expressed in the form of just men made perfect.

'In my book Meeting the Masters I tried to describe the nature of the spiritual beings who spoke to me. I wish I could do them justice but my powers of description fall short. They inspired both love and respect, even a certain amount of awe, in me and I don't consider myself as someone easily impressed. Over the course of my life I have met all sorts of people but none of them could hold a candle to the Masters. Michael Lord, their medium, who had led a very sophisticated life mingling with aristocracy and political leaders on the one hand, and film stars and celebrities on the other, said the same thing. He did not speak to them as I did (naturally, since he was their medium) but they communicated with him clairaudiently and he told me he sometimes saw faces of great beauty and dignity. He had met people from Winston Churchill to Mahatma Gandhi and all sorts and conditions of men and women in between including monks, abbots, sanyasis and swamis. No one, he said, could begin to compare to the Masters.

This was not because of anything as mundane as charisma or force of personality, “star quality”. Michael had met plenty of people like that and knew it was usually a fairly superficial thing. No, it was to do with spiritual presence, an aura (for want of a better word) of love and wisdom that imposed by its certainty and depth rather than a feeling of power or excitement. Power there was in plenty but it was the power of truth not personality, and it was accompanied by a sense of peace like no other. I am not comparing the Masters with Christ, though I do think of them as something like his disciples, but I was often reminded of the words from the Gospel of St John when they spoke. "My peace I give unto you ". Sometimes they used almost the exact same words, usually on departure when they blessed me, and the peace they bestowed during and after a visit was an almost tangible thing. For a while at least, until the afterglow of their presence faded and I was back in the everyday world.

I think their words as reported in the book from notes I took at the time (alas, I only did so for the first year) convey something of their quality. But they don't give a feel of their presence which taught as much as the words they spoke. To me they seemed of another world but not in the sense of being inhuman. They were very human but had all the virtues of the ideal man with none of the shortcomings of the mortal version. They had developed in themselves all the spiritual qualities, love, wisdom and so on, but had these in a real and inbuilt sense not in the rather self-conscious way one often encounters them in spiritual circles. It was how they were, as natural to them as thought and emotion are to us. They radiated a feeling of total authenticity, and also a nobility that imposed by its authority and absolute truthfulness. But they never enforced this.

The difference between these spiritual beings and any person in this world striving to be spiritual, even the best of us, is profound. I have said the Masters were very human and so they were but they were also much more than human. They came from another place, one in which the possibility of sin or falseness was entirely absent, and where love was the dominant mode of being, a pure and holy love bearing little resemblance to our rather crude, often tainted by ego, versions of it. They walked in the light of God, and felt and thought in a way that was completely centred in the reality of God. For them God was a constant presence and a fact from which everything else derived.

I have been asked how many of them spoke to me. The truth is I don't exactly know. The answer is several and I could usually tell one from another but no names were given except once when one of the higher Masters spoke to me. That was how he was introduced by another Master who had spoken to me earlier in the session. He had an air of such regality that I felt, even more than usual, that I had better be on my best behaviour. I must repeat that this was neither asked nor expected of me. It was simply the natural authority of their presence that prompted such a reaction in me. The higher Masters did not speak to me often but I mention them to make the point that even in heaven there is hierarchy. And why would there not be? If spiritual evolution (as in unfoldment of pre-existing potential similar to the development from seed to tree) is endless, and I think it is, that is only to be expected. This, by the way, is a crucial difference between theistic and non-theistic forms of religion or mysticism. When you reach enlightenment or realisation in the latter, that's more or less it. You have reached the absolute and where is there to go after that, especially if there is no “I” to go anywhere? But a theistic system in which the One and the Many both exist has the possibility of there being endless vistas of reality, deeper and deeper truths as you enter ever more completely into the heart of God and the fullness of truth. And God has no top nor bottom nor beginning nor end to Him at all.

I have also been asked why, given such beings as Masters exist, they do not communicate with more people more frequently but this is to misunderstand their purpose. The Masters are spiritual teachers in the purest sense and that is why they do not teach through words, which are concrete things that may obscure as much as they convey, so much as through influence. Their aim is to make their disciples receptive to the spiritual plane of being, not the idea of the spiritual plane, and their primary focus is on awakening the intuition. This they do by stimulating the so-called higher bodies and then encouraging the disciple to, metaphorically speaking, stretch upwards beyond the everyday mind (through meditation, aspiration, self-forgetfulness, prayer and the like), and thereby become more attuned to the soul. There are plenty of teachers in this world to do the still important but more preliminary work of reorienting those focused in their earthly selves to the soul, but the work of the Masters lies with those who are already conscious of the soul as the dominating force in their lives but have not as yet become fully one with it. That is why they work predominantly on higher, super-sensory levels.

You can get an idea of their teaching methods by considering their own words.

Obey the impressions we fill you with and be true to your self. The more you respond to impression, the stronger it will become.

Note their choice of words as well as what they say. They use the word “obey”. Obedience goes against the grain for the modern person as it appears to challenge our personal autonomy, and we are very self-centred people. We are individuals and we demand our freedom. But we are not free. We are slaves to the ego with its self-will, opinions and desires. Spirituality requires surrender and submission to the higher authorities by which I mean truth and our own soul. It requires obedience. Here's a novel definition of a Master for you. It is one who is perfectly obedient. Obedience makes us free.'

What is a Man, What a Woman?

 I got into a conversation recently about transexuals and whether a trans woman was a woman. When I said no, the two other participants seemed appalled at my opinion. It obviously marked me out as a bad or, at least, ignorant and bigoted person. I asked in what way is such a person, born male but supposedly made female by hormone treatment and surgery, a woman I was told it was what 'she' felt 'herself' to be that mattered. In other words, the old feelings trump facts argument. I was told, and it may be true, I don't know, that in some people a female-oriented brain inhabits a male body and so they were clearly female from the beginning. But so what, I replied. They are in a male body so they are not female. I asked what they thought about the fact that a trans woman would not have a womb or XX chromosomes as a biologically normal woman would have but was told that was beside the point. Many biologically normal women cannot have children. Are they any less female? No, I said, but a biological woman whose biology is defective is quite different to a biological man who decides to be a woman. I asked if a white person decided he was black did that mean he now was black? They avoided the question but I fail to see how, in a rational universe, the two cases are different. Perhaps that is the issue here. We no longer live in a rational universe.

I should say that I have the greatest sympathy for anyone who feels him or herself to be born in a body of the wrong sex. This must be a horrible position in which to find oneself. I realise there are medical anomalies but genuine intrasexuals are rare. Most transexuals are not like this. Moreover, that is not the point. The point is that a society that divorces itself from reality, for what ever reason, is a society that has separated itself from both God and Nature, and it is therefore one that is on the way out. This is just the latest indication that we are such a society.

Male and Female Created He Them

 The blurring of the lines between male and female which has been going on for almost two hundred years now has several purposes behind it but first let us be absolutely clear. It is a spiritual attack on the soul of humanity. Separating us from the reality of nature is the next step on after separating us from the reality of God, and this is one of the best ways to do it because the division between man and woman is fundamental. When you attack nature in this way you attack God who created nature and you attack him in a more radical way than simply by not believing in him. That in the conditions of the modern world is often a passive thing but this is active because it deforms and denies the obvious and the everyday. God is not immediately apparent to human beings as they are in this world. The difference between man and woman is.

Then there is the matter of making us believe lies. We all instinctively know the reality of the two sexes. It is hardwired into us. By making us doubt this reality, by denying it and enforcing that denial through public policy as we do we acquiesce in a lie and when we accept a lie against what should be our better judgement we have lost our freedom. We become slaves, capitulating to power which is what slavery is. When you believe a lie while inwardly knowing that it is a lie you have handed over your individual integrity to an outside authority and the only authority that you should be doing this to is God. If you do it to anyone or anything else you are making that thing God. To make people believe palpable nonsense is to control them completely.

Next, this deconstruction of the sexes emasculates men and defeminises women. Everyone loses. Some feeble men might feel safer and more comfortable in such an environment because their weaknesses are pandered to and even portrayed as strengths. Similarly, some power-crazed harpies might thrive, or think they do, but again this is because their vices now become virtues in the inverted scale of values that have come about. In fact, what is happening is that sins and failings are rebranded as positive things and encouraged. The spiritual state of such people is dire. They succumb to their faults and there is nothing to bring them back to truth and goodness.

The reasons offered for destroying the boundaries between man and woman are inevitably to do with right-sounding values such as fairness, justice, compassion etc. However, none of these can ever be used as a justification for going against truth. You cannot use secondary values, which they are, to overthrow primary ones and there is nothing more primary than truth. And to what is the fairness, to what the compassion? The spiritual man or woman or the earthly one? Reinforcing the fallen earthly man or woman against their spiritual selves is neither just nor compassionate. It is, in fact, quite the reverse because it solidifies them in their fallen state. Jesus did not tell sinners they were fine as they were. He told them to abandon sin and follow him.

If the demons who are behind this attack on the male/female divide, aided and abetted by their servants, witting and unwitting, in this world, succeed in their aim of destroying masculinity and femininity they will have brought about a situation in which reality is what we want it to be and that means there is no reality. Human beings as they will have become then might have a fake therapeutic spirituality but they can have no proper spiritual understanding if they reject nature. They will have effectively separated themselves completely from God. This will not be allowed to happen universally, though it may well happen to many individuals. I do see signs of the younger generation, those born in this millennium, beginning to reject the stupidity of their immediate forebears and start to reassert the reality of male and female. I hope this gathers pace. But we have fallen so far it has a long way to go and it may be that only collapse and suffering will bring us back to our senses. It is indeed the character-sapping comforts of the modern world that have brought about the possibility of this lunacy in the first place. In a less artificial environment it would never have taken off.

God created divisions and boundaries for reasons of knowledge and for reasons of love. It is difference that enables understanding. In an amorphous oneness there is no higher or lower, no better nor worse, no greater nor lesser and therefore nothing can be known. And if a man can become a woman or a woman a man what then of love which, in this sense, is the completing of one soul by the other? Of course there can be love between people of the same sex (I am not speaking of homosexuality) but this is not the same as the love between a man and a woman which is profoundly creative as it reflects the union of God and Nature. To seek to destroy the differences between the sexes attacks the root of our being and can only come from something that has so separated itself from God that it has no authentic self. For at the bottom of this being is not goodness, truth and life but a void, and that is where it seeks to take us.

Sex, believe it or not, is a holy thing. It is precisely because it is a holy thing that it can become a diabolical thing when corrupted. But in itself and when correctly oriented it is love and it is creation. The devil hates it and seeks to despoil it in every way he can either through excess or perversion or else by gelding males and making females barren which seems to be what is behind the latest developments. We must preserve it in its goodness and wholesomeness and allow no deviation from its essential truth.

Easter Sunday

 Today is the anniversary of the most important day in the history of the world. It is the day that death died and life was reborn into a new condition of total and complete freedom. It is the day when light shone and there was no shadow because everything became transparent, meaning absolute in purity. The veil that separated spirit and matter was ripped asunder and the two modes of existence became one, joined together in a fashion that made a new creation in which everything was holy.

At least, it was in the case of one person. But that person set a pattern in which this new life could be attained by anyone who followed in his wake. He broke down a wall and left a space through which anyone could pass who believed, that is, really believed, in the reality of his pristine perfection. Believing in him also means accepting his suffering because that is the means through which the soul is purged and cleansed of its residual filth, an uncomfortable word but one which any true believer will recognise as accurately describing the state of the soul before it allows Christ to shine his light into its darkest corners.

On that first Easter Sunday Christ burst the bounds of creation. He shattered the old forms and made a new one which could finally hold and express the glory of spirit with no impediment. We all still labour away with the old forms, the ones that darken and restrict and bind and limit and constrain and crush and weigh down. But the new form now exists and awaits all those who are prepared, through Christ, to make themselves fit and worthy to receive it. No one is worthy of themselves, of course, but we can become worthy through the giving up of self and the acceptance of Christ. This is what belief means. It is so much more than mere intellectual assent. It is opening up one's whole being to the reality of Christ and allowing oneself to be transformed by his spiritual light and power. That is the hope and promise offered by Easter Sunday.

What Is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book By No Means Equal to be published in October.

What is the one thing you cannot speak against without being regarded as wicked and immoral?

Is it not the idea of equality? This is the first principle of modern Western democracies and is applied to wider and wider fields. But what is its basis? Does it derive from the study of nature? One would assume it must but when you look for a possible origin, it is hard to find. For equality does not exist anywhere in nature and the belief in it has no reasonable foundation since people are very different. They are not the same so they are not equal. It's that simple. In fact, no two things in the created universe are the same. The only things that are so are machine-made and these we describe colloquially but perceptively as having no soul. This leads one to think that perhaps the contemporary belief in equality is a consequence of the denial of soul which is the bedrock assumption of modernity. For modernity is based on the separation of Man from God. That is its defining characteristic.

No doubt the ideological belief in equality was also a reaction to the pronounced inequality that existed in the pre-modern age. But, like many reactions, it was an over-reaction and we went from one extreme to another. Or maybe from a perceived extreme to a real one. The further you get from truth, the more truth seems extreme. The idea of the oneness of humanity which gained currency from the eighteenth century onwards was also a factor. An inner oneness should not negate outer differences but the tendency of humanism has been in that direction as the rejection of spirit resulted in what belongs to that level of existence being brought down to and mis-expressed in the lower level as it can no longer be expressed in its proper sphere.

Equality taken to its logical conclusion means everyone, or even everything (for why stop at human beings?), is the same. There is no better and no worse. Everything is reduced to a uniform level which means that the idea of quality is undermined. You can either have quality or equality. You can't have both. We now live in an age in which quantity takes precedence over quality and it is therefore inevitably an age of general decline, intellectual, moral but most of all spiritual. This is the hidden side of democracy.

We need to restore balance but that will require such an upheaval in our current way of thinking that deeply entrenched beliefs which have grown up over 200 years will have to be thrown out. The idea of hierarchy will need to be re-established in some form, and people will have to accept that, though we all form part of the human family, we are not equal, certainly not as far as this world is concerned and probably not even the next. Perhaps if we replaced the word equality with justice we might make some progress. Equality means nothing. It describes nothing real. All human beings deserve respect but if you regard them all as equal you will destroy civilisation just as we are destroying it now. Besides, can you restrict equality just to people? Once you have started, where do you draw the line? These things have a tendency to move on to the next stage once they have established themselves, and even now there are many people who regard human beings and animals as equal. What this will mean in practice is that anything that separates humans from animals will be regarded as suspect. To make the higher and the lower equal here and now, you have only one recourse. You must bring down the higher.

Men are by no means equal on the earth plane but that is not a cause for dismissing anybody. With these words the Masters have summed up the situation. All human beings have intrinsic value in the eyes of God and all have the potential to become godlike. But that potential has been realised by only a few completely, the saints, and in some it has been totally lost, the demons. In between those two extremes there are as many shades as there are souls. By giving in to the illusion of equality we are actually destroying spirituality because we reduce it to something that no one has more of than anyone else. It becomes something that is within us all to begin with and does not need to be grown, developed and worked for, just realised. This both devalues the individual and flattens the transcendent. Goodness, truth, beauty and holiness are made meaningless. That is the end result of egalitarianism. Everything is reduced to nothing. Cosmos is returned to chaos, the only state of true equality.