I read recently that as much as 80% of spiritual communities went along with the patently false propaganda of 2020 and got masked, pecked and all the rest of it. This is a staggering proportion, given that such people should be aware of what lies behind appearance and, further, should be focussed in the eternal rather than the transitory. Why such a failure of understanding?
As I see it, there are several reasons the people in these spiritual communities failed these litmus tests as Bruce Charlton has accurately dubbed them. First, and most obviously, they lack discernment, but why is this? I believe much of it comes down to motivation.
It is not sufficiently appreciated that the reason someone takes to the spiritual path is more important than the fact that they do. There are only two valid reasons. One is a fierce passion for truth. You know there is more out there than is generally recognised and you will not rest until you uncover as much of this as you can. People who fall into this category will not have been misled by the lies and deceit of the recent past. They may not have been able to put their finger on exactly what was going on but they will have felt a profound dissatisfaction with what was presented as fact. To put it bluntly, it smelt very bad.
The other reason for taking to the spiritual path is a love of God. In fact, these two reasons are by no means exclusive. There may be a different emphasis to begin with but the more one travels on the path, the more these two come together and become the same thing. For the person who loves God the machinations of man are evident because these machinations come from a rejection of God. The closer one gets to God the easier it is to discern worldly lies that spit in God's face.
Am I saying that people in spiritual communities who went along with the propaganda don't have sufficient zeal for truth or love for God? Yes, I am saying precisely that. They failed the test because they were more concerned with themselves than they were with God or truth and therefore they may have been in spiritual communities but they were not real spiritual people by any of the criteria that matter. I will concede that it may not have obvious to everyone straightaway what was happening in 2020, and what is happening today might also sometimes take a while to see through. But anyone whose heart and mind are in the right place should be able to tell the real from the unreal. If you can't perceive the shadow cast by demons it means you have not yet properly turned towards the light.
I wasn't familiar with this term Spiritual Communities - but I looked it up, and it seems to refer to residential religious/ spiritual communities similar to monasteries.
ReplyDeleteI have only visited a few such places (or talked with people from such places, or read their writings), and none in the past decade; but I was always disappointed by them, and by their people who, in conversation, seemed to go out of their way to impress me with their worldliness, with how 'normal' they were.
I was always hoping to meet someone whose nature and motivations seemed 'holy' (in my early Christian years, I hoped for a 'spiritual advisor' - but I never did.
So it would not surprise me if the stats you quoted were accurate. Indeed; even if it was 100% of spiritual communities in the UK that went-along with the 2020 totalitarian agenda, it would not surprise me.
That was the phrase used in the example I read about. I think it means those who follow esoteric or mystical or contemplative type paths on a collective basis, Eastern religion for Westerners, New Age groups, that sort of thing. Of course, most of these people are leftists in the sense that their spirituality is heavily contaminated by modern secular assumptions and prejudices. The churches were the same as we know.
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