A Trilogy

 It didn't occur to me until after I had written it, but my new book By No Means Equal has turned out to be the third part of a trilogy, the first two being Remember the Creator and Earth is a School. On the most obvious level, the three might be seen as meditations on words of my teachers, those words being the titles in question. But there is more to it than that for while the first book focuses on the reality of God, the second looks into the reason for our lives on this planet and the third is about the soul and how that is a real immaterial thing. The book is framed in the context of a discussion on equality, that most sacred of cows of our modern secular age, but the ideology of equality is shown to be false by the fundamental reality of individuality and freedom which are spiritual qualities and the defining characteristics of the soul.

Thus we have God, the world and the soul or absolute reality, objective reality and subjective reality, the three facets of our existence. These are all intertwined and at the same time separate but part of an over-arching unity. Problems arise when you give one too much significance so that the others are thereby diminished such as Islam does with God Transcendent (God is all, Man is nothing) and certain forms of Indian mysticism do with God Immanent (the world and the individual soul are illusion), or scientific materialism does with the world or much modern thought does with the soul, or its phenomenal aspect, that being all it recognises, which is regarded as totally sovereign and independent of any higher authority, able to do whatsoever it wishes long as that is within the laws of society. In fact, God, the world and the soul are all real and all important even if God remains the source of the other two.

By No Means Equal brings this run of books to a conclusion. Here is the introduction to the book.

"All cultures have a defining belief or myth on which they base themselves. In most cases it is a religious one which takes various forms but all of them are rooted in a reality beyond this world. However, that of the contemporary West does not follow the traditional pattern for it derives from a belief in the primacy of matter rather than spirit. The modern myth is egalitarianism, the insistence that all men are equal. This idea blossomed at the time of the French revolution with its rallying cry of liberté, égalité, fraternité though the seeds were sown much earlier, going back to certain streams of thought in the medieval period. But, in the sense we understand it today, it is a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Egalitarianism did not form a part of traditional Western belief except for the idea that we were all created by the One Father, God. But that doesn’t mean we are all equal. The natural order in tradition, not just in the West but more or less everywhere in the world where civilisation has developed, was hierarchical and this reflects the belief that there is a vertical dimension to life. That implies transcendence, the denial of which is virtually the definition of modernity which, with a singular lack of imagination, has reduced reality to the world of appearance or what can be grasped by the senses, ignoring the fact that the senses filter as much as they reveal.

Now, in the twenty-first century we have arrived at a belief in radical equality through the spread of communism for communism, whether we realise it or not, underpins the philosophical assumptions of almost all contemporary thought. Not so much in the overt political or economic sense but culturally speaking it does where it has become deeply embedded since the 1960s. It has reached the point at which to challenge this assumption marks you out as an immoral person.

Communism is atheistic and materialistic. There are occasional rather feeble attempts to dispute this but they fail as they must since communist ideology is entirely concerned with this world and has no sense of a spiritual goal for humanity. Hence, it should not be hard to see that egalitarianism, though it too sometimes claims to have a spiritual basis, is in fact a thoroughly materialistic and atheistic doctrine. This makes sense chronologically since the two came about at the same time. The belief in equality in the form it is held nowadays did not arise from any religious principle but from a rejection of religion and its substitution by a belief system centred on the human being in its earthly form. If you want to associate it with religion you would have to say it took what belongs to the spiritual level and applied it to the material level, in the process abolishing the spiritual or, at the very least, making that secondary to the material.

In this book I will start with a series of essays that examine the modern ideology of equality and show that it is essentially an anti-spiritual doctrine, one that denies the reality of the soul using that word to mean the non-material essence of our individual self. Some of the arguments might appear too simplistic to cover all the complexities of socio-economic and political life but I am looking at the question from a metaphysical point of view here, and ultimately everything is downstream from metaphysics anyway. Whether this ideology has arisen now as a natural outcome of humanity reaching a stage in its growth roughly analogous to adolescence when it throws off outer (transcendent) authority and tries to go it alone or whether it is a well-meaning attempt to create a morality in a materialistic society with no higher values or whether it has been put through by forces antithetical to spiritual development specifically to derail higher values, for when everything is equal there is a strong tendency to revert to the lowest common denominator, I shall leave the reader to decide as we go along.

Then we shall proceed to looking at ways in which the egalitarian ethos has affected and corrupted the spiritual search. For it undoubtedly has. Religion is not democratic any more than science or art are but in many instances it is being made so. Misunderstanding the true idea that God is within all of us, we fall into the trap of thinking that he is equally within all of us. Even if that were true, he does not manifest equally in all of us. Like all heresies, if you can call it that, egalitarian ideology takes a piece of the truth and exaggerates its importance while minimising the significance of other aspects of truth. Truths that apply on the level of the One do not apply on that of the Many, and certainly not to the Many as the Many. The Absolute and the Relative are both part of the totality of life but they are different and should not be confused."