The Decomposition of the World

Here is a short excerpt from my book about the end times. 

An important point to grasp about the end times is that they are the result of a process of decomposition. In old age the body breaks down and then it breaks up and is returned to the elements whence it arose, eventually to provide material for new life. This is what is taking place in the world today, and it is a natural part of the stage of the cycle in which we now live. That is one aspect of our current situation.

However, taking advantage of this process, riding on its back, as it were, are the dark forces which have the aim of separating human beings from their divine origins, partly to use them as energy sources since they can no longer receive energy directly from God so they must take it in a downgraded form, partly to make psychic slaves which can serve them and partly because that is the nature of a being voided of light which is what they are and why their name is what it is. You have, therefore, this dual process in which natural decay is hurried along with deliberate stimulation and encouragement, and it applies to the psychological and spiritual realms even more than to the physical. Not true spiritual but spiritual as it is perceived and visualised in terms of the human mind.

Once you understand that our modern world is in a state of spiritual decay much about it becomes clearer. Our material affluence is both an inheritance from the past and the result of focus on the material plane, but it hides a yawning chasm of spiritual emptiness. Even liberalism, surprising as it may sound to the mind brought up on it, is the result of intellectual and moral decomposition, order dissolving into disorder and structure into chaos, which is not to say that conservatism in our day is any solution as that is mostly just a reaction against liberalism and not grounded, as it should be, in spiritual understanding.

There is no outer thing, group, institution, organisation or even religion, in our world that can protect against the dissolving qualities of the end times. That is because they are all affected by those qualities. Some more than others but all are affected. Your only recourse is to go within and forge your own link to God, and that is what you are meant to do. You can certainly use outer things for support and guidance if you find that helpful but you should do so with discrimination. You cannot rely on anything external to save you. That doesn't mean you can save yourself but you must go within to find that which can save you.

The Best Legacy

 A friend of mine died recently. He was relatively young and left behind a 16 year old daughter. Fortunately, he was quite well off but it got me thinking about the best legacy you could leave your children. What I came up with is very simple, but the truth is simple, isn't it?

I would leave them a few sentences and this is what I would say. "Love all that is good and true, both in their expression in this world and, above all, in their essential origin. And then know that this origin is in a being. It's not in some abstract ideal but a real divine being which is God. You cannot have good without God, and if you love good you must love God more because he is the source of it."

That's pretty basic, I know, but what more is there really? Everything else comes from that and without that anything else is irrelevant.

Of course, I would add all my worldly goods to avoid disappointment!

World's End

 A few miles from where I live there is a road turning off the main road with, after a couple of hundred yards, a narrow side road leading off the first one. 

If you walk along the side road for 5 minutes or so you come to the gate of what is obviously the entrance to the courtyard of a grand house.

Carrying on past this you see a sign with "World's End' marked in large letters and underneath in red, "Private Road". 

Now, you might stop here and retrace your steps but you decide that the opportunity to see the end of the world is too tempting. Besides, the private bit probably only refers to vehicles not pedestrians, and so you carry on. The road becomes rougher with several potholes marking its surface. There is a thick wood on the left, overgrown and unkempt, while on the right appears a stagnant pond covered in slimy green weed with broken branches sticking out of the water. 

The area now has an aura of abandonment and slight decay. Then you reach an old stone wall about 7 feet high which lines one side of the road. The stones are worn in many places and even falling down in some, and the whole wall is overgrown with ivy and tangled vegetation. 

Then you come to an old wooden door with a rusty lock that looks as if it has not been opened for a long time, but since there only appears to be a dark wood on the other side of the wall why would anyone want to open it? Perhaps at one time it was the entrance to a pleasant grove but that must have been long ago. 

The sense of going back in time becomes stronger but then a few scattered houses appear on the other side of the road though even these are a little odd. Of an indeterminate age, they have the air of being lived in by people wishing to escape the world. You can see various old-fashioned tools stacked up outside, and the front gardens are planted with vegetables rather than flowers. However, there's no sign of any activity.

And then the road stops dead. Thick undergrowth blocks any further progress, even if the path continued which it clearly doesn't. Could this really be the end of the world or, at least, the edge? There seems nothing to do but go back the way you came.

All at once you suddenly notice, hidden away to the far right, a very narrow little gap which turns out to be a path. You could easily have missed it but you take this path wondering where it might lead. What could there be beyond the end of the world? The path is mulchy underfoot with wet leaves littering its floor but then something unexpected. 

An iron fence bars your passage. Now you really can go no further but you peep through the fence to see what's on the other side.

A glorious vista opens up with a wide expanse of grassland on a gently rolling hill bordered by sunlit trees very different in atmosphere to the gloomy wood you have recently passed through. The photo does not do it justice.

Now this is where it gets interesting. For the narrow path you have been on at this point doubles back on itself and leads to a big housing estate. There is a wide road and cars, and the houses are expensive but soulless in the modern way. It's as though you have gone right back into the 21st century after escaping it for a brief moment. What are you to do? You have a choice. The beautiful country lies ahead but it is blocked by iron railings. The path takes you back to the world. It's the obvious way to go but the magic and the mystery of what lay beyond are not there. No, there is only one thing to do. You must climb the fence.

Can you guess what this is about?

The Soul's Origins

 We've long been told, against any common sense observation, that all human races are the same with any perceived differences being merely cultural. This is one of the justifications for the mass immigration inflicted on Western populations over the last two to three decades. However, modern DNA analysis has now shown that ideological fantasy be the nonsense it always was as Europeans and Asians are known to have around 2-4% of DNA from Neanderthals, acquired when Homo Sapiens moved out of Africa some 65,000 years ago and interbred with another species of human already living in Europe. Neanderthals used to be thought oafish brutes, but we now know they were intelligent and had a reasonably developed culture. In fact, their brain volume was slightly larger than ours. At the same time, those humans who remained in Africa bred with earlier species of human and apparently have between 2-19% of their DNA from an archaic 'ghost' population which would likely be a form of Homo Erectus or Home Habilis. Either way a very primitive human that had not make any substantial progress for a million years.

So, no one can rationally claim any more that all human races are genetically identical. That is just untrue and has been proved such, and the differences are more substantial than skin colour which is largely irrelevant.

However, this post is not about human races but human souls. Do they all come from the same place? Are they all, hold your breath, the same? Clearly in one sense they are as they all come from God, but do all the souls that are born on this planet have the same origin before they came here?  A Christian would not normally entertain the possibility that we have an existence before birth or conception if you prefer, but this is a flaw in Christianity and probably responsible for the equality misunderstanding though it also serves to balance out the opposite error, that the differences between high and low overcome their shared humanity.

I believe that several different types of human souls incarnate on planet Earth to further their spiritual evolution. Some come from backgrounds of greater development than others which surely should be obvious. All, however, have to learn the lesson of overcoming the ego and lovingly surrendering their soul to Christ. This planet is a very specialised environment, home to many differing types of soul in a way that other places in the spiritual universe are not. This causes problems but it also provides opportunity.

Assisted Death

 There's a vote in the British parliament today about what they call assisted dying in which a terminally ill person with less than 6 months to live may be put to sleep as we say when we do it to animals. On the face of it, that seems a humane thing to do and I know for a fact that it has long been done anyway as both my grandfather and my uncle were doctors, and both told me it was standard practice in their day, which would have been from the 1920s to the 1980s, to give a dying patient an extra hit of morphine to hurry their passing. This was a decision doctors took on their own without consulting the patient or the patient's family. Imagine that now! But it was regarded as something that would ease suffering when death was inevitable but being dragged out. Of course, these days with modern medicine we can drag it out a lot longer, and maybe that is the problem. A protracted death is actually caused by medical advances.

So, from the purely human point of view it seems the right thing to do to allow people who are obviously dying to choose when they do die. Most of the objections are to do with coercion which clearly is an important issue, but it is not the only one or even, I would say, the main one. Very few people take the reality of God into account. If you believe in God and respect the traditional teachings about the illegitimacy of suicide, that puts everything in a different perspective. Because we live in a world of free will spiritual plans can be disrupted by human intervention but every soul does have a rough plan for its birth, life and death. Rough because it is not fixed in stone and must adapt to the soul's reactions while on this earth, but a general pattern nevertheless. It may be that our experiences at the time of our death form an important part of our experiences in life. In many cases we are thrown back on ourselves then in a way that is not possible at any other stage of life. To seek to prolong life through massive medical intervention may be one sort of wrong approach but to seek to cut it short may be another. Both are attempts to avoid one's destiny or soul purpose.

Having said that, it is hard to reach a conclusion when one is not in the terrible situation some people find themselves in during particularly severe and/or incapacitating illnesses, although even then if you believe in God you might think this is part of a soul's life lessons. Speaking for myself, I am unable to pronounce on the matter. I don't think we have enough information to make a correct decision. It's easy say that it is wrong but it could be countered that God has given us the opportunity to curtail unnecessary suffering at this time precisely because we have reached a point where we can prolong life past its natural point. All I would say is that every person who considers this should also consider the spiritual side of the question. For, when all is said and done, your body belongs ultimately to God and you should respect his will for you.

Blue and Gold

Meditate on blue and gold as this will purify the mind and take it to a higher level where evil influences cannot operate.

Anyone on the spiritual path will be attacked by evil, and the more progress you make, the more you will be attacked or, using the word the Masters who spoke to me back in the day used, "assailed". (Incidentally, they had a slightly old-fashioned way of speaking which, if adopted self-consciously, would just sound pompous but if used naturally, as it was, gave what was said more weight.)

How are you attacked? There are generally two forms, external and internal. The former means you might come into contact with people who abuse you. The intention here, not so much of these people for they are merely pawns but of the dark powers behind them, is to get you to react and respond in kind, thus falling down to their level. Resist not evil doesn't mean don't fight evil. It means don't react to it or repay it in its own coin.

The second way of attack is that the evil powers stimulate weaknesses within yourself, anger, pride, whatever it may be. They can do this but only if you permit them. They can affect your thoughts and emotions if you let down your inner guard and allow yourself to be carried away by the negativity they seek to stir up within you. They can only stimulate what is already there (unto the pure all things are pure), but if you have a tendency to any particular sin they can blow on the coals, as it were, of that sin and cause it to flare up. If you are not watchful you might identify with this and be swept away by it. Therefore, stand back from your emotions, do not follow negative thoughts. Observe the pattern and disengage from it.

If or when this becomes too hard and you find yourself unable to detach yourself from a particular bad thought or negative emotion then the exercise at the beginning of this post can help. There is something about the combination of the colours of blue and gold that purifies and elevates the mind and, in the Master's words, takes it to a level where evil cannot operate. Evil can only function on the lower levels of being. As you rise through the planes the shadows fall away and the light shines unimpeded. Blue and gold which, not coincidentally, are the colours of the sun in a clear sky have the effect, when concentrated on, of taking the mind to a higher place. Try it and see.

The Soul and the Earthly Self

 Please forgive me but I am going to talk about myself. But then what else can we talk about? Isn't everything we perceive and experience filtered through the self?  We can know nothing except through that self. So really every post of every blog is about the self of the writer. More, every book written, every painting painted, even every word spoken is about the self of the one through whom it comes.

I have found in recent years that I am seeing myself more and more from the outside. I have always felt that the me I know here in this world is not the real me or only an aspect of the real me. It's a personality I am functioning through and by means of which I am experiencing the world but it is not who I really am. Sometimes I have found that frustrating, sometimes encouraging. This doesn't mean I am not William Wildblood but he is just my earthly persona and behind that persona, which will die in the fullness of time, first the physical body and then its psychic elements, there is the soul which is my spiritual self and a much more expansive being.  

Before I stand accused of monstrous spiritual egotism I would say that is true for many people. Probably most though possibly not all as some humans are relatively unevolved as in undeveloped. Certain schools of thought have posited that some souls come down to Earth as descending spiritual beings seeking physical experience whilst other rise up through the material world. These latter will have a spiritual core but it waits to be developed by their actions in this world. This is why some groups of people are much more oriented to the physical side of things.

Be that as it may, my experience as I grow older is that the centre of my consciousness, while still firmly in the worldly persona, has started to move out of that and occasionally look at it from outside. I am no longer particularly attached to the desires and opinions of that person. He is me and I am him but there is also a sense that there is something more going on, and I am not as identified with him as I was. There's no need to call in the men in white coats as this is not some kind of psychological breakdown and I am not becoming two people, but the sense of self is detaching somewhat from the local manifestation of it. It has not transferred elsewhere and this is only an early stage in the process but I suspect it is what happens to all of us when we die. Then we disengage from the earthly self and start to become that higher self. Those who fail to do this would remain what we call earthbound. Some will do this faster than others but in the end all of us have to cast off the "coats", that's to say the psychic and mental bodies as they are called in some schools, that we have donned in order to function in the physical world. Incidentally, it is these cast-off bodies which still have some residual life in for a while that are probably what is contacted by spiritualists. Hence, the banality of most of what they have to say.

I recognise I have a long way to go in the process but I think that those of us who have some slight understanding of the spiritual world, and no one has more than a slight understanding, in my case it's more of a belief in than an understanding of, can do some of our dying before we die. I don't expect to die anytime soon but a friend of mine died recently and he was relatively young so death has been in my thoughts of late. The death of the body is just the first stage. We must disengage from the other vessels of the earthly self before we can return completely to the spiritual world. We can begin that operation while still alive by seeking to centre ourselves in God rather than our worldly ego, and this has both a positive and negative component to it. The negative is detaching ourselves from our personal aims and ambitions, worldly wants etc. A chopping away. The positive, which is more important and if done properly will take care of the negative side by itself, is lifting the mind away from self and up to God. This will pull you up towards your own soul which is where the life of God intersects with your own life. You will start to become your true self.

Book Covers

 When I had to choose a cover for By No Means Equal I followed my usual course of looking at pictures of places where I had lived. My first book showed Beachy Head lighthouse on the Sussex coast. I didn't actually live in the lighthouse, though I did once climb up the ladder that is attached to the outside which was a windy experience.

The second book Remember the Creator had a rather dramatic picture of le Mont St Michel, featured because I lived for 8 years in the nearby town of Avranches. Then came St Catherine's Chapel in Abbotsbury for Earth is a School, chosen for when I lived down the road in Bridport, Dorset. It didn't occur to me at the time but all these places are right on or even in the sea. 

By No Means Equal had a view from the top of the Shevaroy Hills in South India. This was for when I lived in the village of Yercaud which is in those hills, albeit a less magnificent part of them. I found a photograph in a picture library and cropped it for the portrait style of the cover since it was originally in landscape mode. Here is the original.

You can't tell it's up on the hills because of the clouds but normally you can see down to the plains 5,000 feet below. This is what that looks like.

Following the logic of tracing back through places I have lived, the cover for the tentatively titled Surviving the End Times will have to be of somewhere in the town of Bath or nearby. I like this picture of the West Front of Bath Abbey which shows the angels ascending and descending Jacob's Ladder but I can't really see any connections to the theme of the book.  Now, if only it were in ruins.....

Turner painted a picture of the Abbey which I include here for no other reason than that Turner painted a picture of the Abbey.

But these are both too fussy for a book cover so I will have to carry on looking. Since the book is only half-written there is no hurry.

Added note: See the comments below for an explanation for this picture.

A Heroic Age

 I recall reading once that the Emperor Akbar, the great Mughal ruler of India who should figure on any top ten list of monarchs, said that saints cannot be kings nor kings saints. You can see what he meant. The demands of the job are quite different as are the skill sets required. Donald Trump is clearly no saint and his opponents attack him on that account regularly, but it seems that even when their arrows hit the target they just fall off. He remains unscathed. Still, he is no saint but then a real saint would not be able to do the job he appears to have been selected to do, and would not want to either. Their concerns would lie elsewhere.

In Hesiod's poem Works and Days there are five Ages of Man which go from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Iron with each age signifying a descent in human happiness, goodness and nobility. The men of the Golden Age are wise, pious and benevolent while the Silver Age population start off reasonably well but are eventually destroyed for their impiety before the gods. There follow the men of the Bronze Age but they descend into violence, and their end comes in a great flood. Finally we arrive at the Iron Age when life is just hard grind. There is no honour among men who lie and feel no shame. It's a sad and sorry time for everyone. The Roman poet Ovid has a similar view of life. He says that the Golden Age was a time of justice, peace and innocence. Humanity was naturally good but it knew little of the arts and sciences. These came about in the Silver Age as a gift from Jupiter who took over from Saturn as the principal deity. Once again the Bronze Age is a time of war though Ovid says men still respected the gods. However, religious feeling is quite lost in the Iron Age which becomes the most materialistic of times as men dig mines deep into the earth in their search for prosperity, that being all they care about. Truth and decency are distinguished only by their absence.

You will note I said Hesiod has five ages but I only mentioned four. Ovid only has the conventional four, but between the Bronze and Iron Ages Hesiod inserts another which is the Heroic Age. The Bronze Age ends in war and destruction and the Iron Age is a time of universal decline, but the Heroic Age represents a kind of restoration of past glory. It doesn't last but it is there all the same. A time of heroes who are certainly flawed but still are heroes and they bring about an age when the downward trajectory is held back for a period.

The theory of cycles allows for the recapitulation of the major cycle within each section of a minor cycle. There are even further recapitulations of the pattern within these sub-cycles. We are undoubtedly in the Iron Age and have been for a while. But perhaps the elements of the major cycle are repeated on many levels and perhaps, if Hesiod is right, we are due another Heroic Age or mini version thereof. It won't last but that doesn't matter because these ages only relate to the material world and our true home and destiny are elsewhere. But, in terms of the material world, perhaps we are going to experience a small restoration or, at least, a temporary arresting of the slide downwards.

End Times Introduction

 This is part of the introduction to what I am currently calling, following a suggestion by JM Smith, Surviving the End Times.

Ever since the beginning of Christianity a large group of believers have thought they were living in the end times and prepared accordingly. Basing this belief on the words of Jesus himself and the book of Revelation, they saw the world around them as lapsing into spiritual decay and human beings as falling away from God into self-concern and atheism. For them this prefigured the return of Christ in glory and the salvation of all those who believed in him.

It never happened. Despite Jesus’ words that "this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled", the end times never came. But this didn’t stop many subsequent generations from believing that they too were living at a time of universal decline. Now we in the 21^st century are faced with a similar dilemma. You could think, here we go again. Those believers never learn from their mistakes. How they must love their pessimism and the sense of self-righteousness it gives them.

 

But something is different today. The signs of spiritual decay are more obvious than ever before with not just atheism and materialism dominating the minds of most people but even spirituality, where it exists, being often just a form of therapy aimed at comforting the lower self rather than enabling one to go beyond it. And then Christianity has spread all over the world, as predicted must happen before the end times, but its power has greatly waned, especially in its former heartlands, and Christians themselves are increasingly persecuted, on the one hand, while, on the other, their churches have fallen into a sort of secular humanism, voided of the supernatural element and more concerned with this world than the next. Meanwhile even many non-religious people, especially since the turn of the millennium, feel that history has run its course and no longer look with optimism towards a brighter future, but see instead one of growing poverty and cultural loss.

 

This book takes for granted that we are indeed living in the end times though whether these extend for several more years or decades or even longer is a different question. If even Jesus said that only the Father knows when these things will happen, it makes little sense to speculate. Nor is there any real speculation here as to how the end times may conclude or what comes after. Christians expect the advent of the Antichrist followed by the return of Christ himself, and a more universal tradition sees the conclusion of the current Iron Age in large-scale destruction followed by a new Golden Age. Given that spiritual ideas are often expressed symbolically, these could be pointing towards the same thing which is not to say that Christ is just one more avatar among many, but that pre-Christian and pagan ideas were visions of what became reality with Christ.

 

Entropy exists in the spiritual sense as well as the physical. At the start of a new cycle spiritual energy is released into the world from above and it forms a new culture which subsequently runs through the normal stages of growth, maturity, decline and death. The initial energy can be renewed at various points in the cycle, rather like saints can revivify religion, but there comes a time when even this possibility has passed. Now, we live at a time when spiritual energy has dissipated to such an extent that the power of matter has asserted itself over everything. The physical and natural environments have actually hardened and coarsened while, on the mental plane, everyone is cut off from the presence of spirit. This affects even believers which is why saints and miracles are so thin on the ground these days. I do not say that there are no evolved souls around. There may, paradoxically enough, be many but they too will suffer from the world conditions which are universal.

 

In this book we will examine the end times from a variety of perspectives. We will look at its manifestations, some of which are often regarded as positive by those still in thrall to the psychological consequences of the end times inversion of spirit and matter, and consider its significance from the spiritual perspective. We will look at ways in which the soul may separate itself from the downwards pull of end times energy and also examine how greater familiarity with the ideas of tradition might rescue modern people brought up and educated, brainwashed one might say, in modern ways which are ways that derive from the afore-mentioned inverted ideology of end times energy in which quantity and matter take precedence over quality and spirit. The subject has endless ramifications and we will only look at a selection of them, but if one bears in mind the basic theme of the end times, that being the dominance of matter over spirit, it becomes easy to recognise it and therefore resist it in almost every walk of life here and now in the 21^stcentury. That way lies freedom because if you submit to the end times energy, notwithstanding the fact that no one can fully escape it, you are a spiritual slave. These days it is necessary to swim against the current but, in so doing, we develop our spiritual muscles more than we might do in a more convivial age.

 

A Manual for the End Times

Undaunted by the reluctance of my previous books to enter the bestseller lists, I am currently working on a new one. The subject will be the end times which most readers of this blog will agree is the period we find ourselves in now. The provisional title is A Manual for the End Times though that may change as it is slightly dull, even if it does have the merit of describing the contents.

The book will consist of various essays looking into what the end times is, how it manifests, or is manifesting because it surely is, and how we should react to it/them. There are at the moment, though this may change, four sections which are End Times, Spiritual Tradition, Spiritual Practice and God and the Soul. The basic theme is that the end times represents that period at the end of a cycle when the spiritual energy that was initially injected into the world, in one sense at the Incarnation though the actual start of the cycle dates from farther back, begins to run out which means that matter reasserts itself over spirit with all the consequences you might expect. We have been seeing some of these consequences over the last couple of centuries, but today the situation is becoming worse as the process, which is essentially the working out of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics on the spiritual plane or as it relates to the spiritual in the material, has reached the stage in which the balance has definitely tipped. This tipping of the balance will result in a speeding up of the process though it also means there will be a concomitant reaction to the increase of inverted energy, as one might think of it. For even in the darkest times when spirit is apparently almost completely absent, we all still have an inner connection to reality. That cannot be destroyed and might even become stronger as the external world descends into outright denial of truth.

The end times might seem disastrous when you are caught up in them but they are a natural process and inevitable in a material world. Matter is intrinsically unstable. Only spirit is permanent. And they also present opportunity if we react to them correctly though that does mean standing against the flow.

I may be posting here slightly less often while working on the book but will continue to maintain the blog and perhaps will sometimes include sections from the book here.

Christians and the Esoteric

 It is often said that there is nothing esoteric in Christianity. Everything is public and out in the open, and there are no hidden secrets divulged only to higher level initiates. It is true that Christ did exteriorise the mysteries, enacting literally what had taken place symbolically in those ancient rites and so potentially making rebirth into spirit available to everyone who believed in him, though what belief in Christ really means in this context is something to ponder. But time moves on and what was applicable at one moment in history may be less so later on.

Spirituality means escaping the iron grip of matter. Not because matter is evil but because it is matter, i.e. not spirit or, at least, not spirit in its pristine, undisguised form. As one escapes matter one moves up through the levels of manifested reality which, in human terms, means through the levels of the physical nature, the emotions, thought and personal identity. Each one of these levels must be conquered but all are incorporated into the whole. We descend from the pure consciousness of the spiritual world into matter to learn the lessons of matter and acquire its virtues which are the qualities associated with action and doing, relating and feeling, and knowing and understanding, qualities one can only acquire through experience in a dualistic world of subject and object. In the process of our immersion in matter we can forget who we are and identify with the 'bodies' or modes of being through which we temporarily operate in order to gain the ability to become gods, free agents with creative power motivated by love. It is this false identification that is the problem so the fault does not lie with matter, which is merely the medium through which spirit expresses and comes to know itself, but our identification with it.

What does this have to do with the esoteric? Simply this. At an earlier phase of development the majority of human beings were focused in the physical and emotional worlds. Few people had developed mentally to a high level, but that is no longer the case. Many people have now reached a relatively high degree of intellectual development and these people need to understand. They cannot just proceed on faith. Their ability to believe must be coupled with understanding for them to flourish and grow spiritually, and for their belief actually to be rooted in the whole of their being. The esoteric is really just about knowledge. It is not spiritual in the spiritual sense but intellectual. And yet for modern man to be spiritual in the spiritual sense he needs intellectual support.

A follower of Christ in our day must combine a degree of esoteric understanding with faith. If he neglects this his faith will be shallow even if it is intense. His spiritual development will be limited and his entry into the mind of Christ will be partial. This is in line with the growth of human consciousness. The old ways may suffice for some but for those who would not just follow Christ but actually start to become like him then knowledge must supplement faith even if it remains the case that true knowledge actually arises from real faith. "Credo ut intelligam".

The esoteric is not there to replace faith in Christ. It is not a higher level of spirituality but a means of deepening faith and taking it from something that is exterior to the inner man, in the sense that it is located in thought and feeling, to something that is more like knowing through being. It elevates faith to a higher plane where the boundaries between faith and knowledge start to dissolve. If faith is of the heart, as it should be, then the esoteric is of the head and we need both to be spiritually whole. Indeed, only when we have both do we really have either one of them in the proper sense.

Saving the West

There are many online writings lamenting the destruction of the West and blaming the usual suspects of mass immigration, liberalism, feminism and materialism, and their by-products of sentimentality, self-hatred and so on. Some regret this but accept it as inevitable, others want to fight it and think it can be turned around while a few just shrug their shoulders and cultivate their garden which seems to them to be the only option left in a crumbling cultural wasteland. I sympathise with all these approaches but would like to ask a question here. What is the West for? Because only if we know what it is for can we know if it is worth saving. 

Any civilisation worth that name must be organised around spiritual principles. From ancient Egypt to Greece to India, and even Rome when it began, God or the gods were at the centre of life, formed the culture and gave meaning to the civilisation. For the West that organising principle was Christianity which was the greatest expression of spiritual understanding there has been. In fact, all the other expressions might be said to be from the outside looking in. Only Christianity really comes from the inside. That, of course, is the meaning of revelation. Christianity or, better put, Christ is the greatest revelation of and from the spiritual world. There really is no doubt about this. Christ is the only religious personality utterly without flaw or limitation.

The West existed for the expression of Christianity. That is what gave it its greatness. Not uniquely for there were many tributaries but the main river into which all these tributaries fed was Christianity. Some people think the West is defined by science and has reached its greatest state following that pursuit but even science arose in a Christian context with natural philosophers seeking to understand God's creation. And whether it has reached its apogee pursuing science or sunk to a spiritual nadir is a question worth pondering.

When the West started to abandon Christianity it lost sight of itself. Now, we can go into the reasons for that abandonment and say that some of them were actually based in truth because they were to do with the development of consciousness and an increased mental polarisation and intellectual comprehension of the creation. The outer expression of Christ's teachings followed by the West might be said to have been suitable for an earlier phase of consciousness, less so for the new phase. But the core remained eternally valid for the core is Christ himself. It is not true that a better grasp of the world leads to atheism. A superficial understanding may but not a deeper one. A little knowledge has proved to be a very dangerous thing for the West but it is not only this superficial knowledge that has caused the West to abandon God and Christ. This is fundamentally a moral problem. The creature has got too big for its boots. Its newly acquired powers have gone to its head for it has taken these to itself and decided they are aspects of its own self and belong to that self by right.

I regret the ongoing destruction of the West but it has brought this on itself through its own hubris. When it rejected Christ it signed its own death warrant and we live in the playing out of that process. I suppose that it could theoretically rediscover Christ but that looks very unlikely, so much have we succumbed to our own egotism and proved unable to resist the demonic influences which hasten the process of our downfall. Individually, we can and should turn back to reality which means for the West to Christ, but collectively things do not look promising. So be it. The West is only worth saving if it rededicates itself to Christ. Note I do not say spirituality which can mean a whole host of things, some positive, some just self-indulgent and shallow. Without the rediscovery of Christ we can fight the symptoms and secondary causes of decline as listed above all we like but it will not lead to any kind of true renaissance.

Imperfection

 It is a sad fact that in this world everything good is contaminated while many things that are mostly bad have some good in them. This can be confusing and is disconcerting for those who, like me, Virgo that I am, would prefer good and bad to be clearly delineated. But it means that one must develop discernment and also a measure, not too much, of open-mindedness and tolerance. Truth is multi-faceted and the wise do not become set in their ways or restricted to just one approach to it.

This is not an excuse for believing all manner of nonsense nor does it justify falsehood. Good and bad may often be mixed together but our task is to sift them apart and keep the good while rejecting the bad. At the same time, it does mean we should understand that there may be some good in what may be mostly bad (I am speaking of ideas more than actions), and support that good while rejecting the bad. This keeps us on our spiritual toes especially as we are also required to uphold the good unreservedly and without compromise.

This is an imperfect world as it must be since it is the material part of the whole and matter is intrinsically unstable. Nowadays, it is more imperfect than ever as the grip of matter on our minds has tightened. We can never fully free ourselves of that material grip while in the world but nor should we allow it to have a hold on us. The rule is aim for perfection but know you can never reach it in this world. As the Masters said, "Do not be a perfectionist. There is nothing perfect to be found anywhere in your world. Seek the true perfection within but do not expect it outwardly. If you do, all you will find will be disappointment. It is your task to demonstrate the highest you can but not to condemn others who do not live up to your ideals."

Bad People

 What can we do if we get involved with a bad person? I ask the question because this is a common experience for people who seek to become closer to God.

First of all, we have to admit that there are such things as bad people. The sentimentalised modern idea is that everyone is basically good until proved otherwise whereas the traditional Christian belief was we are all basically bad until saved. But that is not what I mean here. I am referring to something over and above the Christian concept of original sin or, as some might just call it, the ego. I am talking about people who are spiritually rotten rather than just undeveloped, unawakened or run of the mill self-centred which is most of us.

Jesus described such people when he called the Pharisees a brood of vipers, specifically associating them with the serpent, Satan. He went on to say, "How can you, who are evil, say anything good?" (Matthew 12:34). Then in John 8:44 he says that their father is the devil and they do their father's desires. These are the fallen beings who come to this world already in league with or corrupted by dark forces. Christianity errs in thinking that souls are newly created when they come into this world. We all have a prior existence in the spiritual world and we have already been through many experiences before coming here which have made us the sort of person we are. Some may have spent previous lives in the physical world, others may have known existence in other dimensions. No human soul in this world is freshly hatched, and what I am calling a fallen being is one who has largely already chosen the path of God rejection and ego before all else.

I believe there are a large number of such souls around at the present time for one of the peculiarities of our age is that it is a summing up of a cycle when all the negativity of the past is released and that includes human negativity. These are hard words but look around. Can you call them unfair? Naturally, all souls can be saved. All are God's children and Jesus came to save sinners not the righteous, but it cannot be denied that it is hard to save a fallen being.

One of the reasons it is hard is because bad people genuinely have no idea they are bad. They even consider themselves to be good and that others who may get in their way are the bad ones. They are the best of self-justifiers. They can consistently behave appallingly to someone but if that person reacts just once then it is he who is at fault and anything the bad person may have done is explained and excused by that one reaction, even if it took place beforehand! I know someone who regularly abuses and insults her husband but if he ever reacts and responds in anger then he is the one at fault, never mind the fact that he puts up with a great deal most of the time. In her mind his one moment of anger justifies her constant aggression and rudeness.

A bad person completely lacks self-knowledge and does not even want it despite claims to the contrary. Most people will strive to understand their shortcomings up to a point but fallen beings are not interested in that. They seek only what bolsters their ego and are oblivious to anything that might show them up as self-concerned monsters. It is a psychological block which they have acquired over time, I am tempted to say over lifetimes, and generally speaking nothing can penetrate it. Perhaps in certain cases, suffering or an extreme experience of some kind, some light may dawn but that is not guaranteed by any means.

These fallen beings are souls that have chosen the wrong path over a long period. They come to this world already spiritually damaged goods, self-damaged, that is. Perhaps some of them are here now as a last opportunity to progress spiritually before being consigned to experiences elsewhere. They are being given another chance to repent. Of course, there is something of this in all of us. We all bear the burden of a corrupt ego as part of the human experience and we all need to repent, but these souls are ones who have consistently failed to do so and, as a result, embedded themselves further in the fallen self.

What, then, can we do if we are in similar position to the husband of the person just mentioned? If, that is, fate has thrown us together with a person of this sort, perhaps someone we might nowadays say suffers from narcissistic personality disorder which is a spiritual as much as a psychological sickness. We might start by accepting that there is a life lesson here. Jesus suffered abuse uncomplainingly. Perhaps we are being given a similar lesson, hard as it might be. Just as God can bring good out of evil, in some cases greater good than there would have been without the evil, so he can use such fallen beings as mediums through which to test us, test our self-control, our ability to remain detached and calm and not react in the face of attack, and our capacity to forgive. The Lord's Prayer asks God to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." To be forgiven we must show that we ourselves can forgive, and how can we do that if there is nothing to forgive? Forgiveness purifies the heart. Without a cause to draw forth this forgiveness such purification is much harder.

Bad people exist and those on the spiritual path will frequently be thrown into close proximity with them. The task is to endure without responding in kind. This is the test to which we must be equal if we would follow the example laid down for us by Jesus. At the same time, it is foolishness to pretend that bad people are not bad. The devil loves to be thought misunderstood rather than wicked. He can pursue his ends that much more easily. As always we must balance love with wisdom and wisdom with love.

The Second World War and its Aftermath

 Seeing the path the world has taken over the last 80 years I have occasionally wondered whether the demonic forces behind World War Two were not so much aiming to win a conventional victory as hoping to use the reaction against the defeated Nazis to promote their agenda to bring down Western civilisation and, more to the point since that was already on the turn, corrupt human souls.

This is not to say the Nazis weren't the tools of darkness but dare one suggest without being accused of contrarian revisionism, that they were not uniquely evil either? They, and especially Hitler, have been made into figures of archetypal wickedness, devils in human form, and it probably suits our self-image to cast them in that light because it makes us appear virtuous, but this is a problem because investing them with such unique evil gives the impression that everything they believed must have been wrong. Consequently, it becomes easy to define good as the opposite of that. This false idea then provides a fruitful area for exploitation in that morality becomes anything that is anti-Nazi.

Let's see how this plays out. The Nazis believed in Aryan supremacy so whatever works against that is good. Anti-racism, mass immigration, belittling one's own people and one's own country to the point that you accept or even welcome their disappearance if you are an Aryan, i.e.white, all this is good because it is the opposite of what the Nazis believed. If it's good we go along with it even if it is against our own interests and our better judgment. The feeling we should do what is right for some and the glow of moral superiority for others overcome any lingering instincts of self-preservation.

The Nazis were against sexual deviance, notwithstanding the personal behaviour of some of them. Therefore, it becomes obvious that sexual liberation is a good thing. To oppose that is to be a cruel fascist, a control freak, a prude, a Nazi. To want to restrict love, you must be a hateful person. Love, or what is called love, is a justification for anything. (By the way, a lot of misunderstandings could be avoided if we, like the ancient Greeks, had more than one word for the many different feelings covered by the simple word 'love'.)

The Nazis wished to ban degenerate art, Entartete Kunst, which we know simply as modern art. They saw this as un-German in inspiration and effect, criticising it for its "Freemasonic, Jewish or Communist nature" (Wikipedia). Their defeat left anyone with similar doubts about this kind of art, that it did not reflect the higher worlds as art traditionally was supposed to do but was more in tune with infernal regions, in a difficult position. If the Nazis thought modern art bad, then it must be good. If you too think it's bad, well then, you are a Nazi sympathiser. At the very least, you belong to an outmoded, out of touch and ignorant group.

And so on. Now, in order to stop any latent Nazi tendencies to rise up once again we must encourage all those things they were against. Evil then spreads not by force of arms but through propaganda and even morality. And this, I would say, is because we have allowed ourselves to see the war against Hitler as an absolute good against absolute evil situation. As a result, for the last 80 years World War Two has become a replacement foundation myth for Western civilisation. And yet it was really just a war like many others. We need to put it behind us and no longer define ourselves in terms of our reaction to it but it seems more important now than it ever was. When I was growing up in the '60s it did not form a big part of my history lessons but my children's history syllabus seemed to revolve almost entirely around it. They were taught a lot about Hitler and the Holocaust and practically nothing about Alfred the Great and the Armada.

Maybe the reaction against the Nazi beliefs became Plan B for the dark forces but, in terms of defeating the Christian West, that plan has been most effective. And speaking of Christianity, one should note that this was the one thing the Nazis were against that has not benefitted from an anti-Nazi reactionary support. Coincidence?

The defeat of Germany prompted the emigration of many European Marxists to America where they spread their ideological poison, first in academia and then throughout the culture, in the process capturing all the institutions which now work against the nations they were set up to support. Whether this was part of the plan to begin with or whether it became the plan after military defeat is irrelevant at this point. The fact is the West allowed itself to be infected by a spiritual virus which has caused the sicknesses we suffer from today. Along with Russia, the West may have won the war on the battlefield but in that victory there lay the seeds for its subsequent defeat.

This piece is not written as part of the recent Churchill-bashing trend. Churchill was clearly a complicated character. My friend Michael Lord knew him quite well in his later life and would sometimes be invited to lunch at his house at Chartwell. On one occasion he watched as Churchill fed his pet goose pate de foie gras from the dinner table, making the bird, in effect, a cannibal.  A jolly joke. But, though one might wonder whether the state of Europe after the war was any better than it would have been without a war, with Britain ruined and Eastern Europe communist, it must have seemed at the time as though there was no other option in the face of Nazi aggression, and Churchill was probably the right man to lead the country at that time. However, one may still be permitted to speculate as to whether the dark forces saw the war and its aftermath as a means to infect the West with atheistic communism as it had to that point proved reasonably resistant to that spiritual disease, a disease to which we have now succumbed if you look at it, as you should, as something much more than an economic system.

There are many people talking and writing about the, to all intents and purposes, communist takeover of the West and how we are being taught by this ideology to hate ourselves and all our past achievements. Our countries are being flooded with aliens and our cultures debased. Feminism is destroying the family and masculinity, which, properly functioning, might arrest the decline, is derided. However, we can never understand what is happening until we see the assault as primarily spiritual and the object of its attack being the soul and its relation to God. It is to sever this relationship that is the purpose of everything else. Jesus said "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else will be added to you". He could just as well have said "Abandon the search for the kingdom of heaven and you will lose everything else." We would do well to bear this in mind. It is no good resisting communism if you do not do so with the full remembrance of God for what communism is chiefly all about is the  replacement of God with man but man in his fallen mode. This is how we can easily identify its Satanic origin.

Heaven is More

 Many people have the idea, either consciously or as a kind of automatic assumption, that the spiritual world is somehow less substantial than the physical. After all, we get there by shedding the solid material body. In our minds, we rise. Ghosts can pass through walls. They presumably are not over bothered by density or gravity. They seem wispy, immaterial, bodiless. And if even ghosts have less substance than earthly men and women how much more would that apply to those who have gone further and not lingered in an earthbound state? We say that Jesus ascended into heaven which implies his body became light in both senses of the word. Does that mean he became less substantial?

A moment's reflection shows that to be absurd. Less substantial means less real. When Jesus rose from the dead he became more real because now his body operated at a higher level than the merely physical. Our material world is one of three dimensions but the higher worlds contain more dimensions and are thus more real. They include more of reality and so are more, not less, substantial. A line has everything a point has but more. A plane contains more of reality than a line and a cube more than a plane. And so on though we currently lack the conceptual framework to understand that other than in a theoretical sense. But we can imagine that Heaven has numerous dimensions and this makes it real in a way that is inconceivable to us. Anyone of a mystical temperament knows that the world in which we currently live lacks full reality, certainly considerably less than we intuitively know exists. This is because our multi-dimensional soul has been squashed down to exist in a three dimensional state of being. This world is certainly real but it is much less real than the higher worlds which contain more and more of reality.

Hierarchy and Complementarity

Complementarity is not equality. I have seen writings by self-styled traditionalists, and even some esotericists who should know better but who are clearly still influenced by Enlightenment ideas, which ostensibly decry feminism but say that men and women are different but equal because they complement each other, with each being superior in its own domain.

This is true up to a point but it falls short of the cosmic meaning behind sex differences, and the laws of the macrocosm should be reflected in the microcosm for order to prevail on that level. Men and women are certainly complementary to each other. That is obvious to all but the most hidebound of feminists but it does not mean they are equal other than in spiritual worth on the individual level. However, that is a separate issue. The truth is that there is a hierarchical as well as a complementary aspect to the male/female duality which is symbolised in the story that Eve came out of Adam's side not vice versa, and also revealed by the fact that to God all souls are feminine in respect of their relationship to him. He represents or, better put, is the positive pole. The nature of masculinity and femininity finds its first origins in this relationship. A Christian might see it reflected in the idea that the church is the bride of Christ. This is a relationship of love but not equality.

To say that men and women are complementary and equal but different with women better at being women and men better at being men is only a half-truth. The masculine pole is prior in the hierarchy of creation and in that sense men do have spiritual authority over women, an authority they must exercise if order and harmony are to reign. The feminine is an essential part of creation which is necessarily dualistic as in subject and object, but it is subordinate to the masculine as matter is to spirit. Without matter spirit cannot be expressed but spirit is the primordial reality. This foundation truth lies at the heart of the masculine/feminine polarity, and in a smooth running universe it should function with love and creativity. But in the human world female ego and male misuse of power has created a war between the sexes. And a lack of love on both sides.

 

This hierarchical relationship does not mean that women should just be submissive wives and mothers as in some traditionalist Christian schools of thought. Still less does it support the Islamic fear and suppression of women which has only produced a stunted and largely uncreative culture. The post-renaissance change in consciousness, entailing a greater focus on the self, that started in the West and then spread everywhere affected everyone, men and women. But the female expression of that should be within the context of womanhood not pseudo-masculinity, and it must still observe the priority of the masculine pole. There will be individual cases where that is not so but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. In general, the principle of masculine or solar rulership must hold if culture and civilisation are to function according to spiritual principles. When it does not, as in the modern quasi-matriarchy, everything will fall apart as indeed is happening in our day, whether admitted or not.

God has given us the sun and the moon to demonstrate the truth of this relationship. The sun rules the day and the moon the night and, in that sense, they are complementary, one to the other. But the moon draws its light from the sun though it processes this light according to its own unique nature. Esoterically, there are lunar mysteries where the feminine rules and solar mysteries where it is the masculine force that dominates. But the solar mysteries relate to higher initiations and deeper truths, spirit rather than soul. Early man worshipped the Great Mother or Goddess because he only knew the natural and psychic worlds and could not yet relate to higher spiritual forces. Spiritual evolution in those days consisted of breaking free of the bond of the mother which was essential if man was to become a free agent. Many stories in early mythology relate to this battle. Now we live in an era in which the feminine is reasserting itself after a period of suppression but it is doing so in an unbalanced and ignorant way. The feminine must be expressed but it must be so in the context of wisdom not desire for power, and that means it must recognise the overall rulership of the masculine. Men and women complement each other, of course, but there is no such thing as equality anywhere in the universe. It is a doctrine spread by the fallen powers in order to put their agenda on an equal footing with that of God.

Added note: The ultimate goal of evolution is the complete infusion of matter by spirit with its subsequent transformation and glorification. This is the mystic marriage of cosmic masculine and cosmic feminine and foreshadows the union of God with his creation. Thus, we can see that the feminine which is matter, nature, all creation, and the masculine which is spirit are two halves of  one whole, in a horizontal sense equal because both need each other but in the vertical sense spirit has hierarchical pre-eminence. 

 

Divisiveness and Unity

 Nowadays you regularly hear condemnation of this or that person or attitude for divisiveness as though to separate was intrinsically bad and to join in unity always good. You must respect those whose views are different to yours or society cannot get along, or so it goes. But here's the truth.  Divisiveness is good. It is even essential if you wish to preserve truth. I don't respect falsehood, I don't respect wickedness, I don't respect anything or anybody that denies the reality of God. To condemn divisiveness is a trick of the devil to get us to accept his degenerate and corrupt agenda.  We must separate good from evil, truth from lies, love from hate. But principally we must separate that which acknowledges God from that which does not. Then other things will follow. You don't love the devil and his works. You don't include them in a fatuous oneness. You reject them utterly as well as the souls that embrace them though with compassion for such souls for while you reject their error and the inner spiritual sinfulness that has led them into error, you still know them as potential sons and daughters of God if they can repent of the sins that have caused them to go astray.

Christ brought a sword, the sword that cleaves truth from lies. In that sense, he was the most divisive person who has ever lived but, at the same time, he also came to heal the division caused by the Satanic introduction of the lie. The devil seeks unity so that he may separate souls from God. Christ divides truth from the lie in order to unite souls with God on a higher plane.

I have posted this under the two tags of equality and non-duality for the former is a secular version of the latter. Both equality and non-duality see all souls as one and basically the same, but they miss the truth that true oneness can only be attained after division has done its work in separating out that which accepts God from that which rejects him. And note that the rejection of God is not just the deliberate refusal of him but also the lack of positive acceptance. There is the active denial of God and there is the more passive ignoring of him, and though the latter may be less spiritually destructive, it is still rejection. The lesson for souls in this world is not for them to realise the unity of everything in it regardless of what it is but to learn to separate good from evil and true from false. Through this separation one grows into true spiritual unity in the reality of God. 

Gravity and Levity

 What stops a soul ascending to the heavenly realms after death? It is its weight. A soul is literally held down by its weight or rises because of a lack of weight. In the physical world gravity is the dominant force but in the spiritual world levity takes its place and your spiritual lightness draws you upwards. 

What causes this weight? Several things but chief among them are attachment to the material world and sin. Sin is the main deadweight that holds the soul down. Lack of sin, or minimal sin since no one is entirely free of sin, allows the soul to rise. There must also be the positive qualities of aspiration and imagination which is the capacity to respond to the higher worlds, but attachment to sin and to material things are the major weights that pull the soul down and prevent it rising

Thus, you could say that gravity operates in the next world too but it operates in terms of consciousness.

What is the main anti-matter force? It is alignment of the mind with the spirit of Christ. This is something much more than belief in Christ. It is the assimilation of your soul with his.

Right and Left

 The cause of many of today's woes is often said to be rooted in the ever-increasing influence of what is loosely termed leftism, an influence to which politics, culture and even religion and science are submitted. It is the dominant ideology in the West. As the definition of the word frequently shifts in focus, it might be helpful to look at the underlying forces for what eventually becomes a tendency to right or left in an individual's mind. This takes us, as it were, behind the curtain and shows that what lies underneath an overt political position is something deeper, something that relates to our approach to reality and, ultimately, to God. I should add that most of what is called right today has absorbed much of the leftist ethos and become just a diluted form of its supposed opponent so you cannot identify public and political right and left with the way I am using these descriptive terms here.

In the end times things come to a point which means all souls must choose one side or the other. The famous sheep and goats. I am not saying anything so crude as right is good and left is bad because, as things stand, neither right nor left are spiritually healthy. Also, there are elements of truth in both sides as there must be since no one would willingly choose naked evil. But the good is often used to mask an underlying spiritual rottenness and an excuse to justify it. However, though the right is not in any way properly in line with the truth of God it usually does not directly oppose it as leftism, for all the ostensible good in it, almost always does.

These are the characteristics in a person which mark an inclination to right or left. They may be responded to on an instinctive level rather than adhered to overtly, and in the case of the negative qualities they will be dressed up to resemble something finer. But these are fundamental motivations that form an individual's outlook on life.

Right

Belief in God - Freedom - Love of something concrete whether it be country, religion, nature - Hierarchy - Truth - Common Sense - Primary motivation is for certain things - Respect - Honour.

Left

Rejection of God - Ideology - Control - Equality - Primary motivation is against certain things - Resentment - Rebellion.

A leftist will say this is prejudiced and paints one side in its best colours and the other in its worst. He will say it ignores the determining humanism of the left and its compassion for the needy and the downtrodden. And he will say what about the greed and lack of empathy of the right? By his lights he has a point but, as I said, I am trying to uncover what lies at the deepest level of leftism as its psychological motivation. No doubt, many leftists do feel themselves to be inspired by humanistic compassion, and perhaps, to a degree, they are, but if you go to a deeper level you will find the rejection of God and this is true even of religious leftists who will reinterpret God to fit their own desires. And as for the greed and lack of empathy of the right, I am not talking about economic systems here but moral and cultural standpoints which are much more important. There are materialistic forms of the right which are severed from their roots. These are irrelevant to my case. The left is always materialistic even when it is spiritual.

The first leftist was Satan, fired by envy and resentment of God. The first humanist was also Satan when he told Adam and Eve to disobey their Creator and seek to become gods themselves. This points us to the truth that the best definition of leftism may be that it is the rejection of God. Not necessarily disbelief in God because Satan clearly believed in God. But he rejected God because he wanted to put himself, his wishes and his desires, in God's place. This is the root of leftism.

Note: Everybody has everything within them. What matters is what predominates.

A Refreshing Fast

 I've recently spent 10 days away from the media, television, the internet, the "news", everything. Aliens could have landed and I probably wouldn't have known. A politician could have said something sensible. I've just been walking, swimming in the sea, eating freshly caught fish and drinking local wine. When you return to simplicity the absurdities of modern life are even more absurd but at the same time so ridiculous you know they cannot last. They are not like the rock in the first picture or the sea in the others, not parts of solid reality. They are seen as terrible aberrations but essentially trivial, even childish. They will be swept away eventually though they may do a good deal of damage before that happens. But they will pass.

This is one of the supposed sites of Atlantis before its destruction. I don't believe that theory because, for one thing, it is in the Aegean not 'beyond the Pillars of Hercules' (i.e. Gibraltar), and, for another, the volcanic eruption that put paid to the Bronze Age site in present-day Akrotiri was in the 16th century BC and Atlantis went down long before that. But archaeological digs have revealed a thriving, well-developed and prosperous prehistoric city that probably traded with Minoan Crete and ancient Cyprus, a major source of copper. Apart from the usual pottery vessels and, less romantic but more practical, advanced (for the time) drainage system, the site has revealed numerous beautiful frescoes such as the ones below.

Minoan City and Ship

A Fisherman

A Saffron Gatherer

All the men in the paintings have ruddy skin while the women are white which perhaps reflects ideas of masculine and feminine beauty. Or maybe the men just worked outdoors more. There are also pictures of blue monkeys, now in the local museum. When you consider these are over three and a half thousand years old it makes you curious to hear their music too. Would it have been of the same quality?

It's spiritually healthy to get off the internet completely and away from the world for a while but one can't remain lotus-eating for long or one becomes soft. That doesn't mean we should spend too much time online but we are here to overcome the world both out there and within ourselves, and so for now it's back to what is amusingly called reality.

It's a pity some of the pictures overlap with the text at the side but they look better bigger.