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.

Repost 2: A Visit to an Ashram

 Meeting the Masters is mostly about a single year in my life, the year my spiritual guides made contact with me and the first year of my tuition by them. This was also the only year I recorded their messages in a systematic (or relatively systematic) way. During that period Michael and I made a month long visit to India which is described in the book. However, shortly after that we returned to India to live and we stayed there for five years, during which time the Masters continued to talk to me through the mediumship of Michael. It seems that part of the reason we went to India was that it was easier for them to do this. I doubt it's the case now but India, or the rural parts of it anyway which is where we mostly were, really was less materialistic than the West back then. Our teachers also wanted  to separate us out from the world for a spell so that we could devote ourselves to the spiritual quest without distraction. 

We spent the first few months in and around the city of Bangalore (now Bengalaru and greatly changed since 1980, its population having exploded from 2.8 to 14 million which means I have no desire to go back) before moving up to the hill station of Yercaud in Tamil Nadu where we bought a property which comprised two bungalows. This property was on the side of a hill with the bungalows on different levels of a terraced garden. We lived in the top bungalow and ran the lower one as a guesthouse. It only had three bedrooms and the season was relatively short but it gave us a small income as well as something to do of a practical nature. The Masters always encouraged me to keep myself occupied and not lapse into the sort of over-introspective mysticism which leads only to self-absorption. As they told me shortly after we arrived in Yercaud. “Work more with your hands so that you keep busy, and do not dwell so much in thought as that will only make you self-centred and inclined to lose yourself in speculation that goes nowhere. You will not gain the knowledge you seek through thought”. The Masters were practical mystics and that same attitude is what they seek in their disciples. Ora et labora, one might say. The correct balance between inner and outer is important on the spiritual path, and the Masters were always keen advocates of working with the hands which they saw both as a pure, i.e. natural and spontaneous, form of self-expression as well as a means of keeping the over-activity of the mind at bay.

"You will not gain the knowledge you seek through thought." That's precisely the opposite approach to the modern one. It does not mean that thought is wrong but it does tell us that spiritual knowledge is only found on a higher plane than the conventional mental one. Spiritual knowledge, as opposed to knowledge about spiritual things which is of the mental plane, may not be the only sort worth seeking but it is the most important.

Our bungalow in Yercaud

I regard those five years in India as the most important of my life but didn't include much about them in the book partly for reasons of space, but also because I wanted to focus on the words of the Masters as recorded during that first year. The following piece is something I did originally include but then cut out as not particularly relevant to the main thread of the story. It's not without interest though, and I hope earns its place as a post in the blog.

'This is not a personal history so, although there are many other things I could write about our time in India, here is not the place to do it. However, I might mention a visit we made to the ashram of Bede Griffiths, the Christian monk who had adopted the lifestyle of a Hindu sannyasi. Michael and Bede Griffiths had a mutual acquaintance who had given us a letter of introduction and so one time when we were travelling in the vicinity of his ashram, we decided to pay him a visit. By one of those little quirks of fate which implies that someone on the other side has a sense of humour, it transpired that Bede Griffiths had that very day gone to Yercaud where we lived for the funeral of a fellow Catholic priest. However, he was expected back the next day and the people at the ashram kindly said we could stay there. I recall that the ‘bed’ we were offered was basically a slab of concrete jutting out from the wall, resembling a shelf you might put pots and pans on more than something you would want to sleep on. Still, you don’t go to ashrams for the creature comforts. The site itself was idyllically situated on the banks of the sacred river Kaveri, the Tamil equivalent of the Ganges, and though the life led by the devotees there seemed simple to the point of austerity, the natural beauty of the place more than compensated.

   Father Bede came back the next day. With his long white hair and beard, barefoot and simply dressed in an ochre robe, he looked every inch the holy man. We talked to him for an hour or so and it was clear that his appearance was a true representation of what he was which is by no means always the case. He had been a pupil and friend of C.S. Lewis and we spoke a bit about that. I've forgotten our conversation but there is an interesting article about the two here.

 I very much liked Father Bede but I did have some reservations about his ashram and the form it took. The church was built along the lines of a southern Indian temple with statues of Jesus and Mary in the form of Hindu deities which made it look like something out of an Indian Disneyland. We went to a service which was half Mass and half Puja and, although conducted with obvious sincerity, seemed to me to be fundamentally misconceived. When you mix the outer elements of religious traditions you end up with a hybrid that may preserve something of the externals of both but has nothing of the inner nature of either. Truth may be beyond form but form can express or misrepresent truth, and if you try to blend traditions that have grown completely separately, you lose most of what matters and are just left with a caricature of both. It is true that religions have borrowed from each other and that, for example, the now unmistakably Eastern form of the Buddha owes much to Greek influence but when a religious iconography and ritual has taken on a settled and defined form, to mix it up with that from another tradition completely and negates its whole purpose which is to act as a channel from the inner to the outer.

 I am not saying that religions cannot learn from one another nor that they may not have the same inner truth behind them, but to seek to combine their outer trappings and forms of worship robs them of their operative value and results in a maybe well-intentioned but effectively confused mish-mash, style without substance. The mystical elements of the various religions may be reaching for the same inner truths but you cannot mix and match the externals, and to see a picture of Christ sitting like Siva seems blasphemous to me. I understand that Father Bede himself was aware of the dangers of syncretism, and I mean no disrespect to his person in writing of my impression of his ashram like this. He was born in a time when religions were very exclusive and it is understandable that as a mystic he sought to move beyond that, but I think the approach tried at his ashram was a mistaken one even if it was well meaning and sincere. '

My visit to Father Bede's ashram was nearly forty years ago and it may be completely different today, but that's not the issue. My point here is that the 'all religions are one' attitude, popular during the 20th century, doesn't really work. Because there is nothing hidden anymore and we appear to have easy access to everything that has ever existed, it is tempting to blend traditions and think we are getting the best of all worlds. But greater breadth often means less depth. I do think we can learn from other traditions, and one of the advantages of living at the present time is that we have that possibility. But if you blend the outer forms of traditions that have sprung from totally different revelations you will lose the connection they both might have had to the source of all.

When I visited Father Bede I was more persuaded of the idea that all religions express the same truth than I am now. Today, we can see that God is conceived very differently in some religions compared to others, and the desired heavenly destination is not the same in all cases either. Obviously, there are strong similarities and the mystics of every religion do have much in common, but we live in a world which is increasingly dominated by spiritual evil and it seems clear to me that only Christ has the power to stand up to that evil. I wonder that if Father Bede were still alive whether he might reassess the wisdom of blending Hindu and Christian iconography at his ashram.

Repost 1: A Holiday in India

 I noticed the other day that there have been 1,000 posts on this blog since it started. This seems a good moment to repost one or two from the beginning, slightly re-edited to reflect my present thinking. My spiritual intuitions are largely unchanged but the form they take has developed through the writing of the blog which is one of the reasons for doing it.

There is a chapter in Meeting the Masters, the book about the early part of my spiritual journey, that recounts a trip to India Michael Lord and I made shortly before going to live there on a more permanent basis. This was in 1979 while we were living in Bath and I was just beginning to find my spiritual feet. It was the Masters' wish that we went to India though they did not tell us that until after we had decided to go. This is a basic rule of the spiritual life. You are not told directly what to do. You may be impressed by the higher powers but you must respond to impression and make your decisions for yourself.

In the book I mentioned that Michael had taken a few photographs during the trip, and I would have liked to have included some of them in the book but production costs made that impossible. However, a blog has no production costs so I can add them here.

Michael's camera in 1979 was a pretty basic one, even for the period, so the pictures are not of a high quality. Also, though he took around 20 photos over the month we were there, not many have made it though the intervening 45 years. It's not like today when people take hundreds of photos and, as far as I can tell, rarely look at any of them again.

We started our trip in Delhi where we visited the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid and other tourist sites but the first photograph I still have was taken at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, one of those  grand buildings the British put up in the Indo-Saracenic style which mixes Mughal and Gothic revival architectural features. It's now a museum.

As you can see, I was not a particularly willing subject. There is a definite 'get on with it' expression on my face.

While in Calcutta we stayed at the Ramakrishna guesthouse and visited the Swami who had initiated Michael into that order a few years previously. He was a venerable old gentleman but still fully fit and demonstrating the inner calm that the Masters were frequently telling me to acquire but which I lacked then and don't have as much as I should do now. Inner calm may be easier to maintain in a monastery or ashram than in the hurly-burly of the world but, as a mental attitude, it should be unaffected by outer circumstances, whatever these might be. This is because it is not a question of controlling emotion but of being centred in the real and therefore responding to the external world as just that, external. A criticism that could be levelled at the Asian mentality which may find it easier to attain inner calm is that it does this by disassociating itself from the reality of the external world so one has to be careful that detachment does not come at the price of the rejection of the subsidiary but genuine reality of outer things and conditions. Spirit is primary but matter is real in its way too.

After Calcutta we went to Darjeeling and then Varanasi but no photos remain from those visits. They were mostly just standard tourist photos of the Himalayas and the Ganges so no great loss though I do regret the absence of a group photo of the Buddhist monks who were staying in the same lodgings as us in Varanasi, with some of whom I enjoyed a game of football. There was no problem in getting them to smile for the camera, something I have always found difficult. Other lost photos are of the Ghoom monastery near Darjeeling which apparently is now called Yiga Choeling, and of the very ancient-looking monk with skin like cracked parchment we spoke to there. This monastery is known for its 15 feet statue of the Maitreya Buddha (that's the Buddha who is to come) of which Michael took a now lost photo. Here's a substitute which is probably of better quality anyway.

While flying to Delhi en route to Kashmir something unpleasant got into Michael. I had been warned of the possibility of this by the Masters, and told that my conduct was the key as to whether it happened or not. In this case, having the puritanism of the spiritual neophyte back then, I had argued with him over what I perceived as worldly behaviour. He had reacted with anger, and the resultant 'bad vibrations' had given the entrée to some kind of demon which had possessed him. I didn't realise what was going on at the time but was profoundly shocked by the transformation. He hissed at me and then shouted, oblivious to anyone who happened to be nearby. His eyes became a dull reddish colour and his skin turned sallow. He was totally uncompromising and hard, quite unlike his normal self. This lasted for the entire flight to Delhi and the thing was only ousted when Michael fell asleep while we were waiting for our ongoing flight to Srinagar. He remembered nothing when he awoke. The Masters told me afterwards what had happened and said that they permitted it as a means of showing me externally what my own lack of control looked like. An extreme policy but I have to admit it was effective. Demonic possession may not be accepted nowadays by the general populace but it remains a possibility, especially for those of a mediumistic tendency which Michael obviously was. Similar experiences were noted in the case of William Coote, the medium in The Boy and the Brothers book.

Michael was well protected by those he served and this sort of thing happened on only a very few occasions and when it did it was always initiated by a spiritual lapse on my part. That is why the Masters permitted it. They told me they could always banish the demon but it might take a while. I don't pretend to understand the mechanics of it but can simply pass on what I was told and what seemed to be confirmed by observation.

Kashmir was a good place for healing and rest. We stayed on a houseboat on the lake called Nagin Bagh and for a week did little more than read, walk, swim and laze in the sun. Here's a picture of the boat,

and here's a not very good picture of Michael in a shikara, the narrow rowing boat that ferries people around on the Kashmiri lakes.

The Masters came frequently while we were in Kashmir, and it was there that they explained what had occurred at Varanasi airport. They told me that there was no need for fear but I should remain vigilant which sums up how the spiritual aspirant should respond to the problem of evil. When I first wrote this piece I was conscious that the word evil might offend because there was this naive idea among some spiritual seekers that evil is just ignorance and in the higher worlds everything is goodness and love. Unfortunately, that is just not true. Evil exists in the spiritual world. In fact, that is where it comes from. I think that nowadays this has become much better understood, especially as it is becoming harder to deny the presence and activity of evil in the world. It always has been understood in serious religion but post-'60s New Age-type spirituality thought it knew better. It didn't.

From Kashmir we returned to Delhi and then on to Agra. North India is a confluence of Hindu and Muslim culture, and the latter reached its apogee in the Mughal Empire which by any criteria must be one of the most splendid ever to have existed. By the criterion of architectural excellence its only rival would be the cathedrals of medieval Europe, and this excellence comes to a peak at Agra. Naturally, Michael took a picture of the Taj Mahal which is undoubtedly a miracle of art and design but I preferred the Tomb of Akbar at Sikandra, and here is the photo I mention in the book as the only one in I which I smiled.

Sometimes you feel a connection with a place. When I visited the tomb of the emperor Akbar I felt like a little piece of a jigsaw puzzle that slotted into place. It fitted. That's the only way I can describe it and it is why I am smiling in the photo. Oddly enough, when I went back to the site 3 years later it was just an impressive building. The spirit seemed to have gone, but that first time was remarkable.

The Cassandra Syndrome

 I don't know how many readers have experienced this phenomenon but I find these days if I speak to anyone, even in watered-down tones, about the parlous state of the world, the country, the culture and the human soul, eyes roll and I'm told I'm talking nonsense. I have only one acquaintance in the real world who would go along with any of that. Most people simply cannot accept that the Western world in the 21st century stands on the edge of a precipice. Perhaps I just don't know the right people.

Cassandra, as I am sure you know, was a Trojan princess who was cursed by the god Apollo because she turned him down after he had given her the gift of prophecy in exchange for sexual favours. Her fate thereafter was that everything she prophesied would be true but no-one would believe her. This has echoes of Mark 6:4 when Jesus said that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and among his own kin and in his own house. I am no prophet but the spiritual state of the world is so bad that anyone who has the slightest awareness of reality ought to be able to see it. The remarkable thing is most don't and I am tempted to say they won't either. They refuse to do so because they are too firmly ensconced in their own comfortable pseudo-reality. They will go along with the clearly biased and fictitious mainstream narrative as we saw in the events of 2020 and again more recently, and get quite angry if holes in this are presented to them. They will talk about science when it appears to back them up but utterly reject it when it does not.

Why is this?  One reason is that most people are still cushioned by comfort and relative wealth. They don't want their boat to be rocked. As long as the trains run on time, so to speak, they will believe everything is fine not realising that when an electric fan is turned off the blades continue to revolve for a while but more and more slowly until they stop. The time to be concerned is when the current is cut not when the blades stop by which time it may be too late.

Then we live in a culture which has become heavily feminised and such a culture no longer has truth as a priority. It is replaced by a relativistic attitude in which there is no higher or lower but everybody has to be accepted on their own terms because we're all equal. That way we all get along, supposedly. In such a nursery world truth can seem hard and ugly, threatening even, and so you ignore it but truth is what is and what is cannot be denied. If you do you will only bring greater suffering on yourself in the long term. The Trojans ignored Cassandra when she warned them about the Horse left behind by the Greeks. They brought it inside their gates and its foreign occupants destroyed them, a parallel which should give us pause for thought today. 

And then most people now have zero awareness of the spiritual reality of things. Religion has been destroyed in the UK, and the tried and tested traditional wisdom of the past has been sidelined for fashionable dogma. The takeover of the country's institutions, political, legal, educational, the media, by the forces of atheism and materialism is now complete. Some commentators speculate that these institutions have been the victims of deliberate sabotage as a result of Communist infiltration, and the process has been so insidious and so comprehensive that does to be seem the only reasonable explanation. However, even if this is what has happened we need to recognise that the agents carrying out the scheme in this world are the servants not the masters which doesn't make them any better, but we should know the ultimate source of the evil and that is supernatural.

How have they got away with this? One answer is suggested by Yeats in his prophetic poem The Second Coming when he sums up the situation in a couple of lines that have become well-known. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Evil hates good and that gives it its passionate intensity but most people's connection to the good is too feeble to make them fight for it, and this is doubly so when they have been indoctrinated to believe that fighting is morally wrong in itself because to fight is to hate. And so we are left with the strange situation in which actual hatred disguises itself as love and condemns supposed hatred, in reality love of the good, in order to delegitimise any opposition to itself.

But we have to fight for truth when it is under assault. Given the climate in which we currently live I should stress I mean fight with words and that even words must be chosen with care. Having said that, listen to what Jesus has to say in John 8:44 about the Pharisees of whom there are still a great many around today. 

"You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." 

Isn't this hate speech, to use a modern term? Maybe, but it comes from the Apostle of Love which should make us think. The fact is there is evil. It has a spiritual source and it has to be recognised for what it is and fought with all our strength.

The Trojans refused to listen to Cassandra because she disturbed them. They would rather close their minds to truth than accept reality because reality challenged their comfortable illusions. Most prophets bring bad news - that, after all, is their function, to call an erring community back to God or the gods. But Cassandra was right and if the Trojans had listened to her they might have avoided their utter destruction. 

The End Times is the End of Term

 Demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived on the Earth over the last 192,000 years, that being the date at which humans are seen as becoming properly human in the sense we now understand that designation. If you add to that figure the number of people alive today you get a total of 117 billion humans which means that 7% of people who ever lived are living now. It is thought that around 9 billion lived before the Agricultural Revolution in about 10,000 BC and that at that time there were around 5 million humans in the world, but since the Industrial Revolution the number has climbed dramatically with the global population hitting 1 billion around 1800 and then shooting up to where we are now. If you consider that up until relatively recently almost half the population died in childhood our present situation seems even more remarkable.

Obviously, the figures before recent times are highly speculative. But they are not based on nothing and the numbers and general trends they indicate are probably accurate enough. My question is does this mean anything from the spiritual point of view, from the evolution of souls point of view, or is it just a result of technological advances, medicine, agriculture etc? It certainly is a result of that but is that all there is to it?

I don't think so. In my book Earth is a School I said that this world is a training ground for the soul. Part of the mechanism for this training is reincarnation which, in the way I envisage it, involves an infant soul returning to a particular environment in order to develop its inchoate capacities, mental, moral, creative and so on. It is also required to make a choice in a world in which that choice can go either way for the reality of God is not a given here as it would be in the spiritual worlds. Here there is just enough material data to support either the acceptance or rejection of God so the inbuilt orientation of the soul, whether it is aligned to God or to self, is brought into play. Predominantly aligned, I mean, for both tendencies are always present in the soul as a result of free will.

The need for this choice has alway been present but what is happening now is that everything is being brought to a head. This is why there is such a large population and is yet another indication we are in that period known as the End Times. Extending the school analogy, this is the time of graduation. No doubt some souls have already graduated (though I personally think that only a few have) but now is the final exam for many with the choices becoming more marked. We live during a period when religion has lost its power so the choice we make is necessarily more of an individual one. It even has to go against the flow which makes it more personal and a truer test of our inner self. Those that pass will progress to higher spiritual worlds while those that don't make the grade will have to continue on lower levels of being with, no doubt, fresh opportunities further down the line but they will have missed an important cut-off point.

The Continuing Sorrows of Albion

 I mentioned in a comment on Bruce Charlton's blog that what has been happening in England recently is that the Saxons are rebelling against their Norman rulers. That's true enough but it's also an over-simplification in that similar things are happening all over the Western world as the native populations show they have had enough of being ignored and replaced in their own countries by aliens who will not integrate with integrating meaning that the newcomers adopt the customs and ways of the indigenous people rather than requiring them to accept the newcomers' customs and ways.

You might say that the hard realities of blood and soil are coming up against the ivory tower abstract theorising of elites cushioned by wealth and power. These elites, because they are intellectually captivated by abstractions rather than recognising the concrete realities of such things as God, country, home and family, adopt the moral high ground, seeing themselves as the defenders of peace and harmony totally failing to understand that they have created a situation in which peace and harmony are increasingly difficult. Trotting out lazy accusations of racism and far right terrorism merely demonstrates the utter failure of the establishment, the politicians, the media, the universities, to admit their own responsibility and recognise how they have ignored and overriden the wishes of the native populace for many years in order to foist their own ideological agenda on an unwilling country.

Yes, you might say that in which case you could think that the establishment at least had relatively good intentions even if these were also naive and foolish. But there is another approach you could take and that is to see the whole stratagem as deliberate. No doubt, the middle ranking sections of the establishment pursued the historically disastrous policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism because they thought it was on message and/or personally advantageous but there would have been those who knew perfectly well what the consequences would be when a tipping point had been reached. They wanted to undermine national identity and damage communal trust and thereby create a situation in which Sorathic destruction would occur. For the goal is destruction of the West as it has been and the replacement of the nation states with a globalist tyranny, and if you doubt this ask yourselves why it is only the Western nations that are required to absorb vast numbers of unassimilable and culturally alien foreigners. That having been said, one must recognise that, though there is certainly a criminal element among some groups, these migrants mostly just follow ordinary human nature in that they are seeking a better life and are more comfortable with their traditional cultures. As are most people except the deracinated Western elites. But the current wave of immigrants have no real loyalty to or love for Great Britain so to put them on parity with the native British just because they have been given a passport is absurd. Nonetheless, they are still for the most part pawns being used by a section of the elites to bring about a certain desired end. It is these elites who should be condemned not the pawns.

Ultimately, all this is a battle in the spiritual war. What is taking place is inevitable in these End Times which doesn't mean there is nothing you can do about it but moral, national and societal decline are all hallmarks of the Kali Yuga in which we find ourselves. We have to use this to direct our attention to the salvation of the soul and part of that means we do not allow ourselves to be consumed by anger or hatred. That's the mistake of the rioting Saxons who forgot the old adage that two wrongs do not make a right. Their violent reaction, though no doubt born of frustration, has merely given the elites grounds for self-justification and done their cause more harm than good. Those of us who can see the spiritual picture have to be wiser and take a longer view.  All that matters is the state of your soul. That is the only thing you can really control. However, we do know that the good, the real spiritual good, will win in the end. Remember how in The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis, a very prescient story, Narnia was destroyed but the incorruptible beauty of the real Narnia, the one on which the earthly Narnia was patterned, remained in the higher worlds. That is true of all that we love in this world too.