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.