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.

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.