Daily Life in Yercaud

(More on my life in India in the 1980s.)

Our life in Yercaud was simple. We rose at 6.00 every morning, had a drink of hot lime juice and honey and then meditated for around 45 minutes. After that it was breakfast which was porridge and toast with a cup of tea. Then I generally worked in the garden or sorted out whatever needed to be sorted out in the guesthouse. After lunch, which I cooked and was basically the same every day, yellow dahl with a mix of vegetables such as onion, brinjal (aubergine or eggplant), tomatoes, potatoes, lady's fingers (okra) and a leafy green vegetable similar to spinach called keerai, all served with rice, Michael had a nap and I read for an hour or so before going back to garden and/or guesthouse duties. 

I flavoured this concoction with a teaspoonful of curry powder. Indians rarely use curry powder. We found a large black granite mortar and pestle in the bungalow when we moved in. This was what the lady of the house used to grind spices every morning, but it remained idle while we were its custodians. You might wonder how, if Indians rarely use curry powder, we got hold of it. The answer is we bought it from a spice shop in Salem, the large town in the plains below Yercaud, where it probably only existed for decadent lazybones like us. A spice shop in India is a lovely thing. Full of strange and exotic smells obviously, but the array of various fresh and dried and powdered plants and roots and seeds and leaves and fruits, either hanging on strings or in sacks or contained in glass jars, makes it a visual treat too. Many other shops were similarly aesthetically pleasing - see the photos below. Traditionally, Indians led lives that were almost like works of art in their simplicity and elegance though that time is passing now, a victim of modernisation and democracy. I may be accused of glamorising poverty to regret this but there is a spiritual poverty that is more degrading than any material poverty that is not absolute penury.

Later on in the afternoon I would go for a walk of a few miles in the hills and local jungle, and then in the early evening Michael and I went shopping at the village bazaar. There was a vegetable market which mostly involved the vendors spreading their wares on a sack while they sat cross-legged to one side. A few people had stalls but many just sold one or two types of produce, onions, tomatoes, whatever, all grown in the area. We caused much amusement by buying a single onion every day but it suited us to do a daily shop. We then went to the baker where we were the only people who wanted wholemeal bread. We would buy the wheat in unground form from a state government supplier and the baker would then grind it and make us a loaf every day. He only had white flour himself and could not understand why we wanted brown bread, but was happy to indulge the foreigners with their strange tastes. In similar vein, it was hard to get brown rice. For that we had to go to Salem to a wholesale rice merchant in the town. Food shops did not stock it.

The next stage on our regular shop was a trip to Mr Padma's. Mr Padma ran a general grocery store where we bought everything that wasn't vegetables, bread, fruit or eggs or a few other things I will come to later. So, items like tea, soap, tinned cheese (yes, tinned cheese, it wasn't bad) and Champion porridge oats. We would always have a chat with Mr Padma who would stand by the entrance to his shop surveying the scene outside as though he were above it all. He was of a higher caste than the other shopkeepers and he made sure people understood this. Not in an arrogant way but simply as someone who wished to preserve the necessary formalities of life.

The last call on our shopping trip was to buy eggs. Our dinner every night was the same thing, two boiled eggs with a couple of slices of bread followed by curds, banana and honey, all sourced locally like practically everything else. We made the curds ourselves from a culture we had been given. Each evening we had a delivery of milk from Major Manuel, an ex-Indian army man who had retired to Yercaud. He had one cow which was milked at 6pm precisely every day. His servant then brought us a litre or whatever it was for a couple of rupees. We knew that Major Manuel did not water his milk whereas if you bought milk in the village it would have had water added as a matter of course. We then boiled the milk to sterilise it and when it had cooled down to a certain temperature, still warm but no longer hot, we added half of it to a teaspoon of culture we had preserved from the previous day. You could do this for months until you had to get a new culture. When that had started to set we transferred it to a small clay pot which we put in the fridge.

Except we didn't have a fridge. What we had instead and what we called our fridge was another clay pot, large this time. It was actually two pots, one of which was placed inside the other. You put the item you wished to keep cool in the smaller of the two and then poured cold water into the larger before placing the smaller pot inside that and putting on a lid. This was surprisingly effective when kept in the pantry, a windowless room just off the kitchen with a tall ceiling and thick walls to keep out the heat. For a day or two anyway.

I was learning a bit of Tamil at this time though, as I discovered later when I tried to show off to a cultured Brahmin in Madras, the Tamil I learnt was of a very crude sort. It would come out as something like, for an English equivalent, "'ello mite, 'ow yer doin'?". I had bought a dictionary that used the Roman alphabet since I never got to grips with the Tamil, but my accent and sentence structure came from interacting with local villagers so left a good deal to be desired. Nonetheless, I thought my vocabulary was reasonable. So when I bought the eggs for dinner I would ask for nalu mittai which means four eggs. There were always several young men behind the counter and they would all laugh and smile before giving me the eggs. I thought they were just being friendly. This went on for several months until the more senior of the servers who spoke English decided to intervene. He explained that the reason they all laughed every time I asked for eggs was that I was actually asking for four sweets. Eggs was muttai not mittai. I no longer smile at foreigners who mispronounce English.

The milk for the curds came from Major Manuel. The honey we added to the curds came from a local cooperative. This was run by our friend Tharyan Matthews and he was the one who suggested that I should keep bees myself. As we had a garden full of flowers this seemed a good idea. I started with a couple of hives, just wooden boxes with rectangular frames in which the bees would make their honeycombs, and I was given a swarm to get me going. I've written about this before so won't repeat myself here except to reproduce the two pictures I have that relate to the subject of honey.

This is a photo of me with the beekeeper's cooperative. Major Manuel is second from the right in the front row and Tharayan Matthews is the mafioso-like figure at the centre which is generally where he liked to be. Tharyan was a tremendous egotist and did sometimes behave like a godfather, but I liked him because he was a larger than life character and full of energy and enthusiasm. He always wore a little woollen hat as in the picture, even in the hottest weather, presumably because he was completely bald. He had a loud booming voice which he employed in church to add a descant to hymns that practically drowned out the rest of the congregation singing the main melody. Tharyan and his wife Elizabeth were Syrian Christians from Kerala but they attended the Anglican affiliated Church of South India services which Michael and I also went to on most Sundays. He had worked for Nestlé and had travelled quite extensively in Europe during the course of his career so had a sophistication that most people in the area, even the educated ones, lacked. He and Elizabeth were always kind to us even if they did help themselves to quite a large sum of Michael's money when we left Yercaud, but that's another story.

Yercaud Beekeepers Cooperative 1982

This picture shows me in our garden in front of flowering coffee plants which produce a very distinctive flavoured honey. In the background are some banana plants. I am in my Sunday best because I had just come from church. The tie was a present from Elizabeth, not necessarily one I would have chosen myself. The trousers come from a suit I had had made in the village by the local tailor. I think it cost a few pounds, including material and a rather fancy blue lining for the jacket.

Me with flowering coffee plants.

I mentioned we bought wheat to give to the baker to make our wholemeal bread. At that time in Tamil Nadu certain items were rationed and we had to get them from a government store. These included wheat and sugar and also kerosene which was useful for cooking and to put in lamps when there were power cuts which was a frequent occurrence. We bought the wheat in the form of whole grain which we would have to spread out in the sun and then sift for the small stones there would always be present, whether to increase its weight or just part of the harvesting process I never knew but I suspected the former as we had to do the same for dahl and rice. Once we had sifted out the stones we took the wheat to the baker who made us a fresh loaf every day.

Roughly once a week we caught a bus down to Salem to buy those few things we needed that were not available in Yercaud, and also just for the pleasure. Salem was a bustling town, typical of South India and still largely traditional in temperament and appearance. There were very few high rise building and almost everyone wore Indian rather than Western clothes, saris for women and dhotis or lungis for men. It was not on the tourist trial as there were no particularly interesting temples there as in towns like Madurai or Thanjavur, but in a way that made it more interesting. I hardly ever saw another Westerner there and we were figures of curiosity.  Here are a few pictures to give a flavour of a South Indian town at that time. I believe they were taken in 1982 by Michael's cousin when he came out to visit us.

A street in Salem

A South Indian bull

Flower stall

Orange stall.
I am carrying wood for a table I was making. 

When we got back from our shopping trip we had another 45 minute meditation which was followed by a light dinner, some more reading and then bed by 10. There was no TV or radio for the first couple of years though Michael did eventually get a tiny transistor so he could listen to the news on The BBC World Service each morning. I got quite used to the Lilliburlero theme tune and the announcement that it was 02 hours Greenwich Mean Time. The only TV I saw in 5 years was of some athletics at the 1984 Olympics which I watched at the Yercaud Club, an institution I shall return to in a later post.

God, the World and the Soul

 The three realities of human existence are God, the world and the soul which is to say the inner subject, the outer object and that from which both of these derive. These can be seen as three points of a triangle with God at the apex. The tragedy of modern man is that the apex point is either denied or, if accepted, seen in the light of some part of the base line. In fact, this point is the only thing that can give meaning and reality to the other two points. Without not just acknowledging God but seeing him as the root of the other two, these two, Man and the World, amount to nothing but confusion and chaos, hence the nihilistic state in which we live even if we cover that up with all kinds of distractions.

Man can only know himself through interaction with the world of objective existence. In his early stages he remains embedded in nature and does not know himself as a free agent. He is still in the arms of the Mother, subject to her moods and seasons. It is the great achievement of Western man that he broke free of Nature and began to master it. The initial phases of this are recorded in myth as the hero fights various monsters, many of these symbolic of the devouring mother that would drag him back down to the pre-conscious state of non-individuality. The rupture with nature brought freedom but also separation and loss. What humanity has achieved is extraordinary but it comes at a cost. When Odin, who can be said to represent Western man, memorably in his guise as Wotan as depicted in Wagner's Ring Cycle, sacrifices his eye in return for wisdom, this signifies the closing down of clairvoyant faculties as the intellectual mind starts to awaken and the free individual asserts himself in subjective consciousness. This is a necessary and vital stage in the evolution of the soul and it was achieved by Western Man more than any other grouping of human beings. However, although it is an evolutionary advance, it leads to eventual calamity, the Gotterdammerung suffered by Wotan and the gods, as individuality goes too far and mastery of nature leads to destruction. Man has conquered the world but lost himself in the process.

We are at that twilight of the gods stage now and all the remedies proposed are useless because they come from within the system. Remaining where we are is alienation and death, but restoring past religion is no good either because it was religion for the herd not the full individuals we have become.  A return to nature is not feasible for the self-conscious beings we now are, and if we try that it will be fake, performative. We cannot go back to the mother and the embryonic bliss of unselfconsciousness. We cannot go back, we cannot stay where we are, we must go through and on. The only solution is to reach for transcendence which means to acknowledge God, but this acknowledgement needs to be twofold. We must see God as the transcendent Creator but also as the ground of our own being and we must align our individual self with that ground. In this way, we eventually become gods ourselves. Not in the way promised by the serpent which offered the temptation of the perfectibility of the separate self, but in and through Christ who raises the self sacrificed in his name up to his own divine state.

The world as we know it is coming to an end. The soul can follow the world or it can follow God. It can identify itself with the world and take the path the world is taking or it can start to identify itself with God and so move out of this world into divine being. This is the choice of our time.

The Spiritual Failure of the Boomers

I was born in the mid 1950s so am a Boomer as these things are defined, but I would like to think I am not typical of my cohort. I certainly absorbed some of the Boomer mentality while growing up in the '60s and '70s but I consciously rejected a lot of the more overt liberal/leftist and anti-traditional stuff though some of it will undoubtedly have rubbed off on me. But I understand why many people in the generations that followed despise the Boomers for trashing Western civilisation, an accusation which I regard as a fair one even if previous generations cannot be exonerated. Nothing comes out of nothing and the Boomer generation was merely the blossoming of a seed that had long been germinating

The Boomers thought they could change the world and they set about it, in their eyes as practical idealists. However, there were generous helpings of selfishness involved and even narcissism. They were the first generation who were spoiled and cosseted in their youth and did they ever take advantage of it. They had the material goods and developed a moral/spiritual superiority complex, but they completely misconceived the idea of love, reducing it to a pleasurable emotion and expunging it of any sense of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the essence of love but the Boomers turned love into indulgence.

Boomer self-centredness is one thing but where this generation really failed is where they thought they were at their best. When I lived in India in the 1980s the caste system was officially disowned but in reality it was still operative. As a Westerner, I was supposed to condemn caste but I understood the reasons for it even if it had been abused in the practice as any hierarchical system will be in a fallen world. Nonetheless, life is hierarchical and if you destroy hierarchy, you simply reduce standards to a lowest common denominator. Tradition which knew this was wise. Modernity which denies it is ignorant.

Ignorant, you might say, but well-meaning to which the obvious answer would be that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But that aside, is it really well-meaning to have this attitude or is it just weak, a symptom of that spiritually corrosive desire, the desire to be liked? I was warned by someone of the higher castes that I should not bring my liberal Western prejudices (and they are prejudices) to any relationships with Indians of the lower castes because if I did they would just take advantage. In words which struck me then and stay with me now he said, "Don't try to be kind. They will take your kindness for weakness". 

Now, this has to be unpacked a little. It doesn't mean, don't be kind. Kindness is good and right - obviously. What it means, and what the Boomers have missed, is that often what you tell yourself is kindness is actually weakness and, in the Boomers' case, it is weakness supplemented by a misplaced sense of guilt to which they have succumbed partly because of indoctrination but also because of their own spiritual failings which include the lack of acknowledgement of the transcendent reality of God or, if God is acknowledged, his demotion from All Father and Creator to impersonal universalised compassion. The self-perceived victim and underdog classes see this weakness and exploit it, and this is leading to the downfall of the West.

Kindness is weakness when it ignores reality for the sake of being, or appearing to be, nice. In line with the general feminisation of the West it is largely a feminine failing (of both sexes). When counterbalanced by masculine authority it can help mitigate any resultant severity, but when that authority has been as undermined as it has been it is purely destructive of any higher order. It opens the door to attack from below and societal dismantling as the structures that have built that society and culture are torn down in the name of equality and fairness. Fairness to what? To those that want what others have or to the truth?

The Boomers are like the decadent progeny of an aristocratic class that consumes what its ancestors have built up with no thought for its descendants. They will have a spiritual bill to pay. But this doesn't let subsequent generations off the hook. They may complain about Boomer selfishness but is that because they want what the Boomers have or are they prepared to suffer and sacrifice to put things right? Not that things can be put right. The momentum of dissolution is too far advanced  for that to happen. This cycle is coming to a close. But the effort to turn the tide and redress past failures will pay spiritual dividends on an individual level and maybe even mitigate what is traditionally known as the wrath of God, an outmoded but evocative term for the consequences of wrong thinking and wrong actions.

Kingship

 On some level every man feels himself to be a king and every woman a queen. Potentially so, at any rate. Is this just egotism or psychological compensation for felt inadequacy or is there something real behind it?

We are created in God's image. That means we are individual. An individual is a unique and complete being. A whole and, in a certain sense, perfect being. Ultimately, no individual can be compared to any other even if in the manifested or created world individuals are very similar, not very interesting for the most part and decidedly imperfect. But in an ideal state and at root each one is perfect. Life is to bring that perfection out into full expression.

This is what a king is. The crown of creation. We all have it in us to become that. None of us are that but we are all working towards it. Our destiny and goal is to become lords of all we survey. Under God, of course, but all worldly kings also know they serve under God.

God is the King of kings. Pilate said to Jesus, “So you are a king?”, Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this purpose I have been born, and for this I have come into the world: to testify to the truth." A king exists not just to rule but to manifest God in the world. All kings believe in divine right which means their right to rule comes from God and God has invested them with his power. The first quality of Divine Being is Will and a King manifests this divine will in his person.

When Christ was in this world he appeared as a humble servant but as Pilate recognised he was a king really. The image on the Turin Shroud is the most regal image I know of which points to its authenticity. Christ is the King of Heaven, and he said that what he did we can too. This means that we too are kings, or will be when we have reached the end of our spiritual journey. 

Note the stillness in this face. It is the face of a man of power who is in perfect possession of himself, completely centred in the true reality of his being. That is what a king is.

To be a king is to reach the point where you can manifest God's glory, where base metal has been turned into gold. It is what the soul was created to be, the male, a king, the female a queen.

Spiritual Sleeper Cells

I believe that in these end times the spiritual powers that be have installed what you might call sleeper cells around the world which are lying dormant until required to act. These would be souls born with this particular mission who, for the most part, have no public image or importance and who, in most cases, have no direct knowledge of their mission in their earthly minds. They have been prepared for this before birth but they still have to go through the normal human experiences. When the crisis comes about they will be awoken to their task which will be in the nature of a salvage operation.

They have been prepared, and even now are undergoing preparation, but are not usually aware of this in their everyday minds. They may have an intuitive inkling that they are waiting for something but as yet they know not what. Their higher selves will know but in their conscious minds only some of this knowledge comes through. They may experience frustration in their ordinary worldly minds because of this disconnect between what they inwardly truly are and what they can outwardly manifest, and sometimes this may cause them difficulty in functioning in the world to their full potential. They must learn not to be concerned by this. Their mission is of greater importance than any worldly success or achievement. The values and judgments of the spiritual world are not those of this one.

We really do live in unprecedented times. Everyone can sense this in different ways. Not everyone realises that it is a spiritual crisis but the consequences of centuries of wrong thinking are making themselves apparent. Not to put too fine a point on it, this will only get worse. This is not a case of pessimism. When the sun is setting it is not pessimistic to say that it will soon be dark. The sun is now on the horizon and when it goes down we will be left with the results of our denial of light. For we have denied light for a long time. We have substituted our own pitiful imitations of it but these will be shown to be the hollow shams they are. Then choices will have to be made. Will we turn to the true source of light in repentance or will we continue with our mental and spiritual rejection of the light? When the sun goes down this is the time that these spiritual sleeper cells can serve as guides in the darkness. If you feel you might be one of these make sure you are prepared and can serve as needed.

Life in Yercaud

 Once we had settled in our new home it was time to get to work. The garden or compound, as gardens are called in India, was very overgrown and both the main buildings had seen better days. The basic structure of roof and walls was in good condition as they built solidly in those days, those days in this case being the late 19th/ early 20th century, and electricity had been installed but the wiring was old and needed to be replaced. The plumbing was rudimentary. There were no lavatories in the lower bungalow but the upper bungalow had three, each one with a cistern that comprised an elephant's head forming the water tank with the trunk becoming the pipe connecting cistern and toilet. I wish I had a photo.

We hired a local electrician and a plumber to sort out that side of things, and then got a painter for the interior and a gardener for the outside. We helped in both those tasks where not much skill was required. I spent quite a lot of time up in trees chopping off branches which we gave away for firewood. Few of the people in the village had electricity at that time and they all used wood for cooking. We would see women going off into the jungle early every morning with their big machete-like knives and then coming back around 3 in the afternoon with a a heavy load of wood which they carried on their heads, often for several miles. Only the women did this. It gave them the most aristocratic posture. Michael described one of them as looking like a duchess.

The gardener lived on the premises in servant's quarters at the back. He coated the floor of his one room lodgings with cow dung which, when dry, resembled smooth concrete and apparently deterred mosquitos. He came with a wife who became our house servant whether we wanted one or not which we didn't. But we were told it would look bad if we didn't have a servant so she did some basic sweeping and washed the floor rather more often than it needed. She was young and very pretty and it was clear that her husband did not like the idea of her being in the house with two males on her own while he was outside. One time she was in the kitchen washing up and suddenly gave a loud scream. Michael and I who had been on the other side of the house ran in to see what was wrong and found she had got an electric shock from the kettle. It was the old wiring which had not yet been replaced. We were comforting her when in rushed Krishna her husband brandishing his kukri knife and obviously suspecting the worst.

He had to be reassured by Saroja his wife that it was only the kettle, but from then on it was apparent he couldn't shake off his jealousy and soon after the two of them left. We replaced him with a man who had been a tea worker in Sri Lanka but had returned to Tamil Nadu when he was regarded as too old for the plantation work. Muthu (which means pearl in Tamil) looked about 70 even though he was in his mid-fifties but he was a good enough gardener. Here he is with me and Michael under one of the two avocado trees there were in the garden. I'd just come from the bathroom hence my strange apparel, an old towelling robe that had belonged to my grandfather.

Muthu kept the compound in good order and we planted tomatoes, potatoes and spinach to go with the avocados, guavas, bananas and mulberry tree already there. There were also a couple of orange trees and some coffee plants. The oranges were too bitter to eat as fruit but made excellent marmalade which was the one thing I missed from England and we got several pounds of coffee a year from our plants. Of no practical use but very beautiful were the jacaranda trees of which there were several in the garden. The jacaranda is native to South America but was taken all over the world in the 19th century - an early case of globalism. Every April our trees would burst (there is no other word for it) into the most glorious purple flowers and when these flowers fell to the ground they left a purple carpet that seemed to glow. Not having a camera at the time the only photos I have were taken by visitors who would then send me copies so this is the only record of that I have. Many of the photos were taken by my mother when she came out to visit in 1982, a couple of years after we had arrived.

A poinsettia bush with orange trees to the left and a banana plant behind

More bananas

It took about a year of hard work to get the guesthouse up and running. There was no way to advertise so we relied on word of mouth and we had a stroke of luck when a German woman from the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry (now Puducherry) stayed with us for a few weeks. Hildegard had come to Yercaud to escape the heat of summer and we met her in the bazaar while she had been staying at a local hotel. We told her about our guesthouse which was much cheaper than the hotel and she moved in, initially for a week but eventually for a couple of months. When she went back to the ashram she told her fellow ashramites (?) about us with the result that several came and stayed in our guesthouse over the next few years during the hot weather. Also, I suspect, for a bit of European calm as a relief from Indian chaos.

Pondicherry was one of the few towns in British India that had been administered by the French and even nearly 40 years after Independence it had a very different feel to it. I've written about my visits there before and won't repeat myself in this post. See here.

Over the years we had a wide range of visitors to our guesthouse, both Westerners and Indian. Some stayed for just a few days and some for several weeks. There were Europeans, Americans and Australians fleeing the heat of the plains or else taking a break from the guru trail, there were Indians coming for a family holiday and there were even people who wanted to study the local flora and fauna. Yercaud was fairly unusual in that it was in the tropics but had a variable climate due to its elevation. It was the proud boast of its inhabitants that they could grow both mangoes and strawberries in the same place. But it wasn't just the vegetation that drew people. We had a British geologist who came to study the local rocks which apparently were among the oldest in the world, and then we had a conservationist named Romulus Whitaker, an American who had lived in India for much of his life and who ran the Madras Snake Park and a crocodile sanctuary. He came with his family on a snake hunting expedition, and I went off into the jungle with him on a couple of occasions to search for specimens. This was not the sort of jungle where you would find tigers or elephants and though there was a place called Bear's Cave there were no bears in the area then. But there were snakes, iguanas and bats as well as plenty of monkeys who would sometimes come into our garden to steal bananas. 

On my expedition with Romulus Whitaker he found a few small snakes and some scorpions but nothing to match the nearly 20 foot long python captured by local hunters a little time earlier. The story of this snake may have been what drew Romulus Whitaker to Yercaud in the first place as it caused quite a stir in the region. One afternoon Muthu came up to the house and asked us (he didn't speak English except a few words so we communicated in a mixture of basic English, some Tamil which I was learning and sign language) if we had seen the pambu (snake in Tamil) at the police station. Apparently, most of the village was down there. We knew where the police station was because it was near the baker and, strangely enough, directly opposite the village brothel run by a mother and daughter team. The mother, who was always heavily painted but still managed to look pretty ancient, would sit outside her house and hail passers by. Before we knew who she was and that the wave was to attract trade Michael would give her a friendly wave back when on his way to buy bread, but he was a little more reserved after he found out her profession.

When we got to the police station we discovered the python stretched out in front of the building and it really was enormous. Muthu had not exaggerated. There was a crowd milling about and chatting excitedly. The python was dead, shot by the hunters who had found it and who had then brought it back as a trophy. But the most extraordinary thing was that at the position of what you might call the python's neck you could clearly see the shape of a large dog. The hunters had been using this poor beast to scent out their prey, wild boar, and the hapless animal had chanced upon the python who had seized it and started to swallow it whole as pythons do. As it was about the size of an Alsatian this was no mean feat. When the hunters arrived on the scene they shot the snake but it was too late to save the dog whose hind legs and tail were still sticking out of the python's mouth.

In the next instalment of this series I will talk about some of the characters we met while living in Yercaud.

Resist Not Evil

 One of the devil's favourite tricks, tried and tested throughout the ages, is to get people who are basically on the side of good to react to evil, thereby drawing them into his net. He presents one group obviously motivated by evil in some form and then another group, seeing that evil reacts to it and in so doing succumbs to an evil of its own in the form of negative emotion, anger, hatred, whatever. Unlike the first group, this second group does have good instincts but is lured into defending them in the wrong way. The members of this group should react to evil from the standpoint of the spiritual man but instead their correct recognition of evil leads them to react to it from a lower, earthly or worldly, standpoint because they are not yet stabilised in the eternal.

God can only erase evil from the world when it is no longer in the hearts of men. In a world of freedom and choice he cannot unilaterally remove evil or darkness while men have not outgrown the capacity to behave in ways conforming to their lower nature. There is the saying that all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, and that saying is true. However, what is done is important. If good men fight evil with hatred and anger in their hearts they are continuing the cycle of evil. This is the hardest thing as it is natural to hate evil, and it can even seem weak not to respond to it with force, but the fact is fighting evil in conventional or confrontational ways will not remove it. It will only perpetuate it. To do bad things or to act in bad ways even if it is ostensibly for good simply feeds the evil. It may destroy it in one form but then causes it to flourish in another, and that is all the dark forces care about. They are not bothered by the type of evil, evil meaning anti-God, anti-creation thought and behaviour, that exists. Their concern is merely that evil exists in whatever form. That God is denied.

There is no doubt that you must fight evil but you cannot fight it with its own weapons. All people on the spiritual path are confronted by the problem of how to react to evil. The natural thing when you see it is to want to contest it and defend the good, but there can be a subtle egotism in this. I am fighting on behalf of God. I am God's strong right arm in the world. You may well be called to serve as God's representative in the world, he needs such, but you do that best by letting him act through you not by acting yourself or from your own standpoint. The only way to help God eradicate evil in the world is to banish it from your own heart and then let your light shine. In the spiritual world you do not fight fire with fire but confront it with a higher spiritual energy. If Jesus had actively resisted when he was arrested he would have soon been forgotten about. By allowing himself to be killed he transformed hate into love. At least he did for those who were open to him and the truth he brought.

This world is a battleground between good and evil and evil takes many forms, particularly now when most people do not know what good is or that good as the world sees it may be spiritual evil. The teaching not to resist evil does not mean let evil have its way but don't react to it on the human level. Evil will be conquered when human beings do not reply to it in its own language. Darkness is not overcome by more darkness but only by light.

Do not misunderstand this. Jesus was not saying that a quietistic approach, defined as a purely passive acceptance of things without any attempt to change them, was desirable. The non-resistance is on the level of the ego, internal only. Every person who believes himself to be a follower of God or truth is duty-bound to defend the good and stand against evil. However, he acts from love of God or truth and that means he acts correctly - as long as he really is in touch with truth and not just his idea of it.

The Spiritual Destructiveness of Leftism

The thing I am calling leftism has existed since the Garden of Eden but never in so widespread and dominant a form as now. In its modern form it started in the late 18th century and became steadily more powerful as the centuries progressed, and it did so because of the abandonment of the sense of transcendence.

That abandonment, essentially, is why leftism is spiritually destructive but it is not the whole story. Leftism is built on resentment, envy and the desire to pull down. It appeals to those with these tendencies and then encourages their propagation, rebranding them as virtue and so drawing in others who may not share these vices themselves but who are susceptible to the propaganda put out because of a lack of spiritual attunement. The devil plays for both sides and the modern right, which is in many ways a product of leftism, is often motivated by greed and selfishness. Nonetheless, in itself the right uncontaminated by leftist ideology rests on love of God, of country, of family and observance of the natural order of creation while the left rebels against all these things. That is why the right builds up while the left tears down. It tears down to a supposed level playing field but that ends up as ground level. The fact that the left can't build is why it appears and spreads in relatively late stages of civilizational cycles where it will dress itself in the garb of compassion and concern for the underdog and the victim. But really it is all about dismantling hierarchies because of envy.

Leftism is a political attitude second and a spiritual one first. It can be hard to define in purely political terms because the object of its focus changes. White working class males, once its chief concern, are now effectively despised. This shows that what really drives it is the spirit of opposition, firstly, to established authority but ultimately to God. Even when it becomes the authority it must project an enemy to which it is the valiant underdog.

How can human beings know the right way to live if they don't know what they are? Liberal nihilism, the end state of all leftism, is based on the denial of our reality as spiritual beings.  Progress for the liberal progressive rests on the idea of man as a purely material being with any spirituality merely the extension of this material being into a supposedly spiritual space. The spiritual person wants progress because life is growth but it is spiritual growth that matters and that is always from the roots. The leftist tears up roots.

It's tiresome just to criticise but unless you know what's wrong you cannot know what is right. Leftism must be rejected because it is anti-spiritual. The promised land it offers can never be reached or, when it is, it will be found to be the wasteland. The right way for humans to live in this world can only come when the reality of God is acknowledged, but this must be the true God not some manmade imitation such as exists in many, I am tempted to say most, religions. God is spirit and only those who approach him as spirit can ever know him or themselves or even other human beings as they really are.

Inner Religion

 Many people who think they believe in God actually believe in a projection of their own mind. On the other hand, there are those who do perceive something of the reality of God within themselves and these are the only true believers because they believe in a reality not an idea. Consequently, their approach to the divine will inevitably take on something of a personal nature. It must and, what is more, it should.

Human beings exist on many levels but the great majority are focussed on physical, emotional and mental planes. They are conscious on those planes but not higher ones. A minority, though one that is growing, is awakening to higher levels and these people will often not be satisfied with an outer religion. They will seek to know God for themselves. They may make mistakes in the course of their search, and they may also be condemned by those who feel that all authority must derive from an external body, an official religion, but the law of life is growth and there is only so much spiritual growth you can obtain if you rely on outer things, whatever they are. Christ wanted us to become Christ-like ourselves, and if we talk about Christ being born in us what else can that mean other than we must seek him within? No doubt in the course of that search we will stumble and fall into illusion many times, but this is all part of the growing process. To risk going in the wrong direction is better than never to move.

It is not necessary to reject religion but it is important not to be bound by it. That is especially true for modern people who have evolved a greater sense of individuality. This is in line with God's will for his creation. We cannot become gods ourselves, which is our destiny, if we remain submerged in the group. At the same time, to be an individual in isolation is what caused Lucifer's downfall. We must grow into individuality but we must then grow beyond it, bearing in mind that each new stage includes and contains the previous which is not destroyed but incorporated in the new.

Every follower of a religion must ask himself the question, what is more important, my religion or God? Because they are not the same. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the religion that we give ourselves to often ends up possessing us if we are not careful and that is even more problematic now when all religions are husks of their former selves so their spiritual light does not shine directly but, as it were, through reflection. Just as those who feel they have gone beyond the need for a religion and can approach God on their own must be extremely attentive to their thoughts, feelings, motivations, egotistical impulses and prejudices so the religious must carefully discriminate between what in their religion is of God and what is of man. And there is an awful lot of man in every religion.

We follow Christ to become Christ not to remain a follower. That means that at some point on the journey we must take full spiritual responsibility for ourselves. Otherwise we will remain outside the temple. Ultimately, every man must become his own pope. There is no other way.

A Pantomime Church

 The appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury is so absurd as to be almost comic.  It must surely be the final nail in the coffin of the Church of England and seems like a deliberate act of self-harm, proving beyond all doubt that this branch of Christianity is only concerned with social justice ideology with any real religion merely a subset of that. Other Christian churches might look on with astonishment but they should consider the degree to which they too are succumbing to the world because they are, only less so. 

But I want to write here about how this is actually a good thing or, at least, can be used to a good end.  All churches are externalisations of the spiritual but the spiritual can only be known inwardly. The external is there merely to point to the inner. It's a support and guide for those whose inner sensibility is not established. The trouble is that support can become a crutch and then it will weaken the connection we should all be developing to God. There are times when we need the support of an external organisation but there are other times when we should be outgrowing that and now is one of those times. The usual excuses are that without an outer authority all sorts of crazy, egotistical, false and deluded notions of the spiritual will arise, reflecting the psychologies and pathologies of those who propagate them. And this is perfectly true. There is plenty of evidence for that throughout the centuries, and certainly from the last several decades. Nonetheless, this is a stage that must be gone through if a true, uncorrupted inner sense of God is to be developed. A child learning to walk will probably fall over a few times, but if he stays on his backside and doesn't stand up by himself he will never walk.

Therefore, use the current state of the churches, taken to its most absurd level in the C of E, a true pioneer in spiritual ignorance, to forge your own connection to God. For Christ is within, not in any organisation or even church. He can use churches and obviously he has done so in the past, but churches only exist to show the way to those who cannot yet find it within themselves. I don't dispute that they provide a structure to belief and a communal space for worship, and I am not saying they should not exist because we need the outer and the inner. Both together make the whole. But in the context of the present time the real need is to go beyond established churches and find God within ourselves. There comes a point at which what once guided becomes an obstacle, and many have reached that point now. The pantomime that is the modern Church of England serves to bring this home with stunning clarity.

How to Respond to Current Events

All those who recognise we are living through an end times scenario have the problem of how to react with regard to the increasingly spiritually debased condition of these times. That includes not just how to face the bad there is but how to deal with the false hopes that are presented as well.

The answer is don't react. We must accept that the end times cannot be resisted. The energy behind them is irreversible and not meant to be reversed. To think it can be arrested is to put matter ahead of spirit. That does not mean we should not try to promote order, beauty and the good while condemning disorder and ugliness. We absolutely should, but our world has entered a state of dissolution and this is a natural process, inevitable in a material world which has its seasons and cycles and in which a fundamental law is entropy, things running down and running out. Entropy can be staved off at certain times but it cannot be wholly reversed and nor should it be because that would be to give matter the same rights as spirit which is a form of blasphemy. 

Therefore we must accept that the nature of these times is towards decadence and loss. That is not to say we allow ourselves to get caught up in that process. Inwardly we must resist but the outer world will go the way it is going. That is written and cannot be altered. Our task is to fortify ourselves on the spiritual level by focusing attention within and becoming detached from material things and the world out there. It is not that we do not care but we do not allow ourselves to get caught up in care and thereby lose our centre in God and our focus on the next world as the true one. What goes on in this world is not our business. Our responsibility is to put ourselves right with God and act as a beacon so that others may be inspired to do the same. We should observe the world and be aware of its deviation from truth but not let that deviation disturb us. That is hard and can seem like indifference but it is a question of balance between love, knowledge of the real and trust in God, all of which must form a part of our approach to these times.

This should lead us to doing the right thing, regardless of any outcome. The result of our actions is not our affair but the thought behind the actions is. We leave the results to God but we act, as much as we can, as his agents in this world so that he has the opportunity to use us in whatever way he sees fit. How that is is not our concern, and the best way we can serve is by attuning ourselves to the divine through love and dedication to the truth. That way the divine can come through us in some small way. We can act as channels through which God expresses himself in this world. The key as always is love but not love as the world understands love. It is love of God and his natural order. This is not a recommendation for turning turn your back on the world or, if it is, then doing so in the right way and for the right reason. Detachment is not disdain. It is simply a matter of putting first things first and then seeing where that leads you. You may act, you may not. That depends on your individual mission. But if you do you will be acting from the right place which is the God-centred soul as opposed to the worldly success seeking self.

The Recent Solar Eclipse

 

This is the chart for the recent solar eclipse on 21st September. That also happened to be my birthday and the eclipse was just a couple of degrees off my natal sun (the eclipse was late in the day and I was born shortly after midnight hence the distance between degrees for the same day). That is significant enough but an additional factor is Saturn directly opposite at 28 degrees of Pisces which is even closer to a direct opposition to my sun at 27 Virgo. So far nothing untoward seems to have happened other than a leak from a pipe in my bathroom that went through the ceiling in the room below and did quite a lot of damage. It was discovered an hour after the eclipse. A leak might involve the water sign of Pisces and also Neptune which is conjunct Saturn here but it does not have any connection with an eclipse. However, it is said that the effects of an eclipse may start several days before it takes place and continue for up to three months afterwards. 

An eclipse on your natal sun is supposed to herald new beginnings and potentially dramatic changes. With Saturn involved there can be increased responsibilities and new limitations as well. This was my 70th birthday so you might say all those factors come into play. But then everyone gets to 70 who lives that long and not everyone has this pattern on their birthday so I doubt that is all there is to it. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, goes on in my life in the next few weeks. The energies involved in astrology, whatever they are, can be processed internally if one is in tune with the cosmos and consciously aware of oneself and one's personal shortcomings. If one is unconscious and, let's face it, we all are to some extent or we wouldn't be here, they can manifest externally in the form of events that occur. I intend to be as aware as possible of my thought processes and emotional reactions in the coming weeks. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to watch myself more closely than usual and bring things I should be doing anyway, but often neglect to do, into sharper focus.

When I first saw the conjunction of the eclipse with my sun I felt mildly apprehensive. I've had experiences with eclipses before as mentioned in Meeting the Masters. But then the thought popped into my head. "Don't be like the heathen. Trust in God." I don't normally think in terms of heathens but that was the word as it appeared in my thoughts. I take it to mean that I should not be superstitious because of this or that pattern in the sky. The stars (so-called) do reflect the workings of creation but above them there is the Creator and one should always have confidence that whatever may play out in our lives down here on earth is always for our spiritual good. The planets are like the gods but the gods are the servants of God who is beyond them all.

Settling in Yercaud

It was now December of 1980. After 8 months in India Michael Lord and I had finally found somewhere we could run as a guesthouse which was our purpose for being in India. Or at least it was the way we intended to make ends meet. Our primary motivation was to lead a contemplative life for which at the time India was still more conducive than the West. And then, as we found out later, the Masters had taken us away from England because of the great cultural changes that were about to take place there and throughout the Western world in the 1980s. In the '60s there had been the feeling in many quarters that a new stage of consciousness was about to unfold. On the popular level this translated into the beliefs and practices associated with the so-called New Age movement, but everywhere there was something in the air, a sense that the old ways were passing and new, supposedly more enlightened, ways would arise to replace them. However confused, misunderstood, trivialised and, in many ways, ignorant this feeling was, it existed.

But every action sets up its own reaction. The world was not about to become more spiritual as many naively hoped. It was going to get even more materialistic. The positive energy of the time was captured and rerouted. In the UK the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher arose to deal with the excesses of socialism but the cure to that ill was equally detrimental to the spiritual health of the nation. I am not some rabid anti-Thatcherite because I believe in a free market and it is obvious that her brand of politics came about in response to the greed and corruption of the left, but it brought with it a materialism and corrupt capitalism of its own. From a societal point of view, it was every man for himself. The moral fibre of the country, already in freefall, took a dive. In different ways and to different degrees this happened all over the West. Living in India in the 1980s I didn't see it as it was going on. I had very little contact with Western media and wasn't particularly interested. But on my return I could see the changes that had occurred. The descent into deeper materialism, now unchecked by the vestiges of a religious sensibility, the vulgarity, the coarseness. This wasn't just caused by the new form of right wing politics because the reaction of the left to those politics caused as much if not more spiritual degradation. In different but complementary ways each side did its own damage, and we are living with the results of that today. 

One could point to many other periods recently when things took a turn for the worse. Again in the UK which is what I know best, the election of Tony Blair (the abbreviation of the Christian name reeking of fake egalitarianism) was another and sharper arrow in the spiritual heart of the nation. But from the perspective of someone just setting out on the spiritual path as I was in the early 1980s it was better that I was removed from the increasingly materialistic atmosphere of the time until I more firmly grounded and better able to withstand it. We are all affected by our environment and adopt its behavioural patterns to an extent. A sapling often needs protective fencing around it while it is in early stages of growth if it is in an unfavourable environment. India was my fencing then though not because it was a particularly spiritual place. It wasn't but it did still value the spiritual and hadn't totally succumbed to materialism. I doubt you could say that now.

The property Michael had bought was on a hillside about a quarter of a mile from the town. It spread over three levels or terraces. Just to the right of the entrance on the lowest level there was the well which was necessary as there was no mains water in the town at that time. 

The well and lower bungalow

All larger properties had their own well and Yercaud itself had a big well in the centre with a few smaller ones here and there. Water was not usually a problem as long as one was sensible except in the summer when several wells would go dry. Ours only dried up once during a particularly hot summer when we had guests in the bungalow who insisted on washing their clothes every day and using a lot of water to do so. We asked them not to but they carried on. They also smuggled in over a dozen people to a bungalow that had three double bedrooms and was priced accordingly. When challenged they insisted that there were only 6 adults, the rest were servants and children who didn't count because they slept on the floor. We had to ask them to leave and as the head of this family was the police chief from Salem things could have got awkward, but since the well was about to run dry he was ready to leave anyway so there were no repercussions which, given how power operates in India, there might well have been. 

The entrance to the property with a wooden gate and one of the two side pillars we added

The stairs leading to the main bungalow on the top level

The bungalow we ran as a guesthouse was on the same level as the well. It had a verandah that ran along two sides of the house, a large central area with a high ceiling for coolness and three bedrooms. There were bathroom areas rather than fitted bathrooms meaning there was just a lavatory, a tap and a space to pour water over yourself with a six inch high ridge around it to stop the water sloshing everywhere. The water ran out through a hole in the wall that led to an external open drain. The idea was that the water would evaporate in the sun which is what generally happened. The drain ran for a few yards and then stopped so any residual water would just seep into the ground. Initially there were no lavatories in this lower bungalow so we had to install a couple and put a septic tank in to deal with the waste. After a few years this tank had to be emptied and believe it or not there was a man who climbed in and did the job by hand. He was a very jovial fellow. I suppose if you do a job like that you have to be able to look on the bright side. If you work in an office and are bored by your 9-5 existence always remember, it could be worse.

The lower bungalow from the road

The entrance to the lower bungalow with a mulberry tree

The lower bungalow viewed from the level above with a large poinsettia bush

We had bought the property from a lawyer who administered it on behalf of the estate of the previous owners. These had been a couple of English spinsters who had died a few years before. They were daughters of a missionary and had lived their entire lives in India. It must have been a lonely existence after most of their compatriots had gone back to the UK but they knew nothing else. Neither of them had ever left India so it was their country though I imagine they had always been outsiders and their isolation seems to have made them increasingly eccentric. Apparently they would take books out of the local library and cut out pages which contained anything of a remotely sexual nature. As this library was housed in a club which had been the social centre for the British coffee planters, most of whom had left by the mid '50s after which no new books were bought, the controversial elements would have been innocent by today's standards. I was actually grateful for this library because the lack of up to date books meant I read a lot of 19th century literature that I never would have done otherwise. These books were the only form of entertainment and information I had for nearly 5 years. I read modern works before and I have done afterwards, though practically no fiction, but I do think those years of only reading books written in a less spiritually corrupt age served me well.

We lived in the bungalow on the upper terrace. Behind this the hill extended further for several hundred yards where it was a kind of scrub jungle. At the back of the house the hill had been cut away to leave a natural wall about 12 feet high and this had grown over with various plants including morning glory and wild pomegranate. The kitchen looked out onto this wall and instead of a solid door just had a wooden frame about 5 feet wide by 6 feet high lined with a wire grill. We usually left this open during the day for air and light and this was responsible for a little adventure I had. I was cooking lunch around midday when I heard a commotion coming from the wall behind the house. Then there was a crash and a lot of vegetation tumbled into the kitchen. This was immediately followed by the cause of the commotion. A python around 10 feet long whose momentum carried him up right up to my feet. He looked at me and I looked at him and then we both turned round and shot off in opposite directions, me into the house and him out of it. But after the initial shock I turned back and followed him. It's not every day you get a 10 foot python in your kitchen. He was going down the waste water gulley at the back and going so fast that he disappeared into the jungle before I could catch up with him which was probably just as well. I wrote about this encounter more extensively a few years ago. https://meetingthemasters.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-snake-stories.html

The Sun and the Planets

 Nietzsche criticised Christianity as a slave religion which sapped the strength of the masculine virtues as a result of its encouragement of humility and self-abnegation. He said it encouraged weakness and condemned its suppression of natural instincts. For him the Christian runs away from life instead of whole-heartedly embracing it. 

It cannot be denied that there is this element in Christianity (though not in Christ) and it is one of the reasons many people these days turn to some form of paganism as a more robust and less vitality draining spiritual approach. There is also an ethnocentric aspect to this in that many Europeans do not wish to adopt what they see as a foreign, specifically, a Jewish, religion. The pagan traditions are regarded as purer and more in keeping with racial identity.

But is Christianity as we know it in the West a Jewish religion or is it really a European one? Although Christ was born a Jew (or half Jewish if you believe the Gospel account of his paternity), the teaching he brought completely overturned the Jewish religion of the time. That is, after all, why he was crucified by the religious authorities or at their behest. That teaching was then absorbed by Europeans and interpreted in the light of their own identity and within the context of their own traditions, Greek philosophy, Roman law and the Germanic/Nordic sense of individuality and freedom to name the three most important. Christ had to have some particular form and he had a Jewish form because the Jews of the time had been prepared by God as a receptacle for his advent, but in himself he is universal and when the religion founded in his name came to Europe it became completely European.

In fact, it was only much later when the traditional European societal structures were undermined and hierarchies destroyed that the enfeebling qualities of Christianity were brought out. Tell the Desert Fathers they had a slave religion, tell St Benedict, St Columba, St Francis and a host of others. Tell the Crusaders or more or less anyone up to the 18th century. It was only when Europe abandoned its traditions and Christianity descended into humanitarianism that it became feminised and lost its spiritual vigour and vitality. Certainly, it was a monastic religion and a priestly religion and suffered much in the way of corruption (though no more than any other religion and a lot less than most), but it was never life-denying even if it did prize celibacy for some and chastity for all. So did many other religions. If you are trying to transcend the pull of this world and the lure of matter you have to take certain steps. It is not denying nature to realise that the sexual instinct needs controlling. On one level spirit and nature truly are at war even if on another level they can be reconciled.

I mention the attraction of paganism for many people these days and that it is seen as a more natural and affirmative spiritual approach for the European mindset than Semitic (so called, it's not really) Christianity. I love many of the pagan traditions, Egyptian, Greek, Celtic, Norse. Many pagan philosophies are replete with wisdom and insight, the Neoplatonic for instance, or the Indian. In my more fanciful moments I speculate that I may have followed some of these paths in previous lives. But there is a problem. All of them have something essential missing. Before Christ it was not known what that was. After him it became obvious what it was. They were stories without the main character, circles with a missing centre. It's no accident that the principal pagan deities are associated with planets* and that behind them there is often envisaged a hidden One. They are satellites to the central sun who is Christ. Before Christ paganism was a valid spiritual path if it worshipped the One Creator God behind all the gods but with him what was hidden became revealed and the old religions were superseded. Things being what they are there were some aspects of Christianity that were lesser expressions of truth than had existed in paganism even if as a whole it went deeper into the heart of truth and goodness and holiness than paganism ever did or could. And as Christianity lost its force, the further it removed itself from the spirit of Christ, these shortcomings became more apparent. But no pagan god can approach Christ in terms of spiritual power or divine radiance, and the way many contemporary pagans look on their gods today is as bathed in his light. Just like the planets and the Sun. The revived pagan gods have taken on aspects they never had because of Christ, but Christ is the source and to the extent they have any true spiritual substance they are just reflecting him.

Christianity is not a Jewish religion. It was specifically rejected by the Jews. It is not a weak religion for resentful slaves simply because it advocates spiritual power over worldly. Christ may have been a servant in this world in order to teach humility which is the overcoming of the ego, but in heaven he is the great solar hero and a King.

*Note: I realise  that pagans did have deities associated with the sun but they had to have something along those lines, the sun being of such obvious importance. But these were not ruler deities so I see them more as placeholders until the real thing manifested itself in Christ.

Recent Events

 The events of recent days in America seem to me to be significant. A frontier has been crossed with the sacrifice of a young white girl by a brutal savage caught on camera and then the murder of someone whose chief fault in the eyes of his enemies was that he was a believing Christian. It is easy to write these off as terrible but not that unusual killings given more relevance by the fact that the media, mainstream and social, uses them to promote its own ends. There is certainly an element of that and we must avoid being influenced and manipulated to go in this or that direction by unholy powers with their own agendas. 

But there is more because these two events are deeply symbolic of where we are today. First in America but really all over the West. Beauty and innocence murdered by evil and goodness destroyed by hatred. That is what we are up against and it may be that fewer people will now be able to look the other way and pretend that all is more or less ok in the world. We are in the middle of a battle between good and evil. It is a spiritual battle so not all external events will fall neatly into place on one side or the other in the way these seem to do. In a sense the individuals concerned in these two cases are not important. This goes beyond them to what they can be taken as representative of. Things truly are coming to a head. It is essential to avoid being carried away by an emotional reaction because the devil knows very well how to take advantage of that and channel the unbalanced feelings brought out, even if justifiably, into his own work. But we need to feel a cold determination in the face of attack to do what we can to further the work of God and continue to maintain the truth in a world that has abandoned it.

Added note: There are several articles online claiming that both these events were stage managed and either didn't take place or not in the way presented. Frankly I doubt it but similar things have happened before and there is definitely an interest in stirring up anger and hatred and dividing people further, possibly with the intention of provoking a civil war. I am sure there is no depth to which the powers that be will not sink. But still, whatever the truth of the matter it is important not to allow oneself to be stampeded into reaction. Observe, be aware but maintain a level of detachment which is not to say don't allow yourself to feel only that there is a balance to be struck. That is the way to go. God has his own agenda. Try to put yourself in harmony with that.

Beyond Left and Right

If the current struggle between the various factions of humanity proceeds without resolution we will lose ourselves in destruction. These divisions can only be resolved by meeting on a higher plane. Outer differences, if paramount and left to themselves, lead to endless conflict. Only by transcending these differences can any kind of peace and reconciliation be found, and only those who can transcend the outer differences will be able to move on. Those who cannot will be left behind. This doesn't mean that differences are ignored or negated but they are seen in the light of something greater. The differences will remain but be seen as subsidiary to deeper truths.

It is a glib truism to say that humanity is one. Ultimately, everything can be conceived of, and sometimes even experienced, as one but the oneness does not override the differences and not all differences are equal just because of the oneness. Differences are important and while some are just different, others reflect higher and lower states of understanding and insight or a greater or lesser proximity to truth. So when we see differences between human beings we have to take two things into account. Are these differences just on a horizontal plane, different expressions of a similar consciousness, or are they indicative of a wider or narrower exposure to reality or even a rejection of it? Naturally, most people are attached to their own expressions of difference but the person on the spiritual path must exercise detachment and discrimination, the one to see himself and his preferred difference objectively and the other to see exactly what difference is most open to truth.

A major difference of the modern world is between what manifests in the political sphere as left and right. The split goes more deeply than this but that is how it appears most obviously. In fact, this split goes right back to the metaphysical level of truth and love, even if both of these are heavily contaminated by the time they come down to the level of the human mind. But still, the left is motivated by a perception of love, however imperfectly it responds to it, and it is not really concerned with truth, and similarly the right focuses on truth and is far less bothered about love. The question is, which comes first, truth or love? In one sense they arise together because they are both part of the same reality but this is by no means the whole answer. In fact, truth does come before love in what you might call a non-temporal sense and the claims of truth do override those of love even if in God's reality they never conflict. Love must be built on a bedrock of truth. Look at it this way. Truth is represented by the number 1 while love is represented by 2. Truth must always come first.

Increasingly these days the left has abandoned truth. Always secondary in their eyes, it now appears to be actively hated. The right has not abandoned love to the same extent but it is certainly not a priority. Of course, in reality the left only appears to be motivated by love but that is its excuse. Nor does the right have much contact with truth. These are followed more as ideas than realities, still less lived realities. Nonetheless they are theoretical motivating forces, and that tells us that if there is ever to be any reconciliation between these opposing forces it can only come like this. Those on the left will have to give up all their beliefs except love while those on the right will have to see all their beliefs in the light of love. Both must go beyond their limited point of view and understand just what motivates the other. At the same time, the left must know it exists to complement the right not for its own sake and the right must realise it does need complementing.

What is playing out now is a battle between truth and love though really it is between misconceived truth and misconceived love. The only way to resolve this battle is to go beyond form to reality. Then you will see that reality is truth and love, both together, but truth comes first. Those who feel that love must come first fail to see that love can only exist because of truth and that the primal love is actually love of truth. Love is the wife of truth and the wife honours and obeys her husband just as he loves and treasures her. This is metaphysical reality.

The Dissolution of Form

 In the End Times a major principle is dissolution meaning all Form built up sometimes over many centuries crumbles. Organisations created to sustain a culture and civilisation are taken over and rotted from within. They are infiltrated by forces actually opposed to the ideals behind them and, to use an expressive modern term, worn as a skinsuit, subverting their original intention. Churches are a major example of this but the phenomenon is widespread.

This tendency to dissolution works out in many ways and one of them is the self-destructive tendency of modern Western nations. I said in a comment on a recent Bruce Charlton post that in the past all nations or groups sought to preserve themselves but Western nations now are encouraged to destroy themselves, and led to believe that doing this is a virtuous act. The inspiration behind this can only come from the forces of chaotic evil, as defined in Bruce Charlton's post, and it demonstrates how these forces are supplanting necessary evil which, though evil, does not completely deny real good.

Non-Western nations and peoples might enjoy watching this, thinking the wheel of fortune is about to turn in their favour, but in fact once the West crumbles they will be left wide open to chaotic evil themselves. It is interesting to note that when I lived in India 40 years ago many people there were of the opinion that British colonialism had been a net benefit to the country, but now the almost universal belief seems to be, especially among the younger generation, that the colonial powers were just rapacious predators. Such people are usually ignorant of real history and motivated by a mixture of resentment and misplaced national pride not to mention the after effects of over 50 years of Marxist propaganda. The reality is that even if Western colonialism started off as a desire to seize the spoils of undeveloped nations, it became from the 19th century onwards the means whereby the non-Western nations could move forward out of their spiritual stagnation into the era of the consciousness soul as defined by Rudolf Steiner. This represents the fullest development of self-awareness and individualisation and is a necessary precursor to a more positive spiritual awareness. It marks the separation of the ego from its environment and has led to many of the ills of the modern world, but without passing through this stage the soul cannot become consciously aligned with divine reality and a full creator in its own right. It is somewhat akin to leaving the Garden of Eden and the meaning behind the old saying that it requires separation to lead to completion.

That is the justification for the colonial enterprise which had a spiritual purpose, much as those in the colonised countries may not wish to acknowledge the fact now. Ironically, their resentment at their colonising shows they have absorbed its lessons and become more individually aware. The next phase for them is to show maturity and acknowledge the benefits they have received. This is not so much in the form of Western medicine, science, technology, political systems etc as a new form of consciousness, one which marks a break with being largely embedded in nature and provides a launching pad to a higher spiritual awareness. Clearly, I am not saying there was no one in the colonised countries who had not already made this break in their own way but neither the masses nor the culture as a whole had until influenced by the West.

I've got somewhat off track here but only to point out that what first manifests in the West will then spread everywhere. That is the nature of these end times. We are witnessing the breakdown of form as happens in old age and, as in old age, we can either cling to the old mode of life for as long as possible or fix our mind on higher things. The destroyers of form may be doing the work of the end times but they are still in themselves part of chaotic evil. Those who seek to preserve ancient form, and not just as outward structure but in order to preserve the spiritual content it once had, are doing noble work because it is good to avoid collapse for as long as possible. However, they are probably doomed to failure because of the nature of these end times though this is not a doctrine of pessimism anymore than to acknowledge that summer turns to winter. Instead, it should lead us to move our attention away from this world into the underlying reality behind it. Then at some time in the future new forms will arise, forms better able to express that reality, but first we must endure the dismantling of the old whose time seems to have come. 

In these days many people are turning to Tradition to rescue them from the desecrations of modernity, and it is good, even vital, to seek the wisdom of the past at such a time. However, the traditional forms do not have the power they once did and cannot be revived, certainly not to their former glory. We should all learn from Tradition but we cannot restore its ancient structures which are without exception subject to the energy of end times dissolution. Sometimes it is hard to separate form and spirit but that is the lesson of the present time.