Saiva Siddhanta

 Most people who are interested in Indian spirituality will be familiar with Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualistic philosophy whose principal exponent is Sankara. This is a profound but flawed system of thought which I have written about on several occasions, chiefly to point out its flaws. See posts under the Non-Duality label. Advaita was clearly influenced by Buddhism, even though the two were rivals, and one of the reasons for its popularity in the West is that, like Buddhism though not in quite such a dramatic fashion, it does away with God who is reduced to an existent in the relative world, albeit the prime existent. This makes it seem to the unwary, steeped in/corrupted by modern ways of thinking, a deeper analysis of reality than theistic religion.

Most Westerners also believe that Advaita is the summation of Hindu thought. The Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon adopted this approach. In fact, that is not the case. In India monistic religion precedes theistic religion which probably arose in reaction to non-duality as its shortcomings became apparent. The qualified Advaita of Ramanuja, which accepts the reality of both the individual soul and God even though the two can be joined in a union of oneness, is one well-known example, and there is also the later and lesser known example of Saiva Siddhanta, the -anta suffix signifying the end of something, the conclusion to which it leads, as in Vedanta which is the end of the Vedas, their culminating point. So Saiva Siddhanta is the final word on knowledge about Siva who in this system stands for the Supreme God.

As a doctrine in codified form Saiva Siddhanta appeared in the 12th century in the south of India with mystical texts that described how the soul, sinful as it is by its own nature, cannot attain liberation except through knowledge of Siva bestowed by his grace on one who loves him. Love is important as it is not in Advaita which is all about knowledge. Souls are intrinsically divine but separate themselves from God through egotism and the impurities or bonds acquired through experience in the material world. Union with the deity is attained through his grace and is absolute in that there is no sense of separation whatsoever, but even in this union the individual self remains thereby drawing a clear distinction between this approach and that of the non-dualist. For the Saiva Siddhanta devotee God always has a transcendent aspect even when he is fully realised as immanent, so even in liberation the Creator/created relationship remains.

God is perceived as the soul of the soul, closer to you than your own self, but he is also infinitely beyond you. This idea is similar to the Christian understanding of the relationship between the soul and God, and the spiritual approach to the deity in this system also has something in common with Christian practice. Siva, which is simply a name for the Supreme First Principle or Primary Person, can only be known through love. This love has four stages. The first is that of the good servant towards his master. The second is like the child towards its parents. These tend to imagine God as external but the following stages see him as within the soul and involve meditation on his perfection. The first is compared to friendship while the final stage which brings full knowledge of and oneness with Siva is likened to the union of lovers.

I have often expressed my conviction that the Incarnation had a spiritual effect worldwide, influencing whoever was able to receive it through inner sensitivity. Naturally, the greatest effect would have been through the spread of the knowledge of Christ by missionaries. But in addition to this Christ entered into non-Christian religions, which may have been culturally resistant to the actual Christian religion, by permeating them with his spiritual being. You can see this with the idea of the Bodhisattva appearing in Mahayana Buddhism in the centuries after Christ, and you can also detect it in the Bhakti movements in both North and South India. I suggest that Saiva Siddhanta is an example of this process. I'm not saying that Saiva Siddhanta is Christianity in disguise. It is what it is, completely itself and outwardly has nothing to do with Christianity. Nor am I saying it is exactly equivalent to or equal to Christianity. But the spiritual essence of it can be compared to the essence of Christianity because Christ has suffused it with his presence and stamped it with the concept of religious love. Christ is only fully present in Christianity but I contend that he is not entirely absent elsewhere to the degree that other religions are able to open themselves up to his universal spirit.

Feminism is not about Equality

This is a subject I return to now and again because it lies squarely at  the heart of the modern deviation. It's not the cause of the deviation. That is the rejection of God and the natural order of creation, but it is one of the major symptoms of it and a big contributory factor to the ongoing rupture from reality.

Feminism is not about equality. It may have seemed so at one time but actually, like many movements claiming to be for freedom and equality, what the impulse behind feminism sought was power. The desire for power is not in itself bad because the ability to exercise power is part of our divine right, but why do we seek power, to what end? That is the point, and the feminist desire was and still is to control men, to be the one in the driving seat. 

Now you could throw this accusation right back at men and say that they wish to control women and this is why they seek headship over them, but there is this difference. The male desire to lead the female, to be, archetypally speaking, the Lord to the Lady, is based on natural justification. This is because in spiritual terms the male represents the Creator and the female represents Creation as is illustrated in simple but profound terms in the book of Genesis. Creation came out of God just as Eve came out of Adam. The fallen female desire to dominate the male is the desire of a created being to usurp the role of the Creator which is why we can accurately call the inspiration behind it Satanic. 

These may seem hard words but they are necessary because they are so widely denied. They do not mean that the male is intrinsically superior to the female in individual or collective terms, but each sex has its role and should not seek to appropriate the role of the other. Nor do they mean that the power the male has over the female is for his own personal ends. That power is inseparable from responsibility, and should be exercised with love, just as it is with the Creator and the Creation which is his bride.

To be sure, there are different masculine and feminine types as is depicted in mythology with different types of gods and goddesses, and the relationship dynamic will not always be the same, but still the basic pattern remains and should be respected if a society is to function creatively and harmoniously.

The great spiritual deception of the 20th century was that progressive and liberal ideas were precursors of the spirit of the New Age or Age of Aquarius, and that the more advanced parts of humanity would adopt them with the spiritual laggards rejecting them. In fact, these ideas are not connected to a new age so much as they are symptoms of a decaying old age. Far from being spiritual advances, they are indicative of spiritual collapse, arising when material concerns take precedence over spiritual ones. The equality of the sexes, the very idea of equality itself, is an example of what comes about as the old age falls into decay. It arises from decomposing elements of the past not from glimmers on the horizon of the future.

That having been said, feminism has made the inroads it has because there is an element of truth to it.  Over the last few centuries human consciousness has been changing, becoming more aware of the self, of personal autonomy and freedom, and this has affected both sexes which both need to express the new awareness. In a sense, you can liken this to adolescence which would imply that what underlies feminism is at the same time a need to become fully individual and a form of adolescent rebellion. So, good and bad. The problem here is that the rebellion has gone unchecked and then been justified or rationalised as a good thing instead of understood as the negative aspect of a growth process which should be got through and grown out of. Thus, one could say that we are in a period of arrested development . We have rebelled against our divine parent and the natural order of being. Women responded to the need to become fully individual but did so from the perspective of the ego rather than the soul. In the latter case, the response would have been in the context of spiritual understanding and not entailed rebellion against God and man.

As with many ideas now firmly entrenched in the modern mind it's hard to see how we can get back to where we should be from where we are now without complete societal breakdown. Things have gone so far that only when we no longer have the luxury of a full stomach and a roof over our heads will we let go of our illusions and be prepared to fall in with how things are as opposed to trying to force them to be how we want them to be. This has been necessary in the past and will be so again. It is why we need to start preparing for a future when all our assumptions will be challenged at the deepest level. We will be stripped bare and we have only ourselves to blame because we have rebelled against reality.

Books from Blogs

 Now and again I like to put out a reminder of a couple of books not mentioned in the sidebar on the right for lack of room and also because they are compilations of blog posts rather than original books. One is of posts from this blog up to about 2020 while the other derives from Bruce Charlton's Albion Awakening blog to which John Fitzgerald and I contributed. Bruce wrote the foreword to the Albion Awakening book but didn't include any of his posts because, in his words, "I used the blog rather like a notebook, and produced something like a stream of consciousness of ideas relating to the main theme. Consequently, my posts were of essentially ephemeral interest, and we decided not to include them here." I wouldn't agree that his posts were only of ephemeral interest, but the book runs to nearly 350 pages just with my and John's efforts so perhaps his decision was the right one. His posts are all still available anyway.

Here is a list of the contents of the two books which have a wide variety of topics and are, I believe, still both relevant though the last 5 years appear to have deepened the spiritual crisis and plunged Albion still further into dormancy. Perhaps we have to fall further before we can rise. 

From Albion Awakening we have, grouped according to theme:

Prophecies and Prophets of Albion

The Destiny of Britain

An Ancient Prophecy of England

William Blake

Auguries of Innocence

Dion Fortune and Glastonbury

The Magical Battle of Britain

England’s Dreaming

The Jerusalem Suite

Taliesin – Bard of Britain

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

G Wilson Knight

The Inklings

The Eighth Narnia Book

Saints and Sages of Albion

Joseph of Arimathea

William of Glasshampton

The Betrayal of the Romanovs

King Charles the Martyr

King Harold Godwinson

Roger Lancelyn Green Kathleen Raine   Colin Wilson   St Cuthbert   St Dunstan   Two Modern Saints   Is Albion an Angel?       The Land of Albion   The Old Country   Beachy Head and Albion   The British Myth   Albion Set Apart   Pilgrimage   Doorways to Albion   Christian Albion   Iona   Maumbury Rings   The Long Man of Wilmington   London   The Strange Ship   The Last of Logres   The Advent of Arthur   This Charged Land    Albion and Russia   Dwellers on the Threshold   Voyage to the West        The Decline, Fall & Possible Rise of Albion   The Vacuum of Leadership   The Glorious ‘50s   A Deeper Reality    The Old Port    Come and See   Another Chance? England Led the World into Materialism Empire and Albion Albion Still Asleep Albion Besieged What are the Signs of Decline? Deviations of Modernity Brexit Brexit and Religion Those Whom the Gods Would Destroy   Awakening Albion Awakening from Illusion True Awakening Demands Deep Penitence Inconsistency and Confusion Fantasy and Reality Intellect and Intuition Mere Christians Nationalism and Patriotism Women Readers An English Virtue Where We Are Now The Robin Hood Option Redditor Lucis Aeternae The Great Return Beyond the Grey Havens The Return of Constantine The Sleeping King When Britain Fell

From The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man we have, also grouped thematically:

God

Do You Need God to be Good?

Mysticism, Monism, Theism

God is Love and Love is God

God and Nothing

Belief in God is a Moral Matter

Philosophical Speculation

Atheism

Who Designed the Designer?

Why Believe in God if You Are Good?

Truth

Are We Intrinsically Good or Fallen?

Education and Truth

Psychologising the Spiritual

Persons or Principles

The Difference Between Psychic and Spiritual

False Prophets

First Principles

Metaphysical Error and Heresy

Truth and Ideology

Closed to the Transcendent Christ The Nativity Christmas Thoughts Christianity and Mystery Things Jesus Didn’t Say The Resurrection Mock Christianity Spiritual Transformation Paganism Christianised Jesus Christ and the Mysteries The Return of the Gods What Seek Ye?   Buddhism Beyond Oneness Mindfulness Question Jesus Wept Three in One Are You Real? Then God Is   Non-Duality Advaita and Christianity The Incompatibility of Advaita and Christianity The Temptation of Non-Duality Nothing to Attain Nothing Beyond The Marriage of Being and Becoming Negative Theology   Love Love Without Wisdom Love of Humanity Love and Law Justice and Mercy Morality The Quest for Moral Purity The Archbishop and Homosexuality Morality and the Left Sexual Morality   The Masters What are Masters? Further Thoughts on the Masters The Liberated Soul After Death Are the Masters Demons? More on the Masters Some Reflections on the Masters Meeting a Master   Evil Free Will and Evil The Persecution of the Innocents Demons Why Does God Allow It? Spirituality and Evil Evil and how It Operates   The Spiritual Path & Spiritual Practice A Question on Spiritual Practice Is Mystical Experience the Final Goal? Grace Is Meditation a Good Thing? Being Alone What is a Spiritual Person? Western Hindus How Do You Know? The Radical Evolutionist New Age Spirituality Mysticism, True and False The Mind is its Own Place   Masculine and Feminine Women Priests Feminism Reappraised The Divine Feminine Male/Female Complementarity Feminism and Power Can a Feminist be a Lady? The Divine Androgyne Some Questions on Homosexuality   Modern Times The Spiritual Corruption of the Elite Perception Politics Don’t You Want to Live in an Equal Society? Is Racism a Leftist Invention? Pollution The Age of Aquarius Albion Set Apart The Fall and the Rise Technological Gain Equals Spiritual Loss At the Crossroads Spirituality and the World Mass Immigration Mass Immigration and Christianity Why Leftism is Spiritual Poison Disintegration or Salvation Environmentalism The End of a World

Some Tibetan Deity Pictures

 When I was in India in the 1980s I met a group of Tibetan refugees who had come to the hill station where I lived to to sell some of their wares which mostly consisted of woollen items for which there wasn't much call in the south of India, even up in the hills. But they also had some pictures of Tibetan deities which were block printed on rice paper, and I bought five of these. The pictures were simple line drawings and I passed a few evenings colouring them in with watercolours which is the sort of thing you do when you live in a place with no TV and have to make your own entertainment. 

I found these pictures which I'd forgotten all about at the bottom of a drawer the other day, and so thought I might put them up here. 

This is Manjushri holding the sword that cuts away ignorance. He is associated with prajna or transcendent wisdom. His lion, which symbolises the mind he has tamed, is normally painted blue so I hope he'll forgive my ignorance.

This is the historical Buddha called Siddhartha or Sakyamuni meaning the sage of the Shakyas which was his clan in the India/Nepal border area.

I'm not sure who this is. It could be Tara, a female Buddha, or else a dakini which is a kind of divine sky nymph.

This could be the deity called Marici, the goddess of the dawn.

This one could be Namgyalma who is a deity for long life and healing.

Probably the two most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism, other than historical gurus, are Avalokiteshvara who is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Maitreya who is the future Buddha. I didn't have pictures of them so here they are to show how it should be done.

Fear of the Dark

Few of us know real darkness nowadays. Unless you live deep in the countryside you will be probably have some buildings nearby that keep their outside lights on all night. Business premises have been like this for some time but now many private properties do it as well, presumably for security reasons. I remember as a child waking up in the night and not being able to see my hand in front of my face. There's no chance of that where I live today as there's always some light coming in through the curtains, some from lights on a neighbouring property but also a great deal from the night sky itself which reflects back light from the earth, from street lights and lights left on all night on the exteriors of buildings, both private and commercial.

It's insane. We evolved to need darkness to have proper sleep. Without darkness our sleep is more easily disturbed and more likely to be shallow, and this means our waking life will be lived more on the surface too because our minds have not engaged with deeper levels at night. The constant noise we put up with is a contributing factor to that as well, but the lack of darkness in our lives means we live in an increasingly artificial state. Darkness helps us to go inwards. It takes us away from the distractions of life and the excessive stimulation of the modern world. Too much stimulation makes us live on edge, on the outside of things, caught up in the endless movement of material life, and unable to find true rest and restoration which can only be known in stillness and silence, and in the deep darkness that is conducive to peace. Darkness is a friend we no longer wish to know.

We can do this because of electricity. It's no coincidence that the discovery and exploitation of electricity has accompanied the rise and growth of materialism. The two are clearly linked and not just because electricity has powered the modern world. If we ask where electricity comes from we find that it has its origin in the world of sub-nature, and what comes from that world partakes of that world and carries the influence of that world. Jeremy Naydler wrote an interesting book about the prehistory of the computer called In the Shadow of the Machine in which he examines this question of electricity. He concludes with Rudolf Steiner that it is a form of degraded light which might mimic light but lacks its spiritual qualities because it comes from what we might justifiably call the nether regions. Our reliance on electricity and addiction to its use will affect our consciousness which will also become, has become, degraded and desensitised. This is because what we use imparts its qualities to our minds. We enter its world and become part of that world. Our injudicious and excessive use of electricity is taking us out of the world of nature, never mind the spiritual world, and into the underworld which is where electricity comes from.

This is obviously all part of the end times scenario and we can't escape it unless we trek off into the wilderness which is not feasible for most of us and may have its own problems for souls who have elected to live now. What we can do is become aware of the problem. We may have to use electricity to live in the world of the present time but we can be sparing in our use of it, and not allow ourselves to become caught up in the products it powers which will inevitably have a despiritualising effect on us. Electricity is not just material as opposed to spiritual. It derives from a place below the natural world which is our proper earthly home. Who does not feel a greater sense of emotional well-being in a room lit by candlelight or even gas than one with electric light? We may have found a great source of energy but it demands something of us and what it demands is of a spiritual nature.

Symbolically, darkness is ignorance and death, and light is knowledge and life. But there is also good darkness and bad light and we must know the difference.

Christianity and Paganism

 There are two sorts of Christians. Those who completely reject paganism and those who retain some admiration and even love for it. There are those for whom pagans are either primitives or demon worshippers, and then there are those who see Christ as the fulfilment of the best of pagan vision and who adopt Christianity as the seal and consummation of paganism.  I am of the second sort.

Obviously, many pagan beliefs and practices were primitive and many were derived from demon worship, but not all by any means. Paganism was how God or, more usually, his lieutenants, the gods, spoke to humanity in times past. While there is no doubt that paganism has been superseded by the advent of Christ, this is more in the nature of a religious upgrade than an outright replacement meaning that the virtues of paganism were real virtues not vices all along. Insofar as pagans believed in one supreme principle and an order to creation, in that they acknowledged higher worlds and even had means to interact with those worlds, they followed a true and good religion. It may have been limited but it was not entirely false in the context of its time and place.

Christians sometimes put all pagans in the same bracket but that is a mistake. There is nature worship paganism and then there is that of the philosophers. Certainly, there is cross over between the two but they are very different. Leaving the philosophers aside, who anyway are often accepted as proto-Christians and who even influenced Christian theology, there is still some spiritual goodness to be gained from paganism as long as we baptise it. One of the reasons the stories of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are so loved is that they did precisely this. Lewis overtly, Tolkien more discreetly, but both of them reintroduced pagan elements to a basically Christian world and in so doing brought something back to a Christianity that had not just lost touch with the supernatural but also reduced creation to a dead thing. Paganism regards creation as holy. This is often confused with pantheism, and can descend into that, but really it is the understanding that God has not departed from this world to a far off place we may or may not access when we are dead. He is ever-present, either directly or through his agents. Every tree, every stream, every mountain contains divine life, and paganism knows this while Christianity has largely forgotten it.

Various elements go to make up pagan religion, some bad but some good and the best of them show an understanding of the spiritual world, respect for the Creator and knowledge of his ways. The Celtic saints were Christians, but many of them retained aspects of their pagan beliefs while submitting these to Christian rule. Their pagan derived love of creation is the reason we find them so appealing today.

Having made these points, I should add a proviso. Paganism is of the past and cannot be revived other than in an artificial form. We are modern people with a modern consciousness and sensibility. Our world is not the pagan world and we have come too far ever to make it so. We can be inspired by the past but we cannot go back to it, and the attempt to do so will only result in pretence and a disconnect between head and heart. In these end times all manner of past beliefs rise up to the surface but they do so in a form largely drained of spiritual vitality. That is true of paganism and, in fact, it is becoming true of official Christianity too which is why the contemporary disciple usually has to make his own way in the spiritual world. While making that way he is at liberty to be inspired by the pagan love for and knowledge of the energies of creation so long as he understands these to be subordinate to the Creator who sent his Son to the world to reveal his true face and form.

We Cannot Get to There From Here

 When people take seriously the condemnations of the modern world, its various ideologies, its materialism, its addiction to technology and all the rest, they might ask, what do we need to do? How can we get back on a proper spiritual track? The answer is simple. On an individual level, this is possible and a return to first principles with the appropriate beliefs and practices will help to realign the soul with reality. For, make no mistake, the vast majority of human beings today are completely divorced from reality and living in a degraded fantasy world 

And that is why that on a societal level it is no longer possible to get back on track and has not been for some time. Things are just too far gone. As a culture we cannot get to where we should be from where we are now. When something has grown and become established to the degree that modernity has, it cannot be put right. It can only be completely uprooted and then we must start again from scratch, or if not scratch then something not far off. 

This became even more obvious to me than it already was during the course of writing my recent book on the end times. When I examined certain modern ideologies, it was clear that these were too entrenched in the contemporary mind to be dealt with effectively. The mind will have to receive a great shock to exorcise these thought forms which have sunk so deeply into consciousness that they cannot be erased without a massive upheaval. Even when many people turn to spirituality, they take these ideas with them, and see spirituality through the prism of modernity and its ideological assumptions. This is the legacy of centuries of actual or effective materialism, coupled with the degradation of consciousness that occurs in the end times.

No new political movement can save us. Not even a revival of religion could do that. Such things might correct some of the more extreme forms of crazy thought and behaviour, but they cannot at this stage address fundamental problems, other than superficially. 

This presents a dilemma. Does recognising the reality that real change is no longer possible mean we do nothing or should we at least try to do something while understanding that can never really succeed, though it might make some improvements here and there? Everybody must make his or her own mind up on that score. There is no ready-made answer. The basics of life are simple and will come naturally into view when we are faithful to first principles, the chief of which is to love or, at least, acknowledge God and respect his order, both natural and spiritual. If we get that right everything else will fall into place. If we fail in that then nothing will ever be right. It's like trying to keep the outside of the circle in place when you have lost touch with the centre.

I have sometimes been asked in response to a criticism of the modern world, "Well, what would you do to make things better?" All I can do is point out that this is an impossible question to answer. When the rot has set in so deeply there is nothing you can do. You can't say you should revive Christianity or bring back paganism or abolish communism or democracy or feminism or whatever it might be. In the case of the former, their time of spiritual effectiveness on the societal level has passed. In the case of the latter, they are indelible parts of the modern psyche. We cannot return to where we were and any attempt to do so would fail. All we can do is get our individual houses in order and wait for whatever is coming to clean up the mess. Or, as Jesus said, watch and pray.

This is not a counsel of despair but one of promise. This world was never meant to be the main focus of our lives, meaning our lives in the whole. Eventually, this world will be redeemed and raised up into spirit. The whole of matter will be transformed as Jesus's body was at the Ascension. But that is a long way off. For the time being, the world serves mostly as a training ground for the soul, and one of its functions is as a platform to push against in the search for spirit. Therefore, the fact of its imminent large-scale purification is something to look on with hope. Destruction on one level will lead to resurrection on another. When the degraded environment and corrupted human consciousness are purified by what is to come then a new humanity can arise, cleansed of the dirt it has accumulated over the last several centuries, if not millennia.