Some Objections to the End Times Idea

Many people are resistant to the notion of end times. For some it's just defeatist pessimism that serves no use other than to encourage negativity and despair. Others reject it because the idea is Christian even though it is universal in one form or another. Then there are the people who say that the world has always had problems, wars, famines, disasters of various sorts. In reality, we are much better off now than we have ever been.  

I can see some justification for these attitudes as negativity and pessimism do exist, and it can't be denied that, in many respects, we are better off than ever before. At the same time, none of that changes the reality that the signs we are approaching some sort of collapse, both spiritual and material, are very clear, and it requires a degree of almost wilful blindness to ignore them. I speak in terms of the West as that is what I know but I strongly suspect that where the West leads everyone else will follow. Materialism and atheism are rampant everywhere, and these are the two key significators of the end times. They have never been as pronounced as they are now. Add to that the fact that religions have all reached a point of spiritual exhaustion. There may be good still left in them on some levels but real spiritual good, salvific good, is draining away. Alternatives to religion are widespread but so many are shallow, without real substance, almost as if they were designed to catch those fleeing materialism as part of a two-pronged attack on the soul. 

Critics might assert that writing about the end times is fear-mongering and provokes anxiety during global crises, but they miss the point that if the end times really do exist and we are in them we had better know how to respond. To ignore a situation can be fatal. One always operates best from a position of understanding. It is quite true that fear-mongering paralyses people but spiritual preparation enables us to face what may come from a point of inner strength and knowledge. If the house is catching fire isn't it wise to point that out so steps can be taken?

 

Doubters would also say that people have claimed they were in the end times on many occasions over the centuries with nothing untoward happening. Perhaps, but past error does not excuse ignoring obvious warning signs in the present.  The object in writing about these things is not to convince anyone of anything they don't already believe but to support those who feel something is amiss and would like to make sense of it all. At times like these when the outer world and its institutions are crumbling, understanding why it is happening and how to respond becomes critical.

 

People also react against the idea of end times because it seems sensationalist and that's fair enough. It is an emotive phrase, but what it really means is the end of old, unsustainable ways of living. The end times are only about external collapse on one level. On a deeper level, what they call for is an internal spiritual upgrade. I'm not entirely happy with that expression because of its mechanical connotations but it serves to emphasise that, in the face of the breakdown of outer structure, we need to discover the light within and build an internal sanctuary. That is a big task not, as it might sound, a glib catchphrase. It requires daily practice of prayer, meditation and the retuning of the soul. It demands clarity of thought and purity of motive which sounds simple but is a lot to ask of any human being and needs a strong degree of honesty with oneself and ability to look into all the dark corners of the psyche with humility and detachment. But it will pay dividends because the more you centre yourself within, the less you will be damaged by fear or anger or any one of a number of negative responses to outer turmoil.

 

Another objection that might be raised is that if we are in the end times and everything is predestined to collapse, why should people bother trying to improve the world or put things right? In that case, isn't talking of spiritual survival just a form of escapism?

What matters is state of mind, the one thing you take with you when you leave this place. One should always try to make things better and not turn one's back on destruction and decay, but we can take an analogy from human life. We try to heal the body but there comes a time when we have to accept the inevitable. Saying this is the end times is not saying, do nothing. Do whatever you feel called to do. Things can always be made better in some way, and passive fatalistic acceptance will guarantee that nothing will ever improve. At the same time, you should know that cycles have beginnings, middles and ends and there are strong indications that we are in the end part of a particular cycle. You can make that as good as it can be but you cannot alter the trajectory of a cycle. 

Looking at the world today from the spiritual perspective shows we are in some kind of crisis. That is what I mean by end times. How long this period will last and what comes afterwards, nobody knows. The period may last a long while or not. Outer collapse may come in some form, great or small, external destruction from comets may even come as some speculate, but none of that really matters. The essential point is that we live in a world that has lost contact with God. We have sought to become our own God and that is to invite consequences. At such time each individual must seek to realign his being with the word of God. That is all the phrase end times means. God has been chased from out there so now we must look for him in here.

 

The Seven Deadly Sins Today

The unholy alliance between a globalist capitalism that treats human beings merely as economic units and a leftist ideology that insists everyone is equal is destroying the West, something no doubt intended by their demonic sponsors. The one is motivated by naked greed, the other by envy which leads to hatred as you can easily see by its reaction when scratched or even threatened. These forces are extremely powerful in the modern world, supported as they are by the political system, the media and the establishment in general whose only interest is self-preservation. Even so, they can be resisted, not always outwardly but certainly inwardly which is what matters if one would defend one's soul from spiritual attack. The question is how?

To begin with, do not try to attack them on their own ground. They have sewn up the discourse so if you use their own framework and language to challenge them you will fail as both of these things have been designed to render their position impregnable. You have to disregard the assumptions they put forward as baseline truths and introduce a new approach that starts from a new standpoint, one outside their assumptions. And that is a simple three part question. "What are we, where do we come from and where should we be going?"

Neither capitalism nor the liberal ideology that has given rise to modern leftism can answer any part of that question but until you do you cannot understand how life should be lived. The answer to the first part has long been known but is currently ignored. A human being is made up of body, soul and spirit, and any culture or civilisation worthy of the name must take this threefold being into consideration, dismissing no part of it. Any that doesn't will collapse. And once you have answered this first and primary part answers to the other two parts will follow.

The seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. You can see from this list that the primary drivers of the current state of Western civilisation are the second and fourth but pride and wrath are also big motivators for the globalists on the one hand and the leftist activists on the other. Traditionally, greed or avarice is countered by charity or generosity and envy by kindness, and this is interesting because the major players often disguise their true motivations by  exploiting the good in these virtues which they wear with ostentation, so much so, in fact, that charity is now often seen as a form of self-promotion and kindness as a mask for destructive impulses. And while all this is going on, the populace is stimulated by the media to lust and gluttony and a large segment of it by the ruling powers to sloth (ever greater dependence on welfare payments).

It seems that the seven deadly sins are in full play today but when have they not been, you may ask. Certainly, they are always there as a basic part of human nature but they are now often actively encouraged and are becoming increasingly acceptable in our modern world. Is this not yet another indication of the end times? I don't offer this as a black pill as it is termed nowadays but, perversely enough you might think, as a sort of encouragement. The rewards for those who see through the lies and hold fast to the truth will be great. This is the test of our times.

The 2026 Eclipse

On 11th August 1999 there was a solar eclipse which was about 90% of totality in the south of England where I saw it. This coming 12th August there is another eclipse which will again be seen at about 90% of totality in much of the British Isles. The 1999 one was at 18 degrees of Leo and this one will be at 20 degrees of Leo which might seem a coincidence but apparently has something to do with how sun, moon and Earth realign over multi-year cycles.

Be that as it may, there is still a significance to this phenomenon. I have long thought that the 1999 eclipse was an important one in that it heralded radical change. It was the last eclipse of the 20th century, and something really did change with human consciousness in the new millennium. We became different people in many respects, moving from a mentality largely based on past thought and attitudes, though with modern influences, to one where modern attitudes became central and past beliefs moved out to the periphery to become fringe. This change has carried on ever since, not in a smooth and straight line as things never go like that, but with a direction of travel that is unaltered. You might say that this is always the way of the world but look at how so many fundamental beliefs that had endured in various forms for centuries have been jettisoned over the last 25 years. It is quite extraordinary.

Perhaps this new eclipse will bring that particular cycle to an end. Not that we will go back to how we were. That is neither possible nor even desirable, but some kind of change in mental attitudes over recent years might be expected. The end of one cycle means the beginning of another, and there will always be several other processes going on at the same time. Even so, I venture to suggest that, in Europe especially which is on the direct path of these two eclipses, changes might come in the coming months. I am not speaking in terms of improvement. This eclipse cycle, if such it be, is a minor event in terms of the greater descent into the Kali Yuga/End Times phenomenon and the forces associated with that and they will continue to gather pace. But it is still an event.

These two eclipses also interest me because of personal involvement. As those who have read Meeting the Masters will know, the 1999 one coincided with the death of my friend Michael Lord whose Jupiter was on the exact degree of that eclipse. Jupiter in my birth chart forms a very close conjunction to the degree of the upcoming 2026 eclipse. I take that in a positive sense.

Note: I am not saying that it was only the 1999 eclipse that prompted the radical changes that have occurred since 2000. Merely that it may have been one factor among several, and that the new eclipse may be bookending a particular period that started then.

From Siegfried to Tristan to Parsifal

 Last year I wrote a post called The Spiritual Failure of Tristan about the character in Wagner's famous opera. In it I maintained that Tristan represents the failure of a spiritual test though, if failure is too strong a word, one might also interpret the opera as showing how a soul can only learn and grow through experiencing the intensity of desire for perhaps in order really to know the fullness and depth of spiritual love you must experience earthly love in its highest form, just as only a strong self can reap the deeper benefits of transcending ego. To renounce fully you must know completely.

I had forgotten about this post but a couple of days ago someone added a comment disagreeing with my interpretation. I then disagreed with his disagreement, though I wasn't entirely sure on what basis he was disagreeing, but this made me reflect further and I recalled something I had once seen, and maybe even came from Wagner himself, about how Siegfried, Tristan and Parsifal can be seen as the same character at different stages of development. I would like to explore that idea a bit further here.

The premise is that these three characters depict successive stages in the same soul's spiritual evolution. It is already the soul of a hero so not an everyman but one who has been brought to the apex of worldly achievement and is now ready to move beyond that into spiritual consciousness.

Siegfried appears first as a child soul linked to the world of nature and the instincts. Born and raised in the forest, he has no contact with the world of men and lives in a state of pre-conscious innocence. He cannot, certainly does not, reflect because his ego is directed only outwards. He is free and fearless but also insensitive to others and totally ignorant. And yet he is a hero which means he has on some level reached a certain degree of achievement. Nevertheless, he is only awakened to himself by his mountaintop encounter with Brunnhilde, demonstrating how we can only know ourselves and become fully self-conscious through experiencing the other. That is one of the fundamental meanings of the division into two sexes. Siegfried, however, betrays his other half through his lack of self-awareness, and this same lack leads to his downfall and death. 

Tristan is Siegfried reborn. He too is a hero but a more self-aware one. He loves Isolde from the beginning but obeys custom and convention and the mores of society, things that would have meant nothing to the pre-adult Siegfried, until the magic potion breaks down his resistance. The potion, by the way, could just as well be water as it is not magic that makes it no longer possible for Tristan and Isolde to conceal the truth of their love but the belief they are about to die. 

Henceforth, Tristan is consumed by passion, first the passion of Eros and then the passion for Thanatos. This passion is so intense it reveals to him the nightmare of the separate self, isolated but desperate for completion in the other. His sense of the pain of duality means he can find no resolution except through annihilation in death and darkness. Tristan is the earthly self brought to the realisation that it must go beyond itself to escape pain and suffering, but he seeks this outwardly in another created being rather than on a spiritual level. He must go through the fire of having all his earthly attachments burnt out before he can progress.

And so we come to Parsifal. To begin with Parsifal is Siegfried reborn, perhaps showing that we must recapitulate past experiences before we can move on to a higher level. He is the pure fool and must go through many trials before he gains wisdom. Unlike Siegfried, who fails through lack of thought and self-awareness, or Tristan, who fails by surrendering his will to desire, Parsifal resists temptation when he refuses to succumb to Kundry in the pivotal Act 2. By transforming sensual passion into divine compassion, he overcomes the desire that brought down Tristan and moves out of the state of ego-driven will into that of the redeemed self who can now become a saviour for others. It is no coincidence that the spear which killed Siegfried now becomes the holy spear that heals the wounded Amfortas who also may well stand for Wotan whose original sin in seeking power rather than love led to the whole corrupt state of the world which can only be healed by compassion.

In the light of this, perhaps my anonymous commenter was right after all in that Tristan's failure was not so much a failure as an inevitable stage that all souls must go through on their journey from the Adamic innocence of Siegfried through Tristan's full human immersion in self-consciousness which he sought to escape in the wrong way, to the transcending of that in Parsifal's eventual union with God. 

I don't know how much Wagner was conscious of this and how much came from his profound artistic intuition, but I believe he was aware of the significance of his characters. I would still have a bone to pick with him in that, even in Parsifal, he downplays the importance of Christ and God who are both shadowy figures in the opera, almost peripheral to its development when they should be central. That is a weakness, but then Wagner was writing in the 19th century when the weight of official Christianity may have been artistically stifling. He sought to break free from the trappings of religion to find its essential source, and in these operas he depicted the progress of a soul with extraordinary beauty and insight.

I could stop here but before concluding it is worth looking at the three female protagonists because they are far from being mere passive foils for the male hero. They are actually crucial to the whole story, and they have their own progression too. 

Brunnhilde represents the descent of the soul to the human state. She loses her spiritual qualities and knowledge but gains the capacity to suffer which may not seem like a gain but is because it opens up the heart to love. She becomes vengeful and bitter when betrayed but in the end, purged by suffering, in the great immolation scene, a Viking sati, she transcends both her human condition and her earlier immature spirituality (immature because it knows nothing else) to reach a kind of omniscience based on universal compassion. To love all is to know all.

Isolde's evolution is similar to Tristan's in that she starts off trapped by duty, the marriage to King Mark, but she is also consumed by pride and anger until her ego is rent asunder by her love for Tristan after that love can no longer be denied. Her trajectory is different to his in that she does not seem so consumed by her passion but she too ends up by dissolving her individual identity into the universal sea which may be seem a spiritual transfiguration but is actually a return to the pre-creation state so spiritually regressive from the Christian point of view. It ends suffering but does not bring true divine union. It doesn't appear that Wagner thought of it like this but it may be that on some level he knew he could not leave his female archetype there and had to move on to Kundry.

Kundry is Wagner's most developed female character, the one he had been reaching towards in all his previous operas. She is the eternal feminine at its most powerful and its most destructive before being transfigured by submission to divine will. After laughing at Christ on the cross she is condemned to wander through the centuries, acting as a despised servant by day and a demonic temptress by night, the one in payment for her sin, the other as the direct expression of the psychic state behind it. This sin cannot be atoned for until she meets someone who can resist her. Only when Parsifal does resist her kiss, which he does out of compassion, that is important, is she freed from her curse which is basically the prison of her own ego. 

This is not the end, either for her or for Parsifal himself, because she must endure many more years of purifying servitude, and he must undergo many more trials during which he cannot use the holy spear as a weapon however much he is attacked. But it is the beginning of the end, and it is brought to its conclusion when Parsifal returns to Montsalvat (Valhalla again, but built this time to support spiritual renunciation rather than worldly power), and she bathes his feet, in return receiving baptism from him. Her spiritual journey is complete and, though this is not brought out in the opera, she can now serve in the lineage of the Virgin Mary who is the eternal feminine fully spiritualised.

A Survival Guide is Now Published

A Survival Guide to the End Times was published in the UK yesterday (August 4th in the US), and you can now look inside on the Amazon website and see some of its contents. It's a simple title which plainly describes what the book is about, but it does raise a couple of questions. What are the end times, and how do you survive them? 

To address the second part of that double question first, survival is preservation and what you need to preserve is the integrity of your soul because, when it comes down to it, that is all you have. That is what survives physical death, and so you need to make sure it is in the best possible condition for what comes after. Surviving the end times is not about preserving the body in the face of collapse. Bodily survival can only ever be temporary. The only true survival is spiritual. 

The reality is that the end times threaten your soul. They do so because all the prevailing tendencies are anti-spiritual. Look around you. Is that not the case now? This is one way we can tell we are in such times, and every day the situation degrades further. On the other hand, on the individual level I believe many people are beginning to wake up, no doubt due to the deteriorating world situation, but when you do start to wake up and see your world crumbling about you, what do you do? 

You can fight against the loss through political action but part of the end times scenario is that all outer things including institutions and even modes of action are corrupted. Political action may bring temporary reprieve here and there but it cannot bring real improvement in the sense of turning things round any more than medicine can cure a dying man. This doesn't mean one should do nothing, just as the fact someone is dying doesn't mean you shouldn't try to help them, but you have to be realistic. The world cannot stand against the end times. The word end is not there for nothing.

This brings us to what the end times might be and why many people believe them to be now. One of the simplest ways to conceive of them is as an example of entropy.  Left to themselves, established systems run down and will naturally revert to chaos and disorder. This can be circumvented by intervention but there comes a point at which the forces of decay are too strong and will outrun any attempt to correct them. Dissolution increases and then gathers speed. 

Another way to understand the end times is as the last phase in a cycle, and for this you have to understand the reality of how our world exists. It is the expression of spirit in matter. These are the two forces or modes of being that correspond to consciousness and that in which life externalises itself for the purposes of self-revelation, essence and substance we might say. At the beginning of a cycle, the spirit aspect dominates but as the cycle unfolds spirit recedes and the material aspect comes to the fore. Spirit never withdraws completely or all life would depart and matter return to its prime condition of formless chaos. But awareness of spirit is diminished by the greater involvement of consciousness in matter as well as the phenomenon of matter itself becoming more material, meaning more opaque to spirit. The fact that over the last 100+ years the culture has become one of atheistic materialism is another strong indication that we live in the end times. Spirit is inaccessible for most people and it requires great effort to be aware of it other than as an intellectual possibility.

To survive the end times you must actively resist the flow of life as it is now. You must stand apart from prevailing attitudes and behaviours and position yourself in the eternal which alone is unaffected by the end times tendencies of dissolution and collapse. This is what survival is all about. It means disassociating yourself from the world and centring your mind in the truth and reality of God.

There is a doom and gloom aspect to the end times. How could there not be? But in fact these times offer tremendous opportunity which is why I would guess so many souls have opted to be born now. Precisely because you have to go against the flow you can make much greater spiritual progress than at a time when outer conditions helped you and more or less took you along with them. What you achieve now is truly yours instead of being achieved for you.

That having been said, how many people are actually taking advantage of the opportunity available? It seems not many. Every aspect of life is corrupted, the ostensibly spiritual as much if not more than any other. This new book aims to help those open to the idea identify end times tendencies and then resist them. That is what is needed for survival.

The Day I Didn't Meet Geoffrey Ashe

 I first read some of Geoffrey Ashe's Arthurian books in the early days of my spiritual researching. They were not exactly spiritual books but there was an overlap because the Arthurian mythos taps into a deep level of the psyche where imagination, legend and spiritual exploration all meet up and feed off each other. The Arthurian stories are an entrance into a world of myth and magic, part pagan but with a strong Christian underpinning. The connection with Atlantis cannot be ignored either. Merlin and the Lady of the Lake both have a relationship with that drowned world which reached great spiritual heights before collapsing in hubris and wickedness.

I had long loved the Arthurian tales as any right-minded person from the British Isles or its diaspora should do. I was introduced to them through a vividly illustrated children's version with medieval knights fighting each other before courting beautiful maidens, and then gravitated to the Roger Lancelyn Green version which is a classic of its kind. Thus, when I encountered Geoffrey Ashe's work which tried to put it all in historical context I was interested to learn what he had discovered about the period. Then I went to India and my interests shifted direction, but when I returned to England I lived for a while in Sherborne in Dorset, and that is only 6 miles from Cadbury Castle, the Iron Age hill fort that some identify as the site of Camelot. I visited Cadbury and let my imagination wander, and thenceforth I was reconnected with the Arthurian world. 

I had been to Glastonbury a couple of times in the '70s but in 1987 I went for another visit. I visited the Tor, which has never really spoken to me, Chalice Well which has, and the Abbey which does most of all. Then I went to a tea shop, that bastion of Englishness which has now almost disappeared, for a cup of tea and a slice of homemade cake before wandering up the High Street and into a bookshop for a browse in the richly stocked (it was Glastonbury) metaphysical section. I had my nose deep in some tome which, oddly enough, I remember as a Gareth Knight book, when what seemed to me to be a rather elderly man came in and began browsing next to me. He saw what I was looking at and said "Ah, yes, that's good", or words to that effect, and I nodded my appreciation. He then moved over to the cash desk to buy a couple of books. The cashier addressed him as Geoffrey and he departed. When I bought my book I somehow knew that this person was somebody so I asked the cashier who he was. "That was Geoffrey Ashe", he said.

I didn't regret not talking to him some more. First of all, I had nothing to say, and secondly it must be annoying to be buttonholed by strangers. But I was intrigued that someone like Geoffrey Ashe would still be buying books like an ordinary person. I know that's ridiculous. Writers are first and foremost readers, but it was somehow reassuring to know that a proper author would still behave like the humble folk and retain the same passions and enthusiasms. He was only in his mid 60s then but seemed older to my relatively youthful self. Some might call this a missed opportunity but I saw it as a chance encounter made more interesting by its sheer everydayness.

A Survival Guide to the End Times

My new book to be published shortly, 28th July in the UK and 4th August in the US. I notice that according to its page on Amazon, it weighs 7.4 ounces and its dimensions are 5.51 x 0.64 x 8.5 inches. Perhaps more to the point, it has 256 pages. Here is a list of the contents. 

Introduction

Part One: End Times

A Body of Slag

Space Is Contracting, Time Is Accelerating

The End Times Is the End of Term

A New Creation

The Paths of Peter and John

The Destruction of the West

How to Save the West

What Is the Solution to the Current Crisis?

Saving the West

World War Two and Its Aftermath

Not Going Along with the Aquarian Flow

Thoughts on the Secular Corruption of Spirituality

Satanic Feminism

Divine Femininity

The Cassandra Syndrome

Part Two: Spiritual Tradition

Introduction on What Tradition Is

The Temptation of the Esoteric

Buddhist Atheism

Heaven, Hell, and What’s In Between

Astrology, A Signpost to Creation

The Gnostic World View

The Guru in the End Times

Jesus Was a Refugee

The Wisdom of the Left

Who Is Sophia? What Is She?

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Tradition and Technology

The Fox’s Prophecy

Part Three: God and the Soul

Meditation and Its Limitations

Consciousness and Christ

The Root of Reality

The Omnipotence of God

What Is the Soul?

The Expansion of Consciousness

The Human Form

Male and Female Created He Them

Hierarchy and Complementarity

No More Sea

Part Four: Spiritual Practice

Spiritual Routine

Illusion and Sin

Empathy and Love

What Is Evil?

Give Them Your Mind and They Will Take Your Soul

Celibacy

Psychedelics and Religion

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

St. Michael

Christians and the Esoteric 

Don’t Worry

Conclusion

It has received three endorsements, all of which I very much appreciate.

In End Times, spirit withdraws from the world leaving a

physical corpse. Many rejoice over this inanimation because

they believe progress exorcises spirit, a phantom in any

case. Their rejoicing is part of End Times because this is a

great winnowing of souls. William Wildblood writes as a

Johannine Christian, so his End Times is not merely a wasting

Götterdämmerung or a decomposing Kali Yuga. It is a test that

divides men and women by their responses to the withdrawal

of spirit. Some rejoice and some lament, and some who lament

lose faith that the withdrawn spirit was ever real. This book is

for those who lament but keep faith, and hope to remain good

grain in the great winnowing of souls. It is an excellent and

much-needed survival guide for those who have entered the

wilderness and hope for more than to leave their dust in this

dry and stony place.

Jonathan M. Smith, PhD, Professor, Department of Geography,

Texas A&M University, Editor of Philosophy and Geography

 

There are many signs that these are the End Times; but what

does this really mean?

William Wildblood’s subtle and nuanced explanations are

focused on the underlying spiritual realities behind the more

obvious material changes.

He explores many of the necessary implications for our attitudes

and behaviours, if we hope to survive this challenging era with

integrity and hope.I have been reading William Wildblood’s writings for a decade,

and he continues to surprise and challenge me by the depth and

originality of his insights.

Bruce G. Charlton, MD, author of Addicted to Distraction:

Psychological Consequences of the Modern Mass Media

 

A powerful, thought-provoking, and candid assessment of

our current Western cultural state of decline, inner decay, and

existential disintegration in terms of Christian end times and

the Kali Yuga cycle. The remedy proposed is in terms of inner

orientation — a commitment to being in but not of the world as

Christ preached, and a recognition of the need for a purging of

the old before the new can come into being.

David Lorimer, Global Ambassador & Programme Director of

the Scientific and Medical Network, Editor of Paradigm Explorer,

and Chair of the Galileo Commission

 

It is available through Amazon and other booksellers and also directly from the publisher here. If anyone who reads it would like to leave a review I would be very grateful as these things help draw attention to it.

Note: This is in response to Chent's question below. The Kindle version is available here and here for the US and UK respectively. It is in other territories too, of course.

Bede Griffiths

Introductory note: This is a slightly revised version of a piece I have previously posted. It seems pertinent in the light of the previous post serving as an example of what I consider to be a well-meaning but misguided and ultimately failed experiment.

 Most of the time during our years in Yercaud not much happened. The idea was to lead a quiet life of meditation and spiritual focus in a suitable environment without disturbance or distraction. I have nothing to write about these times, the bulk of my life there, but they were the most important part. 

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

 

Father Bede came back the next day. With his long white hair and beard, barefoot and simply dressed in an ochre robe, he looked every inch the holy man. We talked to him for an hour or so and it was clear that his appearance was a true representation of what he was which is by no means always the case. He had been a pupil and friend of C.S. Lewis and we spoke a bit about that. He was very friendly and happy to talk. When we told him we had lived for a while at Whitefield he asked us what we thought of Sai Baba. “At best, a false prophet” was my diplomatic response. Father Bede was less condemnatory but thought confusion arose when Indians did not sufficiently distinguish between their mythologies and their philosophy. Perhaps he was being diplomatic too.

 

 

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

 

 I am not saying that religions cannot learn from one another, but to seek to combine their outer trappings and forms of worship robs them of their operative value and results in a maybe well-intentioned but effectively confused mishmash, all style no substance. The mystical elements of the various religions may be reaching for the same inner truths (though they may not, see this post), but you cannot mix and match the externals, and to see a picture of Christ sitting like Siva seems blasphemous to me. I understand that Father Bede himself was aware of the dangers of syncretism, and I mean no disrespect to his person in writing of my impression of his ashram like this. He was born in a time when religions were very exclusive and it is understandable that, as a mystic, he sought to move beyond that, but I think the approach tried at his ashram was a mistaken one even if it was well meaning and sincere. 

 

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

When I visited Father Bede I was more persuaded of the idea that all religions express the same truth than I am now. Today, we can see that God is conceived very differently in some religions compared to others, and the desired heavenly destination is not the same in all cases either. Obviously, there are strong similarities, the mystics of every religion do have much in common and the moral codes are largely identical, but we live in a world which is increasingly dominated by spiritual evil, and it seems clear to me that only Christ has the power to stand up to that evil. I wonder that if Father Bede were still alive whether he might reassess the wisdom of blending Hindu and Christian iconography at his ashram. His friend and mentor C.S. Lewis certainly regarded the two religions as very different. That doesn’t mean there are not many points of contact but there is something unique about Christ that does not exist in Hinduism even in the figure of Krishna who may be similar in some respects but is utterly different in many that count.

Jesus Wept - The Difference between Non-Duality and Christianity

 This is a follow up to the previous post which stated that Christ can operate through avenues other than mainstream Christianity. This is because Christ is not only the historical Jesus. He is also the eternal or archetypal pattern of divine truth which can appear wherever a form is open to it. In fact, this inner Christ is more spiritually important than the historical Jesus though it was fully present in him and best revealed in him.

What this also means is that to be a Christian in the proper sense and not just a believer requires that you allow Christ to be born in the heart and so live in the same divine truth he does though note that Christ does not just live in this divine truth as anyone might. It is grounded in his being so while we can share in it, he is it and it is him. 

The spirit of Christ can overshadow any religious approach that is open to it. That is not to say it operates equally well in any religion, but if there is something in the soul of an individual that accords with the reality of Christ then that individual can find something in most religions that will develop that connection to some degree. We must accept this if we make an unbiased study of non-Christian religions and realise that all of them have their share of genuine holy people.

However, this fact has led some people to draw the conclusion that all religions are essentially the same with the same ultimate goal. When we encounter other religious traditions and see that they are authentic guides to spiritual transcendence and do contain significant numbers of saints and sages, it is logical to assume they must simply be different ways of describing the same thing. This was the conclusion drawn by the group known as perennialists.

It can be hard to argue against this conclusion, and yet I was never comfortable with it because of the obvious uniqueness of Jesus Christ who cannot be reduced to just another enlightened soul or even avatar. You cannot escape what Christ said about himself or that he was the one human being genuinely without sin or stain and the absolute incarnation of goodness and truth in a way that no other person, alive or dead, comes near.  This is clear from the Gospels and brought out by meditation on his holy image.

The perennialists thought that all religions in their higher aspects led to the same goal, but to reach this conclusion they had to set aside much of what Jesus taught. Specifically, he did not teach the extinction of the self as in Nirvana which is the Indian way. I am aware it is not the only Indian way but it is the way usually regarded as the summation of the spiritual path by all those who teach the universality of religion. Everything is subsumed into the One in which the human does not survive. As far as this path is concerned, the individual self is the barrier to truth and must be killed, conquered or transcended. It makes no odds how you express it. The self must go.

Now, this is a real path and does lead to a form of God when the end is attained though that is extremely rare, especially in our day even though there are many claimants to the title, people who may have had a taste of the non-dualistic state but who are not fully established in it. However, the God it reaches is not the personal God of Christianity. Absorption into impersonal pure being is seen as a step beyond the personal God but what if the reverse were the case? What if everything comes from the personal I AM and the impersonal is part of the stuff from which God creates consciousness, his spirit but not his self? This would be the Christian position even if Christians unaware of esoteric teachings might not understand it in this way as they do not have the linguistic and philosophical tools to do so. To support this idea consider the fact that pure impersonal being as ultimate reality could not give rise to an 'I' unless that 'I' was already there in some form. It is the 'I' that comes first as, indeed, it does in language when we say I am. The person comes before impersonal being which shows there is a profound difference between union with the transcendent God and oneness with immanent being.

The non-dualistic Eastern religions and the Christian religion both lead to a form of God but it is not the same divine form. The Eastern way concludes in Nirvana in which the individual is dissolved while the Christian way leads in salvation where the individual is sanctified rather than expunged from existence. The Christian disciple still has to transcend the ego aspect of the soul, the separative sense, but individuality is a gift from God. The Christian way is to return it to God who then gives it back filled with his grace and his spirit.

Thus, we can see that the Traditionalist idea of the transcendent unity of religions is based on a metaphysical error, the assumption that all religions are subsumed in a type of Buddhism in which the I is transcended and left behind as nothing. But non-dualistic religions and Christianity aim at two very different destinations, and while non-dualists would claim that salvation belongs to the relative world because it is still part of Maya or creation, and their goal is the absolute, the truth is that salvation, properly understood, is greater because it includes both the absolute and the relative. It has everything of the peace and bliss and oneness of the non-dualistic state but it also incorporates love, beauty and goodness which belong to the world of created beings.  God did not create man simply to re-absorb him into himself. He did so to watch his children grow up to become god-like themselves.

Non-dualistic religion has no understanding of creation or growth or judgment or purpose or even, really, love. For it, time is an illusion rather than a means to grow and a path to an end which is better than the beginning. But if creation has no purpose, what is it there for? Why go through all that stress and strain just to go back to the beginning with nothing added?

If you talk to a non-dualist about sin or the Fall he will not understand or else he will reframe those things in terms he does understand but that robs them of their meaning. They are more than just ignorance. They relate to a malfunctioning of the will which is where the self is situated, and they mean that good and evil are real things between which there is a battle from which you cannot just turn away by denying its reality. The non-dualist would say only God is real but precisely because God is absolute reality what he creates is also real. Not as real as him because it has dependent being but it is still fully real, and that means that good and evil are not just illusions. They are part of reality as it exists for the individual.

Since the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ a new goal has opened for humanity, one that leads to the divinisation of the self rather than its destruction. This new goal does not make merging into the One obsolete but that does now become the lesser option, a truth which the non-dualist would reject, failing to understand that times have changed since the Vedas were revealed and the Buddha preached. More is on offer. It seems God has left the door to Nirvana open, but I wonder if that is really so or whether those who follow this path might have to return and be required to work out their salvation once more. Or else they might wish to once they realise what is on offer in the greater spiritual universe.

Jesus wept because he shared in the suffering of Mary and Martha. For the non-dualist that suffering is ultimately an illusion and to weep would be to partake in that illusion. But for Jesus, Mary and Martha were real beings in themselves and not merely manifestations of the divine. The new spirituality brought by Christ did not aim to kill the self but to raise it up to eternal life. Yes, it must die to itself but after that death it is resurrected in glory.

A Christian Universalist

 I am sometimes asked "What are you?", meaning am I a Christian, a Buddhist, Theosophist, esotericist or pagan of some kind, whatever it might be. I always find it difficult to give a proper answer to this question since in a way I am all of these and yet none. That is to say, I have learned from many spiritual traditions but cannot fully align myself with any of them because if I did I would then have to take spiritual truth at second hand and be bound by the particular form I had chosen. I am well aware there are some who would consider this spiritual arrogance, but it is not. It simply means that truth is beyond form, any form, and to commit yourself to a religious form means you are stepping down from direct interaction with truth. You then have to accept the restrictions of that form and be limited by its concepts and definitions. You may say you are aware of these and so escape their dominion, but that cannot be the case if you really do believe in the religion as it presents itself. And if you don't wholly believe why bother with it at all other than as a guide? I take several things as guides but do not see any as a destination.

I am always careful to stress that this may not have been the case in the past but it very much is so in our time when all religions have lost spiritual authority and power, and all have become exteriorised versions of themselves with their inner energies increasingly draining away.

So now, if forced to describe myself as something, I might say I am a Christian universalist while all the time realising that is just a phrase which doesn't mean anything much. But if someone wants a label, that's as good as any. I absolutely believe in Christ as the central figure in the human spiritual drama, and that the Christian religion expresses something real and profound about him even though we still do not understand the fullness of it. However, I also believe that Christ as the spiritual commander-in-chief of humanity can operate through different outlets. In this sense, he is like the central hub of a wheel and there are various spokes that go out from him to humanity positioned at different points around the edge of the wheel. That's a clumsy analogy because some of these spokes go directly to him while others only go part of the way and would then have to join another spoke to progress to Christ, complete alignment with whom is the fulfilment of the spiritual path. Still, I hope you get the idea. 

Not all the spiritual spokes lead to Christ but he can use some that don't to get an individual some of the way. I see Christ as the goal for all humanity but there are different paths to him, some direct and some circuitous but still leading to him at the end if followed right. I certainly would not say all paths lead to Christ because that isn't true and most don't, but there are more than just one. At the same time, I would also say that to reach the inner reality of Christ means going beyond all outer paths and treading the inner way, and that is the same path for everyone.

Christian universalist it has to be then, but don't take that as saying everyone is saved regardless of their path. Outer paths may vary in their form but the inner quality of each one must have the same core for the path to be effective. The core is the love of God which means true God not some particular image that has been constructed by man, of which there are numerous. The best image of God is Christ as he is the image in which God is most truly revealed

Psychology and the Soul

 For many people in the modern materialistic world psychology has replaced religion, but how can you heal the mind if you don't acknowledge the soul? And most forms of psychology, despite the name, do not acknowledge the soul except sometimes when it is envisaged as an aspect or extension of the mind.

Human beings consist of a body, a mind and a soul, all three of which must be aligned and interacting harmoniously for an individual to be in a healthy state. All three are important to the whole but there is a hierarchical relationship between them which is to say the soul has a mind and a body rather than the other way around. So, I do not have a soul. I am the soul.

If the spiritual is not taken into account a person will be not be in a healthy psychological condition, and while not everyone will feel the impact of this there will still be damage. To attempt to heal the mind without acknowledging spiritual factors is superficial at best.

Some forms of psychology do attempt to integrate a spiritual element into their thinking but they do this by making the spiritual a subset of the psychological so giving a false idea of the spiritual by reducing it to the psychological.

But the spiritual exists at a level of being beyond the psychological and the psychological cannot touch it. All it can do is create a conceptual framework for it but if that is mistaken for the real thing any true connection to the soul is lost.

The soul is sometimes described as beyond form but this is not strictly true. It does not have material form but it has a spiritual form which is its quality. It takes on form in order to express itself in the material world but then it mistakenly identifies itself with the form assumed. It forgets its true nature. Psychology addresses itself to the mind but the mind is part of the form the soul takes in order to interact with the world. If there is not a clear understanding of the difference between mind and soul psychology cannot address deeper problems when they arise and they will even if one is not aware of it with the outer self.

We can go further than this and apply the same line of reasoning to religion. Does religion bring us into relationship with the soul or does it supplant that relationship with itself? It depends on how an individual views his religion. Does he see it as a path to God and the soul or a replacement for God and the soul?  Often it is a bit of both but we must, especially now when all religions are spiritual shadows of their former selves, recognise that religion belongs to the world of form and that true spiritual understanding must lie beyond that. 

In the End Times religions lose their power for two reasons, one bad, one good. The bad reason is the prevailing atheism and egotism of a large section of humanity. The good reason is that an increasing number of people see that the form of religion is an inevitable limitation on the higher understanding. That is not to reject religion because if that limitation is recognised one can go beyond it while still using the good in religion as a guide and support. But a religion is rather like one of those rockets that enable a spaceship to escape the earth's gravity but must then be jettisoned if the ship is to advance deeper into space. This may not always have been so but has become so in our day when End Times energy affects everything in the world.

The Reality of Evil

 It is remarkable how few people nowadays can bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil. Could the reason be that if they did, they would have to admit the possibility of supernatural good and therefore of God? Do people not admit the reality of evil because then they would have to confess their sins, putting it in good old-fashioned terms? 

If you don't see the activity of evil in the world, since forever but especially over the last couple of centuries, it can only be because you have closed your mind to its possibility, and that may be because your worldview would then have to change so radically and you would have to accept spiritual responsibility. If you want to carry on without having your pleasant existence disturbed, indulging your favourite sins even if they are mild compared to some and not seen as sins by modern liberal standards, then you cannot acknowledge evil and that not only does it exist but it has an agenda.

It may be hard to see the activity of evil if you only look in terms of a limited timeframe as we are increasingly trained to do, divorced as we are from tradition and history, but if you stand back a little and take the longer view then it is blazingly obvious. Consider how our minds and attitudes have shifted over the last century or so. Bit by bit we have been moved further away from God and even nature towards an artificial this-world-only mindset that sees human beings exclusively in terms of their outer forms by which I don't just mean bodies but material selves including the mental and emotional aspects which are as material as the physical seen from the spiritual standpoint.

Go back 100 years, though it might just as easily be 200 or even 300 - this is an ongoing phenomenon, long in the preparation. You are a member of the devil's high command. You have to propose an agenda for the corruption of humanity, a fast track to damnation. I say fast track because it is that, given how historical movements normally proceed, but it may not seem that rapid to us in the context of our 70 or 80 years on this planet but that's nothing in terms of humanity as a whole. Your task is to introduce ideas that will gradually but increasingly separate Man from God, and you have to do so in a manner that to the naive and ignorant might actually seem good and as though they will improve society. What would you suggest?

• Firstly, you might try to undermine the reality both of God and religion by attacking those elements of religion that have accrued over the centuries but which are peripheral to the core message. You might get some clever people in the world whom you can influence because of their lack of faith or intellectual vanity or desire for prestige to formulate theories that purport to show there is no rational need for a divine Creator to explain the universe. They will not need to be wicked people but their flaws can be exploited. The attack on religion is made simpler because all religions really are now outdated so their flaws can be pointed out and used to undermine the whole.

• Next, you might suggest measures to dismantle the centrality of the family because the family is the reflection on Earth of a great spiritual fact. Undo it and you separate men and women from truth leaving them open to the lie. These measures will ostensibly be to protect or acknowledge people who fall outside the family for whatever reason, and to say they are just as good as those inside which may be true but is used as a means to destroy what is inside and an essential good. You might propose presenting ideas which see children as distractions or impediments to personal fulfilment instead of being the means to fulfilment which is the case. You might also push to extend the definition of the family, thereby destroying what it really is which is a father, mother and children that come from them by replacing it with what it isn't, all in the name of tolerance and inclusivity. It's a clever ploy to keep the outer trappings of something while replacing what is within as though it were still the same thing.

• Then you might deconstruct the past and seek to separate people from their roots. People without roots have no depth and are easily herded wherever you might want them to go. This could be through education on the one hand, and immigration, on the other, a two-pronged attack that obliges people to think of themselves in terms of a new definition of what a modern member of a particular society is because that is the only definition that will accommodate both the native and the stranger under just one umbrella. Attack the past to reframe the present in the style you want.

• You might suggest stimulating consumerism, that being the constant and insatiable desire to fill up a perceived emptiness as this fixes consciousness on the material plane better than almost anything else.

• Except sex. And so you would over-stimulate this to an absurd degree, separating it from love and making it absolutely central to all culture and much sense of self-worth.

• At the same time as stimulating the sexual instinct, you would propose dismantling the difference between men and women because then neither will be happy and society as a whole will start to break down as a result of it bending to accommodate something that is only possible when there is a lot of meat already on the bone. Feminism aka equality can only exist in a culture that has built up wealth and power so there is a lot to spare. Or else in a primitive culture which has nothing anyway. Otherwise it tends to be parasitical because it feeds off its host, the society in question.

• Then, in line with the consumerism, make it all about the economy. Make that the justification for everything and everything subsidiary to that. Money replaces God.

• And in case none of that is enough, why not attack, dismantle and break down beauty? Call the ugly beautiful and relativise everything in line with a general destruction of hierarchical values. All this, of course, in the name of unity, fairness and equality, the new anti-value values.

This is only a start and there is a good deal more that the devil can do, has been doing, to degrade human souls. For example, life over-stimulates us now to the point at which inner stillness is totally impossible for most people. We are always after the next hit and then the next and so on.  Our institutions, built to sustain and protect us, have been hollowed out and exist now as bureaucratic leviathans whose only real purpose is self-perpetuation. Even the spiritual, where it exists, tends to be a playground for the ego in many cases, captured and misrepresented as a means of human, i.e. personal, development.

All this is at the same time subtle but blindingly obvious when you know how to look. Surely we can see that everything is in one direction now? And it only ever goes further in that direction, despite occasional attempts at course correction. This should be enough to show us the source of the trends and where that source wants to take us. But then we would have to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil and that would require us to confess our sins and turn to God.

The scale of the attack might seem overwhelming, given that it is everywhere and on every front. But the remedy is simple. Just see it for what it is. The devil likes to hide. Drag him out in the open by revealing his works and he loses power. Once his tricks are exposed he becomes impotent.

The Edge of the Circle

 The UK is currently going through one of its periodic political crises when the powers that be decide to swap one of their indentured servants for another in the hope that the public's dissatisfaction with its controllers will be ameliorated and everyone can start looking forward to a bright new future when everything will be different. It's one of those occasions when tragedy and comedy are hard to prise apart.

When will we learn that nothing can be changed for the better by politics or social action or anything that people actually do? Perhaps at one time that was not the case but it certainly is now. The state of our Western civilisation has reached the point at which everything external has been corrupted and anyone who climbs to the top of the greasy pole will have had to compromise their soul in some way or another. No exceptions. As I always say, this is not a counsel of despair or a reason to do nothing. It simply means that the source of the rot is spiritual and the remedy must also be spiritual first and foremost before anything else can change. If the root of the problem is not addressed than nothing will change and things will continue to decay.

Therefore we must ignore what goes on at the edge of the circle. We must return to the centre for only then will external issues start to correct themselves. Changing yourself is the most radical political action you can take. Not your ideas, though those too, but your very self which must be reoriented to God.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man redux

 In a couple of months my new book A Survival Guide to the End Times will be published and I am reminded that I should promote and publicise it. For someone like me that's the least pleasant part of bringing a book to life, but obviously I understand the need for it. 

However, for now there's an earlier book I would like to draw attention to because it isn't included in the sidebar on the right. That's because it's a collection of posts from this blog so I published it myself through Amazon rather than submit it to a proper publisher. The title is the title of this post and that describes what the book is about. We are in a crisis. I would say almost everyone recognises this but by no means everyone recognises the cause of the crisis. It is our rejection of transcendence which is a fancy way of saying rejection of the spiritual. So, it is a spiritual crisis and that affects everything else because everything, absolutely everything, is downstream from the spiritual. If the source is poisoned then the water will be too. And we have poisoned the source.

The essays of this book are ranged under various broad headings such as God, Truth, Christ, Love, Morality, Evil, The Spiritual Path & Spiritual Practice and Modern Times. Then there are subjects like Buddhism, Non-Duality, Masculine and Feminine and the Masters which interest me but are narrower in scope. The message behind all of them though is that we are in a crisis of monumental proportions. There's no point in beating about the bush. One has to recognise this if one is to address its properly. That it is not acknowledged is why it is worsening which is the case.

As a matter of fact, this ties in with the new book. The spiritual crisis is an end times scenario. It is a product of the withdrawal of spirit and consequent dominance of matter which is what occurs when a cycle comes to an end and the initial injection of spiritual energy has dissipated to the point at which we are basically running on fumes. At the same time, this represents opportunity because although the end times affects everything we experience we still have the divine spark within us and the outer degradation can force us to rediscover this. When your world is collapsing you turn to eternal truths which can never be affected by phenomenal decay. That is what we must do to surmount the present crisis.

The book is available here and here in paperback and ebook form.

World Gone Wrong

A good indication that this is a fallen world is the existence of insects that feed on human and animal blood. I would speculate that when God created the various forms of life it was a law that each group maintained itself by feeding on lower forms. Thus, plants absorb nutrients from the soil in which they grow, animals consume vegetable matter and humans can eat both meat and plants. I have left out carnivorous animals here but that is, as it were, a horizontal process. And it too may be the result of the Fall. Possibly there were no carnivores in the prelapsarian world or, if there were, they ate less evolved forms of animal life.

Be that as it may, bloodsucking insects are something else. We instinctively feel the wrongness of such a thing, and not just because they irritate us and spread disease. We recognise there is something unholy and corrupt about a lower form of life feeding on a higher form. One might even put certain bacteria and viruses into this category of lifeforms not created by God but instead being the product of the deforming of life by the dark forces and/or wrong human thought which has its effect in the external world, particularly in the deep past when physical matter was not as dense as it is now.

Obviously, the materialist will write this idea off as complete nonsense but it is a plausible theory from the spiritual perspective. God did not create mosquitoes and similar unpleasant creatures. They are either the creation of the created (a physical instantiation of spiritual misalignment) or diabolical perversions like the orcs Morgoth made from elves in Tolkien's world. For the sake of this post I looked up when bloodsucking insects are first thought too have evolved and the answer is about 150 million years ago which would seem to put paid to the idea. But life on this planet has been around for a lot longer than we currently estimate as the earlier forms existed when the Earth was less material than it is now so have left no trace. When God created the world he pronounced it good but it has gone bad and one of the signs of that is the existence of lower forms of life feeding on higher.

In Siberia there are myths that say the mosquito arose from the ashes or fragments of some giant creature or demon. Similar tales are found in North American myth, with the mosquito arising from the ashes of a man-eater, suggesting a common origin. It is accepted by many people that myths do point to genuine realities so perhaps here we have a folk memory of the fact that not all life forms were created by God/the gods but some are corruptions in a world gone wrong.