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.

Conquering Evil

 The scale of modern-day evil is extraordinary but many people are insensitive to this evil because, being spiritually based, it is not obvious to the materialistically minded. The majority simply look away as long as they personally are not suffering. But that is becoming less easy to do as one of the manifestations of modern evil is the destruction of Western countries which has now reached the point at which no one other than a self-deceiver can ignore it. Why do people deceive themselves like this? Is it just too uncomfortable to face reality?

When one looks around at how our countries are being deliberately dismantled, it's hard not to get angry. I won't go into all the ways this is happening. If you aren't aware of them by now you have not been paying attention these past thirty years. Or else you have an ideological commitment to ignore them because of political sympathies that could well be based, when you dig down to motivations, on resentful egotism. Western countries, which means Western people, are being systematically taken apart and this should make any right-minded person furious, chiefly with the people doing the destroying and only secondarily with those they use to do it who, for the most part, are ignorant, albeit self-centred, pawns.

However, let's take a step back. There has always been evil in the world and one can assume there always will be. It is the nature of the world that this should be so. It comes in peaks and troughs and we are certainly in a peak at the moment, but if we understand that we have come to the end of a civilisational cycle then we can see that the present situation is almost inevitable. 

With that in mind, what should our attitude be? First of all, as believers in the principle that the real life is elsewhere, we should preserve a measure of detachment. This world is on fire and that is nothing new. The fire is raging now but it has never ceased to burn. We can use that fact as a sign that we should turn away from this world and look for our true home in a higher world. At the same time, we cannot just take a passive, laissez-faire  attitude to the present situation for if we are alive now and understand something of what is going on, we must respond in some way. Knowledge without action is incomplete. But what should this action be?

When we recognise evil, we must do something about it. It is easy (or should be, see above) to see the evil in the world but evil exists within ourselves too. Therefore, the point at which we should start is to set about conquering the evil within ourselves. You cannot fight evil with evil. If you try to defeat evil in the world from a point of spiritual unawareness, you will likely do more harm than good. Put your own house in order first.

This doesn't mean wait until you are perfect before you do anything. If that were the case, you would never do anything. But make sure that what you do comes from a point of spiritual understanding rather than worldly rage. You may appear to be less effective but you will be aligning yourself with the spiritual powers instead of their adversaries who can easily co-opt behaviour that has not submitted itself to a proper spiritual focus.

There is a balance to be struck between, on the one hand, knowing we are living in the dying embers of a civilisation and accepting that cannot be turned around, and, on the other, doing what one can to preserve as much as possible of the good, the beautiful and the true, perhaps only to act as seeds for future revival rather than to revive the present age which may be impossible. The nature of the Kali Yuga is that it ends in collapse. However, that is only external. The real battle, as always, is for consciousness, and that is what we should be working to maintain, support, preserve, uplift and salvage.