Wars and Rumours of Wars

 There have always been wars so the end times prediction of wars and rumours of wars should not seem especially relevant now, and yet it does. Perhaps because wars usually have some kind of sense to them, territorial, tribal, monetary and the like. But recent wars seem to be without any sense at all and simply war for the sake of war. There undoubtedly is a reason for the current entry in the list of wars but it's hard to see why the main protagonist is acting as it is because the net benefit to that country is minimal if there is one at all. It is for this reason that we need to look beyond ordinary politics for an explanation.

The world is breaking down. When that happens the structures of civilisation develop cracks and start to fail after which the normal forces of entropy and decay take over and do the rest. Recent wars are the result of a loss of centre. The centre is the spiritual focus of a society, what it is grounded in and what sustains it. When that no longer holds then things do fly apart, as the poet says. We have had no centre for a long time in the West which is why we have pitiful replacements such as human rights and democracy but these have no real substance to them. They are feeble ideological substitutes for what we have lost or rejected and they don't really inspire anybody for long.

Wars come about because of ambition, and that is certainly a factor with the present one. But there is something else going on which is a simple desire for destruction. When the world has no meaning, and it has none without a sense of something beyond itself, we can find a crude purpose of sorts through destruction. Destruction is easy and it's exciting. It can stimulate the jaded palate and thrill the mind that has become bored and without a deeper goal. And that is just on the human level. The nature of the end times is that certain supernatural forces that work against divine being can take advantage of the prevailing currents of dissolution and breakdown to advance their agenda. The tide that flows towards matter and away from spirit is in their favour. The more matter is separated from spirit (in appearance, of course, it never can be in reality), the less it can hold the imprint of Form and so the more it reverts to its primal condition of chaos. This is why wars are happening and wars themselves hasten the process.

Jesus said that when wars and rumours of wars come about we should not be troubled because these things must be. They must be because this is the same phenomenon we can observe when a physical body breaks down after the soul has left it. The soul has left our civilisation and this is why it is breaking down. However, we need not be a part of that. We must stand apart from it and observe but not get caught up in it. It can be hard to watch the destruction of something we love but death comes to everything in this world and while it is painful it is necessary so that life may progress in a new form. Letting go of the past is required of us at this time but that does not mean embracing the present which, as it is now, is not a new born thing but a decaying corpse. It means transferring attention to the world above where eternal verities remain in their pristine form, waiting to reinvigorate the world once the current stage of dissolution has done its work and the ground has been tilled ready for new seed.

Wars are part of this process. They are not good but they are inevitable as Jesus made clear.

Christian Polytheism

 The rivalry between Christianity and paganism seems to be reviving in the West as the secular materialism of the post-war period becomes increasingly threadbare and unsatisfactory. Once our stomachs are full and we have a roof over our heads and maybe a family of our own, many of us find there is still something lacking in our lives and we look for what might fill that lack. What is missing is meaning, of which there is none in the modern world. Meaning is only to be found in religion, though some seek it in art but even there it only exists when art looks beyond this world for inspiration.

It is the search for meaning that is behind any revival of religion. Some people turn to Christianity but often today some look to the pagan traditions which can provide an ethnic foundation to spiritual practice that Christianity does not have. A problem for would-be pagans is that the pagan religions died out centuries ago so all we have are modern simulations, based on records from the past but not living traditions. Therefore, any modern pagan is of necessity being somewhat performative when he practices his religion. It's rather like Westerners following the path of Hinduism which can never be a natural thing. There is always a cultural difference, in one case caused by space, in the other by time, and that renders the act artificial which is to say false. That doesn't mean it has no value but it will only have limited value.

Another problem is that paganism died out for a reason. It was superseded by the advent of Christ who really did make all things new. And yet some things were lost in the process, in particular a real connection to creation and a contact with the inner workings of nature as well as a proper relationship with the spirit of place. This is why the contemporary Christian needs to re-engage with paganism and even add a pagan element to his Christianity. This element should be seen in the light of Christ, in other words it must be baptised, but it provides a form of spiritual nourishment that Christianity lost as it lost touch with nature, with the earth and the land.

This is what I mean by Christian polytheism. Such a polytheism does not mean believing in many gods rather than one God. It means that under God there are many what we can justifiably call gods who carry out his work in creation. This is not too great a leap from where Christians already are, characterising them as angels, but angels are often regarded as somewhat abstract or, worse, sentimentalised. By seeing them as gods our minds can enter more deeply into the spiritual universe and the inside of creation. You could call them the inner energies of creation though with the understanding that behind these energies are beings not mere impersonal forces.

As a matter of fact, many of us have long been exposed to Christian polytheism without necessarily recognising it as such. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were Christian polytheists, at least in their fiction, and that is a good deal of what makes their work appeal so much to the imagination. They were devout Christians but they were pagans of a sort too due to their creative absorption in the myths and legends of the past which deeply marked their literary work. Their reconciliation of pagan and Christian elements shows how each tradition can bring greater life to the other. You might see this as paganism providing soul to Christianity while in return Christianity brings spirit.

 150 years ago what had been esoteric began to be revealed until now all hidden teachings are out in the open, available for anyone interested to see. And yet the esoteric remains for there is always something more behind the scenes. How do you discover new levels of the esoteric now, ones that have the power of spiritual transformation that is largely lost when what is secret becomes externalised? You must go beyond the human mind and start to enter directly into the mind of Christ, and this you can do through love and imagination. An imaginative engagement with Christian polytheism in which the spiritual levels between the Creator and his emissaries, the gods and angels of creation, are explored will act like water on earth under the sun of Christ causing many beautiful flowers to grow.

When the One becomes Two

In May of 2024 I published on this blog a short series of excerpts from Coleridge's Table Talk which is a collection of his conversations with friends round the dinner table recorded for posterity. One of them ran like this.

"Most women have no character at all," said Pope, and meant it for satire. Shakespeare, who knew man and woman much better,  saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. Everyone wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife, — creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you.

I added a brief commentary saying that if the highest state of matter is to reflect spirit perfectly you can see what he means here. This extended Coleridge's insight to the metaphysical plane but that is the only place the solution to the war between the sexes can be found because it is here that the division into two poles of being first takes place. This is where it works as it should.

The modern version of female rebellion against the male dates back to the early 19th century. It might be seen as a consequence of masculine leadership, backed by all order-based religion, tipping over into tyranny or else of man's prior rebellion against God. However, the reality is that it goes much further back to the Garden of Eden. It is nothing new, and though it may be provoked by male oppression that is not the cause of it. The basic cause is female ego which is not to say that male ego is not involved in the sex war for it surely is but that is not the primary reason for seeking to overturn an order ordained by God from the beginning. Men have certainly abused that order, though, ironically, less so in the culture in which the modern rebellion arose than practically all others, but that does not make the order itself invalid.

With that in mind let us consider the following.

Premise: The feminine can only blossom and flourish when it submits to the leadership of the masculine. Societies can only blossom and flourish spiritually when this is the case.

Proviso: This leadership must be a loving one or authority becomes authoritarian. 

Qualifier: This does not mean women must submit to men at all times for there are certainly areas in which women should take the lead and men should follow. Nonetheless, in overall terms the feminine should submit to the masculine if order is to be maintained just as in the broader sense a man's soul should submit to God, all souls being feminine to God - feminine soul, masculine spirit.

First Principles: In terms of absolute reality the masculine force relates to being and the feminine to becoming and change.

In terms of manifestation the masculine or active force acts and the feminine or passive reacts. The feminine principle is subordinate to the masculine principle though both are parts of one co-existing whole. You can say they are spiritually equal if you understand that in the context of their differing functions in a hierarchy of being. In the real world there will inevitably be permutations and variations depending on individuals and their circumstances but underlying these there must always be cognisance and acceptance of the basic form if society is to function as it should and men and women to realise their proper spiritual purpose.

Dion Fortune was told this by one of her Masters as related in The Cosmic Doctrine. "You will be given certain images (which) are not descriptive but symbolic, and are designed to train the mind not to inform it. Therefore, you may think of the Unmanifest as interstellar space*; and of the Logos as a Sun surrounded by its Solar System of Planets; and of the emanations of the Logos as rays. The Unmanifest is the only Unity. Manifestation begins when duality occurs." He goes on to say that the prime duality is space and movement. That is one way of putting it. There are others. For instance, movement is time. Space is darkness. Movement is, or is akin to, light. This is the root of male and female and it goes back to the beginning of things. Here you will see that the male acts on the female who is passive as is space. God moving on the face of the waters. The mystery of time and space is the mystery of masculine and feminine. Space is all potential but it waits to be fecundated. Time, which is movement, fecundates. Only when we understand metaphysics will we understand the mystery of the two sexes and to do this we must detach ourselves from an exclusive association of sex with its expression in human beings. That must be seen in the light of metaphysical principles which are the realities behind it.

* In fact, the Unmanifest is not interstellar space which only comes about when the Unmanifest manifests but this is the best image the human mind, based on forms, can grasp.

Earthly Utopias Always Fail

The attempt to live on Earth as though you were already in Heaven inevitably leads to disaster, and communities that try to do this always collapse. No exceptions. They may have good intentions but they are naive and lack wisdom.

The world of man is innately corrupt. It is a fallen world marked by sin, ignorance, greed, desire, fear, conflict and death, and any attempt to regulate this world must take those into account. You cannot pretend they are not there even in the best and smoothest running of worldly societies. You shouldn't go too far the other way and think everything is wicked and evil, but you have to acknowledge the reality of evil and its presence in every human heart. Like it or not, that is the truth.

Earth is not Heaven and Natural Man cannot function on the same principles as Spiritual Man. He should certainly aspire to love but cannot pretend love is already there because it just is not which is why all earthly societies, even the most spiritually attuned, must accept that sin is ever present in some form and degree. Hence, there must always be law and a measure of force to preserve order and peace. Idealistic souls (doves) may recoil from this but the wise (serpents) know it is so. We are called to be both doves and serpents at the same time. Either one on its own leads to illusion. In fact, either one on its own is not even real from the spiritual perspective, being a worldly human imitation of a real spiritual quality because on the spiritual level each of necessity includes the other. It is only when the mind is separated from the soul that love and truth appear distinct.

The reality of this world is entropy and death. That is why it is futile to attempt to establish a heavenly kingdom here. At the same time, the flaws of this world make it a good environment for learning which, after all, is its function and the reason for our appearance here. 

Heaven is perfection but this world can never be perfect.  We can and should try to live as best we can. We should try to build societies and cultures that approximate to the higher worlds, but heaven is only heaven because its denizens are completely purified of sin and that is not possible in this world. Earthly utopias inevitably become performative because they are built from the outside, seeking to establish perfection through regulation rather than manifesting it from within. As such their inner inconsistencies and inability to sustain the vision will always tear them apart. 

The attempt to enforce heaven is more likely to create hell and that is what the history of such endeavours demonstrates over and over again.

Ungrounded Goodness

 "When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” 

Bruce Charlton has an excellent piece today about the fakeness of altruism which reminded me of this quote from G.K. Chesterton. Altruism is indeed fake because it is an artificial self-conscious imitation of virtue. It is the mind posing as the heart and the self congratulating itself on its goodness. This is not a cynical put down of philanthropic selflessness but points out that the attempt to do good, even the desire to do good, is not a spiritual quality because it does not come from the soul but the calculating mind which is to say, the earthly self. Jesus said in Matthew 6:1 that good works should be done in secret to have any real spiritual impact and altruism is never done in secret because even if it is not done in front of others it is done for and from the self. True goodness is always spontaneous, but the altruistic mind is always looking for ways to demonstrate its own perfection.

Chesterton points out that all goodness to be real must be rooted in the spiritual. When the desire to be and to do good has lost contact with the spiritual it becomes an imposter that adopts the outer appearance of goodness but has no connection to what is really good which is God, and therefore actually does spiritual harm. This is the case even when the would-be good person claims to be and even thinks himself to be motivated by religious faith. If this faith is only in the mind and if it is directed to worldly ends then it is not faith in God for "God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit" (John 4:24). Altruism, or doing good to others, is pulling God down to this world and worshipping him in matter.

Obviously, this does not mean we should not do good. As Bruce points out, two wrongs don't make a right. The argument (if argument is the right word) must be lifted to a higher plane, the plane of spirit and of truth rather  than that of the thinking, calculating, time-centred mind. There apparent contradictions are reconciled and when we act from that plane we do so without thought or ambition or desire. Altruism is a secular imitation of true virtue and, as such, spiritually corrosive.

A Walk in the Jungle

 During the five years Michael Lord and I spent in Yercaud we met many people, both Indians and Western travellers, some through our guest house and some just chance encounters. There was Arati, a Parsee lady in her 60s from Bombay who stayed with us for a couple of months, supposedly for health reasons. Her husband delivered her, or that's what it seemed like, and then asked us to look after her telling us that she could be a handful at times, before disappearing for several weeks. She was rather demanding but we did our best. 

Then there was Evelyn. She has been living in the Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry but needed a break from ashram life which is not surprising since you get all sorts in that kind of environment, ranging from sincere seekers to lost souls and the occasional deranged person. For most people staying there for long is exhausting because you go in as an idealist expecting some kind of enlightenment but then find all the backbiting and petty jealousies you get everywhere else, magnified by the sometimes unbalanced types who end up in ashrams. Evelyn was in some ways typical of Western female spiritual seekers, a middle-aged unmarried woman searching for Oriental light, but, though she was a spiritual seeker, she was a practical one and had a lot of common sense. She stayed with us for 3 months or so, having a break before going back into the often chaotic world of the seeker after truth in India.

Someone who had been on that trail but had now retired from it was Sofie de Mello, a German lady in her late 50s who had come to the East in the post-Beatles hippie pilgrimage time, first married and then been deserted by an Indian and who now lived quietly in a bungalow in Yercaud making ends meet as a schoolmistress. There was something a little sad about Sofie as though nothing had worked out quite as it should but she was a caring and enthusiastic person, always positive. She was a firm believer in the all religions are one idea and for her that religion boiled down to love. That's not a bad code to live by even if it can descend into the bland and sentimental without something more solid to give it substance and depth. At one time it seemed she was setting her cap at Michael but that was never going to work which she realised after a while. We remained friendly though, and were occasionally invited to tea at her house where she gave us freshly baked cakes and little homilies about the universality of all religions. I recently found a note she sent us in an old book and I reproduce it here as it's just the sort of thing she was always saying. I must have cut it down to fit as a bookmaker which is why some of it is missing but it carried on in the same vein. By the way, I am sure that Sofie is long since dead so I don't suppose she will mind me doing this. It may seem I am slightly poking fun at her here, but I am not. She was a good, sincere and kind-hearted person though she had her eccentricities.

This is the front of the card showing Ramakrishna with his disciple Vivekananda on his right and his wife Sarada Devi on his left.

Some of Sofie's sayings.
She got my name wrong here but not as badly as someone who once called me Mr Wheelbarrow.

On one of the occasions when Sofie was entertaining us for tea she and I formed the resolve to walk down the hills through the jungle to Salem. Michael declined to accompany us. Yercaud was 5,000 feet above the plains and only accessed by the loop road along which buses and cars travelled in order to reach the town. However, we had heard talk of a path that descended to the plains and which was used by travellers on foot back in the day. We couldn't find anyone who had used it more recently but apparently it still existed. We made some enquiries but everyone we spoke to about it looked at us in amazement. "Why would you want to walk down when there's a bus?" was the attitude. I wonder if what makes Westerners want to do this sort of thing is one of the factors that caused them to change the world. For the better in some ways and the worse in others. 

We eventually found someone who told us where the path started, and he said it was occasionally used but only to go to and from a couple of smaller settlements lower down the hillside. No one went all the way to the bottom by that route these days. One must remember that at this time hiking was not really a thing in most parts of India other than perhaps the foothills of the Himalayas. But elsewhere travelling on foot was probably too recent to be thought of as something potentially pleasurable. Nothing daunted, we made our preparations though as that only involved some water and a sandwich it did not take long, and early next morning the two of us set off.

This shows a similar looking path to the one where we started out.

The path started in a reasonable state of repair, just a track as in the picture above really but easily navigable, and it was delightful to walk in the coolness of the day before the sun had climbed high with the birds singing and the forest green and sparkling in the morning light. We were in good spirits and optimistic for the journey ahead even though we had no map and no certainty that the path we were on really would take us where we wanted to go. We passed a few little shacks and attracted some attention from giggling children playing outside to whom white people would have been an unusual and strange sight, and then the trail began to degrade quite quickly. I calculated that we had descended about 1,000 feet which meant there was still a long way to go. The sun was now higher in the sky and it was getting hotter. We had hats but there was no shade on the path. Still, it was there and still going down so we knew we were on the right track. To make things slightly confusing there had been turn offs but these were even rougher than the main path so easy to identify. But then, inevitably, we came to a point at which the path split in two and there was no indication as to which one we should take. We had passed the end of the settlements some time before so there was no one to ask. We deliberated a while and then took one of them hoping for the best.

We carried on along this path but it became progressively worse and then split into several smaller paths. We chose one because we had to and continued but after a while we were no longer descending and then the path, by now almost non-existent, simply petered out in some bushes. We went back and followed another path only to find that did the same thing. Retracing our steps again with the hope of finding the main track didn't work because we had followed too many false trails to know what was what. We appeared to be lost.

This is the kind of scrub jungle in which we got lost though the plains were not visible in our situation.

I well remember the feeling of being lost in the jungle. It was not pleasant. At this point we had descended enough for the more temperate vegetation of the higher elevation to give way to scrub jungle (compare and contrast the two pictures above) so there were no large trees but there were thick bushes, many of human height. It was now getting very hot and we only had about half a bottle of water left each. Sofie was becoming nervous and I had no idea what to do except keep walking in hope. The sun was too high for me to be able to tell which way was south west, that being roughly the direction we should be going, but I made a guess and we took one of the crude tracks that seemed to go that way. Of course it only did so for a short distance, and then it too ended. In that part of the world, what with the tropical heat and monsoon rains, the vegetation grows very quickly so any path that is not constantly renewed soon becomes overgrown. That was obviously what had happened to most of these. I wondered why these paths had existed in the first place since, crude as they were, they were something. We had not seen any people for well over an hour and I didn't think there was anyone living in these parts of the hills. Luckily we found out the reason for their existence.

It was probably only around half an hour after we had realised we were lost, though it seemed longer, when we saw two men coming towards us. I felt a wave of relief but Sofie actually gave a little scream. The men were carrying a long pole over their shoulders on which was strung an obviously freshly killed, since the blood was still dripping, wild boar. They were carrying long knives with curved blades and wearing simple loin cloths with nothing on the upper part of their body or their feet. They were obviously tribals of some sort as it was clear from their manner and appearance that their contact with civilisation was minimal, even compared to the villagers and coffee plantation workers around Yercaud which was at least a town of some description. These men were certainly not town dwellers of any description. Their eyes had a kind of wildness to them which was midway between human and animal, and their responses were strangely emotionless. I realise that it is not the sort of thing we say nowadays but it's how it seemed to me and Sofie was definitely  alarmed by them. They weren't threatening but nor were they unthreatening if that makes any sense. Subsequent research revealed that there was indeed an indigenous tribal community living in the Shevaroy Hills from long before Yercaud was established in the 19th century. They were called the Malaiyalis which means mountain men and they have their own customs and religious practices separate from regular Hindu society. They are regarded as socially and economically backward but, like other Scheduled Tribes of which India has many, given certain protection by the government though what that amounts to in reality is hard to tell.

 I have found a picture of members of this tribe and include it here to give an idea of how they looked. It dates from the 1860s but our two were very similar to the fellow on the right.

The two men stopped and stared at us as well they might since we did not belong in that world. They knew no English but between us Sofie and I could muster enough Tamil to ask if they knew the way to Salem. They understood and indicated that we should follow them which we did for about half a mile and then they pointed to a track which evidently was the path down to the plains. We gave them a few rupees in gratitude which they took without response which again was slightly unnerving. Normally in India if you gave anyone money they would either react with fervent thanks or exaggerated disappointment because you had not given them enough. These men didn't react at all.

However, they had rescued us and we were lucky to have found them. The path they had put us on was well marked and we had no more problems in our descent though it did take another 2-3 hours making the whole trip around 5-6 hours in total. Sofie was going on into Salem so we split up and I got a bus back to Yercaud where I arrived just as dusk was setting in. I felt fine then but the next day the backs of my calf muscles were very sore. I discovered later that poor Sofie who was in her late 50s had been laid up in bed for a couple of days.  I have walked down mountains and up them and going down is always harder on the legs.

Humanity today is not creatively constructive but creatively destructive.

 "Creative power is used for destructive purposes. Nearly all modern arts are blasphemy."

This is a quotation from Towards the Mysteries by Swami Omananda (Maud McCarthy) which is presented as a record of communications from elevated spiritual beings. Most of this sort of stuff is spiritually sub-standard and not what it purports to be, but this is one of the rare exceptions that carries the ring of truth.

Anyway, back to the quote which can stand on its own, regardless of claimed provenance. It suggests that human creativity in the 20th century, and by extension the 21st since that has carried on in the same vein only more so, is not in line with divine being but goes against it. I don't see how any sane person could dispute this. For a while the idea of something being new and different as modern art was could perhaps justify it to some extent, but that period was over by the 1920s. Thereafter, most human creativity, and especially that which was lauded by the art establishment and cognoscenti, dismantled divine order and sometimes spat in its face. In terms of popular art, especially music, the trend was backwards, reviving primitive forms of expression that should have been outgrown, though with technological sophistication giving it greater potentcy. I am not saying that none of this had any artistic merit but overall the form in which these musicians worked rendered the content spiritually harmful. As the composer and Theosophist Cyril Scott said in his book Music, its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages, "After the dissemination of Jazz, which was definitely "put through" by the Dark Forces, a very marked decline in sexual morals became noticeable." We don't like to admit this now but the reality is that the influence of less evolved groups pulled down the standards and level of consciousness of Western society in general.

Even when art flirted with the so-called spiritual it was rarely on the level of aspiring to true divine understanding as with the music and cathedrals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Instead it sought to expand the circle of personal experience and consequently was just as likely to plumb the depths as scale the heights. The creativity involved did not explore truth and beauty and the good, but the supposed wholeness of human nature which effectively means delving into the ugly and the diabolical, and that inevitably damaged and degraded the culture. Human creativity was not aligned with divine order but actually worked against it. As a result it did not refresh or revitalise the human spirit. It exhausted it because it was only attuned to the human mind separated from God and that is a self-consuming, decaying source of inspiration. It retains a certain amount of energy from its origin in divine being but that dissipates over a period and we seem to be coming near the end of that period which is why so much in the field of art and culture now just recycles what came before.

People are acclaimed as great artists today who might have a certain skill and talent but do not have what truly makes an artist which is attunement to the level of Forms, using that word in its Platonic sense. What this means is an awareness of the pattern of divine being and this can unfold in a multitude of ways depending on the individual qualities of the artist. But now we have creative people falling back on themselves and their own minds, and where there is some inspiration from a non-material source it is from the lower levels of being though, as is the way with these things, often mistaken for or claimed to be from higher levels. But by their fruits shall you know them, and the fruit of most art over many decades now is rotten to the core. Humanity is possibly more creative than it ever has been but so often what is created or produced is spiritual poison. This is certainly the case with what gets taken up and promoted. Hence many people seek out the art and beauty of the past which still has the power to inspire. 

I'll tell you why this is done. It's because Satan (using that name to describe the central core of the powers of evil) knows that if he can deform people's idea of beauty he can deform their idea of God and the good. They will consider themselves more sophisticated and 'advanced' than those who don't get it and then they are his toys to do with as he wishes. Unfortunately, he finds plenty of willing egotists in this world to carry out his will.

An End Times Overview

A Survival Guide to the End Times is the latest in a series of books that deal with the spiritual crisis of the present day which, it should be obvious, is the root cause of every other problem we face. 

The series started with Meeting the Masters which describes certain experiences from the earlier part of my life and explains where I am coming from when speaking about these matters. 

There then followed what turned out to be a trilogy of sorts with Remember the Creator, Earth is a School and By No Means Equal which dealt with the reality of God, the reason for our lives in this world, and the soul and how that is a real, immaterial thing.

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God, the world and the soul are the three fundamentals of our experience but there is a fourth thing and that is time. In most traditional societies time was regarded as cyclical but the Christian West saw it as linear with a beginning, middle (perhaps analogous to the Incarnation) and end. Post-Darwinian materialistic culture took up the linear idea and we generally see time in those terms today though many spiritual people have gone back to the cyclical idea. But what if both are true? Time is cyclical, going through various ages as detailed in Indian and ancient Greek thought to name two of the better known, but it also goes in a line which imparts the notion of progression. So, neither cyclical nor linear but proceeding in a spiral form.

A Survival Guide to the End Times takes up the idea of the present day as being the latter stage in a process of spiritual decay as material forces overwhelm the spiritual, and yet it still sees cause for hope because alongside this decay even now can be found potential seeds for revival in a future age not to mention that the withdrawal of spirit provides valuable lessons that can progress the soul if responded to in the correct way.

Current civilisations will fall but this is not defeatist talk because we are at the end of the cycle so that is as inevitable as the fact that old age leads to death. There is no political or any other kind of solution that can avert the natural course of outer events. The age must come to an end, and the end will likely be chaotic. But from the ashes and debris of the past can come rebirth and the beginnings of something new. The rot and decay must be burnt away as the world crumbles and the sin and lies of the past are destroyed. There will be a wiping clean of the slate for a fresh start which nevertheless will not completely be a case of back to square one because many of the lessons of the previous cycle will have been absorbed by the consciousness of the human souls incarnating at that time.

What this means is that the current age is drawing to a close and that cannot be avoided. But the way we respond to this can have a determining effect on the future, providing seeds of renewal on the subtle level that can sprout when the time is right.

Death and Birth - Two Sides of the Same Coin

 When we are born into this world, alone and defenceless, most of us are welcomed with love and cared for until we are able to look after ourselves. Our adjustment to the world is facilitated by older, wiser beings until we have developed the ability to negotiate its demands and challenges on our own.

It is a truism that the same patterns repeat themselves throughout the universe and at all levels of being. Thus, there is every reason to hope that when we die in this world and are born into the next we will be welcomed by souls who love us and who will look after us until we are able to make our own way in this new environment. Forget heaven and hell for the moment. That is too simplistic a framework for the immediate post-mortem experience. To be sure, there will be some sort of judgement and some sort of purification further down the line, but for the majority, saving the very saintly and very wicked, before this there will be loving help in adapting to our new world just as there is in this world before we must face the next stages.

At least, that will be the case for those souls, whatever their spiritual status, who are open to the experience of the new world and who have not darkened their mind by closing off the possibility of rebirth in the spiritual. In the next world it is your own mind that determines your outer situation. Not your intelligence but your spiritual openness and ability to accept light. By no means everyone can accept light and the cleverer person sometimes least of all. That is why faith is so important and why the innocent faith of a child may be a better guarantee of moving on in the spiritual world than all the wit and wisdom (earthly wisdom) of the philosopher. In the previous post I spoke of people being stripped of their worldly pride and arrogance through the processes of old age and, nowadays, dementia. This is to prise open the barriers they have erected in life and reduce their resistance. This is not done for any other reason than to help these souls make a better transition to the next world. Otherwise they might find themselves in a darkness that is an exteriorisation of their own mental state where they will remain until they start to wake up.

The best way to approach death is through faith, hope and an inner calm that rests on the confident (confident means with faith) belief that it is an integral part of life arranged by a loving God. Death is not a light matter nor can one deny the aspect of pain and suffering that may be involved or leaving people behind, for the time being, whom you love. We cannot escape the fact that death in a fallen world has its dark side. But it is also a release into a higher world and a more expansive state of being, and if we can see it in those terms then its sting will be blunted and we might even regard it as in some respects a blessing. After all, dying might be bad but not being able to die would be much worse.

The physical world is a world of entropy as it must be since only spirit endures forever. Rather than taking this material decay as a sign of ultimate nothingness as the atheist does we should see it as a vindication of belief in the reality of spirit. Viewed in this manner death is the proof of God not the denial.

Preparing for Death

Having recently reached my three score years and ten I've been thinking about how to prepare for death. Not because I think I'm due to go anytime soon, but as you grow older you start to understand that the way you die is the whole point of life. By that I mean the state of your mind which is all you'll take with you. So it makes sense to be prepared.

Actually, I've been preparing for death ever since I took the fact of the spiritual world seriously because when you awaken to the reality of God you understand that everything else must be seen in his light. You cannot add the spiritual on to the everyday or worldly (though many people do). The everyday has its place, of course, it is equally wrong to dismiss it as nothing. But that place stands in relation to the spiritual which is primary. And therefore since the spiritual will only fully come into view after death, you must start taking death seriously. Not in a way that makes earthly life futile for earthly life must be lived and lived properly. At the same time, death is the goal of life, the goal not just the end of it, and you must see it as in a sense the crowning achievement of your life.

That the great majority of people in the contemporary West do not see it like that may be one reason for the widespread dementia that afflicts much of the elderly population. The obvious reason for that is that people are just living longer, kept going by modern medicine. However, there could be an underlying spiritual purpose behind this too or accompanying it. I don't know if dementia affects atheists more than believers but it would be interesting to find out if that were the case though how many self-designated believers do not really believe would skew the results. Still, it could be that dementia strips away the resistance to the spiritual and leaves its victims on some level more open to the next world. An atheist has by definition erected barriers in his mind. Old age in general and dementia in particular might help to dismantle these barriers, but this is only a passing thought prompted by personal acquaintance with a case in point. 

To live every day as though it were your last is a traditional spiritual exercise but nobody can really do that, not for long anyway. The lesson is there however, and it is to live in the moment or from moment to moment, giving full attention to everything you do and with a proper respect for the awfulness of death. This will also imbue your mind with a sense of your own insignificance and utter helplessness in the face of the universe but, when backed up with faith in the living God, gratitude and trust. You realise yourself to be totally dependent on God, but his love supports and sustains you always.

Preparing for death requires a twofold approach, akin to the division of the virtues into cardinal and theological. Traditionally, the former, corresponding perhaps to natural religion, are justice, prudence, fortitude and temperance. This would involve developing an inner calm and detachment that brings emotional firmness and stability. Then the mind must be mastered so that thoughts do not run through your head like wild horses but are harnessed and ridden to where you want them to go. Balance, self -control and order are the foundations on which to build the next stage which is not to say you must wait until these are perfect to begin the next stage, only that it is a step beyond and will work best when it does have this foundation.

The next stage is faith, hope and charity which are the spiritual virtues of true supernatural religion. Mental and emotional control are important and will certainly bring power and insight to the mind. But they won't bring genuine spiritual awareness without the positive qualities of faith, hope and charity. They can make a philosopher or a sage but not a saint which is why Dante needed Beatrice to take him where Virgil could not go. Preparing for death is all about faith and hope but these need to be vivified by love of God for without that they are rather like a car without petrol. They may make the car but they don't make it go.

Your mind is all you take with you when you leave this world but you do take that with you. It may be that you can train and develop your mind when you are in the next world. I'm sure that is the case. Nevertheless, tradition affirms, and it makes sense given the educational nature of this world, that the condition of your mind is all-important when you die and that it will determine much about your ongoing experience. Therefore, preparing your mind for death is the most important thing you can do in this life and that means, on the one hand, mastering it, being controller rather than controlled, and on the other, letting it be irradiated by the love of God. This is the single most important thing anyone can ever do both in life and in death.

A Survival Guide to the End Times

 My new book will be published in July this year.  Here is the back cover blurb.

Almost from the beginning, Christians thought they were living in the end times. It didn’t happen then, nor did it later, when subsequent generations believed that they too were living at a time of universal decline. Now we are faced with a similar dilemma. The signs of spiritual decay are everywhere, with atheism and materialism rampant, and even non-religious people are seeing a future of growing poverty and cultural loss. The end times have finally arrived.

 

This book discusses how to survive a time when the spiritual is either banished or corrupted by the material. Survival means spiritual survival and involves building an inner defence of understanding for the preservation of what is truly important: your own self. A Survival Guide to the End Times explains the processes that have brought us to our current state, and it details how to negotiate these times successfully from a spiritual perspective. As all aspects of the modern world are affected by the prevailing influence of dissolution, this book examines several areas of life from an end times point of view.

 

And here is the cover.

and here's the list of contents.

Introduction

 

Part One: End Times

A Body of Slag 

Space is Contracting 

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? 

Saving the West 

World War Two and Its Aftermath 

Not Going Along with the Aquarian Flow 

The Secular Corruption of Spirituality 

Satanic Feminism 

Divine Femininity 

The Cassandra Syndrome 

 

Part Two: Spiritual Tradition

Introduction on What Tradition Is

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? 

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 

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

Celibacy

Psychedelics and Religion

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

St Michael

Christians and the Esoteric 

Don’t Worry 

 

Conclusion

 

The book, like some of my previous ones, expands and develops ideas linked by theme that began life as shorter essays here. There are also several new chapters. The sense that we are indeed living in a period that corresponds to the End Times is widespread now and not just among religious people. An awareness of cultural breakdown is everywhere and will only become more intense. Even those people who outwardly ignore or deny it feel in their hearts that something is amiss in the world, and it is likely that soon denial will no longer be possible. Those who are inwardly prepared for what is to come will be best placed to survive it, survival in this case meaning preserving one's spiritual integrity for that is all that really matters.

Things Are Breaking Down

  Mainstream media hasn't noticed it yet but what is called the post World War Two consensus is drawing to a close. It will be interesting to see how this plays out though it will surely lead to initial disruption and maybe even societal disorder which will be blamed by the mainstream on extremists whereas it is really the reaction of normality to the enforced extremist ideology of the establishment elites. 

The Western world has been bullied and demoralised by its elites for decades now. Europeans and Americans have been told that any pride they have in their civilisations, any love they have for their people or their countries, is dangerous and should be outgrown. It belongs to the bad old days when there were such harmful concepts as better or worse. 

Intellectuals and political leaders decided after World War Two that such a thing must never happen again. They determined that the way to ensure this was do away with all things that might potentially cause division which included sovereign nations, religions and even the idea of the father as the figure of authority.  All these had to be weakened and, if possible, dismantled. We should become empathetic and diverse with nothing better than anything else. All equal. That might have sounded good at one time but when everything is regarded as equal standards inevitably fall. It is a purely quantitative approach to the problem of different types of human being, and as an experiment it has clearly failed. Now, people are beginning to feel they are losing their countries and could soon even be minorities in their own homelands. Having been lulled into docile slumber for so long, drugged by money and entertainment and sexual liberation, they are starting to wake up.

The West has been undone by liberalism along with its subsets such as feminism and anti-racism and all other egalitarianisms. Liberalism is now being seen as the civilisation destroying ideology it always was. That is not to say there is nothing good about it, but it should be seen more as a medicine for when a society gets sick. It should never be the main diet as it has been for almost 100 years for then its poisonous aspects will take over. Excessive freedom, of and for the self, becomes a form of slavery.

It cannot be a question of going back to the 1980s or 90s as some younger people who recognise the problems seem to think, a time before mass immigration. Spiritual decay had long set in by then. People like Guénon and Evola were writing about it before the war. Come to that, the Romantics were writing about the disenchantment of the world in the early 19th century while Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre were eloquent opponents of the French Revolution which was a key event in the formation of the modern mentality. But there can be no question of going back anywhere or to any time. Life has simply moved on and consciousness has changed. Institutions set up in the past to maintain a civilised culture are no longer fit for purpose. They have been captured and deformed to the point where they are beyond saving, but even if they could be saved they are not suitable for humanity as it is now or as it will be in years to come. We cannot go back. We should learn from Tradition but we cannot return to it as it was. We must reject the whole of modernity as it has worked out in the world but take care while doing so not to dismiss the core of good at its heart which is a greater sense of freedom and self-awareness. Growth is the law of life. That is why we cannot go back.

Leftism, which is what liberalism has morphed into, is fundamentally about destruction. Ostensibly, it seeks to create something new and better but really the impulse to destroy is paramount. It seeks to destroy religion because loyalty to a higher power robs it of its power. It seeks to destroy all natural hierarchies because that undermines natural order and a harmonious society which, being a spiritual disease, is what it wants to do. And it seeks to destroy healthy relations between the sexes because that foments distrust and societal breakdown which is the objective underlying leftism when viewed from the spiritual angle. Any historian should be able to tell you that civilisational collapse inevitably follows the liberation of women from masculine authority. This may be an unpleasant truth for the modern mind but not only is it rooted in Christian scripture, it is known by all properly functioning societies because it is written into the fabric of the cosmos that the relationships between the two poles of being should follow a certain pattern, one in which they are spiritually equal but have different functions in terms of created being. To mess with this is to mess with a basic law of creation.

And that, of course, is why it is encouraged. We must recognise that the destructiveness, specifically the spiritual destructiveness, of leftism does not come out of nowhere. Human beings, due to their propensity to sin through pride, greed, spiritual rebelliousness resentment and general egotism, put it into practice on the earth plane, but the impulse behind it, the energy driving it, comes from the dark world that exists between the earthly and the proper spiritual. Fallen spiritual beings are engaged in driving a wedge between God and humanity. They can then exploit human spiritual energy for their own ends. We are protected by God and his angels but because we have free will and evil is subtle if we open our hearts and minds to it, the spiritual protection can be overridden. The dark powers can only lead us astray if we allow them to which is where temptation comes in. It can prompt us to invite evil into our own hearts where it forms a canker that will spread unless uprooted by repentance and prayer. Evil cannot affect us unless we do so invite it in but we have collectively done so.

There is also the matter that these dark forces work over long time spans so if we are not watchful we can gradually stray further and further from God in small degrees. The slippery slope is one of the main weapons in the armoury of these powers. It's relatively easy to get us from A to B and then eventually to Z whereas we would never do that all at once. This is why we must stop the spiritual decline at source which requires a proper recognition of God and his created order from the very beginning. No compromise.

The evils of leftism must be acknowledged. But the danger is that when they are the reaction will bring its own evils unless it is rooted in spiritual understanding. I would say understanding of Christ were it not for the fact that even this has been degraded by false religion and ersatz spirituality in which Jesus has been turned into a drippy humanist whose primary consideration is that people should just get on with each other. Is that why he said he brought a sword rather than peace? He did bring peace but it was the peace that passes all understanding, a peace not as the world gives peace but one that comes from overcoming the world. However, along with this spiritual peace there must be the sword that divides and separates as it cuts away untruth from truth. The sword-wielding Christ is the one to whom we should turn for understanding of how to combat the world and how to overcome it. This sword is wielded with love but it is a sword of flame that burns away falsehood and darkness wherever it strikes. 

And so when we reject the left, as we must, it should be for the right reason which is love of the good, love of God and of truth, and without allowing the evils of the left to darken our own hearts as we reject it. If we do let that happen then we have become absorbed by that against which we fight. This is hard but possible if we keep the vision of the risen Christ before us at all times.

The latest tactic of the dark forces in their attempt to sunder man from God is AI. This mechanical, materialistic, absolutely quantitative device is so obviously contra all things spiritual that any right-minded person should be able to see through its spurious allure instantly. But we have been tempted into its arms by all the miracles (pseudo-miracles) of information technology over the last 30 years. We have been corrupted, and many of us are ripe for the picking. This means we start to see AI as a benefactor or, just as bad, as inevitable rather than something that hollows out human thought and creativity leaving behind just the dry husk of it. AI will stunt our own thinking, blunt our creativity. It will make life duller, flatter, falser, thinner, more empty and rob it of meaning. Without meaning we are dead and that is the point. AI is the most advanced phase yet of the attempt to separate man from the spiritual and deny him contact with God and his angels. That means he is as good as dead.

One part of the evil forces at work in the world at this time wants to impose an iron control over humanity that separates it from God and the spiritual realm. AI is the latest weapon used in that battle. But there is another part that comes from a deeper level and this is simply about destruction. We currently see it most obviously in the Middle East operating through both sides of that conflict. But it is not just about physical destruction. Elsewhere, here in our Western world, it is about spiritual destruction for when humanity loses all sense of the soul as we are doing as a society (not so much on the individual level but collectively, we are) then it opens itself to exploitation by the dark powers. These powers can no longer access pure spiritual energy but need it in a downgraded form which they can access through the negative emotion of human beings, anger, fear, hatred etc. This is why they seek to engender such states and to cut us off from the higher worlds. 

The chaos of destruction is a feast for these degraded beings. There is no point in sugarcoating the pill. Humanity is in a perilous state at the present time, but God does not leave us defenceless. He and his helpers surround us at all times, and all we have to do is turn to him in humble acknowledgement of our spiritual failure. To turn our life round is not easy but nor is it that hard once we open our eyes to reality. That truly is all we have to do and then, though the journey back may be long, at least we will be on the right road.

Mankind's rejection of God is a global phenomenon. We are most aware of it in the West because that is where we are and that is where mankind has fallen further, having risen higher. But it is everywhere. That having been said, many scriptures point to this time so it was probably an inevitable phase in a long cycle which means there is nothing to fear. The collapse is inevitable and cannot be avoided outwardly but it can be robbed of its power to hurt and even used positively by inner spiritual attunement. Jesus said "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die" (John 11:25-26). This is the holy truth if we understand belief in Christ to be not simply intellectual assent but complete reorientation of the heart.