Love Your Enemies

 As we know, the devil quotes scripture for his own ends. Nowhere has he been busier in this regard over recent years than with the matter of love which is now used as an excuse to overlook all manner of assaults on goodness and truth. Don't judge, don't condemn, be tolerant, accept everyone and (pretty much) everything because, you know, love.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies he meant we should not hold hatred in our hearts for those who do us an ill turn. This is not to benefit our enemies who may or may not be good or bad people. It is to stop the hatred corroding our soul which is what hatred does do when it is personal. He was saying that hatred darkens the heart while love brings light to it. You cannot affect what is out there in others but you can affect what is in yourself. If you want to go to heaven then you must have heaven within you. We need to remember this. After death you will go to a place, an environment, that reflects your inner state. The subjective mind and the objective world reflect each other in the post-mortem state, the spiritual world. If you have hatred within you, you cannot go to a place of love

This is why we are enjoined to take Christ into our hearts. Not merely believe in him, but actually build him into our being. This does start with belief but must progress to a form of identification. That does not mean you are Christ, that is blasphemy, but Christ is in you. Controversially for a Christian, this can work with other deity figures depending on how much spiritual light they carry, but none carries so much light, and pure light unmixed with other stuff as is the case with other deity figures, as Christ who is the image of God in human form to a greater degree than anything or anyone else. God has appeared in many images to humanity at various stages of its existence but only in Christ is he revealed as fully as is possible in this world.

So, love your enemies because love cleanses the soul and hatred makes it sick. But loving your enemies does not mean accepting evil, and if you use the excuse of love to ignore or, worse, justify evil then you are betraying love which, ultimately, is love of the Good.

Today in the name of love what is ugly is called beautiful, what is unnatural is called natural and what denies spirit is regarded as as healthy in its own way as what fully accepts it. If you really love then what you love first and foremost is God who is the author of love, and if you love God then you condemn what rejects or insults God. You don't let that condemnation affect you on a personal level because then it drags you down, but nor do you succumb to the dangerous illusion that universal, unconditional love means loving everything equally. There is good and there is evil. To love your enemy does not mean accepting evil which must be identified and unsentimentally condemned.

The Living Image of the Eternal

Truth is beyond form and expression but for religion to be comprehensible it must be grounded in form. Religious forms can take many varieties which approximate to that which they are trying to express to a greater or lesser degree. Some forms capture something of the reality behind them while others distort it, sometimes unacceptably so. The question then arises. What is the best form, the one that comes nearest to revealing the truth that lies behind all genuine religion?

Before answering that, we must accept that different forms suit different people. That is to say, people of different temperaments and from different cultural backgrounds. It would be unrealistic to think that the whole world should follow one particular form any more than that they should speak one language, and it is probably not a good idea either as different forms can express different aspects of truth. None express the whole, even all together can't express more than a tiny fraction of the whole, but they can complement each other by their particular focal points. This may not be necessary from the purely spiritual perspective, but it can be helpful.

No doubt everyone thinks his own religion is best, and it may be for him. On the other hand, it may not. It may simply be a religion one is born into or one that suits one's strengths or weaknesses or prejudices or preconceptions. Over the course of my spiritual life (pompous phrase, but it can't be helped in this context), which is now some 47 years, I have investigated many, I am tempted to say most, spiritual paths. Not as a follower but by reading about them and exploring their forms and practices. It's fascinating to see how human beings have approached the numinous. So many similarities and so many differences. While recognising the validity of many, I have my favourites but there are also some I think are inspired from lower levels, either originally or through infiltration over the years. Some are even a mix of the true and the false. Quite a few are, in fact.

However, there is one clear winner, (I know it's not a competition, but in a way, it is). Obviously, that is Christianity and not so much because of the religion or religions that have arisen in Christ's name but because of him. Christ is the face and form of God, God revealed in a human being, God embodied. And, while we're at it, let us point out that the image of God himself is another form that encapsulates hidden truth. As God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, this image draws the mind and heart up to the realm of pure spiritual light in a way that lesser images do not. The very word 'God' brings together amorphous ideas and feelings and intuitions in the human head and heart, and moulds them into something tangible, something that the mind can latch onto, to which it can respond and with which it can engage.

Jesus Christ is the perfect spiritual form, the one above all others. First of all, because he is a living person, and spiritual reality is personal before it is impersonal - the opposite to what the sophisticated believe. And secondly, because he is the only spiritual figure totally without flaw, without sin as it is said. He reflects the spiritual world without any corrupt influence of this world. You can say that about no one and nothing else. Certainly, there are many other inspiring spiritual figures and philosophies from before the time of Christ and after him. But he is without peer and incomparable in his truthfulness. I do not doubt that non-Christian spiritual approaches can bring their followers to God, and, for that matter, many ostensible Christian ones might fail in that, but Christ is and remains the Way,  the Truth and the Life. He is the revelation of what this excellent essay calls the single, supreme, eternal creator deity or first principle, born into the Jewish race but come for all people.

A New Age Religion

Over the last 100 years people have looked all over the place for spiritual enlightenment, often adopting various forms of what has become known as New Age spirituality which was regarded as a more advanced form of religious understanding with greater insights than conventional approaches. It is true that, as the last post pointed out, the churches have fallen away from the purity of truth because they have become infected by secularism, but the fact remains that the real New Age religion is Christianity and we only fail to recognise this because we are so used to it. Read the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will see why this is so. Christ brought something entirely new to the world which was the chance of entrance to a new creation in which the material or outer was made fully transparent to the spiritual or inner. He made possible the union of Heaven and Earth, and this was expressed symbolically by the New Jerusalem, a city built by God though with the aid of man, all of whose real creativity goes into the construction. The fact that the original garden of Eden becomes the heavenly city of Jerusalem shows we are not just returning to the paradisiacal perfection of eternity but, through time, forging something entirely new.

The New Age religions of the 20th century were really just jumbles of ancient beliefs mashed up together and presented as new. But there was nothing new about any of it. They included bits of ancient paganism with a smattering of Eastern mysticism, a touch of occultism and a seasoning of psychically received messages from the inner planes, some worthwhile, most not, but none of this was new as such. It did point to the immanence of God which was a good corrective to the conventional Christian idea of God as largely transcendent, but it was also heavily influenced by what you might call the Babylonian Mystery religion which is one of the oldest false paths around, going right back to the Fall of Man and the attempt to become a god independently of God. New Age religion was not demonic as such but it had the potential to become so because it was focused more on gaining experience in the psychic and spiritual worlds than on sanctifying the soul. The demons can give mystical highs or the semblance of them but they cannot convey the sense of the holy, and it is holiness not spirituality that opens the door to the real New Age when Man will enter into full communion with God.

Christians and the Esoteric

 It is often said that there is nothing esoteric in Christianity. Everything is public and out in the open, and there are no hidden secrets divulged only to higher level initiates. It is true that Christ did exteriorise the mysteries, enacting literally what had taken place symbolically in those ancient rites and so potentially making rebirth into spirit available to everyone who believed in him, though what belief in Christ really means in this context is something to ponder. But time moves on and what was applicable at one moment in history may be less so later on.

Spirituality means escaping the iron grip of matter. Not because matter is evil but because it is matter, i.e. not spirit or, at least, not spirit in its pristine, undisguised form. As one escapes matter one moves up through the levels of manifested reality which, in human terms, means through the levels of the physical nature, the emotions, thought and personal identity. Each one of these levels must be conquered but all are incorporated into the whole. We descend from the pure consciousness of the spiritual world into matter to learn the lessons of matter and acquire its virtues which are the qualities associated with action and doing, relating and feeling, and knowing and understanding, qualities one can only acquire through experience in a dualistic world of subject and object. In the process of our immersion in matter we can forget who we are and identify with the 'bodies' or modes of being through which we temporarily operate in order to gain the ability to become gods, free agents with creative power motivated by love. It is this false identification that is the problem so the fault does not lie with matter, which is merely the medium through which spirit expresses and comes to know itself, but our identification with it.

What does this have to do with the esoteric? Simply this. At an earlier phase of development the majority of human beings were focused in the physical and emotional worlds. Few people had developed mentally to a high level, but that is no longer the case. Many people have now reached a relatively high degree of intellectual development and these people need to understand. They cannot just proceed on faith. Their ability to believe must be coupled with understanding for them to flourish and grow spiritually, and for their belief actually to be rooted in the whole of their being. The esoteric is really just about knowledge. It is not spiritual in the spiritual sense but intellectual. And yet for modern man to be spiritual in the spiritual sense he needs intellectual support.

A follower of Christ in our day must combine a degree of esoteric understanding with faith. If he neglects this his faith will be shallow even if it is intense. His spiritual development will be limited and his entry into the mind of Christ will be partial. This is in line with the growth of human consciousness. The old ways may suffice for some but for those who would not just follow Christ but actually start to become like him then knowledge must supplement faith even if it remains the case that true knowledge actually arises from real faith. "Credo ut intelligam".

The esoteric is not there to replace faith in Christ. It is not a higher level of spirituality but a means of deepening faith and taking it from something that is exterior to the inner man, in the sense that it is located in thought and feeling, to something that is more like knowing through being. It elevates faith to a higher plane where the boundaries between faith and knowledge start to dissolve. If faith is of the heart, as it should be, then the esoteric is of the head and we need both to be spiritually whole. Indeed, only when we have both do we really have either one of them in the proper sense.

Saving the West

There are many online writings lamenting the destruction of the West and blaming the usual suspects of mass immigration, liberalism, feminism and materialism, and their by-products of sentimentality, self-hatred and so on. Some regret this but accept it as inevitable, others want to fight it and think it can be turned around while a few just shrug their shoulders and cultivate their garden which seems to them to be the only option left in a crumbling cultural wasteland. I sympathise with all these approaches but would like to ask a question here. What is the West for? Because only if we know what it is for can we know if it is worth saving. 

Any civilisation worth that name must be organised around spiritual principles. From ancient Egypt to Greece to India, and even Rome when it began, God or the gods were at the centre of life, formed the culture and gave meaning to the civilisation. For the West that organising principle was Christianity which was the greatest expression of spiritual understanding there has been. In fact, all the other expressions might be said to be from the outside looking in. Only Christianity really comes from the inside. That, of course, is the meaning of revelation. Christianity or, better put, Christ is the greatest revelation of and from the spiritual world. There really is no doubt about this. Christ is the only religious personality utterly without flaw or limitation.

The West existed for the expression of Christianity. That is what gave it its greatness. Not uniquely for there were many tributaries but the main river into which all these tributaries fed was Christianity. Some people think the West is defined by science and has reached its greatest state following that pursuit but even science arose in a Christian context with natural philosophers seeking to understand God's creation. And whether it has reached its apogee pursuing science or sunk to a spiritual nadir is a question worth pondering.

When the West started to abandon Christianity it lost sight of itself. Now, we can go into the reasons for that abandonment and say that some of them were actually based in truth because they were to do with the development of consciousness and an increased mental polarisation and intellectual comprehension of the creation. The outer expression of Christ's teachings followed by the West might be said to have been suitable for an earlier phase of consciousness, less so for the new phase. But the core remained eternally valid for the core is Christ himself. It is not true that a better grasp of the world leads to atheism. A superficial understanding may but not a deeper one. A little knowledge has proved to be a very dangerous thing for the West but it is not only this superficial knowledge that has caused the West to abandon God and Christ. This is fundamentally a moral problem. The creature has got too big for its boots. Its newly acquired powers have gone to its head for it has taken these to itself and decided they are aspects of its own self and belong to that self by right.

I regret the ongoing destruction of the West but it has brought this on itself through its own hubris. When it rejected Christ it signed its own death warrant and we live in the playing out of that process. I suppose that it could theoretically rediscover Christ but that looks very unlikely, so much have we succumbed to our own egotism and proved unable to resist the demonic influences which hasten the process of our downfall. Individually, we can and should turn back to reality which means for the West to Christ, but collectively things do not look promising. So be it. The West is only worth saving if it rededicates itself to Christ. Note I do not say spirituality which can mean a whole host of things, some positive, some just self-indulgent and shallow. Without the rediscovery of Christ we can fight the symptoms and secondary causes of decline as listed above all we like but it will not lead to any kind of true renaissance.

I Am a Christian but...

 I'm not only a Christian. There is part of me that is pagan, particularly Greek, Celtic and Norse, and part that is Hindu and part Buddhist. Part of me is an ancient Egyptian living in the space between the bright blue sky and hot yellow sand and part a Chinese sage secluded in misty hills, and there are other parts too. Anywhere there is beauty and wisdom is somewhere to which I feel that, in some measure, I belong. 

All this is true and all of it matters to me. I would not be without any of it which, I suppose, is a privilege of our otherwise spiritually benighted times in which we have easy access to the whole of history. Nonetheless, although I respond to and have absorbed many different influences, they are all assimilated into and subsumed by a fundamental Christianity. It is against Christ that everything is measured, and where there is any contradiction between him and it, he conquers. Other tributaries can flow into the Christian river but the source of that river is Christ and its flow is directed towards the Kingdom of Heaven where he is king.

Like many people of my generation who engaged in the spiritual search I went away from conventional Christianity to explore other traditions, though that was always on the outside looking in as my main path was as described in my first book from which the title of this blog was borrowed. I learnt much from these encounters and they deepened my understanding of the spiritual world. They also helped me engage with Christianity on a more profound level when I returned to it as in the familiar words of T.S. Eliot in his poem "Little Gidding".

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

So, although I now regard myself as a Christian in a fuller sense than I ever was, my appreciation of the spiritual path has certainly been enhanced by other approaches to it. I think we can all benefit from this though I wouldn't say it is in anyway necessary. I am aware of the old jibe that interest in comparative religion makes you comparatively religious, but what I am talking about is not comparative religion but a serious exploration of the richness of spiritual life in its many guises.  God has revealed himself fully only once but he has left traces of himself in many places. 

Today is Good Friday but Easter is Coming

 I hope it's not sacrilegious to say that sometimes it feels as though the disciples of the world are going through a kind of Gethsemane experience at the moment. Most people will not feel this but those who are responsive to the spiritual level will be aware of the gathering darkness. The bad news is that Gethsemane precedes Good Friday. The good news is that Good Friday precedes Easter Sunday. There is undoubtedly more darkness to come but if we allow it this can be a cleansing, purifying darkness for our souls that prepares them for the light.

Many of the incidents in Jesus's life can be seen as experiences that come to the soul as it progresses on the spiritual path, and the most significant are those that come at the end of his life. Abandoned by friends and, seemingly, even God the soul is thrown back entirely on itself. Its spiritual gifts, if it had them, are withdrawn, its earthly renown, if it had it, is lost. It is no one and nothing with only faith and the intuitive sense of truth to support it. This is the final purification that strips the soul of any worldliness and self-regard that may still be clinging to it so that it becomes light enough to enter the spiritual world. For these are like heavy weights that hold the soul down and will prevent it rising until they are cast off.

This is on the individual level. But patterns repeat themselves at all stages of the path and in all spheres, both on the individual and the group level, and the whole world is experiencing something similar. There is a sorting out of that part of humanity that has the potential to rise and that part which may be held over for future development. We are being presented with a choice which in the simplest terms amounts to God or this world. But note that many people might think they are opting for God when in fact they are in the worldly camp. One of the tests of the present time is that it is no longer sufficient merely to give your allegiance to an earthly institution. All are corrupted and you have to see the reality behind the institution as far more important than the thing itself. Which, of course, means you have to be able to perceive something of this reality.

There is no getting around the fact that the spiritual life can only be known by those who undergo worldly death and this death must be undergone willingly. Before the soul can become united with God it must die to the world and be stripped of itself. Look at the times to come as part of that process for we all, however spiritual or religious we may consider ourselves to be, are sinners and what that means is our centre is our self. We may have relatively good selves or relatively bad selves but until we know, really know, that "we are as nothing and all we are comes from the Creator" the tendency to sin, which means act from the centre of self, remains. The whole of the spiritual life is about replacing self with God at the centre of our being. Good Friday is the start of that process and Easter Sunday the glorious conclusion.

Why is Christianity Better than Islam?

 I was asked this question recently by a young man, some of whose friends had decided that if they were going to follow a religion then Islam seemed a more attractive proposition than Christianity as it had a greater sense of where it stood on issues and didn't prevaricate or sentimentalise which Christianity in its official forms now does. On the face of it, it's hard to disagree with this view. Islam is fixed in its beliefs and doesn't seek to accommodate itself to the secular world which modern Christianity usually does as its leaders, seeing they are losing spiritual power, seek to justify their existence by pandering to social changes. Also, Islam has not become feminised which Christianity along with the whole Western world unfortunately has, and this appeals to younger men who see in feminism a civilisation destroying influence. Why do I say unfortunately? Because a feminised religion or culture prioritises feelings and being nice over truth, social concern over supernatural reality, equality over hierarchy and soft furnishings over the sword. That is to say, the energy that nurtures and comforts over the energy that builds and preserves. You need both but one must lead and it must be the latter.

However, whilst it is true that many Christian churches have succumbed to the world and lost touch with the spiritual, replacing it with the anodyne charms of secular humanism, Islam never had much connection with the spiritual to begin with. It has a fixed view of God based on a primitive conception of the deity and is unable to open itself up to higher dimensions of being*. Its virtue that it doesn't change is also a major weakness. It is stuck in the past, unable to evolve as consciousness does. This inflexibility might be regarded as a positive but the rights and wrongs of inflexibility depend on what refuses to change. Islam might have been a healthy corrective for polytheistic pagans in a 7th century of warring tribes (though Christianity would probably have done a better job even then), but it has nothing to say to a 21st century consciousness unless a person wants to throw away the positive evolutionary gains of the last thousand, and especially last 400, years.

But the best answer to this question is to rephrase it and ask why is Christ better than Muhammad? Even a casual look at the lives of these two teachers shows there is an enormous gulf between them in terms of spiritual understanding. They both spoke of the one God but for Jesus he was a loving father while for Muhammad he was more like the Old Testament Jehovah, an over-promoted tribal deity who demanded servile allegiance. Partly because of this, Christianity is based on love while Islam is based on law. Further, Christianity is grounded in freedom whereas Islam demands obedience. This is illustrated in the postures for prayer of the two religions. A Christian kneels in humility but his back is straight. The full prostration of a Muslim in prayer also shows humility but it is more that of a slave before its master than a free individual.

I have not even spoken of the fact that Jesus was the Son of God who healed the spiritual damage caused by the Fall while Muhammad, even in the eyes of his own followers, was no more than a prophet and one who basically just mixed and matched from Jewish and Christian sources. He brought nothing new while Jesus showed us the way to become sons of God ourselves - see John 14:12 "Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." At best, Muhammad was a messenger but Jesus in his person even more than in his teachings was a window into heaven. In fact, not just a window but a doorway.

Mentioning heaven brings us to another critical difference. Is the Muslim paradise the same as the Christian heaven? I don't see how anyone can seriously believe that since the one is the perfection of earthly existence while the other is the total transformation of being. When you understand that the next world has many planes of existence you see that the paradise of Islam is what is known as the wish fulfilment plane where all your desires are fulfilled but only to the extent that allows for the exteriorisation of your earthly wishes without the impediment of matter. So your mind can creates palaces and gardens insofar as you conceive of such things but this is still no more than this world brought to what you think of as an ideal state. You are still limited by the narrowness of your own vision whereas in the true heaven you are freed from the boundaries of your circumscribed self, and this is what Christ offers. The Islamic paradise gives the lower self what it wants but Heaven is entry into the glorified existence of higher being. There is no doubt that many Christians will go to a place that is a Christian version of paradise on the astral plane, as the psychic world is sometimes known, but that is due to their deficiencies not those of their religion. The fact is Jesus and Muhammed promised their followers entirely different destinations.

I freely admit there may be some bias here. I was born in a Christian country and culture not a Muslim one. But that doesn't mean any of the points here are incorrect. Moreover, the universalist humanitarian prejudices of contemporary Western culture incline many people to go the other way and hold Christianity to higher standards than other religions, seeing the former in the light of its negative aspects (which are all the fault of human beings not its own) and the latter more positively. Obviously, Islam has virtues but unless it has a radical reformation in line with the developments in consciousness over the last several hundred years I would say it is spiritually regressive. Christianity too needs to grow spiritually but it can grow from its roots and I don't believe Islam can.

* I'm ignoring Sufism in this essay which is outside the mainstream of Islam and often regarded with suspicion by fellow Muslims who are not Sufis. Besides, Sufism is the product of Hindu metaphysics and Christian mysticism just as much as Islamic theology though I don't deny it has also fed back in to its parents.

A Christmas Meditation

 The older I get the more obvious it becomes that Jesus Christ really is the Way, the Truth and the Life.* When I was younger I felt this but was under the fashionable impression (or illusion) that all religions said more or less the same thing and were just different ways of bringing man to God if one practiced them seriously enough. I still do think that God and the messengers he sends work through many outlets but in all others he is to a greater or lesser extent hidden. Only in Jesus Christ is he revealed. Jesus is the light shining directly except that it is in a human form. In all other spiritual approaches the light is behind a veil of some sort and obscured in some way.

The Incarnation gave everything in the world that could receive it an irradiation of light from above, a spiritual boost.  Thus, beyond the obvious impact of Christianity, the light of Christ operating from the spiritual world and filtering down through the mental to the material affected all genuine forms of spirituality and revitalised them to the degree that they were open to that light. It is no accident that the Mahayana form of Buddhism with the Bodhisattva figure postdates Christ, and even Hinduism acquired extra spiritual force from Christ's arrival in this world and the spiritual power he released. This statement would be rejected by Hindus and Buddhists but I make it because it seems to me to be the simple truth. It doesn't diminish other religions to say that they stand in the shadow of Christ. They remain what they are which are vehicles given by God, or those that act on his behalf (since God delegates), to helps souls in this world become better aware of their source, but in them all there is still a shadow over the fullness of truth. That shadow was dispersed by Christ. Other religions are effective in their own way but they are incomplete. Only in Christ is the truth made complete.

Apart from the figure of Christ, in which all spiritual truth is embodied and through which it stands revealed more clearly than anywhere else, and his gift of salvation to those who incline their hearts to him (not simply believe, as James 2 says, even the demons believe), there are two principal teachings in Christianity which take it further than any other form of religion. These have to do with the reality of the individual and the fact that God is Love. They are obviously connected. You might say that other religions include these but they don't in the same fully comprehensive way. Regarding love, Buddhism has its impersonal compassion but that is a mild thing compared to love especially in the context of the denial of the reality of the person. Even Hindu bhakti is not the same as agape in that it is an emotional or devotional thing, and love in the Christian sense is not an emotion but an act or condition of being.

My assertion that Christianity contains more of spiritual truth than any other religion might be dismissed as a simple product of the fact that I was born in a world formed and influenced by Christianity, and a Muslim might say the same about Islam, were it not for the fact that any unbiased mind should be able to see that in Christ there is a quality of goodness and purity and sheer holiness just not present elsewhere, not in any other prophet, saint, sage or even god. The light he brought illumined the whole world and spread even where his teachings were not outwardly known. It radiated out on a subtle or immaterial level to be picked up by those sensitive enough to respond to it and then interpreted according to their understanding. It is also, as he himself said, through him, and only through him, that all men now reach God even if they do so through another religion than Christianity which can happen if they pick up the spirit of Christ as it has infiltrated, if I can use that word, into that particular religion. Clearly, the spirit of Christ is more present and more discernible in Christianity though it can be veiled there as well, especially nowadays when all institutions  have fallen away from their core mission and been assimilated into the secular humanism of the materialistic and atheistic System.

The truth of Christ is also why Christmas is important. The first Christmas was the time when the light of God entered the world. That this light was for the whole world is demonstrated by the visit of the three Magi from the East, representing the pinnacle of previous spiritual knowledge, who came to pay their respects to the infant Jesus as the saviour of the world. They were not Jews but they came because they knew that the light embodied in this baby was universal. It repaired the damage done in the past and offered to all men the chance to free themselves from the bondage of matter not by effectively abandoning the relative world of individual beings, of love and beauty and goodness, all of which can only exist in a world of multiplicity and form, for the absolute of pure spirit as taught by the Buddha, but by reconciling spirit and matter, the One and the Many, through the holy mystery of love. This did not require rejecting suffering as the Buddha had done by rejecting the self that suffered, but fully accepting suffering and offering it up as a sacrifice to God. In this way the fallen self was redeemed and made holy instead of being jettisoned as a burden on existence. Thus was the purpose of creation fulfilled rather than being negated.

So, Christmas marks the time when God's reason for creating man is revealed and its fulfilment made possible. And the holy purity of the new born baby reminds us that Christianity goes beyond other spiritual approaches in that it alone fully validates the person, the person that other religions reject as the source of ignorance and a blot on the pure whiteness of naked existence. In Buddhism the person is a barrier to enlightenment and in Islam it exists but as little more than a slave which must submit and obey. Of course, even in Christianity the separate self must be given up, but what is given up is the false self, the self that by the barriers of its self-centredness blocks out God. The true God-given individuality remains and is then revealed as a shining being of light, a unique son of God born of the holy marriage between Spirit and Matter. And the possibility that we can become this being of light is what Christmas is all about.

* This is a slightly revised version of a piece I wrote 7 years ago. Now, of course, I am even older than I was then and the first sentence is even more the case than it was then.

When God Becomes Caesar

 If the religion that was the subject of the last post were just a religion it would still be a somewhat crude simplification of more profound spiritual teachings promulgated by a charismatic medium with a powerful sense of self, but it would not be a problem for those outside the circle of the faithful. But it is not just a religion. It aims to encompass every aspect of life leaving nothing to the individual human being whose only task is to submit. As a result, there is no separation between religion and politics. There is not a religious version of this religion and a political one. These are two aspects of the same thing. Christ said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" drawing a clear distinction between the spiritual and temporal aspects of life, but for this religion God is Caesar and the effect of that is to reduce the human to nothing, stripping him of proper agency, creative potential and freedom.

This religion must dominate every single aspect of the life of its believers, not just the spiritual, not just the political but the social too. It even forbids certain forms of artistic expression which you might think a good idea seeing where complete freedom in that regard has got us to in the West over the last century, but the result in this case has been spiritually crippling not ennobling. To be sure, there is some beautiful architecture and design and poetry produced by the adherents of this religion but these are often produced in spite of it not inspired by it. The fact that it is forbidden to show the human form is very revealing. It demonstrates that humanity is effectively banned. For the Christian, God is revealed in the human form but in this religion he remains totally transcendent and cannot be approached except in a servile way.

The faithful in this religion are under instruction to convert everyone to their cause and not to rest until they have done so. They are even authorised to lie and deceive to this end as long as that is to the unbeliever. That is regarded as a virtuous act and history shows that they will go along with their hosts when in a minority only to enforce their will when their numbers are sufficient. It is naive to ignore this reality but that is just what the West has been doing. 

What is the solution to this problem, since a problem it is and one that will get worse? From the point of view of the West it is to recognise the reality of the situation. These believers believe in their religion and they will obey its diktats so we should know what these are. For the believers themselves the only way forward is religious reform. Their focus on prayer is commendable but they have to abandon those aspects of their religion that may have been appropriate 1300 years ago but are not now. Actually, I doubt they were even then but anyway humanity has evolved. If you have any understanding of the way God works you will see that his aim is to bring us up, not to crystallise us in ways of the past but to spiritualise our understanding. Therefore, these believers need to pay much more attention to the mystical path of their religion, to Sufism, for God has sent them this in an attempt to remedy foundational mistakes.The letter kills but the spirit gives life. This is the primary lesson the followers of this religion need to learn.

If the modern world demonstrates the tragic results of banishing God from the world and giving all power and authority to man then this religion has precisely the opposite problem. That may tempt some people to see it as solution to the problems of modernity. In fact, as opposites reflect each other, it is equally flawed, just in a different way. The only real solution is to see God and man as partners working together creatively though with God, of course, as the senior partner. And where do we see this brought to perfection? In Christ who remains the template for genuine spiritual understanding.

Enlightenment or a New Creation?

 Bruce Charlton had a thought-provoking post recently which struck a chord with me. His point is that the work of Christ was to lead men out of a world of sin and death, an entropic world in which nothing lasts, into a second creation, one without rust or decay or worm or canker in which the good can build on itself forever and is never brought low so that it has to be rebuilt only to fall again. As someone who has much love for Indian forms of religion but is nevertheless firmly a Christian I found this interesting. There is great wisdom and beauty in Hindu and Buddhist teachings and mystical practice but there is something more revealed by Christ which adds an extra dimension to the spiritual life.

The goal of Eastern religion is enlightenment which is aligning one's individual consciousness with universal being. Put simply, it is becoming one with the totality of life. Until the advent of Christ this was the highest spiritual path, and it is still a high path though one which few have taken and even fewer travelled to its conclusion despite numerous claims to the contrary. It entails escaping from the pull of the material and becoming completely spiritual. However, it is exclusive and something important is lost in the process. I know some will argue with me over this but I am talking about practice rather than theory. In effect, if you seek enlightenment you must renounce the material, in fact everything that is not pure spirit and that includes your individual self.

Christ brought a new understanding of the purpose of life. No longer was creation a condition to escape from. To be sure, it was sick and needed healing but it was fundamentally good and offered something which spirit alone did not provide. This was relationship, love, beauty, goodness, all things requiring duality and change. Christ says you do not have to reject creation. You must embrace it but not as it is in its fallen condition. This is what not being of the world means. For Christ it is not the world that is wicked but what it has become. Creation or Nature is good but only when seen in the light of God. Seen in its own light it is at best damaged but more often than not rotten. This, incidentally, is why the polytheistic pagan religions were rejected by early spiritual reformers such as Abraham and Moses. These religions were nature cults that celebrated nature in its fallen aspects which is why sexual licence and child sacrifice lay at their heart. We have seen these two things return over the last 60 years, along with other aspects of paganism, as they always will when the higher religion is dismissed or removed from the centre. Even feminism derives from the loss of proper religion as it comes about when the principle of transcendent spirit is rejected and consciousness brought down to the material level which includes the psychic plane, that being part of the material world. There is much more that could be said on this subject but it would take us away from the main point of the post.

Jesus brought a new Creation. The old creation had been damaged, possibly beyond repair though it may be that eventually it too will be salvaged by a fresh infusion of spirit. After all, anything is possible with God though maybe he cannot break his own laws. However, as things stood, the material world was the realm of Satan, the prince of this world. Jesus offered the redemption of matter and the individual self, both of which would be transformed in and through him and a new realm created which was Heaven. Heaven did not exist before Christ. Heavenly planes of being did but even they, as is said in Buddhist mythology, were not permanent. The denizens of these planes, including gods, could not remain there forever. Entropy operated even there. But in Heaven there is no sin, no darkness, no death. All is pure and holy and in that word is the key to all this. Before Christ there was the sacred which was the spiritual as something beyond the material. But after Christ there was the holy which involves the sanctification of the material, its raising up and incorporating into the spiritual.

Christ turned water into wine. He spiritualised matter. This is the difference between him and earlier spiritual masters. They showed a way to escape matter but he showed the way to transform it.

Easter Sunday

 Today is the anniversary of the most important day in the history of the world. It is the day that death died and life was reborn into a new condition of total and complete freedom. It is the day when light shone and there was no shadow because everything became transparent, meaning absolute in purity. The veil that separated spirit and matter was ripped asunder and the two modes of existence became one, joined together in a fashion that made a new creation in which everything was holy.

At least, it was in the case of one person. But that person set a pattern in which this new life could be attained by anyone who followed in his wake. He broke down a wall and left a space through which anyone could pass who believed, that is, really believed, in the reality of his pristine perfection. Believing in him also means accepting his suffering because that is the means through which the soul is purged and cleansed of its residual filth, an uncomfortable word but one which any true believer will recognise as accurately describing the state of the soul before it allows Christ to shine his light into its darkest corners.

On that first Easter Sunday Christ burst the bounds of creation. He shattered the old forms and made a new one which could finally hold and express the glory of spirit with no impediment. We all still labour away with the old forms, the ones that darken and restrict and bind and limit and constrain and crush and weigh down. But the new form now exists and awaits all those who are prepared, through Christ, to make themselves fit and worthy to receive it. No one is worthy of themselves, of course, but we can become worthy through the giving up of self and the acceptance of Christ. This is what belief means. It is so much more than mere intellectual assent. It is opening up one's whole being to the reality of Christ and allowing oneself to be transformed by his spiritual light and power. That is the hope and promise offered by Easter Sunday.

The Paths of Peter and John

 It could be said that right from the very beginning there were two forms of Christianity, that of St Peter and that of St John. The former provided an ideal foundation for a public religion with a good, solid structure for orientating believers towards spiritual truth. It gave a framework for belief in the human and divine figure of Christ, moral instruction and ethical guidance that would lead souls towards salvation which is the regeneration of the soul in the afterlife. This approach emphasised faith and works which together form the two pillars of the doorway that marks the entry to the higher spiritual world. However, following this path still leaves the believer looking for spiritual authority outside himself. He is dependent on externals and remains a follower.

The spiritual approach exemplified by St John is different. This is the inner approach. Christ remains Christ but he is no longer simply the Son of God who came down from Heaven. He is also within ourselves, within our hearts, and he can be known. More, not only can he be known but we can start to become like him by opening our hearts to his light and truth which will then illuminate our souls and transform them. We will not be human believers in God or followers of Christ but become transformed into spiritual beings ourselves. It might be countered that we are always spiritual beings and it is true that we were created as such. But we are spiritual beings in embryo only until we develop properly. We are seeds and seeds must bloom and flower to fulfil their purpose.

These two approaches are not mutually exclusive but they are somewhat like body and soul, and just as in our day there are many people who are aware of themselves as minds and bodies but few who are conscious of themselves as souls, so it is with these approaches. Historically, one can say that the Petrine approach has only occasionally flowered into the Johannine but humans have evolved to the point at which Christianity can only remain relevant if the Johannine approach becomes known as the direction in which the soul should proceed. It takes the external truths of Christianity and applies them internally.

I am not talking here about the difference between exoteric and esoteric or hidden teachings revealed only to the initiated. Clearly, there are many things about God and the universe we do not know but what really matters from the spiritual point of view is the proper orientation of the heart to the good, the beautiful and the true, and the spiritually perceptive know these are summed up and embodied in Jesus Christ. But there is the Christ 'out there' and the Christ within and while John includes Peter, Peter does not necessarily include John.

Over the last several centuries humanity has entered into the fullness of self-consciousness. This has resulted in two major problems. Because we have developed a much stronger sense of ourselves we have lost a proper relationship with what is below the self and what is above it. I refer to the two worlds of nature and spirit which can be thought of as our mother and our father. The first we exploit and disrespect and the second we reject and deny. Consequently, we are in total disharmony with the universe and this is the root cause of all our problems.

The self has freed itself from that in which it was embedded. This is not a bad thing because only by doing this can it really begin to know itself, but it becomes a bad thing when the process goes too far and, as it were, solidifies. Then barriers are put up against the rest of life, both natural and spiritual. To seek to return to a union with nature, as many do seek to do, is wrong because it is a return to immature childhood. We must go on to a union of the self with spirit and then a proper relationship with the natural will be included but from the higher perspective not on its own terms. But even this approach to spirit must be the right one. At the time of the decline of the Roman Empire there was great fascination with decayed forms of the ancient mysteries. This was a kind of spiritual sensationalism indicative of a jaded palate and desire for new experience. The same phenomenon occurs today with many modern versions of mysticism and occultism which are viewed as ways to excite and expand the self but this is not where true spirituality is to be found. For us in the West that remains where it has been for the last 2,000 years, firmly centred in the reality of Christ only now our approach must be that of John more than of his brother disciple Peter.

Protection from Lies

 I was asking myself recently that if I knew I was going to die in a few days' time what would I tell my children in an attempt to protect them from what is to come in the future. I mean by that the spiritual ravages that have been ongoing in their present form for several decades but, from being on the periphery, have now moved centre stage and are becoming ever more embedded in the culture like a cancer that spreads and eventually take over its host's body. What can protect against this? When almost the whole world is infected with lies where can we find truth? Human beings are often reluctant to go against prevailing good opinion but that is what we absolutely must do to have any hope of salvaging our souls from the darkness of the present times.

All parents know that, try as they might, however they bring up their children these are going to be subject to many other influences. This can be a good thing but in this day and age it rarely is. The culture is decadent. We assume we are more advanced than our ancestors, and in some ways we are, but the fact is that all the signs of the times point to dissolution. Liberalism is taken as a mark of an enlightened society but historically it always occurs in a dying and degenerate culture that has lost touch with reality, a civilisation that has become spoilt and inwardly rotten and is consequently unable to discriminate between right and wrong. The blurring of the boundaries between the sexes, now regarded as progressive but actually a clear indication of separation from nature (and don't forget that when we reject nature we reject God who is the author of nature) is another phenomenon that occurs regularly when a civilisation falls in on itself, having cut itself off from higher reality because of its advancements have deluded it into thinking it is spiritually self-sufficient.

It can be tiresome when people like me go on about how bad the world is getting. I'm 67 and older people are always accused of moaning about how things aren't how they used to be. But I don't look back to the time of my youth as a golden age. It certainly was not. On the other hand, the separation from God and Nature, though well underway, had not progressed as far as it has now. Most people don't know this because material wealth and technological advancements insulate us from the spiritual poverty in which we live. In the first world we are better off than ever before with access to all kinds of things our forefathers could not have imagined but this is very much a two edged sword because it cuts us off all the more from reality.

We live in a collapsing world and yet few people realise it. This is all part of the test humanity is undergoing. The collapse is like a refiner's fire. How do we react when the culture tells us obvious lies? Firstly, we must hold fast to the truth but we must also avoid the corruption of the world affecting our own hearts by responding to it with anger and hatred. At least, some anger and hatred is not only permissible but actually right because if you love truth you must hate lies. But these emotions should not be allowed too much sway or they will overwhelm you and drag you down into the very negativity you are condemning. Therefore, let your love of truth or love of God be the defining tenor of your mind and everything else spring from that. What I mean is hatred of evil should never become stronger than love of good and should only be used in the service of that love.

What could I tell my children to help protect them in the future? The answer is obvious. Read the Gospels.  Get to know Jesus. Familiarise yourself with the truth and wisdom to be found in the New Testament and you will have all the protection you need. There is more, of course. You have to bring Christ into your own heart and mind, and the true Christ not some man-made image of him, but this is the foundation of a proper spiritual life.

The Materialisation of Spirit and the Spiritualisation of Matter

 So much that is called religion does the opposite of what religion is supposed to do. What religion should do is elevate the material to the spiritual. What it often does do is reframe the spiritual in the context of the material. It pulls spirit down to the level of matter. The bizarre absurdity of the prosperity gospel in which faith in God translates to wealth and power in this world is just the most extreme example but anything that regards the earthly human as the focal point of spiritual endeavour also falls into this category. Spirituality is not about feeding the hungry or healing the sick. Does that shock you? I am not saying these things should not be done but they are not what spirituality is about. Yes, Jesus did feed the poor and he healed the sick. He even raised the dead. But this was to show God's power. It was not the point of his mission or else why did he not do it a lot more?

Nor is religion about saving the worldly man. That is to say, it is not about change but transformation. If the earthly man is saved he is still earthly, still a material being on the inside. No one is saved who does not transform his mind which you do through faith and a complete turning around of focus. I would suggest even the physical atoms of the brain are affected by this. In fact, the whole body is, becoming more sensitive. This might be regarded as the first stage of the eventual transformation of the physical body into a body of light which for most people, if it happens at all, happens only after death but is something that can be seen in the lives of certain saints while still in this world. What else does a halo represent?

The materialisation of spirit means bringing the truths of spirit down from their proper level and applying them to the material level in the context of the material with that as central. Spiritual truth should be brought down to the material level but without losing its spirituality. The incarnation of Christ is a perfect example of that. He, spirit, became man, matter, and lived in this material world. But he lost nothing of his 'spiritness'. And he did this precisely so as to spiritualise matter. Spirit became matter so that matter could be brought back up to spirit, infused with spirit. But if matter tries to trap spirit to itself, as so many spiritual approaches do, if it pulls spirit down to itself and interprets spirit within a material framework, it kills it. It will not rise.

This spiritualisation of matter is the meaning of Christmas. People now say that Christmas is really a pagan festival that the Christians appropriated. Not so. Some aspects of Christmas may have their origins in paganism but these have been baptised and raised up from matter to spirit though the power of the light shed by the Incarnation. Christmas is indeed the birth of light in darkness but Christ is spiritual light and his presence at this time grounds and gives full reality to a hope, an aspiration, a yearning that was present but not fully realised in pagan myth. Christ is the substance that lies behind these myths and makes them come alive. They are like dreams but he is those dreams come to waking reality and given concrete form.

Christmas comes at the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year but also the time when the light starts to return. In terms of a wider cycle we are living through very dark times, a period in history when mankind is further away from spiritual light than it has ever been though many of us don't recognise that because this very spiritual darkness has, for the time being anyway, this may not last, allowed for a certain efflorescence of material well being as energies are concentrated in that sphere of life. Is it too much to hope for that a tiny glimmer of light may start to reappear in human hearts at this point in time and inspire us to look heavenwards once more for the true meaning and purpose of life? At any rate, this is the Christmas message. However dark it seems, the light will come again.

Heaven, Hell and What's In Between

How do we square the idea of evolving consciousness, to which I subscribe, with the doctrine that if we reject Christ we suffer a spiritual consequence in the afterlife, traditionally known as damnation or hell? Let me first of all say that nobody is sent to hell. You send yourself there and you do so by closing off your mind to Heaven. I would also go along with Dante's vision that there are different hells equating to different sins because I believe that in the afterlife the principle of like attracts like operates with one's outer environment reflecting inner consciousness. The universe is a thought. Life is Mind and in the spiritual world what you think is what you are and where you go. Thus, there may be hells which are not necessarily that unpleasant, at least not to those who go there, but which are nevertheless deprived of God and real goodness and real beauty. So, of course, they are unpleasant to the reasonable person whose consciousness has not been perverted by a misdirected will.

This world is a world of choice. You choose whether or not to believe in God and you also choose what sort of God you believe in. You choose or don't choose to acknowledge Christ and you also choose what sort of Christ to believe in because many people believe in their own version of Christ, a Christ who is a projection of their own thoughts and desires. There is the real Christ to whom you respond in the heart through the spiritual imagination, aided, of course, by scripture and even art (that is art's highest function), and there is a human created image of Christ who may be modelled on aspects of the real Christ but has some extra elements superimposed  as well as important elements missing. It is a mental version of a spiritual reality and, depending on its approximation to the real Christ, does only limited good. It may even do harm if the image departs too much from the reality and reflects more of social or political or personal concerns than spiritual truth.

Hell is separation from God. There are many degrees of separation and different souls will have separated themselves to different degrees. Some will be a long way off while others may retain some kind of connection to some aspect of God, maybe a love for beauty or concern with right behaviour. For them there is a way back if they will take it but it will mean opening closed areas of the heart and mind and that may be more difficult in the post-mortem state as we may then have solidified choice meaning the occasion for choosing is past as the specific conditions which form the test under which you make a choice no longer prevail.

It may be that souls who refuse to accept Christ's offer of Heaven are held back on lower levels of being while others progress onwards and upwards. They don't have hell in the traditional sense but nor do they have Heaven. It may also be that there are many such souls alive now because this is a time of reckoning when final chances are offered to souls who have turned down previous offers. Between Heaven and Hell there are many other spiritual states which are, returning to Dante, forms of limbo which was Virgil's region in the afterlife. Now, Virgil represented the best of humanity without God. He was virtuous and wise but he did not know Christ so he could not enter Heaven. (As an aside, I believe that all those born before Christ are given the opportunity to know Christ either through being reborn in this world or else in some other way so I would expect that a soul of the quality of Virgil is in Heaven now as are all other worthy pagans.)  Thus, non-believers do not necessarily go to Hell but they are barred from Heaven by their own lack of acceptance of it.

Evolving consciousness is one thing but accepting God is another. In reality both are necessary but you can have one without the other. The devil has a highly evolved consciousness. There are also simple souls who believe in God but are not able to express very much of him. Evolution means we can understand more of God and we can become more like him in terms of love, creativity and intelligence. This is the destiny we are called to. We must grow but we can only grow as we should when we grow according to the pattern of God. To grow according to that pattern is heaven. Not to do so, however evolved you are, is hell.

A New Creation

 At the end of my last post I mentioned that what Christ offers to those who follow him is a new Creation - worth capitalising I think. I would like to pursue this thought here. It's hardly a new thought but it has relevance in the context of a general spirituality v. Christianity debate which is pertinent in our time. I have written on several occasions about how the teachings and person (because the two are linked) of Christ go further than any other form of spirituality, including those of the Buddha. This idea of a new Creation gets to the heart of it. The Buddha saw the reality of suffering and showed a way to escape that. The way involved leaving a fallen creation behind. Basically, it entailed rejecting the goods of creation for entry into the non-created or pre-creation state. We tend to overlook the fact that original Buddhism was a monastic religion. This is a valid response to the evils of this world and/or the demands of the spiritual quest but it is not the only one or even the best one. The best is that offered by Christ in which matter and spirit or creation and uncreated divine being are joined together to make something new. Here matter is sanctified rather than rejected. Latter forms of Buddhism approach this idea but they never fully embrace it. Other spiritual traditions incorporate elements of this approach but they all have a fundamental drawback. They lack Christ, and it would be my contention that it is only through Christ that one can fully enter the new Creation. I firmly believe he is present in other religions to the extent that they are open to his spirit but he can never be as fully present as he is in Christianity where he stands revealed as himself.

This difference has never been more important than it is today in the context of the world as it is now. That is because we are in the middle of a battle between good and evil. A general spirituality which seeks to rise above the world will either be neutral in the face of this battle, beyond good and evil as those aiming at spiritual transcendence might put it, or else it will be sucked into evil. In fact, as genuine neutrality is no longer possible, if it ever was, they will inevitably be drawn onto the side of evil. Now, if you don't stand against evil, you stand with it, and if you would stand against evil you can only really do that by standing with Christ. Why can't you be good without Christ? Because he is goodness. It resides in him as the face and form of God. Other forms might approach or echo that but he is the living template. If you understand what the Good is you must see it is centred in him and the more it is separated from him the less good it is.

The new Creation came into being when Christ defeated the Prince of this World which is what he did with his life and death. This is why there was no path to it before his time. It didn't exist. This means that any form of spirituality which originated before Christ does not offer a path to it unless, as I say above, that form has opened itself to the spirit of Christ. This is a controversial position to take in the modern world because the egalitarian dogma has spread into every area of life including religion. Also, because we in the West reacted to human misinterpretations and distortions of Christianity either by turning to atheism or by seeking spiritual nourishment elsewhere. But go back to Christ himself and the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will discover a spiritual truth that goes beyond all others, one that does not just offer a way out of the material world but purifies that world so rendering it capable of being lifted up into spirit and becoming something new, a new Adam, a new Jerusalem, a new world.

When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven it was this new Creation he spoke of. Heaven is not just the oneness of spiritual consciousness. It is that but it goes beyond that because it brings to that oneness the qualities and colours of creation. And it brings relationship to oneness which means it brings love. Love existed before Christ but it did not exist in the same way as it did after him because he made it possible for the self, hitherto a centre of egotism which could only be escaped from, to be holy. No self means no love. Christ made the individual spiritually beautiful and potentially godlike instead of being a disturbance in the placid waters of divine oneness. Heaven is full of individuals because it is the abode of love and this was the new Creation brought by Christ. 

Consciousness and Christ

 According to standard esoteric teachings, human souls come to this Earth to evolve their consciousness, this being the perfect environment in which to do that given the sense of separation to be found here. It's somewhat like a child being turfed out of the secure family home where everything is done for it in order to make its own way in the world and as a result become a mature, responsible adult able to engage with life creatively and actually contribute to the world in a positive manner. These teachings assume reincarnation and say we come back here many times, seeking experience and means of expression to grow as souls. This is linked to the doctrine of reaping what you sow with the consequence that everything we do, and possibly even think, sets up a flow of psychic energy which we must deal with. It may manifest materially as external circumstances and conditions or internally as character traits but we are responsible for all that we are. This is not to punish but to teach. We evolve in this way until we are able to raise our consciousness to the spiritual level while in an earthly body. It's more complicated than that but this is the in a nutshell version.

Sometimes these teachings picture us as similar to cells in the body of a greater being which would be the spirit that stands behind our sun. This being or Solar Logos is also evolving and would be part of a Galactic being who, in turn, would form part of the being who stands behind the whole universe who would, I suppose, be God. There is a pleasing symmetrical order to this scenario and it makes sense on an intellectual level. I believe it to be broadly speaking correct with the solar and stellar spirits as something like great archangels and so on upwards.

There is a problem with this vision though. It doesn't really fit in with Christian teaching. Esotericists realise this and, as a result, tend to jettison Christianity, reducing Christ to a great spiritual teacher or Head of a Spiritual Hierarchy that oversees humanity or else picture him as the Solar Logos and say this was what was meant by Son of God. You can absorb most other spiritual approaches into this one which is what its partisans generally do, but you cannot really absorb Christ, not without making him something other than what he said he was or altering his teachings to mean something other than what he says they meant. Christ didn't talk about evolving consciousness and he was not inclusive. He said he (underlined) was the Way, the Truth and the Life. That is unequivocal. He is not part of some all-purpose spirituality but goes beyond mere spirituality to something higher, deeper and truer, something approaching proper holiness. Christ taught that we should love God whom we could see revealed in him. This is extreme to say the least but it is what he taught and if we believe in Christ we must believe that.

Is it possible to reconcile these two teachings? Many people don't bother. They believe one or the other but I find myself in the tricky position of believing both. I do believe that human souls are supposed to be evolving their consciousness and this Earth serves as the background for that, a kind of playpen in which we can build things though what we are really building is ourselves. But I also believe that Christ goes beyond that. This means that spirituality and evolving consciousness is one thing but Christ is another. He comes to the worldly and the spiritual alike and offers them both something more. The spiritual may be further along the path to God as things stand but the wonder of Christ is that anyone can come to him from any background and is accepted by him if they give themselves heart and soul to him, and this acceptance will transform their soul to a higher degree than any self-pursued spirituality can ever do. You may be building a humble village church or a grand cathedral but both are hollow structures without the light of Christ illumining them from within.

Could it be that before the advent of Christ scenario 1 operated? Human souls reincarnated after a period in the spiritual realms to further their spiritual evolution and this proceeded in a certain direction, developing all aspects of the whole being, unless brought to a close by the attainment of Buddhist Nirvana meaning a complete disidentification with the phenomenal world and, in a sense, rejection of creation. But Christ came to bring a higher understanding, one in which the soul could be made like him by allowing him into itself. Any soul on any evolutionary level could do this though naturally the more developed the soul, the more of Christ it could absorb and express. Thus, the path of spiritual evolution exists and so does the path of Christ but this latter brings more of divine reality to the picture. For instance, an evolving soul might, in esoteric parlance, have opened all its psychic energy centres including that at the crown of the head, but unless it has fully accepted Christ it is still operating in the spiritual world rather than the true Heaven of Christ which is a new creation containing more of divine being than can ever be attained just through evolution.

I realise a lot more has to be done if one is to develop a proper understanding of how Christ impacts and goes beyond standard issue spirituality but this is my attempt at a start.

The Gospels and Everything Else

  Since becoming interested in spiritual matters I have, as one easily can nowadays, investigated all sorts of  mystical and occult highways and byways. On a literary level, I mean. I have never belonged to any group or followed any outer teaching but I have read numerous books, both in an Eastern and Western vein, on the subjects of mysticism and occultism. Some, a few, have been inspiring, some have been insightful, some have been informative and some just recycle other books. But I have to say that nothing compares to the New Testament. Of course, to a large extent that is because of the figure of Jesus but it is also because the spiritual teachings in the Gospels are presented simply and within the context of a story. They are not philosophical or metaphysical or esoteric in form, though they are all these things to an extremely high degree in essence. They are presented as the expression of the personality of a man and this makes them living truths rather than intellectual statements. They go straight to the heart and soul instead of just feeding the mind.

I must admit I find a lot of the classics of occultism unreadable. I have tried The Secret Doctrine and the Alice Bailey books on several occasions but always given up faced with their turgid, repetitive style and habit of saying things fifteen times that need only be said once. In a word, they are dull. In two words, they are dull and verbose. Even Dion Fortune, who otherwise writes very readably, produced in The Cosmic Doctrine something only an ardent disciple convinced he is penetrating the secrets of the universe could plough through with enthusiasm. Maybe they are the secrets of the universe but like many occult tomes these and other books lack the inspirational and intuitively satisfactory qualities of true spiritual writing. These works remind me that all occultists fail unless they eventually renounce their occultism. That is because "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

The Gospels are stories, true stories, but still stories. The life of Jesus is commonly referred to as the greatest story ever told which it clearly is. Stories have the power to take us beyond the mental world we habitually live in to a higher reality. This is why the works of Tolkien have had such an impact and have been such a force for good. The Gospels are stories that speak to children of all ages, as are those of Tolkien. To be a child in the spiritual sense does not mean to be intellectually undeveloped but not to be limited by the intellect. Jesus did not say become children but become as children. There is a critical difference and I will end this brief post by leaving the reader to think about that.

Behold, I Make all Things New

Egypt was once the centre of the highest spirituality on Earth but then it descended into a concern with magic and power and became the oppressive nation we know of from the time of Moses. Israel was once the focus of God's attention, a chosen nation that was the ground from which the Messiah was born, but then it too descended into materialism, corruption and legalism. Christianity was a religion that gave the believer direct access to the Son of God but it gradually lost power as too many of its leaders succumbed to this world, and now its outer structures remain in place but the fire burns low.

Nothing lasts in this world and that is truer than ever in our day which is a time of increasing destruction. There is no outer spiritual body that will save you if you put your trust in it. The time has come when all aspiring souls must strive for truth within themselves. They can still use the outer forms but they must not allow themselves to be restricted by them. I know there is a verse in the Bible in which Jesus says the gates of Hades will not overcome his church but almost immediately afterwards he calls Peter, Peter the rock on which he will build that church and whom he has just praised fulsomely, Satan! I don't think we can build an entire spiritual edifice on one verse particularly when it can't be certain what Jesus meant by the word 'church'.  And given the recent arguments about inner discernment and outer authority we should also note that Jesus commended Peter for knowing he was the Messiah because he had had that revealed to him not by flesh and blood (outer authority) but by his Father in Heaven (inner knowing). 

I have to say that some people seem to mistake the lamp for the light. You can have a beautiful lamp, made of gold and adorned with jewels and with finely polished glass so that it allows the light to pass through clearly and without obstruction. But it is still the lamp. What is more, the glass can get dirty unless it is regularly cleaned, even replaced when it gets old. When that happens those who look for light in a pure form may have to look elsewhere. Some light may still pass through discoloured glass but it is less than it was and to pretend otherwise will help no one. Those who look elsewhere may still value the lamp for its beauty and the light it continues to transmit but what they really seek is light and they will look for that wherever it may be.

Why do we come into this world? If it is just to obey an outer authority we could do that better in the higher worlds. But if it is to learn to become a real divine being then we have to reach inside ourselves to find the living God there. The church serves supremely as a bastion of tradition and authority but it is like a mother. The growing child cannot stay clinging to its mother or it will never grow. Naturally, it will always love and respect its mother but if it is to become a mature adult it must start taking responsibility for itself.

Those designated Romantic Christians merely believe that the sabbath was made for man not man for the sabbath. They see the Christian religion as a living thing but living things either grow or start to decay. No one is saying the church should adapt to modernity because that is tantamount to saying it should secularise itself which is more or less what the Church of England has done to its catastrophic loss. But that is changing in a negative sense. There is positive, creative change too that reflects a deeper engagement with spirit (rather than accommodating to the world) and that is all the Romantic Christians are interested in. Speaking as one who may be said to fall into that category, I would say RCs (no pun intended) love and respect the church but their real love is for Christ and they will seek him everywhere.