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.

Soul Music

I have been listening to Wagner's opera Parsifal recently. For those who are interested in such things it's the 1962 Bayreuth performance conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch, excellently recorded in stereo and featuring perhaps the last great generation of Wagner singers. I first heard orchestral extracts from Parsifal, specifically the Prelude and Good Friday music, in my early 20s but didn't listen to the whole opera until much later. I couldn't really get on with the singing and seeming longueurs then but now if I listen to Wagner it's the operas as a whole I listen to, the Ring cycle, especially Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, being my favourite with Parsifal a close second. No one can plumb the depth of Jungian archetypes like Wagner, almost literally so with the prelude to Das Rheingold. There is a spiritual intensity to his music which is quite different to the spiritual quality of, say, Tallis or, different again, Bach because it includes much more than these of the human element though less of the purely spiritual, as is only appropriate for Romantic music. You might say it goes deeper but is less elevated. Those who don't believe that human consciousness has evolved should study Western music of the last 1,000 years. From the pure simplicity of Medieval plainchant to the intricate  harmonies of Renaissance choral polyphony through the more expressive and technically sophisticated Baroque and Romantic music and on to the 20th century when it all broke down there is a clear progression with ever greater emphasis on self-consciousness. Wagner brought this to a pinnacle. After him there didn't seem anywhere left to go except for music to turn in on itself and we are still struggling with that problem. The composer Cyril Scott in his book Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages wrote that Wagner touched the buddhic plane, meaning a plane of high spiritual quality, on two occasions in his music, once with the Good Friday music in Parsifal and once with the Prize Song from The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. One doesn't have to express this in his Theosophical terms to recognise that these two pieces of music genuinely do have a spiritual quality like few others.

This is real soul music. It has always seemed ridiculous to me that what is called soul music is so called. Maybe it's a kind of inversion typical of these latter days since music of the soul is precisely what this kind of music is not. Soul, as in sensitivity to spirit and the higher dimensions of being, is just what is lacking here. It may be enjoyable music on its own terms but those terms are of physical being with input from the emotional level, not spiritual in any proper sense at all. Real music of and from the soul inclines to contemplation not sensual movement. The feelings it arouses are to do with reverence, majesty, awe, humility and the sublime not frenetic excitement of mind and body. It may be that not all people are capable of feeling these, let's call them what they are, higher feelings but it is a spiritually fatal mistake to pretend that the lower is the higher or that the two are in any way equal. They are not and if you don't recognise this you will desensitise yourself to higher reality. It's no good saying everything has its place unless you see the lower in the light of the higher. Sometimes, often, that will put it in a very different light from how it sees itself.

Cyril Scott and Music

A post on the esotericist and composer Cyril Scott who must be considered one of the forerunners of the idea of a spiritual awakening in the West even though the form in which his spiritual understanding was expressed, Theosophy, will now be seen as something of a false start.

https://albionawakening.blogspot.com/2019/03/cyril-scott-and-music.html

More on the Masters

I've not written anything about the Masters for a while and, since drawing attention to their existence was the original purpose of this blog and its parent book, I will remedy that now with some thoughts on what they are not. This might seem a strange way to approach the subject but some of the problems preventing a wider acceptance of such beings among serious spiritual seekers come about because of the travesties and simplifications that have been associated with their name over the last century or so. I wrote about this a bit in the book but it's an important matter so I would like to consider the question at further length here.

There are a number of individuals and groups claiming contact with elevated supernatural beings whom they may or may not designate as Masters. But practically always these beings speak from a vaguely New Age kind of perspective and that the Masters who spoke to me never did. Their teachings, and they themselves, demonstrated the best of tradition but carried forward into (I consider) a higher form suitable for the current time in which the spiritual goal is to know God within while, at the same time, being fully aware of his transcendent reality. That is to say, to take the steps required for full divinisation of the soul which was never denied as in some Eastern religions but regarded as something like a seed planted in matter that could eventually grow into full spiritual bloom.

My teachers were not overtly Christian in the way they presented themselves, but their teaching fell solidly into a traditional spiritual pattern. There was no talk of an upcoming Aquarian Age (as so often was the case with psychically received material at the time) and no modernist rationalisations in which a God-centred spirituality is subordinated to humanistic ideals. These teachers were advocates of timeless truth, not in any way aligning themselves with a 20th century mentality under the guise of being up to date. My feeling is that any spiritual communication that accepts or endorses any of the modernist revolutions, sexual, political, cultural and so on, and disruptions to the natural order should be regarded with suspicion. That is not to say that some of these may not be reactions to new impulses raining down on humanity from higher planes but they are usually so distorted that they become parodies of the influence that has inspired them. A prime example would be contemporary leftist beliefs which are clearly materialistic misinterpretations of spiritual impulses. Minds unable or unwilling to comprehend and acknowledge spiritual reality react to its energies on a material level thereby totally distorting its truths. Indeed, worse than that, they increasingly invert these truths by applying them where they have no basis in reality. They treat the material as the spiritual which means the real spiritual is driven out.

Many modern versions of Masters are derived from Theosophy which means either Madame Blavatsky or her successors Charles Leadbetter and Annie Besant who purported to be talking about the same beings as Madame B. but presented them in a very different guise. I don't doubt their sincerity or belief that what they were promoting was true, but I think they were led astray by their psychism in that they (especially Leadbetter) could not distinguish the real from the unreal when it came to what was revealed to them through their psychic powers of clairvoyance, clairaudience and the like. This is a very common problem and accounts for a large number of false claimants to contact with the Masters. In my view no modern Theosophical or Theosophically derived or inspired group is in touch with the true Masters though they may be with their so called astral reflections. To make sense of that phrase we have to understand that the next world has many levels and in these the energy of emotion or thought can create external manifestations of itself. These thought forms can then be built up into apparently real objective things and assume the likeness of a real being which is even able to dispense standard spiritual wisdom though only on the level of those whose energy has fed into it. This is why you never get much that is truly profound out of them.

Groups carrying on in the Theosophical mindset and supposedly in contact with the named Theosophical Masters such as Morya, St Germain etc, are undoubtedly victims of this 'astralitis' or at least their leaders are. Any bona fide energies behind that movement (and I am prepared to believe there may have been such at one time) have definitely withdrawn themselves from it as it descended into a fascination with signs and wonders and lost touch with genuine spirituality.  That's why Krishnamurti rejected it all as shallow and spurious though he went to the other extreme and threw out the idea of Masters altogether just because of false and illusory representations of them. He had the misfortune of being brought up in a spiritual circus and understandably reacted against that though he might have been wiser to sort out the wheat from the chaff since wheat there most certainly is even if there is considerably more chaff as manifested in this world.

A few years ago, out of curiosity, I went to a talk by a modern claimant to contact with the Theosophical Masters. Some of what he said made sense but both he and the bulk of the audience were far too focused on occult marvels and the incidence of apparently miraculous events in their lives, either real or imagined. This hearkened back to the sensationalism of an earlier time and is a perennial problem with those drawn to the occult and esoteric. I am reminded that "it is a wicked generation that asks for a sign", though perhaps spiritually immature would be a fairer description. But most of the audience seemed to assume that just because they believed in higher truths they were, in the jargon, initiates, and the person giving the talk clearly thought himself to be such.  Unfortunately, one of the Masters with whom he claimed to be in contact was JMH who features in the books by Cyril Scott and is an obvious invention. Scott's books are a pious fiction and, while he may have had some psychic contact with a Master, his character JMH who dispenses occult wisdom in the polite early 20th century society of London and Boston is a fantasy of his own, a composite from various sources. Of course, this fantasy may have acquired a kind of psychic existence because it was believed in by a number of readers of the books just like Long John Silver or some other popular literary personage might do, and that is what the lecturer would have contacted and maybe communicated with, believing himself to be in touch with a real being. But it was merely a sort of psychic hologram on the astral plane, that world between the physical and the spiritual in which matter is sufficiently fine to be manipulated by thought, a non-physical but still completely phenomenal world. Another explanation would be that some discarnate spirit assumed this identity for its own ends. In neither case would a real Master be involved.

True Masters do not identify themselves with any particular earthly personality. Their sole aim is to teach the truths of the spirit to their disciples. They do not resort to occult or esoteric terminology nor to mystification and nor do they sensationalise in any way. All these things tend to glamorise and direct a pupil's mind away from spiritual truth in its essence to a concern with phenomenal things. In sharp distinction to the false variety, a genuine spiritual Master does not encourage focus on himself but directs it always to God. Perhaps this above all is what marks out the real coin from the counterfeit.

Authenticity of Teachings

I have been asked an interesting, and I think very relevant, question about how one can determine whether the source of a teaching is what it purports to be. This is a perennial problem to which there is no straightforward answer, but it is one every seeker must ask. It's one I've considered many times myself, and I give my conclusions in the answer below. 

Q. I have a question that pertains to the access others have had to the Masters in the past, and the authenticity of their books. My inquiry is prompted by your post on Cyril Scott. I first read his trilogy when I was a young man and was deeply affected by them. Admittedly, they are overly “romantic”, and perhaps unduly dramatize certain aspects of a Master’s life. But yet, the books struck a chord. I’ve also read the books by Guy Ballard regarding his claimed experiences with St. Germain, which later led to the whole “I Am” movement. And others as well. All of these books, just as those of Scott, were claimed by the author to be true accounts. And all of them have been later questioned. From my perspective, they all contain profound truths, so I don’t want to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, so to say. I believe that in following any path, we are required to utilize our best sense of discrimination and wisdom, but the readers of these books is largely asked to take them on faith. So what to do?

There are also the dictated transmissions of Alice Bailey, which were reputed at that time to be from one of the Masters who had worked through the Theosophical Society. Very detailed and complex teachings, written in a somewhat obtuse style, but clearly coming from some profound source.

All of these books are premised on the authenticity of the Masters, but then if the truth of the narrative itself is in question, then the source must also be questioned. For example, how do we know if Scott was indeed in contact? So, as the fortunate recipient of authentic teachings, can you offer any perspective on these previous teachings, and guidance to help the novice evaluate other teachings that are still coming through from other sources? Perhaps the best we can do is to follow the admonition of Jesus that “by their fruits you shall know them”, but the “fruits” of some of these other books are deeply nourishing indeed. So, on that basis, the books are profound indeed.  Or perhaps the source doesn’t matter at all, and it is sufficient to know that each of us will respond to those teachings that resonate with him. But then, how do we know what teachings are from the Masters, or whether they are even in touch with us at all?

So, how do we determine what teachings are “revealed teachings” coming from those who have walked before us, and who know the way?

A. It seems to me that in essence what you are asking is how do we know that something really is what it claims to be, and the short answer is that we can’t know for sure. Not in this world anyway. We have to use our discrimination and developing powers of intuition to size up what’s on offer. But this, I think, is intended for the modern spiritual aspirant has to know things for himself and not rely on anything external. Only in this way can his spirituality be his own and not borrowed.

Nowadays a lot of information is out there but hardly any of it, or so it seems to me, is completely pure. There is always some falseness, or, if this implies deliberate deception, inexactitude, mixed in with the truth. That is partly the fault of the age, and the fact that there is so much ego in all our seeking and so many imperfect vessels looking to promote their version of the truth, but it also something that can be used by our spiritual mentors on the higher planes in order that we may develop our own insight. We mustn’t remain spiritual babies or become esoteric fundamentalists!

You mention the books of Cyril Scott and Alice Bailey. Interestingly enough, when I searched around for books about Masters in the late 1970s these ones were among the first I read. To begin with I took them at face value and assumed they were exactly what they said they were, but there was always a bit of a nagging doubt. The Bailey books were very wordy, and long-windedness was not a quality I associated with the Masters. They (the books) were also very mentally oriented, and the Masters who spoke to me, while encouraging me to read and to learn, always discouraged excessive philosophizing, always emphasizing that spiritual truth was simple, and warning against getting caught up in in words and ideas. I found these books very interesting, and indeed useful, but I don’t think I ever read any of them all the way through, even though I bought many of them and often used them for reference. They were just too dense, seeming to contain a lot of knowledge but not much light. Almost like textbooks for a university course on esoteric spirituality, in fact. There was probably a need for transmitting esoteric knowledge when they came out but I’m not sure how much of a truly spiritual ‘vibration’ they carry. 

Eventually I decided that a spiritual being of some sort may have inspired them, but there was a good deal of Alice Bailey in them too. Probably she clothed the impressions she was given with her own thoughts. So, as with practically all spiritual writings, you have to read them with discrimination, learning to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

I enjoyed Scott's Initiate series of books when I read them in my mid-twenties but never entirely believed they were as factual as he made out. Now I think they were fiction based on fact. I think he had some genuine contact with the Masters, probably through the medium he mentions in the third book, but a lot of the rest is just made up, although maybe based on his experiences with various teachers he encountered along the way. As far as I know, no one else has ever substantiated anything about this Master supposedly wandering around the drawing rooms of London and Boston! What confirms me in this opinion is another book he produced called The Boy Who Saw True which purports to be the diary of a clairvoyant Victorian boy that was sent to Scott, but is clearly a fabrication of Scott himself, so closely does it echo his other works and what he writes of his own childhood in his autobiography. I think he had good intentions in writing these books but it’s a shame he felt the need to mix truth with fiction as, to my way of thinking, that sullies the truth, especially in a subject such as this where there is so much illusion and sensationalism anyway.

I was never attracted to Guy Ballard or Elizabeth Claire Prophet as their work seemed very contaminated with 'astralitis’. And their tendency to turn the Masters into personalities, common to many Theosophists, runs completely counter to my experience and, indeed, to my intuition about these things. As you say, ‘by their fruits’ etc, and the fruits of these two were very cultish.

I think there are various positions we can take regarding communications claiming to come from discarnate Masters or any spiritually perfected beings. We can think that the whole thing is made up and a fake. Sometimes that is undoubtedly the case. Then we can think that there may be some true basis to the claim but it is not as represented. The psychic world tends to reflect our own state of consciousness back to us, and mediumistically inclined people can pick up all sorts of wandering influences which they interpret in their own way. They can translate impression into concrete form which owes a lot to their own understanding and mental state and conditioning. There are also spirits that may imitate enlightened souls or even mistakenly think they are such, and these can put through teachings that are seemingly elevated but which lack a truly spiritual quality. Quite a lot of communication seems to me to fall into this category. But even if something does genuinely originate from the Masters (which I think is quite rare), that does not mean that the form in which it comes out in this world perfectly reflects the source, owing to the limitations of the channel.

Ultimately, as you quite rightly say, we have to make our own judgment based on common sense and intuition. And something doesn’t have to be perfect to contain valuable teaching, teaching which we may outgrow but which may also serve us well at a certain point in our journey. For me that would be the case with the Scott and Bailey books so even if I no longer think of them as true in the way they were presented as being, I have definitely learnt from them.

We need take nothing on faith in the sense of giving it unconditional and unquestioning belief. As the Masters told me, “there is nothing perfect in your world”. At the same time, some things, and some teachings, are a good deal more perfect than others and we have to exercise discrimination to work out what these are. I think that the source does matter in the sense that only a pure source will give a pure teaching, transmitting not just spiritual words but also a spiritual quality (which will convey more than just words), but until we are able to discern the purity of a particular source it makes sense to do as you suggest, and follow a teaching with which you resonate.

As I said in my book, the only teachings I know of that I think do come from the Masters in an unadulterated form are those in the books by Swami Omananda, “The Boy and the Brothers” and “Towards the Mysteries”. The tone of these is very similar to that of my experience, and the direct method (a complete overshadowing in which there was no influence from the medium) was the same too. I feel that these do present the Masters and their teachings as they are. No doubt there are other records of which I am unaware but I have to say I have explored this question quite a lot over the last 35 years, and while there are a number of teachings I find profound and impressive (there are also many I find much less so!), there’s nothing else that speaks to me quite as these do.

I won’t have said anything you don’t already know here. My view is that the Masters do communicate with humanity but most of that communication is on the spiritual level, i.e. through wordless impression. The person who picks it up then has to put it in their own terms which is where some degree of confusion will always set in. We then have to use our spiritual intuition to separate out timeless truth from the form in which it is presented.

You ask how we can determine what teachings really do come from the Masters, or even if any do. Some certainly do even if most of the time, I believe, the Masters work through their disciples, both incarnate and discarnate. And to the first part of the question I would answer, we determine this through our own purity of heart. If we have sincere love of God and true aspiration in our hearts we will not be led astray. Not seriously anyway.

The authenticity or otherwise of spiritual teachings has long been a question that I have grappled with. It would be nice if the fountain always flowed with pure water but it seems that is not yet the case in this imperfect world. Perhaps through learning, maybe through trial and error but learning all the same, that all that glitters is not gold we are able to develop our powers of intuition in a way that might not be possible if we were given to drink directly from the source.

The Spiritualisation of Matter

I've written the last few posts as a corrective to the tendency of some non-dualists to dismiss the relative world and everything in it, up to and including the personal God or Creator, as unreal or illusion because there's no doubt that Western followers of this teaching often misunderstand it. Part of that is actually down to the teaching itself which, by its emphasis on the absolute, can encourage people to think they are nearer the goal than they really are, causing them to believe they can jump stages or that stages don't even exist. In fact, as I have said before, many non-dualists are a bit like materialists in that they deny part of reality. In the case of the materialist what is denied is the absolute. In the case of the non-dualist what is denied is the relative or at least its authentic nature. The wise spiritual aspirant seeks to integrate relative and absolute or spirit and matter, and so does not just deny self but uses it to go through it which he does by various means including meditation and prayer, and not excluding service, sacrifice and surrender. If all goes well this leads eventually to identification with the Universal and sanctification of the individual. The theoretical non-dualist, on the other hand, bound to his ideas of non-duality, just dismisses the individual self as illusion, rejecting it as something non-existent. But, of course, he can't really do this because the self is there and so he ends up in a mind created non-dualistic thought form. He is unlikely to realise this as his mental attitude has left him with no way out because of his denial of all but the non-dual absolute, and so it will require the hard knocks of life, either this or a future one, to bring him to his senses. He may believe himself to be enlightened or to have gone beyond ignorance or however he wants to phrase it, and he may acquire followers who believe that of him too which will inevitably bolster him in his conviction, but what starts in the head stays in the head. That is to say, the very self that is being denied. True spiritual knowledge comes from the heart and will only start to blossom when the heart centre is awakened which it can only be through the means I have given above.

The composer and occultist Cyril Scott wrote a book, quite well known at one time, called The Initiate in the Dark Cycle. This formed part of a trilogy which purported to tell the story of a real Master who lived and worked more or less openly in the Western world in the 1920s and ‘30s. I think Scott was being a bit mischievous and made the whole thing up in order to get a point across, but I don’t think he made it up from nothing. I read these books as works presented as fact but which were actually fiction albeit based on certain facts because I think Scott really did have some contact with Masters even if the one who was the hero of his books was his own invention. Be that as it may, much of this third book in the series deals with reactions to Krishnamurti’s, at the time, dramatic rejection of his Theosophical upbringing, and to discussion of what he was teaching in its place. This is identified as advaita, and the reason I mention the book here is because there are some interesting remarks made by the Masters in this book about advaita. They describe it as one of the most easily misunderstood spiritual paths, not suitable for the Western world in the present cycle, partly because of the need for a fully realised guru, and say that Krishnamurti’s version is likely to lead his followers nowhere except hypocrisy and self-delusion. Krishnamurti’s personal level of attainment is not disputed but his teaching methods are. I don’t entirely go along with this because I think Krishnamurti was a much needed spiritual purifier, but it may be that that is how the Masters eventually used him once they saw the direction he had taken. What I do find instructive is how these remarks can be applied even more to modern non-dualistic teachings which do not come from teachers of Krishnamurti’s level of attainment and so don’t even have the force of his spiritual realisation to back them up. For it is a fact that the same words will vary in their spiritual impact depending on the level of consciousness they are coming from. Words spoken by a genuine enlightened soul will have much greater inner resonance and transformative power than those same words spoken by an ordinary teacher. Incidentally, this is partly why spiritual teachers who have not attained enlightenment but who speak as though they have are guilty of a form of blasphemy. They are defiling holiness with ego.

Let me repeat here that the purpose of this series of articles is not to deny the basic principle of non-duality, but to point to some of the potential flaws in an exclusively non-dualistic approach to the spiritual path. These arise chiefly from excessive focus on one of the two poles of manifested reality to the neglect of the other, which is why I said in the book of which this blog is an extension that there was a secret beyond non-duality and that it was duality. What I meant by this slightly facetious remark is that consciousness alone is not the goal, which is to say you will not reach the goal by focusing on pure consciousness alone. As most non-dualists take their inspiration from advaita let me express this in terms of Indian philosophy. Realisation does not just come from the knowledge of Siva. It comes from the union in the disciple of Siva and Sakti where Siva is pure awareness and Sakti is the divine energy hidden in form and working through it. So it is not being alone that you should aspire to but the union of being and becoming, spirit and matter, life and form, absolute and relative, universal and individual. And this is done by accepting not rejecting, by accepting the totality of your being and raising it up into the light. This is the spiritualisation of matter and is the real task required of the disciple. You do not make base metal into gold by throwing away the base metal but by purifying and refining it to the point at which real transmutation can take place. Likewise you do not awaken spiritually by denying your soul but by perfecting it, purifying it and then, only when all that has been achieved, offering it up in sacrifice.

Duality is a fundamental principle of the universe and exists for a reason. Everything comes from the interplay between the two poles which are two and, at the same time, one. We need to transcend our current identification with form, that is true. We need to see duality as the expression of the One Reality, that is also true. But we do this through fully integrating the two poles of existence not by denying the creative potency of one of them. Non-dualists are not wrong to see consciousness (the Father, Siva) as the root of existence but the Father can only be known by the Son who is born from the union of Father and Mother in the secret place of the heart.