The Four Ages of Tradition

 I write a lot about the end times these days and that is for two reasons. The first is that we are deep in them though that has no implication as to how long they might still have to go before their inevitable conclusion in collapse and, probably, destruction. It could be 2082, it could be 100 years hence or more. It doesn't matter. All that matters is to be aware of them now and take steps to build our own inner ark which simply means to recognise and love God, and then see this world not as true in and of itself but as the outermost station of divine being which has its place and its purpose but is not our real home. As for how long they still have to run, that is not our concern. We are in them and that is all we need to know. If we knew when the end times were destined to conclude that would artificially alter our response to them. Our hearts would not be properly examined. That is why Jesus says only God knows.

The second reason is that everything about the modern world, literally everything, its many minuses (spiritual) but also its pluses (material), and its art, culture, science, politics, religion and lack of it, can be explained by the end times. Once you understand what these are and what brings them about and how they conclude you understand pretty much everything about the world today. Even how it could not be other than it is though that is not to excuse the factors and individuals that bring it about. Just because the end times are inevitable does not mean that those who facilitate or go along with them are anything other than God-rejecting sinners who will suffer the consequences of their thoughts and actions.

But let's go back to the beginning and put the end times in their proper context without which they have little meaning.

According to all traditional thought, human civilisations degenerate over time. How can this be, you say, are we not kinder, more tolerant and more advanced in every way, moral and material, than ever before? No, we are not. You see, you only say this because you are a materialist even if you are ostensibly a believer in one of the religions or some other form of spirituality. I will explain. We are more moral in what relates to man as he is in this world because we have rejected the higher reality of the next world. We have made great advances in what pertains to the material world, including human relations in that world, because we have denied the spiritual world and man as primarily a spiritual being. Energy follows thought. Our thought is all in the material so that is where our energy goes. 

Obviously, the past was far from perfect but, to the degree that it honoured God, it was better than us. And since God is the highest truth, to deny that truth and its implications (because you can believe in God but believe in this world more which means you don't really believe in God), means that however advanced you are in material terms you are still in an inferior place to one who honours God. Past cultures including our own in the West left a great deal to be desired but they were better than us because, however imperfectly, they paid tribute to a higher reality.

This is the traditional view. We do not progress but decline and this decline takes place over the course of four distinct cycles or ages. Before proceeding with this thought, an increasingly familiar one, I should add that I do not fully go along with it. There is a decline in the spiritual state both of humanity and of the physical and psychic environments in which we exist. That is true. However, there is also an evolution because the ages have a purpose. They are not just (though they are this too) an example of entropy in action. As the environment thickens and we become separate from the higher worlds, we are thereby forced back onto ourselves and we start to develop ourselves as more individual beings. We become less spiritually conscious but more truly individual with greater powers of both thought and self-expression. We move from passive beings swimming in the ocean of consciousness to a more active, though separated, mode of existence. God wants us to be free and independent, in effects, gods. This we cannot be without a strong sense of self, and not just a sense of self but a developed self with its own powers, talents and expressible attributes. This self inevitably becomes fixated on itself. It loses contact with its higher being because it must in order to develop, but that does have a spiritually adverse effect, and as the ages go by and the self further descends into separation its spiritual condition worsens. This is where we are now.

So, there is an explanation for the descent. However, that does not justify fully succumbing to it, and this is important to understand. Yes, conditions are adverse but still at all times we have the voice of God within us, and just because that becomes harder to hear is no excuse not to hear it or, at least, make the effort to listen out for it. It is only those who have hardened their hearts against God who reject him. We are never left without teaching, and you might say that the available teachings now deep in the end times are more abundant and more accessible than ever. This is one of the consolations of our time.

In the present grand cycle mankind has gone through three previous ages and is currently at the tail end of the fourth. In the Golden Age we walked with the gods and listened to their words. We were not perfect but we were in tune with the universe and in harmony with God. But then conditions began to cloud over and the division between this world and the higher planes started to harden so interchange between the two became more difficult. The gods began to retreat. In a way, it was the end of the nursery stage and the beginning of the move to adulthood.

We now live in the Iron Age which represents the nadir of human spirituality and therefore of civilisation and culture. We do not know precisely when the Iron Age actually began but for the sake of argument we can say it was about 5,000 years ago which is the beginning of historical time. So quite a while back. The Iron Age itself has cycles reflecting gold, silver, bronze and iron states of consciousness, and we are now at the end of the final cycle within the overall Iron Age as is demonstrated by the fact of our total materialism and atheism, our material accomplishment, our addiction to and absolute dependence on materialistic technology, our rejection of both God and Nature, our perpetual state of decline, denied publicly but obvious to anyone, and the sense of finality felt by many. Add to that globalisation and the destruction of nations which that entails, the fact that both science and art have lost their way, environmental degradation, uselessness of leaders, institutional collapse and a host of other things from the ongoing battle between the sexes to the general meaningless of life, and you can only draw one conclusion.

All this may seem negative and depressing but it is not a matter for doom and gloom. Quite the reverse, in fact, for the end times can be seen as a period of great potential, even hope. The outer world may be on fire but that drives us within. It gives us the tools to reject materialistic illusion and seek the real. The death throes of our current old world are merely the birth pangs of the new. Nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost. The good seeds of the past will be saved and replanted. The bad crops will be taken away and the ground prepared for a new harvest. No spring without winter.

Today we are addicted to technological devices that separate us ever more from God and reduce the quality of our experiences which become increasingly etiolated in nature. We are jaded and dulled. What we thought would liberate us actually saps our psychic vitality. This is unmistakable signature of the end times. 

And yet despite the fact that we live in a dying world this is an extraordinary time to be alive. For those who can read the signs, the opportunity for spiritual progress is greater than at any other time. Even a little effort in the right direction will be rewarded precisely because it is so much harder. Those who seek to establish a relationship with God and who are pure in heart will successfully pass the test of these times. Those who fail will be kept back at lower levels of being but I would surmise that missed opportunities will not present themselves again for some time as these things have cycles. It's not a question of being cast into a fiery pit but of going where your heart and mind take you which means to a dimension of being that corresponds to your heart and mind. This tells us that the conventionally religious are by no means guaranteed to be saved just because of their beliefs and desires. It is the quality of those beliefs and desires that matter. Moreover, belonging to any particular church or religion means very little now. The time has come when an individual response to God is required. An institutional response belongs to the past. We must think for ourselves. This is what it means to be an individual. Traditionalists might regret that if they are attached to the old institutions but the sabbath was made for man not man for the sabbath, and now each person must forge his or her own inner relationship with God to be saved.

Today we are living deep in the end times or Hesiod's Iron Age, the Indian Kali Yuga. Our task is to reject the illusions of the material world, now stronger than ever, and seek God, but it must be the true spiritual sun that exists both within and above us not one of the many imitations that are present at such a time. For when the material is as strong as it is now there arise many false spirituals which are themselves part of the material because they are just pure reactions to it. This is the task we face. Not simply to reject the material but to be able to discern true gold which is rare in the world from the many varieties of fool's gold. The spiritual is not the opposite to the material but in consciousness terms completely transcends it.

In the Iron Age values are inverted so we praise the lesser and scorn the higher. We call evil good and good evil. The whited sepulchre wicked are honoured and rewarded while those attempting to tread the path of virtue are ignored or derided. However, even these latter will become contaminated to a degree by the qualities of the Iron Age so the best course is to participate in the modern world as little as possible. Most of us must live in it and use its tools but we need to be fully aware of the corrupting nature of the world today and detach ourselves from it as much as we can. Do not get sucked into resisting it as the current will be too strong and you will be drawn into the very thing you fight against. Let it take its course knowing that God has everything in hand and his purpose will be served simply by you directing your whole attention to him. This is not defeatist because the world is dying and it is dying because it has lost its connection to higher principles. Just recognise that and stand back. The death of the world is not a tragedy but a necessary part of its purification and regeneration.

The end times will progress into disorder and collapse but there is a purpose to this collapse because it creates the conditions for rebirth. It forms the souls of men and women who can be the seeds, whether literally or, more probably, spiritually for a new age. It will be a simpler age because it will be a fresh start but not entirely fresh because the best of the past will be preserved on the level of consciousness. Now the sins of centuries are coming to the surface like erupting pustules so they can be lanced so think of the end times as a time of mass purification. That is what they are. Is this not a wonderful thing? Humanity is being cleansed so it can start anew in a fresh cycle. Some souls will go to higher worlds, some will be recycled and some who have failed here will go to dimensions of being appropriate to their level of consciousness.

Civil War

 To continue the theme of the last post, the sad reality is that certain factions of Western men are complicit, either knowingly or unknowingly, in destroying their own group. Putting it in political terms, you have elements of both left and right piling up the logs for the funeral pyre. Mass immigration is the most obvious tool used, and this is promoted by the globalist elites who merely think of humans as homo economicus, fodder for the marketplace, and also by leftists who, for reasons of perverted ideology (a tautology since ideology by definition is perverted as it's what you have when religion is abandoned), push their obsession with equality to the limits of sanity. The one is driven by greed, the other by anger and resentment as we discussed in an earlier post. Here we see how the anti-God forces behind all this take advantage of human sin, their preferred modus operandi, stimulating it wherever it already exists.

Is Britain really on the path to civil war as some are beginning to predict? This is no longer the impossibility it would have seemed 20 years ago. You have the refusal of the elite classes to defend the idea of a shared national identity as they import vast numbers of foreigners who can have no sense of loyalty to or even understanding of the history and heritage of the country to which they are coming. And in response to this you have a growing sense among the indigenous native population that they really are beginning to lose their country. These people are condemned by most of the mainstream (in hock to the elites who control both government and press) in all the usual ways as ignorant, racist, etc, etc, but these stigmas no longer work against people who see their cultural identity rapidly being destroyed.

And then you have Islam.

Muslims can never assimilate with anyone else. That is a basic tenet of their religion which is not so much a pure religion like Hinduism or Buddhism as a political ideology with a religious component which aims at complete totalitarian control, both externally in the community and internally in the mind of the believer/victim. Romantic Westerners like to imagine Islam in terms of the Alhambra Palace, the Taj Mahal, the Golden Age of Baghdad, beautiful gardens and wise Sufis, and there is certainly this aspect to it. Some of the architecture is stupendous, the Abbasid Caliphate was responsible for an extraordinary cultural expansion and Sufism is replete with profound mystical insights. But the Golden Age was done by the end of the 13th century and Sufism, which is considered heretical by most orthodox Muslims, did not get its insights from the Koran so much as advaita, Christianity and pre-existing Persian spiritual teaching. More to the point, none of this is what Islam means now. It's not just a simple monotheistic religion like a non-Trinitarian version of Christianity, but a political ideology that has sought to destroy everything that stands in its way from the beginning. Muslims, who make up an increasingly large section of the population, cannot assimilate. It is against their religion to do so. They also have a long history of spreading their ideology through the sword. That is their tradition.

The spiritually corrupted elites tell us that diversity is strength, in total contrast to historical reality. Moderate diversity can be a strength if there is a common centre, a shared identity and a high level of social trust, but that is precisely what is lacking. National identity has been trashed and replaced with a spurious (spurious because no one feels this in their blood) all-purpose liberalism that is the same everywhere. But incomers keep their identity and it seems inevitable there must be eventual conflict. When has that not happened?

If conflict does arise the elites will blame everyone but themselves. They will condemn the people whom their policies put in an impossible situation rather than admit those policies were utterly wrong. The incomers, flushed with numerical power, will reject the time-honoured wisdom, and, frankly, common courtesy, of when in Rome do as the Romans do. They will seek power, at first democratically but eventually by any means. I believe this is what the demonic powers have been working for all along. It is, therefore, something we really need to avoid, and the only way to do that is to get tough now before the situation gets out of hand. 

We must remember though that the reality behind all this is spiritual. It is bad to lose your country. It is worse to lose your soul. War creates hatred. Well, it comes from hatred but it lets that hatred rip. It is spiritually extremely dangerous for that reason. It's all very well to teach as Krishna taught in the Bhagavad Gita that if you remain detached you can do your duty in war without fear of spiritual consequence. Krishna is right but most people are not capable of that, and war unleashes and seemingly justifies terrible, spiritually destructive, passions. Christianity is not a pacifist religion because it recognises that we live in a world in which evil exists and must be dealt with, but nor is it a martial religion like Islam. War must be a last resort for a Christian and we need to recognise how the demonic powers are trying to manipulate us and take steps to prevent the outcome they are working towards. This will mean hard choices and strong actions but better that than war. The fact that the demons are working towards it shows we should work to avoid it, but we cannot avoid it by refusing to confront the problems that are leading us towards it. The corrupt elites will pay a spiritual price. The rest of us should do what we can to prevent ordinary people being dragged down with them, but the time has passed for all purpose peace and love. These should still be there, of course, but now they will have to take a more rigorous form, one which bends more towards the justice of the father than the mercy of the mother.

I must make one final point to put this all in a wider framework. The elites are plainly wrong and the new arrivals who seek to usurp power are also wrong. This does not mean the native peoples are right. The situation has come about because everyone has abandoned God and truth. If one is not acting from awareness of the spiritual then one's actions are contaminated. If one does not think from an understanding of God one's thoughts are degraded. There is national loyalty and there is spiritual (spiritual not religious) loyalty. The former is right and good but if it is not seen in the greater context of the latter it will not lead to a healthy outcome.

File under wars and rumours of war.

Why Was Western Man Selected for Destruction?

 It certainly seems that way. In almost every situation nowadays the white male is seen as the villain, and has been for at least 20 years. This is despite the undeniable fact that the white male is responsible for almost all modern advances, and that's using modern in its widest sense, going back several hundred years. Is this just the jealousy of the resentful or has that been utilised and exploited for a deeper purpose?

I was recently sent this link and asked for my opinion. It's a familiar trope. China, India and the Islamic lands all had great civilisations when Western Europe was an uncivilised backwater (what about Greece and Rome?). Why did Europe and not these areas develop modern science? The answer supposedly is that Europe took a great deal from these more advanced civilisations, stole, some might say, and that therefore its achievements are not really its own but dependent on those who came before.

Of course, there's some truth in this. Europe did acquire knowledge from other civilisations, but to go from that to saying its achievements are less as a consequence, and to surmise that these could have happened elsewhere, given slightly different circumstances, is to make completely unwarranted assumptions. There was something about the Western European psyche that advanced everything, not just science, but everything, the arts, philosophy, ethics, medicine and much more, to places other civilisations had not dreamed of. No one disputes that other civilisations had some sort of science and that they inspired Western scientists, but they all got so far and no further because they lacked something which the West had. Not so much raw intelligence but they lacked what we call now, after Spengler, I believe, the Faustian exploratory spirit of Western man. 

This refers to the ever-restless search for truth, the expansive attitude that is never satisfied with the known but seeks to go beyond all boundaries and to understand everything; in religious terms, certainly, but not only in religious terms. Just as important, this was coupled with (or perhaps they are part of the same thing) the strong sense of individualism that Western Man developed and a greater devotion to rational enquiry than displayed anywhere else, even in the great civilisations of India and China. Revisionist historians who put Western superiority (which exists in all fields) down to luck or trade networks or exploitation or to geographical advantages are promoting minor and secondary factors to the main one. And they are often doing this in bad faith to support their undeclared ideological prejudices.

 So, why is Western Man subjected to the relentless undermining of the present time? Those who look only from the outside might say it is because Western Man has caused many of the problems of the modern era, and they would point to ill-treatment of other groups, destruction of the environment and similar faults to substantiate this, ignoring the fact that every group has done this kind of thing, given the opportunity, and Western Man is actually the only grouping to acknowledge it and seek to do something about the problem. Another theory might be that the underperforming groups who have reaped the benefit of Western Man's discoveries and advances resent this fact and spitefully seek to bring him down.

Both of these have a degree of truth but they are not the real reason. The reason Western Man, or the white male, is subjected to relentless attack is spiritual, using spiritual in its broadest sense to include all that is non-material. This attack originates from the demonic level, from a centre that seeks to separate humanity from God and exploit it for its own purposes, principally as a source of energy. To do this most successfully they need a conformist, relatively supine population.  White males are the freest, most individual, most focussed on the pursuit of truth and excellence grouping of human beings. They are the ones who will fight for truth. Women are not particularly concerned with truth, preferring security and consensus and a situation where everyone is comfortable. They cannot defend truth and are not designed to do so. That is not their role which is why they are encouraged by the powers that shouldn't be.  Non-Western men are not overly concerned with truth either, principally seeking wealth, power and status. Of course, most Western Men are the same but there is still a significant proportion who seek and will fight for truth and excellence. It is because of this grouping that white males are targeted and undermined with accusations of racism and sexism, neither of which, be it noted, are sins in themselves, being merely legitimate observations of real differences. But no matter. If white males are removed from the equation humanity will become much more susceptible to demonic misdirection.

This is not to absolve white males or Western Man of his faults. But to focus, as we do, entirely on these is to miss his real and vital contribution and, above all, the protection his particular mindset affords to those forces that would lead humanity astray.

Added note: One might also point out that the quality of Western Man has deteriorated over the last 100 years so he is partly complicit in his own undermining.

Some Objections to the End Times Idea

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

The Seven Deadly Sins Today

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

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

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

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

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

A Survival Guide is Now Published

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reality of Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spiritual Loss and What To Do About It

 Anyone who starts looking around for some spiritual sustenance in the modern world is in a very peculiar position. On the one hand, the wisdom teachings of the ages are readily available. From Buddhism to Hermeticism and from Sufism to Christianity, it's all there. Then there are more modern spins, Theosophy, Anthroposophy and their ilk, various sorts of esotericism, the list is endless. Spiritual teachers abound too, and of every stripe. You are spoilt for choice.

And yet there is nothing of any real substance. Of course, the books have all the information required but it's just words. They may help to introduce people to spiritual ideas and concepts but these soon become familiar and you are not really any better off. Not in a deep sense. The teachers expound but they don't do anyone any good except on the introductory level. Once you are past this you see that they don't have anything further to offer and that for many of them being a teacher is just a substitute for living the life. If they truly knew what the spiritual was they would not be needing to set themselves up as teachers. They remain on the outside looking in.

Then there are the practices, meditation, yoga and all the rest. No practice is going to make you a spiritual person. Not on its own. It's not like sports training. You can do whatever it might be and it will bring some results, no doubt, but don't mistake these for spirituality.

What's going on? The nature of these times is that everything is being brought out, and when it is brought out, it is brought down. When a treasure is revealed, it loses its shine. When the sacred is brought into the light of day for all to see, it becomes profaned which is why such things were guarded and protected in the past. The democratisation of spirit means bringing it down to a lower level.

The remedy is for every individual to form his own relationship with God. You cannot rely on anything external now because it is all sullied. So, seek God within yourself. Not as yourself as some would say, but within yourself. There is a difference.

Of Lions and Lambs

 We are living through the end times when spirit is obscured by matter as a result of which even when the spiritual is acknowledged it is often perceived through the distorting lens of modernity.

One of the characteristics of the end times is that the whole era returns as part of a general summing up of the age, but it does so in a form that is misrepresented by the reigning characteristics of the zeitgeist. Thus, we now have access to spiritual traditions of the past in a way undreamt of not long ago, but what we have access to are really only the bones on which we frequently put modern flesh.

An example of this is paganism which appears to be making a comeback in various forms. One particular form has come about in response to the feminisation of modern Christianity and the perception that it is a Jewish religion. The idea is that adopting a foreign religion has weakened the West as a whole and men in particular, and if you look at the Christian religion as it is today you can see there is truth in this. The new Archbishop of Canterbury makes it almost comically obvious. However, if you look more deeply the picture changes somewhat.

To begin with, despite appearances, Christianity is not a Jewish religion. See here and here. Obviously, it was born in a Jewish setting but Christ transcended that which was why the Jews rejected him. And then when the religion took root in the West it was transformed by its host to reflect the sensibility of Western thought and behaviour. The supposed feminine nature of Christianity is only because it shows the way to go beyond the egotistic self. Christianity has become feminised over recent years but that is not its real nature. There is nothing feminine about Christ nor his disciples who all fought and conquered the world but did so through force of spirit rather than force of arms.

Nonetheless, because Christianity has become a bland non-judgmental religion with its idea of love, originally fiery, become wet and soggy, it is not surprising that a more masculine mindset rejects it. Yet those who do reject Christianity for its supposed weakness are not seeing it as it is, only as it has become. Reacting against the soft and sentimental side of modern Christianity, some men adopt hard pagan beliefs in which self-mastery is key. Your mind must master your emotions, they say, if you are to be the master of yourself. They are right. The mind must master the emotions or you remain a slave like most of humanity. 

And yet, is this spirituality or is it self-development? Are you going beyond the self or are you reinforcing it?  It is easy to mistake self-development for spirituality. There is overlap but the former is only a preliminary phase, and problems arise when it is seen as an end in itself.

The resurgence of masculinity often goes with bodybuilding and working out at the gym but then these become ends in themselves, narcissistic ends. Its advocates want success and achievement and to make a mark in the world, and while these are part of human development, especially male development, they are not spiritual things. The self should be strong but it is an error to regard that as a spiritual state. It is only a foundation and it needs refinement and to learn sacrifice or it will degenerate.

Action and reaction are always equal and opposite. We should not allow the absurdities of the left, of feminism, of anti-racism and all the rest of the crazy catalogue of errors Western man has built up over the years, to lead to an excessive response. There are signs this is happening and I suspect the only thing that can keep us on the straight and narrow path, the razor's edge of true spirituality that combines both lion and lamb, is the risen Christ. Happy Easter!

della Francesca's Resurrection of Jesus

Wars and Rumours of Wars

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

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

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

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

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

An End Times Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Survival Guide to the End Times

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

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

 

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

 

And here is the cover.

and here's the list of contents.

Introduction

 

Part One: End Times

A Body of Slag 

Space is Contracting 

The End Times is the End of Term 

A New Creation

The Paths of Peter and John 

The Destruction of the West 

How to Save the West

What is the Solution? 

Saving the West 

World War Two and Its Aftermath 

Not Going Along with the Aquarian Flow 

The Secular Corruption of Spirituality 

Satanic Feminism 

Divine Femininity 

The Cassandra Syndrome 

 

Part Two: Spiritual Tradition

Introduction on What Tradition Is

Temptation of the Esoteric 

Buddhist Atheism

Heaven, Hell and What’s In Between 

Astrology, A Signpost to Creation 

The Gnostic World View 

The Guru in the End Times

Jesus Was a Refugee 

The Wisdom of the Left

Who Is Sophia? 

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Tradition and Technology 

The Fox’s Prophecy

 

Part Three: God and the Soul

Meditation and its Limitations 

Consciousness and Christ 

The Root of Reality 

The Omnipotence of God

What is the Soul?

The Expansion of Consciousness 

The Human Form 

Male and Female 

Hierarchy and Complementarity 

No More Sea 

 

Part Four: Spiritual Practice

Spiritual Routine 

Illusion and Sin 

Empathy and Love

What is Evil? 

Give Them Your Mind

Celibacy

Psychedelics and Religion

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

St Michael

Christians and the Esoteric 

Don’t Worry 

 

Conclusion

 

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