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.

Conquering Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fight Against Evil

 Early on in my spiritual instruction I was told that the more progress I made the more I would be assailed by evil in all its forms. We know from the lives of the saints that as they advance on the path towards God they are increasingly attacked by the demonic forces, and we can conjecture this is so because every person who escapes the dominion of those forces weakens their power. The general populace can be corrupted by general corruption but those seeking release from the net of this world require special attention. God allows this to take place because it tempers the soul. Unto the pure all things are pure. Evil can only work on us by bringing out our own weaknesses, but when they are brought out into the open they can be dealt with if we are honest, alert and true, and if we turn to God for help.

Greater progress equals increased attack. How does this work? One might think that evil thoughts and desires that arise in one's mind show one's own sinful nature, and they might do. But they might also be put there. In dreams, for instance, we might encounter horrible things but this does not necessarily mean these things arise from our own subconscious and are somehow unresolved parts of our own nature. They might be, but they might also be a demonic assault. Attack might come from outside and other people, but it more often comes from within our own mind and we must learn to recognise it and see it for what it is. Then we just don't react to it. We don't fight it because that gives it energy and attention. We simply ignore it.

Evil in all its forms, they said. Evil has many forms. Obvious evil is obvious. We can easily recognise it, but the devil is a trickster. He can lure us down a path of sin through apparent good. How many people have thought they were fighting for God and truth when they had been deceived into following their own desires or had adopted an idol of their own making as God? The devil has corrupted whole religions in this way, not to mention political ideologies, and he can certainly corrupt us on an individual level if we are not alive to the possibility. We might think we are serving God when we are really just serving ourself.

Evil attacks at our weakest points, and these are often aspects of our character of which we are unaware. In a way, the whole spiritual path is the fight against evil which really means against our own fallen nature. The temptations that came to Christ on the mountaintop will come to all of us eventually though perhaps not in such a dramatic fashion. The way to deal with them is as Christ did. Submit yourself to God and keep him as your only goal.

What makes a real saint is conquering evil. Imagine a saint who never knew evil, who was always sweetly loving. Isn't that rather a shallow thing? What gives depth and wisdom and nobility is fighting and conquering evil within oneself. Someone who has never known evil can never be a saint. Does this mean evil is part of God's plan? I don't know but I do know he uses it to make good even better. He's clever that way.

Things Are Breaking Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Resist Not Evil

 One of the devil's favourite tricks, tried and tested throughout the ages, is to get people who are basically on the side of good to react to evil, thereby drawing them into his net. He presents one group obviously motivated by evil in some form and then another group, seeing that evil reacts to it and in so doing succumbs to an evil of its own in the form of negative emotion, anger, hatred, whatever. Unlike the first group, this second group does have good instincts but is lured into defending them in the wrong way. The members of this group should react to evil from the standpoint of the spiritual man but instead their correct recognition of evil leads them to react to it from a lower, earthly or worldly, standpoint because they are not yet stabilised in the eternal.

God can only erase evil from the world when it is no longer in the hearts of men. In a world of freedom and choice he cannot unilaterally remove evil or darkness while men have not outgrown the capacity to behave in ways conforming to their lower nature. There is the saying that all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, and that saying is true. However, what is done is important. If good men fight evil with hatred and anger in their hearts they are continuing the cycle of evil. This is the hardest thing as it is natural to hate evil, and it can even seem weak not to respond to it with force, but the fact is fighting evil in conventional or confrontational ways will not remove it. It will only perpetuate it. To do bad things or to act in bad ways even if it is ostensibly for good simply feeds the evil. It may destroy it in one form but then causes it to flourish in another, and that is all the dark forces care about. They are not bothered by the type of evil, evil meaning anti-God, anti-creation thought and behaviour, that exists. Their concern is merely that evil exists in whatever form. That God is denied.

There is no doubt that you must fight evil but you cannot fight it with its own weapons. All people on the spiritual path are confronted by the problem of how to react to evil. The natural thing when you see it is to want to contest it and defend the good, but there can be a subtle egotism in this. I am fighting on behalf of God. I am God's strong right arm in the world. You may well be called to serve as God's representative in the world, he needs such, but you do that best by letting him act through you not by acting yourself or from your own standpoint. The only way to help God eradicate evil in the world is to banish it from your own heart and then let your light shine. In the spiritual world you do not fight fire with fire but confront it with a higher spiritual energy. If Jesus had actively resisted when he was arrested he would have soon been forgotten about. By allowing himself to be killed he transformed hate into love. At least he did for those who were open to him and the truth he brought.

This world is a battleground between good and evil and evil takes many forms, particularly now when most people do not know what good is or that good as the world sees it may be spiritual evil. The teaching not to resist evil does not mean let evil have its way but don't react to it on the human level. Evil will be conquered when human beings do not reply to it in its own language. Darkness is not overcome by more darkness but only by light.

Do not misunderstand this. Jesus was not saying that a quietistic approach, defined as a purely passive acceptance of things without any attempt to change them, was desirable. The non-resistance is on the level of the ego, internal only. Every person who believes himself to be a follower of God or truth is duty-bound to defend the good and stand against evil. However, he acts from love of God or truth and that means he acts correctly - as long as he really is in touch with truth and not just his idea of it.

Recent Events

 The events of recent days in America seem to me to be significant. A frontier has been crossed with the sacrifice of a young white girl by a brutal savage caught on camera and then the murder of someone whose chief fault in the eyes of his enemies was that he was a believing Christian. It is easy to write these off as terrible but not that unusual killings given more relevance by the fact that the media, mainstream and social, uses them to promote its own ends. There is certainly an element of that and we must avoid being influenced and manipulated to go in this or that direction by unholy powers with their own agendas. 

But there is more because these two events are deeply symbolic of where we are today. First in America but really all over the West. Beauty and innocence murdered by evil and goodness destroyed by hatred. That is what we are up against and it may be that fewer people will now be able to look the other way and pretend that all is more or less ok in the world. We are in the middle of a battle between good and evil. It is a spiritual battle so not all external events will fall neatly into place on one side or the other in the way these seem to do. In a sense the individuals concerned in these two cases are not important. This goes beyond them to what they can be taken as representative of. Things truly are coming to a head. It is essential to avoid being carried away by an emotional reaction because the devil knows very well how to take advantage of that and channel the unbalanced feelings brought out, even if justifiably, into his own work. But we need to feel a cold determination in the face of attack to do what we can to further the work of God and continue to maintain the truth in a world that has abandoned it.

Added note: There are several articles online claiming that both these events were stage managed and either didn't take place or not in the way presented. Frankly I doubt it but similar things have happened before and there is definitely an interest in stirring up anger and hatred and dividing people further, possibly with the intention of provoking a civil war. I am sure there is no depth to which the powers that be will not sink. But still, whatever the truth of the matter it is important not to allow oneself to be stampeded into reaction. Observe, be aware but maintain a level of detachment which is not to say don't allow yourself to feel only that there is a balance to be struck. That is the way to go. God has his own agenda. Try to put yourself in harmony with that.

The Dissolution of Form

 In the End Times a major principle is dissolution meaning all Form built up sometimes over many centuries crumbles. Organisations created to sustain a culture and civilisation are taken over and rotted from within. They are infiltrated by forces actually opposed to the ideals behind them and, to use an expressive modern term, worn as a skinsuit, subverting their original intention. Churches are a major example of this but the phenomenon is widespread.

This tendency to dissolution works out in many ways and one of them is the self-destructive tendency of modern Western nations. I said in a comment on a recent Bruce Charlton post that in the past all nations or groups sought to preserve themselves but Western nations now are encouraged to destroy themselves, and led to believe that doing this is a virtuous act. The inspiration behind this can only come from the forces of chaotic evil, as defined in Bruce Charlton's post, and it demonstrates how these forces are supplanting necessary evil which, though evil, does not completely deny real good.

Non-Western nations and peoples might enjoy watching this, thinking the wheel of fortune is about to turn in their favour, but in fact once the West crumbles they will be left wide open to chaotic evil themselves. It is interesting to note that when I lived in India 40 years ago many people there were of the opinion that British colonialism had been a net benefit to the country, but now the almost universal belief seems to be, especially among the younger generation, that the colonial powers were just rapacious predators. Such people are usually ignorant of real history and motivated by a mixture of resentment and misplaced national pride not to mention the after effects of over 50 years of Marxist propaganda. The reality is that even if Western colonialism started off as a desire to seize the spoils of undeveloped nations, it became from the 19th century onwards the means whereby the non-Western nations could move forward out of their spiritual stagnation into the era of the consciousness soul as defined by Rudolf Steiner. This represents the fullest development of self-awareness and individualisation and is a necessary precursor to a more positive spiritual awareness. It marks the separation of the ego from its environment and has led to many of the ills of the modern world, but without passing through this stage the soul cannot become consciously aligned with divine reality and a full creator in its own right. It is somewhat akin to leaving the Garden of Eden and the meaning behind the old saying that it requires separation to lead to completion.

That is the justification for the colonial enterprise which had a spiritual purpose, much as those in the colonised countries may not wish to acknowledge the fact now. Ironically, their resentment at their colonising shows they have absorbed its lessons and become more individually aware. The next phase for them is to show maturity and acknowledge the benefits they have received. This is not so much in the form of Western medicine, science, technology, political systems etc as a new form of consciousness, one which marks a break with being largely embedded in nature and provides a launching pad to a higher spiritual awareness. Clearly, I am not saying there was no one in the colonised countries who had not already made this break in their own way but neither the masses nor the culture as a whole had until influenced by the West.

I've got somewhat off track here but only to point out that what first manifests in the West will then spread everywhere. That is the nature of these end times. We are witnessing the breakdown of form as happens in old age and, as in old age, we can either cling to the old mode of life for as long as possible or fix our mind on higher things. The destroyers of form may be doing the work of the end times but they are still in themselves part of chaotic evil. Those who seek to preserve ancient form, and not just as outward structure but in order to preserve the spiritual content it once had, are doing noble work because it is good to avoid collapse for as long as possible. However, they are probably doomed to failure because of the nature of these end times though this is not a doctrine of pessimism anymore than to acknowledge that summer turns to winter. Instead, it should lead us to move our attention away from this world into the underlying reality behind it. Then at some time in the future new forms will arise, forms better able to express that reality, but first we must endure the dismantling of the old whose time seems to have come. 

In these days many people are turning to Tradition to rescue them from the desecrations of modernity, and it is good, even vital, to seek the wisdom of the past at such a time. However, the traditional forms do not have the power they once did and cannot be revived, certainly not to their former glory. We should all learn from Tradition but we cannot restore its ancient structures which are without exception subject to the energy of end times dissolution. Sometimes it is hard to separate form and spirit but that is the lesson of the present time.

Bad People

 What can we do if we get involved with a bad person? I ask the question because this is a common experience for people who seek to become closer to God.

First of all, we have to admit that there are such things as bad people. The sentimentalised modern idea is that everyone is basically good until proved otherwise whereas the traditional Christian belief was we are all basically bad until saved. But that is not what I mean here. I am referring to something over and above the Christian concept of original sin or, as some might just call it, the ego. I am talking about people who are spiritually rotten rather than just undeveloped, unawakened or run of the mill self-centred which is most of us.

Jesus described such people when he called the Pharisees a brood of vipers, specifically associating them with the serpent, Satan. He went on to say, "How can you, who are evil, say anything good?" (Matthew 12:34). Then in John 8:44 he says that their father is the devil and they do their father's desires. These are the fallen beings who come to this world already in league with or corrupted by dark forces. Christianity errs in thinking that souls are newly created when they come into this world. We all have a prior existence in the spiritual world and we have already been through many experiences before coming here which have made us the sort of person we are. Some may have spent previous lives in the physical world, others may have known existence in other dimensions. No human soul in this world is freshly hatched, and what I am calling a fallen being is one who has largely already chosen the path of God rejection and ego before all else.

I believe there are a large number of such souls around at the present time for one of the peculiarities of our age is that it is a summing up of a cycle when all the negativity of the past is released and that includes human negativity. These are hard words but look around. Can you call them unfair? Naturally, all souls can be saved. All are God's children and Jesus came to save sinners not the righteous, but it cannot be denied that it is hard to save a fallen being.

One of the reasons it is hard is because bad people genuinely have no idea they are bad. They even consider themselves to be good and that others who may get in their way are the bad ones. They are the best of self-justifiers. They can consistently behave appallingly to someone but if that person reacts just once then it is he who is at fault and anything the bad person may have done is explained and excused by that one reaction, even if it took place beforehand! I know someone who regularly abuses and insults her husband but if he ever reacts and responds in anger then he is the one at fault, never mind the fact that he puts up with a great deal most of the time. In her mind his one moment of anger justifies her constant aggression and rudeness.

A bad person completely lacks self-knowledge and does not even want it despite claims to the contrary. Most people will strive to understand their shortcomings up to a point but fallen beings are not interested in that. They seek only what bolsters their ego and are oblivious to anything that might show them up as self-concerned monsters. It is a psychological block which they have acquired over time, I am tempted to say over lifetimes, and generally speaking nothing can penetrate it. Perhaps in certain cases, suffering or an extreme experience of some kind, some light may dawn but that is not guaranteed by any means.

These fallen beings are souls that have chosen the wrong path over a long period. They come to this world already spiritually damaged goods, self-damaged, that is. Perhaps some of them are here now as a last opportunity to progress spiritually before being consigned to experiences elsewhere. They are being given another chance to repent. Of course, there is something of this in all of us. We all bear the burden of a corrupt ego as part of the human experience and we all need to repent, but these souls are ones who have consistently failed to do so and, as a result, embedded themselves further in the fallen self.

What, then, can we do if we are in similar position to the husband of the person just mentioned? If, that is, fate has thrown us together with a person of this sort, perhaps someone we might nowadays say suffers from narcissistic personality disorder which is a spiritual as much as a psychological sickness. We might start by accepting that there is a life lesson here. Jesus suffered abuse uncomplainingly. Perhaps we are being given a similar lesson, hard as it might be. Just as God can bring good out of evil, in some cases greater good than there would have been without the evil, so he can use such fallen beings as mediums through which to test us, test our self-control, our ability to remain detached and calm and not react in the face of attack, and our capacity to forgive. The Lord's Prayer asks God to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." To be forgiven we must show that we ourselves can forgive, and how can we do that if there is nothing to forgive? Forgiveness purifies the heart. Without a cause to draw forth this forgiveness such purification is much harder.

Bad people exist and those on the spiritual path will frequently be thrown into close proximity with them. The task is to endure without responding in kind. This is the test to which we must be equal if we would follow the example laid down for us by Jesus. At the same time, it is foolishness to pretend that bad people are not bad. The devil loves to be thought misunderstood rather than wicked. He can pursue his ends that much more easily. As always we must balance love with wisdom and wisdom with love.

The Cassandra Syndrome

 I don't know how many readers have experienced this phenomenon but I find these days if I speak to anyone, even in watered-down tones, about the parlous state of the world, the country, the culture and the human soul, eyes roll and I'm told I'm talking nonsense. I have only one acquaintance in the real world who would go along with any of that. Most people simply cannot accept that the Western world in the 21st century stands on the edge of a precipice. Perhaps I just don't know the right people.

Cassandra, as I am sure you know, was a Trojan princess who was cursed by the god Apollo because she turned him down after he had given her the gift of prophecy in exchange for sexual favours. Her fate thereafter was that everything she prophesied would be true but no-one would believe her. This has echoes of Mark 6:4 when Jesus said that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and among his own kin and in his own house. I am no prophet but the spiritual state of the world is so bad that anyone who has the slightest awareness of reality ought to be able to see it. The remarkable thing is most don't and I am tempted to say they won't either. They refuse to do so because they are too firmly ensconced in their own comfortable pseudo-reality. They will go along with the clearly biased and fictitious mainstream narrative as we saw in the events of 2020 and again more recently, and get quite angry if holes in this are presented to them. They will talk about science when it appears to back them up but utterly reject it when it does not.

Why is this?  One reason is that most people are still cushioned by comfort and relative wealth. They don't want their boat to be rocked. As long as the trains run on time, so to speak, they will believe everything is fine not realising that when an electric fan is turned off the blades continue to revolve for a while but more and more slowly until they stop. The time to be concerned is when the current is cut not when the blades stop by which time it may be too late.

Then we live in a culture which has become heavily feminised and such a culture no longer has truth as a priority. It is replaced by a relativistic attitude in which there is no higher or lower but everybody has to be accepted on their own terms because we're all equal. That way we all get along, supposedly. In such a nursery world truth can seem hard and ugly, threatening even, and so you ignore it but truth is what is and what is cannot be denied. If you do you will only bring greater suffering on yourself in the long term. The Trojans ignored Cassandra when she warned them about the Horse left behind by the Greeks. They brought it inside their gates and its foreign occupants destroyed them, a parallel which should give us pause for thought today. 

And then most people now have zero awareness of the spiritual reality of things. Religion has been destroyed in the UK, and the tried and tested traditional wisdom of the past has been sidelined for fashionable dogma. The takeover of the country's institutions, political, legal, educational, the media, by the forces of atheism and materialism is now complete. Some commentators speculate that these institutions have been the victims of deliberate sabotage as a result of Communist infiltration, and the process has been so insidious and so comprehensive that does to be seem the only reasonable explanation. However, even if this is what has happened we need to recognise that the agents carrying out the scheme in this world are the servants not the masters which doesn't make them any better, but we should know the ultimate source of the evil and that is supernatural.

How have they got away with this? One answer is suggested by Yeats in his prophetic poem The Second Coming when he sums up the situation in a couple of lines that have become well-known. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Evil hates good and that gives it its passionate intensity but most people's connection to the good is too feeble to make them fight for it, and this is doubly so when they have been indoctrinated to believe that fighting is morally wrong in itself because to fight is to hate. And so we are left with the strange situation in which actual hatred disguises itself as love and condemns supposed hatred, in reality love of the good, in order to delegitimise any opposition to itself.

But we have to fight for truth when it is under assault. Given the climate in which we currently live I should stress I mean fight with words and that even words must be chosen with care. Having said that, listen to what Jesus has to say in John 8:44 about the Pharisees of whom there are still a great many around today. 

"You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." 

Isn't this hate speech, to use a modern term? Maybe, but it comes from the Apostle of Love which should make us think. The fact is there is evil. It has a spiritual source and it has to be recognised for what it is and fought with all our strength.

The Trojans refused to listen to Cassandra because she disturbed them. They would rather close their minds to truth than accept reality because reality challenged their comfortable illusions. Most prophets bring bad news - that, after all, is their function, to call an erring community back to God or the gods. But Cassandra was right and if the Trojans had listened to her they might have avoided their utter destruction. 

Evil in the Modern World

The grip evil currently has on the world is even greater than might appear from its more obvious public manifestations which are too numerous and too obvious for me to need to go into here. You know what they are.

But we must remember that the real aim of evil is not the destruction of nations by mass immigration nor the debasement of culture by egalitarianism nor the curtailment of freedom by lockdowns nor even the causing of pain and suffering. Its real goal is the bringing of souls  to spiritual damnation meaning inciting them to reject God. That is what is behind everything else .

Some people have the mission to uncover the truth behind particular establishment-pushed lies and we owe them our gratitude in that they can provide substance to back up our intuitions. Others stand back from the particular and see a more general picture in which the tentacles of evil have spread over every aspect of modern life. They can provide a spiritual framework that can be used to understand the motivations and modus operandi of evil. To see the particulars is important in that we can avoid being sucked in by them but we must not get too caught up in them. We can waste energy on fighting the enemy's foot soldiers in little side battles when we should really focus on what the generals are up to in the main war. That's the one we should fight and we should fight it for love of God not out of hatred and anger against the enemy. That having been said, there is room for righteous anger even if that should not be the main motivator.

Evil always has to be invited in. A situation may be contrived as it was 4 years ago that may encourage capitulation to evil but still there is always an element of choice. The nature of spiritual reality demands this. Free will always operates. There must be choice even if we may be manipulated by propaganda and fear in a certain direction.

The world situation is bad and will get worse. But, trite as it may sound, you have nothing to fear if you put your faith in God and align your soul with the spirit of Christ. The world is burning but always remember that nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost. In a world of lies your task is keep your eyes on heaven, hold fast to the truth and proclaim it.

Love Your Enemy Relates to Inner Reaction Not Outer Action

 Jesus said love your enemy but he didn't say love the enemy. We need to distinguish between our personal relationships and the broader issue of the fight against evil in which there is no room for compromise or tolerance or sympathy. That doesn't mean we should hate those who serve the enemy, whether that be consciously or, in many cases, unconsciously, but the enemy is always the enemy. The ideas of the enemy are corrupt and corrupting and while those who serve the enemy should not be hated nor should their ideas be given any quarter.

One of the weaknesses of contemporary Christianity, a religion which has largely become just a hollow shell, is its belief that it should love its enemy and that love means you must be nice to your enemy. The enemy will just take advantage of that and ruthlessly exploit it. Jesus told us to be harmless as doves (love your enemy) but also to be as wise as serpents. Love without wisdom is useless because it descends into vapid, ineffective sentimentality which, given the fact that we are in a spiritual war, will just be used against you. 

And we are in a spiritual war. That fact has never been more obvious. Christians are getting worked up over the depraved corruption of the image of the Last Supper at the Olympics opening ceremony, and so they should. But really what did you expect? This ceremony has been nakedly Satanic for some time. The much praised one in the UK in 2012 made me feel physically sick when I watched it which I did only to see how bad it would be. It exceeded my expectations. I haven't seen the recent one except for some still photos but it is interesting that the attack on Christ (and yes, this is an attack on Christianity but it is chiefly an attack on Christ) has become more overt. It shows that the enemy no longer hides but is revealing himself. That may mean a greater confidence because the softening up process which has been going on for more than two centuries has done its job, but it also makes the enemy easier to spot which makes him weaker.

The Olympic ceremony attack was centred on two things which are Christ and human sexuality or, in other words, God and Nature. When you attack Nature you indirectly attack God who is the author of Nature, and when you deform people's minds through this attack it makes them more susceptible to whatever poison you subsequently wish to inject them with. When you attack Christ you attack God directly. This has a good claim to be the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit which, we are assured, is the one sin that is not forgiven. And why is that? It is because it is a spiritual sin, not a physical one (lust, gluttony, sloth) nor an emotional one (anger, envy), and nor one of the mind/ego (pride). This is what we saw at the Olympic ceremony in Paris recently, the deliberate blasphemy of fallen created beings against their Creator.

We are told to love our enemy so we don't fall into the soul-destroying sins of hatred and anger. Thus, this is for our sake not for the sake of the enemy. Loving your enemy does not mean not recognising sin as sin or evil as evil but that is what it is being used to mean. Love your enemy means keep your heart pure and undefiled by hatred which will put you in the hands of your spiritual enemy. It does not mean refusing to fight that enemy.

Earth is a Filtration System

 One of the books on the right is called Earth is a School which it is. A school for the development and refinement of consciousness and a testing ground for the orientation of the heart in an environment so cleverly set up that one can find reasons to believe or not in God, depending on one's desire. I got that phrase from my teachers but the one that is the title of this piece I came up with on my own which may explain its unromantic sounding nature.

God creates to become more than he is, expanding himself throughout creation, and also to express and share love. But if love is to be real then it must be freely given which means that God must create fully independent individuals. They are extensions of him but they cannot just be extensions of him. They must have their own integrity and it must be absolute. This means love can be given or it may not. It also means the resulting individuals may freely cooperate with God and creation or resist that or even, to further their own ends, turn against it. To have the possibility of deliberate, freely chosen good you must have the possibility of not good. 

This is why God cannot make a creation that is all good to begin with. Or he could but it would be full of clones of God who had no independence, and any love would be a sort of automatic, passionless, all-purpose, blissed out and bland everybody loves everybody else equally sort that you see in some spiritual communes or, at least, you see people imitating that because they think it's what they should be doing. But that is not love which to be real must be personal.

There needs to be a first creation which acts as a selection gateway to the second creation which is the real one. Nothing evil or dark or in any way damaged or even less than perfect can get into Heaven, the second creation. This is why I call the first creation a filter for the second. All propensity to evil in the individual is brought out in the first creation where it may either  be indulged in or made excuses for or justified. Or, and this is the only reaction that gets it through the fine meshes of the filter, repented. The soul makes its choice and on that choice depends its future, whether it goes on to the second creation, the one in which evil does not just not exist but is impossible, or is recycled through one of the many environments in the first creation which differ inasmuch as they are reflections of the consciousness of the soul so some are indeed dark while others may be perfectly pleasant, even wonderful by earthly standards, but they are not the Heaven of absolute good.

If only we knew this for sure, you might say, then we would make the right decision. But that's the whole point. We don't know for sure so we must make an authentic decision, one that reflects our true self. One could add that we do actually know. All the information has been presented to us. If we choose not to accept it, that is our affair.

This idea of Earth as a filtration system, designed to extract impurities in the soul, does not preclude the Earth as a school scenario. Both operate, albeit in different ways. One the one hand, the soul is developed through its experience, expression and experiment in the world of duality, the material world, in which subject and object are wholly sundered. On the other, its inclination to or from itself and towards or away from God is brought out and examined. It is given the opportunity to see itself and to know itself, and also the chance to grow so that when it does reach the portals of heaven it can contribute creatively to the new creation and experience more of it. Many souls may qualify for heaven but the greater the spiritual development, the deeper the spiritual participation and the more the ability to add to heaven's glory.

For heaven is not a place of static peace and tranquillity. It is the eternally blossoming flower that grows from the seeds planted on Earth. Thus, it increases in beauty and glory and wonder, and we increase with it.

Why is there evil in this world? The answer to that is simple. There is evil in this world in order to eradicate it completely and let those who wish go on to a new world in which evil cannot exist. This world brings out and filters evil so that the new creation may be one of absolute good. You might say that Earth is a refinery.

An earlier piece on a similar theme is A Body of Slag.

If You Do Not Stand Against Evil, You Are Complicit With It

 I have an atheist acquaintance who will believe nothing that has not been confirmed by science, and the sort of fully materialistic science he approves of at that. 'The science'. Talking about the current transsexual craze he said he will wait for science to pronounce until making up his mind on the reality or otherwise of genuinely being able to change sex. A young man of 18 present at this conversation asked "What about basic common sense? We don't need science to corroborate that." "We certainly do", said the atheist. "Nothing can be regarded as true until scientifically proven to be so. What is called common sense cannot be relied upon". "Besides" he added "I just don't care about the gender argument. It doesn't concern me."

This person represents the kind of modern person who has so separated himself from reality, both objective reality and the reality of himself as a human being, that he doubts everything and sees meaning in nothing. This is the result of rejecting the core fact of a Supreme Being who gives reality and meaning to everything. What he is doing to himself is reducing himself to a spiritual wraith, a thin-souled being of less and less substance. He is literally wasting away spiritually. A clairvoyant might see him as surrounded by a hard shell which blocks out any incoming light. It is a sorry state to be in and requires a massive turnaround of consciousness if he is to escape his self- created prison.

Furthermore, not to care about something as important as the fundamental reality of man and woman shows a contempt for the good, the beautiful and the true. It is not sophisticated, as he appears to believe, but siding, whether consciously or not, with the agenda of evil that seeks to separate Man from God. Deny the truths embedded in creation and you deny the Creator who has put himself into creation.

I'm sure many people during the Nazi rise to power were not bothered because they were not personally affected. They turned a blind eye to moral evil. But now the situation is in many respects worse. Vast swathes of the Western population turn a blind eye to spiritual evil and are therefore complicit in its spread, enabling this black miasma to creep over human consciousness. These people are not outwardly evil but by allowing spiritual evil to spread they become part of it and their souls are damaged

At one time I thought that the mystical path was the proper end for every human soul. I still do. The spiritual light must be kindled and burst into flames within the heart. However, we are not just called to ascend to higher consciousness as in some forms of enlightenment or oneness spirituality in which we transcend the vicissitudes of this world which is then regarded as the vale of illusion. We must actively fight spiritual evil as Jesus did and if we are to do that we must recognise it. Spiritual evil is subtle and will often pose as good, worldly good, good for the fallen human being, utopian good, and many spiritual approaches of the present day can be co-opted into spiritual evil because they do not actively stand out against it. Hence the title of this post. Not to recognise good and evil in the world because everything is one or the world is a limited state in which nothing is more true than anything else is not spiritually advanced but moral relativism, and moral relativism just plays into the hands of spiritual evil which will exploit your ignorance mercilessly.

Give Them Your Mind and They Will Take Your Soul

 We live today in a spiritually sick society with every tradition undermined and every institution infiltrated by forces bent on destruction. It's right to reassess tradition in the light of contemporary consciousness but very foolish to do a 180 degree turnaround from it without fulling understanding it, and we don't. We just denied the reality which tradition was trying to express. We could have changed the language somewhat but kept the meaning behind it or even gone more deeply into that meaning but our intellectual pride was such that we failed to look beneath the surface of past ways of thinking.

As for our national institutions, once the process of infiltration had reached a certain stage there was a tipping point. That took place around the turn of the millennium after which time the mission became to carry through the new ideology rather than serve the best interests of the nation. Those who rose to the top in such circumstances were the ones who were most comfortable with the agenda or least hesitant to submit ambition to moral scruples. Of course, they employed and promoted like-minded people.

The rejection of tradition and the destruction of institutions built up over, in some cases, centuries, did not happen by chance. It was not simply a matter of organic change but deliberate subversion. Every Western country was affected in the same way at the same time and although it may seem as if this was simply how things turned out because of some fashionable -ism or the impact of the 1960s when class barriers tumbled and freedom and self-expression became the watchwords of the culture, that is not the case because these were only external manifestations of a spiritual revolution that was planned. When I use the word spiritual I do not mean it was good. I mean it came from non-material realms. It was all part of a demonic attempt to corrupt humanity and separate it from God, to present evil as good and blacken spiritual good as evil. This could be done because elements of real good could be taken out of context, promoted, exaggerated  and used to deny others aspects of good. If you deny the primacy of the spiritual then you can present material good as all that is required and what tends to spiritual good is dismissed as either irrelevant or even wicked because it conflicts with your material good.

The aim is control, both physical and psychological. One of the reasons the powers that be are trying to bring the era of cheap energy to a close is that they will have more control. Cheap energy gives freedom but when energy becomes expensive your individual freedom, certainly the power to exercise it, becomes much more circumscribed. Yet more important than this is control of thought. A tamed population does as it's told. This is why, starting from the 1950s, there has been this ongoing attempt to undermine men, especially men of a certain hue, and masculinity. Emasculate to control. This is why such things as feminism and egalitarianism are pushed so relentlessly with the newly invented sins of sexism and racism the worst thought crimes you can commit. It is important to realise that ideologies such as these do have, to quote Bruce Charlton, a "core insight of validity", this being the value of the free individual, each and every one. But the good in them has been deformed and made into an evil by being exaggerated and used to suppress other aspects of truth. A truth taken out of context and the area to which it applies and then applied to other areas in which it does not apply or not in the same way becomes a lie. But, because there is a certain truth nestling within the two ideologies just mentioned it is hard to argue with them as they are presented now on an either/or basis which is what the argument usually gets reduced to. You have to go above and beyond the good/bad dichotomy to find the truth about many things these days which is why we have to go outside both conventional traditional and progressive thinking to get anywhere.

What is the aim of this undermining of freedom and attempted control of thought? For some in the outer circles it may be power but for the real instigators of the process it is the separation of Man from God. Spiritual not political. This is why there are so many contemporary movements that seek to rewrite the reality of creation. Dismantle creation and you do away with God to an even greater extent than simply not believing in him. As long as you accept the natural rules of creation you retain some link to its Maker but when you no longer observe even these you have completely lost touch with reality. Then you can be moulded in whatever shape the demons who are behind all this wish. Give them your mind and they will take your soul.

Note: This is the third part of a short series.

What is Evil?

The Destruction of the West

The Destruction of the West

 To what extent is the current elite deliberately trying to destroy the West, specifically the Christian West, and to what extent is this simply a matter of false ideology and ignorance, short termism and even misplaced good intentions? For, make no mistake, the West is being destroyed. It is being destroyed by materialism, atheism, mass immigration, which is seemingly unstoppable, feminism, which gives a whole new meaning to the traditional women and children first saying, moral relativism and several other movements and ideologies which any spiritually sane person can recognise and which are mostly interlinked and which result from the loss of the sense of the transcendent and the promotion of envy and resentment to virtues.

Just as there is a hierarchy of good so there is a hierarchy of evil. At the upper levels of this hierarchy there is intent, definite, deliberate, serious, cold, malevolent intent. At mid and lower levels, not so much, at least not so much in the sense of something planned and acknowledged. Some of these people may want to destroy but they tell themselves they are motivated by honest impulses to make a better world. No doubt there are elements of that in their psychological makeup but there are also strong feelings of anger and hatred plus the afore-mentioned resentment. They are co-opted by those at higher levels because of some personal moral defect or intellectual weakness or spiritual vacuity. They are unwitting servants of evil but they would not be co-optable if there was not this attraction to sin or spiritual blindness within them.

But we are all sinners so what's the difference? It is precisely this. Yes, we are all sinners but some of us recognise this and struggle against it while others allow themselves to be defined by it. These people justify, excuse, even celebrate their sin. They identify with it and do not allow true spiritual feeling to reveal it for what it is. It is their treasure, their pet, rather than their burden, their pride rather than their shame.

Nothing in this world is 100% one thing. None of us are perfect and none of us are wholly bad. And yet, the world is moving in a direction in which the dividing line between sheep and goats, between those who, on the whole, wish to love and serve God, the truth, the good, however they might define it, and those who, in one way or another, serve the forces of anti-God, anti-truth, anti-good, is being drawn. Tests are underway. They examine our spiritual responses to situations and ideas, but be careful of that word spiritual. It does not necessarily mean what we think it does, we who live in a decidedly unspiritual age. Thus, it is not universal loving kindness unless that is balanced with real love of real spiritual (as opposed to worldly) good. For instance, everyone would say that God loves us but what does he love?  Does he love us as we are or does he love the soul rather than the earthly personality? Both you say? Then does he love the murderer as murderer? This is an extreme example but it illustrates the point that though God loves the sinner he does not love the sinner as sinner. If the sinner will not let go of his sin he is separating himself from God's love. That will always be there should he repent and, for the sake of the soul, God will do what he can to bring that sinner to repentance but he cannot override free will.

Therefore, spiritual response means response to the reality of the world of the soul and to the values of that world. It does not mean treating the lower self as though it were the higher self but that is often the practice of worldly people, even self-defined religious and spiritual people, who lack understanding of that world and who misinterpret the truths of spirit by seeing them in the light of this world and its priorities.

The West is being destroyed, in part by deliberate plan, in part by ignorance, in part by greed, selfishness and so on. But also because its time has come. If that were not the case then the attempt to destroy it would not be succeeding as it undoubtedly is. For those who lament its passing, and I do, let me quote some words of my teachers from many years ago at a time when this process was certainly well underway but had not reached anything like its present state. They said "Nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost." When we see the destruction of goodness and truth in this world we are right to lament it but we should also remember that even this was but a shadow and pale reflection of that which inspired it and which remains inviolate in the higher worlds.

The West is under a ferocious attack by the powers of evil. This has been a long term operation, though it is coming to a head now, and for that reason people who only think in terms of human generations cannot see it for what it is. They think the desire for money or power is what motivates the corrupt elites. But these people are manipulated, their vices exploited, by supernatural powers which seek spiritual destruction and the separation of the soul from God. Only when you recognise this simple, basic fact can you understand what is going on in the world, especially the Western world, today. It is right to lament the destruction of the good but it is more important to hold fast to the vision of the divine. Our salvation never lay in this world.

Added note: To say that salvation does not lie in this world does not mean we should just accept the destruction of the good here. We should not but we should also understand that the real good is elsewhere and that will give us a proper perspective.

What is Evil?

 I've written about this before but I want to consider it again because the battle between good and evil is fundamental today. Of course, it always is but two things mark out the present time. One, the issue is confused, deliberately so, in a way it has not been before, and two, the lines are being drawn with each side becoming more defined, albeit in a way that is not immediately obvious to everyone.

What, then, is evil? The answer is simple. Evil is the rejection of God. That is it. Now, this takes various forms and manifests itself in a number of ways but the root cause of them all is that rejection. And the rejection of God is the rejection of truth because God is truth. Therefore, a God rejecter is a person of bad faith - literally. I realise this is a nasty thing to say in the context of the present day but trying to skirt round the edges of the problem just leaves it unsolved. If you deny God you are a bad person and you will do bad things and support wicked ideology. Perhaps at one time there were legitimate grounds for doubting the reality of God. Human consciousness had changed and a religion formed for the previous stage of consciousness was no longer sufficient for many even if the basics were still present. But now anyone of good faith should be able to see where the rejection of God has taken us and where it will take us. This should force any atheist or even agnostic to make a full reassessment of his position. A period of doubt is inevitable for most people in the modern world, and it's even healthy as it can lead to a deeper faith eventually as one reconsiders the nature of life, the self and the world and no longer takes religion on face value but penetrates beneath its surface. But that period should not be a destination. The healthy soul will move on to acceptance of divine truth. 

Why do I say this so confidently? Partly because God is in us and he will speak to us if we do not suppress his voice, and partly because a healthy soul seeks love, goodness and beauty and these cannot exist unless they are grounded in a God. Otherwise they are no more real than the appearance of a face formed by clouds would be. So either you accept these things are not real in which case anything goes or else you acknowledge their reality in which case you must acknowledge the existence of that which gives them reality.

Where has this rejection of God taken us? For a start, it has taken us to a world of post-truth. This had been creeping up on us for many decades but it took over around the turn of the millennium since when everything is said and done for appearance and effect. Very little simply because it is right. Recently we have seen that even science has become more a matter of consensus than truth, and as for politics, the least said the better.

Then it has taken us to the triumph of technology. Technology starts as the attempt to force Nature to human will which implies the prioritising of matter over spirit but then as it proceeds and develops it becomes the means to remake the human form changing it from being in the image of God to a self-created thing which, by definition, is a deformed thing.

All the various ideologies of the modern world which are supposedly humanistic are actually Satanic.  They are so because they reject God and try to recreate not only human society but even the human being (see above) in a form that has no need of God. The only conclusion to be drawn from this really quite obvious and undeniable fact is that modernism, the whole of it not just the more extreme parts, is evil. If that shocks you or seems excessive it is only because the full effects of the modernistic agenda have not yet been realised. But the steps to that end game have been and they are continuing to be taken. One leads to another and on we go to the inevitable conclusion though maybe there is no clear end, just a deeper and darker descent into spiritual loss and separation. In fact, there will be an end because God will not permit things to progress beyond a certain point but there is some way to go as most people are not yet fully corrupted.

To say that the whole of modernism is evil refers to its manifestation in today's world. It does not mean there was nothing good or necessary about the developments in human consciousness, largely to do with a greater awareness of self, that came about in the Western world and from there were exported and spread all over the globe. This was a spiritual advance but the energies behind it were captured and perverted by demonic forces, and the new sense of self instead of dedicating itself to pursuing divine mysteries became fixated on itself. God was rejected and into that vacant spot humanity put itself though it will find that actually what it has done is made itself the dupe of demonic forces. Now we have reached the point where to retain any aspect of modernism in any of the various forms that have come down to us is like not cutting out a canker from a plant. It will eventually spread over the whole plant, corrupting and killing it. Everything that the world believes today has to be reassessed in the light of the reality of God and his purpose for the soul. Absolutely everything.

Am I really saying in this article that people who don't believe in God are bad people? Don't we all know individuals who do not believe who are good, decent people not to mention those who do who are not? That is not the point. For a start, many people think they believe in God but they just subscribe to an image and are not awake in the heart which is where true belief is centred. That is what I am talking about here, and the test is do you see the world in the light of God or God in the light of the world? 

Then there is the further point that this is not about personal behaviour. It is about whether or not the heart is open to the source of truth and goodness. A heart that is so open is a good heart and will acknowledge God. One that is not so open is actually rejecting the source of goodness. How can you call that good? So you see it is not about whether you are good (which in the modern world means relatively tolerant and charitable and not much more) but whether you love good, actively love real spiritual good. Those who do will believe in God because one inevitably means the other. Those who don't love good will not believe in God. It's all about love. Genuine believers in God may behave badly. They shouldn't but they may. We are, after all, all sinners and repentance is an ongoing requirement. Those who reject God may lead outwardly exemplary lives but that is of small concern if their heart is turned away from their Creator. I repeat it is all about whether the heart is oriented to, open to, real goodness. Depending on circumstances, this need not take exactly the same form in all cases. I personally believe that many spiritual approaches contain pathways to God, not all but many, even if Christ remains the Way, the Truth and the Life and ultimately no one comes to the Father except through him. But people take different ways to get to him.

God is reality and God is good. If you reject God you reject the good in reality. That is evil.

Leftism is at the very least the Pawn of Satanism

 It is said that evil often proclaims itself as such in some way. This may be because the law of free will dictates that if people are to be corrupted they must have some clue that this is the case. Within that criterion though there is ample scope for evil to disguise itself as good to the eye of one who does not wish to see beneath the surface and, on some level, actively wants to be taken in because this will justify some sin or fallen desire.

In occultism the left hand path is the path of transgression, black magic and sexual licence. Often rebranded as a short cut to enlightenment, crazy wisdom, breaking the rules for greater freedom, rising above good and evil and other pseudo-glamorous deceptive descriptions, it is, in fact, the path that leads away from God and towards not God which is all that rejects God and the natural boundaries and standards of his creation. This ends up, if pursued and unrepented, in a spiritual state analogous to hell because hell is nothing more nor less than separation from God. That is a state in which light must be stolen as the soul can no longer get it directly from God. A soul has to fall a long way before that will happen but if it persists on the left hand path and does not turn back to its Maker that is what will happen.

The left has long been associated with the unnatural and the dark side of life. Obviously this is not the case literally but symbolically there is a certain truth to the idea. We take our modern usage from the time of the French Revolution when supporters of the monarchy sat on the right in the National Assembly and supporters of the revolution sat on the left. A pure coincidence you might think but those who are symbolically minded will see more to it than that. We are being told something. None of this means that elements of what became the Revolution, which term I am using to mean the overturning of traditional ideas in the 18th century, were not genuinely progressive. Human consciousness was evolving. The relationship between all sections of society from aristocrats to the ordinary people and between men and women had to be adjusted in the light of greater self-consciousness. Not to mention that a new approach to religion was called for with a greater emphasis on internal enquiry. But the whole process was hijacked and continues to be, and the clue to the hijacking was right there at the beginning.

The hallmark of Satanism is rejection of God and the order of creation. This involves undermining and then inverting all natural hierarchies and if you look at the last couple of centuries, and especially the last 50 years, you simply cannot help but see this as the underlying tendency of the left. It moves from one group to another but always with the aim of subverting the natural order. The excuse is compassion or justice but the real motive is resentment and even hatred of God.

It would clearly be absurd to say that every leftist is a Satanist but every one has allied him or herself to a degree with the Satanic agenda and has done so because of spiritual failings. At the bare minimum every one is a dupe of some kind. And note that when I talk of Satan I am not talking of an individual being though there may well be such. But the prime manifestation of this impulse is the tendency in the created individual motivated by corrupted desire and badly turned will to want to sit on God's throne. This is what is behind the left, particularly as it is in our day.

Religion Won't Save You Unless You Take Full Responsibility.

 Francis Berger has a good post on his blog about how being religious these days is not enough if you lack proper spiritual perception which is the ability to see underneath and beyond the doctrines to the truth within them. Often religious people completely fail to see the evil that is running riot throughout the world and sometimes those who do see this evil fail to see its supernatural origin and the spiritual motivation behind it. It seems we cannot bring ourselves to believe in supernatural evil. We are spiritual sentimentalists who will sing "All you need is love" as we are hauled off to the pit. Well, perhaps that is a bit over the top but the fact is religion's weapons, and Christianity's in particular, are being turned against itself to advance an agenda of spiritual destruction. The well-meaning but naive and emotionally self-indulgent will be left behind unless they toughen up and acquire the wisdom of serpents. They must develop some spiritual backbone and risk being thought bad, because apparently judgemental, by the world, and the world includes most religious people who have allowed themselves to be absorbed by it.

A commenter on Francis's post asked if there were any words of Christ's applicable to the present situation. What immediately sprang to mind when I read this were these words from Matthew 7 21-23.

"Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’"

Many people think they are good Christians because they believe in Christ. That is not enough now if indeed it ever was. You have to start becoming Christ-like. You must at least allow him to be born in your heart and not simply have an exteriorised faith. What is it to practice lawlessness? It is to go against the law and the primary law is to love God which means to love truth. How many religious people really love truth even above their religion? That is what is required. Note, I do not say love truth above Christ but I do say that all Christians must love truth above their Christianity.

In the same Gospel, verse 24, chapter 24, Christ talks about even the elect being deceived in the end times, such will be the all-encompassing but subtle wickedness of those (these?) times. If the elect are deceived then the rank and file will be too. I call it subtle wickedness though it is not so very subtle. But it is not obvious like mass murder and that is why so many religious people fail to see it. They don't realise that evil has changed its modus operandi or it has done so to a degree. Now, in line with the change in human consciousness, it likes to present itself as good. But the problem is also that we are so influenced by materialism, even if we are religious, that we just cannot accept that what might appear random has a purposeful intelligence behind it.

It is good to be able to see the evil that dominates in the world but that is not the end of the story. Sometimes those who have a serpent's wisdom lack a dove's harmlessness. We must have both and not let our awareness of evil curdle our hearts. Then there is the matter of hope. Yes, evil is everywhere but God will prevail. This is the hope, or knowledge really, that we should always keep in mind, whatever the outer circumstances.