Spiritual Teachers are Largely Useless

In fact, many of them are net negative. I was prompted in this thought after being sent this link to the London Mind, Body and Spirit Festival which takes place shortly. Most of the spiritual professionals who appear at these affairs in talks and workshops are just selling their wares. They are basically business people who have a talent for giving a spiritual presentation but they cater to those who seek spirituality as a lifestyle accessory or means to develop themselves. They are the psychics, intuitives, positive thinkers, motivational speakers, wellness experts and aura readers who offer a kind of therapeutic self-help for people tired of materialism or, since few of them actually renounce it, looking to expand their horizons a bit beyond materialism. I suppose you could say they are a stage to be gone through but you shouldn't need to experience that stage to realise the essential emptiness and self-indulgence of it.

I'm sure some of these teachers believe they are doing good and perhaps some of them are but in my opinion they are mostly leading people away from true spiritual understanding down one of the many blind alleys that the novice might encounter when he first starts to aspire to something more than this world has to offer. Anybody who makes spirituality their profession, other than a bona fide priest who anyway follows a vocation not a profession and is certainly not in it for fame or fortune, is either a fraud or, since most of them are not that, an opportunist or, best case scenario, on a low rung of spiritual understanding. Some years ago my guides informed me that there were many teaching half-truths at present and, though they were not all evil, they were not very evolved. I wouldn't say the picture has changed since then. I am not saying these people are evil but what they have to offer is a spirituality intended to make one feel good, and the spiritual path is not about making the earthly self happy and fulfilled or even loving and good. It has one purpose only which is to reorient the heart and mind to God.

So, are there no spiritual teachers worth following? It depends what you mean by teacher. There are certainly people from whom one can learn but the whole concept of a spiritual teacher is foreign to the West. It is imported from Eastern religion, the guru and so on, and therefore it is operating on a different sort of level. But even on that level I would maintain that the spiritual teacher role as it exists now exists as much for the teacher's sake as it does for the pupil. Certainly we can and should share our understanding but the spiritual path today is an individual path and all teachers can do is give us a push in the right direction at an early stage. Thereafter, we must form our own relationship with God. No doubt many teachers would say exactly that but often by their behaviour they encourage dependence, personality worship and idolatry. Nowadays the spiritual teacher is just another manifestation of celebrity culture.

The Expansion of Consciousness

This is a phrase that has long been current in many esoteric and mystical circles as a description of the spiritual project. I've used it myself in the past because one normally expresses oneself in the language of the day but also because, let's be honest, I probably wasn't thinking too deeply about what it actually implies. 

So, what does it imply? To begin with, is expansion of consciousness necessarily a spiritual thing? One assumes so based on an evolutionary description of human unfoldment, and there is certainly the strong probability that the universe is, in one sense, a machine for the growth of consciousness. In that sense then it is spiritual. Human beings can grow out of their limited earthbound type of consciousness into higher states. But they can do this through drugs and there is nothing spiritual about drugs or the states they bestow. Drugs can give the impression of love, bliss, oneness and all that, as can some forms of mental illness, but this is not spiritual because it relates to effects not inner transformation. Meditation and other spiritual, so-called, techniques can also bring about heightened states of consciousness but the subject is not fundamentally changed by that. He may think he is and he may act in a particular way but deep inside he is not really changed at all for one may have many expansions of consciousness and still remain the same fallen, unredeemed human ego at core. This is true even if the expansionary experiences are, so to speak, not just extending the circumference of the circle but going from a circle to a sphere. In these cases the subject may act as though ego has been transcended but he is the same person, responding to his experience by imitating what he thinks is the type of being that would be stabilised in this experience. And note that these expansions of consciousness are all just temporary anyway.

That is why all proper spiritual teachers tell meditators not to imagine they can do without prayer. The old dream of fallen human nature is to think it can reach godhood without God. This is a wicked lie designed to appeal to the spiritually avaricious ego. It's what tempted Eve to bite the apple and it's what tempts many would-be mystics and esotericists today. Spirituality without God is not possible. That is the major drawback of Buddhism though God is often smuggled in through the back door in that religion.

On a simple linguistic level we can say that something that expands still has the same centre, and from the spiritual perspective it is the transformation of the centre that matters so the very concept of expanding consciousness is not spiritual. This doesn't mean that souls in heaven do not have a transfigured state of being but that is because they have taken on the mind of Christ and no spiritual practice can enable that. It depends of the soul giving itself to God through Christ and then becoming the recipient of grace. It may be argued that this is just a different way of expressing the same thing, expanding consciousness and taking on the mind of Christ is six of one and half a dozen of the other, but the way you express yourself matters because it both reflects and forms the way you think. If you think of the spiritual journey in terms of expanding consciousness you are thinking of it in terms of what the ego can gain and how it can grow. To reach a truly transfigured consciousness is only possible through taking on the mind of Christ and that can only happen through the soul loving Christ and asking nothing for itself other than to be allowed to do so.  Everything else is just to make the soul grow by applying growth stimulus from without. This alone grows the soul from within which is the only true way.

Repentance of Sin vs Going Beyond Ego

Secular humanists rule the world and secular humanists do not recognise any fundamental and unalterable moral failing in the human being. We are basically good even if we have the tendency to go wrong sometimes though if we do that is usually the fault of our environment or experiences rather than some inbuilt defect in our human nature. Evil, insofar as that is acknowledged at all, is caused by illness or bad circumstances.

The Christian Church has a different view. It teaches that as a result of the Fall when Adam and Eve disobeyed God humanity has inherited a strong inclination towards selfishness and sin of various kinds. Theologically this is called original sin. It means we have an indelible stain on our soul or one that was indelible until Christ offered us the chance of redemption through faith in him.

When a secular humanist takes to religion, or spirituality as they would probably prefer to think of it, they take a lot of their secular humanism with them. Thus, although they will usually acknowledge the fact that one needs to transcend the ego to realise spiritual knowledge, knowledge of the knowing by being sort, they will frame this idea in terms of freedom from ignorance or illusion. They will rarely think in terms of sin or spiritual responsibility. It's all more about what they can gain from the transaction rather than putting themselves right with their Creator.

But this is to misunderstand what the human self is and what we should be doing with it. It is not an illusion nor is it the result of ignorance. You might say that undue attachment to it, even over-identification with it, is the problem but the thing itself is real and meant to be. There is still a problem that needs to be addressed but this is not done by denying the real source of the problem. That source is not the self but the self gone wrong. In other words, the fallen self and this is something that needs to be cured rather than simply 'risen above'. You can attain certain mystical states in which the self has indeed been risen above but you will always, yes always, come back down to your self. Then the experience, or the memory of it, may make you feel that you have gone beyond self and your persona will adopt a particular  kind of mask to reflect that but you are just deceiving yourself. The sick or fallen self is still there.

The only cure for this is repentance which means genuine contrition for your fallen state. This must be a deeply personal response to a profound realisation of the goodness and perfection of God and the numerous ways in which you fall short. This is why true saints think of themselves as bad people. This is not a pose though obviously it can be when those who are not saints imitate what they think is saintly behaviour. But the true saint will have a sometimes agonising sense of his unworthiness. Clearly, this should not be taken too far to the point where it becomes almost a self-indulgence (all good and true things can be perverted), but the saint will feel the lowly nature of his self precisely because he is aware of the glory of God. This is why all true spiritual experiences lead to humility and reticence rather than the inflated sense of personal worth that the lesser variety of experience, significant as it may seem to the experiencer, may bestow on what you might think of as an unripe or immature soul, one that cannot process its experience in a proper context.

The path to spiritual understanding is not through trying to transcend the ego (what is trying and why?) but through repentance. It is only repentance that can purify the self of what is traditionally described as original sin. But we must go further and say that even repentance by itself is not enough. This is the self washing its dirty clothes but it actually needs a change of garment, and the garment in question is that of Christ which the soul must put on in order truly to be cleansed of the stains of self. These two things, repentance and full acceptance of Christ, are the only things that can cure the soul of its spiritual disease and render it whole. The attempt to transcend the ego without replacing it by the light of Christ can only ever lead to one of the many distorted reflections of the true spiritual world as they exist in the psychic and psychological states of being. It cannot reach the true spiritual level.

Antichrist and the End Times

 Christians await the Antichrist who comes to deceive the faithful and non-believer alike at the end times, the faithful to lead them away from Christ and the non-believers to confirm and justify them in their non-belief. Sinning is one thing but denying the sinfulness of sin quite another. Getting human beings to do this is one of his chief aims. Who is this person and when are the end times? In a certain sense, it is always the end times because the world is always winding down and there is always corruption, sin and death. However, more specifically, the end times are said occur when the Gospel has been preached all over the world, and that surely is now. At the same time, there is predicted to be a general falling away from the truths of Christianity as mankind abandons the Gospel en masse, and that also seems to be the case today. Whatever the reality of the situation, and we cannot know, it makes sense to be prepared as were the wise virgins in the parable. It certainly seems as though we are in an end times scenario but it may be now or it may not. Either way there is no doubt that we are in an end times period, whether it be the main event or simply a precursor of it.

Antichrist types have appeared throughout history but these are just forerunners. They are charismatic, persuasive, powerful figures who may even appear to do good but they lead their followers away from Christ and towards themselves, and that is the case even for those who proclaim some kind of spirituality. I would speculate that the spiritual field is rife with little antichrists and the individual who fulfils the prophecy may well appear in that field teaching a spirituality that offers godlike powers but is hollow at the centre and that precludes Christ. Perhaps he will include Christ but as one of many, a great prophet but not the only begotten Son of God because that would be divisive and exclusive and God speaks to everyone in their own language. Or so he will say. We know he will be subtle, "able to deceive the very elect", and so we can be certain he will not be obviously wicked except to those whose inner vision is fully operative, and that may not be as many of us as we might like to think.

At the moment a great deal of spiritual evil comes through the left. It is the source of many things that are anti-God and anti-nature though packaged under that meaningless word 'progressive'. (Progress means progress towards a destination but where is that destination?). Then there is the idea of the New World Order in which a One World government takes control, ostensibly to benefit humanity and bring us all together but really to enslave us. I don't doubt that certain elites are working to bring this about and that the events of 2020 formed part of their attempts at control. They, or those at the top of the pile, are working in cohort with supernatural demonic beings to impose a spiritual death sentence on humanity. But what do we know about demons? They lie, they deceive. They would have no problem lying to their servants. What if these elites are being used just to be thrown under the bus at the due moment? Already, many people are waking up to the potential tyranny of a New World Order and some speculate that the Antichrist will be someone who reveals the materialism and atheism of an anti-spiritual NWO and offers in its place a spirituality of heightened consciousness and love and brotherhood. What's wrong with that you might think? Simply this. The fact is that love and brotherhood, to be real and not facsimiles of the real, must be grounded in Christ. He is their only source and without him they are spurious copies. The Antichrist is not called the Antichrist for nothing. He will not seem to be against goodness and truth, even love. But he will be against Christ, maybe not overtly but in practise. He will promise the deification of humanity, somewhat like the serpent did to Eve back in the day. He will teach human beings they are intrinsically divine and simply have to realise that or bring it out, salvation without repentance. Materialism is bad but false spirituality is worse because it corrupts us at a deeper level of our being.

This is just speculation and the main purpose for raising the point is to remind us that we must be constantly alert to deception which will always attack us through some chink in our armour, meaning some personal weakness or preferred and insufficiently acknowledged sin. At the same time, we must not let a fear of being deceived blind us to the reality of spiritual growth and renewal or we will remain stranded in the past. This is why it is so important to develop intuition, our inner guide to reality. There are those who recognise the pitfalls of personal understanding without also seeing the absolute necessity for it if one is to attain a closer connection to Christ for he is not just the Jesus of the Gospels. He is also the absolute heart of spiritual reality and that can only be known in your own heart which means you must include but go beyond conventional religious teaching. There is nothing else for it if you would really know Christ and not just remain in the world of images and symbols which is where most of the conventionally religious stay.

Perhaps these are the End Times, perhaps not. But it certainly seems as though they might be in which case it is all the more necessary to be suspicious of all promises and apparent revelations and to construct the inner bridge that leads from your heart to God which bridge is that of the spiritual form of Jesus Christ.

Failing the Litmus Tests

I read recently that as much as 80% of spiritual communities went along with the patently false propaganda of 2020 and got masked, pecked and all the rest of it. This is a staggering proportion, given that such people should be aware of what lies behind appearance and, further, should be focussed in the eternal rather than the transitory. Why such a failure of understanding?

 As I see it, there are several reasons the people in these spiritual communities failed these litmus tests as Bruce Charlton has accurately dubbed them. First, and most obviously, they lack discernment, but why is this? I believe much of it comes down to motivation.

It is not sufficiently appreciated that the reason someone takes to the spiritual path is more important than the fact that they do. There are only two valid reasons. One is a fierce passion for truth. You know there is more out there than is generally recognised and you will not rest until you uncover as much of this as you can. People who fall into this category will not have been misled by the lies and deceit of the recent past. They may not have been able to put their finger on exactly what was going on but they will have felt a profound dissatisfaction with what was presented as fact. To put it bluntly, it smelt very bad.

The other reason for taking to the spiritual path is a love of God. In fact, these two reasons are by no means exclusive. There may be a different emphasis to begin with but the more one travels on the path, the more these two come together and become the same thing. For the person who loves God the machinations of man are evident because these machinations come from a rejection of God. The closer one gets to God the easier it is to discern worldly lies that spit in God's face.

Am I saying that people in spiritual communities who went along with the propaganda don't have sufficient zeal for truth or love for God? Yes, I am saying precisely that. They failed the test because they were more concerned with themselves than they were with God or truth and therefore they may have been in spiritual communities but they were not real spiritual people by any of the criteria that matter. I will concede that it may not have obvious to everyone straightaway what was happening in 2020, and what is happening today might also sometimes take a while to see through. But anyone whose heart and mind are in the right place should be able to tell the real from the unreal. If you can't perceive the shadow cast by demons it means you have not yet properly turned towards the light.

The Guru Figure

Bruce Charlton recently sent me a link to a Youtube video about Seraphim Rose and Alan Watts. 

For those who don't know Seraphim Rose was an American Russian Orthodox priest and definitely someone who was called to holiness. Alan Watts was a populariser of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, in the 1950s at a time when the appeal of Eastern religion was strong among a certain spiritually deracinated intellectual class. I first came across one of his books around 1980 but had an instinctive dislike of the showmanship element I felt I saw in him so only read a few pages before putting the book away. It was well-written and even insightful up to a point but it was also obvious that here was someone who had the words off pat but didn't live the teachings at all, except superficially, and reading that actually does more spiritual harm than good. The video more or less confirms that this was, or became, Seraphim Rose's opinion too. He was attracted to Watts at first but soon saw through him. Bruce Charlton pointed out that Watts seems manipulative and selfish with a cold heart and that you can see this if you watch the video with the sound off. He appears to be trying to intoxicate, entrance, impress and cast a spell on his audience. 

I quote this insight of Bruce's here because this is just what so many guru figures of recent decades have done and no doubt still do, though I am not familiar with what goes in that world nowadays. The potent glamour of being seen as the spiritually enlightened master is very strong, and charismatic figures are drawn to it as a way to feed their egos and dominate lesser mortals who give them energy through their adoration. I once asked my teachers about this because it was something that troubled me in my younger days. They told me that these people were not all evil and some did good at their level. However, that implies that some are evil which does indeed seem to be the case. Such teachers use spirituality to advance themselves and they don't care about their disciples other than as satellites revolving around their sun. The following remarks about Watts from the video can be applied to others of his ilk, and that would be a significant number of prominent gurus and spiritual teachers of the last 100 years.

• His version of mysticism promised him spiritual benefits while allowing him to do whatever he wanted.
• He streamlined Zen to cater to the modern mentality of self-worship.
• He destroyed souls including his own.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you take God and the idea of sin out of the equation. Then you use spirituality as a consumer product which means as something to boost the self. I once believed these people were just in error but now I see many of them are badly motivated, predators on the spiritually naive.

In my estimation the change in human consciousness over the last 200 years, with greater individualism and freedom, means that the age of the guru is past. Of course, there is still a place for spiritual teachers of various sorts but not for the guru as the supreme dispenser of wisdom and enlightenment who must be looked up to almost as though he were God or, at least, a god. That was never a Western concept anyway but the guru became a very romantic figure in the West in the 20th century and many unscrupulous spiritual salesmen jumped on board that train. Alan Watts was by no means the worst but he was a definite type.

Unbelief Posing as Belief

 I got into trouble the other day because I described someone as an atheist. "She's not an atheist" I was told, "She believes in God". I didn't pursue the subject but what I thought to myself was "No, she doesn't, she only thinks she does."

What I meant by this was that this person, like so many, believes she believes in God because in her mind she thinks that God might exist and she would like God to exist though on her terms. But she doesn't really believe. Her behaviour is not that of a person who takes into consideration what the existence of God might actually mean. She doesn't have any kind of inner connection to the reality that is God. God is not  more real to her than this world. Worldly culture influences her far more than spiritual reality does. Her belief in God is actually a form of humanism with a small serving of God on top. He might be the cherry on the cake but he's not the whole cake.

The Pharisees thought they believed in God but they didn't. They believed in a construct of their own making not the living God at whose glance angels tremble (in love and awe not fear). The bishops in the Church of England think they believe in God but the only conclusion one can draw from their actions and words is that most of them don't. These people believe in the human race and they like to think there is some sort of spiritual component in humanity but they don't behave as if they have any understanding of the truth of God. If you don't have any understanding of God what is it you actually believe in?

To believe in God requires that you take God as the foundation of everything else you believe. He is not one ingredient among many. Everything else is seen in the light of that reality and is subsidiary to it. It also means you must have some understanding of what God is, how he expresses himself in creation and what he requires of you personally and human beings collectively. You might ask how can any mere mortal understand God? Obviously you can't completely but you can insofar as a human being can. He exists within your heart and will make his presence known to you if you listen properly, look correctly and remove, as far as possible, preconceived ideas and wishful thinking. You can understand God if you look at yourself in his light but never if you look at him in your light.

So, yes I would say that many people might intellectually acquiesce to the idea of God but they don't really believe in him. Of course, a lot of these people would feel insulted if you told them this but if they were honest with themselves they would see the justice of it. The problem for them is that until they see the truth of the accusation they will remain in illusion, thinking they have put themselves right spiritually while in fact they are as far away from the truth as any regular atheist. 

You only really believe in God if that belief overshadows, indeed determines, every other belief you have.  And nowadays if you say you believe in God but still go along with the worldly agenda, much of which grew out of the specific denial of God, then frankly you are no different from a non-believer. We live at a time of not just materialism but the assimilation of religion and spirituality to the materialistic ethos with the consequences that many of those who would call themselves believers fail to realise that believing in God means rejecting all the trappings and priorities of this world. Seeking to serve two masters they simply become absorbed by the world. Just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

You must believe in the head and you must believe in the heart. If it is just the former then what you believe in is not God. It is only an idea you have about God and that idea will be formed from things other than God, very often things of this world - just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

The Temptation of the Esoteric

 Ancient mysteries, hidden secrets, the wisdom of the ancients. Whose imagination isn't stirred by the idea of arcane knowledge preserved from initiates of the distant past? The magic of Egypt, the mysticism of India, the occultism of Tibet can all be powerful drugs to the questing mind seeking to penetrate the veil between this world and the next. It's intoxicating stuff and there undoubtedly is a reality behind it all. It's not just dreams and fantasy. There is a real substance to it. But is it what spirituality is actually about, especially for us here and now in the modern West?

It's just a coincidence but esoteric and exotic do sound very similar. And it's not just the words that are alike. They both conjure up the sense of something fascinating and strange that can open up unsuspected new areas of experience. They can take you beyond the mundane and everyday and give you a feeling of superiority over ordinary people if you explore or even possess them. 

Wise teachers have always warned of the difference between magic and religion. The esoteric, even if it is spiritually focused, has much in common with magic in that it is to do with knowledge and power. It certainly appeals to those who hunger for these things and who may be motivated by that hunger. But I am always reminded of something the Masters said to me. Spiritual truth is simple but it is easy to get lost in philosophical speculations which lead nowhere. And not just philosophical speculations. Anything that is not inspired by the love of God is a spiritual sidetrack, and the esotericist is often a long way from simple faith and worship, using the word worship in what I regard as its proper sense which is loving God.

Everything changed with the advent of Christ. I appreciate this more and more as the world sinks further into spiritual darkness and Christ is neglected not just by the people but often by the churches that preach in his name  Before his time there were many forms of spirituality and they could open doors into the unknown for the qualified initiate. But they did not lead to Heaven. Those who go back to the past without fully accepting Christ are not revivifying ancient teachings that will give them access to the Mysteries. The spirit has departed from them. It was once present but is no longer and though you may be able to recreate a simulacrum of the once living and vital truth embodied by these spiritual forms, you will not find the living truth itself. That is now in Christ.

I don't know much about Freemasonry but I suspect this is why it is condemned by the Catholic Church. No doubt there is a kernel of esoteric wisdom behind its ceremonies and rituals, possibly passed down from ancient Egypt though it will have travelled a long way and perhaps been subject to the Chinese whispers effect. Nevertheless, I expect there is something there. But if Christ is not there, and as far as I can tell he isn't, that renders the whole enterprise suspect. Hidden truth without Christ is not truth. Moreover, in the case of Freemasonry, it has always been too concerned with building a New World Order. There is a definite whiff of the Tower of Babel about it.

I am not condemning the esoteric. We are called to knowledge and we should seek it out. That is our destiny and our spiritual duty. Greater knowledge will enable us to interact with both God and the universe on a deeper level. I myself have explored esoteric teachings for over 40 years as is easy nowadays when so much has been published and made widely available to anyone who can read. But I do say that if we do this we should always do it under the banner of Christ or we risk falling into illusion and worse. 

The Beginning of Sorrows

 Western civilisation is dying. At its peak it scaled great heights but it has fallen a long way down since then because of its denial of spirit. Pitifully, most people think of this as an advance and a liberation from superstition because the denial of spirit freed us to explore and exploit the material world to a greater degree, but the initial burst of energy that came from that is rapidly dissipating. Progress is petering out. Even our increased recognition of the horrors of violence and war can be understood as a greater fixation on the physical self and material well-being.

I don't know how anyone can live without acknowledging God. Within each human soul there is the divine stamp that is our life and the core of our being. How can we ignore this? But it seems millions of people do. What is going on inside these people that they have closed themselves off to such degree from reality and all that makes life worthwhile? There is no doubt that the material world has solidified so that the connection to spirit is much harder to make but still it is there. There is also no doubt that demonic powers have attacked on numerous fronts to make us believe the material world is all there is but we don't have to succumb to their lies. Even if everyone around us prefers darkness to light we do have the light within us and we can respond to that if we are spiritually responsible and true children of our Father.

Perhaps that's it. Most people don't care about God because they care too much about themselves. They are too fixated on their worldly hopes and ambitions and their personal desires. They are too identified with their bodies or their feelings or their thoughts and so never look more deeply within themselves. Then there are those who are too attached to a particular sin to be willing to acknowledge that it is a sin. Such people are setting themselves up to be the victims of the dark powers to whose influence they will become more and more susceptible. They are cutting themselves off from all that is good and if that alarms you, it should do.

We are unable to perceive the deep inner workings of spiritual evil because we don't acknowledge spiritual good. This makes us easy to manipulate and deceive and lead astray. An essential task for all human beings today is to recognise that the source of evil is hidden. It does not come from this material world. It actually emanates from powerful beings on the spiritual plane working through their emissaries at lower spiritual levels and in this world. Those regarded as evil in this world are merely pawns of these higher beings who are the principalities and powers spoken of by St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. These demons think in the long term. They have prepared for this time over many centuries and if we look back we can see the gradual turning of the screw. This should show us that mortal men alone cannot be responsible for the plan of spiritual destruction even if they are indirectly responsible for enacting various of its stages.

Does this sound sensationalist? That thought again would come to mind as a result of seeds sown by evil powers over many years. They function best when unrecognised or downgraded to cartoon characters or softened by being fictionalised. In the public mind the teeth of supernatural evil have been drawn by its regular appearance in film and on TV. It can be dismissed as entertainment or deriving from fantasy and fiction. This is not without some advantages though. When you have a writer such as Tolkien, who was very aware of the reality of supernatural evil, you have a powerful depiction of its reality and how it operates and then your mind is primed to recognise it later on when you begin to wake up.

People don't believe in God because there is no proof but you cannot prove spiritual realities by material means. Expand your horizons beyond the material world and you will find proof. But this will not be intellectual proof. Spirit cannot be proven by the intellect or the mind as normally considered. It can only be known. This is why faith is important. Faith is not just belief but the opening up of the mind to wider vistas. It is like being in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Faith is opening a window through which daylight can stream in.

It is probable that as the limitations of the materialistic worldview become more apparent to more people there will be a reaction. This has already happened to a limited extent, beginning in the 1960s though the movement seemed to lose energy around the turn of the millennium. But as material privations start to manifest themselves, as they are about to do, it may happen again and this time to a larger degree. This is when we have to be ready to warn people that not all that seems spiritual is good. At the end of the Roman Empire mystical and occult sects flourished but these were mostly degenerate remains of the ancient mystery religions with an emphasis more on the psychic than the spiritual. They were demon infested and only cleaned up by the purity of the vital Christian force that also spread at that time. This phenomenon could recur. The demons will have in place a spiritual movement that will bestow mystical experiences of a sort and also increase the lower psychic powers thus exposing their possessors to a false spiritual plane. We need to be rightly motivated, which means searching for God rather than spiritual pyrotechnics, to avoid falling into this trap. As was the case almost 2,000 years ago, the key will be our acceptance or otherwise of Christ.

Anthropocentric Spirituality

 A spirituality that sees mankind as central, one that is focussed on human beings and their spiritual development rather than God, is very common nowadays. It practically always goes with a generalised leftist attitude and fails the litmus tests proposed by Bruce Charlton which examine an individual's discernment and ability to see what is actually happening in the world today. It seeks personal benefit here and now in the form of an increased sense of well-being and peace rather than to put the soul right with God on his terms and irrespective of what that might bring as regards pain and suffering to the individual. It is really a form of psychological therapy rather than true religion.

The word sacrifice means to make holy and is etymologically related to sacred. Humanistic spirituality is not sacrificial but sacrilegious in that it attempts to steal sacred things that by right belong to God and appropriate them by the self on the human level. It pursues the religious path for what it can get from it, from a desire for heaven rather than a love of God. This false motive corrupts the entire spiritual approach so even if such a person engages in traditional spiritual practices such as prayer or meditation or ritual of whatever sort the work is tainted. This does not mean it won't bring results or that the results may not seem to them to be authentic spiritual experiences, but they will be empty of real spiritual benefit and merely feed the ego.

The desire for spiritual experience is understandable but should quickly be outgrown. We do not come to Earth to have spiritual experiences but to learn and so, generally speaking, such experiences will come to the seeker at the beginning of his journey to give him encouragement and the sense that what he aspires to really does exist but thereafter he may not be favoured. To seek to repeat past experiences is the sign of a spiritual sensualist.

Human-centred spirituality is actually an aspect of materialism. It is the spirituality of the materialist, a person whose whole mindset is formed by materialism and whose motivations relate to the earthly self and the satisfaction of its goals and desires but who has simply broadened his horizons to include a wider range of experiences. He is seeking to be fed and wants to bring the spiritual down to his soul rather than take his soul up to the spiritual. The first commandment will always be to love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. Anthropocentric spirituality is the spirituality of the world.

Media Corruption

 My maternal great grandfather was the editor of the Observer newspaper which was first published in 1791 making it the world's oldest Sunday paper. He did well for himself because his father was an Irish labourer who died when he was only two, a sad experience strangely enough shared by my father. My great grandfather left school at 13 and worked first as a messenger and then a clerk which is another coincidence because those were my first two jobs. However, J.L. Garvin went on to distinguish himself in journalism, becoming the Observer editor in 1908 when he was 40 and remaining there until 1942. I never knew him as he died before I was born but his influence was there to be felt when I was growing up and my mother and grandmother often spoke of him.

I say all this because I have just read a couple of articles in the Guardian which is a sister newspaper to the Observer, both journals sharing the same political perspective which traditionally was liberal. But the Guardian has long since become a parody of itself and is now not only one-sided and bigoted but seemingly motivated by hatred of anything good and true. Naturally, it depicts itself as a champion of the poor and marginalised  but it obviously just uses those to pursue its agenda of spiritual destruction and value inversion. I am sure that my ancestor would be turning in his grave if he knew what had happened to it but from where he is now he's probably got more sense than to worry about such earthly things and is looking down with sadness but in the knowledge that this world must go through a thorough cleansing which means all the evil that is present must be brought out and expressed.

The two articles are on completely different subjects. One is about the truckers' protest in Canada. It's here.  For as long as possible the media in the UK ignored this protest. Then, when they couldn't ignore it any longer, they reported on it but described it as the work of extremists, far right, of course. This Guardian article seeks to blacken it in quite extraordinary terms. Freedom is now the concern of fascist neo-Nazis, it seems. Bodily autonomy is fine if you want to kill your unborn child but not if you have doubts about an improperly tested substance with many well-documented problems, and one that doesn't work very well anyway, being injected into you when statistics clearly show you don't even need it as that which it is intended to protect against is not that dangerous for most people in the first place.

The second article is in some ways even more extraordinary. This one is here.  It's all about how Buddhism changed the West for the better and talks about compassion, equality, non-violence, materialism etc. I'm sure that the West has gained some benefits from learning about Buddhism even if there is not too much fundamental in it that the West did not already know from Christianity, albeit in a different form and with a different emphasis. One forgets or doesn't know that the famous image of the Buddha sitting crosslegged in meditation actually derived from Greek statuary as he was originally depicted only by a footprint, early Buddhism being so world-renouncing as to be little concerned with artistic representation. The human spirit being what it is, that could not last and what Buddhist artists did with the Greek influence, which came by way of Alexander the Great's incursions to the East, was all their own genius. But the point is that most people don't know how the West influenced Buddhism from early on, and particularly I would submit with the idea of the Bodhisattva who is clearly not only a Christ-like figure but actually inspired by the spirit of Christ.

I have often said in these pages that I have the greatest respect for Buddhism. I think it is possibly the greatest human achievement, with profound beauty and wisdom. But it is being used nowadays to erode the spiritual influence of Christianity in the West, and let us remind ourselves that Christianity is not a human achievement. It is a divine revelation. Buddhism contains many insights into the human condition and has developed extraordinary tools for exploring and developing consciousness which we can avail ourselves of if we wish. But it is not a replacement for the teachings of Christ which go beyond those of the Buddha in that they reconcile spirit and matter, the individual self and God, in a way that Buddhism does not and cannot. The Buddhist rejection of God is spiritually harmful for the Western psyche as that is a psyche that is supposed to include the individual, albeit in a way that eventually goes beyond itself as itself. For the Westerner it risks creating a false spirituality that is tempting because it does away with God and even, for many moderns, the idea of sin which becomes mere ignorance, a very different thing. This is not what the Buddha taught but it is what Buddhism and Buddhist derived practices often amount to when applied in the West. This article from the Guardian is a perfect example of how Buddhism is being co-opted by leftism and used as an anti-Christian tool. It now seems to be little better than a false spirituality designed to divert those who might be fed up with materialism away from true spiritual understanding into a kind of humanistic, or fake humanistic, substitute, one in which you can pretend to yourself you are spiritual but actually be further away from God than ever because you have replaced him with what amounts to yourself.

Both articles demonstrate the destruction that is being wrought on the spiritual traditions of the West from within its own institutions. For those of us alive to what is going on in the world today they bear the fingerprints of spiritual wickedness in high places. Please note that I am not saying there is anything wicked about Buddhism but a deformed Buddhism is being used as a false good to do away with a greater good. It's being used as an attack on God.

Oneness Spirituality

 It is a common error of the mystically inclined, especially, the more introverted types who find the spiritual path an excuse to retreat from the complications and demands of the world, to dismiss matter, regarding it as illusion or unimportant, and focus their entire attention on absorption into spirit. But they need to ask themselves this simple question, why they are actually in this world in the first place? Why are they not just remaining in spirit and avoiding the difficulties and challenges of this world of duality? Wouldn't a loving God have let them stay in spiritual peace and bliss instead of, as it were, turfing them out of bed? Time to get up! Time to be born!

God loves us and because he loves us he wants us to grow. That's what this world is for. A training ground for the spirit in which innate potentials can be brought out and developed through the challenges we face here and questions that are asked of us. The main question, the one on which depends our eventual destination after material life, is what relation do we want with God and creation? Do we wish to conform our being to them or do we instead choose to go our own way? We can reject both as most of the world appears to be doing now or we can reject the living, loving creative God and retreat to God in his mode of pure being, a non-creative aspect of the divine. But that is a limited God and it is not what he wants for us because he wants us to be like him in his fullness, in being and in creativity, in his nighttime and daytime modes.

Many mystics misconceive the spiritual path. The purpose of this path is not to become less and less and eventually disappear but to embrace more and more of God. Only thus can you actually serve him and justify your creation. If you want to disappear into God, what use are you to him? What are you adding to creation? Why were you born and why do you live? Many mystics just want to retreat to the safety of the Mother but we are enjoined to progress to the Father which means become spiritually active and responsible, workers in creation not just chewers of the spiritual cud. For the spiritual goal is not to regress to the womb of the Great Mother but to be born anew and walk in the bright light of the Heavenly Father.

Even the Greatest Saints Prayed

 So the Masters told me when I was in the first flush of enthusiasm for meditation. But actually you could say especially the greatest saints prayed.

Something I have noticed more and more, though it's been around a long time, is that if you ask someone if they believe in God they will often, assuming they say yes, redefine God to mean something else. So they might say that yes, I believe in God. He is the One Life or he is the Self that exists within us all or he is the unmanifested Void that exists in the space between vibrations or he is what I am in my truest and best self. But all this means he is not he at all. He is it.

I would question anyone who says he believes in God but then turns God into an impersonal force or abstraction or cosmic absolute. God is not an energy that we can tap into to further ourselves, even further ourselves spiritually. He is not an impersonal Nothingness even if that nothingness be regarded as the seedbed of all existence. That concept, by the way, applies more to the chaos of matter before it is 'breathed' on by God and stirred into active existence, and those who plunge in their meditations into the Void might consider whether they are actually engaging in a positive spiritual practice or returning their consciousness to its pre-created state which is not necessarily the way forward.

Mystical spirituality attracts two types of people. Those who love God and those who want to become God or believe they already are God. At the extremes these are represented by Christ and Satan which should sound a note of warning to the latter type who might see God as impersonal being and therefore regard the spiritual path as one of knowledge or awareness. So it is but it is primarily a path of love and if love is not the driving force for your spiritual journey you risk going off the road. Prayer is love. That is what it essentially is, and love is directed towards a personal being. God is a personal being not an impersonal energy and that is why the saints all pray. Certainly there are deep states of consciousness available to those who seek a God of impersonal being but these are outside Heaven. The perfection of prayer is what heaven is.

We Are All One

 It is a popular and almost unquestioned truism of modern spirituality that everything is one. We are all connected, all brothers and sisters in the great family of humanity with a deep unity that ultimately overrides all other considerations. I went along with this idea myself once because it seems true in an underlying spiritual sense. After all, there's only one God, one Creator. I had reservations but took it as broadly true.

But what if it's not true or, at least, not as true as it is taken to be? To begin with, from a Christian perspective we are all one in Christ but for that to be the case we have to accept Christ. We are not all one outside Christ and even if you extend this to a more universal plane to mean we are all one in God then we surely still have to accept the reality and truth and meaning and fact of God? We have to respond to God within us and do so on a spiritual rather than mere intellectual or emotional plane. Only then can we meet in a real unity.

Then there are good grounds for thinking that the present time is not one of unity but of separation, of dividing the sheep from the goats. Jesus said he did not come to bring peace (unity) but a sword (division). This is often ignored by those who wish to paint a picture of a false Jesus who loves humanity in its fallen state more than he loves God. Of course, Jesus does love humanity but he does not love the fallen state and he wants to redeem us from that state and bring us to the reality of God. But for that to happen we must repent our evil nature. Yes, our evil nature. We cannot continue in the worldly path and expect God's love to operate regardless. God may love all human beings but above all he loves truth and he loves those more who reflect his own truth back to him.

The modern world demands that we accept everyone on their own terms. We are all one regardless of what we are. Essentially, this puts quantity above quality. It is totally at odds with the true spiritual attitude which reverses that hierarchy and sees that what you are is much more important than the basic fact that you are. Spiritual unity can only come about at higher level and to know this unity you have to fit yourself for that level which means respond to spirit. The material world is not the world of unity but of separation and to force unity onto it on its own level is to create a lie. No wonder that agenda is being pushed so hard in this day and age when spiritual truth is being parodied and reinterpreted in material terms to deflect us from the hard (for the ego) facts of reality.

There is another point to take into consideration on this matter of oneness. Evolution is a growing out from sameness to difference. We become more individual as we evolve not less. Insects are a lower form of life than animals, and the higher animals show more individuality than the lower ones. Then when you get to the human kingdom you have real individuals. This no doubt continues. The glory of the saints is that they are so individual, all one in God but fully themselves too. And there is no one in the history of humanity more individual than Christ which is partly why the force of his personality persists through the centuries. He is not a cardboard cut-out saviour but a wholly unique person, as we all are and we will become more so as we progress into the heart of God. That journey brings out our uniqueness. It does not obliterate it in some faceless, tasteless spiritual porridge. The very fact of love proves this. You can't have love in oneness, not real love of the sort that lays down its life for its friends. Love needs separation. Love is the denial of oneness.

Spiritualities that Fail the Test

 If your spiritual path has not revealed to you that Satan now struts openly on the world stage perhaps it is time you reassessed it. Here's some of the latest evidence for that. Link. But, as I say, this is just the latest evidence. It has been apparent for some time that all worldly authorities in all fields, all, none are exempt, have succumbed to spiritual evil.

It may be that you are a follower of what my blogging colleague Francis Berger calls System Christianity which subordinates the truth of Christ to the ways of the world. You believe in God or think you do but, when push comes to shove, you believe in good as defined by the worldly powers more. To put it bluntly, you don't have enough real spiritual substance in you. 

Or it may be that you are some kind of non-dualist who essentially sees everything as spirit and so don't acknowledge the reality of good and evil. If so, you are walking in a cloud which may seem very beguiling, soft and comfortable but is in fact a fog of illusion. Non-duality teachings are limited in that they deny the positive reality of creation, rejecting the truth of the individual self for an amorphous oneness that turns them into robotic escapists who, unbeknown to themselves, are actually numbing themselves to the love, beauty and spiritual glory of reality, perhaps because they are afraid of being hurt. There is said to be a place for such souls on the higher planes where they can exist in a kind of self-absorbed bliss and peace but cut off from the reality of God and the rest of creation. They are enclosed within themselves even if they think of it as the Self or Nirvana and must eventually be reborn in the physical world and experience all the desire, pain and sorrow that makes a fully aware and spiritually sensitive human being. Non-duality, far from being the acme of spiritual teaching as often supposed, is really a one-sided (pun intended) view of reality that ignores the whole purpose of creation. This is not to retreat to the pre-manifested state of infantile oneness but to make fully-functioning creative gods of individual human souls.

However, you can only make these gods in the right way through Christ. If you try to make yourself a god by any other way, whether that be through technology like the transhumanists or a spirituality that sees yourself as already God like some of the non-dualists, then you risk following the path of Satan, the first being that wished to be God on his own terms. The contemporary world situation shows more clearly than ever that it is only Christ who can save us from, on the one hand, demonic attack, and, on the other, our own fallen nature. All goodness is summed up in him and it is only through him that we can find a path through the darkness into which this world has descended. If that wasn't apparent before it certainly should be now. This is what is meant by things coming to a point.

Liberty and Equality

 It should be obvious to anyone nowadays that the modern evils known as racism and sexism are being promoted as the deadliest of secular sins as part of the attempt to dismantle Western civilisation and install a new mindset in which nothing is better than anything else so everything is mediocre and therefore more controllable by our overlords, worldly and otherwise. Just like the mad crow disease of present times these secular sins were not built on nothing which gives them a certain viability if not examined too closely, but they have been grossly exaggerated and used as a means to destroy any idea of difference and even make difference itself a bad thing.

Equality is the great dogma on which liberal Western democracies are built. It might have seemed like a step forward at a time when the gap between rich and poor, powerful and weak was as great as it was, and the movement towards less inequality surely did bring certain benefits in the short term. But the flaw that lies at its heart is now being revealed. If equality, and equality alone, is taken as the foundation of a culture then that culture will collapse into the lowest common denominator and it will eventually collapse altogether. Equality is totally contrary to human nature and to enforce it is to force human beings to live against both their natural and their spiritual instincts. It becomes a tool to push the higher down to the level of the lower. This does not mean that the higher should dominate the lower (except spiritually) but liberty and equality are not natural bedfellows despite what the ideals of the Enlightenment may pretend, and it is liberty that is the great spiritual quality as far as human beings are concerned.

Equality is often said to be rooted in Christianity. If it were how strange it is that it is never mentioned in the Bible and was only discovered to be a Christian virtue 1800 years after the time of Christ. Oneness in Christ is a Christian virtue but that is not equality which is a materialistic distortion of it. Equality is actually a property of unformed matter, matter untouched by the creative breath of spirit, which is why you see it most at lower levels of evolution. The more life evolves, the more unequal it becomes because the freer it becomes and yet within that inequality there is also a spiritual oneness. To realise the truth of this apparent contradiction is one of the major goals of the spiritual path. It and it alone explains the mystery of love.

The Left Hand Path

 In occultism the left hand path is the path that seeks to acquire spiritual power by illicit means. Often justified by its acolytes as the direct path or the heroic path, it is really just the path of the unrepentant self who wishes to steal from God what he has not earned and is not prepared to earn. It is the path of the ego, pursued by those who do not accept that the spiritual can only be known by those prepared to sacrifice their own little egos. It can never bring one to true spiritual illumination but it can take its practitioners to a dark imitation of illumination which they confuse for the real thing.

To me it is no coincidence that the modern way which has rejected God is that of the left. All thought that falls under that general heading shares the belief that man is pre-eminent and that humanity does not need, in fact, is much better off without, God. The left is the way that denies transcendence and the fact of the divine and which seeks to remake the world according to man. To begin with, this may have been innocent enough and an attempt to see that God is within as well as out there, but the small seed has grown into something monstrous that not only rejects God but is also rejecting nature and soon enough will reject humanity. You may scoff at this idea since the left considers itself the defender of humanity but its progression of destruction and deconstruction, all based on the original diminishment of God, leads inevitably to the destruction of everything. It is a maw that must continually be fed. 

The ideology of the left will lead (I am tempted to say has led) to the destruction of Western civilisation. One of its principle expressions is feminism. Feminism arises in a culture when male creative energy has built up a structure it can latch onto and feed off. With its push towards equality in which nothing and no one is better than anything or anyone else, perhaps driven by feminine empathy which is a wonderful thing but only in its proper place, it results in a world in which the safe and the mediocre are the ideals to aim for and celebrate. This inevitably leads to intellectual and spiritual decline, the decline of freedom too because my freedom gets in the way of your safety. Is it a coincidence that the female powers are brought into prominence and propitiated on the left hand path of occultism? And that these powers are independent of masculine spiritual direction and do not manifest the true spiritual qualities of the feminine as reflected in the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary which is the feminine that has given herself over to God? The left side is the female as the right side is the male and it is no coincidence that the normal human condition is to be right handed. This seemingly unimportant fact does point to a greater spiritual truth for those alive to the realities of symbolism.

Feminism is a new twist on the old story of "ye shall be as gods" and like that story it involves a disruption in the natural order of being. The left in general is a rebellion against divine order and seeks to install man on the throne of God. It can never succeed but it can cause a lot of damage before it eventually destroys itself which it inevitably does when it has nothing else left to destroy.

Are Spiritual Teachers Necessary?

This is a serious question. What are spiritual teachers and do we need them? In the West until recently there were no such things as spiritual teachers. There were priests, monks and theologians but these were not spiritual teachers as in the modern sense, borrowed from India, of supposedly enlightened people who could guide their followers to enlightenment. Spiritual teachers in the guru sense are only about 150 years old at the most in this hemisphere and, as far as I can see, they haven't done anyone any real good. Indeed, many of them have been harmful, more interested in personal power and prestige than true spirituality. It is a heady experience, being adored by the faithful who see you as some kind of superman or even divine being, and it can turn the head of even those who start out with good intentions, perhaps after a spiritual experience that makes them think they have broken through to a new and higher consciousness permanently. But time always shows that is not the case. They are just ordinary people, subject to the ordinary sins and temptations. And though they can be helpful at the beginning, they often end up being traps.

I wrote this paragraph about a month ago meaning to develop it later but forgot about it so it just sat in the drafts section of this blog. But I was reminded of it by an excellent post of Bruce Charlton's which he called Against Spiritual Methods. See here. The post concluded with these lines which make the general point that it is motivation that matters in the spiritual world not method.

We should pursue our spiritual aims, from our best motivations (of love); and we should never trust the methods by which these aims are pursued; but always retain discernment concerning the effects that 'what we are doing' is actually having upon us. 

We should never let the method itself dictate what counts as true, virtuous or beautiful - but need to retain a direct apprehension of these values. 

There is an almost inevitable transition between learning to trust the method; to unconsciously using the method to generate what we desire. And these unconscious desires are nearly always self-gratifying and hedonic - which is why manipulative power-games and exploitative sexuality are so often a feature of New Age groups and techniques. 

Method belongs to the world of science and technology. It is always an attempt to force your will onto something and subject it to your desire. In spiritual terms this is getting things back to front. You do not get the soul to do your bidding. You must submit yourself to the reality of the soul. This doesn't mean that there are not things you can and should do to attune yourself to the reality of God and the spiritual self. Prayer and meditation come to mind. But if the motivation is not right, if it is not what I call love of God as opposed to desire for heaven that drives you, then you are chasing shadows. And if you think that any method or practise will make you more 'spiritual', you don't understand what spiritual means. A method may have effects on everyday consciousness that we in our ignorance might call spiritual but then certain drugs can do that too. In the spiritual world it is the heart that is important and if we pursue the path for our own personal advantage or benefit we are effectively materialists.

As for teachers, I do not deny that they can be helpful. How could I, given the story I describe in my Meeting the Masters book? But the evidence from the 20th century shows the field is wide open to corruption and perhaps the lesson we can draw from that is that times have changed. We are now required to be self-motivated and self-taught. This obviously does not mean that we cannot learn from others and that there are not people to whom we can turn for guidance. But the elevated guru figure belongs to the past and we should probably retune our thoughts to the traditional Western idea of a spiritual guide, a fellow-traveller who points us to God rather than himself and does this in practice not just theory.

In saying this I do not mean to disparage real gurus but I suspect their time is past and that is why we have had so many duds of late. Human consciousness evolves, much as some people don't like the idea of that, and as it does our engagement with the religious life does too.

Be Serious

The modern world is fundamentally superficial. I am not simply talking about the childish obsession of many adults with an ever more degraded popular culture, and nor do I just refer to the ordinary person though I include him. I am talking about present day thinkers, the intellectual class, the movers and shakers in all areas of life. Hardly any of these people are really serious. They are just playing games, more concerned with power, fame, money and influence than truth.

A serious person thinks about life and death and grapples with what those might mean because the meaning of death is directly related to the meaning of life. If you say that death has no meaning, it's just the end, curtains, goodbye, then you have washed your hands of spiritual responsibility. You have trivialised life because you have denied death, and, yes, you have denied it because you have reduced it to nothing and you can only do that by rejecting what it is to be human. For a human being is like an iceberg though with this important difference. It's an upside down iceberg with the perceived part the lowest part and the hidden part, which nevertheless supports the whole, stretching up above and beyond what is seen and known. The boundary between the two can be melted occasionally in life but is only fully crossed at death.

Human beings come into this world because, unlike in the spiritual domain from whence we derive, we do not know God directly here. We have to find him. We have to choose him. Everything in nature obeys God's laws automatically except man. We have a natural part which does obey as it must but a human being is also a person so there is necessity but there is also freedom. God has renounced his supreme power to give us some power and he has done so because of love in which there can be no compulsion.

There are fewer and fewer serious people these days, people really willing to think for themselves and look life squarely in the face. We are too distracted by phenomena and the shiny trinkets of modern technology to try to understand what a human being really is. Some people do seek a spiritual answer but the fact is not all forms of spirituality are equally valid. There are some forms that seek to reduce human beings purely to a kind of naked spirit, void of form and individuality. But this is a return to our origins without having learnt the lessons of creation and the material world, and if God had wanted this for us he would never have bothered sending us out into this world, separated from him in order to find him again and know him consciously for who and what he is. There is a higher form of spirituality which includes the spiritual and the individual and the fruits of this are love and creativity, something that pure spirit does not know. For the love that advocates of the pure spirit path talk of is not really this spiritual love at all. They have borrowed the concept from theistic religion while rejecting what makes it possible. Their love is impersonal but impersonal love is a contradiction in terms. God's love is not impersonal and directed equally to everything. He loves more what opens itself more fully to his love and reflects it back.

As the world progresses further and further into what is effectively chaos it is critical that people become serious. Don't accept what you are told by authority without submitting it to a thorough intuitive assessment. Even if everyone you know goes along with the agenda that is no reason for you to follow. Hold up everything you are told to the truth of Christ and see whether it stands or falls in that light. The time is coming when Christ will be the only serious thing left.

Spiritual Feelings

 I occasionally hear people talk about how 'spiritual' they are as in "I'm a very spiritual person". What they mean by this is rather different to what used to be meant. For one thing, you would never have said it of yourself. It's like saying I'm a good person and not even Jesus accepted that of himself (see Matthew 19:17). But it also shows a basic misunderstanding of what spirituality actually is.

Spirituality is not believing that life has a spiritual component to it. It is not even thinking that this component is the most important thing and seeking it out through various means. It is certainly not cultivating a beatific smile and "loving" everyone equally because we are all one. Or being a vegan or meditating. Spirituality is not about having spiritual feelings and looking to satisfy those. That, dear reader, is just another form of consumerism.

I was inspired to write this post because of a discussion with a young person who had been practising meditation for a few months. She said she had found great inner peace at first but could not now recapture this and was distressed by that fact. She wanted more than anything to get back to her calm and tranquil state. At the same time, she realised that her meditation had numbed her in certain ways. (That was not the word she used but she agreed with it when I suggested it). She had become more self-absorbed, less able to deal with the world. She even said she felt she had stopped growing as a person. I told her that this might be exactly why she had been pushed away from her inner peace. That peace was actually a sort of stagnation. We are here to learn not to retreat to a passive bliss in which we cut ourselves off from the external world. If that were the goal why be born at all? She had been doing a vaguely Buddhist sort of meditation, as so many do, and when I pointed out that in traditional Buddhism meditation was only meant for monks and practised within the context of a strict religious framework she expressed surprise. Wasn't it for everyone? I said that in my opinion meditation can do more spiritual harm than good if it is secularised and simply used as a psychological tool to find peace. This is because it can take you away from a proper awareness of God. He becomes simply what you yourself are inside. From there it is a short step to thinking that you yourself are God, the only God you need. This is an error made by many Western practitioners of Eastern-style religions or those who adopt their techniques without adopting a real religious sensibility. They don't usually put it as bluntly as that but that is what their attitude often boils down to.

True spirituality is one thing only and that is loving God. But this means real love and the real God, intuited in the heart and perceived through his creation. Then it means subordinating yourself and all your desires to this love. As long as your idea of spirituality involves you seeking some benefit for yourself, it is a worldly thing. Of course, motives are usually mixed but the emphasis must always be on the love of God. This is why mystics were often frowned upon. If you are a mystic seeking mystical experience for your personal bliss are you really that different to a materialist looking to fulfil herself through continual shopping?