Civil War

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

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

And then you have Islam.

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

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

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

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

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

File under wars and rumours of war.

Islam in the West

History tells us that Islam cannot co-exist with Christianity or anything else for that matter. It must either dominate or it must work towards dominating. This has been forgotten by most secular governments in the West over the last few decades but it is becoming a matter of increasing significance so I reproduce here what was going to be a chapter in my forthcoming book A Survival Guide to the End Times. I cut it out due to its peripheral relevance to the theme of the book but it is hardly irrelevant in terms of where we are today in the Western world. Some of it has already featured here in previous posts but here it is all in one place.

I was flipping through The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis recently, a book I first read many years ago and had forgotten about. It's a short work, based on lectures he gave in 1943 and is not overtly religious in theme even though it is in essence. What it does is defend universal spiritual values against the contemporary assault on them, specifically in the field of education, which denied that moral and aesthetic values were grounded in something objective. It was the beginning of the moral relativism, now so firmly established, which dismisses the idea that there are universal truths which are rooted in an absolute reality. 

Lewis argues for what he calls in this book the Tao which for him is something like Ma'at in ancient Egypt or just objective reality, the foundation truth of the universe and of being in general. The Tao is not provable by materialistic, rational, intellectual, logical or scientific means because it derives from a ground much deeper than can be accessed by these on their own. It is recognised, known, accepted, seen (or not by the spiritually blind), but it is not verifiable by empirical evidence as that phrase is normally understood. It should be self-evident but cannot be proved by any of the ways materialists demand proof. 

At the end of these lectures Lewis provides a compendium of sayings illustrative of Natural Law drawn from many different sources and traditions ranging from Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Chinese to Christian, Hindu and Jewish to Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Babylonian, Native American and even Australian Aborigine. But there is nothing from Islam.

This might seem a strange oversight, but it reminded me of the time I first became interested in spiritual matters and studied scriptures from all the main traditions. I knew the Bible reasonably well but reread the Gospels in the light of my new-found interests and beliefs. I read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, Plato, the classics of Taoism and Zen and some collections of wise words like Lewis's compendium. All these spoke of mystical understanding, perhaps in different ways and on different levels and some more than others but they all had an insight into higher reality. Then I read the Qur’an expecting to find more of the same. 

What a disappointment. There was nothing here that approached the profundity of other scriptures. It barely reached the level of Old Testament spiritual understanding, never mind the New Testament. It was clear that the compiler of this text, which seemed rather like a New Age type channelling, albeit in the context of its time and place, was nowhere near the spiritual level of the founders of other religions.

Now, maybe these teachings were a step forward for the people of that time and place but they have little to say to us today unlike other scriptures which can transcend time and place and still speak to us across the centuries. It is often said that the three monotheistic religions worship the same God. However, they approach him in such different ways that this is hard to maintain in any seriousness. For the Christian, God is a loving Father, but the God depicted in this holy book demands total allegiance as a despot does from a slave. He may be a benign despot if you obey him, but he leaves no room for you as a free individual.

I'm not disputing there have been many pious worshippers of God in this religion but there are also encouragements to violence and, though these are often glossed over and excused by believers, they are plainly there in the source texts and recorded sayings of its founder who was a war leader as much as he was a prophet. Not all Muslims are active extremists, of course, but the extremism in Islam is fundamental to it. It is not a distortion of it but an integral part. The West used to know that, and from hard-won experience.

If the modernist ethos of relativism, as described by C.S. Lewis, is one way of abolishing man so too is an absolutist religion which gives all power to the deity and leaves no freedom for the individual human soul. It must obey. It must submit. It's in the name, after all. But God does not want obedience. He wants love.

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

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

The Muslim faithful are under instruction to convert everyone to their cause and not to rest until they have done so. Islam is not willing to share power and will accommodate itself to its perceived rivals in the short term only for long term advantage. That has been demonstrated historically repeatedly. Muslims are even authorised to lie and deceive to this end if that is to the unbeliever. That is regarded as a virtuous act and history shows that they will go along with their hosts when in a minority only to enforce their will when their numbers are sufficient. It is naive to ignore this reality and yet that is just what the West has been doing.

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

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

Some people would say that any religion is better than none. Any acknowledgement of God is better than rejecting him. I would say, it depends. For one thing it depends on what sort of God you follow. What are his demands and expectations, how does he frame the good? There are many excellent practices in Islam such as faith in God, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, the 5 pillars. These are undoubtedly beneficial to the soul, turning it away from worldly preoccupation and towards the spiritual world. But in the form in which they are presented and followed they are good for souls who need strict external guidance. They become restrictive for souls who are beginning to take spiritual responsibility for themselves. Sufism was provided for such souls but it never really established itself other than on the peripheries of the Muslim world, and was often condemned by the mainstream as heretical, the strong influence of Vedanta being too much to accept.

If Islam is to become a positive force in the world it must change. It remains too intellectually and morally one-dimensional and can only function as a rigid system for people who have not yet separated from the herd. Then it must renounce its political and territorial ambitions and its religious exclusivism. Like Marxism, it is a totalitarian ideology that demands complete control and absolute authority. It has sought to propagate itself through violence but must abandon that aspect of its supposed mission and stick to the 5 pillars. But even these 5 pillars must be seen in a different light, as signposts to inner understanding rather than rules and regulations to be followed without thought. In religion there is an outer path and an inner path. Islam has always given the outer path even more importance than most other religions, and goodness knows this is a fault common to them all.

Islam was born in warfare and spread through the sword. This aspect of its heritage must be renounced if it is to serve the will of God which will be difficult because it will mean a radical reinterpretation of its core beliefs and an acceptance that its prophet was not the perfect image of a man they say he was. Jesus may have said he did not come to bring peace but a sword but quite obviously he meant by this the sword of truth which separates truth from lies, good from evil, love from hate. He also said those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Unfortunately, it is the second usage that Islam has followed.

In the days when I studied the various mystical traditions, I found Sufism one of the most interesting, full of insight and including many souls of great spiritual authority. Sufism contains the inner principles behind Islam and interprets the simplistic injunctions of the Qur’an on a genuinely spiritual level. Muslims who wish to be closer to the guiding impulse behind their faith should explore Sufi teachings more deeply. They should also know that Islam is not and never was intended for the West. Those who try to enforce it on Western countries are not doing the will of God but going directly against it. The principles of Islam are opposed to those of the West which are to do with freedom and individuality. Freedom and individuality in God, but freedom and individuality all the same. Islam denies both. It certainly cannot save the West.

I was recently asked why Christianity is better than Islam by a young man, some of whose friends had decided that if they were going to follow a religion then Islam seemed a more attractive proposition than Christianity as it had a greater sense of where it stood on issues and didn't prevaricate or sentimentalise which Christianity in its official forms now does. On the face of it, it's hard to disagree with this view. Islam is firm in its beliefs and doesn't seek to accommodate itself to the secular world which modern Christianity often does as its leaders try to justify their existence by pandering to social changes. Also, Islam has not become feminised which Christianity along with the whole Western world has, and this appeals to younger men who see in feminism a civilisation destroying influence.

However, whilst it is true that many Christian churches have succumbed to the world and replaced the spiritual with the anodyne charms of secular humanism, Islam never had much connection with the spiritual to begin with. It has a view of God based on primitive conceptions of the deity and is unable to open itself up to higher dimensions of being. Its virtue that it doesn't change is also a major weakness. It is stuck in the past, unable to evolve as consciousness does. This inflexibility might be regarded as a positive, but the rights and wrongs of inflexibility depend on what refuses to change. Islam may have been a corrective for polytheistic pagans in a 7th century of warring tribes but it has nothing to say to a 21st century consciousness.

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

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

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

Islam and the West

 This is a follow up from a post of a few weeks ago. Obviously, emotions can get very heated in a discussion of this topic but I hope to remain objective. I don't think the current attitude that all religions are equally good or equally bad is a useful one. It may be well-meaning and an attempt to redress past prejudice and ignorance but it can also obscure the good and enable the harmful. Where the spiritual is concerned it is not just a matter of believing but of believing what is true and knowing what is either false or on a lower level of truth, meaning a level which caters more to the unevolved consciousness. For consciousness does evolve which is to say it takes in more of reality, is better able to perceive it and to express it. As this takes place the mind is potentially opened up to greater meaning and creative power and love and understanding, and when that happens its values change. If systems are in place which facilitate that it is in line with human growth and development. Not to mention the will of God. If there are systems that impede, prevent or restrict the evolution of consciousness this must be understood or else we will fall back into lower levels of being. That is all there is to it. Good intentions can be as harmful as bad ones if understanding is lacking just as love without wisdom (or misconceived love for it is not real love in these cases more a sentimentalised version of it) can actually have spiritually negative effects. I meant well is the excuse of the foolish and irresponsible.

Will all this in mind I have to point out that Islam in the modern Western world is a counter-evolutionary force. It is all very well to point to the spiritual decadence of the West, and I would be among the first to do so. That decadence is destroying our civilisation but we have to go forwards in line with the growth in consciousness and Islam is only suitable for a pre-rational stage of consciousness and that is looking at it in its best light. We can say that Islam has not succumbed to the absurdities that modern despiritualised Christianity has but that, in part, is because it has remained primitive and not evolved. The modern West has evolved but lost its spiritual centre in the process. Islam has retained its religious focus but is resistant to evolution. Both are wrong and neither is a remedy for the other.

When Muslims emigrate to the West it is because they seek a better life, materially speaking. But so many of them then seem to want to change the West to accommodate the ways of Islam failing to see that this would just make the West like the countries they left. To understand this religion and see why it is spiritually damaging in the modern age one has to go back to its roots. We might then perceive that it is not an intolerant, violent, oppressive doctrine because of misunderstanding of its core teachings. The core teachings are intolerant, violent and oppressive. Of course, sometimes intolerance is good if what you do not tolerate is evil but what Islam does not tolerate is anything other than Islam. That is a plain fact which we cannot avoid. Obviously, there are many good, decent Muslims but that is because they are human beings and God is in all human beings. But while there may be moderate Muslims there is no moderate Islam. Islam means submission and demands that everything submit to it, and its adherents are under the obligation to enforce that rule. You cannot co-exist with Islam for it will always seek to overcome you when it can, and this is because it is not just a religion but a totalitarian political ideology.

I am writing this because I live in London, a city with a Muslim mayor and a Muslim population that has now grown to 15%. That has been very apparent recently and many voices have been raised warning that we are sleepwalking into a massive problem. Often these voices are dismissed as spreading hate and, even though that is just a cynical attempt to shame critics into silence, one has to be careful to avoid unfounded prejudice and make sure one's real motivation is to awaken people to reality. Modern Westerners know little of their own history and do not understand Islam. I don't dispute that it has many qualities. Remembrance of God or some kind of deity, not a particularly evolved concept because it is limited by the limited spiritual capacity of the religion's originator who was clearly no Buddha or Krishna never mind Jesus. Focus on prayer, pilgrimage and fasting, all of which are valuable spiritual exercises. But you can never get away from the fact that it was founded on violence and spread by conquest. It does not tolerate rivals.

Western civilisation is clearly on the way out. In its present form it doesn't deserve to survive because it has turned its back on God. It has therefore become a blot on the face of the Earth. But a civilisation is made up of individuals and many are caught up in the present cultural devastation with no guidance of a better way. That guidance does exist but now you have to look for it and when you find it you will place yourself outside cultural norms or you will if you then follow it properly. At the same time, there are many false answers to the present problems and Islam is one of them. For the West certainly. It may have had a purpose for a particular place and time but that place is not here and that time is not now. Let those looking for a way forward out of the darkness of the present time know that Christ remains the Light of the World. He is the only thing in this temporal zone that truly speaks of eternity.

The Conquest of the West

The ways things are going it looks as though the countries of Western Europe might be conquered without putting up any resistance. Has that ever happened before? In fact, these countries often facilitate their conquest by their own weakness and foolishness. America may go the same way. Part of this comes from an ignorance of history, part from naïveté, part from the feminisation of religion, culture, politics and anything else you care to mention and part from sheer stupidity. You might say that maybe this doesn't matter since these countries are so corrupt and spiritually destitute anyway, and that is certainly true. Perhaps they deserve to die. But what will replace them is in no way better despite theoretically being driven by supposedly religious motives, and it is in many ways worse. At least, the West is nominally Christian and its culture has enabled the thriving of deeper enquiry into religion and spiritual understanding. That which seeks to replace it would not permit any such investigation. Its systems would suppress any search for higher truths. It would be from a bad state to a worse.

I have been struck by the crescent and star symbol of Islam. The crescent is the crescent moon which is also known as the horned moon because of its appearance. The star is pictured next to the moon which means it is a fallen star. The moon itself represents the past and what must be outgrown. Esoterically, it is regarded as decaying. Horns, a fallen star, spiritual decay. What does that call to mind?

Added note: I should probably say that my interpretation of this symbol is not meant to imply a literal association but a symbolic one in the contemporary context. Perhaps the symbol is meaningful, perhaps not, but it is certainly there.

Why is Christianity Better than Islam?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islam in the West

God, being God, can bring good out of evil but to what extent does the good he is able to create mitigate the initial evil and would it be better just to do away with that evil? This is the problem we are faced with in Islam in the West. The religion came about as a Christian heresy or, since it did not come from within Christianity itself but from outside, appropriation might be a better word to use. It based itself on a huge simplification of Christian doctrine which is at once its strength and its weakness. Strength because it makes it easier to comprehend for ordinary people and weakness because it sacrifices depth for surface. Its prophet clearly had some kind of supernatural experience but since his level of spiritual understanding was not very high so the level of inspiration he received as well as his ability to interpret it were also not very high. The first contact he had with the spirit he identified as Gabriel when this spirit choked and nearly suffocated him sounds more demonic than angelic.

Well-meaning people want to find common ground between religions. They will say we all worship the same God only in different ways but just because there are similarities between religions, as there inevitably must be, does not mean they all have equal access to truth. You have to examine the ground from which they grew. The ground of Buddhism was the Buddha, a man of great spiritual insight who gave birth to a profound psychological and philosophical system that reflects his own supreme attainment. Christianity has Christ, the Son of God, who has given the highest spiritual revelation so far to mankind and who, it surely cannot be doubted by the unprejudiced mind, summed up divine being in his person as no one else has. That's even without taking the resurrection into account. Islam has Muhammad, a warlord who broke several of the 10 commandments on a regular basis but who nonetheless preached a form of monotheism to pagan polytheists. However, a comparison between Jesus and Muhammad is so spiritually one-sided it's absurd to think that the religions they inspired can be regarded as in any way equal.

Just because Christians, Jews and Muslims claim the same origins does not mean they have the same spiritual authority for their religions. The latter two are formed from human interpretation of archaic revelation that has been superseded. They have failed to take into account the higher revelation of Christ, and not just by neglect but by deliberate rejection in both cases. This marks them out as founded in error, to say the least. Now, God can straighten a crooked branch, to an extent maybe not completely, and there will presumably be as many potentially good people from these religious backgrounds as there are in Christianity and good people can get the best from their religion. But they will still be working with an inferior product and this should be recognised. Just because there are good and bad people in all religions does not mean that all religions are equally good or bad or equally efficacious in the business of religions which is saving souls, guiding them to the true God.

In modern times all religions have lost most of whatever spiritual power they once had. This means that more and more people if they would get to grips with their spiritual destiny need to start to become aware of the inner path. There are doorways to the inner path in all religions but only Christianity has Christ and Christ is the true light that illuminates the path. He makes it easier to tread and it is also him that awaits at the end. Islam by downgrading Christ to a mere human prophet does not know what it should be working towards. It has no light at the end of its path unlike Christianity. It is true that official church religion is moribund but the figure of Christ is always there to act as a personal saviour. Islam has nothing like this which is why it is a spiritual dead end.

I have written this series of posts about Islam because recent protests around the world have reminded us of the idea, long scoffed at by the smart people, that unless the West wakes up it risks being submerged by an alien and backward culture. The European nations, if they would preserve their cultural and spiritual integrity, urgently need to rediscover their Christian soul. The secular leftism they have embraced will not be strong enough to defend itself against the growth of an ideology which can never tolerate anything that is not itself. 

Islam

 Some people would say that any religion is better than none. Any acknowledgement of God is better than rejecting him. I would say, it depends. For one thing it depends on what sort of God you follow. What are his demands and expectations, how does he frame the good? My last two posts have been about Islam which is the second most followed religion in the world, reaching about 25% of humanity. There are many good things in Islam such as faith in God, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, the so called 5 pillars. These are undoubtedly beneficial to the soul on a certain level, turning it away from worldly preoccupation and setting it facing the spiritual world. But in the form in which they are presented and followed they are good for child souls, souls who need external and strict guidance, souls who have not yet separated from the herd. They are not so good for more developed souls who are beginning to take spiritual responsibility for themselves and who seek something more than a codified, outward form of religion. Then they become restrictive. Sufism was provided for such souls but it never really established itself other than on the peripheries of the Muslim world, and was often condemned by the mainstream as heretical.

If Islam is to become a spiritually positive force in the world instead of being the largely negative force it often is then it must change. But first of all, why negative? For reasons already given. It is intellectually and morally one-dimensional and restrictive. It functions as a rigid and unbending, therefore not open to creative growth, system for people who are relatively undeveloped, both mentally and spiritually. So, although it is good for souls on a certain level, it forces the mind into a small box from which it is forbidden to escape. It is closed off to the fresh, revivifying winds of spirit having ordained that the whole truth was spoken once and for all 1400 years ago. Nothing can ever change from that.

But that is not all. Islam must renounce its intellectual and political territorial ambitions and its religious exclusivism. Like Marxism, it is a totalitarian ideology, one that demands complete control and absolute authority. It has sought to propagate itself through violence and this is sanctioned in its source texts. It must completely abandon that aspect of its supposed mission and stick to the 5 pillars. But that is not all either. Even these 5 pillars must be seen in a different light, as signposts to inner understanding rather than rules and regulations to be followed without thought. In religion there is an outer path and an inner path. Islam has always given the outer path even more importance than most other religions and goodness knows that this is a fault common to them all. Christianity has been guilty of the same thing though, I would maintain, to a lesser extent.

Islam was born in warfare and it spread through the sword. One cannot pretend otherwise. This aspect of its heritage must be completely renounced if it is to serve the will of God, but that will be very difficult because it will mean a radical reinterpretation of its core beliefs and an acceptance that its prophet was not the perfect image of a man they say he was. Jesus said he did not come to bring peace but a sword, but quite obviously he meant by this the sword of truth which separates truth from lies, good from evil, love from hate. He also said those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Unfortunately, it is the second usage that Islam has followed.

In the days when I studied the various mystical traditions I found Sufism one of the most interesting, full of wisdom and insight and including many souls of great spiritual power and authority. Sufism contains the inner principles behind Islam and interprets the fairly simplistic injunctions of the Qur'an on a genuinely spiritual level. Muslims who wish to be closer to the guiding impulse behind their faith should explore Sufi teachings more deeply and give up once and for all the intolerant political side of the religion. They should also know that Islam is not and never was intended for the West. Those who try to enforce it on Western countries are not doing the will of God but going directly against it

When God Becomes Caesar

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

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

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

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

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

The Abolition of Man

 I was flipping through The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis recently, a book I last read quite a long time ago and the contents of which I had forgotten. It's a short work, based on lectures he gave in 1943 and is not overtly religious in theme even though it is in essence. What it does is defend universal spiritual values against the contemporary assault on them, specifically in the field of education, which denied that moral and aesthetic values were grounded in something objective. It was the beginning of the moral relativism, now so firmly established, which dismisses the idea that there are universal truths and these are rooted in an absolute reality. Lewis argues for something he calls in this book the Tao, the word deriving, of course, from ancient Chinese philosophy, which is something like Ma'at in ancient Egypt or just objective reality, the foundation truth of the universe and of being in general. The Tao is not provable by materialistic, rational, intellectual, logical, scientific means because it derives from a ground much deeper than can be accessed by these on their own. It is recognised, known, accepted, seen (or not by the spiritually blind) but it is not verifiable by empirical evidence as that phrase is normally understood. It should be self-evident but cannot be proved by any of the ways materialists demand proof.

At the end of these lectures Lewis provides a compendium of sayings illustrative of Natural Law drawn from many different sources and traditions ranging from Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Chinese to Christian, Hindu and Jewish to Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Babylonian, American Indian and Australian Aborigine. But there is nothing from the second main monotheistic religion. 

This might seem a strange oversight, if oversight it is, but it reminded me of the time I first became interested in spiritual matters and studied scriptures from all the main traditions. I already knew the Bible reasonably well but reread the New Testament in the light of my new-found interests and beliefs. I read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, the classics of Taoism and Zen and also some collections of wise words similar to Lewis's compendium. All these spoke of mystical understanding, perhaps in different ways and on different levels and some more than others but they all had an insight into higher reality. Then I read the holy book of the second main monotheistic religion expecting to find more of the same. What a disappointment. There was nothing in this frankly hotch-potch collection of writings that approached the profundity of other scriptures. It barely reached the level of Old Testament spiritual understanding, never mind the New Testament. It was clear that the compiler of this text, which seemed like a New Age channelling, albeit in the context of its time and place, was nowhere near the spiritual level of the founders of other religions. 

Now, maybe these teachings were a step forward for the people of that time and place but they have little to say to us today unlike other scriptures which can transcend time and place and still speak to us across the centuries. It is often said that the three monotheistic religions worship the same God but they approach him in such different ways that that is hard to maintain in any seriousness. For the Christian, God is a loving Father but the God depicted in this holy book demands total allegiance as a despot does from a slave. He may be a benign despot if you obey him but he leaves no room for you as a free individual.

I'm not disputing there are many pious worshippers of God in this religion but there are also encouragements to violence and though these are often glossed over and excused by believers they are plainly there in the source texts which are the holy book and the recorded sayings of its founder who was a war leader as much as he was a prophet. The extremism in this religion is fundamental to it. The West used to know that, and from hard won experience.

Despite what you might be thinking I am not writing this in the context of the present conflict in the Middle East. It's not the Middle East I am concerned about but the West. The second main monotheistic religion is not willing to share power. It will accommodate itself to its perceived rivals in the short term only for long term advantage. That has been demonstrated historically repeatedly. If the modernist ethos of relativism, as described by C.S. Lewis, is one way of abolishing man so too is an absolutist religion which gives all power to the deity and leaves no freedom for the individual human soul. It must obey. It must submit. It's in the name. But God does not want obedience. He wants love.