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.

Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother

Here is the remedy to all our contemporary ills. This simple instruction, if observed, would change the world and reorient it to its true purpose, a purpose that has now been tragically lost.

I mean it spiritually, of course, but first of all let us consider it in the original sense. The family is the basis of civilisation. It is the creative hub of life, where love and goodness can flourish and human beings grow to maturity, cared for and protected in a way that is not possible in any other environment. But the family has been systematically dismantled over the last 50 years with the result that many of us have become broken and rootless. If they are to be honoured father and mother must be together, a unit with each half fulfilling its natural, ordained and complementary role, but how often does that happen now? Modern ideologies have torn the family apart and because many fathers and mothers have listened to the siren voices of these ideologies they are no longer worthy to be honoured. Yes, you should certainly honour your father and your mother but the other side of that is that your father and your mother should be worthy of honour. If they put themselves before their children they are not worthy.

But, as I say, I am really talking about this commandment on the spiritual plane. Who are your father and your mother? Clearly, they are your divine parents, namely God, the transcendent Creator, "Our Father who art in Heaven", Universal Spirit, the root Person, and the Virgin Mother who is identified in Christianity as Mary, mother of the incarnate God, and by extension, the soul of Nature, she who gave us and who nurtures both body and soul. Today we not only do not honour our divine parents, we have forgotten them and replaced them with idols, whether that be science or reason or any number of the false gods of contemporary materialism.

So, remember your divine father and mother and honour them. You honour them best by seeing them as both who and what they are and then trying to conform your soul to their pattern. They are your parents and the idea is that you should grow to become like them.

This post may well be one of the simplest I have written but it is one that contains the most basic truth, a truth our world has forgotten and which is the case of its confusion and disarray. 

Remember The Creator review

My book Remember the Creator was reviewed on Amazon recently by someone who didn't like it. Fair enough, it's not for everyone. However, in my opinion the reviewer not only failed to understand the book, he has misrepresented it so I would like to offer a few words in response here.

To begin with, the reviewer appears to be reacting from something in his own past which has caused him to reject Christianity and the book gets caught up in that as it seems to have been read through the prism of his prejudices. He talks of a "powerful spiritual experience which led me away from the Bible narrative into a higher, more forgiving spiritual experience and deep intuitive connection with God". I can appreciate that but I sometimes think spiritual experiences do more harm than good because they can be like strong alcohol to one unaccustomed to it. The intoxication can make one focus too much on the bliss and unitive feelings to the detriment of a deeper spiritual understanding. Feelings can overwhelm sense so that theological and metaphysical verities that take form as dogmas and doctrines can appear superficial and rigid. However, the spiritual path is not about feelings, no matter how exalted they might seem. It is about understanding.

The reviewer calls me a fundamentalist Christian and says that I have "rejected truth outside of literal biblical scripture".  I have no idea how he comes to that conclusion. I am more usually criticised for the opposite, too catholic (small c) in my beliefs, too heterodox. Again, I think he is reacting to what he used to think or a situation he grew up in not to what I am saying. I see where he might have got this idea if he wasn't paying attention for the book does compare the Christian revelation with Buddhism and advaita Vedanta and puts the former on a higher plane, essentially because it values creation and integrates spirit with matter rather than dismissing matter as basically unreal or, at least, irrelevant with no part to play in the greater scheme of things. But in no way does it dismiss other religions, of which I suspect I know rather more than he thinks I do. It simply sees them as incomplete in the light of Christ.

The reviewer writes from the perspective of someone who was brought up in a rigid Christian background but has broken out of that and discovered other spiritual and mystical approaches which combine a modernistic humanism with the sense that Man is divine. In many ways this is an advance because it begins to replace unquestioned acceptance of external authority with personal insight. A problem with this approach, though, is that it sees the light of God reflected at second hand in Man but does not properly acknowledge the source of that light. Spiritual humanism is very common today but it is actually a form of spiritual materialism in that it values immanence over transcendence, prioritising the created over the Creator. The title of the book contains a simple remedy for that error.

My reviewer doesn't like the idea of hell or judgment, thinking these are signs of an authoritarian God who demands obedience, and that this kind of God is implied in my book. There are certainly some Biblically based writings that do give this impression but I cannot for the life of me see how Remember the Creator does. God is real and God is truth and to deny God is to deny truth. That's about as far as the book goes. As for judgment, all sane people must judge unless you believe that any kind of belief or behaviour is as good as any other kind. Criticising judgment is judging. God does not punish like a petty and vindictive tyrant but actions and even thoughts have their own consequences. A darkened mind creates darkness for itself. So some kind of hell probably does exist but it is built by us. Naturally, there is always forgiveness but for that to be operative there must be repentance. This is something frequently ignored by the liberal approach to spirituality and religion, but to do so makes a mockery of truth.

The difference between me and my reviewer is that I see Christ as central to the spiritual quest, despite other valid approaches, and he does not. I believe he is reacting to Christ as seen through the earthly mind of mortal man, as he is presented in some forms of outer religion. But there is an inner Christ too who is perceived intuitively and who exists in heaven as the universal teacher of angels and men, of all souls whatever their earthly background or cultural upbringing. 

My reviewer was basically rejecting Christianity in favour of Eastern religion forgetting, like many Westerners who follow that route, that they are not comparing like with like. For they reject the public or more conventional form of their familiar religion without being properly cognisant of its deeper, more mystical side. And then they do the reverse with the new belief system. They ignore the public religious side and take up the mystical elements.

I would like to say to the reviewer that I have the greatest respect for Eastern religions which I have known and studied for many years. They come from God or however you want to define spiritual reality. I don't think everyone has to be a Christian to know God and many non-Christians are closer to him than many Christians. But I do maintain that Christ is the light that lightens all spiritual understanding whether he is revealed or hidden. This is a great truth, the recognition of which doesn't make you a fundamentalist but the most universal of universalists. In esotericism, Christ is called the Great Initiator and everyone has to pass through his door on the inner planes before reaching the true heavenly world. 

I commend my reviewer for moving away from a form of religion which he felt was no longer suitable to express his growing awareness of the deeper aspects of life. I actually did a similar thing myself many years ago. The search for God is the most important thing for any human being to be engaged in, and not enough people take this anywhere near seriously enough. My reviewer obviously does and I wish him Godspeed on his journey. I do think, though, that time may bring him to the realisation that Christ is not just an ancient Jewish prophet but the true light that dwells in the heart of all human beings, whatever their culture or beliefs.

March 29th

My new book Remember the Creator is published today (April 1st in America). The subject of the book is summed up in the title. This is the most important thing for modern day humanity; to remember God. But on its own, it is not enough. For what sort of God are we remembering and how are we remembering him? It is a cliché to say that God invented Man in his own image and ever since Man has been returning the compliment, but such is the case. Look at modern religion of practically any type you care to mention. People pray to God, they talk of God but I venture to suggest that the God they address is often one of their own imagining, conjured up from the limited resources of their own minds and a projection of their own thoughts and desires. 

Of course, none of us really knows God. As the absolute and eternal, he is beyond us all. But there really is a difference between those who intuit something of his reality because they have begun to open themselves up to what is beyond themselves, the truth of the transcendent, and those who may believe in something but do so from within the context of their own minds. It's like an enclosed circle and one in which there is a little opening so that the light outside begins to seep in. We in the West can see the mental conception of God quite clearly in Islam but it appears just as much in many contemporary Christian churches where God has been reduced to something like the head of a social services bureau, a non-judgemental figure preoccupied with egalitarianism and universal friendliness rather than the Maker of Heaven and Earth who hates sin but whose love touches like a blazing fire that burns without hurt. Make sure that the God you remember is the fullest expression you can conceive of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, and try to understand him in spiritual not worldly terms. Accept no lesser substitutes.

This is also the day that the UK was supposed to have left the European Union and regained its economic and political independence, turning back towards its true mission in the world. For, cutting through all the obfuscation and waffle, that is what this is all actually about. However, the bullying potentates of the EU and the craven incompetents of the British Government have put an at least temporary stop to that. Not to mention the behind the scenes manipulations of civil servants and bureaucrats whose arrogance is only matched by their complacency. 

Hard words, I know, and I'm not saying these are all bad people. Doubtless many mean well according to their conception of things. But they see everything in terms of this world (even the religious among them - apparently most of the clergy and all the bishops in the Church of England want Britain to remain in the EU), and they have no spiritual insight or vision, substituting for that a belief in progress on the worldly level. One must hope that their actions will make an increasing number of people realise how completely untrustworthy the political class and technocratic elites are. May they consequently turn to deeper ways of engaging with the problems of life. As the outer world descends further into illusion, remembering the Creator becomes more vital by the day.

Remember The Creator

I have a book coming out at the end of March published by Axis Mundi. It's called 'Remember the Creator' which is something I was told by my teachers many years ago. Very simple, isn't it? In fact, it's almost trite from a spiritual point of view. And yet it's the key to everything. It's also the key to the ongoing descent into chaos in the world today, a descent that is frequently unrecognised or not admitted to but is intuitively sensed by many people even if the majority don't associate it with a spiritual problem. We have forgotten the Creator. And even when people do acknowledge God, that is often within a worldly context in that he is slotted into a largely humanist scenario or seen from within a religion with that, as an ideology, primary and the living, breathing (spirit means breath) God, secondary. 

When we recognise the reality of God, everything turns around. But I mean really recognise not just give intellectual assent to. Our attitude towards ourselves, towards others, towards the world and towards life changes completely. Our motives change, our purpose changes. Our concepts of good and bad, of truth and falsehood, of beauty and love, all these things change. In a way, we are now foreigners to the rest of humanity, those who still live in the world of illusion, a world in which God has no part and they have complete autonomy over themselves.

This is what the book is about. Here is the blurb on the back cover. 

Remember the Creator is a book about the reality
of God and how to become aware of that reality.

Starting from personal experience, it moves on to look at the
evidence for God’s existence and then considers what sort of God he might be. The teachings of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are examined but seen as incomplete in the light of the truth that the deepest level of reality must include the personal. Further chapters discuss atheism, morality and suffering, and how these are to be understood from the perspective of a Creator and his purpose in creating, before the conclusion is reached that any true revival of spirituality in the West should be linked to Christ. Finally, we reflect on the modern world and ask what humanity needs to do to throw off the strong sense of alienation it currently suffers from.

And here are links to its pages on Amazon U.K. and Amazon U.S. where you can, if you wish, browse through some of the pages.

God and Nothing

This is an extract from a book due to come out later this year but it includes bits left out of the book mainly because they over-complicated the principal point of the relevant chapter. Which I hope they don't do here.

God nowadays is often described as transcending any idea of sexual distinction. Either above masculine and feminine or else including both within himself. And if we are positing an abstract Supreme Principle, unmanifest spirit in its pure 'isness', that would no doubt be correct. But if we are talking about the Creator, the one who created the universe, who created our souls and made us individual beings, the one who Jesus Christ called Father and with whom we can have a relationship, then we might have to reconsider that idea. Naturally the fact he is Father does not mean he doesn't contain all qualities within himself but still as the Creator he is Father, and Creation results from the projection of an unexpressed feminine side of the divine being. So God is not biologically male but, as a Person, he is masculine and all souls are feminine to him which is demonstrated by the fact that souls can only become spiritually alive through receiving spiritual impregnation from him, otherwise known as grace.

Is reality ultimately personal or impersonal? If the latter, as with the god of the philosophers, it is difficult to see how the former could ever have arisen or how love, beauty and goodness could have the meaning they do. Ultimately they would be swallowed up, being just pointers to absolute oneness. And if they don’t have any ultimate meaning then they don’t have true meaning at all. However if reality is personal, as the Christian revelation maintains, then life is actually alive and love is real and goodness is truth. I would say that the personal is not a lower, more relative, manifestation of the impersonal absolute but the very heart and point of existence. So the personal is not a limited or bound aspect of the impersonal but the impersonal is a non-manifested aspect of the personal, and it is the personal that is true ultimate reality. The foundation of the universe is not pure being but I AM.

And here perhaps we have the clue to the whole mystery.  God in the absolute sense prior to creation is I AM, therefore transcending duality. But when he manifests himself in creation as the Creator that becomes the masculine polarity and creation is feminine to him. Thus from pure Subject comes Subject and Object, and I believe this gives us an insight into the heart of the origin of the masculine/feminine polarity and a pointer as to what it really means.

For here as Subject and Object we have the two cosmic principles in their most undifferentiated forms. Now, in the context of creation all human beings contain both principles within them so this is not a description of men and women. Reality is much subtler than that. Nevertheless it does point to an archetypal truth about the two sexes and is a guide as to the fundamental dynamics of the relationship between them.

And so from the standpoint of Creator and creation we see that God is masculine before he is feminine even though divine reality includes and contains both. Numerically this can be represented as 2 (female) coming from 1 (male) and then from these arise ‘the ten thousand things’ as creation is called in Taoism. But I should briefly mention a metaphysical speculation that the Mother is not just universal Nature, the ground of matter, space and time in which all things are born, the mirror which enables God to see himself. She is also the emptiness beyond being from whence God himself arises, the 0 before 1. Where this theory falls down is that God does not arise from anywhere. He eternally is. For there is no 0 before 1 except from the point of view of creation, of form, time and space. But the Absolute is not 0. What is more there is no beyond being. There is a state beyond becoming but that is a different matter (no pun intended). Something (God) does not come from nothing (emptiness or zero) even though we may have to resort to an apophatic type language to describe God’s essence, the what of his being. But the one eternally is, existing at the deepest level of being. This theory also conflicts with the idea of the fundamental Personhood of God, his who, which is base level reality. For the Mother is the Mother of the Son not the Father, and the darkness of her womb is that of the prima materia before it is touched by the spirit of God and bursts into the light of Creation. 

0 can only refer to the 'time' before the creation of matter; in Christian terms the 'nothing' from which God created (which was actually out of himself I would say). It does not refer to God himself who is now and always the One. In spiritual terms there is no such thing as zero.

Spirit and Matter

At various places in this blog I have talked about spirit and matter but not really defined these words in any way. I actually rather like not defining them as a definition limits them in a way that leaving their interpretation open to the imagination does not. For we all understand, or should do, what spirit and matter are even if we cannot plumb the depths of what they are. We sense that each describes a very different aspect of life. That, roughly speaking, spirit is life and matter the garb spirit takes to express itself. An intellectual analysis can certainly elucidate that basic idea to a degree but it can also unnecessarily complicate it, and, worse, lock one up in theory which is self-defeating since mind, a material thing insofar as thought is expressed in form, can never comprehend spirit which is intuited or known directly. The annals of philosophy are full of highly intelligent people picking over the bones of a corpse. But still we are intellectual beings so one should make some attempt to expand on a basic definition while stressing that words can obscure the truth as much as they can help to uncover it.


I am regarding spirit as the essence of life and matter as the substance through which that essence manifests itself. The inner and outer components of being. But while the modern world accepts matter as the stuff of which we are made (though it's getting harder and harder to know exactly what that is), it denies spirit, regarding it, if existing at all, as arising from material forces. This is the basis of materialism, that matter comes before consciousness which is secondary. Naturally I disagree with that. Of course, I do. It's wrong! So, what is spirit?

One way to think of spirit is as the energy of pure being which animates otherwise inert matter thus enabling the one to become many, and the whole universe of becoming, change, time, space and so on to appear. But the word “energy” can mislead for spirit is not some impersonal force like a cosmic gas spread throughout the universe, and I doubt could have been conceived of as such before the rise of materialistic science which effectively transposed its concepts onto the spiritual plane. Spirit is fully and gloriously personal, though it may have a non-personal aspect. For it is life and life is consciousness and consciousness requires one who is conscious. I AM implies an I. And an I implies a Mind.

So spirit and matter are the basic duality of creation. They are expressed as life and form, subject and object, God and Nature and so on. This doesn't mean there is an irresolvable duality at the heart of existence for ultimately these two are one. Whether you regard things theistically or not the position is the same. Either matter is an aspect of spirit projected out as the vehicle for its manifestation or God creates matter from nothing as the fundamental stuff from which he then forms everything else.  Whichever way you look at it, matter either comes from spirit or is a part of it. But it is different to it as that which receives is different to that which gives. It is its complementary opposite in manifestation which is necessarily dualistic or nothing could be at all. Perfect oneness would be little different to perfect noneness.


Spirit and matter are the two poles of existence required for existence to be known. Matter is the mirror in which God is enabled to see his face and, as creation, it becomes his bride. Spirit is what gives life to matter, and the two combine to bring about all that is with spirit working through matter, which includes time and space, to carry life onwards to unimaginable glories of ever greater truth and beauty, making the one many and the many more and more perfect individualised manifestations of the one. Without spirit, matter is dead. Without matter, spirit remains in darkness and alone, unable to see its face or express itself. They are two but they are also one and through their interaction the universe is born. 


That is on the macrocosmic level. On the microcosmic level our task to render the material portion of our being ever more receptive to the spiritual which we do through the purification of mind and body, and the turning of our consciousness both inwards and upwards, not quite the same thing and both necessary. We have to transfer our attention from the phenomenal world and its contents to the spiritual one, and the priorities of the latter must become ours. It is a mistake to give too much attention to matter. It is, after all, not meant to be the primary partner in the relationship. But it is also a mistake to reject or ignore or downgrade it in any way since life is a relationship to which both partners contribute just as both do to a dance. The expression of life in matter is the expression of love.


Spirit is the light and life of creation and matter its substance and foundation. From their union comes soul which gives being its quality.

God the Father (revised)

I've put a revised version of an earlier post here on 'Remember the Creator'.
http://www.rememberthecreator.co.uk/2017/09/god-father.html