Virtue

 Every virtue has a complementary virtue which stops the excesses of the first virtue turning into a vice. Mercy and justice is one obvious example. Tolerance and adherence to truth is another while humility and strength is a third pairing of virtues with one filling in the gaps of the other and curbing its tendency to fall into a deformed version of itself. You might add patience and resolve which stops patience drifting into apathy. Then there is compassion which without discernment falls into sentimentality. Each virtue naturally suggests the other and if it doesn't for any individual, that means that its motivating impulse is in some measure deficient or even defective.

It is the same with divine qualities such as love and truth. One without the other leads first to imbalance then disorder and finally to evil. When virtues are seen as emanating from the reality of Christ they will automatically include their balancing opposite because Christ is the central sun from which the virtues originate, and they are like rays. They don't exist in their own right. He exists and they come from him. When severed from the reality of Christ, the supposed virtue loses its spiritual force and becomes a caricature of itself, often ending up as a path to sin.

To be spiritually creative virtue must operate in a proper metaphysical structure which incorporates a sacred centre. The virtue must both express the quality of that centre and be a means of guiding the human soul towards union with it. This is why the virtues without Christ are sterile and then potentially destructive. I am not saying that only a professed Christian can have these virtues but it is easier for a professed Christian to do so because he knows whence they arise. This is also why virtue in the Christian world is followed because it is right whereas in Eastern religion virtue is often just part of technique and a means to an end rather than a justification in and of itself. If the goal is Nirvana the virtues are meaningless except as a way of facilitating that goal. If the goal is Christ the virtues become both means and end.

The modern world has lost Christ but kept some of the virtues associated with him, but cut a flower from its stalk and pretty soon it withers and dies. This is increasingly apparent where the virtues are concerned, and now they are often used as a way of attacking their source. This is a natural outcome of a thing being separated from its founding principle but it has also been exploited by the forces of darkness. There was no need for it to have gone this far for a humanity that was not looking for excuses to sin or a justification for hatred and resentment. Evil is using decayed good to advance its own rotten agenda, and there is no excuse for those who go along with this because in their hearts they know what they are doing. Some may be dupes but no one is innocent. That is the nature of these times when the heart is being examined.

Spiritual Loss and What To Do About It

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

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

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

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

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

Salvation and Enlightenment part 2

Eastern religion is the quest for enlightenment or liberation, the two words amounting to much the same thing. This entails the death of self-identification and a state of consciousness in which the outer world has little or no substantive reality. This is regarded as the zenith of spiritual achievement and at the same time the underlying eternal reality which has always been. Given it transcends time, that makes sense. But are time and the individual self really irrelevant to the spiritual quest or do they have a part to play in that there is a growing process involved and the end result is not just the realisation of something that has always been there? Christianity speaks of a new creation which the saved soul enters through Christ. This is radically different to absorption in eternity. One might call it eternity plus time, the two together making something completely new and more than either on its own.

This is a fallen world. Most religions accept that. The Buddha called it a world of suffering and the Hindu search is for moksha meaning liberation from the need to incarnate in the material world which is an endless process as long as the jiva or individual soul makes new karma which it will do if attached to the outcome of its actions. It may be that the spiritual path before Christ did entail the escape from material bondage through fully transcending identification with the phenomenal part of one's being up to and including the individual self. Hence, enlightenment, nirvana and so on. But Christ brought something new. He defeated the devil, the prince of this world, and thereby redeemed matter. He made a new creation, heaven, and from that moment on there was a higher destiny for the soul than absorption into the all. It could become spiritualised or sanctified which would mean the good in it, love, beauty and goodness itself, all of which are superfluous in strict non-duality where form has no function, would not just be preserved but enhanced. Spirit could transform matter by entering into it instead of matter needing to be left behind for spirit to be known. Christ ascended into heaven with his body which means heaven is not just spirit but spiritualised matter too. It is not a divorce but a marriage.

This does not mean that the Nirvikalpa Samadhi state of Indian mysticism in which subject and object differences cease to exist is not fully real. That does represent contact with the ground of our being. But it is still part of the old creation even if it is the most fundamental, the most primal, part. It is the deepest level of reality but it still exists in nature by which I mean a human being can experience this state through its own efforts unlike salvation which takes us beyond our present spiritual state to a new existence, and which is dependent on grace bestowed by the Creator.

Salvation in contradistinction to Enlightenment does not open our eyes to what already and always is but transforms us into a being which combines the divine and the transfigured individual. The Heaven promised by Christ is very different to the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of heaven which would be better called paradise. The Buddhist and Hindu heavens are transient and below the Nirvana level whereas Heaven is eternal. And, as stated, it cannot be gained by the unsupported efforts of the creature. Entry depends on the grace of God though one must be fully open to this grace which means fully open to him.

Enlightenment is not Heaven. Heaven is a new creation whereas the non-dualistic consciousness called enlightenment is the ground of awareness which is always there albeit overlaid by form. When God saw creation he pronounced it good and, though original creation was spoilt which is why early mystics sought liberation from it, since Christ there is a new creation in which goodness and beauty and love all exist in perfect form, fully transparent to spirit. 

We must understand the difference between the beatific vision which is union with God after death (the degree of union being proportionate to the spiritual condition of the soul at death), and mystical states that can be experienced while on earth. The beatific vision is qualitatively different to the experience of being one with pure consciousness because that is not God but the imprint or image of God within us. The divine image is a living reality but the image is not the actual Person. We can be totally identified with the image within us but that is not oneness with God who is the source of the image. For that we need to go beyond the impersonal which is the spirit of God spread throughout creation to the personal or God in himself.

The identification of the individual self with universal spirit can lead to the erroneous idea that the subject is one with God. In fact, he is one with the root of his own being or God in him not God in himself. This spiritual error can lead to moral and ethical confusion if the subject is not sufficiently aware of the distinction between Creator and created, and many Indian gurus have succumbed to this form of spiritual narcissism though the renowned Ramana Maharishi is not among them. His case was exceptional. He was an ordinary boy who at 16 had a death experience which dramatically altered his consciousness for evermore. He found parallels for his new state in the Hindu tradition, notably that of advaita Vedanta, but he did not come to it through that tradition or any spiritual discipline. He claimed never to have practised sadhana of any kind. The question is what caused his experience? Was it spiritual, psychological or even physical as in a chemical change in his brain? It is not to denigrate his spiritual status to ask this because that was demonstrated in his life afterwards. His personal reaction is a better guide to his high status than his impersonal realisation.

 

Whatever the answer to that question what can definitely be stated is that no experience attainable by mystics in this world necessarily leads to or guarantees salvation and the post-mortem seeing of God face to face which is a spiritual vision that includes and transcends both dualistic and non-dualistic modes of being. No mystic is spiritually saved by his experiences but only by the love of God and faith in Christ, however they may see him because members of non-Christian religions can respond to the spirit of Christ if that appears in their religion which it may do under a form congenial to that religion. Christ appears as he is only in Christianity but his spirit did influence other spiritual approaches after his death to the extent that they were able to respond to it.

 

 Over the past several decades thousands of Westerners have sought mystical transcendence through Eastern religion. The reality is that most people who have followed the gurus and holy men of India and elsewhere in the quest for enlightenment have not got much real benefit from the exercise, and many have even become more spiritually self-absorbed because they have pursued heaven instead of God.

 

It is precisely to correct this that the disciple after mystical transports, which are often given as early encouragement to tread the path, may (if he is lucky) suffer periods or even a whole lifetime of aridity. He must learn to do the right thing for the right reason. He must learn to love God for God's sake not his own. This is the only way to salvation.

Salvation and Enlightenment part 1

 The most distinctive feature of advanced mystical experience is the dissolution of self in which the sense of "I" is subsumed in the totality of what is. To be strictly accurate, this cannot really be categorised as an experience because there is, or seems to be, no self remaining to experience anything. There is simply a pure, universalised consciousness of bliss that shines in the mind and breaks down the barrier between outer and inner so that the duality of self and not-self disappears. It is a state beyond time, space, thought and any divisions of form when everything is taken up into illimitable being. But we do call it an experience because the experiencer always returns. For note this. These experiences are extraordinary but they do not make you a better person when they pass and you reenter the everyday world. And if you think about it, how could they since they have no relevance to life in the normal world with its characteristics of light and dark, good and bad, better and worse. They are above all that, relating as they do to being not becoming.

Two questions arise. If these experiences bear no relation to the world of becoming do they render that world meaningless? Or does the fact that they bear no relation mean they do not represent the ultimate goal of human endeavour as some would claim, but are simply expressions of one side of it and, in that respect, might even be seen as deceptive? That is to say, is life the absolute alone or the absolute and the relative together? The second would surely be more than the first even if the concept of more has no meaning in the light of the first taken on its own terms.

 

When the individual who experiences these transpersonal states tries to interpret them afterwards it is by no means certain he will arrive at the correct understanding. An experience and its interpretation are very different things. In this case, the ineffability of the experience might lead the person to draw the conclusion he has cracked the cosmic code of life. After all, what could be more than something that goes beyond the very idea of more or less, something that is whole and complete and unarguable in its completeness? But if the point of spiritual life was to enter into this supernal state what reason would there be ever to have been born in a world of duality? What need was there for a self in the first place if the goal was just to discard it? To think of life in those terms is to ignore a good part of reality which is obviously more than just pure being or we would not be able to ask the question.

 

Mystic states of oneness, sometimes regarded as pointers to enlightenment if they become permanent, are real. They may be rare for most people and they may not last long even when they are attained, but they certainly exist.  The question is what causes them? Are they a purely spiritual phenomenon or might they be the result of chemical changes in the brain and therefore linked to the physical body which would mean that the death of the body would probably bring them to an end and they would have no bearing on the post-mortem state and fate of the soul.

Mystical states can arise spontaneously or they can come about through spiritual or mental disciplines in the same way as body-building, diet, exercise, training etc, can develop powerful muscles. In India techniques have existed for centuries to manipulate these states into existence and we know they can also be brought about through psychedelic drugs which does rather suggest that chemical changes in the brain might be responsible for changes in consciousness. If we accept that we are spirits in corporeal bodies which are designed to experience the material world then we can see that these bodies might act as filters which block out higher consciousness so we can function in this world. It may well be possible that these filters can be removed under certain extreme circumstances causing mystical experiences to occur, either arising spontaneously through brain changes or else being engineered by technique and discipline.

 

But does this mean the subject is a more spiritual person? His I may have been removed for a spell but in itself it remains what it was. It has not been rendered pure and holy which I would submit is the whole point of the spiritual exercise and which, moreover, is something that can only happen through grace. God gives us a self for us to grow and develop until the point is reached at which we give it back to him and then he restores it, filled with his presence. This is a process not a sudden transformation of being which can take place at any time, and it is not restoring our original nature but creating something totally new which is the divine self, the God-infused self as opposed to re-absorption in the pool of original consciousness from whence we were drawn out at our creation.

 Some Indian gurus teach that enlightenment can be attained through awakening the kundalini energy. To be sure, they will say this is dangerous and should only be undertaken under the supervision of a qualified instructor but what they don't make clear is that kundalini has its roots in the physical body and so the consciousness changes its arousal can instigate are down to material changes not spiritual ones. As a Master in the book Towards the Mysteries in a talk given to Pandit Gopinath Kaviraj, an eminent Hindu scholar of the mid-twentieth century, says "Kundalini is not ‘spiritual’. It is ‘material’". The proper procedure is that it will arise naturally concomitantly with proper spiritual development but it can be forced artificially which is what these renegade gurus (let's call them what they are) teach. They may get results but these are unholy results because not in line with the correct way which is growth within character. Furthermore, being bodily instigated, they will cease with death leaving the subject back where he was or even worse off because he has sought to steal divine fire from God. This may well be the state of many supposedly realised yogis and the like after death. Their occult manipulations will have no bearing on the eventual salvation or otherwise of their soul. They may indeed jeopardise it.

To be continued.

Christian Polytheism

 The rivalry between Christianity and paganism seems to be reviving in the West as the secular materialism of the post-war period becomes increasingly threadbare and unsatisfactory. Once our stomachs are full and we have a roof over our heads and maybe a family of our own, many of us find there is still something lacking in our lives and we look for what might fill that lack. What is missing is meaning, of which there is none in the modern world. Meaning is only to be found in religion, though some seek it in art but even there it only exists when art looks beyond this world for inspiration.

It is the search for meaning that is behind any revival of religion. Some people turn to Christianity but often today some look to the pagan traditions which can provide an ethnic foundation to spiritual practice that Christianity does not have. A problem for would-be pagans is that the pagan religions died out centuries ago so all we have are modern simulations, based on records from the past but not living traditions. Therefore, any modern pagan is of necessity being somewhat performative when he practices his religion. It's rather like Westerners following the path of Hinduism which can never be a natural thing. There is always a cultural difference, in one case caused by space, in the other by time, and that renders the act artificial which is to say false. That doesn't mean it has no value but it will only have limited value.

Another problem is that paganism died out for a reason. It was superseded by the advent of Christ who really did make all things new. And yet some things were lost in the process, in particular a real connection to creation and a contact with the inner workings of nature as well as a proper relationship with the spirit of place. This is why the contemporary Christian needs to re-engage with paganism and even add a pagan element to his Christianity. This element should be seen in the light of Christ, in other words it must be baptised, but it provides a form of spiritual nourishment that Christianity lost as it lost touch with nature, with the earth and the land.

This is what I mean by Christian polytheism. Such a polytheism does not mean believing in many gods rather than one God. It means that under God there are many what we can justifiably call gods who carry out his work in creation. This is not too great a leap from where Christians already are, characterising them as angels, but angels are often regarded as somewhat abstract or, worse, sentimentalised. By seeing them as gods our minds can enter more deeply into the spiritual universe and the inside of creation. You could call them the inner energies of creation though with the understanding that behind these energies are beings not mere impersonal forces.

As a matter of fact, many of us have long been exposed to Christian polytheism without necessarily recognising it as such. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were Christian polytheists, at least in their fiction, and that is a good deal of what makes their work appeal so much to the imagination. They were devout Christians but they were pagans of a sort too due to their creative absorption in the myths and legends of the past which deeply marked their literary work. Their reconciliation of pagan and Christian elements shows how each tradition can bring greater life to the other. You might see this as paganism providing soul to Christianity while in return Christianity brings spirit.

 150 years ago what had been esoteric began to be revealed until now all hidden teachings are out in the open, available for anyone interested to see. And yet the esoteric remains for there is always something more behind the scenes. How do you discover new levels of the esoteric now, ones that have the power of spiritual transformation that is largely lost when what is secret becomes externalised? You must go beyond the human mind and start to enter directly into the mind of Christ, and this you can do through love and imagination. An imaginative engagement with Christian polytheism in which the spiritual levels between the Creator and his emissaries, the gods and angels of creation, are explored will act like water on earth under the sun of Christ causing many beautiful flowers to grow.

Earthly Utopias Always Fail

The attempt to live on Earth as though you were already in Heaven inevitably leads to disaster, and communities that try to do this always collapse. No exceptions. They may have good intentions but they are naive and lack wisdom.

The world of man is innately corrupt. It is a fallen world marked by sin, ignorance, greed, desire, fear, conflict and death, and any attempt to regulate this world must take those into account. You cannot pretend they are not there even in the best and smoothest running of worldly societies. You shouldn't go too far the other way and think everything is wicked and evil, but you have to acknowledge the reality of evil and its presence in every human heart. Like it or not, that is the truth.

Earth is not Heaven and Natural Man cannot function on the same principles as Spiritual Man. He should certainly aspire to love but cannot pretend love is already there because it just is not which is why all earthly societies, even the most spiritually attuned, must accept that sin is ever present in some form and degree. Hence, there must always be law and a measure of force to preserve order and peace. Idealistic souls (doves) may recoil from this but the wise (serpents) know it is so. We are called to be both doves and serpents at the same time. Either one on its own leads to illusion. In fact, either one on its own is not even real from the spiritual perspective, being a worldly human imitation of a real spiritual quality because on the spiritual level each of necessity includes the other. It is only when the mind is separated from the soul that love and truth appear distinct.

The reality of this world is entropy and death. That is why it is futile to attempt to establish a heavenly kingdom here. At the same time, the flaws of this world make it a good environment for learning which, after all, is its function and the reason for our appearance here. 

Heaven is perfection but this world can never be perfect.  We can and should try to live as best we can. We should try to build societies and cultures that approximate to the higher worlds, but heaven is only heaven because its denizens are completely purified of sin and that is not possible in this world. Earthly utopias inevitably become performative because they are built from the outside, seeking to establish perfection through regulation rather than manifesting it from within. As such their inner inconsistencies and inability to sustain the vision will always tear them apart. 

The attempt to enforce heaven is more likely to create hell and that is what the history of such endeavours demonstrates over and over again.

Ungrounded Goodness

 "When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” 

Bruce Charlton has an excellent piece today about the fakeness of altruism which reminded me of this quote from G.K. Chesterton. Altruism is indeed fake because it is an artificial self-conscious imitation of virtue. It is the mind posing as the heart and the self congratulating itself on its goodness. This is not a cynical put down of philanthropic selflessness but points out that the attempt to do good, even the desire to do good, is not a spiritual quality because it does not come from the soul but the calculating mind which is to say, the earthly self. Jesus said in Matthew 6:1 that good works should be done in secret to have any real spiritual impact and altruism is never done in secret because even if it is not done in front of others it is done for and from the self. True goodness is always spontaneous, but the altruistic mind is always looking for ways to demonstrate its own perfection.

Chesterton points out that all goodness to be real must be rooted in the spiritual. When the desire to be and to do good has lost contact with the spiritual it becomes an imposter that adopts the outer appearance of goodness but has no connection to what is really good which is God, and therefore actually does spiritual harm. This is the case even when the would-be good person claims to be and even thinks himself to be motivated by religious faith. If this faith is only in the mind and if it is directed to worldly ends then it is not faith in God for "God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit" (John 4:24). Altruism, or doing good to others, is pulling God down to this world and worshipping him in matter.

Obviously, this does not mean we should not do good. As Bruce points out, two wrongs don't make a right. The argument (if argument is the right word) must be lifted to a higher plane, the plane of spirit and of truth rather  than that of the thinking, calculating, time-centred mind. There apparent contradictions are reconciled and when we act from that plane we do so without thought or ambition or desire. Altruism is a secular imitation of true virtue and, as such, spiritually corrosive.

Humility and Love

 Humility and love are considered two of the primary Christian virtues. They are present in other religions, of course, but not emphasised to the same degree. It is this insistence on humility and love that sometimes gets Christianity accused of being an effeminate religion that promotes a slave morality, a religion that makes men less manly.

But what if there was a deeper reason behind this? What if the emphasis on these two virtues was because Christianity was a religion intended for a masculine people with a strong sense of self? Then, far from being an effeminate religion, it would be a spiritual corrective, something that counterbalanced innate tendencies and raised the qualities of its destined group of people to a spiritual plane. Christianity is often claimed to be a universal religion but really for most of its existence it has been a European one. Even the near Easterners and North Africans of its early days had a strong European component in their makeup, and for the bulk of the last 2,000 years Christianity has been an almost exclusively European religion, lived and developed by people of European origin wherever they might be in the world.

Religions are not the same but most have similar recommendations for behaviour. None, though, stress humility and love as Christianity does, and certainly not the Judaic religion from which Christianity emerged. I believe that Christianity was always intended for the European people, and though these people adapted it for their purposes, the core of it was fundamental. Firstly, the focus on Christ the resurrected Son of God, and secondly, the essential teachings of humility and love. These were there partly because they are true, that goes without saying, but also because they could temper the warrior spirit of the Europeans and transform that into a spiritual energy. The blood stained sword of battle becomes St Michael's gleaming sword of light. St Michael may be an archangel but he is also a chieftain or war leader in the Indo-European style. Warriors become soldiers of God who battle against evil and we see this in various groups throughout the Middle Ages from the Templars onwards. Believers are not just monks who retire from the world. They are also active in the world to a degree you do not see with Hindus or Buddhists or even Muslims. However, their activity is under the aegis of God, and it is the religious focus on humility and love that transforms the fighting mentality of the pagan Europeans into that of a warrior for truth.

The Heliand is an epic poem from the 9th century written in Old Saxon. Heliand means saviour and the poem is a version of the Gospel story that presents Jesus in a form acceptable to the Northern European mind so he is something like a chieftain while his disciples are the band of warriors that surround and support him. For example, the unknown author used the word treuwa to describe faith. This word must be related to our word true and it means faithfulness rather than faith or loyalty rather than belief. So the poet is saying that you are saved by faithfulness to Jesus not simply by believing in him. This would appeal to the pagan mindset of the time much more and, to my way of thinking, is a better way of describing how spiritual transformation may be brought about. 

I mention this to show the type of person early Christianity had to deal with and, so to speak, bring to the table.  If Jesus had been presented as a soft pacifist who was captured and crucified by his enemies that would not be appealing, but show him as a king and warrior who voluntarily underwent torture and death to redeem his men and you make him worthy of being followed and, if necessary, of dying for. Once your leader is revealed as a valiant hero you are more open to his teachings of humility and love.

 The trouble now is that humility and love have been weaponised and used to undermine a more complete or properly developed spiritual consciousness. The victim becomes the hero and the hero the oppressor. Humility and love are certainly primary spiritual virtues but so are wisdom and strength, and the former must be seen in the context of the latter if you are to reach a true spiritual state of being. The soft virtues without the hard ones become spiritually corrosive.

Christ came as the revealer of divine love. He, the greatest of all, humbled himself, allowing himself to be killed on the cross, a shameful end. His teaching of humility and love is the key that opens the door to heaven. But that does not mean that we should focus on these to the exclusion of other qualities which are equally important. Besides, all real love derives from love of God which is love of truth so you cannot use supposed love to deny truth as often happens in these times. As for humility, that is only there to remove pride. It is not a matter of encouraging weakness but points out that true strength is in God.

Humility and love were enjoined on the Europeans not because of any defects they might have but to balance their positive qualities which were to do with a developed sense of the individual self. This is then lifted up to become a creative contributor to spiritual life. The European type is not interested in passive absorption into oneness but wants to be an active participant in the glories of creation, but for that to be his ego must be made clean. Hence humility and love.

Food

 In his book Mere Christianity, first published in 1952 but deriving from lectures given during the Second World War, C.S. Lewis has a chapter entitled Sexual Morality in which he considers what the Christian approach should be to this vexed subject, and specifically the virtue of chastity. He was writing before the sexual revolution of the 1960s but that didn't come out of nowhere and really just meant that what had been going on, or at least discussed, in certain circles of society spread throughout the whole of it.

Lewis makes the point that the sexual instinct, good and natural in itself, has gone wrong, and says that Christianity does not believe that sex is bad, an accusation often aimed at it, but that the state into which the sexual instinct has got is the problem. It has become corrupted and that is what is bad. Something often forgotten is that the idea of romantic love only really developed in the Christian West, and if that love was idealised on occasion it could be said that this reflected the sense that the human love between a man and a woman could be lifted up into the Christian Heaven and, as a result, transformed into a divine state.

But this piece is not about sex. In the course of this chapter Lewis illustrates the degenerated state of the sexual instinct by the example of a striptease act where men gather to ogle a woman undressing. He says suppose you went to a country where you could draw a crowd by slowly lifting the lid off a plate of mutton chops or bacon, wouldn't you think there was something wrong with the people of that country and that the normal healthy appetite for food had become exaggerated and corrupted? He writes this in the sure knowledge that his audience would think it absurd.

But this is more or less what we have today! Our excessive preoccupation with food shows itself everywhere. The number of restaurants and fast food outlets on every high street, the constant advertisements for all things edible, the TV schedules with their endless programmes about food and competitions for those who cook or bake it, the lionising of chefs as though they were great artists. We have become obsessed with food, not so much from the point of view of our stomachs as from that of our tastebuds and the desire to stimulate them unceasingly. This is a sure sign of decadence. There is nothing wrong with enjoying food. One should enjoy it. It is one of the comforts God has given us to make life in the physical world more bearable. But there is a difference between healthy enjoyment and gluttony, and we have forgotten the age old truth that indulging the pleasures of the flesh deadens us to the spiritual. The body is part of what we are but if we give it too much prominence it will become all of what we are, and that is what our modern obsession with food is doing.

I'm not recommending we put on hair shirts and live on stale bread and water, even if that is a good practice sometimes. It's a question of priorities and proportion, and we have gone much too far down the road of physical indulgence. There is a decadent sensuality where food is concerned just as there is in the case of sex, and it too is spiritually destructive.

The pleasures of the body have their place but that place in a spiritually aware culture is a subordinate one. The more attention you pay to these pleasures, the more you try to cultivate them or seek to stimulate the desires associated with them, the more you lose all connection to the spiritual. Man is not an animal but if he indulges the animal side of his nature, something animals don't do, he sinks lower than the animal because he has sinned against both spirit and nature.

Food is good but a good exaggerated or given a place above its merits becomes an evil. This is what has happened with food in our world. There was an episode recently when a well-known journalist and 'media personality' opined that the pleasures of foreign cuisine was compensation for the indigenous people to effectively lose their country. The spiritual state of such an individual is pitiful.

Detachment and Indifference

 A couple of weeks ago I saw a television programme in which an Indian man who had been living in England since he was a small boy and who was, to all appearances, completely Westernised went back to India in order to find acceptance for the death of his father to whom he had been extremely close. The shots where he recollected his love for his father were very touching. He came from a Hindu family but was now an atheist due, no doubt, to the influence of the world in which he, a successful journalist, lived. But his father's death had awoken something in him and though he neither sought nor expected easy answers, he did want to explore his traditional background.

The way he chose to do this was to join a pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela which is a festival that takes place every 12 years when Jupiter, the sun and the moon form some kind of astronomical relationship. The gathering is the most enormous collection of human beings on the planet and wild horses couldn't drag me there. But for many it is the highlight of their lives. Tens of millions of people attend forming a chaotic mass of humanity, and for Hindus it is one of the holiest events with people making many sacrifices to go and bathe in the river Ganges where they can purify themselves of sin and prepare their souls for Moksha which is liberation. At least, that's the idea. I remember reading once that one of Ramakrishna's disciples asked him if bathing in the Ganges really did wash away your sins. It certainly does, he replied. The trouble is the sins sit in the branches of the trees on the riverside and, unless you are attentive, drop back on you as you come out. A good answer that satisfies both faith and reason - sort of.

In the last post I talked about the need for detachment at the present time. There is always a need for detachment but the fact of the end times makes it more important than ever. I spoke of it meaning not that you don't care but that you are not attached to the caring. This might seem a contradiction in terms so let me explain. You care because this world is real but you are not attached to the care because it is not ultimately real. This world is a reflection of a higher world. That doesn't mean it's not real but that its reality is borrowed not innate. The true reality from which springs any reality this world has is located in the higher world. In the heart of God, you might say.

I mention this because as the journalist in the TV programme was going to bathe in the river at the Kumbh Mela there was a stampede. Hundreds of people were injured and dozens died. Naturally, he was horrified and he sought an explanation of how to react from the spiritual perspective from one of the many sannyasis who were present at the event. Unusually, this was a holy woman rather than a holy man, but she wore the ochre robe that signifies renunciation from the word. 

She told him to respond with indifference because birth and death were all part of life which is eternal. This is fine as far as it goes but the problem is the English word indifference carries the meaning of being, well, indifferent, that is to say, not caring about the pain and suffering there is in the world. You might consider this is just a question of the concepts of one language and culture not transferring accurately when expressed in the terms of another, and there is certainly an element of that. I suspect the word she would have used if speaking in her own language would have been vairagya which is a Sanskrit word meaning detachment and dispassion. It describes the spiritual state of being unattached to worldly matters of any kind, including ideas and beliefs, because one is centred in the eternal reality of being, above all the ebb and flow of events in the external world of space and time. It is not a question of the suppression of desire but the transcending of attachment to it. This is an essential quality to be acquired by any spiritual aspirant, Eastern or Western, that involves transferring the locus of attention from the phenomenal world of cause and effect to the stillness of the spiritual plane which is the underlying reality behind all the movement constantly going on in the material.

In classical Indian philosophy it is understood that dispassion does not negate compassion; that, in fact, properly ordered dispassion opens up the path to real compassion. However, there is a tendency, and this seems particularly the case for the Indian mind, for dispassion to actually mean, or result in, real indifference. That's why India is famous for its combination of spirituality with material squalor and degradation. Admittedly, it can be hard to balance detachment with caring but that is the task we are set, to be detached from the world but love it all the same because of the spiritual. Jesus wept. No one knew the reality of the spiritual world more than Jesus but that knowledge did not cut him off from the suffering in the material world.

I suspect that when this holy woman spoke of indifference to the deaths of many men and women at the pilgrimage she really was largely indifferent. I don't judge or condemn her because it is challenging when removing oneself from the world and transferring conscious attention to spirit to retain concern for the world. That is why there is always an element of balancing opposites on the spiritual path, of not going too far in one or another direction but standing on the edge of the razor sharp path. We must have detachment from the world but we must also have detachment from ourself. Then we will find (or so I have been told!) that love arises.

Humility and Pride

 Look in any spiritual textbook and it will tell you about humility and self-abnegation, particularly if it is a Christian one. Humility is an important virtue that shows one is not dominated by the ego or separate self which is a materialised expression/distortion of the soul. Self-abnegation likewise indicates that the disciple has overcome the ego. But are things really as simple as that? Is humility the only quality the spiritual self should possess?

There are two aspects to the soul which are to do with expansion and contraction, and both must be realised if the soul is to be complete. What, after all, is the point of the soul? What is its purpose? You may say that the soul just is as an individualised expression of divine being which is true enough, but that just refers to its raw state and there must be more or else there would be no need for the soul to descend to the phenomenal world, the subject/object world of duality in which the keywords are experience, expression and experiment. This relates to the self-actualisation of the soul which means its development from a more or less blank cipher to a glorious star being of many colours.

Humility relates to the awareness of the oneness of life and the supreme reality of God, the knowledge that all that you are comes from God. It is not yours. It is his gift to you. But the soul is also called to become great. The soul is not a servant or slave, and any religion that teaches this is not worthy of your spiritual allegiance. The soul has the potential to be a king or queen, and this is the path it must follow. The more you have, the more you can give. The soul should strive to have everything and to be everything. This is its destiny, and this is where pride comes into the the equation.

The spiritual person is proud. He seeks the exaltation of the self. He strives to express the majesty of God in his person. This is right and proper and what we are called to do. We are kings of the universe if only we knew it. We can wield powers that could destroy planets. We can master and direct the pure force of spiritual will.

At the same time, the spiritual person is humble. He knows that everything comes from God. He knows that all he has, others can have too. He is bound to the rest of life with bonds of love. He lives in a permanent state of gratitude to his Creator.

Humility and pride relate to love and will, and the two are not mutually exclusive but part of the whole. Christianity has focussed, to excess some might say, on humility, while the old pagan religions, especially those of the Indo-Europeans, sought the path of the hero. There is no contradiction between these two if one understands that they relate to different aspects of the spiritual path, the push forward of the undeveloped self to mastery and its subsequent return to the inner knowledge of God. The problem has been the expression of humility and pride in the wrong spheres. The spiritual self should have pride and the worldly self humility. Some Christians have made the mistake of transferring humility to the soul and some pagans in the past made the opposite error, but if you understand the nature of the inner and outer aspects to your being you will see that both humility and pride (of the right sort) have their place in the spiritual life.

Love Your Enemies

 As we know, the devil quotes scripture for his own ends. Nowhere has he been busier in this regard over recent years than with the matter of love which is now used as an excuse to overlook all manner of assaults on goodness and truth. Don't judge, don't condemn, be tolerant, accept everyone and (pretty much) everything because, you know, love.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies he meant we should not hold hatred in our hearts for those who do us an ill turn. This is not to benefit our enemies who may or may not be good or bad people. It is to stop the hatred corroding our soul which is what hatred does do when it is personal. He was saying that hatred darkens the heart while love brings light to it. You cannot affect what is out there in others but you can affect what is in yourself. If you want to go to heaven then you must have heaven within you. We need to remember this. After death you will go to a place, an environment, that reflects your inner state. The subjective mind and the objective world reflect each other in the post-mortem state, the spiritual world. If you have hatred within you, you cannot go to a place of love

This is why we are enjoined to take Christ into our hearts. Not merely believe in him, but actually build him into our being. This does start with belief but must progress to a form of identification. That does not mean you are Christ, that is blasphemy, but Christ is in you. Controversially for a Christian, this can work with other deity figures depending on how much spiritual light they carry, but none carries so much light, and pure light unmixed with other stuff as is the case with other deity figures, as Christ who is the image of God in human form to a greater degree than anything or anyone else. God has appeared in many images to humanity at various stages of its existence but only in Christ is he revealed as fully as is possible in this world.

So, love your enemies because love cleanses the soul and hatred makes it sick. But loving your enemies does not mean accepting evil, and if you use the excuse of love to ignore or, worse, justify evil then you are betraying love which, ultimately, is love of the Good.

Today in the name of love what is ugly is called beautiful, what is unnatural is called natural and what denies spirit is regarded as as healthy in its own way as what fully accepts it. If you really love then what you love first and foremost is God who is the author of love, and if you love God then you condemn what rejects or insults God. You don't let that condemnation affect you on a personal level because then it drags you down, but nor do you succumb to the dangerous illusion that universal, unconditional love means loving everything equally. There is good and there is evil. To love your enemy does not mean accepting evil which must be identified and unsentimentally condemned.

Spirituality is a False Path

"I'm not religious but I am spiritual". This has been a popular way to present your authentic spiritual credentials for some time. It is supposed to say I am a sensitive, caring person in touch with the deeper aspects of life and able to expand my consciousness beyond the limitations of a materialistic worldview, but I am not restricted by dogma or authority.

Well, that's fine as far as it goes, but there are problems. It is true that all religions are, to a greater or lesser extent, moribund now. They have run their course, and we have entered into a new phase of human evolutionary development. But it is also true that you can only go beyond something when you have fully absorbed it, and most spiritual but not religious people have not absorbed the lessons of religion. What they are really saying is, I want the benefits of religion but I am not prepared to pay the price. I want the rewards without making the sacrifice. I want the elevation without first going through the abasement.

Far too many spiritual but not religious people think of spirituality in terms of their feelings. But spirituality has nothing to do with your feelings. It has to do with feeling but not your feelings because it is not to do with feeding your soul but getting your soul right with God with no expectation of reward, no selfish motive. Only those who turn to God for love of God rather than the hope to get something in the exchange will find what they are looking for. The rest will follow paths lit with false light to the land of illusion. Religion is there to protect these foolish wanderers from going astray. By eschewing its firm guidance many souls will fall into spiritual darkness, even if to begin with this darkness has a glow to it.

When you die all that matters is the orientation of your will. Whether it be towards God or towards self. Your spirituality counts for nothing since spiritual beliefs can be just as ego-centred as materialistic ones if they are directed towards the satisfaction of the ego. Religion may be limiting in many ways to the developing soul, but just as the embryo needs the protective shell of the egg in which to grow safely so the soul needs the structure of religion. Eventually the soul must, as it were, hatch and go beyond this structure but only when it has developed to the point at which it can safely do so, and the safety here refers to threats to its integrity both internal coming from the ego and external coming from the dark powers, the blacks as they have been called, those forces which stand ever ready to lead souls astray, always preying on their weakest points.

If spirituality means unstructured chasing after feeling satisfaction, it is a tool of the blacks. If it means dedication to God and to serving his will then it has learnt the lessons of religion and the individual can proceed with confidence. But so often these days to be spiritual but not religious simply means to be a taker not a giver. Many people over-estimate their position on the spiritual path, imagining they are closer to the goal than they are. If you reject religion and think you can do better on your own or by following one of the many replacements for/imitations of religion that have sprung up over the last 100 years, you had better make sure your motivation is right. If it's not, you are liable to fall into darkness and illusion.

The Winnowing of Souls

I expect the next few years to include tests for the soul that become more and more finely tuned. The soul must eventually be made perfect, and if that seems a tall order, it is. However, the eventual perfection is not ours but God's, and acquired through his grace. All we have to do is be true to God, and to the actual reality of God not our chosen interpretation of that reality. This is what the tests are there to uncover. They are there to examine the deeper responses of the soul, beyond the merely intellectual level. They seek to unveil and reveal the heart. The true heart can be made perfect through the transformative power of God but he needs good ground in order to plant his seed.

Some of the tests will be conventionally spiritual. Do you believe in God or not? But that is just the beginning. What sort of God do you believe in? Why do you believe? What do you seek as a result of this belief? Is God more important to you than anything else, including, obviously, money and power, but also reputation and even family (see Matthew 10:21). Is it a holy God you believe in who acts for spiritual reasons and ends or is it a nice God who loves his children as they are now and accepts everyone for who they are, without requiring inner conversion, sacrifice and repentance?

Some have to do with the world. How do you see the world? How do you see the body? Do they have importance for themselves or as expressions of God and the soul or, perhaps, a mixture of the two? Some are to do with courage and response to stress, some are to do with taste and response to beauty and ugliness. Can you tell them apart? That seems an easy test but many people cannot in our day.

The purpose of the world at this time is to separate the sheep from the goats. The tests examine the mind but principally they examine the heart. The world seems real because it must do to make the tests real. But actually the world is not real in its own right. It can, and eventually will, be transformed or raised up into spirit but at the moment it serves as an environment for learning, and one of the things we have to learn is to reject the world as the world while, at the same time, love it as part of God's creation. That's an easy balance to strike if one perceives from the heart because what is, is, but it may be complicated for the intellectual mind which likes to partition and sees things in either/or terms instead of both/and.

We have it on good authority that not everyone who acknowledges God, of thinks they do, will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21). This is what the tests will pick out, the straight from the crooked, that which is true all the way down from that which is merely true on the surface. By their very nature the tests will be unexpected and require choice. Sometimes they will require sacrifice. They are a kind of mass initiation, and initiation is always preceded by tests and trails. So, be prepared for what is to come.

Saiva Siddhanta

 Most people who are interested in Indian spirituality will be familiar with Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualistic philosophy whose principal exponent is Sankara. This is a profound but flawed system of thought which I have written about on several occasions, chiefly to point out its flaws. See posts under the Non-Duality label. Advaita was clearly influenced by Buddhism, even though the two were rivals, and one of the reasons for its popularity in the West is that, like Buddhism though not in quite such a dramatic fashion, it does away with God who is reduced to an existent in the relative world, albeit the prime existent. This makes it seem to the unwary, steeped in/corrupted by modern ways of thinking, a deeper analysis of reality than theistic religion.

Most Westerners also believe that Advaita is the summation of Hindu thought. The Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon adopted this approach. In fact, that is not the case. In India monistic religion precedes theistic religion which probably arose in reaction to non-duality as its shortcomings became apparent. The qualified Advaita of Ramanuja, which accepts the reality of both the individual soul and God even though the two can be joined in a union of oneness, is one well-known example, and there is also the later and lesser known example of Saiva Siddhanta, the -anta suffix signifying the end of something, the conclusion to which it leads, as in Vedanta which is the end of the Vedas, their culminating point. So Saiva Siddhanta is the final word on knowledge about Siva who in this system stands for the Supreme God.

As a doctrine in codified form Saiva Siddhanta appeared in the 12th century in the south of India with mystical texts that described how the soul, sinful as it is by its own nature, cannot attain liberation except through knowledge of Siva bestowed by his grace on one who loves him. Love is important as it is not in Advaita which is all about knowledge. Souls are intrinsically divine but separate themselves from God through egotism and the impurities or bonds acquired through experience in the material world. Union with the deity is attained through his grace and is absolute in that there is no sense of separation whatsoever, but even in this union the individual self remains thereby drawing a clear distinction between this approach and that of the non-dualist. For the Saiva Siddhanta devotee God always has a transcendent aspect even when he is fully realised as immanent, so even in liberation the Creator/created relationship remains.

God is perceived as the soul of the soul, closer to you than your own self, but he is also infinitely beyond you. This idea is similar to the Christian understanding of the relationship between the soul and God, and the spiritual approach to the deity in this system also has something in common with Christian practice. Siva, which is simply a name for the Supreme First Principle or Primary Person, can only be known through love. This love has four stages. The first is that of the good servant towards his master. The second is like the child towards its parents. These tend to imagine God as external but the following stages see him as within the soul and involve meditation on his perfection. The first is compared to friendship while the final stage which brings full knowledge of and oneness with Siva is likened to the union of lovers.

I have often expressed my conviction that the Incarnation had a spiritual effect worldwide, influencing whoever was able to receive it through inner sensitivity. Naturally, the greatest effect would have been through the spread of the knowledge of Christ by missionaries. But in addition to this Christ entered into non-Christian religions, which may have been culturally resistant to the actual Christian religion, by permeating them with his spiritual being. You can see this with the idea of the Bodhisattva appearing in Mahayana Buddhism in the centuries after Christ, and you can also detect it in the Bhakti movements in both North and South India. I suggest that Saiva Siddhanta is an example of this process. I'm not saying that Saiva Siddhanta is Christianity in disguise. It is what it is, completely itself and outwardly has nothing to do with Christianity. Nor am I saying it is exactly equivalent to or equal to Christianity. But the spiritual essence of it can be compared to the essence of Christianity because Christ has suffused it with his presence and stamped it with the concept of religious love. Christ is only fully present in Christianity but I contend that he is not entirely absent elsewhere to the degree that other religions are able to open themselves up to his universal spirit.

The Living Image of the Eternal

Truth is beyond form and expression but for religion to be comprehensible it must be grounded in form. Religious forms can take many varieties which approximate to that which they are trying to express to a greater or lesser degree. Some forms capture something of the reality behind them while others distort it, sometimes unacceptably so. The question then arises. What is the best form, the one that comes nearest to revealing the truth that lies behind all genuine religion?

Before answering that, we must accept that different forms suit different people. That is to say, people of different temperaments and from different cultural backgrounds. It would be unrealistic to think that the whole world should follow one particular form any more than that they should speak one language, and it is probably not a good idea either as different forms can express different aspects of truth. None express the whole, even all together can't express more than a tiny fraction of the whole, but they can complement each other by their particular focal points. This may not be necessary from the purely spiritual perspective, but it can be helpful.

No doubt everyone thinks his own religion is best, and it may be for him. On the other hand, it may not. It may simply be a religion one is born into or one that suits one's strengths or weaknesses or prejudices or preconceptions. Over the course of my spiritual life (pompous phrase, but it can't be helped in this context), which is now some 47 years, I have investigated many, I am tempted to say most, spiritual paths. Not as a follower but by reading about them and exploring their forms and practices. It's fascinating to see how human beings have approached the numinous. So many similarities and so many differences. While recognising the validity of many, I have my favourites but there are also some I think are inspired from lower levels, either originally or through infiltration over the years. Some are even a mix of the true and the false. Quite a few are, in fact.

However, there is one clear winner, (I know it's not a competition, but in a way, it is). Obviously, that is Christianity and not so much because of the religion or religions that have arisen in Christ's name but because of him. Christ is the face and form of God, God revealed in a human being, God embodied. And, while we're at it, let us point out that the image of God himself is another form that encapsulates hidden truth. As God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, this image draws the mind and heart up to the realm of pure spiritual light in a way that lesser images do not. The very word 'God' brings together amorphous ideas and feelings and intuitions in the human head and heart, and moulds them into something tangible, something that the mind can latch onto, to which it can respond and with which it can engage.

Jesus Christ is the perfect spiritual form, the one above all others. First of all, because he is a living person, and spiritual reality is personal before it is impersonal - the opposite to what the sophisticated believe. And secondly, because he is the only spiritual figure totally without flaw, without sin as it is said. He reflects the spiritual world without any corrupt influence of this world. You can say that about no one and nothing else. Certainly, there are many other inspiring spiritual figures and philosophies from before the time of Christ and after him. But he is without peer and incomparable in his truthfulness. I do not doubt that non-Christian spiritual approaches can bring their followers to God, and, for that matter, many ostensible Christian ones might fail in that, but Christ is and remains the Way,  the Truth and the Life. He is the revelation of what this excellent essay calls the single, supreme, eternal creator deity or first principle, born into the Jewish race but come for all people.

There is No Hope in This World

 There is no time more spiritually perilous than when you get what you want. In bad times you can more easily turn to God as the world is not offering you anything, but when the world does offer you something, whether that be money, fame, power or even the kind of political success that you believe will make the world a better place, then you need to watch out.

Religion exists to point us to the spiritual. The spiritual, by definition, is not the material even if you say that ultimately all is one. Ultimately, all is one, no doubt, but there is nothing ultimate about our life in a body in this world. Here, there very definitely is a split between the spiritual and the material. We have both within us, and when I say within I do mean that because thought, in the normal sense, is material even if it only exists because of the spiritual. It is possible because we are spiritual beings but in itself it is based on material processes and is incapable of discerning spiritual reality so it belongs to the material world. Thus, we have both the spiritual and the material within us but we are called to overcome the material and submit it to the spiritual, which means the spiritual on its own terms not as it may be viewed or interpreted by the material component of our being.

All true spiritual teachings tell us to renounce this world. Heaven is not here and is not meant to be here so political triumphs will never bring it about. Wasn't that Judas Iscariot's mistake? He thought Jesus was here to defeat the Romans and restore a Jewish kingdom in this world, but Jesus said that his followers would be hated by the world. He didn't say they would be hated by this world or that world but by the world meaning any kind of worldly society. That is because those that follow Jesus see that nothing in this world can lead to eternal life. The very nature of the world is against that, despite its many beauties.

To say there is no hope in this world does not mean there is no hope. In fact, it means just the opposite. There is great hope, wonderful cause for hope, but it is in heaven not here. If you get what you want you can become satisfied or content, but that means that your motivation for finding the true path to heaven is weakened. 

So, when things seem to be going your way, be careful. It is hard for the rich to get to heaven, and riches are not just monetary.

Love of God

 How do you get to Heaven?  It's very simple. Here's how. You must love the Creator more than anything in creation, including yourself. This is the only spiritual path that really counts, and the reason it does is because Heaven is a place of love but real love which is founded in love of God not one of the many lesser imitations we are familiar with in this world and which are mistaken for love, though they are but the shadows of it cast in the created world.

This love is why Jesus is important. It can be difficult to love God because most people simply aren't aware of him except for an idea or a theory. Now, you can love an idea in the sense of being passionate about it but that is not what we are talking about. Spiritual love you can only know when you feel it. Those who don't truly feel it might think they do until they really do. Then they realise that what they thought was love was just a human copy, wonderful in its own way but still a lesser thing.

Jesus is important because, as far as mankind is concerned, he is the face and form of God. It is therefore easier to love Jesus than to love God even though what you are loving in Jesus is actually God. But Jesus brings God down to earth for us and makes him comprehensible.

Love God. That is all it takes, and yet while this is simple it is also very hard for us because we are so distracted by this world, by the things in it and by ourselves. However, there are entry paths to this love which, while not being the proper love of God, help us to find him and therefore to love him. They are the love of truth, of beauty and of goodness. These are, as it were, the manifest forms of God, rather like Jesus, and for some people might be easier ways to begin to know God. They are necessary but not sufficient for you must go beyond even these eventually to know the God the Person who lies behind them as their living source.

Because many people want the gifts of God without really loving him there are many spiritual paths which have been invented to make up for this lack of love. The way of knowledge is one. It is good but not good enough. Meditation. Again, good but not enough on its own. Esoteric techniques of various kinds. Yoga, Tantra and the like. These may bestow higher states of consciousness and even powers, but they will not get you to Heaven without love. With these things but without love you will just become a magician, and what use is that to the soul that wants to know God? You can be a spiritual superman roaming the higher planes and experiencing what seems to be cosmic consciousness, but if you do not have a true and sincere love of God then you are always going to be outside his Kingdom because only love can transfigure the soul and make it pure enough get to Heaven.

Blue and Gold

Meditate on blue and gold as this will purify the mind and take it to a higher level where evil influences cannot operate.

Anyone on the spiritual path will be attacked by evil, and the more progress you make, the more you will be attacked or, using the word the Masters who spoke to me back in the day used, "assailed". (Incidentally, they had a slightly old-fashioned way of speaking which, if adopted self-consciously, would just sound pompous but if used naturally, as it was, gave what was said more weight.)

How are you attacked? There are generally two forms, external and internal. The former means you might come into contact with people who abuse you. The intention here, not so much of these people for they are merely pawns but of the dark powers behind them, is to get you to react and respond in kind, thus falling down to their level. Resist not evil doesn't mean don't fight evil. It means don't react to it or repay it in its own coin.

The second way of attack is that the evil powers stimulate weaknesses within yourself, anger, pride, whatever it may be. They can do this but only if you permit them. They can affect your thoughts and emotions if you let down your inner guard and allow yourself to be carried away by the negativity they seek to stir up within you. They can only stimulate what is already there (unto the pure all things are pure), but if you have a tendency to any particular sin they can blow on the coals, as it were, of that sin and cause it to flare up. If you are not watchful you might identify with this and be swept away by it. Therefore, stand back from your emotions, do not follow negative thoughts. Observe the pattern and disengage from it.

If or when this becomes too hard and you find yourself unable to detach yourself from a particular bad thought or negative emotion then the exercise at the beginning of this post can help. There is something about the combination of the colours of blue and gold that purifies and elevates the mind and, in the Master's words, takes it to a level where evil cannot operate. Evil can only function on the lower levels of being. As you rise through the planes the shadows fall away and the light shines unimpeded. Blue and gold which, not coincidentally, are the colours of the sun in a clear sky have the effect, when concentrated on, of taking the mind to a higher place. Try it and see.

Imperfection

 It is a sad fact that in this world everything good is contaminated while many things that are mostly bad have some good in them. This can be confusing and is disconcerting for those who, like me, Virgo that I am, would prefer good and bad to be clearly delineated. But it means that one must develop discernment and also a measure, not too much, of open-mindedness and tolerance. Truth is multi-faceted and the wise do not become set in their ways or restricted to just one approach to it.

This is not an excuse for believing all manner of nonsense nor does it justify falsehood. Good and bad may often be mixed together but our task is to sift them apart and keep the good while rejecting the bad. At the same time, it does mean we should understand that there may be some good in what may be mostly bad (I am speaking of ideas more than actions), and support that good while rejecting the bad. This keeps us on our spiritual toes especially as we are also required to uphold the good unreservedly and without compromise.

This is an imperfect world as it must be since it is the material part of the whole and matter is intrinsically unstable. Nowadays, it is more imperfect than ever as the grip of matter on our minds has tightened. We can never fully free ourselves of that material grip while in the world but nor should we allow it to have a hold on us. The rule is aim for perfection but know you can never reach it in this world. As the Masters said, "Do not be a perfectionist. There is nothing perfect to be found anywhere in your world. Seek the true perfection within but do not expect it outwardly. If you do, all you will find will be disappointment. It is your task to demonstrate the highest you can but not to condemn others who do not live up to your ideals."