The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man redux

 In a couple of months my new book A Survival Guide to the End Times will be published and I am reminded that I should promote and publicise it. For someone like me that's the least pleasant part of bringing a book to life, but obviously I understand the need for it. 

However, for now there's an earlier book I would like to draw attention to because it isn't included in the sidebar on the right. That's because it's a collection of posts from this blog so I published it myself through Amazon rather than submit it to a proper publisher. The title is the title of this post and that describes what the book is about. We are in a crisis. I would say almost everyone recognises this but by no means everyone recognises the cause of the crisis. It is our rejection of transcendence which is a fancy way of saying rejection of the spiritual. So, it is a spiritual crisis and that affects everything else because everything, absolutely everything, is downstream from the spiritual. If the source is poisoned then the water will be too. And we have poisoned the source.

The essays of this book are ranged under various broad headings such as God, Truth, Christ, Love, Morality, Evil, The Spiritual Path & Spiritual Practice and Modern Times. Then there are subjects like Buddhism, Non-Duality, Masculine and Feminine and the Masters which interest me but are narrower in scope. The message behind all of them though is that we are in a crisis of monumental proportions. There's no point in beating about the bush. One has to recognise this if one is to address its properly. That it is not acknowledged is why it is worsening which is the case.

As a matter of fact, this ties in with the new book. The spiritual crisis is an end times scenario. It is a product of the withdrawal of spirit and consequent dominance of matter which is what occurs when a cycle comes to an end and the initial injection of spiritual energy has dissipated to the point at which we are basically running on fumes. At the same time, this represents opportunity because although the end times affects everything we experience we still have the divine spark within us and the outer degradation can force us to rediscover this. When your world is collapsing you turn to eternal truths which can never be affected by phenomenal decay. That is what we must do to surmount the present crisis.

The book is available here and here in paperback and ebook form.

A Survival Guide to the End Times

 My new book will be published in July this year.  Here is the back cover blurb.

Almost from the beginning, Christians thought they were living in the end times. It didn’t happen then, nor did it later, when subsequent generations believed that they too were living at a time of universal decline. Now we are faced with a similar dilemma. The signs of spiritual decay are everywhere, with atheism and materialism rampant, and even non-religious people are seeing a future of growing poverty and cultural loss. The end times have finally arrived.

 

This book discusses how to survive a time when the spiritual is either banished or corrupted by the material. Survival means spiritual survival and involves building an inner defence of understanding for the preservation of what is truly important: your own self. A Survival Guide to the End Times explains the processes that have brought us to our current state, and it details how to negotiate these times successfully from a spiritual perspective. As all aspects of the modern world are affected by the prevailing influence of dissolution, this book examines several areas of life from an end times point of view.

 

And here is the cover.

and here's the list of contents.

Introduction

 

Part One: End Times

A Body of Slag 

Space is Contracting 

The End Times is the End of Term 

A New Creation

The Paths of Peter and John 

The Destruction of the West 

How to Save the West

What is the Solution? 

Saving the West 

World War Two and Its Aftermath 

Not Going Along with the Aquarian Flow 

The Secular Corruption of Spirituality 

Satanic Feminism 

Divine Femininity 

The Cassandra Syndrome 

 

Part Two: Spiritual Tradition

Introduction on What Tradition Is

Temptation of the Esoteric 

Buddhist Atheism

Heaven, Hell and What’s In Between 

Astrology, A Signpost to Creation 

The Gnostic World View 

The Guru in the End Times

Jesus Was a Refugee 

The Wisdom of the Left

Who Is Sophia? 

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Tradition and Technology 

The Fox’s Prophecy

 

Part Three: God and the Soul

Meditation and its Limitations 

Consciousness and Christ 

The Root of Reality 

The Omnipotence of God

What is the Soul?

The Expansion of Consciousness 

The Human Form 

Male and Female 

Hierarchy and Complementarity 

No More Sea 

 

Part Four: Spiritual Practice

Spiritual Routine 

Illusion and Sin 

Empathy and Love

What is Evil? 

Give Them Your Mind

Celibacy

Psychedelics and Religion

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

St Michael

Christians and the Esoteric 

Don’t Worry 

 

Conclusion

 

The book, like some of my previous ones, expands and develops ideas linked by theme that began life as shorter essays here. There are also several new chapters. The sense that we are indeed living in a period that corresponds to the End Times is widespread now and not just among religious people. An awareness of cultural breakdown is everywhere and will only become more intense. Even those people who outwardly ignore or deny it feel in their hearts that something is amiss in the world, and it is likely that soon denial will no longer be possible. Those who are inwardly prepared for what is to come will be best placed to survive it, survival in this case meaning preserving one's spiritual integrity for that is all that really matters.

Book Covers

 When I had to choose a cover for By No Means Equal I followed my usual course of looking at pictures of places where I had lived. My first book showed Beachy Head lighthouse on the Sussex coast. I didn't actually live in the lighthouse, though I did once climb up the ladder that is attached to the outside which was a windy experience.

The second book Remember the Creator had a rather dramatic picture of le Mont St Michel, featured because I lived for 8 years in the nearby town of Avranches. Then came St Catherine's Chapel in Abbotsbury for Earth is a School, chosen for when I lived down the road in Bridport, Dorset. It didn't occur to me at the time but all these places are right on or even in the sea. 

By No Means Equal had a view from the top of the Shevaroy Hills in South India. This was for when I lived in the village of Yercaud which is in those hills, albeit a less magnificent part of them. I found a photograph in a picture library and cropped it for the portrait style of the cover since it was originally in landscape mode. Here is the original.

You can't tell it's up on the hills because of the clouds but normally you can see down to the plains 5,000 feet below. This is what that looks like.

Following the logic of tracing back through places I have lived, the cover for the tentatively titled Surviving the End Times will have to be of somewhere in the town of Bath or nearby. I like this picture of the West Front of Bath Abbey which shows the angels ascending and descending Jacob's Ladder but I can't really see any connections to the theme of the book.  Now, if only it were in ruins.....

Turner painted a picture of the Abbey which I include here for no other reason than that Turner painted a picture of the Abbey.

But these are both too fussy for a book cover so I will have to carry on looking. Since the book is only half-written there is no hurry.

Added note: See the comments below for an explanation for this picture.

A Manual for the End Times

Undaunted by the reluctance of my previous books to enter the bestseller lists, I am currently working on a new one. The subject will be the end times which most readers of this blog will agree is the period we find ourselves in now. The provisional title is A Manual for the End Times though that may change as it is slightly dull, even if it does have the merit of describing the contents.

The book will consist of various essays looking into what the end times is, how it manifests, or is manifesting because it surely is, and how we should react to it/them. There are at the moment, though this may change, four sections which are End Times, Spiritual Tradition, Spiritual Practice and God and the Soul. The basic theme is that the end times represents that period at the end of a cycle when the spiritual energy that was initially injected into the world, in one sense at the Incarnation though the actual start of the cycle dates from farther back, begins to run out which means that matter reasserts itself over spirit with all the consequences you might expect. We have been seeing some of these consequences over the last couple of centuries, but today the situation is becoming worse as the process, which is essentially the working out of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics on the spiritual plane or as it relates to the spiritual in the material, has reached the stage in which the balance has definitely tipped. This tipping of the balance will result in a speeding up of the process though it also means there will be a concomitant reaction to the increase of inverted energy, as one might think of it. For even in the darkest times when spirit is apparently almost completely absent, we all still have an inner connection to reality. That cannot be destroyed and might even become stronger as the external world descends into outright denial of truth.

The end times might seem disastrous when you are caught up in them but they are a natural process and inevitable in a material world. Matter is intrinsically unstable. Only spirit is permanent. And they also present opportunity if we react to them correctly though that does mean standing against the flow.

I may be posting here slightly less often while working on the book but will continue to maintain the blog and perhaps will sometimes include sections from the book here.

Book Published

My new book By No Means Equal was published in the US on November 1st. It came out last Friday in the UK. If I worked in marketing and had a flexible relationship with the truth I could say it contains definitive proof of the soul but I don't and it doesn't. What it does do, though, is lay out the grounds for the spiritual primacy of individuality and freedom, and say how the reality of these fundamental principles stands in direct opposition to the contemporary ideology of equality. Which, it could be argued, amounts to almost the same thing as my imaginary marketing man is saying. For my contention is that the current obsession with equality, which sometimes presents itself as an almost spiritual belief, is in fact deeply materialistic as it reduces the individual to a unit in the collective, a unit that can be weighed, measured and slotted into the System. A controllable and controlled unit. It robs the human being of its humanity.

I suppose one of the reasons the belief in equality has taken root is because it seems to offer a degree of fairness. It also assuages the guilt of the rich and powerful who can carry on being rich and powerful as long as they are seen to disapprove of such things in theory. It is also a more feminine way of looking at the world and society has become increasingly feminised over the last few decades. Men are more naturally hierarchical and competitive but women tend more to cooperation which fits better with the equality dogma. But one could just as well say it has come about because of the desire of those at the lower end of the scale of whatever it might be to chop down those with more. This is certainly a factor but only one of many, some rooted in the desire to be fair and some in envy.

However, all of that is besides the point. The simple question to ask about equality is, "Is it true?". Everything else is irrelevant. We might want it to be true for whatever reason but if it's not true there's an end of it. And the fact is it's not true. Those who see themselves as superior might feel guilty about that and those who see themselves as inferior might feel resentment but these emotions do not alter reality. Equality is a lie.

Of course, an argument might be that equality may not exist now but we should work towards it for a fairer and better society. But what are you saying if you argue that? That society should be built on a palpable falsehood? This could never work as reality would sooner or later break through. In the meantime the inevitable result of your foolish experiment would be a lowering of standards because that is what enforced equality means. The only way you can bring it about is to bring down the higher to the level of the lower. Destroy the ladder of hierarchy and there is nothing left to climb. You remain earthbound. Examined properly, equality is just about the most anti-spiritual doctrine you could have.

This is what the book is about.

A Trilogy

 It didn't occur to me until after I had written it, but my new book By No Means Equal has turned out to be the third part of a trilogy, the first two being Remember the Creator and Earth is a School. On the most obvious level, the three might be seen as meditations on words of my teachers, those words being the titles in question. But there is more to it than that for while the first book focuses on the reality of God, the second looks into the reason for our lives on this planet and the third is about the soul and how that is a real immaterial thing. The book is framed in the context of a discussion on equality, that most sacred of cows of our modern secular age, but the ideology of equality is shown to be false by the fundamental reality of individuality and freedom which are spiritual qualities and the defining characteristics of the soul.

Thus we have God, the world and the soul or absolute reality, objective reality and subjective reality, the three facets of our existence. These are all intertwined and at the same time separate but part of an over-arching unity. Problems arise when you give one too much significance so that the others are thereby diminished such as Islam does with God Transcendent (God is all, Man is nothing) and certain forms of Indian mysticism do with God Immanent (the world and the individual soul are illusion), or scientific materialism does with the world or much modern thought does with the soul, or its phenomenal aspect, that being all it recognises, which is regarded as totally sovereign and independent of any higher authority, able to do whatsoever it wishes long as that is within the laws of society. In fact, God, the world and the soul are all real and all important even if God remains the source of the other two.

By No Means Equal brings this run of books to a conclusion. Here is the introduction to the book.

"All cultures have a defining belief or myth on which they base themselves. In most cases it is a religious one which takes various forms but all of them are rooted in a reality beyond this world. However, that of the contemporary West does not follow the traditional pattern for it derives from a belief in the primacy of matter rather than spirit. The modern myth is egalitarianism, the insistence that all men are equal. This idea blossomed at the time of the French revolution with its rallying cry of liberté, égalité, fraternité though the seeds were sown much earlier, going back to certain streams of thought in the medieval period. But, in the sense we understand it today, it is a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Egalitarianism did not form a part of traditional Western belief except for the idea that we were all created by the One Father, God. But that doesn’t mean we are all equal. The natural order in tradition, not just in the West but more or less everywhere in the world where civilisation has developed, was hierarchical and this reflects the belief that there is a vertical dimension to life. That implies transcendence, the denial of which is virtually the definition of modernity which, with a singular lack of imagination, has reduced reality to the world of appearance or what can be grasped by the senses, ignoring the fact that the senses filter as much as they reveal.

Now, in the twenty-first century we have arrived at a belief in radical equality through the spread of communism for communism, whether we realise it or not, underpins the philosophical assumptions of almost all contemporary thought. Not so much in the overt political or economic sense but culturally speaking it does where it has become deeply embedded since the 1960s. It has reached the point at which to challenge this assumption marks you out as an immoral person.

Communism is atheistic and materialistic. There are occasional rather feeble attempts to dispute this but they fail as they must since communist ideology is entirely concerned with this world and has no sense of a spiritual goal for humanity. Hence, it should not be hard to see that egalitarianism, though it too sometimes claims to have a spiritual basis, is in fact a thoroughly materialistic and atheistic doctrine. This makes sense chronologically since the two came about at the same time. The belief in equality in the form it is held nowadays did not arise from any religious principle but from a rejection of religion and its substitution by a belief system centred on the human being in its earthly form. If you want to associate it with religion you would have to say it took what belongs to the spiritual level and applied it to the material level, in the process abolishing the spiritual or, at the very least, making that secondary to the material.

In this book I will start with a series of essays that examine the modern ideology of equality and show that it is essentially an anti-spiritual doctrine, one that denies the reality of the soul using that word to mean the non-material essence of our individual self. Some of the arguments might appear too simplistic to cover all the complexities of socio-economic and political life but I am looking at the question from a metaphysical point of view here, and ultimately everything is downstream from metaphysics anyway. Whether this ideology has arisen now as a natural outcome of humanity reaching a stage in its growth roughly analogous to adolescence when it throws off outer (transcendent) authority and tries to go it alone or whether it is a well-meaning attempt to create a morality in a materialistic society with no higher values or whether it has been put through by forces antithetical to spiritual development specifically to derail higher values, for when everything is equal there is a strong tendency to revert to the lowest common denominator, I shall leave the reader to decide as we go along.

Then we shall proceed to looking at ways in which the egalitarian ethos has affected and corrupted the spiritual search. For it undoubtedly has. Religion is not democratic any more than science or art are but in many instances it is being made so. Misunderstanding the true idea that God is within all of us, we fall into the trap of thinking that he is equally within all of us. Even if that were true, he does not manifest equally in all of us. Like all heresies, if you can call it that, egalitarian ideology takes a piece of the truth and exaggerates its importance while minimising the significance of other aspects of truth. Truths that apply on the level of the One do not apply on that of the Many, and certainly not to the Many as the Many. The Absolute and the Relative are both part of the totality of life but they are different and should not be confused."

By No Means Equal

 My new book is set to be published on October 27th in the UK and November 1st in the US. Here is the front cover.

and here's the back with the blurb and a typically generous quote from Bruce Charlton whose suggestion it was that I bring out a book centred around some of the writings on the idea of equality that I have produced on this blog. Professor J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere was also kind enough to write a few words about the book which you will find on the Amazon listings, links to which are below.

Those writings were the seed from which the book developed but much of it is new. The theme is the modern concern with equality and how that is actually an anti-spiritual doctrine because it denies both individuality and freedom which are fundamental spiritual principles. This is not on the basis of a crude left/right perspective but something much more important which is true spiritual versus material or false spiritual which I put in the same camp. Thus, equality is a metaphysical matter not a political one. That is a trap which ensnares many people who see the insanity of so much that passes for rational understanding these days but react to it on a worldly level instead of rising above the argument to a spiritual plane which puts both sides in perspective. I am not saying that on the worldly level both sides are the same but the solution to their battle is only found by rising above them as they are in this world. Ultimately, the battle is between God and Satan, to put it in traditional terms, and there are solid grounds for thinking that everything that is not consciously and intelligently for God becomes absorbed onto the side of Satan. Equality which seems so bright and shiny on the outside becomes a means of separating human beings from their spiritual role and purpose. That is why the sub-title of the book is Reclaiming the Soul.

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon here and here. Also elsewhere, of course, but I don't have those details yet.

Some Books

 I won't be posting here for a couple of weeks so this is one of my occasional reminders of the books that don't appear on the right hand side, the first of which are collections of posts compiled from the two blogs I have been involved with.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man comes from 2019. It comprises essays from this blog, sometimes expanded a bit, arranged thematically. There is more detail here.

Albion Awakening was published in 2020. This was a collaboration with John Fitzgerald based on the blog we shared with Bruce Charlton which delved into the mystical aspects of the British Isles. Details are here.

In addition to these there is my new book By No Means Equal which will be published in October. More about that here.

The Reign of Equality

 When I submitted By No Means Equal to the publisher I was asked to name another book it might be compared to. I imagine this was to position it in the market. I hadn't thought about this and at first couldn't come up with anything. It had no obvious influences though, of course, many things had fed into it. But then I thought about equality and how that actually meant focus moved from spirit/quality to matter/quantity and that reminded me of the famous book by René Guénon called The Reign of Quantity. It's been 20 years since I read that book and, to be honest, I can't remember much about it but I do remember that his broad theme is the materialisation of consciousness and how that has impacted the modern age which is an age in which quantity supersedes quality. This is more or less what my book is about and so when it came to the time to write a 'blurb' for the back cover this is what I came up with.

"Equality is the rock on which our modern Western liberal democracies are built. When we talk of Western values this is the one that underlies the rest. But what if this rock is made of sand? This book explores the idea of equality and suggests it is an ideological belief with no foundation in reality. It may seem a progressive belief from the political point of view but in reality its acceptance is spiritually damaging with consequences for the evolution of the soul.

The Traditionalist writer René Guénon said that we live in an age of quantity, one in which nothing is allowed to exist that cannot be measured. This is the age of equality which directly opposes the idea of the individual soul as a spiritual reality.

The equality myth pervades almost everything these days so while the first part of the book examines this myth from various angles, the second part looks at how it has influenced and adversely affected the spiritual search. We go back and look at first principles from a metaphysical perspective and even consider the nature of God. Then there is the opportunity to see how this idea impacts on the end times scenario.

The book is similar in construction and focus to Remember the Creator and Earth is a School, and in that respect could be considered the third part of a trilogy."

As I say, I hadn't thought of Guénon when writing the book but there certainly is crossover between our two approaches to the vexed question of the modern world. The difference is that he appeared to retreat to the past and became a Muslim, albeit one heavily influenced by the metaphysics of the Vedanta, whereas I believe that the modern consciousness is part of proper human development, simply one that has gone wrong. It is like a fruit that has become poisoned rather than a poison in itself and once we are able to submit it to the light of God it will prove to have many benefits. If human beings are on a path to becoming gods themselves, which in my view is part of the divine intention, then the phase of self-consciousness is a necessary stage to go through. The modern consciousness was a risk but one that can bring great spiritual progress if handled correctly. Of course, that is just what is not happening on the collective level but God always works with individuals and, on that level, who can know how much success his experiment is having?

By No Means Equal - Reclaiming the Soul

 I mentioned in June that I was finishing off a book to be called By No Means Equal. See the post here. The book was accepted for publication and the production process has been completed though the book won't be published until next October because, the publisher says, "It takes ten months (sometimes more) for information about your book to circulate through the trade worldwide, and this is essential to maximize your prospects of long-term success. Budgets for buying in new titles in the chain retailers are set many months in advance – they will not look at titles coming out before then. Some key catalogues, like the NBN sales catalogue in North America, the bumper Bookseller Spring and Autumn editions in the UK, cover six months of titles; they need the information on ISBN, page extent, price, sales copy and cover three months before that, so ten months only just gives us enough time." Luckily the book is not topical!

The book is actually called By No Means Equal - Reclaiming the Soul because although it started off as a discussion about how the idea of equality was founded on a false metaphysics, it became clear early on that this metaphysics is based on a denial of the spiritual component of man, even a denial of the very notion of individuality. So it turns out that the rejection of equality is actually an assertion of spirituality and, far from equality being humanistically grounded as it is generally portrayed as being, it is in fact a profoundly anti-human doctrine. Thus, the book is not just about equality but also a plea for the recognition of spirit and soul.

Here is the front cover. As with the covers of my previous books it shows a place I have lived, in this case the Shevaroy Hills in South India. 

And here are the chapter headings. Some of these chapters have appeared as posts on this blog, though have been edited and sometimes expanded for the book, but many are new.

Introduction

Part I

Liberty and Equality

No Rational Basis for Equality

We Are All One

Quality and Equality

Don't You Want to Live in an Equal Society?

What Is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

An Attack on Cosmic Order

What Is the Devil Most Seeking to Destroy?

The Elizabethan World Picture

The Descent of Man and the Prophecy of Hermes

Against Inequality

Body, Soul and Spirit

 

Part II

Secular Spirituality

God, Man and Woman

The Humanitarian God

Ideology and Freedom

A Vulgar Age

End Times

Technology Is Not Neutral

I Am God

Why I Am Not a Conservative

Tolerance and Humanism

The Lowest of the Low

The Most High

Death, the Great Equaliser?

Good and Evil, Spirit and Matter, Creator and Creation

Extreme Times

Demons

A Universe of Persons

Conclusion

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man

 In the spirit of shameless self-promotion I thought I would bring attention to a book published a couple of years ago that drew together the posts I saw as most representative of the thinking behind this blog. It's not one of the three on the right of this page, all of which are proper books i.e. written as such. It is just posts from the blog. These are arranged in various sections such as God, Truth, Christ, The Spiritual Path and Spiritual Practice, Love, Masculine and Feminine, Modern Times plus a few more, and the overall theme is given in the title.

It can be found in paperback and Kindle versions on Amazon UK here and here and for the American market here and here. I mention it now for any newcomers to the blog who might like to explore its past in an easier form, or what I regard as an easier form, than that permitted by the blog itself or else might appreciate a ready reference, something I would value from some of my favourite blogs. It is, in effect, a compilation or 'best of' of the blog up to the beginning of 2020, just before everything took a turn for the worse.

Here's an extract from the introduction.

"After the publication of my first book Meeting the Masters I started a blog of the same name to develop themes from that book, and they have developed, sometimes in ways I hadn't anticipated. My second book Remember the Creator was the product of that. But the blog has continued and it has been suggested that I gather together some of the posts in book form. It is true that old posts on a blog tend to be consigned to history like old newspapers and no one ever looks at them again. But if they are not topical, and most of mine aren't, they can still be relevant. For the few that were vaguely topical I have put the date of their composition.

So here I have assembled essays under various subjects though there is some overlap. Most of them were written after the end of 2017 when the last book was prepared for publication so they represent a kind of continuation of that, in some cases possibly even a progression.

In case anyone reading this is unfamiliar with what started me on a spiritual course let me briefly set out here what is more fully described in Meeting the Masters. Between 1979 and 1999 I was spoken to by spiritual beings who told me, when I asked them who they were, to think of them as messengers from God. Going by their manner and what they said that is exactly what they were. They spoke to me through a medium who acted as a kind of oracle for them. But they told me that they also communicated to me through mental impression and would continue to do so when the other method stopped which it did when the medium died in 1999. I feel this is the case and that they do inspire me with their knowledge. However, this inspiration has to come through my own mind and is subject to my own limitations and prejudices so it is not going to be anywhere near as pure as the source. Nevertheless, I have always tried to respond to thoughts that come to me 'cleanly' and without subjecting them to personal opinion. I am certainly not claiming any kind of divine inspiration for anything written here. It is my work not the Masters and I am the one responsible for it. At the same time, I would be lying if I said I thought they had nothing to do with it. They probably do the best they can with me, as I am sure they do with many others who may not be aware of them, but they have to cut their coat according to the cloth there is at hand.

I have called this book The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man because that is what we are currently going through. It is made worse by the fact that it is largely unrecognised. People talk of environmental problems, social problems, political problems, problems to do with climate change, with capitalism, the relation between the sexes and so on. It is all fundamentally a spiritual problem. Resolve that and the rest will fall into place. A more accurate title might have been The Spiritual Crisis of Post-Modern Humanity but that is a bit of a mouthful and sounds like the title of an academic treatise whereas this is meant as a call to spiritual arms."

By No Means Equal

 In a comment on a post on equality Bruce Charlton suggested I should draw together some of my writings on the subject to be the basis of a book. It seemed a good idea so I have started to do just that. The book will be called By No Means Equal and will use some of the relevant posts on this blog as a rough skeleton which is then fleshed out and to which I will add new thoughts, some directly pertinent, some peripherally so to make it more interesting (I hope) and less one-dimensional as banging on about a single theme with no let up might be. But the thread of equality and how that notion impacts us will be woven throughout as an underlying background.

Actually, the equality myth pervades and contaminates almost everything these days so the range can be quite wide. It also gives one a chance to go right back and look at first principles from a metaphysical perspective and even to consider the nature of God. Then there is the opportunity to see how this idea impacts on the end times scenario. So, quite a lot to work with.

The book will be similar in construction and focus to Remember the Creator and Earth is a School and, like them, takes the Master's words for its title. In that respect it could be considered as the third part of a trilogy.

Added note - see comment below. 

Potential cover images showing Jacob's ladder on the facade of Bath Abbey.

Earth is a School review request

 The publisher of Earth is a School has reminded me that it has received no reviews on Amazon yet and reviews generate sales, to put it bluntly. Bruce Charlton and J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere were kind enough to provide endorsements and it has received a few favourable reviews elsewhere for which see below but nothing on Amazon so if anyone has read and appreciated it and doesn't mind saying so, I would be very grateful.

Lynne Jordal Martin at foxnews.com reviewed Earth is a School on NetGalley  
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. "I will consider inviting the author to write an op-ed for Fox News Opinion based on this book. It's a thought provoking, intriguing perspective on life that deserves a wide audience"

David Lorimer, the Programme Director and Editor at Paradigm Explorer, also reviewed the book. “Many spiritual teachers see Earth as the school, and in this book the author suggests that we are in an end of term examination period. It is based on 40 years of study and experience, arguing that we ignore invisible spiritual forces at our peril in a dense age of materialistic bureaucracy. There are valuable discussions of the nature of spirituality, cycles of change, reincarnation and evolution, and the role of Christ. We are encouraged to follow the line of most rather than least resistance, holding fast to our spiritual core while balancing immanence with transcendence. In this way, we can light a candle in the darkness.”

Ana Isabel of the In the Light-Growing Your Soul podcast reviewed the book on Good Reads and gave it a 4 (out of 5) star rating.

“Why are we here? This is possibly one of the oldest and asked questions in history. In this book, William Wildblood presents his understanding learned through communication with Ascended Masters. He looks at how each Soul develops and grows through each life on Earth. This is a deep and thought provoking book which can inspire us to be the best that we can be.”

 

Earth is a School is now published

 It is available in paperback and on Kindle through Amazon UK here.

In the US here

and from the publisher's website here

I expect it can even be ordered through bookshops.

If you read it and like it a review would be very much appreciated.

This is a good time for me to thank all readers of this blog. Earth is a school but it's currently also a battleground and we, believers in God and Christ and Creation, all need to work together to proclaim and support the truth. That is actually not so hard once you decide to ignore the lies with which you are surrounded and trust your inner voice. Know that you are a soul, a divine son or daughter of God, sent here to learn and to grow but also to fight against sin and evil both in your own heart and out there in the world so as to be a living example and guide to others still ensnared by the darkness. The fact that spiritual truth has almost completely been chased from the world today gives us a great opportunity for it means that we must look for God within and therefore, if we will, become much more attuned to him as the living, breathing (God does breathe) core of our own being. Then we start to become more like him which is his dearest wish.

Earth is a School pre-order

 My publisher has sent me a handy link to a page on their website that has pre-order buying links for Earth is a School at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle and so on. On the Amazon page you can have a look at its contents.

https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/axismundi-books/our-books/earth-school

St Catherine's Chapel

 A few people have commented on the cover of my new book Earth is a School. As with my two previous books published by Axis Mundi, I selected the cover from images associated with places near where I have lived. In this case it was Bridport in Dorset where I lived from 1985-1988. My first book Meeting the Masters has a picture of Beachy Head on the Sussex coast. I lived in Eastbourne from 1996-2000. The cover of Remember the Creator shows le Mont St Michel on the Normandy/Britanny border. I lived in the nearby town Avranches from 1988-1996. So you see I am working my way backwards. If I do another book it will have to be a picture of somewhere around Yercaud in South India where I lived from 1980-1985.

St Catherine's chapel stands on a hill near the village of Abbotsbury in Dorset in the south west of England. It's assumed to have been built in the 14th century from its style though no documents survive to confirm that. It was used by the monks of the nearby Benedictine monastery presumably for retreats for private prayer and contemplation. Although at 260 feet the hill is not very high it does command spectacular views over the coast and may have been used as a beacon for ships at one time, a light on a hill. So in a way there is a connection with Beachy Head lighthouse and le Mont St Michel. For me they are all spiritual beacons.

One of the others pictures I considered for the cover was a very striking image of the chapel under the Milky Way. The symbolism of souls ascending to the heavens in the form of stars was very tempting but, from a practical point of view, the image was probably too dark for a book cover. But here it is to compare with the eventual choice.

Because that is a sample from a picture library it has a watermark on it but here are two unstamped photographs fished off the internet.

St Catherine herself was, of course, a famous Christian martyr who lived in the 4th century in Alexandria. Her nobility, heroism, devotion, wisdom (she is supposed to have beaten fifty pagan philosophers in debate) and unshakeable faith led to her being one of the most venerated saints in the Middle Ages even though most of the stories around her are probably legendary. Joan of Arc claimed that Catherine was one of the saints who advised her. In Orthodox Christianity she is known as a Great Martyr and Holy Helper. Her feast day is on the 25th November, by happy coincidence shortly after the book comes out. Legendary stories or not, I am sure that there is such a person in Heaven.

Earth is a School

 I have a book coming out at the end of October, though it was actually written last year. It's called Earth is a School and presents the case for the material world being a spiritual school specifically designed to develop consciousness and bring the human soul to an understanding of its own divine nature. The idea is that this world, though corrupted by evil, is still the perfect environment for the job it was originally intended to do which was to develop infant humanity into mature sons and daughters of God to the point that they could become co-creators with him. This, however, is an entirely voluntary process. There is no coercion. That having been said, the book suggests that the present time is a time of real decision, foretold in the New Testament, when the souls of all human beings are examined to determine their future path. Professor J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere and Bruce Charlton were kind enough to provide endorsements, and I would like to express my thanks to them here.

It's listed on Amazon UK here and Amazon US here and you can read excerpts there, but it should be available in the proverbial "all good bookshops".

Here are the front and back covers.

Taking Stock

This blog is now seven years old which seems a good time to look back and reflect on the course it has taken since it began at the end of February 2013.

I started the blog a few months after the publication of my Meeting the Masters book, intending to develop themes from that book. Meeting the Masters was autobiographical in the sense that it was an account of my experience as a young man with spiritual beings who instructed me on the path that leads the earthly soul to God, tailored to my particular needs and deficiencies. But, given that this path is more or less the same for everyone, the teachings contained in the book had much wider application. There was nothing new in these teachings but to be told something by someone who embodies the truth of what he is saying is very different to being told that same thing by someone who may know it but has not completely interiorised it which is the case with the vast majority of spiritual teachers in this world. It makes it come alive. So I would say that my understanding of spirituality revolves around three things. Intellectual knowledge, personal intuition and faith (included as one thing) and the experience of having met and spoken to beings who are what they know. Of the three, this last is the most significant from an immediate point of view though intuition is ultimately the most important as it is that inner knowledge which will eventually transform an individual.

This first book was framed from within the context of a general spirituality though there are intimations throughout of a Christian leaning or, at least, a spiritual world view that is based on the Christian understanding of the human soul and its purpose and destiny. This is to become a creative god, a God in miniature. When I began blogging I was still writing from within that more universalist context but as time went by the figure of Christ became more and more important to me.  Christ had always been the essence of what I understood by spirituality but I had not sufficiently appreciated the extent to which everything else stood in his shadow. I suppose I was still under the influence of the 20th century point of view that sees all spiritual paths as saying the same thing only in different language. But a little reflection shows that's just not true. There is, for example, a fundamental difference between the Christian goal of theosis and the Buddhist one of Nirvana even if they can look roughly similar from the outside. And the Christian God really is radically different to the Muslim one. It's the difference between love and law or God as Father and friend and God as supreme master to whom unquestioning obedience is owed.

My second book Remember the Creator was an attempt to come to terms with these ideas and demonstrate that Christ is the foundation of truth and that what he taught takes us more deeply into the mind and heart of God than anything else. His life shows us the path to follow if we would fulfil God's will for us. This is not to escape creation for an uncreated absolute of perfect stillness and peace but to transform creation and raise it up, through the medium of our own self, into the light of God. The key to this is an understanding that suffering is not a universal evil from which we need to escape but a means of spiritual redemption through transforming it by self-sacrifice in love. Other spiritual approaches talk of love because they must but it is only through the path laid out by Christ that true spiritual love can be known. Without Christ we might have a generalised sort of compassion but we would not have love.

When I began my spiritual journey I was mostly focussed on myself. I don't mean this in a bad way but my purpose was to realise truth within myself. The world was there but I didn't pay much attention to it. However, as time went by I saw that to separate oneself from the world leads to a kind of spiritual lop-sidedness. This is particularly the case now when the world has turned to evil. There has always been evil in the world but, in the Christian West at least and elsewhere too but perhaps not to the same extent, good and evil have been clearly identified. Not now. We live during a time of value inversion and at such a time any person claiming some sort of spiritual orientation must stand up for the real good, both for his own sake (if he doesn't, he will get sucked into evil as that becomes the mundane and everyday) and for the sake of anyone he might come into contact with who is looking for guidance and help - whether they know it or not.  This understanding led to the writings that make up my third book, The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man. For, make no mistake, it is a crisis we are in at the moment and there is no sign we are getting out of it. The worldly attempts to address the situation through such superficial and frankly self-indulgent things as politics or, the latest fad, action on climate change don't even begin to address the roots of the problem.

Things go round in circles or, at any rate, cycles. I am now 64 years old. I suspect that I shall eventually return to a more contemplative mode of life in preparation for leaving this world. Then I might see writing about spiritual matters as a distraction from the essential. At the moment, though, it's still a way of developing and sharing a degree of understanding.

The Masters and Jesus

I was asked in a comment on the previous post if my views on spiritual matters have evolved since I wrote Meeting the Masters which was in 2010 though it wasn't published until 2012. What I would say in response to this is in one sense no, in another yes, and in a third, my views are evolving all the time. I realise, however, that is a singularly unhelpful answer! 

What I mean is that my fundamental spiritual idea of the reality of God and of our purpose in this world as to conform our being more and more to his remains unchanged. It cannot change. It's the same with regard to my belief in the reality of the Masters as messengers from God. I have more or less the same approach to basic spiritual truths as I have done since the age of 22 when I first properly encountered them. However, within that basic form there is room for growth which is how I understand the word evolve.

When I wrote Meeting the Masters my aim was to present the Masters and describe my experience with them. This happened as is related in the book and I thought it a story worth telling, given its unusual nature and how it might be a support to sympathetically inclined people. To know that there exist spiritual beings who can carry something of the love and truth of God to earthly humanity, even if we are not aware of them, is surely a consolation in times of struggle and doubt. 

I wrote the book in the context of a fairly universal type of spirituality because that seemed the best way to do it at the time and it roughly matched my position then. Some might see that as New Age-ish though I would not go along with such an assessment since I have always rejected the New Age as a hotchpotch of beliefs, more concerned with the psychic than the spiritual and the creation than the Creator. But my approach was not specifically Christian which has concerned some people because of the warnings against false prophets and psychic wonders given by Christianity. I was always very aware of the dangers of the psychic world and the illusions to be found there. I mentioned this regularly throughout the book. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Angels have been known to come to men since Biblical times and they still do. Some angels are demons posing as celestial beings, of that there's no doubt. But not all are and it is up to us to develop discernment to tell the difference. It's not that hard if one has a true desire to know God and are not looking for personal advancement. 

I am not and have never been an orthodox Christian but I regard Christ as the Saviour and Son of God and always have. He is not just another enlightened spiritual teacher and to see him like that would be to cast him as some sort of crypto-Buddhist and basically ignore everything he says about himself. I don't see how this is a feasible view at all. If he was just a spiritual teacher then he was wrong in many of the things he said, and if that's the case what sort of spiritual teacher was he? No, you cannot see Christ merely as an Eastern-style guru. The Buddha, who I regard as the pre-eminent spiritual teacher in the ordinary sense, proclaimed he had found a way. But Christ said he was the Way. These are two totally different things. You can have spirituality without Christ but Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life. No spiritual teacher, enlightened or otherwise, could ever say this.

Some people have asked why the Masters did not talk of Christ. They actually did mention Jesus in a general sense and he was the only person they ever did mention, but it is true they did not say he was the Son of God. They did refer to him as the Great Master, though, and they also often spoke of the Most High which is a Christian and Jewish reference to God. But the reason they didn't mention Christ more specifically is because they never told me what to believe. That was my responsibility. They gave general spiritual instruction tailored to my needs, essentially revolving around humility and love which are the primary Christian virtues, but they wanted me to grow from within rather than imitate them. It was up to me to forge my own path and find things out for myself because this is how we grow. I firmly believe that they inspired me in certain directions from within but they did not do that through the words they spoke. Any philosophy, metaphysics, religion or theology I might have would have to come from me. I had to make my own mistakes in that regard and learn from them. If we are ever to become as they are, which is the goal for all of us, this is the only way.

I have learnt from other religions, mostly Hinduism and Buddhism, but these have always been peripheral to Christianity, supplements rather than replacements. You might ask why anyone would need supplements and, of course, you don't. Everything necessary for spiritual salvation is in the teachings and person of Christ. But we do live in an age when we have access to almost everything there has ever been and I think we can use that to our advantage though it can also be confusing, distracting and lead astray. Again, though, that is up to us, to our own discernment and spiritual integrity. Eastern religions can help to supply a sense of God's immanence which has been slightly lacking in Christianity (though it is there) and that is how I have used them. But they do not have Christ and that means there is a hole at their centre. For Westerners certainly, I'm not sure about Easterners. The hole would still be there but God may have provided compensation. Christ came for all men but perhaps he is sometimes present without being obviously so. I don't know, though I would add that, even if that is the case, it is not the same thing and only a kind of stop-gap because of the mercy of God.

I hope if you read my book you will see that Christ is the main influence even if that is not presented in an overtly Christian way. Passages such as "the Masters could often sound much more like wise abbots of a Christian monastery than teachers of enlightenment" point, or were intended to point, in that direction. As was the statement that there is a secret beyond non-duality which is duality. I should also say that their medium, Michael Lord, was and remained a Christian until his dying day. He was more orthodox than me and actually insisted that we went to church every Sunday when we lived in India as it wouldn't be right, in his eyes, not to do so when we were supposed to be leading a spiritual life. He meant that it was all very well to have an inner spiritual life but one should observe outer practice too. So we went to the Victorian Holy Trinity church in Yercaud and I read the lesson there regularly. I've just looked the church up and found some pictures of it. It was a simple but beautiful little church with a small but devout congregation. The priest had to come up every Sunday from the nearest big town which was Salem, about 25 miles away. I'm glad to see it still exists 

The commenter also asked how I understand my experiences with the Masters in the light of 1 John 4:1-3 which is the famous passage saying we should not believe every spirit because there are many false prophets and the way to tell true from false is to see if they acknowledge that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. I clearly can't ask the Masters that now and I didn't think to at the time. To me it was obvious that they were who they said they were from many indications of their love and wisdom and essential absolute goodness. But I'm not convinced by this passage anyway. I wonder if it might be specific to the time it was written. After all, it would not be difficult for a deceiving spirit to say Jesus was the Son of God. Certainly, if it denies that then steer clear but there is no reason why a deceptive spirit could not go along with that and then work its mischief. It's not as though they can't be deceptive! To be honest, the only way to tell true from false is through spiritual discernment. There's no magic tool, and why should there be? We are not children and God does not want us to be. If we fall for a deceptive spirit that will be our own fault, because we are promised something or our ego is flattered or we hold false ideas in the first place.

There is one thing I can say on this subject though. An experience that has many parallels with mine is detailed in a couple of books written in the 1950s, The Boy and the Brothers and Towards the Mysteries. This is the story of a young man who was used by the Masters as a medium. The books are written by an Irishwoman called Swami Omananda, née Maud McCarthy. Her Indian name might put some people off but that would be a mistake, I think. She was a devout spiritual seeker and served the Masters faithfully. But, as in my case, they did not tell her what to believe outwardly so she chose her own path.

Near the end of the second book there is a passage in which Swami Omananda asks a Master about Christ, saying that as much as she loved him (the Master), this love did not replace her love for Christ which had only grown with time. Was this wrong, she asked? Presumably she felt she was being a bit disloyal to the teachers who had given her so much. The reply more than satisfied her. Not only was it not wrong, it was absolutely right! Christ was the Master of all the Masters. He was the Lord. You can read a post I wrote on this a few years ago here and also the relevant extract from the book.

This echoes my feelings. I love the Masters who spoke to me and I would be more than honoured to be counted as one of their pupils. But they do not replace Christ. Nothing can replace Christ who is the Son of God and Saviour of humanity.