Fear of the Dark

Few of us know real darkness nowadays. Unless you live deep in the countryside you will be probably have some buildings nearby that keep their outside lights on all night. Business premises have been like this for some time but now many private properties do it as well, presumably for security reasons. I remember as a child waking up in the night and not being able to see my hand in front of my face. There's no chance of that where I live today as there's always some light coming in through the curtains, some from lights on a neighbouring property but also a great deal from the night sky itself which reflects back light from the earth, from street lights and lights left on all night on the exteriors of buildings, both private and commercial.

It's insane. We evolved to need darkness to have proper sleep. Without darkness our sleep is more easily disturbed and more likely to be shallow, and this means our waking life will be lived more on the surface too because our minds have not engaged with deeper levels at night. The constant noise we put up with is a contributing factor to that as well, but the lack of darkness in our lives means we live in an increasingly artificial state. Darkness helps us to go inwards. It takes us away from the distractions of life and the excessive stimulation of the modern world. Too much stimulation makes us live on edge, on the outside of things, caught up in the endless movement of material life, and unable to find true rest and restoration which can only be known in stillness and silence, and in the deep darkness that is conducive to peace. Darkness is a friend we no longer wish to know.

We can do this because of electricity. It's no coincidence that the discovery and exploitation of electricity has accompanied the rise and growth of materialism. The two are clearly linked and not just because electricity has powered the modern world. If we ask where electricity comes from we find that it has its origin in the world of sub-nature, and what comes from that world partakes of that world and carries the influence of that world. Jeremy Naydler wrote an interesting book about the prehistory of the computer called In the Shadow of the Machine in which he examines this question of electricity. He concludes with Rudolf Steiner that it is a form of degraded light which might mimic light but lacks its spiritual qualities because it comes from what we might justifiably call the nether regions. Our reliance on electricity and addiction to its use will affect our consciousness which will also become, has become, degraded and desensitised. This is because what we use imparts its qualities to our minds. We enter its world and become part of that world. Our injudicious and excessive use of electricity is taking us out of the world of nature, never mind the spiritual world, and into the underworld which is where electricity comes from.

This is obviously all part of the end times scenario and we can't escape it unless we trek off into the wilderness which is not feasible for most of us and may have its own problems for souls who have elected to live now. What we can do is become aware of the problem. We may have to use electricity to live in the world of the present time but we can be sparing in our use of it, and not allow ourselves to become caught up in the products it powers which will inevitably have a despiritualising effect on us. Electricity is not just material as opposed to spiritual. It derives from a place below the natural world which is our proper earthly home. Who does not feel a greater sense of emotional well-being in a room lit by candlelight or even gas than one with electric light? We may have found a great source of energy but it demands something of us and what it demands is of a spiritual nature.

Symbolically, darkness is ignorance and death, and light is knowledge and life. But there is also good darkness and bad light and we must know the difference.

We Cannot Get to There From Here

 When people take seriously the condemnations of the modern world, its various ideologies, its materialism, its addiction to technology and all the rest, they might ask, what do we need to do? How can we get back on a proper spiritual track? The answer is simple. On an individual level, this is possible and a return to first principles with the appropriate beliefs and practices will help to realign the soul with reality. For, make no mistake, the vast majority of human beings today are completely divorced from reality and living in a degraded fantasy world 

And that is why that on a societal level it is no longer possible to get back on track and has not been for some time. Things are just too far gone. As a culture we cannot get to where we should be from where we are now. When something has grown and become established to the degree that modernity has, it cannot be put right. It can only be completely uprooted and then we must start again from scratch, or if not scratch then something not far off. 

This became even more obvious to me than it already was during the course of writing my recent book on the end times. When I examined certain modern ideologies, it was clear that these were too entrenched in the contemporary mind to be dealt with effectively. The mind will have to receive a great shock to exorcise these thought forms which have sunk so deeply into consciousness that they cannot be erased without a massive upheaval. Even when many people turn to spirituality, they take these ideas with them, and see spirituality through the prism of modernity and its ideological assumptions. This is the legacy of centuries of actual or effective materialism, coupled with the degradation of consciousness that occurs in the end times.

No new political movement can save us. Not even a revival of religion could do that. Such things might correct some of the more extreme forms of crazy thought and behaviour, but they cannot at this stage address fundamental problems, other than superficially. 

This presents a dilemma. Does recognising the reality that real change is no longer possible mean we do nothing or should we at least try to do something while understanding that can never really succeed, though it might make some improvements here and there? Everybody must make his or her own mind up on that score. There is no ready-made answer. The basics of life are simple and will come naturally into view when we are faithful to first principles, the chief of which is to love or, at least, acknowledge God and respect his order, both natural and spiritual. If we get that right everything else will fall into place. If we fail in that then nothing will ever be right. It's like trying to keep the outside of the circle in place when you have lost touch with the centre.

I have sometimes been asked in response to a criticism of the modern world, "Well, what would you do to make things better?" All I can do is point out that this is an impossible question to answer. When the rot has set in so deeply there is nothing you can do. You can't say you should revive Christianity or bring back paganism or abolish communism or democracy or feminism or whatever it might be. In the case of the former, their time of spiritual effectiveness on the societal level has passed. In the case of the latter, they are indelible parts of the modern psyche. We cannot return to where we were and any attempt to do so would fail. All we can do is get our individual houses in order and wait for whatever is coming to clean up the mess. Or, as Jesus said, watch and pray.

This is not a counsel of despair but one of promise. This world was never meant to be the main focus of our lives, meaning our lives in the whole. Eventually, this world will be redeemed and raised up into spirit. The whole of matter will be transformed as Jesus's body was at the Ascension. But that is a long way off. For the time being, the world serves mostly as a training ground for the soul, and one of its functions is as a platform to push against in the search for spirit. Therefore, the fact of its imminent large-scale purification is something to look on with hope. Destruction on one level will lead to resurrection on another. When the degraded environment and corrupted human consciousness are purified by what is to come then a new humanity can arise, cleansed of the dirt it has accumulated over the last several centuries, if not millennia.

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.

Saving the West

There are many online writings lamenting the destruction of the West and blaming the usual suspects of mass immigration, liberalism, feminism and materialism, and their by-products of sentimentality, self-hatred and so on. Some regret this but accept it as inevitable, others want to fight it and think it can be turned around while a few just shrug their shoulders and cultivate their garden which seems to them to be the only option left in a crumbling cultural wasteland. I sympathise with all these approaches but would like to ask a question here. What is the West for? Because only if we know what it is for can we know if it is worth saving. 

Any civilisation worth that name must be organised around spiritual principles. From ancient Egypt to Greece to India, and even Rome when it began, God or the gods were at the centre of life, formed the culture and gave meaning to the civilisation. For the West that organising principle was Christianity which was the greatest expression of spiritual understanding there has been. In fact, all the other expressions might be said to be from the outside looking in. Only Christianity really comes from the inside. That, of course, is the meaning of revelation. Christianity or, better put, Christ is the greatest revelation of and from the spiritual world. There really is no doubt about this. Christ is the only religious personality utterly without flaw or limitation.

The West existed for the expression of Christianity. That is what gave it its greatness. Not uniquely for there were many tributaries but the main river into which all these tributaries fed was Christianity. Some people think the West is defined by science and has reached its greatest state following that pursuit but even science arose in a Christian context with natural philosophers seeking to understand God's creation. And whether it has reached its apogee pursuing science or sunk to a spiritual nadir is a question worth pondering.

When the West started to abandon Christianity it lost sight of itself. Now, we can go into the reasons for that abandonment and say that some of them were actually based in truth because they were to do with the development of consciousness and an increased mental polarisation and intellectual comprehension of the creation. The outer expression of Christ's teachings followed by the West might be said to have been suitable for an earlier phase of consciousness, less so for the new phase. But the core remained eternally valid for the core is Christ himself. It is not true that a better grasp of the world leads to atheism. A superficial understanding may but not a deeper one. A little knowledge has proved to be a very dangerous thing for the West but it is not only this superficial knowledge that has caused the West to abandon God and Christ. This is fundamentally a moral problem. The creature has got too big for its boots. Its newly acquired powers have gone to its head for it has taken these to itself and decided they are aspects of its own self and belong to that self by right.

I regret the ongoing destruction of the West but it has brought this on itself through its own hubris. When it rejected Christ it signed its own death warrant and we live in the playing out of that process. I suppose that it could theoretically rediscover Christ but that looks very unlikely, so much have we succumbed to our own egotism and proved unable to resist the demonic influences which hasten the process of our downfall. Individually, we can and should turn back to reality which means for the West to Christ, but collectively things do not look promising. So be it. The West is only worth saving if it rededicates itself to Christ. Note I do not say spirituality which can mean a whole host of things, some positive, some just self-indulgent and shallow. Without the rediscovery of Christ we can fight the symptoms and secondary causes of decline as listed above all we like but it will not lead to any kind of true renaissance.

Spiritual Crisis

A few years ago I wrote a book called The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (see here and here) which was largely based on essays from this blog arranged thematically. The crisis has obviously intensified since 2019 when the book was published but its nature has not changed. It concerns humanity's rejection of God which has the effect of leading people to search for meaning in false paths, some political, some supposedly spiritual through the attempted deification of the human self, and some just plain hedonistic. That's to name just a few of the wrong directions in which people may go when they turn away from the path of truth and reality.

The events of 2020 could not have happened, certainly not to the extent they did, in a world in which people acknowledged God. To acknowledge God does not just mean you accept a higher power in which all truth is centred and from which it derives. It means you perceive a meaning and a purpose and goal beyond this world which, let's face it and despite its many beauties, is a distinctly unsatisfying place if it represents the sum total of existence. But surely we should know we are not the body and if we are not the body then this world is not all there is and if that is the case then there must be more, something more real that lies behind it. 

We should know we are not the body for many reasons but one simple one is that we speak of 'my' body. That means we recognise that the 'I' lies elsewhere. It is not the product of the body or physically derived but uses the body as part of its experience and means to express itself. Think of your body. It really is just flesh and bone and blood, and surely it should be obvious we are more than that. Obvious as in known unless we are bamboozled by intellectual sophistries. This is not to denigrate the physical body which is currently part of the totality of our being but it is only part and by no means the central part. If people had understood this then they would not have allowed themselves to be panicked by officious bureaucrats and a cravenly compliant media into a quasi-totalitarian situation with an unnecessary and potentially dangerous medical intervention presented as the only escape route. But most people succumbed to the propaganda and they did so because of fear. It was a test which the majority failed. The medical crisis, assuming there ever really was one which is highly doubtful, has passed but the groundwork has been laid for human beings to have their freedom taken away again at some future date. When something has happened once it becomes much easier to do it again. If it's been done before there is precedent so we are less inclined to question it the next time.

Human beings are so constituted that we can accept or deny reality. We have the freedom to do that. But if we make the wrong choice, there are inevitable consequences as in cause and effect consequences. These may not be obvious straightaway but they will become increasingly apparent. Such is our situation. We have turned away from reality and at first there may even have seemed to be the illusion of greater freedom after doing that. There is also a certain freedom if you jump out of a window. However, the law of gravity cannot be ignored and we descend in this certain freedom until we hit the ground. So it is in a spiritual sense. We are falling and the only way to avoid a crash is to learn to fly which basically means return to the acknowledgment of God who alone can save us from a hard landing. I am speaking metaphorically, of course. Suffering in the material sense is not circumvented by faith and spiritual suffering often increases as that is part of the purificatory operation on the soul. But these are transitory and have an ultimately beneficial purpose. The suffering that comes from the rejection of God has no purpose. It is just the negative consequence of denying truth and it does not lead to joy.

Why does one deny truth? Some people might claim that it is an intellectual matter but that is either too simplistic or else an excuse for the failure to exercise proper spiritual responsibility. The true answer lies in the will. The will is sovereign. It is the one thing that is entirely our own and part of the reason for our life in this material world is to test it in an environment where there is no coercion. The current spiritual crisis may in part be seen as the inevitable consequence of a cycle reaching its conclusion when material clouds have thickened to such a degree that the spiritual sun is almost completely obscured. But even when you cannot see the sun its light is perceptible and so it is now. The light of God may be obscured but it is still present and we should know that without that light we could not see anything at all. The current crisis, which is now in the process of moving from simple crisis to actual madness, is to bring things to a head. Use the situation in the world today as a springboard to push against and return to God.

Space is Contracting, Time is Accelerating

I suggest this is a real phenomenon. You may say space appears to contract because technology has reduced distance while time seems to rush by because life has become so fast and rapidly changing, and I would not dispute that but I would also maintain that this is more than an impression because of our circumstances. It is actually happening though it cannot be measured because any instruments we have would be subject to the same forces that are bringing it about. And the reason it is happening is that we are deep in the Kali Yuga or End Times when spirit withdraws from the world and matter becomes more dominant. This means the very stuff of our current world, now old and worn, is less resistant to the forces of decay and entropy. Consciousness, too, is affected becoming more constricted.

The idea of there being four ages in a cycle is well established in religious cosmology. Many traditions speak of this. Egyptian, Indian and Greek myths all refer to it, and these are only the best known. The ages can be characterised as Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron, and in every case there is a descent from a high spiritual state of being to a low material one. At the beginning space is vast and time moves extremely slowly. This is why there are the stories of men living for several centuries back in prehistory. It is also why change only comes about after great spans of time. There is no sense of history since the patterns of life just repeat.

But as the ages proceed people's sense of time changes. Everything is cyclical for early man, each new year resembles the one before, but gradually there arises the notion of linear time. The material aspect of the world condenses and the spiritual moves further away from perception. The process gathers pace until, as the end of the whole cycle approaches, the cosmic framework in which we live has reached such a point of degeneration that it becomes unstable.

This world was originally structured on the pattern of the heavens. What that means is that the eternal realities of the higher worlds of being, somewhat like Platonic Forms, were the template on which human life was based. We can see this clearly in the case of ancient Egypt and India but it would apply everywhere to the degree that it could, based on the human consciousness of the period. A principal principle, as one might say, was the idea of a complementary duality which was the source of creation, heaven and earth, spirit and matter and, in biological terms, male and female. In the beginning there is a correct relationship between these two polarities and they function harmoniously and creatively, but towards the end of the cycle, due to the widening gulf between higher and lower states of being, this relationship is disrupted and becomes antagonistic. This leads to both an inversion of the hierarchy and also attempts to flatten any kind of hierarchy, indeed any kind of difference, at all. This is all in line with the rapidly developing predominance of matter over spirit. When the active and receptive poles of being are functioning correctly and according to their proper nature, all is well. But in a decaying environment everything starts to break down, matter seeks to usurp the rights of spirit and the relationship between the two ceases to operate creatively. The end approaches.

Back in the day advocates of New Age theory looked forward to the world entering the Age of Aquarius when people would experience a so-called quantum leap shift of consciousness. They acknowledged there would be earth changes as the old age crumbled but appeared to think they and many others would be around to enter into a glorious New Age once that had occurred without facing death. This was fundamentally to misunderstand the doctrine of the ages. It is not like winter turning to spring and a new year carries on in more or less the same way. The end of an age is an end. A new beginning is precisely that. It is a fresh start, perhaps on a higher turn of the evolutionary spiral but the past is completely cleared away. When a new heaven and a new earth arrive everything that belongs to the old order must die. Perhaps to be reborn if it has oriented itself correctly, but still it must first go through death. Transformation always requires death.

You might wonder where Jesus Christ comes into this scenario since, as depicted in tradition, it is a universal phenomenon, independent of him. What Christ adds to the teaching of cyclical ages is the idea of a linear progression to the End Times and a glorious new creation. The Kali Yuga and the End Times have much in common in how they play out. The Kali Yuga even concludes with the incarnation of Kalki, an avatar of Vishnu, who ushers in a new Golden Age or Satya Yuga. However, this is still part of an ongoing cycle which doesn't really have a conclusion except in Mahapralaya which is the complete dissolution of the cosmos and return to non-manifestation. What Christ offers is different. It is a new creation, a new heaven and earth. This is not just another Golden Age which will inevitably degenerate. It is a radical restructuring of reality in which evil and suffering, decay and death no longer have any part, and it is open to all those who wish to partake in it with the proviso that they must also restructure themselves in accord with it. This, of course, is impossible in the literal sense but we can at least allow ourselves to be restructured by opening ourselves up completely to Christ. This entails not just belief but love.

Christ is the lifeboat that rescues us from the spiritual wreckage of the Kali Yuga. Increasingly, all people who regard themselves as on the spiritual path or who are just looking for answers in these times of universal decline, value inversion and all-pervasive spread of evil will find they have to turn to him. As time rushes on towards its final destination there really is no other solution.

What's the Solution to the Current Crisis?

 Everyone recognises that we live at a time of crisis, whether that be spiritual or material. We might call it by different names and have different degrees of insight into the reality of our present predicament but any thinking person knows we are in trouble. Talk about the massive amount of government and private debt, about societal breakdown or climate change (if you believe in that) or about the complete loss of direction of Western societies. All these, real or imagined, are indicative of some sort of crisis but they are just the froth on the surface. Everyone reading this blog will know that the true crisis is spiritual but even those who don't recognise that realise that something is amiss and badly so.

So, what's the solution?

There is no solution and those who look for one or, worse, try to enforce one will only increase the chaos and confusion. There is no solution because we live at the end of an age or cycle which means we are in a phase of universal decline and increasing disorder. To say this is not to be pessimistic or negative. It's just a plain fact. The world goes through cycles which follow the natural pattern of spring, summer, autumn or fall and winter. To recognise we are deep in winter is simply to see the truth. To seek a solution to that is like an old person pretending to be young and, not coincidentally, that is something we do often see nowadays. In the case of modern man there is a mass falling away from spiritual belief which leads to materialism and atheism to begin with and then in many cases to various false spiritualities. This is the way the world goes when the initial burst of spiritual energy behind the forces that set it in motion starts to fade away and humans make their own reality.

We are in the Kali Yuga or End Times which were predicted and were predictable because the tendencies to decline, loss and value inversion are typical of matter replacing spirit as the predominating force, that being a basic definition of the Kali Yuga. The beginning of a cycle sees the injection of spirit into the world system. This determines the path to be followed but over time its force decreases though the framework it has built remains and can even be developed. But eventually material conditions overwhelm that and then they begin to dominate. There is no solution to this other than to build an inner ark and that is the test of these times. To maintain faith in a world which has either lost it or corrupted it. But this is how the wheat is sorted out from the chaff which you may find an objectionable metaphor given its implications but take that up with John the Baptist.

The world is primarily designed to develop consciousness but at certain times it also has the function of testing the soul. This is one of those times. The test now is for the soul to acknowledge and turn to God as its Creator but also to recognise evil as that which opposes God and his purpose for creation. It is no good simply believing in God if you are not on his side. That just means the God you choose to believe in is one of your own imagining which is the case for many. Humanity has reached a point at which it must make a conscious choice to align itself with God, and the nature of the world today is that this must take place on an individual level. In the past we operated collectively because the culture inclined us in a certain direction but now the culture is in the service of anti-God forces and we have to stand against that if we are to succeed spiritually.

Don't be deceived by people who say that a spiritual person has above all else to be a good person. Good by what criteria? First and foremost, we have to recognise what spiritual good is and consciously, completely, align ourselves with that. It is the full acknowledgement of God. No more and no less. Obviously, we should try to behave in the way that befits a disciple of Christ. Faith alone is not an excuse for bad behaviour or a justification for antinomianism. If you love me, keep my commandments. If you don't keep the commandments you surely do not love he who gave them.  Besides which, proper recognition of God will automatically incline a person to seek to be like him. But to be good as the world sees good is not the same thing. Moreover, we all fall short. That does not matter as long as we sincerely try at every moment of the day to "walk humbly with thy God" in the simple but profound words of the prophet Micah.

There is no outer solution but there is an inner solution. Know yourself to be a soul born in the world at this time to prove you are able to turn your spiritual compass to true north in a world in which all outer influences mitigate against that. Not south, materialism and atheism, not east or west, false forms of spirituality, and not even north east or north west. True north. You have to find the way to God within yourself and that is the case even if you follow an established form of religion which is no longer sufficient on its own and can often be a diversion from the true inner path. Now there has to be a real inner connection. And when you have attained that you simply follow where you are led, wherever that may be.

How to Save The West

Anyone can see that Western civilisation is on the way out. Let me rephrase that. Anyone should be able to see that Western civilisation is on the way out, but most people don't because they are too wedded to their own paltry pleasures or selfish resentments or greedy desires or shallow ambitions. The list continues but it basically encompasses all those who do not place the good, the beautiful and the true above their own egos, and that is the majority. If ever a civilisation deserved to collapse, it is ours because we are not worthy of those who established that civilisation. We, who place the temporal above the eternal, put ourselves at the mercy of the temporal and our time has passed.

There is a solution but we will never take it. The solution is to return to tradition and the soul of Christianity. That would include a form of what is now dismissed as patriarchy since, by and large, it is only men who are willing to fight for truth and to preserve it in the face of the inevitable attacks on it, inevitable because Satan exists and wages an ongoing war against creation. This has become so apparent in our day, and especially over the last 25 years, that anyone who wishes to tread the spiritual path has to see that path in terms of the war of good and evil. If you refuse to recognise that and retreat to an 'everything is one' position you are simply being spiritually blind, not to mention irresponsible. The mask is almost completely off now and the face of evil beginning to be seen for what it is.

Satan has weakened the West with, among many other things, the debasement of culture, mass immigration and feminism. In a society that wished to preserve itself immigrants would not be given a say in how the country was run (in other words, a vote) for at least 2 generations, and their number would be restricted. The number of immigrants that flood (the word is fair) into Western countries now will inevitably change them utterly. This may have good or bad results in the long term (I'm being diplomatic), but clearly for the host nation to permit it is borderline insanity because it will destroy itself thereby. A basic instinct is self-preservation. To go against this instinct is to succumb to the unnatural and the anti-spiritual. The failure to reproduce and the desire to kill yourself are ungodly.

Feminism is the devil's secret weapon because, while ostensibly based on reason and justice, it actually seeks to reverse natural hierarchies and turn the two sexes, meant to be complementary, into rivals on the same ground. The promotion of women to previously male spheres damages society because establishing harmony and consensus becomes more important than the search for truth and excellence. This again is one of those things that its so obvious it shouldn't need saying but the ideologically committed will never acknowledge it. That having been said, feminism is not the cause of the collapse but a symptom of it though it does hurry it along as well.

I say the remedy would be a return to some sort of modified patriarchy, meaning one that takes into account the evolution of consciousness and agency of both men and women, but I am not recommending this even if it were possible which it isn't as things stand.  The West must die and that is right and proper. The energies that sustained it are now weak and feeble and it has come to the end of its life. It is becoming a corpse on which the parasites will feed as it dies. But in the greater scheme of things that is not a problem because everything in this world only exists to serve spiritual needs. As the West collapses there are great spiritual opportunities for those who know how to take advantage of them. We may lament the collapse because of past good but everything dies and the West has rejected God so become evil. There is no more to be said. It must go but since the primary function of this world is as a school for consciousness and sphere in which the soul may choose or reject God and be tested thereby that is no great loss. All that is good and true and right exists in the higher worlds eternally.

The Madness of the Present Times

 I have noticed that quite a few writers on the Internet whose main focus is spiritual are getting increasingly drawn into commenting on and analysing current affairs. I understand why people do this especially with each new development revealing an ever greater descent into insanity. But the danger is that too much of one's energy gets focused on irrelevancies. We know, or should do, that the state of a civilisation that denies God becomes more and more detached from reality. We have been in such a state for decades now and it was inevitable we would follow the trajectory we have done. Loss of God leads to lose of the sense of reality because once you reject God you soon start to reject nature as well as there is nothing to anchor you to objective truth. You feel you can make reality what you want and what you want becomes corrupt because it is based on the desires, aspirations and ambitions of your earthly self which is mired in ignorance and egotism. We are some way down that road.

I'm not saying we should ignore what is going on in the world but nor should we allow ourselves to get caught up in it or react to it. To do that will inevitably drag us down to worldly concerns. If you really believe in God you see that life in this world is all about the preparation for heaven. And when you understand how entropy works in terms of human consciousness you see there are going to be times when the world can be coordinated to the heavenly pattern, to a greater or lesser extent, never completely, and times when it goes against that pattern. You have to have the discernment to know what sort of time you are living in. Surely anyone can see that we are now living in a time of spiritual decay and nothing will improve that situation. That doesn't mean you let evil have its way unopposed. You should always resist evil in your heart and stand against it, but you need to know that the trend is irreversible so don't hope for a bright new dawn. Not before there's been a clean sweep anyway. 

This clean sweep may be what is starting to happen now. At the end of an age all the muck of that age has to rise to the surface so it can be brought out and dealt with. Imagine a pond. On the surface the water looks reasonably clear but stir everything up and all the filth that lies at the bottom will be brought to the top. Only then can you clear it away. This is what is taking place in the world today. It is a kind of purification in that our sins are all coming out. It's not pleasant but stand back from what is going on and observe the process from a spiritual vantage point, from above and with a much more extended temporal point of view. Our task is to focus on the spiritual. It doesn't mean we accept the worldly on its own terms but the insanity of the present times has its own logic. That doesn't make it in any way right but fighting it with the idea that you might overcome it externally is a fruitless task. Speak out against so as to support others who might be struggling to make sense of a crazy world but know that the only resolution is spiritual.  

I have written about this before but the madness will only grow which means that the reaction to it will become more extreme, more vehement. That reaction is based on healthy human instinct and common sense (see, for example, this article), but the trap is it can be lured into intemperate response. The proponents of the madness can truly be said to be possessed by the devil in the sense that they have succumbed to malevolently seeded mind viruses because of unacknowledged sins such as envy, resentment, pride and the like. We must be careful not to let their capitulation to sin bring out our own innate tendencies to it which is what Jesus meant when he said resist not evil, something I have also mentioned in previous posts.

The article I link to makes complete sense on the level of everyday normality but it shows no real insight into why the lamented changes are happening. Unless you understand the demonic impulse behind all this you will not grasp that the only resolution to it is to transfer your attention to the spiritual world. Then you will eventually find that everything you think you have lost, and you have lost in a worldly sense, actually exists in a purer and more real form in the higher worlds. That is the reality, this is only the shadow. It is right to lament the destruction even of the shadow of goodness but know that the true goodness can never be harmed by evil. It remains inviolate.

Added note:

Some people might think this is defeatist talk. It is not. We should all fight the madness in whatever way we may be called to do so but we should also know that victory will not be in this world, not at this time. At other historical periods that may have possible but not now. In fact, one of the reasons the madness is allowed is so that we may remove our focus from this world to the higher one. Christians are being called to the Kingdom of Heaven. When the earthly kingdom becomes very obviously the province of the adversary that shift in focus becomes easier to make.

The Battle is Spiritual

 Continuing with the theme of the last post concerning the conquest of the West, the question has to be asked, is the West worth saving? Is it too far gone on the path of truth rejection and God denial? Is it merely suffering the consequences of its apostasy not merely of Christianity but of recognising any kind of spiritual reality at all? The saying "those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad" (see here) can be reversed and become "those who go mad are destroyed by the gods".  All previous generations would have thought that we have gone mad not only because of our spiritual abandonment but, even more, because of our denial of nature. I won't go into details about that but the same old culprits from anti-racism to mass immigration to feminism to same sex marriage and so on bear witness to what I mean. If you don't see these as denials of nature it's because you have succumbed to the temptation of giving abstract thought and ideology more importance than reality. You prefer theory to simple, naked, honest truth. Congratulations, you are an example of someone who has been educated beyond his intellectual capability and led astray by the glamour of thought. You illustrate the point of why certain spiritual teachers of the past preferred pupils who were illiterate and so could not be distracted by theory. I remember a saying from a Taoist text, possibly Lao Tzu,"Great Tao is very straight but the people love byways". You are one of those who has left the straight path and gone down a byway because it looks more superficially attractive. But it leads to death.

Francis Berger has a very good post about how someone who has not succumbed to the madness should fight it. There are three options. Confront it on its own battlefield through politics, ignore it and tend your own garden or fight it on the spiritual plane which might sound airy-fairy (and, to be honest, can be) but is actually the only way to confront it now because it is so deeply embedded in contemporary life and culture. There may have been a time when it could have been fought politically but that is long past. That does not mean those who feel called to do that should not do it but the fact is they will not win. On the other hand, the attempt to do so will at least invigorate those who see some of the madness and perhaps help them to resist it internally. But, in reality, to fight the enemy on his own terms will just mean that you are drawn into his world. He may give ground in small things only the better to advance his main purpose. You will start to become him.

No, the battle is spiritual and must be fought spiritually. The first thing to do is fight it within yourself. Put yourself right with God by full and complete orientation of your heart towards God and his purpose which requires humility and honesty. The next thing is to proclaim the truth as best you can. Not so much by condemning what is wrong (that too but it is not primary) as by asserting what is right. And then just live the truth, again as best you can. This will have a spiritual force which can't be measured and will probably not have a public and obvious impact but which is nonetheless very real. You will be injecting light into darkness on the mental plane and that light will be picked up and responded to by those in search of light. They won't know it comes from you and you won't know it has gone to them but the effect is real.

Francis's post is written in the context of The Lord of the Rings and points out how confronting Sauron, aka, in modern terms, the System, means you must think and act in ways that he doesn't know. If you fight him with his own weapons, he wins.  He (Francis not Sauron!) says in a comment to the post:

"Thinking like Sauron expands Sauron's influence and power. It creates more Sauron. On the flipside, not thinking like Sauron does not imply never confronting the enemy directly, but for goodness sake, if you're going to do it, be creative, intelligent, and "spiritual" about it". This sums the matter up perfectly and corresponds to Jesus's instruction not to resist evil, a widely misunderstood quote. It means don't fight evil with its own weapons because, just as modern materialistic technology actually alters the minds of its users to become more materialistic, so too do those who live by the sword die by it. The real battlefield is the mind and it's that you must address by showing people how to think and perceive differently.

Sauron was not defeated by armed opposition. He was about to crush his opponents on the battlefield when the ring was destroyed. He was defeated by hidden, secret work which went on without being noticed. It's true that the armies that confronted him did serve as a distraction but that was the best they could do.

What Does it Matter if You Lose the Whole World but Gain Your Soul?

It's very strange that the majority of people still have no idea that Western civilisation is being purposefully destroyed. It's an ongoing project which involves the gradual erosion of freedom but since 2020 you would think it so obvious no one could miss it. Recent alarm in the UK about mass immigration and the fact that not only does that erode a nation's sense of self but is actually a net fiscal drain, well known but kept quiet, has done nothing to awaken people to the reality of the situation. The all pervasive leftism used to emasculate native Western populations along with the equally all pervasive feminism means we are robbed of the ability to defend ourselves. The ageing body politic in Western nations has a ravaged immune system and can no longer fend off harmful attacks. Indeed, in many cases it seems to welcome them.

I could go on but this is not a political or nationalist blog. The lesson to take away from all this is that our true life is not here but elsewhere. It is important to recognise the assault on our traditions and our very integrity as a people, and one should know that this is not merely incompetence, though there is certainly plenty of that, but deliberate. The political aim is to remove resistance to globalist control. So, one must recognise the outer attack.  But there is also the intention, now well advanced, of creating a universal cultural nihilism which will leave human beings complicit in their own spiritual disenfranchisement. The real attack is on the human soul.

Even though this world is important not so much for itself as for preparing us for heaven, human societies and cultures should still be modelled on the divine pattern of creation. The soul thrives and can grow as it should in such a scenario. There is a lot of scope for variety but there is still a basic model. The paradox is that in a time such as ours when it emphatically is not the case that this world reflects the higher world there may be fewer people saved as a result of the culture but those who are will be saved at a qualitatively deeper level because they have to go against prevailing winds and currents. This is the advantage of living at the present time. When you turn to God it must be because of your own free will not because society obliges you to do so. This is more authentic. It's a choice of the soul.

Western values, so-called, are now not Christian values which they were for centuries, or even traditional pagan values which at least honoured the gods. They are the fake humanitarian values of the French Revolution and communism, fake because these are not really aimed at human fulfilment which they would be if they actually were humanitarian, but seek the demolishing of previous structures and hierarchies based on a measure of insight into the reality of God, and their replacement by a mechanism to advance the tyrannical aims of the globalist agenda where a small technocratic elite presides over a controlled and servile mass. This is why they seek the destruction of the nations, or those with real traditions of freedom and self-determination, the abolition of the family and ever greater dependence on the state, the promotion of abnormal sexuality which separates us from our true divine nature, the undermining of masculinity which would resist much of this and consequent emphasis on women who tend to go along with the consensus whatever that is. Everywhere you turn nowadays there is this soft totalitarianism which is so much more effective than the jackbooted variety of the past because most people don't even notice they are being herded like sheep.

But take comfort from the fact that all of this was prophesied in numerous traditions from the Christian (Last Times) to the Indian (Kali Yuga). The lesson to take away is that it is inevitable but it doesn't ultimately matter. That doesn't mean you lie down and accept it. You absolutely do not. You must fight it but fight it mostly on the spiritual level by keeping your soul free of the corrupting poison of modern ideologies that deny God or only accept him on their own terms. See what is going on but lay up your treasure elsewhere. Never give in to the lies but know that they are going to increase and will drag down many souls. Make sure you are not one of them by preserving the truth in your heart whatever is said out there. I believe that it is alright to hate evil, I imagine God does, as long as what inspires that hate is love of the good, the beautiful and the true and this is always uppermost in your mind. Don't let hatred overwhelm love and embitter you. It must always be love that guides you.

Actually, this is the difference between a healthy human soul and a leftist, by definition an unhealthy soul because God denying and motivated by resentment. The former hates what he hates because there is something real and good that he loves, and what he hates opposes that. The latter only loves if you can call it that, you might say he only supports something, because firstly there is some aspect of the good that he hates or fears, and what he supports opposes that. He has allowed his soul to be soured. If there is a lesson now for the lonely pilgrim struggling in today's world it is to keep your soul from being soured by focus on the true good which is imperishable. If the world burns, it was always going to do so, besides which that is a necessary stage in the process of alchemical purification. All the bad stuff has to come to the surface in order to be cleaned off.

Antichrist and the End Times

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

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

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

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

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

Read Not the Times

 It may seem a little redundant to write pieces on general spiritual themes with all that is going on in the world today but in fact that makes it all the more important to lift our mental focus above the chaos of current events to the deeper reality beyond. It's easy to get caught up in external conflict and take sides but for the spiritual person that temptation should generally be resisted. I'm not saying there is not right and wrong nor that in a dispute both sides are equally good or bad. That is clearly not the case but we do need to fix our minds on the eternal rather than the times (pace Thoreau). Was it not because Jesus did just that that he was betrayed by Judas who wanted him to take a more active position with regard to Jewish liberation from Roman rule? That is one theory anyway, and it is true that Jesus did not involve himself in politics or worldly disputes anymore than any bona fide spiritual teacher has done. Passions can be aroused, the sense of justice can be appealed to but we have to see that our emotions are being played upon to bring us down from a higher standpoint. This does not mean we make ourselves insensitive to human suffering and evil but we do not become psychologically involved because if we do we will lose connection to higher truth. This is what resist not evil means. It does not mean we let evil have free play but we do not let it into our hearts by reacting to it on its own terms and according to the agenda it sets. This can be a tricky balance to strike.

There will be many attempts to distract the spiritually focused from their proper task of following God. To inflame their minds so that their judgment is clouded and they allow themselves to be drawn into worldly battles. I am not saying we should always stand aside but we must be alive to the manipulation that is going on and not react emotionally. That can be hard, especially if one is personally involved and it is equally important that one remains alive to worldly suffering or you risk falling into the spirituality of self-satisfied solipsism. But you must be careful not to let evil pull you down to its own level which is something it is always trying to do to those who seek to extricate themselves from its clutches.

Surely you can see how first thing then another comes about to engage our emotions and pull us into earthly concerns? When one starts to grow stale up pops something else. We will be told we are unfeeling, inhuman, not to take sides especially in the face of evil actions but that is where discernment is called for. Evil is always seeking to draw us into its net and has no compunction about tactics. Don't react to its provocations unless you are directly concerned and even then never lose sight of God, and the real spiritual truth of God not an image of him that may have been created for some non-spiritual purpose as exists in all religions, especially the ones currently involved. This is not a call for pacifism nor for tolerance of evil but now more than ever is a time for detachment and discernment and to remember that love is not an emotion.

Don't Worry, This Was Inevitable

 It's hard to watch the civilisation of which you are a part destroy itself, especially when that civilisation has created many great and noble things and reached heights that earlier civilisations had not attained both in terms of art and science on the human scale and religion on the spiritual. And it's perplexing that so many people don't see this though I suspect that more are beginning to do so as the suicidal nature of our civilisation becomes increasingly evident and its behaviour increasingly absurd.  

It's also strange that so many members of that civilisation seem hellbent on dragging it down into the mire. We talk of envy and resentment and these are obviously major drivers in this scenario, but are they really sufficient to explain the sheer lunacy of much present day behaviour? I don't think they are. Large numbers of people in the modern age suffer from a profound spiritual disorder and one can only speculate what has caused this. Is it the self-hatred of the decadent? Or is it the rebellion against God of the proud?

And yet although it is difficult to stand by and watch things get worse by the day, disguised by our relative prosperity for people can put up with a lot if their stomachs are full, it is important that we do not succumb to despair, and the best way to avoid this is to realise two things. One, nothing lasts in this world. Everything goes through a spring, summer, autumn and winter cycle. This is how things are in a world in which decay or entropy is the backdrop to everything as it must be in a material world since only spirit endures. We are now in deep midwinter. Then we must realise that the West had the defects of its qualities. For a while the latter dominated but now the former have emerged and are bringing the whole thing down. Our civilisation contained the seeds of its own destruction and these have now sprouted and the weeds are choking the flowers. The main quality of the West was the strong sense of an individual self and the concomitant idea of freedom. This has made our civilisation. But its downside is the egotism and, more especially, the tendency of self to remove God from his throne and instal itself there. This is what we have done both collectively and individually. The idea that we can remake creation in our own image is a consequence of that. The West also birthed the machine through its exploration of natural science. This had the benefits we know but it was also a Frankenstein's monster that has certainly turned against us. Materially miraculous but spiritual deadly. Would we have been better off without it? That's the wrong way to look at the situation. The advent of the machine had to be as all possibilities must work themselves out at the end of an age which is where we currently are. We could have reacted better to it but the descent of consciousness into matter made it inevitable in some form.

The second bulwark against any despair that might arise as our world crumbles is to realise that our true home is not here but Heaven. This life is a learning experience. We are only visitors and the world is a bridge not a home. If we are alive now that is because we are meant to be alive now. There are lessons we can learn and service we can render and perhaps the most important is the one I have just stated. We should value the past but we cannot preserve it because nothing in it can last forever. On the other hand, nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost. Anything good here is but a dim reflection of a reality elsewhere. Perfection exists but it is not here. This world is just to make us worthy of it. The material civilisation of the West is passing but all the good in it will be taken up and absorbed into Heaven.

Failing the Litmus Tests

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

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

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

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

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

Leftism is at the very least the Pawn of Satanism

 It is said that evil often proclaims itself as such in some way. This may be because the law of free will dictates that if people are to be corrupted they must have some clue that this is the case. Within that criterion though there is ample scope for evil to disguise itself as good to the eye of one who does not wish to see beneath the surface and, on some level, actively wants to be taken in because this will justify some sin or fallen desire.

In occultism the left hand path is the path of transgression, black magic and sexual licence. Often rebranded as a short cut to enlightenment, crazy wisdom, breaking the rules for greater freedom, rising above good and evil and other pseudo-glamorous deceptive descriptions, it is, in fact, the path that leads away from God and towards not God which is all that rejects God and the natural boundaries and standards of his creation. This ends up, if pursued and unrepented, in a spiritual state analogous to hell because hell is nothing more nor less than separation from God. That is a state in which light must be stolen as the soul can no longer get it directly from God. A soul has to fall a long way before that will happen but if it persists on the left hand path and does not turn back to its Maker that is what will happen.

The left has long been associated with the unnatural and the dark side of life. Obviously this is not the case literally but symbolically there is a certain truth to the idea. We take our modern usage from the time of the French Revolution when supporters of the monarchy sat on the right in the National Assembly and supporters of the revolution sat on the left. A pure coincidence you might think but those who are symbolically minded will see more to it than that. We are being told something. None of this means that elements of what became the Revolution, which term I am using to mean the overturning of traditional ideas in the 18th century, were not genuinely progressive. Human consciousness was evolving. The relationship between all sections of society from aristocrats to the ordinary people and between men and women had to be adjusted in the light of greater self-consciousness. Not to mention that a new approach to religion was called for with a greater emphasis on internal enquiry. But the whole process was hijacked and continues to be, and the clue to the hijacking was right there at the beginning.

The hallmark of Satanism is rejection of God and the order of creation. This involves undermining and then inverting all natural hierarchies and if you look at the last couple of centuries, and especially the last 50 years, you simply cannot help but see this as the underlying tendency of the left. It moves from one group to another but always with the aim of subverting the natural order. The excuse is compassion or justice but the real motive is resentment and even hatred of God.

It would clearly be absurd to say that every leftist is a Satanist but every one has allied him or herself to a degree with the Satanic agenda and has done so because of spiritual failings. At the bare minimum every one is a dupe of some kind. And note that when I talk of Satan I am not talking of an individual being though there may well be such. But the prime manifestation of this impulse is the tendency in the created individual motivated by corrupted desire and badly turned will to want to sit on God's throne. This is what is behind the left, particularly as it is in our day.

The Spiritual Battle

 One of the advantages of being alive now is that we have easy access to all the religious traditions of the past. This can expand our spiritual horizons though I admit it can also lead to confusion and more breadth but less depth as we turn from one thing to another without ever fully engaging with anything. That is certainly a real possibility but then I believe all traditions are now running dry, and that the spiritual light is disappearing from every one of them, whether it be Buddhism, Islam or even formal Christianity*. That is not to say there is no point attending to the teachings of these traditions and no spiritual benefit to be had from fully committing to them but it is not what it was. I know many people will disagree but how much of that disagreement comes from real understanding and how much from hope, wishful thinking or attachment? We should all do what we feel we are called to do but we should make sure that we really are being called to do that, and that the calling comes from the soul and not some level of our personality. The present time is one in which we largely have to tread an inner path which will necessarily have a strong individual element though see below for how individual should be qualified in this respect.

One of the things a Western Christian might learn from another tradition is the Hindu idea of the Kali Yuga. There is an equivalence in Christianity with the concept of the End Times and also Greek thought has the various ages of Man known best from the writings of Hesiod in which we descend from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Heroic and then now which is the Iron Age. This is a descent because standards of behaviour deteriorate and so does the capacity for human happiness. So, the West does have this idea to counter the more modern concept of progress but it is developed more fully in Indian thought. I presume most readers are familiar with the Kali Yuga so I won't go into details but I would like to draw attention to its inevitability. It is, in fact, an example of the universal principle (in the material world) of entropy. Without an infusion of spiritual energy things will get worse. There have been many infusions of spiritual energy, chief of which, obviously, being the Incarnation, but the well is now running very dry which explains the spiritually catastrophic (not too strong a word) state we are in.

If something is inevitable what should our reaction be? Ignore it and go along with the ride? Certainly not. That is to participate in it, contribute to it. Fight it with all we have? Maybe, but that is to engage in a war you cannot win and you may well be drawn into what you are fighting by combatting it on its own level. Withdraw into the desert or mountains (so to speak)? That is an option that may work for some and I did it myself for 20 years but there is a potential element of self-absorption at play. 

There is no one solution which will work for everyone always but I think the old advice to watch and pray is good. Attempt to live and speak the truth wherever you find yourself and respond to the needs of the moment as they present themselves. The most important thing in the Kali Yuga/End Times is to construct and preserve an inner link to God and then you will know what to do. It won't be the same for everyone. There will always be an individual aspect involved, particularly now when the spiritual path becomes more individual the further you go on it (individual opened to God not enclosed within itself). But remember that if you fight the world you often end up becoming the world. Focus on the inner fight because that is one you really can win.

*Though not Christ himself, of course.

Reaping What You Sow

 It hasn't taken long for the results of the foolish decisions taken in early 2020 to make themselves felt. Anyone who ignored the evidence, perfectly clear early on, that the sickness was by no means as severe as presented and who allowed themselves to be terrorised by propaganda and went along enthusiastically with the home imprisonment, should now accept without complaint the inflation, the higher taxes, the whittling away of the value of their savings that are the inevitable consequences of these decisions. When you shut down an economy and splurge huge sums of money on paying people to do nothing what do you expect?

The lockdowns are not the only cause of the current monetary malaise. The fact that the financial crisis of 2008 was never properly addressed but merely had its cracks papered over is also significant. But the events of 2020 brought everything to a head. That may even have been their purpose or part of their purpose. Acclimatising a population to loss of freedom was also important. The question is what do those of us who are aware of the lies that brought us here and the reasons for us being in the current situation actually do? 

The first thing is to understand that the lies will continue. They have a purpose. They will take different forms but the underlying direction they are pushing us towards is the same. This is the afore-mentioned loss of freedom. That is what lies behind the increased control, the future reduction of people's financial independence and the obligatory medical interventions. You should know that information about everything from war to the weather is manipulated and has an agenda behind it and then you will keep yourself relatively free. Outwardly you may find your freedom restricted but inner freedom is what matters. Preserve that.

Secondly, the only way to protect yourself from what is to come is to focus on the spiritual. What is to come will come. You can't affect that. How you react to it is your task. And the only way to react correctly is to live in the spiritual world. It is true that this world is part of the spiritual world for, ultimately, everything is spiritual. But it is part of the spiritual world that has been invaded by anti-spiritual forces, something that is possible because of the nature of the material realm, the material being the spiritual at a distance from itself. God divides being into spirit and matter or subject and object in order to create, and he creates to reveal himself and become more. But this means there is God and not God or, better put, God as God and God as not God, and, though the latter is still part of God, it has the potential to lose connection to divine reality. When this happens only those who are able to recognise that it has happened can preserve their spiritual integrity.

This is what we must do now. As the outer world falls into darkness we must work hard at maintaining our link to the inner light. It is a standard ploy of the darkness at such times to present itself as light but we must not be deceived. The true light does not have its source in this world and it does not seek to ratify this world or the ways of this world. You will find that there is no institution in the world that is uncorrupted now but that is a necessary thing because it forces you to go within and to grow as a result. I do not say that the current evil is created or wished by God but he is able to use it for divine ends.

Ideally, the outer would reflect the inner. In a fallen world that doesn't happen very often. Today it is not happening at all. But that means that all those who understand what is going on must make even more of an effort to express the inner and to do that we must live as much as possible in the inner. Everyone reaps what they sow. To reap the spiritual we must sow the spiritual.

I find it extraordinary that so many people refuse to see what is taking place in front of their eyes and go along with the dismantling of their world. You could say that once you deny the spiritual then pretty soon everything falls to pieces and that is correct. You have no proper yardstick against which to measure what goes on. But it is not just this. People will not wake up because they are too lazy. It would mean a radical reassessment of their whole lives. It's hard to admit that you are wrong and have based your life on a lie but the longer you put this off the more painful it will be when you eventually have to face reality. As always the key to spiritual awakening is repentance. Far too many people nowadays adopt a surface spirituality that is little more than an adjunct to their worldliness as opposed to  being a replacement for it. These people are easily duped by the anti-spiritual forces currently running the world so make sure you are not one of them. You reap what you sow.

No More Grey

 Yesterday I said to an acquaintance that the climate change conference is surely pointless (I was being diplomatic) since Russia, India and China weren't even going to be there. He, triple pecked, of course, looked at me with real hatred as someone deviating from the party line so naturally I had to ask him why he thought excess deaths in England and Wales are currently higher than they were you know when. See here. The article hedges its bets but the comments seem to have a good idea. That tipped him over the edge and he literally snarled at me saying he listened to experts not gossip and hearsay. Follow the science. 

People are certainly doubling down in their wrong choices now. It seems that something inside them of which they aren't consciously aware is telling them that the only way they can prove to themselves they are right is to entrench themselves even more deeply in their wrongness. Darkness hates light and always wishes to depict it as the real darkness to justify itself. 

This implies that on some level every sinner knows he is a sinner. And they are sinners because the litmus tests (® Bruce Charlton) are actually bringing out the spiritual sickness within souls. Bad people are making bad intellectual choices. That is not to say that those making the right choices are good but they are at least facing the right direction and not bad. I know this sounds very black and white and that is not a popular way to think about people in the modern world. It does appear though that it is how things are increasingly becoming. Anything that was grey must now become either black or white. With every day that goes by the division between sheep and goats is becoming more marked.

On the Other Hand....

I don't mean to be deliberately contrarian, following on the last post with this one, but just to make a point. Everything depends on definition, after all. I still maintain that humanity is on a path of spiritual evolution and therefore cannot remain as it was. I believe in progress but I believe in spiritual progress which always builds on the past, even though it may introduce new dimensions of being. However, it is organic meaning it grows from its roots. Any growth, or imagined or claimed growth, that is not from the roots is a perversion and a deviation. It is a cancer. Our vaunted modern growth, what we call progress, is, for the most part, a cancer. It is a response to stimulation from the higher worlds but a response from lower being and self-will. The sun causes coarse weeds and beautiful flowers to grow. Modern civilisation is a powerful and choking weed that has flourished in the dark heavy manure of sin and is driving out more delicate and sensitive plants. 

In the previous post I said I was not a conservative but I don't completely deny that label. A conservative such as myself values the past and is loyal to the best of the past while not being blind to its failings. He sees how the beauty and wisdom of past achievement was a sincere response to divine impulse and an attempt to express the truth and dignity of God. He also sees how much of humanity's artistic and philosophical productions of the last, shall we say, two centuries has been a response to the devil, celebrating ugliness, sin and perversion. He doesn't want to return to the past because he is a modern man with a modern man's awareness of self but he regards it, for the most part and with provisos but certainly in respect of its higher elements, as a genuine attempt to engage with the spiritual life. We are not the people we were and can never be again, nor should we be, but we can certainly recognise that we were going along a path that led, more or less, in the right direction albeit with many twists and turns, came to a fork in the road and took the wrong turning. We should have gone straight ahead but turned left and the path we took is leading downwards.

This is the sense in which I am a conservative. As someone who recognises that the past for all its faults was usually an attempt to engage with God, and that tradition sought to preserve that in a fallen world. Whereas, in the present time for all our undoubted achievements we have largely succumbed to spiritual corruption and are putting up an increasing number of impenetrable barriers in our consciousness to goodness, beauty and truth.