World Gone Wrong

A good indication that this is a fallen world is the existence of insects that feed on human and animal blood. I would speculate that when God created the various forms of life it was a law that each group maintained itself by feeding on lower forms. Thus, plants absorb nutrients from the soil in which they grow, animals consume vegetable matter and humans can eat both meat and plants. I have left out carnivorous animals here but that is, as it were, a horizontal process. And it too may be the result of the Fall. Possibly there were no carnivores in the prelapsarian world or, if there were, they ate less evolved forms of animal life.

Be that as it may, bloodsucking insects are something else. We instinctively feel the wrongness of such a thing, and not just because they irritate us and spread disease. We recognise there is something unholy and corrupt about a lower form of life feeding on a higher form. One might even put certain bacteria and viruses into this category of lifeforms not created by God but instead being the product of the deforming of life by the dark forces and/or wrong human thought which has its effect in the external world, particularly in the deep past when physical matter was not as dense as it is now.

Obviously, the materialist will write this idea off as complete nonsense but it is a plausible theory from the spiritual perspective. God did not create mosquitoes and similar unpleasant creatures. They are either the creation of the created (a physical instantiation of spiritual misalignment) or diabolical perversions like the orcs Morgoth made from elves in Tolkien's world. For the sake of this post I looked up when bloodsucking insects are first thought too have evolved and the answer is about 150 million years ago which would seem to put paid to the idea. But life on this planet has been around for a lot longer than we currently estimate as the earlier forms existed when the Earth was less material than it is now so have left no trace. When God created the world he pronounced it good but it has gone bad and one of the signs of that is the existence of lower forms of life feeding on higher.

In Siberia there are myths that say the mosquito arose from the ashes or fragments of some giant creature or demon. Similar tales are found in North American myth, with the mosquito arising from the ashes of a man-eater, suggesting a common origin. It is accepted by many people that myths do point to genuine realities so perhaps here we have a folk memory of the fact that not all life forms were created by God/the gods but some are corruptions in a world gone wrong.

It's Not Real, Any of It

 And yet it is. This is the perennial puzzle the spiritual aspirant has to solve. He must walk a fine line on a tightrope with a big drop on either side. Is the world real or does the deeper reality of spirit render the material world ultimately unreal? The Two Truths theory in Buddhism addresses this problem but not entirely successfully as Buddhism cannot acknowledge the abiding reality of the individual self. Nonetheless, it does seek to come to terms with the difference between absolute and relative reality, giving each its place in the overall scheme of things.

I believe we make this more complicated than it need be. It's reasonable to assume that everything is real but some things are more real than others. The structure of life is hierarchical, and just as an amoeba is less than a man but still entirely valid on its own terms and in its own right, so we can say something similar about this world and the spiritual one. This world is real on its own level, and it is even real viewed from the spiritual level too but less so. It must be seen in the light of the spiritual to be understood properly but the fulfilment of its purpose requires it to be seen in its own light as well. If I sat by the roadside and did nothing all day because the material world isn't real then I would die, and would have wasted my earthly existence. That existence has a purpose which is developing the self, to which end the world must be taken seriously. I might return to the spiritual world if I denied the reality of the material to the extent that I  neglected it entirely but I would have failed in my earthly purpose. To opt out by denying the reality of the world is to defeat the vision and goal of spirit which is to become more conscious. more creative, more God-like, God being whole and perfect in himself but able to become more whole and more perfect by investing himself in a world of this and that, here and there, me and you.

Learning to keep one's balance on this path and walk straight will reveal to the aspirant the meaning of what reality is, and how it affects his life in the world. The relative may be a lower order of reality than the absolute but it is still part of reality and with the absolute makes up the whole. Just as spirit needs matter in order to know itself more completely and explore its own depths more fully, so God and the world are part of a mutually supporting totality - even if the world only exists because of God.

Everything is real but there are higher and lower realities. All reality comes from God and he is the height and centre of reality, but he is God so what he creates is fully real even if it is less than him.

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.

A Heroic Age

 I recall reading once that the Emperor Akbar, the great Mughal ruler of India who should figure on any top ten list of monarchs, said that saints cannot be kings nor kings saints. You can see what he meant. The demands of the job are quite different as are the skill sets required. Donald Trump is clearly no saint and his opponents attack him on that account regularly, but it seems that even when their arrows hit the target they just fall off. He remains unscathed. Still, he is no saint but then a real saint would not be able to do the job he appears to have been selected to do, and would not want to either. Their concerns would lie elsewhere.

In Hesiod's poem Works and Days there are five Ages of Man which go from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Iron with each age signifying a descent in human happiness, goodness and nobility. The men of the Golden Age are wise, pious and benevolent while the Silver Age population start off reasonably well but are eventually destroyed for their impiety before the gods. There follow the men of the Bronze Age but they descend into violence, and their end comes in a great flood. Finally we arrive at the Iron Age when life is just hard grind. There is no honour among men who lie and feel no shame. It's a sad and sorry time for everyone. The Roman poet Ovid has a similar view of life. He says that the Golden Age was a time of justice, peace and innocence. Humanity was naturally good but it knew little of the arts and sciences. These came about in the Silver Age as a gift from Jupiter who took over from Saturn as the principal deity. Once again the Bronze Age is a time of war though Ovid says men still respected the gods. However, religious feeling is quite lost in the Iron Age which becomes the most materialistic of times as men dig mines deep into the earth in their search for prosperity, that being all they care about. Truth and decency are distinguished only by their absence.

You will note I said Hesiod has five ages but I only mentioned four. Ovid only has the conventional four, but between the Bronze and Iron Ages Hesiod inserts another which is the Heroic Age. The Bronze Age ends in war and destruction and the Iron Age is a time of universal decline, but the Heroic Age represents a kind of restoration of past glory. It doesn't last but it is there all the same. A time of heroes who are certainly flawed but still are heroes and they bring about an age when the downward trajectory is held back for a period.

The theory of cycles allows for the recapitulation of the major cycle within each section of a minor cycle. There are even further recapitulations of the pattern within these sub-cycles. We are undoubtedly in the Iron Age and have been for a while. But perhaps the elements of the major cycle are repeated on many levels and perhaps, if Hesiod is right, we are due another Heroic Age or mini version thereof. It won't last but that doesn't matter because these ages only relate to the material world and our true home and destiny are elsewhere. But, in terms of the material world, perhaps we are going to experience a small restoration or, at least, a temporary arresting of the slide downwards.

Earth is a Filtration System

 One of the books on the right is called Earth is a School which it is. A school for the development and refinement of consciousness and a testing ground for the orientation of the heart in an environment so cleverly set up that one can find reasons to believe or not in God, depending on one's desire. I got that phrase from my teachers but the one that is the title of this piece I came up with on my own which may explain its unromantic sounding nature.

God creates to become more than he is, expanding himself throughout creation, and also to express and share love. But if love is to be real then it must be freely given which means that God must create fully independent individuals. They are extensions of him but they cannot just be extensions of him. They must have their own integrity and it must be absolute. This means love can be given or it may not. It also means the resulting individuals may freely cooperate with God and creation or resist that or even, to further their own ends, turn against it. To have the possibility of deliberate, freely chosen good you must have the possibility of not good. 

This is why God cannot make a creation that is all good to begin with. Or he could but it would be full of clones of God who had no independence, and any love would be a sort of automatic, passionless, all-purpose, blissed out and bland everybody loves everybody else equally sort that you see in some spiritual communes or, at least, you see people imitating that because they think it's what they should be doing. But that is not love which to be real must be personal.

There needs to be a first creation which acts as a selection gateway to the second creation which is the real one. Nothing evil or dark or in any way damaged or even less than perfect can get into Heaven, the second creation. This is why I call the first creation a filter for the second. All propensity to evil in the individual is brought out in the first creation where it may either  be indulged in or made excuses for or justified. Or, and this is the only reaction that gets it through the fine meshes of the filter, repented. The soul makes its choice and on that choice depends its future, whether it goes on to the second creation, the one in which evil does not just not exist but is impossible, or is recycled through one of the many environments in the first creation which differ inasmuch as they are reflections of the consciousness of the soul so some are indeed dark while others may be perfectly pleasant, even wonderful by earthly standards, but they are not the Heaven of absolute good.

If only we knew this for sure, you might say, then we would make the right decision. But that's the whole point. We don't know for sure so we must make an authentic decision, one that reflects our true self. One could add that we do actually know. All the information has been presented to us. If we choose not to accept it, that is our affair.

This idea of Earth as a filtration system, designed to extract impurities in the soul, does not preclude the Earth as a school scenario. Both operate, albeit in different ways. One the one hand, the soul is developed through its experience, expression and experiment in the world of duality, the material world, in which subject and object are wholly sundered. On the other, its inclination to or from itself and towards or away from God is brought out and examined. It is given the opportunity to see itself and to know itself, and also the chance to grow so that when it does reach the portals of heaven it can contribute creatively to the new creation and experience more of it. Many souls may qualify for heaven but the greater the spiritual development, the deeper the spiritual participation and the more the ability to add to heaven's glory.

For heaven is not a place of static peace and tranquillity. It is the eternally blossoming flower that grows from the seeds planted on Earth. Thus, it increases in beauty and glory and wonder, and we increase with it.

Why is there evil in this world? The answer to that is simple. There is evil in this world in order to eradicate it completely and let those who wish go on to a new world in which evil cannot exist. This world brings out and filters evil so that the new creation may be one of absolute good. You might say that Earth is a refinery.

An earlier piece on a similar theme is A Body of Slag.

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.

The Gnostic World View

 Gnosticism has a bad reputation among ordinary Christians but I believe there are elements of it that can complement conventional religious understanding. I would reject the idea of a Demiurge on a lower level of spiritual reality to the transcendent God who is responsible for the creation of the world with its inbuilt flaws. A basic truth is that God saw Creation and said that it was good. Matter is not evil but it is matter and therefore a more constricted state of being than spirit. The absolute duality of good and evil, spirit and matter, that exists in some versions of Gnosticism, most notably the Manichaean, is also based on a misconception. The world has fallen into darkness but darkness or evil has no separate reality independent of God.

Where I think some Gnostic ideas are useful is regarding the nature of the soul. For the conventional Christian souls are made (as far as I understand the matter) at conception but I think this is nonsense. Souls exist on the spiritual level, in realms of light, and come down to earth to experience life in a body and a sphere of being in which they become separated from God. This is so that they may grow, become independent and, ultimately, if all goes well, return as fully functioning members of the Kingdom of Heaven. John 3:13 says "No man has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven." Now, I know the verse goes on to say "even the Son of man which is in heaven" and I imagine this is normally understood as a reference to Jesus, but what if it can also refer to men as spiritual beings who incarnate in this world to further their evolution? The seed falls from the tree into the ground from whence it grows up and returns to the sunlight.

The Gnostic idea of man being a divine spark trapped in matter from which it must extricate itself has merit. Where I would differ from Gnosticism is in saying that this is intended. There is purpose behind it. It is not simply that the soul has fallen into darkness and ignorance but that it has come to this state in order to learn and to grow. On its own level it is perfect but passive. Bathed in bliss perhaps, but with no chance to deepen its understanding or develop its creative powers. In order to do this it must come to a world where it is thrown back on itself. This is the world of separation which is the material world.

But things are not quite that simple because this world is not only material, that is to say, outside pure spirit, it has also fallen and so is worse than it might have been. This is where the Gnostic misunderstanding comes in. Yes, the world has been damaged. No, it is not on that account evil. Evil is nothing in itself. It can only inflict harm on good. Good is the reality and evil is just the shadow of reality in a dualistic world of light and darkness. Darkness is not a thing. It is just the absence of light.

So, the soul comes down to earth in order to return to the heavenly realm but as a conscious choice rather than automatically. This act of choosing qualifies the soul to go to a higher level than that from which it emanated but it also means there is an element of risk involved. This is required because the soul needs to form itself by consciously allying itself with God and Creation. God makes the raw material but the soul then has to build itself up from that raw material if it is to be, which is the intention, a real individual hence a potential god itself. 

Gnosticism means knowledge. The soul is required to have spiritual knowledge. That much should be obvious. But which is more important, knowledge or faith? On a spiritual level they are the same thing. It is only in worldly terms that they become separated and sometimes even in conflict. But that just means that they are both very imperfect in this world. The aim is to unite them and realise they are two sides of the same coin.

The Spiritual Immorality of Materialist Morality

Here are some frequently repeated sayings which are believed to encapsulate the essence of good moral behaviour as far as the modern mind is concerned but which are all wrong. Sometimes only slightly wrong but it's the gap between partial and full truth that is critical. These sayings may shine superficially but if you mistake them for sound moral instruction you will stay becalmed in materialistic thought - whether or not you believe in a God or spiritual background to the universe

Number 1. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you don't harm anyone else.

This is the classic. It's the foundation stone of humanist ideological dogma which might sound good at first glance but is highly deceptive. It is certainly wrong as interpreted but it is also wrong as it stands. For it matters very much what you do if you harm yourself and there are many things you might do that may not harm others but do damage you, especially on a spiritual level. And the fact is you do not belong to yourself. You belong to God first and foremost because he created you and therefore if you harm yourself you also do harm to him.

But even if we ignore that, wrong actions and even wrong thoughts that do damage on the spiritual plane are sins, a sin being something that does harm to the spiritual self. Sexual sins, to take the most obvious example, may not directly harm anyone else if the people involved are consenting but engaging in such sins harms the culture and therefore it does harm others who may be influenced to wrong behaviour. There is physical and psychological hurt but there is also spiritual hurt and just because this is not recognised by an atheistic society does not mean it does not exist. I would go so far as to say that even unbelief harms others because it contributes to a culture of unbelief and therefore harms people influenced by the culture as we all are to some degree. Denying God does harm yourself and it also harms others, and, as God is the fundamental truth, one might say that denying God is the gravest sin even though to the secular mind it doesn't appear to harm anyone.

Besides, proper morality is not about simple harm avoidance but has to do with living in harmony with the universe on all its levels from physical to spiritual. 

Number 2. Love thy Neighbour.

The truth is love your neighbour. The distortion comes from misinterpreting what this love means. In the Bible the commandment to love your neighbour follows the one to love God and is contingent on it. This means that the love you show your neighbour must involve an awareness of God. It must be a love that supports the neighbour in his relationship with God, not exclusively but that must be an underlying factor. It does not mean universal altruism (see Francis Berger's insightful post) which is a materialistic corruption of proper love, and nor does it mean you must treat your neighbour with kindness and respect regardless of how he behaves. 

Loving your neighbour if it is not founded on the love for God may actually be immoral in that it potentially separates the soul from God which is the greatest evil. Besides, there is no proper love outside of God, certainly not in the spiritual sense and spiritual love is the root of all lesser loves. Without it these lesser loves are like one dimensional representations of a three dimensional solid.

Number 3. You don't need God to be good.

Without an awareness of God you don't even know what good is. You reduce good to material good which may well support spiritual evil. Even Jesus denied personal goodness. How much less can any one of us claim goodness? All goodness comes from God because he is the source and the very definition of it. Not only do you need God to be good, there is no goodness without God.

The point to take away from this is that any form of morality which ignores the primacy of the spiritual and the love due from a created being to its Creator is severely deficient and may actually be profoundly immoral. The word due may confuse because it implies obligation but in this context it merely means that which feeds and makes grow the soul.

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.

Extremism

I am an extremist. As, most probably, are you or anyone who retains faith in a higher power and sees man's destiny as beyond this physical world. We are not really extremists in the sense that our position is bizarre, outlandish, unnatural or one-sided but we have been forced into apparent extremism because of the actually extreme nature of modern civilisation. It is the modern world that has adopted an extremist position of God-denying materialism. It is this world that has evicted itself from reality and propagates lies and illusions. Anyone who holds fast to God and spiritual truth necessarily becomes, by the standards of the extremist ideology of the present day, an extremist. 

Jesus was regarded by the religious and secular authorities of his time as an extremist. His disciples when they spread the word after his death were extremists. All the saints have been extremists even in the context of the religious societies in which they lived, and now when spiritual goodness and truth have been chased from the world and fakes and imitations are put up in their place anyone who affirms the inner reality of God will be condemned as a fanatic, an upstart, mad, even dangerous to societal stability and public order. Such a person is obliged to reject the fashionable ideas of the world. He must go against many perceived public values. In consequence, he will be branded a hater and perhaps, in some not too far off time, a criminal.

This situation has not happened by accident. It may appear that society has evolved in a certain direction over the last few hundred years because of science, education, secular progress etc, but actually we have been like sheep herded in a certain direction and we are now enclosed in the pen that was always waiting for us. Unfortunately, it was not the Good Shepherd who was doing the herding. The only way to understand our present predicament is to see it as the result of evil powers seeking to corrupt humanity and capture our souls. We have been fed half-truths and lies in order that our minds may conform to a certain shape for the demons who are behind the whole process (and no one can deny their skill) know that we cannot be forced into rejecting God against our will. We can be lured into that sorry state but, when all is said and done, it must be our decision. They have set the trap and sweetened the bait but we have voluntarily walked into it with our eyes open. No one has to do this. Even if the path is opened up invitingly before us we still have to set foot on that path and there is always a voice within to warn us against this if we will pay attention to it. If we don't listen to that voice that is because of a spiritual deficiency within us, hard as that may be to hear for anyone raised in the modern world. Don't blame the world. It inclines but does not compel.

As the world descends further into spiritual darkness it becomes more important for us to reject the whole of materialistic atheism and not retain any aspect of it within our minds. There are today many people who protest against this or that aspect of modernity in its most up to date guise, transgenderism being the latest inevitable phase, but who still accept the basic background premise of the materialistic ethos. This position is becoming increasing untenable as the initial harmless-looking seed has grown into the mighty choking weed it has now become. This does not mean a return to the past for the reasons given here but once you accept the reality of God and the spiritual path that puts everything else in a different perspective. We have built up a philosophy of life over the last 300 years based on a false view of man. Throw out that view and everything must be reassessed. You may be able to keep some aspects of the recent past but even they will have to be seen in a completely different light.

One bad apple in a basket soon rots the whole lot. We cannot retain anything of materialism and that is hard because we are soaked in the wretched thing. I don't suppose there is anyone alive, certainly not in the Western world, who is not intellectually affected by materialistic atheism in some form or another. But we do have to try to liberate ourselves from it because it will restrict our spiritual freedom and pollute our minds. That is why we have to be extremists, albeit extremists that walk humbly with God.

Secular Materialism and the Feminine

How can we cleanse our minds, purging them of every aspect of secular materialism? This is the task that lies before us at the present time because this materialism is like a worm in the apple of the mind that will contaminate the whole thing unless it is removed completely. Unfortunately, all of us are corrupted by it to some degree as it is the water in which we have swum all our lives. It's the basic assumption to everything, how we are educated, our culture, high and low, and it drives our dreams and ambitions. It's all pervasive. Even most people who believe they believe in God are materialists with their religious beliefs sitting in an overall context of present day secular materialistic assumptions such as democracy, humanism, feminism, climate change concern and so on.

I mention feminism. Our current world is sometimes described as increasingly feminised but this doesn't just refer to the rise and spread of feminism over the last hundred years. It also describes the attitudes that prevail in contemporary society as a whole, over and above the roles of men and women. What does it mean?

A feminised society is one that no longer seeks truth or excellence. In line with general female motivation, it prioritises what is seen as safe, secure and equally nice to all. It wants what is most agreeable to most people without excessive challenge or discomfort. Consequently, it will never rise above mediocrity. Women seek to observe the status quo. It is men who take risks and break boundaries so a feminised society will seek security and conformity above all. Consequently, it will start to regress to a kind of childhood. These characteristics, excellent and necessary in a mother, are an ideal balancing corrective to the more masculine drive that seeks out truth and creates a civilisation. However, if they dominate as they are beginning to do now they infantilise and weaken and lead to a reversal of cultural achievement. 

The childlike condition that results might be regarded as spiritual in that it bears a slight resemblance to pre-agricultural societies that supposedly lived in harmony with the natural world in a state of peace and communal equality.  I have to stress supposedly since more recent, less ideologically driven, research has shown that to be mostly a fantasy. But even assuming it were true, societies of this kind remained just as they were for thousands of years. They never advanced until disturbed, and their spirituality was largely just an awareness of the supernatural. They had not begun to grow into a real knowledge of God, and the purpose of life in this world is to transform human souls from a state of passive participation in life into beings of creative love and power. In short, to make gods. This requires constantly aspiring upwards, reaching beyond the safe and what is acceptable and attainable by everybody in the society. It demands that we leave spiritual childhood behind and become spiritual adults which means abandoning the lowlands and climbing mountains. Like it or not, and many religious people won't, a truly spiritual attitude needs the pioneering spirit. A feminised society is one that stays in the nest and will never fly. 

It can easily be observed that both materialism and feminism arise at the end of a civilisation's lifetime. They seem to be signs of cultural fatigue and decay and arise from a loss of spiritual purpose, coming about when the creative impulse that forms a civilisation has worn out and it is living off its past achievements.

Duality is the basis of the manifested universe. It is the interplay between two opposing forces that brings about creation and drives evolution. After all, it could be said that Man only begins to know himself because of Woman (and vice versa). Therefore, to point to feminism as a sign of cultural collapse is not to criticise woman anymore than to condemn materialism is to condemn matter. Just as the devil doesn't lie outright so much as deform the truth, the problem here is that womanhood and the material have been taken out of place and made to usurp the role of that which they are intended to complement in the context of duality. They have been made to become, or try to become, what they are not resulting in disorder and spiritual chaos. The devil is not very imaginative. He always makes the same offer. Give me your soul and I will give you money and power. He's played his usual game with feminism and materialism and many people have made the exchange.

How do we grow out of this? By starting to take the teachings of Christ seriously. These are not adjuncts to the modern beliefs of the world, to the secular ideologies of materialism, as they often seem to be perceived nowadays. They completely replace these ideologies, showing those to be shallow impostures deriving from a false idea of the soul. Feminism is an offshoot of secular materialism but when the feminine is rededicated to the spiritual it is transformed and becomes a sacred vessel for the divine as with Mary. Similarly with matter. Just as with the soul itself, these things only find their true fulfilment when they give themselves over to God through Christ. Then they become holy things. At the moment they have been deformed by trying to be something they are not.

Spirituality and the World

 There are two mistakes the spiritually oriented person can make in his relationship with the world. The first is to get drawn into taking sides in worldly disputes. I am not talking about the conflict between good and evil. To take sides in that conflict is essential but sometimes we project good and evil onto worldly scenarios and forget that these are basically spiritual things referring to the spiritual plane and our relationship with God. That can and does spill over into the material world of creation but real good and evil are always rooted in the spiritual and when we think of them that is what we should be thinking of to make sure we are approaching them as they actually are and not as we might imagine them to play out based on worldly priorities and criteria. 

The second mistake is to have no relationship at all with the world. This is the typical error of a certain category of mystic, the sort who forgets that though we should not be of the world, we are in it and cannot ignore that basic fact. To be born into this world means we have a task to perform here, and although that task might be to reorient both the world and ourself to the spiritual plane it is not to reject and deny the world as the arena of God's creation. If God looked at what he had created and saw that it was good who are we to say otherwise?

It can be a delicate balancing act. Our concern should at all times be the spiritual but the material is part of the spiritual as Jesus demonstrated when he took his body with him into heaven. He did not get involved with the world as the world but he loved it as the creation and sought at all times to render it more open to the spirit. This requires reorientation and purification and that also should be our attitude towards the world.

Nowadays there seems to be one crisis after another that clamours for our attention and demands we take a side. Increasingly, good opinion tells us there is a right side and a wrong one and we can be swept up into an emotional reaction or else just be fearful that we might be perceived as bad people if we don't follow everyone else. But I would suggest that often we don't have to take sides in other people's arguments. I am not saying we should stand back and let evil prevail but nor need we get involved in conflicts that fundamentally do not concern us. The immediate problem every human being has to face is within himself and has to do with his relationship with God, but we often ignore that in favour of something external to ourselves which is fundamentally less demanding and can be satisfied with gestures. 

Earth is a School article

This is an article I was asked to write recently by the publisher of Earth is a School in order to promote the book. I am not sure where it ended up so I include it here.

Why are we here in this world? Probably most people nowadays think there is no reason. We just are here and that’s all there is to it. We should try to live as happy and fulfilled a life as possible and when we die, we cease to exist. Religious people would go further and say that we should follow the guidance of our religion and hope for an afterlife in heaven or paradise or maybe get reincarnated in a better position than we are now with the eventual aim of breaking the cycle of manifested existence and being reabsorbed into the All. It depends whether we are materialists or spiritual believers. The former would say life on Earth is for living as best you can, here and now. You have only one life so make it count. The latter in practical terms often don’t seem so very different though they theoretically have one eye on the next world.

 

I would like to consider another possibility. It requires seeing the human being in a different light from the one to which we are normally accustomed. For a start, it takes the pre-existence of the soul as a basic fact. Then it envisages that soul taking birth in the material  world in a physical body for reasons to do with its own aims and goals, those of a spiritual being, not for the incarnate person’s development and fulfilment in material or worldly terms.

 

In this scenario the spiritual individuality, which is a created being, descends to the physical world to advance its evolution. It’s like a seed that is planted in the ground to germinate. The word descends is appropriate because the process is a falling away from the unity of the source into separation and limitation. At the same time, those two characteristics force the soul to develop in certain ways that would not be possible on its own natural level of oneness with the source where there is no conflict or challenge. The material environment provides both of these, as we know all too well. Here we can truly become an individual self, forced to rely on ourself and to make our own way. As the evolution referred to is to make fully conscious creative gods, true reflections of their divine source, out of unselfconscious spiritual babes, beings bathed in peace and bliss but purely passive, that individuality is an essential requirement.

 

Earth, by which I mean this physical world, is a school designed with a purpose. The purpose is to brings souls to maturity. If we were to remain as pure discarnate spirits we would certainly never know pain or suffering but then again we would not know real love either for real love requires a solid sense of self which is something that can only develop in a world of separation, a material world in which spirit and matter have been sundered. Our task is to put them back together again, consciously reassemble them, and from this marriage of Heaven and Earth arises something new which is the god we mentioned earlier. This is a being that can wield the powers of creation in full consciousness. I will add something more for those who might think that love can be known by souls that have not experienced the material world. Not really. These souls can certainly know a kind of balmy bliss and communion which is like love but it is an infantile kind of love. True, serious, deep-feeling love can only be known and expressed by souls who have been touched by sorrow. Suffering may be the bane of our earthly existence but it is also a great spiritual gift. We cannot know it on the higher planes but through it we can enter into the lives of our fellow souls more than we ever could if restricted to those planes. It is through suffering that we come to real love.

 

The soul is created by God, the supreme I AM of the universe, out of himself. It is created in his image so has its own I am quality. It is individual but to be a true, fully functioning individual it must co-create itself. Otherwise, it would remain in spiritual bliss but spiritual ignorance. This is what the school is all about. The experience of duality is necessary for the knowledge of oneness. It is separation that leads to completion. But this oneness does not mean simply returning to God or becoming God. The whole process is to make the One many which is a spiritual enrichment of the One, and the many remain themselves even when they have completed the journey, graduated, you might say, and returned to the source. Now they can add to creation. In fact, this is something we can already do in a clumsy fashion though only the great artists do it to any real degree. And note that you can create with God or against him. Here is a lesson many, especially now in the 21^st century, have yet to learn. God is truth. What is unaligned with God is untruth and therefore evil. That’s what evil is in the greater sense. Our task is to bring ourselves into harmony with the laws of creation and then we will find real fulfilment by working with them. The fact of individuality, which necessarily implies free will, means that things can go wrong. It would appear that things have gone wrong in recent times but it may be that, viewed with the eye of history, even the spiritual darkness into which we have fallen will bring some kind of future advancement. Perhaps we have to experience the consequences of wrong thinking to know how wrong it is.

 

The scenario here sees souls coming to the Earth and being tested just as in a normal school. What is tested is the orientation of the heart. There is no choice on the higher planes to which the soul naturally belongs, no sense of separation from divine being. What is, is. But down here there is a choice. The world is very cleverly set up so that there is just enough evidence to convince those of the reality of God if they incline that way but not enough to persuade those who do not wish to believe. Here, and especially now in our day, you can follow whatever path you choose. Your heart is being examined. There is no coercion, no overwhelming evidence that would take away your free will. You show yourself for what you are. This might sound a little threatening but God is surely at least as compassionate as we are. Failure in life’s spiritual lessons may simply mean you have to repeat the course. Those who make the grade return to the higher worlds where, according to their spiritual station, they will be filled with the love and truth of God. Those who miss out on that proceed to worlds that reflect their current spiritual state which will no doubt provide them with new lessons to take them further on their journey. (Though see Bruce Charlton's comment below about the potential difficulty of changing your mind when no longer in a body.)

Another Year, Another Turn of the Screw

 Here we are at the end of another year in which everything the conspiracy theorists said has turned out to be true though the great majority still won't see it. That's won't not don't. People do not want to wake up. They prefer the illusion of thinking that the world is ok really and everything will get back to what they think of as normal. It will not. We have entered a downward spiral in which such things as disease, climate change and the woke agenda (feminism, anti-racism, homophilia etc, the whole levelling off and making everything equally good and true if you want it to be) are used as instruments of social control and destruction of the traditional, the natural and the common-sensical, and as preparation for a future in which the supposedly friendly ideas of equality, sustainability and security are pressed into service to crush freedom of thought, diversity of opinion or any kind of dissent. The rulers behind the rulers, whoever/whatever they are, are seeking to erase all spiritual, indeed all real human, sensibility from the mind of man. Their aim is that we will be stripped of individuality and forced to lead a herd-like existence in which we will essentially be owned. Whatever else they may be, the pecks are clearly part of that agenda. They are a forerunner for a future process in which everything about everyone is known and counted. If you don't see this, you are living in a dream world. 

So, the future is grim? Not necessarily. This world was never meant to be a perfect place of joy and happiness. It is a training ground for the soul. Joy and happiness are there sometimes but they are not the natural state of the earthly plane. They are interruptions from above, incursions of divine light into the material world. For those who perceive this and choose to align their being with the source of divine light which is God then whatever happens in this world can be seen in a different perspective. That does not mean we should just accept evil. We should always fight against it and strive to defeat it when it seeks to seize the initiative as now. A successful outcome for the globalist totalitarians is not assured. But we should also know that the increase of materialism and everything associated with it, such as the quantitative approach to life that is now paramount, an approach summed up by the computer which typically reduces quality to quantity robbing it of real life in the process, is inevitable. See here for more on that. The end of an age is a time when spirit has ebbed away and matter becomes ever more present. And yet even that can be a good thing for it forces us to look for spirit within ourselves and makes it all the more pressing to begin the search for God. It is said in the Indian tradition that all the sincere seeker has to do to be saved in the Kali Yuga is call on God, even just repeat his name. This may be understating the case a little but the idea is that we do not, as in earlier times, have to perform heroic acts of spiritual athleticism. In times of real darkness the greatest spiritual act is simply to believe and live as though your belief was real. Because it is.

It's Time to Wake Up

 Anyone who hasn't seen through the evils of the current time as summed up by the litmus tests is in danger of being complicit in them. You may think this is unfair and that people cannot be blamed for succumbing to relentless one-sided propaganda but we are supposed to be intelligent, conscious adults. We are called to look beyond appearance and to develop aspects of our mind that see reality beneath the surface. These aspects, which can be brought together under the category of spiritual discernment, exist but we will not develop them if we limit our conception of the human being to a materialistic level. To do that in this day and age I will go so far as to call a sin because it is a failure of spiritual responsibility and shows disrespect towards the Creator. We are not innocent. We are not victims. We have a duty to God and part of that duty is to recognise him and to understand his purpose for us. Both of these are important. It's no good acknowledging God but behaving according to the understanding of this world. There are people who think they recognise God and believe in the spiritual but if these people fail to apply that recognition to what goes on at the material level then they lack insight and their spirituality is sterile. They might believe in the spiritual but they don't understand it.

Equally, it's no good acknowledging God but thinking all you have to do is focus on the spiritual and what happens in the material is of no concern to you. The material is the spiritual. It is part of it and must be seen in the light of the spiritual. God favours marriage not divorce and we are meant to bring the material into line with the spiritual not separate the two. It's always from above downwards but God saw his creation and said it was good. He instructed man to work in it and take care of it. Taking care of the material means bringing it closer into line with the spiritual so that it may serve as a vessel for the spiritual in which to manifest. It is through the material that the good, the beautiful and the true can be known and expressed.

God allows evil so that good may come of it. The good may be the awakening to truth in the human heart as it recognises and rejects evil. The evil is not good in itself but it can help to bring out latent good. We should not make the mistake of thinking that evil is part of God's plan but, given the possibility of it arising in a world of freedom, it can be used by God. Nevertheless, to slightly paraphrase Luke 17:1, even though there must be evil in the world, woe to him through whom it comes. There is never any justification for evil.

Most people are lost because they recognise no reality beyond this world and even many who do believe in the spiritual subordinate that belief to worldly considerations when these assert themselves. Which means they don't really believe. If you really believe in the spiritual you must see everything in that light. There is no situation in which the spiritual is not primary. The body must be fed and life must be lived in the world while you are here but even these things are secondary. The spiritual must always be the root reality of your existence, and if you make it so you will be supported. That doesn't mean life will easy but you will be supported. When times like the current times arise and the worldly powers seek to force you in a certain direction all you have to do is the right thing by God. You need not worry about consequences which is not to say that there won't be consequences. There may well be but these are external to your true self. I don't say this lightly but the most important thing is always to remain faithful to God.

The present time can be understood as one in which the attempt is being made to undo creation and return it to chaos. This is why the spiritual and the natural are both under attack. The aim is to unravel reality and reduce it back down to raw matter untouched by the creative breath of spirit. The relentless focus on equality is one aspect of this. True equality can only exist in the uncreated state of complete equilibrium. The greater the activity of spirit, the greater the inequality precisely because spirit is creative and creation differentiates. It disturbs basic oneness which is the state of unexpressed potential in chaos before creation. Oneness in this respect is the same as nothingness. Equality is death. Why? Because the only way it can be reached is by reduction to nothing. We have fallen for the ideology of equality because we think it means fairness. Everyone is the same. No one is better than anyone else. But that is not the spiritual way which always tends towards greater freedom, more individuality. This is certainly within the context of God and the overall oneness behind creation but to use oneness to crush difference is a diabolical ploy aimed at destroying the hierarchy of being and bringing the higher down to the level of the lower. It is intended to desacralise. We lost spirit and we are currently losing the natural as well. Computer technology is one arm of that and the rejection of the fundamental reality of male and female is another.

The bulk of humanity is asleep. Seduced by comfort and entertainment, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by powers that seek complete separation from God. We are losing our freedom because of fear and many seem willing to accept anything merely for a quantitive extension of life. But life is eternal anyway! To paraphrase again, this time Matthew 10:28, we should not fear what can kill the body but what can kill the soul. It is our spiritual immune system that needs boosting now.

Heat and Light

I don't know the truth behind the current anthropogenic global warming scare. Maybe it's based on some kind of reality, maybe it's partly true but not in the way presented or maybe it's just completely hyped up and 'the science', as it often does now, has followed the funding. What I do know, though, is that it is a spiritual distraction.

Let's be clear about one thing first of all. We should obviously respect the environment or, as it should properly be called, the Creation. We should respect our natural environment, we should respect our intellectual environment and, most of all, we should respect our spiritual environment. But the relentless focus on the physical only points to how little we respect the other environments in which we live and move and have our being, and how much we damage them. Chiefly, we damage the spiritual which we either don't acknowledge at all or else see largely in the light of the priorities of this world. 

I am sure the climate is changing somewhat but isn't that always the case? It's reasonable to think that human activity since the Industrial Revolution might have contributed in some way to this, and I would be the first to decry the pollution industrialisation has caused. We do need to change. That is a basic and obvious fact. But what do we need to change? Our cars and boilers and and diet and habits of over-consumption or something more fundamental? Here I should say that I don't have a car, don't bother with heating until the temperature is truly low and am not much of a consumer of stuff. Also, I haven't eaten meat for years but, quite frankly, none of these things mean much. It is obvious that the idea of climate change is being used to advance another purpose. Amongst other things, it is being used as a secular religion to keep people away from developing a proper relationship with God and attending to their salvation. Concern with it eats up energies that should be turned inwards towards God and causes these energies to dissipate into agitation and self-righteousness to no real effect. Great heat but very little light as you might say, given the subject.

Then it is being used to attack basic freedoms, impose control and eventually reduce human beings to lines of data.  This is what it is really about. Control. Once you realise that you can free yourself of any worries you might have about climate change. Do you think most people really care? Those at the top are using those at the bottom to advance their own ends. Those activists at the bottom are the ones Yeats described as "the worst - full of passionate intensity", convinced of their righteousness but animated by anger and resentment. Many, no doubt, mean well but they are being manipulated.

This does not mean we should treat our world as a resource to be plundered until there is nothing left of it, but the concern with climate change is tinkering with effects. We need to look at causes and the cause of our disconnect with nature is our disconnect with God. Even if, by some miracle, we got the climate to behave just as we would like it to behave (and what exactly is the ideal temperature?) we would be no better off in terms of our interaction with the world. We live in a state of complete alienation and that will not change until we turn back to God and see ourselves as spiritual beings whose fulfilment and duty lies in loving and serving the Creator.

Climate change, real or exaggerated, is a complete red herring. What we should be aware of is the agenda of control it is being used to advance. We should also know that this is a materialistic preoccupation. That is not to say we can use the world greedily or selfishly for that is even more materialistic. The world is the creation of God, that which he looked upon and saw was good. But don't separate it from its Maker. Use it, we were meant to cultivate the wilderness, but use it with love and respect as a good steward. Then things like climate change fade into insignificance. Get your relationship right with God and your relationship with the world will automatically follow on from that.

Anyone who takes this position must be prepared to be assailed by a barrage of statistics proving he is wrong. I would never say one should ignore reliable data but data is open to interpretation and figures can be selected to serve an agenda. But, there is something more. Those on the spiritual path must be guided by intuition. Now, intuition is very good at the big picture but it sometimes falls short on the details.  We don't have to know how and why the climate change agenda is a stalking horse to bring about some other desired end but we can see that is precisely what it is and one of the reasons for that is this. Climate concern is relentlessly pushed as the correct thing to believe for all right-thinking, well-motivated people who have the good of humanity at heart but I have to tell you that nothing that is truly good is promoted by the mainstream nowadays. We are in a spiritual war in which the spiritually harmful is constantly promoted at the expense of the spiritual healthy. It isn't right to defile or exploit our planet. We should reduce our consumption merely as a matter of putting spiritual things first. Our materialism and over-consumption are sins, no doubt about it. But the climate change agenda is just the latest example of deceiving people by leading them into a false good. The precise details behind this operation may be elusive but an obvious effect is the tightening of control and reduction of freedom. We are being coerced into giving up our freedoms on many fronts now.  Just as we have recently accepted restrictions in the name of saving our health so we will shortly be required to accept more restrictions in the name of saving the planet. But what is really behind that?

It's not increasing heat we should be worried about but fading light.

Neutrality Will Soon No Longer be an Option

 The world is dividing up into two camps. Those who are for God and a rightly ordered creation and those who will not accept the reality of these things, who are, in effect, against them because if you are not for them then you are against them. It is a question of two goods or actually a real good and a supposed one, and it is a test of your inner orientation. The supposed good will be pushed hard as the real good and the real good will be depicted as the home of the mad and bad. The process is already well underway, obviously so since 2020 or the turn of the millennium or the 1960s, depending on how alert you are to the changes which are always ratcheted up just one more notch, but actually stretching back many decades, even centuries for those with the longer view.

The great majority of human beings today have no spiritual roots and no spiritual education. This is a condition that has been long prepared for. Most people have now grown up in a secular, materialistic, atheistic world and are consequently ripe for the picking. They have no higher reference points when confronted with the evils of the present day. The saying that we should always put things down to stupidity rather than malice, though it may well be true on many occasions, actually obscures the fact that behind the scenes there really is malice. We don't see it because we don't look properly and that's because we no longer know how to look or even where to look.

Think of the present times as a great test. You have been sent to Earth or asked to come here now because there is a great opportunity. The grain is being sifted with the wheat, having proved itself to be of the right quality, going on to higher worlds. The chaff, according to the Bible, will be burnt in unquenchable fire. I am slightly more optimistic. I think that those who don't make the grade will find themselves in outer circumstances that reflect their inner spiritual state in the post-mortem world but in all God's prisons there is a door to which the prisoner holds the key. This is because the prisons are not actually God's but created by the prisoner himself as an outgrowth of his own consciousness. There is a way out but it will require repentance and change on the part of the prisoner, and, while always possible, this may not be so easy in the next world so it makes sense to get it right in this one.

For a long while because society and the culture has not been actively anti-spiritual it was possible to avoid making a decision about whether to side with truth or let yourself be drawn into darkness and lies. And don't forget that spiritual darkness does not appear dark to the spiritually blind, only to those with sight. But this is no longer possible. Now the culture all over the world is anti-spiritual. Even where there is still some sort of religion it bows down to the worldly powers and conforms to the worldly agenda. You cannot compartmentalise this world and the next and say that this world has its own rights which you must respect. You only respect this world when it recognises and puts itself to the service of the next. Certainly, this world does have its rights but they are always subordinate to the rights and the truth of the next world and must be seen in that light. Ignore that and you have lost the thread and imprisoned yourself on the horizontal by which I mean you have become a citizen of this world rather than the world of God. This world is part of the world of God but only when it acknowledges the hierarchical lineage and sees the vertical connection as primary.

As the demands to bow down to the idols of the modern world continue you will have to make a choice. But first of all you are going to have to wake up and see that these are idols and that they require worship. Nothing really changes in the field of spiritual battle. The form changes but the basic elements remain, and a fundamental element of the spiritual life is that "You shall have no other gods before me." Why? Not because God is jealous but because he is truth. To put worldly idols before him is to have deserted truth. Those idols are not just the false gods of the past, many of which were demons and fallen angels though some were probably what are known as egregores, thought forms given substance by human attention and energy, and others even angelic beings serving God but even these are not due worship in their own right. 

There are modern idols too and one of the most powerful today is science. Especially when it becomes 'the science' but even before that it was still an idol when it was practised for its own sake and seen as a final arbiter of truth. Science as an investigation into the creation pursued almost as a form of worship is a high calling but when it has become severed from that vital connection it risks descending to the satanic. I am not just talking about bombs and instruments of destruction. There is physical destruction but there is spiritual destruction too and modern science stands charged of that crime.

Another powerful modern idol is politics. I will venture to say that all party politics is of the devil and that is certainly so in the modern world. We need governing you will say, and some systems are certainly better than others. True, but all of them replace God with something of this world and in the end that is what matters. If you leave spiritual truth out of the equation then your sums will never add up. Politics is corruption and active involvement in it corrupts the soul. This is more true than ever now when lying has become an essential tool in the politician's kitbag. If you expand the definition of politics to mean those who stand for God and rightly ordered creation versus all the rest then I would moderate my earlier statement but how easy it is to be dragged down to the worldly level and lose your grounding in God if you do actually involve yourself in the political field. Fair better to focus yourself fully on the spiritual. God is calling all who will listen to come to him now, ignoring all other voices which will only lead astray. Hear his voice and follow that to the exclusion of all else. And remember that those who follow God should not expect reward in this world for they are working towards the next and that is where their endeavours will bear fruit. 

The Environment vs. The Creation

I have never owned a car. Between 1980 and 2000 I flew on only 3 occasions (admittedly more frequently since). I haven't eaten meat since 1978. I got central heating at home for the first time 20 years after leaving my parents' house. I don't consume much and waste as little as possible.  I have always loved the natural world. Theoretically I could be a poster boy for environmentalists but I have absolutely no interest in the environment.

What is the environment? Surely only someone with no real feeling for God's green Earth could call it that. It is a word for technocrats and materialists. I don't believe in the environment, I believe in the creation and this is the difference. The environment has no Creator. It is a soulless place despite efforts to pretend it is sacred in an atheistic kind of way in which Nature exists above humanity. But God made Nature to serve humanity. We are her gardeners not her subordinates because although we are part of Nature we are also above her. That doesn't mean we should exploit or mistreat her which we certainly have. But the solution is not to make ourselves inferior to nature. It is to treat her properly and with respect. However, she is still there for us not vice versa.

There seem to be two sorts of environmentalists. The materialists who worry about depleting the planet's resources and the spiritualists who have a vaguely pagan attitude to Nature, seeing her as the earth mother. I don't necessarily disagree with either of them but their view of the picture is incomplete and therefore wrong. We should cultivate our garden with care, attention and respect for its needs, and we would do well to honour Nature as the source of our material self. But above the natural man is the spiritual man. Above the earth mother of Nature is her Creator who is God, and God gave us this planet for us to act as his regent here. Nature is ours in the same way as our body is ours. We treat both well seeing them as the earthly temple of God but ultimately they are there to act as the vessels for spirit to manifest and express itself and it is the spirit that truly matters.

Nature is not the environment. It is the Creation.

Numbers and Measurement

The modern world is based on number which means it is based on quantity and measurement. This is what lies behind two such apparently dissimilar things as computer technology and bureaucracy which are the foundation stones of our contemporary world and which are dragging it deep into the darkness of spiritual oppression.

A world of number is a world of control in which there is no freedom. It is a world without mystery which means it is a world without beauty whatever nonsense may be said by materialistic thinkers who refuse to accept the shallowness and the soul-destroying consequences of their thought. Numbers relate to the operation of the material world, and they obviously have their place in the structure of that world. They can provide a kind of knowledge about its outer functioning and reveal certain properties of material things. They can help to master, to a degree, the material world in terms of what it appears to be. But they cannot tell us anything about what lies behind it or its source or how the life and consciousness that appear in the material world come to be. In short, numbers can tell us about the form of things but they cannot tell us anything at all about what these things are in themselves.

If you rely on number and mathematics to tell you about the world, you kill the world. You reduce it to a machine and you reduce human beings to machines, dead things even if they move about and talk. The fact is that numbers only relate to the shape and pattern of living beings - and everything in the universe is a living being of one sort or another. They cannot describe or reveal anything about their inner life and essence, their true nature, their spiritual being, what they really are. The world of the mathematicians is not a false world but it only relates to externals and appearance. God may be a Geometer in terms of certain of his outer activities but in himself, in his spiritual being, and despite the fact that he is called a Trinity, he is a deep mystery that the quantitative science of mathematics cannot begin to understand. And we are too.

Today, the consequences of several hundred years of materialism, going back at least as far as the medieval nominalists who basically inverted the order of things putting form before being, are coming to a head. The inevitable end result will be a totalitarianism in which freedom is outlawed and control is everywhere because everything must be measured and counted. When you reduce life to numbers, as we have, the individual becomes just a number itself, a mere unit. Then it has no autonomy but must fit into the mathematical structures on which society is run. It is just a statistic and its personal integrity has gone. Unless we rediscover a spiritual vision this is what the future holds, if not for us then for our children and grandchildren.

It's Not AGW, It's AGM

Anthropogenic global warming is all the rage these days. It's become a dogma of the modern world, to dissent from which marks you out as a bad person and this means that most people don't even bother to investigate whether there is any truth in it. If you do investigate you see that the jury is still out and that, even if it is true, it may not be such a cause for concern as it is depicted. This clearly points to an underlying agenda. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that.

So I can't bring myself to be too excited by the idea of climate change. The climate is always changing, it's been warmer in the past and the contribution of human beings to CO2 in the atmosphere, though increasing to a large degree, is still a tiny proportion of what the normal processes of Nature shove up there. On the other hand, I am deeply concerned by something else that, for me, is far more serious and almost completely unrecognised. That is AGM, anthropogenic global materialisation.

What is this? Well, one way to describe it is as a general thickening of human consciousness as it detaches itself from acknowledgement of the spiritual world. This leads to the mind becoming enclosed within itself instead of open to what lies beyond itself, and a separation of the earthly human being from its roots in a higher reality. This, in turn, leads to human beings constructing a new and false reality to which they then have to conform, and that eventually leads to madness and destruction. The materialisation I speak of refers to the environment which, in response to the mind, actually becomes more opaque, more material, less able to serve as a veil to the spiritual. For you can see through a veil but you cannot see through a wall. And that is what we are doing, turning the material world from an opening to and reflection of higher realities to a barrier, an impenetrable barrier for most people, to them.

Mankind is a co-creator with God of the world. God creates the world but man then affects it through his thoughts and actions. When these turn to higher things, the outer world changes to reflect that. When they turn to lower things, material things seen as existing in their own right and impulses deriving from that attitude regarded as right and proper, the outer world solidifies. It grows a kind of crust not only to our perception but also in reality. To slip into New Age speak for a moment, its vibrations are lowered. We fall into a vicious circle with outer and inner both confirming, supporting and strengthening each other, and thus descend into ever greater spiritual loss.

The human impact on the environment, by which I mean not just the natural world but mental levels too, actual thought, does not discount the universal materialisation that takes place at the end of an age. But it adds to it. It will affect us all which is why this is no longer an age of miracles and the spiritual path, even when followed, does not offer the illuminations it used to. In Hindu scripture it is said that in the Kali Yuga it will be considered enough just to repeat God's name, so trying will be the conditions at that time. This idea is rather similar to the Jesus Prayer. However, God is still there if we turn to him. We may not feel his presence or not often but that is a test of our faith in a time of darkness and those who stay firm to the truth will win through. To quote a saying from The Imitation of Christ I've long been fond of, "You are not making progress if you receive God's grace but you are making progress if you bear the withdrawal of grace with patience, humility and resignation". The period of the withdrawal of grace is now. This is a test of the authenticity of the heart. It's easy to be spiritual if you spend your time in contemplative meditation, bathed in bliss. It's not easy when times are hard but that marks out the real lover of God from the one who just wants the gifts he has to offer.

Global warming, climate change, whatever it's called, is just a distraction from the truth. It's the hardening of the human heart and the effect this has on our spiritual and even physical environment that is the real problem. It's the materialisation of the world caused by the darkening of our minds that we should be worried about.

It's not AGW, it's AGM.  Another example of the modernistic inversion of reality.