The Four Ages of Tradition

 I write a lot about the end times these days and that is for two reasons. The first is that we are deep in them though that has no implication as to how long they might still have to go before their inevitable conclusion in collapse and, probably, destruction. It could be 2082, it could be 100 years hence or more. It doesn't matter. All that matters is to be aware of them now and take steps to build our own inner ark which simply means to recognise and love God, and then see this world not as true in and of itself but as the outermost station of divine being which has its place and its purpose but is not our real home. As for how long they still have to run, that is not our concern. We are in them and that is all we need to know. If we knew when the end times were destined to conclude that would artificially alter our response to them. Our hearts would not be properly examined. That is why Jesus says only God knows.

The second reason is that everything about the modern world, literally everything, its many minuses (spiritual) but also its pluses (material), and its art, culture, science, politics, religion and lack of it, can be explained by the end times. Once you understand what these are and what brings them about and how they conclude you understand pretty much everything about the world today. Even how it could not be other than it is though that is not to excuse the factors and individuals that bring it about. Just because the end times are inevitable does not mean that those who facilitate or go along with them are anything other than God-rejecting sinners who will suffer the consequences of their thoughts and actions.

But let's go back to the beginning and put the end times in their proper context without which they have little meaning.

According to all traditional thought, human civilisations degenerate over time. How can this be, you say, are we not kinder, more tolerant and more advanced in every way, moral and material, than ever before? No, we are not. You see, you only say this because you are a materialist even if you are ostensibly a believer in one of the religions or some other form of spirituality. I will explain. We are more moral in what relates to man as he is in this world because we have rejected the higher reality of the next world. We have made great advances in what pertains to the material world, including human relations in that world, because we have denied the spiritual world and man as primarily a spiritual being. Energy follows thought. Our thought is all in the material so that is where our energy goes. 

Obviously, the past was far from perfect but, to the degree that it honoured God, it was better than us. And since God is the highest truth, to deny that truth and its implications (because you can believe in God but believe in this world more which means you don't really believe in God), means that however advanced you are in material terms you are still in an inferior place to one who honours God. Past cultures including our own in the West left a great deal to be desired but they were better than us because, however imperfectly, they paid tribute to a higher reality.

This is the traditional view. We do not progress but decline and this decline takes place over the course of four distinct cycles or ages. Before proceeding with this thought, an increasingly familiar one, I should add that I do not fully go along with it. There is a decline in the spiritual state both of humanity and of the physical and psychic environments in which we exist. That is true. However, there is also an evolution because the ages have a purpose. They are not just (though they are this too) an example of entropy in action. As the environment thickens and we become separate from the higher worlds, we are thereby forced back onto ourselves and we start to develop ourselves as more individual beings. We become less spiritually conscious but more truly individual with greater powers of both thought and self-expression. We move from passive beings swimming in the ocean of consciousness to a more active, though separated, mode of existence. God wants us to be free and independent, in effects, gods. This we cannot be without a strong sense of self, and not just a sense of self but a developed self with its own powers, talents and expressible attributes. This self inevitably becomes fixated on itself. It loses contact with its higher being because it must in order to develop, but that does have a spiritually adverse effect, and as the ages go by and the self further descends into separation its spiritual condition worsens. This is where we are now.

So, there is an explanation for the descent. However, that does not justify fully succumbing to it, and this is important to understand. Yes, conditions are adverse but still at all times we have the voice of God within us, and just because that becomes harder to hear is no excuse not to hear it or, at least, make the effort to listen out for it. It is only those who have hardened their hearts against God who reject him. We are never left without teaching, and you might say that the available teachings now deep in the end times are more abundant and more accessible than ever. This is one of the consolations of our time.

In the present grand cycle mankind has gone through three previous ages and is currently at the tail end of the fourth. In the Golden Age we walked with the gods and listened to their words. We were not perfect but we were in tune with the universe and in harmony with God. But then conditions began to cloud over and the division between this world and the higher planes started to harden so interchange between the two became more difficult. The gods began to retreat. In a way, it was the end of the nursery stage and the beginning of the move to adulthood.

We now live in the Iron Age which represents the nadir of human spirituality and therefore of civilisation and culture. We do not know precisely when the Iron Age actually began but for the sake of argument we can say it was about 5,000 years ago which is the beginning of historical time. So quite a while back. The Iron Age itself has cycles reflecting gold, silver, bronze and iron states of consciousness, and we are now at the end of the final cycle within the overall Iron Age as is demonstrated by the fact of our total materialism and atheism, our material accomplishment, our addiction to and absolute dependence on materialistic technology, our rejection of both God and Nature, our perpetual state of decline, denied publicly but obvious to anyone, and the sense of finality felt by many. Add to that globalisation and the destruction of nations which that entails, the fact that both science and art have lost their way, environmental degradation, uselessness of leaders, institutional collapse and a host of other things from the ongoing battle between the sexes to the general meaningless of life, and you can only draw one conclusion.

All this may seem negative and depressing but it is not a matter for doom and gloom. Quite the reverse, in fact, for the end times can be seen as a period of great potential, even hope. The outer world may be on fire but that drives us within. It gives us the tools to reject materialistic illusion and seek the real. The death throes of our current old world are merely the birth pangs of the new. Nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost. The good seeds of the past will be saved and replanted. The bad crops will be taken away and the ground prepared for a new harvest. No spring without winter.

Today we are addicted to technological devices that separate us ever more from God and reduce the quality of our experiences which become increasingly etiolated in nature. We are jaded and dulled. What we thought would liberate us actually saps our psychic vitality. This is unmistakable signature of the end times. 

And yet despite the fact that we live in a dying world this is an extraordinary time to be alive. For those who can read the signs, the opportunity for spiritual progress is greater than at any other time. Even a little effort in the right direction will be rewarded precisely because it is so much harder. Those who seek to establish a relationship with God and who are pure in heart will successfully pass the test of these times. Those who fail will be kept back at lower levels of being but I would surmise that missed opportunities will not present themselves again for some time as these things have cycles. It's not a question of being cast into a fiery pit but of going where your heart and mind take you which means to a dimension of being that corresponds to your heart and mind. This tells us that the conventionally religious are by no means guaranteed to be saved just because of their beliefs and desires. It is the quality of those beliefs and desires that matter. Moreover, belonging to any particular church or religion means very little now. The time has come when an individual response to God is required. An institutional response belongs to the past. We must think for ourselves. This is what it means to be an individual. Traditionalists might regret that if they are attached to the old institutions but the sabbath was made for man not man for the sabbath, and now each person must forge his or her own inner relationship with God to be saved.

Today we are living deep in the end times or Hesiod's Iron Age, the Indian Kali Yuga. Our task is to reject the illusions of the material world, now stronger than ever, and seek God, but it must be the true spiritual sun that exists both within and above us not one of the many imitations that are present at such a time. For when the material is as strong as it is now there arise many false spirituals which are themselves part of the material because they are just pure reactions to it. This is the task we face. Not simply to reject the material but to be able to discern true gold which is rare in the world from the many varieties of fool's gold. The spiritual is not the opposite to the material but in consciousness terms completely transcends it.

In the Iron Age values are inverted so we praise the lesser and scorn the higher. We call evil good and good evil. The whited sepulchre wicked are honoured and rewarded while those attempting to tread the path of virtue are ignored or derided. However, even these latter will become contaminated to a degree by the qualities of the Iron Age so the best course is to participate in the modern world as little as possible. Most of us must live in it and use its tools but we need to be fully aware of the corrupting nature of the world today and detach ourselves from it as much as we can. Do not get sucked into resisting it as the current will be too strong and you will be drawn into the very thing you fight against. Let it take its course knowing that God has everything in hand and his purpose will be served simply by you directing your whole attention to him. This is not defeatist because the world is dying and it is dying because it has lost its connection to higher principles. Just recognise that and stand back. The death of the world is not a tragedy but a necessary part of its purification and regeneration.

The end times will progress into disorder and collapse but there is a purpose to this collapse because it creates the conditions for rebirth. It forms the souls of men and women who can be the seeds, whether literally or, more probably, spiritually for a new age. It will be a simpler age because it will be a fresh start but not entirely fresh because the best of the past will be preserved on the level of consciousness. Now the sins of centuries are coming to the surface like erupting pustules so they can be lanced so think of the end times as a time of mass purification. That is what they are. Is this not a wonderful thing? Humanity is being cleansed so it can start anew in a fresh cycle. Some souls will go to higher worlds, some will be recycled and some who have failed here will go to dimensions of being appropriate to their level of consciousness.

Why Was Western Man Selected for Destruction?

 It certainly seems that way. In almost every situation nowadays the white male is seen as the villain, and has been for at least 20 years. This is despite the undeniable fact that the white male is responsible for almost all modern advances, and that's using modern in its widest sense, going back several hundred years. Is this just the jealousy of the resentful or has that been utilised and exploited for a deeper purpose?

I was recently sent this link and asked for my opinion. It's a familiar trope. China, India and the Islamic lands all had great civilisations when Western Europe was an uncivilised backwater (what about Greece and Rome?). Why did Europe and not these areas develop modern science? The answer supposedly is that Europe took a great deal from these more advanced civilisations, stole, some might say, and that therefore its achievements are not really its own but dependent on those who came before.

Of course, there's some truth in this. Europe did acquire knowledge from other civilisations, but to go from that to saying its achievements are less as a consequence, and to surmise that these could have happened elsewhere, given slightly different circumstances, is to make completely unwarranted assumptions. There was something about the Western European psyche that advanced everything, not just science, but everything, the arts, philosophy, ethics, medicine and much more, to places other civilisations had not dreamed of. No one disputes that other civilisations had some sort of science and that they inspired Western scientists, but they all got so far and no further because they lacked something which the West had. Not so much raw intelligence but they lacked what we call now, after Spengler, I believe, the Faustian exploratory spirit of Western man. 

This refers to the ever-restless search for truth, the expansive attitude that is never satisfied with the known but seeks to go beyond all boundaries and to understand everything; in religious terms, certainly, but not only in religious terms. Just as important, this was coupled with (or perhaps they are part of the same thing) the strong sense of individualism that Western Man developed and a greater devotion to rational enquiry than displayed anywhere else, even in the great civilisations of India and China. Revisionist historians who put Western superiority (which exists in all fields) down to luck or trade networks or exploitation or to geographical advantages are promoting minor and secondary factors to the main one. And they are often doing this in bad faith to support their undeclared ideological prejudices.

 So, why is Western Man subjected to the relentless undermining of the present time? Those who look only from the outside might say it is because Western Man has caused many of the problems of the modern era, and they would point to ill-treatment of other groups, destruction of the environment and similar faults to substantiate this, ignoring the fact that every group has done this kind of thing, given the opportunity, and Western Man is actually the only grouping to acknowledge it and seek to do something about the problem. Another theory might be that the underperforming groups who have reaped the benefit of Western Man's discoveries and advances resent this fact and spitefully seek to bring him down.

Both of these have a degree of truth but they are not the real reason. The reason Western Man, or the white male, is subjected to relentless attack is spiritual, using spiritual in its broadest sense to include all that is non-material. This attack originates from the demonic level, from a centre that seeks to separate humanity from God and exploit it for its own purposes, principally as a source of energy. To do this most successfully they need a conformist, relatively supine population.  White males are the freest, most individual, most focussed on the pursuit of truth and excellence grouping of human beings. They are the ones who will fight for truth. Women are not particularly concerned with truth, preferring security and consensus and a situation where everyone is comfortable. They cannot defend truth and are not designed to do so. That is not their role which is why they are encouraged by the powers that shouldn't be.  Non-Western men are not overly concerned with truth either, principally seeking wealth, power and status. Of course, most Western Men are the same but there is still a significant proportion who seek and will fight for truth and excellence. It is because of this grouping that white males are targeted and undermined with accusations of racism and sexism, neither of which, be it noted, are sins in themselves, being merely legitimate observations of real differences. But no matter. If white males are removed from the equation humanity will become much more susceptible to demonic misdirection.

This is not to absolve white males or Western Man of his faults. But to focus, as we do, entirely on these is to miss his real and vital contribution and, above all, the protection his particular mindset affords to those forces that would lead humanity astray.

Added note: One might also point out that the quality of Western Man has deteriorated over the last 100 years so he is partly complicit in his own undermining.

The Seven Deadly Sins Today

The unholy alliance between a globalist capitalism that treats human beings merely as economic units and a leftist ideology that insists everyone is equal is destroying the West, something no doubt intended by their demonic sponsors. The one is motivated by naked greed, the other by envy which leads to hatred as you can easily see by its reaction when scratched or even threatened. These forces are extremely powerful in the modern world, supported as they are by the political system, the media and the establishment in general whose only interest is self-preservation. Even so, they can be resisted, not always outwardly but certainly inwardly which is what matters if one would defend one's soul from spiritual attack. The question is how?

To begin with, do not try to attack them on their own ground. They have sewn up the discourse so if you use their own framework and language to challenge them you will fail as both of these things have been designed to render their position impregnable. You have to disregard the assumptions they put forward as baseline truths and introduce a new approach that starts from a new standpoint, one outside their assumptions. And that is a simple three part question. "What are we, where do we come from and where should we be going?"

Neither capitalism nor the liberal ideology that has given rise to modern leftism can answer any part of that question but until you do you cannot understand how life should be lived. The answer to the first part has long been known but is currently ignored. A human being is made up of body, soul and spirit, and any culture or civilisation worthy of the name must take this threefold being into consideration, dismissing no part of it. Any that doesn't will collapse. And once you have answered this first and primary part answers to the other two parts will follow.

The seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. You can see from this list that the primary drivers of the current state of Western civilisation are the second and fourth but pride and wrath are also big motivators for the globalists on the one hand and the leftist activists on the other. Traditionally, greed or avarice is countered by charity or generosity and envy by kindness, and this is interesting because the major players often disguise their true motivations by  exploiting the good in these virtues which they wear with ostentation, so much so, in fact, that charity is now often seen as a form of self-promotion and kindness as a mask for destructive impulses. And while all this is going on, the populace is stimulated by the media to lust and gluttony and a large segment of it by the ruling powers to sloth (ever greater dependence on welfare payments).

It seems that the seven deadly sins are in full play today but when have they not been, you may ask. Certainly, they are always there as a basic part of human nature but they are now often actively encouraged and are becoming increasingly acceptable in our modern world. Is this not yet another indication of the end times? I don't offer this as a black pill as it is termed nowadays but, perversely enough you might think, as a sort of encouragement. The rewards for those who see through the lies and hold fast to the truth will be great. This is the test of our times.

Spiritual Loss and What To Do About It

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

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

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

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

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

The Spiritual Failure of the Boomers

I was born in the mid 1950s so am a Boomer as these things are defined, but I would like to think I am not typical of my cohort. I certainly absorbed some of the Boomer mentality while growing up in the '60s and '70s but I consciously rejected a lot of the more overt liberal/leftist and anti-traditional stuff though some of it will undoubtedly have rubbed off on me. But I understand why many people in the generations that followed despise the Boomers for trashing Western civilisation, an accusation which I regard as a fair one even if previous generations cannot be exonerated. Nothing comes out of nothing and the Boomer generation was merely the blossoming of a seed that had long been germinating

The Boomers thought they could change the world and they set about it, in their eyes as practical idealists. However, there were generous helpings of selfishness involved and even narcissism. They were the first generation who were spoiled and cosseted in their youth and did they ever take advantage of it. They had the material goods and developed a moral/spiritual superiority complex, but they completely misconceived the idea of love, reducing it to a pleasurable emotion and expunging it of any sense of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the essence of love but the Boomers turned love into indulgence.

Boomer self-centredness is one thing but where this generation really failed is where they thought they were at their best. When I lived in India in the 1980s the caste system was officially disowned but in reality it was still operative. As a Westerner, I was supposed to condemn caste but I understood the reasons for it even if it had been abused in the practice as any hierarchical system will be in a fallen world. Nonetheless, life is hierarchical and if you destroy hierarchy, you simply reduce standards to a lowest common denominator. Tradition which knew this was wise. Modernity which denies it is ignorant.

Ignorant, you might say, but well-meaning to which the obvious answer would be that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But that aside, is it really well-meaning to have this attitude or is it just weak, a symptom of that spiritually corrosive desire, the desire to be liked? I was warned by someone of the higher castes that I should not bring my liberal Western prejudices (and they are prejudices) to any relationships with Indians of the lower castes because if I did they would just take advantage. In words which struck me then and stay with me now he said, "Don't try to be kind. They will take your kindness for weakness". 

Now, this has to be unpacked a little. It doesn't mean, don't be kind. Kindness is good and right - obviously. What it means, and what the Boomers have missed, is that often what you tell yourself is kindness is actually weakness and, in the Boomers' case, it is weakness supplemented by a misplaced sense of guilt to which they have succumbed partly because of indoctrination but also because of their own spiritual failings which include the lack of acknowledgement of the transcendent reality of God or, if God is acknowledged, his demotion from All Father and Creator to impersonal universalised compassion. The self-perceived victim and underdog classes see this weakness and exploit it, and this is leading to the downfall of the West.

Kindness is weakness when it ignores reality for the sake of being, or appearing to be, nice. In line with the general feminisation of the West it is largely a feminine failing (of both sexes). When counterbalanced by masculine authority it can help mitigate any resultant severity, but when that authority has been as undermined as it has been it is purely destructive of any higher order. It opens the door to attack from below and societal dismantling as the structures that have built that society and culture are torn down in the name of equality and fairness. Fairness to what? To those that want what others have or to the truth?

The Boomers are like the decadent progeny of an aristocratic class that consumes what its ancestors have built up with no thought for its descendants. They will have a spiritual bill to pay. But this doesn't let subsequent generations off the hook. They may complain about Boomer selfishness but is that because they want what the Boomers have or are they prepared to suffer and sacrifice to put things right? Not that things can be put right. The momentum of dissolution is too far advanced  for that to happen. This cycle is coming to a close. But the effort to turn the tide and redress past failures will pay spiritual dividends on an individual level and maybe even mitigate what is traditionally known as the wrath of God, an outmoded but evocative term for the consequences of wrong thinking and wrong actions.

Why Leftism is Wrong in One Sentence

Leftism collapses the vertical to the horizontal. That's it. That is its great error or sin as you might well call it since it deforms reality. This is why it can only really infect human consciousness in a time of materialism, and why when it contaminates spirituality, you get a false spirituality that reduces the transcendent to the immanent. It is why it favours egalitarianism over hierarchy and the female over the male, the male being associated with the transcendent.

This world must be seen in the light of it being the outermost part of a far greater reality or else as the furthest removed from the centre. When seen as real in its own light, as it is now, it becomes very hard for anyone sensitive to truth to function in it properly. Its values are false, its priorities absurd. Such an attitude strips meaning from life and real purpose from human endeavour. To renounce the world in such circumstances is only right for what you are renouncing is not the world as God's creation but the world as its own be all and end all with material ends and goals supreme. The material has no meaning apart from the spiritual, but this is the crazy situation in which we find ourselves in the 21st century. All human societies and cultures are focused exclusively in the material, and practically all religions and spiritual approaches, where they do exist, function in that paradigm and defer to it. It is the master and they must obey their master if they wish to be allowed to exist.

It is coming to the point at which a serious person must reject everything in the world. Not just the obvious evil but the public attempts to contest or resist that evil. These are not as bad as the evil itself but they are the products of it in that they arise in response to it. Hence, they still bear its mark. The only true good can have nothing to do with any of this as it must exist absolutely independently. The world has now separated itself from the divine. To encounter the divine in anything like a pure form you must separate yourself from the world. You don't have to run off to the desert or remote northern islands (the world is in those places nowadays anyway), but you must separate yourself psychologically, spiritually even, from the world. It is a fact that no church or spiritual group can help you now. You are on your own or with a few like-minded companions.

But that is the point of living at this time. You are being tested in the fire for your spiritual integrity. So many people use the spiritual to further themselves. They are not bad people so much as people who wish to have a foot in both camps. They see the reality of the spiritual but they only see partially and they still see through worldly eyes. You must train yourself to see with the spiritual eye, the eye of the heart. Only then will you see truly.

Christianity with its democratisation of spirit has given a false idea of the spiritual path due to its idea that all you need to be saved is to believe. I realise this is a simplification of what Christianity really says but it is a common idea both outside and within the religion. It fits in very well with the modern ethos that we are all equal, an ethos, by the way, that is only encouraged by the elite to keep the masses subjugated and pull back all those who might seek to separate themselves spiritually from the mass. It may be true that all you need to do to be saved is to believe but the how, why and what of that are essential. It is not mere human belief but belief that comes from the whole person and consequently transforms being. And then it requires belief in the real as perceived by the inner eye not some manmade spiritual idol of which there are many, including many in the Christian faith. 

Ultimately, only those willing to walk into the fire will be saved. Today those truly on the path are called to a kind of inner martyrdom but to be so called is a gift so if you are one of those in that position be grateful, though know it will involve suffering for that is what purges the soul and renders it a fit habitat for God into which he may enter.

The End of a World

 Over the last hundred and fifty years, and especially since the end of the Second World War, Western societies have systematically dismantled the protective devices that guarded them from collapse. Standards, rules and cultural norms that prevented them from internal rot and damage from external sources have been attacked, ridiculed, removed and replaced. This is often at the instigation of particular groups which have worked to make the societies more congenial to themselves. It is true that a healthy society would have resisted these groups, but still they are like viruses that can more easily infect a body whose immune system has already been weakened.

The West has been undermined by sentimentality which is a luxury of the comfortable. It is this that has allowed it to admit elements that do it harm. A perfect example is the present crisis of illegal immigration into the UK with many small boats crossing the Channel from France full of people who have no right to be here and can offer nothing to the country into which they come. The solution to this is obvious but it is unacceptable to a sentimentalised society that has never known true suffering or hardship and indulges in the naive fantasy that its present wealth will always, magically, remain at the same level regardless of what happens. It doesn't see that this wealth had to be earned and can be, is being, dissipated.

Without boundaries everything is dragged down to base level. Boundaries guard. They protect. They keep out elements that would destroy what has carefully and laboriously been built up over long periods of time. Once removed the form they have maintained starts to crumble. Form by virtue of what it is needs boundaries, and higher forms, and yes, there are such things as higher forms, need strong boundaries in order to maintain their structure and integrity. Once those go then the structure goes. Again, to take the example of the UK, though this is true in most other Western nations too, we can see how the present relaxation of boundaries is leading to great cultural and material damage. To deny this may have been possible 30 years ago when the process was not so far gone even if it was well underway. It is no longer possible now except to the terminally deluded and those who, for whatever reason, just lie.

It is unlikely there is any solution to this, and it may be that from the spiritual perspective it was inevitable and might even have been desirable. That is because all societies run their course. The West had clearly reached its limits in the 20th century. No more proper art was being created even if, paradoxically, more supposed art than ever before was being turned out, quantity replacing quality in line with the typical pattern of the end of a cycle. But that is just one aspect of the decline which is well documented so there is no need for me to go into all the signs and symptoms here. Suffice it to say that the loss of the sense of transcendence lies at the root of most of them.

If the West has run its course as a creative endeavour that advanced the spirit of humanity then we may lament its passing because of what it was but cannot shed too many tears over it because of what it has become. A dying thing must die. To be a part of the death process is not pleasant but there are lessons that can be learnt by the spiritual aspirant as his world crumbles, primarily detachment and the realisation that everything true and good and beautiful exists in the higher worlds eternally. Anything that sought to manifest those qualities in the material world is only a reflection of higher things and cannot last. That is no reason not to seek to manifest the good in the world because by doing so we build it into ourselves, but equally when destruction comes as it must we must face it with equanimity and the sure knowledge that the forces of entropy can only affect matter. They cannot touch the spirit.

One last point. Jesus said that evil must come into the world but woe to those through whom it comes. If it is part of the divine plan that the West falls, having come to the end of its useful life, that does not mean that those groups which have attacked and undermined it through infecting it with false ideologies are doing God's work. Sickness and death are never good things though they may be necessary things from one perspective. The attack ultimately comes from non-material levels and the forces behind it are seeking spiritual destruction above all. They use vessels in this world that respond to the debased energies they channel. As the West falls how many souls will fall with it because they identify with the corruption? It is one thing not to regret the passing of a society that has fallen from grace but that society is made up of many individuals and these can either be saved or lost as the society of which they are a part collapses. The only solution is to become aware of the decay and stand apart from it.

The Test of the End Times

 In the End Times all institutions will be controlled, either directly or indirectly, by demonic intelligence. They will ostensibly function as before but their influence and effect will be spiritually corrosive. In few cases will the reality behind that influence be obvious to the ordinary person but it will be apparent to anyone whose spiritual eyes are open. Every individual serving those institutions will be serving the dark forces though most will be unaware of that fact. But they will have made compromises to get to positions of authority, and those compromises will have stained their souls. They will be the whited sepulchres spoken of by Jesus. Beautiful or virtuous or honourable on the outside, but rotten within. These are hard words but we live in unprecedented times. It's not like the end of Rome. There may be similarities because the same patterns do inevitably repeat themselves, but the situation today is of an order of magnitude different to any time we know of in the past. The scale of our spiritual destitution is unparalleled even though it is disguised by improvements on the materialistic humanitarian level. The bread alone level. 

You might ask, where is God in all this? Why does he allow the sheep to be led astray by wolves? Where are the shepherds? The analogy makes the point. We are not sheep, not anymore. God requires us to be spiritually responsible these days. No longer obedient followers but able to develop our own spiritual insight and make our own spiritual decisions. If the outer is corrupt it means we must go to the inner. Souls are being tested for their intrinsic quality. It's easy to make the grade when everything is in your favour but your true orientation only comes out when it manifests in spite of outer circumstances. God has planted seeds in a ground in which only the hardiest will survive and grow. But this is how he determines what is the best seed and what will just turn into weeds or not grow at all. One of the most dangerous doctrines is that God loves us. Of course, God does love us but what does that actually mean? Does this love disregard what we actually are or does it mean that God wants the best for us? We may all have the image of the divine within us but that image does not come alive unless we make it so. If we are equal because of that image within us it is only potentially so because the image must be developed.

The good seed will grow into a beautiful flower but not all seed is good. In fact, if we look at nature most seeds just get recycled back into the earth. That is a sobering thought for these end times and should alert us to the need to aspire towards the light and not remain trapped in the darkness, comforting darkness though it may seem to some, of the earth.

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.

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.

The Second World War and its Aftermath

 Seeing the path the world has taken over the last 80 years I have occasionally wondered whether the demonic forces behind World War Two were not so much aiming to win a conventional victory as hoping to use the reaction against the defeated Nazis to promote their agenda to bring down Western civilisation and, more to the point since that was already on the turn, corrupt human souls.

This is not to say the Nazis weren't the tools of darkness but dare one suggest without being accused of contrarian revisionism, that they were not uniquely evil either? They, and especially Hitler, have been made into figures of archetypal wickedness, devils in human form, and it probably suits our self-image to cast them in that light because it makes us appear virtuous, but this is a problem because investing them with such unique evil gives the impression that everything they believed must have been wrong. Consequently, it becomes easy to define good as the opposite of that. This false idea then provides a fruitful area for exploitation in that morality becomes anything that is anti-Nazi.

Let's see how this plays out. The Nazis believed in Aryan supremacy so whatever works against that is good. Anti-racism, mass immigration, belittling one's own people and one's own country to the point that you accept or even welcome their disappearance if you are an Aryan, i.e.white, all this is good because it is the opposite of what the Nazis believed. If it's good we go along with it even if it is against our own interests and our better judgment. The feeling we should do what is right for some and the glow of moral superiority for others overcome any lingering instincts of self-preservation.

The Nazis were against sexual deviance, notwithstanding the personal behaviour of some of them. Therefore, it becomes obvious that sexual liberation is a good thing. To oppose that is to be a cruel fascist, a control freak, a prude, a Nazi. To want to restrict love, you must be a hateful person. Love, or what is called love, is a justification for anything. (By the way, a lot of misunderstandings could be avoided if we, like the ancient Greeks, had more than one word for the many different feelings covered by the simple word 'love'.)

The Nazis wished to ban degenerate art, Entartete Kunst, which we know simply as modern art. They saw this as un-German in inspiration and effect, criticising it for its "Freemasonic, Jewish or Communist nature" (Wikipedia). Their defeat left anyone with similar doubts about this kind of art, that it did not reflect the higher worlds as art traditionally was supposed to do but was more in tune with infernal regions, in a difficult position. If the Nazis thought modern art bad, then it must be good. If you too think it's bad, well then, you are a Nazi sympathiser. At the very least, you belong to an outmoded, out of touch and ignorant group.

And so on. Now, in order to stop any latent Nazi tendencies to rise up once again we must encourage all those things they were against. Evil then spreads not by force of arms but through propaganda and even morality. And this, I would say, is because we have allowed ourselves to see the war against Hitler as an absolute good against absolute evil situation. As a result, for the last 80 years World War Two has become a replacement foundation myth for Western civilisation. And yet it was really just a war like many others. We need to put it behind us and no longer define ourselves in terms of our reaction to it but it seems more important now than it ever was. When I was growing up in the '60s it did not form a big part of my history lessons but my children's history syllabus seemed to revolve almost entirely around it. They were taught a lot about Hitler and the Holocaust and practically nothing about Alfred the Great and the Armada.

Maybe the reaction against the Nazi beliefs became Plan B for the dark forces but, in terms of defeating the Christian West, that plan has been most effective. And speaking of Christianity, one should note that this was the one thing the Nazis were against that has not benefitted from an anti-Nazi reactionary support. Coincidence?

The defeat of Germany prompted the emigration of many European Marxists to America where they spread their ideological poison, first in academia and then throughout the culture, in the process capturing all the institutions which now work against the nations they were set up to support. Whether this was part of the plan to begin with or whether it became the plan after military defeat is irrelevant at this point. The fact is the West allowed itself to be infected by a spiritual virus which has caused the sicknesses we suffer from today. Along with Russia, the West may have won the war on the battlefield but in that victory there lay the seeds for its subsequent defeat.

This piece is not written as part of the recent Churchill-bashing trend. Churchill was clearly a complicated character. My friend Michael Lord knew him quite well in his later life and would sometimes be invited to lunch at his house at Chartwell. On one occasion he watched as Churchill fed his pet goose pate de foie gras from the dinner table, making the bird, in effect, a cannibal.  A jolly joke. But, though one might wonder whether the state of Europe after the war was any better than it would have been without a war, with Britain ruined and Eastern Europe communist, it must have seemed at the time as though there was no other option in the face of Nazi aggression, and Churchill was probably the right man to lead the country at that time. However, one may still be permitted to speculate as to whether the dark forces saw the war and its aftermath as a means to infect the West with atheistic communism as it had to that point proved reasonably resistant to that spiritual disease, a disease to which we have now succumbed if you look at it, as you should, as something much more than an economic system.

There are many people talking and writing about the, to all intents and purposes, communist takeover of the West and how we are being taught by this ideology to hate ourselves and all our past achievements. Our countries are being flooded with aliens and our cultures debased. Feminism is destroying the family and masculinity, which, properly functioning, might arrest the decline, is derided. However, we can never understand what is happening until we see the assault as primarily spiritual and the object of its attack being the soul and its relation to God. It is to sever this relationship that is the purpose of everything else. Jesus said "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else will be added to you". He could just as well have said "Abandon the search for the kingdom of heaven and you will lose everything else." We would do well to bear this in mind. It is no good resisting communism if you do not do so with the full remembrance of God for what communism is chiefly all about is the  replacement of God with man but man in his fallen mode. This is how we can easily identify its Satanic origin.

The End Times is the End of Term

 Demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived on the Earth over the last 192,000 years, that being the date at which humans are seen as becoming properly human in the sense we now understand that designation. If you add to that figure the number of people alive today you get a total of 117 billion humans which means that 7% of people who ever lived are living now. It is thought that around 9 billion lived before the Agricultural Revolution in about 10,000 BC and that at that time there were around 5 million humans in the world, but since the Industrial Revolution the number has climbed dramatically with the global population hitting 1 billion around 1800 and then shooting up to where we are now. If you consider that up until relatively recently almost half the population died in childhood our present situation seems even more remarkable.

Obviously, the figures before recent times are highly speculative. But they are not based on nothing and the numbers and general trends they indicate are probably accurate enough. My question is does this mean anything from the spiritual point of view, from the evolution of souls point of view, or is it just a result of technological advances, medicine, agriculture etc? It certainly is a result of that but is that all there is to it?

I don't think so. In my book Earth is a School I said that this world is a training ground for the soul. Part of the mechanism for this training is reincarnation which, in the way I envisage it, involves an infant soul returning to a particular environment in order to develop its inchoate capacities, mental, moral, creative and so on. It is also required to make a choice in a world in which that choice can go either way for the reality of God is not a given here as it would be in the spiritual worlds. Here there is just enough material data to support either the acceptance or rejection of God so the inbuilt orientation of the soul, whether it is aligned to God or to self, is brought into play. Predominantly aligned, I mean, for both tendencies are always present in the soul as a result of free will.

The need for this choice has alway been present but what is happening now is that everything is being brought to a head. This is why there is such a large population and is yet another indication we are in that period known as the End Times. Extending the school analogy, this is the time of graduation. No doubt some souls have already graduated (though I personally think that only a few have) but now is the final exam for many with the choices becoming more marked. We live during a period when religion has lost its power so the choice we make is necessarily more of an individual one. It even has to go against the flow which makes it more personal and a truer test of our inner self. Those that pass will progress to higher spiritual worlds while those that don't make the grade will have to continue on lower levels of being with, no doubt, fresh opportunities further down the line but they will have missed an important cut-off point.

The Continuing Slumbers of Albion

 It seems the British have decided to jump out of the frying pan into the fire and to exchange venal incompetents for a group of people ideologically committed to the destruction of the country as it has been. Could this be the moment when the sleep of Albion descends into nightmare?

It is understandable that the electorate wanted to punish the incumbent government, conservative in name only, but the choice they have made will plunge the country into deeper misery. I am not talking in economic or political terms so much here as, important as they are, those are secondary issues. I am referring to the spiritual darkness which will intensify under the new government as it pursues its agenda of dismantling the entirety of tradition and replacing it by rigid bureaucratic control and enforced egalitarianism or Eurocommunism as you might call it. Those who oppose this will be accused, like the early Christians, of being haters of humanity but the idea of love has long since been corrupted and used as a weapon to attack the good, the beautiful and the true. Freedom of thought will be increasingly curtailed with the excuse of safety, equality and fairness. The new prime minister has spoken of his desire to stamp out something called Islamophobia. This may be a cynical vote catcher but nevertheless only someone who has no love for his country or for Jesus Christ could speak in those terms.

The new UK government has achieved a landslide with a relatively small percentage of the vote. They have far more power than would normally be the case given the relative paucity of their support. They managed this because their opponents were split and one has to wonder if this was a tactic of those who pull the strings behind the scenes. I don't say the Reform party was consciously set up to give the left greater power but it has surely been used to do just that. I can understand why so many people turned to it because it asks some of the right questions but it doesn't have any real answers. The rot is too deep.

Bruce Charlton has spoken of the two forms of evil at play here, that which seeks control (Ahrimanic) and that which seeks destruction (Sorathic). As usual, his analysis is spot on. The previous government was Ahrimanic in a passive sense because it had no real beliefs, but the new one will be actively so because it does have beliefs though they are anti-God beliefs. Naturally, they are not framed like that but these beliefs spring from a rejection of God and the natural order of creation. We can never understand why the modern world is as it is until we realise that we are in a spiritual war. The enemy cannot win but it can do enormous damage to people's souls before it loses, and that is what the whole business is all about. And although the enemy cannot incarnate directly in the world, it can certainly influence and overshadow human beings that allow this because of their inner emptiness and spiritual rejection. This has become more of a likelihood.

Ultimately, none of this matters. Our task is only to recognise it and stay faithful to God. If humanity is to be healed then its spiritual sickness must come out. This is what we are witnessing.

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.

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.

Tolkien's Letters

 It seems that the collection of letters written by Tolkien to various family members, friends and Lord of the Rings enthusiasts that was published in 1981 was only the tip of his correspondence iceberg. Like many of his generation he was a prolific letter writer, and an expanded edition which includes hundreds of previously unseen letters is due out this month. See here. I would expect the cream of the crop to have appeared already but I don't doubt there will be treasures of wisdom in the new batch. Even in the few extracts in the linked article there are some tellings insights. For example, he talks of birthdays and says that "Very few men, but practically all women set great store by dates and anniversaries". This after one of his sons had forgotten his mother's birthday. So true!

Then, very pertinently for the present time, he writes in 1956 about the reaction in the country to the Suez crisis. He says "I am really alarmed at the hysteria in this country. It may well be a prelude to mob-rule! Half Oxford is in a kind of screaming frenzy" and then talks of "Armed “pacifism”, destroying the vehicles of innocent citizens" and "Dons yelling “fascist”, at high table, at colleagues who in mild voices venture to disagree with them". It seems the academic world was already well on the way to its present state of spiritual corruption. He sums it all up by writing the profound truth that "What a rot and stink is left by liberalism devoid of religion". This is our modern world in a nutshell though, of course, we are much more advanced than was the case in Tolkien's day. Further on in this same letter he comments that "All leftists are anti-philology" which is an interesting observation.

In 1961 he writes that "Oxford continues to suffer from the ravages of the machine-worshippers. I remember it as a little old university town nestling in the country – and it had about 55,000 inhabitants. It now has nearly 100,000 more, sprawls in every direction, and is jammed with noise and smell; and every now & again the most ­hideous buildings go up." He does praise the removal of slum dwellings on the edge of town but there is no doubt that in his mind the cons are worse than the pros.

Later on he tells us that "Orc I derived from Anglo-Saxon, a word meaning a demon, usually supposed to be derived from the Latin Orcus – Hell. But I doubt this, though the ­matter is too involved to set out here. Warg is simple. It is an old word for wolf, which also had the sense of an outlaw or hunted criminal." I have alway thought these words and many others in Tolkien's creation actually speak of what they are. His genius extended into many fields but perhaps manifested most strongly in that of language which is not surprising since language was his business. Anyway, every word and every name too in Tolkien just seems right. No other author comes close to him in this respect.

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.