The Spiritualisation of Matter

I've written the last few posts as a corrective to the tendency of some non-dualists to dismiss the relative world and everything in it, up to and including the personal God or Creator, as unreal or illusion because there's no doubt that Western followers of this teaching often misunderstand it. Part of that is actually down to the teaching itself which, by its emphasis on the absolute, can encourage people to think they are nearer the goal than they really are, causing them to believe they can jump stages or that stages don't even exist. In fact, as I have said before, many non-dualists are a bit like materialists in that they deny part of reality. In the case of the materialist what is denied is the absolute. In the case of the non-dualist what is denied is the relative or at least its authentic nature. The wise spiritual aspirant seeks to integrate relative and absolute or spirit and matter, and so does not just deny self but uses it to go through it which he does by various means including meditation and prayer, and not excluding service, sacrifice and surrender. If all goes well this leads eventually to identification with the Universal and sanctification of the individual. The theoretical non-dualist, on the other hand, bound to his ideas of non-duality, just dismisses the individual self as illusion, rejecting it as something non-existent. But, of course, he can't really do this because the self is there and so he ends up in a mind created non-dualistic thought form. He is unlikely to realise this as his mental attitude has left him with no way out because of his denial of all but the non-dual absolute, and so it will require the hard knocks of life, either this or a future one, to bring him to his senses. He may believe himself to be enlightened or to have gone beyond ignorance or however he wants to phrase it, and he may acquire followers who believe that of him too which will inevitably bolster him in his conviction, but what starts in the head stays in the head. That is to say, the very self that is being denied. True spiritual knowledge comes from the heart and will only start to blossom when the heart centre is awakened which it can only be through the means I have given above.

The composer and occultist Cyril Scott wrote a book, quite well known at one time, called The Initiate in the Dark Cycle. This formed part of a trilogy which purported to tell the story of a real Master who lived and worked more or less openly in the Western world in the 1920s and ‘30s. I think Scott was being a bit mischievous and made the whole thing up in order to get a point across, but I don’t think he made it up from nothing. I read these books as works presented as fact but which were actually fiction albeit based on certain facts because I think Scott really did have some contact with Masters even if the one who was the hero of his books was his own invention. Be that as it may, much of this third book in the series deals with reactions to Krishnamurti’s, at the time, dramatic rejection of his Theosophical upbringing, and to discussion of what he was teaching in its place. This is identified as advaita, and the reason I mention the book here is because there are some interesting remarks made by the Masters in this book about advaita. They describe it as one of the most easily misunderstood spiritual paths, not suitable for the Western world in the present cycle, partly because of the need for a fully realised guru, and say that Krishnamurti’s version is likely to lead his followers nowhere except hypocrisy and self-delusion. Krishnamurti’s personal level of attainment is not disputed but his teaching methods are. I don’t entirely go along with this because I think Krishnamurti was a much needed spiritual purifier, but it may be that that is how the Masters eventually used him once they saw the direction he had taken. What I do find instructive is how these remarks can be applied even more to modern non-dualistic teachings which do not come from teachers of Krishnamurti’s level of attainment and so don’t even have the force of his spiritual realisation to back them up. For it is a fact that the same words will vary in their spiritual impact depending on the level of consciousness they are coming from. Words spoken by a genuine enlightened soul will have much greater inner resonance and transformative power than those same words spoken by an ordinary teacher. Incidentally, this is partly why spiritual teachers who have not attained enlightenment but who speak as though they have are guilty of a form of blasphemy. They are defiling holiness with ego.

Let me repeat here that the purpose of this series of articles is not to deny the basic principle of non-duality, but to point to some of the potential flaws in an exclusively non-dualistic approach to the spiritual path. These arise chiefly from excessive focus on one of the two poles of manifested reality to the neglect of the other, which is why I said in the book of which this blog is an extension that there was a secret beyond non-duality and that it was duality. What I meant by this slightly facetious remark is that consciousness alone is not the goal, which is to say you will not reach the goal by focusing on pure consciousness alone. As most non-dualists take their inspiration from advaita let me express this in terms of Indian philosophy. Realisation does not just come from the knowledge of Siva. It comes from the union in the disciple of Siva and Sakti where Siva is pure awareness and Sakti is the divine energy hidden in form and working through it. So it is not being alone that you should aspire to but the union of being and becoming, spirit and matter, life and form, absolute and relative, universal and individual. And this is done by accepting not rejecting, by accepting the totality of your being and raising it up into the light. This is the spiritualisation of matter and is the real task required of the disciple. You do not make base metal into gold by throwing away the base metal but by purifying and refining it to the point at which real transmutation can take place. Likewise you do not awaken spiritually by denying your soul but by perfecting it, purifying it and then, only when all that has been achieved, offering it up in sacrifice.

Duality is a fundamental principle of the universe and exists for a reason. Everything comes from the interplay between the two poles which are two and, at the same time, one. We need to transcend our current identification with form, that is true. We need to see duality as the expression of the One Reality, that is also true. But we do this through fully integrating the two poles of existence not by denying the creative potency of one of them. Non-dualists are not wrong to see consciousness (the Father, Siva) as the root of existence but the Father can only be known by the Son who is born from the union of Father and Mother in the secret place of the heart.

How God Grows

I thought a few explanatory remarks on some of the concepts discussed in recent posts might prove useful. One or two of these ideas could seem confusing if taken at face value because they relate to an order of reality beyond the mind, and so need to be understood metaphorically. This doesn't mean they aren't true but they have to be understood in a certain way. For instance, the idea that God wants to grow. How can God have desires? And how can the absolute and illimitable grow? Taken literally that doesn't make any sense at all.  On the level of the absolute there can be no growth because there is no relativity, no becoming, so the idea of more is meaningless. However the absolute, if it is truly absolute, must include the relative, and we can reasonably speculate that it takes on limitation in order to know itself in ways that are not possible in pure unmanifest oneness. Otherwise put, God comes into manifest existence in order to experience Himself more fully. And having done that, having come into being in the dualistic world of form, He seeks expansion within that world. He seeks to become ever more for that is now possible as a result of the creative tension between the two poles of existence, subject and object, required for manifestation to take place. God does not need to do this because of some lack or incompleteness in Himself but the power of the absolute to express itself is part of its reality, and so it does. If it could not do this it would be deficient in something which would be a limitation. So the absolute cannot grow in itself but through its self-expression it can.  It's not a question of something imperfect seeking perfection but of the already complete and perfect constantly transcending itself and becoming more. It's rather wonderful, don't you think?

Then there is God Himself. I have said that God as absolute being and God the Creator are not two different things, and one is not on a lower level of reality than the other. They are the One Reality in passive and active mode, or, better put (since these imply the duality of complementary opposites), they are the One Reality as pure being without form or expression and as being conscious of its own existence. In effect, a being. I have also said that God the Creator has personhood but is not a person. What does that mean? Simply this. God is beyond form, as we might conceive it, and cannot be regarded as a separate being out there or as an object of consciousness that we can know and encounter. Beings such as Christ and Krishna are not God. “None has seen the Father at any time” said Jesus. How could that which created form be bound by it? Nevertheless God has Individuality. His is the fundamental or primal 'I Am' that is reflected in us as our sense of individuality. That is what being made in His image means. It is also His individuality that is expressed in creation and the particular form it takes which is why contemplating the created world can give us a clue as to the nature of God (so long as we bear in mind that the world, as we experience it, is not in a state of grace at the moment). And, though the fact that God has a personal aspect does not mean we can know Him as a person, we can know and feel His presence and His love. Convention would say that we feel the presence of God within ourselves but I think that is to restrict it. It is both within and without or, more accurately, it is in a dimension that includes and transcends these opposites, a level of oneness where there is no within or without. God is everywhere and in everything. His love, which is the expression of His personal Self, informs all matter and all consciousness.

The living reality of the personal God as the Creator and Upholder of the universe is why those who attempt to see themselves as pure being, and that alone, are mistaken. You are not just the absolute, and you certainly are not that now. While the roots of your existence undoubtedly are in pure consciousness, and it is pure consciousness with which you must become identified rather than the separate self, you are still a created being and, until the universe sinks back into the Night of Brahma, God is the Creator. As long as any part of you exists in any relationship to any aspect of the created world (which, let us remind ourselves, extends far beyond this distant outpost of it), you remain a created being. If you have any element of expressed being within yourself (even if you are no longer identified with that aspect of your nature), God is the Creator.

Before completing this brief run through of various phrases I have used which might be open to misinterpretation I should say a word about the Master's advice to 'Merge with the Universal Self'. Strict non-dualists would not like this because for them we already are the Self and so there can be no merging. That is merely prolonging the dualistic illusion. For them there is nothing to merge. However to me this is an example of their extremism as well as a lack of understanding of the whole person. In terms of the absolute they may be right but in terms of this individual in the relative world who has yet to realise his essential nature, the phrase 'Merge with the Universal Self' is correct. The truth is we are not consciously the Self or pure spirit until we, that is, the soul, become spiritually united with it. It is not correct to say that we are all already enlightened but we just don't know it. We are already spirit but we are not enlightened. It is the merging of an individual soul with the Universal Self that creates the enlightenment of that particular individual being.

God gave us a self for us to grow and expand its consciousness. Eventually we get to the point where the only way to continue to do this is to give up the limited self, to cease to identify with it and become identified with (or know ourselves to be) the All. But that does not mean the gift of self was a mistake or that self is an illusion. It is the sense of separateness, resulting from identification with form, that is the mistake.

Lastly I would like to address the question of how I know these things. What right do I have to say them? First of all, it goes without saying that my understanding is far from complete. In fact I would say, in perfect seriousness, that it's on a low level. Some readers may well agree! Nevertheless I have had the great good fortune of having been spoken to by spiritual Masters who know these things because they see them as clearly as you and I see the sun and moon (more clearly probably). I have picked up a certain amount from what they have told me directly, but there is something in addition to that which I find a little hard to explain. Let me try. The nature of their being, as I experienced it in conversations with them but also in meditation and simply through thinking about them and, as it were, tuning in to their vibration, transmits a teaching in itself. Their reality, not the fact of their existence but their actual living reality, conveys a deep and real truth about the nature of God and the universe. It is as though they are an open window into the heart of existence and if you look into them you can see something of that. Experiencing their vibration, which is pure and uncontaminated by the slightest scrap of ego, is a teaching that goes beyond theory and words. Traditionally the guru's presence teaches more than what he actually says, and that is exactly what I found with the Masters. Sometimes they said very little but they taught on a deeper level through the grace of their presence. Even the way they spoke carried the imprint of their realisation. So this is how I know these things, through having been in the presence of those who exemplify them though, needless to say, my personal limitations will condition my understanding.

The Individual and the Non-Dual

Continuing with the theme of the last two posts I would like to consider here where individuality might fit into a non-dual scheme of things. For after all, if non-duality, as it is usually taught, is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth there can be no such thing as the individual. That is just an illusion caused by the faulty identification of consciousness with the processes of life, specifically with thought. It can be no more than an artificial construct created by consciousness mistakenly identifying with the material world, the world of form, movement, change etc. That is what a lot of people maintain, but to me this spiritual denial of the reality of the individual is almost as mistaken as the materialistic notion that life arose accidentally and has no meaning or purpose. In fact these beliefs are almost reflections of each other because they reach opposite, albeit you could say similar, conclusions through denying some part of the totality of life. What the materialist denies, of course, is spirit which is life. Materialism is the doctrine of death.

In the case of the absolutist non-dualist what is denied is the reality and purpose of the created world, and specifically the individual soul. To all intents and purposes non-duality concerns itself solely with a return to the source. Surely, though, we were not created just to sink back to where we came from into unexpressed being but, as Jesus said, to have life and life more abundantly. This is the meaning of creation and the glory of manifested existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? What I mean is why does unmanifest life manifest? Why are individual souls sent forth into the world of experience, into form, merely to return to formlessness and pure awareness? There must be a reason, a purpose for this. And there is. God created to become more, more love, more beauty, more creative joy, and it is the duality of life and form, spirit and matter, that brings this about and even renders such things possible in the first place.

I am quite prepared to be told that I have not understood non-duality, but I think that it is the non-dualists attached to their non-duality who have not understood life. Or at least they have not understood it in its completeness. Form is emptiness, true, but emptiness is also form and, what's more, form is form as well. As it says, God looked at the world and saw that it was good. Unless your philosophy can embrace all of these then it lacks something. If your non-duality makes you turn your back on the truths inherent in duality the chances are that you hold it in the mind, not as a living reality perceived in and by the heart. For life is both form and formlessness, and to deny it form is to deny God and the soul, and therefore, in a real sense, to deny life itself along with love, beauty and creativity.

It goes without saying that we must abandon the sense of a separate self, which is an illusionary construct existing only as a thought form and the root cause of our spiritual alienation. But not with the idea of returning to a oneness without distinction or quality. The illusionary nature of the separate self does not mean that the individual soul behind it has no reality. Only that, when that soul descends to the material level in order to further its development, it mistakenly identifies with the 'bodies' it assumes (mental, emotional, physical) in the process. But it, the soul, was created by God and has a true existence, as anything created by God must do. Of course, this existence is not independent of God and subsists entirely on God who has given it His own being, but it is authentic and should not be denied. As the Masters said in Towards The Mysteries, God made man Individual. Krishna was Individual. Christ was Individual, and these same Masters when asked "Do you believe in being Individual?" replied, "Yes, in being Individual, not a personality". The Masters who spoke to me were not personalities but they were the most fully individual beings, in the sense of being completely themselves, that I have ever encountered. 

This should not be misunderstood for the essence of spirituality is to go beyond the sense of oneself as an individual and to connect or reconnect with God as pure spirit. How are we to reconcile these two things? It is a matter of where we see the centre of our being. This must necessarily be God not our own individuality but that remains as the unique quality through which we express God. You might put things this way. Enlightenment doesn’t mean that you have become God and no longer have individuality, but that you are now identified with God in you instead of you in you. Your individuality remains but it is no longer at the centre. As St Paul put it, 'It is not I who lives but Christ who lives in me'.

The root of our being is in spirit which is the one reality that underlies everything, and the spiritual path has as its sole purpose the realisation of that. My disagreement with non-duality is not on the ultimate goal and the realisation of oneself as pure being, but with its tendency to dismiss the value and reality of the individual. Really it makes no sense to talk about love if you don't allow any validity to individual souls. The fact that non-dualists do talk about love shows that, on one level, they recognise a lack in their philosophy. Love was the purpose for creation, but this was not fully revealed until the time of  Christ who integrated in his person both Heaven and Earth in a way that had never been done before. That is the meaning of Christ being both Man and God, individual and universal. It is our goal too. Not the rejection or denial of matter/form but its conscious integration with spirit.

I mention God frequently in these posts. That's because God exists. But for many modern Western non-dualists, if He is allowed at all, He is reduced to the sidelines, dismissed as part of duality, the last thought. But that is obviously not the reality of God. It is just the concept of Him, and the notion of Him and us as separate. The fact is that God exists, and you cannot detach the personal God from the impersonal absolute. They are simply two ways of describing the same thing, relating respectively to being and non-being. You must acknowledge both if you wish to walk in the light of truth. I realise that Buddhism denies a Creator (as it does the individual soul, of course), but that is because of the Buddha's attempt to bypass the hidebound religious and priestly dogmas and doctrines of his day in order to get at the essential truth in its purity and simplicity. He was concerned only with the absolute but, rather as Krishnamurti did more recently, he threw the baby out with the bathwater. So the Buddhist denial of God is almost an historical accident. The reforms of the Mahayana several hundred years later were an attempt to correct some of the consequences of that, but still the lack of an awareness of God in Buddhism is a weakness of that religion. Buddhism has evolved to compensate for this in part, but for Westerners, not brought up in that tradition, to reject God in the name of a so called higher truth is unfortunate at best, and will not lead to any kind of true enlightenment. 

I have quoted the Masters' injunction to "Remember the Creator" often in these articles. They said this because they were aware of the the tendency of the more intellectual type of disciple, common today, to seek a form of spirituality that does not require acknowledging responsibility to and dependence on a higher power. In other words, to reject God as part of duality. But God is not part of duality. He, personal as well as impersonal, is the essence of reality, and without Him you would not exist. You may seek to remove ignorance and the sense of separation through self-enquiry and so, theoretically, awaken to the ever-present reality of the Self.  But this, without submission and surrender to the divine power that is without as well as within, can easily become yet another mental activity which can never (quite evidently) take you beyond the mind. And even if you do succeed in bypassing thought through this means how can you assume that what you find is on the same ontological level as God? Yet this is just what non-dualists do assume because they have insufficient understanding of the hierarchical levels of being, seeing only the relative (what we are now) and the absolute, pure being.

 I mean no criticism of the ancient scriptures or realised teachers of the past when I say that many contemporary followers of non-duality approach it too much on the level of mind and the intellect. In so doing they reduce spirituality to the psychological level, forgetting that, above all, it is of the heart. This is the risk when the esoteric is made public and taken up by teachers who have not yet fully realised its innermost truths. ‘Live simply in the heart and all mysteries will in time become known to you’, said the Masters. The instructions to have faith in God (Remember the Creator) and live simply in the heart might seem rather basic compared to discovering that you are the Self, and yet I must tell you that they are more likely to lead to the awakening of a genuine love and humility, and a true spirituality, than just meditation and self-enquiry on their own. Not that these should be neglected. I am certainly not saying that. I am only pleading for balance and wholeness in spiritual practice which should be based on an acknowledgment of God as both personal and impersonal equally, and Man as both individual and universal. Seek your source in pure being and see the world as the expression by love of that being. Eventually you will come to the point where questions of duality and non-duality are irrelevant because you will know that you are in God and God is in you so oneness and duality are not mutually exclusive, but both equally part of the whole.

Perspectives on Non-Duality

The other day I had an exchange of views with someone who saw all spiritual matters from the standpoint of a rigid non-duality and would not allow any other approach. I did not dispute that from the perspective of the absolute he was right. After all, it is self-evident that God is one and there is nothing but God. What else could there be? But we do not live in a world in which the absolute alone exists. If the relative world, which includes individual souls, had no meaning and no purpose it would never have come into being, and so we cannot just dismiss it in totality as nothing but an illusion or appearance to be seen through by the wise. The fact that our real being is in God does not mean we have no conditional being.

Here is what I consider to be the truth. It derives from my own experience and understanding, but also from impressions picked up from my teachers who generally preferred to imply rather than state outright. I like to think this approach goes a little way towards reconciling the insights of Christianity and Buddhism for, as things stand, and despite ideas about the inner unity of religions behind outer doctrines, these are actually quite different. The modern Western intellectual who is not religious but is attracted to mysticism will often regard the Christian view as a rather naive form of spirituality which is superseded by the non-dualistic Buddhist approach, but I think matters can equally well be seen the other way round. In fact, the Buddhist position is almost the obvious one in that it takes things to a logical extreme. Reductive and simple, it can seem the last word on the subject and almost unarguable, but, critically, it lacks something that the Christian vision has, and that is an awareness of the purpose of creation. For Buddhism there is no transcendent God and no individual soul. Everything ends up in the Void, the ground, the emptiness behind form etc. And logically this sounds perfectly reasonable. Everything can be reduced to nothing or one thing. Moreover mystical experience certainly allows us to access a state in which consciousness returns to its formless source. But what if this is not the whole truth? What if the soul is not an imaginary construct but has its own reality? We may experience non-dual states in which the self is absorbed by a boundless oneness but this just means that there is a state beyond self or, if you prefer, that is there when the self is no more. That is not at issue. We must go beyond, or out of, identification with self to find spiritual wholeness, but, in doing that, does individuality still remain as our expressed self, something that has a certain unique quality which nothing else in the universe has, or is it just seen to have been always non-existent? Surely the latter would be to deny God real creative power and reduce creation to the level of a conjuring trick. The truth is that the Universal Mind created individual souls so that life could expand and grow. In effect, God multiplied Himself to become more. Souls were not created to be dissolved back into universal oneness as though they had never been, but to add to the wholeness of life.

Buddhism recognises no God and no soul. Therefore it can see no point to the world of appearance which, in classical Buddhism, is seen as something to escape from. But simply to return to primordial oneness is to ignore the purpose of creation, and I repeat this because it is fundamental to the debate between an absolute non-duality and an approach to oneness that recognises the legitimacy, relative but real, of the individual soul. We were not created just to return to where we came from but to go through the manifested world, absorbing the fruits of experience and building up the individual soul. Then we are required to relinquish selfhood and become consciously one with the whole of life, to recognise that we are the whole of life, but in such a way as includes individuality which is not lost but transformed. No longer the centre of consciousness, it becomes that through which consciousness is expressed. The Masters told me to forget the personal self and merge with the Universal Self. The personal self is the separate self and it is this that is the illusionary construct of the mind. However the individual self is different from this and is that which merges. There must be something to merge with the Universal Self and that is the soul. When it merges it loses its own identity in the absolute, that is true, but the greater awareness includes the lesser which, as I say, is not lost but changed from the focus of identity that conditions consciousness to the vehicle of expression that can give form to it.

The purpose of the spiritual path is that we cease to identify with ourselves as individuals. However that does not mean that the individual self is an illusion. Individuality is the gift from God that enables us eventually to know ourselves as God. Without ever knowing ourselves we could never know anything. 

Non-duality has many profound insights into the nature of reality but I part company from it in certain matters, principally concerning the way it views God and the individual soul though even here the differences are mostly to do with emphasis. Let me now summarise a few of these points of disagreement, and make further observations on modern interpretations of non-dualistic thinking.

• The individual soul exists. It is not unreal or an illusion but a creation of God, born out of His love. This soul must eventually be given up but only after it has been brought to spiritual perfection, symbolised respectively by the transfiguration of Jesus and his crucifixion. Then it is taken up into spirit as demonstrated at the ascension. It is, one might say, divinised.

• God is a not a person but He has personhood or 'I'ness. The impersonal Godhead and the personal God are not different, and one is not 'higher' than the other. They are two sides of the same coin, relating to reality in its inactive and active modes, and this 'two-in-oneness'' is reflected in the enlightened soul. In him the universal and the individual are brought together and made one. That is to say, his being is in absolute oneness but his activity, which includes understanding, is expressed through individuality.

• Non-dualists talk of God in a way that implies that He (or it) is life but is not actually alive. This is to limit God to the impersonal absolute, but He encompasses the unexpressed and the expressed equally and inseparably, and the moment there is the slightest movement away from pure being you are in the realm of the personal living God.

•  While non-dualists understand oneness they tend to undervalue multiplicity. Thus their non-duality can blind them to the truth of the created world. Advaita, for instance, like anything else, can become a belief system but life is larger than any belief system even one that may be true. It is both non-dual and dual at the same time which gives it its richness and its capacity to grow. This also explains why there is something rather than nothing.

• The experience of oneness or no self, often called awakening, is usually just a preliminary step on the mystical path, but is regularly taken by the unwary for enlightenment. This leads to all manner of errors of which the main one is mistaking the relative for the absolute.

• There is an old definition of reality as life-quality-appearance. If you focus on only the first of these without appreciating the part the other two have to play in the significance of the whole you have an unbalanced view. Human beings are made of spirit, soul and body where spirit is the divine spark in us, the aspect of uncreated pure being. The soul is the quality part of that definition which evolves through a series of lifetimes and eventually, together with the fruits of its experience, becomes subsumed into spirit thereby combining the individual with the universal. Appearance, of course, is the outer self necessary for function and expression in the phenomenal world.

• Non-duality would be the whole truth if life were completely passive (which, incidentally, might be why the Buddha is usually depicted with his eyes shut). But life is not just like that because it includes creativity and the capacity to grow. Hence philosophies which only concern themselves with pure being lack completeness. The instant a being does anything, or even knows anything, it is acting through a self. That is, through a self if it has transcended identification with form, but from it if it has not

• I do not believe that even those generally acknowledged to be enlightened in the non-dualistic sense such as the Buddha or, more recently, Ramana  Maharishi have reached some kind of ultimate state. To realise your being in God does not mean you have become God. Life continues ever upwards. The Masters who came to me were God-realised beings but they told me of higher Masters and beings beyond even them. The fact that we cannot conceive of spiritual states beyond the enlightened state does not mean that they do not exist. 

Notwithstanding anything I have written above I still agree that the fundamental truth of life is non-dualistic. My disagreement with non-dualistic systems is not with the basic premise but with the confusion of levels. In absolute terms non-duality is the truth, but reality is made up of the absolute and the relative together, and the relative has a more important role to play than it is usually allowed in many forms of non-duality where it is dismissed too easily as maya or samsara. Without it there would be no love, no beauty, no joy, no anything in fact. There would be pure being alone with no capacity to become more. The Unmanifest becomes the Creator who creates in order to express Himself and grow. What He creates is real even though ultimately it can be none other than Himself.

Gradual or Sudden Awakening?

This is an old controversy. Is spiritual awakening something you build up to, and which arrives as a result of hard work and effort, or does it come the instant you realise what you truly are and no longer get in the way of that? Is there a movement through time to reach it or does it happen spontaneously? The answer is quite simple, though it may require a little explanation. It is both.

Many times when writing about spiritual matters I notice how words can get in the way of real communication. I might be approaching the central issue from one angle and will say one thing, but then I will come at it from another side and say something different which may even seem contradictory to what was said before. I happen to think that's a good thing as it gives a more rounded picture of the whole, but I concede that it may be confusing for someone who takes words at face value and doesn't see through them to the reality they are attempting to describe. The subject of this post is definitely one that has the potential for confusion, and even heated disagreement, if one looks at it from an either/or perspective. As so often wisdom comes from treading the middle way.

From the standpoint of non-duality what is called enlightenment must happen out of time as it is awakening to your true self, the pure awareness that is always there and upon which your personal self has merely been superimposed by the actions and reactions of mind. Disassociate yourself from these actions and reactions and you will be what you are, what you always have been and always will be. Your eternal self, the eternal self that exists out of time, beyond form, is unchanging, unmoving and so on. This is elementary, indeed literally so.  There is nothing you can do to bring this about as 'you' are precisely what stands in the way of it. And all of that is true, but it is not the whole truth.

It is possible to have a spontaneous experience in which you seemingly arrive at the ground of consciousness, consciousness stripped of its feeling and thinking accretions. You have an insight into the nature of reality, and may assume you have reached the state called enlightenment. (The truth is this is just a beginning and requires considerable deepening, but we'll ignore that for the moment). You may become a teacher based on this experience and the insight it has given you, and consider that because pure awareness is always ever-present there is nothing anyone can do to get there because you are already there. You simply have to recognise that fact. This may lead you to deny the need for a spiritual path of gradual stages and movement through time, and to reject all teachings which support that idea. But that would be a mistake. For the vast majority of people it is simply not possible to go beyond the separate self without hard work and extensive purification of the ego. Traditional spirituality recognises this and has many practices designed to facilitate the task. However some modern teachers believe these can be ignored. As a result they can leave their followers floundering, confused and disillusioned if they're lucky, self-deceived and imagining they too have attained if they're not.

It may be true that there is nothing you can do to reach any kind of spiritual awakening because what keeps you from that is identification with yourself as the doer. You must simply be. However before you can simply be in a true and real sense you must clear your mind of all kinds of erroneous beliefs and impure energies. You must root out falseness and egotism from your psyche, you must sharpen discernment, detach yourself from image-making habits, deepen humility and thoroughly cleanse the physical, emotional and mental aspects of your nature from the detritus of many years of wrong thinking, self-centred feeling, attachments, tendencies to react and so on, and this is not the work of a day, a year or even, if we're being honest, a lifetime. The self cannot be seen through as an illusion before it has been wiped clean and all the knots and tangles that comprise it have been untied, and that takes time and effort. Truly to be in the ever-present moment is only possible for a soul that has reached a high degree of purification and is relatively impervious to ego. Of course, you can think yourself into the now by forming a mental concept of it and coordinating yourself to that, but this is just the ego copying its idea of reality which, even if it is based on a degree of real insight, is still just an idea.

There is another point that needs to be made here, and because it is one often ignored perhaps it should be stressed. In most cases what is called spiritual awakening is a contact with the soul, or higher self as it is known in occultism, not the Universal Self. Thus it is not a state of full realisation but a reconnection to the ante-natal non-separate consciousness. It can, it certainly should, be used as an inspiration for further spiritual exploration but it is not an indication of any kind of final attainment.

So, bearing that in mind, I would counsel the spiritual seeker to be realistic and to understand that while awakening may indeed come spontaneously, as an act of grace you might say, it can only take root and develop as a result of hard spiritual endeavor. The water of ego will only come to the boil and evaporate when it has been fully heated.

Let me illustrate what I am saying here with an example. A while ago I saw a video in which a woman was lamenting the fact that after many years of seeking she still was not enlightened. The teacher, who was a strict non-dualist, was making the usual point that the fact she wanted enlightenment was what was preventing it happening. She should just let it come.  Now this teacher clearly had some insight and a degree of realisation, but he was still what I call a personality aware of the soul rather than someone totally anchored in and speaking from the higher self. He saw everything from inside the non-dualistic box for it is a fact that the concept of non-duality can indeed become a box if it gets fixed in the mind to the exclusion of anything else. As a result he was only giving his questioner half the story, the ‘forget the personal self’ half (putting it in the terms of my teachers). This is the via negativa side to spirituality, the stripping away of all that is not consciousness to find consciousness, what is known as neti, neti (not this, not this) in Advaita. And it is a valid approach. But it lacks something for what it doesn't take into account is the purpose of creation, the reason for this whole world of manifested life and the fact that there are human beings in the first place rather than just pure unmanifest consciousness. Why would reality manifest just to return to where it had always been? If the via negativa were all there was to spirituality that would surely be the case, but the unmanifest embraces form to become more, and this is why, for a true spiritual understanding, the negative approach to God (or reality, if you prefer) must be coupled with a positive, active complementary side.

What I believe the teacher here should have told his questioner (in addition to what he said not instead of it) was that she should forget about enlightenment and focus her entire being on something greater than herself. This would take her away from herself and make the quest for enlightenment (a personal quest obviously) redundant. This is the ‘Remember the Creator’ half of the Masters’ teachings, which is known as dhikr in Sufism, a form of mysticism which seems to me to combine the essence of both duality and non-duality better than most. It is the injunction to love and serve God, and it would help this lady make much faster progress (and yes, progress for there is a path) towards a true spiritual sensibility. She would not be waiting for enlightenment to come as a result of some sudden insight into her true nature, but instead gradually opening up her heart to receive divine grace.

The objection might be raised that this is just falling back into the illusion of duality with God and the soul seen as two separate things. But God is not an illusion, love is not an illusion, and nor, for that matter, is the soul which was created for a purpose, and the practice of the presence of God in the heart is the best way to overcome the sense of a separate self which is eventually swallowed up by active participation in the divine. Continual remembrance of God purifies the ego, rendering it transparent and fully receptive to the divine light, in a way that a goal-seeking self-enquiry, which is always going to be largely a matter of the mind looking into itself for most people, will be hard pressed to compete with. Spirituality is of the heart and, while it is perfectly correct that identification with the mind must be destroyed, this will not lead to true spiritual awakening unless, together with that negative, there is the positive of being centred in the heart. Live simply in the heart and all mysteries will in time become known to you, said the Masters. Note, with reference to our subject, the phrase ' in time'. 

So there is a spiritual path. It is not simply a matter of seeing that the ego is an illusion caused by thought but of cleansing the soul of all impurities, and eradicating the tendencies and habits of lifetimes. It is not just a question of detaching focus from the mind but of transferring it to the heart which is to be seen as the centre of being. And this takes time. What the God who created us wants is not that we see the self never existed, but that we actively give the self up in love, that we voluntarily give back the gift we were given, and it is this, rather than simply seeing through illusion, that is the sacrifice that makes holy and leads to the sanctification of the soul. Let me repeat this because it is so important. It is not that we see selfhood to be an illusion but that we renounce it in love. This is the proper transcending of duality, going through it and going beyond it, rather than its mere denial which it is all too easy to do with the mind. Furthermore, this is the reason for the Masters' recommendation of prayer as well as meditation, stilling the objection of the unbending non-dualist with the following words, addressed to me but appropriate for everyone. 'Do you think yourself above prayer? Even the greatest saints prayed and, while meditation is necessary, you need the humbling experience of prayer also.'

The universe was created in time. Of course, time is not the absolute reality but it exists as the means whereby unmanifest emptiness becomes more than it is. God,the Universal Mind, wants to grow. That process involves each one of us, and it can only be accomplished in and through time.
 

Thoughts On The Modern World

This post starts off as one of those occasional pieces on my life with Michael Lord during the time we were being instructed by the Masters, but then detours into the preoccupation of the last few posts (as implied by the title) which is why it is included here. After this, though, it will be time to leave the Kali Yuga alone for a while.


The Masters sent Michael and me to India in 1980. Or rather, we came up with the idea to go there independently but they then confirmed that it was their wish for us. There was no question of them telling us what to do. However I imagine this move would have been intended from the beginning, and known on the spiritual level long before it filtered down into our conscious minds. By that I mean that on the level of the soul, the greater part of you that remains with us, as it was described by the Masters, the general pattern of our projected life path is known, though it remains for us to adopt that pattern or not as the case may be.

We had been living together for just over a year, and sorted out areas of disagreement due to our different ages and attitudes. The holiday we had taken in India earlier (described in the book and also here) had introduced me to the country and awoken what seemed to be a strong tie with it. So I felt I was going back to a place with which part of me already had an association. If the reader will forgive a little personal speculation here, I have no recollection of any past lives but I do feel affinity with certain times and places, and India is certainly one of the latter. That proves absolutely nothing but, given a belief in reincarnation, it is not so surprising.  India is such a large country, and of such great antiquity, that many of us must have spent lives within its borders. As for the Masters, they, of course, are universal, but I know they too have a close connection with India. They also told me that it was easier for them to come to us there than in the more psychically polluted atmosphere of the modern West. Mind you, that was over thirty years ago.

Although Michael spoke Urdu, a close cousin to Hindi which is the main language in the north, we decided to go to the south of the country as that region was closer to its traditional roots in those days.  As a result it was somewhat less affected by the ravages of modernity, especially outside the main urban areas. I have been accused by an enthusiast for the scientific/materialistic world-view of hypocrisy because I criticise the modern world while at the same time availing myself of its benefits, but I think my accuser misunderstood my position. This is what I actually believe. We in the modern world have been seduced by the wonders of technology and, as a result, have lost touch with our source and centre. We now live in a self-created artificial environment which we assume to be real, but which actually separates us more and more from what is truly real. It is often claimed that technology is neutral but it's not. It is based on a belief, and that belief is the superiority of the machine over nature. If we accept technology on its own terms then tacitly we accept that belief.

That is my view based on my understanding of the spiritual nature of reality. However we live in the modern world and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise so my attitude has been to use the products of modernity, as and when necessary, but to remember that many of them would not have been created in a society that was metaphysically aware and knew where it had come from and where it should be going. And while I may use them, and in some cases depend on them as we all do now since the contemporary world is built around them, I don't let their conveniences blind me to their downside. I would never deny the many advantages they have brought, but it is important to know that we have paid a price for those in our separation from both nature and God.

Apologists will say there have always been tools and that modern technology is just a more sophisticated tool, but they ignore the fact that this modern technology (beginning let's say, for the sake of argument, around the dawn of the industrial age) seeks to dominate nature with the sole purpose of making our lives materially better. It succeeds but at what cost? A spiritual one, quite obviously. For the more we focus on material improvement as the main point of life, the more we identify ourselves as material beings and the less we know ourselves for what we really are.

In the past mankind respected and worked with nature (not always but usually) because nature was seen as part of the universal spiritual order, but now it is regarded merely as stuff to control and exploit in an increasingly ambitious attempt to refashion the world according to our will. Of course, it's not wrong for man to use his ingenuity to improve his environment and better his material conditions, but that should always be subordinate to a proper spiritual awareness, and there is good reason to think that a line was crossed when nature ceased to be regarded as our Mother, or at least part of God's creation, and became, if not our slave, then certainly our thing to do with as we wished.

The modern world and the technology that created it are the result of a denial of God and nature. How could I not criticise it, given my stance that the basis of life is spiritual? Undoubtedly some degree of compromise is necessary, and I am not saying that everything about the modern world is wrong or that technology has not made life much easier for us. But I am saying that it has assumed too great a significance in our lives, and that the changes it has wrought have brought about many losses, both obvious and subtle. To an extent we are becoming aware of that now but very probably it is too late, and besides we don't seem able to give up what we have.

We are in this world but we have been instructed not to let ourselves become of it. That saying applies just as much to the modern world too, and another saying, that when you sup with the devil you should use a long spoon, is equally relevant in this context. Therefore live in the world, use what you need to live and work, but keep yourself spiritually free and avoid entanglement in its snares. For the apple was not just offered to Eve once only and long ago. It is offered to each one of us every day.

I don't want this article to be taken as a wholesale rejection of science or technology in themselves, but I do intend it as a criticism of the kind of science that denies our reality as spiritual beings, and of the technology that grows out of that attitude. For I am not saying that the modern world was an aberration that should never have happened (as I have mentioned before I believe it to be an inevitable part of an unfolding cycle, which is why its characteristics were able to be predicted so accurately in many ancient scriptures), but as spiritual people we should be alive to its anti-spiritual nature.

Away from the World 1982

It became clear that it was the Masters' wish for us to choose an environment as much as possible removed from the distractions of the modern world, somewhere that would aid our attempts to lead a spiritual life rather than obstruct them. This was not running away from reality, but returning to a state more in tune with reality for a period in order to become spiritually grounded. But it was not an end in itself, and after five years we went back to the 'real' world (real in the sense that it was our world, the world we had come from and to which we, in this life, belonged), partly to show that what we had learned had taken proper root and partly (or so the Masters said) to bring something to the modern world, or that small bit of it we contacted, of what we had learned whilst in India. This is what they said to me in one of the first talks they gave after our return to England. "You must learn to be more outgoing but still make the inner life of meditation your main point of focus, and then balance the two. Remain yourself, do not feel you need to adjust to suit the world, but absorb what others have to give and teach only when it is obviously required or sought. Observe and absorb. Gain strength and awareness from meditation, and practice what you have learned in India. You may find that outwardly people will reject your spiritual attitude, but if you remain yourself you will create an impression."

As always I quote the Masters' words because of their universal application. No spiritual person can feel at home in this world, especially not now, and it is important to know that we do not need to adjust to suit the world. But we cannot turn our back on it either and must always make ourselves available when our help is required or sought. The concluding sentence is also pertinent. The world is hungry for truth, whether it knows it or not, but no one likes being preached to. The way is most effectively shown through example or, as the Masters put it on another occasion, "you teach best through silence and the rays you give out".

Rejection of the Contemporary World

This is another question relating to the Kali Yuga, that intriguing time in which we find ourselves today when so much is brought to the surface and must be dealt with in one way or another. Despite its difficulties we are fortunate to be alive at such a time because it can require us to make real choices and decisions. It is also an excellent opportunity to learn the prized virtue of detachment. When the outer world falls into spiritual disarray it is easier to take one's stand in the eternal.

I say it's a question but it's really more of a challenge. It came from remarks made to me by someone with no spiritual interests, and I include my response here (suitably fleshed out) as many spiritual aspirants can be called to account for themselves in a similar way. The reply is not designed to convert an unbeliever so much to support a believer, and it's the latter I am talking to here rather than the actual questioner.

Q. You don’t seem very happy with the present day. I don’t mean to be rude but couldn’t your interest in spirituality just be part of an escape from the here and now? You may not think much of the modern world but for most people it’s a vast improvement on the past. You might be accused of taking the benefits of 21^st century life for granted while criticising what comes with them.

A. Would you not accept that we live in an age in which the divine presence is either denied or effectively ignored? Of course, from a material point of view there have been enormous improvements over the past few centuries and I don’t discount them though I do question if they genuinely bring real happiness. But the point is that no civilisation that does not acknowledge the supreme spirit can last. In fact, not only can it not last but it rapidly breaks down as ours is in the process of doing, though you may dispute that. If you do, wait and see! Our technological achievements over the past few hundred years have been extraordinary but, while they have brought us greater material prosperity and ease, they have also caused a thicker and thicker veil to be drawn over the divine presence. They have made matter more material and desensitised our consciousness. They have separated us from our source and blinded us to the reality of what we are. Be sceptical when people say you can have the wonders of technology and materialistic science and a full spiritual life also. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot have both God and Mammon. I realise that this opinion might put me in a minority, even amongst spiritual people, and I am not saying that we must retreat to the forest if we are to maintain our spiritual integrity. I’m writing this on a computer after all, and I don’t draw my water from a well. We live in the modern world and shouldn't pretend not to. But I do maintain that the spiritual person must be inwardly detached from all the trappings of modernity and see them for what they are, namely the products of a materialistic mindset that both denies and obscures spiritual reality. They are at once the symptoms and the causes (though probably only secondary ones) of the darkening of the world and the solidification of matter.

You talk of an escape from the here and now but if the here and now, in the sense of the contemporary world, is founded on an illusion, which it is, then it’s better not to be a part of it. And if by here and now you do really mean the here and now as in the ever present moment then the recognition of a spiritual reality transcending and underlying the material world takes you into that more fully than restricting your consciousness to this world ever can.

I do agree with those who say that we are living in the latter days of the Kali Yuga, the final phase of a cycle that unfolds from its earliest stages of matter being perceived as the body of spirit that exists for the manifestation of spirit and for that alone, to one in which it is seen as existent in its own right with spirit as either an imaginary and redundant superstition or as an extension of matter with that as the primary principle, the very reverse of the truth. This does not mean that people are in some sense worse today than they were before but that the environment has degraded, spiritually speaking, and that definitely has an effect on consciousness.

However the fact that the Kali Yuga is inevitable, as the time of breakdown prior to the dissolution of this world in preparation for a new cycle, is not an excuse to succumb to the prevailing mores and opinions. Illusion is illusion regardless as to whether it is inevitable or not, and truth is always truth. Besides, what may be inevitable on the universal scale is not necessarily so on the individual level, and it is as individuals that we are called upon to rise out of darkness and bear witness to the truth in times when it is obscured. Hence, while we cannot prevent the way the world is going, we can and should proclaim the true state of affairs to the best of our ability. We must give those that wish to do so the chance to align themselves with reality. We must also allow those that might reject the truth the opportunity to hear it. Their response is up to them but at least they cannot claim they were left without instruction. They have a choice.

So I say, it cannot be helped that the world will fall into materialism. We have to accept that it will, but we do not have to be part of that. Indeed, we are required not to be part of that. That is the test for those of us alive at the present time. To maintain our spiritual integrity during a period when to do that can be to invite ridicule. Maintaining our spiritual integrity means to love God and seek to do His will (insofar as we understand it) even if doing so puts us at odds with contemporary opinion. However we must take great care not do so in a prideful manner, with the attitude that we are the knowers and the rest are lost souls. We must be firm and true and recognise that, yes, there are spiritual laws (meaning modes of being in line with reality), and to follow them is the way to true happiness while to reject them is the act of ego. At the same time, we must not condemn those who do reject them. It is legitimate to point out the truth but we cannot judge or condemn unless we have arrived at a state where we can do so without a scrap of anger or superiority. Too often those who defend what they think of as God’s laws allow their concern for spiritual truth to cause them to hate others who defy and deny it so they fall into falsehood themselves. But just as often those who claim to seek the good of humanity allow that concern to blind them to its greatest good which is the love of God and desire to do His will. In fact, sometimes that claim is merely a front for what is actually a rebellion against God. ‘In His service is perfect freedom’ is one of the highest teachings I know. How does it make you feel to read those words? Humbly grateful or do they engender a sense of resistance?

We may have improved the world in many ways over the last three or four hundred years as a result of scientific advancements and humanitarian philosophies but we have lost the essential which is the sense of a divine Creator and that our origin lies beyond the material world. If we have that sense, we have all we need. If we do not have it then we have nothing, and that is why I am not very happy with the present day.

I should make one last point. Ultimately, of course, questions of the Kali Yuga and the ascendance of the material pole over the spiritual one at this particular moment in history all belong to the realm of duality. From the highest, and fundamentally only true, standpoint there is never any time when God is not all there is. But this is the world we live in, and until we have transcended it (that is, identification with it), and become fully one with spirit we need to understand it so that we can avoid being ensnared by its illusions.