The Social Sphere 2

I received the following comment on the previous piece which gives me the chance to clarify any misconceptions that might have arisen as to its meaning and intent.

“That’s an interesting position but it basically seems to ignore or take for granted the contributions of those politically motivated groups and individuals who have fought for an increase in human rights over the years, and stood up against privilege and oppression. You would not presumably discount their efforts and, indeed, sacrifices?”

My reply was as follows.

I'm not saying that, given the present state of the world, politics are unnecessary. (I can envisage a time when they are no longer necessary but that would have to be a kind of Golden Age.) Of course, society must be organised along certain lines and there are, as I said, better and worse ways in which to do this, even if all today lack insight into the true nature of things. What I am saying is that for the spiritual person all political matters are, or should be, subsumed into spiritual understanding, and that to step down from that to politics is to go back into the duality of the worldly mind and identification with outer things which should always be seen in the light of inner realities and never in their own light. How many of the great spiritual figures of the past were politically involved in any way or advised their disciples to be? Their counsel was always to “Seek first the kingdom of heaven and all things shall be added to you.” In other words, put all your focus on God and everything else falls naturally into its proper place. If you have the kingdom of heaven, you have everything. If you don't have that then you have nothing at all. 

So I am not condemning political involvement per se but pointing out that there is a much higher approach to all problems, and that when you awaken to the reality of the spiritual world all matters to do with this world are put in a completely different perspective, and it is a mistake to go back to seeing them or trying to tackle them from the old vantage points. 

So my words were not addressed to everyone but only to those who are committed to the spiritual path, and take seriously the implications of the fact of God, and recognise that, ultimately, that is the only fact.

My correspondent replied.

"That may be but if spiritually aware people don't take to public or political life how will things ever improve?"

To which I answered.

That's a good point and I'm sure there are some people whose destiny it is to do that, though looking around it's hard to see anyone who might answer that description at the moment.  But I am referring to the spiritual aspirant who has no destiny of that kind which will always be the great majority of us. And I would add that even those who are so called are more likely to be people who may be spiritually sensitive but who are still rooted in this world and so are not yet completely dedicated to treading the spiritual path. Because they are still largely focused in the material world they can act as intermediaries between this world and the spiritual in a way that someone seeking greater spiritual polarisation could not do. 

Basically what I am saying is that spirituality and politics don't mix any more than God and Mammon do, and if you do try and serve two masters you will inevitably end up losing connection to the higher reality because you are being unfaithful to it. You are, in effect, denying its supreme truth. Real spirituality has to be an all or nothing affair in the sense that everything worldly must be completely subordinate to it.

The Social Sphere 1

In the UK there is a general election coming up in May which gives me the opportunity to discuss how a person who is serious about the spiritual path should approach the vexed question of politics. My answer to that is brief. As little as possible. 

That doesn't mean you cannot have opinions. Everyone does and it's almost impossible not to. But the serious spiritual aspirant should steer clear of political debate and remain aloof from political ideologies, all of which will drag him down into worldliness, attachment and confrontation.  It is inevitable that any undue focus on the material world will distract you from the spiritual. You might say that the two are one and indeed they are, but they are only so when viewed from the standpoint of the higher or that which transcends them both if you see them as opposites rather than higher and lower aspects of the one reality. In other words, the material is only one with the spiritual when approached from the perspective of the spiritual. If you interact with it on its own level or from its own position or by giving it any kind of priority or by seeing it in any other way than by the light of the spiritual then you have lost focus and moved out of the unity of the spiritual into the division of worldliness. You have succumbed to identification with form and outer things, and lost touch with the inner realities that lie behind them through which, and only through which, they are given meaning. 

Just as the world is not real in itself, but is real as the expression of God, so it is with the material which is without significance in and for itself but full of meaning, truth and beauty when recognised as God's creation.

I'm not saying that a person intent on pursuing the spiritual path should not vote. That's a personal decision, though I do believe that the more aware you are of eternal truths, the less you will be drawn to any kind of political ideology that is not rooted in those truths, and that means all of them (without exception) in these days when the world is seen as having no spiritual origin and no purpose beyond itself, and human beings are perceived solely in terms of their social and material needs and aims. There is no political philosophy (and you may well smile when I use that word in this context) that exists today that has any connection to spiritual truth (or truth tout court) because there is none that derives from a metaphysical basis. There is scarcely one that even acknowledges such a thing for you certainly cannot count contemporary Islamic systems which, if they do so at all, do so in word only while in reality representing complete perversions of proper spiritual understanding. It is transparently evident that they have no link to metaphysical truth whatsoever, exemplifying, as they do, religion drained of all spiritual content.

A spiritually attuned person may well have political views. As I say, that's more or less inevitable until you have reached a high degree of purity and insight. Moreover, even with the woefully limited political ideologies that exist today, that does not mean that everything is equal. There are certainly better and worse options as to how society should be organised and run on offer. There are also forces at work consciously seeking to destabilise the spiritual integrity of the human being; inner forces working through outer mediums, individuals and organisations, usually unaware of the source of their inspiration, which are attempting to separate mankind more and more from its divine origin through various means including the deconstruction of the human form, the desecration of the human image and the dismantling in the mind of the true vision of the human archetype. These forces work through art, through social theory and also through politics, and their long term aims  should be recognised and resisted. This may well mean taking a stand that might be interpreted politically even if it is spiritually based.

So the spiritual person will have opinions as to how things should be in the social sphere. But these views are, or should be, always held in the light of a higher metaphysical reality which is at all times and in all circumstances known to be primary. Everything is seen in the context of spirituality by which I mean the reality of God, of the soul and of the world as the creation and expression of God. This, of course, puts contemporary notions of left and right in the position of near irrelevance even if both would have certain points in common, either economically or socially, with a proper spiritual understanding.

There are two basic facts which have to be taken into account in any kind of working out in the social or political sphere of spiritual principles, these being the only principles grounded in concrete truth rather than theory or idealism. They are the unity of mankind under God and the individuality of the evolving (as in unfolding) soul. If we take these as our guiding lights in showing how human beings should relate to each other we will not go far wrong. Overdue emphasis on either one will create imbalance and eventual tyranny, but taken together they will result in harmony and give the best framework in which all may flourish and grow.

As a matter of fact, the Masters in Towards The Mysteries give a teaching that ties in with this, and which, I believe, provides the key to all matters pertaining to politics as well as all economic and social questions. It is stunningly simple and quite obvious when you think about it. They said that the aspiring disciple should be individual but not individualistic.  A little reflection on what this means and its implications would surely resolve the conflict between left and right, satisfy both their concerns and temper both their excesses.

You cannot serve God and Mammon, and the Masters said something else in these books by Swami Omananda which is relevant to our subject, and which should deter anyone thinking that you can mix spirituality and politics. They said that politics are born in the cradle of corruption. These are strong words and they might be contested by those who believe that everything is political, and that politics, of some sort, is always necessary. That may be so from a purely worldly position but, as I hope to have made clear in this piece, political disputes become quite irrelevant when life is seen from a proper spiritual perspective. Problems and disagreements in the social sphere fall naturally into place when submitted to a higher standpoint. As for politics, however they start off, they always descend into the search for power, and power, as we know, always corrupts.

Morality, Humanist and Spiritual

I saw an article the other day which claimed that as intelligence had increased (which the article stated it had over the course of the 20th century, though based principally, it seems, on IQ tests which I thought had long been exposed as efficient at examining only one type of intelligence), so we had also become more moral. Setting aside whether intelligence has really increased or whether our brains and thought patterns have simply been educated into the modern technological way of thinking, good in some respects, poor in others, this assertion must surely depend on what kind of morality one espouses. For me and, I would have thought, for anyone acknowledging a spiritual reality, morality is first and foremost about loving truth and attempting to coordinate oneself to that. And this means knowing, to some degree at least, what truth is. Hence the humanist morality (the one referred to in the article), which is largely atheistic as it either denies or ignores the spiritual reality, is almost the least moral attitude one can take. This implies that much of the perceived improvement is merely a matter of greater conformity to the prejudices and ideologies of the day.

Every society or culture must have some kind of morality or else it will collapse. Its morality will be based on its formational mythology, and in the case of contemporary Western (and really nowadays global) culture that mythology is rooted in the ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the theory of evolution on the other. Both of these, if they don't actually dismiss a Creator, certainly pave the way for that dismissal. So you could say that our modern morality is based entirely on the assumption that there is only humanity, and human obligations and duties and responsibilities are only to other humans. Of course, that's not completely true because many of the moral ideas that fed into and shaped this belief system were actually inherited from Christianity* (even if this is frequently unacknowledged today), but it is the way modern morality tends to perceive itself.

Now, this basing of morality, and how we approach life, ourselves and others, on a purely humanistic level may seem to have much to recommend it, but if it arises from an incorrect or even downright wrong view of the world, then it is insufficient, to say the least. It may even be, in some respects, immoral.

A proper morality has two strands, a vertical one and a horizontal one, and these are plainly identified by Jesus in his two commandments. To love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and to love your neighbour as yourself. These sum up the essence of any morality based on truth, but here's the interesting point. It is no accident that the commandments were given in that order because if the second is to be in any sense real then it must grow out of the first. That is to say that the love of man, to be true, can only really derive from the love of God, and that is because what you are loving is not man in and for himself but God in man. For God is both the source of love and its end. There is no other. If He is not present then, whatever feeling you might think you have, it is not love, not in its true, spiritual sense. And love is spiritual in origin. Anything that is not spiritually derived is not love.

So you can only really love your neighbour if first you love God. Without that you can have good will or even empathy towards your neighbour but not love, and, in the long run, only love can overcome the ego and so bring about a morality that is true and innate rather than a mainly intellectual or ideologically derived thing which can, and will, crack under pressure.

What this means is that our modern morality, which only acknowledges the horizontal, cannot be properly effective even on that level. The first moral requirement is to love God. Everything else springs from that, from the vertical, and if that love is not present then any morality is flawed and ultimately, dare I say it, will prove useless. I am not disputing that the modern approach to morality has improved on the past in some respects. For one thing it has done so because the past failed to live up to its ideals. People can be worse than their beliefs and they can also be better than their beliefs (which is not to say that beliefs don't matter!). But there is also the fact that exclusive focus on the horizontal will necessarily bring advancements in that particular area.  However these improvements take on much less significance once you realise that this approach has lost sight of the essential for it is founded on a falsehood, namely the primacy of man.

In the past we have emphasised the vertical axis and neglected the horizontal. Now we have the opposite problem. What we need is an understanding that both are required for a correct approach to morality. But that does not mean that both are equal. The vertical must take priority, since it is the source of everything else, and the horizontal be seen to derive from that. It has no validity on its own. All it has, it has by virtue of its relationship to the vertical. If you approach it on its own level and see it in its own light, you do not see it properly and, in fact, seen only in that way it doesn’t even have any real existence. 

Some people think that vertical and horizontal axes can be seen as the motivating forces behind conservative and liberal ideologies, with each set of beliefs originating from a focus on one or the other axis. I agree there is a connection to be made, but there are too many other tributaries feeding these streams for this connection to be in any way exact. So while it may be true that, ultimately, the conservative looks to the vertical and the liberal to the horizontal, it is too simplistic to make a direct analogy between them.

I have said that a true morality must have a vertical and a horizontal component, and that the latter must derive from the former. The atheist may well dispute this and say he can have a perfectly good morality without bringing God into the equation. Perhaps that is so but without an absolute reference point what do we base our morality on? For when God is banished from reality there can be no morality resting on something true or real but only one that depends on opinion and preference.  If there is not something that stands above us and unites us by virtue of its transcendence and its absoluteness then there is no unchanging right or wrong. There is only custom, convention and what is deemed to suit a particular society at any given moment.  If we are just the product of a directionless, purposeless, meaningless evolution, as the atheist and materialist believe, then nothing really matters, nothing is true and nothing is better than anything else. A human being is not the crown of creation and the means through which incarnate life may transcend itself but just one material form among many. As for the individual human being, each one is isolated and locked in itself with no real connection to any other human being. Morality is just a theoretical thing with no relationship to any kind of universal truth because there is none.

In the end, however, one must say that moralities are in the eye of the beholder. They shift with perspective but spirituality is what truly matters and that never changes, assuming of course that it is based on the real and not just as subjective as man-made morality systems.


*We could even be said to be living off the moral capital in Christianity in many respects, and it will be interesting to see how much real morality survives as Christianity becomes more marginalised and less and less of a cultural influence on future generations.

The Non-Duality Trap part 2

This is an update for The Non-Duality Trap which I have put at the end of that article but include here as well.

This piece is by far the most viewed of all the posts on this blog. Perhaps that reflects a feeling a lot of people have that non-duality, as it stands, leaves out too much to be a completely coherent doctrine of existence.  As this is also my feeling I have developed ideas only implied here in further articles which may interest those who feel the non-dualistic point of view to be too reductive/exclusive/limited, and these can be found by clicking on the non-duality label under Topics on the right. But, briefly, these articles approach the question of non-duality from the position that, yes, of course, God is One and there is nothing but God, but this unity includes multiplicity as well as the creative energies which do not belong to a degree of reality any less real than the undifferentiated, inactive, transcendent Divine Essence. Thus God’s essential being and His active powers are ontologically inseparable, and the latter do not belong to an inferior or somehow illusionary state of being as they tend to be seen to do in advaita. There is never one without the other and that means that reality is not dualistic but it is what you might call dyadic. Such a point of view has implications both for correct spiritual practice and for a proper appreciation of the reality of individual identity which is not negated in enlightenment, as it is in advaita, but seen for what it is; a unique and necessary vehicle through which universal oneness can manifest, know and be known. The fact that we have an uncreated aspect in pure spirit does not mean that our created aspect or soul is not real.

So where I take issue with rigid non-dualists is in their failure to see that individuality is real, and not only real but the very purpose of manifested existence. You are a true individual. Enlightenment comes when you go beyond the separate self and know your being to be one and the same as divine being, but this does not mean that your individual identity is lost. Post-enlightenment there remains a unique individual with its unique quality, and that is the locus in which realisation has occurred and without which it could not have occurred. For realising that you are the Self does not eliminate the self.  Rather it subsumes it, on the one hand, and transforms it, on the other.


So from this perspective the goal is not for the individual self to disappear into undifferentiated oneness, as a strict non-duality would demand, but for it to become transformed into a completely integrated synthesis of the part with the whole. To be divinized, you might say. And this, I believe, is what is meant when Jesus is described as both God and man. As for him, so for us. It is also the point and purpose of creation, and why there is something rather than nothing.

A Question on How God Changes

This is a question in response to a piece I wrote about a year ago and which can be found here.

Q. You said in an earlier piece that God grows but I don't see how God can change. Surely that undermines the whole idea of divine perfection and absoluteness. Only something relative can grow. Brahman cannot change. Please explain!

A.  You are, of course, quite correct to say that in the absolute sense God is always and forever complete and perfect, and nothing can be added to or taken away from Him. But through involvement in time and through creating self-conscious beings with a degree of freedom and individuality, there is a sense in which He grows or increases. This is something that can only happen in a world of change and becoming so you might say that the reason for this whole world of creation, us included, is precisely so that God may grow through self-expression. The religions which tend to emphasise the Absolute and pure being, and consequently downgrade the personal God, such as, in their different ways, Buddhism and advaita Vedanta, don’t properly appreciate the relevance of the relative and so have only half the truth. God is not just the absolute but the absolute and the relative together, always and equally, and any spiritual approach which ignores that is, in my view, incomplete. 

For many the idea that God could grow seems almost blasphemous, but might that not be because there is confusion between the two aspects of reality, namely being and becoming? Naturally the absolute cannot grow for if it could it would not be absolute, but the absolute is not all there is and its manifesting aspect, which is perfectly real just not absolutely so, can grow or, better put, become more. And that, as I say, is the whole point of creation and what gives it its joy and abundance. 
All of which means that God doesn't grow in His essence but can do through His expression or creativity.

You might reconcile the fact of the perfection of God with the idea that He changes (or grows) by saying that changelessness is a kind of limitation. And if God is infinite and unlimited then surely he cannot be restricted to changelessness. He must include the possibility of change too. And so God manifests or creates to become more; always complete but always moving on to greater levels of completion though this only relates to Him as He is in expression or active mode, but this creativity is an essential and fundamental part of the divine nature. 

I came to this way of thinking because I had to work out why I had an intuitive rejection of the Buddhist and rigid non-dualist point of view, and disagreed with all those who believe that reality is impersonal with the personal just an illusion to be transcended by the wise. For it seemed to me that the personal is the whole point of why there is something rather than nothing, and that God fully and equally encompasses both the absolute and the relative, both the impersonal and the personal, and there is no contradiction in that inclusive approach. Rather the contradiction lies in asserting that a purely impersonal reality could ever give rise to the personal. And if the impersonal is deemed to be the sole ground of reality with the personal somehow (how?) arising from that then to say that God is love is a meaningless statement instead of the fundamental truth which the Masters affirmed it to be.
 It's not enough to say that this statement is true in the relative world. If it's not true right down to the bedrock of existence then it's not true in any meaningful way at all.

So this is where I part company with those metaphysicians who tend to put logic above intuition and consequently see the relative (or activity) as lower than the absolute (or inactivity), and the personal as hierarchically inferior to the impersonal. I think we have to put them both on the same ontological footing, both equally necessary and equally intrinsic to the whole. Different, but both essential for completeness. For the truth is not in either/or but in both/and. Thus ultimate reality is not just one but two in one or maybe three in one as where there are two there must be three as in a and b and the relationship between them. Is this the Trinity?

But, setting aside all theoretical considerations about the nature of and relationship between personal and impersonal, I have the evidence of the Masters and their description of beings beyond them whom they referred to as higher Masters. This means that enlightenment cannot be an arrival at a point beyond which there is nothing higher. The transcending of the limitations of this world and duality as we understand it do not mean the end of spiritual evolution. The realisation of being does not mean the end of becoming. This continues, albeit in a higher cycle. For the Absolute simultaneously comprises both unity and differentiation, and union with it is but the beginning of ever deeper capacity for union that knows no end.

To sum up, then, I think a mistake made in advaita Vedanta and much Eastern metaphysics* in general is that the Impersonal is hierarchically superior to the Personal. How could the latter ever arise in any true sense unless it were somehow present in the Impersonal in the first place? And that suggests that the Impersonal isn’t really impersonal at all. Which has implications both for proper spiritual practice and for the idea we are considering here, namely that God can grow. He can do so because at the most fundamental level He includes both Absolute and Relative, both Impersonal and Personal, both changelessness and capacity for change. His nature is in both being and becoming, and there is never one without the other.


In conclusion, lest some readers see a contradiction between the statement here that reality includes both the impersonal and personal and the Master's oft-quoted injunction to forget the personal self, I should say that this is just a matter of different meanings for the same words. Forget the personal self means we must forget or die to the separate self to realise or merge with the Universal Self, but this does not mean that individual identity is lost. Rather it is transformed and made divine. Thus there is differentiation but no separation, and that is the secret to existence.

* Note:
Certainly not all. Kashmir Saivism has a much more nuanced and inclusive understanding of the nature of reality, manifest and unmanifest, than Sankara’s notion of Vedanta which may seem metaphysically and logically coherent but actually misses the crucial fact that reality is not being alone but being and becoming together. Also, Kashmir Saivism stresses the critical importance of grace, another concept missing in advaita which sees Brahman as totally inactive, and therefore stresses knowledge which in my view can never be sufficient to bring the soul to true enlightenment. That is always a matter of grace which comes when the soul gives itself back to its Maker.

·