England's Failure. Another Chance?

I believe that England was intended to be, or, at least, it was hoped that she might be, a pioneer for a revived form of spirituality in the late 20th century but this failed. It failed through a combination of social and political actions that came about in the 1980s but had their roots earlier, sometimes much earlier. We are still living with the consequences of that today.

More on Albion Awakening.

The Quest for Moral Purity

This is a question about a rather unusual action but I think it's worth including here because it points to a certain type of behaviour which might be perceived as highly moral yet which could actually be motivated either by spiritual pride or even caused by a personality defect.

Q. I read recently about a person who every month gives virtually all her salary to charity leaving only a small fraction for basic living expenses. Do you think the world would be a better place if we all did this?

A. Maybe. As always, though, with matters of this kind one must look for the true motive. Is this a concern for moral purity which is actually a quest for moral superiority, and the action, forgive me, of a self-righteous prig, or even someone who is slightly mentally ill and wishes to attain to a kind of personal sanctity by appearing (to herself as well as others) much better than anyone else? Sometimes the spiritual seeker (whether a religious believer or not) mistakenly seeks a kind of perfection of the separate self, and this sort of behaviour could indicate that. It's rather like a person who refuses to kill a mosquito under any circumstances or a fruitarian who won't eat anything that harms anything in any way. Over-zealous people of this type forget that these external attitudes do not constitute true spiritual understanding. Rather they imply a self-absorbed over-concern with personal purity and righteousness. The desire to go one step further than anyone else and thereby prove moral superiority.

We have probably all met people a bit like that, people motivated by a puritanical obsession to be morally superior but who have little real love in their hearts, either for God or for their fellow men and women, though they may claim to love humanity in a vague general sense. However as the prophet Isaiah said (albeit in a different context) when all is said and done, 'all our righteousness is as filthy rags'. In other words, the ego remains the ego whatever it does. The fallen self can never be good in itself however hard it tries. Only through humility and grace can we really find God and the true uncorrupted self.

There is a name for this kind of behaviour which is pathological altruism meaning an altruism that springs from a personality defect rather than genuine kindness of heart. This is not meant to judge any one individual but to provide a general principle about spiritual excess and melodramatic gesture. The middle way is usually the best way and, as always with anything to do with spirituality, it is the motive behind thoughts and actions that counts. I don't say external behaviour is irrelevant. Of course it isn't but it is secondary. What we do is always less significant than what we think in our hearts and how much we love. Personal sacrifice is good, no doubt, but the only real sacrifice is of the self. This sounds more like a sacrifice ultimately intended for the advancement of the self because of its excessive nature rather like some of the austerities performed by Indian yogis and fakirs.

It is an unfortunate fact that many people take to various forms of spiritual practice to extend the domain of their own ego. The modern liberal often does the same thing with his disfigured version of morality. Indeed, the tendency to seek a personal moral perfection is a temptation we should all be on the lookout for. Morality is not something we should seek for its own sake or our sake or even for humanity's sake. It is something that can only really grow out of the love for God. Apart from that love it is not much more than nothing. In this respect these words from The Cloud of Unknowing, the 14th century book of mysticism by an anonymous Englishman, are worth thinking about.

"I tell you truly that the devil has his contemplatives as God has his.

So beware of behaving wildly like some animal, and learn to love God with quiet, eager joy, at rest in body as in soul. Remember your manners, and wait humbly upon our Lord’s will.

They are more anxious to seem holy in the sight of men than in the sight of God and his angels. Why, these people will worry and grieve more over unorthodox ritual, or the speaking of an unseemly or unsuitable word, than they will for a thousand vain thoughts or nauseating and sinful impulses, which they have deliberately gathered to themselves, or recklessly indulged in in the sight of God, and the saints and angels in heaven. Ah, Lord God! where there are so many humble bleats without, there must be pride within.

The fiend will deceive some men in this way; in a most remarkable fashion he will set them on fire to maintain the law of God and to destroy sin in all other men. He will never tempt them with anything that is openly evil. He makes them like those busy ecclesiastics who watch over every condition of our Christian life, as an abbot does over his monks. For they do not hesitate to reprove us all for our faults, just as if they had the cure of souls. For the sake of God they think they dare not do otherwise than declare the faults they see. They say they have been moved to do so by fervent charity, and by the love of God that is in their hearts. But they lie. It is the fire of hell which is welling up in their minds and imaginations."

These are strong words which might seem a bit over the top nowadays. But a spiritual director must be ruthless in rooting out all falseness from disciples and, heaven knows, in all of us there is a good deal of falseness and treading the spiritual path will always bring it to the surface.

Eastern Religion for Western People

I wrote in a post a while ago words to the effect that I had never seen Eastern religions particularly benefitting Westerners. I know that is a very sweeping statement but, generally speaking, I think it is true though, as with any rule, there will always be exceptions. Before proceeding any further I should first of all say that I have learnt an enormous amount from Eastern religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, but I have learnt this as an outsider looking in. I have never been tempted to adopt an Eastern approach but I have used insights gained from studying these philosophies to deepen my own understanding of spiritual matters. So I am certainly not saying that Westerners should not study Eastern religions. I don't say they must but I think that if they do they will gain a lot thereby. However studying a religion and fully participating in it are two quite different things. It is the latter I am referring to when I say that I don't think Eastern religions particularly benefit Westerners.

There are two issues here and I will get one of them out of the way quickly. Each religion has its own mythology and really you cannot adopt this. It has to be part of you, and that is definitely the case where Hinduism is concerned. I do think you have to be Indian to be a Hindu. Traditionally that is the case anyway. To be sure, you can take the philosophical aspect and leave the mythical side alone but then you will remain outside the religion as a whole so your interaction with it will always be slightly, or even very, artificial. It will be like reading a poem in translation. Of course, you can get something from it but you are not reading the real poem. Where Buddhism is concerned the situation is a little different as that is not so tied to a particular place (Hinduism is the one major religion that comes from the spirit of a land rather than an individual prophet or founder), but it is still soaked in a mythology and garb that will always be alien to a Westerner. They might be able to access the intellectual spirit of the religion but the form will not be natural to them and this is more important than it might appear. The spirit is certainly the main thing but the form houses and earths that spirit so cannot just be dismissed. In a way it and it alone gives true access to what you might call the spirit of the spirit, its living kernel. The appearance of something cannot be completely separated from what it is inside, not without damaging the whole which then becomes considerably less effective.

I'm not saying that nobody can be converted to a religion in which they have not been born. That's clearly nonsense. But the gulf between the modern Western mindset and the ancient Eastern religious attitude and view of the world is too wide for there ever to be a genuine and natural union between the two. The meeting will always be at several removes so adopting a religion that comes from long ago and far away, and is not 'in the blood', will always have a certain artificiality to it which means that it cannot ever really be a natural thing which it must be if it is to spiritually feed and nourish the soul as it should.

But even supposing this bridge can be crossed there is another and greater problem. Most Western people who look to the East for enlightenment are doing just that.  They are looking for enlightenment. They are aspiring mystics seeking a higher state of consciousness. It doesn't matter if you say that Nirvana or Brahman is beyond a mere state of consciousness, that is basically what these people are doing. They seek mystical experience. I know. I've done that myself. But is mystical experience, or even enlightenment, what the religious path is really meant to be about? Is it to do with tracing life back to its unmanifest source of consciousness in itself, without any colouring or flavouring of individuality at all, or is it to do with making the soul fit to receive divine grace thus rendering it holy which requires that it acts out of love for the divine being rather than desire for any condition or state of mind or being, spiritual or otherwise? You might think these two things are just different ways of describing the same thing but there is an important difference and it is to do with motive as well as goal. In the one individuality is (supposedly) renounced but in the other it is brought to perfection by being taken beyond itself in love. Love is key and it is to know its Creator in love that is the true spiritual goal and purpose. Only this takes us beyond the separate self with its personal goals.

Most Western people who take to Eastern forms of spirituality have a humancentric approach to spirituality and privilege knowledge over love but you will only find the true God (and there are many states and conditions you might mistake for God in the higher planes if you are not pure of heart) when your approach is fully theocentric and your motive is love. If you seek knowledge only you may well find a spiritual state that is profound, but you will not be fulfilling the true purpose of your being born in this material world of change and time and multiplicity. You will be abandoning half of life for exclusive focus on one part, albeit that which can be described as absolute. But life is more than just the absolute alone and if you restrict it to that you will be falling short in your duty to God who created you (and he did do that) so that you might know him in a full relationship of love and thereby add your unique individuality to the whole of creation so that it might expand and grow into ever greater glory. Simply to retreat into pure awareness is not going to do that. In a way that is a refusal of the gift you have been given and of the chance to make a gift yourself. I mean by that to make the gift of your self, your sanctified and redeemed self.

Ancient Eastern philosophies are wise and profound. They have much to teach us and I believe that some of their practices can help anyone develop spiritually and start to align himself with the unmanifest ground of being. But ultimately they are to do with knowledge, technique and method, and true religion requires more than this. To go beyond the ground of universal consciousness to a higher spiritual state (and there is such), to go to God as he is in himself not as he is in his outer aspect of pure being, we need love. The prime teacher and exemplar of love is Christ. He is what he teaches and the only way we can become that is to become like him. Christ is still all important for the West.

The Buddha brought light to the world but Christ went further. He included all that the Buddha brought of light and the wisdom of oneness but added to that divine love which, be it noted, is only acquired through suffering. The Buddha, the paragon of the East, sought to escape suffering but Christ, through his acceptance of suffering, transformed it into a path to divine love. It is Christ who set the spiritual pattern for the West to follow.

Dealing With the Modern World

Some thoughts on this sometimes tricky matter on Albion Awakening.

Man is Made in the Image of God

A running theme of the writings here, always implicit but brought out more recently, is that God is personal and not the impersonal, or even so called transpersonal, absolute of many forms of mysticism, particularly Eastern but increasingly Western too. So rather than the absolute undifferentiated oneness that these approaches to truth offer, it is the combination of oneness and individuality that is the highest state open to man and the reason for this world of creation in which everything has a value and nothing is illusion except the darkness of separative existence - though even that can become a perceived reality for us if we go too far in its direction.

God is a Person (capitalized because he is the source of all personhood, our possibility of being a person deriving from the reality of him as Person). Do you not feel a sense of relief in hearing that? It means that you are loved, and that there is a purpose behind everything that happens in this world. We are too quick to dismiss this idea as anthropomorphic and say that we have made God in our own image. That may be true for many of the pagan gods, the Thors and the Cybeles etc, but it is not true of the one living God and Creator who is the source and pattern of all the highest and best in us. Of truth, love, beauty, goodness, and of the capacity to give and to sacrifice without thought of reward. Everyone feels these qualities within themselves to some degree, however overlaid by greed, ignorance and selfishness they might be, and everyone recognizes that they are laudable and should be encouraged unless they are sunk so low in self-hatred and bitterness that they cannot rise above cynicism or pride. They are the stamp of the divine Person within us, the reflection of his qualities and, however dim and imperfect that reflection may be, it is still the image of God shining in our hearts, and we can always use it to connect ourselves to our Creator.

God is not like us. We are like him though only so in terms of our purest, best and truest selves. If he had intended us to bathe in the blissfulness of pure consciousness, as the non-dualists would have it, there would have been no need to undergo the experience of life in this world; no need to develop a true sense of values, of courage and the ability to endure suffering cheerfully. But there is the need to learn all these things because they make us actively good rather than just neutral or detached, and that is why we are here. It is why God conceals himself from us and it is why we live in a world of opposites where evil and suffering are not only possible but likely, indeed inevitable. It is only through struggle that we rise and are able to bring out the potential that exists within us all.

So, far from desiring us to deny our individuality, God wants us to develop this from the seed he has implanted within us. He does not want clones. He wants free individuals but ones who are individual not individualistic. The difference is all important. Understand that there is no contradiction between oneness and individuality. This is simply how things are in a universe in which the One is the underlying reality but the many is the expressed reality, and the reason for that is that God, the fundamental 'I AM', finds the greatest joy in always becoming more. It is his nature to give and to expand (through us) and to know both the bliss of being and the joy of becoming which latter is also the means and fulfilment of his fundamental quality of love. Those who think of the absolute as beyond and above all qualities have misunderstood the very nature of God and creation. For the highest truth is not in pure being alone but in bringing being and becoming into harmony, with each completing the other. Isn't a beautiful painting better than a blank canvas? Pure unadulterated oneness would mean that love was an illusion but it is not. It is the essence of existence and that is because God is not one but three in one, and this is reflected in nature whether that be concretely in Man, Woman and Child or abstractly in subject, object and the relationship between them.

Divine reality has been perceived by human beings in this world as sometimes impersonal and sometimes personal. Over the last 100 years or so it has become more common to think that the impersonal conception is nearer the truth, but I regard this as a sad error caused by our current intellectual focus as well as a rejection of earlier (possibly simplistic) ideas about a personal God. I believe God to be personal in his true self-nature but with an impersonal aspect though that is not him in himself but him as the one life as it exists throughout his creation. It is him as immanence. We can identify with this life aspect if that is our wish, but it is a less comprehensive state than the one of relationship with the personal God, the transcendent Creator, a relationship whose basis is love and which acknowledges creation as real. Note that there is a sort of impersonal benevolence when an individual becomes identified with the pure ground of being (manifesting as compassion), but it is not the fiery joy of true divine love which is only known when creation is accepted as fully real in itself, albeit real as an expression of God, and not regarded simply as a lesser state of illusion or dream that is dissipated in the light of the Absolute.


Oneness underlies the multiplicity of reality but it is not the whole picture by any means. It does not make creation insignificant for creation comes about specifically to make something more than simple oneness. An impersonal absolute could never create and, in fact, could never lead to anything. It would just be itself. Creation needs a mind and a mind means a person. There is no getting away from this. God is personal and that means our individuality is real. We do not 'go beyond' it. We do go beyond exclusive identification with it but we retain our unique quality and if we did not what would become of love? What would become of beauty which always needs a form, of goodness which must be expressed and of truth which requires a mind to know it? There is an aspect of pure being to the divine nature but, though this might be shocking to the non-dualist to hear, it is only a part of it. It is the ground of being, like a spiritual counterpart to the body, but it is not God and if you focus on that exclusively you are falling well short of your true destiny as a human being. Man is spirit, soul and body as in his life, his unique quality and his form, and though there is a hierarchical relationship between these parts of his being they are all fundamental aspects of the totality of what he is and can’t be separated. Like his Creator, in whose image he is made, he is three in one. 

Things Jesus Didn't Say

Here's a little game to play over on Albion Awakening.

Transhumanism and Spirituality

There's an article in the Guardian today about transhumanism. This is basically the idea that human beings can extend their lives and expand their consciousness (almost indefinitely in both cases) through technology. It is sometimes linked to spirituality either as a replacement for it or as a means to realise it. The predictions in the New Testament for a new humanity and a new Jerusalem have even been linked to it.

So it seems important to make the categorical statement that spirituality and technology are completely separate things. There is no possibility of technology ever aiding in the spiritual search. It belongs exclusively to the material world of form and quantity and has no relation, none whatsoever, with the spiritual world of consciousness and quality.

This is yet another attempt by satanic forces to tempt humanity to try to be gods on their own and without reference to a Creator. To a materialistic culture, which has made an idol of science, the idea certainly is tempting but the fact remains that proper spirituality is first and foremost a moral thing and depends entirely on love, love of the good, the beautiful and the true, all of which are effectively denied by the modern scientific mentality with its focus on technique and its rejection of anything beyond itself. Neither technique nor technology can ever bring about a genuine spiritual mindset or consciousness and to propose otherwise is, whether realised as such or not, frankly diabolical.

Technology works from the outside but this is the precise opposite of spirituality which works, or should do, from the inside since matter follows spirit not vice versa. There is no spirituality without prior purification of heart, mind, body and soul.  There is no spirituality without dedication to truth which is a transcendent thing not realisable by the rational mind. A technological enlightenment would be a nightmare because it would cut us off from the real spiritual world of love, beauty and goodness leaving us with ersatz imitations of these which, sooner or later, would become prisons.

Reject the false chimera of technological solutions to the problems of existence. Instead adopt the simple solution of remembering the Creator.

Note: This is filed under the labels of The Kali Yuga (or End Times) and The Material World because the attitude behind it is a perfect representation of our contemporary age when the hierarchical relationship between spirit and matter has been inverted.