The Loss of Intuition

One of the great and unrecognised problems in the contemporary world is that we have not only rejected religion but are also in the process of separating ourselves from natural law. Of course, when you abandon belief in a transcendent and divine principle then rejection of natural law cannot be far behind because it is no longer tied to anything. It has lost its roots in the real. But our separation from natural law has also occurred because of an over-reliance on reason and the downgrading of intuition.

Continued on Albion Awakening.

The Persecution of the Innocents

The innocents referred to here are those seeking to extract themselves from this world and return to God. So perhaps not innocent in the normal sense of the word but since to do this one must become as a little child then innocence might not be such a bad description after all.

It was suggested on the comment thread of a previous post that I wrote something about a phenomenon that anyone seriously treading the spiritual path will have encountered. That is abuse and rejection from those still ensnared in the coils of this world. In the modern God-denying West this is so commonplace as to be almost universal but it is something that has always existed. If you go back to the book of Revelation there is a passage which talks about how the accusers of the brethren were cast out of heaven by Michael and his angels and thrown down to earth where they went about trying to corrupt the souls of men. This clearly refers to the devil and his hordes but the term 'accusers of the brethren' can be taken to apply to anyone who condemns another for attempting to walk the spiritual path.

Whenever a person tries to rise above this world they are attacked by representatives of the world and subjected to criticism. This can range from mild disbelief at your naivety through accusations of selfishness and mental instability all the way up to descriptions of you as insane and even evil. Sometimes this might appear to be well-meaning but at others it is plain vicious. If I say that people who do the attacking are under the dominion of the devil that does not mean they are necessarily bad people. As I say, some can be well-meaning, especially family and friends who worry that you might have gone off the rails. The stories about people running off to join cults you used to hear so much about (though I presume that sort of thing still goes on) shows they are not entirely wrong.

 But I am not talking about that. I am talking about the experiences of anyone who wakes up and then tries to devote him or her self to leading a life and behaving in a way that will bring them closer to God. When you do that you can appear to be confronting people with their own darkness and the less pleasant will attack you for that. So the evil powers can exploit weaknesses in these people in their attempt to undermine you. Either by getting you to abandon your spiritual goals and practices or else by causing you to react in self-defence or with fear or anger. When that happens you have entered a state of negative emotion and/or pride and the devil is quite happy for you to continue in your spiritual beliefs if he has succeeded in dragging you down to his level. He doesn't care what you believe. He's only concerned with the state of your soul.

I said your accusers are not necessarily bad people but the truth is that they sometimes are. I mean bad in the sense of identified with sins of various natures and not doing anything to try to overcome them, either because they are unaware of them or else because they don't regard the sin as a sin - which is in itself a kind of sin - or even because the source of their sin is their delight and how they see themselves. It could be said that we are all like that to a degree, but the degree is important as is the amount to which these sins are a dominant part of our character.

Some people resent anyone who turns to spirituality because they think it means you are saying you are better than them. Admittedly one may give that impression. I rather think I did in the heady excitement of first discovering the spiritual path. I didn't mean to but I did think I was now beginning to wake up and most other people were still asleep and that made me more 'advanced'. But again that's a different thing. What I am talking about happens with certain people regardless of any impression you may give. You show up their deficiencies and they don't like it so they try to bring you down. The only sensible response is not to respond. Don't react. Don't enter into arguments. You don't win arguments. They just create more friction and drag you down. The Masters told me that the mind can argue for any position under the sun but truth can only be known, and that's obvious when you think about it. So just state your position and then leave it at that unless asked to elaborate. Sincerely asked, I mean, not asked as a lure to further argument which your opponent is only interested in winning. 

The Masters also told me several times that the greater progress I made the more I would be assailed by evil in all its forms. Why does the devil attack those who set out on the spiritual path so much? It's clear that he has an interest in stopping souls escape from this world. Whether that is because he gains energy from souls locked in the lower planes, the only planes he can relate to in his fallen state, or because of his desire to prove God wrong in giving humanity free will, I am not able to say. He obviously has an interest in destroying aspiration towards the good and in promoting attitudes and behaviour that separate us from God, and perhaps the more you try to escape his clutches the harder he will work to stop you. The sorry fact is the there are powers in the world, supernatural powers, that seek spiritual destruction and it does no good to pretend otherwise. Indeed, to recognise this is important if one wants to understand the state of the world today and also to know how to protect oneself from them.

Which brings us to the heart of this whole matter. Forces of evil do try to attack the spiritual seeker. The stories of early saints being persecuted by devils are not fictitious or even allegorical. They are true. Nowadays this may not take such an overt form as described in the life of St Anthony and most of us are not saints either. Nevertheless attacks will still take place. These might be inner attacks from dark forces which seek to affect our mind through aggravating our weaknesses or appealing to pride and such like, even tempting us to despair about our unworthiness or the horrors of the world. Or they may be attacks on us from external people, people we know, even friends and family. How do we respond to this, especially knowing that the devil loves to attack by accusing us of his own faults and vices so as to prompt our outraged indignation at the unfairness of it all? Then he's got us where he wants us, in a downward spiral of mutual recriminations.

Jesus told us to resist not evil. This doesn't mean you should allow evil to ride roughshod all over you and have its way. That does no one any good. It means don't respond inwardly. Don't allow evil to drag you down to its level. That is what the accusers of the brethren often seek to do, whether consciously as in the inner dark powers, or unconsciously as in ordinary people fallen under their influence. So try not to react. That's hard but it's what we have to do. And then don't allow yourself to feel self-righteous or superior. That way lies pride.  Don't get angry and don't condemn anyone who criticises you as a pawn of the devil. Even if they are on this occasion, and it may well be that they are, they are to be pitied on that account not demonized as evil themselves. Frankly this is hard when you are under verbal assault but you can look upon it as a test that will make you spiritually stronger and bring you closer to God.

So neither anger nor fear nor pride nor self-justification nor the attempt to repay the accuser in his own coin. Patience, forbearance, long suffering, humility. Hard, I know! But none of us will be accused or pilloried as much as Jesus was. He gave us the example to follow.

Can good deeds and right thoughts get you to heaven?

Short answer no, not on their own.

Longer answer on Albion Awakening.

Politics

All my life, and certainly ever since I became interested in spiritual matters, I have kept away from politics and regarded it as belonging to 'this world'. And, as a general rule, anyone with his or her mind set on higher things should have no concern with, and certainly not become involved in, worldly affairs. I still think like that in many respects. For anyone seriously on the return path to God the spiritual should take precedence over all else, and everything other than that should be seen in the light of the spiritual.

However I now foresee the time when to stand on the sidelines with regard to what goes on in this world could well be to become complicit in evil. As religion has declined in influence so politics has expanded to fill the void and now it is becoming not so much about how we are governed as what we are. Caesar is invading God's realm as he did during the time of Nero and the first Christian martyrs. The outer is trying to usurp the prerogatives of the inner and everywhere traditional (indeed archetypal) values are being overturned as a result. Clearly when that happens the spiritual person has to take a stand and can no longer position himself above it all.

So, though I still want to have as little to do with politics as possible and though I still believe that this should be the position of all sincere spiritual seekers (the sight of monks and nuns voting has always struck me as ridiculous), when, as now, politics starts to transgress its proper boundaries it may become time to review the situation. If politics is used as a covert means to implement evil (under the guise of good, of course) the spiritual person cannot just stand back and pretend detachment. When the world is a spiritual war zone one has to pick a side. That does not mean a political party. It means to align oneself with good rather than evil, truth rather than lies especially when the latter is disguised as the former.

With that in mind I should like to make the following points. There is an anti-spiritual power in the universe which seeks to undermine traditional institutions based on truth and then turn them on their head so that the original meaning is lost. We might think that original meaning is still there, or even enhanced, because its abstract quality remains but when the form its expression takes is distorted, when it is misapplied, then the principle is destroyed. To take just two obvious examples look at art and marriage. Neither of these are now what they were. Both have been so attacked that their true meaning has been debased. 

The devil always works by making truth lies and lies truth. But he includes enough truth in his lies to make them palatable before undermining that truth and exalting the lie. He has a long term strategy and will start his distortions innocently enough but, when you know how to look, you can see the incipient corruption from the beginning. With feminism, for example, he has attacked the basic composition of being under the guise of justice, fairness and truth. But after some initial righting of wrongs he has proceeded to his true agenda which is to try to make women become more like men and blur the lines between the sexes to the deep mutual loss, spiritual loss, for both sexes. Some see this as an evolutionary advancement and a move towards making us all androgynous which is supposedly a good thing but why are there two sexes? It is not just for the physical reproduction of children. There is a far more profound reason which has to do with love, creativity, beauty in the spiritual sense of all of these.

Besides which life is meant to grow organically, building on the past. Jesus came to fulfil the prophets not to abolish them. Radical restructuring such as this is not part of natural growth. It is revolution not evolution which is not how the spiritual powers work except in extreme crisis when human beings have strayed too far from their intended path. To be sure, there is transformation but that is from one state of being to another. It does not concern movements within the same state of being, in this case the merely human.

It's time to recognise that the real power behind the left has always had as its true goal the undermining and destruction of religion, and this is the germ present in all leftism even that of the traditional sort which was often upheld by well-meaning and God-fearing people but still people in whom spiritual insight took second place to a desire to implement social reconstruction. Thus they were people who basically construed reality in terms of this world and failed to see that this world has context and meaning only in terms of how it serves the next. So even when sincere and personally morally upright they had things back to front. Their legacy is the modern left which has no use for religion at all except insofar as it can be inveigled into its agenda. This is because when religion is not front and centre it gradually gets pushed to the edge and then out of the picture altogether.

The core principle of the left is equality which is a false transposition of a purely spiritual principle to the material world. When applied to the material world it inevitably leads to the destruction of quality and value, both necessarily hierarchical, and that in turn means the destruction of truth. It wouldn't in a perfect world but this is not that by any means. It is a fallen world and currently fallen further than ever before. This was always known by the powers behind the left whose aim was the destruction of the Good as in orientation towards God. It is also probably sensed by many of their human representatives (not all, of course, many are good intentioned people who nevertheless lack any spiritual perception) whose underlying motives, it is clear from history and the present day, are hatred and resentment. I see it as no accident that the left is called the left for that is traditionally the path of spiritual deviancy. If it is countered that maybe left wing people just don't believe in God and do believe in humanity I would respond with St Paul in Romans 1:20-22 that the knowledge of God is inscribed on every human heart.

"For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give him thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts and their senseless hearts were darkened.

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools."

None of this means that the right is right. But whereas the right has been corrupted by materialism, greed and selfishness it is an example of something, basically sound, gone wrong, specifically because it has disconnected itself from its roots in religion. But the left is an example of something wrong from the beginning. The right could potentially be reformed if it rediscovered a deep spiritual foundation. The left was wrong from the start because of its worldly focus though it may once have had a corrective or balancing function. Now, however, when it has become the underlying assumption of virtually all modern political thinking (save extremist reactions against it on an exclusively worldly level) its true nature of spiritual destruction should be clear. That it is not to so many people shows how far we are from any true understanding into the purpose of life in this world and the next.


Note: I condemn the left more than the right because it is the left that has tried to remake reality according to its materialistic image. The right has merely followed in its wake in this respect (and it has). Economic considerations are really the least of our worries and hardly the point at all.

What Do We Mean by Meaning?

I was thinking about this the other day.  There can be no true meaning in a materialistic world in which nothing has any real purpose or permanence. Nothing is even real. I'm not real, You're not real. We're just temporary assemblages of atoms, molecules and electric impulses or whatever whose only significance is to pass on our meaninglessness. Is it any wonder that when we peel away the illusions we comfort ourselves with we feel so empty?

More here

The Via Negativa

Following an interesting exchange of views on another post I've been considering the Via Negativa and why I think it to be an advanced but ultimately insufficient approach to God. For those who aren't familiar with the term (it's also known as the apophatic way), it can be defined as the approach to God through negation. No words can describe God, He cannot be known as he is in his essential nature by means of his attributes. He is 'not this and not that'. Anything you say about him is ultimately false. You cannot think anything about him and no concept can hold him who is above and beyond all concept. So you strip everything from your mind. You leave it in what appears to be total darkness and truth arises, a truth that cannot be framed in language. You get the idea. It's contrasted with the Via Affirmativa (cataphatic mysticism) in which God is approached through his attributes of goodness, wisdom, love etc.

The first slightly mischievous thing I would say is that if you cannot approach God through positive affirmation why should you be able to do so through the opposite way, negatively? Opposites are part of the same set up. One suggests the other. One is the other turned inside out. So the Via Negativa is not a higher way than the Via Affirmativa. It is simply its reflection. The two are not separate. You might think this is a false correlation but what it amounts to is that is still the mind that makes the choice of concept or non-concept. Non-concept is still a concept. If the mind seeks God by rejecting or cutting away it has made a choice.

This is not an argument in favour of the Via Affirmativa. That is incomplete because it approaches God through his qualities rather than his being. Instead it's an argument for an approach that either includes both ways, relative and absolute as you might call them, or even dispenses with both for something, to use a favourite analogy of mine, that sits above them like the point of the apex of a triangle sits above (and reconciles on a higher level) the two base points. This requires a both/and attitude rather than an either/or one. You cannot limit God to 'not this' any more than you can limit him to 'this'. He encompasses and is more than both. So approaching God only as the unmanifest absolute, which is what the Via Negativa does, while it does away with some of the problems associated with restricting him to form of some kind, abstract or real, nevertheless brings its own difficulties.

So I regard the Via Negativa as something like what the Buddhists call skilful means. That is, it is not actually true as it stands but is a way for the mind to approach truth through stripping it of its illusions and attachments. But the point is that while we should not be identified with or attached to anything in creation, creation nonetheless exists and gives meaning and beauty and goodness and, yes, even truth to life. For there is no truth without creation. There just is what is. You can call what is truth but if that truth is to be known you have to introduce an extra element and once you have done that you have already stepped off the Via Negativa.

If the Via Negativa were the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth one would have to ask, why would God create a universe? What's the point of humanity? And why would we come to this world to experience its sorrows? I have gone into that a bit here but essentially the answer is that he did this to go beyond the state that the Via Negativa would lead to. That remains, of course, as a kind of substratum but all the positive aspects of life can now be expressed and known. And these positive aspects are part of reality. They are not illusions. They are of the eternal nature of God for God is just as much his qualities as he is what is conceived of (by us) as his unmanifest essence. He is love, as Christ taught us. He does not have compassion. He is love.

 For me that one fact shows that, for all its virtues of breaking false attachments and man-made ideologies, the Via Negativa is incomplete. Taken literally it would dismiss love for it would dismiss the relative and embrace the absolute alone and in the absolute qua absolute there can be no love. There can only be a generalised, universalised compassion but there cannot be love or, for that matter, beauty or goodness.

Luckily we are saved from the tyranny of that kind of absolute by the reality of the Trinity.

So I would regard the Via Negativa as an important aspect of the path to God and an essential counterbalance to its opposite approach. By stripping away all the manifested aspects of our being we find the uncreated core. And yet we are and will remain created beings, and these created parts of us are real. What God creates is real. We should not be attached to them or wholly identified with them or view them in a false light of their own self-sufficient reality but nor should we deny them their own proper place in the hierarchy of existence . Again it's both/and though all parts of the whole should be viewed in their correct hierarchical relationship. This makes for a so much richer and more joyous existence than retreating to the unmanifest absolute, blissful as that may be. It's the life more abundant.

And God thinks so too. That's why he created.

Christ and India

I have put a post on Albion Awakening that speculates on a possible connection between Jesus and India. I should emphasis that it is very speculative!

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/christ-and-india.html