Spiritual Feelings

 I occasionally hear people talk about how 'spiritual' they are as in "I'm a very spiritual person". What they mean by this is rather different to what used to be meant. For one thing, you would never have said it of yourself. It's like saying I'm a good person and not even Jesus accepted that of himself (see Matthew 19:17). But it also shows a basic misunderstanding of what spirituality actually is.

Spirituality is not believing that life has a spiritual component to it. It is not even thinking that this component is the most important thing and seeking it out through various means. It is certainly not cultivating a beatific smile and "loving" everyone equally because we are all one. Or being a vegan or meditating. Spirituality is not about having spiritual feelings and looking to satisfy those. That, dear reader, is just another form of consumerism.

I was inspired to write this post because of a discussion with a young person who had been practising meditation for a few months. She said she had found great inner peace at first but could not now recapture this and was distressed by that fact. She wanted more than anything to get back to her calm and tranquil state. At the same time, she realised that her meditation had numbed her in certain ways. (That was not the word she used but she agreed with it when I suggested it). She had become more self-absorbed, less able to deal with the world. She even said she felt she had stopped growing as a person. I told her that this might be exactly why she had been pushed away from her inner peace. That peace was actually a sort of stagnation. We are here to learn not to retreat to a passive bliss in which we cut ourselves off from the external world. If that were the goal why be born at all? She had been doing a vaguely Buddhist sort of meditation, as so many do, and when I pointed out that in traditional Buddhism meditation was only meant for monks and practised within the context of a strict religious framework she expressed surprise. Wasn't it for everyone? I said that in my opinion meditation can do more spiritual harm than good if it is secularised and simply used as a psychological tool to find peace. This is because it can take you away from a proper awareness of God. He becomes simply what you yourself are inside. From there it is a short step to thinking that you yourself are God, the only God you need. This is an error made by many Western practitioners of Eastern-style religions or those who adopt their techniques without adopting a real religious sensibility. They don't usually put it as bluntly as that but that is what their attitude often boils down to.

True spirituality is one thing only and that is loving God. But this means real love and the real God, intuited in the heart and perceived through his creation. Then it means subordinating yourself and all your desires to this love. As long as your idea of spirituality involves you seeking some benefit for yourself, it is a worldly thing. Of course, motives are usually mixed but the emphasis must always be on the love of God. This is why mystics were often frowned upon. If you are a mystic seeking mystical experience for your personal bliss are you really that different to a materialist looking to fulfil herself through continual shopping?

Spiritual Names

Those who have read Meeting the Masters will know that the spiritual beings who spoke to me did not identify themselves by name except on a couple of occasions. One of their helpers, which term I took to refer to discarnate souls still in the vicinity of the physical realm who assisted them in various ways but were not of their spiritual status, called himself Raman (with a long first 'a'). And one of the higher masters, as he was described, said his name was Sigemund.

But there was one other occasion when a name was mentioned. I haven't spoken of this before because it happened at a time when I was no longer taking notes so it resides in my memory only. Also, I don't know which of the group this was as he was just mentioned as being one of them. Unfortunately, I don't even recall the circumstances properly but I do clearly remember the name which was Silvanus.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw a reference to one of St Paul's companions who travelled with him on two of his missionary journeys and is known as Silas or Silvanus. There is also a figure who may or may not be the same person called Silvanus of the Seventy, one of those apostles sent out by Jesus to preach the gospel in Luke 10. I didn't know of either of these connections at the time. Nor had I heard of The Teachings of Silvanus which is one of the books from the Nag Hammadi library that is dated to around 150 AD and is described as early Christian wisdom literature. There is an icon of Silvanus on his Wikipedia page. He's the one on the left. I have to say that the image of this little group does carry something of the feel of the spiritual messengers who spoke to me. There is an air of gravity, wisdom and dedication which both share though to temper the somewhat dour impression that might give I should add that the Masters were not above making the occasional small joke.

Silvanus, Crescens and Silas

I have written that names of spiritual beings can be a distraction in that one can get caught up in the personality or focus on an individual rather than the message he carries which is always something along the lines of "Seek God with all your heart and mind and soul". You can then pay more attention to the medium than that message. At the same time, all souls have their spiritual name which really does carry something of their essential self within it. The supreme example is, of course, Jesus Christ who also taught us to pray "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name". But it extends throughout creation too. And so, with that in mind, I offer here another name of one of the spiritual group who spoke to me. 

What's Behind It All?

There seem to be an increasing number of people realising that the coronavirus scare with its masks, lockdowns and vaccines might actually be part of a massive project designed to rob humanity of its liberty and put the majority of us back to the status of something like serfs. Some think this is an ambitious scheme devised from the beginning by powerful behind the scenes cabals for their own ends of control and dominance, political, social and financial. Others would say that governments world-wide just stumbled into the current measures because of their ineptitude, better safe than sorry policies and fear of alienating voters (always the problem with democracies), and that this has been taken advantage of by said cabals. I believe there are elements of truth in both these ideas but that actually all worldly bodies are just pawns in the game and the true driving force behind the agenda is demonic. 

This matters. If it is simply a question of worldly powers seeking more power then all we have to lose is our worldly freedom. This is no small thing and I don't discount it for a moment. But it is not the same as the loss of spiritual freedom, and that is the real goal behind what is taking place today. Not just with the coronavirus but in almost every area of thought. We are being herded into the pen marked materialism like lambs to the (spiritual) slaughter. We are being told that what we naturally think and believe is wrong and must be changed to reflect a constructed ideology based on the denial of God and creation. If we allow ourselves to go along with this the end result will be spiritual death.

It is not enough to see through the political agenda of the present time. It is an excellent and necessary start but it is not enough. We must go beyond a worldly viewpoint to a spiritual one. That is the only guarantee that we can be saved from the loss of soul which is the aim of the demonic powers who are far more concerned with capturing our minds than just locking us up in our houses. It is this mind capture which lies behind the attempted imposition of all the anti-spiritual beliefs of our time. In spirituality is freedom. The form our spiritual belief takes is important but there is some room for manoeuvre there if the motivation is true. What is absolutely critical, though, is to have the understanding that sees reality as transcending this world and to make this the focal point of our thought with worldly concerns revolving around that unlike so many supposedly religious people whose religious thought actually orbits around a worldly centre.

We need, in short, a heliocentric spirituality.

I would like to say this to all those who are waking up to the coronavirus scam*. You are only half-awake. You must go further. You must see that the global response to a disease which only kills a small percentage of elderly people has a deeper significance than just the political. It is part of a much wider strategy which seeks to remove freedom from all areas of life and force human beings into a state of spiritual subservience in which they believe what the controlling powers want them to believe. This will lead to the tragic condition known as loss of soul which is the ultimate end sought by the demonic powers. 

Does this seem too outlandish? I assure you that once you look at current goings on in this light it will make much more sense of them than anything else. The difficulty is that it may require a complete transformation of outlook for most people but this is really only a return to things humanity always instinctively knew until it was seduced by its own powers of reason and thought. I am obviously not decrying these powers. Their development was good and necessary but they cannot reveal first principles which operate on a plane beyond their ability to access. They can clarify first principles but they cannot establish them for that is down to intuition. Trust your intuition. That's what my teachers told me and that is what I am passing on to anyone who reads these words. It may trip up on details but as a guide to deeper truths and what is happening today it is fundamentally sound.

*I'm not saying it is not real but that the measures taken to contain it are a vast over-reaction.

Rebellious Souls

The contemporary world lives in a state of rebellion against its maker. We see this in all movements to remake human beings from their natural state into something different that coincides with the egotistical desires of the lower self, that self-centred entity that is a construct of the mortal mind rather than the soul, this latter being the true source of our individuality and naturally tied to God, its Creator. I don't care if you believe yourself to be religious. If you go along with any of the modern attempts that seek to reframe human beings according to earthly considerations, meaning those that take our earthly selves and their desires and feelings as primary, then you are a rebel against God. You don't really believe in him despite what you may say or think. You believe the created is more important than the Creator. At root, you believe in yourself, first and foremost.

The true sons and daughters of God who are aware from whence they come are not motivated by anger, resentment or envy. But scratch the surface and these are the driving forces behind the social and political movements of the present day. I suggest that the people involved in these movements, which they would doubtless describe as movements of social justice, are largely rebels against God and that what distinguishes them is fundamentally the same as what distinguished the first rebel against God. It's the desire to have their own way and to remake reality according to what they want, their own will. This can be dressed up in intellectual or moral clothing but the heart of a revolutionary is always sour and he always looks for the evil in external factors, never in himself.

The true son of God approaches the world with gratitude and humility. Yes, the world always needs improving but he recognises that improvement comes mostly from a better personal relationship with God. The spiritual must precede the material if the material is to be patterned correctly and not according to itself. The rebel always has a sense of injury. He knows better than God. He can reform what God has got wrong. And so, while he may claim to be working for the betterment of humanity, if his work is not rooted in what Jesus called the law and the prophets (which he famously said he did not come to abolish but to fulfil) then he is working against God.

Nicolai Berdyaev talked of spiritual aristocrats and spiritual proletarians. The former are those of any background, class, creed or race who are conscious of being sons and daughters of God and who accept the honour and responsibility of such a position. They are conscious of the soul, the spiritual component of their being, and seek to live according to that. They know this world exists not for itself but as a training ground for heaven. That doesn't mean we shouldn't cherish this world and make it the best reflection of heaven we can but we should know that we can never entirely succeed in that because entropy, corruption, decay, in short, mortality, are all built into it as it stands at the moment. It is not meant to be heaven and will not be until (perhaps) the end of time. The latter are those who either reject God completely or else try to fit him into a worldly agenda. Their motivations are either to do with pride, envy, resentment or else their spiritual attachment is too weak to overwhelm a fundamentally materialistic worldview. They see spirituality as an extension of the earthly viewpoint not something that radically transforms and replaces it.

There seem to be more of these rebellious souls alive today than at any previous time of history. This may just be a perception or it may be a result of the general spiritual apathy and material well-being. It could even be a consequence of the relaxation of Darwinian natural selection as souls with both mental and physical maladaptive mutations remain alive or are born because of modern technology whereas before they might not have survived. Harsh as it might seem, Nature fine-tunes. However, it could also be because more of this type of soul are being born into the world today to give them one final chance to come good. As the noose of materialism tightens the stark reality of what materialism really means, which is death, will be hard to avoid. Recalcitrant souls will be offered what may be a determining opportunity to repent, with those that fail to take the opportunity demoted, to use a sporting analogy.

Life or Death? You Choose

What if the present time were an examination to see which souls wanted life and which did not? For life read spiritual life for when you come down to it there is no other. Life, being, existence, is a spiritual thing. Matter by itself has no life. It is the form life takes. It is the means through which life expresses itself but it is not life. Today we are being asked to choose. Do we wish to live or not?

If asked outright everyone would presumably say they wished to live but it's not that simple. If your actions, thoughts and feelings indicate a rejection of what life actually is then what have you really chosen? If you do not embrace life with your heart, which means embrace what life is, then it makes no difference what you think you want. You have chosen anti-life. If your inner being in the form of your thoughts, desires and what you love points you away from spiritual life that shows you have, in  a certain sense, chosen death for life is spiritual and to reject the spirit is to reject life.

This might seem unfair. Why are we not given all the information? Then we would make the right choice. But that is the whole point. The test is to see what you choose without being influenced by the idea of reward. It is to test your true self, what you actually are. A person's spirituality is determined by their motivation and the object of their love. If you turn to God because of what you hope to gain from him then you are not concerned with God, only with yourself and not your spiritual self which is naturally oriented to God but your earthly self-centred self. You must be put in a situation where your choice is a real indication of your heart and there are no extraneous factors influencing the choice in a direction it would not have gone left to itself.

This is the advantage of living in an age such as ours in which religion is no longer a significant part of life. Today if we turn to the spiritual life it is not because society obliges us to do so. It is because we ourselves want to do so despite rather than because of the world.  I can foresee a time when to live a spiritual life will require a person to go against the world, against good opinion and maybe even against the law. Some think that time has already arrived but I would say current events are only a fore-echo or preliminary phase of what is to come. Masks, vaccines and lockdowns, which all symbolise loss of freedom and personal integrity in various ways, are probably only the beginning of a gathering movement to refashion human nature and the understanding of what it is to be a person. Will an over-concern to preserve the body lead to an even greater loss of the sense of the soul? How much will we be prepared to give up merely to maintain physical existence? Life is so much more than the body and likewise the concept of death can be extended far beyond the merely physical.

I don't want to be melodramatic about this. It may be that present events are not forerunners of something more severe.  I suspect they are but even if they are not they still serve to remind us of potential possibilities and to reorient us to the spiritual world if we are alive to their deeper significance and don't just pass up the symbolism as irrelevant. Symbolism, you say? Why should we read anything into what are just public health measures? But everything in this world has symbolic significance and if you ignore that you live a surface existence and are little better than a talking monkey.

Jesus came to offer us life. That was his mission. To save us from death and give us life. This is a very simple thing, too simple it seems for most modern human beings. Jesus is life. He sums up in himself what life is. He is the expression of life and to accept him is to choose life. By the same token, to turn away from him is to turn away from life, to turn down life, and this is the test which today entails a more active choice than in the past when Christianity was the default position.

I have a book coming out later this year called Earth is a School. The title comes from something I was told by my teachers and reflects my belief that the present time is a critical point in human history, a time of final exams in which we take the test to see whether we will progress to higher worlds of light, beauty, truth and love or sink back to a heavier, darker, more constricted existence. In a sense we do create our own reality in that if our mind shuts out spirit we will eventually find ourselves in an external environment that reflects that mindset. Conversely, if we open our heart and mind to spirit and live a life in accordance with the inner significance of Christ's teachings  we will rise to eternal life.

Music and the Mind

Yesterday I listened to a Shostakovich string quartet which I appreciated but couldn't really say I enjoyed. Then, to cleanse my musical palate, I put on some consort music by the Elizabethan composer John Dowland. What a relief! Whilst I do admire Shostakovich, listening to the string quartet was something of an effort because of its gritty angularity and feelings of threat and disorder. On the other hand, the Dowland was pure pleasure. Everything was right and breathed cosmic harmony. This reminded me once again of the damage Beethoven did to Western music with his introduction of psychologically unsettling states, jarring emotions, rage and sometimes near despair. Yes, I know he brought in profounder ideas of the human psyche taken simply as the human psyche but his music, notwithstanding its splendours, was much less wholesome and spiritually clean than what had gone before. For all his revolutionary impact he didn't come out of nowhere as first baroque and then classical music introduced much more of an earthly human element. But Beethoven took music, and hence art and even human consciousness, to the next level, shifting the focus entirely from God to Man.

This was necessary and intended. To be actively spiritual we had to become more aware of ourselves, and the Romantic movement, of which Beethoven was an extremely significant part, was crucial in bringing this about. We cannot blame Beethoven for the fact that music and art eventually descended into an obsession with (fake) originality and the celebration of ugliness or that second-rate artists decided that, not being particularly creative themselves, their purpose was to shock, épater les bourgeois being their guiding motivation. But his was the seed that grew into a poisonous weed because it was fertilised by corrupted ideology and thought. Moreover, his music already contained elements of the spiritual decadence that would follow after him in a more explicit and developed form.

What should have happened? Having become more aware of self and its creative potential, human consciousness and art (each feeding into the other) should have turned back to God, now seeing him as immanent as well as transcendent. This began to happen to a partial degree but not enough and instead the whole process was thrown off track by the growing atheism and materialism, the consequences of which are still ongoing and developing.

All contemporary art and music is, to a greater or lesser extent, corrupt. If we want to breathe a purer air our best bet is to refresh ourselves, as I did with the Dowland, with music of a previous era. This will not be perfect but it will be spiritually healthy because it will come from a time when the truth of divine being was recognised and not just recognised but primary. Here's a piece to start you off. It comes from a polyphonic mass by the 16th century Italian composer Palestrina. It's the final Agnus Dei of his Missa Brevis in a particularly heartfelt performance. There is still great beauty in the world.

Missa Brevis Agnus Dei II

Palestrina has rather a noble face too.

21st Century Sin

Every generation is tested where it is weakest. This generation has been lulled into a false sense of security insofar as right and wrong are concerned because it believes it has put right a lot of mistakes of the past but in so doing it has made new and more grievous errors. We may have started to correct some of what we regard as the sins of our ancestors but we have overlooked deeper sins because we no longer recognise the areas of life to which these sins pertain. So we have focussed on inter human relations, as in our current obsession with 'racism' and 'sexism' (in scare quotes because these words now mean almost anything and consequently mostly nothing), but completely ignored any relationship with God. We have no relationship with God. How could we when we don't even acknowledge his existence except in a perfunctory way?

The sins of today are based on the refusal to take the primacy of spiritual concerns over material ones (which refusal, by the way, extends to the churches and is why they have, almost without exception, failed the test of Covid-19, electing to obey the worldly powers and ignore the spiritual perspective). In fact, so closed off are we to the spiritual realm that most people don't even recognise our failures in this regard as sins. They are merely matters of personal belief so outside the moral sphere.  We believe ourselves to be virtuous because we think we focus on what is good but it is only what is good for the body and the earthly man not what is good for the soul and the spiritual man. We may be virtuous with respect to the former but with respect to the latter we are the most sinful of generations and we don't even know it.

The earthly man is not separate from the spiritual man but he is certainly not the same either and he must be seen in the light of the spiritual man to be known and understood properly. But we put the earthly man in the place of the spiritual man, the former has usurped the rights of the latter, and this category error is why the people of the present day are further from God than any previous generation - and consequently worse. We may not be Neros and Hitlers, actively wicked, but most people at the time of those monsters still reverenced the gods in one form or another. We do not. Our sins may be those of omission but they are no less sinful for all that and the results of them will be no less severe.