Music, an Influence on and Reflection of Consciousness

Western music, once the greatest in the world, has fallen on hard times. It flourished for over 1,000 years and spoke to the whole person, body, mind and soul, but now is reduced to a pitiful caricature of itself and this is true whether you are speaking of popular music or the more serious variety.

It is certain that our distant pagan forefathers would have had the kind of music we used to regard as primitive, heavy on the drums and accompanied by rhythmic chanting which whipped up primal emotions sometimes to the point of hysteria though they might have thought of that as spiritual ecstasy. It wasn't. It worked on the physical and what occultists call the astral bodies, the latter being the vehicle of the emotional nature. There was minimal melody and no harmony. Somewhat similar to what a lot of music has returned to today though in our time technology has made it even more powerful in its effects to, I might add, our great spiritual detriment.

But as Christianity conquered the West the influence of church music, plainsong and Gregorian chant, would have seeped into the consciousness of everyone, softening, civilising and elevating the primitive paganism of the past in music as well as everything else. Elements of love, joy, peace, hope, forgiveness, all Christian virtues, would have gone out of the church and into everyday society including its music, in the process uplifting dance from a purely sexualised form to one with considerably more grace and elegance.

Polyphony and harmony came from the church music of the Notre Dame era and this developed into the wonderful Renaissance sacred music of composers like Josquin, Ockeghem and a whole host of others. But secular music was affected too including instrumental music as instruments became more sophisticated and news ones were invented. When we reach the time of J.S. Bach we come to an apogee of Western art and a music that had grown quite naturally from its ancient seeds in the liturgy of the Church. Soli Deo Gloria as he wrote at the end of many of his compositions, secular as well as sacred. Baroque music is strongly tied to the dance with its dependence on the basso continuo or figured bass but this is a dance of lightness, elegance and refinement with nothing crude about it and always the primary inspiration is melodic. 

The development in music from baroque into classical might be said to have begun the descent even though the works produced are among the greatest in the Western canon. This was the time of the Enlightenment which was the worship of Reason. Consequently, there was a tendency in music to separate itself from both God and Nature and this carried on into the Romantic era when the centre of the creative process became the composer himself. Again, this resulted in works of exceptional beauty and power because enough of a connection to the past remained to temper the self-centredness and make sure it was not exclusive, and that combined with the appearance of men of genius in a relatively large number. But the disconnect from the spiritual world was becoming obvious. The focus on human emotion dominated spiritual feelings and the ego began to assume its current role as the leading impulse behind artistic creativity. The idea of Soli Deo Gloria was gone. What should have happened was that human imagination and creative drive would have been allied to spiritual perception. What actually did happen was that the former first set itself apart from the latter and then pushed it aside altogether.

The watchword of the 19th century was Revolution. Tradition was overturned to a far greater extent than we now recognise. Romantic artists felt that something vital had been lost and this was reflected in their work which was often deeply nostalgic. But they knew they could never get it back by returning to the past. That was an impossibility. The past is always gone. We must always strive to create a future that is new and based on what we are now even if it can and should contain transformed elements of the past.

The structure of music broke down as the post-Romantic era turned into full-blown modernism. At the same time, the emotional content, which had been ramped up both in terms of the musical message and by sheer volume as singers and orchestras became more powerful, moved in two directions. One, in serious classical music it was quite simply rejected. The music was now cerebral, abstract and elitist, totally divorced from the natural. It had become machine-like and spiritually dead. But in popular music feelings became more important, only they were much cruder feelings. No longer was there any inclination to elevate the emotions. Now, as rhythm and the beat assumed greater centrality in the overall musical package, the lower emotions relating to the body and its gratifications were brought out, encouraged and given their head. Certain writers at the time regarded the advent of jazz as extremely destructive of higher sensibilities and a real factor in the degradation of civilised values, indeed of civilisation itself. It's hard to argue with that and when you see where this sort of music has led the conclusion they were right is unavoidable. We have returned to the deep pagan past of drums and orgiastic dancing in which we do not rise about the ego but fall below it with lyrics all too often depicting crude sexuality and real love totally ignored. A modern love song is likely to be at best a self-pitying complaint but much more probably will sound like the grunts of rutting beasts.

Music is the most profound of all the arts. It can raise us up to a world of divine beauty and order or it can drag us down us to chaos and base material satisfactions that do make us beast-like but without the natural dignity of beasts who act as they act because it is what they are. But human beings are not animals and when they behave as animals they become worse than animals.  We have now replaced a music that elevates with one that degrades and the worst thing is that it is the young that are targeted, people at their most susceptible. Man can be like an angel or an animal and it is music that helps us turn to one or the other. We are fortunate today in that we do have access to all the great music of the past through recorded versions but deeply unfortunate in that most of our modern music is degraded and corrupting.

Love Your Enemy

I don't suppose there is much doubt that this is the hardest spiritual instruction to obey in a completely honest way. I personally don't see myself as having any actual enemies but there have been people in my life I find antipathetic and don't get on with, and one particular person who has caused me no end of problems. And if you extend this group to individuals with a public profile who you profoundly disagree with and who you think are responsible for creating a world in which the spiritual is denied or travestied, the list becomes quite long.  Can a Jew love Hitler? I'm sure some heroic souls have made the effort not to hate because, as we all know, hate stains the soul of the hater, but actually love? That is asking a lot.

And yet it is what Jesus asks us to do. The actual passage in the Sermon on the Mount says, "Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you." Without using it as a get out of jail free card, i.e. an excuse to ignore the instruction to love your enemies, I think the second part does qualify the first somewhat and bring it to within slightly easier reach. Are you expected to love your enemy as you love your friend? That would be silly and demean your friend. It would make real friendship meaningless. However, Jesus goes on to point out that God makes the sun rise for everyone, good and bad, and that says to me that he is fair and without prejudice. Might that be a start for us in obeying this injunction? If there are those we dislike for one reason or another, even those who have harmed us, we should attempt to view them as God views them. Not by being blind to their faults but by seeing them as redeemable as we would hope God would see us when we behave badly. Giving them every chance to improve rather than damning them, and enabling them to do that by not acting towards them as we feel they are acting towards us. If we do, how are we different or any better than them which presumably we assume ourselves to be?

The Masters told me that if you look for the good in people, you will help to bring that out. If you focus on the bad, you will bring that out. This does not require being naive and Pollyanna-ish. Then you will probably just enable wrongdoing and that is not what love your enemy means. But it does mean forgiving and quashing all negativity within you. After all, can a truly loving person ever hate? Isn't it a contradiction in terms? If you do hate there is darkness in your soul. Only love brings light so perhaps when Jesus told us to love our enemies, he was not thinking of the benefit that would accrue to the enemies so much as the benefit that would accrue to us.

The Christian life is about sacrifice which is one of the things that marks it out from other spiritual approaches. For a normal person, certainly for me, loving your enemies is a sacrifice. It's not just swimming against the emotional tide; it is also a blow to pride. If you love your enemy you are, or can seem to be in the eyes of the ego, somewhat humiliating yourself. In a way (again, for the ego) your enemy has beaten you. But this is what Jesus asks, for us to accept the defeat of the ego with a good grace and turn that defeat to spiritual victory.

I have a close association with a person whom I regard as not a good person. This person is constantly abusive to me and full of anger and hate. I wondered why fate brought me together with such a person and came to the conclusion that it is actually for my spiritual benefit. It is precisely so that I may learn 'to love my enemy and pray for those that persecute me', something I clearly needed to learn. It is the egotism in me that has made it necessary for me to experience this. 

One final point.  Love your enemy relates to personal relationships and means we should never hate persons.  But this a world of good and evil and the injunction in no wise applies to principles. Love your enemy does not mean giving evil the same respect as good nor untruth the same honour as truth.

Demonic Subversion

It has often been observed that liberalism is both a symptom and a cause of a decaying civilisation and that neither it nor any ideology associated with it, such as in modern times feminism and anti-racism, can build or preserve a civilisation worthy of the name. This has been the case in the past and it is certainly the case now. But now there is something else. On previous occasions something like liberalism has arisen when a society has built itself up and reached a certain level of prosperity and comfort. It is, if you like, a self-indulgence that is basically parasitic on the work, creativity and energy of previous generations. A luxury that a wealthy and successful society can afford or thinks it can. We have that today but we also have something not so much in evidence at the time of the collapse of previous civilisations though I am sure it was present. But it was not present to such a high degree.

I am talking about what I have often talked about on this blog which is demonic corruption. I talk about it so much because it is the root cause of everything negative. Actually, the real root cause is human egotism and selfishness because without that the corruption would have nothing to work on, no ground in which its seeds could sprout. However, if we are looking for the driving force behind the spiritual degradation of the 21st century, we must look to the world beyond the physical.

It's a fallacy to think there is material and there is spiritual and the latter is always 'higher'. It may be less restricted in terms of the constituents of which is it made but it is by no means necessarily morally better any more than the mind is always good. The spiritual in this sense is a mental world and so can be as good or evil as the mind can be. It is useful to think of the spiritual world as extending vertically as the physical world extends horizontally with the various levels of being/consciousness/experience, whatever you want to call it, separated from one another by the quality of their spiritual vibration, their intrinsic openness to the full reality of God. We can with perfect justification talk about higher and lower in this context, and there is a moral value to these terms.

The lower levels are where the demons exist. It is probable that they have cut themselves off from the light and life of God and can only continue to exist by stealing energy from human beings. Ancient blood sacrifices come to mind in this respect and in the modern world I would surmise that the abortion of unborn infants does too, but there is also 'negative energy' of any sort, anger, hatred and the like which the demons can use and absorb to sustain themselves. Because they are so low themselves they can only feed on energy that is of a similar quality. It may even be that what we think of as damned souls fall into this bracket which is not a pleasant thought. In CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters there is the implication at the end that the senior devil Screwtape is going to consume the life forces of the junior devil Wormwood who has failed in his attempt to corrupt a human soul. He signs his last letter 'yours ravenously'. The meaning is chillingly clear.

This may seem like science fiction but think of this. What are demons? They are clearly fallen souls that have reached the point at which they have totally cut themselves off from God. But God is life. How then do they get life? They must steal it from those that have it and they can only do this if they influence souls who still can draw life from God to 'lower their vibration'. They are like flies that feed off filth.

This is just speculation but it makes sense to me given what we do actually know of good and evil spirits; that they exist and that heaven and hell also must exist as places that reflect the consciousness and moral state of their inhabitants.

Conspiracy Theories

I have always fought shy of conspiracy theories for several reason. Many of them seem far-fetched and the product of eccentrics with bees in their bonnets who home in on only one aspect of the contemporary world. I have also probably been more influenced than I should have been by the sophisticated attitude that loftily sneers at people with tinfoil helmets and knows so much better because we're all rational now, aren't we? Mostly, though, it is because conspiracy theories are normally focused on the political and my interests have always been in the spiritual.

But there are multiple problems with this approach. For one thing, the Bible, especially the New Testament and specifically the Book of Revelation, is one long conspiracy theory. If you are a Christian, a real one, then you are a conspiracy theorist. No two ways about it. We live in a world of spiritual warfare in which demonic powers seek to corrupt God's creation, in particular that most important part of it which is the human race. 

The second reason is of more recent development. The political has seeped over into the spiritual using that word to describe the essential part of what makes human beings human. The dreadful lie, Marxist in origin and now universal in the ideology of the left, that everything is political has taken root everywhere and is believed because the spiritual has been more or less chased off the face of the Earth, certainly insofar as it might have any meaning or real relevance to life. Everything is really spiritual but everything has been made political now. This means that a spiritually concerned person has to take note of what is going on in the world today and cannot retreat to a position of inward detachment.

The third reason I have become drawn to the conspiracy theory point of view is the present time. In all seriousness, how can anyone not look at what has happened to the world over the last few months and fail to see the deep manipulation of human beings that makes them participants in their own enslavement? We are actively encouraged to fear each other, stay away from each other and cover our faces or be shamed. Last night I stood on a station platform waiting for a train in the open air as announcements were made that failure to comply with mandatory mask-wearing in all areas of the station would result in fines of one hundred pounds. This didn't appear to be enforced and a number of people paid no attention but the fact that this authoritarian announcement could be made unchallenged is extraordinary. The only reason I can come up with is that we have been so softened by relentless propaganda over the last 100 years that we are easy pickings unless we have some solid grounding in religion and by that I mean, as far as the West is concerned, Christianity. Other contemporary spiritual approaches will not save us from sin and evil because they can all be accommodated into those things. Only the light of Christ is strong enough to resist them which, by the way, is a very good argument for the truth of Christ.

Who are the most vilified people in the modern world? I'll give you a clue. It's the group who are most likely to resist the corrupt and dehumanising ideology of the modern world. The ones who built the civilisation that is currently being destroyed and who are painted as oppressive and cruel. Many of these people are also among the destroyers because they see some personal advantage to be gained but this group is also the place where you will find the greatest number willing and able to fight for freedom and truth, and that is why they must be undermined and are presented as fundamentally selfish and wicked. Conspiracy theory? Maybe, but I submit it's also true.

In the past I have, for reasons given above, inclined towards the popular view that things go wrong more because of human stupidity and greed than because of some dastardly plot. And if you are looking at the picture from a this worldly, purely human perspective, that may well be so. But you cannot just look at things from that perspective. The real plot is supernatural. The relatively long time span during which all the pieces have been manoeuvred into place proves that even if nothing else does. Plenty else does though. There has been a relentless whittling away at spiritual truths and their replacement with anti-spiritual and, more recently, anti-natural values, if values is even the right word. For they are actually non-values whose only real purpose is to oppose real values. But they have become accepted because we have lost our moorings in transcendent reality so have no grounding in anything real. We can be pushed in any direction because nothing actually means anything. This is always the case when a society loses faith in God. And that means that such a society is destined to go. It will collapse either from external attack or internal decay or both.

In the immortal words of Private Fraser (a terminally pessimistic sitcom character from the 1970s for non-British readers), "We're doomed!". Things will not get better. They will continue to deteriorate. But this is actually a cause for optimism. There is nothing eternal in this world and not meant to be but when outward things are this bad it means, paradoxically, that God is not far away. He is causing us to turn away from the wreckage of this world and towards him, the only place where truth and goodness and real beauty abide everlastingly. As the world descends further into lies and spiritual oppression and most people accept that because it appears to offer them safety and security and they have no faith in anything higher, remember that. When the world turns dark we must hold fast to our inner knowledge of the light that shines just beyond its horizon.

Blog break

I shall be letting my brain lie fallow for a couple of weeks so won't be posting anything here during that time. All comments are still welcome though.

Love of God

Bruce Charlton has been writing recently in his usual illuminating style about the love of God and this set me thinking because, in a way, this is the only important question for the whole of life. Love of God, the intuitive recognition of and opening up of the heart to our Creator, is the key to everything.

Here is a paradox. You must be virtuous to get to heaven but the virtuous man does not go to heaven. All civilisations worthy of the name acknowledge the law which is right behaviour or what C.S. Lewis in his short but important work The Abolition of Man called the Tao. This is the correct way to act with regard to the gods, the universe and one's fellow man. Details may alter but the essentials are remarkably similar everywhere. And yet this is not enough. Observing the 10 Commandments will not get you to heaven. The Pharisees do not go to heaven and this is true even of the good Pharisees not just the ones who observe the letter of the law but neglect its spirit.

The only thing that will get you to heaven is the love of God. Nothing you can do, nothing you can think, no belief you have will get you to heaven but handing yourself over to God in absolute faith and trust and love will. A good person is still himself but you can only enter heaven when you give yourself to God, empty yourself of self and  are filled with love for your Creator. That is because this love is the only thing that will cure the stain of ego that blocks your entry to heaven.

Good people do not go to heaven. Consider that for a moment.

Don't think this is an impossible task. God is always there, waiting to respond to any overture we might make. Even a little attempt to love on our part. All we have to do is turn towards him in truth and love and he will respond. There will still remain much work to be done because the ego self, the swollen self-regarding me, is very powerful but once love for God has risen in our heart then we are facing in the right direction. In fact, even the recognition that we lack this love and the sincere desire to acquire it is an important first step in the purification of the self and its preparation for eventual entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.

I'll tell you the reason for this. It's just common sense really. Love of God shows that you actually recognise and want what heaven is. If you don't even want it, how can you expect to go there?

Masks and Liberty

In England since yesterday it has become what they call mandatory to wear a face mask every time you go into a shop. I hate the idea of this and don't much like the physical reality of it either. There appears to be no solid evidence that these do any good and people have been shopping without masks for the last few months without there being any resultant spike in cases of Covid 19 that can be traced to this. Why bring this ruling in now when cases are falling? If I mention this to anyone I know I am told I am acting like a conspiracy theorist. I don't have a wide circle of acquaintances but every single person I have spoken to on the subject of my reservations about masks, mentioning such things as personal liberty and coercion by government, says I am being ridiculous and should just do what everyone else is doing. To do otherwise is selfish. Of course, this is the sneaky card played by the powers that be. You are protecting others by your actions so not to wear a mask is the sign of a bad person. You are being shamed into compliance.

Why write about this on what is supposed to be a blog about spiritual matters? Because this is a spiritual matter. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like but it seems that we are gradually being forced to give up more and more of our freedoms, freedoms that we in the West have taken for granted for a long time. We are doing it because of fear and for our own perceived good but how else did you think this would be brought about? Clearly, in our modern world it would need be done in an underhand manner, making it seem we are getting a good deal. What we do voluntarily, we don't resist. I don't believe there is some worldly cabal engaged in a secret power grab but I do believe there is a supernatural plot (let's call it what it is without fear of seeming absurd) that has been busily engaged for at least a century to bring about our separation from God and our spiritual enslavement. The operation has been ramped up since the turn of the millennium and has moved into an even higher gear this year.

What, then, do we do about masks? I went into a small local supermarket yesterday without a mask to buy a pot of yoghurt. Just one thing. I was testing the waters to see what would happen. Nothing did but I felt bad for the staff. All the other shoppers were wearing masks and I felt I was putting the supermarket employees in an uncomfortable position to no real purpose except for my own self-satisfaction. Why should they have to confront non-cooperators? As I was going out I apologised to the security person who actually wasn't wearing a mask herself though she had one in her hands. I said I didn't want to cause anyone any embarrassment but I didn't want to wear a mask. She said she didn't mind. She couldn't force anyone to do anything they didn't want to do. She herself got claustrophobic wearing the thing. She was perfectly friendly.

I've thought about this. Part of me thinks that we should resist what is obviously a totalitarian ruling, unacceptable in a democracy. People mention seat belts in cars to me but I don't think it's the same thing at all. There is a very strong unavoidable symbolism about being made to wear a mask. You and everyone else are being dehumanised, rendered faceless and gagged. This is not just imaginary. The symbol in this case actually becomes the reality. Once you have submitted to it, a corner has been turned.

On the other hand, Jesus said that we should render under Caesar what is Caesar's which means obey the law of the particular society in which we find ourselves. However, this brings up the interesting question of what actually is Caesar's. Your face?

We may be forced to wear masks if we want to buy food which we obviously have to do. But those who do not wish to give up their spiritual freedom must resist this in their hearts. The Masters once told me that sometimes it is the will and not the action that counts. This may be one of those times.