A Time Against Race

I was recently called a racist because I don't believe there are no differences between ethnic groups or ancestral populations as is the official dogma these days. (Forgive the double negative but it serves a purpose here). But when I asked the person so dubbing me to define what she meant by racism I got no clear answer. Just the response that I was a racist because I would never have thought such a thing if I wasn't a racist.

Martin Luther King famously looked forward to the day when a man would be judged by the content of his character rather than the colour of his skin. Who could disagree with that? Not me. However, what if some of the content of a man's character (some, not all) was, to a degree, determined by the colour of his skin meaning his ethnic background? If a modern anti-racist was asked to wager his family's life on the results of an IQ test sat by 50 people from China and another 50 of West African origin being equal or random or the results of a 100 yard race between the same two groups being similarly equal or random, would he accept the challenge? Obviously environmental factors would have some influence on the outcomes but it is now largely accepted that there are also important genetic factors involved. Yes, both groups could be improved through training but the differences would not vanish.

The modern desire to erase race (except where white people are concerned, let's face it, they are always bad) might be based on a desire for fairness and a wish to correct past injustices, but to frame belief around and to build policy on what is untrue will never work. When foundations are not sound the building collapses as one suspects it is beginning to now. This will end up benefitting no one. It is far better to accept the truth and then build a future with compassion and fairness based on that truth. To deny truth always leads to disaster. The edifice so constructed will break under the pressure of reality.

If there are racial differences (and there must be as evolution didn't stop when anatomically modern human beings came about), some of them would be unimportant (such as skin colour) while others might be significant, giving an advantage to one group over others in certain areas of life. But let's look at this from a spiritual perspective, specifically a Christian one. Firstly, we do not deny truth on any level. This is important. Then the differences may exist but there is no Jew nor Greek in Jesus Christ. We are all one in God. This is the first fact on which all the others must rest. However, it is not the only fact. Just because there is no Jew nor Greek in Jesus Christ does not mean Jews and Greeks no longer exist. They do, and God has made them so or, at least, he has made a world in which Jews and Greeks can arise. This is the situation and we must have the maturity and wisdom and humility to deal with it as it is and not as we might want it to be. Falling into the arms of the equality dogma is childish evasion. There is no equality in nature or life in general (see here) but all things contain God even if they contain him in different ways and to different degrees. This gives extra richness to life though, again, it does not mean that all things are on the same spiritual level.

It is my impression that many of the current woke brigade, like many leftists of the last few decades, live according to ideology rather than common sense, natural instinct, reason or perception of reality. They believe what they want to believe, and what they want to believe is often the outcome of their own personal defects such as resentment, fear, insecurity and a sense of inferiority. If they worked to overcome those one would feel compassion for them and seek to help them, mainly through awakening them to the reality of God who can cure all such ills. But I condemn them because instead of seeking to overcome their failings they impose these failings on society. Their beliefs are not free and true but prompted by their own inadequacies which they project onto others who must then be made to bear their burdens through the resultant dogmas and policies. We are called to help the suffering but not to justify sinners in their sins. It is not uncompassionate to point to sin and weakness with the aim of establishing the truth of God in the world. It is cowardly to enable these things for fear of seeming nasty according to worldly standards.

The modern world has grown far away from God and so it must create its own religion to satisfy the deep spiritual need all human beings have whether they admit to it or not. When this need is blocked from going in the true direction it will create a false one. That is what the worshippers of equality have done, mistaking the doctrine of the oneness of life in Christ for a doctrine of all men being equal here and now and whatever they think or believe or are. This is a worldly or material parody of the spiritual truth and because corruptio optimi pessima est it acts as a barrier to the real truth by counterfeiting it. The fraud must be exposed. God loves humanity but because of that love he wants us to come up to him where we will find our true fulfilment. To pretend that Earth is Heaven is to deny Heaven.

We think that our denial of racial differences is a mark of our enlightenment. It is actually a mark of materialism because it seeks to reinterpret what is real in the world of spirit according to the world of matter which is a different world with different factors in play. You cannot bring spirit down to you. You must go up to it. Because we don't know real love we invent a pretended love which denies truth, something that real love can never do. A better world will never come by denying truth.

What is Evil?

 Bruce Charlton has written another one of his perceptive posts about the nature of the world today. In it he examines how the modern world has no proper understanding of evil and therefore has sunk deeply into it, more deeply than at any time before. He starts off by quoting someone who points out that "it is not right to say, as many do, that it has always been like this", and I commented that I constantly hear this too. But even in my lifetime it has not always been like this. I accept I have become more aware of evil as I have become more aware of the reality of God, but even so the fact is that never before have so many people, almost everyone, in fact, actively embraced ideas, thoughts, actions and systems that work directly against God and the principles of creation.

We don't understand evil because we view it purely in materialistic terms as violence, murder, rape, poverty, starvation and so on. These are evils but they are only one sort of evil and actually not the most important sort. They are evils of the body but there are evils of the soul as well and it is these latter we have succumbed to today. Evils of the soul are those that deny or downplay the reality of God and the spiritual purpose and destiny of the soul. This is Good. Anything that works against Good is evil so evil does not necessarily mean being nasty or even cruel as we see those things in a worldly sense. Some of the most evil people today are highly moral in their own terms. If that statement shocks you it means you do not understand the spiritual reality of good and evil.

This generation is fully aware of evils of the past and often exaggerates them because of its one-sided approach to life, a fear and hatred of any kind of material suffering. But this has led it into a massive blindness with regard to its own evils. These arise from an ignorance of the true good. You cannot know good if you do not know God. This is not just a glib saying. It is the fundamental truth. Good is spiritual good, it is what works to bring the human soul into closer relationship with God. Evil is what works to sever this relationship and separate Man from God and one of the ways it does this is through undermining the principles of creation, one of the most basic of which is the nature of the two sexes, man and woman. In a sense, these are the principles of creation and not just in the obvious material sense but in a spiritual one too where they represent spirit and matter whose union and interaction lies behind all manifested life. The contemporary attack on the principles of the masculine and feminine, through feminism, legitimisation of homosexuality and now the pretence that one sex can simply become another just because it wants to, is one of the more obvious forms evil takes today even though it is almost universally regarded as a good.

Coincidentally (or probably not because these things are on the minds of all right-thinking people just now),  Francis Berger has also written a very good post on how many modern Christians have bought into worldly evil. He calls these System Christians, an excellent term. These are Christians who really take their moral instruction from this world. They are too spiritually weak to see that what is good in the eyes of the world is often spiritually destructive. They may be well-meaning but they are also keen to appear right in the eyes of the established powers and are unlikely to suffer for their faith. They are really just materialists with a religious colouring who think religion exists to make us better men whereas it exists to make us entirely new men. And their idea of universal love boils down to acceptance of the world on its own terms while spiritual love means seeing the world in God's terms. I read a recent Easter message by a Church of England bishop that epitomised these people. There was no mention of what death and resurrection really means in a spiritual sense just some purely secular talk about the power of forgiveness and compassion during a pandemic. Basically, let's all be nice to each other.

What is evil? Evil is anything that works against real spiritual good. This means that even compassion can be evil if it is misdirected and supports sin, sin being defined as what separates us from God. God is misunderstood in a democratic age as being in everything equally. He is not. He is in everything as life but he is in some things more than others and our task as spiritual aspirants is to accord ourselves to that reality, always to enter more deeply into the good, the beautiful and the true. We must reject evil in all its forms, even those that dress themselves up as good which many do these days.

Increasing Clarity

 The events of the last 20 years, but specifically the last 12 months, can be looked upon as a spiritual good. Obviously in themselves they are a great spiritual evil because they have all involved the separation of man from God and the principles of creation. However, the good that can come out of them is in the reaction they may provoke in souls who might have gone along happily with a low-level materialism such as previous generations, who still lived in the light of past Christianity, experienced, but who are brought to their senses by the actual consequences of the assumption that there is no God and man can make his own reality in any way he likes. 

The worse things get, the more likely we are to wake up. As long as we do not really suffer from the absence of God, largely because we still live in a culture initially formed on a religious understanding of life, we can do without him - or so we think. But as soon as what a God-shaped void in our lives really means becomes apparent then we may start to realise what we have done. Once the mental derangement that is the outcome of this kicks in, once we realise that there is nothing to protect us from the self-interested powerful or, worse, the void of existential meaninglessness, once we actually face the truth of ourselves without God, then we might turn back to him. Currently we live in a comfortable (materially speaking) illusion but that may not last for very much longer. The more official propaganda is enforced, the more absurdly people behave, the more extreme the demands of the mentally unstable become, the more likely it is that normal people will cry "Enough is enough. We didn't know what we had until we threw it away." 

That does rather depend on a fundamental sanity and right orientation at the core of one's being, and it seems that many people may have largely lost this. Caught up in the worldly chaos, their spiritual instincts have so atrophied that they may not be able to revive them. Innate faults have been brought out and stimulated by atheistic materialism and it may be too late for some. But for all those in whom right thinking has not yet entirely departed there is the hope and the possibility that they might wake up as the madness increases and the effects of spiritual denial become clear. As the darkness spreads the need for light becomes more urgent, and the light is still there even though we ourselves have obscured it.

Christ and Christianity

Christianity is the only thing that can save us from the increasingly dystopian and evil world that is coming into being. It alone carries enough truth to overcome the lies with which we are bombarded on a daily basis as the vice of materialistic atheism is tightened. Or, at least, Christ does. Because Christianity itself as it has come to be nowadays has all too often degenerated into a religion that exists only along horizontal lines. This is to say it is understood as relating to the interaction between human beings on the earthly plane. It is becoming more of a social than a spiritual thing involving how we treat our neighbour, seeing him as an earthly being in a material light and not as a soul in need of salvation. But real Christianity relates to our relationship with God and is therefore to be understood vertically. Everything else flows from that. There is a horizontal dimension but it is very much secondary to the vertical just as matter is secondary to spirit, quite clearly so since it only exists as an expression of spirit.

The materialistic focus of much modern Christianity has imitated the general moral focus of the post-modern world. This is because so many church leaders are bureaucrats rather than saints or even aspiring saints. So they follow rather than lead, and they follow fashion rather than truth. What is the motivating force behind atheistic morality (or pseudo-morality)? It is something like harm avoidance. So it is less concerned with the soul and how to bring the soul into closer alignment with God than it is with comforting, supporting and sustaining the earthly man. Equality is not mentioned in the Bible but it is the obsession of contemporary morality and the churches have fallen in with this, thinking it a good above all others. This is because they have misunderstood love and that is because they don't know love except as an ideological theory, something they feel they ought to have. They have failed to see that equality is really a spiritual evil because what it inevitably does is reduce the high to the level of the low. You can have quality or equality. You can't have both, not in this world and not, in fact, in any world. Even the angels and the saints are hierarchically ordered. 

Equality is only possible with complete oneness which means either the chaos of unformed matter or the Night of Brahma when the universe has returned to an unexpressed, unmanifested state which is basically non-being. Creation is a disruption of oneness which breaks the perfect equality of non-being. Inequality is the essence of manifested life, the very foundation of the world, and the current movement to erase qualitative distinction and differences is an attempt to destroy cosmic order and reduce light to darkness. An inequality where the higher preys on the lower is obviously bad but this should not be used as an excuse to throw out the very notion of higher and lower for that is the basic principle of the structure of the universe, both in its material and spiritual forms.

Christianity as an organised religion flourished during the latter stages of humanity's childhood. It guided and instructed as a loving parent. Of course, many individual souls had moved beyond the childhood stage and these were often the ones who formed and tended Christianity, but the masses of people were in the childhood stage, spiritually speaking. However, over the last few centuries this has begun to change and you might now see the majority of people as being in a condition equating to adolescence. This is notoriously a very difficult time, one in which the individual rebels, throwing off the shackles, as he perceives them and as they may indeed be, of external authority. He is becoming an individual but unless he submits that individuality to a higher inner guidance he risks losing his way, and this is exactly what we have done. We should have moved beyond unquestioning spiritual obedience to an awareness of divine truths based on inner perception but we have refused to move out of our adolescent phase into adulthood. Our very culture reflects that. And official Christianity has not been able to keep up with the change.

The solution is in Christ as, of course, it always was. The only way out of the confused mess we have made for ourselves is to rededicate ourselves to him which means turn to the reality he represents. The reality of Christ is beyond any church though the church has guarded and protected the spiritual flame for two millennia and even independents like me must accept that without this protection our spiritual independence would not be possible. I can only know Christ inwardly because the church has kept his fire burning in the world. But now is the time when we must look for Christ first and foremost within our own hearts rather than the church. This is moving from childhood to spiritual maturity.

It is not too far-fetched to see the world as going through a kind of crucifixion at the moment. I anticipate things will become worse. We will lose our humanity because we have lost the sense of ourselves as spiritual beings and with that gone there is no longer truth. There is no longer even the idea of truth. There is only constructed ideology formed from the whims of the moment and the requirements of those who set themselves up as our masters. We will see ourselves purely in materialistic terms and when that happens we are easily manipulated as we are now by fear. Things will get worse but I am not pessimistic. Heaven awaits those who reject the lies of the world, all-powerful as they may seem to be, and realise that today, Easter Sunday, records the most glorious, most wonderful and truest event in the history of the planet. Christ's resurrection from death really did take place and it is something we can all share in. We too will be raised from material death into spiritual rebirth once we open up our hearts to the love of Christ. 

Good and Bad People

 I was thinking of all the people busily engaged in constructing the nightmare world of tomorrow, all the politicians, the scientists, the university lecturers, the media people and so on. It's unlikely they think they are bad people and doing harm. Bad people never do. Hitler and Nero probably thought they were doing good, on some level at least. Have you not noticed that bad people usually think they are good but good people don't think that of themselves. They are always aware of ways in which they are not good.

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.