Non Volo Peccare

An Imaginary Conversation.

Official: Have you had the medical intervention yet?

Normal Person: No. I've done some unwise things in my time but I still have some sense.

O: What do you mean?

NP: To do something unnecessary and potentially risky out of fear or because you've succumbed to state propaganda or media pressure is surely foolish?

O: It's not unnecessary and if you don't do it for yourself, you should certainly do it to protect others.

NP: Most people's immune system is more than capable of dealing with the illness so it is unnecessary for most people. However, I agree with the last part of what you say but would put it in a different context. Spiritual contagion is worse than physical contagion and to provide an example of someone relatively immune from that is surely the best service you can render your fellow man at the present time.

O: But what if you get ill and infect someone who then dies because of your negligence?

NP: Negligence is a loaded term. When did it become an acceptable word to describe someone's right to determine what goes into their own body? Besides, if the peck works who will die and if it doesn't why are we even having this conversation?

Etc, etc. 

This debate could go on indefinitely and still get nowhere as both participants are starting from totally different premises. For O the body is central. For NP it's the soul.

Note: I translate the title I Do Not Want to be Pecked but it's been a long time since I studied Latin so that may not be entirely accurate.

All Men are Created Equal

 Stanford historian Jack Rakove makes the following interesting point.

"When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in the preamble to the Declaration, he was not talking about individual equality. What he really meant was that the American colonists, as a people, had the same rights of self-government as other peoples, and hence could declare independence, create new governments and assume their “separate and equal station” among other nations. But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way. It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself. With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed."

This statement in its distorted form has become the basic dogma of the modern world and I would submit that it lies at the root of our rejection of reality. That is to say, it is used as a justification for it, a kind of religious principle that is taken as obvious and good and right, and to deviate from which is the mark of a wicked person. The fact that it is clearly false doesn't stop us from believing or pretending to believe it. For the masses it is a way to get back at those that have been over them or have more than them. For the weak it is a way to cut the strong down to size. For the sentimental it is a way to make them feel they are decent  and kind people. For the demons and their disciples in the world it is a way to bring down real truth and goodness which are necessarily hierarchical. I would suggest a far more accurate statement is one that the Masters made to me which was this. "Men are by no means equal on the earth plane but that is no reason to dismiss anybody." This statement takes care of both aspects of truth. The fact that we are all the children of God, in potential at least,  but there are older and younger children amongst us. If all men are created equal there is then no higher or lower. There is nowhere to go.

Leftism is Materialism

 I often see articles or comments debating which elements of what they call 'wokeism' but is really just a more developed form of leftism have gone too far and how we should pull back from the situation we now find ourselves in. You have writers like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray as good examples of this sort of thing. Unfortunately, all these articles and comments still accept or assume that some aspects of leftism, whether it be anti-racism or feminism or egalitarianism or whatever, should be retained. It can be hard for a person raised in the modern world to see that all aspects of leftism should be totally rejected but that is the case because if you don't cut it all out, it will just return in some form or other. It is like a poison that will spread throughout the body unless you are cleansed of it entirely. This is because the thing itself is an anti-God, anti-creation ideology. It puts the human being first. That is the, at first sight inoffensive even seemingly benign, seed from which all the other corrupting elements grow.

It's no good bemoaning the dire cultural/spiritual state of affairs if you support any aspect of what's led up to it. You have to go to the source and the source is the rejection of God and transcendent reality, including the laws of creation and the way reality is structured. This doesn't mean we should return to the past. We reached a fork in a road we were meant to be travelling down but we took the wrong turning, the one that downgraded God to first of all something of diminished importance and then to nothing at all. We forgot the reason for being in this world, taking it as something existing in and for itself. Unless we go right to the roots of our problem then whatever we do will be of no significance. The old word for repentance was metanoia which implies something much more deep-seated and visceral than simply regretting or being sorry or changing a few things but leaving the core untouched. It means a complete change of heart, a wiping of the slate and total reorientation of being. Anything less just won't do.

We must understand that we cannot graft some form of spirituality on top of our materialistic assumptions and our human-centred ideologies. We will be no better off. We have to throw out the baby with the bathwater, the baby in this case being materialism in any form. This baby has grown up to be a monster and you can't incorporate it into anything wholesome. It must be destroyed utterly.

This might seem a shocking thing to say because it goes against everything we have been taught over the last few decades but the reason should be clear. For years we have pretended that a humanistic ideology rooted in materialism was basically good, being centred around fairness, equality, compassion etc, but it just got out of hand occasionally as now with the so-called woke agenda. But this is the inevitable outcome of leftism. It's what happens when God is not at the centre of human life, and the true God not some manufactured version that actually just conforms to leftist this worldly priorities and has no proper spiritual purpose. I repeat, this doesn't mean we should return to the past. We couldn't even if we would. But we have to return to God and Christ and live in the full awareness of God's plan for humanity which is the growth of the soul. That can only happen when the soul turns away from the world. Leftism is completely of this world which should be obvious once you realise that it is rooted in the very human characteristics of envy, resentment, fear and self-hatred, albeit disguised in pretty clothes. If you don't see that you have chosen to live in a lie. Why is that?

Things Coming to a Point

“Have you ever noticed,” said Dimble, “that the universe, and every bit of the universe is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?”

His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.
“I mean this,” said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. “If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family – anything you like – at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.”

I am sure most readers of this blog will be familiar with these words from C.S. Lewis, one of the wisest men of the last century and a prophet for these times. They are in his novel That Hideous Strength which is a better book than either Brave New World or 1984 though not nearly as celebrated, very probably because it is a Christian book. I compare it with those two as it covers similar terrain. If you haven't read it you need to do so as soon as possible. It will help you make sense of the present time.

Bruce Charlton often mentions the idea of things coming to point. What this means is that good and bad, moral white and black, become more separated and there is no neutral ground between them, no grey areas which one might suppose that at one time there were. There never were really but the splitting apart becomes more obvious as the End Times gathers pace. The good and the bad become more clearly delineated and you have to make an active choice. Sitting on the fence is no longer possible. The last 18 months have seen a dramatic intensification of that process. Things that you might have thought were on one side are now revealed as being on the other side. These things include all ideologies associated with what we call leftism which might at one time have seemed 'progressive' meaning tending towards the evolution of the human being but are now more easily seen as destructive of a true spiritual consciousness. Those who are more attached to the destructive aspects of leftism (even if they call these humanistic) will stay with it and put themselves in the camp of the demons. Those who really are interested in a spiritual consciousness will now have to reject all aspects of leftism and that will be hard for many people because these have seemed to be on the side of the good for a long while to those who lack proper spiritual discernment. You are going to have to admit you have been duped. This will require a large dose of humility because you will have to confront the fact that what attracted you to the leftist position was actually part of the old unregenerate fallen man. It was your egotism. If you are a man you are going to have to bow your head to God and accept you are a sinner. If you are a woman you are going to have to reject feminism, Satan's most recent temptation to the female sex,  and that is going to be tough. Your apparent ticket to freedom and fulfilment is actually a deep and dark curse. You ate the apple because it was sweet but it is really poisonous.

Now is the time that good and bad are drawing apart but this will only be apparent to those who have good within them. If you don't have that you are going to be in trouble because that is what this is all about. It's to draw out the good in those in whom it is present and reveal the evil in those who gravitate more naturally to that. The position to take won't be obvious to the earthly mind, the mind corrupted by 3 centuries of atheism and materialism and the teaching of dark prophets from Marx to Freud and including many of the famous names in all fields of human endeavour over the last couple of centuries. In a way the odds are stacked against you because most of your modern education and cultural influences have been on the wrong side. But you have the light of God within you and if you are faithful to the truth that light will illumine your mind and release you from the evil influences that are so prevalent. Besides, there are good influences too and C.S Lewis was a major one. Above all stands the figure of Christ.

Unfortunately, however, in the world today the evil influences are rampant. One might even say they are triumphant and all the more so since totally unrecognised by the majority. I say they are unrecognised because most people don't know what evil actually is. In fact, it's very simple. Evil is that which separates from God. It does this either by denying him outright or by deforming him as in religion which submits to the world or by encouraging the breaking or transgressing of the laws of creation. Now can you see how we live in a world of evil?

To speak of things coming to a point and of the gap between good and evil widening to such a degree  that there are sheep and there are goats depending on which side you fall might lead to an accusation that I am demonising those who don't agree with me, and look where that has got us in the past. But I am not demonising anybody. The truth is those who fail to reject evil and embrace spiritual good are demonising themselves. Possibly quite literally in some cases. Anyway, the point is there is good and there is evil and they have to do with an acknowledgement in the heart or lack of it of God, your Creator. The bad news is you can make the wrong choice because there is nothing that is going to force your hand. It's a test of your inner integrity, your spiritual authenticity. The good news is that your choice, if it's the worldly one, is not set in stone as it now stands. You can turn to God at any time as long as you do so sincerely. Of course, in terms of behaviour, you will still stumble and even fall many times but what matters above all now is the direction of your heart. The needle must point due north to God.

We're All Communists Now

Most of the world now appears to have become communist in all but name.  This allegation will be dismissed by those who only see society in economic terms but if you look at things from a social or cultural perspective, the conclusion is hard to avoid. For a start, everything, even much religion once you scratch the surface, is now atheistic and materialistic. These are the bedrock assumptions of communist dogma and, even if there was nothing else, show its essentially evil quality. Then there is our current obsession with equality and worship of 'the science' - as long as that science supports official ideology. We are today living in a world that more and more resembles a prison camp and only those with a true focus on religion will see that clearly and be able to resist assimilation. I know of no one, other than people I have met online, who has not been absorbed to one degree or another and this is because they have no roots in anything substantial. Consequently, they will bend in the direction the wind blows.

In practise there are always two classes in a communist society. There is the elite and then the rest. The elite have the power and most of the wealth. They pull all the strings even if this is in the name of the populace. That populace will be given enough to keep them quiet or subdued. It depends. They can be terrorised into acquiescence or kept dumb by indulging them with bread and circuses. But whichever method is adopted communism always becomes a totalitarian tyranny in which control is everywhere.

The only escape from this is through a genuine spiritual sensibility. Not religion because religion can be co-opted as System Christianity has been but a proper focus on the reality of God and a realisation that this world is not meant to be perfect for and in itself but exists to perfect us or, at least, to prepare us for perfection on a higher plane.

Communism is a great evil and all sane people used to know that. They knew it because they knew it destroyed freedom and reduced humanity to the level of an insect colony in which the collective is all and the individual nothing. But it is even worse than this because the real goal of communism is  a spiritual one. It came about to break the connection between man and God and isolate man in the material world, separated from his Maker. Its theft and perversion of some of the social aspects of Christianity is directed to that end.

When God has been chased from the world as now you know that the end cannot be far off. 

Colin Wilson and Consciousness

 I am currently reading Gary Lachman's biography of Colin Wilson and although I'm only about two thirds of the way through I'm impressed by the combination of meticulous research and keen insight that Mr Lachman displays. As indeed he does in all the books of his that I've read which are his biographies of Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky and one called The Secret Teachers of the Western World about Western esotericism which I did a post on for Albion Awakening a few years ago. I would say his books are always worth reading.

But for me there's a problem and that's Colin Wilson himself. Like us all he was a product of his time and his was a time of deep materialism so to achieve anything of a spiritual nature outside of orthodox religion would always be a challenge. We are somewhat better off in that respect now because, although this is still a time of deep materialism, there has been so much published, unearthed and discussed on the metaphysical, supernatural and spiritual over the last 50 plus years that we have an abundance of riches to draw upon. Some of it is by Colin Wilson himself. That having been said, and a debt to him acknowledged, I would have to add that I still find something of the outsider (pun intended) looking in about Colin Wilson's approach to the spiritual.

I first came across him in the early 1980s when I read The Occult and Mysteries which are really two compendiums of occult and mystical history. They show Wilson's prodigious reading and also his ability to synthesise his research and incorporate it into his own ideas about life and the mind. There is a wealth of fascinating facts and characters in these two books and they are written in Wilson's typical highly readable style which nonetheless shows no concessions to populism. I enjoyed them very much at the time but for me they also read like the work of someone who was in many ways a materialist but who sought to acquire the benefits of the spiritual without actually going all the way to embracing a full spirituality.

The focus on consciousness and how it might evolve is key to what I mean here. I don't know if Colin Wilson believed in God but if he did God did not appear to play a very big part in his thought, certainly not the central part as should be the case. This has long been a problem amongst many of those interested in the esoteric, the occult and the mystical. They want the fruits of the spiritual and the supernatural but they want them on their own terms. They are quite prepared to work, even work hard, to get these fruits but they are less prepared to open their hearts up fully to the reality of God. They are very interested in the expansion of consciousness and higher states of being but they see these in the context of the human (even if that is superhuman) rather than the context of God.

John Fitzgerald wrote a piece about Colin Wilson for Albion Awakening which he also included in the book he and I put together from that blog. I have just reread it and it comes to more or less the same conclusion that I have though John is more charitable than me in that he thinks Wilson might have been deflected from a more spiritual path because of the poor reception given to his book Religion and the Rebel which John thinks, and I agree, is one of his best. But, while appreciating that, I have to say that if you really believe something it shouldn't matter what the critics say. He was still young at the time and should have found his way back to a more genuinely spiritual path though I am not that widely read in Wilson's oeuvre so I don't know whether he did or not. But that is not the impression I get.

Wilson's great value is that he opened up the possibility of evolution in a psychological/spiritual sense in a serious way and on a popular level. Yes, he was a populariser but he was much more than just that and I certainly do not wish to limit him by that description.However, I do get the impression that he was more of a writer and a talker than someone willing to really engage with the reality of religion at a deep level. As far as I can see, he never took that extra step from spiritual outsider to proper believer who accepts the truth of God and who sees himself in the light of God rather than God in the light of himself.

This was a problem with many people at that time who rejected materialism and is a problem now too. Such people saw the work to be done to escape the drab robot self of everyday existence as involving the evolution of consciousness meaning by that a deepening and intensifying awareness of the self. That is true enough but they tended to stop there with the result that none of them really made the jump to a true spirituality. I include people like Jung and Gurdjieff in this category. The human being undoubtedly has higher aspects to his being into which we should be evolving. We have moved from instinctual consciousness to a more self-centred and rational (up to a point) consciousness. Higher states of consciousness are there to be discovered. But the fact remains that these can only be truly and fully known when we give ourselves over to God. A human-centred spirituality which seems to be the path Colin Wilson followed will get us so far but no further.

The Left Hand Path

 In occultism the left hand path is the path that seeks to acquire spiritual power by illicit means. Often justified by its acolytes as the direct path or the heroic path, it is really just the path of the unrepentant self who wishes to steal from God what he has not earned and is not prepared to earn. It is the path of the ego, pursued by those who do not accept that the spiritual can only be known by those prepared to sacrifice their own little egos. It can never bring one to true spiritual illumination but it can take its practitioners to a dark imitation of illumination which they confuse for the real thing.

To me it is no coincidence that the modern way which has rejected God is that of the left. All thought that falls under that general heading shares the belief that man is pre-eminent and that humanity does not need, in fact, is much better off without, God. The left is the way that denies transcendence and the fact of the divine and which seeks to remake the world according to man. To begin with, this may have been innocent enough and an attempt to see that God is within as well as out there, but the small seed has grown into something monstrous that not only rejects God but is also rejecting nature and soon enough will reject humanity. You may scoff at this idea since the left considers itself the defender of humanity but its progression of destruction and deconstruction, all based on the original diminishment of God, leads inevitably to the destruction of everything. It is a maw that must continually be fed. 

The ideology of the left will lead (I am tempted to say has led) to the destruction of Western civilisation. One of its principle expressions is feminism. Feminism arises in a culture when male creative energy has built up a structure it can latch onto and feed off. With its push towards equality in which nothing and no one is better than anything or anyone else, perhaps driven by feminine empathy which is a wonderful thing but only in its proper place, it results in a world in which the safe and the mediocre are the ideals to aim for and celebrate. This inevitably leads to intellectual and spiritual decline, the decline of freedom too because my freedom gets in the way of your safety. Is it a coincidence that the female powers are brought into prominence and propitiated on the left hand path of occultism? And that these powers are independent of masculine spiritual direction and do not manifest the true spiritual qualities of the feminine as reflected in the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary which is the feminine that has given herself over to God? The left side is the female as the right side is the male and it is no coincidence that the normal human condition is to be right handed. This seemingly unimportant fact does point to a greater spiritual truth for those alive to the realities of symbolism.

Feminism is a new twist on the old story of "ye shall be as gods" and like that story it involves a disruption in the natural order of being. The left in general is a rebellion against divine order and seeks to install man on the throne of God. It can never succeed but it can cause a lot of damage before it eventually destroys itself which it inevitably does when it has nothing else left to destroy.