Islam and the West

 This is a follow up from a post of a few weeks ago. Obviously, emotions can get very heated in a discussion of this topic but I hope to remain objective. I don't think the current attitude that all religions are equally good or equally bad is a useful one. It may be well-meaning and an attempt to redress past prejudice and ignorance but it can also obscure the good and enable the harmful. Where the spiritual is concerned it is not just a matter of believing but of believing what is true and knowing what is either false or on a lower level of truth, meaning a level which caters more to the unevolved consciousness. For consciousness does evolve which is to say it takes in more of reality, is better able to perceive it and to express it. As this takes place the mind is potentially opened up to greater meaning and creative power and love and understanding, and when that happens its values change. If systems are in place which facilitate that it is in line with human growth and development. Not to mention the will of God. If there are systems that impede, prevent or restrict the evolution of consciousness this must be understood or else we will fall back into lower levels of being. That is all there is to it. Good intentions can be as harmful as bad ones if understanding is lacking just as love without wisdom (or misconceived love for it is not real love in these cases more a sentimentalised version of it) can actually have spiritually negative effects. I meant well is the excuse of the foolish and irresponsible.

Will all this in mind I have to point out that Islam in the modern Western world is a counter-evolutionary force. It is all very well to point to the spiritual decadence of the West, and I would be among the first to do so. That decadence is destroying our civilisation but we have to go forwards in line with the growth in consciousness and Islam is only suitable for a pre-rational stage of consciousness and that is looking at it in its best light. We can say that Islam has not succumbed to the absurdities that modern despiritualised Christianity has but that, in part, is because it has remained primitive and not evolved. The modern West has evolved but lost its spiritual centre in the process. Islam has retained its religious focus but is resistant to evolution. Both are wrong and neither is a remedy for the other.

When Muslims emigrate to the West it is because they seek a better life, materially speaking. But so many of them then seem to want to change the West to accommodate the ways of Islam failing to see that this would just make the West like the countries they left. To understand this religion and see why it is spiritually damaging in the modern age one has to go back to its roots. We might then perceive that it is not an intolerant, violent, oppressive doctrine because of misunderstanding of its core teachings. The core teachings are intolerant, violent and oppressive. Of course, sometimes intolerance is good if what you do not tolerate is evil but what Islam does not tolerate is anything other than Islam. That is a plain fact which we cannot avoid. Obviously, there are many good, decent Muslims but that is because they are human beings and God is in all human beings. But while there may be moderate Muslims there is no moderate Islam. Islam means submission and demands that everything submit to it, and its adherents are under the obligation to enforce that rule. You cannot co-exist with Islam for it will always seek to overcome you when it can, and this is because it is not just a religion but a totalitarian political ideology.

I am writing this because I live in London, a city with a Muslim mayor and a Muslim population that has now grown to 15%. That has been very apparent recently and many voices have been raised warning that we are sleepwalking into a massive problem. Often these voices are dismissed as spreading hate and, even though that is just a cynical attempt to shame critics into silence, one has to be careful to avoid unfounded prejudice and make sure one's real motivation is to awaken people to reality. Modern Westerners know little of their own history and do not understand Islam. I don't dispute that it has many qualities. Remembrance of God or some kind of deity, not a particularly evolved concept because it is limited by the limited spiritual capacity of the religion's originator who was clearly no Buddha or Krishna never mind Jesus. Focus on prayer, pilgrimage and fasting, all of which are valuable spiritual exercises. But you can never get away from the fact that it was founded on violence and spread by conquest. It does not tolerate rivals.

Western civilisation is clearly on the way out. In its present form it doesn't deserve to survive because it has turned its back on God. It has therefore become a blot on the face of the Earth. But a civilisation is made up of individuals and many are caught up in the present cultural devastation with no guidance of a better way. That guidance does exist but now you have to look for it and when you find it you will place yourself outside cultural norms or you will if you then follow it properly. At the same time, there are many false answers to the present problems and Islam is one of them. For the West certainly. It may have had a purpose for a particular place and time but that place is not here and that time is not now. Let those looking for a way forward out of the darkness of the present time know that Christ remains the Light of the World. He is the only thing in this temporal zone that truly speaks of eternity.

The Battle is Spiritual

 Continuing with the theme of the last post concerning the conquest of the West, the question has to be asked, is the West worth saving? Is it too far gone on the path of truth rejection and God denial? Is it merely suffering the consequences of its apostasy not merely of Christianity but of recognising any kind of spiritual reality at all? The saying "those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad" (see here) can be reversed and become "those who go mad are destroyed by the gods".  All previous generations would have thought that we have gone mad not only because of our spiritual abandonment but, even more, because of our denial of nature. I won't go into details about that but the same old culprits from anti-racism to mass immigration to feminism to same sex marriage and so on bear witness to what I mean. If you don't see these as denials of nature it's because you have succumbed to the temptation of giving abstract thought and ideology more importance than reality. You prefer theory to simple, naked, honest truth. Congratulations, you are an example of someone who has been educated beyond his intellectual capability and led astray by the glamour of thought. You illustrate the point of why certain spiritual teachers of the past preferred pupils who were illiterate and so could not be distracted by theory. I remember a saying from a Taoist text, possibly Lao Tzu,"Great Tao is very straight but the people love byways". You are one of those who has left the straight path and gone down a byway because it looks more superficially attractive. But it leads to death.

Francis Berger has a very good post about how someone who has not succumbed to the madness should fight it. There are three options. Confront it on its own battlefield through politics, ignore it and tend your own garden or fight it on the spiritual plane which might sound airy-fairy (and, to be honest, can be) but is actually the only way to confront it now because it is so deeply embedded in contemporary life and culture. There may have been a time when it could have been fought politically but that is long past. That does not mean those who feel called to do that should not do it but the fact is they will not win. On the other hand, the attempt to do so will at least invigorate those who see some of the madness and perhaps help them to resist it internally. But, in reality, to fight the enemy on his own terms will just mean that you are drawn into his world. He may give ground in small things only the better to advance his main purpose. You will start to become him.

No, the battle is spiritual and must be fought spiritually. The first thing to do is fight it within yourself. Put yourself right with God by full and complete orientation of your heart towards God and his purpose which requires humility and honesty. The next thing is to proclaim the truth as best you can. Not so much by condemning what is wrong (that too but it is not primary) as by asserting what is right. And then just live the truth, again as best you can. This will have a spiritual force which can't be measured and will probably not have a public and obvious impact but which is nonetheless very real. You will be injecting light into darkness on the mental plane and that light will be picked up and responded to by those in search of light. They won't know it comes from you and you won't know it has gone to them but the effect is real.

Francis's post is written in the context of The Lord of the Rings and points out how confronting Sauron, aka, in modern terms, the System, means you must think and act in ways that he doesn't know. If you fight him with his own weapons, he wins.  He (Francis not Sauron!) says in a comment to the post:

"Thinking like Sauron expands Sauron's influence and power. It creates more Sauron. On the flipside, not thinking like Sauron does not imply never confronting the enemy directly, but for goodness sake, if you're going to do it, be creative, intelligent, and "spiritual" about it". This sums the matter up perfectly and corresponds to Jesus's instruction not to resist evil, a widely misunderstood quote. It means don't fight evil with its own weapons because, just as modern materialistic technology actually alters the minds of its users to become more materialistic, so too do those who live by the sword die by it. The real battlefield is the mind and it's that you must address by showing people how to think and perceive differently.

Sauron was not defeated by armed opposition. He was about to crush his opponents on the battlefield when the ring was destroyed. He was defeated by hidden, secret work which went on without being noticed. It's true that the armies that confronted him did serve as a distraction but that was the best they could do.

The Conquest of the West

The ways things are going it looks as though the countries of Western Europe might be conquered without putting up any resistance. Has that ever happened before? In fact, these countries often facilitate their conquest by their own weakness and foolishness. America may go the same way. Part of this comes from an ignorance of history, part from naïveté, part from the feminisation of religion, culture, politics and anything else you care to mention and part from sheer stupidity. You might say that maybe this doesn't matter since these countries are so corrupt and spiritually destitute anyway, and that is certainly true. Perhaps they deserve to die. But what will replace them is in no way better despite theoretically being driven by supposedly religious motives, and it is in many ways worse. At least, the West is nominally Christian and its culture has enabled the thriving of deeper enquiry into religion and spiritual understanding. That which seeks to replace it would not permit any such investigation. Its systems would suppress any search for higher truths. It would be from a bad state to a worse.

I have been struck by the crescent and star symbol of Islam. The crescent is the crescent moon which is also known as the horned moon because of its appearance. The star is pictured next to the moon which means it is a fallen star. The moon itself represents the past and what must be outgrown. Esoterically, it is regarded as decaying. Horns, a fallen star, spiritual decay. What does that call to mind?

Added note: I should probably say that my interpretation of this symbol is not meant to imply a literal association but a symbolic one in the contemporary context. Perhaps the symbol is meaningful, perhaps not, but it is certainly there.

Ethnocentrism and Globalism

Every ethnic group is ethnocentric except for, as a sub-group, white liberals who are both the product and the cause of civilisational decay and whose spiritual nihilism has given them a racial death wish which they disguise to themselves as concern for the other but which is actually founded on a kind of self-hatred whether that be real or something they have been propagandised into believing because of their tendency to prefer abstract theory over reality. Certainly, we are called to self-transcendence as in uplifting our centre of focus from self to God, but this is totally different to the virtue-signalling self-rejection of the white liberal. And note that these people only ever reject their self as their kind not their actual personal self.

History tells us that ethnocentrism can be taken too far but still without an initial love of self there can be no love for anything else because self is where you come from. This is why we are told to love our neighbour as ourself. It is why, as the saying has it, charity (the original meaning of which is love) begins at home.

Ethnocentrism, as least that of white people, is tarnished as racism but what is racism really? Is it racial prejudice or is it the recognition that the different races do indeed differ and in quite significant ways, not just in trivial things like skin colour? It seems that two different attitudes have been confused and lumped together. What is now called racism was never a sin until it was made such by communists in order to weaken the natural instincts of self-preservation of Western nations, making them submit to their replacement by other groups. This was so countries could no longer resist the forces of globalism which would override national identities and concerns and make all groups subordinate to central control. This is why the sense of history is being deliberately lost, the past rewritten to reflect the prejudices of the present and groups which might counter the new narrative with a more spiritually literate understanding attacked or just ignored.

We live in a world of mass immigration, feminism, destruction of family, egalitarianism, climate change propaganda, transgender ideology and the fomenting of war. All brought about to separate Man from God and replace the natural order with Dis-order. The one thing that might stand against this is a Christianity rooted in the supernatural which is why that is attacked or remade into a branch of secular humanism. Know that we are in a spiritual war of good versus evil, and any form of spirituality which doesn't acknowledge this is deluded and just a diversion for dilettantes. Many people go along with the evil to gain money and worldly success as that is what you must do if you want those things. But others who may not actively go along with it can't be bothered to stand against it because they are not sufficiently incentivised to do so as they don't really care. But if you don't care about evil you are a part of it and that means that when it falls, which it will, you will fall with it. To avoid falling you must actively identify it and stand against it both in your mind and in terms of your relationship with the world. It can be hard to resist the relentless propaganda but that is what you must do without falling into the error of allowing evil to drag you down to its level by your opposition to it. Focus at all times on a love of God and the true good and know that evil can never win the war though it may gain many victories in the short term.

Ethnocentrism is attacked because it stands against globalism but also because it is natural. In today's world to be natural is a sin because demonic powers are trying to remake us in a form that has separated itself from its Maker and no longer obeys his laws but has replaced them with others, false laws, spiritually perverse laws. The reason the white race is the primary focus of this attack is because once that falls everything else will follow. Those foolish people who rejoice in the discomfiture of the white nations because of resentment of their past leadership will find that once natural order is removed there will be no barriers to chaos and oppression. 

By No Means Equal review

David Lorimer of the Paradigm Explorer Scientific and Medical Network and former President of Wrekin Trust and the Swedenborg Society has written a review of By No Means Equal (see right). Here it is.

'In the spirit of René Guénon’s critique of our age of quantity, the author argues that we live in an age of equality which ‘directly opposes the idea of the individual soul as a spiritual reality.’ He regards equality as belonging to the domain of measurement that ‘has been mistakenly applied the human world or world of living things which are worlds of quality.’ (p. 52) We live in a time of inverted values, and the dominance of technology has meant that we have lost touch with the world of the spirit that provides the compass for the soul. He argues, rightly in my view, that since 2020 we are well on our way to being ruled by a system of technocracy, where the technocrats are completely materialistic in outlook, regarding us as machines requiring servicing and updates. He writes that ‘technocracy is anti-God because it is materialistic, atheistic, seeks complete control, subordinates truth to the expedient and the efficient, denies the primacy of the good, the beautiful and the true and puts power in the hands of an unaccountable few whose expertise in specialist areas blinds them to the overall picture... in a world controlled by data and spreadsheets there is no room for beauty, mystery, sacrifice or love.’ (p. 100) A stimulating and timely contribution.'

 

The Human Form

We can speculate that our original spiritual form may have been one of light. If it had a shape it might have been something like a sphere or that's the closest we can imagine with our three dimensionally based minds. This is the only way we can conceive of the appearance of the soul, a spiritual being, on its own plane of existence. But when we come to Earth we acquire the human form we know with eyes, ears, a head, hair, limbs and so on.  However, all these are to perform material functions or developed in response to a physical environment. Eyes, ears and nose are to enable sensory response, their shape and structure determined by that requirement. Hands, fingers, legs and feet are to allow us to interact with and manipulate the environment. None of these  have a spiritual purpose as such and so my question is what is the form of souls in heaven? Do they revert to spheres of light with a luminescence determined by the degree of spiritual unfoldment or do they retain an earthly appearance?

Beauty is one of the major attributes of God. A major reason for creation is to allow for the expression of beauty, and, as we currently know it, beauty reaches its apogee in the human being. It makes no sense that this beauty be discarded simply because the functions on which it was initially based are no longer necessary. Therefore, I suggest that one of the reasons for our incarnation as spiritual beings in a material world is to acquire the imprint of the human form which we can take back to our soul selves in the higher worlds in order to beautify these. This would mean that our souls would still be spheres of light (again conceived in three dimensional terms), though now greatly expanded and much brighter than they were before if we have succeeded in our spiritual tasks, but they can be expressed in human form. In this physical world we have an outer form and an inner corporeal composition, blood, guts, bodily organs and the like. In the spiritual world we may have something similar except that that the inner body is now the soul, the being of light. This, I submit, is why we all feel a degree of disgust for the inner physical body but not its outer form. We know that our true inner self is the soul.

When visionaries see higher beings, whether it be Jesus or Mary for Christians or some of the saints, other traditions record similar phenomena, they see a figure. A figure glowing with light but still an individual human figure and one of great beauty. It is sometimes claimed that it is the visionary's own mind that creates the form or else that the spiritual being manifests in this way to appear more familiar. This may be true but it does not mean that the form is not real as well. We tend to think abstract spirituality is more advanced than a concrete representational sort but why should both not be included in the perfected end product? After all, God looked at creation and saw that it was good. I think it is a grave error to reduce the spiritual to the formless. There is the inner and the outer and both together make the whole. The perfection of life is in the perfection of spirit, soul and body, not just one as in spirit but all three, though naturally with spirit in the hierarchically superior position. But if God is a trinity so are we and all parts of the trinity require completion. The outer form may have been constructed in the physical world and according to physical needs but it is made beautiful by the developing soul and then remains as a spiritually perfected union of the two in the higher worlds.

Spiritual Love

 A(nother) perceptive post by Bruce Charlton prompted a comment from me and since it concerns the most important spiritual quality and the one that is often turned against itself in the modern world I thought I would repeat it here.

My comment was:

I don't think most people know what love in the spiritual sense is. We think of it as empathy or compassion or something like that but these are the smoke of love rather than its fire. Or else you could say they are the reflection of love in the ordinary human mind. But when these reflections are mistaken for their true source all sorts of confusion and misunderstandings arise. What I mean here is that we tend to act in imitation of how we think love might act rather than how love really does act because love, to be spiritually based and therefore real, must be directed first of all to God. If that does not exist then the secondary love which is love of neighbour does not properly exist either though an imitation of it might. But that originates in thought rather than the heart.

Comment on the comment:

Everyone, religious or otherwise, wants to be thought loving. It's the primary Christian quality and the one that has been hijacked by secularism to be worn as a badge of authenticity and goodness. For that reason it is the most abused, trivialised, watered-down and imitated of the virtues. Because we all know love on the human level we think that gives us an insight into spiritual love but really it does not. We should have a totally different word. Some people like agape but I find this too academic and remote, as though it belongs in a theological study rather than real life, so we are stuck with love. But still we have to understand that spiritual love is rooted in the love of God. The fact that God is love does not mean that love is God. Love can only be known for what it really is when the heart is open to God. Then God enters that heart and love is known. Otherwise all you have is an earthly imitation of it, like the image of sunlight in water but the reflected image is still made of water not light.