Secular Humanism and Sin

Secular humanism is the standard modern belief system, supposedly derived from science and the ideals of the French Revolution but actually a sort of perversion of Christian ideals which has taken a part of the truth and puffed it up out of all proportion in the context of the whole, at the same time neglecting, if not categorically denying, other more important parts. But whatever its initial inspiration, it is now clearly driven by forces seeking to separate Man more and more from God, to lead him to deny his source and restrict himself to the material world. For the last few decades one of the key ways these forces have been doing this is by attempting to deconstruct the human form in terms of its fundamental identity as two distinct and complementary sexes. Once this reality is lost the human being is disconnected from spiritual truth and its nature can be reassembled from below.  If this sounds a little excessive to you that merely shows how far the process has already gone. Previous generations, or maybe even you a few years ago, would not have thought so.

Secular humanism, which is fundamentally atheistic, has taken much of its moral code from Christianity but it leaves out the most important part, and the one which is the bedrock of all else, which is to love God.  It also misinterprets the commandment to love your neighbor, taking it as affirming egalitarianism and rejecting discrimination. However, as the Masters said to me, human beings are by no means equal on the earth plane (they are equal as human beings but not as expressed forms of the human being), and the wisest course is to treat people with fairness and justice but not necessarily equally, a subtle but crucial difference. This demands judgement which secular humanism doesn't like, always preferring, theoretically at least, to treat everyone the same. 

Truth can be represented by a cross with a vertical and a horizontal axis and it should never be forgotten that the latter hangs on the former. But this is precisely what secular humanism does forget (or deliberately ignore), treating the horizontal axis is if it were all there is. However when you expand your parameters beyond the second commandment to include the first you see that loving God necessarily demands loving truth, and that means that you are obliged to condemn falsehood where you see it and not simply support your neighbour in his acts and beliefs regardless of what they are. The humanist way, which is relativistic, thinks that loving your neighbour means accepting him whatever he does or thinks as long as it doesn’t cause obvious harm to others but this can easily amount to the denial of God and absolute truth. This is not love but sentimentality and moral relativism.

For the injunction to love the sinner does not mean that you don’t recognize his sin as sin or that he is a sinner. You cannot use the theory of love to deny the reality of objective truth, and if you do you will have neither for love, real love, always goes hand in hand with truth. True love does not forbear to point out right from wrong. After all, what is the greater love, to encourage someone happily walking towards the edge of a cliff or to pull him back?

So the way love approaches the reality of sin is to say that, yes, it is sin but there is the possibility of repentance and forgiveness. It does not simply deny that the sin is sin because if it did it would be complicit in keeping the person in the sinful state without offering him a way out to the life more abundant, the life of joy rather than pleasure. Does love make a prison more comfortable or offer a way of escape?

When it comes down to it secular humanism can only end in one thing and that is nihilism. You might not think so at the moment because people are often better than the belief system they espouse since God is within us whether we acknowledge him or not. But the more the West uses up its moral inheritance from Christianity, and the further its morals come from their true source, the more nihilistic it will become until its morality will be just a matter of utilitarianism. Secular humanism cannot stretch us or help us grow out of our limited self-enclosed state. It cannot encourage the God within to come out for it does not acknowledge him. The only way it can go is down.

N.B. Many people dislike the word 'sin' because it implies unworthiness, condemnation and all sorts of negative things. But the reality is that it is a perfectly good word to describe that which separates the human being from its Maker and its proper spiritual destiny, and that's a serious matter.

St Cuthbert

The man on the white horse comes to heal Cuthbert

St Cuthbert was one of the early British saints. Known as the Apostle of Northumbria and widely venerated throughout and after his life, his relics survived the dissolution of the monasteries and are still, nearly 1400 years after his death, kept in Durham Cathedral.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/st-cuthbert.html

Sexual Morality

I saw an article the other day by a well-known Christian philosopher in which he said that such things as pre-marital sex, adultery, the practice of homosexuality and abortion, in other words all those things given the green light by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, were wrong because God said so through Holy Scripture or the church. I disagree. It may well be the case that these things are wrong but it just isn't enough to put it like that nowadays. We are no longer children. Now we must ask that if God says so, why does he say so? If he said the opposite (obviously impossible in reality but theoretically possible), would we just change our ways on that basis?  God doesn't want us to obey him as though he were a tyrant and we his subjects, not the Christian God anyway though some other versions of the divine personage might fall into that category. Above all, he wants us to join him in understanding why right is right and wrong is wrong. And it’s not just because he has ordained it so. Or rather it is, but there is a reason.

It isn't good enough any longer to give a rule without giving the reason for that rule, and if we are told to give up a seeming good we are entitled to ask if this is because of a greater good. In this instance that is precisely the reason. Our Creator is not a spoilsport or puritanical misery. He wants nothing but our good and our happiness, but he knows that our real good lies in spiritual things and this means that we must learn to identify our true nature with the soul, our spiritual being, not personal desires of mind and body. These are not illegitimate because, of course, the mind and body are part of what we are. However they need to be seen in their correct place and very often, in our marred post-lapsarian world, their expression, you might say, their unnatural expression, conflicts with the requirements of the soul and prevents a proper understanding of it.  This is quite apart from any societal breakdown an unrestricted sexual morality might bring in its wake.

Sex is the most powerful force known to us and that is not surprising since it is the source and means of creativity.  It is the result of splitting original unity into two, a necessary split if the unmanifest was to become manifest and creation enabled to take place. However, without being controlled in some way, it can destroy a civilisation. It can certainly derail it from any spiritual achievement, and it seems all cultures have recognised this especially in the periods of their building up. In the period of their decadence and decline it's quite another story, and the examples of past history should be a warning to us.

The more you allow yourself to be dominated by your worldly mind and physical body, the more you will be identified with these aspects of your being and the less you will be able to respond to the soul which is the spiritual component of your being.  The more you act in a way that contradicts truth, the more you will separate yourself from truth until there will come a point at which you will cease to even recognise it and deny its very existence.

As sex is the strongest force there is it needs to be controlled and managed, and the best way to do this is through fidelity to one partner in marriage in which the physical aspect of sex is viewed through a spiritual prism as a reflection of a higher truth. And this is the point. Physical sex is the reflection of a higher truth and if the physical aspect is over-emphasised then its higher aspects will not be able to make their appearance in the individual’s mind. The mind will be too taken up with the lower (lower because relating purely to the physical body) aspects. This is not some kind of Gnostic denial of the body but a recognition of the hierarchical nature of man’s being. Man has many levels to his being and focusing too much on lower levels will block access to higher ones. This is why sex unconstrained by love will dull perception and cloud spiritual vision, and why an over-concern with physical pleasure will deaden receptivity to the inner soul and its intuitive faculties.

At the same time, it is true that sometimes when a person begins to open himself up to higher levels of being through the creative imagination the downpour of energy will over-stimulate to the point that the sexual nature is also stirred up excessively. We can often see this in the lives of poets, artists and the like. However, this is a preliminary phase and a more developed understanding and response will bring about stability. There will still be an increased sensitivity to beauty and a yearning towards union but it will be spiritual rather than physical union that now takes precedence.

This gives us a clue as to why the current sexual over-emphasis and stimulation must be viewed in a negative light. It is quite simply that the sexual and spiritual forces in man are one and the same which is why energy, if directed into the lower channel, cannot go into the higher. Celibacy is not necessarily required. That could cause more trouble than it’s worth if it leads to an inner frustration in which the mind gravitates to thoughts about sex more than it would in the context of a healthy expression. But discipline and control and recognition that the sexual impulse belongs to man’s animal nature not his angelic side are. And, of course, in an naturally ordered world even the physical expression of sex would diminish once an individual goes past the point of having children, something that our current attitude, which encourages even elderly people long past child bearing age to carry on having sex, would completely reject. But these people are at an age when they should be thinking more and more about their spiritual growth, and it is a poisoned society that encourages them to neglect this and attempt to prolong their youth.

So the philosopher was right in the moral position he took but I think that the reasons he gave for it were insufficient. It is surely better to understand why we should behave in a certain way than just to be told that we should with no explanation given.

Le Mont Saint-Michel

Le Mont Saint-Michel at high tide

Here's a link to a post on Albion Awakening about le Mont Saint-Michel, one of the main pilgrimage sites in the Western world.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/le-mont-saint-michel.html

Meditation and Prayer

Meditation and prayer are the two fundamental pillars of the spiritual life, and it's safe to say that no spiritual practice can be effective if it doesn't include at least one of them. They do fulfil different functions, though, and here I'd like to consider what those might be.

Let's get some definitions in place first. What is meditation? Basically it is the attempt to still the endlessly active form-making mind to find out what lies beneath. (Or above, both are symbolically acceptable). There are various techniques designed to aid with this, ranging from concentration on an image, to visualisation, to repeating a mantra, to focusing on the breath and so on, but what they are all attempting to do is create an inner state of stillness and silence in which the rational ego-centred mind is bypassed and the bedrock of consciousness allowed to raise to the surface of attention. The outer world, which includes thought and the sense of self, is negated leaving only consciousness as it is in itself. In that state there arises a different kind of awareness, one seemingly not restricted to or dependent on body or brain. Whether that really is the case is another matter but the point is that the meditator enters into a state in which his normal everyday self is transcended or, at least, held in abeyance. So meditation, at its highest and not simply as a means to find some peace in a busy world, is for mystics. It is for those who wish to go beyond self to find a deeper reality in formless awareness.

But does it make you a better person? As always in spiritual practice everything depends on motive or intention so the answer to that is, not necessarily. It might bring peace, it might bring a measure of insight but, on its own, it is not going to make an egotist less egotistical. It might make us adopt an outer manner that is less egotistical and it might even make us act less egotistically and more lovingly or what, if I may say so, we assume is lovingly, but, as my teachers informed me, we still need to have the humbling experience of prayer. Meditation, at its best, will connect us to the God within, or the impersonal self considered as pure unmanifest being, but this is not necessarily going to change us fundamentally in the sense of the individual selves we will inevitably come back to. Yes, of course, it will affect us and we may appear and act and even think differently but, if we are talking about fundamental change at the root level of the ego, then meditation by itself is not enough.

There are two aspects to spirituality once we start to take it more seriously and move beyond a conventional outer religious approach. These are mysticism and sanctity. Meditation is concerned with the mystical side. It is a way of going beyond our earthbound self and accessing a deeper form of consciousness that can rightly be called spiritual in that it is not limited by the restrictions of form. But just as life is not just material so it is not just spiritual either. It's a combination of the two in the same way that we are and if we neglect this reality then our spiritual development will remain incomplete as does that of so many people practising the mystical approach. They seek God within as pure abstract being and neglect the transcendent Creator who is the personal God, union with whom transforms our individual selves. This is sanctification of the soul, and the way to it is through prayer. It is no coincidence that the Buddha is normally depicted with closed eyes, rapt in higher consciousness, but Christ has his eyes wide open, having united the two worlds of being and becoming, spirit and matter within himself. Christ did not teach the suppression of individuality but its transformation into a higher state that included all its good points, necessarily sacrificed in the pure being of Nirvana but in Christian terms remade into the new man. Now this transformation does require, in a certain sense, the death of self, as symbolised by the Crucifixion, but that is just the death of the false self, the self that clings to itself as a fixed centre separate from all else. Individuality remains as the fruit of the whole incarnationary experience and rises like a phoenix from the ashes, now transfigured into a higher state in which it is united with its source in God.

So meditation relates to mysticism and its practitioners tend to assume that the human being is consciousness above all and not much else really matters. But prayer relates to us as individual created souls who can become one with God when we have emptied ourselves of the stain of egotism. Individuality is preserved and we are made sons and companions of the Father, joined in love which is why he created us in the first place. Meditation basically rejects the created world but prayer embraces it because it is, as its Creator saw, good. I think meditation is important to detach us from our petty selves and give us an insight into the fundamental background of existence. But if we are to know God in his personal form, which was his intention in creating us, then we need prayer, and the essence of prayer is simple. It is always remembering the Creator, keeping him in our thoughts at all times. The constant remembrance of God or the divine presence is the deepest prayer.

Meditation is seeking the depths of your own soul as it was before you were born when it rested in God's being. But prayer is humbly acknowledging your Creator and inviting him into your heart. Both are good but prayer reaches beyond the impersonal to the personal, and the expression of the personal or individual is the whole point of creation and why there is something rather than nothing. God created the universe to express himself in love, and, while meditation might align you with the quiescent state of the world before creation, it is through prayer that you will come to know God as he is in his expressed state in which his glory is made manifest. Meditation is only half the story.

The Old Country

A post on Albion Awakening reflecting on early human consciousness as it is revealed in the Wiltshire countryside and prehistoric monuments there. Also on how we can build on that to go forwards from a passive sense of oneness with the spirit of God in nature to a more engaged understanding of and connection to God in himself, one in which love rather than simple oneness is the keynote.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-old-country.html

Unity and Division

One of the sacred cows of the modern world, especially the modern spiritual world, is unity but if we look back we see that while unity was always valued in the past, it was not under any terms. In other words, unity was important but other things were more important. Chief among these, of course, was truth. What good is unity if it is based on falsehood? But now we put unity above all else and inevitably sacrifice not only truth but any ideas of higher and lower as well. For unity is based on quantity and, if enforced, will result in the loss of quality which is what we increasingly have today.

So sometimes in order to protect truth what matters is not unity but division.

I am aware that this is a heretical thing to say in the modern world but this conclusion had been forced on me by the current state of the world as an ever greater push towards unity results in an ever greater loss of truth in its higher aspects.  And I am comforted in this conclusion by the fact that Jesus said he did not come to bring peace but a sword.  What does a sword do? It divides, specifically, in this sense, it divides truth from falsehood.

Unity is good and much to be desired but not at any cost. There is a higher unity and a lower unity and only the former is worth having. For unity is primarily a spiritual thing which means it operates at an inner level and not necessarily on an outer one.  Indeed it may be wrong outwardly if it results in a falling away from truth and leads to an undifferentiated uniformity of ignorance. Quality, which is spiritual, is always to be valued over material quantity as long as life exists in an expressed form. Creation itself is based on quality and if we envisage the world of created beings as a ladder stretching from earth to heaven we see that there may be one ladder, the ladder of life, but there are many rungs. Sometimes we are led to ignore the oneness of the ladder. At others we ignore the reality of the rungs. Both matter.

To sum up. Truth is more important than unity and, though unity may be part of truth, it is not the whole of it