'Spirituality'

I read an interview recently with a comedian who had been through extensive drug use, multiple sexual relations and the rest of the celebrity lifestyle but had now supposedly rejected all that, settled down, married and found 'spirituality'. What did he mean by spirituality? He thought that traditional religion had been meeting a human need but there was too much bigotry in it, too much sexism, too much emphasis on sin and not enough on fulfilling human potential. He thought we were right to reject it on those scores but that our descent into secularism and materialism was not the answer. We needed a new big idea and, of course, he was going to provide it. He now believed in a higher power which we needed to get in touch with in order to find true meaning and fulfilment in our lives.

This sounds like the old story of the hedonist who no longer finds any pleasure in his previous satisfactions so needs to look elsewhere to find pleasure. He's not interested in spirituality because of a love of God or a desire for truth. He's not concerned with real goodness. He's not willing to sacrifice or serve or really submit to a true higher power. He wants that higher power on his own terms and he wants it while staying resolutely faithful to the values of this world which can't possibly be questioned. Spirit has to accommodate itself to this world in his eyes. The notion that it should be the other way round does not occur to him.

For so many people nowadays 'spirituality' is a lifestyle choice which they want to add to their other worldly possessions. It's an addition to their self image, adopted for purely egotistic reasons. Tell them that it means you have to 'take up the cross' and, like the rich young man, they will walk away. Tell them it means you must sacrifice and renounce and they will look at you blankly. They want heaven while staying firmly in this world. In my view they are further away from true spiritual understanding than an honest materialist. I know that some might say that this is a start but I don't agree. Truth is unlikely to grow from such rotten roots. This is just worldliness disguised as spirituality.

Does this comedian acknowledge the wisdom of the 'archaic' Ten Commandments? Does he renounce the sins of the sexual revolution? Does he accept the reality of evil and see its power in the world? I may be coming across as a bit of a Bible thumper here but just as some old fashioned Protestant religion could focus too much on sin and not enough on love so the modern 'spiritual but not religious' person focuses far too much on love, horizontally understood (i.e. not love of God which is the only real basis for the other kind), and not at all on sin unless that is understood as sins against worldly values or political correctness as it is known these days. He sees spirituality as something waiting there for him to take and make him feel happier as he is now and does not understand that it is something that requires a radical transformation on his part. He might be willing to engage in some kind of technique to get what he wants but he doesn't see that techniques belong to this world and can never get you beyond it. They might work on a physical or psychological level. They can never work on a spiritual one.

The fact is that modern 'spirituality' has no place for God, not the living God who is a Person, who has a will and a purpose. It might give him a token acknowledgement but he is not absolutely central, and he must be if spirituality is to be real and not dissipate into self-centredness and triviality. Yes, I know about Buddhism but the situation in the modern West is so totally different to that in the ancient East that I don't think it is applicable here. Besides, traditionally proper Buddhists were monks and lived a life of sacrifice and renunciation which the spiritual but not religious of today certainly do not do.

We must ask why God is persona non grata in so much spirituality of today, and the answer clearly is that the acceptance of God would mean you had to acknowledge something greater than yourself which was real, not vague like an unidentified higher power. Something to which you had to incline yourself and give yourself up to, holding nothing back. You could not have spirituality as part of your own personality. You would have to sacrifice that personality in order to have spirituality. And this the narcissist of today is not prepared to do.

God the Father (revised)

I've put a revised version of an earlier post here on 'Remember the Creator'.
http://www.rememberthecreator.co.uk/2017/09/god-father.html

What is Spiritual Awakening?

What is the 'strong delusion' sent by God in the end times spoken of by St Paul? Is it this we need to recognise in order to awaken? Some thoughts on these questions on Albion Awakening.

Selflessness

I was recently asked whether I thought anyone could really be selfless or if there was always an ulterior motive behind any apparent selfless action. For instance, the person does whatever it might be to feel good about himself or herself or else to look good in the eyes of others. You could say this is rather a cynical attitude but the sad thing is that my questioner was only 15 years old and, if cynical, made so before her time by the prevailing atheistic/materialistic culture in which she had grown up. For after all if we are just the end result of a lot of random permutations of material forces there is no room for genuine goodness. Any altruism must ultimately have some survival motive at the bottom of it. True goodness requires a real individual really putting someone else first without any thought of recompense or accumulation of prestige or any kind of personal advantage, material or psychological, whatsoever.

I replied that yes, of course, I thought there was such a thing as real goodness or real selflessness even though much that passes by that name does indeed belong to the categories cited above. I gave the example of a young boy I knew who asked that his pocket money be given to a homeless person whose plight had clearly touched his heart. He was far too young to be acting from the self-conscious motives we have outlined. His gesture was spontaneous and came from true compassion. And it is these words I think that give the clue to the solution of our little problem. Compassion and the heart. I can't see how either of these mean anything in a materialistic conception of the universe other than as words inherited from a spiritual understanding that remain through habit and custom but don't mean what they say at all. They would just be prettifications of fundamentally base motivations, the putting of a fair mask on an ugly face.

Human beings are fallen. We are spiritual beings in animal bodies which partly explains our pull in two different directions, but there is something else going on too which is the spiritual sickness to which we are all heir. This egotism, for that is what it is, has the tendency to corrupt all our thoughts, feelings and actions. But there is also the truth within us by which I mean the memory of the word of God, a kind of whispering of something good and true and pure which derives from a higher condition than that of the self-centred material being we usually consider ourselves to be. I can't dissociate this from the image of Christ which image I believe is in us all, Christian or non-Christian alike, placed there or, perhaps better put, activated since the Incarnation.

I'm not saying that selflessness was not possible before Christ's advent but I do think it became markedly more possible after that. This is just an intuition but the highest selflessness is surely self-sacrifice in love and this was not demonstrated by any spiritual teacher before Christ even if there are hints of it in myth and some of the Jataka tales of the previous lives on the  Buddha. But the actual demonstration of the sacrifice of self in the purest, most disinterested love was only fully given by Christ and it was this that anchored the image (in the Platonic sense of a living archetype) of selflessness in the world and made it accessible to all.

So I said to my interlocutor that most certainly real selflessness, without any ulterior motive, is possible. Fakes and forgeries only come about because the genuine article exists. The existence of these fakes and forgeries may lead one to doubt that there is anything true beyond them but without a real goodness whose virtue they can misappropriate they would not even have the illusion of goodness to begin with.

And this young lady believed what I said because she recognised the truth of it in her own heart, never mind what the clever theoreticians had told her.

The Problem of Susan

Over on Albion Awakening I have put a piece about Susan's rejection of Narnia in The Last Battle by CS Lewis.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-problem-of-susan.html

The Rebellion of the Left

Here's a question. As ideas pertaining to the left are fundamentally anti-God (which they are since they replace the centrality of God with the centrality of Man who is regarded as sufficient unto himself, effectively his own creator with responsibility to no one but himself and free to make his own decisions based on his own desires and will), are people on the left bad people? As they have turned their faces from the true good to a false good does that make them bad? 

Continued on Albion Awakening

Impression From Above

An article on Albion Awakening on how the spiritual powers seek to inspire us at this time.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/impression-from-above.html