What are the Signs of a Civilisation in Decline?

Answer here.

https://albionawakening.blogspot.com/2018/11/what-are-signs-of-civilisation-in.html

Free Will and Evil

Does everything that happens do so in accordance with God's will?  Or, to put it another way, is evil part of the plan for the unfoldment of spiritual consciousness?

People have long struggled to make sense of why there is evil in the world if God is both loving and omnipotent. It seems to many that either he doesn't care about the evil or he is unable to stop it, neither of which is very reassuring. The traditional Christian response is that human beings fell at one point early on in their history, and evil came into the world through the misuse of free will. If you want to have a fully conscious and free good then you have to have the possibility of evil as well. I think this is correct as far as it goes but it doesn't answer the question completely for, after all, if we take the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden seriously (I don't mean literally), then we must ask what was the serpent doing there in the first place? Clearly evil was already up and running.

God creates a universe that is properly alive. What this means is that he creates beings who are free because only in this way can real love and real goodness be expressed. Only by doing this can God have a world which is created but also creates itself and so is more interesting to him. The free will of created beings is absolutely essential to this end. However, according to the scriptures, one of the greatest of created beings, a mighty angel, rebelled against God's plan for creation and dragged many other angels down with him. These demons constantly war against the Creator. They have corrupted the natural world and also humanity and they continue to do that. What is their aim? Why should any being rebel against God? The answer usually given is pride but I imagine it is more complicated than that. Love of power, the desire to be worshipped themselves, hatred of a goodness to which they cannot match up because of their wrong choices will all have played a part in their downfall and will continue to ensure a lack of repentance.

What all this amounts to is that this world is a damaged environment due to the activity of these fallen powers. Now, God could eradicate their influence by speaking a single word. He could banish all suffering and return to the world to a pristine innocence. But that would effectively mean destroying the world. Once God has given free will to his creation, he cannot withdraw it. If he could, it would not have been really given in the first place. A conditional free will, one dependent on making the right choices, is not free will at all. So, God is all loving and he is omnipotent but he has resigned some of his power and given it to his creatures in the form of free will. To get back that power, which he could do if he wanted, would mean returning his creation to the complete reflection of himself and he does not want that. He wants it to have its own individuality so that eventually (this is my notion, I'm not sure if it is orthodox) it may be his loving bride. That is what this whole process of creation and unfoldment through time is all about. 

There is, therefore, no contradiction between God being loving and omnipotent. His omnipotence is total but voluntarily and necessarily restricted so that we might have some power which is essential if we are to be real individuals.

Jesus ransomed the world from the devil who had usurped this earthly kingdom from its creator. Whether the devil had originally been assigned a vice-regent position which he abused or whether he, as it were, stole the world is not clear. What is clear is that he took it over, and it needed the Incarnation to put things right. Not that they are right yet because that depends on humanity's full acceptance of spiritual truth but the groundwork for the redemption and salvation of the world has been laid. Satan's power has been overturned and he is now, hard as it may be to believe, on the defensive. But, of course, as is obvious, he still has great power because we are still so recalcitrant to truth.

The conclusion here is that the evils of the world are mostly caused by the dark powers whom we aid and abet by responding to evil within ourselves. God can use evil to bring about good but this is not a justification for evil which is wholly bad and not part of God's original intention for his creation. Our suffering in this world is therefore not ordained by God. Some suffering is spiritually creative but it has to be recognised that some suffering is simply due to the power of the demons in the world and forms no part of God's will. It does not have some ulterior spiritual purpose even if it can be used to some ulterior spiritual purpose because God can bring good out of ill.

An English Virtue

This is an extract from Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd. It tells a tale recounted by the Venerable Bede in his History of the English Church and People.

"A monk named Drylhelm, from the country of the Northumbrians, was escorted by an angel to a “very broad and deep valley of infinite length” where the condemned souls of the departed were tossed in fire “dreadful with burning flames.”  It is unlikely that John Bunyan read this account, but his own image of the “Valley of the Shadow of Death” with “the flame and the smoke,” envisioned a thousand years later in The Pilgrim’s Progress , is part of a continuous tradition. Drylhelm was taken back to the living world, where he spoke only to a few devout contemporaries about his experience. When bathing in a freezing river, with the blocks of ice floating around him, he was engaged in conversation.

“It’s wonderful how you can manage to bear such bitter cold.”

“I have known it colder.”

When urged to alleviate his own watchful self-discipline, he similarly replied: “I have seen greater suffering.”  

Ackroyd goes on to remark that it has often been suggested that understatement is a national characteristic.

 I've put a piece on this 'national characteristic' on Albion Awakening.

Remembrance Sunday

We are at the time of year in Britain when a sense of sanctimoniousness becomes rather noticeable. The public display of virtue, particularly in the media, is very prominent. I am speaking of Remembrance Sunday to which the lead up, just like Christmas, seems to become longer every year. I may be wrong but I think that people only wore poppies on Remembrance Sunday itself at one time but they are now worn days, if not weeks, in advance as we all show how much we are against war and how much we support the brave soldiers who fought and died.

Do you detect a note of cynicism in my words?  Well, there is. It can't be helped. Now that we have chased the goodness of God from our lives we are left with a void that must be filled with something and we effectively fill it with ourselves. I mean that we congratulate ourselves on the nearest thing to spirituality we have left which is our supposed concern for others and our abhorrence of violence. That is all well and good but do we have to make such a display about it? The big public exhibition of virtue we make at this time of year is a pretty tawdry thing. Especially when in most other ways we celebrate the shallow and the hedonistic, and push aside the one thing that really takes humanity beyond war, that being a genuine spiritual awareness. I'm sure churches all over the country will echo with pious platitudes on Sunday but what do they really mean? How many people are really prepared to put aside their egotism and selfishness which are the principal causes of war? 

Of course, it is right to remember those who have died in a just cause but let us also remember that Christ did not approve of big displays of spirituality, and that is because he knew they were largely insincere. As he said:

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy

closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray

to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father

which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

It is all very well to be against war but war takes more than one form, and at the moment we are deep in a spiritual war and this one must be fought. It cannot be sidetracked and there is no chance of a truce. It is not fought with guns and bombs but it has its own weapons which are the spiritual qualities including love of truth. It needs courage just like ordinary war and there will be casualties too though, in this case, it is not physical death we need fear. So perhaps what we should really be remembering at this time is the first war, the War in Heaven, which is actually still going on and which, there is reason to believe, may currently be approaching some kind of climax. Let us make sure we are on the right side

Homeless Inside Yourself

Here's a link to an article on Albion Awakening based on some remarks by the Dalai Lama on Westerners and Buddhism.

https://albionawakening.blogspot.com/2018/11/homeless-inside-yourself.html

The End Times - Reincarnation and Judgment

Can anyone doubt that these are the End Times as spoken of in the Christian tradition? Almost everywhere materialism and atheism have triumphed, and where spirituality does exist it is often a weak, impoverished thing that takes more of its ideology from contemporary political thought than religious teaching. Most people in the West reject Christianity and, of those that do embrace it, many see it in the light of the secular humanism that has developed since the 18th century. Christianity, it is thought, must be revised to reflect that rather than that being seen as wholly secondary to the Christian vision. I believe that traditional Christianity does need to be looked at afresh from the perspective of a developing consciousness which sees humanity as growing into godhood, but this should be done by deepening it not by making it spiritually shallow which is what is actually happening. The heart of Christianity is neglected, and teachings that only really apply to those who have renounced the sins of the world are opened up to all regardless of repentance. That, at least, is becoming the popular conception of the real meaning of the Christian message. God loves everybody equally, disrespective of what they are. Perhaps he does but he loves truth too, and if you love him, you keep his commandments. Only then can his love be expressed without the other side to it which is his anger, considering anger as a metaphysical aspect of justice. For justice and mercy must always go together.

I've gone slightly off the point I wish to address in this post. What I have just written is not without relevance to my subject but I am jumping ahead of myself. I want here to try to reconcile a belief in reincarnation with the idea of judgment. That's because both form part of my beliefs about the spiritual world and, at first sight, they seem contradictory. Reincarnation is normally assumed to mean you have a more or less endless number of lifetimes to get it right. You live a life and learn or don't learn and in your next life you carry on from where you have left off in a new incarnation, the circumstances of which will be a result of the previous one or the previous ones. The consequences of mistakes will be experienced in a future life and you evolve, you develop, gradually growing into higher consciousness. That's the theory which is appealing to many because it has a certain logic to it.

However, I don't think things are that simple. Today's world is radically different to previous eras for many reasons ranging from a hugely expanded population to great material comfort and technological sophistication to access to all the wisdom of the past for anyone who cares to look for it to the decay of all forms of religion. It is a time of crisis and I believe many people are being born now to experience a world in which a definitive choice has to be made between good and evil, truth and lies, with the latter often being presented as the former which makes it a real test of one's inner compass and true orientation. And also of courage. For it does take a certain amount of courage to hold onto one's faith in the true God when so many false alternatives are being presented, usually with the assumption that they are more intelligent, more compassionate or just that to hold them is the sign of a good person. We will find as time goes on that to stand by real Christian values will be seen as the mark of an ignorant or even bad person. That is because these values put God above Man. Modern ideology cannot countenance that. God, if he exists, must adapt himself to human requirements, and his purpose for us must involve the increase of happiness and concomitant decrease of suffering in this world.

Might it be that the population of the world is currently at an all-time high because so many souls are being assembled for a comprehensive test of their spiritual quality and dedication? Circumstances are being make hard in order to sort out the spiritual sheep from the goats. Now is an important time of decision when humanity will be divided into those who make the spiritual grade and those who don't, with the failures (which may be a hard word but is accurate) being sent elsewhere to learn the lessons they refused here. Where that elsewhere will be and what its nature will consist of, I cannot say but I would guess that it will be a descent into a lower level of consciousness which will require a concerted effort to escape from. There will be increased separation from the source with less of the consoling worldly pleasures one can find here.

This is how I reconcile reincarnation and judgment. During the course of a world age souls incarnate at various times and in various places with the aim of developing spiritual consciousness which requires for its proper growth the full sense of duality and awareness of individuality. Only by becoming a fully aware self can the God-created individualised spark of spirit grow into godhood and become a co-creator in the fullness of life which is God's wish for us. If we stayed in the heavenly realms without incarnation we would remain spiritual babes. Independence is acquired through incarnation. 

But a world age comes to an end and that is what ours is now doing. It's the end of term, the time when all spiritual students must take their exam to see if they can pass on to the next stage. Call it graduation. Those who succeed, on whatever level because some are primary school students while others are at higher stages, ready for full graduation into theosis, ascend to higher levels appropriate to their consciousness. Those that do not pass this spiritual exam descend. The choice is ours and it is never too late to make the decision that will be determining. There are temptations galore at the moment, precisely to test the heart. They range from simple materialism and atheism to numerous false forms of spirituality, united in their focus on the human self and its spiritual potential. But it is up to us to see through all of these and open our hearts and minds up to the true reality of God. Then we must act on the measure of that reality without distorting it by egotism, emotionalism or pride. In this, I believe, we are most guided by dedication to the person of Christ. The truth of his being will direct us to the truth of our own being. Using him as a kind of universal standard time by which we set our own spiritual clocks will serve us well when the moment comes for the judgment of our soul.

Why Do People Not Recognise Jesus?

That is, why do people not recognise Jesus for who he is? If he really is who he claims to be then surely that should be apparent? He should strike an echo in every human heart. But even during his lifetime there were plenty of people who saw and heard him but did not recognise him and so consequently rejected him. And now, though you might think he is plainly revealed in scripture, religion, tradition and art, there are many who do not recognise him.

Continued on Albion Awakening.