File under You Couldn't Make It Up

I have a Facebook account which I never look at but I thought I'd mention the publication of my new book there. When I'd written my message I glanced at the posts below where my 'friends' (hardly any of whom I actually know) had written various things to do with this and that. One of these was so incredible I have to share it here. It's a report from the magazine Psychology Today which is a popular psychology magazine apparently. This is what the report said.

"An interesting effect happens as people watch pornography. They become more egalitarian, and more supportive of men and women sharing roles and work, less accepting of gender-discrimination. They also become more accepting of sexual diversity and less stigmatizing towards homosexuality. They become less religious, and may even experience more crises of faith. (Pornography) leads to people changing their beliefs about sex and gender,...... and watching porn may in some cases lead to people being more accepting and less judgmental, both of themselves and others."

In other words, pornography corrupts the mind but to an already corrupted mind this corruption indicates a moral progression. The person who put this up made the comment that this showed how "Liberalism is literally rationalised sexual misbehaviour" which I thought summed it up well. The implication almost seems to be that watching pornography is a moral act. I'm not sure you can take inversion much further.

The modern world really needs to rediscover the idea of sin and not project that onto actions against political correctness. Otherwise it is lost.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man

This is the title of a new book I have just published. It's actually not so much a new book as a collection of slightly edited essays from this blog plus one or two original pieces, all arranged into 12 sections that relate to the title.

The promotional blurb reads as follows:

"The world today is in crisis. We all recognise this but see it as political or environmental or social or economic or something along those lines. In other words, something material using that word to include the intellectual realm of ideas and ideologies. It is none of those or, if it incorporates them, they are symptomatic of something deeper and more serious. The crisis is spiritual. It is the result of wrong decisions collectively taken over several hundred years, each one of which builds on and worsens the last. 

Consisting of over 100 essays arranged thematically, and ranging in subject from God to modern times, this book examines the crisis, looking at its cause, contemporary manifestations and means of resolution. 

Our future is poised in the balance and each individual has a part to play in determining what that future might be. The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man will help you make the right choices."

Well, I did say promotional blurb!

A link to the book on amazon UK is here.

to the Kindle version here

to the book on amazon.com here

and to the Kindle on amazon.com here

At the moment you can only look inside the Kindle versions which went up first but I hope that will be changed soon.

I've only just realised that the title echoes René Guénon's classic The Crisis of the Modern World. That was not intentional but it shows that the crisis has not gone away. In fact, I would say it's got worse.

The Left and the Good

If you were to tell an ordinary person that leftism is evil (not that I go around saying this), most would look at you as though you were mad. The standard modern view of both self-identified left and so-called right is that liberal values, which are those of the left, are enlightened values. Even most spiritual but not religious people would think like this. But they're wrong and here's why.

What leftism does is transfer the idea of the good from the spiritual realm to the material plane. That is what actually defines it. This means that the good, insofar as it concerns humanity, now relates almost completely to the body and the emotions, with what pleases me and gives me happiness being seen as good as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's body or emotions. Correspondingly, evil is what causes suffering on a bodily or emotional level. This makes God, if he exists, either evil himself or uncaring. This spiritual sleight of hand is only accomplished by totally ignoring the higher world or, if it is accepted, it is seen only in the light of this one. The consequence of that is that the transcendental values of the Good, the Beautiful and the True are denied, with the vision of the absolute dismissed so that everything becomes relative and this worldly. In this way leftism denies the real good and replaces it with a false one. What denies good is evil.

The modern world has no understanding of good and evil. But since good and evil exist it must necessarily project the fact of these realities onto something else. So, it thinks it knows good and evil but it assigns their being in the wrong place and not infrequently actually inverts them. This all comes down to a false understanding of what man is. If man is identified as a material being then good is what benefits him in that aspect. However, if he is identified as a spiritual being, a soul, then the situation is very different. Good is what advances him as a spiritual being with evil what hinders or prevents that advance. Treating him as a material being and taking steps to encourage and support that identification would certainly hinder the spiritual side of things. This makes it evil.

To know real good, you must acknowledge God. If you have no understanding of an absolute good, something real in which good is focused, then any concept of good is purely relative which means it is an arbitrary thing with no substance. We no longer know good because we don't acknowledge God, and, not knowing good, we don't know evil which means we are easily vulnerable to it.

Over many decades the left has been used to deny reality. As Bruce Charlton pointed out in a post today (see here), it has consistently set about labelling most of humanity's natural intuitions about life as bad because in some way they exclude though everything excludes on some level. If it didn't there would be nothing. Exclusion is the very nature of form. This, it must be stressed, is not just an honest mistake. It is a quite deliberate attempt to mislead and corrupt. If not on the part of the ordinary man or woman then very definitely on a supernatural level which is the level from where the whole thing is organised. And even the ordinary person is not blameless for if their heart was in the right place and their mind correctly ordered they would not go along with the distortion of truth.

Leftism is the attempt by forces antithetical to God to turn human beings away from spiritual truth towards atheism and materialism. It has been extraordinarily successful. There is no longer any point in being polite about this or looking for excuses. The situation has gone too far and seeks to go further with every year that goes by. The left is demonic and if you don't see that you need to start waking up.

What Are The Causes of Atheism?

I imagine most people reading this blog would agree that atheism is an unnatural state. Unnatural because wrong and a normally constituted human being would, on some level, sense this. What, then, are the reasons for atheism and for such a large number of atheists at the present time? Are they genetic or cultural or to do with intelligence or something else? Let us consider the various possibilities.

Religiousness, apparently, is heritable to a degree. Irreligiousness would, therefore, also be heritable. However, history, not to mention common sense, tells us that religiousness is natural for human beings so it may be that the lack of it is caused by a genetic mutation that harms our normal way of thinking and, effectively, sends us slightly mad, causing us to believe a lie or lack the instinctive wherewithal to know the truth. This mutation has been enabled and spread by the massive decline of infant mortality since the Industrial Revolution, affecting first the upper classes and then everyone which is why atheism began amongst the richer and more educated section of the populace before spreading everywhere else. Previously people who suffered from such genetic mutations would simply not survive. Now they do and they have children themselves, spreading the virus if one can put it like that.

Another reason for the growth of atheism might be cultural and there are two strands to this aspect of the situation. Material science has grown vastly over the last two hundred years, telling us things about the world that previously we would have turned to religion to explain. This inevitably undermines religion in all its aspects. The fact that science cannot explain life or consciousness is conveniently side-lined with the excuse that, no doubt, one day it will be able to do so. For most people, science has replaced religion as the authority to which human beings should defer and, since science is materialistic, atheism is the natural consequence.

The second cultural explanation is the decline of the spiritual power of the churches as they have all, to various degrees but without exception, descended into institutionalism.  Their capacity to inspire is so reduced that, in many people's eyes, they have become no more than museum pieces which we only tolerate because of their rich artistic legacy. But they don't even produce decent art nowadays and their intellectual representatives, the ones that are on public view anyway, are, for the most part, feeble. Once the churches began to accommodate themselves to temporal secular fashions their day was over, their weaknesses were exposed and their relevance destroyed.

It seems that higher intelligence tends to indicate the likelihood of atheism. I would qualify this by saying that in the modern world higher intelligence does this. The greatest people of history were not atheists. But now when you have high intelligence you think for yourself (to a certain extent, it seems strange that so many intelligent people follow liberalism like sheep) and you reject traditionally held values partly because they are traditional and we are supposed to be more enlightened now. You also want to demarcate yourself from the ordinary souls who follow the same old paths. You are better than that. So there is a degree of arrogance involved. There is also a rejection of instinct and a preference for ideology and theory. Instinctive reactions are seen as the mark of the primitive and the unenlightened which in some cases they may be but they have a wisdom too.

However, if intelligence is accompanied by a degree of spiritual insight or real imagination then the whole position is reversed. You begin to see the wisdom of tradition and the past. So, I would suggest that it is not intelligence that correlates with atheism but intelligence without intuition. If we surmise that humanity has three modes of cognition, which develop in an individual as that individual evolves, then we can stay that first comes instinct, then intellect and then intuition which is instinct on a higher level, a more self-aware and insightful level in which you respond consciously rather than automatically to what is perceived, and you do so because your conscious self is beginning to grow out of its own self-limitation into a greater identity. If you fail to develop intuition after a certain level of intellectual attainment then your intelligence actually becomes counter-productive and from being a good thing that functions in an evolutionary progressive way becomes harmful, maladaptive you might even say. This is the position for a sizeable chunk of the intelligentsia in our time. They suffer from arrested development hence their atheism.

We come now to the something else explanations for atheism. First of all, linking back to the genetic explanation, could it be a mental illness? We have seen the rise of all kinds of psychological pathologies in recent decades, affecting all areas of the mind. I don't agree that this is just because we now have better descriptive terms for them and are more able to diagnose them. That's true, but I believe they are also on the rise in the populace, perhaps a populace weakened by relative ease, even luxury, and lack of real stress. Atheism could be a consequence of this, a psychological sickness.

And now I come to the most controversial part of this essay. Might some people alive today have no souls? In normal circumstances, men and women are spiritual beings come to Earth to learn the lessons that will fit them for the life of a fully conscious son or daughter of God in heaven. Their material form is something they, as souls, inhabit in order to incarnate into this world. It is not them or not the whole of them. But at a time of vastly expanded population it is possible that some human beings do not fall into this category. They are their physical and mental selves, their material selves, and actually have to build the spiritual component of their being, to bring their self to the point at which it can receive the divine spark. Instead of being top down constructions, they are bottom up constructions. There is no reason for all human beings to have the same origin. They are all creations of God but who is to say God always creates in the same way? It is possible that some human beings are directly created by God while others are formed as a result of creative processes in the world that God, or his agents, have set up. Clearly this speculation of mine is open to misuse so I need to stress again that all beings spring from God. But do they all spring from God in the same way? 

Atheism is a spiritual sickness but there are different sorts of atheists. There are those who simply do not 'get' the idea of God and can't see how to fit that into their experience of the world. I would call this simply ignorance. But then there are those who actively deny God and this is more in the nature of a sin because it relates to the will. Such people don't want there to be a God because of the damage that would entail (in their eyes) to their sense of a fully autonomous self. These people are actively anti-God and are the true atheists.

Separation from God

The end game of the unseen powers behind the corruption of the world is now becoming clearer. It is to turn this world into an outpost of hell. We have the idea that hell is place of torment and cruelty, darkness and fire and suffering. So it may be in one sense but that is not a definition of hell that encapsulates what it really is all about. Hell is separation from God.

A deluded individual may be in a kind of hell and not realise it. If he is physically comfortable and entertained or distracted in some way, he may be oblivious to the fact that he is in spiritual darkness. You might ask if that matters if he is happy and content. But he is neither happy nor content, not really. He is just numbed to truth and goodness and exists in a kind of emptiness that he may not recognise with his surface mind but the effects of which will be gnawing away at him inside because his spiritual self will be ignored and suppressed. He may not even know he is suffering but he will be suffering just as so many are today.

For several centuries there has been an ongoing attempt to detach man from his spiritual roots and to remake him as a purely material being. This has been planned with precision. Matter became more important than spirit which, as a result, eventually was denied altogether. But the natural man still existed. Now, however, we are in the process of deconstructing even the natural man with the transsexual agenda just the latest twist in a story which has taken in feminism, same sex marriage and so on, all steps in the dismantling of the human form which, let us remember, was made in the image of God.

But the story does not stop there. The aim is not just to separate man from his spirit but to separate him from his body as well. This is the purpose of transhumanism in which man and machine are melded with consciousness uploaded into an artificial construction which, in theory, could be made immortal. This nightmare would potentially involve consciousness being trapped on the physical plane. If that happened hell would have arrived on earth.

I don't believe it will happen because the spiritual powers would step in. But the process might be allowed to run quite a long way before they did to give human beings, or as many of them as possible, the chance to turn away from evil to good. Even now there is a growing repugnance to what is taking place in the world. The problem is people don't know where to turn because so many avenues, of religion, of proper spirituality, of good traditions and common sense, are being closed off. The young are targeted what with non-education (i.e. programming children instead of teaching them how to think for themselves), trashy entertainment, corrupt music, computer technology and hysterical scare stories that distract them from real problems. However, the human spirit cannot be denied and I believe will triumph in the end. What those of us who are alive to the situation of today, and who know that the solution is in God and Christ, must do is keep some kind of flame burning in these times of darkness. Yes, I know that's a cliché. It's no less true.

The scenario I have depicted sounds grim but it is important to have no fear. Take refuge in God and there is nothing that can harm you. Whatever transpires in the world, you will be secure.  And even the world will be restored to truth at the end of it all. The darkness of the present time can never stand against the light of Christ.

Negative Theology

This post arose out of an email conversation with Bruce Charlton during which he expressed the opinion that negative theology was unsuitable for our times. I agreed though I would say it's especially unsuitable for now as I believe it to have shortcomings which render it of limited use at any time. It certainly makes important points but it also has the defects of its qualities so would always need to be balanced by a more positive attitude to God and the universe.

In negative or apophatic theology God is considered in terms of his unknowability. He is divine darkness rather than light, the inexpressible truth beyond form, the unmanifest Void behind the created world. This approach to God, springing from Neo-Platonism rather than anything Jesus taught, has always been attractive to a certain type of intellectual but, unless it is balanced by an approach that focuses on the positive qualities of God, it can potentially mislead the would-be mystic. The sort of temperament drawn to it might be confirmed in its own weaknesses and take refuge in a reductionist spirituality which ignores the truth in creation and in ourselves as created beings.  We are meant to fully embrace creation though always seeing it in the light of the Creator.

Negative theology can be a useful corrective in a culture which sees God in strong anthropomorphic terms or else one over-fixated on ritual and commandment. It can help to reduce focus on the form of God when that becomes too prominent. But in a basically God-denying society such as ours it can become an escape into abstraction and an evasion of spiritual responsibility. From a certain perspective there is a  profound truth in it but if negative theology were what really mattered then the life story of Christ would have ended at the Crucifixion. However, it went on to the Resurrection and the Ascension, both of which involved the validation of the body which in a negative theology can have no real meaning or purpose. 

The Buddha last words were, ‘Work hard to gain your own salvation’. Sound advice but not very inspiring and somewhat dry. This is negative theology. Christ's last words to his disciples were, "I am with you even unto the end of days". What could be more beautiful and full of love? That's the opposite to negative theology.

If you are tempted in the direction of negative theology, be aware of its shortcomings. Seemingly a philosophy pointing to a high spiritual state, it can actually be a rejection of the goodness in creation and the idea of a personally loving Creator. Its Christian advocates try to fit Jesus into their scheme of things but really they go against what he taught. Jesus’s first miracle was changing water into wine. In their worldview there's no real difference between water and wine so he was wasting his time.

What the negative theologians miss is the importance in spirituality of quality. God is in everything but he is not in everything equally. That is the apparent paradox which they do not resolve but it is easy to resolve if you accept creation as real. And people as real for that matter because people are not really real in a negative theology universe. They are outgrown when you see the truth just as in certain forms of Indian philosophy.

When all is said and done, negative theology, the theology of darkness, is reductionist and, being the polar opposite to materialism, has a lot in common with it. The materialistic atheist and the non-theistic negative theologian both miss that life is not just spirit and not just matter but a creative union of the two together which is much richer than either on its own.

God is not unknowable. We can never comprehend the totality of him but we are made in his image and we certainly can know him when we turn to him in our hearts. He is there, not as impersonal being but as our loving Father. "Show us the Father" said the apostle Philip, to which Jesus replied "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."

It might be said that I have argued in this piece not against negative theology itself but against the misuse or misunderstanding of negative theology. Possibly so, but the fact is by its very nature this doctrine lends itself to misuse. Unless counterbalanced by a strong awareness of God as Creator and the reality of the human soul and the truth in creation plus an awareness of the hierarchical nature of the divine qualities of goodness, beauty and truth, it can result in the extinction of the self rather than its raising up into spiritual glory which is God’s purpose in creating us as demonstrated at the Ascension. Jesus did not rise up into darkness. He rose into light. This is the purpose of creation. To make darkness into light not to return to darkness.

Are The Masters Demons? A second look.

I'm taking the unusual step of repeating a post from 4 years ago. I'm doing so because this question came up again after the talk I gave at the conference which I reproduced in the previous post. As far as I am concerned, it's a fair question, given the fact that demons certainly do communicate through channelling

Basically the issue here is the difference between the psychic and the spiritual which is a difference not sufficiently appreciated in our day when anything that is not material is often regarded as spiritual, taking that word to mean intrinsically good as opposed to just non-physical. But traditionally it was understood that there are many beings in the spiritual world which comprises a vast range of different types ranging from the very high to the very low. Anyone contacted by one of these beings was expected to exercise prudence and discrimination.

Here's the original question which is almost identical to the one I was asked just recently.

Q. "I'm a Christian and, according to my beliefs, most of the beings contacted by spiritualistic methods are actually demons whatever they may pretend to be. I must admit that your Masters don't seem to fall into this category but can you say anything to alleviate my concerns? I know that the fallen spiritual powers can be very deceptive and can even appear, as we are taught, as angels of light."

A. It may surprise you to hear that I actually have a lot of sympathy with your attitude which is by no means as alarmist as some people might think. I share your belief that some of the spirits that communicate through channeling, or by other means, are what you call demons, and are seeking to lead genuine seekers astray, whether that be in order to absorb energy from them or to sully spiritual truth by mixing it with enough falsehood to poison the well. Of course, not all are 'demons', the majority being simply discarnate spirits of varying levels of insight and understanding just as exist in this world, but some assuredly are though what a demon might actually be is open to discussion. When I asked the Masters about that they simply said that they were 'erring souls'. However, I think that we can reasonably speculate, given religious tradition and the frankly mad state of much of the world today, that there are forces of division and deceit, spiritual powers of darkness to use a term that may sound melodramatic but which is literally accurate, that work against the upliftment and enlightenment of the world. And, yes, they can certainly present themselves as wise and benevolent beings dedicated to truth.

For, at the moment, there is an all out assault on humanity's understanding of the spiritual. This manifests itself as the stimulating of atheism and materialistic science, together with increasing reliance on machine technology, on the one hand, and the corruption of religion and distortion of spirituality on the other. There is also a gradual falling away from traditional morality, with its sense of responsibility and obligation to a higher power, and encouragement of attachment to the senses, the self and the independent, thinking mind. All potential points of weakness are targeted by these fallen spiritual powers which have as their ultimate agenda the separating of man from God. I appreciate this sounds like nothing so much as an occult conspiracy theory, but I consider the Christian view that Earth is a battleground for the souls of men to be the truth, unfashionable as such a belief might be today to the intellectually sophisticated but spiritually unawakened. If it is asked why this is permitted, the answer would be that it is only through exposure to danger that one can learn courage. Only through the struggle to know truth from falsehood can an individual actually become truth.

So, are the Masters demons? Well, of course, they are not, though naturally I would say that! However, I don't believe that anyone who reads their words in an objective state of mind could possibly think so. Quite apart from the quality of their presence, something of which I hope comes through in the book, their constant emphasis on the need to acquire humility and love seems to me to be the approach to spirituality most consistent with the teachings of Christ. Indeed, the only spiritual figure from the past they mentioned was Christ, and they did not mention him or stress what he stressed simply to slip in other teachings that might cause one to wander off into sidetracks and end up in a marshy bog as some discarnate speakers certainly do, whether intentionally or not. Catholics might not be happy to hear them refer to Catholicism (like any outward form of religion) as good for souls on a certain level but we now need a new and higher understanding of life, but this reflected their attitude that the spiritual path is an inner path, though they would add that only those who have fully assimilated the lessons of the outer path are truly ready for the inner. By their fruits you will know them, and the fruits of the Masters' words can surely be seen to be truth and goodness. So, far from beings demons or the like, they are, using conventional Christian terminology, members of the company of saints in heaven.

There are many channeled teachings. As a Christian you will be aware of the instruction in the epistle of St John to 'try the spirits, whether they are of God'. This is sound advice. You try (or test) them with  your head and with your heart, and if they pass that test then you may give them your attention. Always remember, though, that no external being should ever replace the inner connection you have with your Creator.

Christianity in its essence is the purest expression of spiritual teaching to appear on this planet and, in the figure of Christ, it contains the highest representation of a spiritual being. He was the incarnation of the Logos, just as St John says. But with its understandable desire to protect itself from lower influences, arising from the time when it was struggling to establish itself in a pagan world, Christianity can sometimes reject other approaches to truth that are perfectly valid. One should always exercise discrimination with respect to anything purporting to come from the spiritual world, but to write off anything that is not specifically Christian as demonic is a mistake that can lead to narrowed vision and unnecessary fear. It is certainly both arrogant and foolish to say that we are entering a new age so can throw off the superstitions and restrictions of the past (the ego always wants spirituality on its own terms), but the ways of the past can always be supplemented by new understanding as long as you see that understanding, like Christ said of himself, as coming not to abolish but to fulfil the law and the prophets.