Equality - A Doctrine of Destruction

It has become almost universally accepted that feminism is about equality but there are two problems with this. The first is that it is not true, certainly not nowadays. For, whatever it once might have been, feminism has developed into a movement for the advancement of women as opposed to men, and it clearly seeks power not equality, specifically the traditionally masculine type of power which it attempts to acquire through various methods, many of which are based on deception. It employs the usual tricks of the left (of which it is an offshoot) that include the distortion of language, false assumptions stated as fundamental truths, destruction of common sense basic principles, appeals to supposed justice, political indoctrination, denigration and suppression of opposition and manipulations of ideology.

The second problem is that of equality itself. It is taken for granted that this is a reasonable objective, and that equality means everybody merits exactly the same thing. But if you look at both nature and the spiritual world, there is no such thing as equality. Actually, if equality really were a law of life there would never have been any manifested universe to begin with. Creation is based on inequality, the initial separation of heaven and earth being a rupture in oneness and the start of difference. Now, equality, if real, would have meant there could never have been any break in oneness, all would have been eternally the same, and, by the same token, difference is only possible with inequality. Inequality is at the very root of creation and the fundamental order of the universe. A complete equality would have meant that the manifested world of becoming could never have arisen. The one may be equal because it is one. The many cannot be equal because they are many. To be equal, everything would have to be the same.

Consequently, it is not hard to see that the contemporary obsession with equality, and the assumption that oneness and equality are always and inevitably good, 'spiritual' things, is actually a great metaphysical error. It is an anti-spiritual impulse and an attempt, probably initiated by the dark powers, to return creation to the state of chaos whence it arose. It is the destruction of cosmic order, necessarily based on hierarchy, and it feeds on rebellion and resentment which are first disguised and then justified by the sentimental excuse of compassion. Not that compassion itself is sentimental but if used in a sentimental way which ignores or over-rules truth, it becomes destructive. This is disordered compassion or compassion that is not really compassion but simply dons its clothing in order to achieve an end desired by the sinfully motivated self. If the devil can quote scripture for his own ends, he can surely use virtue for his own purposes too. And he does.

As for men and women and a supposed equality between them, why not look to nature? We could, of course, look to scripture too but that is rejected by most people nowadays when it conflicts with their agendas. However, we have an interesting example in nature with the phenomenon of handedness. Everyone is right or left handed. We do need both hands and so you could say that the hands are equal but one is the leader of the two and most of the time it is the right.* There is a built-in imbalance and this appears to be one of the facts of life. Complete balance or symmetry does not occur. Indeed, the Masters have said (in Towards the Mysteries), "You should create without balance. Balance is not harmony. Balance is mechanisation of the mind”. They were speaking of the arts but what they say applies to life in general too. Indeed, it is because it applies to nature and life that it should apply to the arts. But the point is that balance is equality. Equality is not a desirable thing in terms of manifestation even if it exists at the deepest spiritual level of non-manifestation or pure being, just as oneness does. But it does not exist in terms of created things and beings. Where do we see it? In the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, among humans? Nowhere is there a complete equality and nowhere should there be except in chaos and darkness. But light is never the same, there are always degrees of light. There are no degrees of darkness. (If you think there sometimes are, that is because that difference is created by light.)

Going back to handedness and the undeniable fact that most people are right-handed, we should note that the association of the right side with the male and the left with the female is an ancient one that exists in many cultures. The two are complementary and do (in a way) balance each other but they are not the same and one is naturally the dominant one. This is just an example taken from nature and is not intended to prove anything. But I would say that it does illustrate a general principle that is obvious to the uncorrupted (by desire or whatever) mind. It is not meant to be applied literally to the male/female complementarity but to show that nature is not interested in equality. Human beings are not hands but principles operate in a similar way throughout nature according to context. And note that if the left hand tries to dominate, the result will be a weakened state which is very probably the situation we are heading towards, our advanced technology tending to obscure that fact from us for the moment.

Modern Christians who have lost touch with the transcendent reality of their religion and look at it in largely worldly terms think that Christ preached equality. The fact he didn't is a large part of the reason Judas Iscariot turned against him. Judas could not understand that Christ's kingdom was not of this world. He saw Jesus as a political figure, completely failing to grasp the message of spiritual redemption. This is not meant as an excuse to go the other way or a justification to exploit the weak, but it shows that equality was not a concern of Christ's, except insofar as he taught all people are potentially the children of God.

No doubt if we lived in a world in which the strong did oppress the weak, in which the common humanity of all peoples was ignored or denied, and hierarchy abused (as, of course, it has been in the past), a reminder of the essential spiritual oneness of all human beings would be essential as long as that was fitted into an overall structure of how human beings are also not equal in developed potential, expression, duties, spiritual unfoldment and so on. But the huge over-emphasis on equality today without a corresponding understanding of the hierarchical nature of cosmic order is separating us more and more from spiritual truth, and for that reason must be seen as instigated by the demons who are behind so many of the deviations of modernity.

* Obviously I am aware of ambidexterity but it is not the norm.

The Illusion of Equality

This is an excerpt from the last chapter of my recent book By No Means Equal (see right). As the whole Western world is in thrall to the foolish lie of equality it's worth pointing out that equality is not a consequence of the spiritual law of love, as many people seem to assume, but a materialistic distortion of it and, as such, it is an obstruction to real love.

"The idea of equality might seem reasonable to someone who has no awareness of spiritual purpose or destiny and who does not appreciate that there is a world of greater reality behind this material world which gives our outer world whatever meaning it may have. But really it is an attempt to substitute a false and artificial good for truth. This may just seem a question of well-meaning people with good intentions making a mistake, but the fact is the equality idea has been used for several decades as a tool to chip away at spiritual truth and reduce the higher to the level of the lower, creating a kind of inverted hierarchy in the process. And the well-meaning people cannot be exonerated either because they are guilty of a lack of orientation to spiritual truth. Some may even wish to supplant that with their own version of reality. 

Equality exists nowhere in nature. Creation itself could only happen when the darkness of non-manifestation was shattered by light resulting in the first and fundamental inequality which then became the ground on which cosmic order was built. Creation depends on separation and difference. An unqualified equality would have kept the universe in darkness.

 

And darkness is what those who promote equality would have us return to for equality can only truly exist at ground level, when everything has been brought down to nothing. If anything is to be it must be something and no one thing is like any other thing. Light has an infinite range of shades. Darkness is just darkness. There is true equality only in darkness.

 

But if nature and the universe are both formed on the principle of inequality could equality still be something that human beings should aspire to and work towards while recognising that it may never be actually possible to achieve? First of all, why would you wish to pattern human evolution on something that does not exist in spiritual or natural terms? Are you not thereby working against the flow of life, setting yourself up against reality? But secondly, there is no need for this. For with the principle of inequality goes that of responsible hierarchy which means that everything has its proper place in what used to be known as the Great Chain of Existence which is the basis of cosmic order. Allowing and enabling all human beings to develop themselves in the context of what they are is absolutely what we should be doing but this has nothing to do with equality which is a chimera, the pursuit of which will only disrupt the order and harmony on which the universe is based. This is not the same as saying everyone should know and keep to their place because another principle of life is growth. But again, this has nothing to do with equality. This idea simply introduces a false perspective. 

 

Look at history and you will see that the notion of equality only appears in civilisations when their creative energies are burning out. That does not in itself make it bad or wrong but it does indicate that it is part of the decadent phase of any particular culture which arises when that culture has lost connection to deeper realities and contents itself with wholly secular concerns. It comes about in a declining phase not a developing one.

 

Western civilisation is dying. At its peak it scaled great heights but it has fallen a long way down since then because of its denial of spirit. Unfortunately, most people think of this as an advance and a liberation from superstition because this denial freed us to explore and exploit the material world to a greater degree, but the initial burst of energy that came from that is rapidly dissipating. Actual progress is starting to slow down and a lot of what we thought of as progress turns out to be not without problems. Even our increased recognition of the horrors of violence and war can be understood as a greater fixation on the physical self and material well-being.

How can anyone live without acknowledging God? Within each human soul there is the divine stamp that is our life and the core of our being. How can we ignore this? But it seems millions of people do. What is going on inside these people that they have closed themselves off so much from reality and all that makes life worthwhile? There is no doubt that the material world has solidified so that the connection to spirit is much harder to make but still it is there. There is also no doubt that demonic powers have attacked on numerous fronts to make us believe the material world is all there is but we don't have to succumb to their lies. Even if everyone around us prefers darkness to light we do have the light within us and we can respond to that if we are correctly oriented within ourselves to the spiritual true north.

 

Perhaps that is the problem. Most people don't care about God because they care too much about themselves in the here and now. They are too fixated on their worldly hopes and ambitions and personal desires. They are too identified with their bodies or their feelings or their thoughts and so never look more deeply within themselves. Then there are those who are too attached to a particular sin to be willing to acknowledge that it is a sin which they would have to do if they recognised God. Such people are setting themselves up to be the victims of the dark powers to whose influence they will become more and more susceptible. 

 

The subtitle of this book is Reclaiming the Soul. It is the soul, the spiritual component of our being, that is denied when equality is asserted for each soul when created is original and unique, and its experiences bring out its individuality further. If you believe in the soul you cannot also believe in equality. To do so is to apply quantitative principles to a realm of quality.

 

A world of real equality would be a world with no room for improvement. It would be flat, without height or depth and nothing to aspire towards. It would lack the vertical dimension and the sense of beyond. It would be a world in which numbers and measurement really were at the root of being and that would be a controllable world in which there was neither freedom nor mystery.

 

Fortunately for us the world is not like that. It has its numerical, quantitative side but that relates to matter only. There is a spiritual side too and that is primary. Every soul has complete spiritual reality as a person, an authentic unique individual which cannot be reduced to anything else for it is whole in itself. In a universe of individuals there can be no equality but there can be love. Which would you rather have, equality or love? You can’t have both."

 

 

What Is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book By No Means Equal to be published in October.

What is the one thing you cannot speak against without being regarded as wicked and immoral?

Is it not the idea of equality? This is the first principle of modern Western democracies and is applied to wider and wider fields. But what is its basis? Does it derive from the study of nature? One would assume it must but when you look for a possible origin, it is hard to find. For equality does not exist anywhere in nature and the belief in it has no reasonable foundation since people are very different. They are not the same so they are not equal. It's that simple. In fact, no two things in the created universe are the same. The only things that are so are machine-made and these we describe colloquially but perceptively as having no soul. This leads one to think that perhaps the contemporary belief in equality is a consequence of the denial of soul which is the bedrock assumption of modernity. For modernity is based on the separation of Man from God. That is its defining characteristic.

No doubt the ideological belief in equality was also a reaction to the pronounced inequality that existed in the pre-modern age. But, like many reactions, it was an over-reaction and we went from one extreme to another. Or maybe from a perceived extreme to a real one. The further you get from truth, the more truth seems extreme. The idea of the oneness of humanity which gained currency from the eighteenth century onwards was also a factor. An inner oneness should not negate outer differences but the tendency of humanism has been in that direction as the rejection of spirit resulted in what belongs to that level of existence being brought down to and mis-expressed in the lower level as it can no longer be expressed in its proper sphere.

Equality taken to its logical conclusion means everyone, or even everything (for why stop at human beings?), is the same. There is no better and no worse. Everything is reduced to a uniform level which means that the idea of quality is undermined. You can either have quality or equality. You can't have both. We now live in an age in which quantity takes precedence over quality and it is therefore inevitably an age of general decline, intellectual, moral but most of all spiritual. This is the hidden side of democracy.

We need to restore balance but that will require such an upheaval in our current way of thinking that deeply entrenched beliefs which have grown up over 200 years will have to be thrown out. The idea of hierarchy will need to be re-established in some form, and people will have to accept that, though we all form part of the human family, we are not equal, certainly not as far as this world is concerned and probably not even the next. Perhaps if we replaced the word equality with justice we might make some progress. Equality means nothing. It describes nothing real. All human beings deserve respect but if you regard them all as equal you will destroy civilisation just as we are destroying it now. Besides, can you restrict equality just to people? Once you have started, where do you draw the line? These things have a tendency to move on to the next stage once they have established themselves, and even now there are many people who regard human beings and animals as equal. What this will mean in practice is that anything that separates humans from animals will be regarded as suspect. To make the higher and the lower equal here and now, you have only one recourse. You must bring down the higher.

Men are by no means equal on the earth plane but that is not a cause for dismissing anybody. With these words the Masters have summed up the situation. All human beings have intrinsic value in the eyes of God and all have the potential to become godlike. But that potential has been realised by only a few completely, the saints, and in some it has been totally lost, the demons. In between those two extremes there are as many shades as there are souls. By giving in to the illusion of equality we are actually destroying spirituality because we reduce it to something that no one has more of than anyone else. It becomes something that is within us all to begin with and does not need to be grown, developed and worked for, just realised. This both devalues the individual and flattens the transcendent. Goodness, truth, beauty and holiness are made meaningless. That is the end result of egalitarianism. Everything is reduced to nothing. Cosmos is returned to chaos, the only state of true equality.

 

Equality: A Modern Myth

 

My book By No Means Equal was published a few months ago and the advent of a new government in the UK brings its message to the fore because this government is motivated, theoretically, at least, by the principle of equality. To a degree, this principle drives all Western liberal democracies but the book argues that equality is what you have left when you strip life of its spiritual component and try to preserve some kind of moral foundation. There are also those now whose spiritual understanding is secondary to the leftist ideology with which most modern people are indoctrinated who think that because God is one and love the cornerstone of truth, all souls are necessarily equal. They don't see that in a created world souls may all derive from God and be equal in potential but they are at very different levels of manifesting the fullness of spiritual being. Souls are all expressions of the divine but they range enormously in how much of the divine they can express, and this is both a matter of will and of actual development. This understanding takes into account both oneness and difference and realises that neither can be followed as a principle without the other to balance it.

If everything were equal then nothing could be because everything would be the same. It is inequality that allows for anything to be something. Equality is actually a property of matter undisturbed by spirit or the Logos aspect of spirit. Hence, equality as a philosophical principle is associated with materialism while inequality forms part of the spiritual conception of life, something we can better appreciate when we realise that inequality indicates the presence of the vertical axis of being, in other words transcendence, while equality is restricted to life conceived solely along the horizontal, life without transcendence. For the full view, the fact of inequality must be considered in association with that of oneness which in turn must always be combined with the truth of difference, and that means hierarchy.

The enforcement of equality is an attempt to banish a proper spiritual worldview or create a false one. Those organisations and ideologies that seek to do this are anti-spiritual in nature though many may present themselves as spiritually motivated. But for the forces that work against God both materialism and false spirituality work equally well. In fact, false spirituality is better because the spiritual impulse cannot be suppressed indefinitely so it becomes more useful to divert it into wrong paths than to deny it altogether, even if an initial period of denial helps in the latter corruption of it. The equality doctrine is part of the corruption of spirituality.

If you are interested in this subject of equality, the moral justification for the contemporary deviation from truth, the book goes into it in more detail and from various aspects. Love and justice are divine attributes but equality is a distorted parody of these things and to find out where it comes from you can go right back to the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

What is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

And the one thing you cannot contradict without being metaphorically burned at the stake?

Of course, it's equality. This is the first principle of modern Western democracies and it is applied to wider and wider fields. But what is its basis? Does it derive from the study of nature? One would assume it must but when you look for a possible origin, it is hard to find. For equality does not exist anywhere in nature and the belief in it has no rational basis since people are wildly different. They are not the same so they are not equal. It's that simple. In fact, no two things in the created universe are the same. The only things that are so are machine-made things that we describe colloquially as having no soul. This leads me to think that perhaps the contemporary belief in equality is a consequence of the denial of soul which I take to be the founding principle of modernity. For modernity is based on the separation of Man from God. That is its defining characteristic.

No doubt the ideological belief in equality was also a reaction to the pronounced inequality that existed in the pre-modern age. But, like many reactions, it was an over-reaction and we went from one extreme to another. The idea of the oneness of humanity, which gained increasing currency from the 18th century onwards, though deriving ultimately from Christianity, was also a big factor. An inner oneness should not negate outer differences but it has been used to do precisely that. Once again, we have the distortion of a spiritual principle by misapplying it to the material level.

Equality taken to its logical conclusion means everyone, or even everything, is the same. There is no better and no worse. Everything is reduced to a uniform level which means that the idea of quality is destroyed. You can either have quality or equality. You can't have both.  We now live in an age in which quantity takes precedence over quality and it is therefore inevitably an age of general decline, intellectual, moral but most of all spiritual.

We need somehow to restore balance but that will require such an upheaval in our current way of thinking that deeply entrenched beliefs which have grown up over 200 years will have to be thrown out. The idea of hierarchy will have to be reestablished in some form, and people will have to accept that, though we are all one on some level, as far as this world is concerned, we are not equal. Perhaps if we replaced the word equality with justice we might make some progress. Equality means nothing. It describes nothing real. All human beings deserve justice but if you regard them all as equal you will destroy civilisation as, in fact, we are destroying it now. Besides, can you restrict equality just to people? Once you have started, where do you stop? These things have a tendency to move on to the next stage once they have established themselves, and even now there are many people who regard human beings and animals as equal.

Men are by no means equal on the earth plane but that is not a reason for dismissing anybody. With these words, the Masters have summed up the situation. All human beings have intrinsic value in the eyes of God and all have the potential, eventually, to become godlike. But that potential has been realised in some few completely and in some not at all, and in between those two extremes there are as many shades as there are souls. By giving in to the illusion of equality we are actually destroying spirituality because we reduce it to something that no one has more of than anyone else. It becomes something that is within us all to begin with and does not need to be grown and developed. That both devalues the individual and flattens the transcendent. Goodness, truth, beauty and holiness are made meaningless. That is the true end result of egalitarianism.

There is No Rational Basis for Equality

If you believe in God and think that God exists in everyone, you must also see that not everyone reflects the reality of what God is to the same degree. For all people may be manifestations of God but clearly none are perfect manifestations which means there are greater and lesser manifestations.

If you don't believe in God but think that we all have some kind of universal spiritual component within us then you must still accept that our awareness and understanding of it differs hugely. As does our ability to express it.

And if you are a materialist then you believe that nothing has real meaning or value anyway (unless artificially invented by us) so equality is a redundant concept. It's merely an ideological abstraction, an aspiration without real substance. If a materialist wants to say that we all have equal value then that value, according to his scheme of things, is precisely nothing. We are all equal, but equally worthless.

Equality as a real thing rather than a vague abstraction is only possible in something like an ant colony. It would demand the complete abolition of individuality.

It is a materialistic perversion of a spiritual truth, namely that God does exist in every human being who, by virtue of that fact, all have the potential to awaken spiritually and become godlike themselves. But we are all at very different stages of that journey and some will never reach the destination. Moreover, even when the destination is reached, we will not be equal because we all express our spiritual realisation in individual ways.

Equality is a one-dimensional view of the world which collapses reality to the horizontal, the material level, ignoring the vertical axis of soul. The very concept should be rejected and replaced with ideas of justice and fairness where these are appropriate. That is because to keep equality in any form whatsoever inevitably reinforces the notion of equality pure and simple as an absolute.

How did this absurd idea ever come about when it is so contrary to reason? One can only assume that it is a misconception of Christian teaching, basing itself on the idea that all human beings have the divine within them and, in that sense, all have value and the same divine potential. But to go from that to a belief in equality here and now in this mortal world is an utter non sequitur. As my teachers said, "men are by no means equal on the earth plane".

Proponents of the idea perhaps think that without it the door is open for exploitation of the weak by the strong, but that is akin to saying that the idea may be false but it can have good results or that the means justify the ends which is an axiom any schoolchild should know to be false since a cause and its effect cannot be separated. There are other ways of preventing the abuse of a truth than by propagating a lie. Besides, this exploitation would only occur when the belief in human inequality was interpreted materialistically, that is to say, without the corresponding belief in God. The problem is not inequality but inequality seen through the lens of atheism or false spiritual beliefs which are grounded in worldly interpretations of spirituality. In all cases, the solution is a correct spiritual understanding that sees the presence of God in all human beings, but that presence existing as a potential that needs to be developed.

Equality is actually destructive to the understanding of God because, by limiting everything to the same level, it destroys a proper sense of hierarchy and transcendence. That means that God is reduced in majesty and mystery. In fact, ultimately, if you believe in equality you will eventually believe yourself to be equal to God. And that means you won't believe in God. But without God, as we can see quite clearly now, there is only nihilism and despair, kept at bay by the need for constant entertainment whether that be of the popular variety or the intellectual. Equality, far from being a spiritual belief, as it is often conceived of nowadays, is actually the product of a pure anti-spiritual materialism.

Once again we see that when humanity abandons belief in a transcendent reality it loses itself in invented substitutions that lead it ever further into illusion. And the end result of living in illusion is always spiritual disaster. This all stems from the replacement of true religion with the worship by humanity of itself and the failure to understand that if humanity does not look beyond itself for its true fulfilment it will quickly sink into something less than itself. Egalitarianism is actually all about the promotion of quantity to a universal good and the concomitant destruction of quality.

There is more on this subject in a previous post here.

Liberty and Equality

 It should be obvious to anyone nowadays that the modern evils known as racism and sexism are being promoted as the deadliest of secular sins as part of the attempt to dismantle Western civilisation and install a new mindset in which nothing is better than anything else so everything is mediocre and therefore more controllable by our overlords, worldly and otherwise. Just like the mad crow disease of present times these secular sins were not built on nothing which gives them a certain viability if not examined too closely, but they have been grossly exaggerated and used as a means to destroy any idea of difference and even make difference itself a bad thing.

Equality is the great dogma on which liberal Western democracies are built. It might have seemed like a step forward at a time when the gap between rich and poor, powerful and weak was as great as it was, and the movement towards less inequality surely did bring certain benefits in the short term. But the flaw that lies at its heart is now being revealed. If equality, and equality alone, is taken as the foundation of a culture then that culture will collapse into the lowest common denominator and it will eventually collapse altogether. Equality is totally contrary to human nature and to enforce it is to force human beings to live against both their natural and their spiritual instincts. It becomes a tool to push the higher down to the level of the lower. This does not mean that the higher should dominate the lower (except spiritually) but liberty and equality are not natural bedfellows despite what the ideals of the Enlightenment may pretend, and it is liberty that is the great spiritual quality as far as human beings are concerned.

Equality is often said to be rooted in Christianity. If it were how strange it is that it is never mentioned in the Bible and was only discovered to be a Christian virtue 1800 years after the time of Christ. Oneness in Christ is a Christian virtue but that is not equality which is a materialistic distortion of it. Equality is actually a property of unformed matter, matter untouched by the creative breath of spirit, which is why you see it most at lower levels of evolution. The more life evolves, the more unequal it becomes because the freer it becomes and yet within that inequality there is also a spiritual oneness. To realise the truth of this apparent contradiction is one of the major goals of the spiritual path. It and it alone explains the mystery of love.

Book Published

My new book By No Means Equal was published in the US on November 1st. It came out last Friday in the UK. If I worked in marketing and had a flexible relationship with the truth I could say it contains definitive proof of the soul but I don't and it doesn't. What it does do, though, is lay out the grounds for the spiritual primacy of individuality and freedom, and say how the reality of these fundamental principles stands in direct opposition to the contemporary ideology of equality. Which, it could be argued, amounts to almost the same thing as my imaginary marketing man is saying. For my contention is that the current obsession with equality, which sometimes presents itself as an almost spiritual belief, is in fact deeply materialistic as it reduces the individual to a unit in the collective, a unit that can be weighed, measured and slotted into the System. A controllable and controlled unit. It robs the human being of its humanity.

I suppose one of the reasons the belief in equality has taken root is because it seems to offer a degree of fairness. It also assuages the guilt of the rich and powerful who can carry on being rich and powerful as long as they are seen to disapprove of such things in theory. It is also a more feminine way of looking at the world and society has become increasingly feminised over the last few decades. Men are more naturally hierarchical and competitive but women tend more to cooperation which fits better with the equality dogma. But one could just as well say it has come about because of the desire of those at the lower end of the scale of whatever it might be to chop down those with more. This is certainly a factor but only one of many, some rooted in the desire to be fair and some in envy.

However, all of that is besides the point. The simple question to ask about equality is, "Is it true?". Everything else is irrelevant. We might want it to be true for whatever reason but if it's not true there's an end of it. And the fact is it's not true. Those who see themselves as superior might feel guilty about that and those who see themselves as inferior might feel resentment but these emotions do not alter reality. Equality is a lie.

Of course, an argument might be that equality may not exist now but we should work towards it for a fairer and better society. But what are you saying if you argue that? That society should be built on a palpable falsehood? This could never work as reality would sooner or later break through. In the meantime the inevitable result of your foolish experiment would be a lowering of standards because that is what enforced equality means. The only way you can bring it about is to bring down the higher to the level of the lower. Destroy the ladder of hierarchy and there is nothing left to climb. You remain earthbound. Examined properly, equality is just about the most anti-spiritual doctrine you could have.

This is what the book is about.

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

 This is an article I wrote to publicise By No Means Equal which comes out tomorrow. It recycles some sections of earlier posts here but is mostly new.

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

 

What is the goal of spirituality? What is its end point? Some would say it is a return to oneness, the transcending of all limitations associated with the individual self and absorption into the universalized sea of consciousness in which the individual becomes one with the all and time is replaced by eternity. For this no personal God is required. If he exists then he too is ultimately part of the cosmic ocean. In fact, the French writer Romain Rolland coined the term oceanic feeling to describe this experience which he seems to have become aware of through his study of the life of the 19^th century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna who would frequently fall into spiritual raptures. The search for it is what lies behind many people’s attraction to mysticism, especially of the Hindu and Buddhist variety.

 

I am not much of an enthusiast for the theories of Sigmund Freud but what he apparently thought about the oceanic feeling is worth considering. He envisaged it as a reversion to a pre-ego state, something experienced by the infant before it becomes aware of self and other and sees itself and its mother as one. The fact that Ramakrishna was an ardent devotee of the divine Mother, conceived by him as the goddess Kali, lends some incidental support to this theory.

 

I would go a little further back in time than the materialistic Freud and suggest that the mystical sense of oneness in which the ego is blotted out is a reflection of the pre-incarnation state when the soul is bathed in the bliss of non-separation before being born into this dualistic world in which subject and object are radically divided. Thus, the oceanic feeling is a real thing but it may not be the indication of advanced spirituality it is sometimes taken to be, and especially so since it can sometimes be brought about by drugs or even certain forms of mental illness. I see it as consciousness slipping outside the boundaries of the solid core of the rational self and becoming immersed in the universal substance from which individualised consciousness is drawn but that is like the self returning to the spiritual womb rather than growing up and becoming transfigured, in the process retaining full individuality but expanding that into divine being.

 

This means the world of the oceanic feeling is not where we should be headed but where we are coming from, and that means that attempts to recapture it are misguided. No doubt, it will be recapitulated on a higher turn of the spiral once the lessons of incarnation have been learned but the oceanic feeling is entirely passive whereas we are called by God to be co-creators with him which means being able to wield divine powers for the benefit of all creation. The soul submerged in the oceanic feeling remains inert. We are called to be eagles not fish.

 

What has all this to do with the title of this essay? If return to oneness really were the point of the spiritual path, then we could say that equality is a spiritual principle and one which we should be pursuing with vigour. The attempt to establish equality in the world would have the stamp of divine approval. But if this state of undivided oneness is a primordial state signifying the world prior to creation that may not be so. The sea is the state of chaos or formlessness. In the beginning God divides the waters. Creation separates. It disrupts oneness and brings about differentiation. Now, you might say that, yes, it does do these things as it must if anything is to be, but we must return to the primordial state eventually.

The question then would be, in what way do we return? Do we do so in the same way we left, that’s to say, simply go back where we came from as if nothing had happened in the interim, or is there a point to creation? For that is what it amounts to. Does God have a purpose in creating individual souls or not? Surely, we must assume he does or creation is meaningless. The journey through creation changes the souls making that journey. They are not intended to return to the spiritual cradle but to gain something they could not be given without earning. They are to become spiritual adults, gods themselves. They return to the source but in full consciousness of themselves as divine beings, more individual not less.

 

Equality is not a spiritual principle. For anything to be, it must be something. One thing is never like another, even blades of grass are different, and the more a thing develops, the more it unfolds of its divine nature, the more individual it becomes. True equality is found in one place and one place only and that is in the realm of non-manifestation. Equality directly contradicts individuality which is a spiritual principle, one grounded in freedom, freedom being perhaps the fundamental spiritual quality and impossible in a purely material world. Inequality is only a problem when it is used as an excuse for the strong to dominate the weak but that is a corruption and no reason to try to enforce equality any more than the possibility of hate might lead one to suppress love.

 

In the Book of Revelation there is an intriguing passage which reads “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no more sea.” I’m not so foolhardy as to attempt to explain this most enigmatic of religious texts, but an interpretation of this cryptic passage has been suggested to me which has a bearing on the subject of this essay and so is worth including here.  We are looking at the end of time when all things are completed and the earthly creation has run its course. Everything has been brought to fulfilment and the unrefined raw material of pure consciousness represented by the sea has been transformed into the glorious company of saints, the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem. The sea is that from which life emerges. In its primordial form it is the one place there might be said to be equality, and egalitarianism is the desire to return to the pre-created state where there is no distinction. It is not the mark of proper spiritual understanding for that sees every individual soul as unique which, by definition, means different and therefore not equal.

 

The goal of establishing equality can either be regarded as well-meaning and motivated by good intentions and a desire for fairness or else as an attempt to impose conformity on a populace to make it more controllable and separate it from higher aspects of reality. In fact, the former group can be used by the latter to bring about a society in which all the mountain tops have been levelled and eventually nobody even believes in mountains. Is egalitarianism not so much socially progressive as spiritually reductive? Could the drive towards equality turn out to be a means of enforcing spiritual slavery?

Don't You Want To Live in an Equal Society?

This is what someone asked me when they read one of my criticisms of the left in these pages. It's a reasonable question because a common notion is that the left fights for equality and fairness while the right is only interested in perpetuating privilege. This is a very one-sided appraisal, of course, but it is not totally without substance. Nonetheless, even taking it at its own estimation, it has serious problems.

There is the idea that somehow a society in which everyone is equal would be a more 'spiritual' society. But actually, it would only be more spiritual in the sense that materialistic people think of spirituality. That is to say, as something that pertains and relates to human beings primarily as they are in this world. We say that an equal society would be a fair society and that is good. But this is judging the purpose of human life as being fulfilled in a material world, and disregarding the fact that there may be another, higher, purpose behind life as we see and experience it in three dimensional, phenomenal terms. That life should be fair is the plaintive cry of the child, but adults know that it is just not fair. This doesn't mean that we should not try to make it more just, but it is a recognition that God has more important matters in his project for humanity than making things fair and equal here and now. There are deeper issues involved. To make something a priority which God has apparently not made a priority could be a mistake. Of course, a response to this might be that it is not God but man who has introduced inequality into society, but that is an assumption. The degree of inequality has surely been influenced by men but not the basic fact of inequality which exists throughout nature.

Generally speaking, it seems to be the case that the more equal a society is nowadays, the more atheistic it becomes. Why should this be so? I would say it is because when you abolish hierarchy, you also start to abolish the sense of higher and lower or even high and low. You reduce everything to a level playing field but that means there is no feeling of greater or lesser. The very idea becomes offensive. So God, as the archetypal greater, becomes less easy to accept. And this has ramifications beyond the loss of transcendence, ramifications which a society devoted to equality cannot fail to bring about. Virtues that relate to hierarchy are lost, virtues such as nobility and honour, the very ideas of height and depth, all these are lost or, at least, greatly reduced in their meaning and significance. Cultural relativism becomes the norm because hierarchical distinctions are no longer tolerated. Everything's equal, after all. And then the sense of truth as an absolute begins to fade. It must because this again demands a hierarchical understanding of life, and the appreciation that some things really are better than others because they correspond more to reality. Reality is not equal. It is there as a fact and you either accommodate to it to a greater or lesser degree or you don't. Right there, like it or not, is superiority and inferiority.

An equal society becomes one where mediocrity is the order of the day. It is one opposed to excellence of any sort and any condition, and where greatness is discouraged unless it is totally conformist which, of course, almost by definition, it is not. If everyone is fundamentally equal, this is the inevitable consequence. Such a society becomes one where people don't seek to transcend themselves in a vertical sense because the horizontal plane of being is given full priority. In fact, the vertical plane, necessarily hierarchical, is just denied. It doesn't really make much difference if you say that the equality you want is only one of opportunity. Once you introduce the idea of equality as a dominating principle of your society, it extends everywhere, and everywhere it beats all things down to its own level.

Now, clearly none of this means that a society should be ordered with rigid castes in which no one can rise, however exceptional they might be. Balance is required in all things, and hierarchical quality must be balanced with a sense of the essential oneness of humanity. But, and here's the point all egalitarians need to understand, if you make equality the cornerstone of your system, as we increasingly do today when it has become the default assumption of what is good and right, and to oppose it in any way is the sign of an immoral person, then you are condemning your society to flatline mediocrity. You are going to bring the higher down to a level that is manageable by everyone. You are going to damage quality and ratify the medium and the average. Today we have reacted to a perceived excessive hierarchy of the past by rejecting hierarchy altogether as a fundamental principle. This has resulted in the impoverishment of culture and understanding. It goes hand in glove with materialism and the rejection of higher levels of truth and being. It is the reduction of human beings to their most basic elements.

It's worth bearing in mind that those who are most insistent on equality are often those who feel themselves inferior in some way or another. Their motive is an unadmitted resentment and envy. From such impure beginnings no true system can be built.

Everyone wants to live in a just world. That is a true and worthy aspiration, and probably a long way off. But to confuse this with a world of equality is a mistake. Equality is undue focus on the horizontal plane but human beings to be true to their essential humanity must live on both the horizontal and vertical planes with the latter seen as ultimately primary. There is equality of being but not of realised being. Even some of the saints stand closer to the throne of God than others though all have their fullness of the divine.

Equality Means All Mountains Must be Levelled

Here is the Contents page for By No Means Equal to give potential readers an idea of what's inside the book. It can now be pre-ordered on Kindle as well as paperback. Kindle versions are here and here.

Contents

Introduction

Part I

Liberty and Equality

No Rational Basis for Equality

We Are All One

Quality and Equality

Don't You Want to Live in an Equal Society?

What Is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

An Attack on Cosmic Order

What Is the Devil Most Seeking to Destroy?

The Elizabethan World Picture

The Descent of Man and the Prophecy of Hermes

Against Inequality

Body, Soul and Spirit

 

Part II

Secular Spirituality

God, Man and Woman

The Humanitarian God

Ideology and Freedom

A Vulgar Age

End Times

Technology Is Not Neutral

I Am God

Why I Am Not a Conservative

Tolerance and Humanism

The Lowest of the Low

The Most High

Death, the Great Equaliser?

Good and Evil, Spirit and Matter, Creator and Creation

Extreme Times

Demons

A Universe of Persons

Conclusion

I should add that the book looks at the idea of equality from a spiritual or metaphysical position rather than a political, ideological, social or whatever stance. But that's the only way to look at anything. The reason people make mistakes in their beliefs is because they have failed to engage properly with the level of first principles. Get those right and everything falls into place. Get them wrong and everything is wrong. Even ideas that may be right in essence become wrong if your reason for holding them is based on faulty premises. 

We live at a time when the idea of equality is pushed by the establishment as a way of diminishing the individual rather than raising him up. Of course, it's the latter aspect that is presented as the driving force behind it all but the real motivation is to reduce humanity to a controllable mass dominated by a small elite served by a large bureaucracy of system enforcers who cooperate and conform for a slice of the pie. This is why such things as racism and sexism have become the deadly sins of our secular age. Anything that might resist the assault on freedom, intellectual at the moment, no doubt more later on, or stand for higher values must be attacked and shamed. Those groups best able to do this are the ones who represent a threat to the narrative and must be undermined. Things can only be equal when everything is at ground level. Equality does not mean justice. It means slavery. 

Christmas Break

I shall be taking a short blogging break over Christmas. Many thanks to those who have supported this blog by reading and commenting over the last year. If you would like to deepen your acquaintance with some of the ideas behind it my latest book By No Means Equal is available. As the title suggests, it is an attack on the philosophy (there should really be inverted commas around that word) of modern ideology. Everything depends on getting first principles right, and we have got them badly wrong.

Specifically, the book seeks to show how equality, which has become the fundamental principle and basic assumption of Western liberal democracies, is a false doctrine founded on an illusion. Equality poses as a quasi-spiritual belief but is actually pure materialism. It's now regarded as a secular dogma with which any right thinking person should be in agreement, but it receives no mention in the Bible or any serious spiritual literature and that is understandable when one realises that, taken to a logical extreme, it would reduce the twin realities of creation and evolutionary unfoldment right back to the ground from whence they arose. For equality chops down the tree of life. It drags light back to darkness, reduces the individual to nothing and makes of a freedom a prison.

The modern obsession with equality as a universal good is a legacy of several strands of thought in Western civilisation but ultimately it comes from a denial of God and the natural order of creation. God is being and he creates to be something. All things, by definition, must be different to other things. They must be separate and that means they cannot be equal. To pretend otherwise in the name of a supposedly enlightened morality is to prioritise the material world over the spiritual since it seeks to establish a false outer oneness in place of an inner spiritual oneness which, it should be noted, always goes hand in glove with multiplicity of expression.

Reality is hierarchical as in this illustration from Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi or Metaphysical History of the Two Worlds (i.e Universe and Man). At the top hidden in a cloud of unknowing, the Unmanifest beyond creation, dwells God whose hand reaches down through the heavens, the realm of Cherubim and Seraphim, through the unchanging world of the fixed stars and then the world of the planets (astral plane) and finally to the elemental world of animal, vegetable and mineral. There is a chain linking God's hand with the female figure who is the Anima Mundi or Soul of the World, similar to the Goddess of paganism who as this shows is still a creature not the Creator, and she in turn hold dominance over the ape-like creature perched on top of the world who may represent mortal man seemingly measuring a small globe with his scientific instruments while thinking he has the whole of life in his hands.

This is just a symbol of the macrocosm and it ignores the fact that Man has a direct link to God implanted within his own soul but it conveys the idea that the universe is founded on many levels of being from pure spirit to gross matter though all are bound together by their foundation in God who informs the whole even if he also stands above it all. Equality is nowhere present in such a scheme but the opportunity for the humblest part of creation to rise through the spheres most certainly is for everything comes from God and everything that accepts its spiritual destiny may return to him though that depends on its own free will and ability to make the required sacrifice of attachment to the lower elements in its nature.

By No Means Equal is subtitled Reclaiming the Soul because the modern dogma of equality does away with the spiritual integrity of the individual, its true and unique quality. Equality is materialism, the reduction of the spiritual to what can be measured. Putting it at the centre of our understanding of human life shows we have completely lost touch with what lies beyond the quantitative world. It's time we saw through the illusion and rediscovered our source in the divine.

Note: The publisher tells me I should solicit reviews on Amazon so if anyone would care to leave a few words there (preferably positive ones!) I should be very grateful.

By No Means Equal - Reclaiming the Soul

 I mentioned in June that I was finishing off a book to be called By No Means Equal. See the post here. The book was accepted for publication and the production process has been completed though the book won't be published until next October because, the publisher says, "It takes ten months (sometimes more) for information about your book to circulate through the trade worldwide, and this is essential to maximize your prospects of long-term success. Budgets for buying in new titles in the chain retailers are set many months in advance – they will not look at titles coming out before then. Some key catalogues, like the NBN sales catalogue in North America, the bumper Bookseller Spring and Autumn editions in the UK, cover six months of titles; they need the information on ISBN, page extent, price, sales copy and cover three months before that, so ten months only just gives us enough time." Luckily the book is not topical!

The book is actually called By No Means Equal - Reclaiming the Soul because although it started off as a discussion about how the idea of equality was founded on a false metaphysics, it became clear early on that this metaphysics is based on a denial of the spiritual component of man, even a denial of the very notion of individuality. So it turns out that the rejection of equality is actually an assertion of spirituality and, far from equality being humanistically grounded as it is generally portrayed as being, it is in fact a profoundly anti-human doctrine. Thus, the book is not just about equality but also a plea for the recognition of spirit and soul.

Here is the front cover. As with the covers of my previous books it shows a place I have lived, in this case the Shevaroy Hills in South India. 

And here are the chapter headings. Some of these chapters have appeared as posts on this blog, though have been edited and sometimes expanded for the book, but many are new.

Introduction

Part I

Liberty and Equality

No Rational Basis for Equality

We Are All One

Quality and Equality

Don't You Want to Live in an Equal Society?

What Is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

An Attack on Cosmic Order

What Is the Devil Most Seeking to Destroy?

The Elizabethan World Picture

The Descent of Man and the Prophecy of Hermes

Against Inequality

Body, Soul and Spirit

 

Part II

Secular Spirituality

God, Man and Woman

The Humanitarian God

Ideology and Freedom

A Vulgar Age

End Times

Technology Is Not Neutral

I Am God

Why I Am Not a Conservative

Tolerance and Humanism

The Lowest of the Low

The Most High

Death, the Great Equaliser?

Good and Evil, Spirit and Matter, Creator and Creation

Extreme Times

Demons

A Universe of Persons

Conclusion

The Reign of Equality

 When I submitted By No Means Equal to the publisher I was asked to name another book it might be compared to. I imagine this was to position it in the market. I hadn't thought about this and at first couldn't come up with anything. It had no obvious influences though, of course, many things had fed into it. But then I thought about equality and how that actually meant focus moved from spirit/quality to matter/quantity and that reminded me of the famous book by René Guénon called The Reign of Quantity. It's been 20 years since I read that book and, to be honest, I can't remember much about it but I do remember that his broad theme is the materialisation of consciousness and how that has impacted the modern age which is an age in which quantity supersedes quality. This is more or less what my book is about and so when it came to the time to write a 'blurb' for the back cover this is what I came up with.

"Equality is the rock on which our modern Western liberal democracies are built. When we talk of Western values this is the one that underlies the rest. But what if this rock is made of sand? This book explores the idea of equality and suggests it is an ideological belief with no foundation in reality. It may seem a progressive belief from the political point of view but in reality its acceptance is spiritually damaging with consequences for the evolution of the soul.

The Traditionalist writer René Guénon said that we live in an age of quantity, one in which nothing is allowed to exist that cannot be measured. This is the age of equality which directly opposes the idea of the individual soul as a spiritual reality.

The equality myth pervades almost everything these days so while the first part of the book examines this myth from various angles, the second part looks at how it has influenced and adversely affected the spiritual search. We go back and look at first principles from a metaphysical perspective and even consider the nature of God. Then there is the opportunity to see how this idea impacts on the end times scenario.

The book is similar in construction and focus to Remember the Creator and Earth is a School, and in that respect could be considered the third part of a trilogy."

As I say, I hadn't thought of Guénon when writing the book but there certainly is crossover between our two approaches to the vexed question of the modern world. The difference is that he appeared to retreat to the past and became a Muslim, albeit one heavily influenced by the metaphysics of the Vedanta, whereas I believe that the modern consciousness is part of proper human development, simply one that has gone wrong. It is like a fruit that has become poisoned rather than a poison in itself and once we are able to submit it to the light of God it will prove to have many benefits. If human beings are on a path to becoming gods themselves, which in my view is part of the divine intention, then the phase of self-consciousness is a necessary stage to go through. The modern consciousness was a risk but one that can bring great spiritual progress if handled correctly. Of course, that is just what is not happening on the collective level but God always works with individuals and, on that level, who can know how much success his experiment is having?

Christ and Christianity

Christianity is the only thing that can save us from the increasingly dystopian and evil world that is coming into being. It alone carries enough truth to overcome the lies with which we are bombarded on a daily basis as the vice of materialistic atheism is tightened. Or, at least, Christ does. Because Christianity itself as it has come to be nowadays has all too often degenerated into a religion that exists only along horizontal lines. This is to say it is understood as relating to the interaction between human beings on the earthly plane. It is becoming more of a social than a spiritual thing involving how we treat our neighbour, seeing him as an earthly being in a material light and not as a soul in need of salvation. But real Christianity relates to our relationship with God and is therefore to be understood vertically. Everything else flows from that. There is a horizontal dimension but it is very much secondary to the vertical just as matter is secondary to spirit, quite clearly so since it only exists as an expression of spirit.

The materialistic focus of much modern Christianity has imitated the general moral focus of the post-modern world. This is because so many church leaders are bureaucrats rather than saints or even aspiring saints. So they follow rather than lead, and they follow fashion rather than truth. What is the motivating force behind atheistic morality (or pseudo-morality)? It is something like harm avoidance. So it is less concerned with the soul and how to bring the soul into closer alignment with God than it is with comforting, supporting and sustaining the earthly man. Equality is not mentioned in the Bible but it is the obsession of contemporary morality and the churches have fallen in with this, thinking it a good above all others. This is because they have misunderstood love and that is because they don't know love except as an ideological theory, something they feel they ought to have. They have failed to see that equality is really a spiritual evil because what it inevitably does is reduce the high to the level of the low. You can have quality or equality. You can't have both, not in this world and not, in fact, in any world. Even the angels and the saints are hierarchically ordered. 

Equality is only possible with complete oneness which means either the chaos of unformed matter or the Night of Brahma when the universe has returned to an unexpressed, unmanifested state which is basically non-being. Creation is a disruption of oneness which breaks the perfect equality of non-being. Inequality is the essence of manifested life, the very foundation of the world, and the current movement to erase qualitative distinction and differences is an attempt to destroy cosmic order and reduce light to darkness. An inequality where the higher preys on the lower is obviously bad but this should not be used as an excuse to throw out the very notion of higher and lower for that is the basic principle of the structure of the universe, both in its material and spiritual forms.

Christianity as an organised religion flourished during the latter stages of humanity's childhood. It guided and instructed as a loving parent. Of course, many individual souls had moved beyond the childhood stage and these were often the ones who formed and tended Christianity, but the masses of people were in the childhood stage, spiritually speaking. However, over the last few centuries this has begun to change and you might now see the majority of people as being in a condition equating to adolescence. This is notoriously a very difficult time, one in which the individual rebels, throwing off the shackles, as he perceives them and as they may indeed be, of external authority. He is becoming an individual but unless he submits that individuality to a higher inner guidance he risks losing his way, and this is exactly what we have done. We should have moved beyond unquestioning spiritual obedience to an awareness of divine truths based on inner perception but we have refused to move out of our adolescent phase into adulthood. Our very culture reflects that. And official Christianity has not been able to keep up with the change.

The solution is in Christ as, of course, it always was. The only way out of the confused mess we have made for ourselves is to rededicate ourselves to him which means turn to the reality he represents. The reality of Christ is beyond any church though the church has guarded and protected the spiritual flame for two millennia and even independents like me must accept that without this protection our spiritual independence would not be possible. I can only know Christ inwardly because the church has kept his fire burning in the world. But now is the time when we must look for Christ first and foremost within our own hearts rather than the church. This is moving from childhood to spiritual maturity.

It is not too far-fetched to see the world as going through a kind of crucifixion at the moment. I anticipate things will become worse. We will lose our humanity because we have lost the sense of ourselves as spiritual beings and with that gone there is no longer truth. There is no longer even the idea of truth. There is only constructed ideology formed from the whims of the moment and the requirements of those who set themselves up as our masters. We will see ourselves purely in materialistic terms and when that happens we are easily manipulated as we are now by fear. Things will get worse but I am not pessimistic. Heaven awaits those who reject the lies of the world, all-powerful as they may seem to be, and realise that today, Easter Sunday, records the most glorious, most wonderful and truest event in the history of the planet. Christ's resurrection from death really did take place and it is something we can all share in. We too will be raised from material death into spiritual rebirth once we open up our hearts to the love of Christ. 

The Solar Principle

By No Means Equal was published a couple of years ago and I've noticed since then there have been many more books and articles questioning the validity of the modern egalitarian ethos. I would love to think it was because of my book but I'm not that deluded, especially since it hasn't sold very much. The fact is this is an idea whose time has come. The flaws of egalitarianism are just becoming more and more obvious, and in every sphere too. Most people approach this from a political perspective but the real issue is a spiritual or metaphysical one and everything else follows on from that. As always, get first principles right and correct understanding will generally follow. Get them wrong and one mistake leads to another. Don't we see that everywhere now?

Sometimes Christianity is blamed for inspiring this ideology and there is some truth in that even if traditional Christians would point to Masonic influences, the French Revolution, Marxism etc, all the usual suspects. And they are not wrong. But a Christianity emptied of its transcendent qualities can also be blamed and there always was this seed within in it even if it took many centuries to grow fully. Christianity is not specifically a religion of spiritual aristocrats which is at once its strength and its weakness. Christianity is a religion of love and it's very easy to think that love means equality if that's what you want to think. It doesn't but it can be misunderstood as doing so. Christianity externalised the Mysteries, making them potentially accessible to everyone. This is its glory but also its flaw. I'm not saying it was wrong to do this. That clearly is not the case but it is something that was right which carries certain risks.

A previous post referred to the collapse of the vertical to the horizontal that takes place during the end times. This is almost the perfect visual image of egalitarianism. The pole that points to the transcendent is chopped down and lies flat on the ground with the result that hierarchical values are abandoned and replaced with those that promote and sustain equality. But the attempts to enforce a spurious equality lead to the loss of individuality and freedom, and also to the curtailing of growth beyond the material. With an irony that would be amusing if it weren't so destructive the insistence on diversity in the modern world is leading to an increasingly bland conformity. There is probably less real diversity now than there ever has been, partly because of the pressures applied by modern technology, but also because the obsession with equality forces everyone into the same box.

The question of equality is something about which it is futile to argue or debate. Those who believe in it do not do so for rational or intellectual reasons, still less those of common sense. They are ideologically committed, and the real question is why do they wish to deny reality? For some it is because of resentment, for others the search for power and for many now it is because that is what good people are supposed to think. But ultimately it is because of the rejection of the solar principle in man. What I mean by this is that divine spark that lies hidden in the darkness of the self and which, when discovered, tended and brought to full flame makes of man a god. We completely neglect this essential principle now and even many of those who would say they believe in it substitute man-made imitations, more in keeping with their worldly beliefs, for the true inner light. 

The solar principle is the connection to transcendence within the human heart. And yet though it exists within it must also be conceived high up above us, us as earthly man, like the sun which is its symbol. Normally it is obscured by clouds of delusion and ignorance but when these part it shines with majesty and glory. No egalitarian can ever find it because egalitarianism never leaves the earth, the flat ground. The solar principle can only be seen by those who take their eyes off the earth and look up to the sky.