It seems the British have decided to jump out of the frying pan into the fire and to exchange venal incompetents for a group of people ideologically committed to the destruction of the country as it has been. Could this be the moment when the sleep of Albion descends into nightmare?

It is understandable that the electorate wanted to punish the incumbent government, conservative in name only, but the choice they have made will plunge the country into deeper misery. I am not talking in economic or political terms so much here as, important as they are, those are secondary issues. I am referring to the spiritual darkness which will intensify under the new government as it pursues its agenda of dismantling the entirety of tradition and replacing it by rigid bureaucratic control and enforced egalitarianism or Eurocommunism as you might call it. Those who oppose this will be accused, like the early Christians, of being haters of humanity but the idea of love has long since been corrupted and used as a weapon to attack the good, the beautiful and the true. Freedom of thought will be increasingly curtailed with the excuse of safety, equality and fairness. The new prime minister has spoken of his desire to stamp out something called Islamophobia. This may be a cynical vote catcher but nevertheless only someone who has no love for his country or for Jesus Christ could speak in those terms.

The new UK government has achieved a landslide with a relatively small percentage of the vote. They have far more power than would normally be the case given the relative paucity of their support. They managed this because their opponents were split and one has to wonder if this was a tactic of those who pull the strings behind the scenes. I don't say the Reform party was consciously set up to give the left greater power but it has surely been used to do just that. I can understand why so many people turned to it because it asks some of the right questions but it doesn't have any real answers. The rot is too deep.

Bruce Charlton has spoken of the two forms of evil at play here, that which seeks control (Ahrimanic) and that which seeks destruction (Sorathic). As usual, his analysis is spot on. The previous government was Ahrimanic in a passive sense because it had no real beliefs, but the new one will be actively so because it does have beliefs though they are anti-God beliefs. Naturally, they are not framed like that but these beliefs spring from a rejection of God and the natural order of creation. We can never understand why the modern world is as it is until we realise that we are in a spiritual war. The enemy cannot win but it can do enormous damage to people's souls before it loses, and that is what the whole business is all about. And although the enemy cannot incarnate directly in the world, it can certainly influence and overshadow human beings that allow this because of their inner emptiness and spiritual rejection. This has become more of a likelihood.

Ultimately, none of this matters. Our task is only to recognise it and stay faithful to God. If humanity is to be healed then its spiritual sickness must come out. This is what we are witnessing.

 God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times" Genesis 1:14 (New International Version translation).

Despite the presence of the Magi at the birth of Jesus, Christians have always been reluctant to accept the validity of astrology, seeing it as a link to pagan times and gods as well as being incompatible with free will. But then no Christian would deny heredity which could equally well be said to determine our behaviour to a certain extent, and a wiser reaction to pagan wisdom would be to baptise it rather than simply demonise it.

It is understandable that astrology as divination is frowned upon when it is tries to second guess God and undermine his will. But if study of stellar patterns is used as a kind of weather-forecasting, something that seeks to understand times and tides, it is less questionable. I personally think there are too many variables for this to be particularly useful other than in a very broad brush way, but astrology as character analysis can be instructive. I found that studying my birth chart gave me added insight into my own psychological strengths and weaknesses, and was a helpful spiritual tool insofar as it showed truths about myself in an objective, dispassionate way that I might have otherwise been reluctant to accept.

Clearly, we are not meant to know the future and to seek to do so is blasphemous as it is an attempt to replace God's will with our own. Moreover, we are nowhere near spiritually mature enough to deal with such knowledge as, in our current state, to know our future would be to nullify its lessons. But that does not mean that astrology doesn't work or that it is in any sense diabolical. As the passage from Genesis makes clear, it is part of the majesty and beauty of creation. It is a profound system of symbolism that is built into the cosmos, and God speaks to us through the heavens as he does through nature. We can misuse the knowledge we gain thereby but if astrology is studied with the full realisation that it is subordinate to Christ, considering it rather like a messenger of God or angel, then it can enrich our imagination and guide us to a deeper understanding of the universe and ourselves.

This is a horoscope cast for midnight in London on 1st January 1900. In terms of planetary positions and relationships it would largely apply to the whole world. Any astrologer who saw this with Sun conjunct Mars, Moon conjunct Saturn and more or less everything else in a stellium opposite Neptune and Pluto would think that the 20th century was going to be a bumpy ride. Be prepared is the old scout motto. The study of the heavens can sometimes help us do just that.

A few years ago I wrote a book called The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (see here and here) which was largely based on essays from this blog arranged thematically. The crisis has obviously intensified since 2019 when the book was published but its nature has not changed. It concerns humanity's rejection of God which has the effect of leading people to search for meaning in false paths, some political, some supposedly spiritual through the attempted deification of the human self, and some just plain hedonistic. That's to name just a few of the wrong directions in which people may go when they turn away from the path of truth and reality.

The events of 2020 could not have happened, certainly not to the extent they did, in a world in which people acknowledged God. To acknowledge God does not just mean you accept a higher power in which all truth is centred and from which it derives. It means you perceive a meaning and a purpose and goal beyond this world which, let's face it and despite its many beauties, is a distinctly unsatisfying place if it represents the sum total of existence. But surely we should know we are not the body and if we are not the body then this world is not all there is and if that is the case then there must be more, something more real that lies behind it. 

We should know we are not the body for many reasons but one simple one is that we speak of 'my' body. That means we recognise that the 'I' lies elsewhere. It is not the product of the body or physically derived but uses the body as part of its experience and means to express itself. Think of your body. It really is just flesh and bone and blood, and surely it should be obvious we are more than that. Obvious as in known unless we are bamboozled by intellectual sophistries. This is not to denigrate the physical body which is currently part of the totality of our being but it is only part and by no means the central part. If people had understood this then they would not have allowed themselves to be panicked by officious bureaucrats and a cravenly compliant media into a quasi-totalitarian situation with an unnecessary and potentially dangerous medical intervention presented as the only escape route. But most people succumbed to the propaganda and they did so because of fear. It was a test which the majority failed. The medical crisis, assuming there ever really was one which is highly doubtful, has passed but the groundwork has been laid for human beings to have their freedom taken away again at some future date. When something has happened once it becomes much easier to do it again. If it's been done before there is precedent so we are less inclined to question it the next time.

Human beings are so constituted that we can accept or deny reality. We have the freedom to do that. But if we make the wrong choice, there are inevitable consequences as in cause and effect consequences. These may not be obvious straightaway but they will become increasingly apparent. Such is our situation. We have turned away from reality and at first there may even have seemed to be the illusion of greater freedom after doing that. There is also a certain freedom if you jump out of a window. However, the law of gravity cannot be ignored and we descend in this certain freedom until we hit the ground. So it is in a spiritual sense. We are falling and the only way to avoid a crash is to learn to fly which basically means return to the acknowledgment of God who alone can save us from a hard landing. I am speaking metaphorically, of course. Suffering in the material sense is not circumvented by faith and spiritual suffering often increases as that is part of the purificatory operation on the soul. But these are transitory and have an ultimately beneficial purpose. The suffering that comes from the rejection of God has no purpose. It is just the negative consequence of denying truth and it does not lead to joy.

Why does one deny truth? Some people might claim that it is an intellectual matter but that is either too simplistic or else an excuse for the failure to exercise proper spiritual responsibility. The true answer lies in the will. The will is sovereign. It is the one thing that is entirely our own and part of the reason for our life in this material world is to test it in an environment where there is no coercion. The current spiritual crisis may in part be seen as the inevitable consequence of a cycle reaching its conclusion when material clouds have thickened to such a degree that the spiritual sun is almost completely obscured. But even when you cannot see the sun its light is perceptible and so it is now. The light of God may be obscured but it is still present and we should know that without that light we could not see anything at all. The current crisis, which is now in the process of moving from simple crisis to actual madness, is to bring things to a head. Use the situation in the world today as a springboard to push against and return to God.

Any form of spirituality which doesn't recognise the powerful presence of evil in the world today is a false path. Any approach to God which ignores the pronounced spiritual evil of the present time is not just deficient but ignorant and not just ignorant but very possibly part of the evil itself, either directly or through a kind of coercive absorption. If you don't recognise this it may be that you too are on the side of evil, even if that is only passively so, and that is because of a spiritual lack within you.

What an 'unspiritual' and unloving thing to say! We should tolerate many different approaches and no one of them is better than another if they all seek the same end. So it is said. But this is the problem. People have been so disarmed by the thought of love and kindness that they forget that God's mercy must always be accompanied by his justice or it is just sentimentality. Love needs truth or it is not real love.

So many people who think of themselves as spiritual, and who may indeed practise some kind of spiritual discipline, have no awareness of modern evil, and even consider some of its aspects positive goods. This is because instead of submitting the self to God, they try to make that self emotionally and psychologically comfortable or enlightened without repentance. For repentance you need to be able to see yourself as the fallen sinner you are. These are emotive words but the fact is there is no spirituality without repentance, and repentance requires a ruthless honesty with oneself. You are not seeking to gain something (the true motive of many spiritual seekers), but to redirect the will.

Are the teachings that promote unity, love and doing good to one's neighbour part of a grand spiritual deception now in the 21st century? That may seem an absurd idea but half-truths are often worse than outright lies because they use the sweetness of the apple to smuggle in the putrefaction of the worm. They use the legitimacy of truth to veil a hidden corruption and the corruption here is that we can separate goodness, light and love from their source which is God or Christ. We cannot.

There is no genuine spiritual awareness without the acknowledgement that we of ourselves are nothing. All is from God and God is not an impersonal cosmic energy that we can tap into and exploit if we look deeply within ourselves, but the living, breathing God (yes, God has breath, what do you think spirit is?) who is our Creator. We are not the source of any love we might feel. That derives from God and if its source is not recognised then, guess what, it is not real love but a cheap facsimile of it.

When I was a worldly adult I thought like a worldly adult. I spoke like one and I reasoned like one. But now is the time to put away the grown-up things of this world and become as a child. What are we looking for? Peace, love, happiness or God? We will only have the gifts of God in the full and real sense when we have God himself and to have God you must want him more than his gifts. Motivation is key. 

 I'm not only a Christian. There is part of me that is pagan, particularly Greek, Celtic and Norse, and part that is Hindu and part Buddhist. Part of me is an ancient Egyptian living in the space between the bright blue sky and hot yellow sand and part a Chinese sage secluded in misty hills, and there are other parts too. Anywhere there is beauty and wisdom is somewhere to which I feel that, in some measure, I belong. 

All this is true and all of it matters to me. I would not be without any of it which, I suppose, is a privilege of our otherwise spiritually benighted times in which we have easy access to the whole of history. Nonetheless, although I respond to and have absorbed many different influences, they are all assimilated into and subsumed by a fundamental Christianity. It is against Christ that everything is measured, and where there is any contradiction between him and it, he conquers. Other tributaries can flow into the Christian river but the source of that river is Christ and its flow is directed towards the Kingdom of Heaven where he is king.

Like many people of my generation who engaged in the spiritual search I went away from conventional Christianity to explore other traditions, though that was always on the outside looking in as my main path was as described in my first book from which the title of this blog was borrowed. I learnt much from these encounters and they deepened my understanding of the spiritual world. They also helped me engage with Christianity on a more profound level when I returned to it as in the familiar words of T.S. Eliot in his poem "Little Gidding".

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

 Ma'at and Ṛta are two words signifying concepts whose meaning we have almost completely lost today. The first comes from ancient Egypt, the second from ancient India and they mean more or less the same thing which is truth, universal order or simply that which is right. The cosmos is built on these things and the earthly state or nation should reflect that as should the microcosm, the inner state of the human being. The human soul should conform to Ma'at if it is to walk the correct path and the nation must be based on its principles if it is to be favoured by the gods and prosper. As soon as these principles are deserted because of human corruption or sin or for whatever reason, the benevolence of the gods will be withdrawn and things will start to fall apart. The nation may even be conquered by outside forces or overrun by uncivilised, barbaric elements.

In Egyptian theology Ma'at was personified as a goddess, sometimes shown with wings symbolising her divine origin. She was the daughter of Ra the creator God, so high up in the hierarchy of spiritual beings. She represented the order and harmony of the universe, the pattern on which it was designed and the principles according to which it should be governed. She was also of great importance in determining the post-mortem destination of the soul. After death every soul was required to enter the Hall of Judgment where its heart would be weighed on a set of scales set against Ma'at's feather of truth. If the heart balanced with the feather then Thoth the god of wisdom would record that fact and the soul would be admitted by Osiris to the Sekhet-Aaru or Field of Reeds which was the Egyptian heavenly paradise. If, on the other hand, the heart was heavier than the feather it would be consumed by the goddess Ammit who combined the features of crocodile, lion and hippopotamus, these being the most fearsome beasts known to the ancient Egyptians. This grim fate implied the destruction of the soul. Such was the importance of living by the principles of Ma'at.

The Judgment of the Soul with Osiris (far right) and the Feather of Ma'at in the right hand scale. The jackal-headed god Anubis officiates.

Ṛta expresses a very similar idea. It describes cosmic and moral order and is mentioned over 300 times in the Rig Veda which is the oldest Sanskrit text, currently regarded as dating back to the second millennium BC. The chief god at that time, the sky and ocean god Varuna, is called the king of rta and through its power restores the good order lost from time to time because of sin and ignorance. However, even he is subject to rta in the sense that it precedes him in the order of creation so he may serve and exemplify it but its origin lies further back than the gods. In ancient India the word itself faded from use but its meaning persisted in the idea of dharma which became fundamental to Hindu religion.

These two words convey a similar meaning to the idea of the Tao as used by C.S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man. This is more his adoption of the term than the traditional Chinese sense of the word as the mysterious undercurrent of being, but it fits in with that well enough. For Lewis it is a universal moral structure that transcends the vagaries of the times and cultures in which it may be expressed. It is not verifiable by conventional scientific means because its ground lies in the realm of first principles which cannot be proved as they just are. Lewis traces its presence through many religious traditions, all of which had intuited the reality of this Natural Law as we may think of it. But today we have lost touch with it because we have abandoned the sense of a transcendental absolute. Indeed, a definition of modernity could be that it is the triumph of relativism which might have seemed reasonable at one point but inevitably just ends up in nihilism.

Ma'at, Ṛta, the Tao, all these things point in the same direction, to an eternal, absolute, unchanging, incorruptible reality. We need to rediscover the truth of that reality and start to build our lives and our cultures on that basis. It is flexible enough to allow for different expressions of the one truth but these will differ only in form. In essence, they will be one. However, we must also remember that since Christ natural virtue, which is what Ma'at etc call for, is no longer enough. Piety, worship of the gods, following the path of dharma, supported by the traditional four cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude, are the foundation but on these must be built the house and that is constructed of the spiritual virtues of faith, hope and charity. The difference is that whereas the natural virtues can be acquired through right thinking and human effort, the spiritual virtues can only come from God though God will only bestow them to the soul that has made itself ready to receive them. This should tell us that faith, hope and charity, spiritually considered, are rather more than they are conventionally thought to be as anyone can have them in an ordinary sense but in the proper spiritual sense they are gifts of the Holy Spirit and so qualitatively different to the human versions.

Without the idea of an overarching Absolute human beings have nothing to anchor themselves to reality, and so will make up all sorts of fantastic notions to further their ambitions, desires and goals. But these can never go beyond the limitations of human experience and the human soul is so constituted that it must do this or suffer spiritually. The rediscovery of Ma'at is essential if we are not to drown in relativism.

Right and left are largely meaningless terms nowadays but they are still used because it suits the establishment to perpetuate its power with this charade. The two sides give the illusion of choice but are just variations on the same theme. Most people know this but go along with it anyway as there seems no alternative. 

Now there is the bogey man of the far right used to terrorise the sheep back into the fold. Quite soon a person will be described as far right who

• Loves his country
• Respects the laws of nature
• Thinks men and women are different 
• Honours beauty
• Believes in God and behaves accordingly
• Is a Christian

This last point shows the way forward. There is no political solution to the downward spiral in which we find ourselves. The only solution is spiritual. It always has been but the peculiar nature of our time is that this will become ever more apparent and eventually reach a point at which it cannot be ignored without a conscious effort of denial. If you feel like lamenting the loss of your country remember that your true home is not here.  Use the destruction of your earthly home positively, as a stimulus to focus your thoughts on where you really need to go. "My Kingdom is not of this world."