Meeting The Masters

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.

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."

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.

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.

 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?

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.