Meeting The Masters

 One of the books on the right is called Earth is a School which it is. A school for the development and refinement of consciousness and a testing ground for the orientation of the heart in an environment so cleverly set up that one can find reasons to believe or not in God, depending on one's desire. I got that phrase from my teachers but the one that is the title of this piece I came up with on my own which may explain its unromantic sounding nature.

God creates to become more than he is, expanding himself throughout creation, and also to express and share love. But if love is to be real then it must be freely given which means that God must create fully independent individuals. They are extensions of him but they cannot just be extensions of him. They must have their own integrity and it must be absolute. This means love can be given or it may not. It also means the resulting individuals may freely cooperate with God and creation or resist that or even, to further their own ends, turn against it. To have the possibility of deliberate, freely chosen good you must have the possibility of not good. 

This is why God cannot make a creation that is all good to begin with. Or he could but it would be full of clones of God who had no independence, and any love would be a sort of automatic, passionless, all-purpose, blissed out and bland everybody loves everybody else equally sort that you see in some spiritual communes or, at least, you see people imitating that because they think it's what they should be doing. But that is not love which to be real must be personal.

There needs to be a first creation which acts as a selection gateway to the second creation which is the real one. Nothing evil or dark or in any way damaged or even less than perfect can get into Heaven, the second creation. This is why I call the first creation a filter for the second. All propensity to evil in the individual is brought out in the first creation where it may either  be indulged in or made excuses for or justified. Or, and this is the only reaction that gets it through the fine meshes of the filter, repented. The soul makes its choice and on that choice depends its future, whether it goes on to the second creation, the one in which evil does not just not exist but is impossible, or is recycled through one of the many environments in the first creation which differ inasmuch as they are reflections of the consciousness of the soul so some are indeed dark while others may be perfectly pleasant, even wonderful by earthly standards, but they are not the Heaven of absolute good.

If only we knew this for sure, you might say, then we would make the right decision. But that's the whole point. We don't know for sure so we must make an authentic decision, one that reflects our true self. One could add that we do actually know. All the information has been presented to us. If we choose not to accept it, that is our affair.

This idea of Earth as a filtration system, designed to extract impurities in the soul, does not preclude the Earth as a school scenario. Both operate, albeit in different ways. One the one hand, the soul is developed through its experience, expression and experiment in the world of duality, the material world, in which subject and object are wholly sundered. On the other, its inclination to or from itself and towards or away from God is brought out and examined. It is given the opportunity to see itself and to know itself, and also the chance to grow so that when it does reach the portals of heaven it can contribute creatively to the new creation and experience more of it. Many souls may qualify for heaven but the greater the spiritual development, the deeper the spiritual participation and the more the ability to add to heaven's glory.

For heaven is not a place of static peace and tranquillity. It is the eternally blossoming flower that grows from the seeds planted on Earth. Thus, it increases in beauty and glory and wonder, and we increase with it.

Why is there evil in this world? The answer to that is simple. There is evil in this world in order to eradicate it completely and let those who wish go on to a new world in which evil cannot exist. This world brings out and filters evil so that the new creation may be one of absolute good. You might say that Earth is a refinery.

An earlier piece on a similar theme is A Body of Slag.

 I have an atheist acquaintance who will believe nothing that has not been confirmed by science, and the sort of fully materialistic science he approves of at that. 'The science'. Talking about the current transsexual craze he said he will wait for science to pronounce until making up his mind on the reality or otherwise of genuinely being able to change sex. A young man of 18 present at this conversation asked "What about basic common sense? We don't need science to corroborate that." "We certainly do", said the atheist. "Nothing can be regarded as true until scientifically proven to be so. What is called common sense cannot be relied upon". "Besides" he added "I just don't care about the gender argument. It doesn't concern me."

This person represents the kind of modern person who has so separated himself from reality, both objective reality and the reality of himself as a human being, that he doubts everything and sees meaning in nothing. This is the result of rejecting the core fact of a Supreme Being who gives reality and meaning to everything. What he is doing to himself is reducing himself to a spiritual wraith, a thin-souled being of less and less substance. He is literally wasting away spiritually. A clairvoyant might see him as surrounded by a hard shell which blocks out any incoming light. It is a sorry state to be in and requires a massive turnaround of consciousness if he is to escape his self- created prison.

Furthermore, not to care about something as important as the fundamental reality of man and woman shows a contempt for the good, the beautiful and the true. It is not sophisticated, as he appears to believe, but siding, whether consciously or not, with the agenda of evil that seeks to separate Man from God. Deny the truths embedded in creation and you deny the Creator who has put himself into creation.

I'm sure many people during the Nazi rise to power were not bothered because they were not personally affected. They turned a blind eye to moral evil. But now the situation is in many respects worse. Vast swathes of the Western population turn a blind eye to spiritual evil and are therefore complicit in its spread, enabling this black miasma to creep over human consciousness. These people are not outwardly evil but by allowing spiritual evil to spread they become part of it and their souls are damaged

At one time I thought that the mystical path was the proper end for every human soul. I still do. The spiritual light must be kindled and burst into flames within the heart. However, we are not just called to ascend to higher consciousness as in some forms of enlightenment or oneness spirituality in which we transcend the vicissitudes of this world which is then regarded as the vale of illusion. We must actively fight spiritual evil as Jesus did and if we are to do that we must recognise it. Spiritual evil is subtle and will often pose as good, worldly good, good for the fallen human being, utopian good, and many spiritual approaches of the present day can be co-opted into spiritual evil because they do not actively stand out against it. Hence the title of this post. Not to recognise good and evil in the world because everything is one or the world is a limited state in which nothing is more true than anything else is not spiritually advanced but moral relativism, and moral relativism just plays into the hands of spiritual evil which will exploit your ignorance mercilessly.

 We live today in a spiritually sick society with every tradition undermined and every institution infiltrated by forces bent on destruction. It's right to reassess tradition in the light of contemporary consciousness but very foolish to do a 180 degree turnaround from it without fulling understanding it, and we don't. We just denied the reality which tradition was trying to express. We could have changed the language somewhat but kept the meaning behind it or even gone more deeply into that meaning but our intellectual pride was such that we failed to look beneath the surface of past ways of thinking.

As for our national institutions, once the process of infiltration had reached a certain stage there was a tipping point. That took place around the turn of the millennium after which time the mission became to carry through the new ideology rather than serve the best interests of the nation. Those who rose to the top in such circumstances were the ones who were most comfortable with the agenda or least hesitant to submit ambition to moral scruples. Of course, they employed and promoted like-minded people.

The rejection of tradition and the destruction of institutions built up over, in some cases, centuries, did not happen by chance. It was not simply a matter of organic change but deliberate subversion. Every Western country was affected in the same way at the same time and although it may seem as if this was simply how things turned out because of some fashionable -ism or the impact of the 1960s when class barriers tumbled and freedom and self-expression became the watchwords of the culture, that is not the case because these were only external manifestations of a spiritual revolution that was planned. When I use the word spiritual I do not mean it was good. I mean it came from non-material realms. It was all part of a demonic attempt to corrupt humanity and separate it from God, to present evil as good and blacken spiritual good as evil. This could be done because elements of real good could be taken out of context, promoted, exaggerated  and used to deny others aspects of good. If you deny the primacy of the spiritual then you can present material good as all that is required and what tends to spiritual good is dismissed as either irrelevant or even wicked because it conflicts with your material good.

The aim is control, both physical and psychological. One of the reasons the powers that be are trying to bring the era of cheap energy to a close is that they will have more control. Cheap energy gives freedom but when energy becomes expensive your individual freedom, certainly the power to exercise it, becomes much more circumscribed. Yet more important than this is control of thought. A tamed population does as it's told. This is why, starting from the 1950s, there has been this ongoing attempt to undermine men, especially men of a certain hue, and masculinity. Emasculate to control. This is why such things as feminism and egalitarianism are pushed so relentlessly with the newly invented sins of sexism and racism the worst thought crimes you can commit. It is important to realise that ideologies such as these do have, to quote Bruce Charlton, a "core insight of validity", this being the value of the free individual, each and every one. But the good in them has been deformed and made into an evil by being exaggerated and used to suppress other aspects of truth. A truth taken out of context and the area to which it applies and then applied to other areas in which it does not apply or not in the same way becomes a lie. But, because there is a certain truth nestling within the two ideologies just mentioned it is hard to argue with them as they are presented now on an either/or basis which is what the argument usually gets reduced to. You have to go above and beyond the good/bad dichotomy to find the truth about many things these days which is why we have to go outside both conventional traditional and progressive thinking to get anywhere.

What is the aim of this undermining of freedom and attempted control of thought? For some in the outer circles it may be power but for the real instigators of the process it is the separation of Man from God. Spiritual not political. This is why there are so many contemporary movements that seek to rewrite the reality of creation. Dismantle creation and you do away with God to an even greater extent than simply not believing in him. As long as you accept the natural rules of creation you retain some link to its Maker but when you no longer observe even these you have completely lost touch with reality. Then you can be moulded in whatever shape the demons who are behind all this wish. Give them your mind and they will take your soul.

Note: This is the third part of a short series.

What is Evil?

The Destruction of the West

 To what extent is the current elite deliberately trying to destroy the West, specifically the Christian West, and to what extent is this simply a matter of false ideology and ignorance, short termism and even misplaced good intentions? For, make no mistake, the West is being destroyed. It is being destroyed by materialism, atheism, mass immigration, which is seemingly unstoppable, feminism, which gives a whole new meaning to the traditional women and children first saying, moral relativism and several other movements and ideologies which any spiritually sane person can recognise and which are mostly interlinked and which result from the loss of the sense of the transcendent and the promotion of envy and resentment to virtues.

Just as there is a hierarchy of good so there is a hierarchy of evil. At the upper levels of this hierarchy there is intent, definite, deliberate, serious, cold, malevolent intent. At mid and lower levels, not so much, at least not so much in the sense of something planned and acknowledged. Some of these people may want to destroy but they tell themselves they are motivated by honest impulses to make a better world. No doubt there are elements of that in their psychological makeup but there are also strong feelings of anger and hatred plus the afore-mentioned resentment. They are co-opted by those at higher levels because of some personal moral defect or intellectual weakness or spiritual vacuity. They are unwitting servants of evil but they would not be co-optable if there was not this attraction to sin or spiritual blindness within them.

But we are all sinners so what's the difference? It is precisely this. Yes, we are all sinners but some of us recognise this and struggle against it while others allow themselves to be defined by it. These people justify, excuse, even celebrate their sin. They identify with it and do not allow true spiritual feeling to reveal it for what it is. It is their treasure, their pet, rather than their burden, their pride rather than their shame.

Nothing in this world is 100% one thing. None of us are perfect and none of us are wholly bad. And yet, the world is moving in a direction in which the dividing line between sheep and goats, between those who, on the whole, wish to love and serve God, the truth, the good, however they might define it, and those who, in one way or another, serve the forces of anti-God, anti-truth, anti-good, is being drawn. Tests are underway. They examine our spiritual responses to situations and ideas, but be careful of that word spiritual. It does not necessarily mean what we think it does, we who live in a decidedly unspiritual age. Thus, it is not universal loving kindness unless that is balanced with real love of real spiritual (as opposed to worldly) good. For instance, everyone would say that God loves us but what does he love?  Does he love us as we are or does he love the soul rather than the earthly personality? Both you say? Then does he love the murderer as murderer? This is an extreme example but it illustrates the point that though God loves the sinner he does not love the sinner as sinner. If the sinner will not let go of his sin he is separating himself from God's love. That will always be there should he repent and, for the sake of the soul, God will do what he can to bring that sinner to repentance but he cannot override free will.

Therefore, spiritual response means response to the reality of the world of the soul and to the values of that world. It does not mean treating the lower self as though it were the higher self but that is often the practice of worldly people, even self-defined religious and spiritual people, who lack understanding of that world and who misinterpret the truths of spirit by seeing them in the light of this world and its priorities.

The West is being destroyed, in part by deliberate plan, in part by ignorance, in part by greed, selfishness and so on. But also because its time has come. If that were not the case then the attempt to destroy it would not be succeeding as it undoubtedly is. For those who lament its passing, and I do, let me quote some words of my teachers from many years ago at a time when this process was certainly well underway but had not reached anything like its present state. They said "Nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost." When we see the destruction of goodness and truth in this world we are right to lament it but we should also remember that even this was but a shadow and pale reflection of that which inspired it and which remains inviolate in the higher worlds.

The West is under a ferocious attack by the powers of evil. This has been a long term operation, though it is coming to a head now, and for that reason people who only think in terms of human generations cannot see it for what it is. They think the desire for money or power is what motivates the corrupt elites. But these people are manipulated, their vices exploited, by supernatural powers which seek spiritual destruction and the separation of the soul from God. Only when you recognise this simple, basic fact can you understand what is going on in the world, especially the Western world, today. It is right to lament the destruction of the good but it is more important to hold fast to the vision of the divine. Our salvation never lay in this world.

Added note: To say that salvation does not lie in this world does not mean we should just accept the destruction of the good here. We should not but we should also understand that the real good is elsewhere and that will give us a proper perspective.

 I've written about this before but I want to consider it again because the battle between good and evil is fundamental today. Of course, it always is but two things mark out the present time. One, the issue is confused, deliberately so, in a way it has not been before, and two, the lines are being drawn with each side becoming more defined, albeit in a way that is not immediately obvious to everyone.

What, then, is evil? The answer is simple. Evil is the rejection of God. That is it. Now, this takes various forms and manifests itself in a number of ways but the root cause of them all is that rejection. And the rejection of God is the rejection of truth because God is truth. Therefore, a God rejecter is a person of bad faith - literally. I realise this is a nasty thing to say in the context of the present day but trying to skirt round the edges of the problem just leaves it unsolved. If you deny God you are a bad person and you will do bad things and support wicked ideology. Perhaps at one time there were legitimate grounds for doubting the reality of God. Human consciousness had changed and a religion formed for the previous stage of consciousness was no longer sufficient for many even if the basics were still present. But now anyone of good faith should be able to see where the rejection of God has taken us and where it will take us. This should force any atheist or even agnostic to make a full reassessment of his position. A period of doubt is inevitable for most people in the modern world, and it's even healthy as it can lead to a deeper faith eventually as one reconsiders the nature of life, the self and the world and no longer takes religion on face value but penetrates beneath its surface. But that period should not be a destination. The healthy soul will move on to acceptance of divine truth. 

Why do I say this so confidently? Partly because God is in us and he will speak to us if we do not suppress his voice, and partly because a healthy soul seeks love, goodness and beauty and these cannot exist unless they are grounded in a God. Otherwise they are no more real than the appearance of a face formed by clouds would be. So either you accept these things are not real in which case anything goes or else you acknowledge their reality in which case you must acknowledge the existence of that which gives them reality.

Where has this rejection of God taken us? For a start, it has taken us to a world of post-truth. This had been creeping up on us for many decades but it took over around the turn of the millennium since when everything is said and done for appearance and effect. Very little simply because it is right. Recently we have seen that even science has become more a matter of consensus than truth, and as for politics, the least said the better.

Then it has taken us to the triumph of technology. Technology starts as the attempt to force Nature to human will which implies the prioritising of matter over spirit but then as it proceeds and develops it becomes the means to remake the human form changing it from being in the image of God to a self-created thing which, by definition, is a deformed thing.

All the various ideologies of the modern world which are supposedly humanistic are actually Satanic.  They are so because they reject God and try to recreate not only human society but even the human being (see above) in a form that has no need of God. The only conclusion to be drawn from this really quite obvious and undeniable fact is that modernism, the whole of it not just the more extreme parts, is evil. If that shocks you or seems excessive it is only because the full effects of the modernistic agenda have not yet been realised. But the steps to that end game have been and they are continuing to be taken. One leads to another and on we go to the inevitable conclusion though maybe there is no clear end, just a deeper and darker descent into spiritual loss and separation. In fact, there will be an end because God will not permit things to progress beyond a certain point but there is some way to go as most people are not yet fully corrupted.

To say that the whole of modernism is evil refers to its manifestation in today's world. It does not mean there was nothing good or necessary about the developments in human consciousness, largely to do with a greater awareness of self, that came about in the Western world and from there were exported and spread all over the globe. This was a spiritual advance but the energies behind it were captured and perverted by demonic forces, and the new sense of self instead of dedicating itself to pursuing divine mysteries became fixated on itself. God was rejected and into that vacant spot humanity put itself though it will find that actually what it has done is made itself the dupe of demonic forces. Now we have reached the point where to retain any aspect of modernism in any of the various forms that have come down to us is like not cutting out a canker from a plant. It will eventually spread over the whole plant, corrupting and killing it. Everything that the world believes today has to be reassessed in the light of the reality of God and his purpose for the soul. Absolutely everything.

Am I really saying in this article that people who don't believe in God are bad people? Don't we all know individuals who do not believe who are good, decent people not to mention those who do who are not? That is not the point. For a start, many people think they believe in God but they just subscribe to an image and are not awake in the heart which is where true belief is centred. That is what I am talking about here, and the test is do you see the world in the light of God or God in the light of the world? 

Then there is the further point that this is not about personal behaviour. It is about whether or not the heart is open to the source of truth and goodness. A heart that is so open is a good heart and will acknowledge God. One that is not so open is actually rejecting the source of goodness. How can you call that good? So you see it is not about whether you are good (which in the modern world means relatively tolerant and charitable and not much more) but whether you love good, actively love real spiritual good. Those who do will believe in God because one inevitably means the other. Those who don't love good will not believe in God. It's all about love. Genuine believers in God may behave badly. They shouldn't but they may. We are, after all, all sinners and repentance is an ongoing requirement. Those who reject God may lead outwardly exemplary lives but that is of small concern if their heart is turned away from their Creator. I repeat it is all about whether the heart is oriented to, open to, real goodness. Depending on circumstances, this need not take exactly the same form in all cases. I personally believe that many spiritual approaches contain pathways to God, not all but many, even if Christ remains the Way, the Truth and the Life and ultimately no one comes to the Father except through him. But people take different ways to get to him.

God is reality and God is good. If you reject God you reject the good in reality. That is evil.

 It is said that evil often proclaims itself as such in some way. This may be because the law of free will dictates that if people are to be corrupted they must have some clue that this is the case. Within that criterion though there is ample scope for evil to disguise itself as good to the eye of one who does not wish to see beneath the surface and, on some level, actively wants to be taken in because this will justify some sin or fallen desire.

In occultism the left hand path is the path of transgression, black magic and sexual licence. Often rebranded as a short cut to enlightenment, crazy wisdom, breaking the rules for greater freedom, rising above good and evil and other pseudo-glamorous deceptive descriptions, it is, in fact, the path that leads away from God and towards not God which is all that rejects God and the natural boundaries and standards of his creation. This ends up, if pursued and unrepented, in a spiritual state analogous to hell because hell is nothing more nor less than separation from God. That is a state in which light must be stolen as the soul can no longer get it directly from God. A soul has to fall a long way before that will happen but if it persists on the left hand path and does not turn back to its Maker that is what will happen.

The left has long been associated with the unnatural and the dark side of life. Obviously this is not the case literally but symbolically there is a certain truth to the idea. We take our modern usage from the time of the French Revolution when supporters of the monarchy sat on the right in the National Assembly and supporters of the revolution sat on the left. A pure coincidence you might think but those who are symbolically minded will see more to it than that. We are being told something. None of this means that elements of what became the Revolution, which term I am using to mean the overturning of traditional ideas in the 18th century, were not genuinely progressive. Human consciousness was evolving. The relationship between all sections of society from aristocrats to the ordinary people and between men and women had to be adjusted in the light of greater self-consciousness. Not to mention that a new approach to religion was called for with a greater emphasis on internal enquiry. But the whole process was hijacked and continues to be, and the clue to the hijacking was right there at the beginning.

The hallmark of Satanism is rejection of God and the order of creation. This involves undermining and then inverting all natural hierarchies and if you look at the last couple of centuries, and especially the last 50 years, you simply cannot help but see this as the underlying tendency of the left. It moves from one group to another but always with the aim of subverting the natural order. The excuse is compassion or justice but the real motive is resentment and even hatred of God.

It would clearly be absurd to say that every leftist is a Satanist but every one has allied him or herself to a degree with the Satanic agenda and has done so because of spiritual failings. At the bare minimum every one is a dupe of some kind. And note that when I talk of Satan I am not talking of an individual being though there may well be such. But the prime manifestation of this impulse is the tendency in the created individual motivated by corrupted desire and badly turned will to want to sit on God's throne. This is what is behind the left, particularly as it is in our day.

 Francis Berger has a good post on his blog about how being religious these days is not enough if you lack proper spiritual perception which is the ability to see underneath and beyond the doctrines to the truth within them. Often religious people completely fail to see the evil that is running riot throughout the world and sometimes those who do see this evil fail to see its supernatural origin and the spiritual motivation behind it. It seems we cannot bring ourselves to believe in supernatural evil. We are spiritual sentimentalists who will sing "All you need is love" as we are hauled off to the pit. Well, perhaps that is a bit over the top but the fact is religion's weapons, and Christianity's in particular, are being turned against itself to advance an agenda of spiritual destruction. The well-meaning but naive and emotionally self-indulgent will be left behind unless they toughen up and acquire the wisdom of serpents. They must develop some spiritual backbone and risk being thought bad, because apparently judgemental, by the world, and the world includes most religious people who have allowed themselves to be absorbed by it.

A commenter on Francis's post asked if there were any words of Christ's applicable to the present situation. What immediately sprang to mind when I read this were these words from Matthew 7 21-23.

"Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’"

Many people think they are good Christians because they believe in Christ. That is not enough now if indeed it ever was. You have to start becoming Christ-like. You must at least allow him to be born in your heart and not simply have an exteriorised faith. What is it to practice lawlessness? It is to go against the law and the primary law is to love God which means to love truth. How many religious people really love truth even above their religion? That is what is required. Note, I do not say love truth above Christ but I do say that all Christians must love truth above their Christianity.

In the same Gospel, verse 24, chapter 24, Christ talks about even the elect being deceived in the end times, such will be the all-encompassing but subtle wickedness of those (these?) times. If the elect are deceived then the rank and file will be too. I call it subtle wickedness though it is not so very subtle. But it is not obvious like mass murder and that is why so many religious people fail to see it. They don't realise that evil has changed its modus operandi or it has done so to a degree. Now, in line with the change in human consciousness, it likes to present itself as good. But the problem is also that we are so influenced by materialism, even if we are religious, that we just cannot accept that what might appear random has a purposeful intelligence behind it.

It is good to be able to see the evil that dominates in the world but that is not the end of the story. Sometimes those who have a serpent's wisdom lack a dove's harmlessness. We must have both and not let our awareness of evil curdle our hearts. Then there is the matter of hope. Yes, evil is everywhere but God will prevail. This is the hope, or knowledge really, that we should always keep in mind, whatever the outer circumstances.

 It seems to me that too many well-meaning and properly orientated people nowadays are too fixated on opposing the (obvious) insanity of the worldly powers including the political powers, the media, the entertainment industry, the 'science' and all the rest of it. We certainly should oppose this lunacy but we should not allow ourselves to be defined by our opposition to it. It's an old trick of the devil to lie so hard that he entraps the virtuous into sin or imbalanced behaviour because of their outraged response to his lies. It's all nonsense. Of course it is. The transgender absurdity, the climate change hysteria, the diversity/inclusion/equality diktats, the anti-racism, the feminism etc, etc. It's all stupid, ignorant nonsense. We know it is. Anyone of sense knows it. Don't rise to the bait and allow yourself to be pushed into reaction. That's what the devil wants. If he can't get you on his side he wants you to fight him because then he has drawn you into his orbit. So just laugh at him. He's an idiot, a loser, a fool. We are wise to his tricks. We know his game and we won't lower ourselves to his level. We will just focus on the good and combat darkness by spreading light.

The lies will spread because we have cut ourselves off from objective truth which is God so there is nothing to anchor us to reality. Anything goes now. We can't stop that but what we can do is control our reaction to the lies. All we are responsible for is our self. We are living in today's world so that is where  we are meant to be. That's fine. We just have to hold fast to the reality of God and then let what will be outwardly be. We will convince others more by quiet example than noisy confrontation.

 There is a certain strain in esoteric thought that considers evil to be necessary for good to come about, a kind of resistance required for good to arise by virtue of being forced to push back against it. According to this understanding, evil is simply the darkness against which one can more clearly see the light. 

I completely reject that idea. Evil is evil, full stop. 

At the same time, God is God and can make good come out of evil but that does not justify evil in any way. It remains wrong and a result of the fallen ego. Lucifer is not Christ's dark twin in some mysterious way working with him for long term evolutionary benefit. He is not there to enable self-consciousness to arise and grow. He is not a misunderstood good guy. He is a rebel against God not a partner with him. It's important not to get sucked into this false idea. Sin does not have to be experienced in order to overcome it. Darkness does not have to be integrated in order for a person to be in some sense whole. Evil is not part of good. Judas was not Christ's true disciple doing his work as a form of self-sacrifice. These are all deceptions and have no part in proper holiness. To believe that evil is anything other than evil will corrupt the soul. It is like peering into the abyss. Do that and you risk being drawn in.

I was prompted to write this post after reading a comment that Bruce Charlton made on his blog disagreeing with Rudolf Steiner who apparently believed that Lucifer was 'not really evil' but a kind of evolutionary force that could go wrong but was fundamentally positive. See the comment here at 17.57.  Some of the Gnostics also thought this. I disagree with Steiner as well and so does someone else who knows better than any of us. "Woe to the world because of offenses! For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!" (Matthew 18:7)

 We supposedly live in a humanistic age, one in which mankind is central and owes nothing to anything or indeed anyone beyond itself. We are our own justification. We celebrate ourselves, and our art, politics and science are all based on expanding our knowledge and deepening our fulfilment of ourselves as ourselves. For some our potential is limitless but it is still our potential as human beings even if we bring the universe into it on some abstract or quasi-spiritual level.

What we don't realise is that humanity restricted to humanity is doomed to a solipsistic nihilism, however much we may give our fundamental emptiness a false glamour. The human being can only find any real fulfilment when it goes beyond itself. In fact, the human being is only properly human when it understands itself to be more than human. Humanism actually means separation from God so it is an anti-spiritual philosophy. Truth to tell, it is an anti-human philosophy because the human being without God is destined for death.

We don't live in a humanistic age. We live in an inhuman age. We cover up that grim reality with technological distractions and false ideas about ourself. We are lost, on our own, floating off into the void. We are so insane that people who are aware of this are regarded as mad or childish because they, so it is said, cling onto fantasies. But the biggest fantasy and the greatest arrogance is that we can live without God. Remove the artificial supports that modern human beings have, take away the elaborate structures we have built up to keep out reality and most people might reflect a little more deeply on what they are and what they should be.

The ground is being prepared for the incarnation of a being known as the antichrist by Christians who is probably the same as the one named Ahriman by the spiritual philosopher Rudolf Steiner. This is that aspect of evil which seeks to bind human beings to the material world and cut them off completely from the spiritual. The advent of this being has been prepared by our reduction of life to what can be weighed and measured. Our modern arts, science, politics and philosophy and even medicine have all been pressed into service to accommodate the ends of this individual who may already have been born. Even religion, which now focuses on materialistic humanitarianism more than true spirituality, serves the ends of antichrist/Ahriman. When he appears he will not be obviously evil like some of the despots of the 20th century. He may even appear benign by the materialistic standards we have built up over the last 2 centuries. But he will seek to divert us from true divine understanding and spiritual life. We need to understand that anything or anyone that promises happiness and fulfilment in this world, whatever it calls itself, is not of God. That doesn't mean that hardship and suffering are good in themselves. That also can be a false path. But this life is intended to serve the greater life and can never be justified in itself. 

The current state of the world has been brought about to make us ripe for the picking when the antichrist arrives. But God has not abandoned us. If we can see through the lies we become spiritually stronger. The lies are permitted because they must be brought out into the open in order for us to overcome them and that which corresponds to them in our own souls. If they were not made manifest and outwardly present in this way we would not be able to defeat them and nor could we deal with the same tendencies that exist within ourselves. There is risk involved. The darkness can overwhelm us or we can use it to see the light more clearly. But we are, or should be, spiritual adults now and we can only progress spiritually by facing reality and dealing with it. God will protect us but he will not overprotect us for then we would never grow up.

Ahriman/antichrist has many servants in the modern world, most of whom don't know they are his servants even though they serve his agenda and prepare his way. I would go so far as to say that more or less everyone in the public eye who has any form of power serves his agenda. If they didn't they wouldn't be there. This will only become more so. The plans are laid for complete control of human consciousness. That's not just control of human beings but control of human consciousness. The best slaves are willing slaves and that is what Ahriman wants and what his agents are currently working for in preparation for his appearance. We have to be aware of this. Preserve your freedom. God gave us complete freedom, making us free even to reject him. No one and nothing can take that away but you can give it away. Never sell your birthright, no matter what is offered in exchange for whatever is offered is worthless really. Stay free.

 There is a risk nowadays when the world is pervaded from top to bottom with lies and deceit that those of us on the side of God and Creation may be forced into a state of perpetual opposition. We find ourselves against almost everything and may be defined by a contrary spirit. It's hard not to be trapped by this because evil, frequently posing as good, is rampant in the modern world. But a trap is what it is as constantly feeling oneself to be fighting against something can often obscure or overlay the thing one is actually for. This, of course, does not mean ignoring evil or failing to condemn it. That remains essential. But it does mean focusing on the good at all times and not allowing the darkness to take up all one's attention and energy.

The reality is God and his purpose for us as spiritual beings. Everything that does not derive from this is false. We need to point out the false and confront it when it becomes powerful but we need to do so while remaining firmly fixed in God. It is all too easy to hate evil on the human level. God hates evil. It is an affront to his being and his truth and his goodness. But he hates it without letting the hate consume him or alter him in any way. It's almost a dispassionate hate though I believe it's also passionate if that makes sense. We have to adopt the same attitude. Hate evil because we love good and not let the hate take us away from the good and everything that the good means which primarily is love.

Creation means injecting cosmic order into chaos. But matter is always working to break down the creative energies and return everything to primeval chaos. As the end of an age approaches this disintegrating process accelerates. We are far from the initial creative impulse because, even though God may be creating afresh all the time, the original act of creation is what sets the whole procedure going and gives it its life force. It is the energy that drives the whole age and it sets the pattern for that age notwithstanding the many subsidiary contributions. This means that what is happening now is just what we should expect to happen now. That is not a justification to jump on board and go with the flow. Spiritual progress is made by going against the flow at a time like this, but we cannot expect the current to go in a different direction to the one it now goes in.

What this amounts to is that the evils of the present day are inevitable. We must stand apart from them and identify them clearly but we must not allow ourselves to be caught up in them so that we start actually defining ourselves by our opposition to them. That way they have control over us. 

 Adam Piggott has written an interesting piece on his blog about science and God that takes no prisoners. His conclusion is that you can have one or the other but not both. One part of me agrees but another part feels that science is just a word for knowledge and surely it is not wrong to explore the creation as long as one does it while fully acknowledging the Creator and understanding everything in his light? I have to say that my personal feelings incline towards Adam Piggott’s position but I am not convinced I am correct. It may be how things are now but is not necessarily how the situation always would be. Perhaps the problem is that science easily corrupts the scientist and the type of person who becomes a scientist is often (not always) a materialist who lacks both imagination and intuition not to mention faith. Maybe the scientific method and way of thinking actually require one to close off parts of one's mind that are spiritually attuned or to atrophy these parts*.

But notwithstanding my uncertainty on the matter, let's take the position of assuming there is indeed a dichotomy between science and God. Here are some thoughts put forward as a theory – no more. This also echoes a previous post I did on technology.

What if all our science and, especially, our technology actually comes from a highly intelligent but spiritually dead demonic source, and is given to humanity to separate us from God and bring about our spiritual corruption?

The stories we hear about scientists being inspired in dreams which are sometimes taken as being somehow divine in origin may be something quite other. The spiritual and the demonic are often confused by those who have no experience of such things.

What brought about the Fall of Man from Paradise? It was when the serpent promised Eve that she could be the equal of Adam and even God if she ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now, this tree and its fruit were presumably created by God so were not bad in themselves but the sin was to eat from the tree before being ready and against the specific instruction from God not to do so. The fruit represents the mind or thought which are not bad things except when they are separated from the spiritual source and regarded as independent of God. That is science, is it not?

Eating the fruit means awakening to mind and the world of opposites it reveals and that in turn brings about the sense of a separate self. It destroyed Paradise and resulted in the Fall. Sin and death entered the world and they entered, it could reasonably be said, with science.

The process has continued. Over the last 200 years technology, put through from demonic levels, has destroyed tradition and religion and turned the world into an outpost of hell. Look at our art and architecture just for starters. Technology has corrupted our minds and now, with the diabolical fantasies of transhumanism, is even beginning to deform the human image. The Faustian pact gives us power over our world and our outer self but at the price of severing the link with the divine and our true being.

We get material power but each new form of technology takes us further away from God and the soul. We accept this happily because we only see the benefits which are not even benefits really because they soon pall and we demand more like a junkie with his fix.

Technology is about replacing man with machine, first externally but increasingly internally. Depending on machines for everything just makes our consciousness more mechanical and less alive which is why everything is duller these days. Our minds and our very consciousness become desensitised by technology and shrivel. The computers we increasingly live our lives through are stealing our souls and eroding our spiritual faculties which range from imagination to awareness of the sacred. Even our moral sense is undermined.

Where is all this leading? Is the aim to turn this world into hell and human souls into soulless zombies which the demons can exploit for their own ends? That may be why they wish to have people mentally and physically remade by technology. It is like the corruption of elves into orcs by Morgoth in Tolkien’s legendarium. But perhaps the technological advancements have another aim as well.

.

Demons lack bodies. They have lost their angelic forms and do not have a physical form either. They are spirits in the inner dimensions but they crave form for the greater powers of self-expression and freedom this would give them. Is it possible that through technology, through computers, through artificial intelligence, they are trying to gain an entry into this world? Could this provide the platform they need to incarnate directly in matter? Remember they are currently neither in spirit proper nor matter. They exist in a kind of limbo world, cut off from God. By remodelling the physical world so it is no longer the natural creation they make it possible to connect directly with it. Through digital and mechanical means they can incarnate. Sensitive souls have complained about the spiritual ravages caused by the Industrial Revolution from the beginning. Blake and Wordsworth were at the forefront of this but we have ignored them because we are so easily seduced by material goods. But now things are potentially much worse. The dream of freedom offered by technology is close to becoming the nightmare of slavery to it.

This is a theory. From the normal point of view it’s crazy, the stuff of science fiction as the saying goes. But maybe science fiction can warn us of what may happen if we let it. No, what will happen if we do not take active steps to stop it. We absolutely must rediscover God and reject completely the lure of the demons before they destroy us. Could this be what happened before and brought about the necessity for God to drown a previous humanity at the time of the Flood? For one thing is certain. Even if the demons succeed their success won’t last long. God will not permit it. Surely they know that? Perhaps, but maybe their pride thinks they can get away with it this time. It's up to us to make sure they do not.

* Adam Piggott has written a later piece clarifying that he is referring to science as it is today. So, as it has become rather than what it intrinsically is though the question still remains as to whether that is inevitable given the nature of science and the type of thought that is required to pursue it.

Several times in my life I have felt myself to be attacked by malign psychic forces. Sometimes this has been in dreams and I describe an incident from not too long ago here. That was very dramatic and unmistakeable but these attacks can also happen in waking hours and then they are usually not so obvious. For instance, we are attacked through our thoughts and emotions which can be manipulated, if we allow them to be, by the dark forces to bring us down into the kind of world they inhabit, one of anger, delusion and lies. My teachers told me that the more progress you make on the path, the more you are attacked by these beings and that has been my experience.

There are various ways to protect yourself against these attacks. One very simple way is just to watch out for your thoughts and emotions and not allow these to be corrupted. Keep your thoughts on the full reality of God, seeing everything in his light, and do not let your feelings become contaminated by anger, fear or, a particular weakness of mine, irritation. You can still feel these emotions but try to place them in the context of God's love which can burn them all up. I don't pretend this is easy. It's the work of a lifetime but that's what we are here to do. Life is work, specifically spiritual work, and our labours in this world will be rewarded in the next.

Of all the weapons at our disposal to fight evil I have found (not that it's a new discovery!) there is none more potent than the name of Jesus. This is a kind of gleaming white sword of fire that can cut right through any demonic attack. "In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God, depart!" There is no more powerful utterance. Not only does the very name appear to disarm the demons but by appealing to Jesus you summon his aid, both in your own imagination, which is important, and in reality. You are bringing his presence to the field. In a very real sense where his name is spoken, there he is.

Non-religious people might just regard this as a kind of mental trick, a spiritual version of a placebo which works because you believe it will work. They might point to the fact that Jesus's name varies slightly from language to language. But that is because they are viewing the operation from within the limitations of their own materialistic worldview. The truth is that the name of Jesus in any language has a spiritual power beyond all others because it is a form of Jesus himself. In the spiritual world our names are us and we are our names. It is almost like a face. It is certainly a real aspect of the person. And because Jesus is the greatest person, his name is the greatest name. Just to say the name Jesus brings Jesus into your life, though the greater your faith and love the fuller will be his presence. He is life and truth and so no wonder the demons, who have set themselves against life and truth, flee when he comes.

 In occultism the left hand path is the path that seeks to acquire spiritual power by illicit means. Often justified by its acolytes as the direct path or the heroic path, it is really just the path of the unrepentant self who wishes to steal from God what he has not earned and is not prepared to earn. It is the path of the ego, pursued by those who do not accept that the spiritual can only be known by those prepared to sacrifice their own little egos. It can never bring one to true spiritual illumination but it can take its practitioners to a dark imitation of illumination which they confuse for the real thing.

To me it is no coincidence that the modern way which has rejected God is that of the left. All thought that falls under that general heading shares the belief that man is pre-eminent and that humanity does not need, in fact, is much better off without, God. The left is the way that denies transcendence and the fact of the divine and which seeks to remake the world according to man. To begin with, this may have been innocent enough and an attempt to see that God is within as well as out there, but the small seed has grown into something monstrous that not only rejects God but is also rejecting nature and soon enough will reject humanity. You may scoff at this idea since the left considers itself the defender of humanity but its progression of destruction and deconstruction, all based on the original diminishment of God, leads inevitably to the destruction of everything. It is a maw that must continually be fed. 

The ideology of the left will lead (I am tempted to say has led) to the destruction of Western civilisation. One of its principle expressions is feminism. Feminism arises in a culture when male creative energy has built up a structure it can latch onto and feed off. With its push towards equality in which nothing and no one is better than anything or anyone else, perhaps driven by feminine empathy which is a wonderful thing but only in its proper place, it results in a world in which the safe and the mediocre are the ideals to aim for and celebrate. This inevitably leads to intellectual and spiritual decline, the decline of freedom too because my freedom gets in the way of your safety. Is it a coincidence that the female powers are brought into prominence and propitiated on the left hand path of occultism? And that these powers are independent of masculine spiritual direction and do not manifest the true spiritual qualities of the feminine as reflected in the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary which is the feminine that has given herself over to God? The left side is the female as the right side is the male and it is no coincidence that the normal human condition is to be right handed. This seemingly unimportant fact does point to a greater spiritual truth for those alive to the realities of symbolism.

Feminism is a new twist on the old story of "ye shall be as gods" and like that story it involves a disruption in the natural order of being. The left in general is a rebellion against divine order and seeks to install man on the throne of God. It can never succeed but it can cause a lot of damage before it eventually destroys itself which it inevitably does when it has nothing else left to destroy.

My blogging companions Bruce Charlton, Frank Berger and Wm Js Tychonievich have all written some excellent and illuminating articles recently on the threefold nature of evil as defined by Rudolph Steiner, here, here and here.  According to this systemisation, evil can be personified as three beings or types which are Lucifer, Ahriman and Sorath in which, borrowing Frank's definitions, Lucifer is passionate, selfish, lustful, tormented and short-term, Ahriman is cold, controlling, systematic/bureaucratic, power-hungry and mid to long term and Sorath is the pit into which they all eventually fall (unless they repent) being purely negative, destructive, hateful and desirous of annihilating both creation and, eventually, itself.

It strikes me that these can be considered as evil manifesting on the emotional, intellectual and spiritual planes which is why they can all come from Sorath originally and then all return to 'him' eventually. As our focus moves through the various levels of being we may be prone to manifesting particular sorts of evil if we distort the qualities associated with those levels, evil only ever being a distortion of good and having no authentic existence itself.

 Luciferian evil is selfish above all, unable to control itself or its passions. It relates to the self as a creature of desire. It wants to be fed. I know a Luciferian type person who is abusive, angry, fiery. Lucifer is a hot evil.

Ahriman is almost the opposite to this and that is one reason we don't see it as evil now when it is the dominant evil insofar as it is the one having most impact on the world. But we still see evil primarily as a Luciferian thing, though with tinges of Ahriman and Sorath. I also know someone who is a very pure Ahriman type but  he lives almost like a monk. He is highly intellectual, self-denying in terms of material goods and, by his own standards, very moral, meaning in a leftist everybody must have equal access to everything way. He is fully on board with lockdowns and would like to extend that to combat climate change. But he gives the impression of being cold and dead inside. There is a spiritual void. He is not a conventionally bad person by any means and genuinely believes he is an upright individual  working for the good of humanity. But he has no time for God or the idea that we live in a created world with laws and principles that go beyond those of mathematics and physics. Ahriman is a cold evil, and if Lucifer is a corruption of quality, inasmuch as it relates to the passions and desires, then Ahriman is the idolisation of quantity. Everything can be measured and must be controlled. According to Tolkien, Sauron started off as someone who wanted to improve the world through control. His rings were chiefly means for him to do that. He seems to be a typical Ahriman figure but, and this may be the destiny of all such types who do not turn round and repent, he eventually ended up in the black hole of Sorath.

Sorath seems to be something like non-being that, as it were, comes into mental form when being is manifested in creation. It is not a thing in itself but inevitable in a dualistic world in which everything  has an opposite just as light is the reality and darkness is merely the absence of light. So, Sorath is not actually real but gains a certain reality given to it by conscious beings becoming conscious of their own consciousness and freedom to deny what is. Sorath is the void, a cosmic dustbin into which everything goes that denies God. Neither hot nor cold but dead. As life necessarily implies death in the world but life is the reality so Sorath is the non-reality that arises as a potential when reality becomes actual. 

Steiner apparently thought that Lucifer and Ahriman served an evolutionary purpose but I disagree. I think they are just distortions of the good, possible because God has given us the freedom to deny divine reality which freedom he has given us in order that we might consciously choose divine reality and so bring about a creation of active good rather than simple sterile perfection.

 Bruce Charlton has written another one of his perceptive posts about the nature of the world today. In it he examines how the modern world has no proper understanding of evil and therefore has sunk deeply into it, more deeply than at any time before. He starts off by quoting someone who points out that "it is not right to say, as many do, that it has always been like this", and I commented that I constantly hear this too. But even in my lifetime it has not always been like this. I accept I have become more aware of evil as I have become more aware of the reality of God, but even so the fact is that never before have so many people, almost everyone, in fact, actively embraced ideas, thoughts, actions and systems that work directly against God and the principles of creation.

We don't understand evil because we view it purely in materialistic terms as violence, murder, rape, poverty, starvation and so on. These are evils but they are only one sort of evil and actually not the most important sort. They are evils of the body but there are evils of the soul as well and it is these latter we have succumbed to today. Evils of the soul are those that deny or downplay the reality of God and the spiritual purpose and destiny of the soul. This is Good. Anything that works against Good is evil so evil does not necessarily mean being nasty or even cruel as we see those things in a worldly sense. Some of the most evil people today are highly moral in their own terms. If that statement shocks you it means you do not understand the spiritual reality of good and evil.

This generation is fully aware of evils of the past and often exaggerates them because of its one-sided approach to life, a fear and hatred of any kind of material suffering. But this has led it into a massive blindness with regard to its own evils. These arise from an ignorance of the true good. You cannot know good if you do not know God. This is not just a glib saying. It is the fundamental truth. Good is spiritual good, it is what works to bring the human soul into closer relationship with God. Evil is what works to sever this relationship and separate Man from God and one of the ways it does this is through undermining the principles of creation, one of the most basic of which is the nature of the two sexes, man and woman. In a sense, these are the principles of creation and not just in the obvious material sense but in a spiritual one too where they represent spirit and matter whose union and interaction lies behind all manifested life. The contemporary attack on the principles of the masculine and feminine, through feminism, legitimisation of homosexuality and now the pretence that one sex can simply become another just because it wants to, is one of the more obvious forms evil takes today even though it is almost universally regarded as a good.

Coincidentally (or probably not because these things are on the minds of all right-thinking people just now),  Francis Berger has also written a very good post on how many modern Christians have bought into worldly evil. He calls these System Christians, an excellent term. These are Christians who really take their moral instruction from this world. They are too spiritually weak to see that what is good in the eyes of the world is often spiritually destructive. They may be well-meaning but they are also keen to appear right in the eyes of the established powers and are unlikely to suffer for their faith. They are really just materialists with a religious colouring who think religion exists to make us better men whereas it exists to make us entirely new men. And their idea of universal love boils down to acceptance of the world on its own terms while spiritual love means seeing the world in God's terms. I read a recent Easter message by a Church of England bishop that epitomised these people. There was no mention of what death and resurrection really means in a spiritual sense just some purely secular talk about the power of forgiveness and compassion during a pandemic. Basically, let's all be nice to each other.

What is evil? Evil is anything that works against real spiritual good. This means that even compassion can be evil if it is misdirected and supports sin, sin being defined as what separates us from God. God is misunderstood in a democratic age as being in everything equally. He is not. He is in everything as life but he is in some things more than others and our task as spiritual aspirants is to accord ourselves to that reality, always to enter more deeply into the good, the beautiful and the true. We must reject evil in all its forms, even those that dress themselves up as good which many do these days.

Every generation is tested where it is weakest. This generation has been lulled into a false sense of security insofar as right and wrong are concerned because it believes it has put right a lot of mistakes of the past but in so doing it has made new and more grievous errors. We may have started to correct some of what we regard as the sins of our ancestors but we have overlooked deeper sins because we no longer recognise the areas of life to which these sins pertain. So we have focussed on inter human relations, as in our current obsession with 'racism' and 'sexism' (in scare quotes because these words now mean almost anything and consequently mostly nothing), but completely ignored any relationship with God. We have no relationship with God. How could we when we don't even acknowledge his existence except in a perfunctory way?

The sins of today are based on the refusal to take the primacy of spiritual concerns over material ones (which refusal, by the way, extends to the churches and is why they have, almost without exception, failed the test of Covid-19, electing to obey the worldly powers and ignore the spiritual perspective). In fact, so closed off are we to the spiritual realm that most people don't even recognise our failures in this regard as sins. They are merely matters of personal belief so outside the moral sphere.  We believe ourselves to be virtuous because we think we focus on what is good but it is only what is good for the body and the earthly man not what is good for the soul and the spiritual man. We may be virtuous with respect to the former but with respect to the latter we are the most sinful of generations and we don't even know it.

The earthly man is not separate from the spiritual man but he is certainly not the same either and he must be seen in the light of the spiritual man to be known and understood properly. But we put the earthly man in the place of the spiritual man, the former has usurped the rights of the latter, and this category error is why the people of the present day are further from God than any previous generation - and consequently worse. We may not be Neros and Hitlers, actively wicked, but most people at the time of those monsters still reverenced the gods in one form or another. We do not. Our sins may be those of omission but they are no less sinful for all that and the results of them will be no less severe.

When I started this blog nearly 8 years ago I didn't write about current events going on in the outer world. I focused entirely on spiritual concerns because that was my area of interest. The world had clearly entered into a phase of greater materialism and atheism than ever before but the insanity had not spread so far as to have become the all-enveloping thing it is now. The growth of spiritual evil (meaning the denial of God and the laws of creation and actions and thoughts springing from that) was apparent but it hadn't swept away all traditional understanding which was based on the recognition of God and the objective reality of nature. People weren't actively spiritual but nor were they actively anti-spiritual.

But now they are. Now the beliefs enforced by society, by academia, by the media, by science and by every branch of human thought and activity up to and including most churches, are actively anti-spiritual and so now I do feel it necessary to comment on the outer world occasionally. In the not too distant past a person could lead a life based on true spiritual principles and not be ostracised by society. That is becoming increasingly difficult. Now, if you wish to follow God and live a life in accordance with the values and truths of creation, you must say about most things in the outer world. "This is wrong." You may not yet be required to say it publicly but you must say it to yourself.

And this is why we need Jesus. He is the lodestone of truth. Referring back to the post about a review of my Remember the Creator book, I was criticised for emphasising in that book the spiritual supremacy of Christ by someone who had found his path in Eastern religion. I won't repeat what I said there but I would like to say that I don't think Eastern religions (as practised by Westerners, I should stress) can save people from absorption by the evil that has taken over the world today. They can be too easily accommodated to that, especially if they are of the non-dualistic sort (which most are in one way or another) which do not give proper reality to creation or distinguish sufficiently between what is in heaven and what is on this earth. If you are directing your attention to a purely spiritual state in which the created world only exists as a basically unreal phenomenon then you will be unequipped to confront the reality of spiritual evil which means you will either let it pass or, more likely, be absorbed by it to some degree. Unless you stand against it, fully and whole-heartedly, you will become part of it. The only way to do this, to stand against it, is to recognise Christ who through his incarnation has given full reality to creation. It always was part of the divine but the incarnation has made it, and everything in it, completely so. 

I wrote the above a couple of days ago. Coincidentally, Bruce Charlton published a similar piece yesterday about the shortcomings of what he calls Oneness spirituality, essentially non-duality, the form of mysticism in which everything is boiled down to the Absolute and the created world and the individuals in it have minimal meaning. I made the following comment which (slightly edited) will serve to conclude this post. 

The inadequacy of Oneness as a spiritual path is becoming more clear in the context of the present world. Its great weakness is that it cannot fight evil because it doesn't recognise evil and is therefore absorbed by it. Its practitioners won't admit to that but that is the effective outcome of a Oneness doctrine. In a way, Oneness is a sort of spiritual materialism as it focuses entirely on quantity (that quantity being 1), dismissing quality as somehow illusionary or, at least, on a second and insignificant level of reality. However, creation is all about investing life with quality. Oneness sees no need in creation and can't explain it.

A spiritual attitude in which everything is seen as one cannot distinguish properly between good and evil and nor can it deal with a material world which has been corrupted. You cannot deny the corruption by claiming that all is one. The worlds of spirit and matter have different rules and to treat the material world as though it were the spiritual will not work. You get to heaven by overcoming the world not by pretending it already is heaven. And the way for us to overcome the world is through Christ who was the first to overcome the world himself and not just escape it.

 Does this make sense? 

The strong antipathy and disgust that good has for evil comes from a love of the good. The hatred that evil has for good comes from resentment, pride, fear and the desire to bring down and destroy. Two emotions that may, on the face of it, seem similar but which come from very different sources.