Meeting The Masters

Yes, Jesus was a refugee for a relatively brief period when his family went into a neighbouring country to escape King Herod. But I don't suppose they received any financial assistance from that country and nor would they have had a say in how it was run. Furthermore, they returned to their own country as soon as they could. The Holy Family's situation was not parallel to that of most refugees today which point I only make to show the weakness of the Jesus was a refugee argument made by those who somehow seem to think it can be applied to any and everyone who claims refugee status nowadays and used in the broader sense to justify the modern phenomenon of mass immigration.

Mass immigration inevitably destroys a country. The physical entity will remain, a society of some sort may endure but it will be nothing like the country that existed before. That is effectively destroyed. You might say time changes a country anyway but there is organic change and then there is complete revolution. One is growth but the other is replacement. Mass immigration is replacement. There are no two ways about this. I was brought up in London. The city now is a totally different place with totally different people. Obviously times change but this is not change. It is radical transformation. You might say this is not a bad thing. It just is what it is. However, the fact remains that London and its people as they were for a very long time have gone.

People emigrate to a country because they think they will have a better life there but might it be that human beings are not all the same and that the people who made the better off country have certain qualities that others do not have or not to the same degree? That means that any country that undergoes mass immigration will, over time, begin to resemble those countries, worse off, from which the immigrants came. This may not be inevitable if the newcomers can be properly integrated but the whole point of mass immigration, such as almost all Western countries have endured over the last 2 to 3 decades, is that the excessively large numbers means they cannot be  integrated. Then trust between the various communities diminishes to the point that social cohesion starts to dissolve and the sense of nation identity is lost.

Jesus tells an often quoted parable about the sheep and the goats in Matthew chapter 25. He relates how the righteous will be rewarded for their good deeds on Earth. These include feeding him when he was hungry and looking after him when he was sick. When those so commended are puzzled about this he tells them that what they did for the least of his brothers they did for him. Note that word. Brothers. There is no suggestion that this has a universal application. It surely refers to those who share Jesus's vision of life and whose hearts are set on the Kingdom of Heaven as opposed to this world. Your spiritual brother is not every other human being, regardless of what he believes and his attitude to life, but those human beings who acknowledge and accept God. This doesn't mean you shouldn't help others when you can, you certainly should, but nor does it mean that a nation is spiritually obliged to have an open door policy. Besides which personal morality and national policy are not and should not be the same thing. And after all, isn't loving your neighbour primarily to do with loving your neighbour? Mass immigration by its effect on a country is very likely to harm many of your actual neighbours, i.e. fellow countryman and women, in the sense of putting pressure on house prices, welfare, education and health budgets and many other aspects of life not to mention the general culture and sense of nationhood. There is a glib, sentimental morality that just looks to the obvious and the immediately pleasing, and there is a more mature and spiritually balanced morality that looks at the wider picture and takes into account the deeper ramifications of a particular act.

The fact is that mass immigration has been used as a specific tool, one of several but a significant one, to destroy the West. The West must be destroyed because its civilisation and culture were grounded in Christianity. To that end compassion has been weaponised and turned against itself. I have to say that only the naive and those of bad faith are duped by this but there are a lot of them especially in the intellectual classes. These people want to feel morally superior and so they adopt certain attitudes that will help them do so. They also live in the world of abstract theory as opposed to reality and thus are easy victims to ideological propaganda which a simpler mindset would see through because it clashes with everyday reality.

The Archbishop of Canterbury may have good intentions or think he does but we know what they say about those.  No doubt he means well but what does it mean to mean well? Does it mean he's doing what he thinks is right or Christian? What if he doesn't know what is right or, indeed, Christian? His Christianity is clearly heavily mixed up with, and I would say confused with, Enlightenment humanism which was a specific rejection of supernatural Christianity and promoted its social aspect, its least important aspect, to become not just the totality of moral understanding but also to a universal plane. So, the Archbishop may mean well according to his limited grasp of spiritual reality but his morality is grounded in Enlightenment humanism rather than Christianity. He is a materialist.

The left doesn't like boundaries but God does. He has created very strict boundaries between spirit and matter, Heaven and Hell and even, so esotericists inform us, between the various levels of the higher worlds to which you can only ascend when spiritually qualified to do so. This does not mean that boundaries should never be crossed but nor should they be totally disregarded. Boundaries protect and good things need protection in a world in which the darkness is always trying to overcome the light.

I am not against immigration per se but like everything it depends on the time and the place. It is sometimes right and often wrong, depending on circumstances. A country's first responsibility is to the people who live there. Certainly, if it can, it should extend a welcome to others who may be persecuted in their own lands but this cannot be an endless process or the nation will effectively be committing suicide. The Bible  says that we should welcome the stranger but it doesn't say you should carry on doing this until you have destroyed your own nation. This is the disastrous path the West is set upon. 

 To see through the current world scenarios is going to require increasing levels of spiritual discernment. Mere intelligence of the high IQ variety will not be sufficient, if indeed it ever was. There will be big lies and little lies and the former will be used to obscure the latter which may well turn out to be more insidious in the sense that a half truth is often more damaging than an outright lie. All this is happening now and we need to be finely attuned to the reality of God, as he is and in terms of what his desires and aims are for us, and the truths of the higher worlds to sort it all out.  Those who rely on ordinary brain power will be deceived. It is the light of intuition manifesting as spiritual discernment that is essential. If you don't have that make haste to develop it which you can do by prayer and meditation on God and the Word of God and the person of Jesus Christ.

The game is well underway. Plague, war, probable economic collapse are either here or coming in some form or another. These are not sent by God but the inevitable result of the abandonment of God. Of course, these things have happened throughout history but in the context of here and now they can be seen as the consequence of the warped nature of present day consciousness. Though not sent by God they can be used by him as tools of spiritual learning which, after all, is the only reason we are in this world. That is why we are here, to learn to become like God. It is why we leave the safety and security of the higher planes of being and come down to a world in which we must make choices and be active. It is the wrong choices made by many people over many decades which are leading to a future in which we will be challenged in ways modern humanity is not used to and which will potentially cause great suffering. The only way to surmount these challenges will be through the power of spiritual discernment which will enable us to sift truth from lies and then live according to truth. Those who don't do this will be led astray and fall into darkness. I refer to spiritual darkness which is not perceived as such by those who are blind to the light but the effect of spiritual darkness will spread to the material plane. It must do so.

It cannot be stressed too much that the current world situation demands that we grow spiritually and this has to be on an individual level. It is not a collective thing though should spread beyond the individual to the collective. But it must start in the individual to be real and what it requires first and foremost is the development of discernment and this is not just a matter of knowledge or even insight. True discernment is also a moral thing, arising from a heart that is oriented towards God for that, when you come down to it, is what morality actually is.

Sometimes in today's materialistic world in which traditional values have been turned on their head and good and bad redefined, a person who approaches the spiritual path might be confronted with some version of the following question. This question might come from someone else or it might even come from within oneself. We have all been brought up in the modern world and its attitudes cannot help but rub off on us. We are taught that certain beliefs are moral and good and others are immoral and wrong so if and when we turn to the spiritual path we already have preconceived ideas about good and bad derived from the world. It is important to know whether spirituality is supposed to build on these or to supersede them, putting them in a different light.

The question is this. "What is your position with regard to (any or all of these) homosexuality, racism & feminism?" These issues have become sacred cows of the modern age and usually when the question is put there are inbuilt assumptions as to the correct answer but I would like to approach this question from a spiritual level rather than the secular one from which it it is posed because that is the only way to answer it properly. Consequently, I would respond to it along these lines.

I know, a judgmental question but one that needs to be asked in the light of the challenges facing individual souls today. In our secular, materialistic age we have no proper idea of good and bad anymore and we need to reestablish certain important truths, important from the standpoint of spiritual salvation, that is.

So, are atheists, those who deny the spiritual, bad people? From a certain point of view one would have to say, yes. It is not that atheists cannot be moral or even compassionate people. God is in them whether they acknowledge him or not and so they will have a moral sense by virtue of their humanity. But their morals will, when pushed, tend to become expedient or utilitarian or may be zealously maintained but from pride rather than love of their source which is the only thing that really makes morality integral to the personality. And what is the source of modern atheistic morality anyway? Setting aside the fact that it usually derives from religion in some way, its source is generally considered to be reason. But this means it is intellectually based so is always at one or several removes from the actual person. A genuine morality, one that doesn't change and is not dependent on time or tide, has to be spiritual, based on something that exists eternally and independently of human beings. 

So atheists can be moral but it is not morals that make a good or bad person. Obviously, a person with bad morals is a bad person but a good person has to have more than good morals. What determines whether you are a good person or not is if your heart inclines to the source of true good. And the source of true good must be God. There can be none other if good is to be a living reality and not a mere abstraction. This means that if you reject God it is because you do not respond to the reality of the true good and if you do not do that you cannot be considered a good person, however virtuous your outer behaviour. The heart knows. A sinner who believes in God is a better person than a virtuous atheist. Of course, the sinner must genuinely repent his sin which he will do if he really does believe in God but even so he may fall many times. No matter. God forgives those who sincerely turn to him whatever their transgressions. He cannot forgive or save those who do not turn to him because the one thing God cannot do is transgress free will, not without destroying his creation.

But is a non-believer in God really a bad person simply by virtue of rejecting God? Spiritually speaking, because God is the ground of the real good which derives from and is located in him then yes, he is. The atheist has rejected the real good and you can only do that if you do not love the real good and it is love of the good that makes a person good. Nothing else. If there is that in you that will love the good, you will see the good. If you don't see the good then you lack that love. The well-meaning but spiritually rejecting atheist may want to make the material world as comfortable as possible for man in his material state. Some religious people even follow this path though they may give it a religious or spiritual overlay, and they are the ones of whom Jesus said "I never knew you." They are followers of worldly ways before spiritual. But what the real spiritual person seeks or wants is to go beyond the material state altogether which he recognises as a false state of being, and transform the inner man to spiritual glory, a new being. This is the true rebirth rather than simple conversion. It is the recognition that man must not change but transform.

This is the only path for a human being to follow if he would discover the meaning of his humanity. To deny it, as the atheist does through his atheism, is the definition of bad because it rejects the true good.

Are atheists bad? If it is bad to deny the source of life and love and truth and thereby effectively deny these things as real themselves, then yes, they are bad. If it is bad to deny the human being growth into a higher state then yes, they are bad. If it is bad to reject one's Creator then yes, they are bad. If it is bad not to honour your Father and Mother, well, I won't go on.

But all this is sincere, you might say. Belief in God is not a moral matter. It's an intellectual one. It is an honest opinion, based on the facts as a particular person sees them. No, to claim that is to ignore the fact that God is within each one of his creatures as he is within his entire creation. To refuse to see this is an act of a rebellious will and so it is a moral matter. Listen to St Paul in Romans 1.

"For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools."

These are words which may be too strong for us moderns because they are spiritually condemnatory, judgmental not inclusive, but they are no less true for all that.

I admit to being provocative with this talk of good and bad in order to make a point but these are times of choice and decision. Black and white are being more clearly delineated and the gap between them is widening. There is a winnowing taking place, a separation of wheat and husk and that is happening both in humanity as a whole and within each person. Moreover, the nature of this world is such that everything that does not actively turn to the good becomes bad. That process is accelerating.

All this having been said, we have to remember that all souls are on a journey and all are at different stages of that journey. In saying atheists are bad I am not referring to each and every individual who happens at this stage of his life not to have arrived at a belief in God but only to those in whom the condition of God denial has settled down and become fixed. It may well be that atheism is a temporary state for many in the modern world as people grow out of affiliation to an organised religion and seek a more personal understanding that fits with humanity's development in fields of knowledge other than the religious. That is normal at the present time but atheism is not a place to stop, and it is to those who stop there, rather than those passing through on their spiritual journey, that I refer.

So, are atheists bad people? That depends on how you define good. If you mean personally kind and decent then one would have to say no, not necessarily. There will be good and bad atheists as there are good and bad in almost any grouping of human beings. But if you define the bad as a rejection of the true good and the true good as spiritual (and the good to be true has to be spiritual because the spiritual is the only thing that can give meaning and fundamental reality to life) then yes, they are bad. At the very least, they are spiritual failures. However, the good news is that they can turn to the spiritual good at any time and when they do, who knows?, some of them may be better servants of God than those who were religious all along.

 Democracy only makes sense if all members of a nation or community or whatever it may be have the same idea of where they should be heading and differ only on what the best route is to this destination. This obvious but often ignored fact is allied to the equally obvious point that all members of a community must trust each other. Without that simple connection the case for democracy makes little sense and it becomes just a battle to come out on top with each side or sides despising the other. In other words, for democracy to have any meaning all members of the democracy must be on the same side in terms of what really matters to them.

I saw an interview the other day in which someone, very reasonably, said that current society risks falling into extremes in which there is no middle ground and this is a dangerous situation in which to be. She advocated what she called nuanced conversation in which each side tries to understand the concerns of the other without demonising them. You might think this a sensible and considered approach, one which avoids outright confrontation and seeks harmony between opposing forces.

In many circumstances this approach might be the right one. People have different opinions based on different perceptions and experiences. Fair enough. We can all learn from others to our mutual benefit. The trouble is adopting this approach when it comes to truth and lies. Advocating a middle ground approach is an excellent tactic for the liar. But for the person aligned to truth it is a disaster.

If you and I are arguing about the merits of Bach and Beethoven there is no point in coming to blows. I prefer Bach but I respect your position. However, if we are arguing about whether God exists or not there can be no middle ground. This is an absolute truth and not to abide by it will lead to bad things. I don't respect your position and will have none of it. That doesn't mean I don't respect you or your right to hold that position though it may well mean the former. It depends what in you is causing you to have that belief, whether it is an honest search for truth or whether you are someone who denies God because he doesn't like the idea of God.

If you come to a fork in the road and one path leads to heaven and the other goes to hell do you respect the people who want to take the left hand path in the same way you do the ones who want to take the right? Only if you are naive. Again, it is very important to look for motivation. Why do those who want to go left want to do so? Is it a genuine quality in them which has just made a mistake such as a desire to find truth for oneself rather than do what an institution tells them to do? Or is it down to what I will call  a spiritual perversion of the will? What you do, though important, is always less important than why you do it.

In today's world there are forces, psychological forces, spiritual forces, that are sifting human souls, sorting out those who will go on to higher states of being and those who will be left behind in the material realm or equivalent. In such circumstances to advocate the middle ground is to be sucked into making the wrong choice. If you are not actively for God you will be absorbed by the side that is against him and you will find yourself on the outside with the naysayers. It is true that in normal times and situations you should not demonise your opponents but what if your opponents are demons? Or, to put it less provocatively, what if the line your opponents are taking is one that demons have put forward? It is said that demons are subtle. I don't think that is true. Human souls, all of them, yours and mine included, can be too easily led astray by lies that appeal to desires or fears or vanity or pride. If we make wrong choices it is not because the demons are so clever. It is because we have been led astray by our own shortcomings.

In spiritual terms there is no middle ground though this does not mean that those on one side are all personally good and those on the other side are all necessarily bad. But it does mean that whoever is for God is for the good and whatever is against him is for evil. At the same time, human beings are all sinners and it is not our place to condemn individuals. We can judge them with righteous judgment but the righteousness is God's not ours. Any soul can repent and it is our job to lead those who are wrong to repentance not to condemn them. But we can and should condemn their position if it is wrong. This is the only middle ground we must strike, the one that condemns the sin but prays for the soul of the sinner.

It's often said today that we are much more enlightened than our forefathers because we are less violent, more egalitarian, more concerned for the weak and poor and so on. The psychologist Stephen Pinker has written books about this from the point of view of Enlightenment rationalism and these are regarded as authoritative by secular materialists.

It can't be denied that we have improved on the past in many respects. However, it's not quite as simple as it might appear and the improvement is not necessarily an improvement in overall terms. We now see ourselves in a purely materialistic light so naturally we pay more attention to that sphere of life. But the spiritual loss we have undergone at the same time, along with the contraction into the hard nut of the ego-self, far outweighs any gain in worldly terms. What does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul? That saying has become almost a cliché. Yet it is precisely what we have done.

Obviously we will put our energy into areas we think are important. By the same token, we will neglect those areas we think unimportant or even non-existent. Modern man has shrunk his awareness of reality right down to the material world. Of course, he focuses on that as the sphere of his concern. Therefore he works to make material improvements, changes that will benefit the material man, increase his worldly happiness, reduce his suffering. But these changes might actually be spiritually harmful, especially if they encourage identification with the earthly man. Then they will cut the human being off from his true self. It's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Another cliché. But all we are doing now is making ourselves rich in the worldly sense. Do you think Jesus was referring only to money? He was referring to any and every aspect of material life and particularly when it is severed from spiritual life.

I am not condoning violence but could it be we are less violent because we are more cowardly, more self-indulgent, less tough than our ancestors? Nor do I condone exploitation of the weak by the strong but have certain improvements in the social sphere been driven only by compassion or is there also a greater amount of envy and resentment in our make-up these days? JM Smith has written an excellent piece on The Orthosphere about how democracy fosters envy*. Present developments in almost any area of life you care to look at seem to bear that out. If we're all equal why should you or anyone else have more than me? Even if you're more intelligent and work harder, it's still not fair. I resent it in a way I might not have done in a world where society was based on more traditional lines. The fact that these could degenerate is not an argument against them because everything degenerates if not maintained properly.

Does this mean that any gains in the social and material spheres are inevitably a bad thing spiritually? By no means. There will certainly be a tendency to spiritual loss for, as we have been told, you cannot serve two masters. (Cliché number 3). But if the material world is seen fully in the context of the spiritual there is no reason why the part of life that rightly belongs to it cannot be honoured any more than focus on the soul means you neglect the body. But the chief area of one's attention should always be the spiritual soul and if that essential fact is ignored then any improvements you make in the secular sphere are not just immaterial but positively harmful for they take you further and further away from your true purpose as a human being in this world.

* By pure coincidence, and I assure you it is, I see Professor Smith has just linked to an article of mine from The Orthosphere. It's strange how these things work out.

This is what we are always told.  A man's ideas are separate from his personality and moral worth. But what if that's not entirely true? What if what a man thinks derives in large part from what he is? It seems clear that many of the ideas that have formed the modern world come from people with deeply flawed characters who may have formulated these ideas at least to an extent to justify their own flaws. Rousseau and Marx are obvious examples but there are many more, clever people led astray by their own cleverness and using it to avoid facing up to the reality of their sinful nature.

A good person loves the good. Or perhaps I should say someone who loves the good pursues the good and seeks to manifest it in his life. Someone who does not respond to the good in this way but suspects it may exist may seek to deny or belittle or even to corrupt it out of shame. The good is a hard thing to live up to. What is the good? The best definition I have come across is from Romano Guardini in his book The Last Things where he says that "in the last analysis, the good is God's holiness itself." Linking the good with God and holiness is very important for it goes to the origins of what the good actually is and what it should always tend to. All lesser goods crumble into dust when the base good is denied. A good person is someone who recognises this simple truth and seeks to live up to it. Obviously he will fall short but it is the intention, the motivation, that matters. A bad person is someone who denies it and who tries to substitute lesser goods, political, social, whatever, in its place.

What I am saying here is that if your heart is correctly orientated then your thoughts and beliefs should follow. If your heart is not orientated to the true good your thoughts and beliefs will reflect that misdirection. It is not true that what a man thinks bears no relation to what he is. Sometimes it is valid to play the man not the ball if you wish to understand ideas and where they come from. 

 I was thinking of all the people busily engaged in constructing the nightmare world of tomorrow, all the politicians, the scientists, the university lecturers, the media people and so on. It's unlikely they think they are bad people and doing harm. Bad people never do. Hitler and Nero probably thought they were doing good, on some level at least. Have you not noticed that bad people usually think they are good but good people don't think that of themselves. They are always aware of ways in which they are not good.

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.

I'm probably being very foolish in trying to define something as deep and wide as religion but the question arose when I asked myself what we most lack today. We don't lack morality of a sort, meaning a morality based on totally materialistic considerations, but morality does not lie at the heart of what religion is. In fact, I would say that a highly moral atheist is a worse person, worse in the sense of further away from truth and real goodness, than a sincere believer who, despite his belief, sins and who might even be a bad person in the eyes of the world.

This is because the believer has something the atheist lacks which is not belief as such but openness to transcendence. It is this that lies at the heart of any proper religion or religious attitude. I say it is not belief as such because you can believe anything. In a way what you believe is of secondary importance. What truly matters and what defines real religion is this inner openness, this sensitivity to a higher reality. Of course, this by itself is nowhere near enough and it can be deformed by the way we react to it, by the mental interpretation (belief) we put on it. But without a sense of transcendent reality (an open spirit is more important than an open mind), no man or woman can be called religious.

So, the essence of religion is not morality and it is not belief. These are important and necessary adjuncts but without spiritual sensitivity they are nothing. Spiritual sensitivity needs to be worked on and developed but it is the foundation of religion, and if it is missing the individual in whom it is missing, be he ever so good as the world defines good, clean-living, moral, a giver of charity and all the rest of it, lives in spiritual darkness and will not be saved which means released into heaven after death. If you do not in a certain sense live in heaven now, if your mind does not already tend towards it and if you are not inwardly yearning for it, you will not find it later. If your heart reaches up to heaven, notwithstanding that your behaviour might fall well short of what is required, then you are saved. You will have work to do but you are facing towards the light. It is this idea that lies behind the doctrine that mere belief in Jesus saves. It is not the intellectual belief that saves for it surely does not. It is spiritual receptivity, openness to the divine. That is the only true belief, and this is what lies at the root of all true religion.