Meeting The Masters

 I am sympathetic to the people who advocate taking psychedelic drugs to enhance consciousness and to explore inner realms. They would say this is especially beneficial in an atheistic society such as ours for it frees us from the iron grip of materialism and shines light into the dark clouds that obscure the modern mind. We are given the direct experience of something beyond standard physical plane consciousness and we can know for ourselves that we are not body but mind and that mind has multi-dimensional aspects. As a teenager I took LSD a few times so I know the transformative effect psychedelics can have, especially if you take them in a reverential frame of mind rather than for kicks, humbling yourself before the majesty of the universe.

However, sympathy does not mean approval. I believe that the use of drugs, which is very ancient, came about when early human beings began to lose natural contact with the spiritual realms as the material world closed about them. This was in line with the evolution of consciousness which requires the development of a solid centre, the self, and a rational thinking mind that can become a co-creator with God rather than a passive participant in the general spiritual flow of life. A lot of people try to get back to this flow but that is like a reversion to childhood and it is spiritually immature. We must go forward into a new and higher awareness, one in which we do not merge into the all but become full spiritual individuals, mature, responsible, creative. Sometimes people need a cold shower rather than a warm bath in order to wake them up. Drugs were and are an escape. Early man resorted to them to try to recapture what he had lost but his spiritual progress demanded that he move on and did not revert to what he had known in the past.

Drugs are not recommended and never have been recommended by any proper spiritual teacher. The reason is they are attempts to break the barrier God has placed between this world and the next by artificial means. This barrier can be broken but it should be broken by natural spiritual development if the encounter with the next world is to be authentic and psychically healthy. Drug takers may encounter non-material beings in their experiences and these beings may seem to offer guidance and advice but there are many denizens of the inner realms and you will not encounter true higher beings if you seek to take heaven by force. Your experience will be limited and you may well only experience the world of the demons, albeit often dressed up to resemble what seems a deep and exciting mystery to the unwary.

We are not here not to experience the glories of the spiritual world but to learn the lessons of the material one though with the understanding that the spiritual is primary. It is possible that in this benighted and ignorant age drugs can help guide one towards a previously dismissed and rejected higher reality but anything other than brief use will take you off the true spiritual path which is not about experience but the sanctification of the soul. 

 Since the Fall we have been cut off from Paradise. To attempt to recapture the paradisiacal state by artificial means, whether that be a drug or technique, special breathing, prolonged fasting or even excessive meditation, is an irreligious act that seeks to put you above God. The experience gained will be tainted and a counterfeit one to true mystical experience because it will be lacking the humility and purity of motive which alone guarantee truth and ascent to higher realms. It will lead the individual away from God as he really is and towards one of the many imitations that exist both in this world and the next. The fact that so many people who advocate psychedelics report encounter with pagan deities or similar supernatural beings confirms this. These, if not demons and they may well be, are leftovers from previous cycles of evolution. They continue to exist in the inner worlds but not on proper spiritual levels.

Consciousness is a spiritual thing but it is squeezed into a physical body to learn lessons which can eventually take it beyond the physical and beyond the spiritual as normally considered to the divine. In a physical body consciousness becomes severely restricted but can also be focussed and express greater powers of self-will and motivation than when not so restricted. To seek to escape this through drugs is to seek change from without but change to be real must come from within. You reach the divine by becoming inwardly divine yourself not from attempting to steal what is not yours. A truly spiritual consciousness is not the result of what you experience or even what you feel or what you know. It comes from what you are and that to be of the right stuff demands humility, love of God and openness to the spirit of Christ.

This post follows on from the one about ancient civilisations in that Graham Hancock, the most prominent mainstream proponent of that idea, is also an enthusiast for psychedelic exploration of consciousness. I just want to say you can be right about one aspect of the esoteric/mystical but completely wrong about other aspects. This is actually quite common and simply shows the importance of real spiritual discrimination and correct understanding of what the spiritual truly is. It is not higher consciousness. The devil has higher consciousness after a fashion. It is orientation of the heart to goodness, beauty and truth in their higher aspects and a humble dedication to bring one's own soul into line with that regardless of what this may cost in terms of personal sacrifice and renunciation. A tall order perhaps but that is what it is and we are all called to that path. There are no short cuts.

 So much that is called religion does the opposite of what religion is supposed to do. What religion should do is elevate the material to the spiritual. What it often does do is reframe the spiritual in the context of the material. It pulls spirit down to the level of matter. The bizarre absurdity of the prosperity gospel in which faith in God translates to wealth and power in this world is just the most extreme example but anything that regards the earthly human as the focal point of spiritual endeavour also falls into this category. Spirituality is not about feeding the hungry or healing the sick. Does that shock you? I am not saying these things should not be done but they are not what spirituality is about. Yes, Jesus did feed the poor and he healed the sick. He even raised the dead. But this was to show God's power. It was not the point of his mission or else why did he not do it a lot more?

Nor is religion about saving the worldly man. That is to say, it is not about change but transformation. If the earthly man is saved he is still earthly, still a material being on the inside. No one is saved who does not transform his mind which you do through faith and a complete turning around of focus. I would suggest even the physical atoms of the brain are affected by this. In fact, the whole body is, becoming more sensitive. This might be regarded as the first stage of the eventual transformation of the physical body into a body of light which for most people, if it happens at all, happens only after death but is something that can be seen in the lives of certain saints while still in this world. What else does a halo represent?

The materialisation of spirit means bringing the truths of spirit down from their proper level and applying them to the material level in the context of the material with that as central. Spiritual truth should be brought down to the material level but without losing its spirituality. The incarnation of Christ is a perfect example of that. He, spirit, became man, matter, and lived in this material world. But he lost nothing of his 'spiritness'. And he did this precisely so as to spiritualise matter. Spirit became matter so that matter could be brought back up to spirit, infused with spirit. But if matter tries to trap spirit to itself, as so many spiritual approaches do, if it pulls spirit down to itself and interprets spirit within a material framework, it kills it. It will not rise.

This spiritualisation of matter is the meaning of Christmas. People now say that Christmas is really a pagan festival that the Christians appropriated. Not so. Some aspects of Christmas may have their origins in paganism but these have been baptised and raised up from matter to spirit though the power of the light shed by the Incarnation. Christmas is indeed the birth of light in darkness but Christ is spiritual light and his presence at this time grounds and gives full reality to a hope, an aspiration, a yearning that was present but not fully realised in pagan myth. Christ is the substance that lies behind these myths and makes them come alive. They are like dreams but he is those dreams come to waking reality and given concrete form.

Christmas comes at the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year but also the time when the light starts to return. In terms of a wider cycle we are living through very dark times, a period in history when mankind is further away from spiritual light than it has ever been though many of us don't recognise that because this very spiritual darkness has, for the time being anyway, this may not last, allowed for a certain efflorescence of material well being as energies are concentrated in that sphere of life. Is it too much to hope for that a tiny glimmer of light may start to reappear in human hearts at this point in time and inspire us to look heavenwards once more for the true meaning and purpose of life? At any rate, this is the Christmas message. However dark it seems, the light will come again.

In many traditional spiritualities time was regarded as flowing in cycles with a primeval Golden Age when man walks with the gods descending to a spiritually darkened time in which matter becomes more dense and impenetrable and consciousness collapses in on itself. Then the process concludes in cosmic destruction and a new era commences with another Golden Age.

Christianity rejected that idea, presenting a new understanding in which time progresses in a linear fashion from creation in the Garden of Eden leading eventually through a historical process to the city of the New Jerusalem in which creation is transformed and drawn up into divine reality.

Many people in the spiritual world nowadays reject the Christian view and prefer the cyclical one, seeing it as making more metaphysical sense. Strangely enough, one approach that roughly mirrors the Christian idea is the modern materialistic understanding of human life which would maintain we are progressing to a better human form in which science and technology correct all the faults of our physical bodies and give us, if not immortality, at least a more perfect vehicle to house our consciousness which will also be tweaked and improved though technological means whether that be drugs or even by blending us with machines. This is transhumanism, a great spiritual evil because it denies the spirit replacing it entirely with matter, but one to which the modern world seems inevitably to be tending.

Which of these two ideas about time is the more accurate? My answer is that both are true. Time is indeed cyclical but it also moves forward and if there is a spiritual descent the purpose of that is to bring about conditions in which consciousness can become more individualised with a greater sense of personal freedom in the constricted material conditions. Then there can be a reascent but with the fruits of greater self-awareness.

Most people interested in traditionalist metaphysics believe that all religions convey the same essential truths. There is a perennial philosophy which is the root of them all and they differ only in externals and certain relatively unimportant doctrines. I think this is a mistake. There is something qualitatively different about Christianity and what Christ brought to human consciousness. It has to do with freedom, it has to do with love and it has to do with time. In traditional metaphysics time is something to be transcended. One goes beyond all aspects of the material to enter into complete spiritual consciousness. But Christ redeemed creation which means the qualities of the relative world are not completely transcended and effectively lost but they are spiritualised and thereby add something to divine reality, something that was not there before.

Time is certainly a great mystery in that there is a state beyond earthly time which is the state of divine being. But it is not simply an illusion from the spiritual point of view. It is not just swallowed up in eternity. Through time creation is brought to fulfilment but then at the end of worldly time something happens that is similar to what happened to Christ's body at the Ascension. Time will be taken up into eternity but it will thereby enrich eternity, its quality sweetening eternity as sugar when dissolved sweetens tea.

I've been watching a few more Ancient Aliens programmes. (See here for a previous post on the subject.) The series gives an interesting overview of ancient history, mythology and sacred sites as well as more modern unexplained phenomena and events, and even if you don't go along with its underlying premise and see everything through the same unvarying prism it does, it still raises many thought-provoking questions about our past. Its main fault for me is that it materialises spirituality by reducing all supernatural things to extraterrestrial intervention. The higher spiritual is brought down to the level of the technological so, although the contributors think they are breaking into new ways of seeing and understanding the universe and consciousness, they are actually just transferring the contemporary world view, basically a secular one, to the spiritual plane. We need to see the spiritual in terms of the spiritual not in our own terms.

The most recent programme I saw was about shamans and how they might be tuning their minds and bodies to other dimensions of being where they encounter intelligent life forms, inevitably in the context of this series interpreted as extraterrestrials. The techniques used include dance, rhythm and drugs derived from various plants. I don't doubt that shamans do indeed enter into otherworldly realms of being and supernatural states of consciousness but I would caution against regarding all these as spiritual. One of the most important lessons to be learned on the spiritual path is that between the purely physical world and the real spiritual there is a vast area of being in which live all kinds of creatures, some highly intelligent, some non-human. This psychic or astral world may seem a spiritual world because it is a non-material one but it is not where God and pure truth are to be found. It is an intermediate domain between Heaven and Earth and you will find good and evil there just as you do here but you will not find Christ though you may well find beings imitating him or masquerading as him or even thinking they are the equivalent to him. If shamans really did have access to the spiritual they would be much more than they are which is a curious mixture of the psychically powerful healer and the everyday human with all the virtues and vices of the everyday human. Shamans are magicians not saints.

I live just outside London and, though it is not the country proper, there are several local walks that take me into woods and onto downs and there is even a nature reserve not far away. I go for a walk every day, roughly an hour and a half in duration, but at the moment I can only walk in daylight at the weekend though I also enjoy tramping around in the dark especially when the moon is out or a clear sky shows lots of stars. 

A couple of weeks ago I went up onto Epsom Downs which is a large open grassy area on elevated ground. Because it is so open you get an excellent view of the sky and can take in its vastness so I spend a lot of time there just looking up. I saw this intriguing cloud formation.

It's Great Britain, isn't it? Floating up in the sky. Some of the Scottish islands even show up at the top. You could also, exercising some imagination admittedly, take the long thin strip of cloud beneath it as the Continent.

Last Saturday I went to the nature reserve mentioned above. To be honest, calling it a nature reserve is a bit of a stretch. It's really just some scrub and chalk grassland that has been reclaimed from abandoned playing fields but apparently the original field was mentioned in Magna Carta and artefacts dating back to the Neolithic and Bronze Ages have been found in the vicinity. Pottery, flints, that kind of thing. The current reserve is about 80 acres in size and there are often sheep and cattle grazing there. Skylarks can be seen too if you're lucky. But this time all I saw in the sky were some more clouds in the evening sun. "Hello" I said to myself, "It's the Himalayas over Surrey".

Well, it looked more like the sun on snow-capped peaks a few seconds before I took the photo.

I carried on with the circular walk around Priest Hill, as it is called, and came across a small group of cattle.

For some reason I took a fancy to the brown and white one and we exchanged a few pleasantries about the weather and if the grass was good. Then she lost interest and went back to her herbivorous duties. But she is pretty, isn't she? At least, I think she's a she.

The next day, Sunday, I got up early just before sunrise. Looking out of the window I saw a dramatic conflagration. It was a visual Gloria, the angels cheering the dawning of day. I thought of Phoebus Apollo hitching his chariot to the sun, the horses snorting and stamping their hooves, impatient for a headlong charge across the heavens.

Then shortly afterwards it began to snow. To go from fire to ice in a couple of hours was quite a contrast.

In the afternoon I went for a walk on the local common. It's called a common but is now more of a wood with mostly oak trees though there are many other varieties such as ash, birch, hazel and holly. It covers over 400 acres. There are a couple of large ponds, one built by medieval monks as a fish pond, and various forms of wildlife including roe deer which can be seen occasionally if you are quiet. There are adders and grass snakes and several birds species amongst which are yellowhammers in the right season which is not now. The ponds are visited by heron, grebes, geese, ducks and teal and, though I've never seen one there, kingfishers too, by repute anyway.

The Great Pond built by monks (photo not taken by me yesterday)

There wasn't much to be seen yesterday though I did hear owls in the late afternoon. The ground had recently been very soggy because of all the rain we've been having but the snow and freezing temperature had made it quite hard and pleasant to walk on. The inclement weather also seemed to have deterred other walkers for I saw hardly anyone else out.

There is a particular tree on this walk that I have decided is the Lord of the Forest. He stands a little taller than the others but it is not that which gives him his air of authority. He seems to spread further and be planted more deeply than those around him. Other trees stand back from him a little, respectfully giving him the extra space he merits. On a couple of occasions I have asked for his advice, talking not just to him but to the Creator through him. I once asked him for a boon to do with my family and felt I should make an offering of some kind. All I had in my pocket was a pencil and a handkerchief so I gave him the pencil, throwing it in his direction. The boon has not yet been granted but I know these things work out in their own way and their own time.

I don't know if readers find this sort of thing foolish or superstitious but I can understand our ancestors worshipping objects of nature. For the wiser among them these objects might have been important not so much for themselves but as mediums through which to access spirit. If, as this tree seems to do, they carry some special quality, if they manifest some almost archetypal power, they can be channels to the divine world.  I don't live in a world of original participation when Man and Nature were not fully separated out, but I can sympathise with that state and, while realising the impossibility, indeed spiritual error, of trying to recapture it, still believe that we should attempt to perceive the immanence of nature, the presence in created objects of their spiritual origin. If I talk to the tree I am really using the tree to talk to God. The tree is not an idol, sacred in itself, but something like an icon, a focal point for the divine and a way through this world to a higher one.

Like many people I find the climate change protesters distinctly unsympathetic. These are people I theoretically have something in common with because I firmly believe that mankind has desecrated the environment and polluted the natural world and that we use our resources wastefully with little thought for the long term. I'm not saying the environment isn't ours to use but we are stewards not owners and should be wise stewards. We haven't been.

But the climate change demonstrators are marked by monumental dogmatism and self-righteousness. They indulge in the usual juvenile behaviour which puts sensible people off. And many of them show an unnatural self-hatred which they mask as compassion or concern for the environment but is actually the wish to bring down their own civilisation which certainly has its faults but which has done more to relieve suffering and increase understanding than any other.

The protestors are being used by forces that seek to damage the West. They go along with these forces because they have a romanticised idea of peaceful traditional societies living in harmony with nature. This fantasy goes back at least as far as Rousseau but you won't find these idyllic societies anywhere. What you will find are societies circumscribed by their own lack of know-how. Given the opportunity they would behave just as Western society has as is proved by the fact that when such societies do get the advantages of Western technology and invention that's just what they do. It's often pointed out that the protestors damn the West but are far more reticent when it comes to places like India and China. The excuse that one must clean up one's own backyard first won't wash. Nor will the strange belief that developing countries have the right to reach the point of Western development. Why if the West is so evil?  If this is a global problem, it needs a global solution.

People in an industrial society often have a hankering for a more primitive time when humanity lived close to nature and, supposedly, in harmony with it, but the wish to return to such a time is atavistic. Human beings who have moved on to the self-conscious phase of evolution cannot and should not return to the phase of immersion in nature. This is anti-evolutionary and fundamentally unspiritual taking the word spiritual to mean that which makes a human being into a fully functional son or daughter of God. Consciousness is supposed to follow a path of unfoldment as it grows and expands to include an ever-greater capacity to respond to life. This means growing from an unself-conscious oneness with nature and the environment to the separative state of self-consciousness and then on to oneness with God in which the developed self attains a conscious unity with the transcendent spiritual source of all. In Christian terms, we are not meant to return to the pre-experience condition of the Garden of Eden but to move onwards to the post-experience world of the Heavenly City of the New Jerusalem where each individual has a full and personal relationship with God.

And here's the problem with all this. Where is God?  Climate change is not the problem.  Capitalism is not the problem.  The problem is we have forgotten God. You might think that climate change is the immediate problem but even if the position was as dire as the protestors say (and not at all a consequence of cyclical trends), and even if we took the most extreme measures possible, that would not make a blind bit of difference to what really matters. We would still be the same fallen human beings in need of salvation.  I am not saying that those who pollute the environment and wilfully destroy the natural world are blameless. Far from it but the fact is that Satan stands behind both the polluters and the protesters against the pollution. The truth is not to be found in either of them and nor is the remedy for the troubled state of the world. The remedy is only in God but when I say God I mean the real God as he is in himself not some image of him that we have conjured up in our own minds. The old crack that God made man in his own image and ever since man has been returning the compliment is very appropriate.

The climate may be changing due to man-made causes. I don't believe anyone really knows that but it's very possible.  This change may lead to problems in the future. We are certainly behaving irresponsibly. But the real battle is between those who see Nature as God's creation to be responded to accordingly and those who see it as either a resource to be exploited without concern or as somehow sacred in its own right and maybe even something better than humanity. These last two, much as it might shock them to know it, are fundamentally two versions of the same atheistic thing and both wrong.

I don't think climate change protesters care for the environment as God's creation which is what it is. What they care for is their group ideology and the comforting feeling of spiritual superiority it gives them.

Added note: People compare the climate change protesters to a religious cult what with their ideas of the virtuous versus the wicked and the need to purge ourselves of sin to be saved from the coming apocalypse. I think this is only half true. They certainly exhibit many of the signs of a fanatical cult and some of the characteristics they display are ones that also express themselves in certain types of maladapted religion but these characteristics are not truly religious in origin. They come from mental imbalance, fear and the wish to divide tribally into us and them. The only god for the protestors would be the earth or their idea of it.

Over the last 50 years or so spiritual enthusiasts of various types have regularly talked about the return of the gods to human consciousness. The idea is that about 2,500 years ago contact with the numinous world of the divine gradually became closed off as a more rational, egocentric, individualised form of consciousness evolved, slowly at first but rapidly from, say, the Renaissance period onwards. This was a necessary thing from an evolutionary point of view. We had to become completely focused on the material plane in order to develop certain qualities, to do with mind principally, so that we might become more rounded, self-organised and integrated individuals. Essentially so that we might learn to think. That meant a degree of inner isolation. But now we are living in a world of complete separation from the gods and it is time to restore contact with them and their world of archetypal reality, though this time from the point of view of who we are today with our more autonomous and intellectual mental attitude.

I sympathise with this idea. We are certainly cut off from the inner worlds, much to our detriment. We desperately need to become more aware of the greater reality of the universe, and its spiritual aspects. But is a return to archaic ways the right thing to do, even with the always stressed strong proviso that this should be in the context of who we are now and not as passive as it used to be? Who or what were the gods anyway? Were they really divine or were they often beings who existed in the between worlds by which I mean the worlds between this physical one and the true spiritual worlds? No doubt some were divine, as in what Christians would think of as angels, and some were demons and there were others between the two, non-physical beings but not especially moral or benevolent. When we look at the old gods and goddesses, whether Egyptian or Greek or Indian or Norse or whatever, most of them are not particularly admirable in spiritual terms. This may reflect the limitations of the people who worshipped them but it may not. Please note that I am accepting the gods as real beings and do not just see them as objectifications of components within the human psyche though I am not disputing that they were that as well. However, in the past it was contact with the being that activated the corresponding area of the psyche. A return to the gods would mean opening the mind up to these otherworld beings.

I think the advent of Christ changed everything. To attempt to return to a pre-Christian spiritual attitude, as so many pagans and occultists and shamans and so on do, is spiritually atavistic. These people mostly explore the so-called astral plane, a psychic world in which thoughts and feelings are things. This is pretty much the world of the gods. I say pretty much because there are exceptions but these are rare. The gods are not God even though there is often an underlying belief that each one of them can potentially offer an opening to the Absolute of which they are something like manifested aspects. But I don't go along with this. If you approach the Absolute through the gods, you will not advance beyond the level of the gods which is the level of created beings, albeit an inner level. Since Christ came, the gods are spiritually redundant and they will remain so. Whatever numinous power they may once have had has been taken up by and refocused in him and they are mostly now psychic shells which can be reactivated by desire or thought or concentration but cannot be re-spiritualised to any high degree.

We most certainly do need to open our hearts and minds up to the higher worlds, and also learn to see creation as full of soul, a living thing shot through with spirit. But to do this through the old gods, or god forms as they might better be called, or even some modern equivalent is not the way. The old ways of approach to the divine have been superseded. They cannot be updated. For one thing, they belong to a completely different moral universe. For another, the forms they took reflect the archaic consciousness, especially when they are derived from the animal kingdom. Form is much more important than some spiritual people realise. Outer and inner cannot be disassociated as much as you might think. The sort of outer through which you seek to access the inner will largely determine the sort of inner world you encounter, its quality and spiritual height, depth and truth. It's not all one and the same thing, whatever popular spirituality might say today.

If by the return of the gods you mean a reacknowledgment of the spiritual plane by materialistic people, I have no quarrel with you. But if you say that this can be effected through the agency of archaic pagan religions and god forms, then I think you are mistaken. This is more the approach of occultism than genuine spirituality, the difference being that the former seeks power or knowledge or experience while the latter is driven by love. The occultist may very well acquire all those things for himself but he will not find God. The advent of Christ really did change everything, and for all time.

I've put a post on this subject on Albion Awakening basing it on an excerpt from The Wind in the Willows.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-piper-at-gates-of-dawn.html

A post on Albion Awakening reflecting on early human consciousness as it is revealed in the Wiltshire countryside and prehistoric monuments there. Also on how we can build on that to go forwards from a passive sense of oneness with the spirit of God in nature to a more engaged understanding of and connection to God in himself, one in which love rather than simple oneness is the keynote.

An acquaintance who read the previous post on paganism made some comments on it which I reproduce below in the form of a question together with my response to it.

Q. Why do you say you must go beyond the Goddess to find ultimate truth? I regard the Great Goddess as the primal source of life. I accept that unmanifest Oneness transcends sex but prefer to visualise it in the form of the Goddess who gives us birth and death. What is wrong with that? After all most of the earliest religions of humanity were matriarchal. I follow the pagan path because I like its full acceptance of the natural world which so many religions look down on. We honour the divine as manifested in nature and try to live according to its seasons and cycles. And we have a solid ethical teaching expressed in the maxim "As long as it doesn't harm anyone, you may do whatsoever you will".

A. I would not say anything is wrong, as such, with using the concept of the Goddess as a symbol for Unmanifest Oneness, if that is the way you prefer to look at things, mainly because no way of visualising divine reality can begin to come close to the truth. Therefore all fall short, and equally so in the face of the infinite. However some forms are closer approximations than others, and more metaphysically correct. And some are relatively true while others don't even come into that category. If we take the masculine and feminine polarity as based on something real, and not just arbitrary designations that are interchangeable and have no fundamental meaning, then we must see each in its proper light, and neither should usurp or imitate the role of the other. It is the case that all traditions based on revelation envisage the universe as the product of two primal principles that issue forth from unmanifest Oneness, and these are the origin of what appear in the human being as masculine and feminine. The masculine corresponds to essence and the feminine to substance so the Goddess, the Mother (and it is surely no coincidence that matter and the Latin mater are etymologically so similar), is not the creator but the womb in which creation takes place. She does give birth and death but to form not life. Life, being, comes from the Father. To confuse roles is not to see clearly and implies the intervention of thought and the personal self with its own agendas rather than true, unbiased intuitive perception. As the Masters said, we need to make sure that our spiritual vision is not coloured by wishful thinking.

 Early religions were matriarchal because humanity at that time was bound up in nature and unable to see beyond the natural world. People then could sense the presence of spirit immanent in matter but did not know transcendent spirit. That is why they tended to be pantheistic and were unaware of the reality that transcends nature in whose light nature is revealed as not absolutely real in itself but real only as the activity of something deeper and more fundamental. That is not to downgrade nature at all but it is to see it in its true perspective. No true religion looks down on nature but it will regard it as subsidiary to God, which it must surely be or else when your body dies so you would too. Neo-paganism certainly believes in spirit but it inverts the true hierarchical relationship between spirit and nature for it tends to see the former as an aspect of the latter rather than vice versa. At the very least, the relationship is viewed as one of equals, but nature is an aspect of spirit and not truly real in its own right. That is why I consider paganism to be, in a certain respect, materialistic though, of course, it is so in a quite different way to a belief that denies any kind of reality to spirit at all.

You speak of Unmanifest Oneness but the metaphysical truth of this is not central to pagan or neo-pagan practise. In fact, in the pagan scheme of things, it is conceived more as a raw energy or power diffused throughout nature than pure transcendent spirit, and it has probably only acquired its higher overtones through the influence in the 20th century of such things as Kabbalah and other forms of Western occultism.

As for the maxim you quote, it sounds very reasonable, but it sums up the ethics of the natural man not the spiritual man.  A secular materialist would not find anything in it to disagree with. There's nothing wrong with that either but it doesn't take you very far beyond where you are now. It does not light the way to your true spiritual being. It will not lead to what I called in a previous post the sanctification of the soul. There is a much higher teaching in the Lord's Prayer, and it is contained in the words "Thy Will be done". Not your will but God's will. What is God's will? It is very simple, that you renounce the personal will and go beyond the natural self which you don't reject but don't identify with either. How can you go beyond the 'you', which is the goal of spirituality, if you "do whatsoever you will"?

The pagan remains locked in the natural self, as you imply when you say that you honour the divine as manifested in nature. That is a worthy practice but there is so much more to divine reality which is why you will never see a pagan of the spiritual stature of the Buddha or Christ. I don't mean by this that anyone should reject paganism, but you have to go beyond it. On its own it is not enough. You have to go beyond the forces of nature. You have to go beyond the powers and energies of the material world, and all levels of it for the material world is not just restricted to the physical level.

And how do you know what harms unless you have spiritual vision? Something may not harm the outer person but be severely detrimental to the soul and its development. Things you do, actions you make, choices you take which seem to have no outer consequences as viewed by the standards of this world may be spiritually retrogressive. It simply is not good enough to say that you can do what you like as long as no one else is harmed by it. You may be harming yourself without realising it if you ignore the deeper spiritual teachings in favour of that ideology. Of course, you have the right to do whatever you wish because we live in a world of free will but if your actions, or even your thoughts, go against God's laws, which are the true coordinates of your own being, you will bring consequences upon yourself. At best, you will remain where you are which is fine if you're happy there but there is a long way further to go than your current state.



This is a picture of the stones at Avebury with some local inhabitants. I love the prehistoric sites of Great Britain, and visited those in Wiltshire and the West Country as regularly as I could when I lived in the area which I did for a number of years. There is still a sense of mystery and dormant power to be sensed in these places, and I can sometimes imagine that I lived in the distant times when they were functioning sacred centres, and that I took part in the rituals that were enacted there. Rituals when the veils between the worlds were lifted and the gods appeared to bless the worshippers. I don't doubt that this was what took place at these holy sites. They were not just areas where the tribes gathered to perform fertility rites or worship as modern people go to church. They were places where things we might call spiritual could actually be made to happen. But that was then. It is right to reconnect to the truths known then and subsequently forgotten but it is not right to try to live those times again. The wheel has turned and humanity has moved on. Paganism is a religion of this world but we must go beyond this world and beyond nature to find truth.