Meeting The Masters: Salvation

Showing posts with label Salvation. Show all posts

Wednesday 22 May 2024

Heaven and Hell

There has been a good series of posts on the Orthosphere recently on the subject of universalism and whether all will eventually be saved. One of them is here. They reminded me that I had written something on this subject a few years ago (here and here) which brought forth some interesting comments so it is clearly a subject that concerns people as well it might. Inevitably, no conclusion is reached in either case but the potential contradictions between perfect love and perfect freedom are explored.

For this is what it comes down to. God is a God of mercy and justice but in a conflict between the two which takes precedence? Since God is perfect the answer must be that neither takes precedence and both are fully satisfied, but how can that be? For us it is not possible but with God, as we have been told, all things are possible. One way for the demands of both to be met is that the soul is granted an indefinite period of time to get it right. This might require something in the nature of reincarnation and karma but that is rejected by Christianity, and though there are hints of it in the New Testament (for instance, reaping what you sow, the idea that John the Baptist might be Elijah come again, and "did this man sin or his parents that he be born blind?"), they are inconclusive to say the least. I personally am sympathetic to reincarnation as something like an evolutionary mechanism but it does focus on the theosis side of the spiritual path and ignores, or certainly downplays, the significance of salvation. I believe both are important.

Another possibility would be that purgatory is not just to purify the already saved of residual sins so that they are worthy to enter Heaven, its acknowledged objective, but also has a salvific aspect. Or, if we don't call this purgatory, there are forms of post-mortem existence that have this function. This would also be contrary to orthodox teaching which insists on the right choice being made in this life even if it is at the point of death. That's because there is something unique about life in a physical body as regards making a choice in complete freedom, a freedom that does not exist in the spiritual (meaning non-material) realm, or not to the same extent, because it is not fully separate from God. Nevertheless, if we want God to extend his mercy indefinitely, and we do not accept a return to the physical world, we should admit the possibility of repentance after death.

Then there is the question of Hell and what it is. In one of the posts on the Orthosphere I commented as follows. Heaven is an opt-in destination so you must want to go there and behave accordingly. This would mean that anything that was not Heaven could then be seen as a form of Hell. Perhaps the mistake the universalists make is to see Hell as necessarily a place of eternal torment. That may exist but it may not be the default option for those who reject God. Hell may have many mansions too and many of these may be not too different to how this world is, all reflecting the varying degrees of God rejection and self-assertion to be found in human souls. But they are not Heaven.

I said in the comment that Hell as a place of eternal torment may exist but I am not persuaded that it does. From the eternal point of view, what may happen to the truly recalcitrant soul that refuses to turn round and accept the reality of God is that it gradually loses its life force. All life comes from God. The demons must steal life energy from those who have it because they can no longer get it directly. Evil is parasitical. This is a major reason for their need to corrupt souls. They can then harvest the low level energy produced, the energy of anger, hatred, lust or whatever, but eventually souls that cannot receive life from God will wither and die if they cannot steal it from elsewhere. Meanwhile they will be in a sort of Hell because Hell is separation from God but this may not be experienced by them as torment. It may even have its pleasures though these will not be spiritual or not properly spiritual. After all, we are separated from God (apparently not really, of course) even while in this world.

God obviously wants all souls to be united with him but this must be on a voluntary basis or it is coercion and that would negate the whole point of creating souls with free will who can, in their turn, add positively to creation. If a soul fails the test of turning to God in an environment where that does require a choice (the material world) there are two possibilities. Either it is consigned (that is to say, it consigns itself) to the cosmic recycling bin or it is given new opportunities to get it right, perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere in quite different environments. The idea that it is tortured forever for the failure of a single finite life seems unreasonable, illogical and quite contrary to the idea of a God of love. However, like attracts like in the spiritual world, and for as long as a soul rejects God its consciousness will remain endarkened which is a kind of hell though may not be experienced as such by the soul that has adopted this position. I believe we need to see post-mortem conscious existence as containing many levels. It is not just black (Hell) or white (Heaven) but there are many shades in between. If we see Hell as anything that is not white we may be closer to true understanding. Perhaps jet black Hell is the one place from whence there is no return but most souls who fail to attain Heaven go to some kind of grey hell and from these there is possible redemption. Black Hell is for full and final God rejection but for those who may not have reached this tragic depth there remains hope.

Monday 18 March 2024

They Shall Deceive the Very Elect

The full quote from Matthew 24 is "For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect."

Jesus is talking about the end times. It seems to some that our times are the end times, and even if they are not they certainly do a good impression of it. It's true that often over the course of history people have thought they were living during the end times but the widespread apostasy of the present day has not occurred before nor has the fact that the gospel of the kingdom has indeed been preached in all the world which Jesus said would be an indication of the approaching end. Be that as it may, the same patterns tend to repeat themselves at similar stages so while we may or may not be living in the actual end times teachings relating to that will still be relevant for no one can deny we are living through some kind of cultural and civilisational breakdown with the spiritual being chased from the world in most places.

Jesus says that even the elect might be deceived by the signs and wonders put out by those serving the dark agenda. Who are the elect? I suggest it is anyone who holds fast to the truth and is not deceived, neither by lies nor by half truths which always involve a subtler attack on the psyche. These people remain true for the following reasons. A love of truth, spiritual integrity and humility. They seek their reward in heaven and are not tempted by earthly riches or reputation. A tall order. We would all like to think we belong among this group but we should do well to remember that we are tested where we are weakest and even the elect can fall. We might think we have resisted one illusion but then we be deceived by something coming from the opposite direction. We may be impervious to some assaults on truth but still succumb to something that plays on our weaknesses. Right motivation is essential on the spiritual path. It will not protect us from everything, we have to have right discernment too, but it will guide us through many difficulties and enable us to resist many temptations.

To be part of the elect is not a glamorous position. Their role is to serve and quite possibly to suffer too for the suffering of the saints is a kind of expiation for the whole of humanity. They will not be thanked or acclaimed or rewarded. They may even be condemned as their Master was but then the mark of the elect is that they seek only to tread the path of light in truth and love, come what may. If we would join them we must have that attitude too.

Tuesday 27 December 2022

Protection from Lies

I was asking myself recently that if I knew I was going to die in a few days' time what would I tell my children in an attempt to protect them from what is to come in the future. I mean by that the spiritual ravages that have been ongoing in their present form for several decades but, from being on the periphery, have now moved centre stage and are becoming ever more embedded in the culture like a cancer that spreads and eventually take over its host's body. What can protect against this? When almost the whole world is infected with lies where can we find truth? Human beings are often reluctant to go against prevailing good opinion but that is what we absolutely must do to have any hope of salvaging our souls from the darkness of the present times.

All parents know that, try as they might, however they bring up their children these are going to be subject to many other influences. This can be a good thing but in this day and age it rarely is. The culture is decadent. We assume we are more advanced than our ancestors, and in some ways we are, but the fact is that all the signs of the times point to dissolution. Liberalism is taken as a mark of an enlightened society but historically it always occurs in a dying and degenerate culture that has lost touch with reality, a civilisation that has become spoilt and inwardly rotten and is consequently unable to discriminate between right and wrong. The blurring of the boundaries between the sexes, now regarded as progressive but actually a clear indication of separation from nature (and don't forget that when we reject nature we reject God who is the author of nature) is another phenomenon that occurs regularly when a civilisation falls in on itself, having cut itself off from higher reality because of its advancements have deluded it into thinking it is spiritually self-sufficient.

It can be tiresome when people like me go on about how bad the world is getting. I'm 67 and older people are always accused of moaning about how things aren't how they used to be. But I don't look back to the time of my youth as a golden age. It certainly was not. On the other hand, the separation from God and Nature, though well underway, had not progressed as far as it has now. Most people don't know this because material wealth and technological advancements insulate us from the spiritual poverty in which we live. In the first world we are better off than ever before with access to all kinds of things our forefathers could not have imagined but this is very much a two edged sword because it cuts us off all the more from reality.

We live in a collapsing world and yet few people realise it. This is all part of the test humanity is undergoing. The collapse is like a refiner's fire. How do we react when the culture tells us obvious lies? Firstly, we must hold fast to the truth but we must also avoid the corruption of the world affecting our own hearts by responding to it with anger and hatred. At least, some anger and hatred is not only permissible but actually right because if you love truth you must hate lies. But these emotions should not be allowed too much sway or they will overwhelm you and drag you down into the very negativity you are condemning. Therefore, let your love of truth or love of God be the defining tenor of your mind and everything else spring from that. What I mean is hatred of evil should never become stronger than love of good and should only be used in the service of that love.

What could I tell my children to help protect them in the future? The answer is obvious. Read the Gospels. Get to know Jesus. Familiarise yourself with the truth and wisdom to be found in the New Testament and you will have all the protection you need. There is more, of course. You have to bring Christ into your own heart and mind, and the true Christ not some man-made image of him, but this is the foundation of a proper spiritual life.

Wednesday 28 September 2022

Religion Won't Save You Unless You Take Full Responsibility.

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.

Wednesday 2 February 2022

The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth

It seems that a lot of people still cannot see the difference between the letter and the spirit. There remain many who believe that only those who follow a particular officially sanctioned path live an authentic spiritual life. I fully agree that there is truth and there are lies and any deviation from truth will eventually have to be accounted for. But the truth is not an outward thing. It is not a set of doctrines even though there are some doctrines that accord with it and others that don't. Fundamentally, the path to salvation is to do with the love of God and the intuitive recognition of his laws. It is to do with letting Christ into your heart, and that is a spiritual act not an intellectual one.

There are two points to consider, one that has always existed and another that is operative now. The first is that the spiritual path in its higher and more important stages is an inner path. I have no doubt that some religions reflect a greater degree of reality than others and facilitate the task of finding God better than others, but God can be followed in all serious religions by the seeker of pure heart and sincere intent. One portrait may show a better likeness of its subject than another but that does not make all the others worthless. And the portrait is still not the person.

As long as you stick to the outer path you will not find God. If you allow the finger to be more important than the moon you will never see the moon. The way to God is fundamentally through the heart and that is the only way you will find him. I repeat, this does not make the outer paths redundant. We need both but we must go beyond outer paths.

The second point concerns the time we live in. This is a time when all institutions are corrupt. God is forcing us to go beyond them if we would discover him in his true reality. We cannot hope to find God in outer things, any outer things, and if we insist on that we risk becoming like the Pharisees who refused to recognise Christ because they clung to the old ways. I am not saying that there is a new truth now but there is growth and development of consciousness and we are called upon to engage creatively with the Word of God. That Word does not change but our interaction with it can and must.

Again, I repeat because I have to, this certainly does not mean that anything goes or we can inject our own prejudices and preferences into God's Word, adulterating it. Goodness knows, that has happened many times in the past and it happens now. I fully appreciate the concern that would protect truth from distortion. Truth must be guarded and protected in a world of spiritual greed and sin. On the other hand, God is calling those who would know him to find him in a more profound way and that means to find that the Kingdom of Heaven is indeed within (it's not only there but it is there), and if we would become members of that Kingdom we must search for it within our own hearts. As Christ said to Nicodemus, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit".

Friday 28 January 2022

What is Sin?

I seem to be writing quite a few articles in response to other people's work at the moment. This is another such, inspired by Bruce Charlton's post about why souls might reject Heaven. Because in our time many do. These individuals would probably not put it like that, or even think of it like that, but it is what a person does and what he is that counts not what he says or even what he thinks with the outer mind. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" as it says in the book of Proverbs. And many people do reject Heaven because they reject the mindset that is required to get there. Like attracts like. You only get to the true heavenly world if there is that in you that corresponds to that world. If you are on some level made of the same stuff, spiritually speaking. In fact, to get to heaven you must already be a subject (it's a kingdom not a state) of that world.

A major factor in the rejection of Heaven is unrepented sin which means identifying yourself with a sin to the extent that you will not or cannot renounce it. You may even no longer accept that it is a sin because it has become part of your sense of self. It has become what you think of as you.

A commenter on Bruce's post asked the question in the title of this one. He went on to answer it himself and said that sin is loving the physical over the spiritual. That is right as far as it goes though I would change the word loving to desiring. But we can unpack this idea of sin a little more and I suggested in a further comment that sin is not loving the physical over the spiritual so much as loving oneself over God or putting oneself before God. That is not to say one should hate oneself, that also is a sin as we are God's creation, but God comes first.

Bruce Charlton defined sin as not being aligned with God's will and divine creative purpose. This sums it up. We are all sinners to some extent because we are all in thrall to the ego. It is the mismatch between ego and God or the human self and the Divine Self that is the root of sin. As long as the human self seeks its fulfilment in something other than the Divine Self it is a sinner and this might even include those who seek absorption in impersonal being. They may be sinners of omission rather than active sinners but they have rejected God as a personal being and so they have rejected love. That is a sin of sorts and will have its consequences, even if these are what the individual in this case wants or thinks he does. So he may get what he wants but it is not the best that God has to offer the soul.

What is sin? Fundamentally, I would say it comes down to one thing and that is not loving God. Therefore you can be as virtuous as you like but if you don't love God you are a sinner. To those of an antinomian disposition who might claim that loving God excuses you of all moral obligations or lapses I would say that "If you love me you keep my commandments". The true love of God automatically makes a person behave in a godly fashion or, at least, aspire to behave like that. He may fall short but he always seeks to stand in the light and to reflect that light as best he can. To claim you love God and carry on disobeying his commandments shows that not only do you not love God, you don't even begin to know him.

Sunday 22 August 2021

Why Does Believing in Christ Save You?

The answer to that is, surprising as it may sound to those raised in certain religious backgrounds, it doesn't necessarily save you. After all, the demons believe in Christ and he himself said in Matthew 7: 21-23 that “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."

But let us assume that the belief in question is the sort that saves. Why does it do so? It cannot simply be a matter of thought. The current world situation has revealed many Christians who think they believe in Christ not to do so really. They have gone along with the worldly agenda without questioning it for the most part. Their leaders certainly have which fact, incidentally, shows the absolute necessity nowadays to think for yourself and not follow leaders, even (especially?) religious leaders. We are called to save ourselves. Through Christ certainly but we must adopt a creative faith meaning one that is alive to the movement of spirit. It cannot just take its nourishment from outside whether that be community, religion, religious teaching, scripture, whatever. It must also grow from the Word of God that is within every human heart and, in fact, this is now the more important of the two factors. Our spiritual vitality must come from within if we are to have any spiritual vitality.

Believing in Christ saves when it is the true inner belief because it is the tuning of the soul to spiritual reality, the opening up of the heart to divine truth, and this then starts the process of spiritual transformation. Christ is truth. Accepting Christ is accepting truth. Not accepting him is rejecting truth. If you reject truth you cannot be saved because you have put yourself outside reality. If you accept truth, really accept it through Christ who is its personification, that truth will grow within you.You will start to become it yourself and this is salvation. You accept truth, you become truth. There is no other salvation.

Jesus said that he who does the will of his Father will be saved so the only belief that counts for anything is that which affects the whole being. It is not that God is pleased if someone does his will and then says "Ok, you're in"! It is that this very belief spiritually changes a person by removing the dead weight of unredeemed matter and converting the soul into a real spiritual thing, one of the same quality as the spiritual world. Only heavenly substance can enter heaven.

Tuesday 16 March 2021

Life or Death? You Choose

What if the present time were an examination to see which souls wanted life and which did not? For life read spiritual life for when you come down to it there is no other. Life, being, existence, is a spiritual thing. Matter by itself has no life. It is the form life takes. It is the means through which life expresses itself but it is not life. Today we are being asked to choose. Do we wish to live or not?

If asked outright everyone would presumably say they wished to live but it's not that simple. If your actions, thoughts and feelings indicate a rejection of what life actually is then what have you really chosen? If you do not embrace life with your heart, which means embrace what life is, then it makes no difference what you think you want. You have chosen anti-life. If your inner being in the form of your thoughts, desires and what you love points you away from spiritual life that shows you have, in a certain sense, chosen death for life is spiritual and to reject the spirit is to reject life.

This might seem unfair. Why are we not given all the information? Then we would make the right choice. But that is the whole point. The test is to see what you choose without being influenced by the idea of reward. It is to test your true self, what you actually are. A person's spirituality is determined by their motivation and the object of their love. If you turn to God because of what you hope to gain from him then you are not concerned with God, only with yourself and not your spiritual self which is naturally oriented to God but your earthly self-centred self. You must be put in a situation where your choice is a real indication of your heart and there are no extraneous factors influencing the choice in a direction it would not have gone left to itself.

This is the advantage of living in an age such as ours in which religion is no longer a significant part of life. Today if we turn to the spiritual life it is not because society obliges us to do so. It is because we ourselves want to do so despite rather than because of the world. I can foresee a time when to live a spiritual life will require a person to go against the world, against good opinion and maybe even against the law. Some think that time has already arrived but I would say current events are only a fore-echo or preliminary phase of what is to come. Masks, vaccines and lockdowns, which all symbolise loss of freedom and personal integrity in various ways, are probably only the beginning of a gathering movement to refashion human nature and the understanding of what it is to be a person. Will an over-concern to preserve the body lead to an even greater loss of the sense of the soul? How much will we be prepared to give up merely to maintain physical existence? Life is so much more than the body and likewise the concept of death can be extended far beyond the merely physical.

I don't want to be melodramatic about this. It may be that present events are not forerunners of something more severe. I suspect they are but even if they are not they still serve to remind us of potential possibilities and to reorient us to the spiritual world if we are alive to their deeper significance and don't just pass up the symbolism as irrelevant. Symbolism, you say? Why should we read anything into what are just public health measures? But everything in this world has symbolic significance and if you ignore that you live a surface existence and are little better than a talking monkey.

Jesus came to offer us life. That was his mission. To save us from death and give us life. This is a very simple thing, too simple it seems for most modern human beings. Jesus is life. He sums up in himself what life is. He is the expression of life and to accept him is to choose life. By the same token, to turn away from him is to turn away from life, to turn down life, and this is the test which today entails a more active choice than in the past when Christianity was the default position.

I have a book coming out later this year called Earth is a School. The title comes from something I was told by my teachers and reflects my belief that the present time is a critical point in human history, a time of final exams in which we take the test to see whether we will progress to higher worlds of light, beauty, truth and love or sink back to a heavier, darker, more constricted existence. In a sense we do create our own reality in that if our mind shuts out spirit we will eventually find ourselves in an external environment that reflects that mindset. Conversely, if we open our heart and mind to spirit and live a life in accordance with the inner significance of Christ's teachings we will rise to eternal life.

Saturday 6 March 2021

We Are Losing Our Humanity

Modern people have the idea that we are the most humane people ever. We are the most compassionate, the most tolerant, the most accepting of difference, the least violent and so on. We are not perfect but we have moved into a better way of being and of understanding ourselves and each other. We are progressing to a better form of humanity.

In my view this is mistaken. We are actually in danger of becoming, if we have not already done so, the least human generation of all time and this for a very simple reason. We deny the spiritual.

For modern man there is no reality outside the measurable. There is nothing that cannot be detected by material means. There is no God, there is no transcendence. Even most religious people think and act when you scratch the surface as though this were true. If they didn't think it, they would behave in a completely different way with regard to the world. As it is, they accept the world as it is and go along with its ways. The events of the last year have proved this only too clearly. Modern Christians for the most part are more than happy to burn incense to the emperor.

When you deny the spiritual you become less than human. Man is a spiritual being and if he cuts himself off from that part of his nature, which is the fundamental part, he cuts himself off from the reality of what he is. He cripples himself psychologically not just spiritually. He becomes less than human because the essence of humanity is that we can become more than human. A comment on a recent post here talked about how separating people into those follow spiritual truth and those that rejected it was dehumanising the latter and could lead to great evil. This misses the point that it is the latter group who have dehumanised themselves. The spiritual person is not dehumanising the non-believer by pointing out the evil of his choice. The non-believer has dehumanised, and in some cases maybe even demonised, himself.

I use the word choice. The same comment spoke of how it was actually just ignorance that lay behind this phenomenon. If we knew better, we would do better. Again, this is a mistake. Modern people may have the misfortune to grow up in an atheistic, materialistic society but the tools for spiritual understanding are as available now as they always have been. In a certain sense, they are even more available since the spiritual teachings of all ages are easily accessible today.

I maintain that if your heart is oriented in the right direction you will find what you need to set you on the right road. Ask and it shall be given. But we don't ask and that is the problem. And we don't ask because we aren't interested enough. We don't care enough. We have chosen badly. Of course, we are ignorant too but all human beings have the truth within them if they bother to look for it. We may be ignorant but we don't have to be ignorant. The principle fault lies in the will not the mind.

Evil in the modern world is not expressed mainly through violence, murder and the like. These are obviously still there but they are known evils and relate to the body not the soul. Modern evil is evil against the soul and relates to the denial of God and the principles of creation. It is the reduction of man to a meat machine and if that is what you do either explicitly or implicitly through the way you live and think and by your actions and behaviour then you are on the side of evil. Of course, you are more on the side of evil if you are actively engaged in promoting this deformed view of reality but even if you just passively go along with it, as the majority do, you are still on the side of evil. You are the ones who are losing your humanity and denying it to others and if that is not evil I don't know what is. It doesn't matter if you are a good person as the world judges good, personally well-behaved, honest, leading a morally upright life, even virtuous in a conventional sort of way. If you deny God and the principles of creation, which are spiritually based, then you are on the side of evil and unless you make a radical about turn you will be increasingly drawn into evil. It's a downwards slope.

Man is a spiritual being in a material body. We all know and accept evil on the material plane. We accept sin against the body (other than sexual sin but that is a spiritual matter really). We completely ignore sin against the soul which means we are losing connection to the soul and that means we are losing our humanity.

Note: Some people may not like what they see as a whiff of dualism in the idea that we are spiritual beings in material bodies. If that is the case then think of this in a hierarchical sense and see the modern error as the denial of verticality, limiting us to the base of the hierarchy. This base has a purpose and is part of the whole but it should not be mistaken, as it so often is now, for the whole.

Monday 11 January 2021

Don't Lose Sight of the True Goal

There is a danger that people at the moment may define spirituality in terms of resistance to what is going on in the world. More or less all of what is going on is clearly inspired by what we may call, somewhat melodramatically perhaps but accurately, the dark powers. Of that there is no doubt. Aided and abetted by their countless foot soldiers, who, incidentally, will be eaten up and swallowed when they've served their purpose, evil is all around us at the moment, setting the agenda and smearing and crushing all opposition.

However, resistance to it can lead one into ego-centred, anti-spiritual behaviour if you allow yourself to be diverted from a proper focus on God and the spiritual path into the attempt to engage in some kind of counter-revolution on the worldly plane. Then you become caught up in a spiral of action and reaction, all of which is determined by the devil who is only to happy if you fight him on his own battleground using the weapons he has chosen.

In that case you are externalising the spiritual battle which really should be taking place on the level of your own soul. This doesn't mean you let evil get its way. You must stand against it but if you fight fire with fire you just create a big conflagration. There are two things you should do. First of all, try to clear your own heart as much as possible of anger and hatred. This is hard when faced with obvious evil but it must be done. At least, you must try to objectify the anger and hatred, experience it but not let it sway your mind or dominate your emotions. Keep it at a distance without getting enmeshed in it.

Then you do as Jesus did which was not to fight evil directly on its own level but demonstrate good. Don't be drawn into evil by evil. That's what it wants because then it's got you. This must be why Jesus said "Resist not evil" which is an often misunderstood instruction. It doesn't mean you should ignore evil but that you should not let it into your heart even when you are confronting it. But you should confront it as Jesus did when he overthrew the moneylenders' tables at the temple. That demonstrates that there's no one size fits all approach to this matter. Different situations demand different responses.

What happens in the world is important but only to the extent that it reflects what happens in the hearts of individuals. You have been given one major task in this life. That is to perfect your own soul or, if perfect is too strong a word, to direct it Godwards at all times and in all circumstances. Don't be distracted from that task by outrage at what is taking place in the world. Do what you can when you can but always keep your eyes on the true goal which is the salvation of your own soul. The battle is primarily spiritual.

Jesus did not come to make this world into heaven. He came to show us the way to heaven. We should certainly try to make this world as good as it can be, if for no other reason than to make it somewhere conducive to the spiritual path, but we should not make the mistake of focusing all our energies on life in this world even in times as dark as these.

Monday 7 October 2019

End Times Testing

In the discussion after my last post on universalism the point was made that there was something special about these times. Special as in unusual not good. Really that should be blazingly obvious but the significance is not often realised by the mainstream though many Christians regard our current world as ticking many of the boxes associated with the End Times prophesied in scripture.

What is special is the widespread spiritual apostasy. How can we explain this? We could say that the historical process in the West has led up to it with science, philosophy and human development all contributing to a greater focus on the physical world and what we can know intellectually, but I don't think that is sufficient. Of course, it is a factor, a large one, but there are still plenty of intelligent people who do believe in God so it is not enough on its own. My diagnosis is that the quality of people has changed. Putting it in its bluntest possible terms, there are more bad people incarnating in the world.

How can that be? Aren't we more moral than ever now, less violent, more concerned with the weak and the poor, more likely to see humanity as one? My response to this is that yes, very possibly all these things are true in theory but they are all counterbalanced by our monumental focus on ourselves and our rejection of our Creator. Besides we often go along with the morality of the day because we want to benefit from it or else as a means to assert our superiority or perhaps because we hate the past and its hierarchical structuring which put others over us. When we say we want equality it's because we don't want anyone over us.

Another reason for the perceived greater morality of the present day is that man is a moral creature. When he rejects the spiritual he must construct a materialistic kind of morality which inevitably will appear to a spirit-denying person as better than a morality that was centred on the reality of God. But it's not. It functions only on the horizontal axis and totally ignores the vertical. Consequently it might fulfil the moral needs of a stunted being but it does not by any means for a whole and healthy one.

The population of the world is far greater than it has ever been. This may be because many souls are being born now to experience the current world conditions. It's a time of great testing, a sifting out of sheep and goats with each group moving on to different spheres of being, higher and lower. Among those who are born today are a large number of souls who have rejected God in the past, either in this world in previous lives or in other worlds. They are being given a chance to convert using that word in its literal sense of to turn around. They are facing the wrong direction, towards themselves. They need to turn round to face God. It is not made easy for them because what is easy is not a true test and this is a test of inner motivation not outer beliefs. They are given other options to God because if you do pick God you must do so because you want to not because you have to. Otherwise you haven't really picked him.

Having said that the decision to choose God rather than self is not made easy, I should qualify that slightly. It may not be easy as in the reality of God is plainly presented to you but events are unfolding which will make the choice between God and nihilism (for really that's the only other choice) more and more stark. As the consequences of atheism actually start to manifest themselves in the real world, rather than merely intellectually or theoretically as has largely been the case up to the last 2 or 3 decades, the true significance of rejecting God becomes apparent. For after you have rejected God the rejection of Nature as creation cannot be far behind. Everything becomes open to interpretation and absolutes are meaningless. Indeed, meaning itself disappears and we have to fill the void that leaves with all sorts of artificial distractions and false realities. This is the situation we are currently faced with. The choice between God and not God will soon become as clear as one would be between black and white. Then, if we have not done so before, we must make our decision.

Thursday 3 October 2019

Universalism

One of the strands of Christian thought maintains that God's mercy is such that everybody will eventually be saved. This is called universalism and goes back at least as far as the 3rd century theologian Origen. It's a tempting doctrine, especially for those who focus on the love of God more than the truth of God, but it does have certain problems.

Before considering those, let's look at its attractions and how it might work. The main attraction is obviously that everything is working for the good and no one will be left behind. Somehow every human soul will be brought to salvation. However long it takes, everyone gets to heaven. This might work through a long period of purgatory or it could work through reincarnation with souls continuously coming back until they learn their lessons and are purified of their sins. God has all the time he wants to bring this about and so there is no reason why it cannot come to pass.

The chief objection to universalism is that it comes close to making a mockery of free will which is the defining characteristic of a spiritual being and the reason why God created human souls. It's why we live in a world of good and evil where we have to make a positive choice and the fact of God is not self-evident. We have to incline our hearts to him of our own accord.

This objection might be got around by saying that all those who are saved do eventually have to choose God and not reject him, but if you reject God constantly and only finally accept him because circumstances force you to do so, is this really free will? Surely the whole point is that you choose God when you don't have to, when there are other options that might seem preferable? This act of choice, freely made without coercion or experiencing the results of wrong choices, indicates what you are like inside as a person. If it is only endless experiences in purgatory or a sequence of earthly lives that finally bring you round to God when you have more or less exhausted every other possibility, is that really your own choice, your free choice? Does it reflect who and what you are? You see the problem. If all are saved then salvation is devalued. If it happens anyway then why bother to make spiritual efforts? You might get there earlier but so what? Sin away in perfect freedom, thumb your nose at God who is just a benevolent old uncle who tut tuts affectionately but doesn't really mind what you get up to.

There is something unusual about the present time. It does seem, more than in the past, as if human beings are being called to make a definitive choice, though whether this is for all time or the foreseeable future is a moot point. But it could be that there is a parting of the ways with those who do choose to follow God being taken to higher ways of being while those who either actively deny him or just can't make the leap of faith being held back and left on lower levels. Jesus talks of sheep and goats. He didn't seem to be a universalist. He warns us of the perils of hell in language that leaves no room for doubt. On the other hand, God is merciful and the parable of the prodigal son might offer hope to everyone.

Perhaps to think in terms of salvation and damnation is a mistake. Which is not to say those two conditions do not exist. I'm sure they do and we'd better believe it. But maybe there are many worlds between these two extremes where souls that have neither embraced the reality of God nor sunk to total rejection of him experience external environments that correspond to the inner state of their souls. Until such time as they change that inner state though that may be more difficult in worlds other than this one which is specifically set up for the purpose of choice and change.

What this all comes down to is time. How much time are we allowed? Endless time or a certain period? I can think of reasons for either but only God knows. There is surely a sense, though, that it would be wrong to allow time to play no part in the process. A soul that either ignores or rejects God constantly must one day be called to account in a world in which justice has any meaning. God's mercy may precede his wrath but does it completely obviate it?

Friday 11 January 2019

Life After Death

I am currently reading a book* which examines the similarities between medieval visionary journeys, of which we have several examples, and modern near-death experiences. It turns out there are quite a few. But there is one glaring difference. The medieval examples usually include the subject being shown a choice of paths after death. The one that leads to heaven, maybe after a purgatorial cleansing, and the one that leads in the other direction. Dante's Divine Comedy, while presumably fictitious, is a prime example of this kind.

But modern near-death experiences are almost always wholly positive. There is no division of paths. Everyone feels surrounded by goodness and enveloped in the light of pure love. If there is any suggestion of judgement, it is more the person judging himself with seemingly no serious consequences to be expected.

You might assume this is purely cultural. The medieval person lived in a hierarchical society in which the teachings of the Church regarding salvation and damnation were ubiquitous. The modern person lives in a democracy where the ideas of hell and spiritual responsibility have largely disappeared. There is surely some truth in this.

But is it the whole truth? In both cases, the subject returns to life in this world so the post-mortem experience is clearly incomplete. We are not getting the full picture here.

I think that the reality of what happens after death might lie somewhere between these two scenarios, one of which is focused on justice and the other on mercy. We must assume that the kind of life we have lived and our spiritual state at the end of it have a strong bearing on what happens to us after death. We must assume this because to think otherwise would mean we lived in a meaningless universe without purpose in which case the concepts of love and goodness would themselves be meaningless and illusionary.

However, we live in a spiritual universe, and in the spiritual world like attracts like so we will always gravitate to a plane/state that corresponds to our own inner condition, whatever that might be. This is justice. At the same time, God is a loving and merciful Father and does not leave any soul abandoned. The idea that we are despatched to a condition of eternal suffering for decisions taken without full knowledge (notwithstanding the fact that we do have sufficient knowledge here if we are true to our inner selves) makes no sense in the context of a Creator of love and goodness. But something approximating to hell might be a temporary state for sinners. Hence it is fair to say that those who have faithfully followed Christ, or a spiritual path that approximates to the truth he brought, will go to a place that reflects that reality, while those who have not done so will go to a place that reflects the reality of what they are, bearing in mind that this reality is not how they have presented themselves but how they are in their hearts. This might even, in some respects, compare favourably to the earthly condition but will not be heaven in the sense that there is no proper union with God. 'In my Father's house are many mansions' means there are many inner worlds or planes of consciousness. The idea of heaven and hell with nothing in between is far too simplistic. Perhaps the traditional concept of limbo is one we should entertain where limbo is a state between heaven and hell which may well appear paradisiacal to a new entry from the physical world but is far from the true heaven.

The near-death experiencers all take for granted that they are entering heaven when they see the clear light of love. But this is an assumption. It might be an illusion. It might be an experience that tests the subject to see how he reacts. It might be a preliminary welcome that is the precursor to a more serious examination later on. It might even be a diabolical fake (not that I believe that, but it might be). If we accept there is a spiritual choice to be made at the moment of death, this experience could be part of that.

So, if hell, as pictured in medieval times, now seems an unlikely destination for anyone in perpetuity, it is equally doubtful that everybody, however they have lived, will be granted entry to heaven as 20th century near-death experiences seem to suggest. Once through the gates of death we will probably gravitate to our natural level as determined by our spiritual quality, and though that may seem a higher state than we can experience in this material world, it is most unlikely in the great majority of cases to be the true heaven.

Life after death must depend on life before death. Souls will find themselves in a state of being corresponding to their inner condition, though there will always be opportunities for progress and education. But there must also surely be the need for spiritual purification if a soul is to advance from one state to another. Release from the burdens of physical existence (which includes release from the mental claustrophobia occasioned by enclosure in a physical brain) will inevitably seem liberating, and some of the joy experienced by near-death subjects could be down to this. But perhaps these people are amongst the more spiritually sensitive types anyway which is why they have been given the experience, and the mission to report it, in order to help create a crack in the hard materialism of 20th century humanity. This means that their experience does not necessarily imply that everyone will have the same.

If I had to give my own opinion on what happens after death, I would say that, after a period of acclimatisation, all souls are examined by a judge of some sort, which might include their own higher self though aided and guided by spiritual elders, and put through a purifying process before finding themselves in an environment that corresponds to their degree of spiritual awareness. However, there will be some souls, maybe even many souls at this time of widespread spiritual rejection, who find themselves in a place of gloom which is the objectification of their own inner spiritual darkness. Guides will be sent to such souls but may not be perceptible to them because they have cut themselves off from higher things by their unbelief and materialism. Their spiritual consciousness is too undeveloped to see the helpers and they will have to open their hearts to some degree before they can do so. They must raise their own consciousness before they are able to be aware of the spiritual forces that surround them. This might take some time. For many modern people, sunk in pride and illusion, it might take a lot of time.

In the next world, outer and inner are considerably more one that they are here so it makes sense to refine and purify your consciousness as much as possible while you are still in a body.

* Otherworld Journeys by Carol Zaleski

Friday 14 September 2018

The Camel and the Needle

Jesus's remark that it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle is one of his most poetic sayings. But, if you happen to be rich, it is also one of his most chilling . I haven't seen recent research but some people used to say it was based on a mistranslation and should have been a rope not a camel that was referred to. That is more mundane but almost as difficult a feat. Then there's the theory that the Eye of the Needle was a gate in Jerusalem through which a camel could only pass when the baggage with which it was laden (its wealth) had been removed. That makes sense but I still prefer the saying in its original form. It has an additional symbolic impact because of the incongruity of the two objects in the image.

I believe that these words of Jesus's have a particular significance for us today. Why? Because we are all rich. Most of us in the West are very well off by historical standards with comforts that our ancestors could only dream of. We have fast personal transport, cheap mechanical servants, as much food and drink as we could want and so on. We can travel far afield and often and have almost unlimited entertainment at our fingertips. We are more distracted than ever before by an abundance of material things, and that seems to me to be a good definition of the primary problem associated with wealth.

It is hard for a rich man to get to heaven because he is attached to his wealth. His mind is taken up with what he possesses and his easeful life does not push him to search for meaning beyond this world. At least, that is less likely than it would be if he did not have the means to fulfil his desires whenever he wanted to. It is obviously not a sin to be rich but riches make worldliness easier and the hardships that spur one to look for help in God are kept at bay. By and large, this is more the case for a greater number of human beings now than it has ever been. Except for those at the extreme margin of society, we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, rich. Consequently, we are all in spiritual peril.

Jesus speaks these words at the conclusion of the story of the rich young man who wanted to become his disciple but was unable to sacrifice his wealth. This young man was a devout God-fearing person who had kept the commandments all his life. But when it came to the crunch he was unable to let go of his worldly advantages. He had become too comfortable. Nowadays I don't think we are normally required to give everything we own to the poor but we are required to sit lightly with material things and not get caught up in them. Whatever we might think, it will be hard to resist their pull on our minds if we over-exposed to such things. And nowadays practically all of us are over-exposed.

The disciples are shocked by Jesus's extreme attitude. How can a camel ever get through the eye of a needle? It's impossible. So it is for Man but nothing is impossible for God, replies Jesus. Nonetheless there is one thing that God cannot do and that is override our own free will. God can save us, however far we have strayed from the truth, but we have first to turn to him. However rich we are, in money, intelligence, artistic talent, elevation of birth, whatever it might be (for remember that wealth is not just measured in money or gold), we can find help in God if we give up our attachments to the things of this world.

For a camel is to go through the eye of a needle it must become small. For that might we read humbled? Could this be the pointer to what we must do to be saved? Wealth tends to breed arrogance and the sense of superiority. Giving up our riches means giving up our inflated sense of self. And actually, when you come to think of it, doesn't a camel sometimes look rather self important?

Saturday 14 January 2017

Are All Saved?

At the end of a previous post I pondered on what might happen to souls who reject the truth of God, and speculated that they might be given another opportunity to embrace reality elsewhere, though it would probably involve a tougher journey for them since they had proved recalcitrant this time around. I thought it might be interesting to explore the idea of spiritual refusal further because there is clearly such a thing and it has consequences, serious ones, which we should try to understand.

It has become almost 'unspiritual' to believe in hell because we think that a God of love could not possibly have made such an environment. The only problem is that the place where we learn most about a God of love, which is the Gospels, is the same place where there is the most emphasis on hell. Jesus, the incarnation of love, speaks many times, and in no uncertain terms, about the reality of hell and how those who reject his message may end up there. How can we resolve this apparent contradiction?

Perhaps we can start by saying that God did not create hell. Hell was created by the rejection of God, firstly by fallen angels and then by those humans who joined them in that rejection. A reasonable definition of hell is a place or state where God is not so how can we blame God for it? We can perhaps blame God for the possibility of it but only because he gave creatures free will to accept or reject him but we cannot blame him for the fact of it. It exists because it has been created by the created not by the Creator.

If it does exist then what is it? What form does it take? Biblical descriptions were probably intended to convey symbolically something of its nature to people at the time, but they may also be external manifestations of internal states since the idea is that in the afterlife outer and inner become one so our environment is, to a degree, a reflection of what is in our mind. However I think the key element of hell is separation. Hell is the state of egotism carried to its ultimate degree where the person is so centred on himself that he is separated from everything else. It is a state where the 'I' has become all there is in the sense that nothing else has any intrinsic reality or value of its own. Everything other than the 'I' is perceived only in terms of its usefulness to that 'I'. And this tells us that not only did God not create hell he does not send us there either. We send ourselves there by our rejection of him and our refusal to let go of our own separate egos. It may even be that we go there in full knowledge of what we are doing.

But do we stay there? The answer must be that it depends on what we mean by hell. I would say that there are places in the non-physical worlds where souls closed to God go who are not past redemption and for whom there is a way back if they chose to take it. It may be that the great majority of erring souls follow this path. But there is also the possibility of spiritual destruction for if free will means anything it must mean that a definitive choice can be made from which there is no turning back. It is this spiritual destruction that is the true hell. The lesser or more relative hells are not eternal in that even here a soul can repent and turn its face to the light. Whether it will or not is entirely down to it but the possibility is there.

The thoughts on this post were prompted by a question I was asked elsewhere about how heaven could be heaven if those we love are not there. That is to say, in hell. This is a very profound question and I am certainly not qualified to answer it fully but I do have some thoughts on the matter.

First of all, it is axiomatic that nothing impure can get into heaven. So sinners by definition cannot do so whether they are those we love or not. But then nor can any of us without God's grace. So there is always hope even for the most obdurate of souls. Secondly, we have to ask what is hell? Heaven is surely supreme reality and that implies that hell is actually unreal. How can it be real if it is outside God who is reality itself? So maybe it is only the unreal part of us that goes there. Inside every human being there is something of God and it is that which gives us our reality. This cannot go to hell so maybe this part of us is always salvaged and somehow made new while the dross is burnt away.

Does this mean that somehow everyone will be saved? That would seem to go against justice and free will. But maybe in the next world opportunities exist for every soul to turn round, though the way back will be longer and harder. If these opportunities are still ignored then maybe the seeds that have not blossomed as they should, or the spiritual essence of these seeds, are gathered up and resown and that might happen until everyone is indeed saved. So the crop that's not grown properly is burnt (in hell) but the essence of it, the essence of the person, is preserved and given another chance to grow correctly, and so on until the spiritual essence of the soul is indeed saved though the form it takes will not be the same as it originally appeared. This idea seems to reconcile the demands of free will, of justice and of love. We, as individuals, must take the consequences of our actions and if we choose not to be saved that is our right. But that part of us which is God himself cannot be destroyed. So this could come back in a new form until eventually it finds its true being in heaven.

This means Hitler as Hitler may have gone to spiritual destruction but the spiritual essence of Hitler, which cannot be destroyed because it is of God himself, will have a new chance somewhere further down the line. It is a fresh start and a new outer person but it is the same divine reality behind that outer person. You might say that this is no longer Hitler because he is gone and you would be correct, but the inner truth that anyone who may ever have loved in him is still there and would be known albeit in a quite different form.

These reflections lead me to think that our notions of hell may refer to two different things. The first is a place (or state) of darkened consciousness where those go who have not accepted God in this lifetime, or those things that God stands for, but who still have a chance of redemption if they will but receive it. They have created this hell for themselves but there is a way out. (Note that this is different to the idea of purgatory because that is for souls who acknowledge the light but are not yet sufficiently pure enough to be worthy of it). But the second hell is spiritual destruction of the individual and that is eternal in that it is final. However it may be that, saved from that destruction, is the divine essence of that soul and this does have a new chance of salvation.

But, as I say, all this is speculation. It is certainly no reason not to seek salvation here and now.

Wednesday 6 January 2016

Is mystical experience the final goal?

This question refers to a point made in the last post and, by implication at least, touches on the important matter of what the self, if it exists, is actually for.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit on why you say that mystical experience is not the goal of the spiritual life. You said that in your book and you also mentioned it in a recent post. Surely once a person has attained full unity consciousness there is nowhere else to go? If enlightenment, which I am taking as the summation of all mystical experience, is not the goal then what is?

A. Let's get our definitions in order first. Can we agree that the basis of mystical experience is usually said to be the withdrawal of attention from all external objects and created things, outer and inner including oneself, and the subsequent focus on pure being? There are other, perhaps lesser, forms of mysticism, such as nature mysticism or one-pointed devotion to a deity, but when one talks of mysticism in the context of the search for enlightenment, this is what we are talking about. The entry into pure being. The advanced mystic (that is, one who has not just touched this state but fully embraced or been embraced by it) might come back into the phenomenal world but henceforth his unique focal point is the undifferentiated oneness of uncreated reality.

Some call this the experience of God, others the essence of our own true being, and many mystics maintain that there is not much difference at this stage. But is the attaining of this state really the whole object of the spiritual journey? As I have said before, at one time I might have thought it was, and, as far as I can see, it is for Buddhism and advaita Vedanta. But there is a problem. Even if one comes back from this state and preaches its virtues to other spiritual enquirers there is still a whiff of solipsism about it. The enlightened one wants nothing and nobody. He may have a blanket universal compassion for all living beings still caught up in the illusions of this world, but he himself in himself is remote, distant, uninvolved, detached. He resides in eternity and so cannot really relate to anyone else. For some this may imply completion but others might see an inner solitariness like this as a kind of limitation.

What I am feeling my way towards here is that whatever is behind this created world and our created selves (which, for ease of reference, let us call God) did not just send us out into phenomenal existence for us to come back no different from when we started. What would be the point of that? He (and I use that pronoun a) because I believe God to be personal, and b) because I think the masculine pronoun most accurately describes the nature of the Creator, see here for why) had a purpose. That purpose was not for individual units of consciousness to be absorbed back into pure being with their individuality dissolved but for them to become living Sons and Daughters of God themselves. And this, crucially, does not demand a return to original being with all experience gained from this world just thrown away because it is meaningless, but the full integration of being and becoming with the soul made perfect not just, for want of a better word, binned. Not the abandonment of the Many for the One or of difference for sameness but the recognition that both are part of the whole, two sides of the same divine coin, and only through the perfected union of both can the Good, the Beautiful and the True take form and be known. So the spiritual journey, once it leaves the plains of conventional religion and outer worship and begins to climb, may start its ascent with a quest for inner enlightenment and personal oneness with God, or life as the impersonalists would have it, through the emptying or denial of self. But it is not complete until the mystical path becomes the path of holiness and perfection, and self, instead of being regarded as unreal, sinful, the product of ignorance or an impediment, is seen as a gift to be voluntarily offered up in love as the vessel for grace once it is fully purified of all worldly stain and egotism.

Therefore, in contrast to Buddhism and similar philosophies, in this scheme of things the individual self is not rejected but renewed. To be sure, the old self, the personal or separate self, must die but selfness lives on as the means through which God's grace and glory can be made manifest. For just as abstract reality can only properly be revealed through concrete form so the Universal requires the Individual in order to manifest and to make itself known. God is a combination of the two and so must we be. This melding of absolute and relative is what I mean by the integration of being and becoming, and its necessity in the overall pattern of spiritual unfoldment is why I think of advaita and Buddhism as being but stages on the road to God or godliness not the true goal. Advanced stages, certainly, but not the full destination because they have a one-sided view of ultimate reality.

Through mystical experience we can cure ourselves of the idea that our selves are absolutely real in themselves, and enter into the knowledge of oneness. But we must then use that knowledge or realisation not to dismiss the self but to adorn it and make of it a house fit for the Lord to dwell in. The non-dualist must take his non-duality and, with it, re-enter and re-embrace duality. For self is not an illusion or unreal but the very purpose of existence, and the goal of the spiritual life is not enlightenment but theosis or the divinization of the self which, after full purification, is transformed by grace and made utterly new.

Wednesday 16 December 2015

The Meaning of Christmas

It has become almost a tradition to complain of the commercialisation of Christmas, and I am not going to do that here. After all what’s the point? We have gone so far down that particular road there can be no turning back. But Christmas has not only been commercialised. It has been thoroughly trivialised too with every year bringing a further reduction of the sense of what its meaning really is, to the extent that the Christian aspect is now almost an embarrassment. We are happy to talk about a generalised peace and goodwill to all men but only in a rather bland, humanist context. Reindeer and elves? Fine. The birth of Jesus? Not so good. It might be divisive. Even many religious leaders appear to have succumbed to this watering down of the Christmas message, so much are they a product of their times, seemingly unable to stand back from the relentless flow of materialistic assumptions which increasingly frame all our discourse, our language and what passes for our philosophy.

So here I would like to consider what the true meaning of Christmas is, and I will start off by saying that it has nothing to do with peace and goodwill. This may be a part of it but it is by no means central. Nor, for that matter, is love, another word that has been hijacked by people whose understanding of it seems to be limited to a general sense of benevolent tolerance. But love is not merely well-meaning egalitarianism. It is a spiritual quality that can only be correctly understood in a spiritual context. To be sure, the materialist can come up with an imitation of love but an imitation is what it will be since real love derives from the soul. If the soul is denied then so is love, and all you are left with is a copy or reflection on a lower level, void of any real substance.

What then is Christmas about if not peace and goodwill? The answer to that is to be found in the image of the star shining in the winter night over Bethlehem, an image that is plainly symbolic (though not only symbolic), and speaks of something that combines a wonderful simplicity with great profundity. And what it tells us is that the message of Christmas is redemption from darkness. For Christmas is about the entry of supernatural light into the spiritual darkness of this world, and its core message is that those who recognise and follow this light can be saved from the darkness that constantly threatens to engulf us, a darkness so pervasive that it is not even recognised as such by many of us. Indeed, so much have true values been inverted, that sometimes it is even mistaken for light.

So the true message of Christmas has to do with the salvation of the soul. The rest, peace, goodwill and so on, is peripheral to that central point. Now this means three things. First of all, it means we have a soul. An immortal part of us that is not derived from or determined by the body, or even the mind as normally considered, and which will survive death. Secondly, that soul requires salvation. It is not in a good state at the moment. It certainly needs to get somewhere other than where it currently is. And thirdly, salvation is possible. The light exists but we must acknowledge and accept this light. We must recognise it and allow it to illumine us for, though it may be supremely powerful, it is not coercive and will only come when invited. The most powerful thing in the universe enters this world as a weak, defenceless baby. What a teaching there is in that!

There are those who would like to rebrand Christmas as a pagan winter festival, a sort of eat, drink and be merry Saturnalia. And there is nothing wrong with that unless you think this is all there is to it. Being merry is an excellent thing, and eating and drinking are rather good too. But tomorrow we die. What happens then? The entry of the light of Christ into this world tells us what may happen if we accept that light into our heart. This does not simply mean acknowledging with our mind that Christ is the Lord or something of that nature. That is a purely external thing. There is a big difference between Christ as a person out there, and the light that he embodied. I am not saying the two are separate but the one informs the other not vice versa. It is this light that you must accept and strive to be illumined by if you would embrace the true spirit of Christmas. For Christ does not want your mind, he wants your heart. It is his dearest wish that we break out of our self-inflicted prisons (our egos, if you like) and join him in his heavenly kingdom. This will eventually require death and resurrection but to begin with the entrance to Christ's kingdom is through the heart, and Christmas is the key that will unlock the door.

Some readers may be surprised by the overtly Christian nature of this post, given some of my other writings here. Partly this is because of the time of year. The post reflects that. But I would also say that, even though I do not think of myself as a conventional Christian in the external sense, my experiences with the Masters and my exploration of many spiritual traditions have never taken away my basic sense that it is in Christ that all teachings are consummated. I have always seen him as the supreme saviour of the world and, though there are other valid spiritual paths, the light of God shines most brightly through the figure of Jesus Christ.

It is often said that all religions are one on the level of mystical experience and only separated by their dogmas and doctrines which are ultimately outer things. That may be so but it does not mean that all religions are equally true. There is a fundamental impasse, for example, between Buddhism and Christianity in terms of how they view the Creator God, never mind the centrality of Christ in the scheme of things. I believe that the Christian view is the more correct one and comes from a higher revelation. Besides which, mystical experience is all very well but it really only points to the unity of consciousness on a supra-formal level, and entry into this state is not the primary goal of the spiritual life. At one time I might have thought it was but it's clear from the teachings of the Masters (and many others, of course) that the purpose of the spiritual life is not the attainment of some state of supreme consciousness. It is the sanctification of the soul. In other words, it is not attaining a personal enlightenment, nor any kind of experience, non-dual or otherwise. Rather it is fitting oneself, through repentance, purification, self-sacrifice and whatever else it takes, to receive the grace of God thereby allowing oneself to enter a full and complete relationship with Him which means deeper and deeper union. To think otherwise is to put the cart before the horse. This truth is taught most effectively and revealed most clearly in the figure of Christ and through the teachings of Christianity.

The nature of life, with its complexities amidst fundamental simplicity, equal significance of the One and the Many, essential balance and complementarity of sameness and difference, and importance of goodness, beauty and truth, is just what one would expect if at root it were a Trinity of Persons and not mere impersonal abstraction. Subject, object and the relationship between them. This is just a fancy way of saying that God is Love. Only Christianity fully understands this. As a result only Christianity really values the person, the individual and all that comes from the reality of the individual. Thus to say, as we are wont to do nowadays, that all religions share the same universal values is not quite true. Certainly they share many values and agree that the spiritual is fundamental but they do not agree on precisely what the spiritual is or on the true nature of the spiritual. Only Christianity fully accepts the personal nature of reality and because of that is able to see the purpose of Creation, explain the nature of evil, and understand the essential quality, reason for existence and goal of the human being. This is not to disparage any other religion for all undoubtedly contain truth and offer guidance. But it is something worth pointing out at Christmas, at a time when the relevance of Christianity is being attacked by its opponents, misunderstood and trivialised by many of its exponents and forgotten by the rest of us.