Being Alone

The serious spiritual seeker of today will often find himself or herself alone in the world. Not necessarily literally so as in the case of a recluse or hermit, but in terms of companionship or finding something in common with associates and even family then, yes, alone.

This is for various reasons. To begin with, there just aren't that many people who really are serious about spiritual things so the pool to draw upon is not large. Note that I am not talking about people who are merely religious in an external sense or even those who might be interested in spiritual things but still lead a normal life which actually reflects more of what they are. In this context, I am referring to people who understand that this world is not the true home of man, and who seek to deepen that awareness. This is the most important thing, if not the only important thing, in their lives. These people know themselves to be something more than the earthbound personality here below and that knowledge rules their life. This very fact separates them from others for whom, even if religious or spiritually inclined, the personality, the familiar self of name and form, is who they identify themselves with. Its aims, fears, likes and dislikes are what motivates them. For the true disciple, these are secondary to the burning desire to know God.

Those whose inner awareness is awakening to the higher worlds tend to isolate themselves on that very account. Or rather it is the fact of their awareness that isolates them from others who are not so awakened. Obviously, their awareness separates them from materialists and atheists with whom it is difficult to find common ground but, as we have just seen, so it does from religious and spiritual people who still see their being in terms of how it is conceived to be by the conventions of this world. If someone identifies himself with his natural self, that is, with the self as it appears to be in this world, it is difficult for someone else who is beginning to realise that he is the spiritual soul, and not merely the threefold lower self, to form a relationship with that person. This is not a question of pride or superiority. It is simply an inevitable result of awakening to higher consciousness. It can turn to pride, of course, because we may be awakening to the higher state but are still immersed in the material self but, if it does, that is because we are reacting to the higher state from within the mentality of the lower one.

So, we separate ourselves from the mass of humanity by virtue of the fact that we perceive reality differently. Our goals and aspirations are different in that they are not focused on this world. But very often we are also separated from our fellow men and women by God as he seeks to bring us nearer to himself. For it is a fact that we can only really begin to know God when our hearts are fixed on nothing in this world. Sometimes we detach ourselves, at others we are detached. We might be isolated for the purposes of our own spiritual development because it can be hard to grow spiritually when surrounded by the distractions of this world. Being alone can also constitute a test of one's seriousness and spiritual integrity and, by forcing oneself back on one's own resources, it helps one to become spiritually self-reliant which is the aim for all disciples, especially in this modern age.

Loneliness can be a hard burden to bear but it is often the precursor to initiation of some kind. Not in the sense of dramatic expansions of consciousness but in that of moving on to a deeper understanding of life and a more mature spiritual outlook. If it comes to you, think of it as a gift. It means you are starting to rise above this world and being prepared for entry to the higher ones. It is a betwixt and between condition representing the passage from one state of being and knowing to another and thus, as uncomfortable as it may be while it lasts, it should be seen as something temporary that is the preparation for fuller knowledge of spiritual life.

More on the Masters

I've not written anything about the Masters for a while and, since drawing attention to their existence was the original purpose of this blog and its parent book, I will remedy that now with some thoughts on what they are not. This might seem a strange way to approach the subject but some of the problems preventing a wider acceptance of such beings among serious spiritual seekers come about because of the travesties and simplifications that have been associated with their name over the last century or so. I wrote about this a bit in the book but it's an important matter so I would like to consider the question at further length here.

There are a number of individuals and groups claiming contact with elevated supernatural beings whom they may or may not designate as Masters. But practically always these beings speak from a vaguely New Age kind of perspective and that the Masters who spoke to me never did. Their teachings, and they themselves, demonstrated the best of tradition but carried forward into (I consider) a higher form suitable for the current time in which the spiritual goal is to know God within while, at the same time, being fully aware of his transcendent reality. That is to say, to take the steps required for full divinisation of the soul which was never denied as in some Eastern religions but regarded as something like a seed planted in matter that could eventually grow into full spiritual bloom.

My teachers were not overtly Christian in the way they presented themselves, but their teaching fell solidly into a traditional spiritual pattern. There was no talk of an upcoming Aquarian Age (as so often was the case with psychically received material at the time) and no modernist rationalisations in which a God-centred spirituality is subordinated to humanistic ideals. These teachers were advocates of timeless truth, not in any way aligning themselves with a 20th century mentality under the guise of being up to date. My feeling is that any spiritual communication that accepts or endorses any of the modernist revolutions, sexual, political, cultural and so on, and disruptions to the natural order should be regarded with suspicion. That is not to say that some of these may not be reactions to new impulses raining down on humanity from higher planes but they are usually so distorted that they become parodies of the influence that has inspired them. A prime example would be contemporary leftist beliefs which are clearly materialistic misinterpretations of spiritual impulses. Minds unable or unwilling to comprehend and acknowledge spiritual reality react to its energies on a material level thereby totally distorting its truths. Indeed, worse than that, they increasingly invert these truths by applying them where they have no basis in reality. They treat the material as the spiritual which means the real spiritual is driven out.

Many modern versions of Masters are derived from Theosophy which means either Madame Blavatsky or her successors Charles Leadbetter and Annie Besant who purported to be talking about the same beings as Madame B. but presented them in a very different guise. I don't doubt their sincerity or belief that what they were promoting was true, but I think they were led astray by their psychism in that they (especially Leadbetter) could not distinguish the real from the unreal when it came to what was revealed to them through their psychic powers of clairvoyance, clairaudience and the like. This is a very common problem and accounts for a large number of false claimants to contact with the Masters. In my view no modern Theosophical or Theosophically derived or inspired group is in touch with the true Masters though they may be with their so called astral reflections. To make sense of that phrase we have to understand that the next world has many levels and in these the energy of emotion or thought can create external manifestations of itself. These thought forms can then be built up into apparently real objective things and assume the likeness of a real being which is even able to dispense standard spiritual wisdom though only on the level of those whose energy has fed into it. This is why you never get much that is truly profound out of them.

Groups carrying on in the Theosophical mindset and supposedly in contact with the named Theosophical Masters such as Morya, St Germain etc, are undoubtedly victims of this 'astralitis' or at least their leaders are. Any bona fide energies behind that movement (and I am prepared to believe there may have been such at one time) have definitely withdrawn themselves from it as it descended into a fascination with signs and wonders and lost touch with genuine spirituality.  That's why Krishnamurti rejected it all as shallow and spurious though he went to the other extreme and threw out the idea of Masters altogether just because of false and illusory representations of them. He had the misfortune of being brought up in a spiritual circus and understandably reacted against that though he might have been wiser to sort out the wheat from the chaff since wheat there most certainly is even if there is considerably more chaff as manifested in this world.

A few years ago, out of curiosity, I went to a talk by a modern claimant to contact with the Theosophical Masters. Some of what he said made sense but both he and the bulk of the audience were far too focused on occult marvels and the incidence of apparently miraculous events in their lives, either real or imagined. This hearkened back to the sensationalism of an earlier time and is a perennial problem with those drawn to the occult and esoteric. I am reminded that "it is a wicked generation that asks for a sign", though perhaps spiritually immature would be a fairer description. But most of the audience seemed to assume that just because they believed in higher truths they were, in the jargon, initiates, and the person giving the talk clearly thought himself to be such.  Unfortunately, one of the Masters with whom he claimed to be in contact was JMH who features in the books by Cyril Scott and is an obvious invention. Scott's books are a pious fiction and, while he may have had some psychic contact with a Master, his character JMH who dispenses occult wisdom in the polite early 20th century society of London and Boston is a fantasy of his own, a composite from various sources. Of course, this fantasy may have acquired a kind of psychic existence because it was believed in by a number of readers of the books just like Long John Silver or some other popular literary personage might do, and that is what the lecturer would have contacted and maybe communicated with, believing himself to be in touch with a real being. But it was merely a sort of psychic hologram on the astral plane, that world between the physical and the spiritual in which matter is sufficiently fine to be manipulated by thought, a non-physical but still completely phenomenal world. Another explanation would be that some discarnate spirit assumed this identity for its own ends. In neither case would a real Master be involved.

True Masters do not identify themselves with any particular earthly personality. Their sole aim is to teach the truths of the spirit to their disciples. They do not resort to occult or esoteric terminology nor to mystification and nor do they sensationalise in any way. All these things tend to glamorise and direct a pupil's mind away from spiritual truth in its essence to a concern with phenomenal things. In sharp distinction to the false variety, a genuine spiritual Master does not encourage focus on himself but directs it always to God. Perhaps this above all is what marks out the real coin from the counterfeit.

England Led the World into Materialism

England was probably the first country to adopt the mindset that led to the materialisation of consciousness and the present-day attitudes in which God has no place. It was a pioneer in many areas that formed the contemporary world. You can't trace this back to any single formational event or time but Protestantism was certainly one step towards the separation of the natural and supernatural worlds, and then the English Civil War was another. One religious, the other political. The fact that both of these things may have had positive elements to them is beside the point. The basic truth is that they opened up a gap between the spiritual and the material which, once opened, could be expanded exponentially until the point was reached at which the spiritual was so far removed it no longer existed in any real sense and could just be denied reality. That is now. Consciousness has effectively contracted to the material which is not just primary but all there is. This has affected even religion which is largely earthbound and moribund these days. That contraction may have been beneficial in some areas, such as the development of certain qualities of selfhood and the exploration and dominance of the physical world, but these cannot be said to compensate for the spiritual loss that has accompanied them.

continued on Albion Awakening

Some Reflections on the Meaning of Right and Left

Most people I encounter nowadays lean towards the left in some way, if not from the political or economic standpoint then almost certainly from the cultural one. It's the conventional view in our post-spiritual world and to express ideas at variance with it is regarded with increasing suspicion. The traditional understanding of life seems to have been swept away over the past few decades, and often not just swept away but turned on its head as well. I would never advocate a full return to the past since you don't go forward by going back to where you started. Besides, the past was full of ignorance in many respects. But sometimes when you have taken a wrong turning you do have to retrace your steps or, at least, you have to cut across country to get to where the old path would have led if it carried on going in a proper direction.

Right and left would seem to echo deeper realities than purely political ones, and that makes sense when you appreciate that this is a world built on the interaction between complementary opposites. I think that if you strip them back to basics, to what might be their initiating distinguishing impulse, you could say that the right is based on quality and the left on quantity. Alternatively put, it might be said that the right is based on the vertical aspect of life (hence the focus on hierarchy) while the left follows the horizontal (hence equality). And from this you see that both have a certain validity and also that there is room for both. You can also see why the right (the true right) is religious and the left is materialistic.

But, though there is room for both and though both are, in their different ways, necessary, one does have precedence over the other just as the vertical axis has precedence over the horizontal. Quality must come before quantity just as, on a loom, the warp is woven before the weft is added.

Life is made of spirit and matter working together but it should be obvious that the spiritual comes before the material in this pairing. The latter is actually an expression of the former. Now, it might seem odd to compare the right to the spiritual but I submit that this is precisely what it is ultimately grounded in when it is true to its calling because of its awareness of the primacy of God. Just because many people on the right today have no spiritual leaning does not invalidate this. It simply means that their attitude has been corrupted by the materialistic beliefs of the left. They have lost their true centre and abandoned religion but this means they are right only superficially and their 'rightness' is heavily coloured by leftist assumptions.

That the left relates to the material should not be hard to see. Since its beginning, it has made no bones about its focus on this world and righting the wrongs, as it sees them, of this world, and it does so from a materialistic point of view. When it adopts a spiritual attitude, you will find that its spirituality is cast in a human-centric form, and always social matters come before spiritual ones, the latter being seen in the light of the former.

It is my contention that increasingly over the last 50 years the left has been used by the demonic powers to undermine human civilisation. That is why the focus of the left has gone from alleviating poverty to a near obsession with inverting the natural order of being. Naturally, this demonic campaign has been dressed up in attractive clothing and most of those fighting it believe themselves to be at the vanguard of progress. In some respects they might be since the dark powers are far from stupid and know how to sugar the pill just enough to make it go down. Also, old ways of thinking did need to change to keep up with the general evolution of human consciousness which is why it is not good enough simply to retreat to religious traditionalism. But generally, I'm afraid to say, most of those on the left today are like Lenin's useful idiots, and it has to be pointed out that they are only able to be used in this way because of character defects they might have that can be taken advantage of, envy and resentment being the among the obvious ones but there is also spiritual naivety and, most importantly, lack of imagination. True imagination, that is. As we know, many contemporary artists are on the left but you will find that their imagination is usually grounded and lacks vision. Strong on the horizontal axis but weak on the vertical.

I am not saying that those on the right are paragons of virtue. We are all sinners from the spiritual perspective. That is the legacy of the Fall, that almost archetypal time when we lost connection to the divine. But if such people acknowledge the reality of God, as they should do if they truly are on the right in a more than outer sense, then they are at least facing the proper direction. Moreover, they have this advantage over those on the left. They are generally concerned with real things and with people rather than abstract concepts. They care about those they actually know and who actually exist rather than an amorphous and non-existent 'humanity'. They are realists not ideologues who see everything and everybody through the distorting lens of ideology. They are interested in real individuals not theories about abstractions.

Nothing is completely clear cut and simple. At least nothing is in this world and at this time. In fact and in truth everything is clear cut and simple but here in this world we all have good and evil within us, or the tendencies to such. A person on the right is not better than one on the left. Human beings are a complicated mix of all sorts of things, of mixed motivations, aspirations and ideas of what is good and what is not. But, in general terms, if one is pulled towards acknowledging the reality of God one becomes more aware of the truths of tradition and less drawn towards the idea of remaking human beings in a false, materialistic image which is what the left is hell-bent on doing now. 

I said earlier that there is a sense in which we need both left and right, and I think that is true. One, if not balanced by the other, will tend to manifest the defects of its qualities. So if I say that right is right that does not mean that right alone is right. It's like the two commandments. Love God is the primary commandment, the one on the right. But love your neighbour as yourself is also necessary and this is the commandment that a true left would have as its motto. But you cannot do the second properly unless you do the first to begin with. The second must come from the first. It must arise out of the first. If it tries to come from itself, it is false which is why so many on the left, for all their fine words, are usually to be seen as fakes, uttering words which do not come from the heart and are ideas about goodness not goodness itself. Goodness is only in God and if he is denied there can be no true goodness.

For the right, God comes before Man but for the left the relationship is reversed. Doesn't that make it clear that ultimately the left is just another attempt at disturbing the natural order of being? It takes an aspect of truth, which does have it place in the whole, but removes that from its natural place in the scheme of things to try to make it foundational. It is a disruption of hierarchy, and one more bite of the apple that is supposed to make men gods without reference to their Creator.  I suppose you could say that the first leftist hasn't changed his tactics. These have just become more sophisticated.

You might have followed me up until this point but I am now going to say something that may seem controversial. I have said that we need both right and left as each can balance and complement the other and prevent things going to extremes. But I have also said that the right should be the leading force of the two, the one that sets the tone, with the left acting as a remedial influence, a counteracting pull to proper harmony as well as contributing its own positive qualities. But it should not take precedence. There is a clear parallel here with male and female, and it seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that the right is largely masculine and the left feminine. And once you grasp this the state of the world today becomes easier to understand. As cultures tend to do in the days of their decline, our world has become feminised and this is one of the reasons it has lost its way. For when the feminine seeks to usurp the leadership position, when it rejects love in its desire for power, the natural order of being is disrupted. The search for truth is made secondary and the priority becomes human feelings. I should add that the feminine forces are aided in this by secondary masculine ones who have felt left behind and undervalued by the previous established hierarchy. Here again envy and resentment come into play and work to undermine legitimate authority.

Of course, many people will regard this analysis as absurd and see it as coming from prejudice or fear rather than basic human intuition which is what I would maintain. That is because they are not acknowledging what lies beneath the surface of reality. When you look into the inner state of the world and of human beings then you can see the machinations that have brought about our current spiritual malaise. Ignore that and you cannot really understand what is going on. How can you when you lack the proper facts?

This post is really just an amplification of the meaning of the archetypal realities of Adam and Eve, disrupted by the Fall and then put right and carried forward by the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. In one sense, we are currently repeating the Fall. The only way to put that right is through acknowledging the reality of Christ and living that both inwardly and outwardly. 

What does this mean? First of all, it means rejecting the world, the flesh and the devil. However to do that you have to know what these are and they come in many guises not just the obvious ones. Be wise to them all. Then it means taking Christ as the pattern of your soul and conforming yourself to his reality. This has both an inner and an outer dimension and both must be taken fully into account. This is easy if you have seen properly and without distorting your vision by any one of the three impediments to truth just mentioned. That is to say, it's easy to understand but it is arduous to put into practice because you are taking a recalcitrant material, your soul, and trying to knock it into shape. It is very resistant but persistence and faith will bring results.

The inner dimension is the fact of Christ in you, the Christ light within your very being. But this light can only be kindled through the outer dimension which is the reality of Christ as himself. You cannot truly awaken Christ within if you do not submit yourself to the living God. By the same token, it is not enough to acknowledge God above if you don't seek him within as well.

To conclude, politics must end in spirituality. If it doesn't, and is seen only in its own light, it is redundant and, more than that, harmful. Right and left have no proper meaning in themselves but insofar as the former acknowledges that which is beyond itself while the latter does not, seeing life as political rather than spiritual, it is undoubtedly the truer option.