The Spiritual Destructiveness of Leftism

The thing I am calling leftism has existed since the Garden of Eden but never in so widespread and dominant a form as now. In its modern form it started in the late 18th century and became steadily more powerful as the centuries progressed, and it did so because of the abandonment of the sense of transcendence.

That abandonment, essentially, is why leftism is spiritually destructive but it is not the whole story. Leftism is built on resentment, envy and the desire to pull down. It appeals to those with these tendencies and then encourages their propagation, rebranding them as virtue and so drawing in others who may not share these vices themselves but who are susceptible to the propaganda put out because of a lack of spiritual attunement. The devil plays for both sides and the modern right, which is in many ways a product of leftism, is often motivated by greed and selfishness. Nonetheless, in itself the right uncontaminated by leftist ideology rests on love of God, of country, of family and observance of the natural order of creation while the left rebels against all these things. That is why the right builds up while the left tears down. It tears down to a supposed level playing field but that ends up as ground level. The fact that the left can't build is why it appears and spreads in relatively late stages of civilizational cycles where it will dress itself in the garb of compassion and concern for the underdog and the victim. But really it is all about dismantling hierarchies because of envy.

Leftism is a political attitude second and a spiritual one first. It can be hard to define in purely political terms because the object of its focus changes. White working class males, once its chief concern, are now effectively despised. This shows that what really drives it is the spirit of opposition, firstly, to established authority but ultimately to God. Even when it becomes the authority it must project an enemy to which it is the valiant underdog.

How can human beings know the right way to live if they don't know what they are? Liberal nihilism, the end state of all leftism, is based on the denial of our reality as spiritual beings.  Progress for the liberal progressive rests on the idea of man as a purely material being with any spirituality merely the extension of this material being into a supposedly spiritual space. The spiritual person wants progress because life is growth but it is spiritual growth that matters and that is always from the roots. The leftist tears up roots.

It's tiresome just to criticise but unless you know what's wrong you cannot know what is right. Leftism must be rejected because it is anti-spiritual. The promised land it offers can never be reached or, when it is, it will be found to be the wasteland. The right way for humans to live in this world can only come when the reality of God is acknowledged, but this must be the true God not some manmade imitation such as exists in many, I am tempted to say most, religions. God is spirit and only those who approach him as spirit can ever know him or themselves or even other human beings as they really are.

There is No Hope in This World

 There is no time more spiritually perilous than when you get what you want. In bad times you can more easily turn to God as the world is not offering you anything, but when the world does offer you something, whether that be money, fame, power or even the kind of political success that you believe will make the world a better place, then you need to watch out.

Religion exists to point us to the spiritual. The spiritual, by definition, is not the material even if you say that ultimately all is one. Ultimately, all is one, no doubt, but there is nothing ultimate about our life in a body in this world. Here, there very definitely is a split between the spiritual and the material. We have both within us, and when I say within I do mean that because thought, in the normal sense, is material even if it only exists because of the spiritual. It is possible because we are spiritual beings but in itself it is based on material processes and is incapable of discerning spiritual reality so it belongs to the material world. Thus, we have both the spiritual and the material within us but we are called to overcome the material and submit it to the spiritual, which means the spiritual on its own terms not as it may be viewed or interpreted by the material component of our being.

All true spiritual teachings tell us to renounce this world. Heaven is not here and is not meant to be here so political triumphs will never bring it about. Wasn't that Judas Iscariot's mistake? He thought Jesus was here to defeat the Romans and restore a Jewish kingdom in this world, but Jesus said that his followers would be hated by the world. He didn't say they would be hated by this world or that world but by the world meaning any kind of worldly society. That is because those that follow Jesus see that nothing in this world can lead to eternal life. The very nature of the world is against that, despite its many beauties.

To say there is no hope in this world does not mean there is no hope. In fact, it means just the opposite. There is great hope, wonderful cause for hope, but it is in heaven not here. If you get what you want you can become satisfied or content, but that means that your motivation for finding the true path to heaven is weakened. 

So, when things seem to be going your way, be careful. It is hard for the rich to get to heaven, and riches are not just monetary.

A New Dawn or a Setting Sun?

 Yesterday was a text book example of the truth of the saying that two wrongs don't make a right (pun intended). The only reason anyone can possibly think we have turned a corner is the contrast between the old and the new. The new may oppose the old but only as East opposes West, and we need to go North.

It's a classic case of the devil playing for both sides. When one side overplays its hand, he has the other side waiting in the wings to take over, and though it may correct some of the excesses of its supposed opponent it doesn't actually do real good in any serious sense. We will continue on the same trajectory, albeit by a slightly more scenic route. I see this as a self-selecting process whereby an individual's true motivation and powers of discernment are put to the test. Don't be deceived by something that may appear not quite as bad as what it replaces into thinking that it is good. It is only there to divert you from the true good and accept a false substitute.

A Heroic Age

 I recall reading once that the Emperor Akbar, the great Mughal ruler of India who should figure on any top ten list of monarchs, said that saints cannot be kings nor kings saints. You can see what he meant. The demands of the job are quite different as are the skill sets required. Donald Trump is clearly no saint and his opponents attack him on that account regularly, but it seems that even when their arrows hit the target they just fall off. He remains unscathed. Still, he is no saint but then a real saint would not be able to do the job he appears to have been selected to do, and would not want to either. Their concerns would lie elsewhere.

In Hesiod's poem Works and Days there are five Ages of Man which go from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Iron with each age signifying a descent in human happiness, goodness and nobility. The men of the Golden Age are wise, pious and benevolent while the Silver Age population start off reasonably well but are eventually destroyed for their impiety before the gods. There follow the men of the Bronze Age but they descend into violence, and their end comes in a great flood. Finally we arrive at the Iron Age when life is just hard grind. There is no honour among men who lie and feel no shame. It's a sad and sorry time for everyone. The Roman poet Ovid has a similar view of life. He says that the Golden Age was a time of justice, peace and innocence. Humanity was naturally good but it knew little of the arts and sciences. These came about in the Silver Age as a gift from Jupiter who took over from Saturn as the principal deity. Once again the Bronze Age is a time of war though Ovid says men still respected the gods. However, religious feeling is quite lost in the Iron Age which becomes the most materialistic of times as men dig mines deep into the earth in their search for prosperity, that being all they care about. Truth and decency are distinguished only by their absence.

You will note I said Hesiod has five ages but I only mentioned four. Ovid only has the conventional four, but between the Bronze and Iron Ages Hesiod inserts another which is the Heroic Age. The Bronze Age ends in war and destruction and the Iron Age is a time of universal decline, but the Heroic Age represents a kind of restoration of past glory. It doesn't last but it is there all the same. A time of heroes who are certainly flawed but still are heroes and they bring about an age when the downward trajectory is held back for a period.

The theory of cycles allows for the recapitulation of the major cycle within each section of a minor cycle. There are even further recapitulations of the pattern within these sub-cycles. We are undoubtedly in the Iron Age and have been for a while. But perhaps the elements of the major cycle are repeated on many levels and perhaps, if Hesiod is right, we are due another Heroic Age or mini version thereof. It won't last but that doesn't matter because these ages only relate to the material world and our true home and destiny are elsewhere. But, in terms of the material world, perhaps we are going to experience a small restoration or, at least, a temporary arresting of the slide downwards.

The Second World War and its Aftermath

 Seeing the path the world has taken over the last 80 years I have occasionally wondered whether the demonic forces behind World War Two were not so much aiming to win a conventional victory as hoping to use the reaction against the defeated Nazis to promote their agenda to bring down Western civilisation and, more to the point since that was already on the turn, corrupt human souls.

This is not to say the Nazis weren't the tools of darkness but dare one suggest without being accused of contrarian revisionism, that they were not uniquely evil either? They, and especially Hitler, have been made into figures of archetypal wickedness, devils in human form, and it probably suits our self-image to cast them in that light because it makes us appear virtuous, but this is a problem because investing them with such unique evil gives the impression that everything they believed must have been wrong. Consequently, it becomes easy to define good as the opposite of that. This false idea then provides a fruitful area for exploitation in that morality becomes anything that is anti-Nazi.

Let's see how this plays out. The Nazis believed in Aryan supremacy so whatever works against that is good. Anti-racism, mass immigration, belittling one's own people and one's own country to the point that you accept or even welcome their disappearance if you are an Aryan, i.e.white, all this is good because it is the opposite of what the Nazis believed. If it's good we go along with it even if it is against our own interests and our better judgment. The feeling we should do what is right for some and the glow of moral superiority for others overcome any lingering instincts of self-preservation.

The Nazis were against sexual deviance, notwithstanding the personal behaviour of some of them. Therefore, it becomes obvious that sexual liberation is a good thing. To oppose that is to be a cruel fascist, a control freak, a prude, a Nazi. To want to restrict love, you must be a hateful person. Love, or what is called love, is a justification for anything. (By the way, a lot of misunderstandings could be avoided if we, like the ancient Greeks, had more than one word for the many different feelings covered by the simple word 'love'.)

The Nazis wished to ban degenerate art, Entartete Kunst, which we know simply as modern art. They saw this as un-German in inspiration and effect, criticising it for its "Freemasonic, Jewish or Communist nature" (Wikipedia). Their defeat left anyone with similar doubts about this kind of art, that it did not reflect the higher worlds as art traditionally was supposed to do but was more in tune with infernal regions, in a difficult position. If the Nazis thought modern art bad, then it must be good. If you too think it's bad, well then, you are a Nazi sympathiser. At the very least, you belong to an outmoded, out of touch and ignorant group.

And so on. Now, in order to stop any latent Nazi tendencies to rise up once again we must encourage all those things they were against. Evil then spreads not by force of arms but through propaganda and even morality. And this, I would say, is because we have allowed ourselves to see the war against Hitler as an absolute good against absolute evil situation. As a result, for the last 80 years World War Two has become a replacement foundation myth for Western civilisation. And yet it was really just a war like many others. We need to put it behind us and no longer define ourselves in terms of our reaction to it but it seems more important now than it ever was. When I was growing up in the '60s it did not form a big part of my history lessons but my children's history syllabus seemed to revolve almost entirely around it. They were taught a lot about Hitler and the Holocaust and practically nothing about Alfred the Great and the Armada.

Maybe the reaction against the Nazi beliefs became Plan B for the dark forces but, in terms of defeating the Christian West, that plan has been most effective. And speaking of Christianity, one should note that this was the one thing the Nazis were against that has not benefitted from an anti-Nazi reactionary support. Coincidence?

The defeat of Germany prompted the emigration of many European Marxists to America where they spread their ideological poison, first in academia and then throughout the culture, in the process capturing all the institutions which now work against the nations they were set up to support. Whether this was part of the plan to begin with or whether it became the plan after military defeat is irrelevant at this point. The fact is the West allowed itself to be infected by a spiritual virus which has caused the sicknesses we suffer from today. Along with Russia, the West may have won the war on the battlefield but in that victory there lay the seeds for its subsequent defeat.

This piece is not written as part of the recent Churchill-bashing trend. Churchill was clearly a complicated character. My friend Michael Lord knew him quite well in his later life and would sometimes be invited to lunch at his house at Chartwell. On one occasion he watched as Churchill fed his pet goose pate de foie gras from the dinner table, making the bird, in effect, a cannibal.  A jolly joke. But, though one might wonder whether the state of Europe after the war was any better than it would have been without a war, with Britain ruined and Eastern Europe communist, it must have seemed at the time as though there was no other option in the face of Nazi aggression, and Churchill was probably the right man to lead the country at that time. However, one may still be permitted to speculate as to whether the dark forces saw the war and its aftermath as a means to infect the West with atheistic communism as it had to that point proved reasonably resistant to that spiritual disease, a disease to which we have now succumbed if you look at it, as you should, as something much more than an economic system.

There are many people talking and writing about the, to all intents and purposes, communist takeover of the West and how we are being taught by this ideology to hate ourselves and all our past achievements. Our countries are being flooded with aliens and our cultures debased. Feminism is destroying the family and masculinity, which, properly functioning, might arrest the decline, is derided. However, we can never understand what is happening until we see the assault as primarily spiritual and the object of its attack being the soul and its relation to God. It is to sever this relationship that is the purpose of everything else. Jesus said "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else will be added to you". He could just as well have said "Abandon the search for the kingdom of heaven and you will lose everything else." We would do well to bear this in mind. It is no good resisting communism if you do not do so with the full remembrance of God for what communism is chiefly all about is the  replacement of God with man but man in his fallen mode. This is how we can easily identify its Satanic origin.

Right and Left

 The cause of many of today's woes is often said to be rooted in the ever-increasing influence of what is loosely termed leftism, an influence to which politics, culture and even religion and science are submitted. It is the dominant ideology in the West. As the definition of the word frequently shifts in focus, it might be helpful to look at the underlying forces for what eventually becomes a tendency to right or left in an individual's mind. This takes us, as it were, behind the curtain and shows that what lies underneath an overt political position is something deeper, something that relates to our approach to reality and, ultimately, to God. I should add that most of what is called right today has absorbed much of the leftist ethos and become just a diluted form of its supposed opponent so you cannot identify public and political right and left with the way I am using these descriptive terms here.

In the end times things come to a point which means all souls must choose one side or the other. The famous sheep and goats. I am not saying anything so crude as right is good and left is bad because, as things stand, neither right nor left are spiritually healthy. Also, there are elements of truth in both sides as there must be since no one would willingly choose naked evil. But the good is often used to mask an underlying spiritual rottenness and an excuse to justify it. However, though the right is not in any way properly in line with the truth of God it usually does not directly oppose it as leftism, for all the ostensible good in it, almost always does.

These are the characteristics in a person which mark an inclination to right or left. They may be responded to on an instinctive level rather than adhered to overtly, and in the case of the negative qualities they will be dressed up to resemble something finer. But these are fundamental motivations that form an individual's outlook on life.

Right

Belief in God - Freedom - Love of something concrete whether it be country, religion, nature - Hierarchy - Truth - Common Sense - Primary motivation is for certain things - Respect - Honour.

Left

Rejection of God - Ideology - Control - Equality - Primary motivation is against certain things - Resentment - Rebellion.

A leftist will say this is prejudiced and paints one side in its best colours and the other in its worst. He will say it ignores the determining humanism of the left and its compassion for the needy and the downtrodden. And he will say what about the greed and lack of empathy of the right? By his lights he has a point but, as I said, I am trying to uncover what lies at the deepest level of leftism as its psychological motivation. No doubt, many leftists do feel themselves to be inspired by humanistic compassion, and perhaps, to a degree, they are, but if you go to a deeper level you will find the rejection of God and this is true even of religious leftists who will reinterpret God to fit their own desires. And as for the greed and lack of empathy of the right, I am not talking about economic systems here but moral and cultural standpoints which are much more important. There are materialistic forms of the right which are severed from their roots. These are irrelevant to my case. The left is always materialistic even when it is spiritual.

The first leftist was Satan, fired by envy and resentment of God. The first humanist was also Satan when he told Adam and Eve to disobey their Creator and seek to become gods themselves. This points us to the truth that the best definition of leftism may be that it is the rejection of God. Not necessarily disbelief in God because Satan clearly believed in God. But he rejected God because he wanted to put himself, his wishes and his desires, in God's place. This is the root of leftism.

Note: Everybody has everything within them. What matters is what predominates.

The Cassandra Syndrome

 I don't know how many readers have experienced this phenomenon but I find these days if I speak to anyone, even in watered-down tones, about the parlous state of the world, the country, the culture and the human soul, eyes roll and I'm told I'm talking nonsense. I have only one acquaintance in the real world who would go along with any of that. Most people simply cannot accept that the Western world in the 21st century stands on the edge of a precipice. Perhaps I just don't know the right people.

Cassandra, as I am sure you know, was a Trojan princess who was cursed by the god Apollo because she turned him down after he had given her the gift of prophecy in exchange for sexual favours. Her fate thereafter was that everything she prophesied would be true but no-one would believe her. This has echoes of Mark 6:4 when Jesus said that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and among his own kin and in his own house. I am no prophet but the spiritual state of the world is so bad that anyone who has the slightest awareness of reality ought to be able to see it. The remarkable thing is most don't and I am tempted to say they won't either. They refuse to do so because they are too firmly ensconced in their own comfortable pseudo-reality. They will go along with the clearly biased and fictitious mainstream narrative as we saw in the events of 2020 and again more recently, and get quite angry if holes in this are presented to them. They will talk about science when it appears to back them up but utterly reject it when it does not.

Why is this?  One reason is that most people are still cushioned by comfort and relative wealth. They don't want their boat to be rocked. As long as the trains run on time, so to speak, they will believe everything is fine not realising that when an electric fan is turned off the blades continue to revolve for a while but more and more slowly until they stop. The time to be concerned is when the current is cut not when the blades stop by which time it may be too late.

Then we live in a culture which has become heavily feminised and such a culture no longer has truth as a priority. It is replaced by a relativistic attitude in which there is no higher or lower but everybody has to be accepted on their own terms because we're all equal. That way we all get along, supposedly. In such a nursery world truth can seem hard and ugly, threatening even, and so you ignore it but truth is what is and what is cannot be denied. If you do you will only bring greater suffering on yourself in the long term. The Trojans ignored Cassandra when she warned them about the Horse left behind by the Greeks. They brought it inside their gates and its foreign occupants destroyed them, a parallel which should give us pause for thought today. 

And then most people now have zero awareness of the spiritual reality of things. Religion has been destroyed in the UK, and the tried and tested traditional wisdom of the past has been sidelined for fashionable dogma. The takeover of the country's institutions, political, legal, educational, the media, by the forces of atheism and materialism is now complete. Some commentators speculate that these institutions have been the victims of deliberate sabotage as a result of Communist infiltration, and the process has been so insidious and so comprehensive that does to be seem the only reasonable explanation. However, even if this is what has happened we need to recognise that the agents carrying out the scheme in this world are the servants not the masters which doesn't make them any better, but we should know the ultimate source of the evil and that is supernatural.

How have they got away with this? One answer is suggested by Yeats in his prophetic poem The Second Coming when he sums up the situation in a couple of lines that have become well-known. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Evil hates good and that gives it its passionate intensity but most people's connection to the good is too feeble to make them fight for it, and this is doubly so when they have been indoctrinated to believe that fighting is morally wrong in itself because to fight is to hate. And so we are left with the strange situation in which actual hatred disguises itself as love and condemns supposed hatred, in reality love of the good, in order to delegitimise any opposition to itself.

But we have to fight for truth when it is under assault. Given the climate in which we currently live I should stress I mean fight with words and that even words must be chosen with care. Having said that, listen to what Jesus has to say in John 8:44 about the Pharisees of whom there are still a great many around today. 

"You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." 

Isn't this hate speech, to use a modern term? Maybe, but it comes from the Apostle of Love which should make us think. The fact is there is evil. It has a spiritual source and it has to be recognised for what it is and fought with all our strength.

The Trojans refused to listen to Cassandra because she disturbed them. They would rather close their minds to truth than accept reality because reality challenged their comfortable illusions. Most prophets bring bad news - that, after all, is their function, to call an erring community back to God or the gods. But Cassandra was right and if the Trojans had listened to her they might have avoided their utter destruction. 

The Continuing Sorrows of Albion

 I mentioned in a comment on Bruce Charlton's blog that what has been happening in England recently is that the Saxons are rebelling against their Norman rulers. That's true enough but it's also an over-simplification in that similar things are happening all over the Western world as the native populations show they have had enough of being ignored and replaced in their own countries by aliens who will not integrate with integrating meaning that the newcomers adopt the customs and ways of the indigenous people rather than requiring them to accept the newcomers' customs and ways.

You might say that the hard realities of blood and soil are coming up against the ivory tower abstract theorising of elites cushioned by wealth and power. These elites, because they are intellectually captivated by abstractions rather than recognising the concrete realities of such things as God, country, home and family, adopt the moral high ground, seeing themselves as the defenders of peace and harmony totally failing to understand that they have created a situation in which peace and harmony are increasingly difficult. Trotting out lazy accusations of racism and far right terrorism merely demonstrates the utter failure of the establishment, the politicians, the media, the universities, to admit their own responsibility and recognise how they have ignored and overriden the wishes of the native populace for many years in order to foist their own ideological agenda on an unwilling country.

Yes, you might say that in which case you could think that the establishment at least had relatively good intentions even if these were also naive and foolish. But there is another approach you could take and that is to see the whole stratagem as deliberate. No doubt, the middle ranking sections of the establishment pursued the historically disastrous policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism because they thought it was on message and/or personally advantageous but there would have been those who knew perfectly well what the consequences would be when a tipping point had been reached. They wanted to undermine national identity and damage communal trust and thereby create a situation in which Sorathic destruction would occur. For the goal is destruction of the West as it has been and the replacement of the nation states with a globalist tyranny, and if you doubt this ask yourselves why it is only the Western nations that are required to absorb vast numbers of unassimilable and culturally alien foreigners. That having been said, one must recognise that, though there is certainly a criminal element among some groups, these migrants mostly just follow ordinary human nature in that they are seeking a better life and are more comfortable with their traditional cultures. As are most people except the deracinated Western elites. But the current wave of immigrants have no real loyalty to or love for Great Britain so to put them on parity with the native British just because they have been given a passport is absurd. Nonetheless, they are still for the most part pawns being used by a section of the elites to bring about a certain desired end. It is these elites who should be condemned not the pawns.

Ultimately, all this is a battle in the spiritual war. What is taking place is inevitable in these End Times which doesn't mean there is nothing you can do about it but moral, national and societal decline are all hallmarks of the Kali Yuga in which we find ourselves. We have to use this to direct our attention to the salvation of the soul and part of that means we do not allow ourselves to be consumed by anger or hatred. That's the mistake of the rioting Saxons who forgot the old adage that two wrongs do not make a right. Their violent reaction, though no doubt born of frustration, has merely given the elites grounds for self-justification and done their cause more harm than good. Those of us who can see the spiritual picture have to be wiser and take a longer view.  All that matters is the state of your soul. That is the only thing you can really control. However, we do know that the good, the real spiritual good, will win in the end. Remember how in The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis, a very prescient story, Narnia was destroyed but the incorruptible beauty of the real Narnia, the one on which the earthly Narnia was patterned, remained in the higher worlds. That is true of all that we love in this world too.

The Continuing Slumbers of Albion

 It seems the British have decided to jump out of the frying pan into the fire and to exchange venal incompetents for a group of people ideologically committed to the destruction of the country as it has been. Could this be the moment when the sleep of Albion descends into nightmare?

It is understandable that the electorate wanted to punish the incumbent government, conservative in name only, but the choice they have made will plunge the country into deeper misery. I am not talking in economic or political terms so much here as, important as they are, those are secondary issues. I am referring to the spiritual darkness which will intensify under the new government as it pursues its agenda of dismantling the entirety of tradition and replacing it by rigid bureaucratic control and enforced egalitarianism or Eurocommunism as you might call it. Those who oppose this will be accused, like the early Christians, of being haters of humanity but the idea of love has long since been corrupted and used as a weapon to attack the good, the beautiful and the true. Freedom of thought will be increasingly curtailed with the excuse of safety, equality and fairness. The new prime minister has spoken of his desire to stamp out something called Islamophobia. This may be a cynical vote catcher but nevertheless only someone who has no love for his country or for Jesus Christ could speak in those terms.

The new UK government has achieved a landslide with a relatively small percentage of the vote. They have far more power than would normally be the case given the relative paucity of their support. They managed this because their opponents were split and one has to wonder if this was a tactic of those who pull the strings behind the scenes. I don't say the Reform party was consciously set up to give the left greater power but it has surely been used to do just that. I can understand why so many people turned to it because it asks some of the right questions but it doesn't have any real answers. The rot is too deep.

Bruce Charlton has spoken of the two forms of evil at play here, that which seeks control (Ahrimanic) and that which seeks destruction (Sorathic). As usual, his analysis is spot on. The previous government was Ahrimanic in a passive sense because it had no real beliefs, but the new one will be actively so because it does have beliefs though they are anti-God beliefs. Naturally, they are not framed like that but these beliefs spring from a rejection of God and the natural order of creation. We can never understand why the modern world is as it is until we realise that we are in a spiritual war. The enemy cannot win but it can do enormous damage to people's souls before it loses, and that is what the whole business is all about. And although the enemy cannot incarnate directly in the world, it can certainly influence and overshadow human beings that allow this because of their inner emptiness and spiritual rejection. This has become more of a likelihood.

Ultimately, none of this matters. Our task is only to recognise it and stay faithful to God. If humanity is to be healed then its spiritual sickness must come out. This is what we are witnessing.

Elections

Right and left are largely meaningless terms nowadays but they are still used because it suits the establishment to perpetuate its power with this charade. The two sides give the illusion of choice but are just variations on the same theme. Most people know this but go along with it anyway as there seems no alternative. 

Now there is the bogey man of the far right used to terrorise the sheep back into the fold. Quite soon a person will be described as far right who

• Loves his country
• Respects the laws of nature
• Thinks men and women are different 
• Honours beauty
• Believes in God and behaves accordingly
• Is a Christian

This last point shows the way forward. There is no political solution to the downward spiral in which we find ourselves. The only solution is spiritual. It always has been but the peculiar nature of our time is that this will become ever more apparent and eventually reach a point at which it cannot be ignored without a conscious effort of denial. If you feel like lamenting the loss of your country remember that your true home is not here.  Use the destruction of your earthly home positively, as a stimulus to focus your thoughts on where you really need to go. "My Kingdom is not of this world."

Islam and the West

 This is a follow up from a post of a few weeks ago. Obviously, emotions can get very heated in a discussion of this topic but I hope to remain objective. I don't think the current attitude that all religions are equally good or equally bad is a useful one. It may be well-meaning and an attempt to redress past prejudice and ignorance but it can also obscure the good and enable the harmful. Where the spiritual is concerned it is not just a matter of believing but of believing what is true and knowing what is either false or on a lower level of truth, meaning a level which caters more to the unevolved consciousness. For consciousness does evolve which is to say it takes in more of reality, is better able to perceive it and to express it. As this takes place the mind is potentially opened up to greater meaning and creative power and love and understanding, and when that happens its values change. If systems are in place which facilitate that it is in line with human growth and development. Not to mention the will of God. If there are systems that impede, prevent or restrict the evolution of consciousness this must be understood or else we will fall back into lower levels of being. That is all there is to it. Good intentions can be as harmful as bad ones if understanding is lacking just as love without wisdom (or misconceived love for it is not real love in these cases more a sentimentalised version of it) can actually have spiritually negative effects. I meant well is the excuse of the foolish and irresponsible.

Will all this in mind I have to point out that Islam in the modern Western world is a counter-evolutionary force. It is all very well to point to the spiritual decadence of the West, and I would be among the first to do so. That decadence is destroying our civilisation but we have to go forwards in line with the growth in consciousness and Islam is only suitable for a pre-rational stage of consciousness and that is looking at it in its best light. We can say that Islam has not succumbed to the absurdities that modern despiritualised Christianity has but that, in part, is because it has remained primitive and not evolved. The modern West has evolved but lost its spiritual centre in the process. Islam has retained its religious focus but is resistant to evolution. Both are wrong and neither is a remedy for the other.

When Muslims emigrate to the West it is because they seek a better life, materially speaking. But so many of them then seem to want to change the West to accommodate the ways of Islam failing to see that this would just make the West like the countries they left. To understand this religion and see why it is spiritually damaging in the modern age one has to go back to its roots. We might then perceive that it is not an intolerant, violent, oppressive doctrine because of misunderstanding of its core teachings. The core teachings are intolerant, violent and oppressive. Of course, sometimes intolerance is good if what you do not tolerate is evil but what Islam does not tolerate is anything other than Islam. That is a plain fact which we cannot avoid. Obviously, there are many good, decent Muslims but that is because they are human beings and God is in all human beings. But while there may be moderate Muslims there is no moderate Islam. Islam means submission and demands that everything submit to it, and its adherents are under the obligation to enforce that rule. You cannot co-exist with Islam for it will always seek to overcome you when it can, and this is because it is not just a religion but a totalitarian political ideology.

I am writing this because I live in London, a city with a Muslim mayor and a Muslim population that has now grown to 15%. That has been very apparent recently and many voices have been raised warning that we are sleepwalking into a massive problem. Often these voices are dismissed as spreading hate and, even though that is just a cynical attempt to shame critics into silence, one has to be careful to avoid unfounded prejudice and make sure one's real motivation is to awaken people to reality. Modern Westerners know little of their own history and do not understand Islam. I don't dispute that it has many qualities. Remembrance of God or some kind of deity, not a particularly evolved concept because it is limited by the limited spiritual capacity of the religion's originator who was clearly no Buddha or Krishna never mind Jesus. Focus on prayer, pilgrimage and fasting, all of which are valuable spiritual exercises. But you can never get away from the fact that it was founded on violence and spread by conquest. It does not tolerate rivals.

Western civilisation is clearly on the way out. In its present form it doesn't deserve to survive because it has turned its back on God. It has therefore become a blot on the face of the Earth. But a civilisation is made up of individuals and many are caught up in the present cultural devastation with no guidance of a better way. That guidance does exist but now you have to look for it and when you find it you will place yourself outside cultural norms or you will if you then follow it properly. At the same time, there are many false answers to the present problems and Islam is one of them. For the West certainly. It may have had a purpose for a particular place and time but that place is not here and that time is not now. Let those looking for a way forward out of the darkness of the present time know that Christ remains the Light of the World. He is the only thing in this temporal zone that truly speaks of eternity.

What is Leftism?

Premise: Leftism is the putrefaction that arises from the decaying body of a once creative and correctly ordered civilisation that has abandoned or lost touch with its guiding principles.

Response: A less harsh appraisal might be to say that leftism is what arises when a society loses proper spiritual understanding and transfers the energies that pertain to the spiritual level to the material. So in its distorted way it is a response to spiritual impulse but on the wrong level and, as such, is anti-spiritual since it purloins what applies to a higher area of life and misapplies it to a lower, thereby effectively shutting out the higher. Its fundamental principle is egalitarianism and the end result of this, indeed its intention when you understand that it is put forward and encouraged by demonic powers, is to shut out access to the higher and reduce everything to the lower.

But why does all this come about? The answer is that leftism is at root a rebellion against God and the natural order of creation. We may dress it up and say it's a desire for fairness prompted by compassion which, of course, is how it would define itself, but much of that is window dressing and masks an underlying motive of spiritual rebellion. I believe research has shown that leftists are often more selfish and unfeeling in their personal behaviour once you take them out of the warm waters of ideological abstract theory.

I was thinking the other day of the English Civil War which was one of the earliest manifestations of what became leftism. The old joke was that the Roundheads (the leftists of their day) were right but repulsive and the Cavaliers were wrong but romantic. However, in a situation such as this right and wrong are not so easily assigned. There was moral right and wrong on both sides. Also, both sides would have believed, or believed they believed, in God. And yet despite the relative good and bad of each side's moral position in worldly terms there was a fundamental difference and one that brings out the division between the two sides today. One side saw this world in terms of the higher reality. Down here should conform to up there. King Charles' belief in the divine right of kings comes from this. We may not share this belief but we can recognise someone for whom all power flowed from the divine and who saw this world in terms of the next. The other side saw the higher world to a large extent in terms of this world. Its priorities, despite its strong religious convictions, were to do with justice in this world. I say they had strong religious convictions and they did but their descendants today do not for the most part and this is precisely because of their antecedents' priorities. They have inherited the worldly focus and as a result lost the religious sensibility because that was always secondary. Even though the Roundheads would have seen themselves as highly religious their religion had lost its proper supernatural grounding.

This pattern repeated itself in various ways throughout the ensuing battles between left and right but the right henceforth was never pure as such. It always absorbed more and more of the leftist ethos as it fought one losing battle after another. Every time it lost it regrouped, took on some of its opponent's ideology and the damage to spiritual focus became more severe. This is what I mean by leftism being a rebellion against God. Its ends are to further the human being's growth in a context voided of a true spiritual centre which would be in God. They will adopt a false spiritual centre to fit in with their self-serving ends but it is always secondary, never primary.

Of course, rebellion against God is not the only motivating force behind leftism. There are praiseworthy elements such as the desire to help the poor, the weak and other victims of society. It could never have taken root and spread so widely if that were not the case, and that is why it is difficult to criticise in a world that doesn't recognise God. But the good in it should not disguise its basic spiritual rottenness.

I haven't attempted a full definition of leftism here because its focus constantly changes as does the ground on which it situates itself. But basically any world view which does not have God at its centre is leftist and when I say God I mean the true God who has a spiritual purpose for human souls and who puts them on this Earth to fulfil that purpose. There are many false gods who come about to answer various human desires and deficiencies.

Conclusion: Leftism is a spiritual disease akin to atheism. It can only end in nihilism.

Cure: The reorientation of the human heart to spiritual reality.

Thoughts on the Secular Corruption of Spirituality

I sometimes get challenged about remarks in my books and online in which I condemn leftism as spiritually destructive. I realise there are many spiritual people who would define themselves as of the left, probably the majority in fact, so let me try to explain what I mean though the basis of it all is in the title of this piece. 

First of all, it doesn't imply that the political right is the way to go. Spirituality goes above and beyond all politics and wants nothing to do with any of it in the sense of identifying with any party or the aims and objectives of any party. I would put the spiritual at the apex of a pyramid that transcends both left and right on the baseline, i.e. in the material world. 

That having been said, you have to ask where did leftist ideology as it is today originate, and the answer is that it arose in the 18th century with the specific rejection of God and his replacement with humanitarianism. Now, this may have been a necessary development at the time because it reflected the growth of awareness of the self throughout all sections of society. This awakening of the consciousness soul, as Rudolf Steiner terms it, required a new approach to life and the world and human beings and their relationship with one another. 

But that should have been in a spiritually aware context. What actually happened was that God was removed from the centre and Man, humanity, put there. What should have been a dietary supplement became the main source of nourishment, and the resultant ideology was more and more focussed on this world, seeking to establish what can only be truly known in the spiritual world down here in the material. And it did this by ignoring the reality that this is a fallen world and we are sinners. I know people don't like this idea today but anyone who is honest must know it is true. There is a spiritual corruption within all of us and denying that fact changes nothing. The left tries to redeem fallen man as fallen man instead of getting him to transcend that state for a higher state of being. This transformation absolutely demands we see ourselves for what we are and the left would say we are largely ok as what we are. That is just not true. It's like telling a sick man he is not sick. 

Spiritual people when they are on the left are so because they believe that is the compassionate approach. But what is real compassion? Consolidating someone in their ignorance or giving them the wherewithal to transcend that? Most answers to most questions are given by Jesus, and if you look at his life you will see that in some respects he acted as might a left wing person and in others as might someone on the right. That's because he was neither. He went above and beyond both for both are limited ideological approaches not founded in truth. A good example is when the crowd were going to stone the woman caught in adultery. Jesus stopped the stoning and forgave her (left) but also told her to sin no more (right). So, there is forgiveness but there is also the recognition of sin as sin and the insistence on repentance. 

If you boiled left and right down to their core principles you might get something like equality and freedom and these are mutually exclusive despite the French Revolution slogan. It is actually freedom that is the deep reality of the human soul. Equality is not a real thing. It never can be except in unexpressed non-being. As I aspire to be a charitable person I would say spiritual leftists are well-meaning  but interpret spiritual reality in terms of their experience in this world when the opposite attitude is what is required if you would know truth. This does not do away with compassion but expands it by incorporating wisdom. Again, I emphasise that condemning leftism in this way does not mean recommending its opposite/rival. But I do condemn leftism or what, since definitions can be slippery, is usually thought of as that nowadays, because it separates us from God, replacing him with a man-made idol if he is allowed at all. What is the difference in most things between a spiritual leftist and a material one? Hardly anything really which means that the spiritual person is being influenced by the worldly one to see reality in terms of the priorities of this world.

I know none of this will convince anyone not already convinced but perhaps it might give some people insight into a different perspective.

I mentioned the 18^th century as the origin of leftism but you could go back further as nothing comes from nothing. Specifically, you could go back to the Reformation which introduced relativism and subjectivism into Western culture. Some of the effects of this were good or even necessary because they allowed for the greater expression of self-consciousness, as already mentioned, but there were also rather severe negative consequences which resulted in an increasingly secularized society with moral, social and even religious values centred in the worldly human being rather than the reality of God. The immanent started to drive out the transcendent. From all this came liberalism which started off seeking to free man from oppressive external authority but soon escalated to other forms until now it seeks to liberate us from both God and Nature.

 

People might say what is the left of which you speak? Surely it is just the belief that human beings should be treated with fairness and compassion and allowed to express themselves as they wish? Who could possibly not be on board with that aspiration? Perhaps this is how it presents itself but in reality in the modern world the left is purely oppositional. It is against natural law and the natural order. It is anti-white, anti-male (and anti-female or, at least, anti-feminine too if the truth be told), anti-marriage, anti-nature, anti-creation and anti-God, especially anti-God the Father. The compassion of the left is often just an excuse to deny our duty to our Creator and has more in common with an act of rebellion than true love.

It is often said that when the antichrist comes he will be a humanitarian.

The Wisdom of the Left

 It's a contradiction in terms, isn't it? Can a left wing person or a left wing principle ever be thought of as wise? I don't think so and the reason is that leftism is an entirely secular ideology. Wisdom is surely a spiritual thing. It must be as it goes beyond logic, reason and, particularly, ideology. We may talk about the wisdom of crowds but that is really a misuse of the word. It just means a kind of natural instinct. Even the wisdom of age is just knowledge gleaned from experience. But true wisdom is perception into the heart of spiritual reality and it cannot be in any way associated with leftism which only relates to social and economic matters, in other words, worldliness. I realise there exist spiritual and religious people with left wing views but I see that as an inconsistency in them, an inability to understand the reality of spirit. It's rather like serving God and Mammon. One of them has to fall by the wayside. A spiritual leftist will always have one foot in this world. He is always grafting his spirituality onto his worldliness rather than taking everything from true spiritual perception.

I am not saying that the political right is in any way wise. That's obviously not the case but the point is that wisdom accepts the primacy of the spiritual world and leftism actually arose as a specific rejection of that. Check your history if you don't believe me. Wisdom is neither left nor right but leftist principles are a categorical denial of wisdom which is based in the reality of God as God and not as a humanist reconstruction of God.

Another point I would make to support this argument is that wisdom is hierarchical whereas leftism is rooted in egalitarianism. That is almost its defining principle. It leaves out the transcendent but wisdom derives from knowledge of transcendental reality.

This may seem a trivial thing but I see it as pointing to something very significant and that is the fundamental emptiness, even inhumanity, of leftist thought. It lacks, it cannot ever have, wisdom and therefore it only touches the most superficial level of the human experience and appeals to the most basic desires and ambitions of the human soul. But today we are ruled by leftist principles. Where are they taking us?

Added note: It might be thought that one could write a similar piece putting the word right in place of left but the reality is that the secular right only exists as an opposition/reaction to the left which was the initial disruptive ideology and therefore is part of the same anti-spiritual dynamic. However, to the extent that it does seek to preserve some vestiges of spiritual understanding, or what would derive from that, it has some small connection to the ground from which wisdom arises.

Arguing with Ideologues

 Fate has decreed that I have a close and ongoing association with a couple of people who might be described as hard left in their outlook. That is, they are thoroughgoing egalitarians whose morality is based on materialistic utilitarianism. I have nothing in common with these people but I am grateful that I have had this association because I have learnt a lot from it, and one of the things I have learnt is that if someone is wedded to a particular ideology there is literally nothing you can say that will shake them from that. Both these people (atheists, of course) pride themselves on being rational and scientific but both of them are emotionally bound to their ideology and use reason only when it supports that. Reason, in the limited form it is viewed today, can be made to support the leftist, egalitarian ethos but that is only because vast swathes of reality have been ruthlessly cut out of the picture. It is unreasonable to deny the spiritual, it is unreasonable to deny nature and biology and it is unreasonable to deny God but for these people and people like them a circular argument is all that is required. We cannot see spirit by material means therefore spirit cannot exist. What?

What do you do when you are confronted by people driven by ideology? First of all, you cannot argue with them. Any argument will generate a lot of heat but no light. You are operating from totally different root assumptions. Your first principles have nothing in common and unless that is acknowledged you will get nowhere. If it is acknowledged you have to ask them what their first principles are based on. They will probably say they are based on humanity. Then you might ask what is humanity? The point is that unless humanity has a spiritual origin it is of no consequence, a random assemblage of mindless forces with no coherent centre or actual integrity. What happens to such a thing simply doesn't matter because it isn't in any serious way real. If it is agreed humanity does have a spiritual origin then you must ask whether that should determine how we live and think and act. Does it mean we see our destiny in this world or is there a wider purpose which goes beyond this world and how we see ourselves at present? If spiritual is what we ultimately are then spiritual understanding is what we should be working towards and that means seeing everything in the light of the spiritual not its own light. Materialists are like people who only live at night and insist the moon is the source of its own illumination.

But really all this is irrelevant. People believe what they want to believe and if they don't want to believe in God then they won't. Leftists don't want to believe in God. Even when they do adopt a form of spirituality you will find that it is centred in the human being and how to bring benefit to that. I am not saying it is wrong to seek happiness. We are bound to do that. It is right and healthy to want to do so. But this should be in the light of the reality of God not as a personal agenda. The true spiritual believer wants to bring his soul into conformity with the reality of the Creator and his creation. The leftist, whether believer or not, wants to bring creation into conformity with the desires of his soul and will do everything to further that end. In this sense the leftist is always a materialist even when he follows a spiritual path.

You can't talk to ideologues because their ideology is their idol, their replacement for God. They will accuse the believer in God of having his own ideology and being no different to them, and nothing will persuade them that there is a world of difference between opening up the mind and heart to reality and creating one's own version of reality in line with one's own desires, one that may support and enable flaws in your character and in which sins are not sins. I realise that the believer will always bring something of himself to his beliefs but adding a few decorative touches to a building whose foundations are grounded in solid rock is not the same as building in sand. Some ideologies can contain elements of reality but they are still mental constructs not perceptions of truth and their mental aspect always dominates the reality aspect.

When all is said and done it is probably only experience that can change someone whose mind has been contaminated by an ideology. Arguing is useless. Example might be better but really it is only the consequences of wrong thinking that will help to bring about right thinking. However, bear in mind that most ideologues have adopted their ideology to rationalise and justify a character defect. This is an uncomfortable truth and why it can be hard to argue with a leftist without, in the end, getting personal. So it is best avoided.

On the Other Hand....

I don't mean to be deliberately contrarian, following on the last post with this one, but just to make a point. Everything depends on definition, after all. I still maintain that humanity is on a path of spiritual evolution and therefore cannot remain as it was. I believe in progress but I believe in spiritual progress which always builds on the past, even though it may introduce new dimensions of being. However, it is organic meaning it grows from its roots. Any growth, or imagined or claimed growth, that is not from the roots is a perversion and a deviation. It is a cancer. Our vaunted modern growth, what we call progress, is, for the most part, a cancer. It is a response to stimulation from the higher worlds but a response from lower being and self-will. The sun causes coarse weeds and beautiful flowers to grow. Modern civilisation is a powerful and choking weed that has flourished in the dark heavy manure of sin and is driving out more delicate and sensitive plants. 

In the previous post I said I was not a conservative but I don't completely deny that label. A conservative such as myself values the past and is loyal to the best of the past while not being blind to its failings. He sees how the beauty and wisdom of past achievement was a sincere response to divine impulse and an attempt to express the truth and dignity of God. He also sees how much of humanity's artistic and philosophical productions of the last, shall we say, two centuries has been a response to the devil, celebrating ugliness, sin and perversion. He doesn't want to return to the past because he is a modern man with a modern man's awareness of self but he regards it, for the most part and with provisos but certainly in respect of its higher elements, as a genuine attempt to engage with the spiritual life. We are not the people we were and can never be again, nor should we be, but we can certainly recognise that we were going along a path that led, more or less, in the right direction albeit with many twists and turns, came to a fork in the road and took the wrong turning. We should have gone straight ahead but turned left and the path we took is leading downwards.

This is the sense in which I am a conservative. As someone who recognises that the past for all its faults was usually an attempt to engage with God, and that tradition sought to preserve that in a fallen world. Whereas, in the present time for all our undoubted achievements we have largely succumbed to spiritual corruption and are putting up an increasing number of impenetrable barriers in our consciousness to goodness, beauty and truth.

Why I am not a Conservative

 I know that many people who read this blog would regard themselves as on the right but I don't think of myself in those terms. I am certainly not on the left and never have been, not even in my youth when that approach is generally fashionable, but I don't see myself as a conservative (even with a small 'c') either. There are many things from the past that I would wish to conserve and I do see leftism, for want of a better word, as the main source through which evil and spiritual destruction have been brought into the world and continue to be brought into the world, but that does not mean that we should return to a time before the leftist monster reared its ugly head. For one thing, the past was very imperfect which is why the spirit of reform was justified, but more significantly, human consciousness evolves and what was right at one time ceases to be right at another.

I am reading a book by Nikolai Berdyaev about Dostoyevsky who was my favourite author back in the days when I read fiction. Him and Tolkien anyway, a strange couple if ever there was one! Berdyaev says of Dostoyevsky that he should "not be regarded as a conservative or reactionary in the current sense. He was revolutionary-minded in a deeper way. He saw no possibility of a return to the conception of life, a static and immovable form, that existed before the arising of the revolutionary spirit. He was the first to notice how movements gain impetus in the world, the whole tending towards an end. "The end of the world is coming," he wrote in his notebook. This is not the attitude of a conservative. His hostility against revolution was not that of a man with a stale mind who takes some interest or other in the old social order, but the hostility of an apocalyptic being who takes the side of Christ in his supreme struggle with Antichrist. Now he who marches with Christ with his face towards the last great battle at the end of time is a man of the future and not of the past, every bit as much as him who marches with Antichrist. The conflict between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries is a superficial affair between the has-beens who have been supplanted and the supplanters who now have the first places at feasts. Dostoyevsky stood aside from that contest and was ranged among those for whom revolution of  the spirit opposes the spirit of revolution."

There is more in this vein but the point I wish to make is this. The past has gone. Much that was good has been destroyed but it cannot be restored in the form in which it existed any more than we can bring back the glories of ancient Egypt. What we need to do is reestablish the spirit that built the form of the past but find new ways in which to express it. And that spirit will also be different because we are different. Human consciousness has changed. It is more self-aware and that is a necessary development. It is why the past cannot be brought back.

Conservatives favour a return to or preservation of the form of the past. Whilst agreeing that much has been jettisoned that was noble and beautiful we must make a clear distinction between form and spirit. What really matters is that the connection to spirit is maintained or, in our case, restored. If and when that happens a new form will arise that grows out of the new spiritual awareness but, at the same time, will obviously be built on the same principles as the structures of the past. Materialistic revolutionaries destroy in order to completely remake but spiritual evolutionists seek to fulfil the law and the prophets not to overturn them.

The battle is not between right and left and those that think it is will find themselves in one way or another on the side of the left. The battle is between the forces of Christ and those of the Antichrist, between divine creation and that which attempts to undermine, reframe or destroy divine creation. We have to keep our eyes fixed on the spiritual ball and not be led astray by what are ultimately only worldly things. It's because conservatives often are so led astray, and also because they don't properly appreciate the evolutionary nature of human consciousness and unfoldment, that I am not a conservative.

Spirituality and the World

 There are two mistakes the spiritually oriented person can make in his relationship with the world. The first is to get drawn into taking sides in worldly disputes. I am not talking about the conflict between good and evil. To take sides in that conflict is essential but sometimes we project good and evil onto worldly scenarios and forget that these are basically spiritual things referring to the spiritual plane and our relationship with God. That can and does spill over into the material world of creation but real good and evil are always rooted in the spiritual and when we think of them that is what we should be thinking of to make sure we are approaching them as they actually are and not as we might imagine them to play out based on worldly priorities and criteria. 

The second mistake is to have no relationship at all with the world. This is the typical error of a certain category of mystic, the sort who forgets that though we should not be of the world, we are in it and cannot ignore that basic fact. To be born into this world means we have a task to perform here, and although that task might be to reorient both the world and ourself to the spiritual plane it is not to reject and deny the world as the arena of God's creation. If God looked at what he had created and saw that it was good who are we to say otherwise?

It can be a delicate balancing act. Our concern should at all times be the spiritual but the material is part of the spiritual as Jesus demonstrated when he took his body with him into heaven. He did not get involved with the world as the world but he loved it as the creation and sought at all times to render it more open to the spirit. This requires reorientation and purification and that also should be our attitude towards the world.

Nowadays there seems to be one crisis after another that clamours for our attention and demands we take a side. Increasingly, good opinion tells us there is a right side and a wrong one and we can be swept up into an emotional reaction or else just be fearful that we might be perceived as bad people if we don't follow everyone else. But I would suggest that often we don't have to take sides in other people's arguments. I am not saying we should stand back and let evil prevail but nor need we get involved in conflicts that fundamentally do not concern us. The immediate problem every human being has to face is within himself and has to do with his relationship with God, but we often ignore that in favour of something external to ourselves which is fundamentally less demanding and can be satisfied with gestures. 

No Middle Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domestic Terrorism

I don't write much about current events because they don't interest me in themselves, only in how they reflect spiritual gain or, more likely and almost always these days, spiritual loss. But I should say a word about what is going on now because it is so extreme. Briefly, almost every government in every country of the world is engaged in practising psychological terrorism on its peoples. And not only the governments but the whole establishment, the media, academia, the whole lot of them.

We are lied to every day. We are bullied and threatened until most of us are completely cowed. I don't doubt this has been going on a long time but it has really grown wings and flown recently. What was occasional has become habitual. Politicians don't even know any longer how to speak the truth. They don't even try to communicate honestly. They just aim to manipulate, and the media is the same. Don't think its representatives are any better.

We fuss so much about religious terrorism (only one religion if truth be told) and that is the reason for so much wringing of hands over Afghanistan, a country that would be best left alone as history clearly tells us. And then we fuss over domestic terrorism, the result of importing so many young men who either won't or can't adapt to our admittedly rotten culture. But the real domestic terrorism of the last 18 months has been from our own governments and establishment. Most of them certainly won't see it like that but those for whom they ultimately work know it for what it is and we too should recognise what it is, where it comes from and where it wants to take us.

Here's the thing. These people can't win unless you accept their authority over you. And they have no authority over you. The only one who has authority over you is God and he lets you make your own choices. You have to accept the consequences of those choices but you are given chance after chance to get it right. So, make the right choice. Reject the world and turn to God in whom is all goodness and truth. By the way, the division of the ways is becoming ever more clear and that is the positive aspect of the times in which we live.