March 29th

My new book Remember the Creator is published today (April 1st in America). The subject of the book is summed up in the title. This is the most important thing for modern day humanity; to remember God. But on its own, it is not enough. For what sort of God are we remembering and how are we remembering him? It is a cliché to say that God invented Man in his own image and ever since Man has been returning the compliment, but such is the case. Look at modern religion of practically any type you care to mention. People pray to God, they talk of God but I venture to suggest that the God they address is often one of their own imagining, conjured up from the limited resources of their own minds and a projection of their own thoughts and desires. 

Of course, none of us really knows God. As the absolute and eternal, he is beyond us all. But there really is a difference between those who intuit something of his reality because they have begun to open themselves up to what is beyond themselves, the truth of the transcendent, and those who may believe in something but do so from within the context of their own minds. It's like an enclosed circle and one in which there is a little break or opening so that the light outside begins to seep in. We in the West can see the mental conception of God quite clearly in Islam but it appears just as much in many contemporary Christian churches where God has been reduced to something like the head of a social services bureau, a non-judgemental figure preoccupied with egalitarianism and universal friendliness rather than the Maker of Heaven and Earth who hates sin but whose love touches like a blazing fire that burns without hurt. Make sure that the God you remember is the fullest expression you can conceive of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, and try to understand him in spiritual not worldly terms. Accept no lesser substitutes.

This is also the day that the UK was supposed to have left the European Union and regained its economic and political independence, turning back towards its true mission in the world. For, cutting through all the obfuscation and waffle, that is what this is all actually about. However, the bullying potentates of the EU and the craven incompetents of the British Government have put an at least temporary stop to that. Not to mention the behind the scenes manipulations of civil servants and bureaucrats whose arrogance is only matched by their complacency. 

Hard words, I know, and I'm not saying these are all bad people. Doubtless many mean well according to their conception of things. But they see everything in terms of this world (even the religious among them - apparently most of the clergy and all the bishops in the Church of England want Britain to remain in the EU), and they have no spiritual insight or vision, substituting for that a belief in progress on the worldly level. One must hope that their actions will make an increasing number of people realise how completely untrustworthy the political class and technocratic elites are. May they consequently turn to deeper ways of engaging with the problems of life. As the outer world descends further into illusion, remembering the Creator becomes more vital by the day.

It's Time to Build Your Ark

You've probably heard this before. These are the end times when humanity has turned so far away from God, and actually perceives the source of goodness and truth as, if not evil, then a product of ignorance, that judgement of some sort cannot be far away. The situation gets worse almost by the week. The hatred of those who set the agenda in politics and culture for spiritual truth is ever more apparent. The inversion of values as the transcendent is denied proceeds apace with fewer people able to perceive what is happening and more getting on board with the lie as is hard not to do since it is everywhere, in all things. And as people allow themselves to believe this lie their minds are poisoned and their hearts corrupted. The fact that this was foretold does not make it less of a tragedy. We may know, because we have been told, that good will eventually triumph but it's sometimes hard living in the middle of this time of spiritual darkness to hold on to that, though hold on we must. For those who have not abandoned God, it really is time to build an ark.

But what form can this ark take? Bear in mind that its chief purpose is of spiritual protection not physical safety as before. Therefore it has to be a mental ark this time, an ark of consciousness, you might say. It has to be constructed of faith and understanding which are the only things that can provide a bulwark against the oppression that is the modern orthodoxy of secular humanism based on materialistic atheism.

At the end of an age the world slides into chaos. The work of the age is to build up order out of chaos but when that order has reached its apogee (in the context of the intrinsic quality of the age) then there is nothing left but to run down and disintegrate back into chaos. That is what is now happening. Spiritual order is crumbling and chaos reasserting itself.

But there is a difference between the chaos at the beginning of an age and that at the end. At the beginning, chaos is unformed potential, akin to primal matter or the state of the world before it is touched by the Word. It is fruitful, capable of being organised. But at the end it has become sterile, its creative potential exhausted and its capacity to manifest and hold form of a higher nature so weakened that any attempt to impose this comes to naught. This is why nothing true or real 'sticks' now. The world has solidified around us so much that mass consciousness cannot respond to higher, spiritual states of being. It cannot hear the Word from above and so must react to lower voices but the structures these build are false and insubstantial and do not last for long. But then when they fail they are replaced by others just as unreal. 

However this only applies to mass consciousness. We all have the image of God within us, stamped on our heart, and individuals can always step away from the spirit of the times and respond to that divine image. But to do this, you have to be true to the reality of what is inside yourself and not be led astray by the noise of the world which will certainly drown out the inner voice unless you learn to step aside from the world and love the real Good.

In the coming years our hearts will be tested and the choices will be clearly defined but, at the same time, the right choice will not be easy precisely because it will be made difficult. You will have to make a positive effort and go against the flow, against the wisdom of the world and its best and brightest to make that right choice. However that does mean it will be real. Your choice will be yours, coming from within yourself, based on your own intuitive response to spiritual truth.  As time passes now lines will be drawn and there will be no room for the agnostic. As Christ said, "He who is not with me is against me." This might seem unreasonable but what is meant is that the heart must incline itself to the spirit of truth in a positive way and if it doesn't do that completely then it hasn't done it at all.

When you have made your choice, you must build your ark. An ark of faith and devotion to truth that will carry you through the downpour of worldly lies and deceit until that deluge stops and the spiritual sun arises once more which it will do. Until it does, though, make sure your ark is watertight.

Brexit and Religion

Apparently the farce or tragedy (take your pick) that is Brexit has seen a great increase in sales of self-help books. Is this to people so shaken by the event that they require psychological assistance? Or is it to those who think the future will be disastrous and they need to prepare themselves as best they can? Either way, what a pity that people turn to such feeble nostrums for sustenance rather than to the genuine medicine of real religion.

But then where can the ordinary person find real religion now? If you have been brought up with no particular spiritual education, and therefore have a very poor and biased idea of what religion is, you may reject it without serious investigation. Alternatively, those who are exposed to what passes for Christianity today will not find much to inspire them there if they are searching for something that really speaks to the imagination and the soul. For modern Christianity is often little more than secular humanism dressed up in religious clothing. Its supernatural element, without which it is meaningless, has been reduced as much as it possibly can be without being jettisoned altogether. Partly this is because Christianity has not responded well to the changes in consciousness that have come about over the last few hundred years as humanity begins to awaken intellectually and become more individual (as was meant to happen albeit not in the way it has happened), but partly it is because of the generally low quality of Christian leaders who for the most part, certain honourable exceptions excluded, have lacked any real vision.

Why do most of the intelligentsia wish this country to remain in the EU? Is it because they are believers in the ideology that unity is always good and separatism always bad? Consequently, they see those who wish to separate from a body that seeks to unite as ignorant and selfish. You may think I am reducing something complicated to a simple basic idea but this is more or less how things are. Intellectuals tend to think in terms of abstractions rather than concrete realities and this means they may reject ties of blood and earth which is why they can be perceived as disliking their own country and culture, even to the extent of trying to undermine them. They are, or want to be, men and women of the world which is regarded as being far more sophisticated than those simpletons attached to their native soil. But they are victims of the leftist dogma that humanity is one and the more united it is, the better it is. I call this a dogma because although it may sound very worthy, it is only half the story since ideas of unity should never be used as an excuse to deny or diminish individuality. We may be all one in God in a higher sense but God created us as individuals and it is as individuals that we realise our destiny. You are not required to sink your individuality into a group identity but to enrich the group with your individuality. This is why a Europe of strong individual nation states is a better thing than one in which these nation states have reduced autonomy. Anyone who knows the history and underlying ambition of the EU knows that it has always been determined to follow the latter course, the one that leads to ever closer union with its component parts increasingly weakened and power concentrated more and more in the centre.

The spiritual fact of the sanctity of the individual is the reason that those who have a deeper understanding of what religion actually means are in favour of Britain leaving the EU.  A superficial religious understanding, such as most of our church leaders seem to possess, will think that love your neighbour means there is no difference between you and your neighbour. But then he wouldn't be a neighbour, would he? He would be you. The truth is we need love and we need wisdom, and we need both together to make sure we actually do have real love and real wisdom and not simply an emotional or intellectual copy of them. For love and wisdom are spiritual qualities but human beings who lack these qualities as spiritual things interpret them on the lower level of feelings and thought and as a result they misconceive them. What they call love is not love but a reflection of it in their emotional nature or even something they just have as an idea or ideal. But if they don't truly feel it as living spiritual reality then they don't know it.

Most people who want Britain to leave the EU are not religious but they have natural instincts which the intelligentsia, including many of those considering themselves to be the spiritual intelligentsia, have lost. They do not have minds clouded by ideology, always the weakness of those who have intellect but lack intuition. But religion is actually all about intuition. You might even say that the development of intuition is the primary religious task. Intuition tells us that the EU is a corrupt body that ultimately seeks its own good not the good of the countries that comprise it. For that reason not only should Great Britain leave it but so should every other member state.

If you are one of those people who have turned to a self-help book in this time of crisis let me point out that self-help can only address the earthly human being not the soul. Indeed, it often strengthens the earthly human being against the soul by focusing attention on it so that it becomes even more the centre of consciousness than it already is. Forget self-help, however it is packaged, and seek the transcendent truth in God.

Understanding the remarkable events of Brexit

In the midst of the phony, long-planned, 'last-minute' crisis of Brexit; it is easy to forget what an astonishing thing it has been.

The whole essence of the referendum to leave the European Union was that the British people wanted to leave, but Parliament (all parties) wanted to Remain - and that is exactly why a referendum was needed.

If Parliament had wanted to Leave, there would have been no referendum and no need for one. If matters had been left to the members Parliament, then we would never have tried to leave the EU; and only because there was a supposedly-binding referendum in favour did Brexit ever get off the ground.

But how did it ever get off the ground? Although everyone who is remotely honest and informed knows that the British people want to leave the EU and have wanted to leave the EU for more than two decades - Britain remained because the ruling class (Parliament and the leaders of the major social institutions) wanted to Remain.

How, then, did we get so close to leaving; when essentially everybody with power wants to Remain? This is truly remarkable! It ought to have been impossible!

In the first place, why was the referendum result allowed to be Brexit - given the massive level of voting fraud (mostly via the postal vote system)? Perhaps the real level of Leave was simply too great for the fake votes and false counts to overcome? Perhaps this hidden but massive Leave vote is why the Establishment are so scared; too scared to go against Brexit?

In the second place why was the official referendum result not ignored - in the way that previous referenda have often been ignored? Prime Minister Cameron broke his promise to commence the leave process immediately, but instead it was delayed by nine months - But why was the promise not broken altogether? Somehow, there seems to have been a powerful sense that this one could not be ignored.    

One would have supposed that if the British and European elites had worked-together to prepare a fake Brexit package, then that is what would have happened. For the UK really to leave the EU, with 'no deal' - as appears to be scheduled for March 29th - should have been impossible. It should - from the Establishment perspective - never even have been on the table.

It is the failure to reach a Fake 'deal' with the EU that is so remarkable. Surely it was in all the elites interest that it should happen. And yet it has not...

My belief is that there are unseen, spiritual forces at work - I can't explain it in any other plausible way. My belief is that the spirit of the British people is at work, and it has its eye on the events in Parliament - and there is an immensely powerful sense of fear among the Establishment about what would happen if Brexit does not happen, if they actually blocked it. This fear must apparently be even greater than their fear of a successful Brexit...

I don't think anybody knows - no human being, at any rate - what is coming; or what would happen if Brexit is, in fact, intercepted and delayed or prevented on March 29th.

Nobody knows what will follow if the UK does succeed in getting the real break from the EU that the mass of its people so very much want. If 'we' succeed in achieving such an astonishing thing, what will happen next?

Whatever happens, or does not happen, March 29th 2019 seems to be the Beginning of something, not the end.

What that something will be - well, we will need to wait to find-out. But find-out we certainly shall. Nothing is more sure.

Boardman on Brexit

From last summer, a characteristically broad, deep and thorough analysis of Brexit and what (assuming we do actually get-out from the EU) might come next.

I personally don't see any kind of group-mind at work in UK public life - so I am not sure what we can actually 'do' to promote good outcomes, except at our individual and personal level.

Nonetheless, I still continue to see (in the Brexit process) what might be the consequences of some kind of Good, Godly spiritual strategy; imperceptibly from behind the scenes; using higher mechanisms that we cannot observe but which are more efficient and more powerful than materialism.

This is what medics sometimes call a 'diagnosis of exclusion', in the sense that I regard the fact of Brexit as good, and I am amazed that it has happened even so far as it has; because I cannot see any adequate forces in favour of Brexit that are adequate to account for the implementation of the plan to exit the EU.

I really can't see where Brexit gets its strength in a material sense; therefore I infer that it is operating mostly in a spiritual sense.

If I am right, and I may not be! - this is good news in many ways; in that it may not be possible for the Establishment to thwart Brexit, since they are up against superior forces. If I am correct; then angelic spiritual forces are doing, and will continue to do, the 'heavy lifting' to extract Britain from the EU.

But on the other side, although spiritual powers could create a situation or set-up; it is the multitude of individual people of Britain who make the choices; and unless they are actively in favour of a better (more spiritual, Christian) future for Britain, then the future will not be better - but will continue to get worse in much the same way as-if we had remained in the EU.

So, we British may be gifted with a better situation, however, it is up to us to make something Good of it.

Cyril Scott and Music

The English composer Cyril Scott (1879-1970) wrote a book called Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages in which he set out his belief that, rather than contemporary consciousness determining the kind of music that was produced, it was the kind of music certain composers produced that largely influenced human consciousness. He took examples from the great composers such as Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner and Debussy, and tried to show that the new kinds of music they wrote were responsible for reorientating our thoughts and emotions in new directions. For example, Handel's Biblical oratorios helped create the Victorian Age with its formality, reverence and love of ceremony. Bach's music encouraged the intellectual approach, especially in Germany where it became popular after Mendelssohn's rediscovery of it. Beethoven's passionate outpourings inspired sympathy and allowed the human heart to express emotion far more extensively than hitherto, even leading, so Scott says, to the advent of psychoanalysis. As for Chopin, he helped create a more developed sense of refinement and promoted (not intentionally but by virtue of his music's poetic sensibility) the idea of female emancipation, while Wagner, Debussy and Richard Strauss (among others) all contributed to the evolution of consciousness in various ways.

These were just the major composers but others who ploughed a similar course to the greats all aided in the work of the development of human ways of thinking and feeling. This theory is in line with ancient Greek thought, particularly Plato who wrote in the Republic that "the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state". While Aristotle wrote that "music has the power to form character, and the various kinds of music based on the various modes may be distinguished by their effects on character."

Scott had several strings to his bow. He was at one time a highly regarded composer, but he also wrote books on various subjects and even a bit of poetry*. He was a Theosophist and his book on music is written from that angle. Indeed, he makes no bones about the fact that the information in it came from esoteric sources, namely one of the Theosophical Masters with whom he communicated through a medium.  When I first read this book many years ago I took him at his word but it's since become clear that he was not entirely truthful in certain matters, and that the books for which he is now best known, the Initiate trilogy, though presented as factual, are largely fictitious though probably based on facts of some kind. There is also a book called 'The Boy Who Saw True' which purports to be the diary of a clairvoyant Victorian boy in touch with a Master that mysteriously fell into Scott's hands, but which is obviously a concoction based on Scott's own childhood experiences filled out with Theosophical references and accounts of psychic happenings. I don't think Scott was trying to deceive in any way but he was a creative artist and perhaps used fiction to get across fact thinking that this approach would reach a wider audience. I disagree with him, especially concerning spiritual matters with regard to which I think one must be entirely truthful. The end does not justify the means. But I do believe that Scott had encounters with spiritual beings and tried to represent these in a way that would convince others of their existence; such, he would have thought, being the need of the hour.

Anyway, back to the book about music. I think that Scott's thesis, that music affects and to some extent even determines character and morals, is a sound one though I might extend it to include all the arts, notwithstanding the fact that music is by some distance the most powerful of all art forms and the one that can affect us most profoundly on a subliminal level. To those who would query how classical music which, before the advent of recording techniques, would not have been heard by a majority of the population, can affect a whole society, Scott points out that it would have been heard by those who set the tone of society and that's all that is required. 

Scott states that one of the aims of those who attempt to guide human evolution into higher forms of awareness is to bring us to an understanding of the deva world. Roughly speaking, devas, a Sanskrit word (cf. the Latin deus) borrowed by Theosophists, correspond to our idea of angels. In the Theosophical scheme, these are a separate order of creation that range from nature spirits right up to Cherubim and Seraphim. You might say that they run the universe on God's behalf. Musicians such as Grieg, Debussy, Delius and Scriabin (according to Scott) attempted to express, albeit unconsciously, something of the nature of these beings from the Nordic nature spirit music of Grieg through Debussy and culminating in Scriabin whom Scott (writing in 1958) called the greatest exponent of deva music born so far whose music in Prometheus "reaches a climax expressive of unutterable grandeur but... it is the grandeur of mighty Beings, flashing forth Their unimaginable colours, and filling the vast expanses with Their song." I hadn't heard of Scriabin when I first read the book and naturally after that I rushed off to buy a recording of Prometheus. I have to confess that I preferred the Chopinesque first piano concerto on side 1 of the LP (this was the end of the '70s) to the cosmic eruption of the main work but I've got more used to it since though I still can't feel it lives up to Scott's description. Perhaps it's a case of Scriabin's reach exceeding his grasp, for me anyway.

Scott makes no bones about his dislike of jazz which he says "was definitely 'put through' by the Dark Forces", and led to "a very marked decline in sexual morals." I don't see how one can dispute this and the only question is whether there was an attempt to make the best of a bad job and inspire some musicians to create good music in the context of a decadent form. The same applies to rock 'n' roll which Scott calls "the latest cumulative effect of jazz", going on to write that these have had "such vulgarizing effects, that we now have the misfortune to live in a vulgar and blatant age." I remind you that he was writing in 1958. What would he think now! He is probably right in his basic analysis of these forms of modern music but I can't write them all off. Speaking as someone who grew up in the '60s and '70s, I still enjoy a lot of the music of that era while recognising that some of it (and much more since as popular music has become increasingly corrupt and is often now actively evil in its effects) does correspond to Scott's description. But the music of someone like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has surely done nothing but good. Scott's criticisms, by the way, do not apply to folk music and its derivatives. He can't just be dismissed as a musical snob.

One can argue about the detail's of Scott's thesis but I think he is right in its general thrust. The great composers have been sent by heavenly powers to provide beauty and healing succour to humanity, yes, but also to instigate changes in consciousness. But as we have just seen, what good can do, evil can as well and the era of great composers, or geniuses as one must call them, seems to have come to an end, at least temporarily. But it's still worth bearing in mind the powerful effects of music and try to use it in our own environment in the best way we can. Taken right back to the bone, music is sound and it is commonly thought in spiritual teachings that sound created the universe. It still does in many ways, great and small.

* I didn't realise that he painted too. There are a selection of his watercolours on the website devoted to him (run by his granddaughter) and I think they are rather good. A very talented man.