Monday 3 April 2017

Truth and Love

The gate to the kingdom of heaven has two pillars which are truth and love and you must conform yourself to both of these to a high degree before you are worthy to enter. That's a tall order as no one can be perfect, perfection coming only through the grace of God. But you must attune yourself to both these two qualities as best you can, holding them in a more or less equal balance in your mind and heart.

This balance is important for without it you will not only be unbalanced (obviously) but even lose touch with that which you are over-emphasising. That is because each suggests and assumes the other and if one is over-privileged at the expense of the other it means that you are not responding to the reality as a whole and in its totality but to a personal interpretation of the reality. With true love always goes wisdom. With proper wisdom there is always love. If you follow one of these paths and neglect the other then you are surely following a false path for you are not even following the reality of your chosen path, merely your idea about it.

The devil exploits our sense of fairness and will to do good to the detriment of truth so that truth ends up being denied. You might say that if love is observed what does truth matter? That's just sentimentality. If you do not honour truth above all, and seek to incline your being to it, you will have no chance of aligning yourself with the reality of God. You will remain enclosed in the earthly mind and that means you won't even be observing love. All you will have will be a mental approximation of or idea about love. Just its shadow. Thus by pushing us too much towards an idea about love, a false image of it, the devil effectively cuts us off from truth.

Same sex marriage is a case in point. Any right thinking person, heterosexual or homosexual, can see that it is a complete contradiction in terms, a metaphysical impossibility*, but we have been deceived into accepting it because we wish to be just and because we think that short term happiness of individuals in this world matters more than their education for eternity. That is, of course, because we do not acknowledge eternity or, if we think we do, it's only an eternity that is seen in the light of the desires, aims and purposes of this world. We are putting the earthly personality ahead of the spiritual soul and either denying the latter or else seeing it as an extension of the former. None of this will get us anywhere except deeper into illusion and chaos.

But the devil can also exploit the idea of truth to get us to deny love. The Inquisition is an obvious example from history but many cultures have damned and ostracised those who don't conform to their ideals. The protection of truth is important. There are so many arrows aimed at its heart, so many attempts to corrupt and distort it, so many half truths masquerading as the full version, that we all have a responsibility to fight for truth. But we should not let this fight lead us into blaspheming against love just as we should not take the reality of love, as a spiritual truth, for a reason to offer love to everything equally, regardless of its approximation to truth. Things that contradict truth should not be loved in their expression even if in their essence they are due love. The classic example of this is in the Christian exhortation to hate the sin but love the sinner. In fact, this saying cuts right across the divide between love and truth, successfully reconciling them both.

We live at a time of increasing polarisation when worldly extremes confront each other in mutual incomprehension and antagonism. These can only be reconciled from a spiritual perspective which transcends both of them, and I mean a real spiritual perspective not one that derives from either of these worldly viewpoints. One of them is a distortion on a lower plane of love and one of them is a distortion on a lower plane of truth. Neither has much relation to real love or truth but, just as evil has no reality in itself but can only exist as a perversion of the real, so the worldly viewpoints which dominate today can only arise from a spiritual reality albeit one misconceived, distorted and at many removes.

Spiritual awakening, if it is genuine and sustainable, requires awakening to the understanding that love and truth lie at the heart of the universe. I believe it is through the imagination that we can start to realise this for imagination is the key that unlocks the door to the higher worlds. It is the forerunner of intuition or spiritual intelligence, and it has always been my contention that those who deny the reality of God lack imagination. Such people might think they have imagination and be affronted if it is implied they don't, but what they call their imagination is earthbound in that, though it might extend horizontally as far as the (mind's) eye may see, it cannot rise much above ground level. It is a flat thing that is not proper imagination at all for it cannot see behind outer things to their inner essence which is what real imagination is all about. Unsupported reason, which works by proceeding from one thing to another, can never see the spiritual reality of truth and love but imagination, which perceives directly, can and, if it is real, will. Start cultivating the eye of inner vision now.


* I see the legalisation of same sex marriage as a real frontier that has been crossed. We were asked to believe the unbelievable and basically did without demur. The process had been led up to in stages but, even so, the breaching of that final barrier showed that humanity had officially become insane.

3 comments:

ajb said...

I agree with much of what you say here, but ...

"Any right thinking person, heterosexual or homosexual, can see that it is a complete contradiction in terms"

is true but only when we get clear about Christian marriage is.

I think what people mean in civil society by marriage has changed. This is reflected in various things, such as divorce laws. We are no longer dealing with a Christian institution, which is based on an understanding of God, and informed by Jesus Christ's teaching.

What exactly does it mean when someone gets married nowadays? I'm not sure. It is, basically, two people saying 'we really commit to each other' (although the commitment isn't legally enforceable in any meaningful way), and then certain legal provisions that go along with spousal status. This is not a complete contradiction in terms when it comes to people of the same-sex.

What you are referring to here is another symptom of the decline of Christianity's influence in civil society in the West. Marriage used to be about God. The culture is now secular. Therefore, marriage is now in civil society not about God.

William Wildblood said...

Thanks for the comment ajb but I don't agree with you about this applying only to Christian marriage. It's universal that marriage is between a man and a woman because marriage is between complementary opposites. That is the only union that is creative and this goes right down to basic metaphysics. What human beings decide in their unwisdom and egotism and corruption has nothing to do with it. No previous culture would ever have thought otherwise, even the ancient Greeks, because homosexual marriage is not just against God. It's also against Nature, not that these two are different when they are in harmony and the latter is uncorrupted.

I think in saying what you are you are going part way towards justifying something that is unjustifiable even though I'm sure you don't mean to do so. By all means let two people of the same sex live together and even love each other but you can't call this marriage nor can you justify any sexual element except by denying what human beings are. This goes beyond anything to do with Christianity and can't be limited to applying only to Christianity.

ajb said...

Thanks for this, and I agree with your statement that one ought not call what is now called 'marriage' marriage. It's a different thing, and should have a different name.

However, I didn't mean for the idea of opposite sexes to apply only to Christian marriage. As you say, almost all people throughout history have thought of marriage as involving the complementarity of opposite sexes. Christian marriage partakes of that tradition, and my comments above are meant to reflect the immediate (Christian) context out of which we in the West are operating.

I'm also not trying to justify the changes in law, I am trying to *explain* it. It's not obviously contradictory to some people because they mean something else by the word 'marriage'. This change in meaning has to do with the rise of secularism, and so in the Western context the fall of Christianity from civil discourse.