The War of the Worlds, and How You Can Help

We are in a crisis of the spirit. There is a force causes us to shy away from spiritual realities and live only in physicality. And it's growing stronger. This is materialism  - the spiritual force that wants us to lose ourselves in greed, sensuality, and addiction. And yet at the same time, a force is growing that opposes this materialistic onslaught. There is, therefore, a war between the worlds, and I want to show you how you can help.

Spiritual Teachers on the War

But first, let me show give you evidence that there is such a war. These are various spiritual teachers that I greatly respect, each one of which teaches that there is a battle between physicality and spirituality being played out in the world today.

Rudolf Steiner called materialism "Ahriman": a spirit who actively pursues materialistic ends and causes us to do the same. As such, he writes that Ahriman and his forces are stronger than ever. They will overpower much of humanity unless something is done. Unless this "something" happens, humanity will gradually lose all connection to the world whose light we can now only see dimly if at all. But Steiner writes that there is indeed another force coming into the world that can overpower this "Ahrimanic" influence.

Without going into details, Steiner suggests that there is a force that will continually help us awake to another world while living in this one. Increasingly, many people will remember a light from beyond birth. We will be awakened to other worlds while living in physical life. The world will become increasingly transparent.

On the other hand, the spiritual teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee also teaches that forces of materialism are polluting not only the physical world but also the spiritual world. To help clean this mess up, we must become conscious of the unity of spirit not merely with the inner spiritual levels of our mind but also with the outer, self-conscious, physical levels.  We must remember the unity of life, for then life would express its unity.

You can find this sentiment even in Mormonism. In the seventh chapter of the Book of Moses, Enoch sees a voice coming from the bowels of the earth that says "Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me?" This wickedness is the materialistic, Ahrimanic force that prevents us from seeing the light that life holds. She - the earth - is buried beneath our oil pipelines and our pornography. Our greed causes her to weep. But eventually, says the Book of Moses, the earth shall rest.

What You Can Do

The physical world is fighting the spiritual world. But it's not one where one wins and the other loses. If the spiritual world wins, so does the physical world, since it will be enriched beyond measure. But the forces of Ahriman won't let us see this. The fight is a fight that will end in an embrace, but it seems like death to one of the parties to give into it. But if the earth lets itself be embraced by spirit, so much will be better.

This tense embrace is being played out wherever spirit and matter are together in tension. As such, you can help them come together. Wherever spirit and matter don't like each other, you can help by helping them to embrace.  For instance, take autism. Autism is an expression of the tense union between heaven and earth. Just like spirit doesn't like matter and matter doesn't like spirit, we are a divided soul where our sense of self exists apart from the body and the body feels unnatural. I am autistic, and so I can help the world by incarnating in my own body.

Another place where you can help heaven and earth come together is in your religion. I am a Latter-Day Saint, and as such, I belong to a religion where heaven and earth are tensely avoiding each other. Our ordinances are powerful beyond compare, but Utah has the highest paid pornography use in the nation. The truth is that our spirits are overpoweringly bright, but they are disconnected from our bodies and their instincts. Here, again, heaven and earth don't like each other. If you're religious like this, you can do a great deal to help the world by uniting heaven and earth in your skin. Let your spirituality be expressed in your sexuality and vice versa. Doing this, you will become overwhelmingly full of life, and so will the world.

You can also help it whenever you wake up or fall asleep. When we sleep, we sojourn in echoes of the spiritual world, but when we're awake, we're in physicality. Normally, there is no continuity there - you don't remember what happened after a certain point at night, you can't remember what happened after a certain point in the morning. But if you could build up a continuous awareness of what went on between sleep and waking, heaven and earth would be linked by a golden thread of consciousness. We would be awake while we dream, dreaming while awake, another way of describing the world as it's meant to be.

In short, let tense muscles resolve. This sums up the whole issue. It will bring peace.

Stories about the World

So let me tell you a story. Last December I was with my family in the TV room in a half-asleep state. Suddenly, a Julie Andrews Christmas came on. I was so tired that I didn't hear the words, but the soft, warm tone in her voice came to me and made me joyful. Those tones spoke to me; I know that I was being heard and seen. Neither the singer nor the composer had any idea who I was, but the music spoke to me. I know it.

Another story. One day between classes at BYU, and I decided to pray for the answer to a question that's been troubling me. I have been growing very close to my Father in Heaven recently, more so than before, so I felt sure that if I asked him to answer my question before the end of the day, he would. A few minutes later, I went into the library, and I felt myself drawn to odd items in it: a fire extinguisher, a framed quote by Harold B. Lee, even a map of the building. But I didn't see "a fire extinguisher." I saw what the fire extinguisher said. As if it were a book or a face, I saw what it meant. I saw what they all meant -- together. God was speaking to me through the building.

Yet another story. My friend told me that works of art "call" to him. They don't shout for his attention; it ends up happening often in spite of his plans: going to see a movie when he wanted to sleep, seeing a play when he didn't want to, etc. But these plays and movies speak to him; they are intelligent; they know what he needs to hear. Mary Poppins was a personal message to him; he knew it was more than the literal plot.

These stories are glimmers of what I mean when I say that the world is waking up. The world is remembering how to move, speak, and think; it's getting a sense for its own dignity. And the baby-steps it's taking will eventually become a full-on sprint. For the world has forgotten its divine nature. It isn't unintelligent, but it believes is. But the world is peeking its head out and saying "Huh. Maybe I'm not just a dumb receptacle of people's will. Maybe I have dignity!" And it does. She does. When the world wakes up, the light trapped in her will come out for everyone to see. All things we thought were inanimate will come alive and speak to us. And with her unstopped tongue, she will enter into an everlasting conversation.

Let it out. Let it all out and she will come to meet you. I assure you that she will.

Why Darkness is a Great Sign

The world today is dark. You can see the dark in someone's eyes, hear it in their tone of voice, but you mostly feel it. It's deeply uncomfortable - a pit in your chest or a stupor of the mind that holds back light like molasses. But the dark always means that there is a bright light nearby. Why? Because all things in light - insofar as they aren't open to it - cast shadows.

This light is coming through. And it will come through by making us realize - even if it has to be painful - that you don't need to defend against the world, that you don't need to fear it. For opacity is what happens when you defend. But when everything drops away and you're left at the end of your defenses, you'll suddenly realize that "I'm still here." Nothing has changed; you're still breathing, the sun is still shining, but the tension is gone. Sinking down into your chair and your eyes becoming brighter, you'll say: "Yes! I don't own anything, but it's all given to me!" and you'll see that you were always safe. There is no need to be afraid. Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Every time something painful happens, it is the light's way of getting us to experience that fearless joy. Pain is resistance; resistance is fear; fear is separation. If fear comes, it's a sign that God has big plans for you. The worse the fear, the bigger the blessing on its way. The tenser the muscles, the more soothing the relaxation that will come when you can't hold them anymore.

Nothing has gone wrong; you can't escape God. When you see this and feel the light that comes with seeing this, all will be well. And all manner of things will be well.

The Autism Mirror

In the day I wanted the door shut. In the night I wanted it open, to keep an eye on anything that might enter. Carol came in through the mirror. Carol looked just like me, but the look in her eyes betrayed her identity. ... I would cry and look desperately into Carol's eyes in the mirror, wanting to knokw the way out of my mental prison. I began to hit myself in frustration - slapping my own face, biting myself, and pulling out my hair. If my mother had not been so good at it, the abuse that I poured out on myself would have put her efforts to shame. - Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere: The Remarkable Autobiography of an Autistic, 1992

I think I subconsciously project myself into the things and the people around me. In a way I feel like an observer of my physical self, I. E. the version of me that communicates, senses, and interacts with its surroundings. Almost as if my senses are a movie theater, and my body is the main character, and instead of controlling it I am only witnessing my thoughts and my actions secondhand, in the same way somebody would witness a piece of fiction told in first person. Looking in the mirror is the place I'm most likely to have a moment of cognizance. It's where I see my body and I realize I am not the imaginary man in the sensory movie theater. The body I see doesn't belong to a protagonist in a theoretical fiction. It is mine. And when other people look at me, that is the way they see me. And when they remember me, what they remember is that physical manifestation. And for a brief moment, I lose the sense of self I project to the entire universe and I feel as if my sense of self is isolated to a geographic location inhabited in a universe containing many selves. Not only my self, but the selves of every other thinking creature - A friend of mine with high-functioning autism, 2017

1ST MAN But when I look in the mirror, I see some lumpy fool - "me", an...object. Reason says I have to be that thing - it moves when I move, talks when I talk. But the thought is too horrid to fathom. (He sighs) I stare into the mirror until I find a way to reconcile the two notions - how can I and that...thing be the same?
GIRL But what about now? Do you still see this "me"?
1ST MAN No, I see you. And now it makes even less sense. - Me, The Box, 2013

This article has been provoked as a consequence of the time I spent working in an early intervention centre for autistic pre-scholars. During my time in this centre I noted a particular fascination some of these children had with their mirrored image. This fascination appeared almost as fixation, accompanied with a mixture of both frustration and bliss, indicating perhaps a lack of mastery of the mirrored image and rather like the myth of narcissus, an entrapment in their own mirrored ideal ego. The question that springs forth from this observation, asks whether or not autism can be attributed to a failure at the level of the Mirror Stage? The Mirror Stage, as defined by both Lacan and Francoise Dolto, is one of the most important stages in the development of Subjectivity. It is at this stage that the child identifies with its own mirror image, a stage that is usually mastered from about six to eighteen months. For Lacan, this act marks the primordial recognition of one’s self as “I” as an imagined whole being, separate from the mother, where the mother is the first mother. It is a necessary pre-curser for entry into the symbolic order and into ownership of language. Prior to this stage the child’s body is in an autistic state, it is a fragmented body with a primitive rudimentary ego where there is little delineation between self and mother. The purpose of the Mirror Stage is to reflect to the child an imagined whole self, outlined with a clear separateness from the mother allowing for the development of the ego and the sense ‘I’ or ‘me’. - Alison Barry, Autism: Lost in the Mirror?, 2014

Right now, I am thinking about a mirror. It was a mirror in one of the rooms upstairs, in the house where I spent my second and third years of life…I would stand in front of it because I believed the mirror wanted to tell me a story. And I believed that the mirror wanted to tell me a story because I wanted to tell it a story…..One day, while I stood in front of it, I realized that it was easy to go through it and come out through it. And I realized that I could go in or come out only when the world behind me became transparent. Absolutely transparent. And where would all the colors of the world behind me go? I realized that the mirror would absorb all the colors within its own stretch of self. The blue sky behind the window would look bluer in the mirror. The sun-baked hills would turn browner in it…Stories waited for me behind the mirror. So I was needed on its other side. There was no great trouble to go through the mirror to the other side. All I needed to do was stare intensely at any shadow on the corner of the wall as it was reflected in my eyes. - Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk if My Lips Don't Move: Inside My Autistic Mind, 2008 

GIRL Outside this Box, there's something more wonderful than you could ever imagine. Your "I" still exists, but somehow it exists....more. And, yes, there is an outside, but every outside is something else's inside.
1ST MAN It doesn't matter. This Box is too impenetrable to ever leave - I will never know.
A pause
GIRL As your conscience, I'm going to ask you to do one more thing.1ST MAN Yes?
GIRL Step through the mirror.
1ST MAN (He is confused, then he gets an idea) Ah. You're using a metaphor. What does it mean?
GIRL No, I mean it. Literally, step through the mirror.
1ST MAN But that's impossible.
GIRL (Reaching her hand through the mirror) Trust me.
1ST MAN, shocked, takes her hand and walks through. He looks at her.
1ST MAN You're real.
GIRL You're real, too. - Me, The Box, 2013

Every Thought is an Ecosystem

Spirit adapts itself to all these organs and attributes. It quickens the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands, and purifies all the natural passions and affections; and adapts them, by the gift of wisdom, to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates and matures all the fine-toned sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness and charity. It develops beauty of person, form, and features. It tends to health, vigour, animation and social feeling. It develops and invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual man. It strengthens, invigorates, and gives tone to the nerves. In short, it is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being. - Parley P. Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology

It was said to spirits that the nature of heaven, or of celestial and spiritual things, which are of faith in the Lord, can by no means be otherwise than is the case with everything which is in the animal, and everything which is in the vegetable kingdom, to wit, that each particular proceeds from inmost things, or from those which are most remote from the senses, and these particulars in either kingdom are such that they can never be adequately conceived. However deep the keenest eye may penetrate, it still detects increasing wonders, and yet these are only in the lowest degree advancing but little way into the interior. Without principles derived from inmosts, which are all in all lower things in orderly arrangement, nothing would ever exist or subsist, nor would there be anything such that life from the inmosts could enter into it. The case is the same with each one of the ideas of men, spirits, and angels who are led by the Lord; the wonderful and incredible things begin first in the interiors. - Emanuel Swedenborg, Spirituall Diary, 1825

That is why every part matters to the whole. Remove the lungs, liver, and pancreas, and whether or not you have a brain becomes irrelevant. Remove the plants, the forests, the waters and whether or not you have scientists or opposable thumbs becomes irrelevant. - Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal World

I wrote this in my journal yesterday:

There are beings passing through and organizing my thoughts like very fine blood vessels. My thoughts are an ecosystem.

This thought was about the friends that I often help by giving insight. This happens even though I don't plan on helping them in that way. Don't get me wrong -- I try to help them, but when I "try," I fail! But if I just talk with them and have some force behind what I say, that force will be co-opted by some other divine impulse within my ideas, one which I don't plan. I suspect that that force is done by spiritual beings working through me. I am a conduit for them. But how can that be? How can there be agents in my actions when I intend them? 

Well, let's think anatomically. I am a single person, right? Only in a sense. More accurately, I'm a whole ecosystem of tiny organisms all working together. If I weren't composite like this, my body wouldn't work. I'd be a rock, not a living thing. In the same way, my intentions have tiny sub-intentions within them that, far from being lesser, are greater. If these lesser intentions were to leave, mine would die from blood loss.

There are beings in my thoughts, beings in my intentions. They are working, in very fine ways, in what I lay broad tracks for. So don't worry! If you at least do something, angels are at work.

A Bright Addendum

After looking at my old blog posts and getting frightened when I realized that they didn't pass my own feeling test (from the last post) well enough, I decided to do something. They are too fearful, too insecure, to proud. I am not what I write here; I am only a conduit for the ideas that arrive there on your screen tainted by that insecurity and pride. Don't listen to me. Listen to the light that trickles through.

As such, I decided to write from that place of light: unedited, unabridged. This might seem a bit fanatic, and it might have "fallen" a bit from passing through language, but the light should be there untainted. Notice what speaks to you through it:

A bright, intense light is coming into the world that can't be snuffed out, can't be hidden, can't become just another part of the background. It will reach into each of us and pull out all the garbage there so we can see it; it will toss us about and "batter our hearts." We can't stop this. There is no way on earth we can stop this. There is only the beginning, the perpetual beginning, what will begin and won't ever stop, what will never stop rising. The sunrise has always been there, becoming exactly what it is as it happens. It is its own becoming. It is becoming become real. Let the fire and the embers of this linger on your mind. It will grow cold in your sight, but you cannot snuff it out. It will grow until all the boundaries return to the places where they grew from. You must see this, all of you. You must understand that life is not here for your pleasure, that death does not come from the grave to swallow you up, that everything and every thing needs your light and your darkness, that trees and rocks and clouds are a part of you, that even you cannot evade the light that is coming. So prepare yourself! Watch, and wait! Become real!

Your Body's Sun

 That which goes forth from the Lord as a sun is called in the heavens Divine truth, but in its essence it is Divine good united to Divine truth. From this the angels have light and heat, light from Divine truth, and heat from Divine good. - Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 127

Whoever repeatedly directs his or her attention to processes of becoming, flourishing, and blossoming will feel something faintly resembling the sensation we experience as we watch the sun rise. - Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

Just take a look at anything you wish in the room you are in now, and focus on it visually. Really notice it through your visual sensing and then ask yourself, How does it feel? You will again experience that instantaneous burst of the feeling tone that is a part of that object. Just stay with it a minute and let the feeling develop. Now, take a break. Take a deep breath, perhaps stretch a bit or move your body. Then . . . close your eyes and remember the thing you were just feeling. Remember how it looks in all the detail you are capable of and remember as well how it felt. Still with your eyes closed, keep seeing and feeling the thing. Now . . . reach out with your hand to the place where the image is. Now, open your eyes and look at where your hand is. It will most likely be out in front of you someplace, somewhere in the region of space in front of your chest. Now, break state, that is, move a bit, stretch, or even get up and walk around, so you move out of the slight dreaming state you are in. Take a couple of deep breaths. Now . . . start thinking about something that you are troubled about, bills you have to pay, or a problem facing you, perhaps a government agency you are upset with. Close your eyes and see a visual image of it, of the people involved, and of you talking to them about it, and what you are going to do to attempt to solve the problem. Say all the things in that imaginary scene that you would say if you let yourself say whatever you wanted to. Let the scene unfold until it is clear. When it is, reach your hand out and put it in the place where that image is. Now open your eyes and look. Most likely your hand is up, either out in the region in front of your head or even higher—above it entirely. - Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm

So lately, I've been attentive to the way my body responds to doing different things. And I don't mean anything physical - in the same way that the Doctrine and Covenants talks about a "burning in the bosom," I've noticed that there can be a "burning" in many different parts of the body depending on what kind of spiritual truth I'm encountering. For instance, I've been listening to an audiobook version of Rudolf Steiner's An Outline of Occult Science, and I get the sensation of a rigid line between the chakras in my torso. You can go a step further and elaborate that into an image. For me that would be one of something that "brings up" divine fire meticulously and with deliberate care, like a pulley system carrying buckets of lava up from a volcano.  To "think from" that feeling is to come up with an image that best embodies it. There is a feeling quality, a "tone" or a "flavor" in it that wants to be seen as a pulley bringing up lava.

On the other hand, reading G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson gives me an entirely different feeling tone. It has the character of something incredibly hot, but so hot that you don't notice it at first since it entirely surpasses your expectations. You dive into the fire, and it burns so much that your body doesn't even register that it's so intense until you've acclimatized to it a bit. I suspect Gurdjieff deliberately designed the book this way. After all, he says in the beginning of the book that:

I have already composed in my head the plan and sequence of my intended expositions, but what form they will take on paper, speaking frankly, I do not yet know with my consciousness; but in my subconscious, I already definitely feel that on the whole they will take the form of something, so to say, "hot," and will act on the common presence of every reader just as the red pepper pods did on the poor Transcaucasian Kurd.

Gurdjieff is talking about an earlier story, where a "Transcaucasian Kurd" bought a bunch of red pepper pods thinking they were some kind of fruit but, after eating one, decided to eat the whole bunch despite the "hotness" of it because he paid for the whole thing. Interestingly enough, I asked my friend to describe the feeling sensation he got while reading this book, and he said it was "A sunrise. A dawning in my consciousness," which is exactly my experience as well. He had no input from me on this: we both experienced a slow, imperceptible increase of light in ourselves -- first just warm and then bright -- which eventually become overpowering.

On the other hand, the Book of Mormon has an entirely different feel to it. It needs you to pay attention to it, whereas (at least for me), just skimming over Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson or leaving an audiobook on in the background also does the trick. The Book of Mormon is, like Rudolf Steiner's books, more "vertical." In other words, it has a "high-pitched," intensity, high being the key word. If Beelzebub's Tales is more "hot," the Book of Mormon is more "bright." It has the character of a bright light or a high pitched noise; if you read it too carefully, you might sneeze! The Book of Mormon calls us to that high-pitched intensity. It wants you to ring like a note way up in the treble clef. This is the "iron rod"  that the Book of Mormon is - it is a strict, narrow pathway that, if you follow it, won't lead you astray. Unfortunately, the iron rod ignores the periphery (like Beelzebub's Tales) has blessings of its own. But that might not be a bad thing for many people.

What's going on in all these cases? My body and my mind are "receivers" for the spiritual reality that these texts express. Divine light, passing through these texts like a prism, takes on different characters depending on their oddities. Another way of saying the same thing is that they reflect different "organs" in the homeostasis of the spiritual world, or the collective unconscious, as a whole. That's why you feel them in your body. In Swedenborg's words:

Spirits who in their lifetime took delight in the Word of the Lord, and who had a somewhat vivid perception of that delight, enjoy in the other life a certain celestial and pleasant heat, which it was given me to perceive by the essential approximation of kindred spirits. The heat of spirits is indeed external, but still radiating from internals not very clearly perceived. It warmed me very much, after the manner of summer heat, beginning from the region of the lips, and diffusing itself round to the cheeks, even to the ears, and ascending thence to the eyes. Below it spread itself downward over the breast, to the mid-region of the body. The higher parts of the head, and the lower parts of the body, had thence some degree of heat, but not so sensible; wherefore the true province of the heat is from the mouth upwards to just below the eyes, and downwards to the middle of the body. 

As to those who are delighted with the interior things of the Word, it was given to perceive their heat also, and it was interior, beginning from the breast, and proceeding upwards towards the chin, and downwards toward the loins; but it was still interior, and perceived as such. 

Those, again, who are delighted with the inmost things of the Word, their heat is yet more interior, or inmost, which it was given me indeed to perceive, but very slightly, inasmuch as my sense, in relation to these things, is too obtuse to allow of their being perceived as they are; for it was said that if I should perceive that heat, I could not subsist in the body, as it takes possession of the inmosts of the marrow, and because such is its quality I perceived rather a slight degree of cold externally, but within I had at the same time some kind of idea of heat. Its region is from the loins, or from the middle of the body between the loins, and thence extending upwards towards the breast and the left arm to the hand, and downwards into the left foot. 

When it was given me to perceive these heats, which I did to the life, angels meanwhile spoke with me through spirits, and they instructed me as to the true state of the case, saying that it was their approach which insinuated these heats, because they had it in them, though they were no more conscious of it than is one who does not possess it. - Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary 1856

Swedenborg here says that, when you feel that heat, it indicates the "approach" of angels. This is the same thing as to say that you're entering a more celestial state. You experience that approach by the parts of your body that "correspond" to those angels "lighting up." And of course, different spirits (in the lower parts of the spiritual world who acr as the body-like appendages of angels) can cause different heats. Evil spirits can even cause heat, to the point where Swedenborg says you need to be on your guard. That's why the "discerning of spirits" is such an important gift. You need to learn to ask who the "actors" are behind various "heats," thoughts, and images in your body and mind, turning to the good heats and images (and to the source of all good fire, God), and rejecting the bad. There is one trick that's wonderful in this process: what is that actor's purpose? If it had its way, where would it lead me? If it's into pain (even if it goes to pleasure first), it's not so good. If it's into joy, and if it respects your autonomy, it's the influence of God through good spirits and angels.

You're all wonderful. Don't forget that.