Excellent article! Not for those undiscerning nor for the ones who get bored easily by complex thoughts and intricate phraseology!

The problem with history is that as we weren’t there as witnesses for almost all of it, none of us actually knows the truth, so we thus have to as it were rely on “hearsay”, which as we know is not accepted in a criminal trial (and quite rightly so) as being of the criminal justice standard of truth as of “beyond reasonable doubt.”

That really is the problem with “religious faith”, which in the case of Christianity depends on the acceptance of what we could call “miracles”, meaning things that we don’t have any scientific evidence that could or did actually ever occur.

Which clearly, as to this topic, if the question of when a man who “dies on a cross” can ever “rise from the dead” and live again.

What is however apparently completely overlooked is that non-Christian or Eastern religion does not suffer from these same problems of belief, as it does not generally suggest its followers or founders “rose from the dead”, but that they merely achieved perfection like the Buddha, after a long cycle of reincarnations, and achieved a state of so called “enlightenment” while still in one or another particular physical body.

One could argue this just “kicks the can” down the road, in that one is then left with the scientific problem of how to prove such a thing as a “soul” actually exists, and that it can be reincarnated, and how that might happen, and whether there is indeed anyway such a thing as “enlightenment.”

There are answers to these questions freely available in Eastern literature such as yoga texts and theosophical literature, such as the works of Madame Blavatsky, Alice Bailey and many others.

But on the one hand, science mocks this material as unscientific and on the other hand the mainstream religion, mainly Christianity, equally objects to it, as it desires to hold exclusive rights on the working of “miracles” and what religious truth is, and in fact asserts these rights by aggressively attacking any that disagree.

Like a very successful global corporation, Christianity does not like competition, and prefers to “dominate the market”, and that aggressiveness from those who are supposed to be following the “gentle Nazarene” who told everyone to “love one another as themselves” goes back at least as far as the “Holy Inquisition”, when even those who suggested that the Earth revolved around the Sun were threatened with torture on the rack if they dared to make their ideas public.

So we have a “spiritual lockdown” in the sense that on the one side we have respected scientists like Richard Dawkins who suggests to his gleeful numerous followers that religious belief is just a form of mental illness – and one presumes once they (the atheist liberal perhaps soon to be majority) get enough political power – their main current project is to separate Church from State – they will treat those as such – probably banning religion somewhat like this lockdown, and threatening anybody with arrest or compulsory mental health treatment if they still carry this “virus of faith.”

In this narrow gap therefore in which free speech on this subject at least still somewhat exists I will have my say.

Reincarnation is possibly according to theosophy (as per Alice A Bailey) by the transmission of the ego from life to life by what are known as “permanent atoms”, which can enter a new body in the womb.

These three permanent atoms leave the body at death, and carry the emotional, intellectual and what is called astral personality of each of us to our next life in a new body.

This seems totally implausible unless we are aware of the existence of etheric or other finer levels of matter, which science currently is not.

Except as what they now call “dark matter”, which science predicts actually forms over 80% or 90% of the known universe, but their instruments are currently unable to detect.

So this is simply a lack of awareness of science, which imagines it is nearing the ultimate, just because it can now make bombs to blow everybody up, but has not sadly yet figured out how to reliably cure cancer or create pollution free energy, like that possible theoretically by some nuclear fusion process.

There are also near countless proofs of the spiritual or psychic realm, and of meetings with advanced spiritual beings who exhibit miraculous powers (known as Brothers/Masters) in huge numbers of theosophical works, from first hand experience.

These are almost entirely ignored, and it is believed are all faked or fraudulent.

But there is almost no proper public scrutiny of these things by unbiased persons, so all kinds of “miraculous happenings” (including countless UFO sightings/videos, like the one over Temple Mount in Jerusalem) are desperately explained away, or ignored, because the public needs to be reassured that there is totally no escape from their material prison, which makes them feel secure, though actually it is extremely dangerous as they are currently slowly finding out, and as most of history from the Roman times and before to the 20th century totalitarian dictator era of Hitler and Stalin has made very clear.

It is a very frightening fact of human existence, that most people (and that means nearly everybody) is able to forget “history” ever happened, very shortly after it does, as if it never happened, and just carry on with their daily lives wholly regardless unless something really unpleasant happens to “wake them up” again.

Honestly – if this lockdown is over in a month, as long as no lasting economic damage ensues, the public will have forgotten all about it within about a fortnight, just as they have forgotten all about the riots that happened a few years ago, for not very much reason.

So the other thing about religion, which neither the atheists or the mainstream religious believers want to look at, is that there are thousands of religions coming from all places and all times, and they all start with one inspired founder who has some kind of “spiritual experience” or “close encounter with God”, or sometimes even may think he/she is God.

Which obviously is a delusion, as a God would have to be beyond any human conception, limitation or form to exist, behind the entire material reality altogether in fact, or on the other hand it would have to be – the whole universe – in some sense His body/Being.

A body incidentally, which if the Big Bang theory is approximately correct, which Eastern philosophy does incidentally suggest is the case, i.e. that the material universe periodically arises and disappears (in what are called “Nights of Brahma” lasting god only knows how many aeons, or maybe are even beyond an concept of time we understand) does in fact appear and disappear over huge timescales.

And the extraordinary thing is that all these different prophets whether of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, etc, etc, come up with approximately the same ideas.

(The class of beings we call “artists” are often on the verge of such experiences themselves, as for example can be found in the writings of those like Tennyson and Wordsworth which are often very similar to some of these “scriptural outpourings”)

They have some kind of an “expansion of consciousness” with some kind of level of intelligence that overpowers them and they then describe in superlatives of various kinds, and often fall to their knees at the colossal nature of this experience.

This is followed by a sudden outpouring of what we call “scriptures”, which are often extremely detailed systems of thought like Buddhist scriptures, which can run into thousands of pages, like for example Madame Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine” which she claimed was more or less dictated to her by “hidden Masters” who lived mainly in the East, such as Tibet and so on.

And who sometimes had/have bodies for several hundred years or more, such as figures like Methuselah in the Bible, or didn’t in fact have ordinary bodies, but “spiritualised ones” which existed on a finer level of matter, somewhat like the etheric one I mentioned, that our scientists now call “dark matter” or “dark energy” but don’t yet know how to detect it.

So actually, there is plenty of evidence that a God exists, as does the spiritual dimension of “psychic events.” But because these are largely isolated occurrences, experiences only infrequently or in the case of the spiritual awakenings of prophets who are only one in many millions, or even billions, depending on their stature, obviously nobody else can have these experiences.

But to deny them, may be like denying that nobody could ever paint a picture like Caravaggio or compose a symphony like Beethoven or a theory like Einstein, because one simply had no such ability oneself.

So while science on the one hand and fundamentalist type religion on the other hand dominates society, and each is more or less the mortal enemy of the other, and religions are mortal enemies of one another also, and nobody actually tries to seriously look at religion as a whole objectively, and assess if the psychic and so called “miraculous” (there are no miracles, nothing is beyond the laws of Nature, they are simply exhibitions of laws science does not yet understand, when genuine – of course there are many frauds also) occurrences are true, we remain locked in this terribly dangerous world that does not know the truth, but is just full of people who hate each other, who would mostly in truth like to see the other lot wiped out, which is really a genocidal position if you think about it, and that’s where we are heading now.

The intolerance that leads to mutual destruction and even genocide, because we are as a people divided – instead of trying to help each other as other species herds in nature generally do – yes, there are fights over mating rights, but not generally to the death and no attempts to massacre large sections of the species by other sections – we are all ready to kill each other even over small differences in belief like if you voted Brexit or not, or which political party you belong to, or even which football team you support.

God is there alright, but the reason people don’t find Him, is because nobody is actually looking for Him hardly, they are just trying to find means to wipe the other lot out.

The same is true in politics. No main party now supports proportional representation, which would give everybody a chance to have their vote count, but the 3 main parties are all against it (Labour is softening a bit now it keeps losing).

Because just as in our own personal religion or our atheism, we all want to dominate, we don’t want to share and cooperate.

And with that outlook on life, to get Biblical about it, “the end is nigh.”

So it’s no surprise that we find ourselves in some epidemic of disease and pre-existing mass madness anyway, as like the lemmings, we all do crazy things and push each over the next available cliff.

So all I can do after the foregoing is wish a Happy Easter to everyone.

But understandably I’ll leave out an exclamation mark, as I don’t think it is going to be very happy for anyone, on account of this increasingly dangerous state of division on almost every issue that matters that we are all in.

Very good piece, thank you.