We Are The New Ark

The Work is the distillation of the inner teachings of the world's great religions. The religions closest to it in spirit and in practice are the Catholic and Orthodox Christian denominations, while Orthodox Judaism and moderate Islam are also very near.

Anyone following such a path as a Good Householder will eventually reach enlightenment and attain immortality within the limits of the solar system, as Gurdjieff taught. The Work offers us a short cut, as it were, to the same end, and preserves the Essence of all true religions. We are the contemporary form of the Sarmoung Brotherhood: we gather nectar from all traditions.

For almost two millennia the West has sought to spread the Christian faith throughout the world. Our laws and our customs have embodied the Judeo-Christian precepts on which our society is built. Most people, at least until the late 20th century, tried to live according to the principles of the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Even when dissenters claimed to be atheists or agnostics, the Judeo-Christian tradition formed the background of their lives, and most would have agreed that, even if they personally failed to live up to them, the demands of Christianity were the highest and best way to shape our lives, both as individuals and as a society.

Today, however, we are in the midst of a huge resurgence of paganism. We are throwing our Christian principles - the very building blocks of our society - out of our collective windows with both hands, and we have found nothing save the very vaguest of ideals to put in their place. Notions of "green" living, while admirable, are only a very small part of the stewardship of the planet and the survival of our species. They are important, but cannot take the place of the religious teachings that are now in danger of vanishing.

The original meaning of the word "religion" comes from the Latin "religio", to bind together. Without religion binding members of society together, everything disintegrates. To quote Yeats, "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold". We are seeing the truth of his prophetic poem today.

Living as a Good Householder in the 21st century is even more difficult than in the past, because society no longer supports such a goal. We are daily bombarded with messages from the media that our only problem is lack of money - we need to make more and more cash so that we can buy more and more stuff, have more and more sexual encounters, and so on. Hedonism is the new normal. A Christian man or woman in the Catholic or Orthodox churches faces criticism and risks the loss of his or her job if they dare to voice any dissent from the appalling new norms.

In England, people have been fired because they insisted on wearing a small cross, or have offered to pray for their colleagues. Where once they would have been commended, today they are disciplined and censured.

Politicians holding traditional Christian beliefs now face calls for resignation; apparently, it is impossible for a real Christian to hold high office unless he is willing to jettison his beliefs about abortion, marriage, various sexual activities, and so on. And yet, only 50 years ago, such a person would have won respect, not condemnation, for views which were then held by the majority of people in Western, Christian countries.

It was these commonly held views which bound society together. Inspired by the Bible, they encouraged an ordered, compassionate and sane community. They created the blessings of hospitals and schools, all forms of reciprocal care and consideration for one another. Today, these attitudes are under fire, and unless we ourselves become an Ark we shall all descend into a living hell where mutual help is discouraged, prayer is forbidden, and altruism considered just plain stupid.

Last week I wrote about the expansion of the demonic realm in our times. This sounds sensationalistic, but it is quite real. I suggested that, as others have said, the Holocaust opened a portal to the underworld and that we are now living in the Devil's Century.

The devil hates marriages, hates loving families, hates the God who created us, and in every way possible he seeks to frustrate the divine plan for our lives.

We can only imagine what Gurdjieff would say if he returned to modern day Paris or London! Instead of honouring the ideal family structure as containing a man, a woman and children, we have now encouraged two men or two women to adopt children, creating babies through surrogates if necessary, and raising those children in a completely unnatural environment.

Studies are now being published showing the ill consequences of forcing children to be raised by homosexual couples. Such children are often confused, ill equipped to deal with the opposite sex, and unsure and unhappy about their own sexuality. I am not making this up: the results are now clear and undeniable, yet they must be denied and children must be forced into psychologically abusive situations so that these harmful but politically correct principles are not questioned.

Today we even encourage boys and girls to question their own gender identity from a very young age, forcing them into basic uncertainty and causing much insecurity at a time when they should be learning how to read and write. We have become obsessed with sex in all its forms, and no longer accept the gender into which we were born. Freud once said that biology is destiny. Today he might be locked up for daring to voice such politically incorrect views.

Of course, someone who is born male and wishes to become female is now able to have mutilating surgery performed - at public expense - and a lifetime of expense hormone treatments given, again from the public purse; but this does not make a "he" into a "she". It is all quite senseless.

Catholic adoption agencies have now all been closed down in the UK, because they refused to allow children to be adopted by homosexual couples. Far from extending tolerance to all, society now only tolerates what we all once thought to be the abnormal and unnatural. Christians, Jews and Muslims holding the views of their religions are now forced into silence and forbidden to express their beliefs publicly. Gurdjieff's own teachings about sexuality, abortion and society are today very counter-culture, but they express the principles of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, which have not changed.

Many Catholic parents now home-school their children rather than expose them to the politically correct but completely unChristian attitudes that are forced upon them in public schools.

This evil is now becoming a socially enforced norm. This intolerant "toleralism" is destroying our Judeo-Christian heritage, and sowing entropy throughout every level of society. If we no longer know what a real family is, how may our children grow up secure and confident? If we no longer honour lifelong marriage and fidelity, how may we be trusted to fulfil other commitments?

All these horrors are new in the West - new, that is, since the collapse of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages. From the depravity that reigned at that time the monks and nuns of Western Europe salvaged hope in the form of the Gospels and the teaching contained in them.

When the great darkness had passed, the Christian message could again begin to spread light throughout the West, and civilization grew in the wake of the great monasteries which had preserved this message intact, an Ark for their times.

Today, we in the Work are tasked with keeping the teachings of the Fourth Way - the inner teachings of all true religions - intact in the face of an equally damaging social upheaval and disintegration.

Christians, Moslems and Jews following the way of the Good Householder may have to do so in secret, but they will surely continue to hold to their beliefs and to practice them while the persecution of believers is taking place.

We may support them and encourage them in their great task, while carrying on our own personal work in silence.

We may have a general idea about the end times, but we don't know how this particular story will end. Christians have the assurance of the Bible, that all men and women of good will shall some day be welcomed into the next life, but meanwhile there are great dangers surrounding us that threaten to bring about a new Dark Age.

Gurdjieff has warned us that our species is an experiment, and experiments may fail.

But whatever lies ahead, in the end the struggle is an unequal one, and the side of the Good will always have the ultimate victory. The Devil has been loosed on the world, and with him the 30,000 fallen angels he allegedly seduced from heaven, but he has only one third of the total spiritual kingdom. God has at least 60,000 angels, according to tradition, as well as archangels, thrones and dominions - and He has us and all those who've preceded us in keeping faith with the truth. All Conscious Humanity is engaged in this Holy War, and they lend us their help as we struggle with our own demons.

Keeping our inner Ark safe, refusing to abandon what we know to be true, continuing to work on ourselves and persevering in the face of huge odds, all this is necessary now - and as we preserve the teaching, so it will surely preserve us.

Are We Living in the Devil's Century?

In the late 19th century Pope Leo XIII reported a highly disturbing vision. He was apparently told that the Devil, after much pleading with God, was to be allowed a century in which to focus his activities on Earth. If you remember the Book of Job, God and Satan, although enemies, do converse - and the Devil, also called the Tempter, can exercise great power over mankind.

The Devil, in fact, is often called the Lord of this world, and in Christ's temptations in the wilderness Satan offered Him power over all the kingdoms of the Earth, if Jesus would bow down and worship him.

The original rebellion of Satan, or Lucifer, against God took place near the beginning of creation, when God created mankind and told the angels to serve this creature. Insulted at having to help a mere man or woman, Satan refused to serve. He was cast out from heaven "like lightning", and took with him a third of angels, about 30,000, who all serve Satan as demonic powers.

Satan now rules the world, and works in us through our mechanicalness. We Christians know that in the end, God and those who serve Him will be victorious, but each one of us has a part to play in this spiritual war; according to our particular weaknesses we will each be tempted through a multiplicity of little I's in conflict with our better nature, and our task is to overcome these temptations so that ultimately we may enter the Presence of God as saints.

All this is traditional Christian teaching, and in every respect the Work backs it up. We are here on Earth because of a particular, individual mission we need to carry out, the overcoming of our mechanicalness. If we carry out this task, then with the help of God and His angels we will be assisting the cosmic work of maintaining and creating order and defeating the forces of evil, the tendencies towards mechanicalness and entropy which threaten to destroy the work of creation.

Pope Leo XIII's vision emphasized that in the future this struggle would become even more intense. He added special prayers to St Michael in the Mass, encouraged Christians to prayer the Rosay and to offer other devotions, and to resist the wiles of Satan in their daily lives.

It seemed at the time that the "devil's century" must refer to 20th Century, which began in 1900.

Now, however, some scholars take the view that we are living in a state of even greater evil, greater mechanicalness, greater threats to organic life and to the souls of human beings in particular, than prevailed even during World War I.

I agree with those who locate the hypothetical beginning of this intensified onslaught of evil in the 1930's.

I believe that this period - when the occult practicioner Adolf Hitler, who specifically sought demonic help in his rise to power - began around 1934, give or take a year.

Hitler carried out acts of unprecedented wickedness, as we all know. He evoked the occult himself, and built Wewelsburg Castle as an occult headquarters for the SS, the elite forces of the Third Reich. Rituals involving occultic invocations and sacrifices were carried out there.

Members of his armed forces were encouraged to participate in such rituals themselves, including the orders that they should have sexual intercourse with pure-blooded women in cemeteries where fallen German soldiers were buried, so that the souls of those conceived there would be recincarnations of former warriors. The resulting children were sent to be born and raised in special homes, where they would be indoctrinated from birth with Aryan, occult teachings. All this is a matter of record; just search for "lebensborn" homes and you'll see the terrible truth that resulted from this policy.

What's more, it was during the mid 1930s that Hitler's persecution of the Jews began. At first there were what seemed like fairly mild prohibitions, forbidding Jews from entering or continuing in certain professions. Then came marriage prohibitions, with the notorious Nuremberg laws. Pogroms quickly followed; in 1938, Krystallnacht brought destruction and devastation to the Jewish people as their homes and businesses were smashed to pieces.

We all know the horrifying sequel to this persecution.

The Holocaust killed more than six million Jews.

Other groups were also targeted, for utilitarian reasons; handicapped people wasted food, so they were killed; Catholics and other Christians were sentenced to death for speaking out against Hitler; gypsies and homosexuals were killed because they were considered decadent.

But it was the Jews who suffered the greatest losses. And they were the target of Hitler's hatred because they embodied all he and his demonic master, Satan, most hated - they were the Chosen People, chosen to bring the message of God to the world, and implacably opposed to the Nazis' cult and their aims.

When Jews are specifically targeted, we are safe in assuming that Satan is at work.

We see his actions now in radical Islam, when Jews are sought out for extermination both in the West and in Israel, their homeland. Iran, which finances many terrorist groups including Hamas, is continuing Hitler's work. Iran's primary, stated aim is the extermination of the Jewish people in their homeland, and then the destruction of the Christian, democratic West.

In World War II, Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem were friends and helped each other in their common aim of killing Jews.

Today, the many Marxist-motivated political parties in the Arab world collude in their own aims of destroying Jews and Christians, and they are unfortunately abetted by naive, Christian Westerners who fail to see the larger picture and therefore back the wrong side, the Satanic side, in this great, spiritual war.

In the terrorist attack of 9/11, whose anniversary has just passed, more than 3,000 innocent civilians were killed in New York by Islamic terrorists.

Throughout the West, attacks are continually carried out by radical Islamists bent on destroying our Judeo-Christian culture.

And in Israel, attacks have been unrelenting, and alway target the civilian population, from Jewish kindergartens to restaurants to shopping malls. Israel is in the front line of the West's war on terror, and what happens there is of critical importance to the survival of Judaism and Christianity.

To this observer, we are definitely living in the "devil's century" today, and if this time-frame is accurate we may expect attacks on our civilization to continue and even to intensify at least until the mid-2030s.

It's not only a war waged with explosives, however. The family, marriage and education are all suffering as a result of this relentless onslaught. We are descending into a new barbarism.

In my next post I will outline some of the consequences of allowing Satan full reign in the West, where we are running blindly into the hands of our would-be destroyers.

This war, the war of the devil's century, is the crisis for which the Work was given to us in the 20th century.

We are to create an Ark that will carry us through the flood of destruction and provide the seeds of new understanding when the devil's century is finally over.

When Hitler killed six million Jews he opened a portal to the underworld that had remained closed since the beginning of time. This act has enabled the demonic powers to leash unprecedented evils on the world. In these dark days, all Christians, Jews, men and women of good will in Islam, and those of us in the Work need to focus our aims on our spiritual tasks and to make our lives into prayers by our efforts.

With the approach of the autumn equinox the time is right for us to seek spiritual renewal in the full awareness of all that is at stake.