“The Dark Side of Aquarius is all the darker for thinking that it opposes darkness.” Lyn Birkbeck

On reading this title you might say that you are not interested in politics and just want to learn about spirituality. Me too! But spirituality has been made political to such an extent that you can read an innocent sounding book or attend a perfectly ordinary course entitled something like Spirituality 101: A Beginners Guide and without knowing it be thrust head long into the world of politics. Naturally, the political dimension of what you learn may not be obvious – it may not be party political - but it will be there alright, concealed in plain sight as you learn about how social justice is a spiritual movement, how anti-racism is a display of ascended consciousness, how equity is an essential spiritual principle, how improving local housing policy can make you more spiritual and how taking the shot strengthens the wellbeing of the collective.

There is nothing new about this of course. Politically motivated people have always believed that the world can be transformed in their preferred ways from the outside in. But spirituality, in its pure form, knows this to be wrong, for no transformation will stick unless it takes place from the inside out.

The root cause of every single human problem is the immaturity of Souls. Racism, sexism, poverty, ill health, crime, war and everything else that causes this planet to burn are the results of Soul immaturity and Soul weakness. People who perpetuate these evils do so because they do not know who they are or what they are for. They lack meaning and purpose, and this void cannot be filled by identity politics, social justice, wokeness, universal healthcare, net zero by 2025 or any other Utopian initiative. Improvements only ever come when Souls are matured and strengthened, and that only ever happens one person at a time.

But political leaders and the fanatics who do their bidding are convinced that the world can be perfected, but only by them. They have long ago given up trying to convince voters of this however, instead resorting to flat out mind control and manipulation. They do this by weaponizing emotion, having realised long ago that the continual use of heart-stopping imagery and emotive visuals greatly helps them to push their agenda. Propagandists know that perspective is a phenomenon of the Mind and when the Mind is placed under the rulership of the Feelings then perspective is not possible. Therefore, it is in the interests of the politically motivated to make you more emotional, because then it will be harder for you to see any contrary point of view. As well as feeding the political divide and fuelling the outrage machine this also makes it harder for individuals to recognise the lessons that Life is trying to teach them, instead preferring to put all their issues down to systemic inequality or institutional bias. So, this is where evil is today to be found, in the realm of a politics that is driven by unchecked and uncontrolled emotion. And though it pains me to say it, the chief culprits of this are the Left.

Now, some may say that when it comes to politics, they are all as bad as each other. But there are only certain parts of the political spectrum that wish to denigrate the uniqueness of the individual. This certainly happens on the Far Right, and the dangers of their views are clear to anyone who examines history. But though the threat of the Woke-Left is less obvious, it is no less severe. It is still widely thought that right-wing Conservatives are mean spirited, close minded and generally not very nice people, but that left-wing socialists are the good guys, the nice people, the kind people. While there is no doubt that hardcore conservatism is repressive to the Soul and the Spirit, the Modern Left, through its connections to socialism and communism is today the manifestation of evil. This Modern Woke Left, true to its deep Marxist roots, holds no place for God, preferring instead the flawed ideas of perfectibility, equity, the destruction of tradition, identity politics and social justice, all with the consequence of increased sameness. All political views, from across the spectrum, have their problems, some of them considerable. But the only one which actively seeks to weaken the individual and destroy their connection to God is the Woke Left. The Woke Left are so dangerous because they are not actually a political force at all, but a spiritual one, or more accurately an anti-spiritual one that seeks to kill God and replace it with tyranny by committee.

The words of an ancient Taoist master can be used to sum up the Woke Left. A keeper of monkeys ordered that their rations of nuts should be three in the morning and four at night; at this the monkeys were very angry and complained, and so the keeper ruled that the monkeys should have four nuts in the morning and three at night. With this the monkeys were very satisfied. They got no more nuts, but their whims were satisfied. This is the nature of the politics of the Left, which rewards whoever screams the loudest, and places grievance above growth every time. A better life for all the monkeys can only occur when the keeper looks to himself, and through self-improvement and personal development finds a way for the monkeys to first have more nuts and then be free!

But the Woke Left say no to this, instead placing faith in the ability of people with the ‘correct’ values to calculate society’s flightpath to Utopia. But people with ‘good’ values are often the ones who do the worst things. In their quest for equity the Woke Left often obsess about redistribution, but all that they really achieve is the redistribution of unfairness, discrimination and misery by changing who experiences such things. They cannot – because it is not possible at our current stage of development - to eliminate those things. The Soul enters into the human experience precisely because of the loss, regret, frustration and sorrow that it will encounter, and if we attempt to prematurely relieve ourselves of these things we will be relieving ourselves of our humanity. In light of these facts, words like equity and social justice should be examined carefully and treated with extreme caution. Only robots experience no sadness, and this is what many politicians, especially those on the Woke Left, wish us to become.

Many people say they want to live in a Left-leaning society for the supposed freedoms that it grants them, but there is nothing free about life under the Woke Left, which from its roots to its leaves is authoritarian in nature, seeking to change the meaning of words, re-imagine history in its own image and dismantle the past, all with the explicit aim of undermining the role of personal conscience. Freedom, under the Woke Left, is always heavily conditional, which of course is no freedom at all.

“We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds, but having become righteous we do righteous deeds.” Martin Luther

To be Woke is to lack four important things, while all the while living one big lie. The Woke lack personal responsibility, are devoid of self-awareness, absent of perspective and possess no spiritual connection. As if this were not bad enough, the lie that they perpetuate is that government can be made to serve the people, and the bigger and more powerful the government the better off the people will be.

Because of their faith in Daddy Government, Wokesters also do not believe that individuals matter very much. Recently the Washington Post (once respected newspaper but latterly fully woke establishment mouthpiece) ran with a incredible article entitled ‘You are not fully vaccinated. You never will be. It’s a goal  for communities or nations, not for individuals.’ If this does not convince you of the absolute the contempt with which they hold the individual I do not know what will.

As a result of their disdain for individuality they fail to comprehend that a society which places more and more faith in Daddy Government will become more and more enfeebled. As the government makes more and more decisions, which used to be made by individuals, so that society degenerates. You only have to look around to see this happening right before your very eyes. The individuals within such a society become progressively more unhappy and demotivated, their relationships with each other break down and their self-worth plummets. But that does not matter, say Wokeists, because look here is a metric about how inequality is lessening. Yes, reply the sane people, everyone is becoming worse off!

Wokesters can be of any age group, and a surprisingly large number of them are old enough to know better. But age does not equate either to self-awareness or perspective, because Wokesters often lack a healthy relationship with their ego. This tends to make them feel that they are the most important people in the room, anointed ones who possess special insight into the extent of injustice and hardship in the world. Of course, this self-delusion also makes them the most useless people in the room. If you know what is important and what is not, then you can act in the world in a meaningful and positive way. But if, as Wokeist, you believe that matters which affect 2% of the population are existential for all civilisation then you are looking at life through a glass darkly and cannot hope to find meaning or create anything of worth. The debate around climate change is a prime example of this. If the Woke Left were really serious about tackling climate change they would not be so quick to ignore the role played by the chief global polluter, China, who in 2019 alone accounted for 28% global emissions, far more than any other country, including the US. When confronted with this fact Wokeists will often shift the goalposts and start talking about how the West needs to correct for its contribution to global inequality. It is then that you can experience an important realisation; it is not the climate that they really care about.

Now, to be very clear, I believe that all people should have dignity, and I am in complete support of every single individual being whatever they want to be, free to act without any form of discrimination. I am an A1 advocate for kindness, compassion, tolerance and a leg up for all. My belief in the uniqueness of individuals is without qualification; live your best life and be whoever you want to be. But the Way of the Woke cannot deliver this, because, fundamentally at its core, Wokeism not about being open, kind, tolerant or inclusive. They say inclusion while implementing exclusion (of Jews, Christians, white people, Asians, Conservatives or Trump supporters). Under their rule the theory of diversity always results in the enforcement of sameness. But inversions like these are no accident, and occur because the Woke, despite anointing themselves as better than the rest of us, are in fact struggling to maintain their grip on reality. Wokeism is not just damaging to mental health, it is toxic for the Soul. To be Woke is to padlock shut the gates to happiness and fulfilment and to enter into a world of resentment, grievance and grudge. This is a movement away from God, away from Spirit, away from Source. It is a crying shame that so many spiritually inclined people have hopped on the Woke Train for a journey which has more to do with earthly power than it has to do with spiritual justice. But these statue-toppling, offence-taking Wokeists are not the vanguard, leading us to a better world. They are possessed by an insanity which is leading civilisation off a cliff.

Wokeism is also a con, seized upon by politicians as a convenient way to avoid accountability for their own failures. Governments possess, if they care to use it, enormous power to shape and direct the course of society, but when their policies fail to achieve the intended results it is very easy for them to blame things like misogyny and racism (the effects of which they could have erased, if they wanted to). Such buzzwords generate an emotional reaction, which if repeated often enough, blind people to the reality of their leader’s failure.

“The three kinds of mental action are thinking too much about things that belong to others, meditating in one’s own mind-and-heart about what is undesirable, and adhering to falsehoods.” The Laws of Manu

All this Wokedom is nothing new of course. It is an extension – perhaps PROJECTION might be a better word – of Utopian progressive politics, the idea that the world can be made perfect by imperfect people, and that wherever this progress is impeded it must be due to some form of oppression. This narrative has, over long years, become deeply embedded across the Western world. All that the Woke-Left are doing is to insist upon Utopia NOW!

Though I am singling out the Woke – primarily because theirs actions are so destructive to the cause of spiritual development – any formulation of society that ignores God is doomed to fail. To be anti-woke does not mean I am pro-capitalist or pro-establishment. Capitalism can be just as godless as Wokeism. And the establishment only looks after its own. But we fail as human beings when we insist that just because we do not like apples, we must like oranges. That is such low vibrational thinking.

It is crucial to understand that what the Woke Left are really fighting is not the patriarchy, or racism or capitalism. No, these are proxies for their real enemy – God – for Wokeism is the ultimate anti-spiritual ideology. Bad news for Wokesters though because God is real. It is not a white bearded man in a chair in heaven. But nor it is merely a higher aspect of you. The whole point about a God is that it is NOT YOU. Sure, God might show itself through people and things, and exist within them. But God is more than that, more than our petty fears and desires, more than our thoughts and dreams, more than our feelings and certainly more than our bodies. God is also more than just the NOW, God is the past, present and the future all rolled into one and more besides. God appears through flowers and trees, the sunrise, the sunset, and a million-and-one other things besides, all of which exist whether we are here or not. If we could get woke to those facts, then we might be in with a chance of improving things. Until that day however, every time we support or lend our voice to a social or political initiative that fails to recognise the existence of God, we hammer one more nail into our own coffin. No wonder there is a mental health crisis and a pandemic of fear. Without God we are not enough, and all attempts to convince ourselves that we are good, right, perfect and strong just as we are, without self-improvement, awareness or reflection condemn us further. In order to develop we must be able to find our own way to God, and to do this we must be able to think our own thoughts and speak our own words. Shame on the Wokester language police, because if you cannot speak clearly and freely about your own life experiences then you do not have a life, merely an approved existence.

Truth – another enemy of the Woke – exists, and when you breathe the clean air of truth you yourself become clear. But when you breathe the smog of illusion, the pollution of relativism and lie of progressivism you yourself are reduced and enfeebled. It matters what you believe, and there are many ways to change society for the better. But rewriting history in real time, telling black people that whitey is literally hunting them or telling four-year-old children that identifying as one of a hundred different genders is more important than their character, compassion or intelligence? These are not the ways to do it. Of course, all these are deliberate tactics of the Woke Left, whose war on reality is not meant to be won, but to destabilise you and perpetually ruin your ability to make sense of the world.

Nothing that I say should be taken to mean that I support the excesses of the Right. I do not, for all political ideologies must (by virtue of the Low Souls who promote them) degenerate over time into tyrannies. Instead, I would say that I am conservatively spiritual. This means that I see the way to God and the improvement of life as matters of evolution, not revolution, which can only take place from the inside out. I do not support the replacement, often advocated by the Right, of God with money or false symbols of nation or ethnicity. I do not believe, like some on the Right, in discrimination against any particular group or part of society. I also do not believe, like some on the Right, that change is a bad thing that should be resisted at every turn. Nor do I believe, like some on the Right, in tax breaks for billionaires or corporations being given a free hand devoid of any social responsibility. But revolutions, the Left’s preferred means of change, only succeed when conservatively inclined people fail to embrace evolution. My conservative spirituality is rooted in the realisation that rather than advancing human life, revolutions, such as we are living through now, are often only a Zero-Sum Game, lifting up those who were down, and pushing down those who were up. Revolutions may be, in part, the result of karma, but every revolution destroys something valuable, forcing humans to spend time recovering what was lost. The hand of fate is not nearly as present during political and social revolutions as their supporters would like to think. Revolutions are largely human inspired events, drive by greed, anger and fear.

Maybe, sometime in the near or distant future it will be the Right that shows itself, as it has before, as the enemy of the Soul. Indeed, that danger may already be here, for there are strands within todays fringe Alt-Right which worship power through technology and materialism far more than they do God. But for decades now the leading anti-God, anti-Life forces in Western society have come from the political Left, which has co-opted modern spirituality in its quest for power and reinvented itself as Woke. Daily life will go on, seemingly as normal, in a Woke Left dominated world, but the longer the Woke Left dominates culturally and politically the more God and the Soul will be crowded out. History will attest to this and will confirm that such societies land up destroying themselves. What it comes down to, in the end, is that all forms of politics are an immersion in the illusory material world, while spirituality represents our only shot at transcending pain and suffering through union with God. Politics and spirituality are not the same, but neither are all forms of politics as bad as each other. Right-wing politics, though often religious, can be deeply unspiritual. But Woke-Left politics is anti-spiritual. And that is a whole lot worse.

“Marxism is a badly constructed religion; it has always possessed a religious character.” Simone Weil

People who advocate for radical change should always be viewed with suspicion. Change is a phenomenon that occurs naturally in our world, and this is visible every day. The morning does not fight with the night, and nor does the night resist the morning. Each have their turn and each yield peacefully to the other, when their time comes. When change takes place incrementally, then few are harmed, and every Soul can adjust naturally. But the Woke Left does not want a smooth transition or a universally good outcome, it wants endless instability, because that is its fuel. Revolutionaries often see themselves as advancing some higher purpose, but in reality, the most revolutionary act you can perform is to place your actions, thoughts and feelings under the control of your Soul. That is what will improve things on this planet, for when the impetus for change comes from hate or fear it will be destructive not creative, exclusive not inclusive, partial not universal. Change does not need to be encouraged, it simply needs to be recognised as an ever-present reality, allowed but moderated. Change in the hands of any type of zealous reformer always brings destruction, first of all intentionally, but afterwards in ways that were never intended as the force of change gathers its own momentum and moves out of the control of those who initiated it. The phrase ‘the only constant is change’ was one of the key tenets of my late teacher, Arthur’s approach. But it is Marxist in origin, a statement designed to soften people up for the inevitability of the revolution. As used by Marx it is a statement of intent (not as Arthur used it, as a statement of fact). But the change that Marx envisaged is wholly anti-spiritual in its character.

It may be that some would rather leave politics aside when exploring spirituality, but God and the Truth are indivisible, and once you let one lie in you expose yourself to the next one, and the next one. It matters what you believe.

In order to formulate a functional politics for the Aquarian Age many pre-existing assumptions about justice and fairness will have to be re-examined. From what I see I do not think this work has even started. I see far too many Aquarian Age gurus simply regurgitating Woke Left talking points wrapped in a thin veneer of spirituality. Budding leaders of the future might instead wish to turn back to the Republic and the Laws, by Plato. Both texts offer suggestions, general and specific, on how a society ought to be governed, what it ought to contain and what it ought to reject. Plato was writing for a city state, with a population of a few thousand, but as our society breaks apart so we may find that his ideas become more and more relevant. Reading Plato leads us to important questions, in these early days of the Aquarian Age. Can democracy survive? Indeed, should democracy survive? For his part, Plato was scathing about democracy, furious at how the supposedly democratic city of Athens could have sentenced his teacher and friend to death on trumped up charges of ‘corrupting the city’s youth.’

“In a democratic country you will be told that liberty is its noblest possession, which makes it the only fit place for a free spirit to live in….a democratic state may fall under the influence of unprincipled leaders…law abiding citizens will be insulted as non-entities who love their chains and all praise and honour will be bestowed on rulers who behave like subjects and subjects who behave like rulers…the parent falls into the habit of behaving like the child, and the child like the parent… the school master timidly flatters their pupils and the pupils make light of their masters. Generally speaking, the young copy their elders, argue with them and will not do as they are told, while the old, anxious not to be thought of as disagreeable tyrants, imitate the young. Putting all these items together you can see the result; the citizens become so sensitive that they resent the slightest application of control as intolerable tyranny and in their resolve to have no master they end by disregarding even the law.”

Though these words were written two and a half thousand years ago they might as well have been scribbled down yesterday, for they perfectly foretell the condition of Western society at the start of the 21st-century, where all factions come to believe that society no longer works for them. But this situation, that we face today, has been created and accelerated by the Woke Left. So, what happens next? Well, Plato was convinced that democracy always degenerates into tyranny. It seems pretty clear to me that such a day has now arrived. Sure, a fig leaf of democracy remains, but when elections are fortified and voters scared half to death by behavioural scientists what kind of informed decision are they able to make?

All this suits the Woke Left of course, who despise any form of democracy that fails to deliver the changes that they want. So, to what extent will we allow the Woke-Left and their allies in government, academia, Wall Street, the City of London and the corporate media to forcibly implement their vison of the world? Or do you think my words are overblown, and the Woke are just some random protestors holding up the traffic? Oh no. Regardless of which political party wins elections the Woke Left are firmly in control of the levers of power across the Western World, and despite their so-called compassion and empathy their world view is profoundly anti-spiritual and authoritarian.

If you want some evidence just watch here. As you can see from this clip, the poster child of the Woke Left, Jacinda Arden, has allowed her carefully crafted image of compassion and inclusion as a strong female leader to slip, which has revealed her true intent. This is not a conspiracy, it is the way that the Left work. This is also not about her, but it is crucial to see that Woke Leftism has nothing whatsoever to do with making the world a better place. It is a grievance movement pure and simple, intent on exerting power and control over non-complaint human souls. Want some more evidence? Then take a look at the High Priest and Grandfather of the Woke Left Noam Chomsky advocate for the total exclusion of the unvaccinated from society here. These two examples are not aberrations or slips of the tongue. They are the Woke Left’s true face. Born of Karl Marx, these people exist to divide. It is all they know and the only thing they can do.

In these early days of the Age of Aquarius everything is confusion, and that is probably to be expected. We are still a long way from the truest, highest expression of Aquarius, so the Woke Left Authoritarian nightmare has some way yet to run. But the nightmare ends as soon as enough individuals claim and assert their personal sovereignty, their right to say no. This can start by remembering that no government is able to ‘give your freedoms back to you’ because they do not belong to government in the first place. The right of the individual to walk their own path and make their own decisions is sacred. Of course there must be some common rules, because we each owe responsibility to others. But these rules ought to be minimal because how we discharge our responsibilities is a personal matter of conscience and karma. And the more we cede those decisions to government the more drone-like we become. This is not a political matter. It is a spiritual one.

This is an adapted extract from Soul Strong, by Richard Abbot.