FUTURE TRANSFORMATIONS

(Or an attempt to outline a post-human future)

Transcendental meditation wouldn't suffice to take man to the heavenly Beyond ... of the Omega Absolute, but it would certainly suffice to take him to the post-Human Beyond ... of the Superman. For the Superman is the evolutionary development immediately above man, towards which transcendental men are advancing.

With the decline of egocentric religion, the post-egocentric religion of Transcendentalism becomes the final form religion will take in the evolutionary history of man. Instead of praying and singing hymns, like Christians did, the Transcendentalists of the centuries ahead will directly cultivate their spirit through the medium of transcendental meditation. They will learn to meditate and regularly practise meditation in suitably-designed meditation centres, the institutional successors to churches. Praying, singing, chanting, etc., will have no appeal to them whatsoever. Only the expansion of the superconscious through meditation will be relevant to them, and this they will prefer to do communally - as part of a large gathering of fellow Transcendentalists.

Man in his third stage of evolutionary development (the stage beyond paganism and Christianity) will be succeeded, however, by the Superman, that is to say, by a brain artificially supported and sustained, with possible access to artificial hearing, seeing, and speaking devices, subject to external control. The Supermen - for there should be many such brains in existence - will be clustered together in tree-like formations, their brains being sustained and supported from a central energy source. There will be numerous tree-like clusters of this nature in existence throughout the world, and they will each signify a life form antithetical, in essence, to animals, particularly with reference to such tree-climbing, tree-inhabiting animals as apes. The 'tree' in question will be artificial, but the brains being supported on it will be natural and capable of self-identification. Each brain will be a separate Superman, and all Supermen will be resigned to a communal life, just as apes are resigned to such a life in the crowded branches of the trees they inhabit. The great antithetical difference, however, between these two life forms will be that whereas apes are resigned to a sensual communality, the Supermen will partake of a spiritual communality, and this spiritual life will constitute the first phase of the post-Human Millennium, being conditioned and encouraged by the regular intake of suitably-regulated doses of LSD, or some equivalent synthetic upward self-transcending, vision-inducing stimulant, which will be externally administered to the artificially-supported brains by the future equivalent of priests - the superpriestly spiritual leaders, so to speak, of the Millennium in question.

Meditation, then, will terminate with the termination of man, to be superseded by the visionary contemplation, revealed through LSD-type hallucinogens, of the Superman. Meditation is fundamentally too naturalistic to be wholly compatible with an advanced spirituality in a more sophisticated evolutionary context. As evolution progresses, so the lifestyles of its participants become increasingly artificial, subject to the substitution of synthetic for natural products and experiences. A being freed, so to speak, from the natural body wouldn't be qualified to practise yoga, with its complicated posturings, and neither would he be able to regulate the flow of oxygen to his brain through the manipulation of various breathing techniques designed to facilitate increased awareness. Rather, oxygen would have to be fed to him artificially, through the medium of special containers, and its flow regulated according to uniform standards of intake acceptable to the brain commune as a whole. It would pass into the blood vessels of the various brains, where it would be converted into corpuscles and suitably exploited in the interests of proper brain functioning. There could be no question of a natural respiratory system being in use at that point in time, for the lungs would have 'gone the way' of the rest of the body, left behind with the creature known as man. And, of course, an artificial pump, replacing the human heart, would serve the brain commune by maintaining a uniform flow of blood through such artificial vessels as were deemed necessary to link the pump to the natural blood vessels of the individual brains. The Supermen would never experience the human failing of heart attacks but, at worst, only a temporary mechanical failure of the artificial pump which, hopefully, could be quickly repaired - assuming, for argument's sake, it were to break down in the first place!

The introduction of hallucinogens like LSD into the Supermen's brains would, of course, have to be through the blood, so we may surmise that the future equivalent of priests will inject the desired quantities of them into the artificial blood vessels at salient, predetermined points in the sustain apparatus, thereby guaranteeing each Superman a uniform, carefully-regulated dose of the benevolent, mind-expanding synthetic stimulant, which would be designed to take over from where television and/or meditation had left off. What follows would be a sustained period of gentle acclimatization to its vision-inducing properties, as the Supermen contemplated the jewel-like crystalline images of their turned-on superconscious. With the termination of 'the trip', which would probably occur after several hours, the Supermen would be left to sink into their subconscious minds and either doze or sleep, in the interests of psychic integrity. The following day, however, they would be given another 'trip', and so on, until, with a gradual increase of the dosage to peak levels, they became spiritually ripe for the next evolutionary transformation - namely from Supermen to Superbeings.

Before I go on to discuss Superbeings, a word or two must be said about man and his future transformation into Superman. The average transcendental man of the late-twentieth century is rather like an embryonic superman, and, to be sure, there are already people living a life which approximates to the one just outlined and therefore intimates of it. At the time of writing, I happen to reside next to a couple whom I understand to be unemployed. They rarely go out during the day and hardly ever at night. As a rule, they spend their mornings in bed and their afternoons either listening to the radio or watching television. At night they invariably sit in front of their television for several hours. Now, for me, a quite conscientious intellectual, their lifestyle appeals to my critical sense and generally causes me to feel somewhat indignant and even censorious. What right have they, I ask myself, to spend their days either lying in bed or watching television when I, compelled by a sense of duty, spend 5-6 hours a day at my writings, with from 1-2 hours study every evening? Clearly, my moral sense is offended and I feel tempted to preach to them on the virtue of work, irrespective of whether or not there may be any work available to such people under the present economic climate. And yet my attitude - by no means untypical of people like me - is really quite beside-the-point and hopelessly one-sided. I regard my television-addicted neighbours from a reactionary point-of-view, quite overlooking the more relevant progressive one which, even if they personally aren't directly aware of it, is at least applicable to the trend of evolution towards the Superman. Now since transcendental man is pre-eminently a proletarian phenomenon, and since the proletariat tend, on the whole, to watch more television than the bourgeoisie, I must make some attempt, if I'm to do proper justice to this phenomenon, to view my neighbours' behaviour in the light of contemporary transcendentalism and thus equate their lifestyle, no matter how alien it may be to myself, with a proletarian spirituality that is a prelude to the visionary lifestyle of the Superman. For, viewed in this light, the hours my neighbours spend in front of their colour television correspond, on a lower external level, to the hours the Supermen will spend contemplating the luminous contents of their superconscious minds, as induced by the higher internal stimulant of LSD. And, of course, the hours they spend in bed, both before and after television, will correspond to the rest-periods which the Supermen will require to safeguard their psychic integrity, following the visionary exigencies of their respective 'trips'. My neighbours are therefore resting, each night, from their television experiences of the previous day, while preparing themselves, throughout the morning, for the afternoon and evening viewing to-come. They are the Supermen in embryo, and allow me to add, at the risk of scandalizing middle-class sensibilities, that they are by no means untypical of their class! Perhaps they are just a shade more radical or thoroughgoing than those who, largely because of job commitments, are obliged to confine their TV-viewing to the evenings and weekends.... Which just goes to show that one should be wary of looking at unemployment solely from a socio-economic point of view, quite overlooking the spiritual or modernist dimensions which accrue to it and would seem to be compatible with the unofficial development of transcendentalism in a civilization which, in regard to the bourgeoisie, is becoming increasingly decadent.

Transcendental man is therefore clearly in evidence in the context of extensive television-viewing. Meditation, though undoubtedly relevant to his future development, isn't the only kind of spiritual stimulus, even if it is an inherently superior kind to television, by dint of the fact that it expands spirit directly, through internalizing the mind, rather than indirectly, through the medium of artificial appearances. Nevertheless the incentive provided by television for a mild degree of upward self-transcendence cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to spiritual development, but should be regarded as a prelude to higher things, the temperaments of some people probably being such that they could never come to fully appreciate the virtues of meditation anyway, given that such virtues tend, as a rule, to be appreciated only by a more sophisticated type of mind in the twentieth century, and not by what we may call the lumpen proletariat. If television succeeds in gradually leading the majority towards transcendental meditation, then it will have achieved more than at first meets the eye! It does at least condition people to sit still and remain intellectually passive for a number of hours, which is what meditation also does, albeit minus an external stimulus and therefore with an emphasis on one's own spiritual resources. But if the general proletariat are closer, in their dependence on visionary experience, to the future Supermen, then it could well be that the meditating elite of the present century are closer, in their self-containment, to the ensuing Superbeings, and will doubtless experience a higher degree of collective meditation, pending transcendence. But there is no reason why the proletariat shouldn't indulge in periodic bouts of meditation in due course, even if only as a supplement to their television-viewing. Towards the climax of the transcendental civilization the vast majority of people, of whatever temperament, should be indulging in a degree of meditation on a regular basis, pending their transformation into Supermen.

When this transformation will be brought about I cannot, as someone born into the twentieth century, know for certain. Yet if decadence, in one of its principal manifestations, can be equated with the coming to fruition of the spiritual development of a given class, a kind of spiritual climax to the overall cultural or intellectual progress of each succeeding class, and we accept as fact that the aristocracy attained to the zenith of their spiritual development towards the end of the sixteenth century and, following their example, the bourgeoisie towards the end of the nineteenth century, then there would seem to be some justification for our supposing that the proletariat, i.e. urban men, will attain to the zenith of their spiritual development some time in the twenty-second century, and that the transformation from man to Superman will therefore occur at approximately the same time, which, at the very latest, could be towards the end of the twenty-second century. Hence we may reasonably contend that man in his final form has about two centuries to go, after which time he should be ripe for transformation into the Superman that will constitute the first phase of millennial life - a phase in which the brain will be artificially supported and sustained.

With the second phase of millennial life, however, the Supermen will be transformed, by the technological leadership, into Superbeings, and will consequently become a new and higher life form, antithetical, in essence, to plants and especially to trees. No longer will each brain be capable of self-identification and limited egohood but, with the removal of the old brain (in which resides the subconscious part of the psyche), become elevated, instead, to complete superconscious identification in blissful contemplation of spirit. From being a separate member of a commune of independent brains, the new-brain Superbeings will become components in a larger whole (just as the leaves of trees are components in the larger collective entity known as a tree), and thereupon cease to differentiate between themselves, to know themselves, in the manner of Supermen, as separate individuals. These clusters of new brains will in effect assume the character of one giant entity, and where previously each brain cluster could be regarded as a commune of individuals, and thus bear the plural title of Supermen, each new-brain cluster, by contrast, will constitute a separate Superbeing, the plural being reserved for reference to whatever number of such clusters may happen to exist in the world at any given time. So, considered separately, a Superbeing will constitute a much higher approximation to the ultimate unity of the Omega Point (de Chardin), and thus reflect an ongoing evolutionary convergence (in centro-complexification) from the Many to the One. Furthermore, the new brains of the Superbeings will doubtless be closer together on the artificial supports than would have been possible with the larger ego-bound brains of the Supermen, and will therefore more easily lend themselves to the appearance of a collective entity - each new brain being inseparable from the whole.

How long it will take before the Supermen can be transformed, i.e. engineered, into Superbeings ... I cannot of course say. Though there is no reason for one to assume that the Supermen will last for centuries. After several decades they would doubtless begin to tire of their LSD or equivalent hallucinogenic experiences and to long for a higher type of consciousness, completely beyond the visionary. The leadership would remain in regular contact with them to ascertain exactly what their psychic position was at any given time, and would consequently know when the transformation to the Superbeing was apposite. However, the post-visionary consciousness of the Superbeing wouldn't be forced upon any brain cluster prematurely. For evolution has to proceed by degrees, as the Hindu metaphor of reincarnation adequately confirms - the inability of the devotee's psyche to come to terms with the posthumous Clear Light ... being a reflection of his egocentric past and necessitating, in the paradoxical logic of reincarnation, a return to this world, where it is to be hoped that personal, i.e. evolutionary, progress will better qualify his soul for unification with the Divine in due course. Likewise, the actual progress of the Supermen towards the Omega Point would be a gradual affair, requiring their full acquiescence in artificially-induced internal visionary experience, before any transformation to the Superbeing could reasonably be endorsed. Appearance must precede essence, even when it is internal, and therefore as spiritualized as possible.

With the eventual removal of the old brain, however, the liberated new brain would be conscious of nothing but the light of its own superconscious mind and such a light would be essence, not appearance. It would constitute a higher type of meditation than anything the more sophisticated transcendental men had known prior to the post-Human Millennium, being the final form consciousness will take. Eventually - though again it's impossible to be explicit - this highest collective meditation of the Superbeings should lead to transcendence, and thus to the establishment, in space, of Spiritual Globes, which would be the bigger the more spirit they each contained, that is to say, depending on the number of Superbeings, from whichever part of the planet, that had attained to transcendence at any given time. Yet these Spiritual Globes would not be the Omega Point or, rather, Omega Absolute (to drop de Chardin and revert to my preferred terminology), but that stage of evolution immediately preceding the establishment of definitive God, which would be ultimate Oneness. The Spiritual Globes issuing from the Superbeings would constitute an evolutionary antithesis to the planets, or material globes, and would tend towards one another in the heavenly Beyond. Those which issued from the same part of the earth would probably coalesce into larger wholes as a matter of course, the larger Spiritual Globes, composed of the spirit of numerous Superbeings from any one area of the world, exerting a more compelling attractive influence on the smaller ones which, in being pulled in their direction, would eventually bring about the formation of still larger Spiritual Globes until, by a similar process occurring throughout the Universe over an immensely long period of time or, rather, eternity, all separate Spiritual Globes had converged together to establish the Omega Absolute, in complete contrast to the alpha-stemming divergence of the innumerable stars. And with the Omega Absolute, evolution would be complete and, following the disintegration and dissolution of the stars, the Universe become perfect - perfect in an ultimate unity which would last for ever.

It is therefore my contention that God doesn't yet exist as the Omega Absolute and won't exist as such until every single Spiritual Globe, from whichever part of the Universe, had been absorbed into ultimate Oneness some thousands or even millions of years hence. Gone are the days when it was possible to be agnostic, contending that one cannot know for sure whether God, in any ultimate sense, does or doesn't exist. On the contrary, I believe that one can know, and this essay is intended to furnish proof of the fact. From now on it will be possible for every man to be atheist, for knowledge has at last put paid to agnostic doubts. Every man will know that, while alpha absolutes exist, the Omega Absolute is a creation of the future, stemming not from men but, more directly, from the Spiritual Globes of the heavenly Beyond. Transcendental man may be a long way from the realization of that blessed creation at present, but, as a participator in evolutionary progress, he is certainly tending in the right direction. When he becomes the Superman of the post-Human Millennium, he will have entered the eternal plane. For, although such a context is at a considerable evolutionary remove from the Omega Absolute, his brain won't die, as does man's, but be artificially supported and sustained through to the subsequent transformation ... of the Superbeing, until, with transcendence, spirit becomes completely independent of the brain or, more correctly, new brain and capable, thereafter, of indefinite self-sustain. Here we are left with the ultimate paradox, which is that while the Superman won't last for ever, the spirit appertaining to him, which can be expected to achieve transcendence with the Superbeing, most certainly will. For everything must pass but the Omega Absolute, towards which everything tends.