TRANSVALUATIONS

Living in a world which had been transvaluated would be a good deal different from living in a world such as most people are accustomed to inhabiting in the present century. The 'transvaluation of all values', which Nietzsche hinted at and partly realized in his own work, would have taken place right across the spectrum of everyday life, with a consequence that people would think about life or the world around them through minds the converse, in so many respects, of what most Western minds currently are.

To explore this prospect in more detail, we must project ourselves, if only in imagination, into the transcendental civilization of the ultimate stage of human development. We will be brought into contact, through this projection, with men who, when referring to the weather, will incline to regard a fine day as a bad one and, by contrast, a cloudy, wet, or cold day as desirable - indeed, as much to be preferred. Such men will be Transcendentalists and, consequently, they won't be partial to paganism or to anything which might be associated with a heathen outlook. The sun will be regarded as of diabolic constitution, its sensual face a denial of the spiritual life, a distraction from thought concerned with Truth, which is to say, the truth about transcendent spirit. The sun, together with other such stars, is at quite the opposite evolutionary remove from transcendent spirituality, being the most absolute sensuality. Men whose psyche is spiritually biased won't desire to think too highly of the most absolute sensuality or, for that matter, of lesser degrees of sensuality, including their own. They will be grateful, in effect, for every encouragement to avoid thinking about it, and will accordingly treat cloudy weather with more respect than Christian, or atomic, man ever did. A typical Transcendentalist would admit, if questioned by an alien from some neighbouring solar system, that he preferred winter to summer because it was more conducive to the cultivation of his spiritual life. Man was more interiorized during the winter months than at any other time of year, and therefore given to essence to a greater extent than to appearance. The summer was, by contrast, a pagan season, a season when nature - or such of it as remained - grew to a maximum beauty in copious sensuality, and man was tempted to admire it at the expense of his inner life. No, this typical Transcendentalist would not be as happy in summer as in winter, when the sun was at its farthest remove from one's part of the earth, and the incentive for sensual indulgence, including sunbathing, considerably reduced. The cold was good at snuffing-out insects, and days were shorter than in summer. That meant more artificial light than natural light and, beyond man's evening windows, a closer approximation of the world to the essence of the heavenly Beyond. Daylight all-too-often reminded one that one was living in a kind of purgatory - an interim composite realm in-between the blinding appearance of Hell and the soothing essence of the future Heaven.

Were the alien from outer space to persist in his questioning of our imagined Transcendentalist, he might learn more than a few things which either also applied to his own world or had yet to come to pass there. Take, for instance, the question of sunbathing. Did anybody still sunbathe? No, absolutely not! Sunbathing was strictly taboo, corrective therapy attending infringements of the law, whether the guilty party were young or old, male or female, black or white. There could be no question of man's ever returning to a situation analogous to that which had prevailed in the twentieth century, when a kind of neo-pagan sun worship took possession of so many people, following the collapse of Christian values and before the transcendental civilization had arisen. Such overt diabolism would be completely incompatible with a transcendental approach to life, an approach in which only a direct aspiration towards the Divine counted for anything. The sun was still there, of course, but life was better if one tried not to notice it! Those who desired a skin-tan could always avail themselves of artificial heat therapy, presumably through a solarium, in the privacy of their homes. Beaches were always deserted in the summer.

Perhaps this has become a shade too literary, though not, I hope, too fantastic. There is no reason for us to suppose that man's current attitude to the sun or nature or the weather will last for ever, least of all in a civilization which will have turned against nature to such a radical extent ... as to be predominantly if not exclusively transcendental in outlook. Anything that stems from the Alpha Absolute will be, at best, suspect to this ultimate civilization, which will have no use for an atomic integrity. Many natural phenomena accessible to man's control or reach will, in the course of time, be removed - certain aspects of nature being supplanted by man-made artificial phenomena, other aspects of it simply ignored. The shift away from nature will take various forms but have as its motivation one goal: a closer approximation to the ultimate supernatural ... as achieved through expansion of the lower, or artificial, supernaturalism of man-made phenomena in conjunction with expansion of the higher, or spiritual, supernaturalism peculiar to the superconscious part of the psyche. Eventually this will, of course, lead to the supersession of man by life forms whose brains and/or new brains will be artificially supported and sustained. But by that time the final civilization will have given way to a post-Human Millennium, which is not something connected with man and therefore cannot be evaluated according to human criteria. The post-Human Millennium is, in effect, the free, stateless, classless society which Socialism intends to bring about, the heavenly goal, as it were, of socialist striving; though, in point of fact, it will be Transcendentalism rather than Socialism that leads to this millennial utopia, insofar as, considered in such a definitive light, the post-Human Millennium is a profoundly religious development peculiar to an advanced degree of earthly supernaturalism, and cannot directly stem from a political development, but only from a religious one, like Transcendentalism.

Getting back to the typical Transcendentalist's attitude to life in the coming centuries, we need not doubt that the 'transvaluation of all values' he inherited will lead to endorsement of an atheistic position, contrary to what is officially upheld within the Christian, or atomic, civilization, where God the Father is still acknowledged as God and shares this honour with Jesus Christ, the actual principal deity appertaining to the atomic stage of civilized evolution. With the transcendental civilization, however, there will be no acknowledgement of the Alpha Absolute as God, and neither will there be any recognition of the man-god alpha/omega compromise, but, rather, a direct aspiration towards the full realization of the Divine, conceived in terms of the Omega Absolute ... of unified transcendent spirit. God, for the Transcendentalist, will imply a supreme level of Being which will emerge as the culmination of evolution in the distant future, and he will know that man cannot attain to this supreme level of Being, but must be superseded by a higher life form engineered out of the human ... from which a still higher life form will be engineered until, following transcendence, Spiritual Globes are established in the heavenly Beyond, to converge towards one another in a process which will only come to a climax once the Omega Absolute is established, with the culmination of all spiritual evolution. The Transcendentalist won't therefore worship the Alpha Absolute either in a concentrated or a diluted guise, either absolutely, through the Creator, or relatively, through Christ, but will focus his religious attention on cultivating human spirit to the extent that it can be cultivated ... prior to the extensive supernaturalism of a post-Human Millennium.

Part of this spiritual cultivation will doubtless take place in specially-designed meditation centres, where the communal practice of meditation will come to signify a crude approximation to the higher, or millennial, approximations to the heavenly Beyond still to come. The Transcendentalist will know that this is but a stage on the road to ultimate salvation, and should not be mistaken for the end of the road itself. As the final civilization matures, the state machinery, conceived in terms of Socialism, will continue to 'wither away', so that the closer men draw to the post-Human Millennium, the more the spiritual life will prevail. With this transcendental Millennium, however, the spiritual life will have entirely superseded materialist preoccupations ... as the post-human life forms - first the Supermen and then the Superbeings - are directly set on course for the heavenly Beyond in successively greater degrees of supernaturalism. The free society of the post-Human Millennium is only objectively conceivable in terms of these supernatural life forms, not with regard to man, who will always be subject to some degree of socialist supervision with what time remains to him throughout the duration of the coming transcendental civilization. Only after that time, when brains become artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, would the State, and hence socialist supervision, have completely 'withered away' ... to make way for the exclusively religious leadership of the post-Human Millennium. For in a very real sense the People are the State in a socialist - as opposed to state socialist - phase of evolution, and when they are superseded by the Supermen, so the State will have been superseded by the post-Human Millennium, as well, of course, as its servants in the governmental and/or bureaucratic context of state machinery, which will then become quite superfluous.... Although this is not to say that leadership ends with the complete disappearance of the State. For, as I have just intimated, the religious leadership - derived, one can only suppose, from the spiritual leadership of the transcendental civilization - will take over from the remaining political leaders and have their own machinery to maintain - at least throughout the lower phase of the post-Human Millennium, and thus prior to the probable investment of supervisory authority in the hands of artificial religious leaders, such as robots and computers, at a higher phase of millennial time. This ultimate machinery will include the artificial sustain systems (embracing the possibility of a mechanical pump, oxygen containers, artificial blood vessels which link the natural blood vessels in the brain of each individual Superman to the pump, etc.) and accompanying supports, on which the collectivized brains of the Supermen will be 'housed', together with the requisite supply of LSD or equivalent synthetic stimulants for inducing upward self-transcendence in the superconscious mind of each Superman, the means of injecting such stimulants, in specific amounts and according to regulated practice, and any other machinery relative to this or a subsequent phase of the quest to bring evolving life on earth closer to ultimate transcendence.

Whether the religious leaders will be responsible for the technological aspect of millennial life or whether, in fact, it will be solely left to scientific technicians ... is a moot point. Though an alternative - and possibly more viable - supposition is that leadership will rest in the hands of both technicians and gurus at once - the former as regards all external matters, i.e. the supervision of millennial machinery and the injection of hallucinogenic stimulants into the Supermen; the latter, by contrast, with regard to all internal matters, as directly experienced by themselves in conjunction with other Supermen. That is to say, the spiritual leaders may also be artificially supported and sustained, one to each brain collectivization, and act as go-betweens for both the technicians and the supernatural life form, informing the former of what life is like 'on the other side', whilst advising them as to how much LSD, etc. should be injected into the Supermen at any given time, what the effects are, how the Supermen are coping, and so on, in order that they may be kept directly in touch with and respond more accurately to the needs of their supernatural 'charges'.

Perhaps I am mistaken to distinguish between technicians and gurus in this way? But it seems to me that spiritual leaders, whether Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu, or whatever, have an obligation to enter into the 'promised land' of divine salvation with their flock, and thus share in the religious experience of their flock at the same time as they are enlightening it. Doubtless transcendental leaders would be under a similar obligation, since not only instructing their flock as how best to meditate, but actually meditating along with it, and thus participating in the same 'promised land', so to speak, as those for whom they were spiritually responsible. Why, therefore, should matters be any different for the ultimate spiritual leaders ... of the post-Human Millennium, who should act as both confidence inspirers of and instructors to the Supermen ... by actually participating in the LSD or equivalent hallucinogenic experiences themselves? Surely this would be the only context in which the highest religious leaders could work - as guides to and counsellors of their fellow-spiritual travellers, with a duty to act as principal spokesmen, as it were, for each cluster of artificially-supported and sustained brains, and therefore ability to liaise, presumably through some artificial channel of communication, with the technicians in the interests of the spiritual wellbeing of each individual Superman. The technicians would thereby learn from these chosen spiritual leaders exactly what, at any given time, the psychic position for the Supermen was like; though the actual authority to keep things moving forward, in the interests of evolutionary progress, would remain largely with them, in their capacity as external controllers. They may not enter the transcendental 'promised land' personally, but must nonetheless ensure that any such 'promised land' spiritual leaders and populace have gone into together is not allowed to stagnate.

Eventually, however, this Superman-phase of the post-Human Millennium will be superseded by a Superbeing-phase, when the old brain of each artificially-supported brain is surgically removed by the technicians ... and a greatly intensified collectivization ... of new brains, creating an entity antithetical in context to a tree, arises as the Supermen's millennial successor. It is with this ultimate phase of the post-Human Millennium that transcendence will truly be attained to; for now there will be no spiritual leaders, and therefore no class divisions, as the collectivized new-brains, constituting a Superbeing, exist in a wholly post-visionary context of a consciousness beyond communication with external technicians. This will constitute, in each of its numerous manifestations throughout the planet, a truly free society, and it will simply be a question of time before the hypermeditation of each Superbeing gives rise to transcendence and the consequent attainment of the earth's most advanced life form to definitive salvation, in the heavenly Beyond, from its new-brain atomicity. It is with this second phase of the post-Human Millennium that one suspects the human technicians will delegate authority solely to artificial supervisors, such as computers and robots, while they gradually withdraw from active participation in the supervisory process and allow spiritual matters in the Superbeings to take their inevitably autonomous course, so that, long before transcendence occurs, the superbeingful society of the post-Human Millennium, akin in some respects to a communistic or communal culmination of millennial evolution, will be completely free of human interference and/or supervision, completely equal one to another in its numerous new-brain collectivizations, completely stateless in its exclusively religious orientation, completely leaderless in either a technical or a spiritual sense, and completely programmed, through meditation of the most sublime order, for the ultimate freedom ... of spiritual transcendence in the long-awaited heavenly Beyond.

This, then, is the society which progressive struggle on earth would seem destined to bring about, and we can be confident that, one day, it will arise. What we must anticipate, over the coming decades and centuries, is a 'transvaluation of all values' not only with regard to such matters as I earlier drew attention to - a mere handful of all the transvaluations of that order which must eventually come to pass - but, no less importantly, with regard to Socialism's concept of the Millennium, a concept founded, all too often, on short-sighted projections of existing materialism which, instead of objectively portraying a future transcendental Millennium, serve merely to obfuscate matters and to mislead the mind along quasi-anarchic channels, to the detriment of Truth. One thing we can be absolutely certain of is that the Communistic Millennium will not be a human society minus all existing patterns of bureaucratic and/or governmental control but, on the contrary, the most profoundly religious post-human society of which it is possible to conceive. Perhaps, when all's said and done, that is precisely the most important transvaluation which needs to be made over the coming centuries!