ON THE DEVIL

1. The sun is not the Devil but a component of the Diabolic - a part of the alpha absolute.

2. No man can see Hell in its entirety, though he can usually see a part of it when he beholds the nearest star and/or stars.

3. To look upon the Devil as God is only permissible during a limited period of evolutionary time.

4. Likewise it is only permissible to pay deferential respect to the Infernal, in the guise of the Creator, for a limited period of evolutionary time.

5. The Father, being a Christian anthropomorphic euphemism for the Devil - and most especially, I contend, for that part of the Devil which corresponds to the sun - is deserving of our respect throughout the duration of dualistic civilization, but not after it has passed!

6. Thus although the planet will continue to spin through space as formerly, and men feel that its cosmic stability is still guaranteed in the future, they won't give thanks for this fact to the Father. Rather, they will exclusively turn towards the creation of God ... the Holy Spirit.

7. Post-dualistic civilization will therefore be devoid of both unconscious paganism and conscious Christianity. It will be solely concerned, by contrast, with superconscious transcendentalism.

8. What makes Christianity unacceptable from a post-dualistic standpoint is the fact that it is insufficiently transcendentalist; its dualism, in diluted paganism, curtailing the degree of transcendentalism permissible.

9. To say post-dualistic is equivalent to saying post-egocentric, meaning a consciousness biased on the side of the superconscious, not balanced between the subconscious and the superconscious in dualistic egocentricity.

10. A consciousness biased on the side of the superconscious only becomes possible in an urban context, where the man-made has displaced the natural to an extent that civilization preponderates over nature in the ratio of at least 3:1.

11. Civilization may be regarded, in this urban context, as a manifestation of the materialistic supernatural. Such a 'supernaturalism' can only precede the spiritual supernaturalism which is its logical consequence.

12. A profounder concept of civilization is one that equates it with a society in which politics and religion are complementary ... on a uniform level of evolution.

13. Thus civilization, in this profounder sense, presupposes an official religion, even when that religion has ceased to correspond to majority requirements or interests, and the civilization in question is accordingly decadent.

14. Pitted against decadent civilization is barbarism, which tends to its destruction. In the modern age, a barbarous country is one in which religion has been officially dethroned and outlawed. This primarily applies to traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, though it may also extend to revolutionary religion, e.g. transcendentalism, and hence to 'God-building' in general.

15. Being materialistic, a Marxist-Leninist society is liable to make no distinction between traditional religion and its revolutionary successor but, rather, to pronounce condemnatory judgement on all religion, whatever its nature.

16. It is perhaps inevitable that a Marxist-Leninist society should do this, given the materialistic basis of communist ideology, which claims to be scientific.

17. A superior world-view to Marxism-Leninism will distinguish between traditional religion and the revolutionary, transcendental religion which is destined to replace it. This world-view would not therefore be against religion per se.

18. For it is not religion which is destined to perish, but a particular stage of religious evolution.

19. If in the transitional period between the death of an old civilization and the birth of a new one, there exists an 'internal proletariat' of spiritual inclination and an 'external proletariat' of materialist inclination, as Toynbee maintains, then it should be noted that the converse of these antithetical manifestations of proletarian life is also to be found, so that the West, for example, may be said to harbour an 'external proletariat' of materialist inclination, and the East, by contrast, an 'internal proletariat' of spiritual inclination. These latter proletariats will, however, have been in the minority in their respective societies traditionally.

20. There is also, it should be added, a proletariat which is neither 'internal' nor 'external', in the strict Toynbeean sense of those terms, but simply proletarian, i.e. devoid of either strong religious or political convictions. Such a 'lumpen proletariat' may well constitute a majority.

21. To criticize the barbarism, especially in its physical manifestations, of barbarous countries from a civilized standpoint ... is simply to project one's civilized criterion into contexts to which it doesn't apply - in a word, to meddle.

22. The freer the society the more truth it can take. Conversely, the less free the society, the more does truth have to be diluted by illusion.

23. Dualistic society cannot be expected to imbibe truth in strong doses. Only a post-dualistic society can lead one to the ultimate truth which, as Truth, would be God.

24. What makes the term 'God' so suspect, these days, is that it has been associated for so long with the Devil, in the guise of the Father, and with Christ, the relative anthropomorphic deity of the Christians.

25. And yet the term 'God' can still have meaning and respectability, from a post-dualistic standpoint, if exclusively associated with the Holy Spirit, and thus projected, as the goal of human striving, into the future.

26. The Nietzschean assertion that 'God is dead' should not be taken to apply to the Holy Spirit (which in any case doesn't yet exist) but primarily to Christ, as god of the Christians, and secondarily to the Creator, Who is no longer to be regarded as God but simply as the Devil or, better still, the stars.

27. When we speak of the stars we are using scientifically factual language. When, however, we equate the stars with the Devil we are entering the realm of religion and using not fictional but theological language, since theology has to do with metaphorical extrapolations from the Given.

28. Everything returns to religion; for at the end of the evolutionary road we shall be immersed in transcendent spirit which, as God, would be at the furthest possible remove from the stars.

29. Evolution is therefore a journey, as it were, from the impure light of the stars to the pure light of the transcendental Beyond, which is to say, from the sensuality of the alpha absolute to the spirituality of the omega absolute.

30. Science can never penetrate to the essence of nature but only deal in phenomenal appearances, the reason being that the 'essence' of nature is apparent, not essential.

31. Essence is spirit, and can only come out of nature with the birth of the supernatural at the climax of evolution. To penetrate to the noumenal essence of the supernatural, one must utilize the highest religious approach, which is to say, the direct cultivation of spirit through transcendental meditation. Scientific inquiries are irrelevant.

32. One should not confound what will be transcendent, in the transcendental Beyond, with what already exists, in space, as the stars. There is nothing transcendent, i.e. beyond nature, about the stars. For, as the roots of nature, they are the most fundamental and primal of all existences.

33. One might liken the sun of any particular solar system to the roots of a flower, the planets to the stalk, and the highest life form to be found on those planets to the blossom. Eventually, however, this life form will evolve beyond the blossom and thus become transcendent - wholly detached from nature.

34. Science is a means of investigating, understanding, exploiting, and overcoming the material world. It has nothing whatsoever to do with spirit, the development of which should be entrusted to religion. But it can indirectly assist the development of spirit - through overcoming nature.

35. Thus arises the future prospect of technological transcendentalism, or science in the service of religion. The phasing-out of the natural body will be entrusted to science, while religion simultaneously attends to the development of spirit.

36. The crisis of twentieth-century science stems, in the main, from the void left by traditional religion and the futile attempts being made by science to fill it. Instead of concentrating on natural appearances, science has felt obliged to substitute itself for religion in the hope of coming to terms with supernatural essences. Such an obligation, however, can never be fulfilled, and it is the dawn of this realization which has made for the contemporary crisis. Needless to say, the sooner science is freed from its existential perversions and enabled to proceed to the service, no matter how indirectly, of revolutionary religion, the better it will be for everyone, scientists included!

37. By splitting the atom, man can destroy nature, but he cannot thereby create God.

38. Yet nuclear energy, in whatever context, is an indisputable achievement of modern science. It is the only kind of energy fully commensurate with contemporary life, an energy created by man rather than wholly dependent upon nature.

39. Forms of energy extracted from nature via the sun, the wind, the sea, the earth, fire, et cetera, are but a stage on the road to energy being produced independently of nature - through technological progress.

40. All natural forms of energy are inherently inferior to artificial or, to revert to a term used earlier, materialistically supernatural kinds of energy, and should be superseded by the latter as a matter of evolutionary course.

41. The exploitation of nature is undoubtedly a necessary process of human evolution, but so, too, is the process of becoming independent of nature through the development of technology.

42. Natural energy keeps one the slave of nature, whereas artificial energy enables one to transcend it.

43. It is perhaps necessary that the twentieth century, in developing socialism, should have also developed - and still be developing - an alternative ideology with, nevertheless, certain political affinities with socialism. Necessary, above all, to the extent that, in rejecting materialism, it should endorse a new religious sense - something, however, not always guaranteed, as the examples of recent history attest!

44. Not that such an alternative modern ideology should necessarily replace socialism. Rather, it should seek to co-exist with and influence socialism for the better, which is to say, away from the closed materialist view of history towards an open transcendentalism, such as would be compatible with the next civilization.

45. Perhaps we should rather distinguish between one mode of socialism and another, reserving for the Stalinist mode the description of scientific socialism, or communism, while allowing for the possibility not only of political socialism, but of religious socialism, since socialism would seem to be one of those terms which are as generically broad, in their ideological implications, as royalism and liberalism.

46. Unlike communism, socialism has strong economic implications, and it seems to me that socialism stands to communism as capitalism to liberalism, or feudalism to royalism, with a strongly bureaucratic status.

47. The essential difference between fascism and socialism, in its Marxist manifestation, is that whereas the former would enslave the conquered for the benefit of the conquerors, the latter should liberate the masses from bourgeois oppression, and thus further the ideal of a brotherhood of man.

48. A political movement is only as good as the man who leads it.

49. Politics is only justified as a means to an end - the end of the State and the beginning of the post-Human Millennium.

50. The post-Human Millennium will only come fully to pass, however, when all men have been programmed for transcendence in the exclusive spirituality made possible by the artificial replacement of the natural body through extensive technological progress.

51. As so many meditating brains clustered together on artificial supports, the psychic components of the post-Human Millennium would be at their closest possible approximation, on earth, to the ultimate spiritual unity of the transcendental Beyond, completely oblivious of their external surroundings.

52. The faith and confidence which man now places in his machines will be considerably greater in the post-Human Millennium. For his brain will be entirely dependent on the proper functioning of the artificial sustains, and would not survive without their functioning correctly.

53. Doubtless, computers will be on-hand to verify the proper functioning of the sustains and delegate appropriate tasks, where necessary, to robots. Human brains will thus be dependent on these technological marvels, with considerable confidence in them.

54. Even now the confidence that man places in his machines is by no means inconsiderable, and augers well for the future.

55. The old brain/subconscious mind will eventually be disposed of, after the manner of the rest of the sensual body, making possible the transcendence of egocentric consciousness in the spiritual consciousness of the new brain/superconscious mind.

56. Formerly, psychologists conceived of the psyche as divisible into a subconscious and an ego, or conscious mind. The idea was that the ego sat atop the subconscious, like the tip of an iceberg showing above the water, a tiny fraction of the entire phenomenon.

57. We must reject this absurdity in favour of the contention that egocentric consciousness is but the result of a fusion between the subconscious and the superconscious which varies according to the extent to which either part of the psyche prevails, in overall consciousness, at any given point in evolutionary time, this variation being partly conditioned by changing environmental factors and partly attributable to a variety of individual ones.

58. Thus arise three basic types of human consciousness: the pre-egocentric, the egocentric, and the post-egocentric.

59. The first type corresponds to an environment in which nature prevails over civilization, i.e. the man-made, in the ratio of at least 3:1, with a consequence that consciousness tends to reflect a similar imbalance in favour of the subconscious, and there arises a religious sense corresponding to the pagan.

60. The second type of consciousness corresponds to an environment in which nature and civilization are approximately in balance, giving rise to a consciousness in which the two parts of the psyche form an egocentric equilibrium, and there arises a religious sense corresponding to the Christian.

61. The third type of consciousness corresponds to an environment in which civilization prevails over nature in the ratio of at least 3:1, and there arises a religious sense corresponding to the transcendental.

62. Before pre-egocentric consciousness there is only the beastly consciousness of a psyche almost entirely under subconscious dominion, as with the animals, and beneath that the even more subconsciously-dominated (unconscious) 'psyche' of the plants.

63. Beyond post-egocentric consciousness there is the possibility of pure consciousness, or superconsciousness, leading on, via transcendence, to the even purer consciousness of the Supreme Being.

64. To conceive of a projected antithesis to the stars, which are antithetical to such a consciousness, is to posit the pure spiritual consciousness of a supreme level of being in the (future) transcendental Beyond.

65. To conceive of a projected antithesis to the plants, which are unconscious, is to posit the pure consciousness of the artificially-supported clusters of new brains in the second phase ('communist') of the post-Human Millennium.

66. To conceive of a projected antithesis to the animals, with their rudimentary consciousness, is to posit the radically post-egocentric consciousness of human brains artificially supported and sustained in the first phase ('socialist') of the post-Human Millennium.

67. To conceive of a projected antithesis to the pagans, with their pre-egocentric consciousness, is to posit the post-egocentric consciousness of transcendental man.

68. Thus degrees of consciousness can be pin-pointed, as it were, along a spectrum of evolving consciousness from A - Z, or alpha to omega, with correlative antithetical positions marked on route.

69. When one contemplates a tree or bush in blossom, one is effectively looking at the antithesis to our projected cluster of artificially-supported new brains in the 'Communist' Millennium. The artificial supports will correspond to the branches of the tree, and the brains being supported to the leaves on those branches. The tree reflects the crude, sensual communism of the lowest life form; the cluster of new brains, by contrast, will represent the refined, spiritual communism of the highest life form - highest, that is to say, short of the formless transcendent spirit of the omega absolute, which would be purely essential.

70. Likewise a Christmas tree, suitably attired, provides one with an intimation of things to-come, albeit on a much higher and more direct level than a natural tree. For whereas the leaves of the latter are sustained naturally, through the agencies of sunlight, rainwater, et cetera, the lights of the former are sustained artificially, through electricity, and may thus be said to represent not so much an antithesis to the projected Millennial context as ... a crude intimation of it. Better still when the Christmas tree's branches are synthetic, making the overall effect more transcendent and therefore closer, in essence, to a post-Human Millennium.

71. At Christmas, there should be as many artificial lights in operation as possible. A time of spiritual intimations!

72. It would be a good thing too if, in the future, synthetic drugs were to take the place of natural drugs, so that people could experience a degree of upward self-transcendence in the lower, visionary regions of the superconscious.

73. Synthetic drugs, like LSD, would condition man away from his subconscious and thus slowly lead him, in visionary rapture, towards the pure light of his superconscious.

74. This gradual break with the subconscious would be the necessary prelude to the eventual removal, by qualified technicians, of the old brain, as men matured into a transcendent consciousness.

75. And from transcendent consciousness to complete transcendence, or attainment to the transcendental Beyond, would simply be a matter of time.

76. We cannot be absolutely certain that transcendence would lead directly to the omega absolute, but, assuming the immensity of the Universe precluded this, must rest on the hypothesis that it would, at any rate, lead directly to the transcendental Beyond - to a Beyond which could be one of a number of 'globes' of pure spirit simultaneously converging - and expanding - towards other such 'globes' in a process of bringing about the ultimate unity of the Supreme Being.

77. Only once the ultimate unity of the definitive 'globe' of pure spirit was established, would God be definitive, in complete antithesis to the separate, manifold constitution of the Devil, or stars.

78. With the eventual disintegration and disappearance of the alpha absolute(s), the Universe would be brought to perfection in the indivisible unity of the omega absolute.

79. A perfection which would last for ever and continue to indefinitely expand throughout the void of infinite space.

80. For the omega absolute, in being the complete antithesis of the alpha absolute, could only expand, never contract.

81. Thus the Universe, composed of transcendent spirit, would grow ever more perfect as the immeasurable extent of the omega absolute continued to expand.

82. No man can set limits to the Supreme Being, which is the supreme level of being.

83. Yet no man would be there to watch the Infinite expand through space, as men now watch the gradual contraction and divergence of stars from their various observatories. All men or, rather, their post-human successors would be experiencing the bliss of transcendence in their supernatural manifestations.

84. For whereas one can only investigate the appearance of the Diabolic through science, the Divine can only be experienced, in its essence, though religion - alpha and omega, external and internal, phenomenon and noumenon, Devil and God.