ON ART REPRODUCTIONS

1. I have long entertained the opinion that a reproduction of a modern painting in poster form is a more civilized medium of aesthetic appreciation than the original work from which the reproduction was derived. One might say that whereas the possession of an actual canvas signifies a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois allegiance, the possession of a poster-reproduction bespeaks a proletarian orientation, in which the materialism of canvas and paints has been eclipsed in response to proletarian criteria. And very often a poster-reproduction is of a smaller scale than the original work.

2. To my way of thinking, women who take part in erotic posturings for purposes of photographic reproduction are sublimated prostitutes. They signify a superior type and stage of prostitution to the literal, personal and material type, being, by contrast, sublimated, impersonal and spiritual. With recourse to them, sex is elevated from the body to the mind - most of the pleasure one obtains from them coming through the eyes. They constitute the most appropriate sex partners for the free-electron male, whose sexuality is necessarily sublimated, i.e. free of the flesh.

3. Arthur Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Aldous Huxley were all, in their different ways, outstanding petty-bourgeois authors. But considered from a proletarian standpoint, their writings have little or nothing to offer the future. Like all petty-bourgeois writers, they do not assist the advancement of the proletariat but, on the contrary, oppose such advancement in loyalty to their own class standards and integrity.

4. The expression 'Free World', so often bandied about in the West, is largely hyperbolic; for, in reality, the West is at best two-thirds or three-quarters free, as pertaining to the levels of civilization that prevail there. Anyone who writes on behalf of a higher degree of freedom, such as would correspond to proletarian civilization, soon finds out just how free the West really is! For his work is invariably rejected by publishers who, for the most part, reflect bourgeois and petty-bourgeois levels of freedom.

5. The 'freest' literature will only arise in a post-atomic civilization, or in a nation moving towards such a civilization from a transcendental standpoint. The socialist nations do not and cannot produce a truly free literature; for they are constrained by a materialist integrity into maintaining the expedient lie in the material interests of the proletariat, and are accordingly bound to a traditional or conventional technical approach to literature. Socialist Realism, which normally prevails in socialist states, uses bourgeois genres on behalf of the proletariat, treating such genres in a conventional manner. Thus proton- or, more correctly, neutron-oriented literature is transformed, by reference to the proletariat, into quasi-electron literature, functioning on behalf of bound electrons from a pseudo-neutron base. Only a transcendental nation, dedicated to the expansion of the spiritual in the wake of a universal contraction of materialism, could at some time produce free-electron literature on behalf of a free proletariat from a like base.

6. A Marxist-Leninist state can only contract the material, not expand the spiritual. Its entrenched opposition to petty-bourgeois transcendentalism, e.g. the adoption of oriental mysticism by Western states, is justified by loyalty to proletarian criteria. But such loyalty exists solely on a materialist level, without reference to proletarian spirituality. The Communist opposes petty-bourgeois mysticism, but he doesn't envisage replacing it with proletarian spirituality, or transcendentalism. His chief concern is to contract the material, i.e. oppose capitalism, and a by-product of this mainstream activity will be the rejection of accompanying levels of religion. The construction of a higher level of religion is not an integral part of his programme. That must be left to future Transcendentalists, whose ideological bias entails an understanding of and commitment to spiritual values - in their case the ultimate spiritual values of full-blown Transcendentalism. Not being tied to the materialist criteria of State Socialism, these spiritual socialists would encourage the publication and dissemination of literature bearing on a higher religion. Theirs is the only possible base from which to launch a transcendental crusade.

7. It cannot be denied that the first manifestation of nature gave rise to the second, that the second gave rise to the third, the third to the fourth, and so on, until man was reached as the highest manifestation of nature, possessed of a supernatural capacity. Man arose, one may believe, from the apes, and proceeded on his uniquely human course away from the natural and deeper into the supernatural. At first the supernatural was a part of the natural, nature being invested by early man with magical powers, mostly evil; but, by degrees, it gradually acquired a distinct, transcendent status, as in Christianity, and became the goal of human striving, an otherworldly ideal which could only become reality if the flesh, meaning human nature, was defeated and escaped from. With the advent of a post-Christian and exclusively transcendental age, such as the world is now tending towards, this striving will be continued on higher terms, as man acquires greater mastery over nature and increasingly learns to identify himself with Supernature. The way to the distant goal of heavenly salvation, however, will lead, in due course, beyond the final human stage of religious striving to the post-Human Millennial stages, in which the supernatural will preponderate over the natural to an extent inconceivable in man.

8. Thus as a superior manifestation of nature developed out of a preceding inferior stage, so must each superior stage of Supernature develop out of inferior preceding stages, beginning, as we have seen, with the human, which progresses through successive stages from paganism to transcendentalism, continuing from the human to the post-human in the Supermen and Superbeings (see below) of the ensuing transcendental Millennium, continuing on again from the post-visionary supernaturalism of the Superbeings to the absolute supernaturalism of Spiritual Globes, and culminating in the ultimate supernaturalism of the Omega Absolute.

9. Man is thus responsible not only for effecting increased degrees of supernaturalism within himself but, in addition, to effecting supernatural progress beyond the human stages in what I have defined as the millennial ones. By 'man' I refer, in particular, to those men whose duty it becomes to endorse and supervise succeeding stages of religious progress, to chosen leaders of one cast or another who, as a rule, don't directly enter the 'promised land' of religious striving themselves, but lead others towards it on whichever level they may happen to be. If this is generally the case where humanity and the human stages of evolution are concerned, how much more so must it be for the future post-human stages of evolution, when the 'promised land' of the transcendental Millennium will not only require to be supervised but, first of all, created by certain men, who will stand apart from it in their capacity as leaders, responsible, amongst other things, for achieving technical perfection in the artificial supporting and sustaining of human brains, which, once established, will exist in the collectivized contexts of Supermen - as antithetical equivalents to apes on trees. The means of achieving this perfection will be explored by a chosen Few whose destiny will be to serve the Supermen and ensure they are maintained in good working-order. Yet the substitution of artificial supports and sustains for natural ones ... is only one side of the problem. The other is, of course, to produce brains for those supports and sustains, and to produce them in such a way that they will exist independently of human bodies.

10. No, the leaders, whether technical, spiritual, or whatever, won't enter the 'promised land' of the Supermen personally, but will be as shepherds to the flock, creating and maintaining a higher level of life for the post-human life forms. This will also apply to the superbeing phase of millennial evolution, when an entity - one of a number of such entities - antithetical in constitution to a tree will be created by the responsible leaders, as they elevate life from collectivized brains artificially supported and sustained to more intensively-collectivized new brains supported and sustained in a similar way. Each cluster of new brains will become a Superbeing, and doubtless this most superior life form on earth would also require supervision, lest some malfunction were to occur in the mechanical sustain apparatus or injury to various of the new brains arise in consequence of neglect and/or surgical inadequacy. As a gardener waters and carefully tends his plants, anxious in case any harm should befall them, so would the technocratic leaders of each phase of the post-Human Millennium be solicitous of the wellbeing of their spiritual 'plants', conscious of the important role they play in ensuring the continuity and amelioration of evolving life on earth, if the goal of evolution in absolute transcendence is eventually to be attained. Conscious, above all, of the preciousness of these spiritual 'plants', superior to anything created by nature, almost completely supernatural in their positive orientation towards the heavenly Beyond.

11. Whether the leaders, human and therefore inferior to the post-human life forms, would continue to exist in the higher stage of the transcendental Millennium, the transcendental stage-proper, will remain to be seen. We can't be certain, at this point in time, how long the post-Human Millennium will last (not necessarily a thousand years), nor whether the superbeingful phase of it would be longer or shorter than the preceding superhuman phase. Possibly, as evolution advances, artificial leaders will supersede human ones, as men entrust the supervision and maintenance of the supernatural life forms to robots and computers, withdrawing themselves into the background or maybe even absenting themselves from millennial duties altogether. Doubtless robots and computers would be less disposed to envy of those already in the millennial 'promised land' than human leaders, were they obliged to sit out the progress of supernaturalism right to the very end!

12. The definitive Beyond ... of transcendence would, of course, correspond to Heaven, a Spiritual Globe from any given transcended Superbeing being but a fragment, so to speak, of Heaven en route, in space, to the definitive Spiritual Globe of the Omega Absolute. One might term this the Absolute Beyond, in order to distinguish it from the Relative Beyond, which will precede it in and as the post-Human Millennium. Whether relative or absolute, millennial or heavenly, the use of a term like 'the Beyond' is justified by reference to what lies beyond us as human beings - it being accepted that evolution will continue above the human level to a post-human and, finally, an absolute level. The post-Human Millennium is beyond us, as 'heaven on earth', but heaven with a small 'h', not the definitive Heaven ... of the Absolute Beyond. Likewise the transcendental civilization (of the ultimate stage of human evolution that could paradoxically be regarded as post-humanist) is beyond us, whether we are Christians, Moslems, Socialists, or whatever. It appertains neither to the Christian West nor to the Socialist East, but to that which will emerge in the world at large at some future time, when the current dichotomy between an atomic level of civilization and its post-atomic enemies no longer exists, and the world is ripe for elevation to a post-atomic civilization. Thus, in the present century, we are confronted by the prospect of three beyonds, viz. a human, a post-human, and an absolute, which is to say, a transcendental, a millennial, and a heavenly ... in succeeding stages of evolution.

13. With Christian man - the man of the middle civilization in the evolution of human civilizations from pagan to transcendental - phenomenon and noumenon are approximately balanced in a context betokening dualistic compromise. The will and the spirit each claim an equal part in his religious integrity, the one linking him to the Father, the other reflecting an aspiration towards the Holy Ghost; these antithetical tendencies finding their theological focus in the person of Christ, the Man-God Who is both of the flesh (nature) and of the spirit (supernature), and therefore 'Three in One' - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Not literally, however, because being man precludes one from becoming either of the absolutes, the alpha or the omega, at the same time. Christ was, in effect, a diluted Father and a diluted Holy Ghost, reflecting the condition of psychic compromise between the will and the spirit which must apply to mankind over a given period of evolutionary time - namely, after the psyche has ceased to be predominantly dominated by the will, and before it has become biased on the side of the spirit - as during the era of Christianity.

14. With the era of Transcendentalism, however, the constitution of the psyche is the opposite of what it was in pre-atomic pagan times, and so man becomes more noumenon than phenomenon, more given to the superconscious than to the subconscious, a being directly aspiring towards the Omega Absolute in a religious orientation exclusively favouring the cultivation of spirit. Unlike a Christian, the Transcendentalist will not pray, sing hymns, attend Mass, read the Bible, inhale incense, confess to sins, or whatever, but will simply meditate, in the company of others, in a context approximating, no matter how humbly or crudely initially, to the heavenly condition. He will not meditate, however, with the fanaticism of an oriental devotee of spiritual salvation, who knows nothing about the future need to support and sustain brains artificially in collectivized contexts. On the contrary, he will conduct his meditation on a level commensurate with a knowledge of things to come, and thus in a relatively relaxed fashion. Transcendentalism is not Buddhism, nor any other oriental or old-world religion. It is potentially the ultimate world religion of the final human civilization.

15. And so it will lead, by degrees, to the post-Human Millennium, when spiritual aspirations are stepped-up in a context favouring the artificial. It isn't, however, something that should be stepped over, as though the periodic practice of meditation in specially-designed centres was of little or no account. Everything proceeds by degrees, and the development of religion is no exception! When men have learnt to congregate specifically for spiritual purposes and not, as with Christianity, for a combination of sensual and spiritual purposes, then they will be ready for elevation to the superhuman stage of evolution in a context more radically spiritual than anything known to man. Even if, personally, they are not destined to be transformed into Supermen, their descendants will be better qualified to embrace a superhuman level of life in the wake of the preceding high level of spiritual conditioning known to them. For psychic attitudes are, to some extent, handed on from generation to generation. The baby of a pagan couple in 2000 B.C. would not have inherited the same psychic predilection from its parents as the baby of a transcendental couple - assuming couples still exist - living sometime in the next few centuries. The sins of the forefathers are indeed visited upon the children and grandchildren, but so, too, are the graces! Intelligence, and thus one's psychic constitution, is to a significant extent inherited. So, naturally enough, is a lack of it!

16. Civilization, of whatever degree, will always provide some official institution in which people can congregate for religious purposes. The final civilization would be less than civilized were it to refrain from endorsing the legitimacy of this fact, and thus leave it for people to meditate in private - assuming they wanted to then. Meditation in private - the very opposite of what meditation should be - is something that is more likely to occur in barbarous societies, where religion, of whatever persuasion, has been officially placed under ban and consequently no encouragement is given for people to form meditation collectives. This is of course perfectly logical within such a context, but it would be totally inappropriate in a nation purporting to be civilized, especially on the highest terms. Then the building and endorsement of meditation centres would proceed as a matter of transcendental necessity, and people be encouraged to participate in a public expression of spiritual earnestness. And not just a minority of people but, rather, the vast majority, since there would be no excuse for staying away from such centres in a thriving transcendental civilization, as there is for staying away from church in a decadent Christian one. If Christianity is passé and inadequate for a majority of people - mostly proletarians - who live at the tail-end, as it were, of bourgeois civilization within environments incompatible with an atomic attitude to life, then the same could not be said of Transcendentalism in any future civilization, which, by contrast, would be specifically geared to reflecting a post-atomic attitude to life.