ON NATURAL EVOLUTION

 

1.    Evolution proceeds from alpha to omega, from an inception in the first stars to a culmination in the ultimate Spiritual Globe.  It doesn't begin in absolute beauty.  It begins, on the contrary, in absolute ugliness, a formlessness of raging flame appertaining to the 'first cause' of any particular galaxy - in all probability the central star there.  Stars may appear beautiful from a distance, i.e. from a human point-of-view, but viewed close-up they would suggest the ultimate ugliness, a truly frightening, chaotic, seething mass of flame, the visual intensity of which was matched only by the aural intensity of infernal noise!  In sum, the nearest experience to Hell - short, that is, of one's being literally burnt alive!

 

2.    Yes, stars are terribly ugly and, given their primal nature, could not be otherwise.  It is not beauty that is absolute but ugliness, as germane to the subatomic proton-proton reactions of pure soul.  Ugliness precedes beauty as surely as evil precedes good, or illusion precedes truth.  Theology may distinguish between a divine Father and a diabolic Satan, between 'Creator' and 'Devil', but that is largely for the sake of convenience, a mere relative antithesis between fictions abstracted from specific cosmic facts - namely, a central (unseen first-mover) star and the peripheral star known to us as the sun, the latter equivalent, in Biblical terms, to a 'fallen angel', or a star which exploded out of the primal one in or near this part of the Universe.  In actual fact, however, both a tangential star, like the sun, and the central star are pure soul, or subatomic reactions.  You cannot have atomicity in a star, only in a planet, or partly cooled star, and then only in relation to the mineral and organic, with the emergence of atoms.  The Devil may be depicted in Christian mythology as beastly, and hence highly ugly, and the Father as elderly and handsome, but such a contrast, though theologically expedient, does little justice to the similarity which must in reality exist between the sun and the central star of the Galaxy - namely that the central star would be just as ugly, viewed close-up, as the sun.  Leaving burdensome theology aside, we may maintain, with utter conviction, that evolution begins in ugliness and only slowly proceeds towards the Beautiful through the development of benign nature.

 

3.    I wrote 'benign' advisably.  For anyone familiar, through encyclopaedias and the like, with primeval times will know that the first manifestations of life on this planet were anything but beautiful!  Indeed, they were extremely ugly, and not only with regard to reptiles but to nature in the raw, the earliest plants, which formed dense and pitiless jungles, traps of pain and death for other life forms, including early man, who was no less ugly than everything else, since descended from apes.  If reptiles were the ugliest of primeval life forms, then the ensuing mammals were not much better, and even the caveman, wrapped in furs and carrying a club or crude spear for hunting, left a lot to be desired, what with his ape-like features and hairy body, his painful soul and wild behaviour.  Pain is of course the qualitative attribute of ugliness, the stars being pure pain, though a pain that is beneath all understanding, since they lack a consciousness and body to register it, theology thereby entitled to endow the Father (as an anthropomorphic extrapolation from the central star) with a painless, or 'heavenly', status, against which the conscious pain of plants, animals, and men must seem a 'fall', even if, like all such Biblical falls, it is really a fall forwards, or something tending towards the possibility of beauty and, therefore, pleasure.  Even early man had a capacity of sorts for pleasure, as did - and still do - the animals and, to a lesser extent, the plants.  But he lived mainly in pain, like a wild beast, hunting and hunted, fearful and feared, the victim of just such a 'fall', conscious of his pain, less ugly than the beasts, but still predominantly so!

 

4.    In time, however, life evolved to beauty, not just in man but also, to a degree, in plants and animals - a slow, gradual process of transforming ugliness, refining upon such beauty as had been achieved, ordering life in such a way as to make pleasure predominate when, with regard to man, pagan civilization came to supersede the primeval barbarism of primitive man in certain parts of the world, particularly the Middle East and, thereafter, Greece and the Mediterranean as a whole.

 

5.    Early civilization was not, of course, hedonistic in essence but, rather, stoical and therefore largely a continuation, on more refined terms, of primitive barbarism, a negative prelude to a positive climax, the romantic, so to speak, preceding the classical, stoicism leading, as in ancient Greece, to hedonism, once the pursuit of pleasure had come to replace the endurance of pain as the chief virtue.  At last, beauty triumphant over ugliness, man living on the electron side of the atomic dualism of the flesh to a greater extent than on its proton side - at least where the privileged Few were concerned; though we should never forget that life was still a predominantly painful affair for the slaves and soldiers and other categories of men whom we may describe as less than civilized, i.e. not permitted or able to be hedonistic.  Only a small minority could be civilized in this pagan sense, indulgent of crude positive sensation and sensuality as the lowest commitment to spirit, the pseudo-spirit of the minority electron content of the flesh, given the absolutely autocratic integrity of pagan civilization, one stemming from pure soul in aristocratic stoicism.

 

6.    When we turn to Western civilization in its early-stage grand-bourgeois manifestation, however, we find that beauty has become more refined, that, even after a painful and largely stoical inception during the Dark Ages, Roman Catholic civilization has a profounder concept of the Beautiful than had either the ancient Greek or Roman civilizations, and a no-less profounder concept of pleasure, a more refined sense of pleasure through positive sensation in the rites and sacraments of the Church.  Now that the slender Blessed Virgin has come to supersede the fleshy Venus as the ideal of feminine beauty, the highest type of the Beautiful, we find the concomitant attribute of the highest type of sensuality, the ideal of refined pleasure in the smell of incense and the feel of Holy Water, the appearance of the colourful priestly vestments and the stained-glass windows, the celebration of the Eucharist through the sacramental symbolism of Christ's body and blood, the lighting of candles and the murmured chanting of Latin, the parallel placement of the hands in prayer and other such refined sensual indulgences as signify an evolutionary progression over the unabashed sensuality (hedonism) of the civilized pagans which, from a Catholic standpoint, was regarded as sinful, its contemporary equivalent, in a similar indulgence of crude sensuality, necessitating confession and neutralization, as it were, through priestly absolution.  Being in part an extension of sensuality from crude to refined levels, Catholicism anticipates sin and expects confession.  Appertaining to the inception of the theocratic spectrum, on which a knowledge and intimation of truth avowedly exists, it cannot encourage a religious indulgence more applicable to the autocratic spectrum.  Not pseudo-spirit but quasi-spirit is its religious ideal, through a very moderate indulgence of the minority electron content of the flesh.  If the masses are too backward to appreciate truth in the unadulterated guise of the Holy Spirit, then they must at least make efforts to curb their sensuality and maintain allegiance to the refined beauty of the Blessed Virgin.  There is no higher beauty than hers!

 

7.    Which is, of course, a theological acknowledgement of a biological fact - namely, that beauty, as the highest manifestation of phenomenal form, attains to a climax in the female body, with particular reference to the face.  Beautiful women are not only more beautiful than beautiful or handsome men; they are more beautiful than beautiful animals and plants as well, the culmination of a process of evolution that began in nature and proceeded, via the animals, to mankind, where its purest and most absolute manifestation was to be found in woman.  For what is absolute beauty but a form that is untarnished by ugliness, a perfectly formed human body and face?  If evolution began in absolute ugliness, then it was not until mankind had reached the stage of producing beautiful women ... that it attained to absolute beauty or, at any rate, to the nearest equivalent thereof.  We cannot in all honesty claim that a cat or a flower is more beautiful than a beautiful woman, even though we may recognize a lower manifestation of the Beautiful in it, perhaps even a lower manifestation of absolute beauty - one less complex or ingenious than in a woman.  And yet, even with regard to the Catholic Middle Ages, we must admit that refined beauty and pleasure were the preserve of only a tiny minority of people, usually aristocratic or grand bourgeois, and that, far from sharing in it, the masses were little better off than the slaves of ancient Greece and Rome.  Whether peasants or artisans, their lifestyles would have been less than civilized when judged from an aesthetic point-of-view.  For civilization was still an elite affair, surrounded by a sprawling barbarism of proton pain and ugliness, slavery and disease, poverty and dirt.  It could not have been otherwise; the galactic-world-order still prevailed!

 

8.    But evolution must continue, and whether revolt is fuelled by resentment against the control or by a genuinely revolutionary urge or, indeed, by a paradoxical combination of both, another 'fall' was in order, this time from beauty and refined pleasure to evil and hate, the Lutheran protest against subservience of the Church to autocratic dominion, a late-stage grand-bourgeois rebellion against early-stage grand-bourgeois precedent, a period of religious strife and inter-denominational persecution, the great schism known as the Reformation, which gave birth to early Protestantism as a 'romantic' phase of religion in revolt against the classicism of the Roman Catholic Church, a kind of Christian equivalent to stoicism.  Well, if Lutheranism signified a 'fall' from refined pleasure to unrefined hatred, or a puritanical hatred of pleasure, it was nevertheless the inception of a new civilization, which was to flower into the religion of love, a fresh classicism superior to the Catholic variety to the extent that emotional love is superior to refined pleasure, or the Good to the Beautiful.  This bourgeois civilization, centred in Christ, was to last from approximately the 17-19th centuries, pushing Catholic civilization into an inferior historical position, since the latter still clung to beauty, in the person of the Blessed Virgin, and could not do otherwise.  Protestant classicism was triumphant!

 

9.    Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a new reformer and revolutionary writer was at work undermining the ethical foundations of this second Western civilization, and another 'fall' ... from the positive side of the emotional plane to the negative side of the feeling one ... was in the making - namely, the Marxist fall from goodness and love in Puritan classicism to illusion and sadness in Communist romanticism, the revolt of the Anti-Christ against Christian precedent, an antithetical equivalent of the Lutheran (anti-Virgin?) revolt against Catholicism, necessarily early-stage petty bourgeois in time and, like all such revolts, successful only after a protracted struggle with the status quo, both inside and outside Russia, the country destined, through Lenin, to become the world's first Communist state.  Inevitably, the Soviet Union existed as a 'fall' from the (in particular) Protestant West.  But, as in all such falls, there was the prospect of a 'rise' ahead, one leading to a new classicism, and, following the defeat of Hitlerian Nazism (a partly revolutionary and partly traditional movement), the Soviet Union was destined to evolve towards it ... with the development, firstly, of détente and, subsequently, of glasnost and perestroika, a reflection, in large measure, of a new-found classicism in relative truth and happiness, which owed not a little, ironically, to the emergence of Hitler as the antithetical equivalent to the Blessed Virgin, the chief - and perhaps only - approximation to the Second Coming of his time, the harbinger of a new era in the history of Western man, necessarily late-stage petty bourgeois, in which the ideal of happiness began to acquire primary importance, at least in Communist states.  The shift from romanticism to classicism corresponding to a shift, in regard to the old brain/feeling mind, from the minority proton content of the old brain to its majority electron content, Communist states having become more socialist in character, though still rooted in dialectical materialism and therefore pertaining to the ideology of the Anti-Christ, as germane to the subdivision of the theocratic spectrum which stretches from early Protestantism through Protestantism-proper, i.e. Puritanism, to early Communism, and which parallels the development of the democratic spectrum underneath, so to speak, from democratic tyranny (Cromwell) through liberal democracy (Gladstone) to democratic dictatorship (Lenin).  After which time the development of late Communism/early Socialism, with its People’s democracy appertaining to a late-stage petty-bourgeois/early-stage proletarian era, provides an extension to each spectrum or, rather, to both the democratic spectrum and the subdivisions of the theocratic one, while the main, or absolute, part of the theocratic spectrum, previously represented by Fascism, is to a certain extent filled by America, with its emphasis on 'fun' and interest in oriental mysticism, and this in spite of America's being politically rooted in democracy, albeit a democracy more extreme, and hence republican, than liberal.

 

10.   However that may be, the age of relative truth (neo-Buddhism) and happiness cannot last for ever, neither on its American nor its Russian sides, since evolution must go forwards to an absolutely transcendental age, an age when not happiness but awareness will be the primary religious ideal.  In other words, there must be an extension of the theocratic spectrum beyond the Hitlerian Second Coming to an Anti-Hitler and/or True World Messiah, in which the relative absolutism, so to speak, of hypercontemplation, corresponding to a 'fall' from happiness to visionary awareness, from the majority electron content of the old brain to the minority proton content of the new brain, will supersede the extreme relativity of positive feelings, and thus signify the romantic inception of a new and higher civilization, as germane to Social Transcendentalism.

 

11.   Not, then, an antithetical equivalent of the Blessed Virgin, but a straight antithesis between the inception of the autocratic spectrum in ancient Greek/Judaic civilization and the future culmination of the theocratic spectrum in Social Transcendentalist civilization; the first phase, in stoicism, of the former civilization corresponding to the second phase, in hypermeditation, of the latter one; the first phase, in hallucinogenic enlightenment, of the latter civilization corresponding to the second phase, in hedonism, of the former one, though as a straight antithesis in each case.  For just as stoicism preceded hedonism in the ancient autocratic world, so hypercontemplation of hallucinogenic enlightenment must precede hypermeditation in the future theocratic world, the one significant of a romantic 'fall' from late-stage petty-bourgeois classicism in transcendental meditation, the other indicative of a classical 'rise' applicable to the higher phase of an absolutely transcendental age, with the progression from Social Transcendentalism to Super-transcendentalism, as germane to the True World Religion.  Whether one chooses to regard the first phase as specific to the Anti-Hitler and the second as specific to the True World Messiah, with proletarian and classless distinctions respectively, or to regard them both as but two aspects of the same absolute age ... is relatively unimportant.  Suffice it to say that the one presupposes the other, and that both alike are two sides of the True World Religion.  If the goal is experience of the majority electron content of the new brain, then the experience of the minority proton content of that same brain will constitute a quasi-spiritual phase of religious evolution, the necessary prelude to higher things.

 

12.   But even the indulgence of absolute awareness through hypermeditation is only a stage on the road to higher things - namely, the supersession of men by the Supermen and Superbeings of the first and second phases of the post-Human Millennium, when, firstly, human brains and, subsequently, new brains (or human brains minus the old brain) will be artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, so that a situation the converse of that which preceded pagan civilization, and indeed mankind in general, duly arises - a situation as much above and beyond man as, first, trees and, later, apes were beneath and before him ... in the early evolution of life on this planet.  So a straight antithesis, in the first phase of the post-Human Millennium, between Supermen and apes, and likewise a straight antithesis, in its second phase, between Superbeings and trees, antitheses which, in religious terms, would in each case be between different degrees of awareness and different degrees of stupor; between that which, in the trees, is beneath consciousness and that which, in the hypermeditative new-brain collectivizations, would be above it; or that which, in the apes, is only crudely conscious and that which, in the hypercontemplative brain collectivizations, would be highly conscious - the one natural, the other supernatural.

 

13.   And so we can now take evolution on beyond the post-Human Millennium to the post-Millennial Beyond, in accordance with the guidance of written truth, and envisage the Spiritual Globes of pure spirit emerging from the Superbeings with the culmination of their hypermeditation.  Such free-electron transcendences, the antithesis to planets, will converge towards and expand into other such transcendences in a cumulative process leading, in due course, to the formation of Galactic Spiritual Globes, or globes of pure spirit that are so vast as to rival the sun in scale, the antithesis, in short, of peripheral stars.  Well, such a process, taken to its ultimate conclusion, should result in a Universal Spiritual Globe, the sum-product of all convergence and expansion of Galactic Spiritual Globes, and this ultimate globe of pure spirit, corresponding to the Omega Point (de Chardin), will constitute an antithesis to the central stars (one to each galaxy), and so bring evolution to a climax on terms diametrically antithetical to its inception in the raging flame of pure soul.  What began in the Many will culminate in the One.  What began as proton-proton reactions will culminate in electron-electron attractions.  What began as absolute ugliness will culminate in absolute truth.  What began as the pain that is beneath all understanding will culminate in the peace that is above all understanding.  What began in the archdiabolic will culminate in ultimate divinity.  What began as a gaseous revolt against the void will culminate in the utmost being.  Such an utmost beingfulness could never be the source of an absolute fall into the lowest doing of pure soul.  There is no 'eternal recurrence' in that sense, even if earthly evolution may be regarded as progressing from one absolute to another via a relativity, and the progression towards the second absolute is interpreted in terms of a return to absolutism, albeit it be diametrically antithetical to the first.

 

14.   No matter, the ultimate absolutism of the Omega Point will not be the source of innumerable alpha absolutes of pure soul.  On the contrary, it will be an eternal peace, the culmination of all evolution in ultimate truth.  Stars and planets will eventually disintegrate, leaving the Void to the peace that surpasses all understanding.  The Universe won't simply culminate in God; it will be God.  For the more Heaven expands the less room there will be for Hell, and we may be confident that the expansion of the former will hasten the decline of the latter.  Eventually, not a single star or planet will remain in existence, and the birth of new stars out of exploding gases will cease to be possible in a void which is increasingly being filled by God's presence, the steady expansion of pure spirit.  Only when the last star collapses and disintegrates ... will the Universe be brought to perfection in pure spirit alone.  The utter triumph of spirit over soul will be but a reflection of evolutionary progress towards a divine universe, a universe destined to last forever.  All appearances having passed away, only essence remaining.  Such is the way of evolution - a way that culminates in bliss!

 

15.   But not without the historical struggle that takes place in the world and that, no matter how sure one may be of the final outcome, remains of the gravest importance for those of us engaged in it on behalf of the True, as of truth.  The struggle with the enemy, be he autocratic or democratic, aristocratic or plutocratic, is never easy; for the alpha side of the Universe and all that stems from it is tenacious and strong!  Those of us privileged to struggle on behalf of theocracy, particularly the ultimate theocracy of Social Transcendentalism, will have to struggle long and hard to overcome the reactionary and traditional enemies of evolutionary progress, whose numbers are legion.  We shall have to endure much hardship and make great sacrifices.  But we shall have the consolation of knowing that the current of evolutionary progress flows on our side, and that, come what may, truth alone will eventually triumph!