Links to the files of
which follow the remarks below:–
This volume of
philosophy, combining maxims and aphorisms with essays and dialogues, goes way beyond the
scope of my earlier philosophical works in outlining what I contend to be the
logical stages of evolution beyond man which will have to be passed through
before definitive salvation can be achieved in a transcendent goal of evolution
... analogous to Teilhard de Chardin's ‘Omega Point’ or even to Bunyan’s
‘Celestial City’.One could say that I
have attempted to concretize Nietzschean notions concerning man's ‘overcoming’
... in respect of specific post-human stages of ensuing life.Hitherto, when I wrote about more advanced
stages of life, it was generally within the scope and definition of man.Here, by contrast, the attainment to a more
artificial stage of evolution is, ipso facto,
chronologically beyond man and thus
implicitly post-human, if not supra-human.Such was the revolutionary break with my earlier Huxley-inspired way of
thinking which occurred in the Spring of 1982, and it is, I believe, of
momentous significance!Henceforth my
philosophical task was largely to be a refinement upon and modification of
contentions outlined here.Obviously, in
the many years that have passed since then, several changes, some of which were
quite drastic, have occurred in my overall evolutionary perspective.But the beginnings of my mature philosophical
oeuvre are to be found here, in Future Transformations,
and it was from this time onwards that I began to grow in what I like to think
of as a sort of messianic self-awareness. – John O’Loughlin.
John O’Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic
of Ireland,
of Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army),
he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who upon the premature death of her husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of
denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been sent to a children's home
by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his ethnically-protective grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an
assortment of CSEs
(Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs
(General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived
jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford
Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) an ABRSM Gd.4 piano exam, he eventually became responsible as a clerical officer for booking examination venues for the Board's examiners throughout Britain and Ireland.
After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to take English and History A Levels, he returned to his former job in the West End
but, due to a combination of personal factors, left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which,
despite a brief spell as a computer and office-skills tutor at Hornsey Management Agency within the YMCA in the late '80s and
early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), An Interview
Reviewed (1979), Secret
Exchanges (1980), Sublimated
Relations(1981), and False Pretences (1982). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to
philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned several titles of a
philosophical nature, including Devil and
God (1985–6), Towards
the Supernoumenon(1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and,
more recently, The Best
of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth
(2009), Insane but not Mad (2011) and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).
