Towards Ultimate Oneness
ROBERT:
Religion is one of those subjects about which there can be so much doubt and
dissension, so many conflicting opinions and contradictory arguments. For instance, there are people, traditionally
regarded as mystics, who maintain that one can have direct contact with God
and, conversely, others of a less mystical persuasion who categorically deny
this.
FRANCIS: I
agree. There are
any number of contradictory views on the subject, which is but a reflection, I
suppose, of different stages or degrees of religious awareness among the
disputants. Personally, I side with
those who maintain that we cannot enter into direct contact with God. For, so far as I'm concerned, God doesn't
exist but is in the making, as it were, through the development of human consciousness. Those who assume the contrary would seem to
be either deluded into mistaking their own little quota of spirit for God or
into equating God with the Universe, and thus with some transcendent other with
whom they can commune.
ROBERT: And
you disagree with both attitudes?
FRANCIS: I
do indeed! For, in the first place, I
wouldn't confound what, as human spirit, is potentially God with God per se. And, in the second place, I wouldn't confound
God with the Universe, and thus imagine myself communing with the stars, which
are effectively the Devil. The Devil
does, of course, exist in this cosmic context, but not as something with which
one can commune! On the contrary, stars
don't bother themselves about human prayers or wishes. They are beneath consciousness, existing on a
deeply subconscious level of intense sensuality, devoid of thought. We can never approximate to their primal
level, no matter how hard we may try. For,
as men, we belong to a much later and more evolved stage of evolution, in which
sensuality is far less intense. As men,
we are on the way to becoming God.
ROBERT:
Yet, presumably, not entirely free of the Devil's influence?
FRANCIS: By
no means! We have to continuously
struggle against it or, more precisely, that which stems from the Devil in the
forms of nature and its sensuous offspring, including the flesh. This is essentially what evolution is all
about - a struggle to free ourselves from the mundane and attain to the transcendent, or that which, as pure spirit, would be God.
ROBERT: I
recently listened to a modern-jazz album on which people were singing about
being one with the Universe and dancing with the stars.
FRANCIS:
Ugh, devil music! I trust you didn't
like it?
ROBERT: It
was rather boring, to tell you the truth.
But I wasn't quite sure what my religious position was in regard to it
at the time.
FRANCIS:
Well, you can rest assured that there can be no unity between man and the
Cosmos, since stars are the Devil and, being antithetical to God, appertain to
separateness and diversity. A downward
self-transcendence induced by a potent natural drug or even by sleep may
constitute a tendency in the Devil's direction, so to speak, but can never
actually bring you into unity with the Devil.
Nothing defies the idea of unity more!
ROBERT: But
what if, in experiencing a mystical state-of-mind, you project a feeling of
unity and togetherness onto the Cosmos, so that you actually feel that the
Universe really is One. I mean, surely such a state of mind,
experienced on a few occasions by no less a writer than Aldous
Huxley, is valid in itself?
FRANCIS:
Doubtless it is! And it constitutes the
kernel of Wordsworth's mysticism, albeit as applied rather more to nature than to the stars.
But it hides the truth from its recipient by inducing him to identify
with that which is really the opposite of God.
For the state of mind to which you allude appertains to upward
self-transcendence in the lower reaches of the superconscious
and invariably induces feelings of Oneness, in response to the spiritual, as
opposed to sensual, nature of that mind.
But when projected onto one's surroundings, be they mundane or cosmic,
such a state of mind can only lead the beholder to the false assumption that
they are one with him and he one with them.
In reality, however, nothing could be further from the truth! For stars remain stars and nature remains
nature, apart from man and an obstacle, fundamentally, to his spiritual
progress. An impartial, objective
viewpoint confirms this fact all too clearly, whereas, under mystical
pressures, one will incline to deceive oneself as to the unity of the whole.
ROBERT: And yet, even supposing what you say happens to be true, the
mystical state-of-mind is surely no less valid for all that?
FRANCIS:
Oh, absolutely! For it inclines one in
the direction of God, of ultimate spiritual unity in the future Beyond, and necessarily causes the mind to embrace what is
foreign to it as kindred and congenial.
Doubtless supreme divinity, when it finally comes to pass, will co-exist
with the stars without being in any sense aware of their presence as a distinct
force in the Universe, because it will be too absorbed in the ultimate
consciousness of its inner unity as transcendent spirit. But man, being a long way from such consciousness
even in his occasional mystical states-of-mind, remains aware of external
cosmic or natural reality, and falsely assumes oneness with it. Supreme being ...
above egocentric or visual consciousness ... would be aware of nothing but
itself, and therefore it wouldn't take note of the diabolic components of the
Universe, be they stars or planets, moons or comets. Eventually everything that pertains to the
Devil would pass away, dissolving into dust and nothingness. God, however, would remain, and with His sole
existence the Universe would be brought to the perfection of spiritual oneness,
which even the last remaining star would deny so long as it continued to
exist. But God would of course be
oblivious of its presence and in no degree inclined to identify with the
remaining star or stars. The omega
absolute would be above what mystics habitually succumb to, in their egocentric
projections of higher states-of-mind onto external reality. With God, there is no consciousness of the
other. Only awareness
of the highest degree, which transcends opposites.
ROBERT:
Yet, on a much inferior level, that is precisely what the mystical experience
enables people to do, by embracing the Devil, as it were, as one with
themselves.
FRANCIS: To
be sure! But such an experience is crude
compared with the consciousness which is beyond any form of identification of
the not-self with the self. With God,
there would be nothing but the self, the not-selfs
being outside and beneath the picture, so to speak, which is composed of pure
spirit and not diluted, to any degree, by optical or visionary experience. Man can never know that pure consciousness
because he remains chained to the phenomenal world through the senses, and
therefore isn't able to completely transcend visionary awareness. At best, he may experience a momentary
glimpse of the higher, non-representational consciousness. But such a glimpse is incompatible with the
Divine per se, which would be transcendent and composed of the entire superconscious mind of which the evolutionary universe was
capable of producing in an intensity of bliss far beyond mortal experience or
comprehension. The individual mystic
inevitably remains chained to his individuality, his intimation of the Infinite
necessarily limited to the capacity of his psyche for upward
self-transcendence. He isn't communing
with God when he experiences a mystical state-of-mind, but simply with that
which, as spirit, is potentially divine.
Mystics have often deluded themselves on this point, unconsciously
belittling and reducing God to the relatively humble level of their particular
mystical experience. We, however, should
guard against making the same mistake!
For, in reality, God doesn't yet exist in the Universe, since we have
still to transform ourselves from men into pure spirit and thereby create
divinity. This can only happen in the
future, following the phasing-out of the natural body through technological
means, which the further development of civilization to increasingly-artificial
stages of evolution inevitably presupposes.
When we have dispensed with every last vestige of the sensual world,
both externally and internally, we shall be ready for the transcendental
Beyond.
ROBERT: To
the extent that we on earth are still insufficiently spiritually advanced to
attain to the transcendent plane, and couldn't have done so in the past, when
technology was either non-existent or extremely crude and, in any case, never
used in the connection to which you allude, I agree with you that we haven't
yet created God in any ultimate sense - with reference, in other words, to a
divinity whose being is supreme. We
have, of course, created God in the anthropomorphic sense of endowing man with
divinity and worshipping him, in the person of Jesus Christ, as the Son of God
... the Father, which you would doubtless agree was a step in the
aforementioned direction?
FRANCIS: I
would indeed! A step
away from pagan identification with or propitiation of the Creator, which is
diabolical, towards the literal creation of God from human spirit. An in-between egocentric realm in which a
diluted paganism is combined or alternated with a diluted transcendentalism,
and the paradoxical result is called Christianity. That was certainly a stage on the road to our
ultimate salvation from the flesh, which has still to come.
ROBERT:
Yes, but what makes you sure that no other people elsewhere in the Universe
have gone way beyond us in evolutionary terms and already literally created
God, so that a degree of transcendent spirit currently exists somewhere? I mean, you haven't even raised the
possibility of advanced life forms on other planets, so how can you be sure
that God doesn't exist?
FRANCIS: A
good question, and one that demands an equally good answer. Consequently let me say I very much doubt
that, assuming intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the Universe, any
other people, as you say, would already have evolved to a truly transcendental
status. For we have neither seen nor
heard anything of them, and that would surely be improbable where
truly-advanced peoples were concerned!
As you doubtless know, what applies on the microcosmic level also
applies, to varying extents, on the macrocosmic one, and vice versa, so that
the tendency on earth of evolutionary progress to manifest itself in a gradual
struggle towards world unity and uniformity of belief should also apply to the
Universe as a whole where, to coin Teilhard de Chardin's phrase, a 'convergence to the Omega Point' would
presumably be in simultaneous operation.
Our struggle towards salvation in the transcendental Beyond leads us to
concern ourselves with the entire world population, not just a tiny percentage
of it, and this must surely be true of other civilized peoples in the Universe
as a whole, assuming such peoples to exist.
When more is known about the Universe than at present, and we have
regular contact with people or whatever from other planets, we shall be in a
better position to gauge the extent of a 'convergence to the Omega Point' with
regard to the Universe in general, rather than to just one tiny fraction of it
in particular. At this point in time,
however, I doubt whether any other 'people' have literally created God. For we haven't been brought into contact with
a superior alien civilization, and therefore we have no reason to believe that,
at present, such a civilization exists or, indeed, has ever existed. So I remain an atheist with regard to the
assumed existence of the Supreme Being, absolutely convinced that, so far as
man is concerned, we haven't created ultimate divinity, and relatively
convinced that no-one else has either.
Besides, one could argue that even if, by some remote chance, an alien
civilization considerably more advanced than us had evolved to
a transcendental culmination, the resultant globe of pure spirit which now
existed somewhere in the Universe wouldn't be God as such, but only the
beginnings of God - a relatively small globe of spirit composed of all the spirit
which that particular civilization had made transcendent but, nevertheless, a
long way short of the total assimilation of spirit into a uniform globe towards
which the potentially transcendental civilizations in the rest of the Universe
would eventually contribute, and hence to the completion of God.
ROBERT:
This argument is becoming slightly too academic for my liking! What you're saying, I take it, is that God
wouldn't really exist in toto until such
time as every advanced civilization throughout the Universe had contributed
their share of transcendent spirit to its total spiritual mass, so to speak.
FRANCIS:
Yes, that is approximately my argument, and it is a pretty complicated one,
I'll concede. But, then, the Universe is
a pretty complicated place, and so is the evolutionary struggle. There are also further complications
concerning its final nature. For when we
bear in mind the immense scale of the Universe and begin to consider the
possible number of habitable planets in it, we cannot, surely, bring ourselves
to believe that we will gradually get to know about every single one of them
and become familiar with all of their various life forms. It stretches the imagination to its limits to
believe that, one day, we will know everything about and everyone in our own
galaxy, never mind the Universe in general, in which there are literally
millions of galaxies. So let us assume
that we won't come into contact with the inhabitants of remote galaxies, but
will be confined, instead, to exploring and unifying, on a spiritual level,
this galaxy. Now other intelligent life
forms in it would probably be doing something similar, and so a 'convergence to
the Omega Point' would be put into effect on the level of the Galaxy and, in
all probability, of individual galaxies generally, where similar criteria may
be assumed to apply.
ROBERT:
There is always the alternative possibility that we will be content to live in
the united world we have created for ourselves on this planet and mind our own
business, as we dedicate ourselves to the cultivation of pure spirit.
FRANCIS:
True. But, knowing man, I rather doubt
that he will be entirely immune to the lure of discovery and exploration, where
other planets are concerned. Of course,
life on earth will doubtless continue to progress and therefore concern itself
less and less with appearances, no matter how fantastic, and more and more with
essences; less with the outer and more with the inner. Yet that shouldn't rule-out the possibility
of interplanetary communication. For man
wouldn't want to turn his back on the rest of the Galaxy at the risk of leaving
himself exposed to alien invasion. He
wouldn't relish having what progress he had achieved
put in jeopardy as a consequence of alien interference. However, let us confine our argument to
long-term progress and assume that transcendence, when it eventually comes to
pass, will occur on a galactic rather than a universal level, so that instead
of converging to a common central area of the Universe, spirit will tend to
form locally, as it were, and thereby exist, in the region of this particular
galaxy, as a part of ultimate divinity or, better, a potential component of
ultimate divinity rather than as the Omega Point itself, which would of course
be ultimate Oneness.
ROBERT: In
other words, you are contending that, because the Universe is so vast, the
convergence towards the Omega Point will more than likely take place by degrees
even on the transcendent plane where, presumably, various galactic
contributions of spirit would co-exist independently of one another, following
their respective births, so to speak, on a local level. What that doesn't tell one, however, is how,
having evolved to so many separate globes of pure spirit, these potential
components of the Omega Point will subsequently merge into ultimate Oneness.
FRANCIS:
Ah, you've anticipated my argument! I
was going to contend that spirit is inherently expansive and convergent, and
that each separate galactic contribution to the ultimate establishment of God
would tend to converge towards other such contributions in a continuous process
of convergence and expansion until, with the successive mergings
of individual globes of spirit into larger wholes, the time finally came when
even the most originally distant contributions were fused together, and the Omega
Point was thereby established. Only
then, once ultimate Oneness had come to pass, would God actually exist, in
complete contrast to the innately separative,
divergent, contractive nature of the innumerable stars, which correspond, so I
contend, to the Devil. Yet, by then, I
wager that most if not all stars would have collapsed and disintegrated,
leaving the Universe to the spiritual perfection of God's Oneness. For, having come fully into being as the
end-product of manifold convergence, God couldn't continue to expand
indefinitely through the infinity of space if the Devil was in the way, so to
speak, and thus an obstacle to His divine expansion. As spirit expands in the
Universe, so the stars contract, burning-up at the phenomenal rate of millions of
tons of their matter a second.
Inevitably they must contract out of the Universe altogether, leaving
room for the continuous expansion of transcendent spirit, and ultimately God,
in the blissful being of its pure indivisibility.
ROBERT: A
very interesting theory! And one,
moreover, which, despite its mystical pretensions, leads me to assume that God
would make the Universe increasingly precious, as more and more space became filled, as it were, with His blissful
presence. We are, indeed, a long way here
from traditional theories of the Beyond, especially where you contend that the
Omega Point wouldn't properly exist until the establishment of ultimate
Oneness, and that such an establishment would be more likely to come about by
degrees rather than all at once, given the immensity of the Universe.
FRANCIS:
Yes, and also the fact that evolution proceeds by stages anyway, so that a leap
from this world or even this galaxy to an ultimate merging with spiritual
globes from other galaxies would seem to be rather drastic, to say the
least! We would, I think, be wiser to
vouch for a gradual 'convergence to the Omega Point' in the transcendental
Beyond, as separate globes of transcendent spirit slowly converged towards one
another from all quarters of this immense Universe, with the objective, one
might say, of establishing supreme being in all its final Oneness. These individual globes of pure spirit
wouldn't be aware that they each constituted only a potential component of God,
as they converged and expanded. For transcendent spirit, from whichever corner of the Universe,
would be totally self-absorbed in the contemplation of its own spiritual
perfection and, consequently, unaware of anything outside itself, whether of
the diabolic or the divine. One
might suppose, however, that with each additional accumulation of transcendent
spirit from other regions of the Universe, the overall condition of any
particular spiritual globe would not only become more perfect but more blissful
as well, so that expansion acquired fresh incentive, in heightened awareness,
for further expansion, and so on, until all such globes became One, and thus
attained to an optimum perfection in the ultimate awareness of the Omega
Point. Perhaps, after that, expansion
would not so much intensify the level of being as ... spread it over ever wider
and deeper areas of space, as more space became available, following the
contraction and eventual dissolution of the stars.
ROBERT: The
mind fairly boggles at the thought! It
is as much as I can do to imagine a tiny globe of transcendent spirit emerging
from the brain or whatever of a meditating person, never mind the larger
galactic globes to which a vast combination of such transcendences would
apparently give rise! I cannot even
imagine what transcendent spirit would look like, never having seen human
spirit.
FRANCIS:
Something rather pure and centripetal, I suspect, in marked contrast to the
impure, centrifugal light of the sun.
But by the time we attain to the transcendental Beyond, you can be sure
that nothing recognizably human will be left of us. For, with transcendence, man will become
supernatural and thus completely independent of the natural world, knowing
nothing but the bliss of total salvation.
And that bliss can only become more perfect, as the transcendental
Beyond becomes ever more unified in continuous expansion. That is the promise of the transcendental
future.
ROBERT: You
have convinced me, as no-one else could, that the Christian civilization must
be superseded by a civilization leading straight to Heaven through the literal
creation of pure spirit.
FRANCIS:
Yes, we won't be worshipping the diabolic Almighty or the humanistic Christ in
the future, but be directly aspiring, through self-realization, towards the
divine Holy Spirit. We shall be
God-builders in the highest, most true sense of the word.
ROBERT:
Verily have you spoken!