Op. 12
THE TRANSCENDENTAL FUTURE
Philosophical Dialogues
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
1. Introduction: The Ultimate Purpose
2. Spiritual Truth for Third-Stage Man
3. Environmental Transformations
4. The Transcendental Future
5. From the Ego to the Superconscious
6. The Rise of Transcendental Art
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INTRODUCTION: THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE
Is there an ultimate purpose to human evolution, and, if so,
what? This is a question which serious
writers have been asking themselves for some considerable time now and
providing a variety of answers to, according to their individual bents. For some, the answers have been flatly
negative. For others,
by contrast, highly positive.
There are those who believe that evolution is a haphazard affair without
any ultimate purpose, and others who are convinced that it signifies an
important trend in the direction of greater spirituality. There are those who believe that evolution is
drawing to a close, and others who are convinced that it still has a long way
to go. No matter how diverse the
opinions or answers may happen to be, the question remains one to which writers
generally apply themselves either negatively or positively, pessimistically or
optimistically. It induces a 'yes' or a
'no' response, rather than incertitude.
In this essayistic
introduction and most of the ensuing dialogues, I propose to take a 'yes'
stance and investigate one or two of the possibilities which human evolution
may undergo during the course of the next few centuries. I am going to assume that there is an
ultimate purpose to evolution which takes the form of a spiritual transformation
of mankind into the Divine, but I'm not going to pretend that such a
transformation will come about merely in the course of a few decades. If there is a progressive advancement from
matter to spirit, it is not one that proceeds quickly but, rather, in
accordance with the overall pattern of higher evolution from ape to man and
then on to whatever lies beyond him.
Yes, I am going to
contend that we began in very unspiritual
circumstances, progressed, via our ape-like ancestors, to beings capable of religious
experience, and are still progressing, slowly but surely, from the cultural
state in which we have intermittently existed for the past 6-7,000 years
towards a higher state of predominant spirituality, after which the material
aspect of our being may disappear altogether as we merge into the omega
absolute of pure spirit, following transcendence. If that sounds like Vedanta, then so be
it! But I am not going to pretend that
the ultimate purpose of evolution will be achieved before some considerable
period of time has elapsed - enough time, in fact, to enable us to transcend
our current identity. For at present we
are still men, not godlike entities, and so we shall remain until such time as
the next great spiritual revolution and/or evolutionary leap comes about.
We are men, and
therefore victims of and participants in history. History largely hinges, we learn from Spengler, a prominent philosopher of history, upon cultures
rising and falling, upon a succession of cultural developments - some great,
the majority small. It appertains to
that compromise between the sensual and the spiritual which is man. Before the compromise, there is no history. Likewise there can be no history after
it. Ape and Superman (to use a Nietzschean term) are each devoid of history and,
consequently, of culture. Only man makes
history, which will be the greater the more finely balanced the compromise
between the sensual and the spiritual.
Therefore history must continue, in one form or another, until man is
extinguished in the Superman.
But what of cultural
history, the history pertinent to great cultures, which Spengler
considered the only true one? Does what
he saw as the decline of the West, the last great culture to have appeared in
the world, signify man's approaching end, or is there likely to be another such
culture in the near future?
Of great cultures there
have been, according to the aforementioned philosopher, seven or eight, and of
this relatively small number the Christian, or Western, was in his opinion the
greatest, having had the most far-reaching effects on the world and achieved
cultural wonders unprecedented in the entire history of man. It was the last of a succession of great
cultures and the most extensive of them all.
No previous culture had developed art or music or literature or
sculpture or architecture to such a high and complex level, and it is difficult
to imagine any subsequent culture surpassing it. If we try to imagine a hypothetical future culture
producing great art, we are immediately confronted by the immense difficulty of
trying to imagine paintings or music or literature of a superior order to the
greatest works of each genre currently in existence. We would have to reconcile ourselves, under
duress of this hypothesis, to the implausible possibility of artists producing
works superior in essence to Da Vinci, Michelangelo,
Raphael, Van Eyck, Breugel,
Dürer, Poussin, Rubens,
Rembrandt, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo,
et al. Composers producing works
superior in essence to Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber,
Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, et al.
Writers producing works superior in essence to Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais,
Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Swift, Goethe, Dickens, Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, et al.
Needless to say, we are unlikely to succeed in doing that! And so, its being supposed that the arts have
attained to their egocentric zenith in the last great culture known to man, we
must assume that the cultural process, properly so-considered, has come to an
end, never to be supplanted by another such development in the near or distant
future.
For what would another
culture require in order to establish itself on a proper footing with cultural
development generally? It would require
nature, above all regular contact with the best possible type of nature - a
type peculiar to temperate rather than tropical zones. A great culture is unlikely to arise in
climates which are either too hot or too cold, too
fierce or too sultry. It requires proper
nourishment, and this can only be obtained in certain regions of the
world. Rule out those regions, such as
Western Europe and North America, where the representatives of the last great
culture still exist, or those regions, including China and India, where an
earlier cultural people developed and declined, and what is left? Very little, indeed! Hardly anywhere which is not either already
in the hands of the last cultural people or, alternatively, in the hands of an
earlier cultural people who have since abandoned or are in the process of
outgrowing their culture. Apart from
this, one finds regions which are not in the best of geographical positions to
foster a great culture. There is
something inferior about the climate and the consequent state of nature
there. One cannot imagine the world's
greatest art ever arising from such places.
But if the proximity of
temperate nature is a necessity, indeed a precondition, of higher cultural
development, then its abundance is no less so.
Thus arises our next objection to the
likelihood of subsequent cultural development.
For wherever man lives in large numbers, these days, nature is on the
defensive, is being ruthlessly exploited and destroyed by him. The larger the cities become, the less does
nature come to play a part in the lives of their citizens, with a consequence
that cultural activities decline. And
because the world is becoming increasingly urbanized and mechanized, there
would seem to be little chance of another culture arising. The incentive for it is just not there. Consequently we need not be surprised if the
age of separate cultures is at an end.
But what of the world's
future, now that we are outgrowing our traditional provincialism and growing into
a cosmopolitanism based on the technological
advancements and inventions of the West?
Is man drawing to his end?
There are two ways of
looking at this question, and in both cases I would be inclined to grant man
the benefit of the doubt and to accord him a survival beyond the cultural
phase. In the first case, I would
imagine him capable of surviving the catastrophe of a nuclear accident and/or
war, even if millions of his kind don't. But in the second case, I would imagine him
incapable of transforming himself into the more-than-human over the next few
decades. Consequently, the end of man
would seem to lie too far into the future for us to have either serious qualms
about or any great hopes for his self-overcoming. In the meantime, however, it isn't impossible
that he will survive his own self-destructive tendencies and extend his
knowledge of space to a point which may well bring him into contact, whether on
a friendly or a hostile basis initially, with other beings (aliens) in the
Galaxy.
Conceived in material or
scientific terms, evolution should embrace an expanding knowledge of the
Universe, and thus confine man to the roles of victim of and participator in
the struggles for survival which will probably take place there. Conceived, on the other hand, in spiritual or
religious terms, evolution should signify a growing knowledge of spiritual
potentialities, and thus involve man in an inner journey towards his Final End
through a condition which completely transcends the mundane. If, however, man is first destined to come to
grips with the Galaxy, then it's difficult to imagine his transformation from
the human plane to the superhuman one taking place before he has done so. As such, one is inclined to push this
hypothetical transformation quite a long way into the future!
But why assume that man
will be transformed anyway? What is
there to prevent us from considering his present form the final one? Well, let us briefly take a look at the
history of his development. He began -
did he not? - where the ape-like ancestor came to an
end. The ape-like ancestor may have
developed from something earlier or lower, but, as far as we're concerned, it
suffices us to consider it the forerunner of man - the animal beginnings. Thus from the unspiritual,
predominantly sensual life of the ape surrounded by nature-in-the-raw, man
emerged as a compromise between matter and spirit because he could to some
extent master nature, and thereby surround himself with civilization. He built villages, then towns, and finally
cities, and the more he advanced, the less animal he became and the closer he
drew to the superhuman, which stems from large cities. In the pre-cultural stage he is smothered by
nature and thus remains, to a significant extent, its victim. In the cultural stage, however, he exists on
equal terms with nature, thanks to his growing ability to create a world of his
own in opposition to it. Villages and
towns are a pleasant reminder of man's power and province. They prevent him from feeling the might of
nature breathing down his neck and driving fear into his soul. But if nature-in-moderation is the motto of
cultural man, then the motto of post-cultural man is
effectively victory-over-nature, and the larger his towns and cities become,
the more evident does this victory appear.
Now it is man who plays the bully, as he continues to extend his power
at nature's expense. The compromise is
gone and, with its departure, man finds himself one stage closer to the
Superman, to the spiritual transformation which will put an end to his
humanity.
Thus from the pre-human
ape-like creature there emerged man, and from him there should emerge the
post-human godlike being who will signify the
termination of his evolution. From
predominant sensuality one proceeds to a sensual/spiritual balance, and from
that to a spiritual predominance. From the subhuman to the superhuman via the human. In the first, or subhuman, stage there is
only the fight for survival carried-out in the crudest terms. In the second, or human, stage the fight for
survival is no longer as crude as before but, though still existing in various
degrees, is accompanied by evidence of man's growing spirituality - in short,
by culture, which proceeds from its humble beginnings in the predominant sensuality
of the pre-cultural to the balanced greatness of the culture-proper, before
declining, with the post-cultural, into the predominantly spiritual. However, in the third or superhuman stage
there is neither a fight for survival nor culture but continuous
self-realization. For the temporal world
has largely been overcome in the interests of the eternal one, and man, the
doer of deeds, has ceased to exist.
What, exactly, his
successor will look like it is of course difficult, if not impossible, for us to
imagine at this juncture. But we needn't
be particularly surprised if 'he' should transpire to being as different from
man as man was from his ape-like predecessor.
If the pre-cultural lasted many hundreds of years, then there is no
reason for us to suppose that the post-cultural, which began in the nineteenth
century, won't do so either. For we are
still, to all appearances, a long way from becoming the superhuman beings that
evolution would seem to be working towards!
A few of us may be slightly closer to that transformation or be more
spiritually advanced than the majority, but most human beings can hardly be
regarded as incipient or even potential Supermen! Alas, the faces and mentalities of the local
road sweepers, dustmen, butchers, grocers, window cleaners, etc., are not
guaranteed to inspire one with any great confidence that humanity is about to
be transformed into something higher and more spiritual! If one is reasonably realistic, one can only
conclude that the post-cultural stage of man should have quite some way to go,
before the next hypothetical stage of evolution makes its first appearance in
the world. Thus we need not fear any
impending demise of our sensual habits!
Yet, paradoxical though
it may seem that humanity in general is heading towards a future
transformation, it nevertheless does remain a fact that our relationship to the
world has been steadily changing ever since we began, and will doubtless
continue to change for as long as we continue.
There can be little doubt that human evolution is a fact, even if we
aren't altogether convinced, at present, that we are
destined to transcend our humanity at some unspecified time in the future. What has happened to man over the past
6-7,000 years of cultural development is staggering enough, and reveals to us,
particularly in its more recent Western manifestations, the cultural heights to
which he can rise through living in harmony with the most suitable type of
nature. If there was a golden age of
man, it could only have been during the heyday, so to speak, of his greatest
cultures, not antecedent to them in the pre-cultural stage, or subsequent to
them in that of the post-cultural. For
early man, surrounded by too much nature, could not attain to the balanced
compromise between matter and spirit which makes for the grandeur of cultural
man, or man in his prime as man, while late man, surrounded by too much
civilization, has outgrown that compromise and thereby established himself in a
lopsided, predominantly spiritual context which is the converse of early man's
predominant sensuality. He has passed
from the instinctually-tinged spirituality of temporal religion to an
intellectually-tinged spirituality which, whether in the guise of mysticism,
spiritualism, academicism, or puritanism,
characterizes our time. From the
standpoint of man, this third or post-cultural stage of his development does
indeed signify a decline, a decadence. But from the standpoint of man's hypothetical
future transformation into the Superman, it must be regarded as a phenomenon
bringing him one step closer to evolution's ultimate designs. For what can the final post-human stage
represent if not the most extreme opposition to nature conceivable, the
ultimate victory of a higher life-form over nature? After all, if one begins like an ape, with
subservience to nature in the form of animal sensuality, and progresses to the
human stage which, in its prime, signifies a balanced compromise with nature,
how can the third or final transformation of the being called man not signify a
complete independence of nature in the form of a supernatural severance from
the sensual? And what is that if not the
ultimate spirituality, a spirituality which transcends the sensual spirituality
known to man in his prime as man?
For cultural man is ever the finest compromise between the animal
nature-bound past and the godlike transcendent future and, as such, his
spiritual endeavours can be no more than a pointer to that ultimate
spirituality which would seem to lie in-wait for his post-human
successors. Whatever he does is tempered
by the sensual, is rooted in his animal past, with his dependence on
nature. But in his highest cultural
achievements, be they the great ceiling paintings of Michelangelo or Tiepolo, the great musical outpourings of Bach or Mozart,
the great literary writings of Bunyan or Milton, he is already depicting the
future course of humanity, albeit through sensuous means and forms, towards its
ultimate goal in spiritual union with the Divine.
If there is one symbol,
above all, of man's aspirations towards his future transformation, it is that
of the Risen Christ Who, in His Ascension into Heaven, symbolizes the triumph
of the supernatural over nature, which is termed the miraculous. In its transcendentalism, Christianity has
aptly symbolized man's spiritual aspirations, whilst its mundane side has
constantly reminded him of his sensual origins and consequent dual nature,
pitting the light of heavenly redemption against the darkness of worldly animality. Now that we
are outgrowing our cultural traditions, however, these reminders are becoming
less necessary and therefore less frequent, as the aspirations towards our
spiritual transformation grow more earnest with the influence of urban
civilization, which is bringing us one step closer to it by further isolating
us from nature and thereby reducing our sensual capacities. While man remained in harmony with nature,
balanced between body and spirit, Christianity remained the true spokesman of
his dual condition, reminding him of his 'sinful' (sensuous) nature but, at the
same time, pointing him towards his future spiritual salvation. Curiously that salvation is now closer to us
than when Christianity was at its height.
But the traditional Christian way of conceiving of it is no longer
relevant, because we have outgrown the environmental conditions in which
Christianity flourished, and cannot therefore regard it from a strictly
Christian standpoint. Naturally, this
doesn't mean that Christianity was mistaken in its concept of a future
salvation in God, but simply that it could only illustrate this salvation in
the sensual/spiritual terms peculiar to man at that stage of his evolutionary
development. At the time in which it
flourished, Christianity was the most apt representative of man's spiritual
aspirations, the only possible representative of them under the circumstances
of his allegiance to nature. But now
that we have evolved to a point where the great sensuous mother of us all is on
the defensive, as we increasingly isolate ourselves from her, so it stands to
reason that Christianity should be left behind with our previous harmonious
condition, left behind as a testimony to it, to man in his prime as man. For now that we are in the post-cultural
stage of our development it isn't the religion of balance, with its sensuous
representations, to which we relate, but the religion of spiritual lopsidedness
or, rather, a biased spirituality, the transcendentalism which stems from our
growing isolation from nature and necessarily excludes sensuous representation
of the spiritual.
Thus the evolution of
man through the three stages of his being, from pre-cultural to post-cultural
via a cultural stage-proper, is accompanied by a religion germane to each stage
of his development. In the pre-cultural
stage we have, in accordance with his subservience to nature, a religion
glorifying the sensual aspects of life which, in its various manifestations, we
may call paganism. Then comes the
cultural stage in which, in accordance with his growing knowledge of nature and
ability to tame it to some extent, we have a religion which, while rooted in
the earthly, aptly expresses his aspirations towards the Divine, and so takes
the form of Christianity or Buddhism or some such cultural religion. Finally, in the post-cultural stage of his
development, in which he is increasingly becoming the enemy of nature, a being
who predominantly lives in isolation from it in giant cities, we have a
religion reflecting his growing concern with the purely spiritual aspect of
life, a religion which is the complete converse of the pagan worship of
sensuality with which he began his religious advance, and therefore a logical
development beyond the dualistic religion that supplanted it.
Thus from the old fertility
rites and phallic worship, man progressed, via religions like Christianity and
Buddhism, to the modern transcendental preoccupations with the spirit, the Holy
Ghost, in which there is not a hint of sensuous representation. From the phallic Father to the Holy Ghost via
the Risen Christ - such is the path of human evolution from the senses to the
spirit. The Risen Christ is indeed a
beautiful symbol of man's ongoing spirituality, but the very fact of its ongoing renders such a symbol inadequate to contemporary
man, whose spiritual evolution has attained to a point where bodily
representations of the evolving spirit are less credible than a
transcendentally abstract conception like the Holy Ghost. In the Holy Ghost there will be no bodies,
not even the beautiful body of the radiant Christ. Evolution is on the side of the spirit!
So we need not be
ashamed of the decline of our Christian culture, for, objectively considered,
the progression from an instinctually-bound spirituality towards a more abstract,
intellectualized spirituality isn't a tragedy but a very positive indication of
man's ongoing spiritual evolution. It
will not serve our best interests to cling to the past, as if the past was all
that really mattered! For whether we
like it or not, we shall be swept along by the evolutionary current which is
driving us towards our ultimate goal, our ultimate salvation, in God.
That the past has
produced many wonderful cultural interpretations of our aspirations towards the
transcendent, we shall not deny. But it
is not for us to worship the past because of this, as though it were an
end-in-itself rather than a means to a higher end. Traditional religion and the art that
accompanied it are simply milestones on the road to man's ultimate home, and
accordingly have to be left behind, like all milestones, if they are not to
become an idolatrous weight around one's neck.
The future will have no need of such milestones, less because it will be
a bad or an empty time in which to live than because it should bring man closer
to his ultimate home in the pure spirit of true divinity, and thus eventually
transform him into that spirit. So of
what use would traditional religion or art be to a future which is their fulfilment? Truly, they have 'had their day', and we
should be grateful for it. For we are
already in a better position to really understand God than were our more
sensual forebears, whose sensuality obliged them to depend on symbols, or
sensuous means of representing the spiritual.
But the spirit cannot really be represented by anything but itself, and
this we have come to realize, this we are now in a position to realize, having
abandoned so much of our former sensuality.
Not surprisingly,
science is also affected by our ongoing evolution. For where it formerly conceived of matter
simply as matter, then as tiny atomic particles joined together into molecules,
it now conceives of matter in terms of particles and wavicles,
thereby testifying to the spiritual direction of our evolution. Need we be surprised if, at some point in the
not-too-distant future, it sacrifices particles altogether and thereupon
conceives of 'matter' simply in terms of wavicles,
assuming it still recognizes the existence of matter? For the modern revolution in materialistic
science is no less significant than the revolution in our religious concepts,
and can only point towards the general trend of human evolution on this planet
- a trend profoundly related to our changing social environments.
The fact that a writer
like D.H. Lawrence rebelled against this trend is well known. For, looked upon from the viewpoint of the
senses, it would appear detrimental to man as we have traditionally known him,
and indicative, moreover, of a collapse of the old values. But
That there may have been
some uncertainty, at one time, as to which of these two influential authors was
on the right path, we needn't doubt.
Fortunately, we are now in a much better position than were most of
their contemporaries to judge correctly and, in judging from an eternal rather
than a narrowly temporal point-of-view, it shouldn't be too difficult for us to
come down in Huxley's favour. We may
admire
SPIRITUAL TRUTH FOR THIRD-STAGE MAN
NICHOLAS: (Flicking through a volume of Lady
Chatterley's Lover) So you really think that D.H
Lawrence was the devil's advocate?
BRIAN: Not literally, of course!
But certainly in a manner of speaking. To be more precise, I would regard him as the
advocate of a return to paganism, rather than of an
advancement towards transcendentalism.
NICHOLAS: (Visibly puzzled) Paganism?
BRIAN: Yes, which is another way of saying
nature and the sensual.
Lawrence's god, being dark, was antithetical to Huxley's. The god of
NICHOLAS: So it would seem.
And yet if
BRIAN: Not simply, but partly.
Yes, I am a member of the intelligentsia, if rather unofficially and
unorthodoxly so, and therefore I cannot be expected to share
NICHOLAS: You mean that we are on the threshold of some kind of
biological and/or spiritual mutation from man to superman?
BRIAN: Not as yet exactly on the threshold, but certainly heading
in its direction. You see, we began our
human pilgrimage under the sway of nature, which is strictly sensuous. But, as men, we were destined to pit
ourselves against it, at first very slowly and unconsciously but, nevertheless,
in accordance with the essence of man, which is spiritual. Even at that early stage of his evolution,
man felt the pull of his spirit in opposition to the predominantly sensual
identification with nature of the apes or, for that matter, his ape-like
predecessors, and thus initiated civilization, or the establishment of a world
uniquely belonging to man - a world which included religion. Being surrounded by so much raw or relatively
untamed nature, however, it isn't surprising that his earliest religious
impulse acquired a predominantly sensual character and accordingly manifested
itself in fertility rites, phallic worship, pantheism, blood sacrifices, etc.,
in which the spirit of man, or religion-forming impulse, was subordinated to
his body, and thereby confined to an acknowledgement of the Father, or some
such pagan equivalence.
NICHOLAS: Like the 'dark gods' of D.H. Lawrence?
BRIAN: Precisely! It is
fundamentally to this earliest stage of man's religious evolution that
NICHOLAS: And this evidently leads us
further away from the sensual allegiance to the Father or, rather, Creator of
our pagan ancestors, and closer to the spiritual concept of God which Aldous Huxley advocated?
BRIAN: Indeed it does!
Though not without an intermediate, or second, stage of human
development as characterized by the great world religions, such as Christianity
and Buddhism, which signifies a kind of compromise between the sensual and the
spiritual. It is at this dualistic stage
of his evolution that man is in his prime as man - finely balanced between the
two antitheses. For he has evolved
beyond the paganism of early man through the environmental progress he has made
in his struggle with nature, and has now established his civilization to a
degree where the natural is no longer as influential as formerly, having been
pushed back and thinned out, so to speak, to make room for his villages and
towns. Man's spirit - which is, after
all, what distinguishes him from the brutes - has succeeded in freeing itself
from subservience to nature and, in the process, managed to direct its
religious impulse towards the transcendent, the Holy Spirit, and thus establish
itself on a higher plane. But whilst it
may have freed itself from subservience to nature, it has by no means triumphed
over the natural realm, as Christianity is only too keen to point out, and so
allegiance to the sensual still exists, if no longer as strongly or partially
as before. It is when this compromise
between the dual tendencies of man is at its finest and most balanced ... that
one attains to the high-point of a great culture, which is nothing less than a
record of man in his prime as man.
Here is the point at which man's artistic or expressive capacities are
at their greatest, since he is now enabled to depict his spiritual strivings in
the sensuous images of his partly sensual nature, and thereby give them
tangible form.
NICHOLAS: Which is doubtless where all the great paintings of madonnas, angels, visitations,
transfigurations, crucifixions, etc., come into the picture, so to speak. Man's spiritual aspirations given bodily
form.
BRIAN: Absolutely! And that
is why we get the paradoxical compromise between the mundane and the miraculous
- the concepts of the Immaculate Conception, Resurrection, Transubstantiation,
Ascension, etc., not to mention the delightfully sensuous nature of so many madonnas, angels, saints, saviours, etc., which the
greatest painters and sculptors chose to depict. There is more than a hint of soft pornography
about various of those high-flying angels whose
heavenly garments flow gracefully with their movements and offer us discreet
glimpses of beautiful limbs. And what
about those numerous damnation scenes in which the Damned are pitchforked into Hell in the nude, and often exposed to our
eyes in postures which are anything but spiritual? Being damned for their sensual crimes, they
are appropriately sensuous, and we recognize in them that section of humanity
which is closer to the earlier, predominantly sensual stage of human development. In the time-honoured distinction between 'the
quick' and 'the slow', they represent 'the slow', who have not kept abreast of
evolutionary strivings and are accordingly damned. Only 'the quick' can hope for salvation in
the Beyond, those who put their trust in the transcendent - the spiritual as
opposed to sensual allegiance. For it is towards the transcendent that human evolution is slowly
proceeding, and in which it will attain to its ultimate salvation in the
godlike beatitude which lies beyond the merely human.
NICHOLAS: Thus the Day of Judgement is no mere figment of the
imagination but, presumably, something still to come?
BRIAN: Yes, in a manner of speaking. Though not, by any means,
in the exact terms which Christianity has outlined. For we should not confound such a Judgement
Day with the appropriately sensuous symbols employed in its depiction! What we are really dealing with here is the
final stage of human evolution - the transformation from man to superman, in
which spirit, represented in Christian symbolism by Jesus Christ, is wholly
triumphant, and man thereby attains to salvation in the transcendent
Beyond. However, it may well transpire,
at that more evolved juncture in time, that some men, insufficiently spiritual,
will be unable to achieve this transformation, this mutation onto the highest
plane of existence, in which case they will probably be confined to the world
of time and suffering, and their confinement, in contrast to the pure godlike
beatitude experienced by those who have climbed onto the Eternal Plane, may be
interpreted as a kind of damnation. For,
as Aldous Huxley rightly said, man's Final End must
reside in unitive knowledge of the Godhead, though it
doesn't necessarily follow that all men
will attain to such an End. Again there
will be 'the quick' and 'the slow', with the relevant consequences attending
each. But the real mistake, concerning
the Last Judgement, would lie in taking the Christian symbolism - beautiful and
appropriate though it was at the time of its conception - at face-value, and
thus confounding it with the reality which lies beyond, and which it strives to
convey in sensuous terms. The
consequences of doing so could only be extremely foolhardy and pitifully
beside-the-point, leading one to imagine Christ literally making His second
appearance in the world, with the Second Coming, in order to divide the chaff
from the wheat and thereupon establish His 'Kingdom of Heaven' on earth. Symbolically, this is perfect. For the principle it strives to convey of the
ultimate triumph of the spirit over nature is wholly in accordance with the
trend of evolution and demands our utmost respect. But, conceived at a time when man was in the
second stage of his religious evolution, it is inevitable that the sensuous
representation of the spiritual principle, viz. Jesus Christ, should pertain to
human understanding as it was at that stage of its development
and not at the present stage, where, on the contrary, the spiritual principle
demands a literal representation or, rather, no representation at all. For we have outgrown the symbolic stage of
our evolution and thus entered the third and final stage of it, wherein
civilization has the better of nature instead of existing, as before, in a
balanced compromise with the sensuous world.
NICHOLAS: You mean the subsequent enlargement of our towns and
cities has further limited or curtailed nature's influence, and accordingly
engendered a different religious impulse.
BRIAN: Yes, absolutely! Which is why Christianity has been increasingly on the decline
since the eighteenth century. For
Christianity is the religion appertaining to man in his prime as man, balanced
between flesh and spirit. But with the
expansion of urbanization, this balance has been upset in the general direction
of greater spirituality, so that the sensual side of man is subordinate to the
spirit and approximately in the position the latter was in when man lived as a
nature-worshipper. In entering the third
stage of our religious evolution we are the converse of the first stage, and
our religious impulse is appropriately transcendental. In isolating ourselves from nature we are
drawn away from the Father and closer to the Holy Spirit, in consequence of
which the Christian compromise is no longer relevant, since possessing too much
sensuality for our tastes. We don't
require symbols now, because they are simply a means of expressing the
spiritual in sensuous terms, and we are too spiritual to appreciate them. Our traditional instinctually- and emotionally-charged
religious impulse has been superseded by an intellectually abstract one, in
which the Holy Spirit becomes our concept of divinity, as we cease to think in
terms of bodily representation. For
throughout the Christian era men did conceive
of God in bodily terms, and this we can no longer do, this we no longer wish to
do, having abandoned the sensual life to a much greater extent. Admittedly, there were transcendentalists of
one persuasion or another in
NICHOLAS: So we have recently entered the positive stage and thus
drawn one stage closer to the Holy Spirit?
BRIAN: We are certainly drawing closer to the Holy Spirit, but we
are by no means in the positive stage, which would indeed be that of ultimate
divinity. As long as we remain men, which should be for some time to come, we shall be partly
negative, though not, of course, to the same extent as our cultural or
pre-cultural forebears. Instead of being
predominantly negative, as were they, with their work and art and sport and war
and sex, we shall become increasingly positive, draw
progressively nearer, with each succeeding generation, to the pure beatitude of
the supreme existence which still lies beyond us. Our machines will increasingly carry the
burden of our negativity, as we proceed into the future, and thereby make it
possible for us to spend more time simply meditating our way towards unitive knowledge of the Holy Ghost. But as long as we remain men - and this
should be perfectly obvious - there can be no question of our becoming
divine. Man is man at any stage of his
evolution, though never more so than when he composes great music or writes
great literature or paints great paintings or involves himself in any other
form of great creative work. For such
work is the hallmark of man, especially man in his prime as man, not of the
Superman that lies beyond him. And even
the (from an egocentric standpoint) lesser creative work of predominantly
intellectual and spiritual man will not entitle us to consider either him or it
truly godlike, even though it may be the closest man has yet come to such a
state in his physical actions. For man
is never closer to himself than in his actions, and all physical actions, no
matter how clever or socially beneficial, take one away from the Holy
Spirit. It is only in meditation that
man will come to know the Godhead, and thus cease to be himself. But pure spirituality is still some way into
the future, so we needn't fear anything for our manhood at present.
NICHOLAS: That comes as quite a relief to me, I can assure you!
BRIAN: Yes, I thought it would!
Though I am confident that it would come as an even greater relief to
most healthy, attractive young women!
However, joking aside, it should be emphasized that pure spirituality,
if and when it comes to pass, will be vastly superior to any of our physical
doings, even the most agreeable of them, and therefore something that is
unlikely to cause its experiencers any serious
regrets. They will be too blissfully
absorbed in the higher state to care anything about the world of men - a world
which, so far as they're concerned, would have completely ceased to exist. In the meantime, however, we must bear the
burden of our human status and carry-on with our physical actions, the bad as
well as the good, while the new religious impulse takes root in us and slowly
expands towards our ultimate salvation.
Christianity has 'had its day' and this is something for which, despite
all the works of great art it inspired, we should be sincerely grateful, since
we can now look towards a brighter future, one in which art will eventually
cease to be necessary and, no less significantly, cease to be possible. For as Tolstoy indicated, art is essentially
a means of conveying feelings and emotions, preferably the noblest and most
pertinent to any given culture, through symbols. It is a phenomenon dependent upon and linked
to the sensuous, so that when man's sensual/instinctual capacities decline,
with the advancement of civilization, and his spiritual/intellectual ones take
over, then the age of great, or egocentric, art comes to an end. A new age of post-egocentric, intellectually-oriented
art takes its place, until such time as even that ceases to be practicable and
art disappears altogether. What one
increasingly finds nowadays in the realm of art is thought, i.e. philosophy,
technology, psychology, sociology, etc., as befitting beings dominated by their
intellect and consequently under the sway of a higher spirituality than the
instinct-bound spirituality of the great artists of the past. It is the intellect rather than the id, or
instinctive will, which is destined to condition our responses to life over the
coming decades, and this will merge with and eventually give way to the
still-higher spirituality of pure knowledge, leading, in due course, to man's
Final End in total union with ultimate divinity. So do not brood over the death of traditional
art as though it were some terrible tragedy!
For it is only through the demise of such art that we can hope to live
on a higher plane - freed from the lower, sensuous spirituality it represents. Great egocentric art has already come to its
end and, eventually, post-egocentric art will follow suit, to be respectfully
buried in the giant curatorial mausoleums of mankind's cultural history as
tokens of our more sensual past. And
thus the way will be cleared for us to proceed with our intellectual and
spiritual preoccupations in the optimistic spirit of post-cultural man - a
spirit diametrically antithetical to the pessimism of our pre-cultural
ancestors, and no longer indulgent of the dualistic compromise on which our
more recent cultural forebears built their great culture. It won't be the novel, the play, or the poem
that will characterize our creative urge in this third stage of evolution, but
the essay, dialogue, and aphorism - the philosophical genres of beings
liberated, through large-scale urbanization, from the tyranny of their
emotional instincts and placed firmly under the control of their spiritual
intellects. Like art, literature and
music will completely die out, great music and literature having already done
so, their post-egocentric successors soon to follow suit. After all, regarded from another standpoint,
can one really expect the arts to live-on indefinitely? Aren't there enough great paintings,
symphonies, concertos, drawings, etchings, novels, plays, songs, operas, poems,
sculptures, etc., in the world already?
Not to mention all the comparatively mediocre works which have either
come down to us from earlier times or proliferated during the course of this
century? Surely one cannot continue
hoarding them up in the world, as though there was an unlimited supply of
space! Obviously a halt has to be called
sometime, and we are closer to it now than at any previous time in the history
of man. The future will have no use, you
can be certain, for art of any description!
NICHOLAS: Which is probably just as well, if the subject-matter of
the bulk of it is anything to judge by!
But even if, as I'm now inclined to believe, art is destined to perish,
what makes you so confident that man will survive? After all, we still live in the shadow of
nuclear obliteration, and it isn't a shadow that permits one to be particularly
optimistic about mankind's future, is it?
BRIAN: No, maybe not in the short term. But that isn't to say that man won't survive
the effects of a nuclear accident and/or war, and therefore is destined to
perish along with his traditional creations.
In the unlikely event of a nuclear war, it stands to reason that large
numbers of human beings would perish, just as they have perished in or through
wars from time immemorial. But I can't
for one moment believe that humanity in toto would perish, as some present-day pessimists are
only too apt to imagine. It would be
entirely against the grain of human evolution, which is leading man from a
lower to a higher state, leading him beyond the phenomenon of war towards an
era of eternal peace. No, if he is
destined to perish as a species it won't be in consequence of nuclear war, but
through his metamorphosis from man to superman, which we earlier discussed and
briefly referred to as constituting, in post-Christian terms, a kind of Last
Judgement, in which the temporal world of man in his third stage of evolution
will be superseded by an eternal world of pure godlike beatitude. It could well be that we are on the verge of
the most radical revolution in the entire history of mankind, but I don't see
that such a possibility should induce us to assume that mankind is on the point
of perishing. On the contrary, it seems
more probable that the old Judeo-Christian world will ultimately come to an end
in that event, thereby clearing the ground, so to speak, for the widespread
acceptance of man's third-stage religion - the religion centred on meditation
and leading, inevitably, to the transcendental Beyond.
NICHOLAS: So you don't believe that mankind is on the verge of
nuclear annihilation?
BRIAN: No, I don't. Like Koestler, I believe in short-term pessimism but in
long-term optimism. It is precisely in
the transitional stages between the old religious impulse and the new one that
most confusion and uncertainty is apt to arise, as our recent history
adequately attests. But it is our duty
as intellectuals to lead as many people as possible out of that confusion and
uncertainty towards the brighter future in which their salvation resides, and
thus to assure them that, in spite of all the vicissitudes or apparent setbacks
with which contemporary life may confront them, human evolution is slowly
winding its way towards a future consummation in the post-human absolute. History is on the side of the spirit, and it
is the spirit of man that will ultimately triumph - not in any fictitious
Beyond, such as one might be led to believe in, à la Malcolm
Muggeridge, through a misconception of Christian
symbolism, a more or less literal belief in that symbolism instead of a
figurative interpretation of what, in sensuous terms, it was striving to convey
at that particular stage of human evolution, but, rather, in the very genuine
Beyond of our future transformation from men into godlike beings, which will be
a consequence of our technologically-biased urban lifestyle and the
transcendental religion appertaining to it.
Man, to cite Nietzsche, is something that should be overcome, and we are
now some way on the road to overcoming him.
Only when he is completely overcome, however, will we fully enter the
long-awaited transcendent Beyond which our ancestors have been dreaming about,
in various ways, since the spirit first liberated itself from heathen
subservience to nature. But we needn't
pretend that we are on the verge of that dream just because we have entered the
third and final stage of human evolution.
We may be closer to it than man has ever been before, but it should be
fairly evident, from a glimpse at the world around us, that we still have a
long way to go in order to attain to our ultimate salvation in unequivocal
spiritual triumph. There are still
buildings to demolish, new buildings to build, machines to invent, drugs to
discover, meditation techniques to learn, further aspects of nature to
overcome, space explorations to make, technological improvements to effect,
racial frictions to eradicate, and so many other things to do before we arrive
at our heavenly destination. But even if
we must face-up to this sobering thought, at least we can be assured that there
is a purpose, a justification to our activities, that progress is a fact, and
that we are slowly but surely working-out our destiny, in accordance with
evolutionary requirement. Even The
Hour of Decision, that largely reactionary work by Oswald Spengler, was a part of our destiny which had to be worked
out and proven inadequate, before we could proceed beyond the narrowly temporal
view of culture it takes to a much wider view of human evolution, in which the
decline of individual cultures is regarded as part of a greater, more
comprehensive development in human progress, rather than simply seen as a
lamentable tragedy to be bewailed and if possible - which, incidentally, it
never can be - prevented. No, it isn't
for us to lament over our cultural decline, but to grasp the full implications
of what it signifies in terms of our ongoing spiritual development - a
development which has no further use for traditional modes of cultural
expression. Spengler
had a task to fulfil and we may congratulate him for fulfilling it. But his is not the last word in the struggle
for Truth, which must continue as long as man exists and cannot possibly come
to a halt, not even where the efforts of such distinguished thinkers as
Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Koestler,
Louis Mumford, Aldous
Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin,
and Arnold J. Toynbee are concerned. For
it is the task of the outstanding minds of each generation to carry the torch
of Truth one stage further in the direction of that ultimate truth which will
reside in the transcendental Beyond and have no need of verbal justification,
being its own silent witness. Neither
will this ultimate truth be clouded or diminished by illusion, which inevitably
characterizes and accompanies, to varying extents, our struggle for
intellectual truth. In the Beyond there
will be no place for that conflict of opposites, no opportunity for sensual
illusion to mar the pure face of spiritual truth, since antitheses will have
been transcended in the One, and the One will reign supreme. But that, as already noted, is some way into
the future, so, in the meantime, we must persist with the truth relative to
ourselves, as third-stage men, and thereby endeavour to overcome what illusion
we can. Now the truth relative to
ourselves is by no means the truth relative to man in his previous two stages,
when he looked upon life and God from either a predominantly sensual stance, as
in the first stage, or a balanced sensual/spiritual stance, as in the second. It is a truth superior to the lower truths of
both these stages and, as such, isn't something that we should regard as a
misfortune or decadence in relation to the past. D.H. Lawrence tried to relate to the first stage
of human development - that of paganism, with its phallic worship and fertility
rites. So much for
NICHOLAS: Yes, I guess I shall have to agree with you, even though
I rather like
BRIAN: Well, now you know better, don't you? You ought to have a sufficiently
comprehensive criterion to enable you to distinguish between the reactionaries
and the progressives, thus avoiding unnecessary confusions. And watch out for the traditionalists as
well, since they won't point you in the direction evolution is taking either,
but will simply strive to impose their limited notions of salvation upon
you. Always fight for the truth, but
make certain that it appertains to man at this stage of his evolution, not to a
previous one! For there are all too many
people who are convinced that there is only one truth and that they have it,
even though circumstances indicate that their particular stage of truth is no
longer relevant - indeed, may even be several centuries out-of-date!
NICHOLAS: Or even thousands of years -
as, presumably, in
BRIAN: Yes, absolutely!
Fortunately for humanity, however, there are still intellectual leaders
in the world, and they are in it to do a specific job, irrespective of whether
or not the bulk of mankind approves of it.
Life isn't static but evolutionary, and it is the task of intellectual
leaders to remind people of that fact and to lead them in the right direction,
which, in effect, is the only possible direction, since they themselves are led
by the pressures of intellectual evolution.
NICHOLAS: How right you are!
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATIONS
JOSEPH: I have recently read that the decline of Christianity in
the West was due, in large measure, to the rise of the big city, which is
hostile to the context of environmental compromise in which Christianity
originally flourished. Apparently, the
predominantly artificial environment of the city signifies a step beyond the
dualistic, provincial framework peculiar to cultural man, and is accordingly
indicative of a higher stage of evolution.
Where, formerly, Western man was approximately balanced between nature
and civilization, the sensual and the spiritual, he now exists in a
spiritually-lopsided position (or, at any rate, most of those who live in big
cities do). So he has grown beyond the
dualistic, anthropomorphic religiousness appertaining to a less-urbanized
context and thereby exposed himself to the possibility of a new religious
awareness - one reflecting his isolation from nature, and consequently
testifying to his spiritual advancement.
RICHARD: Quite true! And
this new awareness is transcendental as opposed to anthropomorphic, and
therefore hostile to the sensual. It is an awareness superior in essence to anything that has
preceded it, constituting the final stage of Western man's spiritual
evolution. From predominantly sensual
beginnings in nature he has progressed to predominantly spiritual endings in
the big city, the dualistic compromise coming in-between, when man was in his
prime as man - approximately balanced between his two selves and therefore not
lopsided on the side of either the beastly or the godly. But the path of evolution is leading him
towards the Holy Spirit, and so post-Christian man is somewhat closer to that
blessed consummation than were his Christian predecessors, whose anthropomorphism
invariably kept them bound to the sensual.
JOSEPH: And when he attains to his
consummation in transcendent bliss, he will presumably cease being human?
RICHARD: Yes, he will have outgrown the three stages of human
development and entered the post-Human Millennium, which is the post-Christian
equivalent of Heaven - the coming time of happiness in the transcendental Beyond.
JOSEPH: Why post-human?
RICHARD: Because he will no longer be man but superman and
therefore beyond the merely human. We
use the word 'millennium' because we do not want this transcendental Beyond to
be confounded with or mistaken for any posthumous afterlife, such as the word
'Heaven' might lead one to do. You see,
Heaven is inextricably linked to Hell.
But we are outgrowing the dualistic framework of Christianity and
consequently drawing closer to our ultimate salvation, which is in the
future. So we prefer to substitute
Millennium for Heaven, in order to avoid the dualistic connection with Hell
which almost invariably presents itself when the word 'Heaven' is mentioned. With the post-Human Millennium, on the other
hand, there is no possibility of Hell simultaneously existing. People will either climb onto the higher
plane or fail to climb onto it, as the case may be. But we must assume that there will be more
incentive for them to transcend their humanity than to keep it, and therefore
that most if not all of them will make the necessary change. Thus the Christian Last Judgement would seem
to be too dualistic in conception to be quite relevant to the climax of human
evolution, in which only a post-Human Millennium will prevail. As the middle development in Western man's
ongoing spiritual evolution, Christianity was obliged to acknowledge mankind's
past as well as to anticipate its future, and this past, in which sensuality
predominates, is juxtaposed with the future in depictions of the Last
Judgement. Consequently, it is open to
misinterpretations of simultaneity which, in actual fact, it doesn't really
warrant. For, in reality, Hell is a
context out of which mankind is slowly climbing, whereas Heaven is a context
towards which it aspires. It is the
difference between pure sensuality and pure spirituality, the diabolic
beginnings and the divine endings, with three stages of human development
coming in-between. Now, obviously,
first-stage man, surrounded and dominated by nature, was closer to Hell than
Christian or second-stage man, who had pushed nature away from himself to an
extent which made it possible for him to differentiate between the sensual and
the spiritual, and thus aspire, no matter how intermittently or half-heartedly,
towards the transcendental Beyond. And
third-stage man, it logically follows, is closer to that Beyond
than were his Christian predecessors, who were still tied to the sensual to an
extent which made it necessary for them to fear Hell and thus maintain a
dualistic framework of religious awareness.
So third-stage man doesn't fear Hell, since he is too far away from it,
but directs his attention towards Heaven or, rather, the post-Human Millennium,
which exists as his goal and ultimate salvation. He dispenses with dualism in his drive
towards spiritual perfection - a perfection destined to take place in a
transcendent context which should not be confused with some afterlife. After all, what has the Second Coming of
Christian symbolism to do with a Beyond in that traditional sense?
JOSEPH: You tell me.
RICHARD: Very little! For
why should Christ, as the symbolic representative of the spirit, bother to come
back to earth if people were already being judged, following death, in an
afterlife? Why should he bother to judge
the living when they would all be judged at death anyway - as, apparently,
millions and millions of people had already been, prior to His Second
Coming? It simply doesn't make
sense. So, obviously, the Christian
symbolism refers, in the context of Christ, to the ultimate triumph of the
spiritual in life, which we can now regard as the post-Human Millennium. As for judgements in the afterlife, I just
don't believe in them.
JOSEPH: Which induces me to assume that you don't believe in the
Afterlife or, more specifically, in an afterlife which presupposes more than
just the condition of non-being, following life?
RICHARD: Indeed not! In
point of fact, I believe that people have often misinterpreted Christian
symbolism and thereupon confounded Heaven with something that occurs following
death, rather than in a futuristic context towards which humanity are slowly
advancing here on earth. I absolutely
reject this posthumous conception of Heaven, for which, incidentally,
Christianity wasn't entirely to blame.
After all, Christianity has pointed
man towards his future salvation in the Beyond, though this was often mistaken
for an afterlife state by the Christians themselves. Now if people get consolation from thinking
in that myopic sort of way, good luck to them!
We needn't feel particularly sorry on their account. As far as the truth is concerned, however, we
can hardly concede that they had it!
Self-deception is one thing, the truth quite another!
JOSEPH: Then what about Aldous Huxley,
whom you are always talking about these days?
Surely, if you don't believe in the Afterlife, you won't approve of his
conception of life-after-death which, as I understand it, was founded upon The Tibetan
Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thödol? Surely you would have to reject his belief in
a posthumous Clear Light and possible union of the departed's
spirit with it?
RICHARD: Oh, I most certainly do!
I reject not only his belief in a posthumous Clear Light, as you so
eloquently describe it, but also the accompanying belief in reincarnation -
reincarnation apparently being reserved for those who posthumously reject the
Clear Light and opt to return to the world.
It seems to me that Huxley was inclined to take a sort of Christian
instead of post-Christian view of the Beyond, by conceiving of it as following
death, rather than in the post-human life of the Superman. One dies and, following a short transitional
period, is then confronted by the Clear Light, which, according to Huxley, one
either accepts and therefore merges with, or rejects and consequently returns,
sooner or later, to the ego-bound world.
Well, I cannot go along with that assumption, no matter how much I may
admire Huxley in certain other respects.
Writing when he was, in the thick of the transition between the
Christian and post-Christian worlds, it is perhaps not surprising that his
mysticism should have had a Christian slant, and thus related salvation to a
posthumous merging with the Clear Light.
But I don't believe that such a hypothetical procedure is the context in
which it occurs. On the contrary, it
seems to me that salvation is very much an affair of human evolution towards a
higher spirituality attained to on this earth, in the future. It is essentially a climax to our evolution,
the mutation, if you prefer, from man to superman, in which
the body will be completely transcended and the spiritual life duly reign
supreme. So we have to live for the sake
of that more fortunate generation who will effect man's transformation to the
post-Human Millennium, and thus vindicate all our evolutionary struggles,
justify all previous propagation. Our
sons will be one step closer to the post-Human Millennium than ourselves, and
their sons will be closer to it than them, and so on, until the ultimate
transformation. But we won't enter the
transcendental Beyond, neither now nor, in my opinion,
following death. All we can do is have
faith in the future and work towards making it possible. As, however, to our ultimate salvation in the
Afterlife - that I must confess to having grave doubts about! If, in dying, we encounter a darkness and
'sleep the long sleep', then I don't think we shall
have any great cause for complaint. It
will be acceptable for us, as corpses, to leave the affairs of this life behind
and take a well-earned rest. Even if the kernel of our being, the will as 'thing-in-itself', to
cite Schopenhauer, is indestructible and therefore survives death, it would
almost certainly do so without consciousness, and consequently without a
knowledge of where it was and why it was there. It would be completely at home in the
eternity of nothingness that follows life, oblivious of this world and bereft
of any desire to return to it. And
because, deprived of consciousness, it wouldn't know where it was, it would
hardly be exposed to the spectacle of the Clear Light and the possibility of
either merging with or rebelling against it - as the case may be!
JOSEPH: Contrary to the speculations voiced by Aldous
Huxley in his novel Time Must Have a Stop, in which its principal character Eustace
Barnack, having died in the lavatory of his country
house, finds himself confronted by the Clear Light and, unable to reconcile
himself to it, persists with the personal ego-bound state of the Afterlife
until such time as he can contrive to return to the world, as a child of the Weyls?
RICHARD: Yes, contrary to speculations based on the Bardo Thödol, which Huxley was inclined to
take too seriously, it seems to me. Had
he read Schopenhauer's Parega and Paralipomena, he might have subsequently modified his
speculations or not even entertained them at all. As things transpired, however, he pressed-on
with a belief in the posthumous survival of consciousness which I can only
regard as irrational, not to say implausible.
For how can visionary consciousness possibly exist independently of the
intellect and the proper functioning of the brain? And what is more - why should it? What purpose would it serve? What would one be doing in a hypothetical
Other World that would make such consciousness necessary?
JOSEPH: Perhaps deciding whether to merge with the Clear Light or
return to this world in the guise of a new-born infant.
RICHARD: Indeed, that would be a good
enough reason to retain such consciousness if that is what actually
happens. But does it? Can it, when, by all rational accounts, the
loss of intellect, with death, should deprive one of visionary
consciousness? No, I don't see that it
can. The idea of an isolated mind, as it
were, being subject to the intrusion of a Clear Light in the post-death state
seems to me quite absurd. One wonders
where this Clear Light is supposed to exist.
And one wonders even more where the consciousness that perceives it is
coming from, how such consciousness can exist without the assistance of a
brain. Yet this hypothetical
consciousness is supposed to be able to reject the Clear Light, if it prefers
to, and dream its own dreams until such time as, having grown weary of
dreaming, it elects to find itself a new body - and presumably accompanying
brain - on earth! Well, this belief in
reincarnation is even stranger and more absurd to me than what precedes it. For how can a given consciousness - the
ego-bound consciousness of Eustace Barnack, let us
say - be itself one moment and, with a return to this world, someone else the
next; be a knowing mind that wills itself a suitable married couple and
subsequently become the child of that couple - altogether bereft of recollections
of its temporary stay in the Other World?
The idea scarcely merits dwelling on, so preposterous does it appear in
the light of rational inquiry! After
all, propagation is an affair of parents, isn't it? An affair, if we may believe Schopenhauer, in
which the will comes from the male and the intellect from the female, and
consequently where there is no room or place, in the child's psyche, for any
external, otherworldly intervention. For
if a so-called soul, as will and intellect combined, is to effect a return from
the Afterlife and impose itself upon a suitable couple of prospective parents,
what purpose, one wonders, would their own reproductive seeds serve? Why, indeed, should they possess any such seeds
at all?
JOSEPH: You tell me!
RICHARD: Obviously not as mere decoration, but in order to
propagate their own kind. And that does
mean their own kind, not the kind of someone or, more accurately, some thing
which has rejected the Clear Light and elected to return to this world in the
guise of their child! So I cannot place
much confidence in the concept of reincarnation, as propounded by Huxley. Neither do certain other speculations
deriving from The Tibetan Book of the Dead particularly appeal
to me. If my wife were dying, I
certainly wouldn't spend hours at her bedside encouraging her towards some
hypothetical Other World, as Huxley did with regard to his first wife. I would just let her die quietly and
peacefully - without mystical accompaniment.
I would want her to be resigned to losing her consciousness at death,
resigned to sleeping the long lifeless sleep of oblivion in the eternity of
nothingness, and thus putting the cares and pains of this life behind her. I wouldn't want her to feel that she had a
moral obligation to live-up to, in the post-death state. For the prospect of such an obligation would
only serve to put unnecessary strain on her last hours. No, I would want her to have the peace that
the dying deserve - freed from the imperious or meddlesome clutches of the
living. And I would hope, too, that some
years before her death she had learnt to differentiate between the post-death
state, which is really no Beyond at all but a nothingness, and the post-human
state towards which humanity is slowly advancing, so that, mindful of the
fiction of a posthumous afterlife, she needn't be in any doubt as to her
impending fate. Then she could discard
the fears which sometimes beset the dying as they imagine themselves being
judged for their sins and, in the event of negative judgement, summarily pitchforked into Hell.
But Hell is something in the distant pre-human past, not something still
to come!
JOSEPH: Not even with the possibility of a nuclear war?
RICHARD: No, though that, needless to say, would be hellish
enough! But it would constitute only a
temporary hellishness out of which we would eventually arise, phoenix-like,
from the ashes of the past and press-on with our destiny towards a higher
spirituality. We would press-on in
accordance with the one-sided spirituality appertaining to third-stage,
big-city man, and so adopt a post-dualistic attitude to divinity. We would not endorse anthropomorphism but
only transcendentalism, as appertaining to the third and highest part of the
Trinity, which will inevitably lead to the long-awaited triumph of the spirit,
represented in Christian symbolism by the Second Coming, and to the
establishment, thereafter, of a post-Human Millennium. Now just as we would be obliged to dispense
with anthropomorphism, that compromise between body and spirit, so we would be
obliged to dispense with democracy, the dualism appertaining to second-stage
cultural man.
JOSEPH: You mean we are heading towards a future based not on
democracy but on totalitarianism?
RICHARD: Yes, that is my belief.
After all, aren't politics and religion fundamentally two aspects of the
same coin, conditioned, at any given time, by the nature of the environment in
which a given people happens to live?
How therefore can you press-on with a one-sided spirituality in the big
cities and not have a politics complementary to it, a politics which is as much
a consequence of the environment as the religion? You can't have third-stage religion and
second-stage politics? That would be
quite illogical, even if a minority of intelligent people may now be responding
to the city environment in an appropriately spiritual manner, and consequently
be practising a form of transcendentalism in the capitals of the democratic
world. Until Christian churches
disappear and Christianity is officially superseded, the transcendentalism of
this intelligent minority is bound to remain an unofficial break with tradition
upon which the Christian Establishment, in its advocacy of anthropomorphism,
can only frown. It cannot be sanctioned
as the official successor to Christianity, and therefore it can only exist as a
kind of spiritual outsider in the West, even though it may be more pertinent to
the particular environment in which it is practised than the traditional
religious integrity. But that, I
believe, is merely a temporary situation.
For the evolution of man continues to proceed within the overall
structure of Western society, and eventually that structure will be obliged to
come to terms with the extent of his spiritual evolution and officially
recognize the transformation from second- to third-stage life.
JOSEPH: I do hope you are right!
THE TRANSCENDENTAL FUTURE
ARNOLD: It would seem, if what I've heard about you is true, that
you regard democracy merely as a transitional phenomenon leading to something
higher, a midway stage, as it were, between man's predominantly sensual past
and his predominantly spiritual future, in which a variety of contending
parties struggle against one other in a kind of twilight zone of democratic
balance, until such time as the balance swings so much in favour of the
progressive party that a new phase of evolution gets under way in the form of
transcendental totalitarianism - the equivalent, in evolutionary terms, of the
Light.
KEITH: Yes, I regard democracy as a kind of twilight between the
darkness of royalism and the light of socialism, a
kind of egocentric state between the subconsciousness
of Western man's beginnings in subservience to nature and the superconsciousness of his endings in transcendental bliss. Early man lived most of his life in the
subconscious realm of sensual identification with nature. He put the spiritual aspect of reality into
the sensual and thereby embraced an animistic/pantheistic concept of
divinity. For him everything was essentially
dark, fearsome, and cruel. His
subconscious projections led him to worship the Lawrentian
'dark gods of the loins', rather than any transcendent deity, and therefore to
respect a predominantly sensual mode of political administration roughly
commensurate with royalism. There could be no question of a political
opposition existing in a society so much under the tyranny of nature, where the
spiritual was embodied in the sensual. So early man lived in a
kind of perpetual darkness of royalist allegiance. But gradually Western man - and we may as
well focus our attention chiefly on the evolution of Europeans - broke free
from this sensual tyranny and established civilization to a degree whereby he
could differentiate between the sensual and the spiritual, and thereupon assign
to each a separate realm - the former mundane, the latter transcendent.
KEITH: Yes, Christianity was duly accepted because its compromise
integrity reflected the evolutionary situation of Western man as a being
divided between sensuality and spirituality, a being halfway-up the ladder of
human evolution, so to speak. And, in
due course, his evolutionary position in relation to nature led him to endorse
democracy, led to democracy, which is essentially a compromise between royalism and socialism.
Thus a kind of twilight era of political balance was established, in
which the parties of the Left vied with the parties of the Right for ultimate
control of the parliamentary framework.
Now very gradually, following a progression from dictatorial capitalism
to a democratic balance between capitalism and socialism, the left-wing party
began to tip the balance in favour of socialism, and so inaugurated the
phenomenon of democratic socialism, with which we in the West are sufficiently
well-acquainted this century not to be in any degree surprised by. So now the twilight zone of democracy-proper
has given way to a brighter zone of the political spectrum which, in due time,
should give way to the Light itself, and thus reflect the era of
transcendentalism.
KEITH: Absolutely!
Christianity, with its allegiance to a personal anthropomorphic deity,
will be eclipsed by the blinding mysticism of the Inner Light, as the regular
practise of meditation paves the way for man's ultimate salvation in the
post-Human Millennium. Western man will
no longer pray, as has traditionally been the case in the egocentric world of
second-stage cultural life, but will simply meditate his way towards direct
experience of what, in the superconscious, is
potentially divine. He will follow the
historical example, in short, of the spiritual masters of the Orient, and
accordingly relinquish the egocentric claims of Christianity. He will focus his attention upon the Holy
Ghost, the third and highest part of the Trinity, and thus dispense with the
Father and Son of his previous two stages of religious allegiance. For the Father is really
pantheism, the Son anthropomorphism, and the Holy Spirit alone
transcendentalism - the blessed equivalent to the Huxleyian
Clear Light of the Void.
ARNOLD: Hence religion, like politics, is conditioned by the
nature of the environment, and may accordingly be said to evolve from the dark
to the light via a kind of twilight, or Christian, stage coming in-between.
KEITH: Precisely! Though
the twilight stage also evolves from a predominantly dark state on the border,
so to speak, with paganism to a predominantly light state on the border with
transcendentalism, as can be borne out by the early-Christian emphasis on the
Virgin Mary, which is given priority in Catholicism, and the late-Christian
emphasis on Christ, which is given priority in Protestantism. It is a shift from the sensual to the
spiritual, the symbolically mundane to the symbolically transcendent.
ARNOLD: You mean Protestantism may be equated with a kind of
religious democracy, in contrast to the religious autocracy, as it were, of
Catholicism?
KEITH: Yes, up to a point!
For Protestantism signifies a later stage of religious evolution than
Catholicism, being the product of a more artificial drive. It has become the Christianity of the more
industrialized nations of the West, like
ARNOLD: So Protestantism can be regarded as the logical successor
to Catholicism and forerunner of transcendentalism, the religious equivalent,
in a manner of speaking, to democratic socialism?
KEITH: Yes, that is roughly how I see it, at any rate. As something more artificial in essence than
the more sensual Christianity out of which it grew, a transitional phenomenon
between second- and third-stage development, between churches and meditation
centres. For there are quite a number of
what one could call prayer centres being built these days - buildings which
spring from the urban environment and testify to an architectural style
applicable to a post-Christian age, a style that can only be equated with
third-stage life. For churches-proper
can only be built in a context conducive to the furtherance of Christianity, a
provincial context - as opposed to the urban context in which most of us live
these days - wherein Christianity logically prevails. As such, they will reflect allegiance to the
typical church style and consequently be recognizable as churches. But an environment inherently hostile to
Christianity, with its sensual/spiritual compromise, can hardly be expected to
encourage or facilitate the erection of genuine churches! Consequently, whatever is built in that
environment, for purposes of Christian worship, is more likely to be closer in
conception to a meditation centre than to a church, even though the official
line may suggest the contrary. Needless
to say, the widespread practice of meditation in buildings specifically
designed for that purpose cannot be encouraged until we officially move up the
ladder of human evolution to its third and final rung. So the new so-called churches will doubtless
continue in the vein of transition from Christianity to transcendentalism, as
before. But, like democracy,
Christianity is on the way out - of that you need be in no doubt! Nothing but the complete destruction and
disintegration of our great cities could do anything to reverse the trend of
evolution away from the subconscious and towards the superconscious. For it is in the superconscious that our future salvation resides, not in
the egocentric life of the Christian past. As such, it is in our deepest interests to do
everything we can to further it, to make certain that our cities aren't allowed
to crumble into ruin but continue to expand, in accordance with the extent of
our financial and technological resources.
For, in the final analysis, it is the city which makes third-stage life
possible, insofar as it isolates us, to an increasing extent, from the sensuous
influence of nature and thereupon imposes increasingly artificial lifestyles
upon us. It is the city that will bring
us to ultimate divinity, enabling us to free ourselves from nature's pagan
clutches and attain to the post-Human Millennium in spiritual salvation. Thanks to the city, Christianity and
democracy are destined to be superseded by the politico-religious integrity
appertaining to third-stage life - the post-dualistic reflection of lopsided
spirituality in which relativity will be transcended. The Son of God will be superseded by the Holy
Spirit, just as, in politics, that old democratic competitive/co-operative
compromise between capitalists and socialists will be superseded by maximized
co-operation.
ARNOLD: So the evolutionary journey that began in feudal
competition, and is now passing through the twilight compromise, will
eventually culminate in unequivocal socialist co-operation. And that will eventually bring us to the
climax of our evolution?
KEITH: Indeed it will! For
in the battle between darkness and light, the darkness is destined to be
vanquished! Nothing can prevent us from
going forwards to our ultimate goal in the transcendental Beyond.
ARNOLD: I begin to realize how wrong I was to assume, as formerly,
that democracy was the best that could be expected in political terms, and that
the freedoms it permitted, i.e. the right to vote for one of a number of
different parties, free speech, freedom of the press, etc., were
inviolable. I used to think that
democracy signified the apex of political evolution against which it was unwise
to rebel. For rebellion, if successful,
could only lead to totalitarianism, and that was something to be avoided, since
the source of abuses of human freedom.
But now that I have come to learn that political evolution is a fact
which cannot be denied, and that there is a vast difference between royalism at one end of the political spectrum and socialism
at the other, my previous supposition relating to the nature of democracy seems
to me quite absurd, much as though one should wish to stop halfway-up the
ladder of political evolution under the delusion that the halfway stage was in
fact the top when, in reality, it was anything but that! It is as though a pupa should prefer to
remain at the chrysalis stage of its evolution than go on and become a
butterfly, should prefer the lifestyle of a chrysalis to that which stood above
it! Quite an absurd and contemptible
viewpoint, to say the least, but one to which I wholeheartedly subscribed until
you came along and enlightened me, liberated me from my constricting
delusion. And I hope to God you
enlighten others as well, enlighten them before it is too late and they have to
learn political evolution the hard way.
Democratic freedoms may be a good thing, but if what you say is true,
then it is patently obvious that they can only be good for a given period of
time - namely, during the transitional stage of evolution between the politics
of the predominantly sensual environment and the politics of the predominantly
spiritual environment which characterize the inception and culmination of
civilized evolution.
KEITH: Yes. For when the
transitional stage is over - as it soon will be in the West - there can be no
place in life for democratic freedoms, because we shall have evolved beyond the
traditional dualism which justified and necessitated them. Life will have become so biased in favour of
the spirit, so much a consequence of large-scale urbanization, that there will
be no possibility of a democratic capitalist party existing, and consequently
no cause for democracy. The party of the
body will have been completely triumphed over and, as such, only the party of
the spirit will prevail, signifying the end of the twilight era of democratic
compromise and the inception of the era of Light - the era towards which all
true progressives aspire, as holding the key to the transcendental Beyond. In that fortunate era, the further
development of co-operation will establish the brotherhood of man, a
brotherhood founded upon egalitarianism, where the distinction between
exploiter and exploited ceases to exist, there being no place for that economic
competitiveness which characterized the era of royalism
in particular, but the aristocratic/bourgeois, bourgeois/bourgeois, and
bourgeois/proletarian phases of democracy to varying extents. With the ultimate victory of the proletariat,
however, the opposition will cease to exist, and thus only co-operation
prevail.
KEITH: Simply those who genuinely subscribe to the advancement of
the spirit and relate to the age in which they live,
relate to the twin ideals of co-operation and transcendentalism. One need not be an uncouth labourer. One can be the most intelligent and tasteful
of persons, the most handsome or pretty, as the case may be. All that's necessary is that one
wholeheartedly believes in the highest values of the age and lives to put them
into practice, lives to be an integral part of third-stage life. For the victory of the proletariat is the
ultimate social victory, against which there can be no justification for or
possibility of revolt. From a society
dominated by the aristocracy, we evolve to a bourgeois democratic society,
which passes through the three phases I alluded to a moment ago, and from there
we climb-on up the ladder of political evolution to the proletarian society of
third-stage man, in which dualistic confrontation ceases to exist. When the swing of the evolutionary pendulum
from competitiveness to co-operativeness is complete,
man will be on the verge of his ultimate salvation in spiritual beatitude. With economic co-operation on the political
plane and spiritual meditation on the religious one, he will eventually attain
to the long-awaited transformation from man to superman, and thereupon enter
the post-Human Millennium. His evolution
will then be complete, for the spirit will reign
supreme, freed altogether from the sensuous influence of nature. Man, remember, is something that should be
overcome, but it is only through a combination of socialism and
transcendentalism, call it Social Transcendentalism, that he will eventually
overcome himself and thereby attain to the goal of human evolution in the Nietzschean 'great noontide' of the post-Human
Millennium. To live predominantly in the
superconscious rather than in the ego, or conscious
mind, is the destiny of our race, the true hallmark of third-stage man. As yet, we are still too close to the ego for
comfort. We have quite a way to go
before we arrive at our ultimate destination in transcendental bliss. But we can be assured that we are evolving in
the right direction, even if rather slowly.
KEITH: Indeed! And not just individually but collectively as well. In point of fact, there is a very important
fact to bear in mind as regards evolutionary progress, which is that the
environment in which a given people live inevitably conditions, to varying
extents, their overall level of politico-religious awareness, so that a people
accustomed to a rural environment are going to be at a lower level of evolution
than a people accustomed to an urban one, and will consequently be
ill-qualified to endorse or relate to exactly the same politico-religious
integrity. And, of course, a people who
live in the desert are going to have a different scale of spiritual values from
a people accustomed to the jungle.
Obviously, one cannot force the same level of awareness upon
everyone. For some peoples are currently
more sensual than others, some are currently more spiritual than others. World transcendentalism cannot come about
overnight, but only gradually, in accordance with the approximate level of
spiritual awareness prevailing in different parts of the world. It may be possible to superficially force
transcendentalism upon a people. But,
deep down, if they are insufficiently evolved, they will reject it and/or
pervert its essence to something more akin to their own socio-environmental
integrity. At heart, they will remain
sensual royalists or dualistic democrats, unable to suddenly transform
themselves into the most spiritual of men!
FROM THE EGO TO THE SUPERCONSCIOUS
TONY: It seems to be a popular illusion, these days, that because
Christianity is dead or in terminal decline, we are abandoning religion and
accordingly going backwards. It is as
though, with the demise of Christianity, one should lament over the dreadful
tragedy which has befallen us.
STUART: And you don't see it like that?
TONY: No, I don't see it as a tragedy at all. Rather, as something for which to be
grateful, not, however, because Christianity should be regarded, in somewhat Nietzschean vein, as having been a bad thing - which it by
no means entirely was - but simply because it means that we are progressing
towards something higher and better, to a new religious awareness which is
destined to supersede the old, dualistic one.
We are abandoning Jesus Christ for the Holy Spirit, abandoning dualism,
based on the ego, for transcendentalism, centred in the superconscious,
and are accordingly growing closer to our ultimate salvation, a salvation which
Christianity itself foresaw, in its own symbolic fashion, and therefore should
endorse.
STUART: You mean that, strictly speaking, Christians ought to be
relieved that the Church is in terminal decline, instead of worried - as many
of them now are? In other words, they
ought to encourage us towards the heavenly goal which Christianity anticipated,
instead of imagining that only Christianity can take us there, and that its
decline is consequently something to be lamented?
TONY: Yes, in a manner of speaking. Though I am aware that there is a degree of
confusion and despair at the root of the pessimism which seems to characterize
the thinking of so many of us these days.
But I don't think we need fear that, whatever the fate of Christianity,
religion is a dead issue. On the contrary,
the pessimism of a Huysmans or a Malcolm Muggeridge can certainly be countered with the requisite
enlightenment concerning the overall course of evolution and the necessity of
our going beyond Christ, in order to attain to the salvation which the Church
has promised us for so long! Let the
Church have the rest it deserves, after the long struggle it has waged on
behalf of the spirit through the centuries!
Its function as a midway stage between paganism and transcendentalism
was admirably sustained. We couldn't
have managed without it. But such a
function cannot continue for ever, and now that we are entering a
transcendental era - as confirmed by the rapid growth of interest in meditation
- it should be apparent that the decline of the Church is a logical thing, an
inevitable part of our destiny, about which we needn't be, in any degree,
ashamed. Even professed Christians, if
they aren't to get in the way of their faith, should begin to see it as such -
to see in the decline of belief in Christ the rise of identification with the
Holy Spirit. At least that should apply
to the more spiritually evolved of them, whose minds are coming increasingly
under the sway of the superconscious.
STUART: I seem to recall that, in The
Anti-Christ, Nietzsche regarded the development from a dualistic religious
framework to a transcendental one as a regression, the concept of a good God
signifying, in his estimation, a weakening of the spiritual strength of a
people, a failure of the will to power, rather than an improvement.
TONY: Yes, it is indeed ironic that the author of the book to
which you allude should have unwittingly advocated a Christian standpoint in
his assumption that man 'has as much need of the evil God as of the good
God'. After all, Christianity did in
fact represent that very assumption - the figure of Christ being opposed by the
Devil in one context and endowed with a good/evil
integrity Himself in another, as, for example, in His capacity of banisher and
redeemer at the Last Judgement. But
Nietzsche didn't really understand Christianity, and consequently what he says
about it is often erroneous, as in the example you allude to, in which he
identifies the highest religious awareness with a combination of love and fear,
only to condemn Christianity for not representing it. But that is precisely what Christianity does represent,
being the midway-point between the religion of the subconscious, in which fear
predominates, and the religion of the superconscious,
in which only love prevails. To
Nietzsche, however, the progression from a God of Hate to a God of Love via a
dualistic compromise would have signified a regression, which just goes to
prove how devilishly wrong he could be!
For, in reality, the progression to a good God represents the zenith of religious
evolution, not, as he foolishly imagined, its nadir!
STUART: Doubtless he would have preferred us all to be quaking
beneath the anger of some wrathful deity in the future, offering up blood
sacrifices as a means to securing some paradoxical salvation?
TONY: Which, fortunately, won't be the case; for in the superconscious there will be little room for either fear or
hate. Naturally, we will still be
dualists to some extent, even in the more advanced stages of transcendental
life. For man is ever a dualist and
cannot possibly, while he yet remains human, be anything else. He may be predominantly evil in his early
development, balanced between evil and good in his middle development, and
predominantly good in his late development, as between pagan, Christian, and
transcendental alternatives, but he will always possess some kind of dualistic
integrity. Only at the
transformation-point to the Superman, which should signal his entry into the
post-Human Millennium, will he become entirely good, entirely spiritual, and
thus abandon the last vestiges of his humanity.
Until that time comes, however, he will always be at least partly
sensual, partly evil, as befitting the nature of man.
STUART: Yet, at this point in time, he should be more good than
evil, considering that, according to your theory, he is in transition between
the ego and the superconscious?
TONY: Yes, I would be inclined to think so, though only, of
course, on the basis of a generalization appertaining to those of approximately
the same cultural integrity. For we are certainly more spiritual than our Christian forebears,
particularly those of 7-800 years ago.
And they would have been more spiritual - and hence better - than their
pagan forebears of some 2-3000 years ago, and so on, right back to the earliest
men who, on the strength of their predominating sensuality, were undoubtedly
the most evil.
STUART: And before them?
TONY: Well, naturally, the beasts out of whom man evolved, or is
alleged to have evolved, would have been even more evil, because so sensual and
absolutely lacking in spiritual values.
The earliest men, living most of their lives in the subconscious, would
at least have had some contact with the spirit, a faint glimmer now and again,
perhaps, of something deeper than themselves, which it was obligatory to fear
and, if possible, appease.
STUART: Not the very earliest men, surely? After all, there is quite a difference
between men of, say, 30,000 and men of about 3000 years ago, quite apart from
the distinction between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, as between two entirely
different species.
TONY: Of course there is!
But what particularly distinguishes a man from a beast is his religious
sense, or capacity for worship. So if
one is to refer to the earliest-known bipeds as men, then one must accredit
them with at least a faint glimmer of religion, even if, by later Christian
standards, it was extremely mundane. Now
if early men lived entirely in the subconscious, they wouldn't have been
capable of having a religious sense at all.
For it is from the superconscious that the
light of spirit comes, the feeling for gods and supernatural powers in
general. Thus there must have been some
connection between the subconscious and the superconscious
even in the most primitive men, if only somewhat tenuously. But, being so much more under subconscious
influence, they were obliged to animistically treat
the 'intimations of immortality' they experienced as part of the sensual,
palpable world, rather than as something completely distinct from it in a
separate, transcendent world - an Other World.
STUART: Which presumably continued to be the case, to varying
extents, right up to the time of Christianity and its inherent dualism?
TONY: Yes, until such time as, by dint of gradual expansion, the superconscious began to play approximately as great a part
in man's religious awareness as the subconscious, and a kind of dualistic
balance was struck between the two chief realms of the psyche in the ego, or
conscious mind, which, contrary to popular assumptions, isn't really a distinct
realm of the psyche at all, but a compromise region in which both the
subconscious and superconscious minds struggle for
supremacy.
STUART: You mean that the ego corresponds to Christianity and democracy,
in that it signifies the fusion of two essentially antithetical minds in part
of an evolving spectrum of psychic development?
TONY: Indeed I do! For just
as Christianity signifies a religious transition from paganism to
transcendentalism, and democracy a corresponding political transition from royalism to socialism, so the ego represents a psychic
transition from subconsciousness to superconsciousness - the essential dualism of life
acquiring a tripartite appearance with the transitional stage coming
in-between, just as the dark and the light are fused in the twilight, and
thereupon assume a new appearance.
STUART: So the ego corresponds to a kind of twilight zone of the
mind brought about by the fusion, or balanced clash, of the two great adversaries
- the evil subconscious and the good superconscious,
the bridge to the sensual and the bridge to the spiritual. Really, that is a most paradoxically
illuminating theory!
TONY: To be sure! And the superconscious is destined to triumph, as the decline of
our traditional religious and political allegiances adequately attests. For, thanks in large measure to the expansion
of our urban environments in recent decades, a majority of us are now more
spiritual than ever before, and thus psychically better than ever before. We are no longer balanced between the sensual
and the spiritual, like our Christian forebears, but biased on the side of the
spirit, not, as yet, to any appreciable extent, since we are still in transition
between the ego and the superconscious, but
nevertheless to some extent - to an extent, I would argue, which should give us
cause for hope concerning our future progress.
The psychic twilight is becoming progressively lighter, as we draw
closer to the superconscious and accordingly have
more to do with it than ever before.
STUART: Although it must be said that quite a few people,
including the illustrious likes of Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, et al., preferred
to dwell on the subconscious this century, and
seemingly related more to the past than to the present, which, in an age of
transition to something higher, seems rather strange, to say the least.
TONY: Yes, it does in a way.
But it is indicative of the fact that we are no longer tied to the
subconscious to the extent of our Christian forebears, but can look down on it,
so to speak, from the predominantly analytical level of the superconscious,
and accordingly treat it as a foreign body or, at any rate, as something to be
investigated rather than simply experienced.
Formerly, people would have been too much its victim, too closely
attached to it, to be able to detach themselves from it to the extent of the
great psychologists you mention, and thereby impartially investigate it from
the transcendent vantage-point of another person, another mind.
STUART: The modern split mind?
TONY: Quite! Although it is
as well to remember that, in man, the mind, or psyche, has always been split,
always divided into two parts, though people formerly lived mostly in the
subconscious part and weren't particularly conscious, in consequence, of the
split. At least this is true of most
people until the age of Christianity, which, as we noted earlier, signified a
greater balance between the two parts of the psyche. But the notion of the modern split mind is really
something of an exaggeration or overstatement.
For, in reality, the Christians were more split than ourselves. Having evolved beyond their psychic balance
in favour of the superconscious, we are simply more
intellectually aware of the split, since the recipients of more light. Hence the sharp rise of psychology in the
twentieth century, the looking back or down on the subconscious that it largely
entails.
STUART: One is reminded of what Arthur Koestler
wrote, in Janus - A
Summing Up, about the emotional old-brain requiring to be brought under
greater control, in order to preclude the possibility of further eruptions of
those irrational tendencies which he alleges to have been responsible,
hitherto, for the greater part of human suffering ... in the guises of war,
rape, crime, mindless violence, etc., and at the slightest provocation. It would seem that our 'divided house', to
use his phrase, should, in its alleged imbalance on the side of the old brain,
be regarded as constituting a kind of biological mistake which ought to be
rectified, apparently, by the introduction of some new anti-emotion pill, in
the interests of mankind's future survival.
For if the rational new-brain continues to be dominated by the emotional
old-brain to the extent it appears to have been in the past, we could well fall
victim, so Koestler contends, to mass suicide through
nuclear war in the not-too-distant future.
TONY: Well, however that may be, I don't think we need assume,
like Koestler, that the old brain and/or subconscious
part of the psyche is quite as powerful as formerly - not, at any rate, among
the more civilized peoples of the world!
On the contrary, our evolutionary progress is all the
time drawing us away from the old brain and further into the new brain,
further into the superconscious, so that its
traditional hold on us is, by and large, a thing of the past, scarcely to be
feared in the present. Indeed, the very
fact that Koestler could come to the conclusion that
the old brain required to be brought under greater control ... is sufficient
proof of our growing bias on the side of the new brain, and once again reflects
the tendency of modern man to look down upon the subconscious from the
vantage-point of a higher mind. Only a
man who had evolved beyond the balance between the two brains, the two
minds, would be in an intellectual position to criticize and oppose the old
brain in Koestler's manner. One could hardly expect a Christian to do so,
still less a pagan! So, much as the old
brain may still have some influence on us, it is by no means one that is likely
to grow stronger but, on the contrary, progressively weaker, in accordance with
our ongoing transcendental evolution.
Thus the alleged need for a special pill to give the new brain greater
control over the old one would seem to be quite superfluous, insofar as we are
steadily gaining greater control over it through the artificial influence of
our industrialized and urbanized civilization.
STUART: Then what about the biological mistake which our 'divided
house' apparently constitutes, in Koestler's
considered opinion?
TONY: Frankly, I don't believe there is one! For the age-old opposition of the
subconscious to the superconscious, even when there
is an imbalance in favour of one or the other, strikes me as being perfectly in
accord with the dualistic nature of human life - a nature, however, which is
destined to be transcended, through the victory of the superconscious,
at some future point in time. Early man,
you will recall, lived predominantly in the subconscious and was
correspondingly more instinctively emotional than middle man, who lived in a
balanced context of transition between subconsciousness
and superconsciousness, Hell and Heaven, Satan and
Christ. Late man, on the other hand,
will live - and is already beginning to show signs of living - in the superconscious predominantly, and
therefore will be more spiritual than middle man, whose dualistic condition
precluded him from ever transcending the emotional to any appreciable
extent. But at the climax to our
evolution, represented in dualistic terminology by Heaven and in transcendental
terminology by the post-Human Millennium, we shall cease being dualistic
altogether and thus live wholly in the superconscious,
as befitting the Superman. Then the
journey from the diabolic beginnings to the divine endings will be complete,
and man will cease to exist. The
'divided house' will have been completely overcome in the interests of the
spirit. Needless to say, we still have
some way to evolve before that happens!
STUART: So it would seem!
Clearly, the ego, or conscious mind, isn't quite the antithesis to the
subconscious it was once considered to be, but only the fusion-point, as it
were, of the two psychic adversaries - the dark and the light. And the latter is destined to triumph.
TONY: Indeed it is, as our latter-day consciousness more than
adequately attests. You can be sure that
the conscious mind of today, signifying a kind of superconscious
one-sidedness, is very different from the consciousness which, in the heyday of
pagan civilization, betrayed a subconscious one-sidedness. Unlike our distant ancestors, we don't live
predominantly in the dark, shaking or cringing before the old evil powers which
obsessed their minds and induced them to offer-up blood sacrifices as a mode of
propitiation. We have no taste for the Lawrentian 'dark gods of the loins' - not as a rule, at any
rate! Although it has to be admitted
that there are people for whom the subconscious has proved of overriding
interest this century, not least of all the great psychologists themselves.
STUART: Whose investigations of the subconscious presumably ran
contrary to the grain of evolution?
TONY: Yes, in a manner of speaking. Though, as I remarked earlier, it is only in
such an incipiently transcendental age as this that it becomes possible to take
an objective interest in the subconscious and consequently regard it as a kind
of foreign body. But you can rest
assured that the historians and analysts of the deeper psyche, such as Freud,
Jung, and Reich, stand in a poor relation to such spiritual leaders as Huxley, Isherwood, and Heard, whose work on behalf of the superconscious puts the subconscious preoccupations of the
above-mentioned psychologists in the psychic shade, both literally and
metaphorically. Only transcendentalists
are worthy of the claim to genuine spiritual and intellectual leadership,
certainly not the foremost psychologists!
The latter, by contrast, stand in a reactionary relationship to the age,
signifying, in their concern with the instinctual life, a
retrogression to primitive criteria.
Indeed, one cannot be surprised that Huxley should have had a distinctly
cool attitude towards psychology in general.
For a man who spent so much of his time writing on behalf of the superconscious could hardly have been expected to possess
any real enthusiasm for those who dwelt on its antithesis! One recalls his dislike of Jung's symbolism,
the emphasis Jung placed on so-called sacred mandalas
and kindred archetypal patterns in the pursuit of spiritual illumination, as an
illustration of the incompatibility between his own rather more advanced
abstract spirituality and the subconsciously-influenced, emotionally-tinged
symbolic 'spirituality' of the psychologist.
And one can't imagine Jung's strong interest in alchemy - that atavistic
sublimation of animism - particularly appealing to him either! Indeed, it may well transpire that the great
psychologists will appear demonic to the eyes of a future generation, who will
see them as the twentieth-century equivalent to the Black Magicians and
Sorcerers of the Middle Ages. After all, Freud's overriding interest in sex
and Jung's more than passing interest in alchemy, not to mention astrology and
the occult in general, can scarcely be described as typifying the direction of
evolution towards spiritual transcendence!
One cannot be surprised that the superconscious
was largely if not completely ignored by such men, or
that they came to oppose the subconscious with the ego! For the superconscious
would scarcely have cast a favourable light upon their manifestly retrogressive
predilections! Only a psychologist could
have come-up with the disgraceful contention, voiced by Wilhelm Reich in The Murder
of Christ, that the Saviour regularly had and endorsed sex. From a theological standpoint, about which we
can only suppose Reich to have been entirely ignorant, the idea of a carnal
saviour is monstrous, betraying a total disregard for the symbolic status of
Christ as spiritual leader or exemplar, and a no-less total ignorance of the
path of evolution! For if Christ had
sex, if He is to be regarded as a sensual being, then what kind of spiritual
example can He be expected to set to the millions of people who aspire to
following in his divine footsteps?
STUART: Not a particularly credible one, I should think!
TONY: Indeed not! For the
essence of Christianity lies in regarding Christ as a godlike being, nay, as
the Son of God, rather than as an ordinary sensual man subject to the carnal appetites
of ordinary men! Thus when, in
accordance with theological wisdom, Christ is elevated to the status of God, it
is ridiculous to consider Him sexual. As
if the road to salvation lay in the advocacy of sexual pleasures, instead of in
the overcoming or reduction of them through civilized spiritual progress! Truly, there is nothing if not a gross
affront to human evolution in Reich's - as in D.H. Lawrence's - advocacy of
regular sex as a means to salvation! But
one must assume that, at heart, the age is too wise, too much the heir of
Christianity, to be particularly impressed by such neo-pagan delusions. And the same, I would imagine, applies to
psychology in general. For, if I may be
permitted to quote from Dr Faustus here, we are 'entering upon times,
my friend, which will not be hoodwinked by psychology' - extremely ironic as it
is that Thomas Mann should have put those memorable words into the mouth of the
Devil! But it is also true to say that
we are entering upon times which will not be hoodwinked by Mephisto,
considering that he is destined to be left behind, together with the
psychologists, in the dungeon of the subconscious, as we proceed further into
the superconscious and thus draw closer to our
ultimate salvation in transcendent beatitude.
No longer will man have 'as much need of the evil God as of the good
God', as Nietzsche contended, but only need of the good God - the Holy Ghost,
in which love alone prevails. That man
should formerly have had need of a dualistic religious awareness ... is
perfectly understandable. But to infer
from that fact that he should therefore always have need of it, is to betray an
ignorance of what man actually is, that is to say, a being transitional between
the beastly and the godly. One might as
well suppose that he will always have need of great egocentric art - despite
all the evidence to the contrary which already presents itself. All Nietzsche really meant by man, in the
above-mentioned aphorism, was second-stage cultural man, man torn between the dark
and the light. That, fortunately to say,
is only man in his prime as man, not man biased towards the godly and therefore
at his highest stage of evolution. But
cultural man in the West is being superseded, as you well know, by
post-cultural man, and so the traditional arts are in decline, if not already
extinct. For the
period of egocentric art only comes to pass when a people are balanced between
the subconscious and the superconscious, the sensual
and the spiritual, neither before nor afterwards. And now that most of us have evolved beyond
that balance in favour of the superconscious, we can
only produce transcendental art - art which is less sensual than its egocentric
precursor but, for that very reason, on a higher rung of the evolutionary ladder
and consequently closer to ultimate divinity.
For, paradoxical as it may seem,
post-cultural man is spiritually superior to cultural man and therefore not
given to sensuous representation of the spiritual to anything like the same
extent. Thus, for him, egocentric art is
something to look down upon rather than look-up to, as though from the
pre-cultural viewpoint. For him, the
sensuous content of great art is unworthy of true spirituality; it is merely a
compromise between the Devil and God, rather than a reflection of the Holy
Ghost. God clothed in the flesh isn't a
thing he can regard with complacency, for he knows only too well that true
divinity must ultimately transcend the flesh, being purely spiritual. And so, cut off from the sensuous influence
of nature to the extent that he now is in his great cities, he turns away from
egocentric art, as from an irrelevance, and proceeds with the art pertinent to
himself - a predominantly, if not exclusively, spiritual art whose essence is
abstract. For beyond Christian art there
is transcendental art. But beyond
transcendental art there is only God, purely and simply! Even the bright, light-suggesting pitchful circularities of the latest avant-garde works will
cease to be viable as, eventually, we abandon art altogether and give ourselves
up to the pure contemplation of abstract spirituality. In the meantime, however, the production of
transcendental art will doubtless continue, and continue to reflect our
mounting allegiance to a God of Love in the superconscious. There can be no possibility of art
subsequently relapsing into the old Christian dichotomy of Devil and God, a
dichotomy which engendered some of the finest egocentric art in the entire
history of cultural man, but a dichotomy out of which we are progressively
emerging, thank goodness, in a new and superior guise. The battle against the subconscious may still
be far from over, but, for a growing number of us, it is already more than
two-thirds won!
STUART: What more can one say?
THE RISE OF TRANSCENDENTAL ART
BERNARD: It would appear, if I've understood you correctly, that
the regular use of electric light corresponds to our mounting allegiance to the
superconscious, and thereby attests to our spiritual
progress away from the dark of the subconscious, in which our distant ancestors
spent most of their lives. Generally
speaking, we are incapable of tolerating too much darkness.
BERNARD: As I can adequately confirm,
since, by nature, a poor sleeper but a good waker. It isn't often that I get more than five
hours' sleep. So I usually find myself
confronted by an early-morning darkness which tends to bore and oppress me.
BERNARD: You mean the further we progress into the superconscious, the less likely it is that we shall require
as much sleep as formerly, and the more likely, in consequence, that we will curtail
our sleep as much as possible?
BERNARD: Surely not for some time yet?
BERNARD: In which, presumably, there will be no sleep?
BERNARD: So modern man, being mainly on the side of truth, is less
given to illusion than ancient man, who mainly lived in his subconscious.
BERNARD: You mean the greater part of, say, twentieth-century art
in the West is spiritually superior to the greatest art of the Middle Ages, both earlier and later? That a contemporary abstract expressionist
work, for example, is morally superior to the great religious works of painters
like Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto?
BERNARD: So an abstract expressionist work by, say, Jackson
Pollock is spiritually superior to a representational work by, say, Tintoretto, portraying the Resurrection?
BERNARD: Which is, after all, exactly what many people consider it
to be these days!
BERNARD: But what about the great landscape painters of the period
- men like Gainsborough, Constable, Friedrich, Millet, and Corot,
each of whom gave a considerable amount of creative attention to the landscape
without going out of their way to make it turbulent? Surely they can't be classified with
Delacroix?
BERNARD: Hence at some point in the transition between
Christianity and transcendentalism it was possible for pantheism to rear its
worldly head in a manner which would have been unthinkable in a more settled
age?
BERNARD: And a monochrome canvas would presumably signify the most
spiritual of artistic developments to which Western painterly art has evolved?
BERNARD: Which are?
ADRIAN: For man to attain to his ultimate
salvation in the post-Human Millennium, and thus outgrow his humanity. And that does mean to outgrow his
predilection for art, no matter how good or bad it may happen to be. Thus he will abandon both extreme abstraction
and, no less importantly, the disruption of the concrete world as manifested
by, amongst other things, surrealistic transcendentalism.
BERNARD: What, exactly, do you mean by surrealistic
transcendentalism?
ADRIAN: Simply the discrediting of the material world through the
uncanny juxtaposition of unrelated objects and/or the distortion of individual
objects, so that everyday realism is subverted and the imaginary or artificial
prevails. Hence
surrealistic transcendentalism, which reflects our growing freedom from the
tyranny of the natural-world-order and consequent anti-natural and, hence,
transcendent aspirations.
BERNARD: A kind of À Rebours
of the visual?
BERNARD: And presumably no less so in a work like Galatea of
the Spheres, which, in its apparent secularity, is perfectly relevant to the
age?
ADRIAN: Indeed it is, though, once again, from the standpoint of a
disruption or disintegration of the concrete, rather than of an eruption or
integration of the abstract - the scientific as opposed to strictly religious
angle, which corresponds, so I maintain, to surrealistic
transcendentalism. But the disruption of
the concrete, no less than the eruption of the abstract, is destined to be
transcended, as we abandon art altogether and draw one step closer to our
ultimate salvation in the post-Human Millennium, the transcendental climax to
evolution.
BERNARD: Which brings us back to what you were
saying earlier, about man outgrowing illusion, whether aesthetic or otherwise,
in the course of his long journey towards ultimate truth.
