Op. 23

 

FUTURE TRANSFORMATIONS -

The Undiluted Truth

 

Multigenre Philosophy

 

Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin

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CONTENTS

 

INTRODUCTION

 

PART ONE: MAXIMS

 

1. Maxims 1–150

 

PART TWO: ESSAYS

 

2. Future Transformations

3. Irish and English

4. A Teasing Paradox

5. Millennial Thoughts

6. Post-Dualistic Sexuality

7. Towards a True Equality

8. Concerning Transcendentalism

9. Musical Transformations

10. Safeguarding Freedom

11. Protons and Electrons

12. Two Kinds of Dependence

13. Materialists and Spiritualists

 

PART THREE: DIALOGUES

 

14. A Changing World

15. Proletarian Writing

16. The Evolution of Art

17. From the Alpha Absolute(s) ...

18. From the Apparent to the Essential

19. Transformation Points

20. A Fundamental Dichotomy

21. The New Subjectivity

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INTRODUCTION

 

If there is such a thing as a truth that is too pure for certain people, less psychically evolved, to take, then may we not suppose this situation may extend to an entire work, an entire book, in which undiluted truths are the creative norm.  Such books haven't, admittedly, been too plentiful in the past; for we are only now beginning to live in a purely truthful age.  Nevertheless books with diluted truths, proportionate to the degree of evolution manifest in the writer and his society at any given time, have caused similar problems for people who weren't 'up to' the level of 'truth' therein recorded.  In this respect, such a book becomes akin to the Hindu metaphor of the Clear Light of the Void, which is too pure for the egocentric mind to abide with, inevitably resulting in its return to the world in some other flesh, as part of the recurrent process of reincarnation, until such time as, become more evolved, it can abide with the Absolute and thus escape the cycle of rebirths.

     Returning to factual reality, this means that the evolution of human life on earth proceeds by degrees and that, strictly speaking, one can't 'gate-crash' the Divine.  One must earn the right to become an integral part of the Supreme Being, and one can only do this by improving the quality of life over the generations, from century to century. 

     Likewise one must earn the right to properly appreciate a certain type of truthful book, which necessarily remains a 'closed shop' to those who are insufficiently intellectually or morally evolved to do so.  As, in occult mythology, Count Dracula shies away from the Cross, symbolic of Truth and Goodness, and, in religious mythology, the egocentric mind shies away from the Clear Light, so, on the intellectual plane, the reactionary or traditional mind shies away from such revolutionary truths as are expressed in the foremost books, usually philosophical, of the age.  A man who cannot 'take' such truths ... inevitably passes negative judgement on himself, and reverts, in all probability, to fiction or perhaps even to poetry.

     The great writer and thinker is thus in the position of being a kind of intellectual Supreme Being on earth, to whom many are drawn but with whom only comparatively few can abide.  The majority shy away from his stronger grasp of truth from fear that it will disrupt their particular psychic or intellectual integrity, causing them to extensively revise or even change their position.  Perhaps it will be only after several generations that the majority of men can come to abide and understand his truth.  In the meantime, he remains a kind of lone beacon, shining in the vanguard of psychic evolution, revered by some, but feared and even hated by many.

     I like to see myself as such a writer, and I know that not all men can come to me at present and wholeheartedly acquiesce in what I write.  Nevertheless I live in the hope that, eventually, most men will come to me if they are to grasp the prerequisites of salvation, and thereby set themselves on the right road for the only reasonable evolutionary goal.  For, unless they abide with the driving light of my truth, they will continue to flounder in the comparative darkness of pedestrian illusions, shut out from the promise of Eternity.

 

John O'Loughlin, 1982 (Revised 2006-08).

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PART ONE: MAXIMS

(Speculations Concerning the Future)

 

1.   The Supreme Being should not be thought of as a creature but as a state of mind, a supreme level of beingfulness.

 

2.   The equation of being with a creature is pagan.  The equation of being with a state of mind, by contrast, is transcendental.

 

3.   Evolution proceeds from the materialistic concept of being to the spiritualistic concept of being as a matter of course.

 

4.   An ultimate communism, or communality, can only come about with the post-Human Millennium, which will succeed the transcendental civilization.

 

5.   This ultimate communality will entail the artificial support and sustain of vast clusters of new brains, and will stand as the polar antithesis to the primal communality of plant life, with particular reference to trees.

 

6.   Sensual communality appertains to the lowest life form on earth, and is manifested in trees and bushes, whose subconsciously-dominated leaves are supported and sustained naturally, that is to say, through trunk, branches, sunlight, rainwater, etc.

 

7.   Spiritual communality will appertain to the highest life form on earth, which will be manifested in the millennial communes of the Superbeings, whose superconsciously-biased new brains will be supported and sustained artificially, that is to say, through technology.

 

8.   Beneath sensual communality are the Alpha Absolute(s) ... of the stars, with their diabolic sensuality.  Above spiritual communality will come the Omega Absolute ... of the Holy Spirit, with its divine spirituality.

 

9.   Just as the sensual communality of the plants evolved out of the Alpha Absolute(s), so the Omega Absolute will evolve out of the spiritual communality of the clustered new brains.

 

10.  The term 'new brains' appertains to the collective.  But, individually, the new brain is the intellectual/spiritual, as opposed to instinctual/ sensual, part of the brain.

 

11.  The eventual removal of the old brain, or instinctual/sensual part of the brain, will put the resultant life form in a directly antithetical position to the leaves of trees, which are subconscious and, hence, devoid of autonomy - rooted to their branches.

 

12.  In becoming superconscious, the Superbeing will also be devoid of autonomy, its new brains rooted to their artificial branches because devoid of egocentric consciousness, and therefore indisposed to the comprehension of external surroundings.

 

13.  Whereas the leaves of a tree exist for the sake of the trunk and branches, the artificial supports of the millennial communes will exist for the sake of the new brains.

 

14.  The millennial communes of the Superbeing will signify a distinctly different and higher life form than man, whom one is obliged to associate with the natural body.

 

15.  Indeed, there will be as much difference between transcendental man and the Superbeing as there was between, say, pagan man and the tree.

 

16.  The fact that man is not static but an evolutionary phenomenon ... is borne out by the successive transformations from pagan and Christian to transcendental - the latter only incipient in the West in the twentieth century.

 

17.  An alternative terminology for the successive transformations listed above would be: pre-dualistic, dualistic, and post-dualistic, with individual variants on the respective religious developments.

 

18.  Beneath pagan, or pre-dualistic, man is man's direct ancestor, the ape, who appertains to the animal kingdom and is largely dependent on trees.  Above transcendental, or post-dualistic, man will come man's immediate successor, the Superman, who will pertain to the godlike kingdom and be largely dependent on artificial supports and sustains.

 

19.  But what will distinguish the Superman from the succeeding Superbeing ... will be retention of the old brain, and the consequent existence of visionary, or egocentric, consciousness.

 

20.  This consciousness, albeit greater than the natural consciousness of transcendental man, will be less evolved than that of the new-brain components of the millennial communes, and will consequently signify a stage of evolution directly preceding the latter.

 

21.  The Supermen will be fed intermittent quantities of LSD, or some such synthetic hallucinogen, in order to facilitate upward self-transcendence in the lower, i.e. visionary, reaches of the superconscious, and thereby will be encouraged, by degrees, to break with traditional subconscious and conscious modes of awareness.

 

22.  Although clustered together on artificial supports, the retention of the old brain by the Supermen justifies one in regarding them as individuals, since each brain will be subject to periods of personal consciousness, and therefore be capable of regarding itself as a distinct entity.  Indeed, as one of a number of such entities which bear the generic title 'Supermen'.

 

23.  Likewise apes are capable, with their animal consciousness, of distinguishing between themselves as individuals, while simultaneously sharing a common habitat in the branches of a tree.

 

24.  With the eventual removal of the old brain, however, the Supermen will be transmuted into a collective entity, by dint of sharing an identical post-visionary consciousness, and thereupon become, in the context of millennial communes, a completely new life-form, antithetical, in essence, to the tree, which, however, is likewise regarded by mankind as a collective entity, rather than as a loose conglomeration of separate creatures, i.e. leaves.

 

25.  The Superbeing of the millennial communes will therefore stand one stage closer, in evolutionary terms, to the ultimate unity of the Supreme Being, in which transcendent spirit will constitute an indivisible whole.

 

26.  How many millennial communes there will be on earth, preceding spiritual transcendence, will depend on the technological facilities available to the age and the number of new brains to be supported.

 

27.  It isn't impossible that, with the eventual removal of the old brain from individual Supermen, the ensuing increase in space available on the supports will allow for the introduction of additional new brains on each support, thereby making possible a decrease in the overall number of supports in existence.

 

28.  Such a hypothetical decrease in the overall number of supports world-wide would correspond to an evolutionary progression away from the materialistic Many and towards the spiritualistic One, thereby signifying a reduction of the materialist component to an absolute minimum.

 

29.  It should be feasible to contend that each support, no matter how many new brains it may contain, will be connected to a single sustain system, so that the individual organic or, rather, super-organic components of the commune are nourished from a central source, not dependent on separate sources.

 

30.  Thus, our collectivized or communal entity would be completely interrelated, and could only function as an integral whole.

 

31.  To a certain extent, men protect apes and apes protect trees.  Likewise, one can assume that transcendental men will protect Supermen and the Supermen duly protect Superbeings.

 

32.  Put another way, this means that the creation and protection of the Supermen will be in the hands of certain trusted men, specialists in their chosen field, who will tend their superior creations and know how they feel, what they require, etc., at any given time.

 

33.  But the Supermen will themselves create or, at any rate, protect the Superbeings by the very fact of their existence ... to the extent that they will be the logical evolutionary forerunners of the latter, rendering the ensuing maintenance of the artificial supports and sustains obligatory for the trusted men.

 

34.  And, presumably, if everything hasn't become completely autonomous and directed by computers and robots by then, these trusted men - a technological elite - will be entrusted, at the appropriate hour, with the surgical removal of the old brain from the clustered Supermen and consequent creation of the collective entity I have termed a Superbeing.

 

35.  But they, or their mechanical equivalents, will never act arbitrarily or over-hastily, but will always bear in mind the evolutionary status of the life forms under their protection, thereby regulating their professional activity in strict accordance with the requirements of the hour.

 

36.  This patient, considerate attention to their 'charges', by the technological leadership, is not, however, incompatible with an element of coercion, which is an essential element not only to responsible leadership, but also to evolutionary progress.

 

37.  Thus a delicate balance must be struck between the requirements of the post-dualistic life forms and the ambitions of the leadership, too weak a leadership resulting in the danger of an evolutionary stasis or even regression; too strong a leadership resulting in the possible destruction of the said life forms and, as a paradoxical corollary to this, the undermining of the leaders, who would then be deprived of anything to lead.

 

38.  Just as an able gardener both protects the plants under his keeping and encourages them to grow, so must the successive leaderships of the transcendental men, the supermen, and the superbeings strike a workable balance between the two responsibilities, in order to ensure the steady spiritual growth of their human and post-human 'plants'.

 

39.  That the state, as signified by the leadership, will eventually 'wither away', in Engles' oft-quoted phrase, can be confirmed by the foregoing speculations concerning future developments, and will doubtless result in the supervision of the evolutionary life forms by trusted humans eventually being eclipsed by an entirely autonomous, mechanistic supervision carried out by robots and computers.

 

40.  When current political and other leaders retire, they do so in the knowledge that their work is in safe hands and will be continued by their successors.  Doubtless this will still apply in the foreseeable future, even if or when their successors are known to be robots and computers.

 

41.  Political evolution presupposes an extension of democratic power to greater numbers of people, so that, at its highest level, the maximum numbers of people are being represented by the government.

 

42.  A dualistic system of democracy, torn between capitalism and socialism, inevitably limits the number of people being represented, by the acting government, to those whose votes proved successful, which may be no more than a narrow majority.

 

43.  In accordance with political progress, a post-dualistic democratic system, centred in socialism, extends the number of people being represented by the government to the vast majority of voters, since every vote balloted proves successful to the extent that it elects or re-elects a socialist candidate.

 

44.  This post-dualistic system is called Social Democracy, as opposed to Liberal (Capital) Democracy, and is largely a consequence of the transference of political power to the proletariat, who are no longer obliged to share power with the bourgeoisie, and thus suffer the consequences of capitalist exploitation.

 

45.  The transference of political power to the proletariat is the ultimate political revolution, in which the vast majority acquire representation and thereby experience maximum democracy.

 

46.  An erroneous concept of 'more democracy' is to confound maximum representation with the absence of all representation, and thereupon assume that it should signify freedom from all government.

 

47.  This erroneous concept of 'more democracy' can only lead to anarchy, which is contrary to political progress.  Consequently it will be opposed by post-dualistic leaderships.

 

48.  It isn't freedom to do what they like that will lead the People to their future salvation in a post-Human Millennium, but ... directive leadership.

 

49.  This post-dualistic directive is socialism, as opposed to anarchy.

 

50.  And socialism, conceived politically, cannot 'wither away' until men attain to the post-Human Millennium, and thus become recipients of spiritual salvation in the millennial communes.

 

51.  The State is a materialistic phenomenon that will continue to exist so long as men are capable of identifying with matter, which is to say, so long as they retain the old brain and are therefore partly disposed to subconscious allegiance.

 

52.  Thus the State will still exist, albeit to a less apparent extent, when men are elevated to the Supermen, or clustered brains artificially supported, in the first, or 'socialist', phase of the post-Human Millennium.

 

53.  But the State, having 'withered away' throughout that time, will completely cease to exist with the second, or 'communist', phase of the post-Human Millennium, in which the radically superconsciously-biased new-brain clusters of Superbeings will have supplanted the partly superconsciously-biased brains of Supermen.

 

54.  For with the removal of the old brain, the ensuing higher post-human life form would be incapable of identifying with matter and, therefore, be oblivious of the State.

 

55.  Likewise trees, which signify the sensual communality antithetical, in retrospect, to the spiritual communality of our projected Superbeings, are incapable, lacking consciousness, of recognizing the State.

 

56.  So, on the next evolutionary level, are apes, whose rudimentary consciousness, subconsciously-dominated, keeps them beneath civilization.

 

57.  For civilization, at any level, appertains to man, and signifies a compromise between politics and religion, the State and the Church.

 

58.  Such a compromise will still exist for post-dualistic man, taking the form of socialism and transcendentalism.

 

59.  With the transformation of transcendental man into the Superman, however, the State will 'wither away', as transcendentalism continues to expand, and by the time the evolutionary metamorphosis of the Superbeing comes properly to pass, the State will have completely ceased to exist, and with it civilization, as life becomes exclusively transcendental.

 

60.  And as life becomes exclusively transcendental, so there will be no further need of directive leadership, but only of supervision - surveillance by the relevant computers and/or robots, as required.

 

61.  For the State is not only a subjective phenomenon, dependent on the ability of consciousness to perceive and identify with matter, but is also, and more particularly, an objective phenomenon, embracing the directive capabilities of government.

 

62.  When direction is no longer necessary, because the materialistic component of the psyche has been removed, government ceases to exist and the State along with it.

 

63.  And thus civilization comes to an end with the full-blown spirituality of the Superbeings.

 

64.  At some subsequent point in millennial time the Superbeings will attain to transcendence, and so bring about the Spiritual Globes of the heavenly Beyond.

 

65.  Broadly speaking, the development of evolution runs as follows: the Alpha Absolute(s) of the stars leading via planets (cooled stars) to the sensual communality of the plants; the plants, including trees, leading to the animals, of whichever type and degree of intelligence; the animals, including apes, leading to man, of the lowest, and therefore pagan, type; pagan man, in his successive manifestations, leading to Christian man; Christian man, and other dualistic equivalents, leading to transcendental man; transcendental man, in his subsequent manifestations, leading to the Superman; the Superman, with his artificially-supported and sustained brain, leading to the spiritual communality of the Superbeings which, in their exclusive spirituality, will be antithetical to the plants; and, finally, the Superbeings leading via successive Spiritual Globes of transcendent spirit to the Omega Point (as defined by Teilhard de Chardin ... as the spiritual culmination of evolution) - Universal and One.

 

66.  This evolutionary progression signifies a convergence from the Many (stars) to the One (Holy Spirit), with all due gradations of improvement in the quality and type of life coming in-between.

 

67.  Whatever the Alpha Absolute(s) are, viz. many, separate, sensual, infernal, etc., the Omega Absolute is their complete antithesis.  There is nothing further apart, in evolutionary terms, than the Devil and God, alpha and omega.

 

68.  Likewise a less extreme but, nevertheless, consistent contrast is to be adduced between the various antitheses which gradually develop along the evolutionary spectrum created on earth.

 

69.  On the dividing line between that which stems from the Diabolic Alpha, and that which aspires towards the Divine Omega, is early transcendental man.

 

70.  Of course, Christian man also aspires towards the Divine Omega, but not to the extent of completely turning his back on the Diabolic Alpha.  As a dualist, he always remains rooted in nature.

 

71.  What the television is to transcendental man, LSD, or some such hallucinogenic equivalent, will be to the Superman.

 

72.  Transcendental man allows his consciousness to be invaded from outside himself ... by artificial visionary images, which affect a mild upward self-transcendence in the lower regions of the superconscious.

 

73.  The Superman will allow his consciousness to be invaded from inside his brain ... by the visionary images of hallucinogens, which will constitute a stronger upward self-transcendence in higher regions of the superconscious.

 

74.  Appearance always precedes essence, but can never expand spiritual consciousness to the same extent, the reason being that appearance appertains to the flesh, whereas essence appertains to the spirit.

 

75.  Thus, no matter how ingenious or educative the appearance may happen to be, its ability to expand consciousness upwards is severely hampered by its contrary nature to that which it is intended to expand.

 

76.  Only essence can radically expand essence (spirit), which is why the use of an internal stimulant, like LSD, would be far more efficacious than the contradictory and inevitably futile use of an external one, like TV.

 

77.  LSD will be the 'art' of the future, transcending art as we have known it.

 

78.  If LSD was prohibited in the twentieth century, it was because such a mind-expanding hallucinogen would be premature and a danger to society as it is currently constituted.

 

79.  Only with the first phase of the post-Human Millennium would an official, widespread use of LSD and/or equivalent synthetic hallucinogens be possible; for the Superman would be indisposed to riotous or otherwise irresponsible behaviour.

 

80.  It should always be remembered that whereas natural drugs, i.e. those grown from the soil, appeal primarily to the subconscious and are accordingly of diabolic orientation, synthetic ones, by contrast, appeal to the superconscious, and are therefore of a comparatively divine orientation.

 

81.  Even the mildest natural drugs, like tea and tobacco, are fundamentally of a diabolic orientation, insofar as they result in a correspondingly mild downward self-transcendence.

 

82.  Even for transcendental man, a degree of downward self-transcendence becomes necessary ... to the extent that he is the possessor of a natural body with natural needs, including, not least of all, sleep.

 

83.  It is quite conceivable that a person who, for one reason or another, lacked the requisite intake of sensuality for his particular body in one or more important contexts, would be obliged to seek compensatory sensuality in the regular use of tobacco, alcohol, coffee, etc.

 

84.  In the future, however, all natural drugs will be transcended ... as man transcends his body in the Superman.

 

85.  And the Superman will be cultivated from birth with the aid of test-tube reproduction, so that he will be accustomed to existing in an extensively artificial, not to say transcendental, context from the very first.

 

86.  It would be quite immoral to create the Superman from a grown man, depriving that man of his body through an extensive amputation.

 

87.  No grown man will be forced to sacrifice his body in order to become superhuman.  The Superman will be created, in all probability, from birth.

 

88.  Even a brain that, under natural circumstances, would have acquired a female body ... will become a Superman and not a Superwoman.  This first phase of the post-Human Millennium will be predominantly transcendent - as will the second phase, although, given the removal of the old brain, to a somewhat greater extent.

 

89.  Transcendence will signify the complete spiritualization of life ... in and through the Divine Omega; for it will entail the total overcoming of matter, with freedom even from the new brain.

 

90.  Transcendence will inevitably lead to the heavenly, i.e. transcendental, Beyond, though it won't necessarily lead straight to the Omega Absolute ... in ultimate Oneness.

 

91.  Bearing in mind the immensity of the spatial universe, it is more than likely that transcendence will lead to the establishment of 'local', or galactic, globes of pure spirit, which will gradually converge towards other such globes from remoter parts of the Universe.

 

92.  Thus a gradual convergence to the Omega Absolute may also be manifested on the transcendent plane, constituting (for a time) an antithetical development to planets, which are themselves intermediaries between the Alpha Absolute(s) ... of the stars and the sensual communality of the plants.

 

93.  With the eventual establishment, however, of the Omega Absolute, the evolution of the Universe, in the fullest sense of that word, would be complete.

 

94.  And the supreme being of the Omega Absolute would continue, in all likelihood, to expand into space, in contrast to the gradual contractions and dissolutions of the stars.

 

95.  With the ultimate dissolution of the remaining stars, the Universe would attain to perfection ... in the sole presence of the Omega Absolute.  And the Omega Absolute would last for ever.

 

96.  As spirit expands, so matter contracts.  As spirit converges, so matter diverges.

 

97.  Social evolution begins in tribalism, proceeds to nationalism, and culminates in internationalism.

 

98.  Parliamentary democracy is a compromise between conservatism and socialism, and is therefore inherently liberal.

 

99.  Just as the pre-dualistic age was fundamentally lesbian in character, and the dualistic age ... heterosexual, so the post-dualistic age can only be homosexual (though not necessarily literally), if more in terms of a male-biased unisexual absolutism.

 

100. Each time a man falls in love, he becomes a spiritual nonentity.  To fall in love is to succumb to the body and its beauty thereof.  Spirit is eclipsed by flesh.

 

101.  Just as the ape is beneath sensual love, so the Superman would be above it.

 

102. Literature is the greatest of the arts, because it appeals directly to the mind.

 

103. The modern literary masterpiece must necessarily be both short, reflecting a materialistic contraction, and true, advancing a spiritualistic expansion.

 

104. Western nations are divisible, in the present century, between those that are dualistic, like Britain and France, and those that are transitional between dualism and post-dualism, like the United States and Germany.

 

105. As life evolves, so it becomes more interiorized.  The men of the transcendental civilization won't just be more introspective than those of the Christian or Christian/transcendental ones.  They will also spend more time indoors.

 

106. In the post-dualistic civilization, books will be superseded by computer discs, which will be the medium through which literature is read.

 

107. In the post-dualistic civilization, nothing appertaining to pre-dualistic or dualistic civilization will be read.  An exclusively omega-oriented civilization requires an exclusively omega-oriented literature.  Works appertaining to the past will, for the most part, be taboo or, at any rate, 'beneath the pale'.

 

108. A new civilization requires not just a new literature, but a new art, music, architecture, politics, religion, science, sexuality - indeed, a new everything.

 

109. The typical leader of the post-dualistic civilization will be more of a religious than a political figure.

 

110. By the time mankind attains to the post-Human Millennium, the leaders will be exclusively religious types.

 

111. That there will always be leaders and led, coercers and coerced, is a cardinal fact - and necessity - of evolution.

 

112. The demolition of the State for its own sake would not lead to a post-civilized society in the post-Human Millennium, but to a pre-civilized society in barbarous chaos and anarchy.

 

113. The demolition or, rather, contractive 'withering away' of the State ... is only justified on the basis of the expansion of the Church towards an exclusively religious stage of evolution, as in the post-Human Millennium.

 

114. But such an advanced stage of evolution, commensurate with the superhuman and superbeingful phases of the post-Human Millennium, will still entail a distinction between leaders and led, the only difference being that the leaders will then be exclusively religious.

 

115. The leaders of a civilization, however, are divisible between politics and religion.

 

116. In pre-dualistic civilization, the political leaders or, rather, rulers preponderate over the religious ones in the ratio of at least 3:1.

 

117. In dualistic civilization, the political and religious rulers/leaders are approximately in balance, although nominal priority of status is granted to the latter.

 

118. In post-dualistic civilization, the religious leaders will preponderate over the political ones in a ratio of at least 3:1.

 

119. In the post-Human Millennium, however, only religious leaders will exist, and their task will be to ensure that the collectivized brains of the Supermen and, later and most especially, the new-brain collectivizations of the Superbeings ... are set directly on course for transcendence, and hence the attainment of spirit to the post-millennial Beyond.

 

120. Unfortunately latter-day Marxists, especially in the West, do not possess such an evolutionary perspective, which is why they make the lamentable mistake of assuming that the proletariat should be left entirely to its own devices, without either political or religious guidance, following the advent of socialism.

 

121. The consequences of such an hypothetical eventuality would be too bleak to bear contemplating, but naive Marxists, who foolishly elevate the common man to the level of a saintly ideal, could not be expected to know that!

 

122. Rather, if anything, would these naive Marxists be inclined to equate the Millennium with literal power to the People, with an absence, in other words, of any control on and/or guidance of the People, in the interests of what they mistakenly consider to be true socialism.

 

123. By treating Marx as an infallible guide to evolutionary truth, his most literal followers are doomed to repeat all of Marx's worst errors and limitations.

 

124. Without my own contribution to the evolution of post-dualistic thought, one is in the realm of socialist barbarism - a necessary realm for a certain period of time, but a realm which must eventually be transcended, if civilization is to reappear on a higher level.

 

125. As the spiritual expands, so the material contracts; the bound electron becomes free and the proton is transformed into or replaced by quasi-electrons.

 

126. The post-atomic society will be free of proton control, and thus able to aspire towards the maximum electron freedom.

 

127. If the sun, and indeed most stars, convert(s) hydrogen into helium through proton-proton reactions, then the future Spiritual Globes, so far from a helium hell, will entail an electron-electron attraction ... as they converge towards one another in the transcendental Beyond.

 

128. Quasi-electron equivalents, whether socialist politicians or avant-garde scientists, function in opposition to proton equivalents, but remain, at bottom, proton-natured.

 

129. Free-electron equivalents, whether radical politicians or transcendentalists, oppose bound-electron equivalents, such as Christians and liberals, and desire to orientate mankind towards the Divine Omega.

 

130. By themselves, quasi-electron equivalents would only minimize the Diabolic, whereas it is imperative for evolutionary progress that the expansion of spirit towards the Divine should subsequently be aided by free-electron equivalents.

 

131. Only when the political quasi-electron equivalents make way for free-electron equivalents ... will post-atomic civilization make its first appearance in the world.

 

132. The present century signifies a transitional age between the end of proton determinism and the beginnings of electron freedom, and is accordingly neither atomic nor post-atomic but ... somewhere in-between.

 

133. It is thus, par excellence, a bourgeois/proletarian age, an age of transition from the capitalistic bourgeoisie to the socialistic proletariat, and its chief representatives are countries like America, Japan, and Germany.

 

134. To an officially proletarian state, all types and degrees of petty-bourgeois art, which includes what is commonly regarded as 'modern art', are irrelevant.

 

135. This would be so even if the proletarian state were civilized and not barbarous, since the irrelevance of petty-bourgeois art to a proletarian civilization would then be founded on its inadequate degree of transcendentalism rather than, from the barbarous point-of-view, on a materialistic opposition to petty-bourgeois transcendentalism, i.e. painterly abstraction.

 

136. The proletarian society of a transcendental bias, however, would wish to develop post-dualistic spirituality, and consequently would uphold the more radical transcendentalism of the proletariat, utilizing a variety of electronic means.

 

137. This superior transcendentalism would be derived from the superconscious, which constitutes the higher subjectivity of transcendental man, rather than from the conscious mind at or near its 'Pentecostal' peak, as it were.

 

138. The oldest idealism, as pertaining to the objectivity of the subconscious, would have no hold on the civilized proletariat, and consequently they would not be partial to the lower objectivity of the external cosmos.

 

139. Rather, they would tend to impose on that external cosmos the ultimate idealism abstracted from the subjectivity of the superconscious.

 

140. Only the internal reality of the superconscious is really pertinent to a post-atomic society, for which the proton-dominated external reality of the Cosmos - and nature - will be taboo.

 

141. The civilized proletariat would look upon that lower diabolic reality with a divine bias, seeing only the idealism they have imposed upon it, in fidelity to their superconscious subjectivity.

 

142. And thus post-atomic society would draw ever closer to the ultimate reality of transcendent spirit, derived from the superconscious and destined for unity in the Omega Absolute at the spiritual culmination of evolution.

 

143. Literature in the proletarian civilization would be collective and essential rather than individual and apparent, as with previous levels of civilization.

 

144. Meaning in literature is the proton of a sentence, words the bound electrons which revolve around it, so to speak, in the interests of meaningful sense.

 

145. Post-atomic literature requires that words be freed from the constraint of meaning and elevated to the status of free electrons.  This is especially desirable in the context of poetry, hitherto the most proton-dominated branch of literature.

 

146. The convergence towards an Omega Point on the level of literature not only requires that words be freed from proton determinism but, as a corollary of this, that literature be freed from the constraints of one language and composed in multi-lingual terms.

 

147. For with the eventual emergence of post-atomic civilization throughout the world, literature would have to be international in the profoundest sense.

 

148. As they grow old, women contract physically whereas men expand spiritually.  Just so does the material side of life contract as the spiritual side of it expands.

 

149. Socialism signifies a contraction of the material, transcendentalism an expansion of the spiritual.

 

150. As the State 'withers', so the Church will blossom into the exclusive spirituality of the post-Human Millennium, post-civilized because post-human.

 

 

PART TWO: ESSAYS

 

FUTURE TRANSFORMATIONS

(Or an attempt to outline a post-human future)

 

Transcendental meditation wouldn't suffice to take man to the heavenly Beyond ... of the Omega Absolute, but it would certainly suffice to take him to the post-Human Beyond ... of the Superman.  For the Superman is the evolutionary development immediately above man, towards which transcendental men are advancing.

     With the decline of egocentric religion, the post-egocentric religion of Transcendentalism becomes the final form religion will take in the evolutionary history of man.  Instead of praying and singing hymns, like Christians did, the Transcendentalists of the centuries ahead will directly cultivate their spirit through the medium of transcendental meditation.  They will learn to meditate and regularly practise meditation in suitably-designed meditation centres, the institutional successors to churches.  Praying, singing, chanting, etc., will have no appeal to them whatsoever.  Only the expansion of the superconscious through meditation will be relevant to them, and this they will prefer to do communally - as part of a large gathering of fellow Transcendentalists.

     Man in his third stage of evolutionary development (the stage beyond paganism and Christianity) will be succeeded, however, by the Superman, that is to say, by a brain artificially supported and sustained, with possible access to artificial hearing, seeing, and speaking devices, subject to external control.  The Supermen - for there should be many such brains in existence - will be clustered together in tree-like formations, their brains being sustained and supported from a central energy source.  There will be numerous tree-like clusters of this nature in existence throughout the world, and they will each signify a life form antithetical, in essence, to animals, particularly with reference to such tree-climbing, tree-inhabiting animals as apes.  The 'tree' in question will be artificial, but the brains being supported on it will be natural and capable of self-identification.  Each brain will be a separate Superman, and all Supermen will be resigned to a communal life, just as apes are resigned to such a life in the crowded branches of the trees they inhabit.  The great antithetical difference, however, between these two life forms will be that whereas apes are resigned to a sensual communality, the Supermen will partake of a spiritual communality, and this spiritual life will constitute the first phase of the post-Human Millennium, being conditioned and encouraged by the regular intake of suitably-regulated doses of LSD, or some equivalent synthetic upward self-transcending, vision-inducing stimulant, which will be externally administered to the artificially-supported brains by the future equivalent of priests - the superpriestly spiritual leaders, so to speak, of the Millennium in question.

     Meditation, then, will terminate with the termination of man, to be superseded by the visionary contemplation, revealed through LSD-type hallucinogens, of the Superman.  Meditation is fundamentally too naturalistic to be wholly compatible with an advanced spirituality in a more sophisticated evolutionary context.  As evolution progresses, so the lifestyles of its participants become increasingly artificial, subject to the substitution of synthetic for natural products and experiences. A being freed, so to speak, from the natural body wouldn't be qualified to practise yoga, with its complicated posturings, and neither would he be able to regulate the flow of oxygen to his brain through the manipulation of various breathing techniques designed to facilitate increased awareness.  Rather, oxygen would have to be fed to him artificially, through the medium of special containers, and its flow regulated according to uniform standards of intake acceptable to the brain commune as a whole.  It would pass into the blood vessels of the various brains, where it would be converted into corpuscles and suitably exploited in the interests of proper brain functioning.  There could be no question of a natural respiratory system being in use at that point in time, for the lungs would have 'gone the way' of the rest of the body, left behind with the creature known as man.  And, of course, an artificial pump, replacing the human heart, would serve the brain commune by maintaining a uniform flow of blood through such artificial vessels as were deemed necessary to link the pump to the natural blood vessels of the individual brains.  The Supermen would never experience the human failing of heart attacks but, at worst, only a temporary mechanical failure of the artificial pump which, hopefully, could be quickly repaired - assuming, for argument's sake, it were to break down in the first place!

     The introduction of hallucinogens like LSD into the Supermen's brains would, of course, have to be through the blood, so we may surmise that the future equivalent of priests will inject the desired quantities of them into the artificial blood vessels at salient, predetermined points in the sustain apparatus, thereby guaranteeing each Superman a uniform, carefully-regulated dose of the benevolent, mind-expanding synthetic stimulant, which would be designed to take over from where television and/or meditation had left off.  What follows would be a sustained period of gentle acclimatization to its vision-inducing properties, as the Supermen contemplated the jewel-like crystalline images of their turned-on superconscious. With the termination of 'the trip', which would probably occur after several hours, the Supermen would be left to sink into their subconscious minds and either doze or sleep, in the interests of psychic integrity.  The following day, however, they would be given another 'trip', and so on, until, with a gradual increase of the dosage to peak levels, they became spiritually ripe for the next evolutionary transformation - namely from Supermen to Superbeings.

     Before I go on to discuss Superbeings, a word or two must be said about man and his future transformation into Superman.  The average transcendental man of the late-twentieth century is rather like an embryonic superman, and, to be sure, there are already people living a life which approximates to the one just outlined and therefore intimates of it.  At the time of writing, I happen to reside next to a couple whom I understand to be unemployed.  They rarely go out during the day and hardly ever at night.  As a rule, they spend their mornings in bed and their afternoons either listening to the radio or watching television.  At night they invariably sit in front of their television for several hours.  Now, for me, a quite conscientious intellectual, their lifestyle appeals to my critical sense and generally causes me to feel somewhat indignant and even censorious.  What right have they, I ask myself, to spend their days either lying in bed or watching television when I, compelled by a sense of duty, spend 5-6 hours a day at my writings, with from 1-2 hours study every evening?  Clearly, my moral sense is offended and I feel tempted to preach to them on the virtue of work, irrespective of whether or not there may be any work available to such people under the present economic climate.  And yet my attitude - by no means untypical of people like me - is really quite beside-the-point and hopelessly one-sided.  I regard my television-addicted neighbours from a reactionary point-of-view, quite overlooking the more relevant progressive one which, even if they personally aren't directly aware of it, is at least applicable to the trend of evolution towards the Superman.  Now since transcendental man is pre-eminently a proletarian phenomenon, and since the proletariat tend, on the whole, to watch more television than the bourgeoisie, I must make some attempt, if I'm to do proper justice to this phenomenon, to view my neighbours' behaviour in the light of contemporary transcendentalism and thus equate their lifestyle, no matter how alien it may be to myself, with a proletarian spirituality that is a prelude to the visionary lifestyle of the Superman.  For, viewed in this light, the hours my neighbours spend in front of their colour television correspond, on a lower external level, to the hours the Supermen will spend contemplating the luminous contents of their superconscious minds, as induced by the higher internal stimulant of LSD.  And, of course, the hours they spend in bed, both before and after television, will correspond to the rest-periods which the Supermen will require to safeguard their psychic integrity, following the visionary exigencies of their respective 'trips'.  My neighbours are therefore resting, each night, from their television experiences of the previous day, while preparing themselves, throughout the morning, for the afternoon and evening viewing to-come.  They are the Supermen in embryo, and allow me to add, at the risk of scandalizing middle-class sensibilities, that they are by no means untypical of their class!  Perhaps they are just a shade more radical or thoroughgoing than those who, largely because of job commitments, are obliged to confine their TV-viewing to the evenings and weekends.... Which just goes to show that one should be wary of looking at unemployment solely from a socio-economic point of view, quite overlooking the spiritual or modernist dimensions which accrue to it and would seem to be compatible with the unofficial development of transcendentalism in a civilization which, in regard to the bourgeoisie, is becoming increasingly decadent.

     Transcendental man is therefore clearly in evidence in the context of extensive television-viewing.  Meditation, though undoubtedly relevant to his future development, isn't the only kind of spiritual stimulus, even if it is an inherently superior kind to television, by dint of the fact that it expands spirit directly, through internalizing the mind, rather than indirectly, through the medium of artificial appearances.  Nevertheless the incentive provided by television for a mild degree of upward self-transcendence cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to spiritual development, but should be regarded as a prelude to higher things, the temperaments of some people probably being such that they could never come to fully appreciate the virtues of meditation anyway, given that such virtues tend, as a rule, to be appreciated only by a more sophisticated type of mind in the twentieth century, and not by what we may call the lumpen proletariat.  If television succeeds in gradually leading the majority towards transcendental meditation, then it will have achieved more than at first meets the eye!  It does at least condition people to sit still and remain intellectually passive for a number of hours, which is what meditation also does, albeit minus an external stimulus and therefore with an emphasis on one's own spiritual resources.  But if the general proletariat are closer, in their dependence on visionary experience, to the future Supermen, then it could well be that the meditating elite of the present century are closer, in their self-containment, to the ensuing Superbeings, and will doubtless experience a higher degree of collective meditation, pending transcendence.  But there is no reason why the proletariat shouldn't indulge in periodic bouts of meditation in due course, even if only as a supplement to their television-viewing.  Towards the climax of the transcendental civilization the vast majority of people, of whatever temperament, should be indulging in a degree of meditation on a regular basis, pending their transformation into Supermen.

     When this transformation will be brought about I cannot, as someone born into the twentieth century, know for certain.  Yet if decadence, in one of its principal manifestations, can be equated with the coming to fruition of the spiritual development of a given class, a kind of spiritual climax to the overall cultural or intellectual progress of each succeeding class, and we accept as fact that the aristocracy attained to the zenith of their spiritual development towards the end of the sixteenth century and, following their example, the bourgeoisie towards the end of the nineteenth century, then there would seem to be some justification for our supposing that the proletariat, i.e. urban men, will attain to the zenith of their spiritual development some time in the twenty-second century, and that the transformation from man to Superman will therefore occur at approximately the same time, which, at the very latest, could be towards the end of the twenty-second century.  Hence we may reasonably contend that man in his final form has about two centuries to go, after which time he should be ripe for transformation into the Superman that will constitute the first phase of millennial life - a phase in which the brain will be artificially supported and sustained.

     With the second phase of millennial life, however, the Supermen will be transformed, by the technological leadership, into Superbeings, and will consequently become a new and higher life form, antithetical, in essence, to plants and especially to trees.  No longer will each brain be capable of self-identification and limited egohood but, with the removal of the old brain (in which resides the subconscious part of the psyche), become elevated, instead, to complete superconscious identification in blissful contemplation of spirit.  From being a separate member of a commune of independent brains, the new-brain Superbeings will become components in a larger whole (just as the leaves of trees are components in the larger collective entity known as a tree), and thereupon cease to differentiate between themselves, to know themselves, in the manner of Supermen, as separate individuals.  These clusters of new brains will in effect assume the character of one giant entity, and where previously each brain cluster could be regarded as a commune of individuals, and thus bear the plural title of Supermen, each new-brain cluster, by contrast, will constitute a separate Superbeing, the plural being reserved for reference to whatever number of such clusters may happen to exist in the world at any given time.  So, considered separately, a Superbeing will constitute a much higher approximation to the ultimate unity of the Omega Point (de Chardin), and thus reflect an ongoing evolutionary convergence (in centro-complexification) from the Many to the One.  Furthermore, the new brains of the Superbeings will doubtless be closer together on the artificial supports than would have been possible with the larger ego-bound brains of the Supermen, and will therefore more easily lend themselves to the appearance of a collective entity - each new brain being inseparable from the whole.

     How long it will take before the Supermen can be transformed, i.e. engineered, into Superbeings ... I cannot of course say.  Though there is no reason for one to assume that the Supermen will last for centuries.  After several decades they would doubtless begin to tire of their LSD or equivalent hallucinogenic experiences and to long for a higher type of consciousness, completely beyond the visionary.  The leadership would remain in regular contact with them to ascertain exactly what their psychic position was at any given time, and would consequently know when the transformation to the Superbeing was apposite.  However, the post-visionary consciousness of the Superbeing wouldn't be forced upon any brain cluster prematurely.  For evolution has to proceed by degrees, as the Hindu metaphor of reincarnation adequately confirms - the inability of the devotee's psyche to come to terms with the posthumous Clear Light ... being a reflection of his egocentric past and necessitating, in the paradoxical logic of reincarnation, a return to this world, where it is to be hoped that personal, i.e. evolutionary, progress will better qualify his soul for unification with the Divine in due course.  Likewise, the actual progress of the Supermen towards the Omega Point would be a gradual affair, requiring their full acquiescence in artificially-induced internal visionary experience, before any transformation to the Superbeing could reasonably be endorsed.  Appearance must precede essence, even when it is internal, and therefore as spiritualized as possible.

     With the eventual removal of the old brain, however, the liberated new brain would be conscious of nothing but the light of its own superconscious mind and such a light would be essence, not appearance.  It would constitute a higher type of meditation than anything the more sophisticated transcendental men had known prior to the post-Human Millennium, being the final form consciousness will take.  Eventually - though again it's impossible to be explicit - this highest collective meditation of the Superbeings should lead to transcendence, and thus to the establishment, in space, of Spiritual Globes, which would be the bigger the more spirit they each contained, that is to say, depending on the number of Superbeings, from whichever part of the planet, that had attained to transcendence at any given time.  Yet these Spiritual Globes would not be the Omega Point or, rather, Omega Absolute (to drop de Chardin and revert to my preferred terminology), but that stage of evolution immediately preceding the establishment of definitive God, which would be ultimate Oneness.  The Spiritual Globes issuing from the Superbeings would constitute an evolutionary antithesis to the planets, or material globes, and would tend towards one another in the heavenly Beyond.  Those which issued from the same part of the earth would probably coalesce into larger wholes as a matter of course, the larger Spiritual Globes, composed of the spirit of numerous Superbeings from any one area of the world, exerting a more compelling attractive influence on the smaller ones which, in being pulled in their direction, would eventually bring about the formation of still larger Spiritual Globes until, by a similar process occurring throughout the Universe over an immensely long period of time or, rather, eternity, all separate Spiritual Globes had converged together to establish the Omega Absolute, in complete contrast to the alpha-stemming divergence of the innumerable stars.  And with the Omega Absolute, evolution would be complete and, following the disintegration and dissolution of the stars, the Universe become perfect - perfect in an ultimate unity which would last for ever.

     It is therefore my contention that God doesn't yet exist as the Omega Absolute and won't exist as such until every single Spiritual Globe, from whichever part of the Universe, had been absorbed into ultimate Oneness some thousands or even millions of years hence.  Gone are the days when it was possible to be agnostic, contending that one cannot know for sure whether God, in any ultimate sense, does or doesn't exist.  On the contrary, I believe that one can know, and this essay is intended to furnish proof of the fact.  From now on it will be possible for every man to be atheist, for knowledge has at last put paid to agnostic doubts.  Every man will know that, while alpha absolutes exist, the Omega Absolute is a creation of the future, stemming not from men but, more directly, from the Spiritual Globes of the heavenly Beyond.  Transcendental man may be a long way from the realization of that blessed creation at present, but, as a participator in evolutionary progress, he is certainly tending in the right direction.  When he becomes the Superman of the post-Human Millennium, he will have entered the eternal plane.  For, although such a context is at a considerable evolutionary remove from the Omega Absolute, his brain won't die, as does man's, but be artificially supported and sustained through to the subsequent transformation ... of the Superbeing, until, with transcendence, spirit becomes completely independent of the brain or, more correctly, new brain and capable, thereafter, of indefinite self-sustain.  Here we are left with the ultimate paradox, which is that while the Superman won't last for ever, the spirit appertaining to him, which can be expected to achieve transcendence with the Superbeing, most certainly will.  For everything must pass but the Omega Absolute, towards which everything tends.

 

 

IRISH AND ENGLISH

 

Ethnic generalizations are sometimes misleading, though not necessarily impertinent.  The distinction between Anglo-Saxon and Celt is a particularly revealing one, and, in its extreme manifestations ... between Protestant Englishmen and Catholic Irishmen, it furnishes us with an objective understanding of the relative merits and predilections of these two, in many ways, antithetical peoples.

     If there is one word that sums up England and the English better than any other it must be 'quantity', with its strong materialistic implications.  The word I would choose for the Irish, on the other hand, is 'quality', which, by contrast, has spiritual implications.  Quantity appertains to appearance, quality to essence.  Here, if anywhere, one has the chief distinction, it seems to me, between the English and the Irish (not to mention Welsh and Scots) in a nutshell, a distinction which has been the source of much bitterness and misunderstanding, down the centuries, as well, paradoxically, as a certain amount of mutual admiration and respect - the English casting a-not-unenvious eye on the Irish for their intellectual, cultural, and religious genius; the Irish likewise sometimes feeling that a more pragmatic, factual, materialistic approach to life wouldn't be a bad thing.  Yet whereas it is conceivable that more than a few Englishmen have wished they were Irish, it is unlikely that all that many Irishmen have wanted to be English, and for the very sound reason that quality is a better asset than quantity, an altogether superior predilection.

     Of course, there are several disadvantages and detrimental consequences from belonging to a people who generally put being above doing in their scale of values.  On the lowest level such a preference often leads to drunkenness and laziness, an unwillingness or inability to come properly to terms with the practical demands of life, and no Englishman needs to be reminded that a significant proportion of Irishmen are either regularly drunk and unemployed or irregularly drunk and under-employed, as the case may be!  Nor would he need to be reminded that his ancestors were able to dominate Ireland in consequence of its comparative military weakness.  For the fact that Irishmen have lived so long under external rule must be regarded as a further disadvantage of what it means to belong to a people for whom being takes precedence over doing, and quality thereby prevails over quantity - not least of all in terms of population density.  Had the Irish been more industrious and pragmatic, they might have driven out the invader sooner than they did.  But that wasn't to be, and so the yoke of imperial enslavement had to be endured, in accordance with historical necessity.

     Yet this is just the negative side of Irish experience, as largely appertaining to the masses.  For on the positive side came the intellectual, cultural, and religious achievements of men of genius such as Burke, Boyle, Swift, Goldsmith, Moore, Maturin, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Synge, Yeats, O'Faollain, O'Casey, and Beckett.  Naturally the English, with their much larger populations, have produced more writers than the Irish, and some of them have been very good ones, too.  But, with few exceptions, they haven't produced as many outstanding writers as the Irish - certainly not in the twentieth century, which, if anything, marked a turning-point in these two peoples' fortunes, and not just with regard to creative writing.  Fundamentally the twentieth century was the first post-dualistic century in history, and since the Irish are nothing if not extreme, it is inevitable that the twentieth century should have been more to their liking than it has been, on the whole, to the rather more middle-of-the-road English.  If England dominated Irish political life during the centuries when dualism (particularly in its liberal manifestation) ruled supreme, then it should come as no surprise to us when we find that, with the emergence of a post-dualistic age, the Irish have dominated and continue to dominate English cultural affairs.  I need only city Joyce in respect of the novel, Yeats in respect of poetry, Starkie in respect of biography, O'Faollain in respect of the short story, and, in the semi-literary context of theatre, Shaw in respect of the play ... to confirm this Irish domination of literature.  And although I have racked my brains over literally dozens of English authors, from the best, like Aldous Huxley, to the worst, like D.H. Lawrence, it would be impossible for me to ascribe pre-eminence in any one field to an Englishman.  For modern English writing is not only comparatively second-rate; it is also deeply pessimistic, reflecting the disenchantment, anxiety, and regret that many Englishmen feel for the passing of dualistic civilization and its replacement by an increasingly volatile world which is difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the English temperament.

     It isn't by mere chance that Joyce's greatest novel, Ulysses, concludes with a wholehearted affirmation of contemporary life, its very last word being 'Yes' with a capital Y, whereas Joyce's contemporary and in many ways English counterpart, Huxley, allows Point Counter Point - as indeed most of his novels, including Island, the last one - to end on a note of defeat and despair, reflecting the end of a civilization beset by the twin enemies of barbarism and decadence.  This pessimistic syndrome in the face of post-dualistic evolution cuts right across contemporary English literature, from Waugh and Muggeridge to Orwell and Amis, signifying, as it does, what may be called the mainstream trend of the age.  Not so where the Irish are concerned, and not so either - at least nowhere near to the same extent - with  British writers of Irish extraction, like Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess, Cecil Day-Lewis, and John Middleton Murray, who seem to reflect an in-between psychological realm of pessimism tempered by optimism, rather than to stand at either Irish or English extremes.

     It is tempting to see in this Irish literary revival a golden age of Celtic literature which would correspond to the golden age of ancient Greece in the fifth century B.C., and, indeed, to equate the 1916 Uprising with the Greek victory over the Persians in 479 B.C., so that the Irish are perceived as being, in some sense, the modern equivalent of the ancient Greeks.  But this would be an over-facile and quite erroneous analogue, scarcely one based on real historical logic!  That Joyce may have conceived of such an analogue at the time he was writing Ulysses ... is a possibility we shall not ignore.  But there is no reason for us to endorse it on the grounds of historical recurrence.  If there is a kind of cyclical recurrence in history, and one with reversible applicability, depending on whether the context be pre- or post-dualistic, then there would be a strong case in favour of our equating the victory of the Americans over the British in the War of Independence with that of the ancient Greeks over the Persians in 479 B.C., and of seeing in America the modern equivalent of ancient Greece.

     Thus, in the trend towards dualism of the ancient world, the Greeks won their independence from a predominantly pre-dualistic people, only to lose it, eventually, to the Romans, who were early dualists.  Reversing this cycle through the trend away from dualism of the modern world, we find the Americans, as antithetical equivalents to the ancient Greeks, winning their freedom from the late-dualistic British, who can be regarded as antithetically equivalent to the Romans, and, in all probability, destined to lose it in the future to an early post-dualistic people, like the Russians or, more probably, the Chinese, who would then be the modern equivalent of the ancient Persians.  As history tends to reverse itself on the post-dualistic level, we might well be justified in equating the modern Irish with the ancient Egyptians or, at any rate, with a development which is tending towards an antithesis to the world's first great religious civilization and which, if it continues, may well constitute the basis for the world's last great religious civilization in due course - a civilization not peculiar to the Irish alone, but partly stemming from Ireland, or Irishmen, and spreading throughout the world.

     Thus the pre-dualistic development from Egypt and Persia to Greece (a kind of transitional civilization) and on, with early dualism, to Rome, would seem to have its post-dualistic parallel with Britain, as late dualism, leading via America (another transitional civilization) to Russia and/or China, and on, finally, to Ireland, the future equivalent, now in embryo, of ancient Egypt, which will round off the cyclical recurrence of evolutionary civilizations and lead, in due turn, to a post-Human Millennium, with the transformation of universal man into the Superman.  Ireland, then, will have the responsibility of determining the shape of the last great civilization, which will be cosmopolitan, just as Egypt determined the shape of the first, purely national one, and in such speculation I believe we are some way along the road to understanding the contemporary Irish domination of literature in twentieth-century Britain.

     As an extreme people for whom quality prevails over quantity, the Irish are already laying the foundations of the next civilization, a civilization that will follow on behind the American one of transition between dualism and transcendentalism.  With the ancient world we are always conscious of a lacuna between the Egyptians and the Greeks, the Persians not having fashioned a civilization to compare with either their predecessors or successors, and consequently not being known as a highly civilized people to contemporary minds.  In the modern world a similar lacuna may be projected as existing between the American civilization of today and the Irish or Gaelic civilization of tomorrow, since the Marxist-Leninist materialism of both the former Soviet Russia and, more especially, contemporary China falls short of genuine civilization, and corresponds to a neo-barbarism analogous, one can only surmise, to the relatively barbarous society of ancient Persia.  The twenty-first century may well constitute a new Dark Age for the passing civilizations, both British and American, but at least, if the logic of scientific history is to be trusted, we can express hope about the rebirth of civilization on higher terms in the not-too-distant future.

     Not so long ago, in an earlier volume of essays, my application of a modified cyclical recurrence to various nations in the overall progression of history led me to refute not only Spengler, with his assessment of Nazi Germany as a 'New Rome', and Britain, traditionally, as the 'New Greece' (or modern equivalent of ancient Greece), but also Malcolm Muggeridge and Simone Weil, the former upholding the theory of Britain as equivalent to ancient Greece and America to ancient Rome, while the latter maintained faith in France as the modern equivalent - particularly during the Napoleonic period - to ancient Rome, and Britain, by contrast, as equivalent to ancient Greece.  I disagreed with each of them and, I think, wisely, as things turned out.  But I wasn't entirely justified in aligning France with ancient Greece, even though I still adhere to the alignment of Britain with ancient Rome.  Frankly, I should have equated France with Carthage, so that America was free to be equated with ancient Greece.... As for Nazi Germany, it might have become the 'New Persia', so to speak, had it defeated the allies in World War Two.  But this it ultimately failed to do, and so Germany lost its claim to a major place in historical recurrence, much as Spengler may have wished otherwise!  Unfortunately, his reading of history was insufficiently profound to comprehend Nazi Germany in the light of a potential modern equivalent to ancient Persia, and so he drew the erroneous analogy with Rome.  Likewise, Muggeridge and Weil failed to probe deeply enough into historical evolution, and so came up with mistaken contentions.  However, it is interesting that they attributed Grecian characteristics to Britain when, except for one short period in its history, namely the Romantic era, Britain has steadfastly resembled ancient Rome, having come to power, as its antithetical equivalent, at the tail-end rather than inception of dualistic civilization.  Yet whereas ancient Rome took over Greek civilization and embellished, modified, and extended it into the Christian era, with the reversal of cyclical recurrence on the post-dualistic level we find that it is America, the 'New Greece', which has taken over British civilization and embellished, modified, and extended it into the transcendental era.  The Romans made no attempt to found a new religion completely independently of the Greeks, even though they eventually converted to Christianity, and neither have the Americans made any serious attempt to break away from Protestantism, as inherited from Britain in the seventeenth century.  Despite its indubitable transcendental leanings, not to mention its large Catholic population, America still officially clings to Protestant Christianity, and will doubtless continue to do so for some time to come.

     Yet the Irish will, I believe, adopt a completely new religion in the future, one stemming from Christianity but independent of humanistic influence, and will expand it abroad, just as Irish monks brought Catholicism to Britain and various Continental countries during the Dark Ages.  This new religion, though reminiscent of Buddhism, will be more than just a copy or derivative of oriental religion, since far less influenced by natural criteria and correspondingly more sympathetic to artificial and technological ingredients, pointing the way towards the Superman.  It won't make the mistake of imagining that man can attain to God, for it will know that man is but a stage on the road to something higher (the Superman), who is but a stage to something higher again (the Superbeing), and so on, until the attainment of the Omega Absolute at the climax of evolution.  If such a transcendental religion is destined to catch on anywhere, it can only be in a country with a long tradition of religious devotion, a country in which quality takes precedence over quantity and, consequently, being over doing.  I believe Ireland is such a country, and it will doubtless remain so in the future, whatever happens on the world stage.

     An Irish priest is always somehow more credible, more authentically theocratic, than an English one, and it would be scant exaggeration to say that an Irish priest is worth an English bishop, or even several English bishops.  Conversely, the Irish politician is usually inferior to his English counterpart and not taken quite so seriously either by his own people or by the British.  This is, however, relative to the antithetical predilections of the two peoples, and isn't likely to change very much in the future - whatever their respective fates may happen to be.  The Irish will continue to value their religious representatives above their political ones, while the English will take politicians more seriously than priests.  How it is that the Irish and English do differ so radically in this way must, in some degree, remain an enigma, although there is evidently something in the blood of the Celt that corresponds to a spiritual predilection, whereas the typical Anglo-Saxon feels more at home in the realm of tangible reality.  Doubtless the respective histories of the two peoples have contributed to this distinction, as, one suspects, have the geological and geographical differences between their respective islands or ancestral backgrounds, not least of all in respect of climate.  Yet whatever the main reasons, the moderation of the Englishman and the extremism of the Irishman remain fundamental characteristics of a centuries-old ethnic divide.

     In a transcendentalist age, however, it is inevitable that the Irish will dominate English cultural and intellectual affairs, as they did in the twentieth century.  The new men will take over from where their predecessors left off, bringing works of quality to a people who would otherwise be condemned, in materialistic stagnation, to mere quantity alone.

 

 

A TEASING PARADOX

 

It was by mere chance that the terms 'Left' and 'Right' came to be applied to political allegiances of, in the one case, a progressive and, in the other, a reactionary or conservative bias.  For it was the progressive party (Jacobin/Cordelier) that sat on the left of the chamber in the new French Assembly of October 1791, while the moderates (Girondists) sat on the right, following the political turmoil of the French Revolution.  Thenceforth, as a result of this contingency, each successive progressive party the world over acquired the description 'left wing' and, conversely, each conservative party the description 'right wing'.  We have lived with this habit for so long now that we tend to take it for granted, convinced that it reflects a logical, meaningful way of describing the antithetical parties.  The thought that evolution, whether political or otherwise, may not be proceeding from the Right to the Left never really enters our heads, and we would be inclined to brand anyone who had the nerve to suggest, on the contrary, that political evolution proceeds from the Left to the Right as an ignoramus or, more likely, an idiot.  Yet the curious fact of the matter is that, strictly speaking, evolution does indeed proceed in this latter fashion - not according to the chance arrangement of an historic division in the new French Assembly!

     It isn't simply a matter of bringing a Nietzschean 'transvaluation of all values' to bear on the traditional viewpoint.  For such a 'transvaluation' can only reasonably be applied to natural phenomena and their relationship to civilization as it is now constituted.  A contingency doesn't permit of a transvaluation, and so we shan't attempt to turn the logic or, more correctly, illogicality of 'Left' applied to progressives and 'Right' applied to conservatives the correct way up.  Instead, we shall simply reverse the descriptions, so that, for once, the progressive party are regarded as right wing and the conservative party, by contrast, as left.  This merely as an experiment in logic, not as a recommendation for a revolution in our political thinking!

     Why, then, have I come to this subversive decision?  Because the brain, as currently constituted, is divisible into a left and a right compartment - the old brain or, in psychological terminology, subconscious mind being on the left, and the new brain/superconscious mind, by contrast, being on the right.  Translated into physiological terms, this means that the old brain is located to the left of the new brain, not underneath it.  Strictly speaking, there is no physiological entity corresponding to the ego, since it is a function of the brain, a spiritual attribute that arises from the latter's physiological workings, which also produce the independent attributes of subconscious and superconscious psychic functioning.  Thus as spirit arises from matter, it is dependent on matter, and will remain so until transcendence is attained ... as the long-awaited goal of human evolution.

     Now since evolutionary progress presupposes the gradual expansion of spirit towards its transcendent goal, it follows that the psyche's evolution proceeds from left to right, which is to say, from the subconscious to the superconscious via a continuously-modified ego which reflects, at any given point in time, the existing degree of consciousness, or the extent to which the one side of the psyche prevails over the other, in any individual.  This degree of consciousness isn't only a personal affair, depending on the intellectual or spiritual potential inherited from one's parents, nor, for that matter, is it solely related to the cultural standards of the society into which one was born, but is also - and perhaps predominantly - a consequence of the environment in which one lives - the successive historical transformations from rural to urban via suburban and/or provincial engendering a corresponding shift in the psyche's constitution, so that consciousness will reflect either more or less superconscious influence according to the individual's environmental position, extended over many years, at any given time.  With the rapid growth of urban environments, in recent centuries, we may note a more radical shift in consciousness from a kind of twilight balance between the subconscious and the superconscious to a light imbalance, so to speak, on the side of the latter, an imbalance which constitutes the psychic integrity of transcendental - as opposed to Christian - man.  Thus a shift away from the old brain towards the new or, rather, deeper into the new brain ... is a principal characteristic of evolutionary progress at this juncture in time, and, as the former is on the left and the latter on the right, we may infer that, strictly speaking, political evolution also tends from left to right, reflecting, as it must, the psyche's evolution.

     The fact that the old brain/subconscious mind is situated on the left and its antithesis on the right ... makes for a corresponding distinction between the left- and right-hand sides of one's face, most especially with reference to the eyes.  The left eye, it will be observed, is usually somewhat gentler and even sleepier-looking than the right one, and in the morning, if you bother to scrutinize your face before washing, you will find that it usually contains more sleep than its neighbour, the reason being that it is closer to the subconscious and therefore more under subconscious domination during sleep.  A factor which I have often observed in myself, and which I can only suppose common to others as well, is a predilection I have to sleep on my left side, so that consciousness slides down naturally into subconscious domination with the coming of sleep.  When, by contrast, I have attempted to sleep on my right side ... the almost invariable consequence has been a nightmare, and this I can only suppose to be related to the fact that, in such a position, the subconscious is on top of the superconscious and, with the coming of sleep, tends to oppress one through its essentially active, negative characteristics.  A reversal of this position doesn't necessarily prevent one from experiencing a nightmare, but it does at least guarantee that the subconscious, in being underneath, remains in a less oppressive context, thereby facilitating a more agreeable dream-life.

     As to the right eye, the fact of its proximity to the superconscious guarantees it a more penetrating, lucid, aggressive appearance than the left one, an appearance which, as a rule, will be more marked the greater the intelligence of the individual concerned, that is to say, the more his particular psyche is under the sway of the superconscious, with its intellectual/spiritual bias.  A poster I have of Lenin is particularly revealing of the distinction between the left and right eyes.  For whereas the former is in shadow the latter stares fiercely out at one from a brightly-lit section of the face, almost menacing in its fixity.  Men like Hitler, Dali, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche also provide conspicuous examples of the psyche's dichotomy, as reflected in facial appearance, and more than a few well-known politicians, including former American president Richard Nixon, have furnished convincing illustrations of this fact when photographed in a stern mood!  It would be misguided, however, to equate this forceful stare in highly intelligent men with the evil eye of superstitious tradition.  For it isn't the right eye but the left one which connects with the subconscious, and the only valid criterion for objectively assessing evil must pertain to the sensual, not to the spiritual!  A penetrating right eye is no more evil than a highly intelligent mind.

     Whether the distinction between the two eyes is sharp or blurred will, of course, depend on the psychic constitution of the individual, the vast majority of people probably not presenting the critical observer with very much contrast, and especially will this be true of people accustomed to a rural environment.  A more marked contrast will only be observed, as a rule, among the most spiritually-evolved people who, now as before, constitute a minority of higher types.  In the course of time, this distinction between the two eyes will doubtless spread to greater numbers of people, in response to social amelioration in educational and genetic contexts.  Post-dualistic man will be aptly reflected in his facial bias - a bias corresponding to the stronger influence of the superconscious in his overall psychic integrity.

     Before the discovery or perhaps I should say acknowledgement of the superconscious, psychologists were inclined to attribute positive characteristics to the subconscious in an attempt to explain away the psyche's positive predilections.  Since, to their way of thinking, consciousness was simply something that sat atop the subconscious, it seemed perfectly feasible to attribute positive motivations to the latter, seeing that such motivations had to come from somewhere and, given that the subconscious was the only other known part of the psyche, so the psychologists reasoned they must come from there.  Thus Freud and, following his example, Jung each endowed the subconscious with positive inclinations.

     For my part, I contend that positivity, in the truest sense of that word, is the principal attribute of the superconscious and will generally - though not invariably - be found on the right-hand side of the psyche, which is to say, in the new brain.  Positivity is not, as was formerly believed, an active thing but a decidedly passive phenomenon, like love, and corresponds to the spiritual life.  Only negativity is active, since aligned with the sensual, and it is precisely this characteristic that should be associated with the subconscious.  The proof of this, if it isn't already self-evident, lies in the fact that one's dreams are always active, and thus negative, whereas the experience of anyone who has expanded his consciousness through LSD, for example, will show that the contents of the superconscious, as revealed in this hallucinogenic way, are perfectly still, passive luminosities whose positivity fascinates the receptive consciousness.  Thus an antithesis may be posited between the restless, active contents of one's subconscious mind, as experienced during sleep, and the tranquil, utterly passive contents of one's superconscious mind, as revealed through upward self-transcending synthetic stimulants like LSD, whilst awake.  Aldous Huxley's mescaline experiments, as recorded in The Doors of Perception, provide quite conclusive proof of this matter and clearly point in the general direction that transcendental man is taking towards the millennial Superman, when equivalent artificially-induced upward self-transcending visionary experiences will become the social norm, shared by the vast majority of fellow-superhuman beings.  If Aldous Huxley deserves to be especially remembered for anything, over the coming centuries, it must surely be for his experiments with synthetic stimulants, which arguably constitute the most interesting and enlightening side of his work.  Hallucinogens like LSD may not be suitable to society as it is currently constituted, but they must surely presage a future applicability in response to the dictates of a more evolved psyche than generally exists at present.

     I have contended that whereas the subconscious is active, the left eye, as the one nearest to the old brain, is relatively passive and sleepy-looking, which would seem, on the face of it, to be a contradiction in terms.  Yet this is only so if one fails to perceive a contradiction within each part of the psyche, which corresponds to the mind/brain dichotomy.  For whilst it is perfectly true to say that the subconscious is active during sleep, we cannot accredit it with anything like the same degree of activity during our waking hours, when the conscious mind takes over.  Thus we needn't be surprised that the eye most under subconscious influence should be comparatively passive during the day, whereas the right eye reflects the visio-spatial/analytical activity of the superconscious or, at any rate, of its lower regions thereof, which correspond to the higher, logico-verbal regions of the subconscious.  Admittedly, the eyes don't exclusively connect with that part of the cerebral cortex nearest to them.  For they also cross-connect in the chiasma and thereby link-up with the opposite brain.  But the distinction between the contradictory appearance of the left and right eyes in highly intelligent people confirms a bias reflecting the predominant influence of the nearest brain, whether old or new.  The fact that the left side of the brain controls the body's right side, and, conversely, the right side of the brain the body's left side, does not invalidate this contention, since the eyes are arguably too close to the brain to be subject to the same rules as govern the physical body in general.

     The converse of the intellect's conscious activity in the lower regions of the superconscious, however, is the utterly passive nature of the visionary contents of the upper regions of superconscious mind, as revealed by mind-expanding drugs, which tend to fade into post-visionary consciousness at the topmost level ... of mystical beatitude.  Thus not only is there an antithesis between the active dream-world of the subconscious and the passive visionary world of the superconscious, but there is a parallel distinction within each part of the psyche between, on the one hand, active dream and passive thought, and, on the other hand, passive visionary experience and active intellectual behaviour, depending on whether one is in a state corresponding to sleep or to wakefulness.  In a wider context, an active superconscious mind is paralleled by a slothful subconscious body, and, conversely, an active subconscious body normally presupposes a slothful superconscious mind.  When the superconscious is passive, the subconscious comes awake, so to speak.  And, similarly, a passive subconscious mind makes possible the true awakening of the superconscious in visionary experience.  One might say, to extend this paradox, that the superconscious is only half-awake in visio-spatial/analytical activity, while the subconscious is only half-awake in logico-verbal/intellectual passivity.  To come fully awake, the former needs the passive visionary experience encouraged by synthetic hallucinogens like LSD, whereas the latter needs the active dream behaviour of sleep.  Let us therefore leave the matter with this teasing paradox: that whereas the subconscious only comes fully awake with the sleep of the superconscious, so the latter likewise only attains to full wakefulness with the sleep of the former.  Our higher mind is generally only half awake.  It will be our duty and privilege, in the future, to bring it fully awake, as we are transformed into Supermen.

 

 

MILLENNIAL THOUGHTS

 

It isn't merely to escape from the natural body that Supermen would be elevated to the status of brains artificially supported and sustained in our projected post-Human Millennium, but also to preclude the possibility of physical irresponsibility or otherwise riotous behaviour, among the populace, in consequence of high-level LSD tripping or equivalent synthetic experiences.  The gradual supersession of the natural body by an artificial, communal one will enable the religious life of Supermen to be conducted with a minimum of physical friction and social disturbance.  No-one will be liable to throw himself out of an upstairs window or under a car or on unsuspecting females or whatever in the post-Human Millennium, for no-one who regularly participates in the hallucinogenic experience will have a body to abuse.  The leadership, responsible for the maintenance and supervision of the social order, won't have to worry about irresponsible or riotous behaviour from the 'trippers', since their artificially-supported brains will be immobile and, consequently, no Superman would be disposed to physical revolt.  A perfectly docile society will become the cherished norm, and this norm won't be violated by any of its members.

     Of course, people have taken LSD in the twentieth century and, as a rule, they've behaved responsibly, refraining from physical violence.  The more intelligent members of the hippy subculture which arose in the late 1960s but declined in the early 1970s would certainly have behaved in this way, not imposing any severe strain on their friends or, indeed, on society generally.  But not everyone would have done so and, had LSD been legalized, the chances of riotous behaviour resulting from a more widespread use of this particular hallucinogen could only have been greater, doubtless leading to serious abuses of personal freedom by people not psychically qualified to make sensible use of it.  Of course, LSD wasn't legalized, and we needn't expect any radical change in the law relating to its use over the coming decades.  Quite probably, it will remain illegal until the advent of the post-Human Millennium, when men become transformed into Supermen and the natural body, or what remains of it, is consequently superseded by an artificial support/sustain system for the brain.  For so long as man exists, there will always be the possibility of social repercussions of a violent nature resulting from a premature legalization of LSD, or equivalent upward self-transcending synthetic stimulants.  We can't anticipate the widespread use of LSD under present conditions, even if certain individuals, more intelligent than their fellows, are perfectly capable of responding to it in a civilized manner - as various people showed themselves to be during the hippy era.  Unfortunately the persecution, by the liberal authorities, of hippies for 'drug abuse' was a virtual inevitability in a society where the legalization of such a potent mind-expanding stimulant remains, for reasons already discussed, out of the question in the short-term.

     There are, however, two kinds of alleged drug abuse.  There is the reactionary abuse involving recourse to stronger natural drugs than any given society is prepared to tolerate, and in a society where, in consequence of evolutionary progress, even comparatively mild drugs like tobacco and alcohol are becoming less respectable, it stands to reason that the use of opium, morphine, cocaine, and heroin will be penalized as incompatible with the moral standards of that society, and stiff sentences accordingly be meted out to those convicted of 'drug abuse'.  Yet such an abuse should be distinguished from, if not treated more leniently than, abuses involving synthetic drugs, [Strictly speaking, my understanding of drugs is of something that deadens the mind in the manner of a narcotic, whereas substances which, like LSD, enliven the mind or open it up to visionary experiences I regard as stimulants - the opposite, in effect, of a drug.] some of which may well be applicable to a future age.  LSD is, I believe, an example of the latter, and whilst its use cannot reasonably be legalized at present, nevertheless a distinction should be upheld between what may well presage a future spirituality and what is patently a manifestation of reactionary sensuality.  In a society tending, all the while, in the general direction of greater spirituality, the use or, rather, misuse of 'drugs' reflecting that tendency shouldn't be confounded with the use or misuse of drugs whose natural constitutions are far more harmful to both the individual and society in general.  While, from society's standpoint, a smashed window must be treated with equal severity by the law whether it be the result of hallucinogenics or narcotics abuse, from the individual's standpoint, however, the distinction between the two kinds of drug is a marked one, reflecting the difference between progress and regress.  Generally speaking, the man who is prematurely progressive is a superior phenomenon to the one who is belatedly regressive, and should, within reasonable limits, be recognized as such!

     Yet I am not here encouraging the use of LSD.  What is destined to find its niche in society will do so as a matter of course, irrespective of the opposition or repression it may meet with in the meantime.  The absence of 'progressive' drug abuse from society would doubtless prove a grave obstacle to evolutionary progress, which is always carried out, no matter what the context, in the face of natural opposition.  A society without LSD adherents would not be tending towards the Supermen but, on the contrary, standing somewhat closer to the apes!  Modern industrial society, however, should be progressive, and it would be an encouraging factor to learn that, of the total number of people convicted for drug abuse each year, the majority were for synthetic rather than natural abuses.  For a ratio biased on the side of the synthetic could be interpreted as a good omen of things to come and, instead of fretting themselves over its increase, the responsible authorities might be prevailed upon to take a more lenient line which, while still penalizing the offence, got it into better perspective from an evolutionary point-of-view.

     Positive lawbreakers, who presage the future, are no less culpable, in the eyes of the law, than negative ones who resurrect the past.  They are evolution's slaves rather than its masters, a medium through which change may be effected in due course.... Not wishing to directly align myself with the lawbreakers, however, I prefer, in my philosophical endeavour to comprehend evolution, the role of seeking to influence the lawmakers for the better, so that, through this and similar methods, they may become more receptive to the possibility of amending or changing the law in the future, at a time when such a policy appeared not only feasible but desirable.  An attempt to have the law changed prematurely, on the other hand, would be to nobody's advantage, not even the drug-taker's, since he would then be confronted - assuming he knew how to respect the drug - by those who simply maligned or squandered it, to the detriment of his own self-esteem.

     For transcendental man, then, we can take it as axiomatic that television will remain the principal medium (above both video and cinema) through which a degree of upward self-transcendence may be achieved.  Television is visionary experience coming at one from outside the self, and, since appearances precede essences, we needn't expect the widespread evolutionary leap to artificially-induced visionary experience inside the self to come about for some time yet - certainly not until the majority of people are capable of appreciating it!  Which probably won't be during the remaining course of this century, nor even, perhaps, during the early course of the next (although that isn't something about which anyone can be certain at present).  With the increased pace of evolution nowadays, we are by no means guaranteed that modern, i.e. transcendental, man will remain content to continue watching television throughout the course of the next hundred years.  It could well transpire that the novelty and excitement of television-viewing, even via satellite, will wear thin some time before then, to be replaced either by the higher visionary experience of Supermen or, what's more likely, by a wider interest in transcendental meditation as a prelude to the post-Human Millennium.  At this juncture in time, transcendental meditation remains a comparatively elitist interest, restricted to those who are capable of directly cultivating spirit without need of external assistance, such as television.  It presages not the Superman but the Superbeing of the succeeding phase of the post-Human Millennium, and is accordingly somewhat closer, in essence, to the blessed state of the heavenly Beyond.  But evolutionary progress should lead, in due course, to an ever-growing number of people taking-up with transcendental meditation in the decades or centuries to come, so that it will co-exist and possibly alternate with television spirituality within the framework of a higher religion - one institutionalized and collectivized.

     A materialist would probably contend that television will suffice to lead transcendental man directly to the LSD visions of the Superman, thereby making transcendental meditation totally irrelevant.  But I don't believe that meditation can be dismissed so easily, as though it were simply an anachronism which artificially-induced visionary experience, whether apparent or essential, external or internal, was destined to replace.  The need for a religious institution, such as would be provided by meditation centres, still requires to be addressed and is absolutely indispensable to religious progress in the world.  By becoming part of a meditating community, one would be on the next evolutionary rung, so to speak, above the church congregation, and such a communal context necessarily signifies an approximation, no matter how crudely, to the envisaged ultimate unity of the Omega Absolute, the divine culmination of evolution.  Yet no such approximation is reflected, however, in the context of an individual sitting either alone or with one or two others in front of a television screen every night, which is why, it seems to me, television can't be regarded as the logical successor to religion, but only as a component of contemporary spiritual progress.  What would condemn transcendental meditation outright, as a useless anachronism stemming from an obsolete society, would be a lack of applicability to the future, its failure to presage a superior spiritual development which a later stage of evolution will encourage.  If, then, the post-Human Millennium could be conceived solely as an affair of the Superman, with his artificially-induced internal visionary experience, we would be justified in condemning transcendental meditation as a futility.  But since the Millennium in question should extend into a more spiritual phase, in which the ensuing Superbeing will directly cultivate spirit pending transcendence, we would be mistaken to consider transcendental meditation irrelevant, even though it can be shown that, by itself, such meditation wouldn't suffice to take man to the heavenly Beyond.  This knowledge, however, needn't preclude us from meditating, since the experience is sufficiently rewarding in itself to be self-justificatory.

     But whether the entire human population can be induced to take meditation seriously, over the coming centuries, is another matter, and not one about which I feel confident to speculate, even given the inevitability of meditation centres as a precondition of the post-Human Millennium.  Not everyone attends church, and perhaps it will transpire that not everyone will attend the 'church' of tomorrow, although we may expect a greater degree of directive persuasion on the part of the relevant authorities than has ever existed before, with, it should be added, more incentive for the devotees to attend!  And so transcendental man, full-blown, would be participating in the transcendental civilization, a civilization presupposing the simultaneous existence, in harmonious co-existence, of socialism and transcendentalism or, rather, of a fusion of the one with the other.  For unless there is a community religion, there is no civilization, in the true sense of that term, but only what precedes it - namely barbarism.

     Since pre-dualistic man had a civilization, in which paganism and royalism (or some autocratic equivalent) prevailed, and dualistic man also, with his Christianity and parliamentary liberalism, it would seem only fair for us to ascribe a future civilization to post-dualistic man, since man is man at any stage of his evolution and ever in need of a church, where he can rub shoulders with his fellows.  The coming together of men into crowds isn't by itself a good thing, however.  What determines the moral status of the crowd is the reason why men come together, that is to say whether for sensual or spiritual purposes.  Since a communal context is relevant both to the lower communality of the plants and to our projected higher communality of the coming Superbeings, there is nothing in communal life per se that distinguishes it as a virtue.  One might say that it becomes a vice when the motivation driving people together is sensual, and such a motivation was certainly paramount during the era of pagan pre-dualism when, as often as not, men visited the temple or whatever to express their sexual predilections, with or without the assistance of resident priestesses!  The pagan orgy utilized the crowd for sensual purposes, so that men came together on the basis of the lowest-common-denominator, and thereby resembled the leaves of trees.

     With the advent of Christian dualism, however, the emphasis in crowd formations was spiritual rather than sensual, although a degree of sensuality was necessarily still upheld, as, for example, in the celebration of the Mass, with the symbolic offering of Christ's body and blood conducted through the sublimated mediums of wafer and wine - a far more frugal approach to sensuality than would have been intelligible to pagan man.  But if a diluted sensuality was the norm of Christian communal life, then for a post-dualistic age it follows that the motivation driving people together must be exclusively spiritual and thus, for the first time in history, entirely good.  The coming together of people for purposes of meditation in specially-designed centres will reflect the highest mode of communal life given to man, and be the nearest approach to the subsequent spiritual communality of the Superbeings.  Because no such motivation has previously existed in the West, nor, properly considered, anywhere else in the world, there can be little doubt that it will be endorsed over the coming centuries, so that man will pass through the entire spectrum of his evolution, from the beastly to the godly, as he enters its highest phase with widespread transcendentalism.  Tomorrow's crowds will, in this religious context, be purely virtuous, superior even to Christian congregations.

     There are, however, strict limits to the degree of togetherness men can experience, since they have bodies and remain imprisoned in them, prevented, by the flesh, from experiencing a truly close approximation to the omega goal of evolution in indivisible spiritual unity.  For transcendental men, the regular practise of meditation in communal contexts will simply constitute a stepping-stone to a still-closer approximation to ultimate divinity ... as experienced by the ensuing Supermen of the post-Human Millennium.  These Supermen will, as already noted, be elevated above the natural body in extensively artificial contexts designed on a collective basis.  As brains artificially supported and, no less importantly, artificially sustained, they will stand in a much closer relationship to ultimate divinity than transcendental men, with their individual bodies.  Unfortunately the body is always a grave obstacle to the attainment of an advanced degree of spiritual togetherness, of communal oneness, since its varieties of forms and appearances aren't always pleasant to behold, least of all when radically ugly, and serve rather to excite disgust, which negative feeling drives men apart.  Likewise its exposure to germs of one kind or another is a repellent rather than an attractive feature, since men fear contagion and are consequently inclined to maintain their physical distance, when possible, from the victims of colds, flu, and other common illnesses.  Even the division of the sexes is, in its relativity, a contributory factor in the inhibition of closer approximations to the Omega Absolute.  Obviously, the only solution to these problems lies with the Superman, who will be elevated above them through the supersession of the natural, individual body by an artificial and communal one, and accordingly experience a greater degree of unity with his fellows - a degree presaging the even greater spiritual unity of the Superbeings, when individual consciousness will be eclipsed by the collective, post-visionary consciousness of the tightly-packed clusters of new brains.  After which it will simply be a matter of time before this comparative spiritual unity makes way for the most complete spiritual unity ... of the Spiritual Globes as, following transcendence, they tend towards one another in accordance with the positive drift of a gradual convergence towards ultimate Oneness.

     However, where space is concerned, it isn't true, contrary to what modern scientists tend to believe, that the Universe is expanding.  The stars, we may rest assured, are contracting, and if they are tending farther apart, they are not expanding but ... diverging, after the fashion of their infernal natures.  The concept of an expanding Universe should only apply to man and man-equivalent life forms (if any) elsewhere.  Now when we narrow the Universe to man we find, despite appearances to the contrary, that spirit is expanding, in accordance with the chief characteristic of being, while simultaneously converging towards its goal in the indivisible unity of the Omega Absolute.  Thus an antithesis exists between the divergence of the physical universe on the one hand, and the convergence of the spiritual universe on the other, as, likewise, between the contraction of stars and the expansion of spirit.

     On what may be termed the microcosmic plane of global civilization, we see the contraction of the diabolic side of the Universe in the curtailment of nature, the overcoming of various pestilential diseases, the penalizing of serious natural drug abuse, the decline of authoritarianism, the reduction of competitive individualism, and the gradual undermining of private property.  Conversely, we see the expansion of the divine side of the Universe in the growth of cities, the increase in the use (or abuse) of synthetic stimulants, the development of collective contexts, the increase in public spending, the substitution of artificial for natural modes of sexuality, the growing interest in meditation, and so on - all factors which point in the general direction of both a post-Human Millennium and subsequent heavenly Beyond.  What is happening on this planet is probably also happening on the thousands if not millions of other possible life-sustaining planets throughout the physical Universe, so that the divine side of the Universe is simultaneously converging towards its future culmination in the most absolute noumenal indivisibility.  We needn't expect this culmination to come about for some considerable time yet, however, since there are definite stages to evolutionary progress, presupposing, in the future, the emergence of new life forms out of man which will be as spiritually superior to him ... as apes and trees were and, in some sense, continue to be his spiritual inferiors.

     It would be erroneous, however, to suppose that man will venture to the far corners of the Universe in the future, and thereupon come into contact, whether on a friendly or a hostile basis, with beings from outer space.  For although there will doubtless continue to be a degree of space exploration during the coming centuries, the fact of evolutionary progress will preclude him from making the exploration of space his chief priority, since higher stages of evolution presuppose greater degrees of psychic interiorization, and consequently less interest in the phenomenal worlds that lie outside it.  As human evolution draws toward its climax so noumenal essence predominates over phenomenal appearance, making the cultivation of spirit the overriding priority of the age.  In all probability, the life-sustaining planets in other parts of the Universe won't differ too radically from the earth, seeing that life, particularly on the human plane, requires fairly predictable conditions, neither too hot nor too cold.  This being the case, we would be foolish to concern ourselves with the altogether futile, time-wasting explorations of kindred planets!  As transcendental men we would have better things to do with our time than to dabble in appearances, cosmic or otherwise!  And as Transcendentalists we would not have an indefinite life-span, but no more, at most, than a few centuries before the transformation to the Superman became apposite.  Our current space explorations should be designed primarily to assist our spiritual development, not be pursued for the mere sake of exploring!  And it is sincerely to be hoped that if, in the not-too-distant future, we put an end to war between human beings, we won't proceed to start wars between ourselves and the nearest aliens, since an end to war as such is commensurate with a higher, more advanced stage of evolutionary progress.  Yet while this is undoubtedly so, it is also worth remembering that an extension of war from tribal and national to international and, in all likelihood, planetary levels is also compatible with evolutionary progress, and consequently that some kind of compromise, involving a more civilized or sublimated kind of warfare than man has hitherto waged against himself, may well be required throughout the duration of the next civilization, in the interests, needless to say, of safeguarding his spiritual progress.

     As to the phasing-out of aspects of life on the diabolic side of the Universe, the growing freedom from nature which man will achieve in the centuries to come will doubtless lead to his dispensing with what might be described as unnecessary animals, such as dogs, cats, horses, mice, rabbits, and other pets, whilst any dispensing with necessary animals, including pigs, cattle, and sheep, will probably follow with the advent of the Superman and consequent supersession of the natural body by artificial supports and sustains for the brain.  There are besides pets, workers, and livestock, many other types of animal in the world and these, whether wild or captive, will also be dispensed with in the course of time.  What began in the transcendental civilization would doubtless be finished, by the relevant authorities, during the post-Human Millennium, so that towards the climax of spiritual evolution on earth very few beasts would remain in existence.  For their continued presence there would be incompatible with the radically spiritual bias of a society tending towards transcendence, as well as a potential threat, if left unchecked, to the safe and proper functioning of that society in an extensively artificial context.  As man tends towards the spirit so he makes war on the beast, both internally and externally, since it stems from the alpha side of the Universe in its intrinsic sensuality.  If animals are acceptable to a dualistic civilization which, in its openness, has pagan roots, they would most assuredly prove incompatible with and therefore unacceptable to a transcendental civilization.... Although we needn't expect a radical purge of pets or other animals to take place over the coming decades, we can certainly anticipate a gradual reduction in their numbers, as society takes appropriate measures to transcendentalize itself, so to speak.

     Likewise the gradual elimination of private property is compatible with evolutionary progress towards the Divine, insofar as property reflects a diabolical inclination on the part of its owners, who function in the guise of individual suns competing with one another for planets.  Since the most powerful suns or stars in the Universe are likely to be those which control the biggest and/or greatest number of planets, so the most powerful men are usually those with the most property, which stands to them in the ratio of a planet to a sun.  A man with three houses is equivalent to a sun with three planets, and he can only be more powerful, from an alpha-stemming viewpoint, than the man with a single house (provided, of course, that the scale of the latter is smaller than that of the former, whether collectively or individually).  Nowadays there aren't that many people with three or more houses, but even one house will be considered excessive in the future, and its owner doubtless penalized as a matter of social necessity.  With the post-Human Millennium there will be no private property in existence at all, not even for the leaders, who will live in communal dwellings while their superhuman 'charges' live in the communal clusters of artificially-supported brains in the various meditation centres.  Thus the world will tend ever more radically in the direction of God, or the transcendence of all materialism, in the heavenly Beyond.  Verily, the overcoming of nature and the natural body will be a significant step on the road to that spiritual destination!

 

 

POST-DUALISTIC SEXUALITY

 

Since everything on earth stems from the polar constitution of the Galaxy, including the distinction between female and male, which is the essence of Original Sin, it follows that the gradual overcoming of this constitution signifies an evolutionary progression away from the natural-world-order towards the supernatural context of God.  Since stars correspond to the female side of the Galaxy and planets to the male side, we find that the struggle away from the natural towards the supernatural entails a rebellion, on the part of males, against female attractive power, a rebellion which has led to a loosening of traditional sexual ties and to a gradual move towards a predominantly male-oriented society, a society in which the post-dualistic bias of industrial, urban man finds its chief sexual outlets in either homosexuality or pornography, while women, becoming increasingly masculinized, effectively function as 'lesser men', or 'quasi-males', thus giving rise to an extension of 'homosexual' tendencies within the framework of heterosexual relationships - as manifested, for example, in the ubiquitous cult of unisex and the practice, intermittently or otherwise, of anal sex.  Thus bisexuality cuts across heterosexual as well as homosexual relationships, reflecting, as it must, the growing post-dualistic bias of contemporary man.  If the pre-dualistic age was congenial to lesbianism, then the post-dualistic age will necessarily favour homosexuality, in accordance with the expansion of the male over the female side of life, as essential to mankind's struggle towards the Divine.

     Thus, in the Western world, it is fashionable - one might almost say obligatory - to refer to homosexuals as 'gay' rather than 'queer', since the derogatory implication of the latter term would reflect too naturalistic a mentality, suggestive of a poor opinion of deviations from the natural or traditional norm.  But to have such an opinion would be to put oneself in the position of a man, devoid of evolutionary perspective, who imagines that life should always be lived on natural terms, and that deviations from such terms are inherently blameworthy and, consequently, something to be regarded as a perversion.  It would be to condemn evolutionary progress in matters relating to sex, and thus remain entrenched in a short-sighted materialism that was all-too-ready to brand manifestations of sexual progress as 'insane' because, according to one's traditional criteria, arguably perverse.

     No, in this age only the less spiritually-evolved people are partial to the word 'queer' for what they regard as a deviation from the natural right.  They are the twentieth-century's sexual fascists - people who are unable or unwilling to recognize sexual progress when they see it, but persist in applying their own rather short-sighted denigrations to it as a matter of course.   'Queer' is equivalent to 'perverse', and being homosexual is, according to this value-judgement, somewhat inferior to the natural, heterosexual norm.  In fact, it is to be a kind of sexual spastic.  Not surprisingly, Marxist-Leninist societies tend to frown upon homosexuality and pornography as constituting a perversion of the natural norm, which is also symptomatic, in their view, of bourgeois decadence.  Lacking any kind of transcendental criterion, such societies have no basis for justifying or understanding it, since, without reference to the spiritual dimension of evolutionary progress, homosexuality may well appear a perversion of the natural rather than a development towards the supernatural, in which increasingly artificial standards come to apply.  But such artificiality isn't readily encouraged in Marxist-Leninist states, since it connotes with an elitist tendency that would appear to run contrary to the inherent naturalness of the general proletariat, whose social backwardness or, rather, innocence must be protected from such 'corrupting' influences as allegedly stem, in the main, from the decadent West.

     To be sure, there is a certain degree of logic behind this type of thinking, especially with regard to the presumed inability of the general proletariat to properly appreciate the merits of so-called perverse activity.  Yet decadence isn't the root from which homosexuality and pornography spring, even though such phenomena may arise during the decadence of a given civilization.  The fact of contemporary Western civilization's being decadent does not, however, imply that everything which exists in or springs from it is inevitably decadent, too.  Decadence can only extend to certain contexts, with politics and religion especially conspicuous, and is chiefly characterized by the inadequacy or irrelevance of the official system, whether political or religious, from a majority standpoint - by its inability, in other words, to correspond to the evolutionary changes wrought by environmental and other factors among the masses.  That certain sections of the masses may develop more relevant unofficial systems to compensate themselves, in some measure, for this lack ... is a fact which cannot be denied, and sometimes a context or system that began unofficially, as a reflection of evolutionary progress outside the prevailing system, is subsequently absorbed into the decadent civilization in response to both popular demand and financial expediency.  Pornography is, I believe, one such phenomenon, and its prevalence throughout the West reflects a manifestation of evolutionary progress which co-exists with the manifestations of decadence also to be found there.  For as a means of intellectualizing sexuality, pornography - and I use the term loosely in the sense of general erotica - must signify a development away from traditional materialism ... in which not concrete but sublimated sexuality comes to pass, as the highest, most appropriate sexuality for an increasingly transcendental age, with other types of post-dualistic sexuality, including the homosexual, in fairly close attendance.

     Of course, homosexuals have existed in the past, long before the dawn of post-dualism, and not all latter-day homosexuals can be considered truly post-dualistic.  Nevertheless it remains a fact that, in recent decades, homosexuality has become more widespread than ever before, a fact which must be associated, to some extent, with the gradual undermining of the traditional female side of life and consequent upsurge of the male side in its place.  If homosexuality is a reflection of this, then so, too, is pornography, bisexuality, unisex, celibacy, and, indeed, the sodomizing of women.  Whatever the particular sexual preference of the individual male, it is evident that he can choose between a number of alternative modes of post-dualistic sexuality within the broad contexts of the Western dualistic and, most especially, transitional civilizations.  Admittedly, he can also remain traditionally dualistic and only consort with actual, palpable females in a consistently orthodox fashion if he so desires or, what's probably nearer the truth, if his class instincts and environmental/professional conditioning so dictate.  He can thus behave, on the conventional bourgeois level, like any good traditional Marxist-Leninist male, who would never dream of doing anything unnatural to a woman or of having sexual relations with a man, never mind casting an appreciative eye over pornography!  But such conventional types, who are more apt than anyone to regard homosexuals as 'queer' and pornographers as 'pervs' or 'jerks', are unlikely to be around for ever, least of all towards the latter stages of the next civilization when, with the full-blown acceptance of post-dualistic criteria, adherence to traditional dualistic criteria would be regarded as a gross misfortune, the subject of derisory contempt if not actual suppression.

     To be shamelessly heterosexual in that more advanced age would be tantamount to being the victim of atavistic paganism, a kind of anachronism in a wholly transcendental society that was progressing, all the time, closer to a post-Human Millennium, and thus to the complete supersession of the natural body by artificial supports and sustains for the brain - arranged, no doubt, on a communal basis.  To be shamelessly heterosexual at that time would be even more uncomfortable, from the social point-of-view, than being homosexual now.  For at least the twentieth century gave rise to the transitional civilizations of America, Germany, and Japan, which recognize the legitimacy of a degree of sexual transcendentalism unprecedented in the dualistic civilizations of the more traditional European West.  And even these latter are being obliged, in coming under the influence of the more advanced civilizations, to extend the transcendental side at the expense of the pagan side of things, so that post-dualistic sexuality is a tolerated, if not wholeheartedly encouraged, aspect of contemporary life.  But in a full-blown post-dualistic civilization the prevalence of natural sexual activity could hardly be considered compatible with transcendental criteria, and so more rigorous steps would have to be taken to phase it out.  Doubtless artificial modes of reproduction would be preferred, though not necessarily along the lines envisaged by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, while women - assuming they still existed at such a time - would be a great deal more liberated than at present - so liberated, in fact, as to take artificial sexual practices, including recourse to vibrators, for granted.

     Yet the Western world, being partly tied to its pagan past, will have its Mary Whitehouses and Malcolm Muggeridges, not to mention Andrea Dworkins, for some time to come - certainly for the foreseeable future!  It will also, thank goodness, have its Havelock Ellises and Henry Millers, who reflect the transcendentally progressive side of this world.  Doubtless hard-line Marxists would, in the event of taking over the West, carry on from approximately where sexual puritans left off, thereby postponing the advent of the highest civilization for as long as possible or, at any rate, until such time as internal or international pressure obliged them to change their tune.  But it is doubtful that they would be able to stamp out pornography, homosexuality, etc., altogether, and so a flickering of post-dualistic sexuality would probably continue, sometimes threatening to burst into flame and set the whole world alight - an eventuality which well-intentioned people could only look forward to, since a world in which transcendental sexuality predominates is superior to one still under the dominion of natural, sensual, palpable sex.

     There are, of course, various drawbacks to the prevalence of pornography in the West at present, but they are largely inevitable.  The man who misuses pornography is an example of what I mean, and such men, insufficiently sublimated to properly appreciate it, tend to react from pornographic idealism with a greater degree of heterosexual realism than might otherwise have been the case, in consequence of which they then commit rape or put their pornographically-induced fantasies into action in socially unacceptable ways.  Instead of being absorbed into the higher sexuality of the pornographic world, these men rebound off it, so to speak, with redoubled physical violence, their sexual appetites inflamed by the seductive spectacles to-hand.  They are akin to the egocentric mind that, according to the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation, rejects the purity of the Clear Light of the Void and is therefore obliged to return to the world in the guise of a new person.  What the Clear Light ... is to the insufficiently-evolved person, the pornographic stimulus is to such men as these, who must needs refer everything back to palpable reality, rather than strive to live on the higher plane of sexual sublimation.  As I said, this is a drawback.  But it is one that has to be endured by society in the name of evolutionary progress and fidelity to transcendental criteria.  There is no justification for stamping out pornography on the hypothetical grounds that it leads to an increase in sexual crimes, since such crimes as are committed against unsuspecting people tend to be committed by a small minority of men, not by the majority of pornography enthusiasts who, on the contrary, are perfectly capable of containing themselves and directing their sexual impulses towards the Ideal.  That such masturbation as may take place in this context is regarded, by less-evolved people, as a perversion ... is perhaps inevitable, if regrettable.  For the people in question remain too tied to the natural to see that it is only through the perversion or, rather, subversion of natural behaviour ... that man can progress towards the supernatural, and thereby achieve redemption as an evolutionary being.  Not to be capable of unnatural or artificial sexual behaviour is to condemn oneself to the level of a beast, in whom natural determinism prevails.

     Yet masturbation, much as it may take place amongst a majority of the pornography-buying public, does not have to take place, and, with the more highly-evolved men, it generally transpires that voyeurism alone is sufficient to cater for their pornographic needs.  A man who can scrutinize pornography without feeling compelled to masturbate ... may well be more spiritually evolved than one who can't, since he reduces sensual commitment to the barest minimum of optical engagement.  But even masturbation, morally considered, is a less sensual activity than copulation, and undoubtedly represents a more civilized, because artificial, mode of sexual behaviour. [For one thing, it cannot be equated with Original Sin and neither, for another, does it involve the literal use of another body, and of another body, if female, likely to be more fleshy than one's own.]   Of course, D.H. Lawrence wouldn't have agreed with me here.  But, then, Lawrence was one of the twentieth-century's least civilized writers, a kind of modern savage for whom sex in naturalis, and as often as possible, was the key to salvation.  Such a key, however, simply opens the door to damnation, and has been condemned by all true spiritual leaders for centuries.  We don't cultivate spirit when we make love, and neither did Lawrence, whose writings are among the most naturalistic of his time, intend us to do so.  Instead, he wanted us to become 'whole', which, according to him, meant perfect.  Alas, such ‘wholeness’ would not lead us towards God, but simply keep us tied to the beastly as perpetual men!  Yet man is something that 'should be overcome' said Nietzsche, an altogether more enlightened philosopher, and pornography, by freeing him from the palpable, is a contributory factor in his overcoming - a means of encouraging him towards the complete transcendence of sex in the post-Human Millennium.

     Of course, man is human at any stage of his evolution and cannot completely escape from the sensual world into a post-human spiritual one.  There are sensual, sexual obligations to be honoured whether one is in the pagan, the Christian, or the transcendental stages of human evolution.  But whereas the sexual obligations of pre-dualistic pagan man would be largely if not exclusively natural, those, by contrast, of post-dualistic transcendental man should become increasingly artificial, as befits his greater freedom from natural determinism.  The former is only capable of heterosexual copulation, whereas the latter, while still capable of such activity, prefers to gloat over a pornographic magazine and/or video, and thus displays more free will, as is compatible with a higher degree of evolutionary progress.  For in the age-old struggle between free will and natural determinism, free will can only triumph over natural determinism as men grow ever more civilized, and so approximate, by ever-increasing degrees, to the ultimate freedom of God.  In a transcendental society the ratio of free will to natural determinism should be in the region of at least 3:1, in accordance with the post-dualistic status of the age.  Eventually, with the advent of transcendence, natural determinism will be completely escaped from, as the Spiritual Globes issuing from Superbeings tend towards ultimate Oneness in the heavenly Beyond.  For Salvation (as definitively signified by transcendence) is, above all, deliverance from the flesh, from, at that incredibly-advanced juncture in time, the clustered new-brains whose physiological constitutions would retain a degree of natural determinism right up to the moment of transcendence, and hence complete spiritual freedom.  But, of course, the degree of natural determinism imposed upon the meditating wills of the Superbeings would be considerably less than the degree of it imposed upon man, whether transcendental or otherwise, and be proportionate, moreover, to the stage of evolutionary progress consonant with that age when, with extensive technological assistance, the new-brain clusters were artificially supported and sustained, 'the flesh' having been reduced to the barest minimum compatible with a truly intensive cultivation of spirit.

     Returning from the upper reaches of our projected post-Human Millennium to the present, we find that the most advanced men are those in whom free will predominates over natural determinism to the greatest extent.  As a rule, men of genius are the ones who display the most free will, and this is virtually a primary criterion of genius, whether we are alluding to a man like Schopenhauer, who willed to spend most of his adult life in undeviating fidelity to certain solitary habits, or to one like Salvador Dali, who once lectured a gathering of students with a loaf of bread tied to his head.  Natural determinism, carried to any extent, is incompatible with greatness, and never more so than today, when transcendental criteria are on the rise.  The leading minds must be the freest minds, mini-versions of God on earth who intimate, through no matter what idiosyncratic circumlocutions, of greater freedoms to come; Christ-like figures with a divine mission - artists and philosophers.  Thus they draw the masses up towards themselves, and so away from the tyranny of natural determinism.

     However, just as it follows that not all men can be as free as the great, so it usually happens that not all women can be as free as men - even in the twentieth century, the first post-dualistic century in history.  As a rule, women are more under the sway of natural determinism than of free will, and especially were they so in the past, prior to the growth of female emancipation.  Today, however, while natural determinism still prevails over free will in most women, evolutionary pressures are ensuring that women, too, become freer than ever before, thus behaving increasingly like men, whose work-a-day world is no longer an exclusively male preserve.  Nowadays comparatively few women can expect to have more than three children.  For the emphasis on free will in an incipiently post-dualistic age ensures that child-rearing becomes rather more the exception than the rule, and that women accordingly look upon their professional calling as the main one, with child-rearing a temporary interruption of their public duties.  On the other hand, in an age with high mortality rates, like the nineteenth century, this attitude and behaviour wouldn't have been possible, even if other factors had encouraged it.  But, in the modern age, with extremely low infant mortality rates in the more civilized parts of the world, it stands to reason that large families and/or regular pregnancies aren't going to be necessary either to increase or maintain the population level, and that 1-3 successful first-time pregnancies and deliveries, per adult woman, will suffice to maintain the population ... as well, possibly, as enable it to increase.  Thus women are now freer than ever before of maternal responsibilities and able, in consequence, to regard their public functions, as wage-earning employers/employees, as their principal ones.  Free will is gradually getting the better of natural determinism in women as well as in men, and although a significant proportion of women don't much welcome this fact, it nevertheless remains an inescapable aspect of evolutionary progress which comparatively few of them can do anything to reverse.  For the post-dualistic age is hostile to traditional female aspects of life in proportion as it is biased on the side of those male elements which are gradually bringing the world closer to Heaven.  Future women, you can rest assured, will be a great deal less naturalistic and correspondingly more liberated than contemporary ones!  We may not yet have reached a supermasculine stage of evolution, but we are certainly tending in its direction, as various aspects of the modern world, including the sexual, adequately confirm. 

     An historical man (assuming he could come back to life from a previous century) could only cast a scandalized gaze over the shapely rump of a liberated young woman walking along the street in tight-fitting denims.  The more enlightened modern male, however, hardly deigns to be impressed by the seductive spectacle of such a clearly-outlined female figure.  He is simply conscious of looking at another man, albeit an attractive one, in front of him.  He is post-dualistic and, consequently, if not literally homosexual, then his relations with such quasi-masculine 'women' are effectively bisexual.  For homosexuality, in one degree and form or another, is not so much the exception in a post-dualistic age as ... the general rule!

 

 

TOWARDS A TRUE EQUALITY

 

Are introverts morally superior to extroverts?  This is an interesting question and one which I believe can be answered in the affirmative.  Yes, introverts generally are morally superior to extroverts, and for the simple reason that whereas the former are aligned with essence, or the internal, the latter remain aligned with appearance, or the external.  Essence and appearance are forever antithetical and can never be considered equal.  Of course, no-one is completely an introvert or an extrovert, but the fact that, when not striving for a balance, most people are predominantly one or the other permits us to distinguish between them as, in effect, 'the good' and 'the bad'.

     To be an introvert is to value the internal world above the external one, to prefer being 'in one's head', through reflection or contemplation, than outside it ... in curiosity at the world around one.  An introvert is thus biased in favour of the spirit rather than of the flesh, and may be defined as of masculine character, in whom the profound predominates over the superficial.  Conversely, an extrovert spends more time in the external environment and may accordingly be described as of feminine character, with a corresponding predilection for the superficial over the profound.  The extrovert is usually a man of action and may well be highly observant.  He notices what goes on around him with a comprehensiveness and penetration which the introvert will rarely if ever possess.  To him external events are important, whereas the internal world, to the extent that he has one, seems relatively trivial. 

     Generally speaking, this extrovert/introvert antithesis appertains to the division of the sexes.  Women are fundamentally extrovert and men, by contrast, introvert.  A woman notices appearances with more consistency and penetration, as a rule, than does a man, and this is because, for her, appearance is what really matters, what really counts in life, so that, as Schopenhauer well-remarked, she usually takes appearances for reality (and even, in a certain sense, too seriously).  On the other hand, a man, if truly masculine, will treat essence with more respect than appearance, and thus adopt an introverted attitude to life.  He will be predominantly immersed in the spirit, whereas a woman will remain aligned with the flesh.  Indeed, it could be argued that whereas women are rooted in the eyes, men are centred, by contrast, in the brain.

     These distinctions between the sexes are gradually being eroded and all because the influence of modern industrial civilization, in slowly masculinizing women, is driving society towards a post-dualistic status in which the ultimate objective can only be the complete transcendence of the feminine element in life.  Needless to say, we have a long way to go before we attain to a supermasculine and highly introverted society, which, so I contend, will only come about with a post-Human Millennium, and the correlative elevation of humanity to the superhuman level ... of human brains artificially supported and no-less artificially sustained in communal contexts.  In the meantime, women will doubtless continue to exist, but not as traditionally!

     Nevertheless, one would be a hypocrite to assert that all modern women were already radically masculinized, since the evidence of the senses would seem to indicate that a majority of them are still sufficiently feminine to be able to continue behaving in a traditionally seductive, sensual manner, and to perform the usual female duties in life.  Some women may be more advanced and liberated than others, but they remain a comparatively small minority of, for the most part, university-educated intellectual types.  Most women, it seems to me, have not yet betrayed their sex or been obliged to do so to any radical extent, which is why they continue to treat appearances as being of more importance than essence.

     I shall give you a typical example of an average woman's concept of the world, as appertaining to sex.  Such a woman will regard the solitary man as 'bent' by assuming that he masturbates.  Whether or not he does so ... isn't particularly important.  What is important, however, is the light thrown on the woman's psychology by the word 'bent'.  It reveals, I mean, that she cannot conceive of sex in transcendent terms, but must refer it back to nature, so that anything which may be regarded as a deviation from the natural norm is deemed perverse, and duly castigated with the crude epithet in question.  Lacking a more evolved spiritual dimension, this average type of woman is unable to relate to a lifestyle or attitude to life which refutes conventional sexual behaviour.  Rather than interpreting the man's celibacy in terms of spiritual aspirations, she regards it as a failure, a perversion of the natural sex instinct, and does so because of an inherent bias, in her psyche, for appearance over essence, the flesh over the spirit.  Such women are incapable of appreciating the virtue of sublimated sexuality.  They remain chained to the concrete, the apparent, the phenomenal, and are thus more traditionally feminine.

     Of course, even the most advanced women have spiritual limitations, and I do not for one moment believe that they would be capable of attaining to the same level of spiritual freedom as a man of outstanding genius - say, a Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Dali, de Chardin, or Prokofiev.  The tendency of publishers to employ an ever-growing army of women readers, these days, can only be a source of lasting regret to those men - more spiritually advanced than the majority of their fellows - whose works are bound to prove unattractive to such readers by dint of being either too complex or too artificial, too transcendental or too progressive, too moral or too elitist, as the case may be.  With a high percentage of women employed in editorial roles there are always going to be significant drawbacks from a serious writer's standpoint, not the least of which will entail the female reader reacting against the content of too radical a typescript for her liking under the impression that it is erroneous or dangerous when, in point of fact, it is simply the product of a more spiritually-evolved psyche, one that would probably find a greater degree of sympathy and understanding from an intelligent male reader - provided, however, that he was habituated to appreciating men of genius and could therefore boast of intimate scholarly connections with the likes of Huysmans, Roussel, Spengler, Sartre, and Koestler.  Alas, not many female readers could do that!

     Despite the progress which has been made, during the past century, in drawing women up higher towards more masculine criteria, the fact nonetheless remains that a division between the sexes still exists and will doubtless continue to exist until the post-Human Millennium, when only Supermen will prevail.  Yes, the traditional feminine/masculine division still exists, but so, too, does a new dimension, as applying in particular to so-called liberated women in their relation to the most intelligent males, in which a kind of spiritual disparity exists along a post-dualistic spectrum in response to male superiority in things of the spirit.  The more advanced women are doing their best to close the gap, but even they have to admit, sooner or later, that they are still fundamentally women and cannot therefore hope to compete with the contemporary world's outstanding male geniuses.  If these geniuses are to be described as 'greater men', then the leading female intellects effectively become 'lesser men' in relation to them, and so they must remain.  This is not male chauvinism, but fidelity to truth as I endeavour to push free thought to greater heights, in revolt against natural determinism.  No woman, barring a sex change, will ever become a man, though she can certainly become more man-like in the course of evolutionary time, and thus sacrifice a number of traditional feminine norms or be obliged to modify them in response to masculine pressures.

     As for sex, however, women are on the whole extrovert and, hence, superficial.  They are likely to be more impressed by a neat, clean appearance than by what a man may know about the Universe or God or the Millennium, and, consequently, they are inclined to regard a well-dressed man as superior to a poorly-dressed one, even though the former may be a money-grubbing scoundrel and the latter a poverty-stricken genius!  This is the inevitable consequence of taking appearances for reality and evaluating people according to superficial criteria.  One cannot be surprised that some men, predominantly given to essence, choose to dress poorly or informally as a means of expressing their contempt for appearances.  For one can't please the world and genuinely aspire towards the transcendental Beyond at the same time.  A truly introverted man will know in which direction salvation lies.

     The fact that evolution is tending in the direction of greater spirituality ... inevitably means that women must be treated increasingly like men, since the post-dualistic age requires that they effectively become 'lesser men' rather than remain just women, as before.  The move towards sexual equality in certain contexts is therefore both morally desirable and inevitable, but one must understand the exact terms on which the world is moving towards it, else the chances of one's interpreting equality in a ridiculous way can only be pretty high!

     Let me give you an example.  A husband and wife decide that, since the sexes are equal and women should be liberated from traditional domestic slavery, they will share whatever domestic duties they may have, including care of their offspring.  Consequently the husband takes turns with the cooking, washing-up, sewing, hoovering, bed-making, nappy-changing, bottle-feeding, etc., while his wife dedicates a correspondingly greater amount of time to reading, watching television, listening to the radio, practising yoga, or whatever.  Here, in this absurd situation, evolution has only gone forwards for the wife, whereas for her husband it has effectively gone backwards, since he now has to take a share in traditional female duties.  But this is precisely what shouldn't happen, since evolution is primarily furthered by men, and the modern age signifies not the triumph of women over men but the coercion of women away from their traditional roles, in response to a male-oriented technological world.  For a modern husband to take turns with his wife in tackling domestic responsibilities is really quite ridiculous, since evolutionary progress should be serving his interests by making him even more masculine, and hence spiritually-biased, than were his male ancestors, thereby leading him towards a greater degree of spirituality, whether through culture or religion, than would previously have been possible.  With the comparatively recent invention of so many electrical appliances for domestic use, such as dishwashers, washing-machines, spin-dryers, hoovers, fridges, cookers, electric fires, and so on, the woman is spared much of the time-consuming manual work which her sexual ancestors formerly had to do, and should thereby have more free time in which to cultivate masculine, i.e. spiritual, interests, like watching television, reading books, playing chess, or painting pictures.  This is what liberation should really mean for the wife - not the absurd imposition onto her husband of traditional female duties!

     So although we speak of equality, we should be careful not to misspeak of it, and thereupon run the risk of reversing or impeding evolutionary progress.  What we must understand is that the sexes are only equal, these days, to the extent that women are now effectively becoming 'lesser men' through the influence of environmental and technological progress, rather than remaining firmly entrenched on the female side of history.  But that same coercive influence which has slowly dragged them across the borderline, so to speak, which separates the feminine from the masculine, has driven men even further ahead on the masculine side of it, so that an evolutionary gap still exists between women and men, but this time on the post-dualistic level ... as a distinction between 'lesser men' and 'greater men' or, as one could alternatively phrase it, quasi-men and genuine men, according to the logic of a male-biased society.

     We can exploit a useful analogy here with a tug-of-war, in which a male team is striving to pull a female team over a white line which divides the feminine from the masculine side.  Let us imagine that the women are three feet away from being pulled over the line and that the men are also three feet away from it on their side.  Thus a gap of six feet exists between the sexes, since the two teams are balanced either side of the line.  With their greater strength, however, the men gradually pull the women closer to the line and eventually right over it, so that everyone is on the male side.  But the distance the women have been pulled is also the distance the men have moved deeper into their masculine territory, which means that a gap of six feet still exists between the two teams, since the women are now some three feet over the white line and the men at least (barring a large team) nine feet away from it.  This analogy suffices to explain the spiritual gap which exists between 'lesser men' and 'greater men' on the post-dualistic side of evolution.  The men have dragged women into a masculine-biased lifestyle, but they have evolved apace at the same time, and thus exist on a higher level of post-dualistic evolution.  Because women are now effectively 'lesser men', it is expedient to treat them as men rather than to discriminate against them as women.  What it is not proper to do, however, is to treat the men, who are now effectively 'greater men', as if they were women, and so oblige them to share in a variety of traditional female responsibilities!  In truth, an inequality between the sexes still exists, the only difference being that it is not now the old gender-based inequality, in which women were women and men were men, but a completely new, post-dualistic inequality reserving to 'greater men' the right to take upon themselves tasks and responsibilities which, owing to their comparative physical or mental weakness, 'lesser men' would be insufficiently advanced or qualified to do.  The 'lesser man' who now plays a competent acoustic guitar in the manner of, say, Judi Collins or Joni Mitchell is dwarfed by the 'greater man' who plays a brilliant electric guitar like, say, John McLaughlin or Carlos Santana.  No equality of guitar-playing could ever exist between these two dissimilar masculine creatures, though masculine they both arguably are!

     There is, however, a reverse case to the downgrading of the husband in a domestic egalitarianism which results in his sharing feminine duties with his wife and, fundamentally, it is no less absurd, insofar as it entails the downgrading of women.  I refer to that aspect of sexual equality which results in women becoming freak athletes, whether as cricketers, footballers, long-distance runners, or whatever.  Now whilst I'm not altogether opposed to the concept of women in sport, there are certain sports which seem less to reflect evolutionary progress, where the emancipation of women is concerned, than simply to degrade women into types of 'lesser men' who are far below the 'lesser men' whose lifestyles reflect a spiritual bias.  Better for women to become the latter than the former, since evolution is tending towards the spiritual and thus away from the physical, as reflected, amongst other things, in contemporary sport.

     We are on difficult ground here, so I beg the reader's patience whilst I redefine my position, this time solely with regard to men.  We can omit the inverted comas here, for we are now dealing with the literal - namely the distinction between lesser and greater men, defining the former as physical and the latter as spiritual.  The fact is that, just as an introvert is morally superior to an extrovert, so a brain worker is morally superior to a muscle man or a manual labourer, since evolution tends towards a spiritual culmination.  A literary genius is thus a superior type of man to a sportsman, say, a cricketer or a footballer, no matter how accomplished the latter may happen to be.  The one uses brain power, the other muscle power.  The one is introverted, the other extroverted.  The one aspires towards the divine consummation of evolution, the other stems, in a manner of speaking, from the diabolic roots of life in the cosmos.  But the preponderance of sport over war in modern life does at least indicate that the lesser men are now generally behaving in a less evil, because more sublimated, competitive fashion than was formerly the case.  It is better that this lesser type of man should be a cricketer or a footballer than a swordsman or a spear thrower in a much more lethal form of competition - namely, gladiatorial contests or even war.

      Thus for men, competitive sport represents a degree of evolutionary progress which has to some extent sublimated evil along less violent and dangerous lines.  For women, on the other hand, competitive sport does not reflect such sublimation, but is simply something imposed upon them in response to the post-dualistic nature of the age.  Where, formerly, men were opposed to one another more violently, whether as soldiers or gladiators, they are now increasingly brought into opposition on terms which don't, as a rule, lead to bloodshed or loss of life, though injuries of one sort or another do of course frequently occur.  But women were never - or rarely - opposed to one another in war or gladiatorial combat, so one cannot regard their adoption of competitive sport as a form of moral progress.  Rather, it signifies a regression for them which is a consequence of their masculinization and the correlative tendency of men to treat or regard women as 'lesser men'.  Where, formerly, women were confined to maternal, domestic, and sexual roles, they are now free to play football or cricket or hockey in a competitive context.  Thus they become 'lesser men', but only in relation to men who were already lesser when compared with brain workers.  As 'lesser men' in this context they are decidedly inferior to those women whom we earlier discussed in terms of intellectual or spiritual predilections, since their masculinization is physical and therefore not strictly compatible with evolutionary progress.  Indeed, it could well be that women whose lifestyles are now spiritualized to the extent that they become 'lesser men' are superior to the actual lesser men whose lifestyles, in contrast, are predominantly physical and competitive.  For if the actual lesser men become 'greater men' in relation to the sports-playing 'lesser men' on the physical level, why shouldn't 'lesser men' on the spiritual level become 'greater men' when compared with the actual lesser men of sport?  The distinction between the physical and the spiritual should still hold true, regardless of gender.  For if a philosopher of genius is superior to a female novelist, how can the latter not be superior to a sportsman, whose emphasis is physical rather than spiritual?

     One is therefore unable to contend that all men, just because of their maleness, are, ipso facto, superior to all women.  There are men who are superior to other men, as spiritual to physical; there are women who are superior to other women, as spiritual to physical.  But there are certain types of women who are superior to lesser types of men, as spiritual to physical, and certain types of men who are superior to all women, regardless of how intelligent or intellectually accomplished some of the latter may happen to be!  The fact is that, much as a female intellectual can outshine lesser types of men, she can never outshine the greatest, who are always in the vanguard of evolutionary progress.  A Simone de Beauvoir is obliged to take second place to a Sartre, a Woolf to a Huxley, a Plaith to a Pound, a Weil to a de Chardin, a Gregory to a Yeats, and so on.  Here we come back to the inevitable gap along the post-dualistic spectrum which cannot be closed while women remain at least partly female.  Only with the post-Human Millennium will there be an absolute equality, and then only because all bodies will have been transcended in the artificially-supported and no-less artificially-sustained brains of the Supermen and nothing approximating to the feminine will accordingly remain.  And because the artificial contexts will necessarily impose a uniform psychology on the brains being supported, there will be no distinction whatsoever between male and female - everything having by then become supermasculine, in advanced spirituality.

     Hence the equality of the sexes that we superficially speak of, these days, is but a prelude to the complete overcoming of the feminine element in life, as essential to evolutionary progress.  To treat women as women would be an unfortunate anachronism in a world with post-dualistic aspirations.  We do not wish to be reminded of dualistic criteria, since our bias is towards the post-Human Millennium.  We are all the time becoming more introverted, and we desire that women should become more introverted or, at the very least, less extrovert as well.  They will always lag behind us on the human plane, but on the superhuman one there will be no distinctions.  Men will become Supermen and so, too, will women.  Sex will be transcended, for sex is specific to the body and the psychology which that body, be it male or female, imposes upon the mind.  An artificially-supported brain could only be masculine, never feminine!  It is precisely by overcoming the feminine that a true equality will exist - an equality of supermasculine Supermen.  We may have a long way to evolve before such equality comes to pass, but at least it is my belief that we are slowly tending towards it.

 

 

CONCERNING TRANSCENDENTALISM

 

Transcendentalism should not be confused with or mistaken for Buddhism or Hinduism or any other Asiatic religion.  On the contrary, the religion of the future will involve meditation, but that won't make it Buddhist or Hindu.  There can be no question of Transcendentalism being equated with any of those old religions.  For it will be superior to all traditional world religions, whether considered separately or taken together.  It will reflect a religious convergence from the Many to the One, and therefore could not be described as one of the old religions up-dated.  The Many - and they include Christianity (in all its various denominations), Mohammedanism, Shintoism, Judaism - must be transcended in the One, the one true world religion, which, unlike the many fundamentally false so-called world religions, will take humanity to the post-Human Millennium.  Religious evolution demands that Transcendentalism supersedes all so-called world religions, whatever their constitutions.  There can be no question of any of the old religions taking over from and supplanting the others.  All traditional faiths must be superseded as humanity moves in toto towards the ultimate world religion, based on meditation.

     What will especially distinguish Transcendentalism from the above-named religions, however, is the knowledge its devotees will have of mankind's position in relation to the post-Human Millennium and, beyond that, the heavenly Beyond at the transcendental culmination-point of all evolution.  A Transcendentalist will have an objective perspective of future evolutionary requirements, and will thus be absolved from the error of imagining that one can attain to God if only one meditates long and hard enough.  Having a theoretical foreknowledge of the post-Human Millennium, the Transcendentalist will have no illusions about the likelihood of his subsequently attaining to God if only he devotes himself to the task with sufficient determination, but will know that man is but a link in the evolutionary chain stretching from the stars to God, a link which fits in between the apes and the Supermen, and therefore not someone or something capable of personally achieving transcendence.  The Transcendentalist won't meditate with a view to attaining to God, but simply in the interests of spiritual expansion, so that he may experience a state of mind approximating, no matter how crudely or humbly initially, to the condition of transcendent spirit.  He will know that, hitherto, whether through paganism or Christianity, men have come together in religious buildings partly for sensual as well as spiritual reasons, and that now, virtually for the first time in history, their motive for coming together will be purely spiritual.  No longer will men sing or chant or inhale incense or partake of the Mass or pray or dance or listen to sermons.  All that will be a thing of the past!  Instead they will simply meditate, and, in meditating, they'll learn something of the peace and stillness of the transcendental Beyond.

     But they won't expect meditation to work miracles for them and literally take them to that Beyond.  They will know that, as men, they are subject to certain limitations which can never be transcended except in the post-Human Millennium, when human brains become artificially supported and sustained, and thus cease to be human.  For in the Millennium in question a more extensive, not to say intensive, spirituality will be possible, since the artificial supports will have freed the Supermen from the great majority of sensual or natural obligations to which men are perforce enslaved, including the obligations to eat, drink, defecate, urinate, copulate, and take exercise.  If, having an old brain as well as a new one, the Supermen still sleep, that will be a limitation of their particular stage of evolution.  But such a stage will have to be lived through, and presumably with the aid of synthetic stimulants like LSD, before the next and more advanced stage could get properly under way.  For, with the Superbeings, meditation will return, but on a much superior level than before.  Each Superbeing, or new-brain collectivization, will experience the maximum degree of meditation compatible with its more absolutist constitution ... as the ultimate earthly life-form, until, eventually, such meditation leads to transcendence and thus to the Spiritual Globes of the heavenly Beyond, the Beyond of Heaven per se.  Yet these Spiritual Globes won't be God, but only become the Omega Absolute when they have merged into one another, through a process of convergence throughout the Universe, and thereby established ultimate spiritual unity, in complete contrast to the divergent behaviour of the stars.

     All this and more the Transcendentalist will know, and so his religious sense will be radically different from a Buddhist's or a Hindu's.  Only Spiritual Globes attain to the Omega Absolute, while man must be content with attaining, in due process of evolution, to the Superman.  He won't be deceived on this issue and therefore have to approach meditation on the human level with the same fanaticism as a Buddhist set on attaining to the heavenly Beyond.  Yet, at the same time, he won't treat meditation frivolously either, as though the impossibility of literal transcendence on the human plane justified his doing so!  On the contrary, if to approximate to the ultimate heavenly condition in such a fashion is the best that can be done at a certain stage of evolution - technology being insufficiently advanced to establish a Millennium on the aforementioned post-human terms - then approximate one must, and therefore treat one's relatively humble endeavour with respect.  In due course, spirituality will be upgraded, as the Supermen carry-on from where men left off.  But everything must take its proper course.  Some form of religious orientation in a communal context will continue to be both morally desirable and socially necessary so long as there is intelligent life on earth, and the transcendental orientation of the next civilization will be no exception!  Man must pass through this ultimate phase of his evolution before the more advanced spirituality of the post-Human Millennium becomes either possible or desirable.

     Another distinction between the Transcendentalist and the oriental mystic which needs clarification is the complete absence of any reference to or identification with either the Ground (of all being) or the avatar who functions in an anthropomorphic role approximately equivalent to Christ.  The Ground in the East is basically equivalent to the Father in the West, to Allah in the Middle East, and to Jehovah in Israel.  In all probability, it is an abstraction from the central star of the Galaxy, thereby corresponding to the creative-force at the diabolic roots of the Universe.  Likewise, Allah and Jehovah correspond to that same force and are only intelligible within the context of dualistic religion, where a limited or transmuted degree of Creatorism reflects the egocentric balance between subconscious and superconscious minds, as the pagan and the transcendental form opposite poles of a dualistic reference-point whose axis is anthropomorphic.  Anthropomorphism, or the fusing together of pagan and transcendental within the context of a saviour, human and yet divine, transcendent and yet mundane, is also only intelligible within the context of traditional dualistic faiths, and would have to be excluded from Transcendentalism, with its post-dualistic bias.  Thus the Transcendentalist would not recognize a Buddha or a Mohammed or a Christ as God, but would know that anthropomorphism was a thing of the past.  Consequently he would not identify (except initially and provisionally) any teacher of the true world religion ... with God, but would know that, historically, he was the man who pointed humanity towards the post-Human Millennium by upholding meditation and showing them the true way to Heaven through successive evolutionary transformations.  A Transcendentalist would not worship the teacher of the true world religion - or what purports to be such and may well become such - the way a Christian worships Christ, or a Mohammedan Mohammed, or a Buddhist Buddha, but would simply acknowledge his teachings and follow his guidance.  And, in doing so, he would also turn away from the abstraction appertaining to the root creative and sustaining force of evolution, which, whether as Jehovah, Allah, the Ground, the Father, or whatever, could no longer be recognized, still less feared.  The omega orientation, on the contrary, would require all or most of one's attention, and it would entail a religion of love, not of love and hate, as with dualistic faiths, and certainly not of hate alone, as in pagan contexts.  Man would thus have no need of reference to the Creator, and neither would he acknowledge His 'Son' - the human avatar.

     Meditation, however, requires a specific building appropriate to a transcendental orientation.  It is no good one's imagining that, in the future, meditation can be carried out in a church, and that churches should therefore be converted into meditation centres.  As a rule, churches appertain to the dualistic stage of evolution with regard to their architectural characteristics, including the degree of materialism inherent in their overall construction.  Transcendentalism, by contrast, requires comparatively idealistic buildings suggestive of space and light, which should be constructed from synthetic materials.  Everything naturalistic and materialistic would have to be excluded from them in the interests of as transcendental an environment as possible.  For meditation carried out in a materialistic, brick-heavy building would be a lie, as would a Christian service taking place in a pagan temple.  Clearly, churches will have to be superseded by meditation centres when the transcendental civilization gets properly under way, the post-dualistic nature of which would require the removal of buildings connected, no matter how indirectly, with pagan precedent.

     Unlike dualistic civilization, the transcendental one would not encourage antiquarianism or conservationism, and thus preserve old buildings, whether pagan or Christian, virtually as a matter of historical course.  There would be no pride in the past or in anything stemming from the Alpha Absolute, but simply a post-dualistic orientation towards the Omega Absolute, which will only materialize, so to speak, in the future.  The emphasis would be on making the human world as transcendent as possible, and doing this will inevitably require the removal of everything pre-dating post-dualistic civilization, whether in terms of churches, castles, palaces, cathedrals, monasteries, or whatever.  There could be no question of that which is not post-dualistic being protected or admired when, eventually, the next civilization comes properly to pass!  Nostalgia for the historical past would constitute a grave heresy in a transcendental age!  The necessity of improving the world, of making it as transcendentally advanced as possible, will certainly preclude the preservation of traditional architectural styles and monuments - as, indeed, of traditional culture in general.  Transcendental man would stand to lose from an acquaintance with or allegiance to earlier institutions and customs.  He wouldn't wish to be reminded of such things, the sight of which could only detract from his omega-oriented aspirations.  Better that meditation centres flourish where once churches or temples or mosques or synagogues did.  Better that the spiritual convergence towards an Omega Point ... of absolute spiritual unity ... be reflected in one transcendental institution of world-wide uniformity.

     But it is evident that the old order could only be overcome through radical measures at some future date, when the ultimate revolution of apocalyptic transformation brings about the necessary boost to evolution which would not otherwise materialize.  The Last Judgement of Christian prophecy is somehow relevant to the modern world, though not in terms strictly compatible with Biblical teachings.  A world exclusively dedicated to the attainment of millennial transcendence would be one in which the Last Judgement lay in the distant past, when opposition to post-dualistic criteria still existed and had to be dealt with in appropriately judgemental terms.  Such a judgement, unfortunately, has still to come, since the world is by no means set directly on course for the post-Human Millennium at present.

     As for the Second Coming, it should be evident that he corresponds to the world teacher destined, at this crucial juncture in time, to set mankind on course for the transcendental civilization.  There is no question of such a teacher being universally accepted at present, though his teachings will have to take root in his or one country before eventually spreading abroad ... in the struggle to bring about universal Transcendentalism.  He won't promise the world any miraculous changes over the coming decades, or petition peoples to live in peace when they are patently divided into mutually hostile camps which are incapable of reconciliation and require, in consequence, to be sorted out on the basis of moral judgements and ideological transmutations.  He isn't so superficial as to imagine that evolution can progress without a revolutionary boost, nor so corrupt as to consider candour naive.  For he knows that only the victory of social progress over the old civilizations will clear the way for the transcendental civilization.  He is no false messiah preaching idealistic nonsense, but a realist teaching truth.  And he knows that such truth will have to wait a while yet for universal acknowledgement!

 

 

MUSICAL TRANSFORMATIONS

 

Today's world is a curious, even bizarre, mixture of the old and the new, the naturalistic and the synthetic.  It is very much a transitional age, an age in which progress away from dualism is becoming manifest in numerous different contexts, not least of all music.  We have grown so accustomed to the incongruities resulting from the co-existence of ancient and modern ... that we tend, in spite of ourselves, to take them for granted.  Take, for example, the distinction between symphony orchestras and rock groups, a distinction which reflects class differences as much as anything.  The orchestral performers, with their bow ties, black suits, acoustic instruments, scores, and conductor, obviously appertain to a very different musical world from the, for example, T-shirted, jean-wearing rock groups whose electric instruments would be capable of drowning out any orchestra in a competition designed to discover who could make the most noise or, at any rate, create the greater volume of decibels.  The orchestra clearly appertains to the bourgeois, semi-naturalistic world in which acoustic instruments are taken for granted, whereas the rock group is comparatively proletarian, given their electric instruments of a largely synthetic construction.  The two worlds exist side-by-side, occasionally overlapping but, for the most part, remaining distinct - the rock group preferring, as a rule, to evolve further and further away from classical musicians who, as often as not, remain tied to the nineteenth century, if not to several previous centuries.  How long, one wonders, can this paradoxical state-of-affairs continue?

     My guess is that it won't continue very much longer, since evolution cannot be reversed or impeded for ever!  The life-span of the symphony orchestra would seem to be drawing towards a close, although its final collapse may not be for several years yet - certainly not before the second-half of the new century.  Whatever happens between the capitalist West and the socialist East in the historical unfolding of our world over the coming decades, I cannot envisage symphony orchestras outlasting the twenty-first century.  Even today, with computers, rockets, colour televisions, laser beams, holographs, microchips, supersonic jets, and other such late twentieth- and/or early twenty-first century phenomena, the orchestra appears increasingly out-of-place, a sort of acoustic anachronism in an electronic age.  The bowing or blowing or banging of acoustic instruments contrasts sharply with the latest push-button techniques in the manipulation of the most up-to-date electronic instruments, and one cannot help but feel that whereas the latter are very much an integral part of modern life, the former resemble social dinosaurs in their remoteness from it!

     Naturally, works for symphony orchestra continue to be composed, but even the most avant-garde compositions are unlikely to be performed beyond the twenty-first century.  If these comparatively modern works outlast the orchestra, it will be because they have been recorded to disc or tape, and thus preserved for posterity.  The actual performance life-span of these works can only, in the face of evolutionary pressures, be short - far shorter, I would imagine, than the performance life-span enjoyed by the works of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach.  For as evolution progresses in the modern age, so it becomes ever quicker, and consequently the likelihood of Walton or Honegger or Prokofiev still being regularly performed well into the new century can only be increasingly remote.  This is one reason why a contemporary composer who makes the grade is quickly acknowledged with international success and recording fame, his music soon to take its place beside the 'immortal' recordings of a whole galaxy of illustrious predecessors.  A Tippett recording is already somehow part of the musical tradition, and Walton is now regarded as virtually one of the 'old masters', to be placed alongside the immortals.  Simply to have been recorded is confirmation of one's 'classic' status.  And, given the likelihood of the classical orchestra's impending demise, a delay in recording a modern composer could well prove fatal - depriving posterity of access to his works.

     But if orchestral concerts are unlikely to be an aspect of twenty-first-century life, the same must surely hold true of jazz concerts and, indeed, the recording of modern jazz.  The electric guitar may be a relatively new instrument, peculiar to the second-half of the twentieth century, but we need not expect it to outlive the symphony orchestra by a great many years, since it has already become part of a long musical tradition within the swiftly-evolving context of modern life.  Doubtless some form of electric music will continue to be composed and performed during the twenty-first century, but the instruments and instrumental combinations will probably change, as new tastes and evolutionary pressures dictate.  The possibility that modern jazz will merge with atonal electronic music, over the coming decades, cannot be ruled out, since the latter seems destined to supplant serious acoustic music and will doubtless undergo progressive modifications in the course of time.  Eventually all music should be composed on the highest possible evolutionary level, which means that even pop music will be transcended as society increasingly becomes more transcendentally sophisticated overall, not just within certain sections of the population.  Pop music, arguably the musical equivalent of socialist realism in art, may be necessary and even commendable in a transitional age like this, but it must eventually be eclipsed by a more spiritual music, equivalent to transcendentalism in art, if an ultimate civilization, classless and universal, is to come fully to pass.

     One reason why recordings of whatever type of music are beginning to supplant live performances ... is that they make for a superior means of listening to music, in which a perfect instrumental balance can be obtained at a volume suitable to oneself and in the comfort of one's home.  The use of headphones can further enhance one's appreciation of music by seeming to interiorize it, and one is of course free to select exactly the right recordings for one's particular taste or mood.  It may be that in improving the technical aspect of musical appreciation in this solitary fashion, one is obliged to forfeit the social advantages accruing to a public concert, in which a large audience comes to share the same enthusiasm, and, doubtless, studio recordings will never be able to match live concerts for atmosphere.  Yet, even then, the advantages of recorded music are too great to warrant serious criticism, and reflect the ongoing spiritualization of art through sublimated means of appreciation.  The fact that recordings tend, paradoxically, to undermine the musical necessity or validity of live performances, whether by orchestra or group, cannot be denied, and is a further reason why the latter will eventually die out.  When, exactly, the last public performance will be, I cannot of course say.  But a world tending ever more rapidly towards the post-Human Millennium, and thus towards the complete dominion of being over doing, won't require people to perform in public for ever.  Better that we should just sit still, in the comfort of our homes, and listen to the latest studio recordings at an appropriately transcendent remove from the actual recording session!

 

 

SAFEGUARDING FREEDOM

 

To discover whether the so-called Free World, by which is meant the West, is actually free, one must have an objective criterion by which to assess freedom.  One must know what freedom is and how it stands in relation to evolution.  One must eschew the relative in favour of the absolute, and by comparing what currently exists in the world, as a given system, with this desired absolute, one will see how free, if at all, that system really is.

     Evolution being a struggle from the Diabolic Alpha to the Divine Omega, from the raging stars in one absolute context ... to the eventual emergence of pure spirit in another, it must follow that freedom, in any ultimate sense, can only be interpreted as a freedom from the former and a dedication to the latter.  In other words, the freer a man is ... the less will he be under the influence or domination of the Diabolic, with its selfless naturalism.  Degrees of freedom can therefore be ascertained along an evolving spectrum ... from the ultimate negativity in stellar energy to the ultimate positivity in transcendent spirit.  How, then, does the 'Free World' stand up to the test of freedom, as defined above?

     To answer this question, one must understand what freedom usually means in the West.  Generally speaking, it means the freedom to worship as one chooses, to vote for one of a number of political alternatives, to exercise freedom of opinion, to buy and amass property of one's own, to conduct business in the interests of personal profit, to become an avant-garde artist, to read what one likes, to practise transcendental meditation, and so on.  These, I think, are most of the main or, at any rate, obvious freedoms normally found in Western society.  Let us now put them to the test, using our ethical criterion.

     The freedom to worship as one chooses is not really a manifestation of omega-oriented freedom, as we may call that which aspires towards pure spirit, but an example of alpha-stemming boundness.  To worship is either to worship God the Father or Jesus Christ.  In Christianity it is mostly to worship Christ, although the Father or, to give Him an alternative name, the Creator (Jehovah) ... is by no means ignored.  On the other hand, the Holy Spirit cannot be worshipped, for the simple reason that it is a state of blissful being to aspire towards, rather than an already-existent fact.  One can only worship what exists, either as a theological entity (Christ) or as an abstraction from cosmic reality (the Father), and to do this is to be bound to the Alpha Absolute, even if, as where Christ is concerned, there is an omega-oriented element involved.  With the Creator, however, there is no omega-oriented element at all, no transcendent spirituality, since this anthropomorphic deity appertains to the subconscious ... as an abstraction, in all likelihood, from the governing star of the Galaxy ... out of which both the lesser stars and the planets originally 'fell'.  To worship is therefore to be bound (to that star) rather than to be free (from it).

     To vote for one of a number of political alternatives, which is the next 'freedom' under consideration, isn't quite what it may at first appear, since in a capitalist democracy one of the parties concerned will always be more bound to aristocratic and/or bourgeois materialism than the others, which means that a vote for that party is, in effect, a vote for slavery to capitalist materialism to a greater extent than would be the case with liberal or left-wing parties, although they, too, are partly allied to such a materialism.  No, so long as there are parties with either aristocratic or bourgeois loyalties, the politics in question will be largely bound instead of free.  Freedom comes with an aspiration towards the supernatural, towards pure spirit, and although politics can never be conducted on strictly religious terms, nevertheless parties with allegiance to the proletariat, within a context of social democracy, will reflect a greater degree of political freedom, as a rule, than any others.

     As to the right to exercise freedom of opinion, this is partly tied-up with dualistic politics and religion, since appropriate to a stage of evolution when no absolute aspiration towards the divine omega is under way in post-dualistic terms.  It entails freedom to defend or champion what is bound to the sensual, the material, the diabolic, the galactic-world-order, and thus, in practice, can fall a long way short of truly free opinion, which will be aligned with a post-dualistic, omega-oriented system of beliefs.

     The 'freedom' to buy and amass property of one's own likewise entails loyalty to what stems from the Diabolic Alpha rather than to what aspires towards the Divine Omega, since private property emphasizes the individual, with his materialistic acquisitions, and is accordingly an aspect of a process at a sublimated remove from the possessive tendency of stars to amass either weaker stars (suns) or planets to themselves, as a matter of cosmic necessity.  To have one's own property is to be bound to materialism, like a star, and to amass additional property, whether large or small, is to extend the dominion of the materialistic in one's life at the expense of spiritual freedom.

     Likewise the 'freedom' to conduct business in the interests of personal profit enslaves one to materialism and makes the acquirement of profit an end-in-itself, quite divorced, it may transpire, from work satisfaction or quality of work or, indeed, the nature of the product itself.  Christ is reputed to have said that it was 'easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven', and that may well illustrate why, in the interests of spiritual freedom, it is better not to become bound to wealth.  Those who do so will never be free to any significant extent!

     On the other hand, the freedom to become an avant-garde artist reflects, in the main, a freedom from the sensual, apparent, concrete realm of artistic activity, and may well be indicative of an omega-oriented tendency compatible with evolutionary progress on the post-dualistic level.  Even when the object of this art is to discredit the external, natural world; even when, in other words, it is anti-natural rather than pro-transcendental, it connotes with evolutionary freedom from the natural-world-order to the extent that it attacks, distorts, and belittles whatever is bound to that order, whether human, animal, or vegetable, and thus indirectly assists in the re-orientation of the mind towards supernatural criteria.

     As to the freedom to read what one likes, this too can entail the study of books, magazines, papers, etc., which do in fact subscribe to anti-natural and/or pro-transcendental tendencies; although, unfortunately, it can also entail the study of traditional, reactionary, or anachronistic kinds of writings which bind one to what stems, in selfless aggression, from the diabolic roots of evolution, and thus preclude, for large numbers of less-informed people, true enlightenment.  A post-dualistic society, on the other hand, would only encourage the reading of books, magazines, etc., compatible with transcendental criteria, thus preventing the everywhichway cultural or intellectual confusions which arise in and necessarily appertain to liberal societies, with their atomic relativity.  Freed from the pernicious influence of writings bound, in one degree or another, to the Diabolic Alpha, the people would be enabled to acquire an exclusively omega-oriented education worthy of the highest civilization.

     Finally, the freedom to practise transcendental meditation in public halls, or wherever, is another aspect of Western life that, carried-on in the right non-mystical spirit, is conducive towards a freedom from the sensual realm and aspiration towards the spiritual one.  We need not doubt that this, too, should be encouraged in the future.

     Getting back to the question of whether the 'Free World' is really free and, if so, to what extent, we can now answer it by contending that in some contexts, not least of all the freedom to worship as one chooses, to vote for one of a number of alternative class parties, to amass property, and so on, the so-called Free World is really bound, in varying degrees, to the diabolic roots of evolution in the stars.  Whereas in certain other contexts, notably avant-garde art and transcendentalism, it is probably more free from those roots than anywhere else in the world, and accordingly reflects an aspiration, whether directly or indirectly, towards the divine consummation of evolution in the transcendental Beyond.  In all probability, the omega-oriented tendencies outweigh the alpha-stemming ones in a majority of Western countries these days.  But the continual existence of the latter provides adequate grounds, as I see it, for ideological opposition and their subsequent elimination, in the event of a truly moral society coming to pass.

 

 

PROTONS AND ELECTRONS

 

There are two kinds of antithesis, and they may be defined as relative and absolute.  The vast majority of antitheses are relative, though as evolution approaches the antithesis of the Alpha Absolute(s) in ... the Omega Absolute, we may note an approximation to or from the absolutes at either end, as it were, of the evolutionary spectrum.  Only the Alpha Absolute(s) ... of the stars and the projected Omega Absolute ... of undifferentiated transcendent spirit would constitute an absolute antithesis, however.  Such an antithesis is absolute in every sense, there being no point of contact or similarity between the two extremes of evolution.  On the other hand, a relative antithesis, such as exists between stars and planets, or men and women, presupposes points of contact, and may be likened to the North and South poles of a magnet - the unlike poles of which attract, while the like poles repel.  Those poles which are opposites are yet similar to the extent that they are both comprised of the metallic substance of the magnet, and accordingly form a relative rather than an absolute antithesis.

     Such an antithesis we may note at the basis of the Solar System and, on a larger scale, of the Galaxy.  There is a kind of magnetic reciprocity between the sun and circling planets of the Solar System formed by the relative contrast between the negative, i.e. active, charge of the sun, in which, according with the principles of a proton-proton reaction, hydrogen is transformed into helium, and the positive, i.e. passive, charge at the core of this planet, which is gradually cooling.  The sun's core would therefore be radically different from the earth's, and I wager that while the one is hard, the other is soft, and this contrary to traditional notions on the subject!  Indeed, in describing the sun as possessing a negative charge and in equating that with the active, I have already reversed the traditional notions as to what constitutes a negative charge, and this reversal, corresponding to a Nietzschean 'transvaluation of all values', is at the core of my philosophical endeavour, and may be traced back to the essay 'The Negative Root' from BETWEEN TRUTH AND ILLUSION - my first step in this revolutionary direction.

     The sun, then, generates energy from deep within its tightly-packed proton core, and is thus active, whereas the earth has a soft core which feeds upon the surrounding hardness of its outer layers and is thus dependent on those layers for sustenance, i.e. the continuation of its existence.  This distinction between an independent hard-core sun and a dependent soft-core planet is fundamental to the mechanistic workings of the Solar System, which function in the guise of a magnetic reciprocity - the hard core of the sun attracting the planet's soft core to itself but having to contend, in the process, with the attractive forces of other suns (stars), which establish a dynamic equilibrium between suns and planets, after the manner of an atomic integrity involving protons and electrons.

     Here, of course, the equation of the sun's hard core with protons gives the lie to the traditional notion of protons as positive and electrons, by contrast, as negative.  For any 'transvaluation of values' applying to the macrocosm must also apply to the microcosm, since the inner workings of the latter are at the base, so to speak, of the solar and indeed galactic orders, which would not exist at all were they not derived from a microcosmic blue-print in the atom.  Admittedly, it may have been acknowledged that protons were active and electrons passive, but activity is not, contrary to traditional belief, a positive phenomenon.  On the contrary, it is only passivity which is positive and the more passive ... the more positive is it.  That is why only a planet, as a place with a positive core, could be used as a base from which to launch an aspiration, in the form of mankind, towards a condition of ultimate passivity in the heavenly Beyond (of transcendent spirit).  No star could be so used, for stars are the very converse of such an aspiration, because the diabolic active roots of the Universe.

     No, if the sun is a negative phenomenon, corresponding to the proton of an atom, then the planets must be positive phenomena corresponding to electrons, the overall integrity of the Solar System corresponding to the interactions of an atom, and the still greater integrity of the Galaxy corresponding to a cluster of atoms forming a kind of molecular structure.  This structure, kept in dynamic equilibrium by the relatively antithetical constitutions of stars and planets, only exists by dint of the common will of stars for dominion over planets.  For without planets to keep them in equilibrium, the stars would fly-out in every direction, in accordance with the divergent inclinations of a negative charge, through anarchic revolt against the dominating influence of the governing star of the Galaxy, which probably exerts a greater attraction over the planets of whichever solar system than any of the smaller stars considered either separately or taken together.  Thus arises the paradoxical situation in which like are kept in the vicinity (a galaxy) of like because of their mutual interest in the dominion of planets - phenomena which have the effect of preventing the stars from breaking away.

     When this pattern is repeated on earth, as it must be whenever evolution is insufficiently advanced to warrant an exclusive aspiration towards the Divine Omega, we get what I have termed the galactic-world-order, in which a monarch, as personification on earth of the governing star of the Galaxy, lords it over both nobles, who correspond to the lesser stars of the Galaxy, and populace, who of course correspond to the planets.  The nobles and monarch are fundamentally akin, and would tend away from one another were it not for their mutual interest in the domination of the populace for their own aggrandisement, an interest which constrains nobles to an oath of allegiance to the throne.  Naturally, the populace are also bound by loyalty to the throne, but their allegiance is of a very different order from that of the nobility, who, after all, stand to gain a share of the spoils.  The allegiance of the populace more resembles the submission of slaves to the will of the conqueror, and we may infer from the term 'subject' the subjection of such slaves to monarchical dominion, a subjection which entails an indirect rather than a direct allegiance to the throne.  Only those who are fundamentally 'of the same stuff' as the monarch are entitled to a direct oath of allegiance, and this applies no less to a constitutional monarchy than to an authoritarian one - the only difference being that the sphere of direct allegiance is widened, though not necessarily deepened, by the admission of the parliamentary bourgeoisie, who have partly taken over the traditional preserve of the aristocracy.

     The relationship of peer and/or parliamentarian to the populace of his particular sphere of geographical influence thereby comes to resemble the relationship of sun to planets in a solar system, and is thus atomic.  While the wider relationship of monarch to peers, parliamentarians, and populace as a whole comes to resemble the galactic order in being molecular, or composed of separate atoms which interact and are obliged to remain in place by the stronger attractive power of the governing proton - namely, the monarch.  Since a star is negative, and therefore active, it may be described as of essentially feminine constitution, and never is the galactic-world-order so faithfully reproduced on earth than when the reigning monarch happens to be a woman, as was usually the case in more primitive societies, given their greater disposition to violence.  Then the pomp and ceremony essential to maintaining the cohesion of nobles, politicians, and populace to the monarchy was reinforced by the charismatic power of the reigning queen.

     I do not wish to go into the distinction between monarch, nobles, and populace to any extent, though I should remark that the antithesis formed between the personifications on earth of the stars of the Galaxy and the populace itself is relative rather than absolute - there being various points of contact, not least of all in the common structure and substance of the human body.  That the monarch rules by 'divine right' isn't, however, strictly true, although there is a sense in which it could be said that he/she does rule by 'diabolic right', which is to say, as the personification on earth of the governing star of the Galaxy, and therefore according to the principles of the galactic-world-order.  He/she functions in the guise of an arch-devil.  For even if the governing star of the Galaxy isn't literally the Devil it corresponds to the diabolic roots of evolution in the Universe and is therefore antithetical, in an absolute way, to the future divine culmination of evolution there.  In truth, the Creator is an abstraction from this governing star and consequently appertains to the subconscious mind, a mind, however, which is being outgrown, as modern man tends ever more deeply into the superconscious, expanding consciousness upwards rather than remaining a victim of the Given.  The monarch is therefore the nearest person on earth to that abstraction, since he/she functions in the role of the governing star vis-à-vis society in general.  Compared with the monarch, the various grades of nobles, from a duke down, correspond to petty devils, having status positions relative to the lesser stars of the Galaxy.  Reversing this correspondence, one might well argue that our sun is but a baron-equivalent in the overall hierarchy of the Galaxy, being but a small peripheral star of only moderate power.  A duke-equivalent would be much larger and, needless to say, would stand closer, as it were, to the governing star of the Galaxy than a mere baron-equivalent.  The Solar System of this important star would doubtless be somewhat larger and more imposing than that pertaining to a star like our own.

     But, cosmic speculation aside, we can say for certain that the twentieth century signified a turning-point in the evolution of man in which, for virtually the first time in history, the galactic-world-order was completely overthrown in a number of countries, in order that he could be set on course for a post-atomic society tending, eventually, towards the Divine Omega in conscious transcendentalism.  The example of Eastern Europe stands as a lesson to those countries which have retained some form of monarchical allegiance.  The atom has been split, but that is merely a prelude to splitting one part of humanity, corresponding to electrons, from the clutches of another, corresponding to protons, in the interests of evolutionary progress towards an exclusively omega-oriented (divine) society.

     Of course, I have described the workings of the Solar System and the Galaxy in rather Newtonian terms in these pages, stressing the force-and-mass aspect of magnetic reciprocities in preference to the curved-space notion of latter-day quasi-mystical physics, and I am fully aware that many educated persons would strongly object to this, considering me mistaken and hopelessly anachronistic.  After all, it is in our interests to regard the workings of the Cosmos from a quasi-mystical point-of-view, which is a good deal more comforting than to dig deeply into its basic diabolism and unearth findings not guaranteed to flatter our transcendental bias or reassure us that we live in a good universe.  Yes, I know the position well enough!  But I also know it is important that some people, broadly regarded as philosophers, should commit themselves to a more literal investigation of the Cosmos, the better to understand how it really works.  For unless they do, the truth of evolutionary progress will be obscured beneath the 'theological' expedience of scientific subjectivity, and no truly objective knowledge of the Universe will be accessible to us, a knowledge which a small number of higher minds should be able to live with ... no matter how much the spiritual progress of the age may demand a subjective interpretation of the physical cosmos, such as corresponds to our superconscious bias and reflects our growing allegiance to internal as opposed to external reality.  The literal truth of the workings of the Cosmos and of the relations between planets and stars would seem to be very different from what the curved-space mysticism of Einstein would have us believe!  But the truth concerning the external cosmos isn't necessarily what an age tending towards the post-atomic absolute should want to uphold.  Rather, it will increasingly view life in terms of the freedom of electrons from proton control - not their dependence upon them!

 

 

TWO KINDS OF DEPENDENCE

 

It is often said that we live in a woman's world, not least of all by men.  Yet, despite appearances to the contrary, this is basically untrue, because the world has a positive base in its soft core which makes for an evolutionary tendency towards the Divine Omega, and thus towards a transcendental society.  Women are rather like strangers in the world - visitors from the sun or any nearby star.  For, like the sun, they have a hard core and a relatively soft or urbane exterior, whereas men are effectively hard outside but essentially soft inside, more disposed to leniency and compassion than the so-called fair sex.

     Since women resemble the sun, it is perhaps natural that they should generally be more heliotropic than men, and this can, I think, be borne out by the greater importance they attach to sunbathing and to acquiring a suntan.  Sensing an affinity between femininity and the sun, women draw sustenance, both physically and psychologically, from its rays, which they often soak-up for hours on-end, lying perfectly still and availing themselves of the sensuality imparted by the sun's rays to sink into their subconscious mind, like animals, and doze or daydream, unconsciously or perhaps even consciously transmitting signals to nearby males.  In this context they reflect a sort of stemming from the diabolic roots of life, and are almost as far removed from an aspiration towards the divine consummation of evolution, in transcendence, as any animal or plant.  Communion with the sun is for many women a form of religion, though, unbeknown to themselves, it is the lowest form - a kind of devil worship!

     Like the sun, women have a tendency to contract and diverge rather than, like men, to expand and converge - the former tendency existing on the physical level, the latter on the spiritual one.  Were it not for the fact that men are attracted to them, we may assume that most women would remain solitary and independent for life, scorning one another but making no real attempt to acquire male company, either.  They do of course obtain male company in a majority of cases, but this is usually because their urbane appearance has attracted a man who has expressed a dependence on them.  Such dependence is akin to that of a planet upon a star, and will continue to be the norm for as long as an atomic integrity holds good between proton equivalents and electron equivalents, viz. females and males.  Once evolution reaches the stage where the atom can be split and mankind sundered, once and for all, from the galactic-world-order, however, then it is highly probable that men will emerge who'll be independent of women, going their own omega-oriented way either in homosexuality or, preferably, celibacy, with or without pornographic stimuli.  Of course, evolution also affects women; for if it didn't it is doubtful that we would have the Women's Liberation Movement and other aspects of evolutionary progress which, to some extent, have the effect of 'masculinizing' women, and thus causing them to behave, in varying degrees, more like men.  Where, formerly, it was the case that men were dependent on women, just as society was dependent on monarchical government, so, with the transformation to post-atomic freedom, men duly become independent of them, just as society becomes independent of monarchical control.  Women, however, correspondingly become more dependent on men, though not so much in a sensual as in an intellectual or a spiritual sense.

     Here we have slightly returned to the theme of the previous essay, in which the enslavement of the populace to the nobility was stressed at the expense of the reverse situation - namely, that of the dependence of the populace upon the nobility during a given phase of evolutionary development.  Since I was emphasizing the absolute at the expense of the relative there, I should now remark that, as the relative preponderates in life, so a paradoxical situation is the norm.  For, indeed, both aspects of the noble/populace antithesis to some extent apply.  The nobility do enslave the populace, much as stars enslave planets, but so too, at this comparatively early stage of human evolution, do people in general show themselves to be dependent upon a monarchical government, since insufficiently advanced, in artificial terms, to be capable of an independent, self-willed, socialist destiny.  Only when evolution has arrived at a more advanced stage, in which people are for the most part isolated from nature in their giant cities, can their dependence on monarchical government be broken and the emphasis accordingly be placed on freeing them from autocratic control or tyranny, as though only those factors had played a part in the traditional relationship of nobles to populace!  The truth is of course rather different, but it wouldn't flatter the masses to say so!  Neither would the average man be flattered to learn that he was only dependent on women because insufficiently advanced to be capable of an independent, post-atomic lifestyle.  Better for him to believe that women were dependent on men, even though their basic behaviour and attitudes would hardly substantiate such a belief!

     The fact that men have been dependent on women for thousands of years is no fault of men, any more than it is the fault of planets that they have been dependent on stars.  Evolution proceeds from the natural to the supernatural very slowly, and while nature dominates human affairs ... the atomic integrity of the galactic-world-order will continue to prevail.  Women will function as protons and men, by contrast, as electrons - the latter dependent on and revolving around the former.  The man will say that he lives for his family, and the woman will believe him.  Only when evolution progresses to a point where the artificial predominates over the natural will a situation arise in which the man - assuming he has a wife and children at all - will say he lives for his work or the cause, whether political or religious.  To live for something greater than himself rather than for someone lesser than himself ... is the distinction between the free man and the bound man, and it will correspond to the splitting of the atom in a post-atomic society, whereby electrons are severed from their proton control.  The inceptive stages of this tendency are already manifest in the contemporary West, where the frequency of divorce is testifying to a disruption of traditional marital fidelity, and where wives as well as husbands are obliged to take regular employment, a fact which, logically enough, results in small rather than large families.  And wisely, since the minimum commitment to propagation ensures a greater freedom for both husbands and wives from the atomic integrity of long-term parental responsibility.  Given the much-improved ratio of infant survival over infant mortality these days, there is no real necessity for large families anyway.  A child or two from most couples will maintain and possibly even increase the birth-rate level, while leaving the woman relatively free to conduct her life along quasi-electron, as opposed to traditional proton, channels.  Eventually, however, the further development of post-atomic tendencies will lead to the supersession of marriage by a much freer interaction between men and women, compatible with their higher status in conformity to electron principles.  A long-term relationship between specific couples in such a free society would not only be anachronistic ... but morally reprehensible, since indicative of a regression to dualistic criteria.  Reproduction would, for the most part, be taken care of artificially, which is to say, with the aid of sperm banks, test tubes, incubators, and so on, while relationships between the sexes would be increasingly spiritual rather than, as before, predominantly physical.  Functioning as quasi-electrons, the women would be intellectually and/or spiritually dependent on men, while the men, as free electrons, would be physically independent of women.  Such a society is not as far off as it may now seem!

 

 

MATERIALISTS AND SPIRITUALISTS

 

The distinction between materialists and spiritualists is an age-old reality which stems, in large measure, from the fundamental dichotomy in the Galaxy between stars and planets, the relatively antithetical constitutions of which give rise to a magnetic reciprocity responsible for maintaining the orbital integrity of the Galaxy as a whole - as, indeed, the entire universe of galaxies of which this one is but an infinitesimal part.  On the microcosmic plane this same distinction is to be found in the relatively antithetical constitutions of protons as negative charges and electrons as positive charges - the former active and the latter passive, though galvanized into action by the competing attractive powers of the nearest protons.  On the human plane, the distinction between active materialists and passive spiritualists has traditionally manifested itself in the relatively antithetical constitution of women and men, the women constraining the men to themselves, after the fashion of stars or protons, and galvanizing them into action on their behalf, i.e. as fathers to their family, the children of which resemble tiny protons, or neutrons, in that they revolve around the mother much the way that a tiny extinct sun, such as the moon, revolves around the earth.  However, I have elsewhere sought to demonstrate that as evolution progresses towards a predominantly artificial phase, the atomic integrity of the traditional family unit is gradually undermined until, with the dawn of post-dualistic civilization ... following a sudden revolutionary break with tradition which resembles the splitting of the atom, the electron equivalents are set free of proton constraint and the former proton equivalents are themselves electronized, functioning, thenceforth, in the guise of quasi-electrons.  The spiritualistic world predominates over the materialistic one at that juncture in time by quite a considerable margin!

     The aforementioned atomic distinction, however, between female and male on the family plane may be equated with the human microcosm, whilst a similar distinction between politicians and priests or scientists and artists will pertain to the human macrocosm, i.e. to society as opposed to the family, society itself coming to resemble a galaxy in that it is composed, on the independent level, of numerous proton-dominated atoms and, on the dependent level, of various professional interests and contributions, some of which resemble protons, others electrons, but all of which are subject to evolutionary pressures and may therefore undergo gender changes corresponding to the transformation, on the microcosmic plane, from closed atomic families to open post-atomic promiscuity.

     Thus it can happen that a traditional proton profession, such as politics when patterned after the galactic-world-order, will acquire a sex change, so to speak, and become a quasi-electron opposing the proton political order in the interests of evolutionary progress.  Hence socialist politicians, although nominally materialists, function in the guise of what may be called 'lesser spiritualists' in opposition, in such a transitional age as this, to the materialistic politicians per se, though on a lower level, needless to say, than genuine spiritualists, including latter-day gurus.  Likewise, in science, a sex change corresponding to the progress of electron freedom over proton determinism ensures that quasi-electron scientists, who function in the guise of 'lesser spiritualists', oppose the materialism of traditional science in deference, amongst other things, to the higher spirituality of avant-garde artists, who are their spiritual peers.  As quasi-electrons, revolutionary politicians and scientists oppose proton determinism and thus behave like spiritualists, which, however, they can never be in an authentic or genuine sense, seeing that their professions are largely governed by materialistic considerations.  And just so for so-called liberated women who, in this transitional age, are by no means absolved from certain traditional female duties and responsibilities!  Only with the advent of post-atomic civilization would the lifestyles of quasi-electron equivalents be radically influenced by electron freedoms - a situation which today applies neither to the bourgeois West nor to the proletarian East, the former being insufficiently civilized and the latter not really civilized at all, despite the considerable changes for the better which have come to pass since the eclipse of Soviet Communism by Social Democracy.  Consequently, in the East artists and priests have traditionally had a comparatively raw deal.

     The distinction between materialists and spiritualists does not of course only apply to politicians and priests or to scientists and artists, nor indeed to proton politicians and quasi-electron politicians, proton scientists and quasi-electron scientists, the former of whom will be more indebted to Newton than to Einstein.  It applies equally well within the profession of art, where social realists align themselves with the quasi-electron level of socialist politicians and produce a materialistic art of superior quality to traditional materialists, but necessarily inferior to the genuine spirituality of the free-electron, or avant-garde, artists.  Likewise, a similar distinction exists in literature between writers, on the one hand, under quasi-electron materialistic domination, like Koestler and Sartre, and free-electron spiritualists, on the other hand, like Huxley and Camus.  And, of course, in the religious profession we will generally find the distinction between priests and gurus to be one between electrons under proton dominion (the Creator), and electrons free of such a dominion.  A decadent civilization may produce either bound- or free-electron equivalents, depending to a large extent on the bent of the artist - the distinction between Sartre and Camus, in France, being adequate confirmation of this fact, even though Sartre wasn't particularly bound to quasi-electron politics and Camus wasn't a particularly radical free-electron equivalent.  No doubt, this distinction between the two writers goes some way towards explaining their differences of political opinion and concomitant professional antagonism!

     A post-dualistic civilization, however, could only produce free-electron artists, since religion and art take considerable precedence over politics and science with the advent of such a high degree of civilization as would be achieved on the post-atomic plane.  In a post-atomic barbarous society, on the other hand, art and religion can only be bound to politics and science, since a new state has come to replace the old one and officially outlawed the religion appertaining to it without, however, creating a new religion to replace what went before.  In such a society - and the Soviet Union was the classic example - the artist must necessarily be bound to the quasi-electron materialism of the politician and accordingly produce some kind of socialist realism.  The free-electron artist, to the extent that he exists at all, can only be unofficial and, hence, taboo.  His spiritualistic bias is incompatible with a barbarous state integrity, which derives, through Marx, from the teachings of Lenin.  Only with the coming of Social Democracy, and thus an end to 'scientific communism', will this artist be able to come into the open - to 'come out' - and join the crusade of those who wish to see a genuinely free-electron society come to pass, in which the spirit is freed from all proton constraint and enabled to achieve full self-realization in the name of that greater being which is the 'Kingdom of Heaven'.

 

 

PART THREE: DIALOGUES

 

A CHANGING WORLD

 

DONALD: I have always been puzzled by the uncertainty that exists - and has long existed - in philosophical circles about the extent to which external reality is actually there, outside ourselves, and the extent to which our appreciation of it is conditioned by consciousness - in other words, about the extent to which objective reality is really objective and not partly a creation of our subjective minds.

MATTHEW: You have good reason to be puzzled about this matter, since it isn't one that permits of a straightforward, eternally unchangeable answer.  Rather, one has to answer it provisionally by saying that the respective ingredients in the determination of objective/subjective reality will vary according to the evolutionary position of the psyche in any given age, so that no fixed ratio of objective to subjective is possible.

DONALD: You therefore agree that our awareness of the external world is partly conditioned by consciousness.

MATTHEW: Of course!  Reality isn't just 'out there'.  It is also in the mind, and consequently external reality depends, to a certain extent, on the applicability of this mind for its elucidation - as, indeed, philosophers have known for quite some time!  And not only philosophers but also scientists, who, like Konrad Lorenz, would never dream of completely detaching external reality from the internal world.

DONALD: Yet the doubt apparently lies with the extent to which the one conditions or is conditioned by the other?

MATTHEW: Yes, and not altogether surprisingly since, as already remarked, the extent varies from age to age, as from individual to individual.  Let me attempt to clarify this point by dividing the history of the human psyche into three distinct stages, viz. a pre-dualistic, a dualistic, and a post-dualistic.  The psyche, it should be remembered, is divisible into a subconscious and a superconscious mind, with consciousness being the product of a fusion of these two minds in the ego, or in-between realm of the psyche.  If you accept this proposition, we can continue.

DONALD: I think I can accept it.

MATTHEW: Good!  Now the first, or pre-dualistic stage will be one in which the subconscious predominates over the superconscious in the ratio of approximately 3:1, since at that juncture in time man is dominated by nature and insufficiently civilized, in consequence, to lead an independent spiritual existence beyond it.  The ego, or conscious mind, of pagan man will therefore be relatively dark, as befits the psychic ratio just described, and, accordingly, the ratio of the external objective world to the internal subjective one will also be in the region of 3:1, which is to say, his consciousness of the external world will be very little affected by internal subjective reality, since that reality will be insufficiently evolved to colour or condition it to any significant extent.  Rather, the subconsciously-oriented objective psyche will cause him to invest nature with hidden and usually malevolent powers, including demons.  But the external world will appear to him basically as it is - a materialistic world at no great remove from himself.

DONALD: Hence we get animism or pantheism at this primitive stage of evolution?

MATTHEW: Precisely!  But the next, or dualistic, stage reflects a psyche more-or-less balanced between the subconscious and the superconscious, in which consciousness comes to reflect a kind of twilight state and, by dint of environmental progress away from nature, man is in a position to distinguish between the mundane world and a transcendent one separate from it, which he invests with supernatural and usually benevolent powers, including angels.  Now because the ratio of subconscious to superconscious mind is approximately 2:2, it follows that the external objective world will be conditioned by the internal subjective one to a greater extent than formerly, so that man inclines to distinguish himself from nature (to the extent that he previously identified with it) and thereby ceases to fear it.

DONALD: Thus the demons or whatever that formerly infested nature are transformed into angels and other benevolent powers who belong to a separate transcendent realm, as determined by the growth of superconscious mind?

MATTHEW: Yes, though not entirely!  For some malevolent powers are still associated with nature, in accordance with the dualistic criteria of this stage of partly subjective psychic evolution.  But, fortunately, human progress in the face of nature eventually leads to a situation, such as we find today, in which the superconscious is getting the upper-hand over the subconscious and a psychic ratio emerges which is the converse of the pre-dualistic one.  In this post-dualistic age, the ego of transcendental man is relatively light, reflecting three times as much superconscious as subconscious influence, and so the external world is accordingly coloured by the internal one to a greater extent than ever before, which makes for a complete reversal of pagan criteria in an assessment of nature and matter in terms of the transcendent rather than the mundane, the divine rather than the diabolic.  Indeed, we cannot now speak of an external objective world and of an internal objective one, as formerly, but are obliged to reverse the qualities of these worlds in response to the superconsciously-biased subjective nature of the modern psyche.  Hence it is the external world that becomes subjective and the internal one that is seen to represent the higher, truer reality of the spirit.  What we see outside ourselves is conditioned by our transcendent psyche to a greater extent than ever before, becoming, in the course of time, but pale abstractions of palpable materiality, which are to be explained away in terms of mystical generalizations stemming from our internal subjectivity.  For instead of being brute matter now, nature must conform to our spiritual bias and display a similarly-biased constitution.  To make it do this or, at any rate, appear to do this ... we invent machines like the Bubble Chamber and ideas such as the quantum theory, which goad nature into conforming, seemingly, to our wishes.  A people without a spiritual bias would never have got around to it.  But we impose our bias on the external world as a matter of course, quite happy to deceive ourselves as to its actual nature.  Thus from being a reality to which our ancestors applied idealistic theories involving demons and evil spirits, nature has become a repository for an idealism abstracted from the higher reality of our superconsciously-biased psyche.  Where, formerly, we abstracted from materialistic objectivity, we now abstract from spiritualistic subjectivity, and accordingly bend nature to our desires.  To speak of an objective internal world now would be an anachronism or, at best, a partial truth applying to that part of the psyche which conforms to the subconscious.  Consequently there is no justification for our using the expression 'objective' vis-à-vis the internal world.  For now it is the external, traditionally objective world which becomes subjective reality for us, and it does so because the subjective reality of the post-egocentric psyche stands to it in the ratio of approximately 3:1, making our interpretations of it correspondingly biased on the side of internal subjective reality, which is to say, on the side of mysticism ... with a spiritualistic integrity.  It is as though, at some propitious future occasion, matter will dissolve altogether if only we stare at it long enough from our superconsciously-biased psyche.  But, in reality, matter hasn't changed one iota since our distant ancestors encountered it under pressure of subconscious, objective domination and invested it with demonic powers.  Only we have changed and so drawn away from it, in accordance with evolutionary progress.

DONALD: This is incredible!  Are you really saying that the external world isn't literally what our foremost scientists would have us believe?

MATTHEW: Absolutely!  And I am saying this in camera, to the chosen few who can be trusted to appreciate and respect the fact.  Not for a moment would I wish things to be any different - don't think otherwise!  But I am too much a man of truth to be wholly satisfied with the relative 'truths' of scientific idealism.  I can now see why they should exist and am thus in a better position to uphold them.  For it is no good imagining that a return can be made to scientific realism in the objective spirit of Newtonian man.  The age necessarily belongs to Einstein and must continue to do so in the future, whatever the extremism of scientific subjectivity may happen to be and, needless to say, irrespective of any Marxist materialist opposition in the short term.  For the psyche cannot now be expected to regress to a predominantly objective status, but must continue to grow ever more subjective as the superconscious is developed further.

DONALD: And thus we must oppose purely materialist interpretations of the external world which, though literal, are obsolescent from a transcendent standpoint?

MATTHEW: Indeed, and which, if upheld, would constitute a grave obstacle to our spiritual aspirations.  But, of course, such materialistic interpretations can only be upheld in a materialist state where, under Marxist-Leninist influence, transcendentalism is supposed not to exist.  Hence in the former Soviet Union, traditionally, it wasn't so much curved space ... as force and mass that explained the workings of the Solar System from an orthodox, or Newtonian, point-of-view.  Perfectly correct, of course, from an objective angle, but on a lower evolutionary plane than the Einsteinian subjectivity which was to characterize Western science in the twentieth century.  Yet such subjectivity is only relevant to a society that to some extent acknowledges transcendentalism, not to one that outlaws it.  In other words, such subjectivity is relevant to civilization, which is politics plus religion, not just politics!  More specifically, it is relevant to the transitional (dualistic/post-dualistic) civilization which the leading Western countries, including America and Germany, signify.  That there will be a final, or post-dualistic, civilization in the future, I haven't the slightest doubt, and when it comes you can be certain that scientific subjectivity will be pushed to the limit, as it abstracts from the higher subjectivity of the transcendent psyche.  We haven't seen the last of materialistic idealism yet, believe me!

DONALD: But, presumably, we have seen the last of spiritualistic idealism, the religious idealism of our ancestors, who were under subconscious domination to an extent which made religious realism impossible.

MATTHEW: Yes, there can't be too many people left in the more-advanced parts of the world, these days, who believe everything recorded in the Bible, even though the Bible still officially prevails in the West.  What might be defined as lower mysticism, in which objective interpretations of and abstractions from external reality apply, is increasingly being superseded by the higher, subjective mysticism which has conditioned the findings of modern science.  Religious objectivity isn't particularly influential in intellectual circles these days, whether scientific or literary.

DONALD: So you don't subscribe to the Fall of Man, which is essentially a pagan concept?

MATTHEW: No, although I do respect the doctrine of Original Sin, which is a Christian one.  The Fall of Man, however, could only apply to a pre-dualistic context, in which a guilt complex exists as a consequence of the development from animal to man which evolutionary progress imposed upon man in the face of nature.  With the advent of man, the close identification with nature, peculiar to the animal world, is lost, and so the distinction he then feels between nature and himself is interpreted as a fall - it being remembered that, at such an early stage of psychic evolution, the subconscious predominates ... with its naturalistic affiliation.  To have fallen out of nature's bosom is regarded as more of a curse than a blessing, since pagan man lacked an evolutionary sense corresponding to the transcendent and, in consequence, could only regard his fate in terms of his immediate circumstances.  Only with the advent of dualism was it possible for man to look towards the transcendent for his (future) salvation, rather than simply to regret that he had fallen out of nature.  And in an incipiently post-dualistic age it should be obvious that man is on the rise towards the supernatural and therefore towards his transformation, in due course, into the Superman, as a life form one stage closer than man to the ultimate Oneness of the heavenly Beyond.

DONALD: And what of Original Sin?

MATTHEW: That is destined to be left behind with the future transformation of man.  Not that I adopt an orthodox attitude to it, as if one should avoid sexual contact altogether.  For, after all, it is only through sexual contact, resulting in propagation, that mankind survives and thereby evolves towards Heaven.  If now, as formerly, sex is essentially an evil or sensual phenomenon it is nevertheless a necessary evil which has to be endured for the sake, above all, of evolutionary continuity.  Life abounds in such necessary evils, and while the odd individual here and there is entitled, in his capacity of saint, to rebel against them to the extent he can, the majority of people must bow to them in the interests of survival.  These days, however, the justification for sainthood is more fragile than at any former time in the history of civilized man.  For whereas the majority of Christian saints firmly believed they would be rewarded for their mundane hardships in a transcendent afterlife, living as we do, in a more-advanced age, we lack this incentive and can only take a more realistic, down-to-earth attitude to salvation in consequence.  Like it or not, salvation will only come about with spiritual transcendence at some more fortunate future age, not happen following death.  And knowing this, we would be extremely foolish to starve ourselves of sensual needs for the mere sake of starvation.  The Christian saints were at least wise enough to starve themselves or, more correctly, eat only the most frugal meals ... for an ulterior purpose, which is something we oughtn't to forget!  They may have been deluded to expect a posthumous salvation, but at least they acted in accordance with the logic of their times.

DONALD: Which is also, I believe, the official logic of the contemporary Christian West or, at any rate, of Christian officialdom in the West.

MATTHEW: Yes, up to a point.  But, as I said before, it is only the unofficial logic which is truly contemporary and which, in infiltrating the decadent dualistic and transitional civilizations, has ennobled them with a transcendentally objective bias.  We may be a long way, at present, from the official transcendental civilization of universal man, but we are certainly tending in its direction, whatever the upholders of religious objectivity may happen to think of the fact.

DONALD: Yes, I can only agree!

 

 

PROLETARIAN WRITING

 

FRANCIS: Where modern writing is concerned, it would seem that the age is more spontaneous than ever before and therefore, in a sense, more careless than ever before.  Would you agree?

GERALD: Yes, in a way I would.  For spontaneity is pertinent to a comparatively advanced age, in which intellectual dynamism has come to signify the appropriate momentum.  Where, formerly, it was the body that was especially active and the mind that remained relatively inert, nowadays it is the converse which increasingly applies, and this is compatible with evolutionary progress from the material to the spiritual realm, from the physical to the mental one.  To deliberate overmuch on a script one was writing would be to acquiesce in a degree of mental inertia out-of-step with the essential intellectual dynamism of the age.  As a truly contemporary writer, one should be hard-pressed to keep-up with one's thoughts and, consequently, if one writes before typing, one will be obliged to adopt a kind of shorthand in order to ensure the quickest possible conveyance of one's thought to paper.  For it normally happens that one's best thoughts come to one 'on the wing', so to speak, and must be captured for letters before they disappear again.

FRANCIS: Yet, to return to the second part of my question, surely this results in a degree of carelessness unprecedented in literary history?

GERALD: In the aesthetic sense I suppose it does, since one won't have either the time or inclination to carefully arrange and, as it were, chisel one's sentences into harmonious shapes.  But in another, dynamic sense one must remember that the contemporary literary mind is so much more highly charged than the traditional one ... that it is able to both muster and master thought more quickly and efficiently than ever before, and thus mould it into intelligible sentences with the minimum of hesitation.  The struggle is mainly carried out before the words reach paper, so that only a minimum revision is required for the completed script.  It is no use one's coming to the work with a lazy or disordered mind, as various writers did in the past.  The test of one's credibility as a contemporary writer will rest with the fluency of one's style, and that is dependent upon the dynamic workings of the mind.

FRANCIS: Yet, even so, it cannot be denied that such writings as you endorse are less than perfect from a grammatical standpoint.  I mean, there will be instances of split infinitives, prepositions ending sentences, conjunctions out of place, adverbs not close enough to the adjective or noun they are intended to define, subordinate phrases occurring in ungainly or even unlikely places, punctuation logically inconsistent, phrases less than wholly apposite, choice of words sometimes inappropriate, tenses not properly followed through, elision, and so on - through a whole host of academic failings.

GERALD: Yes, there will doubtless be lapses - sometimes frequent, sometimes occasional - from textbook criteria ... as expounded by pedants.  But so what?  Does that necessarily disqualify the contemporary writer from artistic or intellectual credibility, turning his work into an example of how not to write?  No, I don't believe so, and for the simple reason that textbook criteria and serious literary endeavour are two entirely separate things, which rarely if ever overlap!

FRANCIS: Oh, but really...!

GERALD: I assure you this is no exaggeration, but a wholehearted confession of fidelity to contemporary literary requirements, irrespective of what the case may have been in the past.  Of course, it is true that bourgeois and, to an even greater extent, aristocratic authors have taken great pains with their work in the past, not least as it bears on grammar.  But such a fastidious attitude, by no means uncommon in the present century, is hardly justifiable as an eternal verity, to be scrupulously adhered to in the interests of professional dignity and integrity.  On the contrary, we find that as writing progresses from class to class, so it becomes increasingly bolder in defying strict grammatical rules and establishing new criteria for itself in the face of tradition.  Where, in less enlightened ages, writing was shackled by numerous grammatical fetters, it is now comparatively free of them and must become even more so in the future, if there is to be any further literary progress.

FRANCIS: But why must it become ever freer in this way?  After all, grammatical rules exist to assist our understanding of writing, not to hinder it.

GERALD: Doubtless that is fundamentally true.  But it should also be remembered that, if adhered too rigorously to, such rules can also serve to impede or obscure our understanding.  No, the real reason behind the gradual emancipation of letters from grammatical fetters is that, by so freeing itself, writing can become a medium for the conveyance of essence over appearance, as it should be in any advanced stage of its evolution.

FRANCIS: How, pray, do you distinguish between essence and appearance?

GERALD: Very simply.  Essence appertains to the thematic content of a work, appearance to the means used to convey it.  The one is subject-matter, the other technique.  Now the fact is that the ratio of the one to the other has been steadily changing ever since man first acquired the rudiments of civilization and put pen to paper.  If you'll permit me to generalize, we shall discover that appearance predominates over essence in pre-dualistic writings; that appearance and essence are approximately in-balance during a dualistic age; and that now, as we enter a post-dualistic age, essence predominates over appearance, in accordance with the spiritual bias of the times.  Thus less attention is given to technique in post-dualistic writings than was given to it at any previous time in the history of letters, and this is compatible with the fact that much more importance is attached to content, to what is being said rather than the way in which one says it.  Content is the all-important factor, and because it is recognized as such in the best and most progressive writings of the age, less time is wasted on apparent factors than ever before.  Indeed, a concern with appearances could only detract from the content, as well, no doubt, as impede the fast flow of thought so crucial to the intellectual dynamism of the times.  To unduly deliberate over the choice and arrangement of words like an aristocrat or pseudo-aristocrat, such as Edgar Allan Poe, would constitute a gross anachronism in an age which is tending, willy-nilly, towards greater spiritual mobility.  What Poe was to pseudo-aristocratic writings, Baudelaire was to bourgeois writings, and neither of them should be emulated now - certainly not by proletarian authors, at any rate!

FRANCIS: Would this development away from appearance, as applied to literature, also apply to poetry then, so that the absence of rhyme from modern poems is regarded as a mark of their evolutionary superiority over traditional, rhyming poems, rather than as a reflection of technical disintegration or prosy degeneration?

GERALD: Most assuredly!  And never more so than when we are dealing with the free verse of the best proletarian poets.  Not for nothing is Poe regarded as a jingle-jangle man.  For to write verse in the manner of Poe now would be to fall way behind the foremost developments of the day, which are becoming ever more biased on the side of essence.  Rhymes of whatever sort primarily appeal to the senses, to eyes and ears, rather than to the mind, and so, too, do such apparent devices as alliteration, assonance, regular metres, vowel placements, and stanza divisions - all of which have constituted an irreplaceable and, I regret to say, irreproachable aspect of pre-dualistic and even dualistic poetry.  In the final analysis, however, appearance can only detract from or limit the applicability of essence, never enhance it!  The rhyming poetry of the past can never be resurrected in any seriously progressive context, and in general one finds that only the most conservative poets of the twentieth century continued to write it, as did W.B. Yeats and Robert Graves, doubtless with some justification within the context of dualistic civilization.  But such rhyming poetry can certainly be bettered, and it is and will continue to be the fate of petty-bourgeois and/or proletarian poets to do so.  Compare Yeats' early poems with Allen Ginsberg's late ones, and you'll see what I mean!  Yet poetry is only one branch of literature, and what applies there must also apply elsewhere, in response to evolutionary progress.  Thus the spontaneous attitude of D.H. Lawrence to novel writing is, despite the reactionary or traditional nature of much of his thought, inherently superior to and somehow more contemporary than the deliberative, rather formal attitudes of novelists like James Joyce and Thomas Mann, whose large attention to technique could only detract, in the long-run, from the importance attached to content.  With Joyce, words become important in themselves, as things to be looked at and listened to, juggled into amusing or teasing juxtapositions, riddles or puns.  He retains a traditional poetic attitude to writing, so that his novels become - most especially in the case of Finnegans Wake - exercises in poetic prose.  How different from D.H. Lawrence, who conveys the impression that words are all on the same level, with no hierarchic preferences, and need scarcely be looked at except as means of conveying thought!  Truly, Lawrence's is the more progressive attitude, and although I despise much of his thought, I can't help but admire his spontaneous approach to writing, which gives maximum priority to essence.

FRANCIS: You would obviously admire the spontaneity of John Cowper Powys' writing, too.  He must surely be among the most prolific novelists of the century.

GERALD: Yes, though once again I am obliged to admit that I despise his thought and would not wish to champion it!  The age of nature-worship is long dead and unlikely ever to be resurrected in the future, as the world tends ever more radically away from nature in pursuit of the supernatural.  Powys is, it seems to me, a kind of neo-pagan anachronism in the modern world, a remnant or rehash of the old world rather than a pioneer of a new one.  If his literary facility is commendable, his philosophy, in my opinion, is considerably less so, and we need not expect it to be influential in building the next civilization.  He is really one of those curious hybrids or chimeras which the twentieth century, as a transitional age, seemed prodigal in producing, whose class bias, while fundamentally bourgeois, isn't exempt from proletarian leanings, whether technical, as in Powys' case, or thematic, as in the case, for example, of Aldous Huxley.  A wholly post-dualistic writer we haven't as yet seen, which isn't altogether surprising, since the West remains fundamentally bourgeois and, hence, dualistic.  Even America, which represents the higher, transitional civilization between dualism and post-dualism, hasn't produced a full-blown transcendentalist, although it has fostered a number of transitional (bourgeois/proletarian) writers whose works are, on the whole, more progressive than those of their European contemporaries.

FRANCIS: I presume you are alluding to writers like Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, whose novels are not only more transcendentalist than is to be found in the general pattern of European writings, but more technically spontaneous as well?

GERALD: Yes, especially is this true of Kerouac, whose quasi-mystical novels are among the most free and enlightened literature of the age.  Kerouac went a step further than Miller in developing the American novel, and, no doubt, others have since gone a step further again, using a more spontaneous technique in the service of a more enlightened transcendentalism.  But there are limits, as I said, to the development of such literature within the confines of a transitional civilization.  For truly proletarian literature is only relevant to a post-dualistic civilization, and nowhere in the world does such a civilization currently exist.

FRANCIS: Not even in the former Soviet Union?

GERALD: No, since the Soviet Union was essentially a neo-barbarous post-dualistic state, not a civilized or partly religious one.  The absence of an official post-dualistic religion, such as Transcendentalism, from the Soviet Union inevitably limited the scope of proletarian writings to political and social propaganda, precluding the development of an avant-garde technique in pursuance of spiritual ends.  What one usually encounters in Soviet literature, as in the other Soviet arts, is a bourgeois technique, in which deliberation and appearance balance content, put to the service of proletarian propaganda - not the utilization of a truly proletarian, spontaneous technique in response to the intellectual dynamism of the times.  Technically, Soviet art was very conservative, and this fact could only hinder the progress of proletarian literature which, as in the Soviet Union, necessarily remained confined within materialist limits.  No, the highest proletarian literature, whether novelistic or otherwise, will only come from a post-dualistic civilization ... where technique and content can be developed along the most transcendental lines.  If Ireland is destined to become such a civilization before any other country in the world, then it will be there that this literature will first arise ... in accordance with post-dualistic criteria.

FRANCIS: And what, exactly, will these criteria be?

GERALD: Adherence, above all, to the intellectual dynamism of the age, with the inevitable corollary of spontaneity in writing and the reduction of appearances to the barest minimum.  The further development of truth as essence is expanded as much as possible.  The organization of one's work into a collectivistic format, so that the traditional procedure of keeping the various literary genres separate is transcended in a divine-oriented literature that reflects an evolutionary convergence to the Omega Point, to cite Teilhard de Chardin.  The use of computers, so that discs replace books as the medium through which this ultimate literature is read.  An adherence, all along the line, to post-dualistic ideology, whether political or religious.... Thus the full-blown proletarian literature of the future will bring literature to its consummation, and so prepare the way for the post-literary epoch of the post-Human Millennium.  It will eventually spread throughout the world, becoming universally accepted, as the ultimate civilization supersedes the neo-barbarism of socialist materialism in response to historical necessity.

FRANCIS: So what the Americans, with their transitional literature, are to the contemporary dualistic world, the Irish, in their subsequent development of post-dualistic civilization, will become to the neo-barbarous one - cultural leaders on the world stage.

GERALD: I see no reason why not, especially as I am an Irishman and the world's first truly post-dualistic writer, whose literature awaits its due recognition.  Sooner or later my hour will come, and when it does you can rest assured that proletarian literature will be here to stay, never impeded, any more, by bourgeois realism or neo-barbarous materialism.  Who knows, but if such writings are allowed to develop to the full, they may well transcend appearances altogether one day, as increased spontaneity pushes them towards the maximum freedom in total abstraction, thereby transforming literature once again.  For once truth has been attained to, in meaningful sentences, there is nothing left for us to do ... other than begin to free ourselves from words by breaking-up meanings.  Verbal concepts are all very well for man, but they won't be of much use to his superhuman successor, believe me!

FRANCIS: I almost do, although, to be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that such abstract writings would constitute the ultimate literature, since, without meaningful sentences, they would be a bore to read.

GERALD: You are speaking more from an egocentric than from a post-egocentric point-of-view.  As it happens, there are three main approaches to art, of whichever kind, in the post-dualistic age.  In the first approach one can be post-egocentric in the sense of free from self-aggrandizing penchants for aesthetic finesse and embellishment.  One's work will accordingly be somewhat simplistic in construction and seemingly slapdash or careless in appearance.  It will be a literature approximating more to D.H. Lawrence than to James Joyce, with a fairly high degree of spontaneity.  In the second approach, however, one can create in the post-egocentric context of disrupting and discrediting the natural world, whether this is the external world of nature or the internal world of the subconscious.  With the former one gets Expressionism in one degree or another.  With the latter ... Surrealism in one degree or another.  Perhaps where the development of a truly abstract literature is concerned, one would be a proponent of this anti-natural type of post-egocentric creativity, so that the meaninglessness of one's sentences was largely designed to discredit and disrupt the subconscious as a means of partly freeing man from its influence ... in the interests of superconscious development.  But in the third approach, which I believe applies most especially to myself, one's commitment to post-egocentric writings would be with intent to explore and expand the superconscious, and for that it would be necessary to retain meaning, in well-ordered sentences, as one sought to elucidate spiritual progress.  This is the highest type of post-egocentric creativity because wholly forward-looking, and a good example of it can be found in the mature novels of Aldous Huxley, which aspire to the status of religious literature on a transcendent plane.  In painting, we find Mondrian generally signifying the same thing, and, in music, Michael Tippett has displayed a consistently transcendental bias.  One can only suppose that, eventually, this third type of post-egocentric creativity will completely eclipse each of the others, as evolution tends ever more deeply into the superconscious.

FRANCIS: Thus a kind of creative hierarchy exists, on the post-egocentric level, which stretches from the simplistic and/or slapdash to the transcendental via the expressionist and/or surreal, and such an hierarchy might well be reflected in twentieth-century literature by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Aldous Huxley respectively; in twentieth-century painting by the canvases of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Piet Mondrian respectively; and in twentieth-century music by the works of John Cage, Karl-Heinze Stockhausen, and Michael Tippett respectively.

GERALD: In general, I think that would be approximately correct, even given all the creative changes which any one artist may undergo.  But post-egocentric art, in whatever context, has yet to develop to the full, and when it does you can rest assured that the attainments of most of the leading artists of the twentieth century will appear comparatively moderate.  Only the next civilization will be radically post-egocentric.  In fact, so radically post-egocentric as to be wholly superconscious.

FRANCIS: That I can well believe!

 

 

THE EVOLUTION OF ART

 

PETER: Do you agree with Keats that 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever', or that 'Truth is beauty, beauty ... truth'?

GRAHAM: No, I don't!  And neither do I agree with his near contemporary, Goethe, who said: 'The eternal feminine draws us up'.

PETER: Oh and why is that?

GRAHAM: Because the feminine aspect of life is merely a temporal affair and, except in the erotic sense that Goethe probably intended, only serves to draw us down towards the beastly rather than up ... towards the godly.  When one makes love to a woman one is in the feminine world, which is inherently sensual, and consequently turning one's back on the world of spiritual striving.  One's responsibilities there are feminine and, hence, negative, not masculine and positive.  Baudelaire defines the situation well when he says: 'Love greatly resembles an application of torture or a surgical operation', and, later, when he goes on to record: 'There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan', and proceeds to define the latter as a 'delight in descent' involving, amongst other things, woman, he directly refutes the aforementioned maxim of Goethe - at least as it may apply to moral standards!

PETER: Which is, I suppose, only to be expected, since Baudelaire was an ascetic Catholic and not, like Goethe, a hedonistic Protestant.  But, really, I asked you a question about Keats and still haven't received an enlightening answer.

GRAHAM: I told you that I didn't agree with Keats' lines, and my reasons for saying so are similar to my reasons for not agreeing with Goethe's oft-quoted line - namely that, like the feminine, beauty isn't eternal, and therefore is incapable of being 'a joy forever'.  You see, beauty appertains to appearance, an attribute which is quantitative and, hence, temporal.  Truth, on the other hand, appertains to essence, an attribute which is qualitative and, hence, eternal.  To write: 'Truth is beauty, beauty truth', like Keats, is to write nonsense from any higher or objective point-of-view, seeing that essence and appearance are forever antithetical, and therefore incapable of being reconciled.  The beauty of a beautiful woman is apparent, whereas the truth of a truthful man is essential, and never can the two attributes be harmonized, let alone become equal.  For whereas the former leads down to sensuality the latter leads up to the spirit.  Only a dualist could confound them and strive, no matter how self-deceptively, to reconcile the two in one equation.  Yet as Baudelaire said somewhere else: 'The more a man cultivates the arts, the less he fornicates.  A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute'.

PETER: Doubtless that is true within certain limits.  But surely it also contains a contradiction, since the arts are more often apparent than essential, and thus more aligned with beauty than with truth?

GRAHAM: Traditionally, and on the lowest artistic levels, that may well be the case.  But the highest art, especially during the last century or so, is primarily concerned with truth, not beauty.  The criteria of artistic excellence have changed, in accordance with the dictates of evolutionary progress away from the natural, material world towards a supernatural, or spiritual, one.  To be concerned overmuch with beauty, in this day and age, would hardly help to place one's work in the vanguard of artistic progress.  Rather, one would be producing anachronisms, only fit for the most popular or old-fashioned appreciation.

PETER: But the fact nevertheless remains that art is largely apparent, if only because it stands outside the self and obliges one to contemplate it from a distance.

GRAHAM: Ah, if you are specifically alluding to the art of painting, then that is undoubtedly true!  But, you see, modern art utilizes appearance in the service of essence to the extent that appearance can be so utilized.  Of course, one is going to be at cross-purposes to some extent, and this is an unfortunate limitation of art as we currently understand the term.  For no matter how much the artist may strive to convey truth as opposed to beauty in his work, appearance inevitably remains tied to the sensual, temporal, material world.

PETER: Then what is the point of the artist's working at cross-purposes with himself if the end-product is going to fall short of perfection, as defined in terms of the essential?

GRAHAM: The point is not to attain to perfection, as just defined, but to intimate of it, no matter how crudely, by utilizing apparent means.  Improvements from the spiritual point-of-view on the physical constituents of art are always possible and continue to be made, whilst its content can likewise be improved upon through increased abstraction.  Where painters were once dependent on heavy frames and thick canvases, not to mention stodgy oils, they now have access to much lighter frames - assuming frames are used at all - and thinner canvases on which less materialistic pigments, like acrylic, can be applied.  On the content side of artistic improvements we find a progression from, say, the religiously pictorial paintings of Tintoretto and Rubens to the completely abstract paintings of Mondrian and Ben Nicholson via the bare interiors of Protestant churches, as revealed by de Witte and Saenredam.  Thus, in the material context, we find that the materials used in modern paintings are, on the whole, less materialistic than those used in the paintings of earlier centuries, whilst, in the spiritual context, we find that the subject-matter of the best contemporary works is far less apparent than with paintings at any previous time, and therefore signifies a closer approximation to essence.  An abstract painting may not constitute essence, or spirit, but it is at least a superior symbol of essence than could have been attained from a representational or pictorial work of religious objectivity, as produced in earlier centuries.

PETER: But surely art conceived in terms of abstract painting must inevitably reach a dead-end, if what you say is true, with a maximum approximation to essence beyond which it cannot evolve.

GRAHAM: Oh, indeed!  And, to all appearances, this is what has happened.  Or, more accurately, painting has attained to its consummation in the pure abstractions of masters like Mondrian, Kandinsky, Nicholson, Klein, et al., beyond which no reasonable progress is possible.  What began with Turner and the Impressionists in the nineteenth century has attained to completion in the twentieth.  Indeed, whenever I look at an Impressionist painting these days, whether by Monet, Sisley, or Pissarro, I am conscious of looking at crude abstract art, at the beginnings of a process of spiritual development that was furthered and brought to perfection in the twentieth century.  The Impressionists thus become for me somewhat primitive, I might even say too materialistic and apparent for comfort.  I prefer the superior developments of Mondrian, Nicholson, et al.

PETER: Then, assuming these developments have attained to a climax now, it would seem that art has got very little left to do and is essentially a thing of the past.

GRAHAM: When conceived solely in painterly terms I agree that that must undoubtedly be so.  But to imagine that art ends with painting would be to underestimate its evolutionary capabilities, since moving from the canvas to the air or electric-light bulb is as inevitable a progression as was the one which led from the cave or wall to the canvas.  Like biological evolution, which takes the form of successive transmutations of species, art also changes its constitution in the interests of both survival and aesthetic improvements, with the latter consideration dominating the former in this day and age.  Thus light art, as reflected in fluorescent tubing and various types of light bulbs, becomes the successor to painting ... as a better means of approximating appearance to essence.  An abstract arrangement of slender neon tubing provides a superior spectacle to abstract painting ... to the extent that it conforms to a less materialistic context, both as regards content and materials.  The slender transparent plastic tubing is less materialistic than a canvas, with or without frame, and the light, created by electricity, is likewise less materialistic than the pigments utilized in the creation of paintings, which congeal into hard layers of paint capable of being touched.  But you can't touch electric or neon light, since it is an impalpable medium diffused throughout the tubing by the process of molecular action on chemicals.  In the case, for example, of fluorescent lighting, it is the electron bombardment of phosphor that produces the impalpable glow.  Thus light art is far better suited for an approximation to essence than painting, and has accordingly superseded painting in this respect.

PETER: But isn't light art a kind of sculpture rather than successor to painting?

GRAHAM: Doubtless some of the more cumbersome light works, involving bulbs and tubes, can be regarded as a kind of modern sculpture.  But I incline to regard most light works as a step beyond painting, rather than as a new manifestation of sculpture.  And I do so because, fundamentally, sculpture is a tactile art and must remain so ... if it isn't to become transmuted into something else.  Modern sculpture, as produced, for instance, by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Archipenco, Arp, Brancusi, and Viani, remains fundamentally tactile, and especially is this so with such outdoor works as are accessible to the public.  A large bronze by Moore invites touch, not just visual curiosity, and should be gently touched, caressed, slapped, etc., in accordance with one's mood and the inherent property of mass as a tactile object.  To treat sculpture as though it were only a more solid or materialistic type of painting ... is simply to misuse it, since its physical constitution as a three-dimensional object does not warrant purely optical consideration.  The best paintings, on the other hand, signify an attempt, no matter how crudely, to approximate matter to the spiritual world, whereas sculpture, no matter how modern, can never really desert the palpable world of materialism.  One reason why we are required not to touch paintings on display in a public gallery is that to do so would infringe upon the spiritual pretensions of art, emphasizing its alignment with the material world at the expense of purely optical appreciation.  Paintings were never designed to be touched, and neither, it seems to me, can one be expected to touch light works, the bulbs or tubes or tubings of which would seriously burn one's fingers if one were foolish enough to try.  Consequently I have no hesitation in regarding such works, or the great majority of them, as the logical successors to paintings ... rather than as alternative modes of modern sculpture, since they exist to be contemplated, not touched!

PETER: So, presumably, to contemplate sculpture instead of to touch it would be as absurd, in your view, as to touch paintings or light works instead of to contemplate them?

GRAHAM: I didn't say that, although I am in no doubt that, traditionally, sculpture should be touched as well as contemplated.  If, however, we prefer to contemplate than to touch sculpture these days, that is simply a reflection of the spiritual bias of the age, which induces us to treat matter more spiritually, as it were, than our ancestors would have done, and so elevate sculpture to solely optical appreciation.  Probably it would be bad form now for people to go about touching sculptures, particularly those housed in galleries, since the solidity experienced by their fingers would contradict the modern preference for spiritual or partly spiritual interpretations of matter, as upheld by contemporary science, and only serve to remind people that matter is still solid, after all.  Doubtless they would be more willing to touch sculpture in Marxist-Leninist societies, which are materialist, than in quasi-transcendental ones, if you follow my drift.

PETER: Indeed, though whether they would be encouraged to do so is another matter!  However, getting back to the subject of light art and assuming, for the sake of argument, that such art does indeed signify a step beyond painting rather than a new type of sculpture - how can it be improved upon if it is to intimate more closely of essence in the future, bearing in mind that it will always be tied to appearances no matter what happens?

GRAHAM: Well, what applies to painting applies no less to light art, so that the progressive reduction of its material side will constitute a mode of improvement, as, no doubt, will the progressive expansion of its spiritual, or abstract, side.  Thus what is all the time happening on the macrocosmic plane of contracting suns and on the microcosmic plane of expanding spirit, is also happening in art, with regard to its changing constitution.  The diabolic side of art is reduced in proportion that its divine side increases.  Consequently, where light art is concerned, the next obvious evolutionary improvement will free light from the plastic tubing, or whatever its material envelope may happen to be, and place it in the air, in the sky, in space.  So not only will light be free of the plastic tubing, it will simultaneously be free of the support wall or floor or stand on which the tubing rests.  Now with this contraction of its material side will come an expansion of its spiritual side, as light is concentrated into purer and brighter globes, with the convergence towards one central point in space of the beams of numerous searchlights or equivalent powerful lighting apparatuses, like a convergence to Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point.

PETER: Thereby taking light art outdoors?

GRAHAM: Yes, although there will also be scope for indoor light shows of a progressively more transcendent order, which may involve the projection of kaleidoscopic colours onto walls or ceilings.  But the most spectacular effects with light will be outdoors, and should come from laser beams projected into space as an approximation of appearance to the ultimate essence of pure spirit in the future transcendental Beyond.  There have already been a number of laser-light works on display in the West, particularly America, and such works must surely constitute a superior stage of artistic evolution to works more closely tied to the material world.  They were the highest religious art possible with light, since light is seen to be transcendent, detached from the mundane, and accordingly purer and more cohesive than would otherwise be the case.  Were it not for the fact that the laser beams stem from a materialistic source on the ground, the illusion of transcendence would be complete.  But even laser beams are dependent on materialism and therefore can only intimate of essence, not become it.

PETER: Presumably not only with regard to the light-producing mechanism, but with regard to the appearance of light in the sky as well?

GRAHAM: Yes, undoubtedly.  For essence, conceived transcendently, would not be phenomenal but noumenal and therefore totally beyond appearances.  The Spiritual Globes that should issue from Superbeings, at the transformation point from the post-Human Millennium to the transcendental Beyond, could not be detected as visible presences looming large.  For the spiritual world is necessarily invisible to the senses, since antithetical to what is sensual.  Traditionally, we have realized and acknowledged this fact by conceiving of ghosts as impalpable, scarcely perceptible entities that float aloft like transparent clouds.  Our egocentric status in the past did of course lead to ghosts being anthropomorphized, or given human form, as though the spirit was patterned on the entire physical body and stemmed in bodily form from the body with death!  This, of course, isn't the case.  For, in reality, it is only the most noble organ of the body, namely the brain, that truly produces spirit, and then only in its higher, or new-brain, part, which, translated into psychological terminology, we call the superconscious.  It is from this new brain/superconscious symbiosis that, with transcendence, spirit will emerge as the climax to the post-Human Millennium, and it won't have human shape for the simple reason that - apart from the aforementioned absence of divine spirit from the body in general - the human body will have long before been superseded by the artificial supports and sustains of the Supermen and Superbeings respectively.

PETER: Then, presumably, ghosts were figments of the imagination and little else?

GRAHAM: Yes, though inevitable figments, given the evolutionary limitations of the age of religious objectivity, with its notion of man being made in God's image and the consequent fact that spirit was believed capable of surviving death and returning to its Maker.  But these beliefs would now be incapable of standing up to logical, rational opposition, which is why they should be discarded, like a dead husk.  If at death the spirit dies it is because the body, being mortal, has killed it off, snuffed out something that would have been capable of lasting for ever if only it had been given more adequate or long-term support.  For spirit remains dependent on matter so long as it is insufficiently cultivated to manage without it, which is to say, until transcendence is achieved as the fruit of so much spiritual striving ... carried out in collective and extensively artificial contexts.  But whether, depending on the age into which one was born, one's spirit is destined for immortality or not, the fact nevertheless remains that, being essence, spirit is aligned with truth and isn't therefore capable of being detected, like beauty, on the plane of phenomenal appearance.  Consequently all attempts to depict transcendent spirit, whether by paint, electric light, laser beams, or whatever, are intrinsically contrary to the truth of spirit as noumenal essence, and can only be misleading from a strictly subjective standpoint.  Even the Hindu conception of God as the Clear Light of the Void is fundamentally inadequate, since it presupposes appearance and consequently induces one to visualize, in the mind's eye, some clear light shining in the 'heavens', like a purer kind of star, perceptible to sight.  Yet that isn't what the Omega Absolute would be, nor even the Spiritual Globes that will precede the ultimate unification of pure spirit.  One could never know the Omega Absolute in the sense of perceiving it.  One could only conceptually experience essence as pure spirit, which would be the condition of Heaven.  Light art, however, will always remain partly tied to Hell, no matter how sincerely it is used to intimate of Heaven.  For one will always see it, just as one can see the hell specific to our world if one looks up at the sky on a clear day.... Contrary to traditional belief, there is not one hell but literally billions of hells scattered throughout the Universe, which correspond to individual stars.  Our star is therefore but one of millions of petty hells which revolve around the great star at the centre of the Galaxy - part of the overall pluralism of the Diabolic Alpha.  Given the limitations of the ancients as regards the true extent and nature of the Universe, it is possible that the Creator was abstracted from the sun rather than from the central star of the Galaxy, which, then as now, would have been too remote to be seen.  However, this is a debatable point, since it is well known that primitive societies have responded differently to the concept of a 'Creator', doubtless by abstracting from different cosmic sources.  Thus if some of them, like the Aztecs, referred religion directly to the sun, others, like the Jews, abstracted from a something assumed to be the sun's creator - quite possibly the central star of the Galaxy.  Hence when the sun is regarded as Creator, we get polytheism.  For the other stars that can be glimpsed in the Galaxy or outside it are likewise regarded as gods.  But when the sun is considered as merely a part of nature, and not its sole creator, we get monotheism, and can surmise that the religious sense appertaining to the Creator will be abstracted from the central star of the Galaxy, since that would probably be the star responsible, directly or indirectly, for the creation of such minor stars as the sun, and need not be known to mankind to be placed in a creative role.  The important thing to remember, however, is that when we refer to 'the Creator' we are primarily referring to a creator of this world and, by implication, everything naturally in it, not to the Creator of the Universe.  For the latter would have been created from an explosion of gases giving rise to the star clusters we now refer to as galaxies.  Yet such a Creator, or First Cause, would have no relevance to man, and could not be prayed to as something that was believed to exist in the Universe.  Only the stars exist there, and if it was the case that ancient man, with his cosmic myopia, abstracted the Creator either from the nearest star or the unglimpsed central star of the Galaxy, then there is no reason for us to attempt to equate it with all the stars.  After all, the Lord's Prayer, beginning 'Our Father ...', suggests a relative rather than an absolute frame-of-reference, doesn't it?  There is no reason for us to doubt that there are other 'Fathers' in the Universe, or that other peoples or whatever on other planets haven't likewise prayed to their specific 'Father', during the period of evolutionary time in their historical destinies when such a prayer was deemed relevant.  For the post-dualistic civilization of the future, however, no such alpha-oriented prayer could possibly be relevant, since people would be exclusively concentrating their religious attention on the cultivation of spirit in an omega orientation, not referring back to a cosmic creator for assistance or forgiveness.  Religion at that fortunate epoch in time, beyond the tyranny of priests and all those who would uphold alpha in the face of ongoing omega, would be purely subjective, not abstracted from the materialistic objectivity of the external cosmos in objective illusion.  And art, you can rest assured, would be superior to what it had ever been in the dualistic and transitional civilizations of the contemporary West.

PETER: Although, presumably, it would still remain tied to appearance, and thus be no more than a crude intimation of essence?

GRAHAM: Yes, and that would apply to holography no less than to laser art, since holograms, as three-dimensional reproductions of objects projected into surrounding space through the use of mirrors, would still be apparent, if the nearest thing to the ghost of an object.  A telephone, for instance, can be projected into surrounding space in this way, positioned no more than a few feet above the ground.

PETER: I have actually seen this done, and felt very tempted to put my hand through the holographic 'phone, in order to verify that it really was an illusionary projection and not a factual reality.  But as other people were verifying that fact, I was content merely to gaze at it, charmed and intrigued by its pale-green luminosity.

GRAHAM: You behaved wisely!  For holograms, being a form of light art, are primarily there to be seen rather than karate-chopped.  Of course, they are novelties within the context of dualistic civilization, and so they will remain.  But the next, wholly post-dualistic civilization will develop them to unprecedented heights and take a special pride in them, a pride commensurate, one might say, with the extremes of scientific subjectivity, in which a wavicle theory of matter will probably come to replace the compromise particle/wavicle theory of twentieth-century physics, and art forms seemingly reflecting this new theory duly be accorded a place of honour.  Doubtless a hologram through which one can put one's hand will be more suited to the spiritual bias of transcendental man than an impervious object!  And the translucence and gem-like lustre of the hologram will provide him with an aesthetic foretaste, as it were, of the still higher art of the Superman, which won't be external but internal.

PETER: To what, exactly, are you alluding here?

GRAHAM: The internal visionary experience induced by LSD, or some such hallucinogenic stimulant, which will constitute the highest possible use of appearance put to essential ends.  For whereas the hologram, no matter how translucent or bright, still remains tied to the external world, with hallucinogens like LSD, however, art is brought into the internal one, into the lower reaches of the superconscious, where it is closer than ever before to essence.  Here, in the spiritual landscape opened up by LSD, the Superman will apperceive the translucence and gem-like lustre of the utterly passive, crystal-clear contents of his visionary superconscious, the spiritual contents of the transcendent psyche.

PETER: You mean, he will be apperceiving a kind of internal hologram, or series of internal holograms?

GRAHAM: That is probably not very far from the truth!  Although, in his case, there will be no holographic apparatus.  And consequently 'art' will attain to its apotheosis in the maximum approximation of appearance to essence ... achieved through the complete internalization of the former.  Every Superman will become an artist, the witness of his own psychic creations.

PETER: Like watching an internal television show?

GRAHAM: In a sense, though television programmes are usually negative, or active, whereas the visionary contents of the superconscious are purely positive and, hence, passive, like a hologram.  What holography is to LSD experience, television is to dreams, which are always active.  Watching television is rather like dreaming externally, dreaming, one might say, objectively instead of subjectively.  Looking at holograms, on the other hand, is rather like tripping externally, tripping objectively instead of subjectively.  A confusing distinction perhaps, because the external objective ends with material reality, whereas the internal subjective really begins with the spiritual reality of the superconscious.  Thus dreams, which appertain to the subconscious, are ever objective, while the visionary contents of the superconscious are subjective, in accordance with internal reality.  Dreams, you see, are rather like the idealistic abstractions from the external material world of religious objectivity.  They distort and reinterpret external reality.  The visionary contents of the superconscious, however, strive to illuminate internal reality, which is purely spiritual and, at its highest levels, completely beyond appearances.  Beauty still clings to visionary experience, but it is a beauty through which the light of truth shines as an intimation of things or, rather, essences to come.  Eventually, with the advent of the second phase of millennial salvation, the light of truth will eclipse the illuminated beauty of LSD visions, as the Supermen are transformed into the Superbeings of spiritual communality, the true and ultimate earthly communes in which new-brain clusters, artificially supported and sustained, will meditate their collective way towards transcendence and, hence, the heavenly Beyond.  What LSD was to the Supermen, intensified meditation will be to the Superbeings - a meditation in which not appearance but essence will prevail, as the full-blown superconscious experiences the undiluted truth of post-visionary spirit.  Here life will be completely beyond art.  For no longer will the mind be in need of guidance towards the essential through the exploitation of progressively refined-upon-appearance.  It will be in the essential, and accordingly almost at the long-awaited goal of spiritual striving.  Almost!  For the earthly paradise of Superbeings will be superseded by the transcendent paradise of Spiritual Globes, and they, in turn, will expand into one another in the heavenly Beyond, to form the ultimate paradise of the Omega Absolute.  It is a curious fact that truth, oneness, pure spirit, and transcendence will not only be the attributes of ultimate divinity, they will also be the attributes of Spiritual Globes on route, as it were, to the Omega Absolute.  They will even be the attributes, to a lesser extent, of the Superbeings.  They won't be unknown to the Supermen.  And neither will they be completely alien to transcendental man, who will glimpse them but faintly through the barrier of his human psyche.  That is why, as a Transcendentalist, I speak to you of these matters in the hope that you, too, will find a place for them in your psyche.

PETER: Those words aren't wasted on my ears, for I am not deaf to truth, like so many people.  But perhaps I shall become blinder to beauty than formerly, and therefore disinclined to agree with John Keats that 'Truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all ye know and all ye need to know'?  There's no beauty in his words for me now, and neither is there much truth.  Like you, I have become deaf to illusion.  I see and hear only truth.

GRAHAM: That is better.  But it will be even better when the time comes for minds like yours to experience truth, and so escape from the senses.  Until such time, let us be content to improve and refine upon art - of whichever kind.

 

 

FROM THE ALPHA ABSOLUTE(S) TO THE OMEGA ABSOLUTE

 

ROBERT: Talking of religion, does the Creator really correspond to the Devil, and does Hell actually exist?

PAUL: Yes, I believe that the Creator and the Devil are fundamentally one and the same thing, since theological abstractions from the Galaxy.  As to whether Hell exists, you might just as well ask me whether the Devil exists, and I would give you the same answer.

ROBERT: Well?

PAUL: No.

ROBERT: Is that supposed to be an answer?

PAUL: It is.  And for this reason: what exist in the Universe, not just the Galaxy, are stars and planets, which correspond to objective reality as it bears on the external world.  The stars are really there, we needn't doubt that fact, and they burn both continuously and fiercely.  They are rather nasty phenomena, as anyone who has suffered sunstroke or otherwise burnt himself through the sun's power will tell you.  Not something to which one would want to get too close!

ROBERT: I know all that.  And it makes one think of Hell when you mention it!

PAUL: Ah, but Hell isn't the sun, nor even the central star of the Galaxy, but an abstraction from the sun, an idea in the subconscious which reflects the prevalence of religious objectivity, as appertaining to the pagan and Christian stages of human evolution.  Hell only exists in the mind, and so, by a similar token, do 'the Devil' and 'the Creator', since they are all abstractions from the same cosmic source.

ROBERT: But surely the Devil, or Satan, has co-existed with the Creator, or Jehovah, in Biblical tradition, and thus led an independent life, so to speak?  We read in the Old Testament of Jehovah as God and Satan as the Devil, who was kicked out of Heaven for what one would now call insubordination.

PAUL: Well, that might signify a distinction of place and power, but it doesn't necessarily prove that the Creator and the Devil are radically different.  Rather, I see them as two manifestations of fundamentally the same thing, both of which were abstracted from similar cosmic phenomena.  This thing would be the stellar roots, so to speak, of the Galaxy, which is comprised, we now know, of a central star - much the most powerful star - and millions of smaller stars, like the sun.  They are basically of a similar constitution, though they differ in size and position in the Galaxy.

ROBERT: Are you therefore implying that the Fall of Satan corresponds to the hypothetical stellar explosion that sent millions of small stars flying out from the large central one at the base of the Galaxy?

PAUL: In a way I suppose I am, since our sun was almost certainly created through extrapolation from some larger source and would have constituted a suitable objective reality from which to abstract the Devil.  A mind that contends that God created the sun is referring, willy-nilly, to the far-away central star of the Galaxy out of which it probably arose.

ROBERT: Surely you mean fell?

PAUL: A fall would be the proper pagan interpretation to put on it, since no early Hebrew mind would have been aware of a transcendental goal to be attained to, and would consequently have felt the guilt that comes with a degree of human independence from nature in the face of nature's vast preponderance, both externally - as stars, planets, plants, animals, etc. - and internally - as subconscious mind.  From our point of view, however, the emergence of small stars from the big one signifies an evolutionary progression that could be regarded, paradoxically, as a sort of rise.  But if the Devil is an abstraction from the sun and the Creator an abstraction from the central star of the Galaxy, then we needn't be surprised by the co-existence, in Biblical writings, of these two manifestations of religious objectivity.  Hell, conceived as a place where the Devil reigns, only began to develop as a theological entity with the advent of dualism and the consequent belief in a posthumous Heaven.  Before men conceived of Heaven, they had little idea of Hell.  It is among the ancient Greeks that we get the strongest belief in Hell prior to the Christians, though they termed it Hades and simply regarded it as the abode of the dead - a rather lacklustre place devoid of the kinds of excruciating tortures so essential to the medieval concept of Hell, and therefore more resembling the Christian purgatory.  The Greeks were also polytheistic and thus inclined to abstract gods and goddesses from nature, including the sun, rather than to envisage a monotheistic creative power behind it.  The Christians subsequently adopted the Hebrew bias for the centre, while tempering it with a modified extension of Hades and Olympus, which embraced the extremes of Hell and Heaven.  But whether a particular deity was abstracted from one source or another, the fact nevertheless remains that neither the Devil nor the Creator correspond to external realities, but are simply idealistic abstractions relative to subconscious illusion.

ROBERT: So one wouldn't be strictly justified in contending that evolution proceeds from the Devil to God or from Hell to Heaven.

PAUL: No, because evolution proceeds from the stars to God, from the stars to Heaven, which is to say, from objective reality conceived externally, as matter, to subjective reality conceived internally, as spirit.  Only the subjective psyche truly exists, for the objective psyche is necessarily illusory.  And it is necessarily illusory because composed of abstractions from objective reality.  Thus in the lower idealism of religious objectivity we get the Creator, the Devil, Hell, and so on, whereas in the higher idealism of scientific subjectivity ... we get curved space, the particle/wavicle theory of matter, multiple universes, and so on.  The former was abstracted from cosmic reality, while the latter has been abstracted from the psychic reality of superconscious mind.  The former must inevitably precede the latter, but will also be superseded by it.  Thus we intellectuals don't believe in the Devil, Hell, the Creator, like our medieval ancestors, but we do believe in curved space, the particle/wavicle theory of matter, and multiple universes, and so we should, even though, from any objectively materialist point-of-view, such beliefs could only be regarded as erroneous and misguided!  Just try thinking about curved space for a moment.  Imagine space, which is a nothingness or void, as a curve!

ROBERT: I can't.  Only certain material objects appear curved, since curvature is detectable on their surfaces, being a property of certain objects.  But I can't imagine a void being curved.

PAUL: No, and neither can I, although every advanced and truly contemporary Western scientist will endorse Einstein's theory of curved space.  Some of them can even purport to prove it, as did Faraday, who was clever enough to invent a machine which created the desired impression, thereby proving, once and for all, that space really was curved and the Universe finite.  As to the particle/wavicle theory of matter, anyone can bang their hands against a strong piece of wood and feel the resistance of matter.  But certain ingenious devices, like the Bubble Chamber, can prove that, on the subatomic level, matter isn't really what it appears to be on the surface, since composed of numerous particles which interpenetrate one another and also become, at other times and when viewed from a different psychic angle, so to speak, numerous wavicles.  Mysterious now-you-see-me-now-you-don't alternations of particles and wavicles are brought to life by this magical device that would shame any traditional materialist.  But no contemporary so-called physicist could possibly do justice to matter without it, and neither could he pursue scientific subjectivity so ardently was it not for the fact that our supermystical bias requires being flattered in this metaphysical way, not just recognized.  The contemporary physicist becomes, in this context, a sort of scientific theologian, the modern equivalent of the religious theologians of the past.  What he tells us is false by any objective materialist standards, but absolutely true to the age - an age in which information concerning the external world is abstracted from the spiritual reality of the superconscious, in conformity with transcendental criteria.  Previously, however, it was the other way around, as information concerning the subconscious was abstracted from the material reality of the external world, and internal objectivity accordingly prevailed.  Now that we have external subjectivity, however, we should be sincerely grateful for the fact, since it reflects a considerable degree of evolutionary progress!

ROBERT: Although this external subjectivity, as you call it, only prevails in the West, particularly in the United States, where a transcendental bias is permissible, if not always officially encouraged.

PAUL: Yes, the so-called communist world has traditionally remained tied to scientific objectivity, and thus to material reality.  If at one time it officially outlawed religious objectivity, it failed to endorse religious subjectivity, and so couldn't encourage abstractions from the superconscious concerning the material world.  It was essentially an external, superficial world that corresponded to a post-dualistic barbarism.  Civilization on the highest, or qualitative, level requires a religion, but Marxist-Leninist countries didn't really have one, at least not in any morally progressive sense.  However, don't blame them for that!  They were part-and-parcel of historical necessity and couldn't possibly gravitate to civilization on the next level within the context of the world as it was until quite recently, which, as you know, was largely divided between the dualistic and transitional civilizations on the one hand, and the neo-barbarous post-dualistic powers on the other.  To have had three stages of civilization, viz. a dualistic, a transitional, and a post-dualistic, existing simultaneously would have been illogical and therefore quite improbable from an historical point-of-view.  Obviously the first two will have to be superseded before the third can truly become a reality, and socialism accordingly embraces transcendentalism.  But it won't embrace transcendentalism overnight, so to speak, nor in all the revolutionary post-dualistic countries at once.  Only in one country, initially, will socialism tend towards the establishment of post-dualistic civilization, as signified by Social Transcendentalism, and from there such a civilization will spread abroad to eventually embrace the entire world.  Then we will certainly be on the road to global civilization.  But not before transcendentalism has proved its worth and socialist powers have been persuaded to evolve, via Social Democracy, into post-dualistic civilization.

ROBERT: Which will be atheistic rather than theistic, like the dualistic and transitional civilizations of the contemporary West?

PAUL: Yes, because completely beyond religious objectivity, which upholds the idealism of the subconscious mind.  For a post-dualistic psyche, with approximately three times as much superconscious as subconscious influence, the illusory contents of the subconscious fade into the mists of history ... as the mind tends further and further into the light of truth.  So, obviously, they can't be upheld as formerly.  The external world, with particular reference to the Galaxy, will still exist as before, so that the cosmic phenomena from which religious idealism was abstracted in the past are still there, and consequently still support and sustain the world.  But the internal world will have changed so much that the Creator, the Devil, Hell, and other such theological abstractions will hold no place in our references to the external world and, accordingly, have ceased to exist for us.  Evolution will be regarded as a progression from the stars to the Holy Spirit which, in more objective language, one might call the Omega Absolute.  And the stars and planets will generally be regarded as though they functioned according to divine logic, with mystical rather than materialist criteria, in deference to the transcendental bias of scientific subjectivity.  Strictly speaking, however, this could never be the case, since stars are ever infernal and therefore function on the fundamentally Newtonian basis of force and mass.  But to a post-dualistic civilization, scientific objectivity would be as irrelevant as religious objectivity.

ROBERT: So considered from the traditional point-of-view, with regard to the infernal nature of the stars, you would have no difficulty in equating the Creator with a more powerful inferno than Satan, who was generally regarded as the Devil.

PAUL: If the Creator was abstracted from the biggest star of the Galaxy, then He would certainly be more powerful than anything abstracted from the sun.  If the Creator created the Devil, whether by mistake or otherwise, then Satan could only be a minor inferno by comparison.

ROBERT: And do you think there was one Creator or many?

PAUL: There would have been many Creators throughout the Universe.  For each galaxy has a governing or central star around which the millions of smaller stars revolve.  To imagine that the Universe began with a Big Bang ... from one huge mass of gas which sent stars, or the rudiments thereof, flying out in every direction ... would, I think, be to overlook the fundamental nature of the Diabolic Alpha in utter separateness.  If evolution is destined to culminate in the indivisible unity of transcendent spirit, then I don't see that one should ascribe a unity in indivisible sensuality to its beginnings!  Rather, one should envisage numerous separate explosions of gas throughout the Universe which, issuing from what we now call the central star of each galaxy, sent suns flying out in every direction, to bring about the rudiments of individual galaxies.  Possibly some of these suns were of a different internal constitution than others, they may even have come from other galactic explosions in which the gases were differently constituted, and thereby set up a kind of magnetic equilibrium in tension when they encountered their opposite numbers, so to speak, in the gradual formation of galaxies.  But it was solely from and within the context of this galaxy, rather than from the totality of galaxies making up the Universe, that religious objectivity was subsequently abstracted.

ROBERT: Which means, I take it, that the ancients, whether Hebrew or otherwise, took the Galaxy for the Universe, since they lacked the scientific means by which to acquire a more comprehensive knowledge of the various galaxies, and accordingly imagined that the Universe was simply compounded of all the stars they could see, and that it revolved around the earth.

PAUL: Yes, so they abstracted from a fragment of the Universe under the mistaken assumption that they were in fact abstracting from the whole, and thereby arrived - at any rate, in the case of the Hebrews - at a monotheism only relative to this galaxy.  In reality, there are or were literally millions of creators in the Universe, because millions of separate galaxies with their respective governing stars, and these creators each gave rise to millions of devils, because billions of separate stars in all the galaxies of the Universe taken together.  This, however, is to extend religious objectivity farther afield, and it can have no applicability to the modern world!  We speak of galaxies, not creators, and so we should.  I am not now expecting you to resurrect the past and modify it by substituting creators for the Creator, devils for the Devil, hells for Hell, or the lot for galaxies!  But, to get the record straight, I am quite sure that the traditional religious reference to the Creator, the Devil, etc., was, so to speak, cosmically provincial, relevant only to this galaxy, and that there were in fact millions of creators being worshipped throughout the Universe, with millions of devils being feared there - each alien 'people' acknowledging their own abstractions in whichever solar system they happened to exist.

ROBERT: So the old enigma as to whether there was only one First Cause of the Universe or numerous First Causes has been solved at last, if what you say is true?

PAUL: I believe so.  And I believe that intelligent life forms in any particular galaxy would only acknowledge the First Cause relative to their specific galaxy, not to anyone else's, even though they would probably have abstracted the Devil from different sources, depending on which solar system, if any, they inhabited.  Thus if certain of our ancestors on earth abstracted the Devil from the sun, there would be plenty of other suns in the Galaxy to serve a like-purpose for other human equivalents in different solar systems, and consequently they would all be referring to different devils.  As to the fact that, in most traditional political arrangements, the king and nobles derive their justification from the workings of the Galaxy and may be thought of as corresponding, in their relationship with the general populace, to the relations of suns to planets, I have little doubt that the king corresponds, in his privilege of 'Divine Right', to the governing star of the Galaxy, and thus functions as the human equivalent on earth of the Creator.  His nobles, being fundamentally of the same stuff as himself, correspond to the numerous smaller stars that revolve around the large central one, and therefore are aligned with devils, functioning as the human equivalent on earth of the devils of a particular galaxy.  The populace, by contrast, correspond to the planets of each solar system and are therefore aligned with demons, functioning as the human equivalent on earth of the demons of a particular galaxy.  This is a thoroughly diabolical system which prevails while man is under the dominion of nature, of the natural status quo, and has not yet begun to exclusively aspire towards the supernatural.  Thus to some extent it prevails right up to the advent of post-dualistic civilization, when everything appertaining to the monarchic/aristocratic system of government would have ceased to exist.  A constitutional monarchy, such as exists in dualistic Britain, is fundamentally a diabolic system that has been diluted by bourgeois democracy, whilst a republic, such as exists in transitional America, is a worldly system characterized by bourgeois/proletarian democracy.  Only in a post-dualistic civilization will the undiluted truth of a divine-oriented system become possible, as men turn exclusively, in Transcendentalism, towards the cultivation of spirit, and thus cease to fear or worship or slave for the human equivalents on earth of the galactic order.  At that fortunate time there will be no such equivalents, for they will have ceased to exist, having faded into the misty past, along with scientific and religious objectivity.  Only the divine-oriented class of the proletariat will continue the progress of human evolution, and they will do so not as the human equivalent on earth of demons, like the peasant masses and, more especially, soldiery of the feudal and pre-feudal past, but as Transcendentalists - angelic aspirants towards the post-Human Millennium ... and beyond.

 

 

FROM THE APPARENT TO THE ESSENTIAL

 

MICHAEL: I know that, in this day and age, one sometimes encounters men with long hair and women with short hair, but in general it is the other way around, and this has often puzzled me.  I mean, why should a woman's hair be longer than a man's?

LIAM: The obvious answer to your question is that women allow their hair to grow longer.  But if you probe beneath the surface to the, as it were, moral or metaphysical implications of such a tendency, you will find, I think, that women wear their hair longer than men because they are more natural, as a rule - not, as might at first be supposed, because it necessarily makes them look prettier.  Being closer to nature than men, it is natural for women that what grows naturally should be encouraged to grow rather than be cut short.  Their acquiescence in the natural order of things is greater, on the whole, than a man's.

MICHAEL: An interesting theory, I must admit!  Perhaps that explains why women generally grow their fingernails longer than men as well?

LIAM: Yes, I believe so, since fingernails are no less natural than hair.  Having short hair and fingernails is the mark of a being who desires to keep nature down, so to speak, and prevent it from dominating him.  The mark of a more civilized being - in short, of a man.  Now for this reason a man, when he is truly civilized, tends to trim his beard or, better still, shave his face clean every day.  A clean-shaven face is a more civilized-looking face than one with a beard or a moustache on it, even when the latter are regularly trimmed.  What grows naturally, in this context, has been removed or, at any rate, curtailed in the interests of an artificial and, hence, civilized appearance.

MICHAEL: You embarrass me slightly, since I habitually sport a beard, albeit one that is regularly trimmed.  Nevertheless I am sure you have a point, seeing as the majority of men tend, these days, to prefer a clean-shaven face to a bearded one, just as they also prefer short hair to long hair - at least on their own sex.

LIAM: Yes, the heyday of the hippy cult of long hair, beards, moustaches, bell-bottoms, and sandals has well and truly passed now, which is why long hair on men is seen much less frequently than was the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  A majority of that generation have abandoned long hair for a more civilized appearance; they have returned to the ongoing masculine trend of evolution instead of being in rebellion against it, as youths almost invariably are.

MICHAEL: Are you implying that the hippy cult was reactionary?

LIAM: Yes, up to a point; though I am aware that there were progressive aspects to it, like rock music, psychedelic drugs, festivals, the desire for peace, and so on.  But long hair on young men wasn't one of them, since connoting with a naturalistic and, hence, feminine predilection which could only be at loggerheads with the male-biased character of the age.  Rather than showing a contempt for nature by cutting their hair short, these young men preferred, in this respect, to identify with it, and so adopt a lifestyle that was partly reactionary and, in effect, neo-pagan.  It was almost as though they had decided to opt-out of the evolutionary pressures on their own sex in response to the fact that women were rebelling against their traditional role in society by wearing jeans, using contraceptives, travelling about the world more freely, taking jobs, studying for degrees, and generally expressing themselves in ways which their grandmother's generation wouldn't have understood, let alone attempted.  The roles of the sexes seemed, at that point in time, to have been reversed or, at any rate, cross-fertilized.  A man could wear a pair of lightweight sandals as shamelessly as a woman could wear a pair of monkey boots.  The only thing one didn't see men doing, as a rule, was wearing skirts, which just goes to show that, despite their long hair, there were definite limits to the degree of reactionary neo-paganism they permitted themselves.

MICHAEL: Just as well, I think!  However, now that most of the males of our generation have returned to the masculine fold as short-haired, shoe- or boot-wearing individuals, would it not seem that the females have carried on as before, preferring jeans to skirts a lot of the time?

LIAM: Yes, in quite a number of cases, and for the very sound reason that the overall trend of evolution is towards a supermasculine society in which women become progressively more 'masculinized', and thus effectively acquire the status of 'lesser men'.  Of course, not all young women frequently wear jeans, but most of them do at least wear pants of one description or another, which is a step in the right direction.  Yet a majority of them are still pretty feminine, as can be borne-out by the fact that, in addition to wearing skirts or dresses, they also wear their hair fairly long and allow their fingernails to grow longer than would be acceptable on a man.  They may shave their armpits, but only a comparatively small minority of them are given to short hair, and these aren't necessarily the most sophisticated types either!  As a rule, women prefer their hair to hang down, in confirmation of their basic adherence to nature and naturalistic criteria in general.  And, by a similar token, they prefer to grow their fingernails.

MICHAEL: As also to paint them, which must surely indicate that they desire to bring a degree of civilization to bear on their natural appearance and thereby improve it.

LIAM: Undoubtedly.  Although one should beware of assuming that a woman who regularly uses make-up of one kind or another is necessarily more civilized than those who don't.  Generally speaking, this won't, I think, be the case.  For there are also instances, perhaps subconscious, in which make-up is used not so much to enhance the natural ... as to draw attention to it, to become a kind of body art reminiscent of the art practised by primitives, both male and female, in the interests of a crude degree of civilization.  After all, before man put art on walls or canvases, and thereby made it partly transcendental, he applied it to himself, and to some extent this is what many women still do, since insufficiently psychically-evolved to prefer the former to the latter.  Even the appreciation of a great painter's work is if not beyond them then certainly less interesting to them than the application of make-up to their face.  And so, at heart, they remain primitives, preferring the mundane to the transcendent.  Admittedly, there are women who prefer to study or create works of fine art than to paint themselves, and therefore don't wear make-up, at least not conspicuously.  But they are by no means a majority, as I think you would have to agree.

MICHAEL: Indeed!  Although if what you say about not wearing make-up is true, then it follows that, as a rule, only the most sophisticated women will tend to avoid it, since they prefer to adopt a masculine attitude towards life in pursuance of certain intellectual or spiritual goals.

LIAM: Oh, absolutely!  The paradox of the situation is that while make-up constitutes the application of civilization to nature, it only does such on a crude and relatively primitive level.  For even the most tastefully made-up woman is still drawing attention to appearance instead of transcending it by concentrating on essence, i.e. on her spiritual or intellectual interests.  Instead of behaving like a 'lesser man', for whom intellectual matters are of greater importance, her allegiance to nail varnish or lipstick emphasizes her status as a woman, or a creature for whom appearance, and hence beauty, is paramount.  But the truly liberated, progressive woman eschews such make-up, since she is above the practice of body art and thus insists that she be respected for her cultural and intellectual abilities - to be regarded, in effect, as a 'lesser man'.

MICHAEL: A fascinating theory!  And doubtless one that explains why it is normally the less-educated and least intellectual women who sport the brightest nails.  Could the shift from appearance towards essence, in recent decades, be the chief reason why beauty in art has become so suspect?

LIAM: Oh undoubtedly!  For beauty is ever aligned with appearance rather than with essence which, by contrast, is a matter of truth.  Beauty is on the diabolic rather than the divine side of the evolutionary divide, as, I think, Baudelaire maintained, and could only be suspect in an age tending towards truth.  By being non-representational, or abstract, modern art signifies, at its best, an emphasis on the essential rather than the apparent side of life, and is accordingly omega-orientated: the enigmatic or nondescript appearance it entails symbolizing the higher, internal world of truth instead of the lower, external world of illusion or beauty.  At its worst, however, modern art isn't so much pro-transcendental as anti-natural, content merely to distort the external world of nature and thus deprive it of beauty, thereby assisting us to turn away from it.  Much Expressionism is of this order, and although we may not derive a great deal of aesthetic pleasure from such art, we can't dismiss it as bogus or poor.  On the contrary, it is highly significant, since aesthetic pleasure is precisely what we need to avoid if we are to acquire a greater respect for truth.  And what applies to art applies no less to music, literature, and sculpture.

MICHAEL: I am sure you're right, though one's feelings, alas, can't always keep-up with the pace of one's thoughts!  Nevertheless if beauty is a thing of the Devil, then it stands to reason that ugliness should be embraced as a means to enlightenment, ugliness being beauty distorted rather than the opposite of it, which is truth.  The preponderance of ugliness in much modern art would seem to constitute a sort of Nietzschean 'transvaluation of values' so necessary and crucial to the age.

LIAM: Indeed, and not just in modern art but in various other aspects of modern life too, including the punk cult, which was more enlightened than it may at first have appeared.  By displaying their contempt for beauty, punks at least demonstrated that they were on the road to salvation, if rather indirectly so.... Incidentally, whilst on the subject of transvaluations, you may be interested to learn that one of the most important transvaluations we need to make concerns the respective status of light and darkness, the former having traditionally been equated with spiritual enlightenment and, hence, good, while the latter was equated with spiritual ignorance and, hence, evil.

MICHAEL: Are you trying to tell me that light ought to be equated with evil instead of good?

LIAM: Yes, at any rate, when external; and for the simple reason that light stems from the sun, which is equivalent to the diabolic creative force behind life and not to its future divine consummation in transcendent spirit.  External light is a matter of appearance, not essence, and is therefore an inadequate symbol for God, which, ultimately, could only be pure essence.  The use of the word 'light' to define God, as in the oriental term Clear Light of the Void, betrays a diabolic orientation or, more specifically, the contradictory application of apparent terminology to an essential context.  Strictly speaking, transcendent spirit could never be seen, since essence is at the furthest possible evolutionary remove from appearance.  Therefore if, at the inception of evolution, the stars are perceptible as bright, one can only conclude that, at the climax to evolution, transcendent spirit would be if not dark then, at any rate, beyond sensuous perception - would, in fact, resemble a Black Hole, or dense void of spirit, from a sensuous point-of-view.  Which is why I have recently come to equate Black Holes with Spiritual Globes, as I call manifestations of pure spirit en route, as it were, to the Omega Absolute at the spiritual culmination of evolution.

MICHAEL: You could well be right, although the current scientific theory tends to equate Black Holes with collapsed stars, as you probably know.  But if a denser void, composed of compressed spirit, were to appear to a telescoped eye as a sort of black hole in space, then certainly the term Clear Light of the Void would be inadequate for defining or suggesting God?

LIAM: Yes, and consequently we ought perhaps to transvaluate these traditional values, so that spiritual enlightenment comes to be symbolized by respect for the darkness rather than for the light, the respect of a person given to the inner light of his spirit.  I, for one, have no difficulty, these days, in regarding the night as a better time than the day, since we are then at a further remove from the diabolic sustaining force of the sun.  And this being the case, we are enabled to cultivate spirit to a greater extent then than during the day, when the sun's sensuous influence is never very far away.  Only with sleep do we slide into sensuality again, to experience, in dreaming, a sort of night sun.  Curiously, however, what the night is to the day, winter is to summer, which is to say, a time of year when one's part of the earth is at a greater remove from the sun and, consequently, the conditions for cultivating spirit are much more propitious.  One could describe summer as a pagan season and winter, by contrast, as a transcendental one, a season when nature is stripped of its beauty to an extent which makes the cultivation of essence, among human beings, more desirable than the contemplation of appearance.  Winter is decidedly a masculine season, whereas summer is fundamentally feminine.  Women are more in their element in summer, for they can exploit the heat to show off their bodies and thus entrap men in appearance.  They also incline, as a rule, to bright colours - yellows, reds, pinks, whites, bright blues, etc. - rather than to dark ones, which tends to confirm what I have just said about spiritual enlightenment having to do with darkness instead of light, since bright sun-like colours are precisely what appeal to the majority of women.

MICHAEL: Perhaps that also explains why priests and nuns dress in black, since black could be said to approximate to the condition of transcendent spirit or, at any rate, to the renunciation of the flesh, whereas white is too close to sunlight?

LIAM: Yes, I think so and consequently I believe you will find that all those who are in any way intellectually or spiritually advanced tend to prefer dark clothes to bright ones - the latter, by contrast, appealing more to the spiritually superficial.  I, for one, have always worn dark clothes, and I know of no intellectual of any standing who makes a habit of wearing bright ones, like an attractive young woman bent on making herself as phenomenally conspicuous as possible.  Those, as a rule, who draw attention to appearances are the superficial, the extrovert - in a word, the heathen.  Most people probably wouldn't want to accept this truth, but that is only because, in our ostensibly-enlightened but in reality morally ignorant age, they are more pagan than transcendental.

MICHAEL: One can only suppose that fact to be particularly true of the fair sex, who must constitute a majority of the 'most' in question.

LIAM: Indeed, and for reasons already touched upon, including the retention of long hair, long fingernails, and make-up.  But this is a consequence of the fact that human life is caught between nature and an aspiration towards the supernatural, and has not yet evolved to a wholly omega-oriented civilization.  Such a civilization - post-dualistic and, hence, transcendental - will only materialize in the future, following the collapse of the partly diabolic, alpha-stemming ones.  Then the drive towards sexual equality will be much stronger than at present, since women won't be encouraged to emphasize appearance at the expense of essence, but will become more spiritual, in accordance with the requirements of a post-dualistic society.

MICHAEL: You mean, they will be expected to wear their hair short and to regularly clip their fingernails into the bargain?

LIAM: Quite probably.  Although you mention but two aspects of what will doubtless be a large number of expectations, including, one can only suppose, the avoidance of make-up.  Still, if women are to become more spiritualized, in the interests of sexual equality, then they can hardly expect to carry on as before, with specifically feminine allegiances to the natural order of things.  The emphasis on appearance must be reduced with each step of evolutionary progress.  For only by reducing appearance can essence be encouraged to expand.  The world has not evolved at the expense of women, as certain deluded feminists like to believe, but in spite of them, which is to say, in opposition to them.  Where women were formerly in their feminine/domestic element, as wives, mothers, courtesans, etc., they are now being forced out of it by the pressures of a male-oriented technological and urban society.  It took men a long time to evolve to this stage of evolution, for nature had the better of them right up to the last century.  And women, needless to say, were an integral part of nature - not, as feminist theologians prefer to believe, the victims of men!  That the bitter truth of the matter should have been coated with the sugar of feminist theology ... is something I can quite understand.  But there is a great deal of difference between theology and philosophy, as all students of Schopenhauer will know, and the philosopher's task, now as before, is to expound truth for the benefit of those capable of appreciating it, which is to say, for the benefit of those who aspire to rise towards the inner light.  That, at any rate, is what I believe I have done, and whether or not you approve of the fact ... is a matter of complete indifference to me.  I have simply done my duty.

 

 

TRANSFORMATION POINTS

 

PHILIP: What is there about meditation that makes it so important in your eyes?  I mean, why should transcendental meditation become the religious norm of the future, as you assume it will?

SEAN: Precisely because it makes an approximation to the heavenly condition of the transcendental Beyond possible by emphasizing stillness, peace, freedom from worries, wellbeing, self-contentment, identification with an agreeable state-of-mind, and so on.  Admittedly it will be a crude approximation, quite inferior to the actual condition of transcendent spirit, of which we mortals can have only a faint inkling.  But even a crude approximation to that is better than nothing at all.

PHILIP: Presumably people would experience this approximation to the transcendental Beyond in communal contexts within the overall setting of a meditation centre?

SEAN: Yes, for solitary meditation is really a contradiction in terms.  It is not to emphasize the solitary individual that one meditates, but to partake of the multitudinous collective.  Being solitary is a limitation of our worldly phenomenality, whereas being part of a group in spiritual togetherness is to aspire towards the divine consummation of evolution in the maximum unity of undifferentiated spirit.  Meditation should only be practised in the latter context.

PHILIP: Thus one would be indulging in a form of spiritual communality?

SEAN: Absolutely!  However, the spiritual communality of the transcendental devotees in meditation centres would be merely a prelude to the ultimate spiritual communality, on earth, of the Superbeings in the second phase of millennial life.  For this latter communality would involve what I like to call hypermeditation, or supercharged meditation made possible by the removal of the old brain from individual Supermen at the termination of the first phase of millennial life, and their consequent elevation to the intensely collectivized new-brain status of Superbeings.

PHILIP: How many new brains would constitute a Superbeing?

SEAN: A great many - possibly several thousand.  For the object of placing so many new brains in close proximity to one another on a common artificial support would be to approximate more closely to the projected unity of transcendent spirit in the heavenly Beyond, and so bring the communality of meditating brains to the highest possible pitch on earth.  The old saying that two brains or, rather, heads are better than one ... for solving a problem ... would certainly apply, if only slightly, to the creation of a large 'brain' out of thousands of individual brains whose capacity for meditation was enhanced in proportion to the number of brains or, more correctly, new brains interacting with one another to the level of what I have called hypermeditation - the direct means of attaining to transcendence.

PHILIP: Whew, this is beginning to surpass my powers of comprehension!  What you are saying, I take it, is that only the interaction of so many new brains in an intensely collectivized context would generate the necessary spiritual potential for transcendence, and the consequent almost nuclear detachment of spirit from the new brain as such.

SEAN: Precisely!  Without the interaction or mutual stimulation of the numerous new brains upon one another, there could be no ultimate salvation.  For salvation requires not meditation but hypermeditation, such as only the Superbeings would be capable of experiencing.  Each Superbeing, incidentally, would be the antithetical equivalent to a tree.

PHILIP: How do you mean?

SEAN: Well, a tree is a natural entity composed of a support, viz. trunk and branches, and innumerable leaves, which may or may not flower.  The leaves are subconscious and therefore devoid of autonomy.  They are components of the tree.  One can't speak of leaves as though they were individual life forms subject to egocentric consciousness.  The tree is a communal entity and functions in terms of a sort of sensual communality.  The antithetical equivalent to a tree will also be a communal entity, composed, as I have said, of numerous new brains which will be artificially supported, through a trunk- and branch-like apparatus, and exist on a superconscious plane, likewise devoid of autonomy, in which spiritual communality prevails.  What flowers are to the leaves of a tree, transcendence will be to the new brains of a Superbeing.

PHILIP: Fascinating!  And these new brains presumably won't think of themselves as distinct or separate entities - anymore than would leaves on a tree?

SEAN: No, they will be no less above egocentric consciousness than leaves are beneath it.  Only the Supermen of the first phase of millennial life would be capable of or, rather, disposed to self-identification.  For the persistence of the old brain from earlier stages of evolution would entail a degree of egocentric consciousness - at least during those periods when the Supermen were relaxing or recovering from their LSD trips, or equivalent synthetically-induced visionary experiences.

PHILIP: And would these Supermen be collectivized, too?

SEAN: Of course, since evolutionary progress would be emphasizing collectivization on the preceding level of the transcendental civilization, and that could only be stepped up, as it were, within the first phase of the post-Human Millennium.  Here, then, brains would be artificially supported on a common branch-like apparatus, but instead of being the antithetical equivalent to leaves on a tree, they would exist as an antithetical equivalent to apes on a tree, i.e. as so many individuals gathered together in a loosely communal context.  As apes precede man in chronological time, so the Supermen will succeed him - each artificially-supported brain being a distinct Superman.

PHILIP: And why will they be injected, or whatever, with LSD?

SEAN: Because it makes for upward self-transcendence on the visionary plane, and before the psyche could be expected to live on a wholly post-visionary, or essential, plane ... it would doubtless have to pass through an intermediate stage of internal visionary experience, in which a limited degree of appearance would prevail.  Such appearance, however, would be static, in accordance with the predominantly omega-oriented constitution of the lower regions of superconscious mind, not be active like dreams, which reflect, by contrast, the alpha-stemming constitution of the subconscious.  Having a subconscious mind, because an old brain, the Superman would still sleep, like us, and so experience his own dream world.  But during the day he would trip, i.e. experience artificially-induced visions, and thereby thoroughly familiarize himself with his superconscious.  The leaders - priest equivalents of the post-Human Millennium - would be on-hand to tend him, injecting the requisite dosages of LSD into each Superman, presumably via an arrangement of plastic tubing responsible for conveying blood and nourishment to the brain.  After all, it isn't enough that the Supermen should be artificially supported; they must also be artificially sustained, so that one is led to envisage a large mechanical pump, common to all brains, being used to convey blood and oxygen, via plastic tubing, to the individual Supermen.  If apes and trees are naturally sustained, through sunlight, oxygen, rain, earth, and so on, then their antithetical equivalents ... could only be sustained artificially - in the aforementioned manner.  It's as simple as that!

PHILIP: I wish I could believe you!  However, now that I am more or less in the picture, what particularly puzzles me is the transformation from Supermen to Superbeings.  I mean, when would the leaders know the time had arrived for them to remove the old brain from each Superman and create that more intensely collectivized entity which you have termed a Superbeing?

SEAN: One would have to be alive during the post-Human Millennium to know the answer to a question like that, since only the most complete understanding between the Supermen and their overseers would put the latter in a position to know when to set about creating the Superbeing.  Obviously, no attempt would be made to transform Supermen before they were thoroughly acquainted with internal visionary experience and therefore sufficiently acclimatized to the superconscious to be capable of gravitating to post-visionary consciousness, following the surgical removal of the old brain.  A premature transformation from the one post-human life form to the other would be foolhardy, assuming it were possible, which is by no means guaranteed, since the technological know-how of performing such a delicate operation would take time to develop, and preliminary experiments would doubtless have to be carried out long before the Supermen were considered ripe for transformation.  Only when the leaders were technically capable of effecting the desired transformation from the one post-human life form to the other would they proceed with their task, since evolutionary progress requires a certain amount of initiative from the leadership at any given time, and cannot depend upon the wishes of the led alone.  Doubtless those wishes have to be taken into account, but they must be supplemented, as it were, by the progressive ambitions of the leadership, if evolution is to continue.  Yet what applies to the transformation from Supermen to Superbeings applies no less to the earlier (in relation to this) transformation from men to Supermen, which is also something that would have to await its proper time.  We can have no certainty, at present, of when this earlier transformation will be brought about, though we need not expect it to happen for 2-3 centuries yet.

PHILIP: You mean, towards the culmination of the next and, presumably, final civilization?

SEAN: Yes, the universal civilization of transcendental man, in which meditation will be practised in suitably-designed meditation centres and the State continue to 'wither away', as religion gradually takes over from politics.  By the time the People have grown accustomed to this civilization, and their leaders have developed the technology for supporting and sustaining brains artificially, the transformation to the post-Human Millennium will be possible, and therefore man's correlative upgrading into Superman.  At present, we are still at quite an historical remove from that momentous turning-point, however.

PHILIP: So it would appear!  For, in the West, one has the old dualistic, or Christian, civilization of countries like Britain and France, together with the more recent transitional, or Christian/transcendental, civilization of the United States.  Whilst in the East one has ...

SEAN: What, under Soviet Communism, could formerly have been regarded as the barbarous opponent of those civilizations but which, with the development of Social Democracy, may well be something on the way to becoming the ultimate civilization.

PHILIP: Let us sincerely hope so!

 

 

A FUNDAMENTAL DICHOTOMY

 

MARTIN: Would you regard being reserved as a good or a bad thing?

DONAL: Why do you ask?

MARTIN: Well, I recently read of the British temperament being described by no less a writer than Anthony Burgess as frightfully eclarté but, nevertheless, preferable to the French one, which, as you know, is rather the opposite.

DONAL: Ah, I see!  And presumably you don't know whether or not to agree?

MARTIN: No, I suppose not.

DONAL: Well, in my opinion, the French temperament is preferable to the British one, even though it has its nasty side.  And I regard it as preferable because it reflects an uninhibited approach to life which indicates a divine rather than a diabolic orientation.

MARTIN: I'm not sure that I follow you.

DONAL: Doubtless because you are unaware that to be reserved is a star-like tendency in which one is shut off from other people in one's own little consciousness, in the assertion of one's individuality and separateness.  The stars, corresponding to the diabolic roots of evolution, tend to diverge from one another ... rather than to converge towards one another, to contract rather than to expand.  Well, a temperament described as eclarté does pretty much the same thing, since other people are not seen as presences to converge towards but, on the contrary, as something to avoid.  One prefers to remain imprisoned within one's own identity, reserved in one's conduct and speech.  The other person isn't someone to open up to but, more usually, someone to fear as a potential enemy or competitor.

MARTIN: Yes, but one can open up to people in a nasty way, abusing them with foul language, and I am sure the estimable writer I read had that in mind when he described the British temperament as being preferable to the French one.

DONAL: Maybe he did.  But such unpleasant speech is simply the reverse side of opening up to others in a pleasant way, and needn't imply that an uninhibited attitude to people is necessarily bad.  At least one is prepared to acknowledge others and to impose one's soul upon them, which is arguably better than to ignore them altogether, as if they didn't exist or were so many inferior creatures, scarcely human.  One embraces others spiritually, drawing them into one's world, affirming the communion of human beings, the fact that, although possessing distinct bodies, they are in some sense linked together mentally and should share a common aspiration towards spiritual unity.  Being reserved is to deny this, to prefer the separate to the unitary, the individual to the collective.  Of course, there are times when it is expedient to be reserved, when an uninhibited attitude to others would be foolhardy or simply out-of-place.  But I cannot agree with your author that a reserved temperament, such as the British are alleged to possess, is preferable to an unreserved one.

MARTIN: But why, as a rule, are the French so different from the British in this respect?

DONAL: Why indeed?  I think you will find that it has something to do with the respective national constitutions of the two peoples, with the fact, I mean, that nations are normally divisible into those which are predominantly materialistic and those, conversely, which are predominantly spiritualistic.  This is a fundamental dichotomy traceable, so I believe, to the basic antagonism at the root of the Galaxy between stars and planets, the one effectively feminine, the other masculine, and is the reason why some countries acquire a star-like materialistic tendency whilst others, by contrast, acquire a planet-like spiritualistic one.  Evidently the Protestant British developed from the former, whereas their French counterparts, more given to Catholicism, developed from the latter.  Hence the traditional antagonism between the two peoples, an antagonism which isn't entirely allayed even now, although it is certainly past its prime, so to speak, since we no longer live in a world dominated by dualism.  The British and the French came to power as imperialist nations at the dualistic stage of evolution, albeit as late dualistic powers.  They have since been superseded by the transitional powers ... in between dualism and post-dualism ... of, amongst others, Japan and the United States.

MARTIN: And presumably this same dichotomy between a predominantly materialistic and a predominantly spiritualistic orientation still applies on the transitional plane to which you allude.

DONAL: Yes, except that, as they are a little further up the evolutionary ladder, so to speak, the Japanese will be a shade less reserved than the British, while the Americans, by contrast, will be a shade more uninhibited than the French.  The diabolic side of evolution contracts while the divine side of it expands.

MARTIN: I seem to recall that the only time a complete stranger ever started a conversation with me was in a small public garden off the Boulevard de Clichy in Paris, and that he happened to be an American.

DONAL: Well, that speaks for itself, doesn't it?  An American is usually the best bet, these days, for an uninhibited attitude towards strangers, and where better to display it in Europe than Paris, capital of the civilization preceding the American one on the spiritualistic side of evolution.  I trust you enjoyed the conversation?

MARTIN: To be sure, it was one of the most interesting conversations I have ever had, I who had grown all-too-accustomed to a reserved life in London.

DONAL: Considering you are an Irishman, that is a most unfortunate thing!  For we are also on the spiritualistic side of evolution, though we haven't as yet blossomed into the fully-uninhibited attitude or approach to life we shall adopt, once the next civilization gets properly under way and we are enabled to take our rightful place beside China on the full-blown post-dualistic level of evolution.

MARTIN: How do you mean?

DONAL: Well, what America is to France, Ireland will subsequently become, in conjunction with several other countries, to America, as post-dualistic civilization takes over from where transitional civilization leaves off.  As a spiritualistic people, we could only develop a more uninhibited attitude to life than the Americans currently possess, since evolutionary progress demands that spiritual expansion be stepped-up with each successive stage of civilized advancement.  And, simultaneously with this, it demands that the materialistic contracts, so that the Chinese will be less reserved, on the whole, than the latter-day Japanese, albeit still essentially a reserved rather than an uninhibited people.

MARTIN: Thus there will be progress along both the positive and negative sides of evolution, as the former becomes more uninhibited and the latter less reserved.

DONAL: Precisely.  And from Ireland, positivity will spread throughout the world ... to establish the ultimate human civilization, universal and transcendental.  The planet-like countries are destined to completely triumph over the star-like ones as the world becomes exclusively omega-orientated.  However, during the coming decades, the negative side of evolution will continue to exist, principally in the guise of China, though on a less reserved level, as I said, than is currently manifested among the Japanese.  But the Irish will begin to acquire a more positive outlook, compatible with Ireland's destiny as the next spiritualistic nation in the evolution of the world.  At present, they are still partly victims of the centuries-old influence of British imperialism on their country and therefore somewhat akin to convalescents recovering from a lengthy illness.  But once the last traces of bourgeois imperialism disappear from their system, they will be in a better position to develop their considerable spiritual potential, and thus take over from America the expansion of positivity in an even more unreserved attitude towards one another.  Why, in comparison with them, even the French might well appear reserved!

MARTIN: While the Chinese, as a less reserved people than their alleged national predecessors on the materialistic side of evolution, might well appear similar to the French, whose uninhibitedness you regard as less radical than the Americans'.

DONAL: Whether a lower stage of uninhibitedness could ever approximate to a higher stage of reservedness, or vice versa, is a moot point, though you may not be all that far from the truth in what you say!  Anyway, you would soon notice the difference between the converse situation, which would contrast, say, Victorian Britain on a lower stage of reservedness with the future transcendental Ireland on a higher stage of uninhibitedness.  However, that is merely intellectual speculation, unworthy of serious philosophical discussion!  We should concern ourselves with the actual and potential, not the imaginary.  And as long as we accept the fact that evolution progresses from Britain to China via Japan on the materialistic side, and from France to, amongst other countries, Ireland via America on the spiritualistic side, then I believe we shan't go far wrong - not, at any rate, as far as the progression from late dualism to early post-dualism is concerned.... Incidentally, the fact that Ireland is a small country materially is all the more reason why it should become a big one spiritually.  By contrast, China is such a big country materially that it could only be a relatively small one spiritually, since the one factor tends to condition the other.

MARTIN: There would certainly be a materialistic contraction involved in the development of civilization from America to Ireland, although the contention that China signifies a materialistic expansion over Japan precludes your theory from being logically consistent.  Nevertheless, irrespective of the countries concerned, there is probably something to be said for your underlining argument concerning the basic dichotomy between reserved and unreserved nations, whatever the respective size or shape of any given nation may happen to be, and I now incline to agree with you that the overall tendency of evolution is to contract the former and expand the latter, thereby gradually improving the moral constitution of the world.  If the British, Japanese, and Chinese would be less than flattered by your contentions, you can at least take some consolation from the likelihood that the French, Americans, and Irish would find them progressively more flattering, in accordance with their respective levels of uninhibitedness.  From now on I will know the truth about being eclarté, deeming it preferable to have a sociable rather than an unsociable, or reserved, national temperament.

DONAL: Had you not lived so long in England, you would have known the truth sooner.  But, frankly, I can't blame you for your ignorance!

 

 

THE NEW SUBJECTIVITY

 

KEVIN: Feminists have a habit of saying that women are socially rather than biologically conditioned, that their traditional responsibilities were not so much biologically inevitable as forced upon them by men, and that men only progressed and prospered at the expense of women.  This, at any rate, is how that estimable feminist Simone de Beauvoir speaks, and she does so with general feminist approval.  Yet while she may be justified from a feminist standpoint to speak in such fashion, she is quite wrong from an objectively philosophical standpoint.

DAVID: Oh, in what way?

KEVIN: In the same way that a scientist would be wrong to speak of curved space as the causal explanation of the planets' rotation about the sun when, in reality, the Newtonian factors of force and mass are the only ones literally applicable to the conduct of planets and stars, particularly the latter, which correspond to the diabolic roots of evolution and behave in an appropriately forceful fashion.  But the modern physicist doesn't explain the workings of the Cosmos in literal terms, but in terms corresponding to Western man's growing predilection for the superconscious, which reflects, in its omega orientation, his mystical bias.  To speak literally of such workings, as did Newton, would show the Cosmos to be a less agreeable place than modern man evidently wishes to see it.  Even if his transcendental bias, largely conditioned by countries like America and Germany, has a long way to go before it becomes radically transcendent, nevertheless a quasi-mystical interpretation of how the Cosmos works remains necessary.  Largely through environmental progress from nature to the contemporary city Western man has acquired a higher consciousness and must project this consciousness onto the Cosmos, deeming the conduct of both stars and planets to proceed along gentler lines than would have been envisaged by Newton.  His self-deception in this matter is essential to his spiritual self-esteem.  For modern consciousness is not, as formerly, connected with appearance in the external environment, whether cosmic or worldly, but appertains to the internal realm of superconscious mind, and consequently science must take its cue from essence and so become subjective.  This is especially true of transitional, or bourgeois/proletarian, countries like America and Germany.  But the more traditional dualistic countries have also been affected by it, and thus dragged into the transcendental perspective.

DAVID: Although most countries of the communist or former-communist East have seemingly refused to countenance this subjectivity, and instead remained aligned with Newtonian objectivity.

KEVIN: Yes, to some extent they have, since transcendental criteria were officially taboo under Marxism-Leninism, although there could be nothing more communist, from a scientific point-of-view, than the curved space theory of the Universe, with its quasi-electron transcendentalism.  However that may be, communist societies also remained partial to traditional and, hence, objectively correct valuations of women, which is why feminism was largely a dead letter with them.

DAVID: You mean women really are biologically conditioned, contrary to what Western feminists insist?

KEVIN: Of course!  Although they were never wholly so, not even in the past, long before the Women's Liberation Movement was ever dreamed up.  What curved space is to the modern physicist, social conditioning is to the feminist - a convenient illusion for masking the sad truth of biological conditioning, since such an illusion is flattering to the liberated woman's social vanity and enables her to have a better opinion of herself than would otherwise be the case, were she to regard herself literally, which is to say, as a creature striving to overcome biological hurdles.

DAVID: So although one would not be objectively correct to define women as victims of social conditioning, one is subjectively correct to do so, and for similar reasons as pertain to science.

KEVIN: Absolutely!  The higher reality of the superconscious imposes a spiritual bias upon one's assessment of women which contradicts the external reality of the flesh.  Rather than give the lower reality of the flesh its objective dues, one submits to the higher reality of the superconscious, projecting that reality onto women.  Feminist subjectivity is no less necessary in a society with a transcendental bias than scientific subjectivity.  You can't really have the one without the other.

DAVID: And yet, if people are able to see through the illusions of contemporary Western society, as you apparently can, surely those illusions will be less efficacious in achieving their desired ends?

KEVIN: It depends what those ends happen to be.  Though if you are querying whether or not one ought to crack such illusions, then I can only say that, so long as there are philosophers in existence, illusions will be cracked, whatever their status or nature!  However, not everyone is inclined to read philosophy and, by a similar token, not everyone is inclined to crack illusions, particularly when they are absolutely pertinent to the age or civilization.  But a philosopher - who is, par excellence, a man of truth - will be morally entitled to do so, since only by cracking illusions is he enabled to extend the realm of truth.  On the other hand, a theologian, using that term in a loosely Schopenhauerian sense, must uphold such illusions as are deemed suitable to the age.  For he/she relates to the generality, and must accordingly put expedience above objectivity.

DAVID: Are you therefore implying that Simone de Beauvoir, for example, was essentially a theologian in this respect?

KEVIN: Yes, unlike Sartre, who was a philosopher.  A feminist is always a theologian, as is a Marxist, who of course puts expedience above objectivity in his assessment of the proletariat.  But whereas Marxist subjectivity is derived from the objectivity of the external world, with particular reference to the economic relations of the employer/employee classes, feminist subjectivity derives from the subjectivity of the internal world, or superconscious.  The one speaks truthfully of the external world but untruthfully of the proletariat.  The other speaks truthfully of the internal world but untruthfully of women.  Both untruths, however, are equally necessary and inescapable.  They may be despised by the philosopher, but they cannot be discarded as untenable.

DAVID: Although philosophers are apparently unnecessary in societies based on theological expedience?

KEVIN: Yes, because philosophers pertain to the pursuit of truth and are therefore essential to civilization, where religion is officially upheld.  A barbarous state, on the other hand, can manage without them, since, as you correctly observed, it is expedience and not objectivity that matters there.

DAVID: Do you, as a philosopher, pertain to civilization then?

KEVIN: Most assuredly!  Although within the context of both the dualistic and transitional civilizations of the contemporary West ... I am something of an outsider.  Rather, I presage a future post-dualistic civilization which will, I believe, take root in countries that, like Eire, have achieved Social Democracy in one form or another, and spread abroad when the time is ripe.  Thus I am currently a stateless philosopher who projects his work into the future and thereby hopes to contribute towards the creation of a post-dualistic civilization.

DAVID: They say all great philosophers are ahead of their time, so you must be in the tradition in that respect.

KEVIN: Yes, I guess so!

 

    

LONDON 1982 (Revised 2012)

 

Future Transformations