Op. 26
POST-ATOMIC PERSPECTIVES
Multigenre Philosophy
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: MAXIMS
1. Maxims 1–46
PART TWO: APHORISMS
2. Aphorisms 1–16
PART THREE: ESSAYS
3. Literary Developments
4. Transitional Literatures
5. A Second Coming
6. True and False Messiahs
7. Antithetical Equivalents
8. Withering of the State(s)
9. Christian Pagans
10. Transvaluations
PART FOUR: DIALOGUES
11. Knowledge of God
12. Relative and Absolute
13. Becoming and Become
14. Evolutionary Stages
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PART ONE:
MAXIMS
1. The greater the man the more tragic the
life. Conversely, the
pettier the man the more trivial the life.
2. The higher the
woman, the more she will function as a quasi-electron equivalent rather than as
a proton equivalent on the post-atomic plane.
3. The higher the man,
the more he will function as a free-electron equivalent rather than as a
bound-electron equivalent on the post-atomic plane.
4. The nearest the greatest man will come to
being a bound-electron equivalent is in his dreams, when he may encounter a
woman with whom he has sex.
5. The post-atomic man
will not revolve around a woman, like a bound electron around a proton, but be
free to expand spirit towards the Divine.
6. The post-atomic
woman, who functions as a quasi-electron equivalent, will both receive semen
and conceive life artificially.
7. Woman as proton
equivalent and man, by contrast, as bound-electron equivalent; liberated woman
as a quasi-electron equivalent and Superman as a free-electron equivalent.
8. Because women effectively become
quasi-Supermen in a post-atomic society, they cannot be discriminated against as
women.
9. This fact is already grasped and partly
realized in the transitional, or bourgeois/proletarian, stage of civilized
evolution, such as still prevails in the greater part of the Western world in
the present century.
10. But transitional civilization still falls
somewhat short of the free-electron status of a post-atomic society.
11. Considered from a historically objective
point-of-view, a continuity may be discerned from one
stage of civilized evolution to another, cutting across the divisions of class
integrity ... as appertaining to each stage of civilization, and manifesting a
progression towards the Divine.
12. But considered from a contemporary relative
point-of-view, there exists only the opposition of one class to another and the
unwillingness of the prevailing class to further the higher evolutionary
aspirations of what may be called the under class.
13. Thus on the relative scale, one cannot expect
bourgeois/proletarian civilization to further the development of proletarian
civilization on the post-atomic plane per se.
14. That which appertains to the bourgeois stage
of evolution is sufficient unto the needs of the bourgeoisie.
15. Proletarian civilization, with its post-atomic
bias, can only be furthered by the efforts of the proletariat in opposition to
the preceding or prevailing evolutionary class.
16. Thus arises the need
for Transcendentalism and Socialism to champion the interests of the
proletariat in the face of bourgeois opposition.
17. The material interests of the proletariat are
championed by Socialism, their spiritual interests by Transcendentalism - the
one concentrating upon a contraction of materialism in the world, the other,
following in its wake, upon an expansion of spirituality there.
18. The materialist limitations of Socialism lead
it to denounce abstract art as petty bourgeois, and to regard all degrees and
kinds of abstract art as decadent.
19. The spiritual insights of Transcendentalism
lead to a denunciation of petty-bourgeois abstraction in the arts not so much
because it is abstract but, rather, because it is insufficiently abstract: in
other words, because it doesn't correspond to proletarian transcendentalism, as
appertaining to a post-atomic civilization.
20. But post-atomic
civilization is not the prerogative of Socialism, and so Socialists limit
themselves to a denunciation of decadent bourgeois civilization.
21. The socialist responsibility is sufficient
unto itself and an integral part of historical necessity. Just so, the transcendentalist responsibility
... of effecting spiritual progress on the proletarian plane in the wake of
socialist influence in the world at large ... will be an integral part of
historical necessity, corresponding to the addition of a spiritual
superstructure to the material foundations of post-atomic society.
22. Thus proletarian civilization will arise as
the ultimate human civilization preceding the post-Human Millennium.
23. The twentieth century
was, by and large, a century of bourgeois/proletarian transition - the most
representative transitional nations being
24. The older European countries, such as Britain,
France, Belgium, and Holland, were still basically bourgeois but subject to the
influence of the transitional nations, and therefore stood closer to their
level of civilization.
25. Thus the bourgeois nations were conditioned
towards bourgeois/proletarian criteria by the bona fide
transitional nations without, however, entirely betraying their
middle-class roots.
26. Not being genuinely bourgeois/proletarian,
these older nations could never take the lead in developing transitional
civilization but were obliged to follow-on behind the leaders.
27. Their lifestyle was thus often not their own
but, rather, what the genuinely transitional nations had injected into them.
28. They resembled an old patient being kept alive
by an influx of fresh blood from a young doctor. If they appeared to be truly living, it was
more often than not a semblance of life or a veneer of zestful living imposed
upon them from without.
29. They couldn't stand properly on their own
feet, for their legs were old and shaky, requiring the crutches of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization as support.
30. Without the continuing
support of the truly contemporary nations, the passé
ones would have either collapsed into internal anarchy or been destroyed as
civilizations by post-atomic barbarism.
31. Bourgeois/proletarian civilization cannot last
for ever, but will be superseded, in due course, by proletarian civilization.
32. For the universal establishment of proletarian
civilization ... a nation specifically dedicated to the expansion of the
spiritual side of life will be required, to disseminate transcendental truth
throughout the world when the time is ripe.
Such a nation will be transcendentalist.
33. From the fact of the
alpha absolute to the truth of the omega absolute; from the fiction of 'the
Creator' to the illusion of a benevolent cosmos.
34. The internal fiction of the Father derived
from the external fact of the First Cause; the external illusion of a
benevolent cosmos derived from the internal truth of the superconscious.
35. The internal appearance of the subconscious
projecting the theological fiction out into the external context as a
pseudo-fact; the internal essence of the superconscious
receiving the scientific illusion in the internal context as a pseudo-truth.
36. The complexity of the modern atom is no less
an aspect of scientific subjectivity than the complexity of the Cosmos. Microcosm and macrocosm are subject to
identical evaluations.
37. Considered literally, the atom is no more
complex now than formerly, when man first became aware of it. Electrons still revolve around a proton
nucleus, with neutrons in attendance.
38. Only our scientific bias regarding the atom
has changed, and it conforms to the subjective need to complexify
the external, whether microcosmic or macrocosmic, in response to the
corresponding simplification of the internal, or superconscious,
as required by quasi-theological expedience.
39. A sick man cannot regard the world from the
viewpoint of a man who is well, and vice versa.
Similarly, a mind in which the superconscious
predominates over the subconscious cannot regard the world from the viewpoint
of one in which the subconscious predominates over the superconscious. This explains our changing attitude to the
world, as indeed to the Universe in general.
40. But it doesn't follow from this that the world
or the Universe has changed independently of ourselves.
41. Just as there are degrees of nature, from the
most densely natural in the stars to the least densely natural in man, so there
are degrees of Supernature, from the least purely
supernatural in man to the most purely supernatural in the omega absolutism of
transcendent futurity.
42. Man, who is not a static life-form but an
evolving one, progresses from the least human degree of supernaturalism in
paganism to the most human degree of supernaturalism in transcendentalism via
an intermediate realm of balance between the natural and the supernatural.
43. Beyond man, however,
the Superman of the lower phase of the post-Human Millennium would attain to a
still superior degree of supernaturalism, as the superconscious
was opened-up through participation in artificially-induced visionary
experience.
44. Beyond the Superman,
however, the Superbeing of the higher phase of the
post-Human Millennium would attain to the maximum degree of supernaturalism prior
to transcendence, as the superconscious was
completely freed from subconscious constraint, and post-visionary experience
became possible.
45. With the attainment
of transcendence, however, the ensuing Spiritual Globe would be completely
supernatural, as it escaped from the physiological constraint of collectivized
new-brains and so became a fragment, as it were, of absolute mind converging,
together with other such fragments, towards the heavenly goal of evolution in
ultimate spiritual unity.
46. The attainment of ultimate spiritual unity
would bring the evolving universe to completion in the Omega Absolute, the most
supernatural of noumena, at the opposite extreme to
the most subnatural of phenomena - the stars.
PART TWO:
APHORISMS
1. I have long entertained the opinion that a
reproduction of a modern painting in poster form is a more civilized medium of
aesthetic appreciation than the original work from which the reproduction was
derived. One might say that whereas the
possession of an actual canvas signifies a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois
allegiance, the possession of a poster-reproduction bespeaks a proletarian
orientation, in which the materialism of canvas and paints has been eclipsed in
response to proletarian criteria. And
very often a poster-reproduction is of a smaller scale than the original work.
2. To my way of
thinking, women who take part in erotic posturings
for purposes of photographic reproduction are sublimated prostitutes. They signify a superior type and stage of prostitution
to the literal, personal and material type, being, by contrast, sublimated,
impersonal and spiritual. With recourse
to them, sex is elevated from the body to the mind - most of the pleasure one
obtains from them coming through the eyes.
They constitute the most appropriate sex partners for the free-electron
male, whose sexuality is necessarily sublimated, i.e. free of the flesh.
3. Arthur Koestler,
Malcolm Muggeridge, and Aldous
Huxley were all, in their different ways, outstanding petty-bourgeois
authors. But considered from a
proletarian standpoint, their writings have little or nothing to offer the
future. Like all petty-bourgeois
writers, they do not assist the advancement of the proletariat but, on the
contrary, oppose such advancement in loyalty to their own class standards and
integrity.
4. The expression 'Free World', so often bandied
about in the West, is largely hyperbolic; for, in reality, the West is at best
two-thirds or three-quarters free, as pertaining to the levels of civilization
that prevail there. Anyone who writes on
behalf of a higher degree of freedom, such as would correspond to proletarian
civilization, soon finds out just how free the West really is! For his work is invariably rejected by
publishers who, for the most part, reflect bourgeois and petty-bourgeois levels
of freedom.
5. The 'freest' literature will only arise in a
post-atomic civilization, or in a nation moving towards such a civilization
from a transcendental standpoint. The
socialist nations do not and cannot produce a truly free literature; for they
are constrained by a materialist integrity into maintaining the expedient lie
in the material interests of the proletariat, and are accordingly bound to a
traditional or conventional technical approach to literature. Socialist Realism, which normally prevails in
socialist states, uses bourgeois genres on behalf of the proletariat, treating
such genres in a conventional manner. Thus
proton- or, more correctly, neutron-oriented literature is transformed, by
reference to the proletariat, into quasi-electron literature, functioning on
behalf of bound electrons from a pseudo-neutron base. Only a transcendental nation, dedicated to
the expansion of the spiritual in the wake of a universal contraction of materialism,
could at some time produce free-electron literature on behalf of a free
proletariat from a like base.
6. A Marxist-Leninist state can only contract
the material, not expand the spiritual.
Its entrenched opposition to petty-bourgeois transcendentalism, e.g. the
adoption of oriental mysticism by Western states, is justified by loyalty to
proletarian criteria. But such loyalty
exists solely on a materialist level, without reference to proletarian
spirituality. The Communist opposes
petty-bourgeois mysticism, but he doesn't envisage replacing it with
proletarian spirituality, or transcendentalism.
His chief concern is to contract the material, i.e. oppose capitalism,
and a by-product of this mainstream activity will be the rejection of
accompanying levels of religion. The
construction of a higher level of religion is not an integral part of his
programme. That must be left to future
Transcendentalists, whose ideological bias entails an understanding of and
commitment to spiritual values - in their case the ultimate spiritual values of
full-blown Transcendentalism. Not being
tied to the materialist criteria of State Socialism, these spiritual socialists
would encourage the publication and dissemination of literature bearing on a
higher religion. Theirs is the only
possible base from which to launch a transcendental crusade.
7. It cannot be denied that the first
manifestation of nature gave rise to the second, that the second gave rise to
the third, the third to the fourth, and so on, until man was reached as the
highest manifestation of nature, possessed of a supernatural capacity. Man arose, one may believe, from the apes,
and proceeded on his uniquely human course away from the natural and deeper
into the supernatural. At first the
supernatural was a part of the natural, nature being invested by early man with
magical powers, mostly evil; but, by degrees, it gradually acquired a distinct,
transcendent status, as in Christianity, and became the goal of human striving,
an otherworldly ideal which could only become reality if the flesh, meaning
human nature, was defeated and escaped from.
With the advent of a post-Christian and exclusively transcendental age,
such as the world is now tending towards, this striving will be continued on
higher terms, as man acquires greater mastery over nature and increasingly
learns to identify himself with Supernature. The way to the distant goal of heavenly
salvation, however, will lead, in due course, beyond the final human stage of
religious striving to the post-Human Millennial stages, in which the
supernatural will preponderate over the natural to an extent inconceivable in
man.
8. Thus as a superior manifestation of nature
developed out of a preceding inferior stage, so must each superior stage of Supernature develop
out of inferior preceding stages, beginning, as we have seen, with the human,
which progresses through successive stages from paganism to transcendentalism,
continuing from the human to the post-human in the Supermen and Superbeings (see below) of the ensuing transcendental
Millennium, continuing on again from the post-visionary supernaturalism of the Superbeings to the absolute supernaturalism of Spiritual
Globes, and culminating in the ultimate supernaturalism of the Omega Absolute.
9. Man is thus responsible not only for
effecting increased degrees of supernaturalism within himself but, in addition,
to effecting supernatural progress beyond the human stages in what I have
defined as the millennial ones. By 'man'
I refer, in particular, to those men whose duty it becomes to endorse and
supervise succeeding stages of religious progress, to chosen leaders of one
cast or another who, as a rule, don't directly enter the 'promised land' of
religious striving themselves, but lead others towards it on whichever level
they may happen to be. If this is
generally the case where humanity and the human stages of evolution are
concerned, how much more so must it be for the future post-human stages of
evolution, when the 'promised land' of the transcendental Millennium will not
only require to be supervised but, first of all, created by certain
men, who will stand apart from it in their capacity as leaders, responsible,
amongst other things, for achieving technical perfection in the artificial
supporting and sustaining of human brains, which, once established, will exist
in the collectivized contexts of Supermen - as antithetical equivalents to apes
on trees. The means of achieving this
perfection will be explored by a chosen Few whose destiny will be to serve the
Supermen and ensure they are maintained in good working-order. Yet the substitution of artificial supports
and sustains for natural ones ... is only one side of the problem. The other is, of course, to produce brains
for those supports and sustains, and to produce them in such a way that they
will exist independently of human bodies.
10. No, the leaders, whether technical, spiritual,
or whatever, won't enter the 'promised land' of the Supermen personally, but
will be as shepherds to the flock, creating and maintaining a higher level of
life for the post-human life forms. This
will also apply to the superbeing phase of millennial
evolution, when an entity - one of a number of such entities - antithetical in
constitution to a tree will be created by the responsible leaders, as they
elevate life from collectivized brains artificially supported and sustained to
more intensively-collectivized new brains supported and sustained in a similar
way. Each cluster of new brains will
become a Superbeing, and doubtless this most superior
life form on earth would also require supervision, lest some malfunction were
to occur in the mechanical sustain apparatus or injury to various of the new
brains arise in consequence of neglect and/or surgical inadequacy. As a gardener waters and carefully tends his
plants, anxious in case any harm should befall them, so would the technocratic
leaders of each phase of the post-Human Millennium be solicitous of the
wellbeing of their spiritual 'plants', conscious of the important role they
play in ensuring the continuity and amelioration of evolving life on earth, if
the goal of evolution in absolute transcendence is eventually to be
attained. Conscious, above all, of the
preciousness of these spiritual 'plants', superior to anything created by
nature, almost completely supernatural in their positive orientation towards
the heavenly Beyond.
11. Whether the leaders, human and therefore
inferior to the post-human life forms, would continue to exist in the higher
stage of the transcendental Millennium, the transcendental stage-proper, will
remain to be seen. We can't be certain,
at this point in time, how long the post-Human Millennium will last (not
necessarily a thousand years), nor whether the superbeingful
phase of it would be longer or shorter than the preceding superhuman
phase. Possibly, as evolution advances,
artificial leaders will supersede human ones, as men entrust the supervision
and maintenance of the supernatural life forms to robots and computers,
withdrawing themselves into the background or maybe even absenting themselves
from millennial duties altogether.
Doubtless robots and computers would be less disposed to envy of those
already in the millennial 'promised land' than human leaders, were they obliged
to sit out the progress of supernaturalism right to the very end!
12. The definitive Beyond ... of transcendence
would, of course, correspond to Heaven, a Spiritual Globe from any given
transcended Superbeing being but a fragment, so to
speak, of Heaven en route, in space, to the definitive Spiritual Globe of the
Omega Absolute. One might term this the
Absolute Beyond, in order to distinguish it from the Relative Beyond, which
will precede it in and as the
post-Human Millennium. Whether relative
or absolute, millennial or heavenly, the use of a term like 'the Beyond' is
justified by reference to what lies beyond us as human beings -
it being accepted that evolution will continue above the human level to a
post-human and, finally, an absolute level.
The post-Human Millennium is beyond us, as 'heaven on earth', but heaven
with a small 'h', not the definitive Heaven ... of the Absolute Beyond. Likewise the transcendental civilization (of
the ultimate stage of human evolution that could paradoxically be regarded as
post-humanist) is beyond us, whether we are Christians, Moslems, Socialists, or
whatever. It appertains neither to the
Christian West nor to the Socialist East, but to that which will emerge in the
world at large at some future time, when the current dichotomy between an
atomic level of civilization and its post-atomic enemies no longer exists, and
the world is ripe for elevation to a post-atomic civilization. Thus, in the present century, we are
confronted by the prospect of three beyonds, viz. a
human, a post-human, and an absolute, which is to say, a transcendental, a
millennial, and a heavenly ... in succeeding stages of evolution.
13. With Christian man - the man of the middle
civilization in the evolution of human civilizations from pagan to
transcendental - phenomenon and noumenon are
approximately balanced in a context betokening dualistic compromise. The will and the spirit each claim an equal
part in his religious integrity, the one linking him to the Father, the other
reflecting an aspiration towards the Holy Ghost; these antithetical tendencies
finding their theological focus in the person of Christ, the Man-God Who is
both of the flesh (nature) and of the spirit (supernature),
and therefore 'Three in One' - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Not literally, however, because being man
precludes one from becoming either of the absolutes, the alpha or the omega, at
the same time. Christ was, in effect, a
diluted Father and a diluted Holy Ghost, reflecting the condition of psychic
compromise between the will and the spirit which must apply to mankind over a
given period of evolutionary time - namely, after the psyche has ceased to be
predominantly dominated by the will, and before it has become biased on the
side of the spirit - as during the era of Christianity.
14. With the era of Transcendentalism, however,
the constitution of the psyche is the opposite of what it was in pre-atomic
pagan times, and so man becomes more noumenon than
phenomenon, more given to the superconscious than to
the subconscious, a being directly aspiring towards the Omega Absolute in a
religious orientation exclusively favouring the cultivation of spirit. Unlike a Christian, the Transcendentalist
will not pray, sing hymns, attend Mass, read the Bible, inhale incense, confess
to sins, or whatever, but will simply meditate, in the company of others, in a
context approximating, no matter how humbly or crudely initially, to the
heavenly condition. He will not meditate,
however, with the fanaticism of an oriental devotee of spiritual salvation, who
knows nothing about the future need to support and sustain brains artificially
in collectivized contexts. On the
contrary, he will conduct his meditation on a level commensurate with a
knowledge of things to come, and thus in a relatively relaxed fashion. Transcendentalism is not Buddhism, nor any
other oriental or old-world religion. It
is potentially the ultimate world religion of the final human civilization.
15. And so it will lead,
by degrees, to the post-Human Millennium, when spiritual aspirations are
stepped-up in a context favouring the artificial. It isn't, however, something that should be
stepped over, as though the periodic practice of meditation in specially-designed
centres was of little or no account.
Everything proceeds by degrees, and the development of religion is no
exception! When men have learnt to
congregate specifically for spiritual purposes and not, as with Christianity,
for a combination of sensual and spiritual purposes, then they will be ready
for elevation to the superhuman stage of evolution in a context more radically
spiritual than anything known to man.
Even if, personally, they are not destined to be transformed into
Supermen, their descendants will be better qualified to embrace a superhuman
level of life in the wake of the preceding high level of spiritual conditioning
known to them. For psychic attitudes
are, to some extent, handed on from generation to generation. The baby of a pagan couple in 2000 B.C. would
not have inherited the same psychic predilection from its parents as the baby
of a transcendental couple - assuming couples still exist - living sometime in
the next few centuries. The sins of the
forefathers are indeed visited upon the children and grandchildren, but so,
too, are the graces! Intelligence, and
thus one's psychic constitution, is to a significant extent inherited. So, naturally enough,
is a lack of it!
16. Civilization, of whatever degree, will always
provide some official institution in which people can congregate for religious
purposes. The final civilization would
be less than civilized were it to refrain from endorsing the legitimacy of this
fact, and thus leave it for people to meditate in private - assuming they
wanted to then. Meditation in private -
the very opposite of what meditation should be - is something that is more
likely to occur in barbarous societies, where religion, of whatever persuasion,
has been officially placed under ban and consequently no encouragement is given
for people to form meditation collectives.
This is of course perfectly logical within such a context, but it would
be totally inappropriate in a nation purporting to be civilized, especially on
the highest terms. Then the building and
endorsement of meditation centres would proceed as a matter of transcendental
necessity, and people be encouraged to participate in a public expression of
spiritual earnestness. And not just a
minority of people but, rather, the vast majority, since there would be no
excuse for staying away from such centres in a thriving transcendental
civilization, as there is for staying away from church in a decadent Christian
one. If Christianity is passé and
inadequate for a majority of people - mostly proletarians - who live at the
tail-end, as it were, of bourgeois civilization within environments
incompatible with an atomic attitude to life, then the same could not be said
of Transcendentalism in any future civilization, which, by contrast, would be
specifically geared to reflecting a post-atomic attitude to life.
PART
THREE: ESSAYS
LITERARY DEVELOPMENTS
The more
spiritual one is, that's to say, the more biased the
constitution of one's psyche towards the superconscious,
the less qualified one becomes to either create or enjoy reading fiction. By which I mean most traditional and a great
deal of contemporary literature. For the
creation and enjoyment of fiction requires a psyche constituted in such a manner
as to be more or less balanced between the subconscious and the superconscious in egocentric dualism. Such a psyche will ordinarily be bourgeois
and appertain, as a rule, to a suburban rather than an urban lifestyle. Yet the proletariat cannot entirely be
exempted from equation with an egocentric integrity, and, even though a
majority of them live in urban contexts, there are still those among their
ranks who prefer fiction to fact - the most plausible explanation probably
being that, despite the artificial influence of the urban environment, such
people aren't particularly intelligent.
To say that the production and assimilation
of fiction corresponds to bourgeois dualistic and bourgeois/proletarian
transitional levels of evolution, as opposed to a proletarian level, would not
be far off the mark. For
the bourgeoisie are, as a rule, dualists and, consequently, they are
sufficiently acquainted with subconscious influence to be capable of either
creating or enjoying fiction.
Likewise the petty bourgeoisie, although less egocentric and therefore
more biased towards the superconscious than their
class predecessors, are capable of creating and enjoying fiction; though they
will generally prefer novels with less fiction and more fact in them, and will
write, if artists, more like Hermann Hesse or Arthur Koestler than, say, John Cowper Powys or Evelyn Waugh.
If, considered from a fictional
point-of-view, literature should be limited in time to bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois stages of evolution, when the psychic constitution of its
practitioners and patrons is such as to preclude a wholly factual approach to
it, what, you may wonder, will happen to literature when the proletarian stage
of evolution eventually makes an official appearance on the level of
post-dualistic civilization? The answer
to this question must, I think, be fairly obvious: literature will cease to be
written in the context of fiction. For
by then the psychic constitution of the prevailing class of the day, namely the
proletariat, will be so biased towards the superconscious
... as to preclude either the creation or appreciation of a literature with any
concessions to fiction. Thus even the
most predominantly factual petty-bourgeois novels or short stories will be
found wanting and be consigned, in consequence, to the rubbish tip of cultural
history. Nothing pertaining to a
subconscious allegiance would be relevant.
Does this therefore mean that the novel and
the short story would cease to exist in a transcendental civilization? Yes, I believe it does. The masses would be provided, instead, with
fusion literature, or the combination of various genres within the overall
context of a single production. Thus no
volume reminiscent of a petty-bourgeois novel or a collection of short stories
or even a collection of poems would be published, though something
approximating to a novel (long and/or medium prose?), collection of short
stories, etc., on a higher, more truthful basis within the context of fusion
literature might still be read.
A proletarian civilization properly
so-considered, with Transcendentalism as the official religion, would, however,
be post-atomic - in contrast to the bourgeois and bourgeois/proletarian
civilizations of the contemporary West.
By 'post-atomic' I mean that the electron equivalents in literature,
namely words, would be set free of neutron equivalents, namely meanings, and
enabled to exist in complete freedom on the post-atomic level. For meaning is the neutron of a sentence, and
when words are bound to meanings, as they tend to be in an atomic civilization,
they become constrained by grammatical determinism, which serves to make
meaning as clear or intelligible as possible.
Grammatical determinism implies that words function as bound electrons
in the service of meaning. There can be
no bound-electron equivalents in a post-atomic civilization!
Now what applies to literature applies no
less to the other arts, which have already made considerable strides towards
electron freedom within the context of transitional, or bourgeois/proletarian,
civilization in recent decades. In art,
representation is the neutron of a subject and paint, the medium of art,
functions as a bound electron when constrained by representational
priorities. Bourgeois art is, as a rule,
entirely representational, whereas petty-bourgeois art reflects a transitional
status between naturalistic representation and artificial abstraction in some
in-between realm of creative compromise.
At its most radical, as in the finest works of Mondrian,
Kandinsky, Nicholson, Pollock, et al., it can be
entirely abstract, though constrained from true electron freedom by the
retention of naturalistic materials, such as oils and canvas, which indirectly
pertain to neutron determinism. Likewise
in music, melody is the neutron of a phrase or sentence, and notes correspond
to bound electrons when constrained by atomic convention to serve melody. Bourgeois music is, as a rule, entirely
melodic, and thus atomic, whereas petty-bourgeois music, like most of the music
produced by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, signifies a
degree of freedom on the part of notes which, at its most radical, is
suggestive of a proletarian avant-garde, while yet being constrained to a
petty-bourgeois context by dint of the composer's intermittent adherence to
melody and/or continuous utilization of acoustic means. For what natural materials are to art,
acoustic instruments are to music, and no truly transcendental, because
exclusively artificial, music can be produced through such naturalistic means. Even the most atonal Webern
or Schoenberg composition remains petty bourgeois on account of its reliance on
acoustic instruments. Just
so, the reliance of trad. jazz
on acoustic instruments precludes it from being wholly or completely
proletarian. Rather, it is a form of
bourgeois/proletarian music.
Having outlined the direction I believe
literature and the other arts will take in the coming post-atomic civilization,
a few words should be said concerning other types of writings - as, for
instance, those pertaining to science and philosophy. Clearly such writings cannot be subject to
exactly the same criteria as apply to the future development of literature, for
intelligibility is of their essence in the dissemination of, for the most part,
utilitarian, pragmatic and factual knowledge.
If literature is destined to become totally abstract on the proletarian
level, then those writings which are not literary must retain allegiance to an
atomic integrity, and thus to a degree of grammatical determinism, in fidelity
to intelligibility for practical or evolutionary ends. A scientist dedicated to the discovery of
means whereby, come the millennial stage of evolution, brains may be
artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, is not going to
derive much profit from a volume of abstract literature. As a member of that category of human beings
whose principal responsibility is to lead humanity at large towards the
'promised land' of the millennial Beyond, it is not for him to enter it
himself, nor any interim 'promised land', such as might be signified by the
assimilation of abstract literature. On
the contrary, it is his duty to stand back from it at a kind of bourgeois
remove, in loyalty to his vocational responsibility. For while the masses are perfectly entitled
to avail themselves of every crumb of evolutionary progress in loyalty to their
essentially passive, self-indulgent mentality, the leader, be he scientist,
politician, philosopher or whatever, must refrain from participating in such
crumbs to anything like the same extent himself, in order that he may continue
to struggle on behalf of mankind and so bring it closer, by degrees, to that
ultimate 'promised land' which will only be attained with the culmination of
evolution in the heavenly Beyond. Thus
the leader, while not being entirely debarred from sampling the fruits of
evolutionary progress himself, must remain committed to intelligible writings,
in order that he may learn from them - and indeed contribute towards them -
ways by means of which the quality of life on earth may be improved.
On the materialist side, one has science
and politics; on the spiritual side - art and religion. Philosophy, which functions as a kind of
bridge between materialism and spirituality, must also retain allegiance to intelligibility
in the interests of its synthesizing vocation.
And the same will of course apply to philosophical literature, which is
but a more philosophically-biased mode of literature - too literary to be
literally philosophy, but, at the same time, too philosophical to be subject to
such evolutionary criteria as pertain to literature-proper. The philosopher, that hybrid writer in
between the scientist and the artist, may lean towards the spiritual more than
the material or, conversely, towards the sciences more than the arts, but,
whatever the case, he can never become wholly committed to either discipline,
since that would spell his end as a philosopher. His primary task is to attempt a
reconciliation of science and art, or politics and religion, on a new, higher
level, and thus act as a 'bridge builder', in Aldous
Huxley's apt phrase, between the various disciplines, integrating them to an
end that will transcend the pitfalls of exclusivity which make, on the
materialist side, for scientism, and, on the spiritual side, for
aestheticism. Scientism and aestheticism
are alike in that they pursue their respective bents without recourse to a
wider, more comprehensive perspective which, if comprehended, would preclude
the emergence of those dangerously anarchic and nihilistic tendencies accruing
to them. The scientist who pursues
experimentation for its own sake, without reference to a higher moral purpose,
is no less destructive and misguided than the artist who excludes scientific
progress from his world-view in fidelity to a narrowly aesthetic bias.
But if scientism and aestheticism are two
sides of the one exclusive coin, then what may be called politicism
and spiritism are two sides of another, and they must
be criticized or countered by the philosopher too, since politics divorced from
a moral perspective is no less dangerous than scientism, while religion
divorced, through spiritism, from political reality
is no less fatuous than aestheticism.
The one results in the emergence of a Stalin, the other in the emergence
of a Ghandi or, translated into literary terms, a Propter
- watching his own navel. The fact,
however, that politicism and scientism will prevail
in a barbarous post-dualistic state is only to be expected, in light of the
materialist lopsidedness of such a state, which conforms to an opposition to
existing levels of (decadent) civilization.
Naturally, it is impossible for a philosopher to exist in such a
society. For his vocation conforms to
civilization, in which the various disciplines exist in a kind of symbiosis or
equilibrium of warring tensions, and the spiritual side has not capitulated to
the materialist side nor, as in the case of religion in Marxist-Leninist
states, been officially banned. When art
is made to serve politics no such symbiosis exists, and consequently there is
no place for the philosopher, since politicism and
scientism are taken for granted.
A post-dualistic civilization, however,
would once again free art and religion from materialist constraint, only this
time they would be even freer from such constraint than had been the case at
lower stages of civilization. Yet not so
free that there was no place for science or politics in society, and therefore
no place for the philosopher! His task
would probably be easier than at any previous stage of civilization but, even
if the danger of scientism and politicism was not so
great, he would still have to warn people against the danger of aestheticism
and spiritism, which, in a post-atomic civilization,
could only be greater!
TRANSITIONAL LITERATURES
At its best
literature is a superior kind of human endeavour to science, being concerned
not with the apparent, i.e. the external world and the way it works or may be
changed, but with the essential, i.e. the internal world of the psyche in connection
with spiritual experience. Literature
can and does evolve from a lower, instinctually emotional level to a higher,
spiritually intellectual level, just as science evolves from a lower
materialist to a higher quasi-spiritual level, with the development from
Newtonian objectivity to Einsteinian subjectivity, as
relative to the evolution of the psyche from the internal objectivity of the
subconscious to the internal subjectivity of the superconscious. Yet science, for all its transmutations,
cannot deal in direct spiritual experience, for which the discipline of
literature is required, in fidelity to man's highest and most sublime
aspirations - aspirations which transcend the pragmatic prerogative of proof
through verifiable experimentation, and therefore cannot be subjected to
scientific endorsement. Science may
dismiss these aspirations from its own, narrowly empirical point-of-view, but
they cannot be dismissed on their own terms, which, being internal, transcend
the boundaries of scientific inquiry.
Neither can they be proved in terms of the quasi-electron science of
post-Einsteinian subjectivity, despite the various
attempts which this 'spiritual' science may make to prove them. For, once again, experience transcends
investigation, making the findings of this pseudo-science conform to hidden
impulses which derive, in all probability, from the superconscious.
If modern science is an ally of the
spiritual life rather than a sceptical enemy, it is nonetheless constrained by
the fundamentally external, superficial nature of science from a truly
spiritual identification with matters experiential, as opposed to
experimental. Only literature is capable
of speaking on behalf of the spirit from a direct point-of-view,
and the greater the literature ... the more direct will be its speech. To paraphrase, one may say that whereas
science deals with phenomena, literature deals with noumena
- a distinction, in short, between the apparent and the essential. When science strives to deal with tiny
phenomena, as it must do at its highest level, it interprets what is being
investigated as though they were noumena. For it, too, is subject to superconscious influence and must accordingly accommodate
its findings or provisional hypotheses to the internal subjectivity of
contemporary reality. No scientist is an
impartial instrument looking at the world from a completely neutral
point-of-view. His psyche is conditioned
by the age in which he lives and by the influences, intellectual or otherwise,
with which he is brought into regular contact.
The man who appertains to a transcendental civilization must necessarily
interpret matter according to transcendent criteria.
As yet, however, no transcendental
civilization has officially arisen in the world; for it can only do so once
society becomes wholly post-atomic in constitution, which, needless to say,
won't be before the existing bourgeois and bourgeois/proletarian civilizations
have been superseded by proletarian civilization at some future point in time. The contemporary transitional level of
civilization, which for the most part prevails in America and Germany, may have
extended traditional dualistic alignments in the arts and sciences towards the
coming post-dualistic ones, but it hasn't entirely broken with the past, nor
can we reasonably expect it to do so!
The particle/wavicle theory of matter, as
relative to transitional science, may prevail over the traditional particle
theory of bourgeois science, but we cannot expect it to be transmuted into an
exclusively wavicle theory before the onset of
post-atomic civilization. So long as
transitional civilization prevails, a particle/wavicle
theory of matter will be the academic norm, against which the scientifically
precocious would be powerless to rebel.
Only an ignoramus could expect bourgeois/proletarian science to
accommodate itself to wholly proletarian criteria.
And something similar could be said with
regard to literature, which will continue to toe-the-line of transition between
bourgeois determinism and proletarian freedom so long as bourgeois/proletarian
civilization remains relatively intact.
Even if, here and there, some form of proletarian literature were to be
created, it could not be popularly endorsed, but would exist beyond the pale of
transitional civilization, awaiting its proper appreciation in the post-atomic
civilization still to arise. My guess,
however, is that no such literature would be created anyway - the nearest thing
to it being some radical manifestation of petty-bourgeois decadence, such as
exists, in comparatively short supply at present, in the contemporary West.
The progression away from traditional
fictional standards is manifested on two levels of petty-bourgeois literature
and, broadly, one might define them as the objective and the subjective, or the
lower and the higher. The first level
mainly pertains to what has become known as philosophical literature, and is
characterized by a partial rejection of fictitious illusions in favour of factual
truths, in order that the resulting literature may serve as a vehicle for
philosophical speculation. Among the
major authors to have worked on this level are André Gide,
Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse,
Arthur Koestler, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The second level mainly pertains either to
the substitution of autobiographical information, i.e. subjective fact, for
conventional fictional inventions, or to the extension of literature, whether
fictitious or otherwise, into experimental channels. Leading exponents on this level include James
Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell,
Anthony Burgess, and William Burroughs.
Both levels of literature tend away from fictions, but they do so in
different directions - the first down towards philosophy, the second up towards
the proletarian literature of the future post-atomic civilization. Admittedly, no writer is ever entirely any
one thing, since no man is an absolute.
But a preponderating tendency will exist in each author for either the
first or the second level, thereby enabling us to define him in terms of one of
the two traditions. If
the philosophical, then his art will be constrained to an atomic integrity by
dint of its adherence to philosophical speculation and factual information, and
will exist on a comparatively materialist level of dogmatic thought. If, on the other hand, the autobiographical
and/or experimental is the tradition to which he pertains, then his art will be
capable of extension towards the post-atomic, though only on experimental
terms. For a wholly abstract post-atomic
literature can only arise out of a subjective tradition which, in abandoning or
spurning autobiographical fact, may gravitate towards the higher subjectivity
of the abstract.
But I use the term 'subjectivity' only in
contrast to the objectivity of philosophical literature, which largely focuses
on facts outside the self, i.e. in the external world. I do not wish to give the impression that
such subjectivity is in any way illusory or necessarily entails a concession to
fiction. On the contrary, it is really
the highest form of objectivity, insofar as it pertains to the superconscious looking back and down at the
subconscious. Perhaps one should
therefore define it as the higher objectivity, in contrast to the lower
objectivity of philosophical literature, which focuses on external reality and
the world in general? This higher
objectivity of autobiographical and/or experimental literature transcends the
self for an impersonal realm of post-atomic freedom. Or, at any rate, it will do in the
future. For, in the contemporary West,
it exists on a petty-bourgeois level, and that level is by no means
post-atomic.
Probably the greatest petty-bourgeois
novelist of the twentieth century was James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake extended language beyond the merely
national to the international, in its adoption of multi-lingual puns and
phrases. Finnegans
Wake is almost abstract, but not quite!
Most of it is intelligible and therefore subject to a degree of neutron
constraint in the interests of meaning.
The words - often oddly juxtaposed or formed into teasing puns - are
perhaps freer than words have ever been at any previous time in the history of
literature, but they aren't completely free; they don't correspond to
free-electron equivalents. They exist on
the level of some radically Expressionist painting, say a Kokoschka,
or some predominantly atonal acoustic composition by a composer like Webern. And of
course they exist in a novel, not in a volume of fusion literature, which may
or may not embrace narrative writings.
Together with their syntactical predecessors in Ulysses, they
constitute a petty-bourgeois contribution to the decadence of French dualistic
civilization. For although Joyce was
born in
None too surprisingly, because Americans
were asserting themselves in a like-manner to Joyce and were already set on
course for the coming time of American ascendancy in the arts, when the tide of
exile would be reversed and Europeans flock to America instead of Americans
flocking to Europe and, in particular, to France. Prior to the Second World War, however, it
was generally the other way around, since the transitional civilization of
At the time of writing, transitional
civilization - which, of course, is more than petty bourgeois - is still in
existence, and
Petty-bourgeois literature and poetry have
generally failed to live-up to the challenge set by Joyce in Finnegans Wake and by Pound in the Cantos. The finest artists since them may have
extended creative progress in one or two directions, but, overall, they have
failed to extend it more comprehensively ... right across the transitional
board, as it were, of the higher literature.
Even Henry Miller, who succeeded like no-one else in making autobiographical
literature respectable, could not attain to the same experimental level as
Joyce, and came no closer than Surrealism to the abstract. Of British writers, both Lawrence Durrell and Anthony Burgess have surpassed Miller in
certain technical matters, though they haven't produced anything analogous to Finnegans Wake, despite their commitment to the
experimental. Could it be, I wonder,
that petty-bourgeois genius attained to its zenith with Joyce and Pound, or has
someone greater still to arise?
One will have to wait until transitional
civilization has run its course before a definite answer to that question
becomes possible! Although it does seem
that the petty-bourgeois literature of the above-mentioned masters has been
eclipsed by bourgeois/proletarian literature which, ever more popular, seeks an
accommodation with film, and thus with proletarian civilization in its
comparatively naturalistic phase.
A SECOND COMING
'No man
will enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he first comes unto me,' said Christ,
and I, who am disposed to regard myself in a certain Messianic light, also say
it, albeit on higher terms. For I do not
believe that any man will enter the 'Kingdom of Heaven' and I don't much like
the word 'Kingdom', which has an old-fashioned, not to say monarchical,
connotation more applicable to the alpha than to the omega of things. Nevertheless, unless men 'come unto me',
unless they read and adopt my teachings, particularly those appertaining to religion,
they won't attain to Heaven. That, I
believe, is a fact. For I have outlined,
in various works, the direction of evolution, with the life forms which
correspond to each distinct, successive stage of its unfolding - life forms
that extend above man in the guise, firstly, of the Supermen, i.e. human brains
artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, and, secondly,
of the Superbeings, i.e. new brains artificially
supported and sustained in more intensively collectivized contexts. These two life forms are destined, I maintain,
to emerge out of man with the establishment of the post-Human Millennium at the
termination of, or climax to, the next and final civilization - the global
civilization of transcendental man. The Superbeings would constitute, in each of their separate
collectivized contexts, a life form antithetical to trees, which are completely
subconscious. The Superbeings
will be completely superconscious, since
collectivized new brains will know nothing of old-brain/subconscious
allegiance, as relative to the preceding superhuman stage of evolution in the
first phase of the post-Human Millennium....
I have dwelt on these and similar themes
throughout my writings, and by now I know what I am
talking about! Only from the Superbeings would transcendent spirit eventually emerge,
and its emergence would signify the attainment (of the ultimate life form) to
the heavenly Beyond ... in the guise of Spiritual Globes which, antithetical to
stars, would converge towards and expand into one another, until such time as all such
globes, from whichever part of the Universe, had joined together to form the
ultimate Spiritual Globe ... of God the Supreme - what I am wont to term the
Omega Absolute.
Thus I am saying that unless man is set on
course for his future transmutation, or elevation to the superhuman stage of
evolution, by adopting Transcendentalism as the next logical stage of religious
progress, and unless my teachings are honoured by future generations, there
will be no eventual attainment of life to the heavenly Beyond. I speak with more certainty and logical
authority than Christ probably had ... when he voiced equivalent thoughts at an
earlier, more naturalistic period of time.
Christ was 'God' because the stage of human
evolution to which he pertains demanded that man be elevated to the status of
divinity, that man became God in the person of
Christ. This doesn't of course mean that
God the Father, or some such Creator-equivalent, became Christ. It means, on the contrary, that Christ was
entrusted, by men collectively known as Christians, with the honour of
supplanting the Father as the second God in the evolution of human
religion. That he was only the 'Son of
God' to the extent that he was the second deity to emerge, following the Father
or, more correctly, the Creator. Thus
God as man stands between the alpha absolutism of the Creator and the future
omega absolutism of the Ultimate Creation - the 'holy-spiritual' Supreme
Being. Christ, being man, was both diabolic and divine - abraxas-like,
with powers of damnation as well as salvation.
If the Father was wholly diabolic, by which I mean rooted in the
reactive Alpha Absolute, then the Holy Spirit will be wholly divine, as
appertaining to the attractive Omega Absolute.
In between, the man-god, Christ.
But the era of this man-god cannot last for
ever, since it is human destiny to progress towards the Omega Absolute, as
mankind draws spiritually further away from the Alpha Absolute. With the advent of a transcendental
civilization, man will be so biased in favour of the spirit ... that no
dualistic allegiance to Christ, and so no place for his paternal forebear,
would be possible. Transcendental man
will be exclusively omega-orientated in his religiosity, conceding no right of
worship to the Alpha Absolute, whether in the context of the wholly or the
partly diabolic. Transcendental man will
thus be atheist. For he will know that,
conceived in its ultimate sense, God doesn't exist, since it is the duty of a
superior life form than man, viz. the Superbeings, to
attain to transcendence, and thus to a level of life, viz. the Spiritual
Globes, directly preceding the Omega Absolute.
Not until the Omega Absolute is established, following convergence of
these Spiritual Globes to an indivisible unity, will Supreme Being exist in any
ultimate sense. Even the transcendent
spirit of a Spiritual Globe would be something en route
to God in the heavenly Beyond.
Higher man will know that there must be
evolution towards the post-human life forms before any prospect of a literal
attainment to the heavenly Beyond can be envisaged. He will not regard God the Father or Christ
as divine, for he will know that the Father was diabolic and Christ both
diabolic and divine. Thus he will be
atheist, since there can be no association of God with the diabolic for
him! What existed in the past was never
wholly or truly divine. Only what will exist in
the future, as the consummation of evolution, would be truly divine, because
the Supreme Being of the Holy Spirit. An
atheist does not confound the Devil with God, the supreme level of attractive Being with the reactive Almighty!
But in the next civilization ... use of the
word God will probably drop out of favour, as a terminology devoid of ambiguous
associations, and transcending all previous so-called world religions, comes
into regular use. If so, then a term
like Teilhard de Chardin's
Omega Point or my own more absolutist variation on it would doubtless be an apt
choice.
I, however, am not the Omega Point, and
neither am I the Christ. If I correspond in some respects to a Second
Coming, a more advanced stage of Messianic deliverance, I do so devoid of
mystical associations and beyond the realm of anthropomorphic necessity. There will be no worshipping of man as God in
the transcendental civilization, and therefore no worshipping of me, who is but
man! I point the way forward, and those
who wish to evolve must lend an ear to my teachings. I do not speak for the wrong ears, the ears
of those who pertain to the dualistic and transitional civilizations, which are
aligned with some abstract Christ. I
speak, rather, for those who are destined to build the next civilization, and
so I avoid, where possible, casting pearls before swine.
Am I therefore the Antichrist? No, I do not think so, because, to my mind,
the Antichrist and he who corresponds to a Second Coming are two different
people. If the former is more 'anti'
than 'pro', then Nietzsche would be a better candidate for the intellectual role
of Antichrist, he who wrote a book bearing that title, and who raved against
Christianity more often than he intimated of a coming post-Christian
civilization. If 'anti' is negative,
then 'pro' must be positive, and he who corresponds to a Second Coming would
have more to say about the future direction of evolution than the destruction
of what already exists. The Antichrist
and the Second Coming would therefore be entirely different entities.
But the Second Coming comes as man, not
God, and so he does not require to be endowed with miraculous abilities, such
as the ability to walk on water or to change water into wine. Such endowments correspond, from a
theological point-of-view, to the need to make the man-god superhuman, to
attribute 'divine' powers to him so that his followers, down through the
centuries, will find it easier to worship him as God. The fact that Christ is conceived as man-god
and not just man ... makes it imperative that he should be endowed with more
than simply human abilities. Was this
not the case, he could hardly exist on the level of a second deity (after the
Father) for his followers.
Was Christ, the actual man, really capable
of such miracles as have been attributed to him? Personally, I rather doubt it, though he may
have been able to do one or two things bordering on the miraculous. But a priest who asks such a question and
then answers it in a negative fashion, like myself, is truly decadent. A priest is supposed to uphold theological
expedience in loyalty to his clerical vocation, and if he can't do so, then he
is already on the road to becoming a guru or something analogous! When priests seek to de-mystify Christ, it
proves that Christianity is drawing towards its close, drawing closer to the
higher religion which is destined to supersede it ... with the advent of a
transcendental civilization. I advocate
such a religion, but I do not set myself up as God. For that would be thoroughly anachronistic.
In case some confusion may have arisen,
earlier in this essay, concerning the antithesis between the Creator and what I
have called the Ultimate Creation, I would now like to say this: truly, the
antithesis between the Father and the Holy Ghost is an absolute one, which
means that if the former is regarded as alpha and the latter as omega, then the
distinction is as much between the plural and the singular, viz. Alpha
Absolutes and Omega Absolute, as anything else.
We habitually speak of the Father as if there was just one, but in
reality what ends with the One must begin in the Many - its absolute antithesis. The reason that humanity has traditionally
referred back to a single Creator is that religious thinking in the West
derives, via Judaic monotheism, from a partial rather than a universal
point-of-view: namely, from a galactic integrity, as germane to primitive
civilization. We have acted and thought
as components of the Galaxy, knowing comparatively little about the millions of
other galaxies which also exist in the Universe, and therefore tending to
define everything in terms of our own.
Thus we have spoken of a single Creator - which, unknowingly, was
probably an abstraction from the central star of the Galaxy - whilst imagining
that such a spirit counted for and embraced the Universe in general! From a post-galactic, and thus post-atomic,
point of view it should be possible for us to understand that our Creator was
but one of millions of Creators simultaneously at work elsewhere in the
Universe, i.e. millions of central stars of millions of galaxies, and that
evolution therefore proceeds from the Alpha Absolutes to the Omega Absolute,
which is to say, from the Primal Creators (essentially diabolic because
functioning according to the negative standards of the most infernal doing -
the conversion of hydrogen into helium - the very stuff of hell - through
proton-proton reactions) to the Ultimate Creation (divine because 'existing'
according to the positive standards of the most beatific Being - the blissful
passivity of the freest electrons in pure spirit).
Yes, there is indeed an absolute antithesis
between the two extremes of evolution, though this fact can never be endorsed
so long as a galactic integrity remains the accepted religious norm. Only in a post-atomic civilization would the
subjective truth of evolution be recognized and accorded universal
validity. But, by then, the Creator
would have ceased to be a component of religious allegiance, since the
progression of the psyche towards a much greater superconscious
bias would have rendered all subconscious abstractions from cosmic reality
anachronistic. As
Nietzsche said: 'All gods are dead.
We want the Superman to live!' - Ay!
But not before transcendental man has done his bit to bring the
superhuman stage of evolution closer. We
have yet to witness the full emergence of this ultimate type of human
being. The Superman cannot be evolved
out of Christians! Nietzsche played an
important philosophical role, but those who value the Truth must come unto me!
TRUE AND FALSE MESSIAHS
There are,
it has long been acknowledged, two kinds of love. There is the personal love for another human
being, the love experienced by people who, as the expression goes, 'fall in
love', and as an alternative to this there is the impersonal love of a man for
his country or his people or mankind in general. The first kind of love is sensual, the second
kind spiritual. The first stems from the Diabolic, the second aspires towards the
Divine. Most people, during the slow
progress of humanity towards the twenty-first century, have preferred the
personal to the impersonal kind of love.
The former is more all-pervasive at a lower stage of evolution, the
latter only begins to gather momentum when evolution reaches a more advanced
stage, such as it is currently at in various parts of the world, and continues
to progress beyond that towards the most advanced stage of all - the Omega
Absolute, in the heavenly Beyond.
It has often been said that God is love,
but this is an inadequate statement.
Some people are inclined to interpret this love in a personal or
romantic way, and consequently come to imagine that 'being in love' with
another person is akin to the Godhead.
This is really quite untrue! For,
in reality, few states of mind could be further removed from the Supreme Being,
which would be free from sensuality and, hence, any degree of animal
passion. No, but neither is the other
interpretation of love quite satisfactory in defining God - assuming of course
that one is attempting to define God in an ultimate rather
than a merely relative sense ... as appertaining, for example, to Christ. For in equating God with impersonal love, and
thus with the impersonal love one may feel for other people, one is limiting
God to this feeling. One is in effect
saying that God is this state of mind which corresponds to impersonal love. But God is or would be far more than
that! For God, considered objectively,
would be the ultimate Spiritual Globe at the culmination of evolution, that is
to say, the ultimate manifestation of transcendent spirit. God would be an absolute corresponding to the
Supreme Being, to a condition of life in pure spirit surpassing all
hitherto-known degrees of Being, as the most supreme level of Being. But such a supreme level of Being would not correspond to an impersonal love for others,
since there would be nothing outside and beyond transcendent spirit for God the
Supreme to feel impersonal love towards.
Such a supreme condition would be completely absorbed in the bliss of
its eternal self, paying no attention whatsoever to the gradual collapse and
disintegration of stars, planets, moons, etc.
No, impersonal love, such as human beings
can experience towards one another, is not God and is a long way short of being
so in either sense, i.e. whether God is viewed in terms of an existence, a
large globe of pure spirit, or in terms, far more importantly, of a supreme
level of Being - the actual condition of such an existence. Impersonal love aspires towards the Divine
but should not be mistaken for it, else God will be
reduced in stature to the level of the most sublime human feelings. Unfortunately human feelings, even when
blessedly impersonal, are at least two life forms removed from the possibility
of transcendence, inferior, no doubt, to the most noble
level of mind to which our projected Supermen and Superbeings
of the future millennial stages of evolution will attain. The highest impersonal feelings will stem
from transcendental man, or man of the ultimate human civilization, but such a
man is still in the making and nowhere fully manifest in the world, which, at
present, is still some way from being post-atomic.
To return to love. The impersonal variety is morally superior to
the personal; the man without friends may be the friend of humanity or, at any
rate, a significant proportion of humanity.
It could be argued that, for all his faults, Hitler was such a man, and
to the extent that he valued love of his people above love of any one person,
he was a better and higher type of man than the one incapable of living without
a personal love. It is perhaps
significant that he only married when his political destiny had run its course
and his dream of a Greater German Reich lay in ruins about him. Up until the last act, it was the German
people rather than Eva Braun that most mattered to him. Marriage was as much an admission of defeat
as of anything else.
But was Hitler a Messiah, the German
Messiah? No, I do not really believe
so! For, like
Mussolini, Hitler was essentially a politician, not a religious man, and, to my
way of thinking, being a Messiah is inseparable from religion or a religious
destiny. To be sure, there has
been much talk of twentieth-century statesmen as 'Messiahs', and even Stalin
was not beyond consideration to the effect that he may have been the Soviet
one! Yet such talk fails to convince one
of its justification, seeming but an example of the elevation of politicians to
a quasi-religious status in the wake of the collapse of traditional religious
values - the elevation of Marxism-Leninism to a quasi-religion being a case in
point. Thus in the twentieth century the
'Messiah' manifested himself as a politician and came not to lead men towards
God (conceived, in any ultimate sense, as the Holy Spirit), but to free his
people from bourgeois constraints and set them on the road to a Soviet
Communist future or, in Hitler's case, a National Socialist one.
No, I do not think one should take these
political Messiahs too seriously, in any ultimate sense. For just as the first Messiah, the Christ,
was a man of religion, whose Kingdom was 'not of this world', so must any
subsequent Messiah, corresponding to a Second Coming, essentially be a man of
religion who points humanity towards the goal of evolution on terms outreaching
those of Christ, and thereby confirms the justification for a Second Coming, a
second stage of Messiahship. No matter if he does not
come in the exact terms envisaged by the apostles of old, or if he is not quite
a Jew. The important thing is
that he should have a message which bears on religious evolution and shows
humanity what it will have to do if it wishes to draw closer to salvation in
any ultimate sense, as signified by transcendence and the concomitant
attainment of pure spirit to the heavenly Beyond. He doesn't have to be a miracle-worker or a
knight in shining armour. He must simply
possess a logic ... relating to evolutionary transformations in connection with
post-human life forms which, based on sound rational foundations, is
effectively irrefutable, and thus the key to salvation. Neither Hitler nor Stalin, nor even
Mussolini, possessed such a logic, which is why they were false messiahs -
politicians who sought to drag the essence of Messiahship
down to their activist, materialist level.
No good! The need for a Second
Coming remains as great as before. For
the spiritual direction of evolution hangs in the balance without his guidance,
and any number of impostors can step into the void to do their damnedest.
How, then, will the New Messiah, the second
world teacher after Christ (or Buddha or Mohammed or Zarathustra
or whoever), compare with the first one?
The answer to this - with due respect to Christians - must be ...
favourably. That is to say, he should
reflect a degree of evolutionary progress relative to the historical gap
between Christ and himself. If Christ
was a simple carpenter-turned-preacher who could neither read nor write but
taught peripatetically, through word of mouth, then he who corresponds to a
Second Coming must spread his teachings in a superior fashion to Christ -
namely, through the medium of the printed or recorded word. Evolution has gone forwards, so no
Christ-equivalent figure could reasonably be expected to conduct his
evangelical mission on the primitive terms of Christ in this day and age. A man who wandered about preaching the 'Good
News' from town to town ... would simply be an anachronism, subject to
allegations of crankiness. Nor need we
expect the New Messiah to come from a desert land, like Christ, since
evolutionary progress would seem to require that he who champions the Truth on
a higher and more advanced level than Christ must stem from a radically
different climate - one, by contrast, which is cold, wet, and windy. A man born into a hot land would not be in
the best of geographical positions to think transcendentally, since the
sensuous influence of the sun, compatible with pagan criteria, is so much more
prevalent in such a land ... that no true spiritual leadership could now arise
there. As evolution progresses from
pagan to transcendental stages, from alpha to omega via Christ, so it is
furthered, at each successive stage, by peoples appertaining to less sensual
climates.
Thus while the earliest civilizations could
only have arisen in hot lands, the ultimate civilization must stem from a cold
climate, which will be conducive towards a more spiritual attitude to
life. No second Messiah could originate
in a climate approximating to that which Christ knew. That is why the
If, then, the New Messiah, stemming from
cold, wet, Northern Europe, compares favourably with Christ, under what terms
does he remain Messianic? I have argued
that such a role is essentially a religious one, so there can be no question of
the Messiah being a political leader.
Only so long as he continues to write and offer the world, or a
particular part of it at this point in time, the irrefutable truths of his
evolutionary teachings, which outline the means by which Heaven may ultimately
be attained to, will he function as Messiah.
As soon as this task is accomplished, or he feels that he has taken the
truth of evolutionary progress as far as it can go, then he ceases to be
Messiah. Should he subsequently become a
politician or an artist or a computer tutor, then he will be that and not a
Messiah. The role of the second world
teacher is only valid so long as it is being actively fulfilled. There is no reason why it should last the
entire working duration of the man's life, since all or most of the essential
truths appertaining to a Messianic credibility can be committed to paper in a
few years. Christ himself was only a
Messiah for a comparatively short period of time. Prior to the inception of his mission, he was
a carpenter. He died, crucified by the
Romans, at thirty-three. Died to the
flesh in order to be reborn into the spirit as the 'Chosen One', destined to
fill the role of Saviour to millions of his followers - a man posthumously
elevated, by theological expedience, to the status of God. There is no reason why the New Messiah should
not die to the spirit and be reborn into the flesh in his own lifetime, that is
to say, die as a writer of the whole truth in order to be reborn as a
politician or tutor or artist or whatever.
There is no reason why, having terminated his religious vocation, he
should not embark upon a radically different course - assuming he were capable
of doing so!
In the beginning was the Word, and that
would also apply to the future beginnings of the transcendental civilization,
which would have to have received its direction and justification from the Word
of the New Messiah - he who corresponded, while he wrote, to a Second Coming. There is no need to mystify this man. For he does not write to be
set-up as God but, on the contrary, to instruct those who are destined to
profit from his teachings. He
knows himself and has proclaimed himself.
But he also knows what he is not and what, on a wider scale, the New
Messiah is not. Certainly not a
politician, like Hitler or Stalin, and certainly not a peripatetic
preacher! Not a crank either, though
there are plenty of people who imagine that they correspond to a Second Coming
on terms which, because of their tendency towards the literal or factual, could
only be described as highly dubious!
Such people are quite often Americans, which isn't altogether surprising
since, as a transitional civilization between dualism and transcendentalism,
America is the nearest thing, at present, to the future transcendental
civilization, and it is therefore natural - I might even say 'logical' - that
false messiahs (and I don't just mean Superman) should emerge from a
civilization bordering on the (hypothetical) ultimate one. But to the extent that they appertain, as
Americans, to transitional civilization, then they can never be the legitimate,
logical historical choice for the task of outlining any future
civilization. Such a task must fall to a
man who perceives himself as being outside all mainstream civilizations of the
contemporary West - like, dare I say, myself.
ANTITHETICAL EQUIVALENTS
Since
evolutionary progress proceeds in the direction of superconscious
freedom, and thus away from subconscious enslavement, it transpires that, at a
certain more advanced stage of its progress, what I have termed antithetical
equivalents will emerge. Evolution
begins with the stars and ends with an ultimate Spiritual Globe, which we can
term the Omega Absolute (or, after de Chardin, the
Omega Point), but in between come what I believe to be the antithetical
equivalents of the planets at stage two of evolutionary progress and the
Spiritual Globes at stage nine; the plants and, in particular, trees at stage
three and the Superbeings at stage eight; the animals
and, in particular, apes at stage four and the Supermen at stage seven; pagan
man at stage five and transcendental man at stage six; and of course the
antithesis within the one life form of dualistic, or Christian, man at stages five/six.
To take a vivid antithetical equivalent
from this list: a tree, as a completely subconscious life-form whose leaves are
naturally supported by trunk and branches while being naturally sustained by
sunlight, rain, etc., and a Superbeing as a completely
superconscious life-form the numerous new brains of
which will be artificially supported by plastic or metallic trunk/branch
equivalents while being artificially sustained by a mechanical pump, oxygen
containers, plastic tubing, hallucinogenic stimulants, etc.
But here I am contrasting, in imagination,
what exists, as a tree, with what I believe will exist,
as a Superbeing, in the second phase of the
post-Human Millennium, and therefore at two evolutionary removes from even the
most sophisticated men - those of the coming transcendental civilization. I am anticipating antithetical equivalents in
advance of their actually being brought about by qualified human personnel
when the time is ripe. Let us now
settle, by contrast, for certain antithetical equivalents which already
exist and which we take for granted as a logical aspect of modern
life, rarely if ever ascribing any evolutionary significance to them beyond
their utilitarian functions. The first
pair of such paradoxical equivalents to which I should like to draw attention
are natural fish and artificial 'fish', which we may define as a distinction
between, say, whales (if we allow that large sea mammals are akin to fish) and
submarines. The submarine functions
underwater, like a fish, but is constructed of artificial materials and
propelled in a mechanical manner, these days quite often by a nuclear-powered
engine. This artificial type of 'fish',
in which many men can live and work, is a much superior phenomenon to a natural
fish, since it exists at approximately stage seven of the evolutionary ladder,
whereas the whale approximates to stage four - that of fish and, indeed,
mammals in general.
Let us take another category of
antithetical equivalents, this time as applying to the distinction between
natural birds and artificial 'birds', which is to say, between
naturally-propelled birds and mechanically-propelled aircraft. Here, too, the artificial 'bird', be it
warplane or passenger plane, is much superior to the natural bird and
corresponds to stage seven of the evolutionary ladder, whereas even the king of
birds, the eagle, can go no higher than stage four. As to helicopters, which function on a
different mechanical principle from aircraft, they form, it seems to me, an
antithetical equivalent to dragonflies, looking rather more like large
artificial 'insects' than artificial 'birds'.
Some aircraft also seem to resemble moths or butterflies more than
birds, but the great majority correspond to bird shapes.
Another antithetical equivalent which
readily springs to mind is the one between ducks and ships, the latter having
long existed but never on such antithetical terms to the former as in the
modern age, when natural materials such as wood and hemp were superseded by
artificial materials like plastic and steel.
A better example, however, is afforded by the contrast between horses
and motorbikes, the horse having traditionally served man as a creature to ride
about on, the motorbike, or artificial 'horse', of more recent date also
serving man in a similar capacity, albeit on terms far superior to the
horse. For the horse
is natural, whereas the motorbike is mechanical and therefore a lot faster. The man who rides a horse and the man who
rides a motorbike do not appertain to the same stage of evolution, even though
both of them are men. The former
attaches himself to a life form approximating to stage
four of the evolutionary ladder, the latter to an artificial phenomenon which
approximates to stage seven. The one
faces down towards the beasts, the other aspires up
towards the Supermen. And while we are
discussing this particular antithetical equivalent, we may as well draw
attention to the kindred distinction between, say,
camels or elephants or bullocks and cars or buses or trucks. Just as certain species of larger, stronger
animals served, in the past, to carry two or more people about on their backs,
so these mechanical 'beasts of burden', the latter-day trucks and buses,
perform a similar function in the present, and do so, as a rule, on far
superior terms to the natural means of transportation!
There can be no denying the fact that the
creation of antithetical equivalents to an earlier life form is consonant with
evolutionary progress, as it struggles its way from stages 1-10 in pursuance of
the goal of ultimate spiritual salvation.
The age is fast approaching when man will create the antithetical
equivalent to his own immediate predecessor, the ape, in the form of the
millennial Superman, whose brain will be artificially supported and sustained
in collectivized contexts. Each brain
supported in this fashion will correspond to a Superman, just as each ape on a
tree is a distinct ape, not part of a larger entity. Only with the removal of the old brain by
qualified human personnel, during the next evolutionary leap forward, would the
collectivized new brains resulting from such a surgical operation amount to a
larger entity, which, embracing artificial supports and sustains as before, I
have termed a Superbeing - the antithetical equivalent
to a tree.
Having listed the most significant
categories of antithetical equivalents currently in existence and intimated of
those still to come, I would now like to draw attention to some of the more
obvious or commonplace ones, such as derive from antitheses extending beneath
the animal world to preceding stages of evolution - the distinction, for
example, between natural light and artificial light, as between the sun and/or
candles and neon and/or electric light. The distinction, for example, between natural heat, or an open
fire, and artificial heat, or an electric fire. The distinction between
natural flowers and artificial flowers, natural trees and artificial trees
(especially as used at Christmas time to intimate of the post-Human
Millennium), and so on. Strictly
speaking, such distinctions do not constitute antithetical equivalents ... in
the sense outlined above, but are extensions of the same thing on radically
dissimilar terms. For instance, natural
light and artificial light are both light, and therefore not antithetical to
the degree or in the sense that a tree and a Superbeing
would be. Rather, they are both relative
antitheses, whereas the latter approximate, in their alpha/omega polarity, to
absolute antitheses. Electric light is
rather like an indoor sun, a sort of artificial source of pagan light.
Relative, too, is the comparatively recent
invention of plastic inflatables, otherwise more
colloquially known as 'sex dolls', whose shapely artificial bodies are designed
to give the lonely, divorced, or hyperspiritual male
some of the pleasure to be derived from a natural woman's body and maybe, in
certain respects, as much. It is
unlikely that, liberated women aside, all that many natural women would approve
of this artificial alternative, which may strike them as unwarranted
competition. But, like it or not, such
an alternative now exists, and will doubtless continue to exist in the
foreseeable future. Whether or not some
men can derive more pleasure from a plastic inflatable than from a real-life,
flesh-and-blood woman, it would be rather odd, in light of our earlier
contentions, if such a life-like phenomenon had never been invented. After all, even relative antitheses have a
part to play in evolutionary progress!
WITHERING OF THE STATE(S)
Under a
socialist system, the People are the State and the Government simply the
People's leaders. Under a capitalist
system, on the other hand, the State is not fixed but oscillates, depending on
the type of government in office at any given time, between the
aristocracy/bourgeoisie and the People.
The socialist system 'socializes' the State by transferring it from the
land, i.e. naturalism, to the People.
The capitalist system, preceding the socialist one in historical time,
signifies a materialist compromise between naturalism and realism, land and
people.
Prior to the inception of parliamentary
politics, the State was only the land, the country as owned by the nobility
under the patronage of the ruling monarch.
The boundaries of the State were determined by those of the country, and
it was not unusual for a monarch to attempt to enrich himself
at the expense of weaker neighbours.
Here arose the origins of imperialism, which the bourgeoisie were to
perpetuate in a diluted fashion from the inception of their own reign, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the current day.
The transference of the State from the land
to the People is a long, slow, and often arduous process, taking many centuries
to complete. In contemporary
The British monarch, as head of state, is
in the ambivalent position of having two states of which to be head. Whenever the Tories are in office, the
reigning monarch is head of the State conceived from a naturalist/capitalist
angle. Whenever, by contrast, a
left-wing party is in office, the reigning monarch is head of the State
conceived from a materialist/socialist angle.
In the one case, head of the land. In the other case, head of
the People. Doubtless the Monarch
would be more in his/her political element as head of the land than head, or at
any rate effective head, of the People, since the institution of monarchy does,
after all, derive from and pertain to the naturalistic concept of the State.
One would be mistaken, however, to suppose
that the Monarch and the State were synonymous, even in the pre-atomic ages of
autocratic rule over the People in the interests of the aristocracy. The State was always the natural land mass,
as owned by the reigning monarch and nobles, to be worked for their own
benefit. The People, as peasants, were
stateless because owning nothing. The
Monarch was head of state in a more directly consistent way than is possible
under a constitutional compromise, but he was not the State itself. The only reason why Louis XIV's
claim "L'État c'est
moi!" is memorable ... is because it is a
profoundly false and corrupt one, testifying to the arrogance of this decadent
French king. Were it based on fact, we
would have no reason to accord it the status of an historical quote. A truism is quickly forgotten.
Concerning the parliamentary compromise
between land and people, the sphere of ownership of the land is of course
extended to embrace the grand bourgeoisie, who rule the People in the interests
of the land-owning classes. Every Tory
government, from the inception of bourgeois politics to the current day, has
upheld the naturalistic concept of the State in loyalty to landed
interests. By contrast, the left-wing or
liberal parliamentary parties have claimed to represent the People, through
their various permutations, and have generally aligned themselves with the
social concept of the State in the People's interests. This distinction between land and people
arose slowly, by degrees, since the early Whig governments weren't entirely
disposed to champion a social conception of the State, but also upheld landed
interests in defiance of the restricted circles of such interests traditionally
prevalent. By degrees, however, the
left-wing parties successively became more socialized - the extension of the
franchise from bourgeois to proletarian elements opening the way to a more
unequivocal advocacy of the People's interests vis-à-vis the landed
tradition. But even with the advent of
the Labour Party on the extreme left-wing, as it were, of the parliamentary
spectrum, the State could not become the People, since democratic socialists
were a development within the atomic, dualistic tradition of ambivalent
statehood, and couldn't have entirely liquidated landed interests in the name
of the People. They were still representatives
of the People, a title which can only apply to left-wing governments who
function within an atomic framework and represent the interests of the People
to or in the face of the opposition party and/or reigning monarch. One must admit that, in certain respects and
to a limited extent, latter-day Tory governments can also represent the
interests of the People, since evolutionary progress away from the naturalistic
towards the socialistic concept of statehood will to some extent affect
right-wing governments too, even if to a much less greater extent than is
manifested on the left wing of the parliamentary spectrum. Yet, generally speaking, the Conservatives do
not exist to represent the People but to uphold traditional
bourgeois/aristocratic interests, and this whether or
not their party is in government.
In states, however, where post-dualistic
politics has become the norm, the People are not represented in parliament by
petty-bourgeois politicians for the simple reason that, in a post-atomic system
of government, there is no bourgeois opposition against whom the People may be
represented - representation of the People being vis-à-vis that opposition
rather than in complete isolation from it.
As soon as a system of government arises on a socialist basis, which it
must do in a post-atomic state, the People are not represented, but directly
govern through the agency of their chosen politicians, who constitute a
People's government. But such a
government is not the State, as many misguided individuals in the capitalist
West like to imagine. On the contrary,
it is the servant of the People, who are themselves the State. The People have thus attained to power and
are guided and supervised by their most able leaders, the genuine socialists of
a Social Democracy - democracy having been extended, on the post-atomic level,
to embrace both quantitative and qualitative maximization, which is to say, a
maximum electorate with a maximum voting satisfaction, every vote effectively a
winner.
Unfortunately, 'Power to the People' can be
misinterpreted in a way leading to an exaggeration of the People's stake in
democracy, and thus of their political influence in a People's State. The leaders of the People - professional
politicians with a sense of destiny - are entitled to curb what, unbeknown to
its perpetrators, may be interpreted as anarchic or quasi-bourgeois reactionary
tendencies among certain sections of the People. A favourite analogy of mine is to liken the
People's true leaders to shepherds. What
happens when 'People's Power' is misinterpreted, in some quarters, is that a
situation arises whereby the flock, or various members of it, are trying to
dictate policy to the shepherds instead of following the latter's leadership,
and when such an illogical situation arises ... it is of course necessary for
the shepherds to reassert their authority over the flock with the help of their
sheep dogs (police). This may entail the
weeding-out of 'black sheep' from the flock, contrary to the wishes of the
flock as a whole. But, willy-nilly,
flocks require shepherds and should follow their directions,
else they will degenerate into an anarchic mob disposed to wandering everywhichway or in no particularly progressive direction
at all. Socialism is not mob anarchy,
but leadership of the People by the People's politicians in the interests of
the People. Some persons, regrettably,
seem not to realize this!
Of course, there is a good reason for some
persons to rebel against state control, and it is that they are aware that
Socialism is but a means to a higher goal, involving the end of the State,
class, work, privilege, etc., in the so-called Communist Millennium. Very well, they say to themselves, let us set
about opposing the existing state machinery ... that we may bring about such a
goal or, at any rate, help bring society closer to it. Wrong attitude at this point in time! For the State to which they pertain does not
exist in splendid isolation in the world but, on the contrary, is confronted by
world-wide capitalist opposition or seduction, and could not possibly move
towards higher things while such a situation exists and remains a potential
threat. These persons aren't fully aware
that socialism and capitalism hang together on a single thread and can
influence each other for better or worse, depending on which way the political
wind blows. They would like their
socialist state to ignore the capitalist threat and progress towards the free,
classless, stateless, society of the future Communist Millennium.
But what do they envisage this Communist
Millennium as being - a stage of evolution when human brains are supported and
sustained artificially in collectivized contexts for purposes of spiritual
expansion? No, not at all! Simply a time when the state machinery, i.e.
politicians and security services, cease to exist and the People are
accordingly free to live in peace with one another, no class distinctions,
because no professions, then applying.
Ah, how naive and short-sighted!
They are anarchists without realizing it, through having confounded
anarchism with communism! The
politicians may not have any objective concept of the Communist Millennium
either, but at least they are socialists, or men indisposed to people's
anarchy. And so they penalize those who
would seek to effect premature or unrealistic change in their People's
State. I do not condemn them for that!
An objective concept of the Millennium is
not possible within a hard-line socialist system. For such a system can only project forward on
realist terms, not on terms appertaining to the spirit. Only in a transcendental system with social
roots can the objective truth of evolutionary progress be comprehended and
upheld. This is not to say, however,
that the one system should entirely replace the other, the transcendentalist
the socialist, but that they have separate tasks or duties in the world which
should complement rather than conflict with each other. When Socialists have contracted the
natural/material, the way will be clear for Transcendentalists to expand the
spiritual. For one would indeed be
mistaken to imagine that Socialism can take man to the Millennium of
Christ-like reign on earth by itself!
How can it, when the millennial Beyond is a profoundly religious epoch
in time, with nothing whatsoever to do with politics or the continuation of the
State?
But let us now distinguish between
Transcendentalism and Socialism in the profoundest sense! Let us admit that, considered as this future
classless, free, stateless society, Transcendentalism
evolves out of Socialism, so that even Communism, or international socialism,
and Transcendentalism are different phenomena.
Very good! Let us agree that the
State 'withers away' with the higher development of Socialism towards
Transcendentalism, and that, by the time a truly transcendental society is
created, the State has ceased to exist.
But what is the State in a socialist society? Precisely the People! So it is really the People who must 'wither
away' and be superseded by the Supermen, as brains artificially supported and
sustained in collectivized contexts, before this true transcendentalism of the
millennial Beyond comes into effect. The
'withering away' of the State on socialist terms has nothing to do with the
state machinery of government and security forces or, rather, the socialist
state should not be confounded with the machinery of state, which is there to
serve the People. Such machinery will
doubtless disappear or be modified ... once the People are superseded by the
Supermen, but it would be quite a misinterpretation of socialist progress to
imagine that state machinery must be superseded by the People, become an
anarchic leaderless mob, or that state machinery and the People are two
entirely different things - the one a hindrance to the other! Were it not for state machinery, no socialist
state would still be in existence, and did it not continue to function in the
People's interests ... no eventual 'withering away' of the State (as people)
would be possible - the People having no real desire, in a majority of cases,
to do away with themselves!
However, the State and the People are only
synonymous in a socialist phase of evolution.
Prior to then there were, as I have attempted to explain, two concepts
of the State, viz. a naturalistic, or landed property, concept as applying to
the grand bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and a materialistic, or
capitalist/socialist, concept as applying to the bourgeoisie and, to a lesser
extent, the proletariat. The 'withering
away' of the first state began with the development of parliamentary democracy
and was to continue throughout the duration of the two-party system without,
however, this state completely 'withering away'. Only with a proletarian revolution does the
naturalistic state cease to exist, but such a revolution is unlikely to happen
in traditionally bourgeois countries. In
CHRISTIAN PAGANS
In the
Christian iconography, Christ offers man the possibility of salvation, as He
sits in Judgement between Hell and Heaven.
Atomic religion opens up the possibility of salvation but does not
discount the alternative possibility, for those who have been judged and found
wanting, of damnation. Christ is abraxas-like, a dual-natured deity who, so the iconographic
depictions demonstrate, damns with one hand and saves with the other, having
first weighed-up the ratio of sins to graces or graces to sins of those deemed
eligible, in the Christian schema, for judgement. Being the Son of God (the Father), Christ,
the second deity in the evolution of gods from the alpha-most to the
omega-most, is perfectly entitled to behave towards the Damned in a manner
owing something to the Father, Who is entirely negative and therefore
indisposed to save anybody, and will accordingly curse those whom He
damns. The Father, if He could curse,
would curse with a capital 'C'. But
Christ, being abraxas-like and therefore diluted,
only curses with a small one, because the better half of Him, in the Christian
iconography, is disposed to bless, albeit with a small 'b', and thus to
save. The ultimate blessing or, rather,
Blessing with a capital 'B', would only come from the Holy Spirit, yet not as a
deity separate, like Christ, from those to be blessed, but as one compounded,
as it were, of the Blessed in Spirit, whose very condition is
blessed. Christ, however, is not that
deity but, appertaining to the 'Three in One', merely a diluted Holy
Ghost. Consequently He cannot offer man
ultimate salvation, but only the relative salvation, still paradoxically
couched in terms of the Father, of the Christian schema. This salvation is really fictional, though
necessarily so for a given period of evolutionary time. Man cannot live with the whole truth about
salvation when he is still subject to various illusions, as Christian man
inevitably is. That
truth must come with a post-Christian and, hence, post-atomic age.
Throughout the Christian era, however,
there were still many men who could not identify with Christ and therefore
didn't place much confidence in their prospects of salvation, not so much
because they were more disposed towards a transcendental attitude to
Christianity as because, being relatively pagan in their psychic constitutions,
they were insufficiently evolved to properly relate to the 'Son of God'. A typical attitude of such men when on the
point of death would have been one which emphasized the part they expected the
Father to play in judging them in the Afterlife. They would have been preparing themselves for
a return to their 'Maker', the Creator in whose image man had apparently been
made, and, as such, they would have died with a pagan heart. Had they been true Christians, they would
have looked forward to being judged by Christ in the Afterlife, confident, with
what time remained to them, that they had done their best in this life and
could expect the blessed hand of salvation rather than the cursed hand of
damnation to fall upon them. The
prospects for even a less than true Christian was at least 50/50, provided that
his life had not been one long orgy of sin in a category approximating to the
criminal. In a borderline case, Christ
would be more likely to show compassion than vengefulness.
A man, however, who looks forward to
returning to his 'Maker', meaning the Father, is not, objectively considered, one who can expect to be saved but, on the
contrary, one who, in effect, passes negative judgement upon himself. For to return to the Father, assuming it were
possible, would indeed be to suffer damnation, since, theologically speaking,
the Father is at the opposite evolutionary remove from the Holy Spirit,
corresponding, in essence, to the most cursed deity, an absolute negativity
rather than a negative/positive compromise, as in Christ, the man-god. No man who looked forward to meeting his
'Maker' in the Afterlife could reasonably be considered a Christian, nor could
he be regarded as a logical thinker if he expected to be saved in the
process! Whatever he expected, he was
effectively betraying a basic allegiance to the Alpha Absolute, and thus
expressing a pagan orientation analogous to that upheld by certain tribes in
pre-atomic America, whose braves practised the custom of turning towards the
sun when death seemed imminent, in order to align their soul with what was
considered to be a return to its source (in the Diabolic).
Of course, there is no return of the soul
either to a 'Maker' - which is really a theological abstraction along the lines
of the Creator, Jehovah, etc., from the First Cause, or literal root of the
Galaxy, in the central star (the major star from which such minor stars as the
sun 'fell', with the theological equivalent of the Big Bang at the root of
Creation), nor literally to the sun, conceived as the source of all earthly
creation, for the simple reason that, as id-like seat of emotions in the
subconscious, the primitive soul is not eternal but decidedly temporal in
constitution, and therefore couldn't return anywhere - least of all to a cosmic
entity at a considerable remove from itself!
At death, the instinctual soul dies, but so, too, does the spirit, or
intellectual faculty of the superconscious, which,
though potentially eternal, is unable to survive on an absolute basis without
physiological support, because accustomed to a relative existence in
conjunction with the id. Thus the man
who supposes that, at death, his soul will return to its 'Maker', to be judged
one way or the other, is deluded twice over, both as regards survival and
judgement. And even if he lives in the
Christian civilization, he is yet a sublimated pagan for whom the possibility
of spiritual survival does not enter into account, since he is too wrapped-up
in the prospect of his soul returning to its 'Maker' to have any thoughts to
spare on the alternative prospect of his spirit, arising from the upper half of
his psyche, being admitted to the 'Kingdom of Heaven', viz. the Holy Spirit, by
an intermediate Christ in Judgement.
Even the anticipated return of the soul to its 'Maker' would seem, in
such minds, to be a matter requiring no reference to a negative judgement by
Christ, but one which can by-pass the Christian Judge, as it speeds on a directly pagan course to its
alpha-oriented goal! Not, assuredly, the
kind of attitude that a genuine Christian would uphold. For he would never leave Christ out of
account where the fate of his soul and/or spirit was concerned, even if,
objectively considered, his spirit was no more likely to attain to salvation
than the soul of the quasi-pagan ... to be damned.
From the theological point-of-view, a man's
fate in the Afterlife could of course be determined by a Christ capable of
weighing sins and graces on a mental balance, and passing judgement according
to which way the scales tipped. Yet
precisely because Christianity was not an absolute
religion but a compromise between soul and spirit, will and intellect, there
could be no possibility of anyone literally being either damned or saved. That may sound fairly obvious to us, but it
wouldn't have been so obvious to medieval Christians. For, as a relative compromise, it can only
follow that the mind of a Christian would have been damned to the extent it was
composed of instinctual soul and saved to the extent it was composed of
intellectual spirit. Being in itself
split between Hell and Heaven, fire and light, emotions and awareness,
Christianity could only offer a split judgement to the split humanity over whom
it elected to preside. The Christ in
Judgement between Hell and Heaven is indeed an apt reflection of the psychic
constitution of Christian man. Every man
would simultaneously have been damned and saved, although this is not, of
course, the impression which Christian iconography strives to convey, since it
functions on the theological basis of either/or, rather than both. But even there, the justification of
Judgement can be questioned when scrutinized with a literal eye. For if the soul is temporal and the spirit,
by contrast, only potentially eternal when intellectually housed in the same
psyche as its great instinctual antithesis, one might be forgiven for adopting
the line that the spirit alone would be eligible for judgement and that, as
spirit, it must be a foregone conclusion for admittance to Heaven. However, as this and other such remarks will
have demonstrated, the literal eye is not the most relevant one to apply to
theology, least of all to a theology so closely associated with a medieval
understanding of the psyche!
Getting back to the inability of so many
men to come to terms with Christ and the transcendental prospect which
Christianity was intended to demonstrate, it would be wrong of me to leave the
reader with the impression that only in medieval times was this actually the
case. For although it was arguably more
prevalent then, the adherence of various men to sublimated paganism continued
throughout the Christian era and even into the twentieth century, which was
scarcely an archetypal Christian century but, rather, an incipiently
transcendental one. And not only among
the ranks of the lowly or with such paradoxical examples of alpha-oriented
allegiance as Jehovah Witnesses, who alone of Christian sects
strive to reconcile Christianity with Judaism. One of the most lethal alpha-oriented people
of all time was undoubtedly Adolf Hitler who, as
anyone familiar with writings about him will know, was far more disposed
towards references to Providence, or the Creator, the Father, and other such
variations on an alpha-oriented theme, than ever he was towards references to
Christ (and this despite a professedly anti-Semitic disposition which evidently
had no trouble accommodating Creatoresque
monotheism). Indeed, he scarcely ever
mentioned Christ except in derogatory terms - rather like Nietzsche - and never
seems to have conceived of God in terms of the Holy Spirit. For him, the only God that existed and
mattered was the Father, whose name he would evoke, in a variety of guises,
with the regular persistence of a monomaniac.
If he escaped relatively unscathed from an attack upon his life, as he
did on more than one occasion, it was alleged that the hand of
As a theological abstraction from the First
Cause,
Politics wasn't the only field, however, in
which an arch-pagan came to the fore in the twentieth century. My own field of creative writing fell victim
to a quite formidable pagan in the person of John Cowper Powys, whose
petty-bourgeois philosophy champions the cause of a kind of Rousseauesque
return to nature, and emphasizes, in a number of publications, the importance,
as he sees it, of psychological association with the root of all nature in the
First Cause, which should be approached in an ambiguous fashion, depending on one's
mood or circumstances, of either gratitude or defiance. Gratitude to the First Cause for all the
pleasure in life, defiance of the First Cause for all the pain it entails -
these are the alternating poles of Powys' paganism, a paganism which doesn't
even express itself indirectly, through the medium of some theological
abstraction, but refers directly back to the literal roots of the Universe in
what, whether or not he realizes it, can only be cosmic energy. Treating this scientific term in a theological
way, however, only confounds the issue, and we may be sure that Powys was as
baffled as most of his followers must surely have been by the exact nature and
location of this two-faced First Cause!
If ever a man was the champion of the instinctual soul, wallowing
brontosaurus-like in subconscious stupor, it was this latter-day Druid, this
anachronistic heathen, this apostate son of a Welsh clergyman, this
antithetical equivalent to Nietzsche, this revivalist of Celtic atavisms and
arch-enemy of the spirit! I do not think
his work will be greatly admired by future generations.
Neither, however, do I expect the work of
D.H. Lawrence, Powys' literary contemporary and heathen counterpart, to serve
as a vehicle of spiritual enlightenment for future generations, since it, too,
falls heavily on the side of the Alpha absolute. As one of the few men of his time who could
logically distinguish between soul and spirit, instinct and intellect,
TRANSVALUATIONS
Living in a
world which had been transvaluated would be a good
deal different from living in a world such as most people are accustomed to
inhabiting in the present century. The 'transvaluation of all values', which Nietzsche hinted at
and partly realized in his own work, would have taken place right across the
spectrum of everyday life, with a consequence that people would think about
life or the world around them through minds the converse, in so many respects,
of what most Western minds currently are.
To explore this prospect in more detail, we
must project ourselves, if only in imagination, into the transcendental civilization
of the ultimate stage of human development.
We will be brought into contact, through this projection, with men who,
when referring to the weather, will incline to regard a fine day as a bad one
and, by contrast, a cloudy, wet, or cold day as desirable - indeed, as much to
be preferred. Such men will be
Transcendentalists and, consequently, they won't be partial to paganism or to
anything which might be associated with a heathen outlook. The sun will be regarded as of diabolic
constitution, its sensual face a denial of the spiritual life, a distraction
from thought concerned with Truth, which is to say, the truth about
transcendent spirit. The sun, together
with other such stars, is at quite the opposite evolutionary remove from
transcendent spirituality, being the most absolute sensuality. Men whose psyche is spiritually biased won't
desire to think too highly of the most absolute sensuality or, for that matter,
of lesser degrees of sensuality, including their own. They will be grateful, in effect, for every
encouragement to avoid thinking about it, and will accordingly treat cloudy
weather with more respect than Christian, or atomic, man ever did. A typical Transcendentalist would admit, if
questioned by an alien from some neighbouring solar system,
that he preferred winter to summer because it was more conducive to the
cultivation of his spiritual life. Man
was more interiorized during the winter months than at any other time of year,
and therefore given to essence to a greater extent than to appearance. The summer was, by contrast, a pagan season,
a season when nature - or such of it as remained - grew to a maximum beauty in
copious sensuality, and man was tempted to admire it at the expense of his inner
life. No, this typical Transcendentalist
would not be as happy in summer as in winter, when the sun was at its farthest
remove from one's part of the earth, and the incentive for sensual indulgence,
including sunbathing, considerably reduced.
The cold was good at snuffing-out insects, and days were shorter than in
summer. That meant more artificial light
than natural light and, beyond man's evening windows, a closer approximation of
the world to the essence of the heavenly Beyond. Daylight all-too-often reminded one that one
was living in a kind of purgatory - an interim composite realm in-between the
blinding appearance of Hell and the soothing essence of the future Heaven.
Were the alien from outer space to persist
in his questioning of our imagined Transcendentalist, he might learn more than
a few things which either also applied to his own world or had yet to come to
pass there. Take, for instance, the
question of sunbathing. Did anybody
still sunbathe? No, absolutely not! Sunbathing was strictly taboo, corrective
therapy attending infringements of the law, whether the guilty party were young
or old, male or female, black or white.
There could be no question of man's ever returning to a situation
analogous to that which had prevailed in the twentieth century, when a kind of
neo-pagan sun worship took possession of so many people, following the collapse
of Christian values and before the transcendental civilization had arisen. Such overt diabolism would be completely
incompatible with a transcendental approach to life, an approach in which only
a direct aspiration towards the Divine counted for anything. The sun was still there, of course, but life
was better if one tried not to notice it!
Those who desired a skin-tan could always avail themselves of artificial
heat therapy, presumably through a solarium, in the privacy of their
homes. Beaches were always deserted in
the summer.
Perhaps this has become a shade too
literary, though not, I hope, too fantastic.
There is no reason for us to suppose that man's current attitude to the
sun or nature or the weather will last for ever, least of all in a civilization
which will have turned against nature to such a radical extent ... as to be
predominantly if not exclusively transcendental in outlook. Anything that stems from the Alpha Absolute
will be, at best, suspect to this ultimate civilization, which will have no use
for an atomic integrity. Many natural
phenomena accessible to man's control or reach will, in the course of time, be removed - certain aspects of nature being supplanted by
man-made artificial phenomena, other aspects of it simply ignored. The shift away from nature will take various
forms but have as its motivation one goal: a closer approximation to the
ultimate supernatural ... as achieved through expansion of the lower, or
artificial, supernaturalism of man-made phenomena in conjunction with expansion
of the higher, or spiritual, supernaturalism peculiar to the superconscious part of the psyche. Eventually this will, of course, lead to the supersession of man by life forms whose brains and/or new
brains will be artificially supported and sustained. But by that time the final civilization will
have given way to a post-Human Millennium, which is not something connected
with man and therefore cannot be evaluated according to human criteria. The post-Human Millennium is, in effect, the
free, stateless, classless society which Socialism intends to bring about, the
heavenly goal, as it were, of socialist striving; though, in point of fact, it
will be Transcendentalism rather than Socialism that leads to this millennial
utopia, insofar as, considered in such a definitive light, the post-Human
Millennium is a profoundly religious development peculiar to an advanced degree
of earthly supernaturalism, and cannot directly stem from a political
development, but only from a religious one, like Transcendentalism.
Getting back to the typical
Transcendentalist's attitude to life in the coming centuries, we need not doubt
that the 'transvaluation of all values' he inherited
will lead to endorsement of an atheistic position, contrary to what is
officially upheld within the Christian, or atomic, civilization, where God the
Father is still acknowledged as God and shares this honour with Jesus Christ,
the actual principal deity appertaining to the atomic stage of civilized
evolution. With the transcendental
civilization, however, there will be no acknowledgement of the Alpha Absolute
as God, and neither will there be any recognition of the man-god alpha/omega
compromise, but, rather, a direct aspiration towards the full realization of
the Divine, conceived in terms of the Omega Absolute ... of unified
transcendent spirit. God, for the
Transcendentalist, will imply a supreme level of Being which will emerge as the
culmination of evolution in the distant future, and he will know that man
cannot attain to this supreme level of Being, but must be superseded by a
higher life form engineered out of the human ... from which a still higher life
form will be engineered until, following transcendence, Spiritual Globes are
established in the heavenly Beyond, to converge towards one another in a
process which will only come to a climax once the Omega Absolute is
established, with the culmination of all spiritual
evolution. The Transcendentalist won't
therefore worship the Alpha Absolute either in a concentrated or a diluted
guise, either absolutely, through the Creator, or relatively, through Christ,
but will focus his religious attention on cultivating human spirit to the
extent that it can be cultivated ... prior to the extensive supernaturalism of
a post-Human Millennium.
Part of this spiritual cultivation will
doubtless take place in specially-designed meditation centres, where the
communal practice of meditation will come to signify a crude approximation to
the higher, or millennial, approximations to the heavenly Beyond
still to come. The Transcendentalist
will know that this is but a stage on the road to ultimate salvation, and
should not be mistaken for the end of the road itself. As the final civilization matures, the state
machinery, conceived in terms of Socialism, will continue to 'wither away', so
that the closer men draw to the post-Human Millennium, the more the spiritual
life will prevail. With this
transcendental Millennium, however, the spiritual life will have entirely
superseded materialist preoccupations ... as the post-human life forms - first
the Supermen and then the Superbeings - are directly
set on course for the heavenly Beyond in successively greater degrees of
supernaturalism. The free society of the
post-Human Millennium is only objectively conceivable in terms of these
supernatural life forms, not with regard to man, who will always be subject to
some degree of socialist supervision with what time remains to him throughout the
duration of the coming transcendental civilization. Only after that time, when brains become
artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, would the
State, and hence socialist supervision, have completely 'withered away' ... to
make way for the exclusively religious leadership of the post-Human
Millennium. For in a very real sense the
People are the State in a socialist - as opposed to state socialist - phase
of evolution, and when they are superseded by the Supermen, so the State will
have been superseded by the post-Human Millennium, as well, of course, as its
servants in the governmental and/or bureaucratic context of state machinery,
which will then become quite superfluous.... Although this is not to say that
leadership ends with the complete disappearance of the State. For, as I have just intimated, the religious
leadership - derived, one can only suppose, from the spiritual leadership of
the transcendental civilization - will take over from the remaining political
leaders and have their own machinery to maintain - at least throughout the
lower phase of the post-Human Millennium, and thus prior to the probable
investment of supervisory authority in the hands of artificial religious
leaders, such as robots and computers, at a higher phase of millennial
time. This ultimate machinery will
include the artificial sustain systems (embracing the possibility of a
mechanical pump, oxygen containers, artificial blood vessels which link the
natural blood vessels in the brain of each individual Superman to the pump,
etc.) and accompanying supports, on which the collectivized brains of the
Supermen will be 'housed', together with the requisite supply of LSD or
equivalent synthetic stimulants for inducing upward self-transcendence in the superconscious mind of each Superman, the means of
injecting such stimulants, in specific amounts and according to regulated
practice, and any other machinery relative to this or a subsequent phase of the
quest to bring evolving life on earth closer to ultimate transcendence.
Whether the religious leaders will be
responsible for the technological aspect of millennial life or whether, in
fact, it will be solely left to scientific technicians ... is a moot
point. Though an alternative - and
possibly more viable - supposition is that leadership will rest in the hands of
both technicians and gurus at once - the former as regards all external matters, i.e.
the supervision of millennial machinery and the injection of hallucinogenic
stimulants into the Supermen; the latter, by contrast, with regard to all
internal matters, as directly experienced by themselves in conjunction with
other Supermen. That is to say, the
spiritual leaders may also be artificially supported and sustained, one to each
brain collectivization, and act as go-betweens for both the technicians and the
supernatural life form, informing the former of what life is like 'on the other
side', whilst advising them as to how much LSD, etc. should be injected into
the Supermen at any given time, what the effects are, how the Supermen are
coping, and so on, in order that they may be kept directly in touch with and
respond more accurately to the needs of their supernatural 'charges'.
Perhaps I am mistaken to distinguish
between technicians and gurus in this way?
But it seems to me that spiritual leaders, whether Christian, Moslem,
Buddhist, Hindu, or whatever, have an obligation to enter into the 'promised
land' of divine salvation with their flock, and thus share in the religious
experience of their flock at the same time as they are enlightening it. Doubtless transcendental leaders would be
under a similar obligation, since not only instructing their flock as how best
to meditate, but actually meditating along with it, and thus participating in
the same 'promised land', so to speak, as those for whom they were spiritually
responsible. Why, therefore, should
matters be any different for the ultimate spiritual leaders ... of the
post-Human Millennium, who should act as both confidence inspirers of and
instructors to the Supermen ... by actually participating in the LSD or
equivalent hallucinogenic experiences themselves? Surely this would be the only context in
which the highest religious leaders could work - as guides to and counsellors
of their fellow-spiritual travellers, with a duty to act as principal
spokesmen, as it were, for each cluster of artificially-supported and sustained
brains, and therefore ability to liaise, presumably through some artificial
channel of communication, with the technicians in the interests of the
spiritual wellbeing of each individual Superman. The technicians would thereby learn from
these chosen spiritual leaders exactly what, at any given time, the psychic
position for the Supermen was like; though the actual authority to keep things
moving forward, in the interests of evolutionary progress, would remain largely
with them, in their capacity as external controllers. They may not enter the transcendental
'promised land' personally, but must nonetheless ensure that any such 'promised
land' spiritual leaders and populace have gone into together is not allowed to
stagnate.
Eventually, however, this Superman-phase of
the post-Human Millennium will be superseded by a Superbeing-phase,
when the old brain of each artificially-supported brain is surgically removed
by the technicians ... and a greatly intensified collectivization ... of new
brains, creating an entity antithetical in context to a tree, arises as the
Supermen's millennial successor. It is
with this ultimate phase of the post-Human Millennium that transcendence will
truly be attained to; for now there will be no spiritual leaders, and therefore
no class divisions, as the collectivized new-brains, constituting a Superbeing, exist in a wholly post-visionary context of a
consciousness beyond communication with external technicians. This will constitute, in each of its numerous
manifestations throughout the planet, a truly free society, and it will simply
be a question of time before the hypermeditation of
each Superbeing gives rise to transcendence and the
consequent attainment of the earth's most advanced life form to definitive
salvation, in the heavenly Beyond, from its new-brain atomicity. It is with this second phase of the post-Human
Millennium that one suspects the human technicians will delegate authority
solely to artificial supervisors, such as computers and robots, while they
gradually withdraw from active participation in the supervisory process and
allow spiritual matters in the Superbeings to take
their inevitably autonomous course, so that, long before transcendence occurs,
the superbeingful society of the post-Human
Millennium, akin in some respects to a communistic or communal culmination of
millennial evolution, will be completely free of human interference and/or
supervision, completely equal one to another in its numerous new-brain collectivizations, completely stateless in its exclusively
religious orientation, completely leaderless in either a technical or a
spiritual sense, and completely programmed, through meditation of the most
sublime order, for the ultimate freedom ... of spiritual transcendence in the
long-awaited heavenly Beyond.
This, then, is the society which
progressive struggle on earth would seem destined to bring about, and we can be
confident that, one day, it will arise.
What we must anticipate, over the coming decades and centuries, is a 'transvaluation of all values' not only with regard to such
matters as I earlier drew attention to - a mere handful of all the transvaluations of that order which must eventually come to
pass - but, no less importantly, with regard to Socialism's concept of the
Millennium, a concept founded, all too often, on short-sighted projections of
existing materialism which, instead of objectively portraying a future transcendental
Millennium, serve merely to obfuscate matters and to mislead the mind along
quasi-anarchic channels, to the detriment of Truth. One thing we can be absolutely certain of is
that the Communistic Millennium will not be a human
society minus all existing patterns of bureaucratic and/or governmental control
but, on the contrary, the most profoundly religious post-human society of which
it is possible to conceive. Perhaps,
when all's said and done, that is
precisely the most important transvaluation which
needs to be made over the coming centuries!
PART FOUR:
DIALOGUES
KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
BRIAN: How,
Martin, would you define faith in God, if someone were to ask you?
MARTIN: Not
in the way that most religious people would tend to do, anyway. For when they ask themselves whether God
exists, they are more often than not either referring to the Creator,
alternatively known as the Father, or to Jesus Christ, the Christian deity per se. To have faith in God in this sense is to
answer such a question by saying: 'Yes, I believe that the Creator exists
and/or that Christ lives and is awaiting the time for His return to earth'.
BRIAN: Yet,
presumably, you don't share such a belief?
MARTIN: No,
I possess a different and, to my mind, superior belief - namely, the idea that
the real purpose of our living here is to evolve towards God considered, in a
supreme sense, as the Holy Ghost, which would be the culmination of
evolution. I said 'belief', but in point
of fact I have knowledge of this purpose, since I am the possessor of an
irrefutable logic appertaining to successive stages and types of life in an
evolutionary spectrum which stretches from the Alpha Absolutes (of the stars)
to the Omega Absolute (of the ultimate spiritual globe), conceived as the
Supreme Being, or supreme level of Being in eternal bliss.
BRIAN:
Briefly then, what are the successive stages and types of life in this
evolutionary spectrum?
MARTIN:
They are as follows: the stars at stage one, the planets (including mineral
formations) at stage two, the plants at stage three, the animals (including
fish and birds) at stage four, pagan men at stage five, Christian men at stages
five/six, transcendental men at stage six, the Supermen at stage seven, the Superbeings at stage eight, the Spiritual Globes at stage
nine, and the Ultimate Spiritual Globe at stage ten. Stages one and ten are absolutely
antithetical, which is to say, antithetical in every sense; for what begins in
the Many must culminate in the One. Stages
two and nine constitute the most radical manifestation of what I term
antithetical equivalents, which status is shared, albeit to a lesser degree, by
the plants at stage three and the Superbeings at
stage eight; the animals at stage four and the Supermen at stage seven; pagan
men at stage five and transcendental men at stage six - the Christians
combining stages five and six in their dualistic integrity.
BRIAN: If
the Superman may be said to succeed transcendental man, then what animal life
form preceded pagan man?
MARTIN: Man
is descended from the apes, so it is with regard to a line of evolution
stemming from the apes that pagan man should be seen. Now, of all the plants, the ones most
appropriate for apes are trees, in which they virtually live. So trees, or a certain type of tree, preceded
apes; apes preceded men, in all three stages of their development; and the
Supermen, as brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized
contexts, will succeed them.
BRIAN: But
what is it that particularly distinguishes one stage of life from another?
MARTIN:
Constitution of the psyche, which is to say, whether the life form concerned is
predominantly subconscious, balanced between subconscious and superconscious, or predominantly superconscious. The higher the life form, the more the superconscious will predominate over the subconscious,
although as evolutionary development approximates to the absolutes at opposite
ends, as it were, of the evolutionary spectrum, the distinction between the
subconscious and the superconscious ceases to
apply. Thus while the plants are beneath
superconscious affiliation and are accordingly
incapable of autonomous behaviour, the Superbeings,
as our projected antithetical equivalent to trees, will be above subconscious affiliation
and therefore incapable of or, rather, indisposed to autonomous behaviour for
the opposite reason.
BRIAN: So,
as the projected antithetical equivalent to trees, the Superbeings
will presumably be new brains artificially supported and sustained in more
intensively collectivized contexts?
MARTIN:
Yes, for the removal of the old brain from the Supermen would elevate life to a
wholly post-egocentric status of exclusive superconsciousness. And from then on, the resulting Superbeings would be pending transcendence, and thus the
attainment of pure spirit to the heavenly Beyond.
BRIAN: This
is incredible! You have acquired
knowledge, through such logic, that the outcome of evolutionary progress must
be pure spirit, and that such spirit, converging from all parts of the
Universe, must eventually attain to a maximum unification in the Ultimate
Spiritual Globe.
MARTIN:
Precisely! And that is why I am above
faith, in my assessment of the purpose of our being here. I know that the evolving universe is destined
to culminate in the Omega Absolute.
There is no way that anyone could deny the essential truth of
evolutionary progress from stages 1-10.
My logic is irrefutable!
Willy-nilly, 'Man,' to cite Nietzsche, 'is something that should be
overcome.' And, doubtless, in due course
he will be!
BRIAN:
Provided the Superman can be brought to pass!
Tell me, what do you believe concerning God the Father and Christ, in
whom you have apparently little or no faith?
MARTIN: I
have no faith in either of them because, once again, I possess a knowledge of what they are. For me, God the Father doesn't really exist
because my psyche is too superconsciously biased to
be much under the sway of subconscious psychic contents originally extrapolated
out from cosmic reality. As I see it,
the Creator as Jehovah was largely an extrapolation from the central star of
the Galaxy, which, in all probability, was the original creative force behind
lesser stars, planets, et cetera, whereas the Creator as the Father was largely
an extrapolation from both the sun and the core of the earth combined. God the Father is - or was - an
anthropomorphic white-haired, bearded figure responsible for Creation. So runs the theology. But, in reality, no such Creator has ever
existed in the Universe, which probably came into existence through various
explosions of gases giving rise to stars and planets. Stars most certainly exist there, but
Jehovah/the Father doesn't exist anywhere except in the minds of those who are
subconsciously biased.
BRIAN: Then
what about Jesus Christ?
MARTIN:
Christ exists in the mind for those whose psyche is approximately balanced
between subconscious and superconscious in egocentric
dualism. Again, for a person like me,
Christ doesn't really exist, since the ratio of superconscious
to subconscious is such in my psyche that no dualistic, egocentric affiliation
is possible. If God the Father
corresponds to the alpha-based inception of evolution, then Christ signifies a
dualistic integrity which stands chronologically in between the Father and the
Holy Spirit. So long as one's psyche
reflects a dualistic integrity, one can relate to Christ and thus have faith in
God conceived as man. But as soon as
one's psyche becomes superconsciously biased, as it
must do as evolution proceeds towards a transcendental stage, then Christ
becomes irrelevant, since this more advanced psychic constitution requires that
man turns his religious attention towards the creation of the truly divine God
which will only fully emerge at the culmination of evolution. Man must therefore set about expanding
spirit, and while he may do so to a quite significant extent during the
ultimate phase of his evolution in the transcendental civilization to-come,
nevertheless the literal attainment of spirit to the heavenly Beyond, in the
guise of Spiritual Globes, will require that such a phase be superseded, in due
turn, by the superhuman and superbeingful stages of
the post-Human Millennium, which will permit of a much more radical expansion
of spirit. In fact, the ultimate life
form on earth will be able, through a form of supermeditation,
to expand spirit to such an extent ... that transcendence should result - a
transcendence corresponding to the salvation of pure spirit from the remnants
of the 'flesh' ... as signified, at that highly-advanced juncture in time, by
the collectivized new brains of each individual Superbeing.
BRIAN: So,
in any ultimate sense, Heaven really is in the Beyond, and not in the self?
MARTIN: One
can only get to Heaven through the superconscious
self, which is to say, through the cultivation of spirit. But one should not make the mistake of taking
our projected Ultimate Spiritual Globe of the future Omega Absolute for the
comparatively tiny amount of spirit within the superconscious
self, or vice versa! Man is not God in
any absolute sense, though we know that man became God in the person of Christ
in a relative and, hence, anthropomorphic sense. One day, however, proletarian man will become
transcendental man, and one day thereafter transcendental man will become the
Superman and the Superman become the Superbeing and
the Superbeing become the Spiritual Globe and the
Spiritual Globe, in converging towards other such transcendences, ultimately
become the Omega Absolute. Ah, how the
Truth liberates! Faith in God, you
say? But one day soon people will
acquire knowledge of what I know through the study of my teachings, and then
they, too, will be above faith. Such a
day is fast approaching, my friend, even though there are various people who,
in their dualistic blindness, would like to prevent it!
RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE
STEPHEN: I
have long been puzzled about the relationship of mind to body, wondering
whether, in the final analysis, the two aren't completely independent, as I have
occasionally had reason to believe.
PAUL: There
is no such thing as a mind that is completely independent of a body, despite
what certain mystical types may tell you.
Mind and body hang together in an interdependent relationship.
STEPHEN:
Then mind grew out of or developed from the body, instead of coming to exist
with it from an independent source?
PAUL: There
was no independent source! Reincarnation
is a myth, not a reality. Mind evolved
out of matter, and it continues to do so.
STEPHEN:
But what is mind?
PAUL: The
essence of spirit.
STEPHEN:
The essence of spirit?
PAUL: This
is the converse of the appearance of the flesh.
Mind is the essence of the spirit; body the appearance of the flesh.
STEPHEN:
Then mind and body are antithetical in constitution?
PAUL: Of
course! Mind is a composite of the
workings of the spirit, whereas the body is a composite of flesh shaped into
recognizable features. The flesh is the
substance of the body, but the spirit is the quality of the mind. The flesh is apparent, but the spirit
essential. You can never see the
latter. Yet it works both through and
independently of the flesh, in the same person and, considered chronologically,
at different stages of evolution. 'By
the works of the flesh is the spirit known', though that can only hold true for
a given period of evolutionary time ... before man or society becomes
sufficiently advanced to be able to cultivate spirit independently of the
flesh. While, however, the spirit works
through the flesh, it corresponds to atomic mind. As soon as it becomes radically independent
of the flesh, the mind becomes post-atomic.
STEPHEN: I
have never learnt to distinguish between them.
To me, all minds are alike.
PAUL: Quite
wrong! The Orient has long sought to
cultivate a post-atomic attitude of mind, whereas the Occident has concentrated
on an atomic subservience of mind to body, and thus stressed doing rather than
being. Individually, within the confines
of a given culture, it is of course possible for some people
to approximate to a post-atomic attitude of mind when the majority are atomic
or, conversely, to approximate to an atomic attitude of mind in the face of
post-atomic convention. My own mind is
now more post-atomic than atomic in constitution.
STEPHEN:
And thus functions independently of the body?
PAUL: Tends
to place more importance on the direct cultivation of spirit independently of
the body than on indirectly manifesting spirit through bodily works. You may call this a post-Christian attitude,
though it isn't so much Oriental as transcendental.
STEPHEN:
The difference being?
PAUL: That
one bears in mind the necessity of technological assistance in the development
of spirit independently of the body. One
has got to a point where one can envisage spiritual progress only being made
through a kind of symbiosis of East and West on a higher, or transcendent,
plane. The flesh must be overcome if the
spirit is to attain to salvation in the heavenly Beyond. But, ultimately, it can only be overcome on
technological terms, such as would eventually imply the artificial sustaining
and supporting of human brains in collectivized contexts, while spirit was
being cultivated through intensive meditation.
This period of time would be the post-Human Millennium, and it would
signify, at its furthermost point of development, the maximization of the
spiritual life with a correlative minimization of the flesh in a context
pending transcendence and, thus, the attainment of pure spirit, as Absolute
Mind, to the heavenly Beyond.
STEPHEN:
Absolute Mind presumably being the essence of pure spirit?
PAUL:
Yes. Spirit is, as it were, the
'apparent' or superficial definition, as though transcendence was being
considered from the outside and a Spiritual Globe was accordingly regarded as a
'thing'. A Spiritual Globe would be
composed of pure spirit, but the actual workings of that spirit, its interior
condition, would correspond to Absolute Mind.
To be 'inside' a Spiritual Globe would be to know Absolute Mind as the
very essence of one's Being.
STEPHEN:
Which, however, human beings can never or only very imperfectly know, since
they are victims of relative mind, or of mind tied in varying degrees,
depending on the individual, to the body, and dependent on that body for
survival.
PAUL:
Correct! No relative mind could possibly
attain to Absolute Mind. There is no
survival of the spirit at death, for the simple reason that it can't be
cultivated to a point pending transcendence in a context, such as the human,
where the flesh has not been minimized, i.e. reduced to the new brain, but,
rather, maintained in its natural state with regard to the body as a
whole. Death would be the last time when
transcendence occurred, for it presupposes a maximum spiritual development on
earth before it can happen, and no such development is possible on the human
plane, least of all at a time when the body is wearing out, as it tends to do
with age, and, at the point of death, ceases to function even subnormally. Death
isn't so much the cessation of adequate physiological workings of the body to
sustain life as ... the killing of the spirit by the cessation of those bodily
workings. When the heart stops beating,
death occurs to a person because the spirit can't survive without physiological
assistance. The spirit of a human being,
being relative, is dependent on the brain for survival, and the brain is in
turn dependent on the proper functioning of the heart to receive fresh oxygen
from the blood being pumped through the body.
As soon as this functioning ceases, the supply of oxygen to the brain is
cut off, and so the spirit dies. There
is never any alternative.
STEPHEN:
Because spirit is generated in and by the brain and depends on the workings of
the brain for its survival?
PAUL: Yes,
the spirit is the immaterial quality co-existing with the material brain. It is akin to the wavicle
aspect of matter, matter being an amalgam, as it were, of particles and wavicles in oscillatory motion, forming what modern
physicists term a complementarity. There is an atomic integrity about this
interpretation of matter, which I incline to regard as
bourgeois/proletarian. The future, I
feel certain, will witness the birth and development of a post-atomic
interpretation of matter along lines stressing the wavicle
aspect at the expense of its particle aspect.
Likewise, the mind/body dichotomy, as currently applying to the brain,
will be superseded by an interpretation exclusively favouring the mind or, as
we have been saying, the spirit. This
post-atomic interpretation will stress the independence of mind from the brain,
but it won't on that account fall into the traditional trap of deriving it from
some primal source external to the body.
On the contrary, this exclusive concept of mind will stem from the
de-materialization of the brain and have attainment of Absolute Mind as its
goal.
STEPHEN:
But what exactly is mind?
PAUL: Simply the functioning of the spirit, the raison
d'être of spirit, as pertaining to psychic interiorization.
STEPHEN: Is
thought therefore mind?
PAUL: The
physiological functioning of the brain gives rise to thought, so thought does
not derive from the mind which, on the contrary, knows thought, is conscious of
thought, and arranges it into coherent, meaningful, systematic patterns. Being conscious of thought appertains to the
essence of spirit. But mind is never
more itself than when it is conscious of itself as spirit, just as the
body is never more itself than when it is conceived as flesh during or
preparatory to sex.
STEPHEN:
Now you are talking of meditation. Consciousness of the higher self.
PAUL:
Yes! But such consciousness, which is
mind at its most refined level, is only one aspect of the total mind
experience. Being conscious of thought
and ordering this thought into coherent patterns is another. Applying one's consciousness to the study of
what other men have written is yet another vital aspect of mind behaviour, one
connected with evolutionary progress and the mind's cultivation.
STEPHEN: Is
what I see around me connected with this consciousness?
PAUL:
No! Mind is not the world you see
through your eyes because mind appertains to essence, the visual experience, by
contrast, of the external world appertaining to appearance. This appearance actually dilutes mind, just
as the use of the other senses - of hearing, touch, taste, and smell - dilutes
mind by imposing apparent phenomena upon it.
Mind, or consciousness, is still there when one closes one's eyes and
stops one's ears and forbids oneself to touch, taste, or smell anything. In fact, mind is more there then than it
would be when one was using one's senses, because one is not diluting it with
apparent distractions. It is only by
blocking out one's senses that one can become more conscious.
STEPHEN:
Though if one keeps one's eyes closed for any length of time, one may fall
asleep and thus lose consciousness.
PAUL: Only
if one is intending to sleep, not if one is set on meditating! With sleep, one does of course lose one's
conscious mind as consciousness slides down into the subconscious realm of
dreams. But the subconscious is sensual,
whereas the superconscious, towards which meditators aspire, is spiritual. Consciousness is really an amalgam of
subconscious and superconscious influences. It doesn't exist in complete isolation from
the lower and higher reaches of the psyche as an independent entity, contrary
to what psychologists once imagined. It
isn't the tip of an iceberg, to coin a well-worn cliché. It depends for its waking-life constitution
on the degree to which the superconscious preponderates
over the subconscious or vice versa, that is to say, on the ratio of psychic
ingredients - these ingredients also balancing each other over a certain period
in evolutionary time for the great majority of people, who then function
according to atomic, or dualistic, criteria.
Post-atomic criteria presuppose, on the other hand, a consciousness in
which the superconscious is the predominating psychic
influence, whereas in the pre-atomic ages of pagan civilization, the
subconscious predominated in the overall constitution of consciousness.
STEPHEN:
Would one therefore be justified in contending that consciousness is the
psychic equivalent of the corpus callosum which, as
the organ responsible for linking the old brain to the new one, functions as a bridge
between the two main physiological components of the human cortex?
PAUL: Yes,
in a manner of speaking! For what the
corpus callosum is to the physiological constitution
of the brain, egocentric consciousness is to its psychic constitution - a kind of
fusion-point of psychic influences from both the subconscious and the superconscious.
STEPHEN:
Then consciousness isn't so much homogenous as divisible into two main parts -
one part stemming from the subconscious and another part stemming from the superconscious?
PAUL:
Absolutely! There are, in effect, two
minds at work in a psyche subject to an atomic integrity, so that consciousness
is an amalgam of instinctual will, or id, and spirit, the former deriving from
the subconscious, and therefore responsible for ordering and comprehending
emotions; the latter, by contrast, deriving from the superconscious,
and therefore responsible for ordering and comprehending thoughts. The atomic mind is dualistic, with the lower,
or instinctual, consciousness functioning as a proton equivalent, and the
higher, or spiritual, consciousness functioning as a bound-electron equivalent,
which, in any atomic integrity, revolves around, and is therefore subservient
to, the proton equivalent. Thoughts, in
a typical atomic mind, are subservient to feelings. And consequently the atomic mind tends to be
enslaved to the flesh in more senses than one!
STEPHEN:
But, presumably, one day the higher consciousness will be freed from the lower
one and thus exist in a post-atomic context?
PAUL: Yes,
though not in an absolute sense before the Superbeing-phase
of the post-Human Millennium, when, so I believe, the old brain will be
surgically removed from individual Supermen and new brains become hypercollectivized into contexts suggesting a life form
antithetical, in psychic constitution, to trees. The resulting Superbeings
will be completely beyond subconscious influence and subject to post-visionary
consciousness of a nature approximating to Absolute Mind. The collective mind of each individual Superbeing,
or arrangement of artificially supported and sustained new-brains, would
experience hypermeditation pending transcendence, and
consciousness would therefore correspond to a free-electron equivalent, the
proton equivalent having been escaped from with the removal of the old brain -
a task reserved, in all probability, for the millennial servants of the
post-human life forms. Human
consciousness, however, can only remain divisible between subconscious and superconscious influence.
There is no question of a truly post-atomic mind being attained to while
the old brain is still intact and thus able, through the medium of subconscious
sensuality, to dilute consciousness in the interests of an atomic
integrity. Human consciousness is, in Koestler's memorable phrase, a 'divided house', and so, to
varying extents, it must remain until all psychic dualism is transcended, come
the Superbeing Millennium. Even the preceding Supermen would, as brains
artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, be subject to
some subconscious influence, and would undoubtedly spend time asleep each
day. But they would be conditioned away
from the subconscious and further into the superconscious
through periodic recourse to such synthetic stimulants as LSD, which would make
for upward self-transcendence on a visionary or, rather, hypervisionary
level. Prior to them, the men of the
transcendental civilization would be conditioned away from the subconscious and
further into the superconscious through periodic
recourse to transcendental meditation, a spiritual discipline which is designed
to free consciousness from preoccupation with thoughts and feelings, and enable
the higher part of the conscious mind, the part we identify with the superconscious, to come to the fore, though in a
contemplative rather than a cogitative role.
The stage will be set for a post-atomic attitude of mind, such as is
already prevalent in the West among devotees of meditation, albeit on a
minority basis and as pertaining mainly to the transitional civilization of
contemporary America. Western
transcendentalism is derived from Buddhism and other oriental sources, and thus
corresponds to a bourgeois/proletarian, rather than to a full-blown proletarian,
level of transcendentalism. The
Transcendentalism that I advocate, and envisage as applying to a future
post-atomic civilization, transcends all traditional world religions, including
Buddhism, and is intended to signify a convergence to Heaven on the basis of an
ultimate world religion - a religion embracing, besides the practice of
meditation, a knowledge of subsequent stages of evolutionary development.
STEPHEN:
Such as would be signified by the Supermen and Superbeings
of the ensuing post-Human Millennium?
PAUL: Plus,
of course, the subsequent attainment of spirit to the heavenly Beyond in the
guise of Spiritual Globes, and the gradual convergence and expansion of such
globes of pure spirit towards an Omega Absolute - the sum-total of all
convergence and expansion. A relative understanding
of Absolute Mind would not be inappropriate in any serious attempt to extend
religious education among the masses, over the coming decades. The highest truths will, of course, remain
the preserve of the most intelligent.
But something of the ultimate truth should become intelligible to the
average man in the course of time. A knowledge of the importance of technology in minimizing
the flesh should preclude a repetition of the kind of spiritual fanaticism
which history has witnessed, down the centuries, in connection with the more
naturalistic Orient. One won't attain to
ultimate salvation through meditation alone, no matter how earnest one's
endeavour! Mind can only be cultivated
in proportion to the extent that one's commitment to the flesh is minimized,
and to achieve a radical minimization of the latter and corresponding
maximization of the former ... it will prove necessary, eventually, to have the
natural body superseded by artificial supports and sustains for the brain. Thus the spiritual life will be expanded
without the threat of bodily disease and/or starvation - there being no body to
succumb to such a tragic fate.
STEPHEN: On
the subject of disease, I wonder whether the prevalence of schizophrenia,
particularly as signifying a disparity between thoughts and feelings, is not
connected, in the present century, with the evolution of the psyche from an
atomic to a post-atomic status, with the result that thoughts are drawing
further away from feelings as the higher part of the conscious mind gradually
acquires ascendancy over the lower part, and connections or interactions
between the two sides of the 'divided house', to return to Koestler,
become both more tenuous and less frequent.
Perhaps, in that case, schizophrenia is more a reflection of
evolutionary progress, as bearing on the changing constitution of the psyche,
than an isolated, incidental disease?
Perhaps we are all a little schizophrenic these days, because
consciousness is evolving away from feelings and deeper into pure mind, in
consequence of which we find it harder to relate the latter to the former, or
to mediate between them with the aid of thought.
PAUL: You
may well be 'on to something' there, as Jung would say, and what you have just
said doubtless applies in some measure to yourself, since I was alluding to
bodily disease, such as leprosy and cancer, and you jumped straight onto the
psychic plane. However, we needn't doubt
that consciousness is divided, and in the future the
lacuna between the spirit and the id, or between that part of the mind
influenced by superconscious spirituality and that
part of it influenced by subconscious instinctuality,
will become even greater, as the higher mind adopts an increasingly post-atomic
orientation in defiance of subservience to proton determinism. Not before the radical post-atomism of the
ensuing transcendental Millennium, however, will evolving life on earth be in a
position to attain to salvation from the flesh in the Being
of Absolute Mind. We needn't expect to
survive death, as our ancestors did, but for that reason we have all the more
incentive to prolong life and program ourselves for coming to terms with
Absolute Mind. It will take a long time,
and we have yet to get properly under way!
BECOMING AND BECOME
KEITH:
Concerning the subject of transvaluations, one of the
most revolutionary transvaluations you have made is
surely with regard to transcendent spirit being, as you conceive it, essential
rather than apparent. In
other words, the idea that pure spirit would be the very opposite of the stars
in appearance - indeed, not something that could be discerned as phenomenal
because purely noumenal, and therefore beyond the
realm of sensuous appreciation.
COLIN: Yes,
transcendent spirit, whether in the penultimate context of Spiritual Globes
converging towards one another, or as the Ultimate Spiritual Globe ... of the
Omega Absolute, would be completely essential, as befitting an absolute at the
very opposite extreme from the stars which, as we all know, can be highly
apparent, particularly on a clear night!
I don't envisage pure spirit shining in the dark, like a star.
KEITH: And
consequently you tend not to look upon enlightenment in terms of light, whether
metaphorically speaking or otherwise?
COLIN:
Certainly not in any apparent sense! For
all such traditional valuations seem to me but an extension of pagan criteria -
like, for instance, the idea that the heavenly condition would be blissful.
KEITH: Yet
you don't envisage it being so yourself?
COLIN: No,
because I regard bliss as a feeling, a very strong and positive feeling, and
feelings can only be connected with the will, which is to say, the subconscious
part of the psyche. By contrast, I
regard spirit - which should emerge from what is now the superconscious
part of the psyche, but will eventually become the only part of it for a
superior life form than man - as lying beyond feelings, emotions, and passions,
in a realm of pure consciousness that transcends everything but itself through
the most complete self-absorption of psychic fulfilment. As men, we can't know exactly what this
supreme state-of-mind will be like. For,
besides being relative, our spirit is regularly subjected to instinctual
intrusions, as feelings, emotions, et cetera, of one kind or another condition
our thoughts or, conversely, as our thoughts engender certain usually
appropriate feelings, et cetera. Value
judgements concerning the heavenly Beyond are therefore liable to reflect our
own psychic limitations, and that is why one should be extremely sceptical as
to their literal applicability, especially when conceived in terms of an
instinctive feeling like bliss, which is undoubtedly the strongest positive
one. If evolution were a journey, as it
were, from one extreme feeling to another via the world of man, one could take
the idea that it will culminate in bliss more seriously. Yet it seems to me that bliss can be attained
to, over intermittent periods of time, on the human plane, whereas evolution
must go well beyond that plane to a purely spiritual one, such as would
transcend feelings altogether, and thus culminate in a context antithetical, in
every respect, to how it began - namely, as the most absolute will of the
stars.
KEITH: So
from agony to bliss and then on again to some as yet unimaginably abstract
psychic fulfilment?
COLIN: Yes,
that is approximately how I see it anyway.
KEITH:
Then, presumably, you would agree with the Buddha, who strove to get away from
feelings, of whatever description, in an attempt to escape from pain.
COLIN: Yes,
insofar as he realized that pleasure and pain were interconnected and that one
couldn't escape, in any absolute sense, from pain simply by indulging in
pleasure. Sooner or later one would have
to pay one's dues, through fresh pain, for the pleasure in which one had
earlier indulged, so that one would remain trapped in a vicious circle of
pleasure/pain alternations. Consequently
the Buddha sought no pleasure in order to avoid pain.
KEITH: A
highly paradoxical procedure that doesn't necessarily lead to spirit being
cultivated to any significant extent.
COLIN:
Indeed not, because non-evolutionary and too naturalistic. Sitting under a tree all day, every day of
the week, won't change the basic constitution of the psyche. For one will still be
the victim of a subconscious mind, and this lower mind will prevent the superconscious mind from expanding in the direction, so to
speak, of the Divine. Of all places to
meditate, the jungle or forest is among the least suitable, because the air is
heavily leaden with the sensuality of surrounding plant life and one's psyche
is therefore likely to be conditioned in a manner favouring the
subconscious. No, the radical
cultivation of spirit, in the future, will require the assistance of
technology, in order that the brain, or physiological base of the psyche, can
be artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, and provided
with such artificial stimuli as may prove necessary to the facilitation of
psychic development.
KEITH: No
doubt, you are alluding to LSD or to some such equivalent synthetic
hallucinogen which artificially induces upward self-transcendence in the
psyche?
COLIN: Yes,
a stimulant that should develop the superconscious at
the same time as it neutralizes the subconscious. The Supermen of the post-Human Millennium
will be fed specific quantities of this vision-inducing drug and thereby
partake of an aesthetico-religious experience
superior, in essence, to what the men of the preceding age - that of the
transcendental civilization - were fated to experience when they meditated in
front of holograms in specially-designed meditation centres - the hologram
approximating to a kind of external 'trip'.
KEITH: And thus preceding, in chronological time, the widespread
recourse to an internal 'trip'?
COLIN: I
believe so. External visionary
experience of a static nature would signify an inferior phase of aesthetico-religious development to internal visionary
experience of a similarly static nature, and should accordingly precede the
latter in chronological time - it being accepted that evolution proceeds from
apparent to essential levels.
KEITH: So
art and religion would become inseparable again, as they were during the most
religious centuries of the Christian era?
COLIN: Yes,
because, at its height, art is designed to facilitate religious development,
being the handmaiden, as it were, of religion.
I cannot conceive of a meditation centre being without a specific
quantity of the finest art, particularly holograms, though holograms, needless
to say, of a religious character. There
might also be room for certain kinds of laser and/or light art, whether with
fluorescent tubes or plastic tubing; though, as you know, I tend to have a
relatively poor opinion of light these days, even when artificial. Possibly, meditation will mostly be practised
in the dark, with strategically-positioned holograms close-by in order to
facilitate concentration and act as a kind of psychological focal-point.
KEITH: Some
people might prefer to meditate without recourse to such a focal-point.
COLIN: Which they could continue to do, and simply by closing
their eyes or looking straight through or above it, as the case may be. Yet meditation ought not to be encouraged to
become too naturalistic, as in traditional oriental contexts, but should be
accompanied by such artificial stimuli as I have just alluded to, if only to
prevent some persons - perhaps less spiritually earnest - from dozing or
falling into thought traps. The more profound
persons will still prefer to interiorize their meditation as much as
possible. But the existence of holograms
shouldn't present a serious obstacle to that!
KEITH: One
could argue that the deeper persons, being introverted, would prefer to take
some hallucinogenic stimulant, and thus contemplate internal 'holograms' rather
than their external equivalents?
COLIN:
True. But that would only apply to a
relatively small minority of people, who might well be catered for in that
respect during or before the latter stages of the next civilization. I cannot see hallucinogens being used on a
truly widespread or comprehensive basis, however, much before the advent of the
post-Human Millennium, when human brains become artificially supported and
sustained in collectivized contexts.
KEITH: Why
ever not?
COLIN:
Frankly, because most people wouldn't be psychically mature enough to properly
appreciate them, with consequences not unknown to those of us who lived in the
late-twentieth century. Not everyone is
born to become a sophisticated 'acid head', the majority of people being more
disposed to alcohol or tobacco. No
doubt, this fact will still apply over the coming decades; though we may assume
that alcohol and tobacco will cease to be available with the advent of the
transcendental civilization, a civilization which could not encourage the use
of natural drugs.
KEITH: Then
surely it would be necessary to plug the gap, as it were, with the help of
synthetics ... in order that people could have a superior alternative with
which to carry on?
COLIN: In theory, this may seem so.
But, in practice, I rather doubt that so potent a mind-expanding
hallucinogen as, say, LSD could be brought into regular, sustained use much
before the post-Human Millennium.
Perhaps a diluted variant could be adopted in the meantime. Yet I still can't envisage the next
civilization as being an out-and-out 'acid' one. For a comparatively small
minority of people - possibly.
But not for any Tom, Dick, or Harry whose chief inclination, under the
influence of such a powerful stimulant, might well be to do either himself or
someone else a grievous injury! The
meditation centre should be a place of calm, quiet, concentrated consciousness,
togetherness, and happiness, not a place where, at any moment, one's neighbour
might throw-up, freak out, jump about, or cause bodily violence to those in the
immediate vicinity, and all because LSD was proving too mind-boggling an
experience for him or her to handle! I
witnessed quite a number of such disturbances at music festivals and rock
concerts in the past, and often enough it seemed to me that they took place
less through any fault of the drug than because the persons concerned were
insufficiently spiritually mature to cope with it.
KEITH: A
situation analogous to the sight of the Cross to Count Dracula, or even the
purity of the Clear Light of the Void to Eustace Barnack,
that character from Aldous Huxley's Time Must
Have a Stop, not to mention the complexity of a great tome to a simpleminded
person.
COLIN:
Precisely! Which is why I cannot
envisage LSD being put into regular, widespread, and intensively-sustained
service much before the post-Human Millennium, when there won't be any arms or
legs to thrash around with, and no tongue to cry out with, and, in all
probability, no cause for alarm - each brain being enclosed in its own psychic
world and therefore not subject to the fear-provoking distraction of sight
vis-à-vis other people, which of course applies to the human world. The superhuman one would be much more
interiorized anyway, since deprived of or, rather, elevated beyond the usual
senses ... as applying to the body.
Probably there would be some kind of artificial means of communication,
whereby each brain could tune-in, as it were, to the thoughts of another or to
instructions coming from without at certain fixed times of day, either before
or after the 'trip'. I am thinking along
the lines, for example, of an artificial voice-box linking the Supermen, or a
chosen representative of their number, to the external world of the scientific
technicians. Possibly the most
intelligent brain of each commune would be responsible for liaising, in such
fashion, with the human technicians, and it would appertain to the superman
who, for reasons of spiritual suitability, had been elected to function as a
priest-equivalent for each gathering of Supermen. This priest-equivalent would actually be in the
spiritual 'promised land' of the post-Human Millennium, not external to it like
a technician. For it seems to me that
spiritual leaders in whatever stage of evolution always enter the particular
'promised land' to which their leadership appertains - as, in another sense, do
artists.
KEITH:
Whereas politicians and scientists remain relatively aloof from the flock in
the interests of their respective external roles as coercive or controlling
agents?
COLIN:
Precisely! And for that reason they do
not identify with the flock after the manner of priests or artists, who create
and maintain the successive spiritual 'promised lands' on route to the ultimate
'promised land' ... of the heavenly Beyond.
KEITH: But
will there be artists at work in the post-Human Millennium?
COLIN: No,
not in the professional sense! For every
Superman, in experiencing the 'trip', will witness his own superconscious
mind and thus effectively be his own inner 'artist'. What man would ordinarily witness but for the
opaque veil of the subconscious mind, the Superman will daily witness because
LSD, or some such synthetic hallucinogen, will have drawn the veil across by
neutralizing the subconscious. He will
be dreaming awake, and thus experiencing the antithesis of sleep dreams. So he won't require an external artist, in
the sense that transcendental men of the ultimate human civilization would have
required one to create the various holograms as incentives to meditation. All he will require is a priest-equivalent, a
fellow Superman with a stronger mind who, besides liaising with the scientific
technicians, will offer encouragement and advice, if needed, to the surrounding
Supermen on any given artificial support.
Thus the priest- or, if you prefer, guru-equivalent will supersede the
artist - just as, in the external realm, the scientific technician will
supersede the politician - with the advent of the post-Human Millennium.
KEITH: So a
class distinction between priest-equivalents and lay Supermen, as also between
technicians and post-human life forms in general, will persist into the
Millennium in question.
COLIN: Yes,
but only throughout the duration of its first phase. For, with the second phase of millennial
life, such class distinctions will be totally eradicated, since the Supermen
will be elevated, by the technicians, to the post-visionary consciousness of
collectivized new brains, and the ensuing entity will have no need of
priest-equivalents to liaise with anybody - each Superbeing,
or collection of new brains, being beyond communication with the external
world, as their consciousness is directly programmed, through hypermeditation, for transcendence, and thus the eventual
attainment of the most free life form on earth to the ultimate freedom of the
heavenly Beyond. There would be no class
distinction between one Superbeing and another - no
more than there is really any such distinction between, say, one Oak tree and
another, or one Beech tree and another - and so the higher phase of the
post-Human Millennium would indeed be classless.... As regards the human
technicians, who would become completely external to the superbeingful
society, following the operation designed to elevate Supermen to a
post-visionary life form, my guess is that they would thereafter have very
little to do and could accordingly entrust supervisory responsibility to
artificial 'technicians', viz. robots and/or computers, while the spiritual
life of the Superbeings continued to expand towards
transcendence. Having placed such
supervisory responsibility as was still required into the hands of artificial overseers, the technicians would increasingly remove
themselves from millennial duties and die quietly in their own time. For it could well transpire that
transcendence would take decades or even centuries to occur in each of the superbeingful communities, and that the only sensible thing
for the human technicians to do, in the circumstances, would be to let matters
take their preordained course under the watchful 'eyes' of overseers capable of
surviving for centuries. Besides, it is
doubtful whether, at that advanced post-atomic juncture in time, man would be
capable of propagating himself anyway, so he would probably die-out sooner or
later - there being no real justification for his remaining alive.
KEITH:
Presumably because he had done what was necessary to set the Superbeings directly on course for transcendence?
COLIN: And
also because his continued presence would constitute an infringement of the
classless society, even if the Superbeings were
oblivious of anything or anyone outside themselves on account of their being so
wrapped-up in the hypermeditation of the most free
earthly society.
KEITH: What
you are saying suggests that evolution proceeds in a kind of zigzagging
fashion, since lower-level meditation would be the spiritual norm for men of
the ultimate human civilization - a norm which would be eclipsed with the
LSD-experiencing Supermen of the ensuing post-Human Millennium?
COLIN:
Evolution does indeed proceed in such a fashion, and you might alternatively
choose to define it in terms of a romantic/classic alternation - the religious
focus of the Superhuman Millennium betokening a kind of romantic interlude
between the lower classicism of the transcendental civilization and the higher
classicism of the Superbeingful Millennium. To trace this development right back to its
beginnings, one could contend that what began, with the First Cause, as the
lowest romanticism ... is destined to end, with the Last Effect, so to speak,
as the highest classicism - the definitive classicism of the ultimate
Become. Even on the human level there
were alternations between the classic and the romantic in this respect, the
lower classicism of pagan antiquity being superseded by the classic/romantic
dichotomy of Christian modernity, its early, or Catholic, phase being romantic
or, as we prefer to say, gothic, and its later, or Protestant, phase
comparatively classic, emphasizing the Become rather than the Becoming. Well, above Christianity will come the lower
classicism of transcendental futurity, as men congregate together in meditation
centres in order to approximate to Heaven through a supreme human level of Being. Now you ought
to see why LSD would be inappropriate in this context, which must stress
togetherness.
KEITH: Yes,
LSD, corresponding to a romantic orientation, would simply segregate one person
from another in their individual preoccupations with such psychic contents of
their superconscious minds as the drug was designed
to free. Wrapped-up in his individual
'trip' - and therefore largely if not completely oblivious to other people when
the lights were off - each person would exist as a law unto himself, and thus
as a refutation of the group or communal context which this phase of human
evolution was intended to signify. There
would be no real justification for people being in a group at all, if all they
intended to do was to experience the visionary contents of their individual superconscious minds.
COLIN:
Absolutely! Which is
why the widespread use of synthetic hallucinogens like LSD is unlikely to be
endorsed until the advent of the Supermen ... with the first, or romantic,
phase of the post-Human Millennium.
The transcendental civilization, on the other hand, should signify the
highest human classicism, placing due emphasis on the spiritual togetherness of
each meditating community in whatever meditation centre, in order that a
superior approximation to the Become may be achieved. By contrast, the first phase of the
post-Human Millennium will signify a romantic Becoming, as each Superman
experiences his own 'trip'. He will of
course be part of a community of similarly artificially-supported and sustained
brains, but this community will be more apparent from the outside, i.e. from
the scientific technicians' standpoint, than from the actual internal
experience of each Superman. If this
phase of evolution seems a little zany in its post-human romanticism, so should
the antithetically-equivalent phase to it ... of the pre-human romanticism of
apes, our own direct ancestors, swinging collectively in trees ... be regarded
as a little zany - indeed, as more than a little zany; though we tend not to be
particularly conscious of that fact these days.
Apes, too, would have formed a paradoxical community!
KEITH: And
still do, wherever they exist in the world.
However, as the Supermen will signify a romantic Becoming, the highest
earthly Becoming, we may assume, I take it, that the ensuing Superbeing phase of evolution will represent the highest
earthly Become, as the post-visionary life form indulges its penchant for hypermeditation in the most communal togetherness of which
it is possible to conceive in earthly terms.
COLIN:
Indeed we may! And that penultimate
classicism will lead, via the romantic Becoming of numerous Spiritual Globes
converging and expanding in the heavenly Beyond, to the ultimate classicism of
the Omega Absolute in the most perfect Become - a Become in which essence is
maximized, in the perfection of spiritual unity, and evolution accordingly
attains to its culmination. At present,
however, it is still some way from that culmination. For we have yet to attain to the spiritual
classicism of the transcendental civilization!
KEITH: In which, presumably, people will meditate collectively in
specially-designed meditation centres?
COLIN: Yes,
and with the assistance, if needs be, of suitably religious holograms. The classical age which lies before us will
be far superior to the classical age behind us ... in the Graeco-Roman
past. We need not rush headlong into the
post-Human Millennium, as if this ensuing age were merely an obstacle to
further development. That is something
it most assuredly won't be - not if properly explored and evolved away from
when the time is ripe!
EVOLUTIONARY STAGES
STUART: I
like this idea of yours that evolution proceeds in a kind of zigzagging fashion
with oscillations between the romantic and the classic, as emphasizing a
distinction between the Becoming and the Become. It begins, you say, with a romantic Becoming
in the First Cause?
KEVIN:
Which can be equated with the central star of the Galaxy, as of any galaxy.
STUART: And
then proceeds to a kind of classical Become in the planets?
KEVIN: No,
more precisely in the smaller stars, such as the sun, from some of which there
eventually emerged the planets as a kind of romantic Becoming.
STUART: Ah,
the minor stars! Yes, of course! They precede the planets, which go through
various changes until ...
KEVIN:
Nature emerges on earth as the first planetary classical Become, with
particular reference to the trees - the oldest and most noble specimens of
nature.
STUART:
There then follows, however, a romantic Becoming in the animals...?
KEVIN:
Including insects, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, et cetera, which are all
life forms, irrespective of their size or habitat, capable of movement and
conscious decision, and therefore stand between the plants and man in the
evolution of life. Of all the animals,
we must single out apes, or a certain species of ape, the way I singled out
trees, as integral to a line of evolutionary ascent leading, in due course, to
man.
STUART: So
from the classical Become of a tree to the romantic Becoming of an ape swinging
in its branches, we move on, at length, to the classical Become of a man
descended from that ape?
KEVIN: Yes,
in a manner of speaking! The man you are
alluding to arose at a rather later phase of evolution than the caveman of
prehistoric times, being of pagan civilization and, in particular, a certain
phase of it ... such as we nowadays tend to equate with Graeco-Roman
classicism. This man signifies a
classical Become on a predominantly sensual level.
STUART:
Whereas the tree presumably signifies such a Become on an almost exclusively
sensual or, at any rate, sensuous level.
KEVIN: Yes,
since somewhat closer to an absolute than is man. With the next, or dualistic, phase of
evolution, however, we enter the realm of a romantic Becoming, particularly
with regard to Catholic Christianity, and from there, with the inception of
Transcendentalism in a post-dualistic civilization, we shall progress to the highest
human Become, a classical Become of predominantly spiritual constitution, and
therefore quite the reverse of the pagan Become.
STUART: I
have now counted from 1-8, beginning with the First Cause and ending with
transcendental man.
KEVIN: Then
let us continue on up the ladder of evolution to the ninth rung, so to speak,
which will be the romantic Becoming of the Supermen in the first phase of the
post-Human Millennium. The Supermen will
require artificially-induced upward self-transcending visionary experience and
signify a stage on the road, as it were, to the next classical Become - the
highest earthly Become ... of the Superbeings who, as
new-brain collectivizations, will stand at the
opposite evolutionary remove from trees (rather than to apes on trees) and thus
signify classicism on a near-absolute spiritual level.
STUART:
Which level will in turn be superseded, I take it, by a fresh romantic Becoming in...?
KEVIN: The
convergence and expansion of Spiritual Globes in the heavenly Beyond, which would
constitute the ultimate romantic Becoming prior to the ultimate classical
Become of ... attainment by such separate transcendences to unity in the Omega
Absolute at the climax of spiritual evolution.
And that, believe it or not, would be stage twelve - the complete
antithesis to the lowest romantic Becoming ... of the First Cause, at stage
one.
STUART: How
amazing! One could argue that evolution comes full-circle with its return to an absolute.
KEVIN: Except for the fact that the Omega Absolute will be as
different from the alpha absolutism of stars, both major and minor, as it is
possible to conceive.
What began under the negative principle of proton-proton reactions
should culminate under the converse principle of electron-electron attractions
- the ultimate positivity!
STUART:
Thus evolution proceeds from the subatomic to the supra-atomic via the atomic.
KEVIN:
Precisely! Atoms are at the base of
matter, but before matter arises one has the alpha absolutism of the gaseous
stars, and after electrons have escaped from matter one will have the omega
absolutism of transcendent spirit. The
most absolute soul, whether in its romantic or classic phase, is beneath
electron emergence. Transcendent spirit,
whether in its romantic or classic phase, will be above proton constraint. The former is absolutely evil, the latter
absolutely good.
STUART: So
when do atoms first emerge in evolution?
KEVIN: With the formation of matter in the romantic Becoming of the
planets, particularly on planets, like the earth, which were rich in mineral
formations. As matter ascends it becomes
less dense; but the lower manifestation of matter in rock/crystal formations is
especially dense, thereby testifying to a considerable preponderance of protons
and/or neutrons over electrons in an atomic cohesion which defies the emergence
of consciousness. However, consciousness
as we understand it doesn't arise with the plants either, but only with the
animals, and then on a comparatively rudimentary level.
STUART:
This suggests that the ratio of protons and/or neutrons to electrons in the
overall constitution of the animal brain is still heavily biased on the side of
the former, and consequently impedes the development of consciousness.
KEVIN:
Particularly with regard to spiritual consciousness, which requires for its
expansion a preponderance of electrons over protons and/or neutrons such as one
only finds in man, and then after millennia of evolutionary struggle. Animal consciousness is predominantly sensual
because of the preponderance of protons and neutrons in the atomic constitution
of its brain. But the atomic structure
is such that a degree of spiritual consciousness becomes possible, because the
electrons are more numerous than in the matter of, say, a tree, and not so
densely smothered by protons and neutrons.
STUART: So
even a tree, to the extent that it is atomic rather than subatomic, must
possess mind in some degree?
KEVIN: It
possesses a subconscious, or sensual, mind derived from a preponderating proton
constitution. But although the rudiments
of a conscious mind are present in the electron ingredient, so to speak, of the
tree's atomic structure, there is no consciousness as such, because the
electrons are too greatly outnumbered and tightly smothered by both the protons
and neutrons to emerge as a distinct consciousness. A tree can feel, but it can't think!
STUART:
Thus feeling is the quality of proton-dominated matter.
KEVIN: Yes,
feeling corresponds to the wavicle aspect of matter,
proton and/or neutron and electron cohesions to its particle aspect. The wavicle aspect
is the soul of matter, the particle aspect its body, whether as regards protons
and neutrons or electrons.
STUART: You
mean, an electron, no less than a proton, is a tiny material entity?
KEVIN:
Considered literally, yes! But, unlike a
proton, an electron will have consciousness as its quality, so that the
electron wavicle will be spiritual rather than
sensual or intellectual, and therefore akin to the spirit of matter. Thus a distinction arises, with the wavicle aspect, between the soul and the spirit of matter,
which is paralleled, in the particle aspect, by a distinction between protons
and electrons. Obviously, the ratio of soul to spirit, or vice versa, will vary
according to the kind of matter under consideration.
STUART: You
mean, a piece of wood will possess a different wavicle integrity from the neo-cortex of a highly
intelligent man.
KEVIN:
Absolutely! The wood will be proton
biased and therefore its wavicle quality will be
soul, whereas the neo-cortex will be electron biased and possess, in its wavicle aspect, a spiritual quality.
STUART:
Then surely there must be a similar distinction between the two main
physiological components of the human cortex, viz. the old brain and the new
brain, which would suggest a different atomic structuring at the base of each -
the one being of a proton bias and the other, by contrast, of an electron bias?
KEVIN: Oh,
indeed! And that is precisely why the wavicle aspect of each brain is so different, the
subconscious being soul and the superconscious ...
spirit, the former betokening feelings and the latter ... awareness, with
intelligence coming in-between. Were
each brain identically structured in the ratio of protons to electrons, then
their wavicle aspects would be identical, as either
soul or spirit. But the neo-cortex, or
new brain, is in the process of evolving in the direction of greater electron
freedom, its atomic integrity being rearranged, through spiritual striving, in
such a way as to create an imbalance favouring the electron component, an
imbalance which, taken to its logical extreme, should result in the
disintegration of any remaining atomic structure and the attainment of
electrons to transcendence, in complete freedom from proton and/or neutron
constraint.
STUART: An eventuality which could only happen, presumably, in the
latter phase of the post-Human Millennium, when life, in the guise of Superbeings, was directly programmed for the heavenly Beyond.
KEVIN: Yes,
for by then the old brain would have been surgically removed by the millennial
technicians and only the new brain would remain, its wavicle
aspect being spirit, and the raison d'être of each Superbeing, or new-brain collectivization, being the
expansion of that spirit towards transcendence in an endeavour to bring
evolution to a supra-atomic plane of ... electron-electron attractions in the
heavenly Beyond. Each Superbeing would be expanding spirit through a hypermeditation made possible by the interaction of the
various new brains in any given collectivization and the complete absence of
subconscious constraint, thereby changing the new brain's atomic structure in
the direction of greater degrees of spiritual freedom ... until, with transcendence,
the ultimate degree of spiritual freedom was attained to, a degree entailing,
in all probability, the collapse of the physiological base - the new brains
disintegrating into flame as the electrons broke free of the remaining proton
and neutron constraints, and thus shattered what atomic integrity there had
been.
STUART: Why
do you suggest the possibility of flame?
KEVIN:
Because once electrons had departed for the heavenly Beyond,
the disintegration of what had formerly been an atomic integrity would result
in protons reacting against one another in a subatomic context akin to that of
the sun, and the sun, as we both know, is a great ball of raging flame. Thus would the world gradually destroy itself
in the wake of departed spirit - flame spreading from each collapsed new-brain
collectivization to whatever lay in its path until, eventually, everything was
consumed.
STUART: You
said electrons would break free, but would they actually soar heavenwards or
would particle husks be left behind, as their wavicle
aspect attained to transcendence?
KEVIN: Yes,
I said electrons and I meant electrons!
I can't imagine spirit existing without its particle base in the
electron. Does the sun's flame exist
without its particle base in the proton?
No, of course not! And neither
need we expect wavicles to exist without electrons on
which to dance. They have to emerge from
somewhere, after all.
STUART: But
would that make for transcendence?
KEVIN: Oh
yes, because these wavicles would not be attached to
matter, as in an atomic integrity, but to pure electrons, which would be as far
above matter as pure protons, in the subatomic absolutism of the stars, are
beneath it. Maybe even
more so, insofar as electrons are the pro-spiritual elements in an atomic
structure, whereas protons remain aligned with the emotional realm, and
neutrons with the intellectual one.
But when pure spirit arises from the Superbeings,
it will create a nuclear reaction releasing proton energy in every direction,
and this in turn will give rise, I am quite convinced, to a holocaust, albeit
one destined, in due course, to burn itself into nothingness as the proton
fires subside. Thus will the protons
destroy themselves as the electrons wing their way heavenwards, as it were, in
various-sized spiritual globes.
STUART: The
smallest size presumably arising from any given Superbeing,
and the largest ...?
KEVIN:
Eventually being the Omega Absolute itself.
Though while Spiritual Globes were converging towards one another and
expanding into larger wholes in a kind of romantic Becoming, they would pass
through evolutionary stages corresponding to the successive star changes ...
from the galactic central star to the individual planets via the minor stars of
each galaxy. However, these supra-atomic
stages would be the converse of the subatomic ones, so that, beginning in
Spiritual Globes as antitheses to the 'material' globes of the planets,
supra-atomic evolution would progress from a 'planetary' to a 'galactic' level,
and on, eventually, to a 'universal' level, as the individual Spiritual Globes
became larger and fewer in number, following successive convergences and
expansions.
STUART:
Your genius overwhelms me and obliges me to request a clarification, on the
basis of this more comprehensive perspective, of the respective evolutionary
stages ... from the first to the last.
KEVIN: Very
well! Let us begin with whatever number
of governing stars there are in the Universe, one to each galaxy, which
correspond to X number of first causes.
Let us then proceed to an XX number of minor stars, millions to each
galaxy, and consider them as stage two.
Then let us proceed to an XXX number of planets, possibly billions to
each galaxy, which in turn give rise, on certain planets, to an XXXX number of
plants, including trees, at stage four.
Next let us proceed to an XXXXX number of animals on these
life-sustaining planets, and bring ourselves to stage six with the advent of
XXXXXX numbers of pagan men. The ensuing
Christian, or equivalent anthropomorphic, stage is really a combination of two
stages, since dualistic in constitution, and leads, via XXXXXXX numbers of
atomic men, to stage seven with XXXXXX numbers of transcendental men. Then follows stage eight, with XXXXX numbers
of Supermen, which are human brains artificially supported and sustained in
collectivized contexts. After this first
and lower phase of the post-Human Millennium, however, we proceed to its second
and higher phase in new-brain intensified collectivizations
... with XXXX numbers of Superbeings at stage
nine. This in turn leads to
transcendence with XXX numbers of Spiritual Globes, these small transcendences
continuously merging into one another until, at stage eleven, they become more
the size of stars than planets and may justifiably be regarded in terms of XX
numbers of Galactic Globes. It now only
remains for these larger transcendences to converge towards one another, from
whatever part of the Universe, into one ultimate globe ... for evolution to be
complete in the Omega Absolute at stage twelve, the final X.
STUART:
Thus what began in the many First Causes will culminate in the one Last Effect?
KEVIN:
Precisely! Evolution
proceeding from the subatomic to the supra-atomic via intermediate degrees of
atomic compromise.
STUART: And
in a kind of zigzagging fashion of romantic/classic alternations?
KEVIN: Yes,
though that particularly applies to the intermediate, or earthly, stages of
evolution, where a Becoming/Become alternation derives from and appertains to
the variously-constituted atomic integrities which prevail there. With the
subatomic stages, however, evolution broadly reflects the proton absolutism of
stars and planets in terms of a continuous romantic Becoming, whereas with the
supra-atomic stages of evolution there will really be a continuous classical
Become, in accordance with the electron absolutism of spiritual globes en route,
as it were, to the Omega Absolute.
Viewed from the human standpoint, this convergence and expansion of
Spiritual Globes will suggest a romantic Becoming. But Absolute Mind, the essence of
transcendent spirit, would be unaware of any such Becoming
because entirely wrapped-up, so to speak, in self-absorption ... as sole
witness to its divine Being. Conversely,
although the stars may suggest to us, as we view them from millions of miles
distance, a classical Become, they are continuously engulfed by the negative
Becoming of their proton-proton reactions, and are thus consumed in apparent
activity. Transcendent spirit, by
contrast, would be completely immersed in essential passivity, the quality of
electron-electron attractions. There
could be no greater distinction than that!
STUART: So
now I understand, for the first time, how evolution proceeds and where it is
tending. Man has now reached the point
where he can split the atom of crude matter, severing electrons from their
proton and/or neutron constraints. But
he has a long way to go before he can split the atomic structure of the new brain
apart!
KEVIN:
That's true. Though there is no reason
for us to be pessimistic as to its eventual achievement. The Superbeings of
the higher phase of the post-Human Millennium will most certainly progress
towards transcendence, and when they attain to it ... the result will be
salvation for the liberated electrons but damnation for the abandoned protons,
which will then react against one another in diabolic fashion. Just as well that, by then, all human
technicians would have departed the scene, to leave the prospect of witnessing
the ultimate nuclear holocaust to their artificial colleagues - the robots and
computers, whose material constitutions will be impervious to conscious pain!
