Op. 33
SOCIAL TRANSCENDENTALISM -
Means to an End
Multigenre Philosophy
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: ESSAYS
1. A Feudal Prototype
2. Sexual Evolution
3. A Zigzagging Progression
4. From the Barbarous to the Civilized
5. Towards an Absolutely Free-Electron Literature
6. Towards an Absolute Architecture
7. Evolutionary Spectra
8. New Beginnings/Old Endings
9. The Rise of Theocratic Centrism
PART TWO: DIALOGUES
10. Literary Distinctions
11. From Old Brain to Superconscious
12. Developments in the Arts
13. Correlations in Sex and Art
14. Religious Integrities
PART THREE: APHORISMS
15. On Evolution
16. On Civilized Evolution
PART FOUR: MAXIMS/NOTES
17. On Ideological Spectra ...
18. On Antithetical Equivalents ...
19. On Art ...
20. On Sex ...
21. On
22. On Clothes ...
23. On Church and State ...
24. On the Supra-natural ...
25. On Romanticism and Classicism ...
26. On Revolutionary Change ...
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PART ONE:
ESSAYS
A FEUDAL PROTOTYPE
It is
difficult to see how trees could possibly be popular with Social
Transcendentalists, as we may call people with a socially transcendent view of
life. For a tree mirrors, on earth, the
galactic-world-order of governing star, minor stars, and planets, which is to
say, the tyranny of both major and minor stars over planets. With a tree, the trunk is equivalent to the
governing star of the Galaxy, the branches are equivalent to the peripheral
stars there, and the leaves equivalent to the planets. The leaves serve both the branches and trunk
of a tree by drawing moisture, sunlight, etc., into themselves, which is then
transferred to the tree-proper. We need
not doubt that this procedure mirrors the galactic arrangement further down the
ladder of evolution, whereby the planets serve the stars by keeping them in
some kind of galactic order and thereby enable individual stars to rule over
particular solar systems to their own lasting advantage (given that a fixed
star is better off than a shooting one, if for no other reason than it isn't
likely to collide with other stars and has a recognizable status in its
powerful fixity).
So much for the galactic and natural levels
of evolution! Let us now apply this
arrangement to human affairs, where it will be found that the pattern of a tree
is imitated whenever human society stems from natural dominion, whether
absolutely, as in a pagan age, or relatively, as in a Christian one, when a
transcendental dimension necessarily dilutes the commitment of that society to naturalistic
criteria. In the first instance, we find
an absolute monarchy presiding over a feudal system. In the second instance, a constitutional
monarchy presiding over a capitalist system.
The monarch is equivalent, in a feudal society, to the trunk of a tree,
the nobility are equivalent to its branches, and the peasantry equivalent to
its leaves. Now in this natural
arrangement the latter serve the former, either directly vis-à-vis the nobility
or indirectly vis-à-vis the monarch.
With the extension of feudalism into a capitalist phase of evolution
this arrangement to some extent still applies, except that where formerly the
nobles and monarch were the sole rulers being served by the peasantry, the rise
of the bourgeoisie ensures that they, too, are served in some measure by ... if
not the peasantry then their urban equivalents - the industrial proletariat.
Thus, when all this is taken into account,
it is difficult to see how a tree (a plant which served as a blueprint, as it
were, for feudal and capitalist societies) could possibly be popular with
Socialists, never mind Social Transcendentalists, since they relate to an
artificial arrangement of society in which the exploitation of man by man, or
peasants by nobles, no longer applies, and the proletariat, that antithetical
equivalent of the peasantry, are served by a bureaucracy who, antithetically
equivalent to the nobility, take their directives from the reigning president,
the antithetical equivalent of the feudal monarch.
Although, contrary to popular notions, a
socialist society is not classless (no more than was the feudal society which
preceded the compromise epoch of bourgeois capitalism), it is nevertheless one
in which the bulk of humanity are served rather than exploited, and cannot bear
any resemblance, in consequence, to that society stemming from the naturalistic
pattern of the tyranny of trunk and branches over leaves, which we equate with
feudalism. The distinction between
strong and weak, as between a tree and its leaves or a nobility and its
peasants, does not apply to a socialist society, where, by contrast, the only
distinction is between a more ideologically-motivated bureaucracy and a less
ideologically-motivated proletariat, a fact which calls forth not tyranny but
the service of the latter by the former.
Clearly a day will come when trees, no less
than monarchs and nobles, are banished from a society tending towards the omega
supernatural from an artificial base. We
see this process in action wherever the city has come to supplant nature, and
it can only become more absolute with the passing of time. Doubtless oxygen will be produced
artificially to a much greater extent in the future than at present, thereby
enabling man to dispense with trees and spend more time indoors, to the lasting
advantage of his spiritual life. An
omega-oriented absolute society can only be interiorized, not partial to a
dualistic oscillation between internal and external environments, like a
relative society. And a socialist
society, properly considered, should be anything but relative!
There are, however, two types of what may
be called post-atomic societies, and we can define them as relative and
absolute respectively. A relatively
post-atomic society, such as exists in the United States, will tolerate trees
in public places, whereas an absolutely post-atomic society that was also
civilized would find trees objectionable, if on none other than ideological
grounds, and accordingly seek to curtail their numbers and distribution as much
as possible.
By contrast, a pre-atomic society would be
more likely to worship or fear trees, as in fact used to be the case wherever
pagan criteria prevailed, and this same tendency would have been refined upon,
to a point of respect, with the ensuing development of atomic society, where
trees were cultivated as much for their perceived natural beauty as for the
various utilitarian uses to which they could be put - industrial, social,
environmental, or whatever. Such
respect, while still applying wherever atomic criteria survives, would become
transmuted, with the development of post-atomic society, into tolerance, a
tolerance probably attaching far more importance to utilitarian than to
aesthetic considerations, though falling short of outright antipathy, such as can
only be expected from an absolutely post-atomic society moving towards, if not
already in, a Social Transcendentalist and, hence, fully civilized status.
SEXUAL EVOLUTION
Before men
and women acquired a distinct social status with the development of atomic
civilization - the sexes balancing each other in a relationship sanctified and
legalized by marriage - they were submerged in a kind of pre-sexist society
which, in effect, rendered them Superwomen and quasi-Superwomen respectively -
a pagan society that culminated in the city states of the ancient Greeks and
Romans, to name but two representative pagan peoples. In this society the sartorial norm for
Superwomen was a long, ankle-length dress or robe, while their inferior
counterparts, the quasi-Superwomen, were obliged to wear a short or, more
correctly, less lengthy dress or robe, such as accorded with their inferior
social status.
The development of Christianity in the West
changed all that, though only very gradually, in line with the progress of civilization
away from nature towards more artificial attainments, so that, by the
seventeenth century, a sexist distinction between women on the one hand, and
men on the other ... had emerged to replace the old 'lesbian' pre-atomic
unisexual society with one partial to properly heterosexual atomic
distinctions. Gradually women came to
wear shorter skirts/dresses, and men ... to dress exclusively in trousers, not
in stockings partly covered by a skirt-like tunic such as had prevailed
throughout the Middle Ages when, though nominally distinct from women, they
continued to think and behave more like quasi-Superwomen vis-à-vis Superwomen
or, in relatively more evolved terms, as submen
vis-à-vis pseudo-Superwomen.
With the twentieth century, however, a
trend the converse of the pre-atomic began to develop, in which women
increasingly came to dress in still shorter skirts/dresses, indicative of a
more modest vaginal status, and even to abandon them altogether for trousers of
one description or another, though never or rarely completely so. We may equate this bourgeois/proletarian age
with a transition between the atomic and the post-atomic, Christian and
transcendental criteria, in which liberated females (subwomen)
and free males (pseudo-supermen) tend to be its chief representatives,
particularly in the
However, if the twentieth century signified
a transition to a post-atomic transcendental age, we need not doubt that the
twenty-first century will witness the beginnings of an actual post-atomic
civilization, absolute as opposed to relative, and dedicated, in consequence,
to transcending all sexist dichotomies.
Instead of subwomen and pseudo-Supermen, or
liberated females and free males, this transcendental civilization will
encourage the emergence of a relative distinction between quasi-Supermen and
Supermen, as between what, in earlier works, I have alternatively described as
female and male Supermen - the reformed proletarian females and the bona
fide proletarian males respectively, each category newly civilized.
Thus, whereas in bourgeois civilization an
absolute distinction existed between men and women, in the coming civilization
both alike will have been 'overcome' (to use a Nietzschean
expression), their evolutionary successors being unisexually
superhuman because appertaining to a post-atomic stage of civilization, a stage
leading to the ultimate overcoming of human beings in the first phase of the
post-Human Millennium, when relatively superhuman Transcendentalists will have
been superseded by the absolute Supermen who, as brain collectivizations
artificially supported and sustained, will be partial to a contemplation, via
synthetic hallucinogens like LSD, of the artificially-induced visions of their
new brains - given, in other words, to a kind of quasi-Supernaturalism
preceding the ultimate Supernaturalism of the hypermeditating
Superbeings who, as new-brain collectivizations,
will constitute the ultimate life form on earth ... prior to the elevation of
evolving life to total salvation in the post-Millennial Beyond, with the
attainment to transcendence, and consequent escape of electrons from the
remaining atomicity of individual new-brain collectivizations.
Returning to history, we have, then, the suggestion
of two sexual extremes either side of a heterosexual balance - the first, or
'lesbian', extreme signifying a pagan stage of human evolution, when men had
not really acquired a separate social identity from women but were equivalent
to quasi-Superwomen and/or submen; the second, or
'homosexual', extreme signifying a transcendental stage of human evolution,
when women have ceased to retain a separate social identity from men and become
quasi-Supermen in a post-sexist society.
In between, as already noted, a social balance, submen
having in the meantime become men, to drag Superwomen or, rather,
pseudo-Superwomen down to an atomic level, as women, beside themselves.
If any of this is true - and there seems to
be no reason to assume the contrary - how, one may well wonder, is one to
explain 'homosexual' behaviour among the ancients, for instance the Greeks and
Romans, who apparently lived in a lesbian age?
And how, by a similar token, does one explain the 'lesbian' activity
which seems to have developed among women as never before in what appears to be
a homosexual if not yet unisexual age?
The situation in each case appears to involve a paradox, to constitute
an inexplicable enigma, until we look a little closer into each age and come to
realize that in pre-atomic civilization men weren't really men but either
quasi-Superwomen or submen, and therefore more
disposed than later generations of penis-wielders to regard one another in a
quasi-feminine light.
Consequently, their seemingly homosexual
behaviour acquires a lesbian character which sets it apart from contemporary
homosexual behaviour among free men in an incipiently post-atomic society. One might describe it as quasi-lesbian, the
converse of latter-day seemingly lesbian behaviour among females which, on
account of the increasing masculinization of women
and their gradual elevation towards a post-atomic status, we can describe as
quasi-homosexual, involving either liberated females or their proletarian
counterparts.
Whereas the character of quasi-lesbian
activity among quasi-Superwomen in ancient civilization would have been
reactive, in accordance with their 'feminine' status in an overwhelmingly
proton age, the character of most contemporary quasi-homosexual activity
between quasi-Supermen or their near equivalents in contemporary civilization
will be attractive, in conformity with their 'masculine' status in an
increasingly electron-biased age. Such a
paradoxical situation would in each case parallel the genuine lesbian and
homosexual behaviour appropriate to each civilization, as well, of course, as
co-exist with a degree of heterosexual behaviour more suited, on the whole, to
an atomic age than to either of the civilized extremes.
I do not wish to leave the reader with the
impression that the future will be literally homosexual in the sense generally
understood by that term, as implying sexual contact between only males. Such a concrete sexuality appertains solely
to a bourgeois/proletarian stage of post-atomic civilization, is the materialistic
alternative to pornographic indulgence, which accords, by contrast, with a
spiritual predilection. It is the
pseudo-electron side of a relatively post-atomic civilization, an objectively
inferior form of sexual indulgence than the free-electron equivalent ... of
pornography.
No, the transcendental civilization will
not encourage concrete homosexual behaviour between Supermen, or its lesser
equivalent in quasi-homosexuality ('lesbianism') ... as affecting
quasi-Supermen, the reformed proletarian females. It will encourage, on the contrary, a more
absolute type of pornography, a type that, utilizing computers, will be found
to stem from the higher type of petty-bourgeois magazine pornography, as
involving a focus on the sex organ of the participating models rather than, as
with lower types of pornography, a more diffused perspective which inevitably
emphasizes female beauty, that bête noir from any truth-oriented absolute
standpoint. If such soft-core pornography
may be equated with Post-Painterly Abstraction, that quintessentially American
form of Abstract Impressionism, then the more vaginally exclusive hard-core
pornography can be regarded as being on the evolutionary level of the highest
type of light art, necessarily spiritualistic in design and content.
Thus, as spiritualistic light art is
destined to be superseded in an absolute civilization by abstract holography,
we should have no qualms in contending that relative hard-core pornography will
likewise be superseded, in that same civilization, by absolute hard-core
pornography, in accordance with the more transcendental criteria of a
quintessentially unisexual stage of civilized evolution. In all probability quasi-Supermen would be
more inclined to a male-based absolute pornography, their bona fide
counterparts to the female variety.
Either way, the pornography, or erotica, in question would be beyond
both sublimated beauty-mongering, that sexual cynosure of soft-core
pornography, and the sexist relativity of relative hard-core pornography. It would be the ultimate pornography,
relevant to the final civilization in the historical evolution of man from
femininely superhuman beginnings to masculinely
superhuman endings via bourgeois humanism.
A ZIGZAGGING PROGRESSION
No less
than politics, art has a way of evolving from a barbarous to a civilized phase
within any given cultural tradition, whether contemporary American or European,
and it does so within the compass of the creative integrity of any given
class. Take the early petty-bourgeoisie,
those stemming from a bourgeois stage of creative endeavour who yet rebelled
against bourgeois precedent to create an anti-art, if by 'art' we mean
bourgeois representational painting.
They are divisible, as in any relative civilization, into materialistic
and spiritualistic camps, those on the one side producing Expressionism, those
on the other side ... Impressionism, the first fundamentally Austro-German, the
second ... Franco-American. In both
cases, one might describe the art produced as non-representational, either
applying to a distortion or a mere impression of the representational, whether
natural or artificial, though particularly the former. Non-representational art is not abstract; it
is the negative, barbarous forerunner of the abstract.
Which brings us to the higher, or
civilized, phase in the creative evolution of the early petty-bourgeoisie, with
particular reference to Abstract Expressionism on the one hand and to Abstract
Impressionism or (as it is more usually called in America) Post-Painterly
Abstraction on the other hand, the one materialistic or, rather,
pseudo-spiritualistic, the other spiritualistic. By now, both Austria and France have been
left behind, their petty-bourgeois successors having blossomed into a civilized
phase of creative evolution, America most especially so, thanks to its wealth,
power, and geographical isolation from Nazi persecution. Certainly such art as we are now discussing
can be described as abstract, since there is not even a negative connection
with the representational but, rather, a positive intimation of higher abstract
possibilities or trends - what one might term a pro-light art status, to
distinguish it from the anti-art (bourgeois representational framed-painting)
status of its 'barbarous' forerunner.
So much for the evolution of modern art in
its mainstream petty-bourgeois manifestations, as applicable, in the main, to
Which brings us to the distinction between
the barbarous and the civilized phases of light art, the former phase
paralleling the civilized phase of avant-garde painting, the latter phase overhauling
and surpassing it; the first phase symptomatic of a lower type of late
petty-bourgeois art, the second phase symptomatic of a higher type - a positive
as opposed to a negative type. And just
as the non-representational painting of the anti-artists, whether materialistic
or spiritualistic, was a revolt against civilized bourgeois painting, so we may
contend that the sculptural light art of the anti-modernists (as we may
alternatively call the lower type of late petty-bourgeoisie) was in large measure
a revolt against civilized petty-bourgeois painting, an expression of the
reaction of a new art form against formal precedent, one leading, in due
course, to the development of civilized light art, as symptomatic of a higher
type of late petty-bourgeois/early proletarian creativity, and suggestive, at
least on the spiritualistic side, of a pro-holographic status, since intimating
of a purer abstraction than abstract painting - one completely free of material
surrounds. Such an art form as abstract
light art can only point the way towards the ultimate art, which would be
virtually formless.
No such formlessness can accrue, however,
to petty-bourgeois art, not even in its highest phase, since petty-bourgeois
criteria are forever relative. Just as
with avant-garde painting, so with light art (both in its barbarous and
civilized manifestations), a distinction exists between the materialistic and
the spiritualistic, the abstract expressionist and the abstract impressionist,
and we may believe that if the spiritualistic side intimates, in its highest
manifestation, of abstract holographic possibilities ahead, then the
materialistic side indirectly intimates of a representational holography
consonant with its expressive bias, a holography that is indeed furthered
within the confines of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, and which may be
equated with the barbarous phase of a proletarian class integrity ...
co-existing with civilized light art and indicating, in its revolt against that
art form's abstraction, an anti-light art status commensurate with a higher
spiritual embodiment of representational form.
The coming of abstract holography will of course eclipse the barbarous
with the civilized, but it may have to wait the dawn of a transcendental
civilization to gain in universal momentum.
If, then, the progress of art follows a
kind of zigzagging course in the revolt of a lower phase of a superior art form
against the higher phase of an inferior art form and does so, moreover, on both
materialistic and spiritualistic terms, we need not doubt that this process
mirrors distinct class stages within any given relative civilization, the
ultimate development being a sort of proletarian revolt within
bourgeois/proletarian civilization against civilized late petty-bourgeois art
that takes the form of representational holography, an art form which will
co-exist with abstract-impressionist light art until such time as
bourgeois/proletarian civilization is democratically overthrown and/or
reformed.
However, unlike the relative arts, abstract
holography, the ultimate and therefore truly civilized proletarian art form,
would not co-exist with a barbarous art form or intimate of a superior
abstraction to come or be divided into a materialistic and a spiritualistic
camp, the one contracting the material while the other seemingly expands the
spiritual. Abstract holography would be
absolute in every sense, the sole civilized art of a transcendental
civilization, complete in itself and yet intimating, more convincingly than any
previous art form, of transcendent spirit, of the Divine Omega which lies
beyond man as the goal of evolutionary striving.
Whereas relative art, whether avant-garde
painting or abstract light art, could be said to intimate of both a higher
abstract possibility in the development of art and the Divine
Omega on terms relative to its particular class stage of aesthetic evolution,
absolute art, being complete in itself as the ultimate manifestation of
aesthetic development, would intimate, on the most pure terms, only of the
Divine Omega, the ultimate impression of spiritual transcendence. Art, as we have traditionally understood it,
would attain to a spiritual climax here, though the process of revolt against a
contemporary civilized art would continue, taking the form, with the onset of a
post-Human Millennium, of recourse to synthetic hallucinogens like LSD, which
would constitute the next, or barbarous, phase in the zigzagging evolution of
art and life towards the goal of evolution in ultimate divinity, what one might
describe as an anti-hologram 'representational' phase.
Strictly speaking, LSD trips could not be
described as an art but, rather, as the successor to art, an antithesis to
dreams, which, however, preceded the inception of art in the sculptural monuments
of the ancients. Just as dreams are
beneath art, a pseudo-phenomenon of the old brain which the subconscious is
obliged to witness during sleep, so trips would be above it, a quasi-noumenon of the new brain which the superconscious
can contemplate in the interests of expanded consciousness.
This barbarous phase of the post-Human
Millennium will be superseded, in due course, by its ultra-civilized phase, a
phase during which the new-brain collectivizations of
the Superbeings will experience hypermeditation
and thus directly cultivate their superconscious
rather than, as with the brain collectivizations of
the Supermen in the preceding phase, indirectly do so ... through the medium of
LSD visions. This direct cultivation of
pure spirit will constitute the ultimate spiritual abstraction, an
ultra-positive successor to the quasi-positive 'representational' phase of
millennial evolution, and such a procedure will inexorably culminate in
transcendence, or the attainment of pure spirit to space, in which setting it
will converge towards and expand into other such transcendences en route, as it
were, to the ultimate spiritual oneness of the Omega Point, the culmination, in
de Chardinesque terminology, of all heavenly
evolution.
Such a culmination is what the abstract
holography of the next civilization will intimate of, but it is not something
that the highest art will achieve; for that must be left to what transcends art
through the most pure contemplation of the Superbeings
in the highest phase of the post-Human Millennium. Even the contemplation of LSD-induced visions
will be relative and, therefore, impure in relation to that, a quasi-barbarism
leading to the more than civilized - namely the supercivilized
self-contemplation of the ultimate life form, pro-transcendental rather than
anti-holographic.
FROM THE BARBAROUS TO THE CIVILIZED
If art is
not fine it is crude, if not civilized then ... barbarous. In the twentieth century, art continued to exist
on both levels, though in a more complex and divergent way than ever
before. Moreover, a new type of folk art
arose - a militant or politically propagandist form of barbarism called
Socialist Realism. It is distinguishable
from other types of folk art by being absolute in status and character,
existing within (formerly) Marxist-Leninist countries independently of
civilized art and on thematic terms which never vary. No other kind of painting could be officially
created or admired within the
Within the West, on the other hand,
barbarous art was generally relative, co-existent with fine art and
comparatively free from ideological fastidiousness - in short,
a-political. It was free to adopt varied
subject-matter and, within limits endemic to its folksy status, to treat what
it had adopted in a variety of ways, both technically and conceptually; though
this is only clearly apparent to anyone who takes an evolutionary or
comprehensive view of such art, and thus perceives it as passing through a
spectrum of ongoing development from Naive-Primitive painting at the lower end,
to Pop Art at the upper end via Modern Realism.
For within each type or stage of folk art
there is certainly a distinct formal and conceptual bias, which appears
stronger at the lower end and in the middle, so to speak, than at the top,
where, in response to evolutionary pressures, technique and treatment of more
varied subject-matter varies quite dramatically from artist to artist, while
still permitting a barbarous integrity to shine through. For, despite its greater freedom than earlier
types of modern crude art, Pop Art was still recognizably folksy and bore no
resemblance whatsoever to the civilized art with which it was more or less
contemporary - namely, light art.
Before Pop Art arose, however, there was
another type of art, distinct from civilized petty-bourgeois precedent and
co-existent with light art, though not on that account a folk art. This was Op Art, which strove to create an
impression of movement and light relative to optical variations induced, in the
viewer's mind, by the wavy lines or small circles or tiny dots or whatever of
the particular Op work. As a form of
abstract art, there could be no question of one's considering such work as a
more sophisticated type of folk art since, by definition, folk art is formally
and conceptually anachronistic, existing as a law unto itself on a creative
level very much beneath the technical and/or conceptual requirements of that
civilized art with which, superficially at least, it is contemporary.
No, and neither could this art be described
as a higher kind of abstraction, one, say, post-Mondrianesque
and therefore bringing art to an all-time abstract climax. For in the European West, abstract art had
attained to a climax with Neo-Plasticism, a
materialistic development beyond Cubism, just as spiritualistic art had
attained to a similar climax with Surrealism, that illusory art beyond
(realistic) Symbolism, a climax indicative of a progression from lower/early
petty-bourgeois art to higher/early petty-bourgeois art, which had a mainstream
counterpart - mainly relative to Germany and America - in the distinctions
between Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism on the materialistic side and,
by contrast, Impressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Abstract Impressionism)
on the spiritualistic side, after which time painterly art was destined to be
transcended with the development of light art from lower/relative to
higher/absolute levels.
But if this late petty-bourgeois
development was mainly relative, once again, to mainstream petty-bourgeois
culture within the broadly
bourgeois/proletarian
civilization of contemporary America, then the fundamentally bourgeois nations,
such as Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium, were less disposed to such a
radical break with the past and more disposed, in consequence of their more
conservative natures, to create a type of light art employing painterly means,
which resulted in the paradoxical phenomenon of Op Art, neither strictly
painting nor strictly light art but a sort of chimerical compromise between the
two and, if I'm not mistaken, the more civilized abstract successor to
sculptural Op or, as it is better known, Kinetic Art. If Op is materialistic in character, a
bourgeois equivalent to tubular light art, then its spiritualistic counterpart,
equivalent to non-tubular or free light art, must surely be Minimalist Art,
which provides the mere outlines of a representational image, and is thus
closer in conception to a comic book than to a magazine.
As for sculpture-proper, which is the
earliest fine art known to man and one not susceptible, in consequence of its
ancient lineage, to extension beyond an early petty-bourgeois age, we are
dealing with an art the basis of which is form and the essence of which is
tactility. From being representational,
sculpture has this century become non-representational (biomorphic) but
remains, at least in theory and in spite of its relative formlessness,
fundamentally tactile.
On the other hand, sculptural light art,
though often having the appearance of a type of modern sculpture, should not be
confounded with sculpture, since there can be no tactility with white-hot
electric or neon tubes and, as a rule, very little form! As a mainstream lower/late petty-bourgeois
development, this relatively civilized art signifies a step beyond abstract
painting in the overall evolution of art from sculptural beginnings towards a
holographic climax. Consequently there
can be no question of its signifying a higher type of sculpture, since no
sculpture can extend into a post-painterly epoch, but simply a lower type of
light art, one 'sculptural' in appearance, and thus the logical precursor of a
totally abstract and 'painterly' kind of light art such as usually employs
slender neon tubing in adherence to a higher materialistic integrity.
By contrast, spiritualistic light art has
its inception in 'architectural' light art, or the use of spotlights and other
such powerful beams of electric light trained on the night sky according to a
specific pattern, and became in the course of (post-Nazi) time more refined and
absolute, culminating, we may assume, in such indoor laser shows as the
Americans in particular have developed.
Generally speaking, whilst
To return to painting, it should be evident
to the reader by now that any painterly art with a pretence of being civilized
can only be anachronistic in an age of late petty-bourgeois/early proletarian
art, in which the focus of creative endeavour has switched from abstract
painting to light art. Frankly,
painterly art is now passé, and those who still indulge in any form of
civilized painting, be it non-representational or abstract, are living behind
the times in a kind of petty-bourgeois dream world of their own imagination.
Probably artists in the older European
countries like
But as the highest criterion of what is
truly contemporary can only be derived from the leading Western nations, it
follows that those who scorn this or are not in a psychological position to
adopt it will continue to work in an obsolescent context, producing art of an
inferior quality and status - novels and classical music no less than painting
and sculpture. Although such passé work
could not be described as folk art, it is certainly less than truly civilized,
if by 'civilized' we mean what is in the forefront of creative evolution. Some of it may even be of less value than
contemporary folk art, the mention of which brings me back to the distinction
between the fine and the crude, where we began this essay.
Since barbarous art must be categorized as
an absolutely anachronistic type of art, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to
contemporary civilized trends, we shall see that the current production of
civilized art which is less than contemporary, like Abstract Expressionism or
Abstract Impressionism in relation to light art, can only be regarded as
comparatively civilized. Certainly it is
civilized compared with any folk art of the present century, including Pop
Art. But it is less civilized than those
truly contemporary civilized arts which are in the vanguard of creative
evolution. We may prefer it to the
genuinely barbarous, but if we are on the side of creative progress we will
hesitate to regard it with the same respect as we reserve for higher
developments. And after light art, what
higher development is possible if not representational holography, which I
regard, in this context, as a relatively civilized art preceding the attainment
of holography to an absolutely civilized status in total abstraction, both of
which phases (of holographic evolution) should be relevant to the proletariat
within the context of a transcendental civilization, such as I hope will
presently arise in Ireland, a country with a long tradition of theocratic
allegiance.
If Pop Art is co-existent with light art
within the overall context of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, then with the
progression to an absolute civilization no such co-existence would be
acceptable, the people having become or in the process of becoming civilized,
and therefore entitled to the appreciation of a relatively civilized art. In such a society the age-old dichotomy
between the fine and the crude will be transcended, leading to an exclusive
production of fine art of the highest quality.
Whereas relative civilization tolerated barbarism, an absolute
civilization would be dedicated to civilizing the People. Only thus will they come into their own as
worthy inheritors of the highest cultural legacy - one stemming from
contemporary bourgeois/proletarian civilization yet, at the same time, completely
transcending it.
TOWARDS AN ABSOLUTELY FREE-ELECTRON LITERATURE
Bourgeois
writers, appertaining to an atomic stage of evolution, tend to write in a way
that gives as much importance to form as to content, to technique as to theory,
whereas petty-bourgeois writers, appertaining to a relatively post-atomic stage
of evolution, tend to write in a way that attaches more importance to content
than to form, to theory than to technique, which results, as a rule, in a more
spontaneous, improvisational kind of literature - one predominantly concerned
with what is being said rather than the way in which it is being said.
Instead of being balanced between
appearance and essence in a dualistic compromise, these more contemporary
writers are lopsided on the side of essence, dedicated to the inner world of
truth as opposed to the outer world of fact.
Their work partakes of the improvisational character of modern art, not
to mention modern jazz, in a bias for spiritual freedom, wrapped-up in the
interior world rather than enslaved to external appearances to the extent of,
say, a bourgeois. One might argue that
they are intimating, consciously or unconsciously, of a future literary goal in
total interiorization, a completely abstract
literature such as I envisage taking the guise of computerized poetry. For in writing 'on the wing', they are
exposed, as bourgeois authors rarely were, to grammatical laxities and
eccentricities - a situation which a pedant would necessarily regard with
dismay but which, so one imagines, these modernistic authors are really quite
proud of, insofar as it attests to a growing freedom from grammatical
constraints, a tugging of the electron equivalent (of words) at the
proton/neutron leash (of emotions/meanings), with the promise of a complete
departure from that leash in due course.
Few are the petty-bourgeois authors who do
actually depart from the leash; indeed, strictly speaking, none of them can,
since such a degree of abstract absolutism as I envisage being relevant to a
free-electron literature would be incompatible with extreme relativistic
criteria, even where experimental literature in the guise of a predominantly
abstract poetry was concerned! If such a
materialistic poetry, chiefly pertaining to mainstream petty-bourgeois civilization,
is absolute or very nearly absolute in itself, it is still relative to the
extent of being published in separate volumes, traditionally, of poetry rather
than in an anthological format. There is
something of a quasi-electron equivalent about it, in contrast to the
relatively free-electron status of such petty-bourgeois spiritualistic poetry
as is usually represented by a predominating concern with the metaphysical,
though one still published, as a rule, in separate editions under the name of a
given poet, who may or may not acquire a degree of fame in consequence.
By contrast, proletarian anthological
poetry transcends the individual in the collective, and thereby signifies a progression
from the relative to the absolute, even when, as is generally the case these
days, such anthologies tend to contain material of a less than absolute
status. So we may regard them as
relatively civilized, with a quasi-electron status germane to their
comparatively materialistic integrity.
They appear as a kind of outsiders' threat to civilized petty-bourgeois
precedent, scorned by all but their authors or those who, through working-class
intuition or affiliation, naturally gravitate towards new developments.
No matter!
A time will come when, with the development of People’s civilization
from relative to absolute levels, such quasi-electron poetry is succeeded by
the absolutely free-electron and truly civilized poetry of a non-readerly abstraction, which, availing itself of computer
discs, should bring literature to a transcendental climax on a par with
abstract holography, pure jazz, and hypermeditation,
to name but a few compatible modes of free-electron absolutism. We are probably closer to that time now than
we realize!
If the late-twentieth century was
essentially a late petty- bourgeois/early proletarian epoch, then it was also
on that account an epoch of either experimental or metaphysical poetry - in
short, a quintessentially poetical age.
Chronologically speaking, this poetry, relative in the main to countries
like
But if anthological poetry and
representational holography are essentially outsiders in the contemporary
Western context, this is not to say that they, or some derivative from them,
won't become insiders in a society dedicated to the establishment and
furtherance of People’s civilization, a Social Transcendentalist society such as
I envisage being relevant to Ireland and other such theocratically-biased
countries in the near future. There, by
contrast, they would become the accepted norm, rendering all types and degrees
of petty-bourgeois literature and art anachronistic, and consequently subject
to curtailment.
People's civilization cannot be furthered
on the basis of half-measures. There
must be a wholehearted commitment to cultural progress and a no-less
wholehearted opposition to cultural traditions, whether indigenous or foreign. While relative civilization protects and
admires past cultural achievements, even when they pertain to an earlier
civilization, the absolute civilization of the future must rigorously proscribe
and/or remove all cultural achievements irrelevant to itself. Instead of being conservationist, an
Neither fiction-writing nor painting nor
classical composing would be encouraged in a Social Transcendental
So, of course, would Socialist Realism and
more relative types of folk art, which pertain to a barbarous integrity - the
former directed against Western civilization from a state socialist base, the
latter existing within Western civilization and testifying to the comparatively
uncivilized status of the masses vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie. Barbarisms, whether militant or urbane,
external or internal, should no more find encouragement in a Social
Transcendental
So an
A poetry that is computerized and on route,
as it were, to total abstraction. An
omega literature, placing maximum emphasis on content, on the literary truth of
free-electron words, freed from proton and/or neutron-biased grammatical
constraints and therefore intimating of the omega absolutes, those unified
electrons of pure spirit such as should one day stem from the highest of the
millennial life forms - the superbeingful new-brain collectivizations of the ultimate classless society. Certainly one would look in vain for
concessions to appearance in this absolute literature!
TOWARDS AN ABSOLUTE ARCHITECTURE
It is
probable that, with the development of a Social Transcendentalist civilization, all forms of bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois architecture would be demolished to make way for the uniquely
proletarian forms in due course.
Already, since the late-twentieth century, the mould of proletarian
architecture has been established, at least in its rudimentary form, and we
need not doubt that such a mould - collective and transcendent - will be
further developed and/or remodelled in the future, so that apartment blocks
will become more the architectural rule than, as at present, the architectural
exception.
If we endeavour to categorize domestic architecture
according to class-evolutionary stages of development, or to stipulate the
appropriate domestic environment for any given class, beginning with the
aristocracy, we may arrive at conclusions similar to the following: a large
country house and/or castle for the aristocracy; a small country house for the
early-stage grand bourgeoisie; a detached suburban house for the late-stage
grand bourgeoisie; a semidetached suburban house for the bourgeoisie; a
terraced suburban house for the early-stage petty bourgeoisie; an apartment
and/or bedsitter in a city tenement for the
late-stage petty bourgeoisie; and, finally, a small flat in a city block for
the proletariat. Such, rightly or
wrongly, is how I estimate approximate class stages of architectural evolution,
and in an open society which is advanced in years, having embraced a
proletarian stage of architectural development, one finds all earlier modes of
architecture still in existence, complete with their specific class owners.
Thus while proletarians ascend by lift to
their flats on the ninth or tenth floor of a communal high-rise in the city,
aristocrats may still be found climbing the wooden stairs of an ancient country
house. While late-stage petty-bourgeois
types wake-up each morning in a cramped bedsitter,
early-stage grand-bourgeois types go to sleep each night in the spacious
bedroom of their quite affluent small country-house. Such is life in a relative civilization, with
its open-society distinctions not only between the rich and the poor, but also
between the country and the city.
Life in an absolute civilization of
transcendental integrity would, one fancies, have to be quite different from
that - indeed, so different as to attest to a uniformity of architectural
styles and domestic environments. A
post-atomic closed society would have no aristocrats in it for a start, and
scarcely any bourgeoisie, so that neither rural nor suburban modes of
architecture would be encouraged. The
emphasis would be on developing proletarian architecture within an urban
environment, and this would certainly entail the demolition of suburban and
early urban modes of architecture in order to make room for the inevitable
spread of late urban architecture as the city expanded, literally engulfing
formerly petty-bourgeois and bourgeois environments. So terraced houses no less than semidetached
and detached suburban houses would have to make way for the urban blocks
destined to supplant them. Eventually a
proletarian uniformity of architectural style within a uniform environment
would arise, testifying to the lower, or relative, phase of People’s
civilization.
How 'relative', you may well wonder? Well, firstly to the extent that there would
be numerous blocks of flats in any given area, each block separate from its
nearest neighbours. But secondly in
terms of a materialistic style encasing a spiritualistic content, a rectangular
or square design housing proletarians, those absolutely electron equivalents in
relation to the proton- or neutron-biased classes stretching from the
aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. So the
rectangular, then, may be regarded as a materialistic form, a mechanistic
design stemming, in some degree, from the Diabolic Alpha, and this no less so
in a high-rise block of flats than in a country or suburban house. In early proletarian architecture, a
rectangular design is the norm. But this
could not be the case in late proletarian architecture, with the higher phase
of People’s civilization, since such a phase would be absolutely orientated
towards the Divine Omega. Consequently
an absolute mode of architecture would have to be developed, a mode curvilinear
in design, the circular a comparatively spiritual form intimating of divinity
conceived as transcendent spirit, with particular reference to the goal of
evolution in the post-Millennial Beyond.
So a curvilinear style of architecture, in
complete contrast to the aristocratic inception of architecture in palatial or
country-house rectilinear styles. A
truly absolute mode of architecture, the proletariat living in more intensive collectivizations in a more extensive communal setting than
where the preceding relative mode ... was concerned, one large circular tower
comprising the equivalent to a residential sector of a city, a kind of omega
city, built in such a way that the maximum number of people can be accommodated
there in relative dignity, a central circular space enabling the residents on
the inner side to look out onto the space and/or other half of the building
some hundreds of yards away, while those on the outer side looked out onto -
well, why not another such curvilinear tower a few hundred yards away?
Or, better still, why not the circular
tower built in such a way that it spirals out in a series of concentric
circles, the residents on the outer side of the central tower looking out onto
the inner side of the adjacent tower, while those on the far side of the second
arm, as it were, of the spiral would be looking out onto the inner side of its
third arm, and so on, through successive spirallings,
until the entire population of the area was accommodated in this omega city,
replete with shops, cinemas, etc., on the ground floor of each arm of the
spiral?
Certainly this second suggestion involves a
more absolute approach to architecture, doing away with distinctions between
one tower and another in any given locale and establishing, in consequence, a
more homogeneous city, not simply an isolated block of flats in the
country. We may also speculate that if
Meditation Centres were to be built into them, the best possible place would be
in the centre, from which spiritual cynosure the domestic arms of the spiral
would curve outwards in an ever-expanding arc.
Thus any given city would be complete in
itself, on religious no less than on commercial or domestic terms. It should be possible, in addition, for
people to get from one arm of the spiral to another without having to venture
out-of-doors, simply by following a ground passageway which led from the outermost
ring of the city through each of the arms of the spiral to the Meditation
Centre at its heart. In this way people
would be spared contact with nature and enabled to maintain an
intensely-interiorized and highly-civilized lifestyle - in complete contrast to
the aristocratic inception of civilized evolution in the country.
Because proletarian civilization should be
concerned with the maximum interiorization of life,
it follows that not only access to the open country, but natural light must be
minimized in order to reduce contact with nature as much as possible. Although proletarian architecture would
appear comparatively lightweight and transcendental in construction, employing
synthetic materials, its glass-like outer casing should not be translucent but,
increasingly in the future, of an opaque constitution in order to preclude the
entry of natural light and necessitate recourse to artificial lighting,
preferably of a neon, i.e. electron-biased, type.
Likewise instead of air entering the
interior of the buildings from without, special air-conditioning filters linked
to oxygen containers should be employed in proletarian architecture not simply
to reduce or exclude contact with the natural but, more importantly, to
condition man towards greater dependence on the artificial, since that is a
means to the supernatural, and artificially produced oxygen would induce a
clearer consciousness in its recipients than naturally produced oxygen - trees
having largely become discredited phenomena, subject to destruction.
So a free humanity aspiring towards omega
divinity would necessarily require to be freed from dependence on natural
light, which stems from the sun, that component of the Diabolic Alpha, as well
as from dependence on natural air, which stems in large measure from trees,
those offspring of the Diabolic Alpha and mirrors of the galactic-world-order,
serving, in some degree, as the prototype for feudal society. Obviously, anything akin to a feudal
arrangement would be taboo in a People’s civilization, and so one can take it
as axiomatic that the artificial production of oxygen, no less than of light,
will become essential to the psychological and moral well-being of the future
proletariat.
As to the curvilinear style of advanced
proletarian architecture, one should add that a positive commitment to the
Divine Omega presupposes a defiance of the Diabolic Alpha, so that such
architecture ought really to taper down slightly at roof level in order to defy
gravitational force upwards, while at its lower end a slight tapering upwards
in defiance of gravitational force downwards would not be out-of-order. Quite possibly such curvilinear architecture
will be built, in any case, on raised inner platforms and/or outer pillars, thereby
being elevated above the ground in accordance with transcendental criteria -
the overall appearance suggestive of levitation. This is already true of certain advanced
petty-bourgeois skyscrapers in
Moreover, it is also possible that, rather
than simply living in high-rise blocks of flatlets
raised on stilt-like supports, people will eventually live in space in cosmic flatlets, and within an architectural context not all that
dissimilar from the one outlined above, replete with permanent recourse -
obligatory in space - to artificial lighting and artificially produced oxygen,
not to mention artificial heating. Such
space cities would certainly constitute a more transcendental context than
earth ones, enabling the occupants to cultivate their spiritual potential to a
degree impossible to achieve on earth, where there is always so much
gravitational force.
Could it be, I wonder, that the post-Human
Millennium - a time when human brains are artificially supported and sustained
in communal contexts - will be partly set in space in such curvilinear space
cities? Why should not the post-Human
Millennium, particularly during its higher phase, be set in a context closer to
the definitive Beyond (of literal Heaven), where the goal of transcendence (of
pure spirit from the superbeingful new-brain collectivizations) may well prove easier to achieve?
Ah, I should not allow my imagination to
run away with me like this! But I do not
think it can be too far off the mark.
Certainly such space cities would not preclude contact with the earth,
nor need one suppose that everyone would necessarily have to spend their entire
lives in them. They would enable a more
advanced life form to conduct its intensely spiritual affairs at a transcendent
remove from the earth's gravity, and hence in a context appropriate, one feels,
to an exclusively omega-oriented aspiration.
If what directly stems from the Diabolic Alpha is rooted to the earth,
why shouldn't what may, one day, directly aspire towards the Divine Omega be
free from the earth's gravity in an almost heavenly context?
However, all this far-out futuristic
speculation does not invalidate the foregoing suggestions concerning
proletarian architecture on earth in the coming Social Transcendentalist
civilization, and we need not doubt that proletarian earth cities would have to
precede space cities, which, in any case, may well prove more applicable to
absolutely post-human life forms than to the ultimate stage of man's evolution.
EVOLUTIONARY SPECTRA
There are
those who sing the praises of democracy, but they don't realize that, for all
its advantages, democracy is essentially a middle-class phenomenon which, like
novelistic fiction, canvas painting, and symphonic music, stretches from a
late-stage grand-bourgeois age to an early-stage petty-bourgeois one ... as a
kind of materialistic hybrid in between autocracy and theocracy, and that, with
the emergence of a late-stage petty-bourgeois age, it becomes effectively
anachronistic, though subject to extensive modification ... in the interests of
an attempt to bring it into line with an age of pseudo-democracy, that form of
democracy germane to state socialism, with its so-called People’s democracy.
For people's democracy, despite its
proletarian implications, is essentially a late-stage petty-bourgeois
phenomenon, existing at the tail-end of a democratic spectrum, beyond the pale
of genuine democracy but not, on that account, a chronologically inferior
development! On the contrary, simply a
more contemporary one, relevant to the second-half of the twentieth century -
like colour photography, colour film, and rock music. Pseudo-democracy is, in effect, the antithetical
equivalent of Cromwellian dictatorship, a form of
political dictatorship posing as democracy, no less the end of the middle
spectrum of social affairs than Cromwell's dictatorship was its inception, back
in the seventeenth century, when the English bourgeoisie revolted against
royalist autocracy. Socialism, by
contrast, signifies a revolt against democratic pluralism, with its capitalist
base. However, capitalism and socialism
are not, contrary to what is commonly supposed, antithetical. Rather, socialism is the antithetical
equivalent of feudalism, with capitalism coming in-between.
However, the middle, or democratic,
spectrum is flanked by two others, which we may characterize as an autocratic
spectrum beneath (if we imagine these spectra of evolutionary development lying
parallel to one another in a horizontal course), and a theocratic spectrum
above, the former beginning in pagan antiquity under aristocratic auspices, and
the latter beginning with an early-stage grand-bourgeois epoch in Western Europe,
the one manifesting in authoritarian monarchism, the other in Roman
Catholicism. Let us take each spectrum
separately.
Beginning with the ancient kingdoms of
rural antiquity, authoritarian monarchism (royalism)
signified worship of the God-King, the nearest equivalent on earth to the
Creator or, as Christians prefer to say, the Father, whose status, at least in
theory, was omnipotent, the ultimate tribunal over life and death, the maker or
breaker of men. Gradually, as evolution
progressed, the powers of the monarch were curbed, and by the seventeenth
century Cromwell was able to lead a successful revolt in England against
authoritarian monarchism which resulted, albeit briefly, in the dethronement of
autocracy and its replacement by a democratic dictatorship.
Since then the powers of the monarchy have
been further curbed in all Western societies, with the result that it has
become - where still surviving - constitutional, or subject to parliamentary
sanction, the reigning monarch little more than a figurehead of state, bereft
of independent power, and consequently functioning in a pseudo-autocratic
context. We may contend that
constitutional monarchy is the norm for those societies which have retained an
autocratic spectrum while being centred, as in Britain, on a democratic one,
and that pseudo-autocracy is, by and large, a late-nineteenth/early-twentieth
century phenomenon, the autocratic spectrum coming to an end with an
early-stage petty-bourgeois era, after which time the extension of the first or
bottom spectrum will take the form of a military dictatorship, as germane to a
late-stage petty-bourgeois era, and thus become quasi-fascist, as in so many
Third World countries since World War II.
Of course, where a constitutional monarchy
is already deeply entrenched, as in
Can one therefore speak of a military
dictatorship as being reactionary from a democratic point of view? Certainly it signifies a reaction, very
often, from the middle-spectrum democratic traditions of the imperial power to
the bottom spectrum of autocratic tradition, though not on monarchic
terms. Rather, military dictatorship is
more contemporary than democracy, a development paralleling the tail-end of the
middle spectrum in pseudo-democracy, as pertaining to Marxist-Leninist states,
both of which relate to late-stage petty-bourgeois criteria.
So, paradoxically, there is more
progression than reaction to a military dictatorship in recently-liberated
This brings me to a discussion of the third
and highest spectrum, namely the theocratic one, which began on early-stage
grand-bourgeois terms in the form of Roman Catholicism and was superseded, in
those nations destined for democracy, by Protestantism, that democratic
religion, equivalent to drawing in art and to the concerto in music. Unfortunately, due to historical pressures,
Roman Catholicism became increasingly autocratic, a religious complement to
authoritarian monarchy, and was subject to a revolt by the bourgeoisie, whose
Protestant triumph led to the persecution of Catholics and their relegation to
second-class citizenship throughout the era of bourgeois hegemony, roughly from
a late-stage grand-bourgeois to an early-stage petty-bourgeois age, spanning
the 17th-20th centuries.
With the dawn of a late-stage
petty-bourgeois era, however, Fascism made its appearance on the top spectrum
as the antithetical equivalent of Roman Catholicism, a necessarily
anti-democratic ideology with a religious mission, though less one favouring
the development of a True World Religion, the successor to all old-world
religions, than one partial to Roman Catholicism, if more so in Italy than
Germany, while retaining a quasi-religious status for itself as vested in the
dictator, who became an approximation, in effect, to God. If Roman Catholicism found its aesthetic
equivalent in stained glass, then fascism had light art, that successor to
drawing on the penultimate section, as it were, of the top spectrum, the
section preceding holography, which would be relevant to the proletariat, and
no less so than Social Transcendentalism, the means to the True World Religion,
the successor to fascism and ideology, so far as I am concerned, of 'Kingdom
Come', necessarily hostile to both royalism and
military dictatorship, liberalism and socialism, Protestantism and fascism
(considered as a late-stage petty-bourgeois movement), because beyond and above
all of these, the principal exponent of truth!
Social Transcendentalism would be beyond
antithetical equivalents because extending the top spectrum into an absolute
stage of evolution, a stage antithetical, in constitution, to the authoritarian
monarchism of the bottom spectrum, before bourgeois relativity intervened in
the form of parliamentarianism. Beyond
all bourgeois relativity, no less than autocratic absolutism was beneath it,
Social Transcendentalism would open out towards the superhuman millennium and,
consequently, the eventual supersession of man by his
post-human successors, the only way towards definitive salvation, the only way
forward. No proletarian humanism, like
socialism, but a post-humanist concern with evolutionary progress towards
future transformations in advancing life, man being something that, in the Nietzschean dictum, 'should be overcome'.
Humanism pertains to the middle spectrum,
not the third, which has little respect for ethics once it reaches that stage,
as with Social Transcendentalism, where truth is attained to and systematically
endorsed. Only the Protestant part of
the top spectrum kow-tows to ethics, as during the hegemony of the age of
democratic relativity. Social
Transcendentalism, even more than fascism, is 'beyond good and evil', those
antithetical attributes of the Christian civilization. Only that is 'good' which furthers truth, and
every act must be judged according to this criterion. Only in truth does man aspire towards the
Holy Spirit, only in the context of pure awareness.
The ethical good act has nothing to do with
divinity, considered in its ultimate sense.
Goodness pertains to Christ, the temporal divinity between the two
absolutes of alpha and omega, the strong and the true, the Creator and the
Ultimate Creation. Neither strength,
which pertains to the bottom spectrum, nor goodness, that ethical compromise
between the extremes, can have any place in the absolute phase of the top
spectrum. Neither a worship of the
Father nor an emulation of the Son will prevail in that society dedicated to
the realization of truth. Only an
aspiration towards the Holy Spirit can have any value there, and only that
which brings such an aspiration closer to ultimate realization is 'good'. We have lived long enough in the world of the
Strong and the Good. Now we must live
for the truth!
NEW BEGINNINGS/OLD ENDINGS
It was
shortly after the Second World War that late-stage petty-bourgeois civilization
began to get properly under way and a world arose which signified a break with
the past, a new beginning, an aspiration, one might say, towards absolute
proletarian criteria. For centuries men
had lived with paintings, novels, symphonies, wind-up watches, spectacles,
carriages, ships, universities, houses, books, acoustic guitars, and numerous
other things which it seems fair to associate with a period of history
stretching from late-stage grand-bourgeois to early-stage petty-bourgeois
times, from approximately the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries,
though some of those things of course date from even earlier times.
But then, with the acquirement of new
technologies and a desire to revolutionize life in some degree, all that
changed, and post-war man, particularly in his late-stage petty-bourgeois
manifestation, began to turn against the past and acclimatize himself to the
ever-changing present. Of course, the
old things - wind-up watches, universities, novels, etc. - continued to exist,
both in their historical and more contemporary manifestations. But a growing number of people were
preferring the new and thus living within a more civilized context, if by
'civilized' we mean artificial and transcendental.
To be sure, there was still a large number
of people going to universities, those traditional institutions of higher
education, but there was also a large number, probably more
petty-bourgeois/proletarian in character, who went to technical colleges, those
late-stage petty-bourgeois successors to universities. Admittedly, there were still a considerable
number of people who preferred wind-up watches to digital ones. But, even so, the number of digital wearers
seemed to be on the increase. If many
people still read novels, there was also a more contemporary body of people who
preferred their fiction in a magazine or comic book, and who went to the cinema
as often as possible or, alternatively, sat at home and watched a film on
television.
The old and the new often overlapped, but
there could be no doubt that the new was gaining in importance and influence as
time wore on. Even people with old-world
habits and allegiances occasionally indulged in some form of contemporary
activity or identification, if on a comparatively low-key basis. A detailed investigation of people's
lifestyles would probably indicate that most of them were far from consistent
in terms of contemporary allegiance and behaviour, largely, one suspects,
through ignorance as to the class-status of any given pursuit or identification,
and possible ambivalence as to their own class-status in a continuously
changing world.
Hence the paradoxical and often amusing
chimeras of, say, university students in jeans - those late-stage
petty-bourgeois successors to trousers - or, conversely, of technical-college
students in trousers - those more traditional kinds of legwear. No-one is ultra-consistent, and I myself
occasionally wear cords and a button-up shirt instead of a tee-shirt. Nevertheless a methodology of homogeneous
living is possible and could be systematically pursued by anyone intelligent
enough to work out both his own class-status and the class-status of the things
or habits available to him in the contemporary world, should he decide to
harmonize the two in the interests of ideological perfection.
Here, for example, is a list of some old
and new things which might be of interest to anyone aspiring towards a more
homogeneous lifestyle:-
universities technical colleges
condoms the pill
ships hovercraft
natural sex pornography
novels short stories
plays/theatre films/cinema
books magazines/tapes
paintings posters
cameos photos
spectacles contact lenses
trousers jeans (denims/cords)
shirts tee-shirts
wind-up watches digital watches
houses flats
operas vocal rock
symphonies instrumental rock
concertos modern jazz
ballroom dancing disco dancing
stained glass light art
drawing holography
sculpture kinetics
skirts/dresses slacks/boiler-suits
prayer transcendental
meditation
beer/cider cola/soda
writing typing
manual washing-up washing-up machine
hand washing machine washing
outdoor drying spin/heat drying
open fire electric fire
gas cooker electric cooker
drying hair manually hairdryer
feather bed water bed
hand shaving electric/battery shaving
manual toothbrush electric toothbrush
woollen blanket electric blanket
liberal democracy social democracy
Protestantism Marxism
capitalism socialism
dildos vibrators
prostitutes masseuses
girlfriends inflatables
bombs missiles
truncheons plastic bullets
handkerchiefs paper tissues
candles torches
matches lighters
men's bicycles motorbikes
women's bicycles scooters
houses flats
natural conversation telephone conversation
manual games autonomous games
potatoes chips
fish fishcakes/fingers
Catholicism Fascism
monarchs military dictators
This isn't
by any means an exhaustive list, but it should indicate the nature of the
distinction that exists between traditional bourgeois civilization and
contemporary petty-bourgeois/proletarian civilization, the former preceding the
Second World War and the latter succeeding it, the two generally overlapping in
such open societies as prevail in the West at present, particularly in the more
traditional societies of countries like Britain and France, which have a longer
history than the more contemporary nations like Germany and the United States,
not to mention Italy and Japan.
Indeed, it is in these more contemporary
nations that late-stage petty-bourgeois/proletarian civilization is more consistently
upheld and most clearly manifest, such aspects of it as apply to the older
Western countries often deriving from them.
No sooner does one think of America, for instance, than a veritable host
of contemporary things and practices leap to mind, including jeans, tee-shirts,
cola, cartoons, comic books, films, jazz, and basketball. If
Of course, this civilization is not the
ultimate one, and I personally have no doubt that another and better one will
shortly emerge in which specifically proletarian criteria will prevail,
replacing most of the contemporary things and attitudes which people in the
West nowadays take for granted. But,
even so, the break with tradition that followed World War II created the basis
for any subsequent evolutionary progress, and such progress as has still to be
made will derive, in large part, from what currently exists, whether in science
or art, religion or politics, society or sex.
Certainly it is difficult to see how the
pill, contact lenses, digital watches, hovercraft, and other such contemporary
things could be bettered, though profound changes will doubtless occur and,
indeed, already are occurring, as in the development of a new kind of pill,
more long-term than the old, and the burgeoning plethora of plastic digital
watches in succession, seemingly, to the older (and possibly more
petty-bourgeois) metallic ones. Probably
either a late phase of petty-bourgeois civilization or an early phase of
proletarian civilization is already manifest in many of these changes, which
herald an age of absolute criteria.
Assuming they haven't been entirely eclipsed by computers, magazines may
continue to be published in a proletarian civilization, but it is unlikely that
they will be crammed full of adverts, as in capitalist societies.
Other aspects of contemporary civilization,
like photography and film, jazz and rock, motorbikes and bicycles, kinetics and
light sculptures, short stories and posters, will undoubtedly die-out in the
course of time, evolutionary progress having rendered them obsolescent,
knowledge having placed them within a certain time-span relative to a given
class-status and/or kind of civilization, and history having sealed their fate
in the process of its inexorable unfolding.
Not everything contemporary is necessarily the blueprint for a higher
development. Nevertheless a significant
proportion of it is, and in some cases that development has already been
realized.
THE RISE OF THEOCRATIC CENTRISM
Just as
philosophy, fiction, and poetry are three branches of literature corresponding,
one could argue, to three parallel spectra; and sculpture, painting, and
drawing are three branches of art likewise corresponding to three parallel
spectra; and ballet, the symphony, and the concerto are three branches of
classical music whose correspondence to three parallel spectra is no less
evident, so authoritarianism, parliamentarianism, and totalitarianism are three
branches of politics, as different from each other as any of the above-named
branches but, nevertheless, related by a common family tie, so to speak, to
political evolution. To return to our
spectrum analogy, one could speak of authoritarianism as autocratic,
parliamentarianism as democratic, and totalitarianism as theocratic,
indicative, in their different ways, of a progression from the Father to the
Holy Spirit via the Son. Politics and
religion are not entirely separate, as might at first appear to be the case,
but are really two aspects of the same thing, politics being the practical
application of a religious premise, the ordering of human society according to
the criteria of religious precedent.
Thus in its first, or royalist, stage of
evolution, politics is autocratic, reflecting the 'divine order' of the Creator
and His 'fallen angels', establishing on earth an equivalent to the
galactic-world-order, in which the monarch functions as the human equivalent of
the central star of the Galaxy and thereby rules over both a nobility,
corresponding to peripheral stars, and a populace, corresponding to planets,
who are enslaved to monarch and nobility alike, owing allegiance to both,
though particularly to the feudal baron, lord, or whatever, who directly rules
over them and thus holds them within a solar system-like integrity. He comes in-between the peasantry and their
monarch, free to rule the former as he thinks fit but owing direct allegiance
to the latter, who rules by 'divine right', the personification on earth of the
Creator, less truly divine, in any objectively omega-oriented (free-electron)
sense, than archdiabolic, a more powerful ruler than
the myriads of nobles who only correspond to minor stars, devil equivalents
vis-à-vis a demonic populace.
We see this same so-called 'divine order'
at work in trees, where a trunk, corresponding to central star/monarch, is
served by the branches, corresponding to peripheral stars/nobility, which in
turn are served by the leaves, those planet/peasant equivalents which have no
option but to slave for their differently-constituted masters, providing them
with the nourishment they require to survive.
A pedant could argue as to the exact solar/noble status of any given
branch in the overall feudal hierarchy of a tree, but we need not go into such
trifling details here! Suffice it to say
that most of the larger branches would be equivalent to high-ranking nobles
such as dukes and princes, most of the smaller ones, or those not immediately
stemming from the trunk, equivalent to low-ranking nobles such as viscounts and
barons. The eventual grading of nobles
along more complex and variegated lines was a development presupposing a higher
degree of civilization ... commensurate with a more advanced age, as the
monarch moved out of his castle into a palace, and the lesser royals and/or
nobility in general moved from their forts, or small castles, into country
houses, or small palaces. In a strictly
pagan society, this wouldn't have been possible or, indeed, credible. But with the rise of the Christian
bourgeoisie and the development of parliamentarianism at the expense of
authoritarianism, the status of the feudal classes was irrevocably changed, so
their freedom to rule in an autocratic manner was curbed, the monarchy in due
course becoming subject to greater constitutional constraint.
The emergence of parliamentarianism as a
compromise, in effect, between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the Father
and the Holy Ghost, marked a shift from pseudo-pagan to properly Christian
criteria, as democracy, in large measure derived from Protestant teachings as
to human equality, supplanted autocracy, and the age of dualism, necessarily
hostile to autocratic Roman Catholicism, was ushered in, placing due emphasis
on compromise between disparate (in the main) bourgeois interests, and
upholding the ethic of self-enrichment through hard work. Indeed, democracy was quintessentially ethical,
concerned with the general good, usually interpreted in a commercial or
utilitarian way, and thus was committed to human freedom, freedom, above all,
from autocratic tyranny in order to pursue the Good rather than remain
enslaved, as with feudal societies, to the Strong, whether natural or 'divine'.
Inevitably, democracy gave rise to industry
and furthered the growth of urbanization, which, at first, was highly
ugly. Centred in the ethics of equality
and a faith in the ability of human effort to overcome natural obstacles, it
necessarily favoured the artificial, one might even say the transcendental;
though the theory and practical implementation of Christian teachings weren't
always consonant, the industrious bourgeois rarely averse to putting practice
above theory, private enrichment before the general good, and to an extent that
the former tended to eclipse the latter, making for a society where the toiling
masses, far from sharing in the general wealth, were exploited and oppressed by
their industrial masters to a degree not far short of the exploitation and
oppression experienced by peasants in the age of feudal enslavement.
The bourgeoisie may have acknowledged a
transcendental perspective, relative to Protestantism, but they remained firmly
rooted in the mundane and were, to a degree, sympathetic towards feudal
precedent. There was no moral rebirth
with them, no clean break with the past, since capitalism is ever a mode of
industrial feudalism, an artificial as opposed to a natural form of exploitation. Just as Christ acknowledged the Father, so
parliamentarians acknowledge royals, democracy being a kind of diluted
autocracy, the bourgeoisie sharing power with the aristocracy, as symbolized by
the distinction in England between the House of Commons and the House of Lords,
the bourgeoisie themselves divisible between capitalist and socialist
interests, not to mention different shades of capitalism, as in the heyday of
Tory/Liberal confrontation in Victorian times.
As in Christ, so in parliamentarianism, everything must be divided,
divisible, and divisive! Compromise is
taken for the norm and, indeed, transformed into an ideal, not simply regarded
as the best way of dealing with divisions but considered sacrosanct in itself -
valid for all time!
Well, those who, as Bolshevik-styled
communists, signify an extension of democracy into absolute channels ... don't
think so, even though they pertain to the democratic spectrum and are
themselves materialists, concerned with the ethical application to society of a
proletarian humanism based on the teachings of Karl Marx, whose Communism is to
pseudo-democracy what Protestantism was to democracy proper - namely the
theoretical foundation for political action, Marx following on behind Christ as
the Anti-Christ, state socialism no less anti-democratic, in the bourgeois
atomic sense, than capitalism was pro-democratic, the means, one feels, to the
overthrow of liberal democracy.
Yet not, on that account, the means to
Transcendentalism, which appertains to the third and highest spectrum, the
theocratic spectrum, as one that would seem to have played only a very
secondary role throughout the age of parliamentarianism, theoretical influence
notwithstanding, and only began to take an independent line with the rise of
Fascism, an ideology biased towards Roman Catholicism but revolutionary and
independent enough to signify, in the person of the Leader, a crude
approximation to the Second Coming, the basis of a genuinely theocratic society
in which religion becomes absolute, if on terms diametrically antithetical to
the absolutism of its inception in various degrees and kinds of
Creator-worship. Does not the leader of
a fascist state personify divinity on terms the converse of the God-Kings of
pagan antiquity?
Certainly, one would be hard-pressed to
deny the divine status of the Leader in a fascist society, even if, in the
late-stage petty-bourgeois context to which we are of course alluding, this
status is less than a truly objective intimation of the Holy Ghost and more
like a representation of the Father, given its quasi-autocratic
implications. But fascism and royalism are really antithetical, and if sovereignty is
vested in the Monarch in an autocratic society, the ruler equivalent to the
Father there, then it is most assuredly vested in the Leader in a theocratic
society, who becomes the personification of the Holy Spirit, the leading
embodiment of truth, an intimation of ultimate divinity. Only in a democratic society is sovereignty
vested in the People, who are entitled to elect representatives to parliament
who govern and/or serve on their behalf.
In
Early in the twentieth century, however, a
further, even more radical example of the same kind of revolution occurred in
Russia and, bearing in mind the progress of history towards an absolute age, it
resulted in the eventual emergence of a People’s republic, necessarily
proletarian in character and therefore beyond the bourgeois compromise of the
French Revolution. Beyond a Soviet-type
revolution history cannot go on the middle, or democratic, spectrum,
pseudo-democracy being the ultimate form of democracy, where sovereignty is
vested in the proletariat and a sort of dictatorial democracy ... of the
proletariat ... prevails, the antithetical equivalent to the democratic
dictatorship of the Cromwellian revolution. The only way forward after this is Fascism
and its ideological successor in Social Transcendentalism, but this pertains to
the top, or theocratic, spectrum and can only be hostile towards republicans of
whatever degree, as sovereignty is vested in the Leader, who becomes dictator
to the masses, a no-less absolute figure than the autocratic monarch of
royalist times, because equivalent to God.
Thus a totalitarian society is inevitably
anti-republican and anti-democratic, the Leader alone responsible for
determining the course of evolution, and thereby leading from above, pulling
the masses after him towards the post-Human Millennium, that stage in time when
man will have been completely overcome and only the Supermen prevail, in the
guise of brain collectivizations artificially
supported and sustained, though not without human supervision and assistance
from qualified technicians. Only in the
second phase of this post-Human Millennium, when the old brain has been
surgically removed from each Superman, would such technicians become
superfluous, as the truly classless, free society of the Superbeings,
or new-brain collectivizations, hypermeditated
towards transcendence and thus the attainment of pure spirit (free electrons)
to the post-Millennial Beyond.
All this is, of course, pertinent to Social
Transcendentalism and therefore to the ideology propounded by the closest
approximation on earth to the Second Coming.
If Fascism was petty bourgeois in character, the crude beginnings of a
theocratic society, then Social Transcendentalism is proletarian and, hence,
absolute, the more objective ideology of the Second Coming for a post-democratic
age, an age when real progress towards the post-Human Millennium can be made,
as Social Transcendentalism strives to extend the top spectrum towards a
theocratic absolutism, and thereby paves the way for universal civilization.
Pertaining to the tail-end of the middle
spectrum, Communism simply isn't qualified to further progress towards the
post-Human Millennium. Its concept of Millennialism
is necessarily subjective, envisaging not the supersession
of men by post-human life forms, but a kind of global equalitarian society
based on the ethics of proletarian humanism.
In short, it lacks a capacity for truth, being an extension of ethics
beyond bourgeois relativity to a kind of proletarian absolutism germane to
People’s democracy. But such a relatively
absolute phase of democracy cannot stretch into a genuinely proletarian
age. There is only one way forward, and
that is through Social Transcendentalism.
For it is only the last stretch of the top spectrum which is truly
absolute in character. The age of
People’s republics, no less than that of bourgeois republics, will soon be a
thing of the past. Tomorrow belongs to
us!
PART TWO:
DIALOGUES
LITERARY DISTINCTIONS
BRENDAN: I
understand, Neal, that you are of the opinion that a novelist isn't necessarily
an artist, these days, just because he writes novels, but can be one of three
things.
NEAL: That
is correct. He can be an artist, an
anti-artist, or a philosopher, using the latter term in the contemporary sense
as applying, in the main, to metaphysical writers, or men who identify more
with essence than appearance.
BRENDAN:
How, then, do you distinguish between novelists as artists and novelists as
anti-artists?
NEAL: Very
simply! Between those who write in an
illusory vein, intimating of truth or envisaging a future society in an
expressive style, and those, on the contrary, who specialize in writings of an
autobiographical character, making the crux of their novels hinge on the story
of their lives.
BRENDAN:
Thus you are distinguishing, I take it, between novelists like George Orwell on
the one hand, and Henry Miller on the other.
NEAL: Yes,
between those who indirectly extend literature towards objective truth, and
those who directly indulge in subjective fact - a distinction, in effect,
between bound-electron equivalents and pseudo-electron equivalents, bearing in
mind that we are discussing the novelist, within the broader framework of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization, in relation to petty-bourgeois culture, as
relative to contemporary Western society, with particular reference to the
United States.
BRENDAN: So
we are not referring the novelist-as-artist to bourgeois criteria, which would
presumably be to discuss the novel in traditional fictional terms.
NEAL: No,
the story-teller of old is precisely the kind of artist that the anti-artist is
in rebellion against in his 'romantic' fixation on autobiography. The modern novelistic anti-artist is
anti-fiction, fiction being the traditional preserve of the artist, who
abstracts fictions from external facts and thus creates a story. The modern novelistic artist, on the other
hand, is pro-truth, truth being the goal of evolution in pure spirit, the
approach to this goal in literary terms necessarily requiring of the artist
either fidelity to illusion, i.e. anticipations or intimations of truth, which
is a quasi-philosophical approach, or (assuming he is more of a pure artist) an
extension of abstract technical procedures in his work towards some
consciously- or unconsciously-envisaged future literary goal of a totally
non-expressive art, an art reflecting the post-atomic status of a free-electron
age, in which only pure poetry would be produced. This artist takes the direct route to truth
by approximating literature to a free-electron status whereby words, the
electron equivalents, are freed from the proton/neutron constraint of
emotions/meanings, about which, in atomic writings, they invariably
revolve. The artist who intimates of
truth, however, takes the indirect route to it, since his use of illusion
requires fidelity to grammatical conventions in the interests of a meaningful
expression of this intimation. He
approximates more closely to the modern philosopher, who also approaches truth indirectly
... through the medium of expression, albeit in a more intensively non-literary
way than the artist.
BRENDAN:
You are distinguishing, I presume, between a kind of lesser modern artist and a
greater modern artist, as applying to the indirect and direct approaches to
truth, conceived in literary terms.
NEAL: I
am! And while the lesser artist
approximates to the metaphysical philosopher, the greater artist approaches, in
his predominantly abstract prose, the pure poet of the future absolute
civilization, a civilization in which all forms of relative literature,
including the most poetic of petty-bourgeois novels, would be taboo. Generally speaking, these two types of modern
artist are relative to the distinction, within the wider parameters of bourgeois/proletarian
civilization, between what I call mainstream petty-bourgeois culture on the one
hand, and subsidiary petty-bourgeois culture on the other hand, so that, as a
rule, the greater artist will be indigenous to the United States, the lesser
one to Western Europe, with particular reference to Britain and France, which
are fundamentally bourgeois nations influenced by, though not pioneering,
petty-bourgeois trends.
BRENDAN: So
you would contend that while the predominantly abstract tradition especially
appertains to the United States, the illusory, or indirect, route to truth
appertains more to the United Kingdom and France, thereby enabling us to
distinguish between novelists, on the one hand, like William Burroughs,
particularly with regard to works such as The Naked Lunch and The
Soft Machine, and novelists, on the other hand, like George Orwell, whose 1984
must rank as one of the best examples of a novel's intimating, for its time,
of what were then future trends, and thereby approaching truth indirectly -
through the medium of literary expression.
NEAL: Yes,
such a distinction is certainly apposite, although it will usually be found,
with the British, that the intimation of future trends, as you put it, is less
than objective, falling woefully short of optimism, as can also be borne out by
such an illusory novel as Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World, with its nightmare projection of an envisaged artificial society of
the future.
BRENDAN:
Would you describe Huxley as generally a lesser artist?
NEAL: No,
for apart from the above-mentioned work the only novel I can think of which
entails an illusory projection of characters into a futuristic setting is Ape and
Essence, which focuses on the aftermath of a nuclear war, as affecting
FROM OLD BRAIN TO SUPERCONSCIOUS
KEITH:
Apparently there is more to the old brain than just a subconscious, and more to
the new brain than simply a superconscious, if I
understand you correctly.
CHRIS:
There is, though traditional psychology has failed to stress that fact. The old brain is divisible between a
subconscious and a feeling/visionary body, while the new brain is likewise
divisible between a superconscious and a
feeling/visionary body, the principal difference being that whereas in the old
brain the subconscious is dominated by the feeling/visionary body, in the new
brain it is the superconscious which dominates its
alpha-stemming antithesis. And this is
because the ratio of protons and neutrons to electrons, or vice versa, is
dissimilar in each of the brains - the atomic integrity of the old brain being
heavily biased towards the proton/neutron ingredients, that of the new brain
being biased towards the electron ingredient, so that whereas protons and
neutrons dominate electrons in the former, electrons dominate protons and
neutrons in the latter.
KEITH:
Presumably that is why the old brain is a predominantly feeling/visionary
phenomenon and the new brain, by contrast, a superconscious
phenomenon or, more correctly, essential noumenon?
CHRIS:
Absolutely! Being antithetically
constituted, the old and the new brains function in different ways, according
to their respective atomic integrities.
Egocentricity, as we customarily understand it, is a combination of
these two disparate functions; feelings and visions/thoughts coming up from
below, and awareness coming down from above, each of which meet in the corpus callosum, that psychological link between the two brains -
the cerebellum and the cerebrum.
KEITH:
Whereas the cultivation of pure consciousness, as the mystics understand it,
depends upon our ability to transcend feelings and visions/thoughts, and
presupposes a deeper commitment to the superconscious
- in other words, to a consciousness undiluted by feelings and
visions/thoughts.
CHRIS: Yes,
to superconsciousness purely and simply, since we do
not feel with our superconscious mind. We register feelings in our body through the
agency of soul, the body's mind, as it were, which consciousness becomes aware
of, to the detriment of its own expansion.
KEITH: Thus
consciousness and superconsciousness are
approximately the same?
CHRIS: No,
consciousness is our superconsciousness existing as a
bound-electron equivalent in a day-to-day context of ordinary utilitarian
and/or relaxed receptive awareness.
When, however, we strive to tune-in to our superconscious
in order to cultivate awareness for its own sake, divorced from will, we
experience superconsciousness, or consciousness
elevated above feelings and thoughts, in a free-electron context, to a higher
pitch of awareness. Ordinarily our
consciousness, although originating in the superconscious,
is less elevated and therefore encumbered by feelings and thoughts, which
impinge upon it, causing us to respond to them in some way. If we haven't habitually sought to develop
our consciousness, we will be more exposed to the encroachments of feelings and
thoughts than otherwise. Indeed, we may become our
feelings or thoughts rather than our consciousness of them. Consequently we will be more exposed to the
encroachments of feelings/thoughts than otherwise, and therefore become
enslaved to the flesh, the body/brain, at such times. The object of evolutionary progress, however,
is to become free of this enslavement, to cultivate consciousness independently
of the body, and thus aspire towards the Divine, which would be pure
consciousness.
KEITH: And
therefore completely beyond the flesh, beyond all manifestations of atomicity,
with their proton/neutron roots?
CHRIS:
Precisely! When we purposely cultivate
awareness by tuning-in to our superconscious we
achieve a free-electron consciousness, an absolutely post-atomic consciousness
elevated above the usual relatively post-atomic consciousness of the everyday
conscious mind, which, when we aren't enslaved by or succumbing to feelings,
emotions, sensations, thoughts, fantasies, et cetera, functions as a relatively
bound-electron consciousness - as when we watch television or listen to the
radio. This is the consciousness which
is contiguous with the subconscious, that part of the conscious mind which
pertains to the old brain and exists there as an absolutely bound-electron
equivalent enslaved to and dominated by the majority proton/neutron content of
the feeling/visionary body.
KEITH: As
when we sleep and witness the dreams that the majority proton/neutron content
of the old brain foists upon our subconscious.
CHRIS: Yes,
our subconscious is, at such times, the passive spectator of the dream process,
which takes place independently of conscious volition, and is thereby
absolutely bound to the proton/neutron control, unable to transcend it in any
way.
KEITH: Thus
one could speak of an old brain/subconscious dichotomy as applying to this
distinction between the feeling/visionary body and the subconscious, phenomenon
and noumenon, idea and will, but a will so enslaved
to and dominated by the proton/neutron root ... as generally to be incapable of
conscious volition.
CHRIS:
Correct! Though there are occasions
when, under duress from a particularly oppressive dream, even the subconscious
can muster the necessary resolve to revolt against its oppressor, and we
wake-up before matters in the nightmare have come to a grisly pass, or so it
seems! Even the subconscious has
willpower, though nowhere near as much as the conscious mind, which is relatively
free to direct the body along any desired channel of activity. When the conscious mind is turned away from
the body, however, it ceases to function as will but becomes the free-electron
consciousness of the superconscious.
KEITH:
Interesting how there is a spectrum of consciousness from the subconscious to
the superconscious via an intermediate level of
everyday consciousness, a spectrum which pertains to the spirit or psyche as
opposed to the body/soul, and is therefore separate from feelings and dreams.
CHRIS:
Indeed! And in its highest reach, that
of the superconscious, separate from thoughts and
visions as well! For we do not think
with our superconscious but use it, as awareness
directed towards a conceptual end, to elicit and order thoughts from the
minority neutron content of the new brain, in which such concepts are
housed. What feelings are to
consciousness in the old brain, thoughts are to consciousness in the new one,
which is to say, its antithesis, except that whereas in the former context
feelings tend, through the medium of the senses, to condition consciousness, in
the latter context it is generally consciousness which, through the agency of
the will, conditions thought - at least during waking-life periods. For during sleep the old brain prefers to
indulge in dreams, which are feelings made manifest to the subconscious through
perceptual images.
KEITH: Then
what of new-brain visions, particularly with regard to synthetically-induced
ones?
CHRIS:
These are thoughts made manifest to the superconscious
through perceptual images, a kind of waking-life dream state in which
consciousness perceives the visual contents of the new brain as the minority
neutron content is freed from majority electron control and thus from the will,
which, though not entirely neutralized, is rendered passive before the highly
intriguing spectacle of the synthetically-induced visions that we refer to as
the 'trip'. An hallucinogen like LSD
directly appeals to the new brain, where it reduces the threshold of the
minority proton/neutron content from the level of concepts to the level of
visions, from the quasi-essential to the apparent, albeit an appearance
rendered static by dint of its proximity to the majority electron content. Just as sleep lowers the threshold of
consciousness to the subconscious and thereby allows the old brain free play,
so LSD lowers the threshold of the new brain and thereby permits the superconscious to contemplate the visionary contents of its
antithesis. From being a
thought-mechanism, the new brain becomes a vision-mechanism. With sleep, the old brain is raised from a
feeling bias to a dreaming bias. With
'trips', the new brain is lowered from a conceptual bias to a perceptual
bias. Sleep lowers consciousness,
whereas LSD raises it.
KEITH:
Though the latter doesn't raise it as far, I presume, as would transcendental
meditation.
CHRIS: No,
since LSD directly appeals to the new brain and only indirectly to the superconscious, whereas transcendental meditation directly
appeals to the superconscious and not at all to the
new brain, i.e. to the minority proton/neutron content of its atomic
structure. The 'trip' is a quasi-occult
experience, the meditation state, by contrast, a hypermetaphysical
one - the difference, in a sense, between the phenomenal at its furthest reach
and the noumenal at or near its inception. The 'trip' is the culmination of an
alpha-stemming tradition, the meditation state the beginning of an exclusively
omega-oriented aspiration. The one is
basically Occidental, the other Oriental.
The one stems from a tradition of proton indulgence in the use of
alcohol, the other from a tradition of electron indulgence in the use of
hashish and kindred mind-expanding drugs.
The former tradition lowers consciousness by weighting the
proton/neutron content with increased sensuality, whereas the latter tradition
expands consciousness by imposing increased awareness upon the electron
content. In the first context, the
distilled, i.e. alcohol, is used to sensualize the
old brain and, following on its heels, the synthesized, i.e. LSD, is used to
visualize the new brain. In the second
context, the naturalistic, i.e. hashish, is used to increase sensual
consciousness and, following on its heels, the supernaturalistic,
i.e. transcendental meditation, is used to increase spiritual
consciousness. Alcohol leads to LSD as
surely as dope to meditation in the evolutionary progression of each
tradition! Of course, neither tradition
is absolute. For, in a certain sense,
tobacco is the occidental equivalent to dope and, conversely, tea the oriental
equivalent to alcohol, though both tobacco and tea are considerably milder than
their respective counterparts. Tobacco
does not raise sensual consciousness to anything like the same extent as hashish
or marijuana. Conversely, tea does not
lower consciousness, by appealing to the old brain, to anything like the same
extent as alcohol, particularly the wines and spirits. So whilst a relativity has prevailed in each
tradition, it has not prevented a bias, one way or the other, from emerging in
accordance with the use of stronger drugs, so that the Occident has remained
predominantly alcoholic and the Orient, by contrast, predominantly hashistic, despite the recourse of each civilization to
tobacco and tea respectively. The one
tradition has mainly stemmed from the Diabolic Alpha, while the other one has
mainly aspired towards the Divine Omega.
KEITH:
Though the Occident presumably began by directly stemming from the Diabolic
Alpha and has now reached or is approaching a stage of indirectly stemming from
it, whereas the Orient began by indirectly aspiring towards the Divine Omega
and then proceeded, in due course of time, to directly aspire towards it - a
distinction, in the one case, between distilled alcohol and synthesized LSD,
and, in the other case, between naturalistic hashish and supernaturalistic
transcendental meditation.
CHRIS: Yes,
which we may alternatively define, in atomic terms, as a progression from a
proton equivalent to a pseudo-electron equivalent in the case of the Occident,
and from a bound-electron equivalent to a free-electron equivalent in the case
of the Orient. It is the example of the
Orient that we must follow in regard to the development of a transcendental
civilization.
KEITH: Then
the final human civilization will be entirely metaphysical, with regard to the
practice of transcendental meditation?
CHRIS:
Correct! And it will lead, in due course
of time, to the Host-human Millennium, the first phase of which - a quasi-occult
one - will entail the widespread use of synthetic hallucinogens like LSD by the
Supermen, the first of two life forms who, created by millennial technicians,
will be human brains artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts. With the subsequent establishment, however,
of the second of the post-human life forms, the superbeingful
new-brain collectivizations, millennial evolution
will progress to its highest phase, a wholly metaphysical phase involving the
practice of hypermeditation - a more intensive and
purer form of meditation than was practised, if I may be permitted to
anticipate the future, by the transcendental proletarians of the civilization
preceding the post-Human Millennium.
This hypermeditation will lead to transcendence,
to the freeing of the majority electron content of the new brain from its
minority proton/neutron content - in other words, to the freeing of superconsciousness from the new brain, so that pure spirit
can soar heavenwards towards its ultimate goal in the Omega Beyond, a goal,
however, which is unlikely to be attained to for some considerable period of
supra-atomic evolution, as the various Spiritual Globes from whichever Superbeing on whichever habitable planet converge towards
and expand into one another in a continuous process leading from separateness
to unity. As you can see, life has a
long way to go before it becomes a candidate for transcendence! But at least it is slowly evolving, in the
guise of men, towards that distant goal in a truly superconscious
mind. Both the old and new brains are
destined to be discarded, as the superconscious
continues to expand towards the omega goal of evolution. From discarding them relatively, evolving
life will proceed to discard them absolutely, the removal of the old brain
preceding the transcendence of the new!
DEVELOPMENTS IN THE ARTS
GAVIN: I am
fascinated by this theory of yours that, like art and music, literature evolves
along a kind of disjointed spectrum or, more correctly, series of overlapping
spectra ... from philosophy to poetry via fiction, each stage of this evolution
being independent of the others and yet still indicating some kind of
continuity.
JAMES: Yes,
and to revert to atomic terminology, one could describe philosophy as the
proton root, fiction as bespeaking an atomic integrity, and poetry becoming,
with full maturation, a free-electron equivalent. A similar distinction also applies, as you
remarked, to art and music, so that we can describe the evolution of art in
terms of a development from a proton root in sculpture through an atomic
integrity in painting to a free-electron culmination in holography. Likewise we can define the evolution of music
from rhythmic beginnings through a melodic atomicity to a climax in pure pitch.
GAVIN: Let
us take one art form at a time, shall we?
Beginning with literature.
JAMES: This
begins, as I said, in philosophy, as an analytical concern with external
appearances, and proceeds to an apparent/essential compromise in fiction,
before culminating in an exclusive concern, through poetry, with essence. Philosophy stems from an aristocratic
absolutism in pagan civilization which, in the Western context, stretches from
a grand-bourgeois root (Bacon) through a bourgeois stem (Kant) to a
petty-bourgeois flowering (Wittgenstein), at approximately which time it is
also transmuted from appearance to essence and becomes, at the hands of
petty-bourgeois revolutionaries, a pseudo-electron equivalent, a kind of
reformed proton, which endows it with an anti-philosophical integrity
appertaining to its metaphysical bias.
Genuine philosophy, by contrast, ends with the furthest reach of
appearance in a critique of language which, in comparison with its inception as
a critique of natural phenomena, is not as genuine as might at first
appear! Nevertheless, this philosophy -
academic philosophy as we may call it - signifies the furthest stretching of
philosophy from its aristocratic roots, and corresponds to contemporary
representational sculpture in art and to a kind of Afro-Caribbean rhythm-biased
music involving percussion instruments.
By contrast, the development of metaphysical philosophy, which mainly
stems from Schopenhauer, bespeaks a separate spectrum of literary endeavour, though
one paralleling the philosophy spectrum from its petty-bourgeois inception,
while completely outstripping it as we tend towards a proletarian climax in an
ultra-metaphysical collectivized format.
One might describe this pseudo-philosophy as corresponding to modern
abstract sculpture in art and to a melodic rhythm-biased music which, like
Calypso, uses percussion instruments in a variety of pitches to largely melodic
ends.
GAVIN: And
what about fiction?
JAMES:
Being a largely atomic art form, the novel can be either biased towards the
proton, as when it is highly fictional and mainly concerned with appearances,
or biased towards the electron, as when it is predominantly illusory and mainly
concerned with essences. Or,
alternatively, it can approximate to a sort of atomic balance between the two,
as when appearance and essence are granted equal treatment by a
quintessentially bourgeois novelist - the other types of novel being grand
bourgeois and petty bourgeois respectively.
The bourgeois novelist creates in such a fashion that essence is bound
to appearance, and so engenders the enslavement of illusion to fiction, the
former functioning as a bound-electron equivalent, the latter as a proton
equivalent within the overall atomicity of his quintessentially literary novel. The petty-bourgeois novelist, on the other
hand, specializes in essence, pushing literature towards truth, and so creates
a work in which the electron content of illusion or non-expression predominates
over the proton content of fiction or illusory expression, depending on the
type of petty-bourgeois novelist in question, that is to say, whether he
corresponds to a bound-electron status or to a pseudo-electron status; whether
his work is illusory, i.e. intimating of truth or some future society through
expressive means, or predominantly non-expressive, i.e. largely abstract.
GAVIN: So
we are alluding to a distinction between, say, George Orwell and William
Burroughs, are we?
JAMES: Yes,
and while the bound-electron expressive novelist stems from an atomic
tradition, corresponding to the furthest reach of painting and classical music,
the pseudo-electron non-expressive novelist corresponds to the
anti-philosopher, to the extent that he presupposes the development of a new
literary spectrum which, beginning as an autobiographical revolt against
fictional literature, and therefore briefly paralleling the tail-end of the old
in both its traditional and modernist manifestations, should extend to the
boundaries of a proletarian absolutism, without, however, ceasing to be petty
bourgeois.
GAVIN: So
that leaves us with the poet - the highest kind of writer.
JAMES: It
does! And we may contend that although
poets have long existed, they haven't been genuinely poetic, prior to the
inception and development of contemporary metaphysical poetry, but enslaved to
appearance and description, functioning more as a bound-electron than as a
free-electron equivalent, creating a pseudo-poetry that smacks of traditional
philosophy and fictional literature.
Only with the comparatively recent development of metaphysical poetry,
which parallels anti-philosophy, have poets begun to appear in their true light
... as men of essence and literary freedom.
Needless to say, this development has attained to greater heights in the
mainstream petty-bourgeois culture of contemporary America than ever it has in
Europe, particularly with regard to the extension of the genuinely poetic into
impressive, or abstract, writings, such as one finds in the 'Cantos' of Ezra
Pound and, to a greater extent, the late poetry of Allen Ginsberg. We can speak here of a relatively
free-electron poetry, a poetry which is relatively post-atomic, combining the
metaphysically expressive with the metaphorically impressive, in accordance
with the extreme relativistic criteria of bourgeois/proletarian
civilization. Like non-expressive
novelistic writings and anti-philosophy, this genuine poetry signifies the
beginnings of a different spectrum of poetic development, one paralleling the
end of the old pseudo-poetic spectrum and extending beyond it towards a
proletarian absolutism, such as must some day arise on wholly free-electron
terms, with the inception and subsequent development of a transcendental
civilization.
GAVIN:
Presumably when poetry will be created on absolutely post-atomic terms, with
regard to impression alone?
JAMES: Yes,
the ultimate pure poetry of a free-electron age. At that juncture in time poetry will attain
to full maturity on computer discs, the transcendental medium, par
excellence, of a proletarian civilization.
GAVIN: So
this ultimate poetry won't exist in a new spectrum of poetic endeavour, but
will signify a continuation of the free-electron spectrum from contemporary
petty-bourgeois relativity to subsequent proletarian absolutism.
JAMES: Yes,
a continuation paralleling that from neo-Buddhism to Social Transcendentalism
in religion.
GAVIN:
Having outlined the evolution of literature from its philosophical inception to
its poetic consummation, let us now turn, if you will, to music and art, and
briefly discuss their parallel evolutions.
JAMES:
Which are, of course, from a proton root through an atomic compromise to a
free-electron climax, both relatively and absolutely. In music, we shall find the first stage
exemplified by rhythm, by a music exclusively or predominantly conceived in
rhythmic terms. From there music will
evolve to a second stage in melody supported by harmony, which signifies a
compromise between rhythm and pitch, protons and electrons, and thus reflects
an atomic integrity. Finally, after a
number of intermediate emancipations ... with especial reference to
petty-bourgeois civilization and its relatively post-atomic jazz, music will
evolve to an absolutely free-electron status, in adherence to the criteria of
an exclusively omega-oriented civilization, and thus attain to its goal in pure
pitch, in compositions the notes of which are completely free from rhythmic
attachments. Such an ultimate music will
be the norm wherever proletarian civilization is developed, and it will largely
stem from modern jazz, just as pure poetry will stem from the relatively
post-atomic poetry of contemporary
GAVIN: So
this absolutely free-electron music is part of a separate spectrum of musical
evolution from the European classical tradition.
JAMES:
Absolutely! Since, if it doesn't
correspond to a bound-electron equivalent, such classical music corresponds, in
its avant-garde manifestation, to a pseudo-electron equivalent, which pertains
to a different spectrum of creative evolution - one paralleling the tail-end of
atomic tradition and extending as far beyond that as petty-bourgeois criteria
will permit.
GAVIN: Thus
a parallel development with the pseudo-electron literature of William
Burroughs, which exists on a different level, within a different spectrum, to
the largely illusory novel-writing of, say, George Orwell.
JAMES:
Precisely! In the context of a lesser
music, just as the expressive illusory novels of the typical European author
are lesser literature when compared with the (greater) literature of the
pseudo-electron novelist. So the music
of the next civilization will stem from the highest music of contemporary
American civilization, viz. modern jazz, being, however, as different from that
relatively post-atomic music as pure poetry ... from its petty-bourgeois
precursor. Pure jazz as opposed to
modern jazz.... As for the evolution of art, it proceeds, like literature and
music, towards a free-electron climax through a number of similarly independent
spectra of evolutionary development, commensurate with a distinct atomic
status, so that, from humble proton beginnings, we may note a disjunctive
continuity through successive art forms towards the ultimate art form of the
future. Beginning, then, with
aristocratic sculpture in the round, the evolution of art is through lower
grand-bourgeois vase painting to murals, which signify a higher grand-bourgeois
integrity, and thence to representational painting on framed canvas, that
approximately bourgeois stage of artistic evolution. From which we proceed to painting of a partly
or exclusively non-representational character on frameless canvas, bespeaking a
lower petty-bourgeois preserve, and from there, via a different spectrum, to
higher petty-bourgeois art in the form of light art, that relatively
post-atomic art form. This then leads us
to the climax of art in the representational, or rather, abstract holography of
the coming transcendental civilization.
GAVIN: In
what way or ways is light art relatively post-atomic?
JAMES: By
being a combination of materialism and spirituality, the one conceived on the
highest terms, as pertaining to the glass or plastic tubes of the light work,
and the other conceived in terms of the electric or neon lighting which,
particularly in the most transcendental examples of this art form, can be used
to symbolize the spirit, to intimate of omega divinity. That there is a lower type of light art, of
materialist/expressionist tendency, I do not deny. Yet this is another factor in that art form's
relativity, one that could never apply to abstract holography, as germane to a
transcendental civilization, and for the simple reason that such a
civilization, being absolute, would have no place for the quasi-occult - in
other words, no place for expressive, materialist alternatives. The holography of that civilization would be
purely impressive, and such an impression, designed to intimate in the most
unequivocal way of pure spirit, would be projected into space conceived as the
interior of a Meditation Centre, free from material surrounds or casings, as
light purely and simply, which would constitute its conceptual absolutism. One could not contemplate a higher type of
art than that - at any rate, not objectively considered. For, although the Supermen of the first phase
of the post-Human Millennium may be contemplating the visionary contents of
their new brains, thanks to LSD or some such synthetic hallucinogen, and such
contemplation be directed at the apparent inside their brains rather than (as
with abstract holography) at the quasi-essential outside them, those visionary
contents won't be impressive but expressive, not abstract but largely
representational and, therefore, quasi-occult, on a lower level to abstract
holography, because perceptual rather than conceptual.
GAVIN: And
yet evolution will still have to pass through a hallucinogenic phase, if only
to get to an ultra-metaphysical one.
JAMES: Yes,
the process of evolving toward the ultimate metaphysical, or supernatural,
absolute in the post-Millennial Beyond must take place on relative terms while
life is subject, as it is with men and will continue to be with their immediate
successors, to relativity. While the
representational aspect of hallucinogenic stimulation may constitute a fall
from the impressive absolutism of holography, at least it is situated within
the new brain rather than without it ... in surrounding space, and thus
signifies, on that account, some kind of evolutionary progression, even if only
on relative terms. The truly absolute
mode of progress will only come following the subsequent elevation of
millennial life to its superbeingful stage, when pure
contemplation succeeds the impure contemplation of the Supermen. This higher contemplation, involving the
experience of hypermeditation carried out in the
context of new-brain collectivizations, will in due
course lead to transcendence, and thus to the goal of millennial evolution in
the space-centred Heaven of the post-Millennial Beyond. It would be beyond all art, which at its
highest level is designed to intimate, through apparent means, of the
essential, viz. the Omega Point. This hypermeditation would be divine and therefore entirely
essential, the spirit's contemplation or, rather, direct experience of itself
in absolute purity. Art ends, in any
objective sense, with pure holography, essential as opposed to apparent, but
hallucinogenic contemplation will signify a pseudo-metaphysical subjective
extension of art into a post-civilized, post-human age. Just so, pertaining as ever to the human and
civilized, art began with pure sculpture, apparent as opposed to
essential. Yet before art there were
dreams which, antithetical in every respect to trips, bespoke a pre-human,
pre-civilized aesthetic beginning, a beginning that involved the contemplation
of naturalistic visions by the subconscious.
Thus a spectrum of evolutionary development leading from pre-human
dreams to post-human trips passes through the intermediate human development of
art which, as we discovered, is divisible into approximately seven stages,
corresponding to class-evolutionary distinctions in a disjunctive spectrum, or
series of overlapping spectra, which stretch from a sculptural absolutism to a
holographic absolutism. Before they created
and contemplated art, men and/or their ape-like predecessors dreamt. After they have completed the evolution of
art, as of literature and music, men or, rather, their superhuman successors
will trip. But dreams and trips are
alike two extreme manifestations of cerebral activity, the former pertaining to
the majority proton/neutron content of the old brain, the latter to the
minority proton/neutron content of the new brain. Evolving life will only be truly free when it
gets beyond the contemplation of proton/neutron appearances by directly
experiencing electron essences. The
finest art, literature, and music have intimated of the truth, and to that
extent served as a means to an end, a pointer to that ideal society which I
equate with the post-Human Millennium.
It took man a long time to bring art to the level of an intimation of
truth. For in its earliest stages, those
of sculpture, vase painting, murals, even much painting, it stemmed from and
sought to emulate or describe naturalistic fact. We can have no truck with such fact now, for
we are in favour of supernaturalistic truth, and can
only intimate of this through the most free-electron art, an art stemming from
the best or foremost developments of contemporary American civilization and
evolving through the highest level of civilization, as germane to a
transcendental proletariat, to its future consummation in the purest
terms. Like pure poetry and modern jazz,
the best light art is situated on a free-electron spectrum that will extend
into an absolute phase with the development of this ultimate civilization. We cannot take over any of the relatively
free-electron arts ourselves, but we can certainly continue from where they
leave off, and on a basis that will become uniquely our own, producing
absolutely free creations which, whether in literature, music, or art, should
bring that final spectrum to a divine climax.
CORRELATIONS IN SEX AND ART
SHEILA: If
what you say is true ... about politics, art, and sex all hanging together on
an equal level of development in any given class-stage of evolution, then it
should be possible for one to equate a given sexuality with a compatible
aesthetic or political development, and thus come to form a better
understanding of that sexuality both in terms of its nature and the extent of
its applicability to any specific society.
DONAL: I
agree! And therefore, not altogether
surprisingly, I have worked out an exact correlation between each of the
subjects to which you refer, with particular reference to the relationship
between sex and art.
SHEILA:
Please proceed to expatiate on this correlation!
DONAL:
Well, I divide sex, no less than politics and art, into spiritualistic and
materialistic categories, since such a distinction is endemic to a relative
civilization, where either an atomic dualism or a relatively post-atomic
dualism prevails, as in Britain and America respectively. I also distinguish between two stages of
petty-bourgeois evolution within each of these relativities, viz. an early and
a late, and further divide each stage into two phases, the first of which I
equate with a revolt against civilized precedent, the second of which I equate
with the attainment to a new civilized ideal - a distinction, in effect,
between lower and higher manifestations of a given class integrity.
SHEILA:
Hence the barbarous art of the lower/early petty-bourgeoisie and, by contrast,
the civilized art of the higher/early petty-bourgeoisie, to name but one of the
two petty-bourgeois class stages. Though
one could just as easily refer to early/lower petty-bourgeois art and, by
contrast, to late/lower petty-bourgeois art, if one wanted an alternative
logical structure within which to work.
DONAL: I
agree, though I prefer to reserve the distinction between lower and higher for
the type of art being produced within the context of any given class stage,
whether early or late petty-bourgeois.
However, since we were intending to correlate a given level or type of
sex with a compatible aesthetic framework, we may as well concentrate more on
those subjects and distinguish, to begin with, between lower and higher
manifestations of early petty-bourgeois sexuality and their aesthetic
correlates, before proceeding to tackle the parallel manifestations of those
same subjects as applying to the late petty-bourgeoisie, always bearing in mind
a further distinction between the spiritualistic and the materialistic side of
each subject.
SHEILA:
Which can presumably be equated with the predominating moral bias of any given
manifestation of petty-bourgeois culture?
DONAL: Yes,
with particular reference to its mainstream manifestations, as applying to
SHEILA:
Against which the Nazis were to rebel in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
DONAL:
Until their ascension to power in 1933 enabled them to destroy virtually
everything for which it had stood. As
should now be apparent, Nazism signified a lower/late petty-bourgeois rebellion
against Weimar civilization, being essentially a spiritualized politics and
therefore opposed, in particular, to materialistic manifestations of civilized
art and sexuality, the two chief representatives of which in Germany at that
time were Abstract Expressionism and soft-core unisexual pornography, by which
I primarily mean a kind of rump-biased heterosexual pornography, one involving
young women in a variety of rear positions.
If one is to find an aesthetic equivalent for Nazism, it must be in
architectural light art, in the lower, impressionistic art of the late
petty-bourgeoisie - a type of spiritualistic barbarism paralleling expressionist
light art, its materialistic counterpart, which was more sculptural than
architectural.
SHEILA:
Certainly the Nazis had a reputation for light art, for building 'cathedrals of
light', as during the annual Nuremberg rallies, when numerous spotlights were
trained on the night sky from a variety of angles and positions, making for a
kind of dome of light above the heads of the assembled faithful. Such architectural light art, corresponding
to a barbarous because paradoxical use of light, would presumably parallel the
sculptural light art of those artists who would appear to be primarily in
rebellion against Abstract Impressionism, as mainly pertaining to America, and
who consequently employed a materialistic barbarism.
DONAL: Yes,
and whose sexual equivalent would be homosexuality, a barbarous sexuality not
unknown to Communists either. However,
as for the Nazis, who opposed Communists and homosexuals alike, we should have
little hesitation in contending that the sexuality most relevant to them was
paedophilia, or the condition of being sexually attracted to children, which
accords, it seems to me, with a lower/late petty-bourgeois phase of sexual
activity, being, in large measure, a revolt against rump-biased soft-core
pornography, a fresh sexual medium, but one employed in a paradoxical and,
hence, barbarous way.
SHEILA: Are
you serious?
DONAL:
Perfectly! Just as architectural light
art bears no resemblance to Abstract Expressionism, and Fascism no resemblance
to
SHEILA:
Thus from the contemporary point of view, both paedophilia and homosexuality
are passé, anachronistic modes of barbarous sexuality.
DONAL:
Absolutely! Following the brutal demise
of Nazism, the way was clear for the development of higher/late petty-bourgeois
sex and art, which took the forms of hard-core pornography and abstract light art,
as relevant to the late petty-bourgeois civilization of the Federal Republic of
Germany on its materialistic side, and to post-War American Republicanism on
its spiritualistic side - the former the relevant political setting for a bias
favouring hard-core homosexual pornography and abstract-expressionist light
art, the latter the relevant political setting for a bias favouring hard-core
heterosexual pornography and abstract-impressionist light art, which usually
takes the form of slender neon tubing symmetrically arranged rather than, as
with its 'materialistic' counterpart, a-symmetrically arranged in everywhichway anarchic fashion.
SHEILA:
Doesn't a kind of sculptural light art continue to exist with these
developments?
DONAL: Yes,
particularly in
SHEILA:
Thus certain barbarous American trends in sex and art would be adopted by
DONAL: Yes,
until such time as that integrity was no longer necessary and could be
superseded by Social Transcendentalism's mature phase, the phase more dedicated
to construction than destruction, when abstract holography would come to
supplant the barbarous, or representational, variety and, in sexual matters,
hard-core juvenile pornography become the logical successor to soft-core
juvenile pornography, with its representational perspective.
SHEILA: How
exactly would juvenile pornography become hard-core?
DONAL: By
exclusively focusing on the rump and, in particular, anus of the mature teenage
model, be it boy or girl. Such a
hard-core absolutism would transcend both heterosexual and homosexual hard-core
pornography, the former tending to focus on the vagina, the latter on the
penis. From being sexist, pornography
would become post-sexist in the transcendental civilization, a juvenile's rump
distinct from either male or female sex organs and significant, moreover, of a
higher order of unisexual focus - one literally transcending sex. In such fashion pornography would attain to
its consummation, a consummation wholly relevant to computer discs and thus to
VDU contemplation, while holography was likewise brought to its consummation
in the purest abstractions, abstractions originating in sculptured objects
projected into space through the reflection of mirrors.
SHEILA:
Quite a remove from Nazi paedophilia and architectural light art!
DONAL: To
be sure! And quite a remove from all
modes of civilized late petty-bourgeois art and sex as well, not to mention
civilized late petty-bourgeois modes of religion like neo-Buddhism and
mescaline tripping, about which we have not said a word! Certainly there will be no toleration of
barbarous modes of late petty-bourgeois art or sex either, which means that paedophiliacs and homosexuals, if any such exist in Eire,
would be subject to censure and, if necessary, internment. Similarly there would be no encouragement of
either architectural or sculptural light art, nor, I need scarcely add, of
their civilized successors. A Social
Transcendental
SHEILA:
That is something to which one can only look forward!
RELIGIOUS INTEGRITIES
STEVE: What
would be the religious integrity specifically germane to Social
Transcendentalism?
SEAN: A
relatively civilized mode of upward self-transcendence dependent upon LSD or
some such synthetic hallucinogen. In
other words, the indirect cultivation of awareness through the contemplation of
artificially-induced visionary experience - in short, through tripping, which
would take place in public within the institutional context of Meditation
Centres, under the watchful eye of specially-trained spiritual guides.
STEVE: So
tripping would presumably constitute the lower phase of religious evolution
within a civilized proletarian context.
SEAN: Yes,
a relative absolutism on a par with representational holography in art, tonal
synthesizer compositions in music, expressive metaphysical poetry in computer
literature, and so on. Something
distinct, in other words, from late petty-bourgeois absolute relativity,
including neo-Buddhism.
STEVE: And
thus currently beyond the pale of bourgeois/proletarian civilization.
SEAN: Yes,
officially speaking! Probably no more
than an intimation of things to come, once People’s civilization gets properly
under way, as I hope it will do in
STEVE: So
it would be a stage on the road to an absolutely free-electron equivalent, once
the introduction of the absolute phase of People’s civilization became
feasible.
SEAN: Yes,
which would be with the transformation from Social Transcendentalism to
Super-transcendentalism in the second phase of the civilization in question,
when hypermeditation became the relevant religious
commitment.
STEVE:
What, exactly, would distinguish this hypermeditation
from transcendental meditation?
SEAN:
Principally the fact that it would be experienced with the body in a vertical
position, free from the ground, through utilization of a special harness
suspended from some support apparatus within the Meditation Centre, an
apparatus which would enable the hypermeditator to
remain suspended from above, in a levitation-like posture. This physical transcendentalism would
correspond to an absolutely post-atomic integrity, conferring a hyperspiritual status on the meditator
in question, his mode of meditation also being hyperspiritual,
i.e. centred on awareness and the cultivation of awareness, elevated above even
the most positive feelings which, in pertaining to the old brain, would be
irrelevant to an absolutely post-atomic civilization, particularly during its
mature phase.
STEVE: So
this Super-transcendentalism, as you call it, would constitute an aspect of the
True World Religion.
SEAN: Undoubtedly
the most important aspect, though not, however, the only one! For, as I envisage it, lectures on the future
course of evolution and certain 'cultural' ingredients, like abstract
holography, pure synthesizer music, and impressive computer poetry, would also
have a place within the overall context of the True World Religion, which to
some extent begins with the first phase of People’s civilization and simply
attains to a climax with its second phase.
STEVE:
After which time the same thing presumably begins again, albeit on higher and
more intensive terms.
SEAN: Yes,
with the introduction of the Millennium-proper and consequent elevation of
post-humanist life to a post-human status, as human brains become artificially
supported and no-less artificially sustained in communal contexts, establishing
thereby the Supermen of the lower phase of millennial evolution, one given to
LSD tripping - as in the corresponding phase of the preceding civilization -
but this time on more extensive and intensive terms, the tripping more regular
and probably stronger as well.
STEVE: Who
will be responsible for creating the Supermen?
SEAN:
Qualified technicians, or men with more than a superficial grasp of
evolutionary requirement, a kind of serving nobility stemming from the
bureaucracy, leadership, scientific community, or whatever. Such men will create and then serve the first
of the post-human life forms, rather as a gardener serves his plants. They will also, in due course, create the
second of the post-human life forms, the Superbeings,
who, as new-brain collectivizations, will duly hypermeditate towards transcendence and, hence, ultimate
salvation, that is to say, the escape of pure spirit from the remaining
new-brain matter.
STEVE: You
mean they will remove the old brain from each Superman and thereupon upgrade
post-human life to an absolute status, with more intensified collectivizations.
SEAN:
Indeed, thereby establishing the ultimate life-form on earth, each Superbeing, or hypercollectivity
of new brains, being the antithetical equivalent of a tree. Well, just as trees preceded apes in the slow
evolution of life on earth, so the Superbeings will
succeed the Supermen who, by contrast, may be regarded as the antithetical
equivalent of apes. Now just as trees
stem from the phenomenal globe of planet earth, so the Superbeings
will aspire towards the noumenal globe of pure
spirit, a transcendence destined to converge towards and expand into other such
transcendences in a heavenly journey towards the definitive unity of the
ultimate Spiritual Globe - namely, the Omega Absolute. However, before all that can come to pass,
life on earth must be directly programmed for transcendence, and this will be
the responsibility of the serving nobility in the post-Human Millennium, who
will create the Superbeings out of the Supermen,
according to the demands of the occasion.
STEVE: And
when they have achieved their objectives in this matter?
SEAN: There
will be nothing more for them to do, in consequence of which they will gradually
withdraw from active service and, eventually, die out, leaving behind an
absolutely classless society of Superbeings -
god-like beings perfectly capable, one imagines, of looking after themselves
or, rather, their selves, i.e. of hypermeditating
towards complete salvation.
STEVE: This
presumably isn’t something that the meditators of the
preceding post-humanist civilization would be capable of doing.
SEAN: No,
they would be unable to attain to pure spirit in space, but could, at any rate,
make the most of their situation by attaining to pure spirit within a relative
context, their superconsciousness elevated above the
intrusion of troublesome feelings, not to say thoughts, and elevated, moreover,
above the contemplation of the visionary contents of their new brains. Theirs would certainly be a more absolute
phase of transcendental evolution!
STEVE: Yet
before this higher phase could be seriously contemplated and extensively
introduced by the leaders, post-humanist life would presumably have to pass
through a phase of LSD tripping?
SEAN:
Correct.
STEVE: All
over the world?
SEAN: I
believe so. After all, it would be a
precondition of being able to successfully hypermeditate
that evolving life had passed through a phase of indirect hypermeditation,
as it were, through LSD tripping; that the relative had preceded the absolute,
and thereby opened-up the new brain to a degree which made an absolute
orientation both possible and desirable.
LSD would force consciousness up towards the visionary contents of the
new brain, up towards superconsciousness. You can't expect people to hypermeditate who have spent the greater part of their
lives drinking beer or wine, indulging in various degrees of downward
self-transcendence in contexts of sensual stupor! When you are dealing with the proletariat,
you are dealing with the urban masses, people whose psyche isn't necessarily
disposed to upward self-transcendence.
Therefore a precondition of making it so disposed is first to ban or phase-out
alcoholic and other such sensual indulgences, and then induce them to trip and
thus have their psyche almost physically wrenched away from the sensual - a
precondition of their eventually being in a position to take hypermeditation seriously.
For hypermeditation won't be like transcendental
meditation, that petty-bourgeois extreme relativity. It must lay claim to an absolute integrity,
as appropriate to a civilized proletariat.
But before the proletariat can become absolutely civilized, they must
become relatively civilized, and they will only become this, it seems to me,
through the assistance of LSD tripping, the trip constituting a form of
quasi-meditation. Once alcohol, tobacco,
and other such sensual drugs have been banned, as would be the case in a
post-atomic civilization, commensurate, so I believe, with 'Kingdom Come', then
a substitute stimulant must be made available not only as a means of
compensating the masses for the loss of traditional drugs but, more
importantly, of upgrading their religious bias from the sensual to the
spiritual or, at any rate, quasi-spiritual.
STEVE: So
it appears that if LSD is for universal export, once the drive towards People’s
civilization gets properly under way in certain countries, Social
Transcendentalism must also be so, since corresponding to the relative phase of
post-atomic civilization as a quasi-religion.
SEAN: Yes,
I believe you are right! For Social
Transcendentalism is primarily a religious ideology, and it would therefore
have to take root in all countries before Super-transcendentalism, or the
absolute phase of People’s religion, became possible. It signifies the Centre, that transcendental
successor to the Christian Church, not to mention every church-equivalent
throughout the world, and must be orientated towards the establishment of a
universal centre, or global community of Transcendentalists, which will signify
the total eclipse of statehood come the absolute phase of People’s
civilization. Statesmen are at best
petty-bourgeois democratic types, but proletarian leaders, when genuine, should
be theocratic centrists, dedicated to the furtherance of a free-electron
absolutism throughout the world. If they
cannot be absolutely such throughout the relative phase of People’s
civilization, they can at least be statesman-like centrists, and thus testify
to a relativity biased towards the theocratic absolute.
STEVE: In
other words, theocratic quasi-centrists.
SEAN: Yes,
and therefore opposed to state-like designations, because fighters for the
development of religion and associated cultural achievements towards the
absolute. Wherever Social
Transcendentalism takes root, you can rest assured that it will be 'all up'
with the State. Free-electron
equivalents, even when 'quasi', cannot abide anything proton- and/or
neutron-constituted.
STEVE: And
neither are they deeply enamoured, one imagines, of pseudo-electron
equivalents, with their people-as-state integrity.
SEAN: No,
but they understand such pseudo-electron equivalents and are determined to
convert their upholders to a quasi-electron status in the course of time. For Social Transcendentalism is the root from
which the flower of Super-transcendentalism will stem!
PART THREE:
APHORISMS
ON EVOLUTION
1. Evolution proceeds from alpha to omega, from an
inception in the first stars to a culmination in the ultimate Spiritual
Globe. It doesn't begin in absolute
beauty. It begins, on the contrary, in
absolute ugliness, a formlessness of raging flame appertaining to the 'first
cause' of any particular galaxy - in all probability the central star
there. Stars may appear beautiful from a
distance, i.e. from a human point-of-view, but viewed close-up they would
suggest the ultimate ugliness, a truly frightening, chaotic, seething mass of
flame, the visual intensity of which was matched only by the aural intensity of
infernal noise! In sum, the nearest
experience to Hell - short, that is, of one's being literally burnt alive!
2. Yes, stars are terribly ugly and, given their
primal nature, could not be otherwise.
It is not beauty that is absolute but ugliness, as germane to the
subatomic proton-proton reactions of pure soul.
Ugliness precedes beauty as surely as evil precedes good, or illusion
precedes truth. Theology may distinguish
between a divine Father and a diabolic Satan, between 'Creator' and 'Devil',
but that is largely for the sake of convenience, a mere relative antithesis
between fictions abstracted from specific cosmic facts - namely, a central
(unseen first-mover) star and the peripheral star known to us as the sun, the
latter equivalent, in Biblical terms, to a 'fallen angel', or a star which
exploded out of the primal one in or near this part of the Universe. In actual fact, however, both a tangential star,
like the sun, and the central star are pure soul, or subatomic reactions. You cannot have atomicity in a star, only in
a planet, or partly cooled star, and then only in relation to the mineral and
organic, with the emergence of atoms.
The Devil may be depicted in Christian mythology as beastly, and hence
highly ugly, and the Father as elderly and handsome, but such a contrast,
though theologically expedient, does little justice to the similarity which
must in reality exist between the sun and the central star of the Galaxy -
namely that the central star would be just as ugly, viewed close-up, as the
sun. Leaving burdensome theology aside,
we may maintain, with utter conviction, that evolution begins in ugliness and
only slowly proceeds towards the Beautiful through the development of benign
nature.
3. I wrote 'benign' advisably. For anyone familiar, through encyclopaedias
and the like, with primeval times will know that the first manifestations of
life on this planet were anything but beautiful! Indeed, they were extremely ugly, and not
only with regard to reptiles but to nature in the raw, the earliest plants,
which formed dense and pitiless jungles, traps of pain and death for other life
forms, including early man, who was no less ugly than everything else, since
descended from apes. If reptiles were
the ugliest of primeval life forms, then the ensuing mammals were not much
better, and even the caveman, wrapped in furs and carrying a club or crude
spear for hunting, left a lot to be desired, what with his ape-like features
and hairy body, his painful soul and wild behaviour. Pain is of course the qualitative attribute
of ugliness, the stars being pure pain, though a pain that is beneath all
understanding, since they lack a consciousness and body to register it,
theology thereby entitled to endow the Father (as an anthropomorphic
extrapolation from the central star) with a painless, or 'heavenly', status,
against which the conscious pain of plants, animals, and men must seem a
'fall', even if, like all such Biblical falls, it is really a fall forwards, or
something tending towards the possibility of beauty and, therefore,
pleasure. Even early man had a capacity
of sorts for pleasure, as did - and still do - the animals and, to a lesser
extent, the plants. But he lived mainly
in pain, like a wild beast, hunting and hunted, fearful and feared, the victim
of just such a 'fall', conscious of his pain, less ugly than the beasts, but
still predominantly so!
4. In time, however, life evolved to beauty, not
just in man but also, to a degree, in plants and animals - a slow, gradual
process of transforming ugliness, refining upon such beauty as had been
achieved, ordering life in such a way as to make pleasure predominate when,
with regard to man, pagan civilization came to supersede the primeval barbarism
of primitive man in certain parts of the world, particularly the Middle East
and, thereafter, Greece and the Mediterranean as a whole.
5. Early civilization was not, of course,
hedonistic in essence but, rather, stoical and therefore largely a continuation,
on more refined terms, of primitive barbarism, a negative prelude to a positive
climax, the romantic, so to speak, preceding the classical, stoicism leading,
as in ancient Greece, to hedonism, once the pursuit of pleasure had come to
replace the endurance of pain as the chief virtue. At last, beauty triumphant over ugliness, man
living on the electron side of the atomic dualism of the flesh to a greater
extent than on its proton side - at least where the privileged Few were
concerned; though we should never forget that life was still a predominantly
painful affair for the slaves and soldiers and other categories of men whom we
may describe as less than civilized, i.e. not permitted or able to be
hedonistic. Only a small minority could
be civilized in this pagan sense, indulgent of crude positive sensation and
sensuality as the lowest commitment to spirit, the pseudo-spirit of the
minority electron content of the flesh, given the absolutely autocratic
integrity of pagan civilization, one stemming from pure soul in aristocratic
stoicism.
6. When we turn to Western civilization in its
early-stage grand-bourgeois manifestation, however, we find that beauty has
become more refined, that, even after a painful and largely stoical inception
during the Dark Ages, Roman Catholic civilization has a profounder concept of
the Beautiful than had either the ancient Greek or Roman civilizations, and a
no-less profounder concept of pleasure, a more refined sense of pleasure
through positive sensation in the rites and sacraments of the Church. Now that the slender Blessed Virgin has come
to supersede the fleshy Venus as the ideal of feminine beauty, the highest type
of the Beautiful, we find the concomitant attribute of the highest type of
sensuality, the ideal of refined pleasure in the smell of incense and the feel
of Holy Water, the appearance of the colourful priestly vestments and the
stained-glass windows, the celebration of the Eucharist through the sacramental
symbolism of Christ's body and blood, the lighting of candles and the murmured
chanting of Latin, the parallel placement of the hands in prayer and other such
refined sensual indulgences as signify an evolutionary progression over the
unabashed sensuality (hedonism) of the civilized pagans which, from a Catholic
standpoint, was regarded as sinful, its contemporary equivalent, in a similar
indulgence of crude sensuality, necessitating confession and neutralization, as
it were, through priestly absolution.
Being in part an extension of sensuality from crude to refined levels,
Catholicism anticipates sin and expects confession. Appertaining to the inception of the
theocratic spectrum, on which a knowledge and intimation of truth avowedly
exists, it cannot encourage a religious indulgence more applicable to the
autocratic spectrum. Not pseudo-spirit
but quasi-spirit is its religious ideal, through a very moderate indulgence of
the minority electron content of the flesh.
If the masses are too backward to appreciate truth in the unadulterated
guise of the Holy Spirit, then they must at least make efforts to curb their
sensuality and maintain allegiance to the refined beauty of the Blessed
Virgin. There is no higher beauty than
hers!
7. Which is, of course, a theological
acknowledgement of a biological fact - namely, that beauty, as the highest
manifestation of phenomenal form, attains to a climax in the female body, with
particular reference to the face.
Beautiful women are not only more beautiful than beautiful or handsome
men; they are more beautiful than beautiful animals and plants as well, the
culmination of a process of evolution that began in nature and proceeded, via
the animals, to mankind, where its purest and most absolute manifestation was
to be found in woman. For what is
absolute beauty but a form that is untarnished by ugliness, a perfectly formed
human body and face? If evolution began
in absolute ugliness, then it was not until mankind had reached the stage of
producing beautiful women ... that it attained to absolute beauty or, at any rate,
to the nearest equivalent thereof. We
cannot in all honesty claim that a cat or a flower is more beautiful than a
beautiful woman, even though we may recognize a lower manifestation of the
Beautiful in it, perhaps even a lower manifestation of absolute beauty - one
less complex or ingenious than in a woman.
And yet, even with regard to the Catholic Middle Ages, we must admit
that refined beauty and pleasure were the preserve of only a tiny minority of
people, usually aristocratic or grand bourgeois, and that, far from sharing in
it, the masses were little better off than the slaves of ancient Greece and
Rome. Whether peasants or artisans,
their lifestyles would have been less than civilized when judged from an aesthetic
point-of-view. For civilization was
still an elite affair, surrounded by a sprawling barbarism of proton pain and
ugliness, slavery and disease, poverty and dirt. It could not have been otherwise; the
galactic-world-order still prevailed!
8. But evolution must continue, and whether revolt
is fuelled by resentment against the control or by a genuinely revolutionary
urge or, indeed, by a paradoxical combination of both, another 'fall' was in
order, this time from beauty and refined pleasure to evil and hate, the
Lutheran protest against subservience of the Church to autocratic dominion, a
late-stage grand-bourgeois rebellion against early-stage grand-bourgeois
precedent, a period of religious strife and inter-denominational persecution,
the great schism known as the Reformation, which gave birth to early
Protestantism as a 'romantic' phase of religion in revolt against the
classicism of the Roman Catholic Church, a kind of Christian equivalent to
stoicism. Well, if Lutheranism signified
a 'fall' from refined pleasure to unrefined hatred, or a puritanical hatred of
pleasure, it was nevertheless the inception of a new civilization, which was to
flower into the religion of love, a fresh classicism superior to the Catholic
variety to the extent that emotional love is superior to refined pleasure, or
the Good to the Beautiful. This
bourgeois civilization, centred in Christ, was to last from approximately the
17-19th centuries, pushing Catholic civilization into an inferior historical
position, since the latter still clung to beauty, in the person of the Blessed
Virgin, and could not do otherwise.
Protestant classicism was triumphant!
9. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century,
however, a new reformer and revolutionary writer was at work undermining the
ethical foundations of this second Western civilization, and another 'fall' ...
from the positive side of the emotional plane to the negative side of the
feeling one ... was in the making - namely, the Marxist fall from goodness and
love in Puritan classicism to illusion and sadness in Communist romanticism,
the revolt of the Anti-Christ against Christian precedent, an antithetical
equivalent of the Lutheran (anti-Virgin?) revolt against Catholicism,
necessarily early-stage petty bourgeois in time and, like all such revolts,
successful only after a protracted struggle with the status quo, both inside
and outside Russia, the country destined, through Lenin, to become the world's
first Communist state. Inevitably, the
10. However that may be, the age of relative truth
(neo-Buddhism) and happiness cannot last for ever, neither on its American nor
its Russian sides, since evolution must go forwards to an absolutely
transcendental age, an age when not happiness but awareness will be the primary
religious ideal. In other words, there
must be an extension of the theocratic spectrum beyond the Hitlerian
Second Coming to an Anti-Hitler and/or True World Messiah, in which the
relative absolutism, so to speak, of hypercontemplation,
corresponding to a 'fall' from happiness to visionary awareness, from the
majority electron content of the old brain to the minority proton content of
the new brain, will supersede the extreme relativity of positive feelings, and
thus signify the romantic inception of a new and higher civilization, as
germane to Social Transcendentalism.
11. Not, then, an antithetical equivalent of the
Blessed Virgin, but a straight antithesis between the inception of the
autocratic spectrum in ancient Greek/Judaic civilization and the future
culmination of the theocratic spectrum in Social Transcendentalist civilization;
the first phase, in stoicism, of the former civilization corresponding to the
second phase, in hypermeditation, of the latter one;
the first phase, in hallucinogenic enlightenment, of the latter civilization
corresponding to the second phase, in hedonism, of the former one, though as a
straight antithesis in each case. For
just as stoicism preceded hedonism in the ancient autocratic world, so hypercontemplation of hallucinogenic enlightenment must
precede hypermeditation in the future theocratic
world, the one significant of a romantic 'fall' from late-stage petty-bourgeois
classicism in transcendental meditation, the other indicative of a classical
'rise' applicable to the higher phase of an absolutely transcendental age, with
the progression from Social Transcendentalism to Super-transcendentalism, as
germane to the True World Religion.
Whether one chooses to regard the first phase as specific to the
Anti-Hitler and the second as specific to the True World Messiah, with
proletarian and classless distinctions respectively, or to regard them both as
but two aspects of the same absolute age ... is relatively unimportant. Suffice it to say that the one presupposes
the other, and that both alike are two sides of the True World Religion. If the goal is experience of the majority
electron content of the new brain, then the experience of the minority proton
content of that same brain will constitute a quasi-spiritual phase of religious
evolution, the necessary prelude to higher things.
12. But even the indulgence of absolute awareness
through hypermeditation is only a stage on the road
to higher things - namely, the supersession of men by
the Supermen and Superbeings of the first and second
phases of the post-Human Millennium, when, firstly, human brains and,
subsequently, new brains (or human brains minus the old brain) will be
artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, so that a
situation the converse of that which preceded pagan civilization, and indeed
mankind in general, duly arises - a situation as much above and beyond man as,
first, trees and, later, apes were beneath and before him ... in the early
evolution of life on this planet. So a
straight antithesis, in the first phase of the post-Human Millennium, between
Supermen and apes, and likewise a straight antithesis, in its second phase,
between Superbeings and trees, antitheses which, in
religious terms, would in each case be between different degrees of awareness
and different degrees of stupor; between that which, in the trees, is beneath
consciousness and that which, in the hypermeditative
new-brain collectivizations, would be above it; or
that which, in the apes, is only crudely conscious and that which, in the hypercontemplative brain collectivizations,
would be highly conscious - the one natural, the other supernatural.
13. And so we can now take evolution on beyond the
post-Human Millennium to the post-Millennial Beyond, in accordance with the
guidance of written truth, and envisage the Spiritual Globes of pure spirit
emerging from the Superbeings with the culmination of
their hypermeditation. Such free-electron transcendences, the
antithesis to planets, will converge towards and expand into other such
transcendences in a cumulative process leading, in due course, to the formation
of Galactic Spiritual Globes, or globes of pure spirit that are so vast as to
rival the sun in scale, the antithesis, in short, of peripheral stars. Well, such a process, taken to its ultimate
conclusion, should result in a Universal Spiritual Globe, the sum-product of all
convergence and expansion of Galactic Spiritual Globes, and this ultimate globe
of pure spirit, corresponding to the Omega Point (de Chardin),
will constitute an antithesis to the central stars (one to each galaxy), and so
bring evolution to a climax on terms diametrically antithetical to its
inception in the raging flame of pure soul.
What began in the Many will culminate in the One. What began as proton-proton reactions will
culminate in electron-electron attractions.
What began as absolute ugliness will culminate in absolute truth. What began as the pain that is beneath all
understanding will culminate in the peace that is above all understanding. What began in the archdiabolic
will culminate in ultimate divinity.
What began as a gaseous revolt against the void will culminate in the
utmost being. Such an utmost beingfulness could never be the source of an absolute fall
into the lowest doing of pure soul.
There is no 'eternal recurrence' in that sense, even if earthly
evolution may be regarded as progressing from one absolute to another via a
relativity, and the progression towards the second absolute is interpreted in
terms of a return to absolutism, albeit it be diametrically antithetical to the
first.
14. No matter, the ultimate absolutism of the
Omega Point will not be the source of innumerable alpha absolutes of pure
soul. On the contrary, it will be an
eternal peace, the culmination of all evolution in ultimate truth. Stars and planets will eventually
disintegrate, leaving the Void to the peace that surpasses all
understanding. The Universe won't simply
culminate in God; it will be God. For
the more Heaven expands the less room there will be for Hell, and we may be
confident that the expansion of the former will hasten the decline of the
latter. Eventually, not a single star or
planet will remain in existence, and the birth of new stars out of exploding
gases will cease to be possible in a void which is increasingly being filled by
God's presence, the steady expansion of pure spirit. Only when the last star collapses and
disintegrates ... will the Universe be brought to perfection in pure spirit
alone. The utter triumph of spirit over
soul will be but a reflection of evolutionary progress towards a divine
universe, a universe destined to last forever.
All appearances having passed away, only essence remaining. Such is the way of evolution - a way that
culminates in bliss!
15. But not without the historical struggle that
takes place in the world and that, no matter how sure one may be of the final
outcome, remains of the gravest importance for those of us engaged in it on
behalf of the True, as of truth. The
struggle with the enemy, be he autocratic or democratic, aristocratic or
plutocratic, is never easy; for the alpha side of the Universe and all that
stems from it is tenacious and strong!
Those of us privileged to struggle on behalf of theocracy, particularly
the ultimate theocracy of Social Transcendentalism, will have to struggle long
and hard to overcome the reactionary and traditional enemies of evolutionary
progress, whose numbers are legion. We
shall have to endure much hardship and make great sacrifices. But we shall have the consolation of knowing
that the current of evolutionary progress flows on our side, and that, come
what may, truth alone will eventually triumph!
ON CIVILIZED EVOLUTION
1. In a truly aristocratic civilization, such as
the early phase of ancient Greece, stoicism is the religious ideal, because
pain tends to vastly predominate over pleasure, and the courageous endurance of
pain is consequently regarded as the noblest posture. Beginning in an absolute phase of proton
domination, this negative civilization proceeds, in due course of pagan time,
towards a more relative integrity, in which hedonism, or the pursuit of
pleasure, comes to be regarded as the chief good. It switches, in other words, from the proton
side of an atomic divide to its electron side, from negative to positive
sensations, as relative to the minority electron content of the flesh. Thus it progresses from a soulful to a
pseudo-spiritual bias, and with this progression comes a more marked
distinction between an elite - formerly stoical - of pleasure-seekers and a
mass of toiling sufferers, in contrast to the more general diffusion of pain
prevailing hitherto. The elite, mainly
aristocratic, switch from their proton origins to a kind of electron-biased
identification, because pleasure pertains to the electron side of the flesh,
which is, of course, its positive side.
Thus, in reflecting the atomic constitution of the flesh, sensual
civilization in its higher phase reserves the pursuit of pleasure for that tiny
minority, who function as electron equivalents, while simultaneously obliging
the vast majority - peasants, soldiers, slaves, etc. - to function as proton
equivalents in a generally painful existence.
The elite are what they are precisely because their lifestyles are
morally superior to those of the toiling, suffering masses - positive and pleasurable
rather than negative and painful. If
stoicism was the moral ideal of the earliest aristocrats, one not widely shared
by the masses, then hedonism became the ideal of their more fortunate
successors in the relative phase of pagan civilization.
2. With the development of Catholic civilization
out of the painful Dark Ages in Western Europe, we find a similar dichotomy
between an elite and a toiling mass, because, for all its moral progress,
Catholic civilization is still a predominantly sensual civilization and must
accordingly reflect the ratio of protons to electrons in the flesh, with,
paradoxically, the upper classes functioning in an electron-biased context and
the lower classes - peasants, artisans, soldiers - remaining akin to proton
equivalents. From being exclusively
autocratic, as in ancient
3. However that may be, the disparity between
refined pleasure and unrefined pain in early Western civilization, between
admiration for the Beautiful and endurance of ugliness, was but a reflection of
the ratio of electrons to protons in the flesh, since Catholic civilization was
essentially sensual. Not so the
proton-biased revolt against this extreme relativity, which took the form of
the Reformation and signified a 'fall' from beauty and pleasure to evil and
hate, that is to say, from the positive side of the flesh to the negative side
of the heart, from the higher side of a sensual plane to the lower side of an
emotional one, the inception of ethical civilization in the Protestant revolt,
the beginnings of a truly relative Christian civilization. For, unlike the flesh, the atomic
constitution of the heart, that seat of the emotions, is, if anything, more
balanced, with a slight preponderance of electrons over protons, if one is
prepared to believe, as many people would, that love is a stronger emotion than
hate; though, naturally, this will depend on the individual, not least of all
in terms of his class integrity as conditioned, in large measure, by
environment. Suffice it to say that, for
a majority of small-town and suburban dwellers, love would be considered the
stronger emotion, if only marginally so!
Yet the emergence of Protestant civilization reflected a progression
from the outer to the inner, from the flesh to the heart, from refined pleasure
to negative emotions, though it didn't, of course, emerge without a bitter
struggle with autocratic and theocratic precedent, not least of all in England,
where a bloody civil war was necessary to shift the balance of power towards
the bourgeoisie.
4. However, if love was the religious ideal of
the Protestants, it didn't automatically follow that everyone would experience
or uphold it. On the contrary, there
were plenty of people more disposed to hate, and not only among the
masses! For if the heart is
approximately balanced between electrons and protons, it follows that an
emotional civilization will reflect this balance, and so divide power or
sovereignty between the bourgeoisie and the (newly-emergent) proletariat, as
signified by the two-party system, with the haters, or representatives of evil,
on one side, and the lovers, or representatives of good, on the other, as
between Liberals and Tories, the democratic compromise of an ethical
civilization, with an emotional Church behind it. What began in evil, as a hatred of beauty and
autocracy, progresses only slowly towards good, as a love of justice and
democracy. But this civilization remains
relative, divided between disparate interests, as between capitalism and
socialism, electron-biased Tories and proton-biased Liberals.
5. Since Protestant civilization was centred in
an ethical compromise, so the revolt against it was post-ethical, the
reflection of another 'fall', this time from the positive side of the emotions
to the negative side of the feelings, from the heart to the old brain, from
love to sadness. This Marxist-Leninist
revolt gave birth to a new civilization, with
6. Since a relative absolutism in hedonism
preceded the extreme relativity of Roman Catholic civilization in the Middle
Ages, so a relative absolutism in LSD-induced visionary awareness will have to
follow the extreme relativity of Communist civilization, if there is to be any
real evolutionary progress towards the Millennium, that post-human epoch in
time. Thus one is speaking of another
'fall', germane to the inception of a new and, indeed, ultimate civilization,
this time from the happiness classicism of mature Socialism to the visionary
awareness of LSD tripping, from the majority electron content of the old brain
to the minority proton content of the new brain, and the consequent emergence
of another elite to lead the masses in the name of Social Transcendentalism and
its concomitance of evolutionary truth.
Just as the atomic constitution of the old brain signifies an imbalance
favouring the electron - if, as many people would agree, happiness is deeper
than sadness - and thus represents an evolutionary progression beyond the
marginal electron imbalance of the heart, so the ratio of electrons to protons
in the new brain may be assumed to far outbalance anything found elsewhere,
including its immediate evolutionary precursor, and to a degree whereby an
antithesis with the flesh may be inferred.
Consequently the era of LSD tripping will be superseded, in due time, by
an era of hypermeditation, or meditation solely
centred on awareness and conducted, via the aid of special harnesses suspended
from overhead pulleys, at a vertical, and hence transcendental, remove from the
ground; an era which will correspond to a progression from the minority proton
content of the new brain to its (vastly) majority electron content, as religion
becomes truly absolute and society, far from embracing a People’s democracy (as
in socialist states), increasingly comes to reflect this religious absolutism
to an extent whereby any degree or form of proton control or identification
becomes both unnecessary and irrelevant, the need for a Leader, in the
first-phase sense, no longer valid, since society will have become too firmly
set on course for the post-Human Millennium to require any such dictatorial
guidance.
7. Just as the aristocracy, including the
monarch, are distinct from the peasantry in a royalist society, so a meritocracy,
including the Leader, must be considered distinct from the proletariat in a
Centrist society (as we may call that which is based around the concept of the
Centre, as signifying the omega-most sensible arrangement of society), and thus
function as proton equivalents vis-à-vis the People, serving their interests as
well as those of the Leader. If the
aristocracy of the Catholic civilization of Western Europe became electron
equivalents, to be served by the proton masses, then the meritocracy of a
Social Transcendentalist civilization in any future Centrist society must serve
the masses and follow the directives of their Leader, in whom sovereignty would
be vested no less absolutely than (it was) in the autocratic monarch. If aristocracy and meritocracy are
antithetical, then so, too, are the peasantry and the proletariat, the former
functioning in autocratic terms as proton equivalents, the latter
corresponding, in a truly theocratic society, to electron equivalents; the
former serving the aristocracy, the latter being served by the
meritocracy. Thus the Leader does not
rule the people like a monarch, but, as his title suggests, leads them. He leads because he is out front, because he
represents evolutionary truth, and this empowers him to dictate. He is no mere People’s representative,
accountable to the People. For he is not
of the People but antithetical to them - a proton equivalent vis-à-vis an
electron mass.
8. Where, on the other hand, the people are sovereign,
as in the more emotional context of parliamentary democracy, they are divided
between proton and electron sides, corresponding to proletariat and
bourgeoisie, and will elect a representative to govern on their behalf. Such a representative will not, of course,
represent all the electorate, but solely those to whom he corresponds on
whichever elemental terms. Thus an
elected proton equivalent, or member of the left-wing party, will govern on
behalf of the workers, whereas an elected electron equivalent, or member of the
right-wing party, will govern on behalf of the bourgeoisie, provided, however,
that his party is in office. In either
case, the elected representative will be accountable to his supporters, since
he corresponds to them.
9. Where, by contrast, there is no such elemental
correspondence - of protons to protons or of electrons to electrons - there can
be no accountability, and so the sovereign, be he monarch or dictator, is
comparatively free to go his own way, whether in terms of his own interests or
those of evolutionary progress and, by implication, what is best in the People
- namely, their spiritual potential. As
an electron equivalent, the monarch paradoxically rules a proton mass of
peasants, soldiers, slaves, etc., whereas the dictator, corresponding to a
proton equivalent, no less paradoxically leads an electron mass of
proletarians, police, military police, etc.
I say 'paradoxically' with some justification, since it is logically
more in the nature of a proton equivalent to rule, indeed to tyrannize, and of
an electron equivalent to serve himself, which, to some extent, each type
does. The earliest kings, or tyrants,
were, of course, almost invariably proton equivalents; for early pagan society
was by no means atomic but, rather, subatomic, since that which is atomic
presupposes evolution to the relative and, in particular, to a democratic level
of society, whether physically or emotionally.
Yet most Western kings, certainly in the Roman Catholic civilization of
Medieval Europe, had effectively become electron equivalents, given, in
conjunction with the aristocracy generally, to the pursuit of pleasure and to
admiration of the Beautiful, and consequently they were no longer truly
representative of the aristocratic, with its stoical foundations.
10. Doubtless 'rule' is the Western equivalent or
successor to pagan tyranny, just as 'government' appears to be the democratic
equivalent or successor to feudal rule.
A democratic politician, whose party is in office, will both represent
and govern, representing his constituents or, more correctly, his supporters in
the local constituency, but governing the mass of those who did not vote for
him and who are accordingly his elemental antithesis. By contrast, the dictator of a Fascist/Centrist
society will lead, or serve, the People in his capacity as a proton equivalent
vis-à-vis a newly-established electron mass.
Yet this leadership will sometimes paradoxically entail the metaphorical
cracking of a coercive whip! To speak of
him in this connection as a ruler, however, would simply be to mistakenly
regard him, in cruder terms, as an autocrat, or someone who rules (tyrannizes)
over the masses in his own and/or fellow aristocrats' material interests. Quite the contrary, he will have the People's
interests at heart, either soulfully, as in a Socialist dictatorship, or with
regard to their spiritual progress, as in a Fascist and, hopefully to a much
greater extent in the future, Centrist (Social Transcendental) one. Whereas the first kind of dictatorship
eventually leads to a Socialist democracy, where a particle-biased electron
proletariat are politically sovereign, the second kind of dictatorship will
eventually lead to a Centrist theocracy, where the proletariat, become
classless in an electron-wavicle equivalent, are religiously
sovereign. It is all the difference
between the old and the new brains, between spiritual politics and political
religion. In the Socialist case, one may
claim that dictatorial leadership is by the autocratic intelligentsia, since
they correspond to the minority proton content of the old brain, whereas in the
Centrist case it is by the theocratic intelligentsia, who correspond to the
minority proton content of the new brain.
The governmental representatives of the People, who come in-between this,
will generally correspond, as democratic intelligentsia, to the electron/proton
(neutron?) content of the midbrain. The
collapse of the Soviet Union has already demonstrated the progression from
State Socialist autocracy to Social Democracy, and, hopefully, a future
Centrist revolution in Ireland or elsewhere will demonstrate, in due time, the
emergence of a Social Theocracy from republican democracy.
11. Within the Western Christian framework we can
list the evolution of divinities - primary and secondary - as follows: the
Father, the Blessed Virgin, the Anti-Virgin, the Son, the Anti-Christ, the
Second Coming, and the Holy Ghost. If
the Father corresponds to the autocratic spectrum, then the Blessed Virgin corresponds
to the Catholic inception of the theocratic spectrum, after which the Lutheran
schism gives birth to an heretical subdivision of the theocratic spectrum in
early Protestantism. From being negative
in its first phase, Protestantism becomes positive in its second phase, largely
through the influence of Calvin, who might be defined (in contrast to Luther's
status as the Anti-Virgin) as the Pro-Christ, and thus attains to a classical
perfection in Christianity-proper, as germane to the religion of love, with
Christ as its cynosure.
12. Further along this relative theocratic
spectrum, however, we encounter the Marxist rebellion against the practical
implementation, in liberalism and capitalism, of Protestant theology, which
leads, via Lenin, to the birth of a new religion, based on the teachings of the
Anti-Christ, in Soviet Communism, the first phase of which, under the
dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin, is negative, the second phase, largely in
consequence of Krushchev's subsequent influence,
becoming positive with the attainment - under, first, Gorbachev and then, more
completely, Yeltsin - of a classical perfection in which People’s democracy and
socialism are the political and economic concomitants, respectively, of what
had been Marxist-Leninist theology. This
does not imply, however, that Krushchev corresponds
to a Second Coming, though there is of course scope for various interpretations
and generalizations in this largely speculative sphere of historical
determinism! Neither need we seriously
attach such a status to Hitler, if we are basing our contentions on strictly
Western theological progressions from the Blessed Virgin to the Second Coming,
which necessarily remain sketchy; though Hitler certainly signified a revolt
against Soviet Communism, if in its first, or Bolshevik, phase. The only phase or time during which such a
revolt is historically valid is when it is against the classical phase of a
preceding civilization, so that we get a 'fall', as with Luther and Marx, from
the classical perfections of mature Catholicism and Protestantism respectively,
a 'fall', in the paradoxical nature of evolution, to the negative, or romantic,
side of a higher moral plane. But we
should not overlook the fact that both the Anti-Virgin and the Anti-Christ
pertain to the heretical subdivision of the theocratic spectrum, because no
anti-divinity could legitimately pertain to its main or absolute part, only the
positive divinities of the Blessed Virgin and the Second Coming
respectively. So instead of being a
revolt against classical Communism, the Second Coming, regarded from a Western
standpoint, would be an extension of the truly theocratic spectrum into a new
and final religion, the True World Religion of Social Transcendentalism - a
religion which could only lead, in due time, to the ultimate divinity of the
Holy Spirit, with the culmination of all evolution.
13. The evolutionary sketch outlined above is not,
of course, ideal. For the Christian
framework is limited, and accordingly fails to do proper justice to the
evolution of religion considered in its totality, as a global phenomenon. I have already used other frameworks in my
speculations, the most comprehensive being that which extends the theocratic
spectrum beyond an antithetical equivalent (Second Coming) of the Blessed
Virgin in a straight antithesis (involving opposite spectra) between one
absolute and another, such as the True World Messiah and Moses. For, after all, Western civilization begins
on an early-stage grand-bourgeois level with Roman Catholicism, which is
necessarily relative when compared with the absolute inception of civilization
in pagan antiquity. Similarly, the
concept of a Second Coming, pertaining to this Christian framework, is relative
(if on extreme terms) in comparison with the absolute culmination of civilization
still to-come, with the transcendental future.
Of what use is such a concept to a person of Hindu or Buddhist or Moslem
or Judaic descent? He will regard it as
applicable to Christianity and to Christianity alone, and would take umbrage at
the prospect of having to abandon his own religion for the sake of another, no
less parochial one. Clearly, a clean
break with all parochial, so-called world religions is desirable, if people are
eventually to come round to an ultimate world religion. Now this can only be achieved by reference to
a True World Messiah, a Jewish concept transcending everything parochial, a
concept appertaining to Judaism no less than to the historical desire of the
Jewish people for a religion that will transcend all others and unite mankind
in a common faith. I cannot say that I
am particularly partial, in this respect, to the concept of a Second Coming,
even if, in the paradoxical order of things in this relative world, it may have
some value vis-à-vis Christians and, in particular, Catholic peoples.
14. Regarded, then, from a more comprehensive
point-of-view, civilized evolution proceeds from an aristocratic absolutism in
stoical antiquity to an aristocratic relativity, or relative absolutism, in
hedonistic antiquity, that is to say, from a romantic to a classical phase
within a pagan context. Then comes the
early-stage grand-bourgeois phase of civilization in Roman Catholicism, though
not before the Dark Ages have paved the way for this new classicism in a kind
of relative absolutism of aristocratic tyranny.
Against this we get a late-stage grand-bourgeois rebellion through early
Protestantism, and this in turn leads to a fresh classicism in bourgeois
Puritanism. An early-stage
petty-bourgeois revolt against mature Protestantism is the next logical
evolutionary step and, manifesting in early Communism, this duly leads to
classical Communism in a late-stage petty-bourgeois/early proletarian context
of People’s democracy, which, under the ideological sanctions firstly of détente
and then of glasnost, perestroika, etc., is prepared to peacefully
co-exist with the bourgeois West, just as the Protestant West was prepared to
co-exist, if not always peacefully then at least grudgingly, with the Roman
Catholic civilization of an earlier time.
This finally brings us to the transcendental future, with civilized
evolution again manifesting in two phases - the first, or romantic, phase with
regard to the relative awareness of LSD-induced visionary experience, and the
second, or classical, phase with regard to the absolute awareness of hypermeditation, both of these antithetical to the
equivalent phases of pagan antiquity, LSD tripping to hedonism and hypermeditation to stoicism. So just as pagan antiquity was beneath the
Western Christian pale, so transcendental futurity will be above it, the True
World Messiah appertaining to a classless absolutism as opposed to a
petty-bourgeois relativity. In between
come the Catholic, Protestant, and Communist civilizations, as germane to
grand-bourgeois, bourgeois, and petty-bourgeois stages of evolution, their
classical ideals refined sensuality, love, and happiness respectively.
PART FOUR:
MAXIMS/NOTES
ON IDEOLOGICAL SPECTRA, ETC.
1. From the autocratic and the democratic to the
theocratic; from the monarch and the prime minister and/or president to the
dictator.
2. From the monarchic and the prime ministerial
and/or presidential to the dictatorial; from rule and representation to
service.
3. From autocratic and democratic economics to
theocratic economics; from Feudalism and Capitalism and/or Socialism to
Centrism (Centre trusteeship of the means of production).
4. From autocratic and democratic politics to
theocratic politics; from Authoritarianism and Parliamentarianism to
Totalitarianism.
5. From autocratic and democratic religion to
theocratic religion; from Paganism and/or Roman Catholicism and Protestantism
and/or Communism to Social Transcendentalism and/or Super-transcendentalism.
6. From autocratic economics and democratic
politics to theocratic religion; from Feudalism and Parliamentarianism to
Social Transcendentalism.
7. From autocratic politics and democratic
religion to theocratic economics; from Authoritarianism and Protestantism and/or
Communism to Centrism.
8. From autocratic religion and democratic
economics to theocratic politics; from Paganism and/or Roman Catholicism and
Capitalism and/or Socialism to Totalitarianism.
9. From autocratic economics and politics to
autocratic religion; from Feudalism and Authoritarianism to Roman Catholicism.
10. From democratic economics and politics to
democratic religion; from Capitalism and/or Socialism and Parliamentarianism to
Protestantism and/or Communism.
11. From theocratic economics and politics to
theocratic religion; from Centrism and Totalitarianism to Social
Transcendentalism.
12. From an economic (proton) root and a political
(atomic) stem to a religious (electron) flower; from soul and matter to spirit.
13. In Ireland, where Social Transcendentalism
should first take root, economics and politics will be subordinated to
religion. Hence, while being centrist
and totalitarian, Social Transcendentalism should remain primarily religious. In other words, Social Transcendentalism comes
first, because in Ireland, traditionally, religion takes precedence over
economics and politics. (Unlike, for example, in
14. Social Transcendentalism is the first phase of
a proletarian religion, the relative (LSD-induced visionary awareness) phase
leading, in due course, to Super-transcendentalism, in which hypermeditation becomes the absolute focus of religious
endeavour.
15. With the attainment to the second phase of
proletarian religion, both economics and politics will effectively cease to
exist in any recognizable sense.
However, while Social Transcendentalism is the order of the day,
centrism and totalitarianism will continue to prevail, though in a subordinate
capacity to the religious essence of the movement. Social Transcendentalism is not politically
centrist (in the middle-ground sense of that term), but religiously cent(e)rist. For the
Centre, as defined by me in relation to Social Transcendentalism, is the most
radically omega-orientated of all phenomena.
16. Although embracing both economic and political
responsibilities, the Social Transcendentalist leader will predominantly remain
what he had been (before assuming office), namely an electron equivalent, and
this because he is not simply a dictator but, more importantly, a religious
guide, the embodiment, as it were, of the Holy Spirit. Thus his sovereignty is primarily justified
on religious grounds, in contrast to the sovereignty of a political and/or
economic dictator like Hitler or Mussolini, who puts politics first, whether in
terms of Nazism or Fascism.
17. Instead of subordinating religion - Protestant
and/or Catholic - to politics, as did Fascism, Social Transcendentalism will
subordinate politics to religion and economics to politics. Both of these fundamentally diabolical
phenomena will be eclipsed by religion and absorbed into the Leader, who,
alone, should have the moral and spiritual strength to bear them in the name of
truth and the concomitant development by the People of their spiritual
potential. Neither economics nor
politics can corrupt the Social Transcendental Messiah, who will subordinate
these proton and atomic phenomena to his electron will, which is divine.
18. Thus he who represents the Divine Will is the
true approximation to the Second Coming and/or True World Messiah. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini can be said to
have done so! Only the Leader of Social
Transcendentalism can be accredited true messianic status; for he is
essentially an electron equivalent, who must subordinate politics and economics
to his will.
19. Consequently, he forms an antithesis to the
true kings of autocratic antiquity, monarchs who were proton equivalents ruling
the populace in their own, largely soulful interests. Such kings may have been surrounded, in time,
by an electron-biased ruling nobility, or aristocracy, but their
responsibilities of state ensured a less hedonistic, and therefore more
stoical, lifestyle. Likewise the leader
of a Social Transcendentalist society may find himself, in the relative nature
of things, surrounded by a proton-biased serving nobility, or bureaucracy, who
must execute his will and thus serve the People. But for all his dictatorial responsibilities,
he will remain predominantly an electron equivalent, in spiritual touch with
the electron-biased proletariat to a no-less significant extent than (was) the
ruling monarch of autocratic antiquity in soulful touch with the proton-biased
peasantry of his kingdom.
20. Monarch - aristocracy - peasantry/soldiery: a
proton - electron - proton-biased atomicity indicating a distinct bias for the
proton side of matter. Leader -
bureaucracy - proletariat/police: an electron - proton - electron-biased
atomicity indicating a distinct bias for the electron side of matter. The former stemming from the proton-proton
reactions of pure soul; the latter aspiring towards the electron-electron
attractions of pure spirit. From the
Father to the Holy Ghost, as from the First Cause to the Final Effect.
21. And yet one should never forget that such
atomic divisions and structures are but rough guides to basic realities rather
than immutable absolutes. There is an
electron side to every proton equivalent; a proton side to every electron
equivalent. The king, too, can be
hedonistically self-indulgent when it suits him. The leader can also be ruthlessly dictatorial
when he considers it appropriate to be so.
True absolutes are both anterior and posterior to material evolution,
though flame can consume it. The real
purpose of our being here is to get spirit beyond material constraints and,
worse still, its exposure to soul. For
pure spirit is indestructible!
22. Ideal slogan for the true Irish people:
Forever theocratic!
23. Militant propaganda slogan against the false
Irish people: Democrats beware, theocrats are here!
24. Just as, for the revolutionary democrat
struggling on behalf of socialist ideology in a liberal democracy, the most
appropriate slogan would be: Forward to a People’s democracy! so, for the
revolutionary theocrat struggling on behalf of Social Transcendentalism in a
Catholic theocracy, the most appropriate slogan must be: Forward to a People’s
theocracy!
25. As liberal democracy to the socialist
revolutionary, so Roman Catholicism to the revolutionary theocrat. You do not extend the democratic spectrum
(from liberal to social democracy) without a struggle with the liberal status
quo. Similarly, you will not extend the
theocratic spectrum (from Roman Catholicism to Social Transcendentalism)
without a struggle with the Catholic status quo. Needless to say, both struggles are mutually
exclusive.
26. Catholicism corresponds to a grand-bourgeois
autocratic (feudal) theocracy. By
contrast, Social Transcendentalism will correspond to a proletarian theocratic
(centrist) theocracy. There is all the
difference between the Middle Ages and the twenty-first century in these two
theocracies.
27. People have often spoken of a Jewish world
conspiracy, but, in reality, there can be no such thing. The Jew will never dominate the world, for
the simple reason that we are evolving towards an ideological identification
and away, in consequence, from tribal roots.
Social Transcendentalists of Jewish descent may well be in highly
influential positions in the world to-come, but to regard them as Jews would be
to fall into an anachronistic trap nothing short of slanderous!
28. An Israeli Social Transcendentalist would be
as far from being a Jew as an Irish Social Transcendentalist from being a
Celt. As far as I am concerned, Israelis
and Irishmen are but passing (nationalist) phenomena in between tribal and
ideological extremes. In the coming age,
there will be neither Jews nor Celts, neither Israelis nor Irishmen, but
regional components of supra-national federations of Social Transcendental
Centres.
29. One should perhaps distinguish between worker
and proletarian, reserving the use of the latter term for citizens of socialist
states, with the implication that they signify a transformation from the proton
to the electron side of an atomic integrity, and are therefore essentially
different from and superior to the proton-biased masses of a bourgeois state
who, by contrast, are but an evolutionary stage further along from peasants
(serfs), as a liberal manifestation of proton enslavement.
30. In this respect, nothing could be more
subjective and slanderous than to refer to proletarians in socialist states as 'mob',
'rabble', 'herd', etc., as some Western writers, of liberal tendency, are only
too disposed to doing. If such terms are
ever applicable to the people at all, they would seem more relevant to the
proton masses, or workers, of a liberal society, who are simply the exploited
and exploitable victims of a bourgeois elite, and may accordingly come to
reflect this fact, from time to time, in uncivilized conduct and speech.
31. Social Transcendentalism in Ireland cannot
solely appeal to proletarians, but must be regarded as an Irish Movement, a
movement intended to extend theocracy in a Social Transcendentalist direction,
rather than to extend democracy in a socialist one, and consequently aimed at
the supersession of all democracy and, by
implication, republicanism, which is but an acknowledgement of the People’s
political sovereignty, the very sovereignty Social Transcendentalism looks down
upon from its theocratic vantage-point.
32. For its founder knows that religious
sovereignty signifies a superior evolutionary development, being a reflection
of post-republican and truly theocratic
thinking, in which the Leader comes to embody and/or intimate of the Holy
Spirit in his correspondence to a Second Coming, beyond and above any
democratic sovereignty, the kind that every true Irishman will know, in his
heart of hearts, to be a Protestant phenomenon, more relevant to the British
than to the time-honoured upholders of a theocratic bias.
ON ANTITHETICAL EQUIVALENTS, ETC.
1. Autocratic - democratic - theocratic; one
might even say: horses - carriages/cars - motorbikes, if one wanted to
establish approximate correlations where such modes of transportation were
concerned. Certainly there is something
autocratic (aristocratic) about using a horse for transportation, just as there
seems to be something theocratic (proletarian) about the use of a
motorbike. And coming in-between these
two extremes is a middle-of-the-road mode of democratic (bourgeois)
transportation in carriages/cars.
2. Of course, the carriage preceded the car,
which only came into its own during a late-stage petty-bourgeois era, when
streamlining (artificial beauty) reached unprecedented levels of perfection
and, as a corollary of this, road performance was greatly improved - an
evolutionary progression commensurate with the attainment of crude
pre-classical black-and-white photography to colour photography or,
alternatively, of crude pre-classical black-and-white film to colour film.
3. Now just as there was a progression, on the
civil side of four-wheeled transportation, from carriages to cars, so there was
a like-progression, on its commercial side, from carts and/or coaches to vans
and/or lorries, not to mention from horse-drawn coaches to buses and/or motorcoaches on its public side.
4. As regards the theocratic (proletarian)
spectrum of transportation, one could contend that bikes (bicycles) preceded
motorbikes in a like-progression from the manual to the automotive. Elsewhere in my writings, I have contended
that mopeds should be conceived as following motorbikes in the evolution of
two-wheeled transportation, and I believe that, despite a strong temptation to
place them in-between bikes and motorbikes as a kind of cross or transition
between the two, this contention remains valid, largely on the grounds that we
are distinguishing between a late-stage petty-bourgeois mode of transportation
and an early-stage proletarian mode, the latter of which presupposes a 'fall'
(forwards) from full automation to semi-manual manipulation within the higher
context of a less materialistic body design.
5. With regard to scooters, which I equate with
a late-stage petty-bourgeois mode of transportation, there seems to be valid
grounds for placing them at the tail-end, as it were, of the autocratic
spectrum, as a kind of successor to the horse, commensurate with such other
pseudo-autocratic or quasi-theocratic phenomena as military dictatorships,
sculptural light art, funk-jazz, and quasi-poetic philosophical writings. In other words, as a mode of transportation
diametrically opposite - though not antithetical to - motorbikes, which, in
returning to political analogies, can be regarded as fascistic.
6. So if scooters and motorbikes are on the
extreme spectra of a late-stage petty-bourgeois era, they may be regarded as
flanking the modern car, that socialistic mode of contemporary road
transportation. A genuine antithesis can
only be established, it seems to me, between the inception and culmination or,
alternatively, relative inception and relative culmination of opposite
spectra. Thus horses and motorbikes
would constitute an example of the latter, as between, say, early-stage
grand-bourgeois and late-stage petty-bourgeois modes of transportation, whilst
a more absolute antithesis could be inferred between, say, elephants and
mopeds, or their future successors.
7. This contention concerning the nature of
antitheses obliges me to revise a previous evaluation, appertaining to certain
earlier works, which posited apes and Supermen as antithetical equivalents and,
by a similar token, trees and Superbeings as a more
extreme manifestation of the same type of antithesis. Anyone familiar with my more recent work,
namely that which concerns the division of human evolution into autocratic,
democratic, and theocratic spectra in a sort of disjointed progression, will
sooner or later discern the anomaly in regarding apes and Supermen as
antithetical equivalents or, more correctly, Supermen as the antithetical
equivalent of apes when, as I have elsewhere pointed out, such an equivalent
can only be inferred to exist between antithetical parts of the same spectrum.
8. Now if civilized human evolution begins in
the autocratic and culminates in the theocratic, as I happen to believe, then anything
pre-human or pre-civilized can only be conceived of as pre-autocratic, whether
we are alluding to cavemen, apes, or trees, and, similarly, anything post-human
or post-civilized can only be regarded as post-theocratic, whether in the guise
of technological personnel, Supermen, or Superbeings
(millennial supervisors, human brain-collectivizations,
and new-brain collectivizations respectively).
9. An antithesis, then, can only be established
between opposite spectra, so one is obliged to conclude that pre-autocratic
apes and post-theocratic Supermen form an antithesis, as, on more radical
terms, do pre-autocratic trees and post-theocratic Superbeings.
10. By contrast, an antithetical equivalent should
only be inferred to exist between phenomena on the same spectrum, such as, say,
late-stage grand-bourgeois Cromwellian revolution on
the inception of the democratic one, and early-stage petty-bourgeois Leninist
revolution at, or just before, its tail-end, these revolutions in large measure
owing their motivation to the parallel theocratic schisms signified by Lutheran
Protestantism and Marxist Communism respectively, which form a similar
antithetical equivalent, albeit one less radical than that between early-stage
grand-bourgeois Roman Catholicism and late-stage petty-bourgeois Fascism.
11. I like to distinguish between middle class and
bourgeoisie in the sense that I equate the former with spiritual/professional
commitments and the latter with material/commercial commitments, so that a
distinct dichotomy can be inferred to exist, in any relative society, between
these two disparate categories, as between electron equivalents and proton
and/or neutron equivalents.
12. Proceeding from a class-evolutionary
viewpoint, I should therefore have to distinguish between upper-middle-class
priests and grand-bourgeois feudalists, middle-class vicars and bourgeois
capitalists, and lower-middle-class gurus and petty-bourgeois socialists.
13. Similarly, an artist may be described as
middle class and a scientist, by contrast, as bourgeois. In the present century, the chief distinction
will be that between lower middle-class artists and petty-bourgeois scientists,
though where, say, the seventeenth century is concerned, the prefixes 'upper'
and 'grand' would be more appropriate.
Whatever the case, I have no hesitation in maintaining that the middle
classes are superior, morally and socially, to the bourgeoisie, to the degree
that spirit is superior to matter.
14. Proton autocrats - atomic democrats - electron
theocrats. Autocracy is a stemming from
the Father, democracy a Christian compromise, and theocracy an aspiration
towards the Holy Spirit. Autocracy
signifies a proton-proton reaction (between monarch and populace), democracy an
atomic compromise between reaction and attraction, and theocracy an
electron-electron attraction (between leader and masses). Autocracy fades away with the emergence and
development of democracy, theocracy only comes properly into its own with the decline
and eclipse of democracy.
15. A fading autocracy (constitutional monarchy)
is a pseudo-autocracy, a not-yet-independent and absolute theocracy (Roman
Catholicism), a pseudo-theocracy, its endorsement of the Holy Spirit
considerably diluted by 'autocratic' compromise with the Blessed Virgin, a
concession to beauty rather than to truth.
Genuine theocracy can only emerge as an aspiration towards truth, in
concentrated awareness. One might say
that pseudo-theocracy indirectly aspires towards truth (perfect essence)
through beauty (perfect appearance), a highly contradictory and paradoxical
situation! And yet still preferable to
any autocratic stemming from ugliness.
16. Autocratic academies - democratic universities
and/or technical colleges - theocratic seminaries. Between academies and seminaries (or their
future Social Transcendentalist successors) one finds the democratic, humanist
institutions of universities and the socialistic, post-humanist institutions of
technical colleges and/or polytechnics.
Certainly the age is partial to the development of the latter, though
the former still exist in abundance throughout the civilized world, even if
their status is in decline in most Western countries, where technical
considerations are taking precedence.
17. However, a genuinely theocratic country would
abolish university education and demolish obsolescent theological colleges,
replacing them with its own higher institutions of theological learning, as
germane to Social Transcendentalism, and thus the truth. It would doubtless subordinate technical
colleges and polytechnics to theological ones, though by no means neglect their
welfare, since technological studies will continue to be an important branch of
post-humanist learning.
18. There would, however, be no academies left in
existence. For if democratic
institutions are unacceptable to a theocratic society, then autocratic ones
would be nothing less than totally irrelevant!
But, of course, a society that is essentially theocratic, even if on a
pseudo-theocratic basis, will not have too many academies in any case. Rather, they pertain to autocratic
democracies (or democratic autocracies), like
19. To be sure, ambivalence is part-and-parcel of
British dualism, of the bourgeois, Christian compromise. If the People are not technically sovereign
in Britain's Constitutional Monarchy within the United Kingdom, then they are
at least intermittently and, in practice, sovereign, since they are free to elect
representatives to parliament who, in the paradoxical order of such a liberal
democracy, will both represent and govern them, depending on the political bias
in question.
20. Such an ambivalent, ambiguous situation has
been the norm in Britain for some three centuries, and it will doubtless
continue to be the norm until such time as history may decide otherwise. The British could not, in all honesty, move
towards a social democracy, even if some of them wanted that. Far too many of them don't and, besides, even
most Socialists are tarred by the parliamentary brush. They speak of a gradual progression to
Socialism, but in reality no such gradualism could bring about a social
democracy in a society run along republican lines. Probably a majority of the so-called
Socialists would not want that, in any case, since they are British and
therefore too set in their political and social thinking, as well as accustomed
to compromising with the opposition and (no less shamefully from a genuinely
socialist point-of-view) with the nobility!
21. If most democratic peoples are destined to
remain democratic in the short-term, though, eventually, on a more socialistic
level than that to which they have hitherto been accustomed, then those peoples
who may be described as essentially theocratic must remain theocratic, though
on a higher level than hitherto!
22. The ultimate revolution in Eire must
accordingly ensure progress from Roman Catholic theocracy to Social
Transcendentalist theocracy, but such a revolution will not be achieved without
a struggle with the State. As a
political religion, Social Transcendentalism will be privileged to use the
Church in its battle against the State.
For once it wins the support of the Church, it will have sufficient
moral authority to defeat the State.
Then it will be in a position to build the Meditation Centres
appertaining to its own religious integrity, which is nothing less than,
potentially if not at this point in time literally, that of a True World
Religion or, at any rate, the relative (LSD-induced visionary awareness) phase
thereof, serving as a precondition for the absolute (hypermeditative)
manifestation of the True World Religion, the literal
practical manifestation of it, to flower in due course.
23. But no flowering, no classical Become without
a preceding romantic Becoming in Social Transcendentalism, the internal
apparent phase leading to the truly essential phase in the course of
evolutionary time - a situation corresponding to a progression from the proton
new-brain to the electron superconscious.
24. From the Republic of Ireland to the Irish
Social Transcendental Centre, from nationalism to ideological identification,
from the tricolour to the abstract emblem (Y-like in design) of the Second
Coming and/or True World Messiah. If the
true Irish people have been selected as a new 'chosen people', it is because of
their theocratic bias, their ethnic suitability to embrace and expand a higher
theocracy, to effect the wider dissemination, through word and deed, of Social
Transcendentalism, to be the root motivator of a projected Federation of Social
Transcendental Centres stretching across the British Isles, Western Europe,
and, eventually, farther afield. An Irish Social Transcendental Centre would
know when and where to proselytize the truth of the True World Religion, as
well as how!
ON ART, ETC.
1. The twentieth century witnessed the growth of
a split in art between democratic and theocratic trends, a split, in effect,
between Liberal Realism and Socialist Realism on the one hand, and Liberal
Realism and Fascist Realism on the other hand.
The democratic artist, be he liberal or radical, represents the People,
or that section of them - bourgeoisie, proletariat - with whom he chooses or is
obliged to identify. The theocratic
artist, by contrast, intimates, in a variety of ways and in varying degrees, of
the Holy Spirit, is free to 'do his own thing' irrespective of whether or not
it brings him public approval. He alone
is sovereign, not the People, and consequently he sets such artistic/spiritual
standards as he can achieve, leading, like a fascist dictator, from above. Thus his art - symbolist, post-painterly
abstractionist, surrealist, etc., is fascistic or, better, Transcendentalist. It doesn't require the People's
approval. But neither, in a liberal
society, can it be forced upon them!
Consequently it remains, by and large, an elite phenomenon.
2. In a liberal society, democratic art cannot
be forced upon the People either, though a socialist society can encourage the
People to view and attempt an appreciation of the Social Realist art on
offer. Needless to say, there will be
little or no Modern Realist art on offer in such a social democracy, and
neither, of course, will there be much theocratic art, as produced by the
painterly avant-garde in the liberal West.
The People’s artist must represent the proletariat, almost literally,
though often mythically, as so many militant Marxists overthrowing or opposing
bourgeois rule.
3. Ironically, militant Socialist Realism
becomes anachronistic in an age of détente, with its peaceful co-existence with
the West. Rather, it appertains to the
militant phase of Communist struggle (particularly within Russia) against the
bourgeois/aristocratic tradition. Where
there are no representatives of the old order left in power, the justification
for militant Socialist Realism must be held in question. Only a more benign, positivistic Socialist
Realism, reflecting the day-to-day lives of the average proletarian, preferably
in a working context, would seem to be in order. Such a civilized Socialist Realism will
reflect the progress of Socialism as it bears upon the transformation of the
proletariat from a proton bias under the old order to an electron bias under
the new one, following the inevitable socialist revolution. One might even contend that a militant
Socialist Realism would be demeaning to the proletariat in such a People’s
democracy.
4. However that may be, militant Socialist
Realism would certainly not demean or misrepresent the workers (proton
equivalents) of a liberal democracy, where the perpetuation of syndicalism
affords the Western Social Realist a vehicle for militant dramatization ... in
the form of the workers' struggle against bourgeois oppression, thus creating
or perpetuating the myth of Marxist revolt.
5. But such a militant form of Socialist Realism
is only one aspect (necessarily extreme) of democratic representative art in a
liberal society and, from the establishment's viewpoint, hardly the most
important or attractive aspect either!
For co-existent with this art is Modern Realism, the conservative
alternative to (left-wing) Socialist Realism, which generally portrays
middle-class life in its complacent, classical setting, and therefore may be
said to represent the electron-equivalent bourgeois and/or petty bourgeois of
the contemporary West. All very smug and
relaxed, in contrast to the workers' struggle against capitalist oppression or,
as in the more left-wing types of Modern Realism, the frank portrayal of the
effects of such oppression upon the worker from a democratic socialist
point-of-view. One sees it in certain of
the works of Hockney, just as one saw its
nineteenth-century precursor in Degas, Manet, and
Renoir. Perhaps 'capitalist realism' would
be the most appropriate term for this classical democratic art, the
representative type of contemporary academic art?
6. In the nineteenth century, however, academic
art was less bourgeois and more aristocratic, or neo-aristocratic, in
character, not so much a classical democratic art as an humanistic autocratic
one, as represented by the choice of pagan (ancient Graeco-Roman,
Egyptian, Hebrew, Byzantine, etc.) subject-matter, congenial to artists like
Alma-Tadema, Poynter,
Leighton, and other such exponents of fin-de-siècle decadence, not to
mention earlier masters like David and Ingres, who
indubitably displayed a taste for autocratic nostalgia in an age of ongoing
democracy, an age seemingly no-less partial to the prototypical social-realist
works of Courbet, Millet, and Le Dounier,
as well as to some revolutionary theocratic works from the brushes of Turner, Redon, and Moreau, each of whom preferred to 'do his own
thing'.
7. If humanistic autocratic art is now dead and
unlikely ever to arise again, democratic art is still alive in both the liberal
West and the socialist East, if to a lesser extent than formerly. For the growth of theocratic art,
particularly in France and the United States, is in many respects the most
important contribution of the twentieth century to artistic progress,
outweighing the achievements, varied as they may be, of Socialist Realism
which, while bringing democratic art to a republican climax, signifies the
tail-end of an old tradition rather than the inception and development of a
new, higher order of painting, as pertaining to the Holy Spirit. It is this theocratic art which, in the
evolutionary nature of things, has taken over from and extended beyond the
democratic, as in the case of Op art, a late-stage petty-bourgeois successor to
early-stage petty-bourgeois painterly avant-garde art - painting, of whichever
description, being incapable of extension beyond petty-bourgeois criteria,
coming to a climax, one might say, on avant-garde and/or Social Realist terms.
8. Thus in a late-stage petty-bourgeois era the
only truly contemporary art will be theocratic Op, a genre above and beyond the
scope of conventional painting. Beyond
this, however, lies the art of the proletariat, the light art, holography and,
in particular, abstract computer art of an absolutely theocratic civilization,
such as I hope will take root in Eire in the not-too-distant future, following
a progression to truly classless criteria.
9. Needless to say, an absolutely theocratic
society would not encourage anything democratic, so there would be neither
Modern Realism nor Socialist Realism, nor even earlier (petty-bourgeois) forms
of theocratic art, whether abstract, and therefore at best quasi-theocratic
(given the democratic nature of the painterly genre), or as Op or Kinetic art,
and therefore fascistic. Only that which
could be described as relevant to a proletarian civilization, the logical
successor to the spiritualistic, late-stage petty-bourgeois civilization of the
contemporary West, with particular reference to the United States, and one not
at all connected with or stemming from its materialistic counterpart in the
(former) Soviet Union.
10. Not all avant-garde or modern art is
theocratic, as an intimation of truth.
Much of it is neo-autocratic in an anti-aesthetic and expressionist kind
of way, more concerned to distort nature and the natural than to intimate of
pure spirit. An art of the Ugly rather
than of the Beautiful, the Ethical, or the True. Some of it is even neo-pagan, and thus a
glorification of sensuality, hedonism, sun, strength, nature, etc. And, of course, it should not be forgotten
that nature-painting of any description is fundamentally autocratic, that is to
say, concerned not with man, still less the Holy Spirit, but with that which,
as nature, stems from the First Cause and thus, by implication, solar energy.
11. If nature precedes man and his democratic,
humanistic concerns, then nature-painting, whether in the hands of a Constable
or a Cortot, a Monet or a Rousseau, is beneath
democratic painting as a kind of more absolutist autocratic art than that which
focuses, even in pagan guise, on men and human society generally. To be sure, not a great deal of
representational nature-painting was done in the twentieth century, least of
all among the truly representative artists of the age. But we should not let this fact lead us to
attribute a democratic or a theocratic bias to paintings of nature done in a
semi-abstract or minimalist style. A
more contemporary technical treatment of natural phenomena does not constitute
the truly modern! Rather, it is a form
of attenuated autocratic art, indicative of the lowest type of
twentieth-century art, using the latter term in its strictly painterly sense.
12. If the highest type of twentieth-century art
has its limits, how much more limited must this autocratic art appear when
compared with that which, as holography and (more importantly in the immediate
future) computer graphics, is beyond painterly art, and as much above and beyond
such art as pagan sculpture was beneath it!
Indeed, to do this ultimate art justice, we should distinguish between
holography, as a true antithesis to the inception of 'art' in pagan sculpture,
and computer graphics, as a true antithesis to pagan and, in particular,
ancient Greek amphora art. In contrast
to the antithetical equivalent that may be inferred to exist between light art
and medieval stained-glass in a fascist/catholic distinction. Thus holography and computer art are as much
above and beyond the pale of Western civilization ... as pagan sculpture and
amphora art were beneath and before it.
13. Concerning elites, who are always a minority,
one may note a progression, commensurate with autocratic/democratic/ theocratic
distinctions, from aristocrats to meritocrats via
plutocrats. Whereas the autocratic
aristocrats rule the populace (largely in the guise of peasants), the
democratic plutocrats both rule and serve the People (as middle class and/or
workers), while the theocratic meritocrats serve the
masses (largely in the form of proletarians).
14. A parallel description to the above categories
can be discerned in the distinction between Lords, Ministers, and Commissars -
the Lords ruling a subject populace, the Ministers representing (ruling and
serving) a sovereign people, and the Commissars serving the free proletarian
masses.
15. However, one should distinguish between
Commissars (more usually bureaucratic Ministers) of a socialist stamp and,
conversely, those of a centrist one; for whereas the former endeavour, in their
democratic capacity, to serve the material interests of the proletarian masses,
the latter will strive, in their theocratic capacity, to serve what is best in
the People - namely their spiritual potential, even though compromises with
materialism will of course have to be made.
ON SEX, ETC.
1. Autocratic lesbianism, democratic
heterosexuality and/or homosexuality, theocratic pornography. Heterosexual sex is to the democratic
compromise between proton and electron equivalents. viz. workers and
bourgeoisie, what homosexuality is to its socialist successor, that is to say,
the logical sexual concomitant of an atomic civilization. If heterosexual sex corresponds to a
proton/electron relativity between women and men, then homosexual sex
corresponds to an electron-electron attraction between men. However, there is still a relativity of sorts
involved with the latter, and therefore an extension of humanism towards an
absolute integrity. Thus homosexuality
is more suited to a social democracy than to a parliamentary one, and we need
not doubt that many Socialists, or would-be Socialists, are essentially
homosexual. This is not to say, however,
that all those who consider themselves socialist are really what they claim to
be! A strong bias for pornography would
indicate a fascistic temperament and ideological suitability for theocracy, a
strong bias for heterosexual relations ... a democratic or bourgeois integrity.
2. Now let us turn to the two extremes - those
corresponding to the autocratic and the theocratic respectively. If lesbianism was the autocratic norm, then
it was on account of the stemming from proton absolutism of the early (pagan)
civilizations, their subatomic constitution favouring, in sexual as in most
other matters, something equivalent to a proton-proton reaction. But lesbianism was not the sole sexuality,
nor even the most important one where some ancient peoples were concerned; for
there also existed, at least with the ancient Greeks and Indians, a taste for
erotic sculpture, which undoubtedly played a significant role in relieving
sexual tensions! We may say that nude
sculpture was to them what pornography is to us or, at any rate, to those of us
with a theocratic bias. Thus an
antithesis may be inferred to exist between latter-day pornography and erotic
sculpture.
3. However, if autocratic sexual indulgence
implied a radical concession to materialism, to the sub-organic as well as to a
pre-atomic proton absolutism in the form of lesbianism, the latter a later and
more 'democratic' development than the former (corresponding to the
progression, in modern times, from heterosexuality to homosexuality), then we
need not doubt that theocratic sexual indulgence implies a radical concession
to idealism, to the supra-organic, which manifests itself in various forms and
degrees of pornography.
4. Pornography, then, is the theocratic sex of
the age, somewhat beyond the sculptural connection, in medieval iconography, of
the Blessed Virgin or of her elevation onto stained-glass and canvas, an
intellectualized, spiritualized compromise existing between lovers in the
flesh, whether lesbian, heterosexual, or homosexual. I have described it as fascistic, but that
would apply to adult pornography, particularly of a hard-core nature, whereas
its evolution to a proletarian level presupposes the use, through computers
rather than magazines, of juveniles in an ultimate pornography only appropriate
to a Social Transcendentalist age and society, in which a more attenuated
sexuality, focusing on mature (16-19) teenagers, was the morally desirable
alternative to properly adult levels of sex.
No doubt, earlier levels of pornography, together with the three kinds
of fleshy sex, would be taboo in an absolutely theocratic society. Propagation would increasingly become an
artificial affair, invoking Centrist regulation and supervision. Sperm banks and artificial insemination would
gradually supersede natural sexual activity as the appropriate method of
reproduction for an advanced civilization.
Couples, whether married or otherwise, would become a thing of the past,
a reflection of atomic compromise, and this no less the case with regard to
homosexuals than to their heterosexual counterparts.
5. Regarding lesbianism again, my conception of
a lesbian age, as germane to an autocratic society, isn't one - necessarily
oversimplified - which posits lesbian relations solely between females but, on
the contrary, one that regards all relations,
whether between men and women or men and men, as fundamentally lesbian on
account of the pre-atomic integrity of pagan society and, as a corollary of
this, the reactive nature of sexual relationships. In short, women would have been too reactive,
by and large, to contemplate or indulge in regular sex with their own
kind. The ability of women to have
attractive sex with one another comes later, at that point in time when women
undergo masculinization to a degree whereby any such
seemingly lesbian relations partake of a quasi-homosexual character. Exceptions to this rule there may have been,
but I am quite convinced that women would not have gone in for strictly lesbian
sex with each other in pagan times!
6. Concerning musical instruments, there exists,
as in other contexts, a distinction between the autocratic, the democratic, and
the theocratic. Broadly, instruments
falling within the first category include percussion, wind, and brass;
instruments within the second category include strings, keyboards, and guitars;
while those within the third category include harps, organs, and
synthesizers. Again, to generalize, we
may hold that 'autocratic' instruments are played horizontally and naturally,
i.e. with naked contact of fingers; that 'democratic' instruments are played
horizontally and artificially, i.e. with bow, plectrum, etc; while 'theocratic'
instruments are played vertically and artificially. There is about the 'democratic' instruments a
kind of dualistic compromise between the horizontal and the vertical, the
natural and the artificial, as befits their bourgeois status.
7. If acoustic upright pianos correspond to a
liberal democratic integrity, then electric pianos signify a progression along
that same democratic spectrum to an integrity corresponding to social
democracy, and may accordingly be regarded as socialistic, in conjunction with
electric guitars. By contrast, the
distinction between an acoustic organ and an electric organ would correspond to
the theological distinction (on the schismatic theocratic spectrum) between
Protestantism and Communism, whereas the truly theocratic instruments,
corresponding to the catholic and fascist parts of the main theocratic
spectrum, would be further apart from each other because flanking the 'false'
theocratic instruments, and therefore more akin to the distinction between a
harp or, alternatively, harpsichord and a synthesizer. Has not the harp long symbolized Ireland's
Roman Catholic theocratic integrity?
8. However that may be, we are advancing towards
an age when the harp should be supplanted by a more advanced 'theocratic'
instrument, if not exactly a Moog synthesizer these days ... then one of its
more sophisticated and autonomous successors in the form of a synthesizer
appropriate to a Social Transcendentalist age.
Needless to say, all 'democratic' and 'autocratic' instruments would
then become taboo!
9. Referring to the autocratic, it seems
feasible to contend that the popularity of the saxophone in the present century
owes not a little to its vertical handling, since possessing a kind of
quasi-theocratic integrity as an instrument equivalent to a military
dictatorship, being on the tail-end, as it were, of the autocratic spectrum,
and thus the logical successor to more horizontal types of brass (trumpet) and
wind (flute) instruments. But not,
definitely not, electronic!
10. A decidedly important factor with regard to
Social Transcendentalism that will distinguish it, during both its phases, from
petty-bourgeois LSD-tripping and/or transcendental meditation, will be its
dependence, for practical realization, on specially-constructed chest-to-crotch
harnesses suspended from an overhead scaffold-like apparatus within any given
Meditation Centre, so that its practitioners are lifted free of the ground and
enabled to trip or meditate, as the case may be, in a vertical posture - free,
to all appearances, of their bodies.
11. In such fashion, the body will be immobilized
and thus rendered incapable of disturbing or dominating the mind, a
particularly important consideration where LSD tripping is concerned, in that
people would not be able to walk about or otherwise make physical nuisances of
themselves. A tripper trussed-up in one
of these harnesses would be unable to leave the Meditation Centre during the
duration of his trip, and so his psychic experiences would be strictly confined
to the Centre in question, where qualified personnel would ensure his mental
and/or physical wellbeing.
12. Of course, I do not wish to stress the
negative advantages of this procedure at the expense of the positive ones,
which should always remain paramount - namely, that the individual
practitioners of the true religion will be in the best possible physical
position to cultivate spirit by dint of being in an absolutely vertical posture
some feet above the ground, a posture as levitation-like as its psychological
concomitance is transcendental.
ON BRITAIN AND IRELAND, ETC.
1. In relation to the Irish, Scots, and Welsh,
the English have always effectively functioned as proton equivalents, holding
an atomic U.K. together through domination.
Thus the 'Celtic fringe' is - and has long been - a predominantly
electron equivalent. One might say, to
extend the analogy, that the relationship of British imperialism to natives in
Empire and Colony was akin to a proton domination of electron slaves. Freedom for the enslaved is, above all,
release from proton domination, and its realization must entail, at some point
in time, the development of a free-electron society, a society consciously
dedicated to the furtherance of spiritual freedom.
2. If Britain signifies, through its allegiance
to a Constitutional Monarchy, an autocratic democracy, then Eire signifies, in
its allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church, an autocratic theocracy. A bourgeois republic, like France, would
correspond, by contrast, to a democratic democracy, whilst a People’s republic,
like China, may be accounted a bureaucratic democracy.
3. In religion Protestantism signifies a
democratic theocracy, whereas Fascism is more akin to an autocratic
theocracy. The only true theocracy, a
theocratic theocracy, so to speak, will arise from Social Transcendentalism, as
germane to true religion. Thus for
4. Anyone who defines himself as a theocratic
theocrat, i.e. a Social Transcendentalist, should find literature, particularly
in its novelistic essence, beneath him, since literature is fundamentally a
liberal art-form, scarcely to be countenanced by a theocratic mind!
5. Democracy-proper, akin to literature-proper,
is ever a liberal phenomenon. For a
late-stage petty-bourgeois era, essentially post-liberal in character, there
are one of two possibilities. Either
democracy can be stepped up, or improved upon, and one gets a system of
proportional representation, akin to a magazine short-story in literature, or
it can be transcended in a new 'genre', namely the bureaucratic democracy
germane to Socialism, a political equivalent to colour film.
6. At present, proportional representation and
bureaucratic democracies co-exist. But
there are also liberal and/or autocratic democracies still in existence,
political anachronisms corresponding to the literary anachronisms of novels and
plays, genres still favoured by many Englishmen, writers and readers
alike! Given these analogies between
politics and literature, one is tempted to ascribe more relevance to magazine
short-stories within a P.R. democracy than to either novels or colour
films. Likewise one might suppose colour
films to have more relevance to a bureaucratic democracy than to either of the
other kinds. But this is purely
speculative.
7. From the autocratic kingdom to the democratic
state, from the Father to the fleshy side of Christ (Liberalism). From the democratic church to the theocratic
centre, from the spiritual side of Christ (Protestantism) to the Holy
Spirit. Thus civilized evolution may be
perceived as progressing from a subatomic proton inception in the Kingdom to a
supra-atomic electron consummation in the Centre via an atomic compromise in
the balance between state and church. In
other words, a progression from soul to spirit via matter.
8. Matter evolved out of soul, but spirit
evolves - and will increasingly evolve - out of matter. Paganism and Roman Catholicism were alike
religions of soul, Protestantism signifying a 'fall' (forwards) into matter,
Communism yet another, as a later and in some respects more refined
materialism, whereas Fascism signified a reaction, in part, against such
materialism in the form of a new spiritual impetus, the inception of a religion
of spirit that will develop more absolutely in the guise of Social
Transcendentalism, the religion of spirit and,
consequently, ultimate world religion.
9. An alternative word for Centre would be 'Saviourdom', an antithesis to 'Kingdom'. In the former, the dictator leads; in the
latter, the monarch rules. The one as
embodiment of the Holy Spirit, the other as embodiment of the Father. In between, the collectivized institutions of
church and state, deriving their collective integrity from the Christian notion
of the equality of all souls/spirits and, hence, sovereignty in the mass, the
people, with the political concomitant of representation and, so far as the
Church is concerned, the religious concomitant of guidance.
10. Just as the first civilizations were beneath
fictions and thus given to the propitiation or worship of facts, both cosmic
and natural, so the ultimate civilization will be above illusions, and thus
given to the comprehension and experience of truth. Just as the propitiation of natural phenomena
preceded the worship and/or propitiation of mythical abstractions (fictions),
so the experience of spirit, or superconscious mind,
should succeed the acknowledgement of such contemporary illusions (scientific
abstractions) as the curved-space theory and the notion of an expanding
(cosmic) universe.
11. Distinctions between cosmic and/or natural
facts and mythical fictions on the one hand, and between spiritual truth and
scientific illusions on the other, are only relevant to a relative
civilization, not to an absolute one; the same of course applying to those
theological abstractions - a cross between the mythical fiction and the scientific
illusion - to be found in quintessentially dualistic and, hence, atomic
civilizations, such as the Christian.
12. Hitherto civilization has never been entirely
civilized but, except in the earliest absolute examples, a combination, to
varying extents, of the civilized and the barbarous. If the earliest civilizations were, in their
stoical integrity, a kind of controlled or regulated barbarism, then the
relative civilizations, including the Christian, signified a distinction
between a civilized elite and a barbarous populace, a distinction still
applying where petty-bourgeois civilization, with its transcendental bias, is
concerned. The development of a truly
civilized civilization, embracing the vast majority of people, has yet to come
about. But it will only do so, it seems
to me, on Social Transcendentalist terms, as the masses are led (from above)
towards the highest cultural and religious allegiance.
13. Even Communism, which is fundamentally a
petty-bourgeois ideology on the side of the People, cannot create a truly
civilized civilization, since, despite its commitment to the proletariat, it
makes no provision for the highest culture and religion but tends, on the
contrary, to represent the People on their own necessarily barbarous terms, in accordance
with its democratic bias. No ultimate
civilization can be established on the basis of representative leadership! It requires the utmost theocratic leadership,
in which political sovereignty is firmly and absolutely vested in the Leader,
the Saviour of his - and eventually all - people(s). And not simply in a positive sense ... as
saving for, but also, if less importantly, in a negative sense ... as saving
from, saving, above all, from the State, and thus democracy, republicanism,
parliament, elections, representation, and other such political concomitants of
statehood, that atomic integrity stemming from the autocratic sovereignty of
kingdoms.
14. The highest, most civilized civilization is
indubitably of a free-electron integrity, significant of the greatest spiritual
freedom on human terms. It will
inexorably lead towards the still greater spiritual freedom of the post-Human
Millennium. And that, in turn, will
inevitably lead to the ultimate spiritual freedom of pure spirit in the
post-Millennial Beyond. Verily, how can
an honourable and progressive man not be in favour of all this?
15. A truly civilized civilization will always act
not in the name of the People but in the name of the Truth. The Leader serves the Truth. For theocracy is ever above and beyond
democracy, the culmination of human evolution.
16. Communism does away with the Church but
extends the State. Social
Transcendentalism will, if successful, do away with the State but extend the
Church ... into the Centre. In the one
case, a social democracy. In the other
case, a social theocracy. Both, in their
contrary ways, are absolutist, in accordance with the absolute criteria of an
incipiently extreme age. There is no
church/state relativity in Communism, any more than there could be in Social
Transcendentalism. People do not
congregate in a Communist church, as they would in a Protestant one, since no
such institution exists. An absolute age
demands state or church, not both!
Communism chose the former, Social Transcendentalism has chosen the
latter, and on no-less genuine terms than the other camp's was pseudo.
17. For the progression, in respect of Communism,
from liberal to social democracy, or bureaucratic democracy, corresponds to a
development from the genuine state to the pseudo-state, which is to say, from
the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, from the national to the international
entity beyond it, as beyond any intermediate petty-bourgeois
nationalism/internationalism.
18. Make no mistake, the pseudo-state, applying to
a transformed proletariat (now electron equivalents) within the ideological
context of an international entity, is historically superior to the genuine
state! And, by a like-token, genuine
centrism, in a theocratic theocracy, would be superior to the pseudo-centrism
of the RC church, which corresponds to an autocratic theocracy. If Communism signifies a contraction of
materialism from capitalism to socialism, then Social Transcendentalism most
definitely signifies an expansion of the spiritual into the True World
Religion. The former, tied to the
tail-end of the democratic spectrum, can never be anything more than petty
bourgeois, even though it is pro-proletarian.
The latter, appertaining to an extension of the main, or non-schismatic,
theocratic spectrum beyond petty-bourgeois Fascism, will be genuinely
transcendental, one might even say the upholder of a People’s theocracy,
bearing in mind its absolute status.
19. But such a People’s theocracy would be
primarily concerned with what is best in the
People, namely their spiritual potential, and not with the People as a
people, which, by contrast, would constitute an illogical concession to
materialism, as appertaining to the democratic spectrum, and thus to
Socialism. Not for the ultimate
theocracy to act in the name of the People, like some democracy, but primarily
in the interests of their spiritual potential, whether in terms of the direct
cultivation of spirit (awareness) in each individual or, less ideally but
nevertheless imperatively, in terms of the dissemination of the Truth and,
hence, Social Transcendentalism to various appropriate countries overseas - a
procedure which, one way or another, may entail personal sacrifices on the
individual's part. One might say that
this latter procedure corresponds to the 'social' side of the ideology, the
direct cultivation of spirit, by contrast, to its 'transcendental' side. Not until the Truth was established
world-wide ... could a true spiritual absolutism emerge, paving the way for the
post-Human Millennium.
20. The higher, more intellectual men can make
personal sacrifices in the name of the Truth, grasped in its theoretical and
abstract formulation. Not so the broad
mass of people who, whether as soldiers or civilians, policemen or bodyguards,
will respond to the concrete and tangible embodiment of the Truth in the person
of the Leader. They will make sacrifices
for the Leader, not for his truth, about which they may be largely if not
totally ignorant! And the Leader will be
more significant in their eyes to the extent that he appears before them as a
spiritual guide, nay! the personification on earth of the Holy Spirit, rather
than as a politician, be he president or prime minister, and thus a mere
representative of the People. For, in
truth, the Leader is no politician, and he knows that the People generally
despise and avoid politics, being potentially, if not actually, beyond it, as
so many candidates for theocracy.
21. Pertaining, as he does, to the climax of the
theocratic spectrum, the Leader stands before them as a refutation of politics,
the denier of the State, with its presidents and prime ministers, and thus the
saviour of the People from democratic materialism ... for the life of the
spirit, the Eternal Life to-come. He signifies
an electron absolutism, and so leads from above, leads from the Centre, the
embodiment of spiritual freedom. The
People, if they are loyal to their selves and to their developing
electron-biased constitution, cannot but be loyal to him; for he is their hope
and encouragement, their promise of a better future, the phenomenal mirror to
their spiritual selves.
22. Autocratic subnationalism,
democratic nationalism, social democratic internationalism, and theocratic
supra-nationalism: a progression from the proton-biased tribe to the
electron-biased ideology via the atomic nation-state. A genuinely theocratic society, or Social
Transcendental Centre, can only be supra-national, and hence dedicated to the
establishment and furtherance of a federation of Social Transcendental Centres,
in accordance with its classless integrity.
Neither bourgeois nationalism nor proletarian internationalism can be
relevant to a genuinely theocratic society in a transcendentalist phase of
social evolution. To think in these
anachronistic terms is to put oneself beneath the pale of genuine
transcendentalist criteria. If
ON CLOTHES, ETC.
1. The dress is autocratic, by which I mean that
it conforms to a centrifugal absolutism in its one-piece cylindrical
shape. Whether we are referring to very
long dresses, germane to an aristocratic age, or to contemporary minidresses, necessarily petty-bourgeois in character, we
are dealing with an autocratic mode of clothing.
2. By contrast, democratic clothing is always
dualistic, or relative. It affirms an
atomic compromise between the feminine and the masculine, skirts and
trousers. And this compromise is further
indicated in the relativity of skirts to blouses and/or jackets on the one
hand, and of trousers to shirts and/or jackets on the other hand, so that each
of the sexes reflects a dualistic integrity, the one to a large extent the
converse of the other.
3. Coming to a theocratic mode of clothing, a
mode the antithesis of the dress, we enter the realm of the post-dualistic,
where a centripetal absolutism prevails in the form of a one-piece phallic
shape or design. I am of course alluding
to boiler suits, which are a rudimentary manifestation of a more synthetic and
absolute trend still to arise, a kind of proletarian precursor to the one-piece
zippersuit of the future, doubtless the only kind of
clothing permissible in a truly theocratic society, where an aspiration towards
the absolutism of the Holy Spirit would be the religious/moral norm.
4. If boiler suits, usually in denim, are socialistic,
then these synthetic zippersuits will be centrist, or
relative to a Social Transcendentalist integrity. No-one will dress like a democrat, in a
two-piece suit or, worse still, like an autocrat, in a dress. Only the closed-society absolutism of a
one-piece zippersuit will prevail!
5. Since I have elsewhere distinguished between
kingdom and state on the one hand, and between church and centre on the other,
as reflecting an evolutionary progression from the subatomic to the
supra-atomic via the atomic (church/state) compromise, I shall refer the
above-listed modes of clothing to their respective politico-religious
parallels, thus equating dresses with the Kingdom, skirts with the State,
trousers with the Church, and one-piece zippersuits
with the Centre, a progression from the subatomic absolute to the supra-atomic
absolute via an atomic compromise in bourgeois relativity. Thus like the Church, two-piece suits testify
to a bound-electron equivalent, one-piece zippersuits
testifying, like the Centre, to a free-electron equivalent. Dresses and skirts, like kingdom and state,
are proton and neutron equivalents respectively.
6. Whereas the button-up collared shirt is
relative, divisible into two halves, as it were, and further divisible between
masculine buttons and feminine button-holes, the T-shirt is absolute,
all-of-a-piece, and thus purely masculine in character. Besides making dressing easier, it conforms
to the extreme relativistic criteria of a late petty-bourgeois/early
proletarian age, being the sartorial complement to jeans (cords or
denims). In conjunction with this other
masculine attire, it reflects a socialistic and unisexual integrity, and this
whether or not the wearer is consciously socialist and/or unisexual. It accords with colour films, colour
photography, and rock music, as appertaining to the tail-end of the middle, or
democratic, spectrum of political evolution.
7. One should distinguish between the upgrading
of an old-style form of bourgeois, relative clothing, whether masculine or
feminine, and the new-style relative clothing more absolutist in
construction. Thus one should
distinguish between, say, a cord or denim trouser suit, the jacket of which
overlaps the legs in traditional bourgeois fashion, and a cord or denim trouser
suit with a short, waist-length jacket.
In the former case, a conventional relativity between masculine trousers
and feminine jacket; in the latter case an absolutist relativity between
masculine trousers (jeans) and jacket.
Whereas the one finds its political analogue in a P.R. liberal
democracy, the other should be equated with a radical, or socialist,
democracy. Whereas the one is aligned
with the heterosexual, the other provokes a homosexual analogue. Thus the absolutist relativity of contemporary
jean suits, in which no feminine overlapping of the leg occurs, is on a
cultural level with the theocratic democracy of Communism and the masculine
relativity of homosexuality. If
appearances were invariably aligned with essences, one would have no hesitation
in regarding a person who dressed in the above-mentioned manner as either a
communist or a homosexual, or both.
Certainly his mode of dressing corresponds to an extreme petty-bourgeois
integrity.
8. Now consider the man who wears a boiler suit or,
better still, a one-piece zippersuit that zips up the
front and gives him the appearance of a pilot or even of an astronaut. Such a man would be dressed in an absolutist
manner, the antithesis to a woman in a dress, and so approximate to proletarian
criteria of sartorial appearances. The
political or, rather, religious analogue evoked here would be Social
Transcendentalism, while the sexual analogue would be pornography, particularly
of a radical nature, and the man concerned might well be a pornographer and/or
transcendentalist of one type or another.
Such a man would almost certainly despise those who dressed in a
relative manner, considering them bourgeois or, in the case of the more extreme
relativities, petty bourgeois. Whether
or not he knew anything about political/sexual analogies, his appearance would
correspond to a radical theocracy, theirs, by contrast, to either liberal or
social democracy, thereby existing on an inferior evolutionary level.
9. Where women are concerned, the upgrading of
bourgeois, knee-length skirts takes the form of the mini, with or without a
jacket, thereby retaining a relatively feminine appearance. Recourse to jeans or jean suits would place
the woman on an equal communist/homosexual footing with a man so attired, and
thus bring her into line with contemporary petty-bourgeois criteria. We need not doubt, however, that proletarian
females will eventually gravitate from contemporary sartorial relativities to a
one-piece zipper absolutism along the lines of the aforementioned zippersuit.
10. In countries with a church/state dichotomy,
conforming to their atomic status, it usually transpires that one side prevails
over the other in accordance with the ethical/ideological bias of the people
concerned. Thus in Britain, the State
prevails over the Church, whereas in Ireland the converse is generally the
case. And as though to symbolize this,
not to say reinforce the respective distinctions, Britain retains allegiance to
the Monarchy, Ireland to the Papacy. On
the one hand, an autocratic democracy; on the other hand, an autocratic
theocracy. To conceive of the Church
being stronger than the State in monarchic Britain is as impossible as to
conceive of the converse situation in papal Ireland.
11. During the atomic stage of evolution, each
people retains a distinct, nay, an antithetical bias, and one that will remain
such should post-atomic absolutism replace atomic relativity in the
not-too-distant future, if in radically dissimilar ways, so that a new
distinction arises between, on the one hand, the theocratic centre in Ireland
and, on the other hand, the bureaucratic pseudo-state in Britain, the former as
hostile to democrats as the latter to autocrats.
12. An Englishman, especially when middle class,
easily adopts a utilitarian attitude to the weather on a hot summer's day; he
wears the bare minimum, perhaps no more than sandals and shorts. Religious or moral considerations don't occur
to him, since he is largely devoid of them.
His attitude is crassly philistine!
By contrast, an Irishman is more likely to keep his clothes on,
irrespective of the heat: socks, shoes, trousers, and shirt being the minimum
requirement. To the typical pragmatic
Englishman, he may appear foolish, but that is only from a utilitarian point-of-view. For the Irishman will know or, at any rate,
sense that there is also a moral dimension which is more important - namely,
that clothing is worn not just to keep warm but to cover the flesh, to hide the
body, and this applies no less on a hot day than on a cold or a wet one. Hence his attitude, unlike the Englishman's,
is largely conditioned by religious considerations. It is profoundly moral!
13. If clothing were worn merely to keep one warm,
then there would be little or no point in people in the Middle East, Iran, or
North Africa wearing any. But, as a
rule, they are buttoned- and/or wrapped-up from head to toe, especially in the
case of women. Partly of course this
protects them from the sun, but it is also an aspect of Islamic law, of a moral-world-order
imposed by religion. Generally speaking,
theocratic peoples, wherever they may be, respect this moral dimension, whereas
democratic peoples are only too willing to discard or, more correctly, shun it,
since they respect merely the utilitarian dimension, which they mistakenly
suppose, in their short-sighted materialism, to be the only one. Instead of shunning or ignoring the sun, they
rush to greet it, like so many heathens, obsessed by the prospect of
sunbathing. No wonder such people remain
loyal to the ideals of an open society!
A passive form of sun-worship confirms their pagan bias - the opposite
of a truly religions orientation.
14. The above example of the way in which an
Englishman can misunderstand and, consequently, belittle an Irishman is but one
of countless examples that could be given.
Clearly, so long as the Irish remain under British rule and/or
influence, they will never be evaluated according to their true worth, but be
expected to behave in a British manner.... Which, because they won't or can't,
leads to additional friction and belittlement in a vicious circle of prejudice
and misunderstanding! Salvation for the
Irish is intrinsically linked with freedom from the British, freedom from the
democratic, and will only come when Ireland is elevated to a radically
theocratic status in an island purged of British, and hence democratic,
influence.
15. There can be no compromise between theocracy
and democracy in the future! The age
demands an absolutist choice: either radical theocracy in the form of Social
Transcendentalism, or radical democracy in the form of Socialist
Republicanism. There can be no question
of Ireland's adopting the latter!
16. If Britain was the hub or cynosure of a world
empire, then Ireland, elevated in the aforementioned manner, should become the
hub or, at the very least, root-motivator of a world centre, an ideological
grouping of radically theocratic peoples that will stretch - in the short term
- across those parts of the globe, including North Africa and South America,
not destined for Socialism but entitled to work for Social Transcendentalism
and, by implication, the eventual defeat of democracy in the world at
large. What Britain was on materialistic
terms, Ireland should become on spiritualistic terms; and on the most absolute
spiritualistic terms at that, not, as traditionally, on the level of Catholic
missionary work, but with regard to what I have called the True World Religion,
with its supra-national integrity.
17. If an autocratic hairstyle is long, then a
theocratic hairstyle is short. If an
autocratic hairstyle hangs down, then a theocratic hairstyle sticks up. Because they are alike absolutist, both
hairstyles will be without a parting.
18. Not so the democratic hairstyles in between
these two extremes, by which I mean the medium-length hairstyles that, in the
liberal case, favour a parting in the centre of the head and, in the radical
case, favour a peripheral parting. The
traditional liberal hairstyle naturally favours a relativity, consonant with
dualistic criteria, but does so in a way bespeaking a balance between the
feminine and the masculine, which is to say, between each side of a central
parting. By contrast, the radical
hairstyle, whilst affirming a relativity, does so on terms which assert the
superiority of the masculine side of the parting so that, instead of a
feminine/masculine balance, one finds a masculine bias, and this in response to
radical and/or homosexual criteria. So
we may affirm an evolution of hairstyles that passes from autocratic beginnings
to theocratic endings via a democratic compromise, in which medium-length
parted hair is the norm.
19. Where the democratic compromise stage is
concerned, a distinction will, of course, exist between feminine and masculine
hairstyles, whether in terms of a continuing autocratic bias in the former or
of its democratic modification in relation to the latter, as described
above. A woman's hair will generally be
longer than a man's in a liberal society, whereas a society stressing sexual
equality, and thus invoking a masculine bias compatible with homosexual
criteria, will encourage women to wear their hair shorter, perhaps as short, or
medium-length, as a man's, with the attendant concession of a more or less
peripheral parting.
20. A more comprehensive outline of the evolution
of hairstyles should bear in mind that the progression from one absolute to
another takes place by degrees, so that a peripheral parting which favours the
feminine will precede a central parting, just as a peripheral parting favouring
the masculine will succeed it. Thus one
could speak of a grand-bourgeois/petty-bourgeois antithesis (either side of a
bourgeois relativity) in which the peripheral parting will be on opposite sides
of the head. Thus whereas the
grand-bourgeois parting favoured the right-hand side of the head, corresponding
to the old brain/subconscious mind, the contemporary petty-bourgeois parting
favours its left-hand side, the side proximate to the new brain/superconscious mind.
The first parting attests to a feminine imbalance, the second to a
masculine one. In between, the central
parting through which, in accordance with bourgeois relativity, the two sides
of the head are in approximate balance, as between state and church, lesbianism
and homosexuality. However, such a
balance no longer holds sway to any appreciable extent; for most people - women
included - are partial to the left-hand side peripheral parting, and thus to a
bias towards the Church or, at any rate, towards theocracy, while remaining, in
their relativity, essentially democratic.
Only in a radically theocratic society would an absolutist hairstyle be
systematically encouraged and, as already remarked, it would be short and vertical,
constituting an exclusive masculinity, a proletarian antithesis to absolutist
femininity in the unparted long hair of the
autocratic aristocrats of pagan antiquity.
ON CHURCH AND STATE, ETC.
1. The autocratic temple, the democratic church,
and the theocratic centre. From a
worship of the Creator to an aspiration towards the Holy Spirit via a worship
of and aspiration towards Christ. From
absolute enslavement to absolute freedom via a dualistic compromise. From soul to spirit via matter, in this case
'human'.
2. The autocratic subego,
the democratic ego, and the theocratic superego; from subconscious to superconscious via the conscious mind.
3. Where formerly, in liberal societies,
politics and religion were separate, as between state and church, the
post-liberal societies signify a progression from the relative to the absolute
in the form of religious politics - the false world religion of the People.
4. By contrast, societies that were genuinely
Catholic and thus pre-liberal or, better, anti-liberal, can only progress from
an uneasy compromise between church and state to a political religion, an
absolute theocracy, in the guise of post-fascist Social Transcendentalism,
which upholds the true religion of what is best in the People, namely their
spiritual potential, and aims to cultivate this potential in the most
systematic and radical way, in the interests of spiritual progress.
5. Thus we are distinguishing between the
communist illusion and the centrist truth, between the tail-end, as it were, of
the democratic spectrum and the post-fascist level of the theocratic one. Only this latter can extend towards the
post-Human Millennium and, hence, the overcoming of man in the Supermen and Superbeings of its successive phases, as evolution draws
nearer to a climax in pure spirit.
6. From time to time, in accordance with the
acquirement of fresh insights, I, like anyone else, revise my opinions and/or
theoretical positions, and will do so now with respect to the distinction
between aristocrats, plutocrats, and bureaucrats, which I formerly regarded as
roughly synonymous with autocratic, democratic, and theocratic
distinctions. Not so! A more comprehensive - and hence objectively
correct - evaluation will include meritocrats, or
those who embody the principle of elite leadership and passionately maintain
that the best minds should be allowed and encouraged to go to the top ... if
society is to be progressively and sensibly run. These meritocrats
are, in effect, the intelligentsia, and they can only be equated with the
theocratic, and thus with the coming age of meritocratic
guidance.
7. So where, then, do bureaucrats fit in, if
they are not, after all, to be equated with the theocratic? Well, the simple answer to this is ... on the
left wing of the democratic spectrum, whether moderate or extreme. In a liberal democracy a relative distinction
exists between capitalistic plutocrats and socialistic bureaucrats. In a radical democracy, on the other hand,
there exists only a kind of bureaucratic absolutism, which is intended to serve
the People. Thus a bureaucratic state is
ipso facto communist, the successor, in effect, to states
upholding a compromise between plutocracy and bureaucracy.
8. Where, however, no such compromise has traditionally
been upheld or, rather, where a theocratic bias has generally prevailed over
secular concerns, then the logical evolutionary progression is from a kind of
diluted, clerical meritocracy to a radical fascist or post-fascist meritocracy,
such as would further curb plutocratic and bureaucratic tendencies in response
to its more absolute theocratic integrity, thereby utilizing most of the monies
available for the service of the Truth and, consequently, the consolidation and
dissemination of the new enlightenment - a policy not disassociated from the
service of what is best in the People, namely their spiritual potential. Naturally, a certain amount of bureaucratic
service, not to mention plutocratic generation of capital, would still be
necessary, but a minimum bureaucracy, corresponding to the 'social' aspect of
Social Transcendentalism, with particular reference to welfare, housing, and
health. Thus a Social Transcendental
Centre could broadly be defined as a bureaucratic meritocracy, in contrast to
the meritocratic bureaucracies that tend to prevail
in communist states.
9. An absolute antithesis may consequently be
inferred to exist between autocratic aristocrats and theocratic meritocrats, whereas the antithesis between democratic
plutocrats and democratic bureaucrats can only be relative. Even communist bureaucracies are essentially
democratic, serving the People.
10. If
11. Autocratic ruralism,
democratic provincialism/suburbanism, radical
democratic urbanism, theocratic supra-urbanism.
A liberal democracy tends to reflect a provincial/suburban relativity,
as between Conservatives and Liberals, whereas a social democracy reflects an
urban absolutism. The big city is
essentially an environment aligned with radical democracy. Beyond and above such an environment lies the
supra-urban context germane to a radical theocracy, a Social Transcendentalist
theocracy. Alternatively, one could term
it supra-rural.
12. However that may be, it should not be
confounded with the urban, since signifying a more evolved constitution, one, I
should think, in which tall, well-spaced curvilinear buildings tend to
predominate over any oblong, rectilinear arrangements of tenement-type
dwellings. Indeed, one in which such
materialistic arrangements no longer exist, all buildings having become
curvilinear, hence transcendentalist in construction and design - residential
and commercial, cultural and educational facilities no longer separate but
integrated into the one overall structure, thus creating the concept of an
omega complex, whereby all parts, or functions, are dovetailed into the whole,
the ultimate form of civic development on earth.
13. The current existence and continuing creation
of large, curvilinear housing estates, as in Northern Ireland, more than
suggests a supra-urban tendency in process of development. It is as though we are being confronted by
the antithesis - communal and curvilinear - to the castles and palaces of
autocratic antiquity - an arrangement owing nothing to suburban and urban, not
to mention provincial (small town), precedent.
14. Nature reflects an atomic integrity or, if you
prefer, dichotomy, and therefore the natural is always a compromise and tension
between atomic divisions, no less the case in political than in sexual
relations. Just as, in politics, an
opposition between conservative and liberal interests reflects a natural order,
so, in sex, heterosexual behaviour is ever natural or, more correctly,
naturalistic.
15. Opposed to this natural order, however, is
that which, arising at a later time, scorns such an atomic division in favour
of a pseudo-electron (protons in disguise) one-sidedness, and in politics this
takes the form of a social democracy, its sexual equivalent ...
homosexuality. The natural and the
anti-natural alike appertain to the atomic spectrum. Not so the subnatural
and the supra-natural, which appertain, in their very different constitutions,
to the subatomic (proton) and supra-atomic (electron) spectra respectively, the
former manifesting in an autocratic context, the latter in a theocratic one;
the former the antithesis to the latter.
If the subnatural is beneath politics and, in
a certain sense, sex, then the supra-natural will be above it, the former
existing on the mundane level of economic materialism, the latter on the
transcendental level of theocratic spirituality - a distinction between kingdom
and centre, as between erotic sculpture and computer erotica, aristocratic rule
and meritocratic leadership.
16. Coming in-between the subnatural
and the natural, however, one has what may be termed the pro-natural,
manifesting sexually in lesbianism, that is to say, in a pseudo-proton (crude
electron) one-sidedness, and politically in a pro-democratic Cromwellian pseudo-tyranny, equally one-sided in character,
though essentially pertaining to the democratic spectrum, where it stands to
the natural as a relativistic absolute to an absolute relativity. Indeed, the subsequent emergence, on the same
spectrum, of the anti-natural ... establishes an antithetical equivalent with the
pro-natural, as between homosexuality and lesbianism, Bolshevik
pseudo-dictatorship and Ironside pseudo-tyranny. One could alternatively speak of the natural
being flanked by the pre- and post-natural, two modes of extremism not to be
confounded with the truly absolute extremities of the subnatural
and the supra-natural respectively.
17. As the early-Christian (Roman Catholic)
civilization of Medieval Europe arose out of the Dark Ages accompanying and
following the barbarous eclipse of late-pagan Graeco-Roman
civilization, so the early transcendental (Communist) civilization of countries
like Russia arose out of the pseudo-Light Ages accompanying the decline of
late-Christian (Protestant) Anglo-American civilization. Contrary to popular superstition, evolution
proceeds upwards in a spiralling movement, never exactly repeating itself, but
manifesting antithetical parallels with an earlier age the higher it ascends.
18. Thus to speak of an impending new Dark Ages
would be to succumb to the superficial notion of an 'eternal recurrence' at the
expense of objective historical evaluation.
The Anglo-American antithetical equivalents of the Graeco-Roman
stoical/hedonistic phases of late-pagan civilization are puritanism
and promiscuity respectively - the one an expression of Protestant ethics, the
other a consequence of republican revolution in the so-called Age of
Enlightenment. The former a calculated
asceticism, the latter a sublimated self-indulgence.
19. As the catholic Counter Reformation to the
Reformation, so the fascist reaction to Communism, the latter an antithetical
equivalent of the former, an aspect of antithetical parallels in evolutionary
spirals.
20. If early paganism - Egyptian/Byzantine
civilization - was not a specifically Western development, then neither need
late transcendentalism - Social Transcendentalist/Super-transcendentalist
civilization - be so, since given to global aspirations.
21. Western civilization, in the widest possible
geographical sense of that term, begins with Graeco-Roman
late paganism, progresses to early-Christian Catholicism, progresses from there
to late-Christian Protestantism, and culminates in early-transcendental
Communism. The first and last are of
course tangential to Western civilization-proper, as manifesting in the atomic
compromise, or dichotomy, between Catholicism and Protestantism. They are akin, in resurrecting a sexual
analogue, to the relatively absolute extremes of lesbianism and homosexuality
flanking a heterosexual relativity.
22. If Catholicism is a bound-electron equivalent,
then Protestantism is its neutron opponent, a kind of suburban opposition to
provincial (town) religion. By contrast
Communism is an urban ideology, just as late paganism was rural and thus as
much pre-natural, in our specific atomic sense, as Communism is
post-natural. Only late
transcendentalism could be supra-natural, as pertaining to a supra-urban
environment, just as early paganism was subnatural,
the absolute reflection of a desert environment.
23. Thus genuinely autocratic and theocratic
extremes flank the democratic civilizations, though only the Christian and, in
particular, Protestant civilization may be accounted genuinely democratic.
ON THE SUPRA-NATURAL, ETC.
1. Increasingly I dislike the term
'supernatural', because it suggests a heightened naturalism, a kind of higher
naturalism that contrasts with nature.
To my mind, 'supra-natural' does more justice to the concept of that
which is above and beyond nature, i.e. a question of free-electron unity in
attraction, in contrast to the uneasy and problematic compromise between
protons and electrons, not to mention neutrons, in organic matter. The supra-natural is divisible, it seems to
me, into the artificial and the civilized, the one pertaining to the material
world, the other to the spiritual one.
2. A distinction, then, between, say, plastic
furniture and a mind attuned to pure awareness, neither of which is
incompatible with the twin aspects of Social Transcendentalism, which embraces
both a bureaucratic and a meritocratic dimension, the
former aligned with the material world, and hence artificial; the latter with
the spiritual world, and hence civilized.
Perhaps, after all, the artificial, or synthetic, would be better
described by the term 'supernatural'?
3. When Christian theology distinguishes between
the body and its afflictions, as between the Father and the Devil, the one good
and the other evil, it is acknowledging the fact that, in general, ill-health
is the exception to the rule, and therefore that the work of the Creator, namely
the body, reflects the rule, whereas that of the Devil, in ill-health, reflects
the exception. Sound enough in its
rather simple logic, though scarcely an argument in favour of the Holy Spirit! For no matter how much the rule of
good-health may prevail over the exception of ill-health in the vast majority
of people, the body is still an obstacle to the extensive cultivation of
spirit, and no man can ardently aspire towards the Holy Spirit who also
acknowledges and serves the Father.
4. To take a compromise position between the
Creator and the Holy Ghost is to be Christian.
To turn away from the Creator, and by implication His Son, and aspire
towards the attainment of pure spirit ... is to be transcendental, and thus
supra-natural, an enemy of everything subnatural and
natural. Such a closed-society position
is the only truly theocratic religion, above and beyond all autocratic and
democratic attachments, free from enslavement to soul and to that which stems
from it, in matter. Free for spirit.
5. The age of a truly theocratic religion may
still be some way into the future, but, in the meantime, Social
Transcendentalism, and by implication Social Transcendentalists (theocratic
centrists), must rigorously oppose everything that accrues to the open-society
mentality of those who would keep humanity enslaved to the past - to the
natural and the subnatural. Only through systematic struggle with
reaction and tradition will a new and ultimate civilization in the history of
the world emerge.
6. Early-pagan ugliness, late-pagan beauty;
early-Christian evil, late-Christian good; early-transcendental illusion,
late-transcendental truth - an approximate quantitative attribute to each stage
of civilized evolution.
7. On the other hand, an approximate qualitative
attribute thereof would read: early-pagan pain, late-pagan pleasure;
early-Christian hate, late-Christian love; early-transcendental sadness,
late-transcendental happiness, a happiness achieved through increased
awareness.
8. Ugliness is the doing against self, and the
qualitative attribute of such negative behaviour is pain; beauty is the doing
for self, and the qualitative attribute of such positive behaviour is pleasure;
evil is the doing against others, and the qualitative attribute of such
negative behaviour is hate; good is the doing for others, and the qualitative
attribute of such positive behaviour is love; illusion is the being against
self, and the qualitative attribute of such a negative stance is sadness; truth
is the being for self, and the qualitative attribute of such a positive stance
is happiness.
9. Because Social Transcendentalism aims at the
establishment of a supra-natural, supra-urban, supra-national society, it favours
the concept of a classless society, the logical outcome to a process of
world-historical evolution directed not, as with Communism, against the
bourgeoisie, but towards the dissemination and development of true religion. It does not intend to extend democracy at the
expense of the bourgeois state, but to extend theocracy at the expense of the
Church. It does not favour a proletarian
exclusivity, but the classless integration of as many different classes as possible
into the new, Social Transcendentalist community for the purposes of furthering
that community's true interests.
10. A proletarian opposition to the bourgeoisie is
communistic, because relative. Only a
people struggling, under the guidance of Social Transcendentalism, for the
extension and expansion of theocracy to the level of true religion can be
intrinsically classless, that is to say, existing on an absolute level of
society for purposes beyond the pale of class warfare, which pertains, after
all, to the State and therefore could not be relevant to a centrist society,
above and beyond all class distinctions.
But not every people are qualified to struggle in such a fashion at this
juncture in time, and class warfare will doubtless remain valid for those who
aren't, as demanded by their proletarian social integrity.
11. An approximate list of class-society
distinctions in the history of civilized evolution would read as follows:
early-pagan aristocratic absolutism; late-pagan aristocratic/grand-bourgeois
absolutist relativity; early-Christian grand-bourgeois/bourgeois relativity;
late-Christian bourgeois/petty-bourgeois relativity; early-transcendental
petty-bourgeois/proletarian absolutist relativity; late-transcendental
proletarian absolutism.
12. Ultimately, the only truly and genuinely
classless society will arise in the second phase of the post-Human Millennium,
with the new-brain collectivizations of the Superbeings - that life-form far superior to man and, in
all probability, existing in specially-constructed space cities from which
spiritual transcendence, achieved through high-level meditation (hypermeditation), would be more likely of attainment than
on the earth, in close proximity to the latter's gravitational pull. What rumour and legend have sometimes taken
for flying saucers (UFOs) might well be such space cities constructed by
advanced human-equivalent life on other, unknown planets in the Galaxy.
13. Fundamentally, the theocratic spectrum has
always been classless, even during its Roman Catholic inception, since stressing
the brotherhood of man, with particular reference to Christians. Likewise the Nazis emphasized the brotherhood
of Germanic, or Aryan, man. Needless to
say, both brotherhoods were upheld in the face of certain religious and/or
racial outsiders.
14. Just so, Social Transcendentalism will be
obliged to exclude certain categories of men from its classless integrity
vis-à-vis proletarian opposition to the bourgeoisie. In truth, there will hardly be a bourgeoisie
for Social Transcendentalist proletarians to be in opposition to, the vast
majority of their opponents probably being reactionary aristocrats, tribalists, gypsies, clericals, and socialists - capitalism
not being traditionally indigenous, so to speak, to the peoples concerned.
15. Definitions of contemporary political madness:
the application of communist criteria to theocratically-biased
societies or, conversely, the application of fascist criteria to
democratically-biased ones. A failure,
in each case, to come to grips with the ideological complexity of the world as
deriving from the age-old dichotomy between the material and the spiritual,
materialism and spirituality. The first
madness will lead to a
16. However that may be, the deepest ideological
dichotomy is not between Germans of one denominational persuasion or another,
but between dissimilar ideological peoples of disparate race. Thus the spiritual/material dichotomy
between, for example, the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons has remained an
ideological dichotomy in the national manifestation, traditionally, of
Anglo-Irish hostility. Such a dichotomy,
necessarily profound, will still exist between the two peoples if and when
Ireland adopts Social Transcendentalism and Britain socialism. But, all the while, forces of evolutionary
pressure will be at work undermining materialism at the expense of its
upholders, and thus bringing the world closer to a spiritual absolutism. For the material/spiritual dichotomy is
merely a transient phenomenon, reflecting the passage of human evolution
through an atomic stage of its unfolding.
What began in a soulful (autocratic) absolutism will culminate in a
spiritual (theocratic) absolutism, having passed through a material (democratic)
relativity.
ON ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM, ETC.
1. Just as Judaism was a revolt, in part,
against pagan polytheism, so, in like measure, Protestantism was a Western
revolt against Roman Catholic polytheism, substituting the one truly Christian
divinity, viz. Christ, for the plethora of associated divinities to which the
Catholic Church appeared to attach as much if not more importance, viz. the
Father, the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph, St. Peter, and a number of lesser
figures derived from the Gospels and, inevitably, the Church itself.
2. Now, however, it seems that a new kind of
polytheism exists in various parts of the world where, under Marxism-Leninism
or some derivative thereof, the practice of collective leadership prevails, the
communist authorities not simply People’s representatives but also elevated to
a pseudo-theistic status commensurate with their dictatorial prerogatives. If Marx and Lenin are traditionally the chief
'divinities' of this pseudo-religion, then the current president and other
high-ranking leaders of the communist state constitute its lesser 'divinities',
apt subjects for iconization for the adulation of the
proletariat, faithful followers of the gospel according to Marx and Lenin.
3. However, no such secular polytheism would be
permissible in a society under Social Transcendentalist guidance, where a new
monotheism, embodied in the Leader, would signify the attainment of a
classicism superior to either Protestant or Judaic precedent, a classicism
relative to the Second Coming and/or True World Messiah, reflecting an
aspiration towards the Holy Spirit rather than an acquiescence in Christ or a
stemming from the Father. If polytheism
indicates a stemming from the Many, the diabolic roots of evolution, then
monotheism indicates, by contrast, an aspiration towards the One, its divine
consummation. Whether this Oneness is
diabolic or divine or a combination of both ... will depend on the epoch and
people in question.
4. Let us therefore list the approximate evolution
of world civilization in a way which reflects this polytheistic/monotheistic
alternation, as between romantic and classic antitheses: early-pagan
(Byzantine) polytheistic romanticism, late-pagan (Judaic) monotheistic
classicism; early-Christian (Roman Catholic) polytheistic romanticism,
late-Christian (Protestant) monotheistic classicism; early-transcendental
(Communist) polytheistic romanticism, late-transcendental (Centrist)
monotheistic classicism.
5. Graeco-Roman
civilization (which in relation to the West I have elsewhere characterized as
late pagan) was of course polytheistic and thus, in effect, a continuation of
early-pagan civilization vis-à-vis Judaism, with its monotheistic bias. Early Christianity, whilst in part an
extension of Graeco-Roman polytheistic precedent,
also embraced Judaic monotheism with regard to a Creator (the Father),
compliments of the Old Testament (Jehovah), and thereby took on that relativity
characteristic of Christian civilization, with its atomic dichotomy, a relativity
still accruing, at a later date, to the Protestant revolt in favour of a more
absolutist, monotheistic orientation in the person of Christ, Himself a
relative, or anthropomorphic, divinity.
6. Christian decadence is characterized not by
an atheism that turns its back, as it were, on the Father and Christ, but by a
slandering of these two traditional divinities.
Hence one could define it as a perverse relativity, a negative dualism
wherein the Christian civilization is progressively polluted by internal
slander. The analogy of sheep in a pen
who, instead of jumping over its fence into freedom, remain imprisoned, to
steadily worsen their living conditions, is not entirely inappropriate here! The Western bourgeoisie do pretty much the
same thing, fouling Christianity with their blasphemous slander, but lacking
the courage or desire to abandon it.
Clinging negatively to a class allegiance out of formalism rather than
conviction. Sowing the seeds of their
own demise in soulless materialism.
7. If the civilized petty-bourgeoisie are now
capable of compiling and appreciating poetry anthologies, such anthologies are
not abstract but descriptive and expressive.
Only in a Social Transcendentalist civilization would anthologies of
abstract poetry be the norm, as an aid to contemplation, an aspect of religious
striving, part of every Meditation Centre's cultural stock. And such poetry would be the highest
literature precisely because it induced contemplation rather than necessitated
reading; because its appreciation favoured the electron as opposed to neutron
and/or proton side of the new brain; because, in a word, it neutralized the
will!
8. As of old, literature, like art (holography)
and music (pitch-oriented synthesizer tonality), would once again become
inseparable from religion, an aspect of Social Transcendentalist
self-realization. Consequently no
secular literature, art, or music would be encouraged, all democratic
institutions of the arts - libraries, art galleries, museums, theatres, concert
halls, etc. - having been transcended in the interests of a theocratic
absolutism, people thus being encouraged to attend the Meditation Centre for
such culture - apart from the possibility of films, videos, audios, and so on -
as they may desire, the availability of the highest art itself a sufficient
inducement in this regard. Secular art
having been consigned to the rubbish heap of bourgeois (church/state) history,
obsolescent religious art likewise, the way would then be clear for the highest
theocratic art to blossom on the firm foundations of a Social Transcendentalist
civilization, drawing men nearer to the Holy Spirit and, hence, simultaneously
pointing towards the future post-Human Millennium.
9. Verily, so long as a single library or museum
or concert hall or art gallery remains in existence, this ultimate civilization
will not come to pass! Those who
patronize and uphold these secular institutions cannot be expected to further
the cause of the truly theocratic institution that must bear sole responsibility
for cultural nourishment of the spirit in their wake. This task must be entrusted to people more
attuned to theocratic progress, the revolutionary fighters for a better future
- one based on sound Social Transcendentalist criteria!
10. Unlike the Protestant church, the Roman
Catholic church, more absolutist in character, catered to the various arts
(literature, music, painting, sculpture), as did the temples of Graeco-Roman pagan civilization, the early Greek in
particular. By banishing art from its
precincts, however, the Protestant church, though well-intentioned in regard to
itself, unwittingly encouraged the growth of secular art, with a consequence
that various democratic institutions of cultural nourishment quickly came into
being, and not simply to replace the cultural void created by Protestantism,
but to satisfy a growing demand for secular culture as an expression of
democratic freedoms and rights, the cleavage between state and church becoming
more radical with the emancipation of the State attendant upon the Age of
Enlightenment (or pseudo-Enlightenment) and, following the French Revolution,
the progressive decadence of Western - meaning primarily Protestant -
civilization.
11. For if, during the classical phase of
Protestant civilization, the Church was more influential than the State, by the
time its romantic phase arrived the converse was increasingly becoming the
case, with the State and, as a corollary of this, secular art growing in
importance as time wore on, a trend which could not but culminate in the state
absolutism of communist pseudo-civilization, with its all-powerful opposition
to the Church and predisposition towards Socialist Realism - the most secular
democratic art conceivable.
12. Just as communist pseudo-civilization arose
out of the decadence of Protestant civilization, and this in spite of a
Catholic tradition, albeit one subject to Western influence, so the future
Social Transcendentalist civilization should arise out of the church-biased
Roman Catholic civilization of contemporary Ireland and, contrary to Communism,
extend the legacy of the Church to a degree whereby, in the form of the Centre
(the religiously-biased institution germane to Social Transcendentalism), it
becomes all-powerful and can consequently dispense with the State and its
secular culture altogether, arrogating political, not to say economic,
responsibilities to itself. In this
civilization, art (in the fullest sense of that term) will once again become exclusively
the 'handmaiden of religion', as it was in the distant past and, to a degree,
still is wherever a genuinely Catholic civilization prevails, and this in spite
of its continued co-existence with the secular art of the democratic,
Protestant tradition - an art which, together with its communist successor,
will be rigorously proscribed, once Social Transcendentalist criteria obtain in
Ireland, as elsewhere, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.
13. In literature, the novel is the most
democratic art form, the one that strives to be popular and, hence, commercial,
whether written from a conservative or a social democratic point-of-view. Admittedly, a small number of novelists
aspire towards theocracy to a degree, as did Aldous
Huxley, and are thus akin to painters who push canvas art in an abstract
direction. But that is still merely the
'best of a bad job', so to speak, within the novelistic context, an elite
procedure that will only appeal to the most spiritual intelligentsia and not to
the broad mass of novel readers who, as before, require a more unadulterated
democratic literature, particularly in countries like Britain and America.
14. Needless to say, such literature would be
taboo in a radically theocratic society - indeed, the writing and reading of
novels, no matter how good their intentions, would be discouraged, if not
proscribed, as unworthy of serious attention.
Only a democratic society, and in particular a liberal one, can take the
novel for granted, just as it takes paintings and symphonies for granted -
those plastic and musical counterparts to novelistic literature. All this will change in the future, as much
regarding the obsolescent theocratic and autocratic arts ... as the more
conspicuously obsolescent democratic ones, not to forget the Social Realist
successors to the latter.
ON REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE, ETC.
1. The only true and worthwhile revolution is
the one that changes everything, not just a few things here and there! The Social Transcendentalist revolution, if
successful, will be the most radical and far-reaching revolution ever. The Kingdom or, rather, Centre that he who
corresponds to a Second Coming/True World Messiah intends to establish ... will
be no mere continuation of open-society democracy, but the radical break with
tradition, nature, the world, etc., that all true believers, whether Christian
or Judaic, have awaited for centuries - a break that will confirm them in their
belief and test its authenticity.
2. Those who oppose this revolution will be
judged severely, as they fully deserve!
The sword of truth will cleave the faithless from the faithful, the
liars from the true. Only those with
faith in my teachings will be saved for the Centre, the others ... damned to a
banishment irrevocable! And they include
all those who appear Christian on the surface but, underneath, would oppose the
Second Coming and seek to protect the Church from criticism and supersession, the false believers who have substituted the
institution of the Church for the living truth it exists to convey, the truth
of the 'kingdom within', and would consequently oppose radical change,
especially any radical change that threatens their vested interests.
3. Christ taught that those who came unto Him
would have to abandon parents and family.
It is ever the same where a true revolutionary is concerned. You do not become a revolutionary by clinging
to tradition or by hanging-on to the luxuries of bourgeois life. You must be free, absolutely free, for the
cause, not be inhibited by concern for parents or family. You must be prepared, if necessary, to
sacrifice them for it!
4. If heterosexual behaviour is natural and
homosexual behaviour anti-natural, corresponding, in political terms, to a
communist opposition or alternative to liberal democracy, then anal intercourse
between women and men should be regarded as a kind of homosexual
heterosexuality, the sexual equivalent of democratic socialism, a sort of
relative or diluted anti-naturalism in between liberal and communist
contexts. Alternatively, one could
contend that, in the evolution of anti-natural sexuality, anal
'heterosexuality' precedes bisexuality, meaning an oscillation between straight
heterosexuality and homosexuality, a more extreme relativity than that evinced
by the anal violation of women, though a degree of this may still figure in
bisexual relations or practices.
5. Thus one would be distinguishing, to risk a
further political analogy, between a Democratic Socialist equivalent and a
Social Democratic equivalent, the one preceding the other as from early to late
stages of petty-bourgeois evolution.
6. If one were to return to the absolutist
inception of the democratic spectrum, one would probably be justified in also
speaking of Cromwellian or Whig lesbianism, but that
is another matter and now I only wish to add that, by contrast, a truly
theocratic sexuality, i.e. a supernatural sexuality, must involve recourse to
pornography of one degree or another, either with adults (soft or hard) or -
more for the transcendental future than the mundane present - the use, via
computers, of lawful teenage juveniles.
7. A supernatural sexuality is precisely one in
which there is still a natural relation between model and masturbator/voyeur,
as between female and male, vagina and penis, except that, the model being a
reproduction and not a real-life flesh-and-blood woman, the sexual
proceedings/relations are necessarily one-sided (absolutist) and
sublimated. Hence supernatural.
8. The present age is partial to much hard-core
adult pornography, and this static mode of sublimated sexuality can be
contrasted with the video/film active mode which suggests a sexual parallel
with a military dictatorship, i.e. the pseudo-autocratic successor to the
autocratic rule of monarchs. The sex
film does not, as a rule, induce supernatural participation but, rather, the
subordination of the viewer to the passive role of voyeur of other people's
sexual activity. A contrast, no doubt,
with the pagan inception of autocratic sexuality in the worship of erotic
sculpture, some of which, being static, must have induced actual copulation.
9. One wonders whether the numerous arms and
legs of certain oriental statues, for instance, were not specifically intended
to discourage active participation by suggesting animation, the ever-active
dance of sexual life. Speculation aside,
the significance of contemporary sublimated sexuality in the evolution of life
towards a theocratic climax cannot be underestimated, and, certainly,
pornographic erotica will continue to be respected wherever theocracy gains the
ascendancy, even, in some future societies, to the extent of completely
displacing other modes of sexuality, the democratic not excepted.
10. The genuine artist is ever a law unto himself,
a man who says what he wants to irrespective of whether or not it will be
appreciated by the majority of people.
He is a kind of Arts Führer, in whom creative
sovereignty resides, and he leads from above, setting new standards and
creating fresh interpretative possibilities, which the public may draw near to
if they wish or, more correctly, are capable of appreciating what he has
suggested, achieved, or whatever.
11. Thus he is essentially theocratic, in contrast
to the bogus, or democratic, artist, who aims to please the broad masses -
whether bourgeois or proletarian - and thus prostitutes his creative talent
(such as it is) in the name of popularity and, by implication, financial
success. In a democratic society, the
genuine artist will always be the exception, doing his own thing at the expense
of popular acclamation and, hence, financial betterment. But an age is coming when no democratic art
will be available, and then, in the theocratic society that ensues, the
theocratic artist will be the rule - in fact, the only representative of
artistic endeavour.
12. Economics - politics - religion; science -
philosophy - art; autocratic - democratic - theocratic; aristocratic -
plutocratic - meritocratic; beauty - goodness -
truth; pleasure - love - happiness; Father - Son - Holy Ghost; protons -
neutrons - electrons; kingdom - state - centre; propitiation - worship -
self-realization; subego - ego - superego; soul -
matter - spirit; Hell - Purgatory - Heaven; child - youth - adult.
13. The aristocratic kingdom - the technocratic
church/plutocratic state - and the meritocratic
centre: from the autocratic to the theocratic via the bureaucratic/democratic,
paralleling an evolutionary progression from the Father to the Holy Spirit via
the Son, Who, in His humanistic relativity, embraces both the aristocratic and
the meritocratic, as a kind of diluted Father and
Holy Spirit respectively, but is not, in any absolute sense, aristocratic or meritocratic.
14. The next civilization will be as much beyond
Christ as the Christian one was beyond the Father, or Creator. There can be no literal Second Coming ... of
Christ as a cross between alpha and omega.
Embodied Holy Spirit does not acknowledge the Father, but champions an
evolutionary course set on the freeing of all spirit from the body. He who corresponds to a Second Coming, i.e.
the founder and teacher of what, in its radical truthfulness, deserves to
become a truly global religion, does not bear the name 'Christ', and neither
should he be regarded as such. For that
would be an insult to peoples of non-Christian descent.
15. Those who believe in a literal return of
Christ are simply the dupes of theological expedience. No such Christ - transmuted into pure spirit
following His Ascension into Heaven - will ever return, for no such ascension
ever literally occurred. It was simply
theologically correct that the Church should have taught the Ascension into
Heaven (on the Third Day) in order to show simple humanity that there was more
to life than the body and its dying, that, due to evolutionary progress, a
dimension of life transcending the body had been discovered, as taught by
Christ, and that future progress for mankind lay in expanding the spiritual at
the expense of the sensual.
16. The Ascension served as a metaphor for this
divine possibility in man, as in evolution, and has accordingly been upheld
wherever Christian and equivalent religious teachings have prevailed. But in reality no man, not even Christ, can
ever literally ascend into Heaven, the realm of pure spirit. Evolution must pass through two post-human life
forms before transcendence becomes possible, and this contention is at the core
of my teachings, the teachings, as I said, of a new or second Christ-like
figure, less a Second Coming than - at any rate potentially - a True World
Messiah.
17. But there are vested interests and fools who
will cling to the past, seeking, in the process, to deny or slander my
teachings. It is really amazing how many
stupid people are in positions of traditional power, people whose innate
intelligence, even cleverness, has been stunted and limited by their class
allegiance to the doctrinal teachings of their faith and, not least of all, by
the influence of a rural or partly rural lifestyle, their dependence on nature
in natural or semi-natural surroundings precluding the development of a truly
radical, transcendental mentality!
18. Ah, the enemies of evolutionary progress are
legion, but Judgement must be severe if that progress is not to be held back
indefinitely by the purblind machinations of sophisticated fools! All power to the Centre! Let Social Transcendentalist truth spread
throughout the world, in order that it may eventually become united in the
faith of the ultimate theocracy!
