PART
THREE: ESSAYS
*
LITERARY
DEVELOPMENTS
The more spiritual one
is, that's to say, the more biased the constitution of one's psyche towards the
superconscious, the less qualified one becomes to either create or enjoy
reading fiction. By which I mean most traditional
and a great deal of contemporary literature.
For the creation and enjoyment of fiction requires a psyche constituted
in such a manner as to be more or less balanced between the subconscious and
the superconscious in egocentric dualism.
Such a psyche will ordinarily be bourgeois and appertain, as a rule, to
a suburban rather than an urban lifestyle.
Yet the proletariat cannot entirely be exempted from equation with an
egocentric integrity, and, even though a majority of them live in urban contexts,
there are still those among their ranks who prefer fiction to fact - the most
plausible explanation probably being that, despite the artificial influence of
the urban environment, such people aren't particularly intelligent.
To say that the production and assimilation of fiction
corresponds to bourgeois dualistic and bourgeois/proletarian transitional
levels of evolution, as opposed to a proletarian level, would not be far off
the mark. For the bourgeoisie are, as a
rule, dualists and, consequently, they are sufficiently acquainted with subconscious
influence to be capable of either creating or enjoying fiction. Likewise the petty bourgeoisie, although less
egocentric and therefore more biased towards the superconscious than their
class predecessors, are capable of creating and enjoying fiction; though they
will generally prefer novels with less fiction and more fact in them, and will
write, if artists, more like Hermann Hesse or Arthur Koestler than, say, John
Cowper Powys or Evelyn Waugh.
If, considered from a fictional point-of-view, literature
should be limited in time to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois stages of evolution,
when the psychic constitution of its practitioners and patrons is such as to
preclude a wholly factual approach to it, what, you may wonder, will happen to
literature when the proletarian stage of evolution eventually makes an official
appearance on the level of post-dualistic civilization? The answer to this question must, I think, be
fairly obvious: literature will cease to be written in the context of
fiction. For by then the psychic
constitution of the prevailing class of the day, namely the proletariat, will
be so biased towards the superconscious ... as to preclude either the creation
or appreciation of a literature with any concessions to fiction. Thus even the most predominantly factual
petty-bourgeois novels or short stories will be found wanting and be consigned,
in consequence, to the rubbish tip of cultural history. Nothing pertaining to a subconscious
allegiance would be relevant.
Does this therefore mean that the novel and the short story
would cease to exist in a transcendental civilization? Yes, I believe it does. The masses would be provided, instead, with
fusion literature, or the combination of various genres within the overall
context of a single production. Thus no
volume reminiscent of a petty-bourgeois novel or a collection of short stories
or even a collection of poems would be published, though something
approximating to a novel (long and/or medium prose?), collection of short
stories, etc., on a higher, more truthful basis within the context of fusion
literature might still be read.
A proletarian civilization properly so-considered, with
Transcendentalism as the official religion, would, however, be post-atomic - in
contrast to the bourgeois and bourgeois/proletarian civilizations of the
contemporary West. By 'post-atomic' I
mean that the electron equivalents in literature, namely words, would be set
free of neutron equivalents, namely meanings, and enabled to exist in complete
freedom on the post-atomic level. For
meaning is the neutron of a sentence, and when words are bound to meanings, as
they tend to be in an atomic civilization, they become constrained by
grammatical determinism, which serves to make meaning as clear or intelligible as
possible. Grammatical determinism
implies that words function as bound electrons in the service of meaning. There can be no bound-electron equivalents in
a post-atomic civilization!
Now what applies to literature applies no less to the other
arts, which have already made considerable strides towards electron freedom
within the context of transitional, or bourgeois/proletarian, civilization in
recent decades. In art, representation
is the neutron of a subject and paint, the medium of art, functions as a bound
electron when constrained by representational priorities. Bourgeois art is, as a rule, entirely
representational, whereas petty-bourgeois art reflects a transitional status
between naturalistic representation and artificial abstraction in some in-between
realm of creative compromise. At its
most radical, as in the finest works of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Nicholson,
Pollock, et al., it can be entirely abstract, though constrained from true
electron freedom by the retention of naturalistic materials, such as oils and
canvas, which indirectly pertain to neutron determinism. Likewise in music, melody is the neutron of a
phrase or sentence, and notes correspond to bound electrons when constrained by
atomic convention to serve melody.
Bourgeois music is, as a rule, entirely melodic, and thus atomic,
whereas petty-bourgeois music, like most of the music produced by Schoenberg,
Berg, and Webern, signifies a degree of freedom on the part of notes which, at
its most radical, is suggestive of a proletarian avant-garde, while yet being
constrained to a petty-bourgeois context by dint of the composer's intermittent
adherence to melody and/or continuous utilization of acoustic means. For what natural materials are to art, acoustic
instruments are to music, and no truly transcendental, because exclusively
artificial, music can be produced through such naturalistic means. Even the most atonal Webern or Schoenberg
composition remains petty bourgeois on account of its reliance on acoustic
instruments. Just so, the reliance of
trad. jazz on acoustic instruments precludes it from being wholly or completely
proletarian. Rather, it is a form of
bourgeois/proletarian music.
Having outlined the direction I believe literature and the
other arts will take in the coming post-atomic civilization, a few words should
be said concerning other types of writings - as, for instance, those pertaining
to science and philosophy. Clearly such
writings cannot be subject to exactly the same criteria as apply to the future
development of literature, for intelligibility is of their essence in the
dissemination of, for the most part, utilitarian, pragmatic and factual
knowledge. If literature is destined to
become totally abstract on the proletarian level, then those writings which are
not literary must retain allegiance to an atomic integrity, and thus to a
degree of grammatical determinism, in fidelity to intelligibility for practical
or evolutionary ends. A scientist
dedicated to the discovery of means whereby, come the millennial stage of
evolution, brains may be artificially supported and sustained in collectivized
contexts, is not going to derive much profit from a volume of abstract
literature. As a member of that category
of human beings whose principal responsibility is to lead humanity at large
towards the 'promised land' of the millennial Beyond, it is not for him to
enter it himself, nor any interim 'promised land', such as might be signified
by the assimilation of abstract literature.
On the contrary, it is his duty to stand back from it at a kind of
bourgeois remove, in loyalty to his vocational responsibility. For while the masses are perfectly entitled
to avail themselves of every crumb of evolutionary progress in loyalty to their
essentially passive, self-indulgent mentality, the leader, be he scientist,
politician, philosopher or whatever, must refrain from participating in such
crumbs to anything like the same extent himself, in order that he may continue
to struggle on behalf of mankind and so bring it closer, by degrees, to that
ultimate 'promised land' which will only be attained with the culmination of
evolution in the heavenly Beyond. Thus
the leader, while not being entirely debarred from sampling the fruits of
evolutionary progress himself, must remain committed to intelligible writings,
in order that he may learn from them - and indeed contribute towards them -
ways by means of which the quality of life on earth may be improved.
On the materialist side, one has science and politics; on the
spiritual side - art and religion.
Philosophy, which functions as a kind of bridge between materialism and
spirituality, must also retain allegiance to intelligibility in the interests
of its synthesizing vocation. And the
same will of course apply to philosophical literature, which is but a more
philosophically-biased mode of literature - too literary to be literally
philosophy, but, at the same time, too philosophical to be subject to such
evolutionary criteria as pertain to literature-proper. The philosopher, that hybrid writer in
between the scientist and the artist, may lean towards the spiritual more than
the material or, conversely, towards the sciences more than the arts, but,
whatever the case, he can never become wholly committed to either discipline,
since that would spell his end as a philosopher. His primary task is to attempt a
reconciliation of science and art, or politics and religion, on a new, higher
level, and thus act as a 'bridge builder', in Aldous Huxley's apt phrase,
between the various disciplines, integrating them to an end that will transcend
the pitfalls of exclusivity which make, on the materialist side, for scientism,
and, on the spiritual side, for aestheticism.
Scientism and aestheticism are alike in that they pursue their
respective bents without recourse to a wider, more comprehensive perspective
which, if comprehended, would preclude the emergence of those dangerously
anarchic and nihilistic tendencies accruing to them. The scientist who pursues experimentation for
its own sake, without reference to a higher moral purpose, is no less
destructive and misguided than the artist who excludes scientific progress from
his world-view in fidelity to a narrowly aesthetic bias.
But if scientism and aestheticism are two sides of the one
exclusive coin, then what may be called politicism and spiritism are two sides
of another, and they must be criticized or countered by the philosopher too,
since politics divorced from a moral perspective is no less dangerous than
scientism, while religion divorced, through spiritism, from political reality
is no less fatuous than aestheticism.
The one results in the emergence of a Stalin, the other in the emergence
of a Ghandi or, translated into literary terms, a Propter - watching his own
navel. The fact, however, that politicism
and scientism will prevail in a barbarous post-dualistic state is only to be
expected, in light of the materialist lopsidedness of such a state, which
conforms to an opposition to existing levels of (decadent) civilization. Naturally, it is impossible for a philosopher
to exist in such a society. For his
vocation conforms to civilization, in which the various disciplines exist in a
kind of symbiosis or equilibrium of warring tensions, and the spiritual side
has not capitulated to the materialist side nor, as in the case of religion in
Marxist-Leninist states, been officially banned. When art is made to serve politics no such
symbiosis exists, and consequently there is no place for the philosopher, since
politicism and scientism are taken for granted.
A post-dualistic civilization, however, would once again free
art and religion from materialist constraint, only this time they would be even
freer from such constraint than had been the case at lower stages of
civilization. Yet not so free that there
was no place for science or politics in society, and therefore no place for the
philosopher! His task would probably be
easier than at any previous stage of civilization but, even if the danger of
scientism and politicism was not so great, he would still have to warn people
against the danger of aestheticism and spiritism, which, in a post-atomic
civilization, could only be greater!
TRANSITIONAL
LITERATURES
At its best literature
is a superior kind of human endeavour to science, being concerned not with the
apparent, i.e. the external world and the way it works or may be changed, but
with the essential, i.e. the internal world of the psyche in connection with
spiritual experience. Literature can and
does evolve from a lower, instinctually emotional level to a higher,
spiritually intellectual level, just as science evolves from a lower
materialist to a higher quasi-spiritual level, with the development from
Newtonian objectivity to Einsteinian subjectivity, as relative to the evolution
of the psyche from the internal objectivity of the subconscious to the internal
subjectivity of the superconscious. Yet
science, for all its transmutations, cannot deal in direct spiritual
experience, for which the discipline of literature is required, in fidelity to
man's highest and most sublime aspirations - aspirations which transcend the
pragmatic prerogative of proof through verifiable experimentation, and
therefore cannot be subjected to scientific endorsement. Science may dismiss these aspirations from
its own, narrowly empirical point-of-view, but they cannot be dismissed on
their own terms, which, being internal, transcend the boundaries of scientific
inquiry. Neither can they be proved in
terms of the quasi-electron science of post-Einsteinian subjectivity, despite
the various attempts which this 'spiritual' science may make to prove
them. For, once again, experience
transcends investigation, making the findings of this pseudo-science conform to
hidden impulses which derive, in all probability, from the superconscious.
If modern science is an ally of the spiritual life rather than
a sceptical enemy, it is nonetheless constrained by the fundamentally external,
superficial nature of science from a truly spiritual identification with
matters experiential, as opposed to experimental. Only literature is capable of speaking on
behalf of the spirit from a direct point-of-view, and the greater the
literature ... the more direct will be its speech. To paraphrase, one may say that whereas
science deals with phenomena, literature deals with noumena - a distinction, in
short, between the apparent and the essential.
When science strives to deal with tiny phenomena, as it must do at its
highest level, it interprets what is being investigated as though they were
noumena. For it, too, is subject to
superconscious influence and must accordingly accommodate its findings or
provisional hypotheses to the internal subjectivity of contemporary
reality. No scientist is an impartial
instrument looking at the world from a completely neutral point-of-view. His psyche is conditioned by the age in which
he lives and by the influences, intellectual or otherwise, with which he is
brought into regular contact. The man
who appertains to a transcendental civilization must necessarily interpret
matter according to transcendent criteria.
As yet, however, no transcendental civilization has officially
arisen in the world; for it can only do so once society becomes wholly
post-atomic in constitution, which, needless to say, won't be before the
existing bourgeois and bourgeois/proletarian civilizations have been superseded
by proletarian civilization at some future point in time. The contemporary transitional level of
civilization, which for the most part prevails in America and Germany, may have
extended traditional dualistic alignments in the arts and sciences towards the
coming post-dualistic ones, but it hasn't entirely broken with the past, nor
can we reasonably expect it to do so!
The particle/wavicle theory of matter, as relative to transitional
science, may prevail over the traditional particle theory of bourgeois science,
but we cannot expect it to be transmuted into an exclusively wavicle theory
before the onset of post-atomic civilization.
So long as transitional civilization prevails, a particle/wavicle theory
of matter will be the academic norm, against which the scientifically
precocious would be powerless to rebel.
Only an ignoramus could expect bourgeois/proletarian science to
accommodate itself to wholly proletarian criteria.
And something similar could be said with regard to literature,
which will continue to toe-the-line of transition between bourgeois determinism
and proletarian freedom so long as bourgeois/proletarian civilization remains
relatively intact. Even if, here and
there, some form of proletarian literature were to be created, it could not be
popularly endorsed, but would exist beyond the pale of transitional
civilization, awaiting its proper appreciation in the post-atomic civilization
still to arise. My guess, however, is
that no such literature would be created anyway - the nearest thing to it being
some radical manifestation of petty-bourgeois decadence, such as exists, in
comparatively short supply at present, in the contemporary West.
The progression away from traditional fictional standards is
manifested on two levels of petty-bourgeois literature and, broadly, one might
define them as the objective and the subjective, or the lower and the
higher. The first level mainly pertains
to what has become known as philosophical literature, and is characterized by a
partial rejection of fictitious illusions in favour of factual truths, in order
that the resulting literature may serve as a vehicle for philosophical
speculation. Among the major authors to
have worked on this level are André Gide, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Arthur
Koestler, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The
second level mainly pertains either to the substitution of autobiographical
information, i.e. subjective fact, for conventional fictional inventions, or to
the extension of literature, whether fictitious or otherwise, into experimental
channels. Leading exponents on this
level include James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell,
Anthony Burgess, and William Burroughs.
Both levels of literature tend away from fictions, but they do so in
different directions - the first down towards philosophy, the second up towards
the proletarian literature of the future post-atomic civilization. Admittedly, no writer is ever entirely any
one thing, since no man is an absolute.
But a preponderating tendency will exist in each author for either the
first or the second level, thereby enabling us to define him in terms of one of
the two traditions. If the
philosophical, then his art will be constrained to an atomic integrity by dint
of its adherence to philosophical speculation and factual information, and will
exist on a comparatively materialist level of dogmatic thought. If, on the other hand, the autobiographical
and/or experimental is the tradition to which he pertains, then his art will be
capable of extension towards the post-atomic, though only on experimental
terms. For a wholly abstract post-atomic
literature can only arise out of a subjective tradition which, in abandoning or
spurning autobiographical fact, may gravitate towards the higher subjectivity
of the abstract.
But I use the term 'subjectivity' only in contrast to the
objectivity of philosophical literature, which largely focuses on facts outside
the self, i.e. in the external world. I do
not wish to give the impression that such subjectivity is in any way illusory
or necessarily entails a concession to fiction.
On the contrary, it is really the highest form of objectivity, insofar
as it pertains to the superconscious looking back and down at the
subconscious. Perhaps one should
therefore define it as the higher objectivity, in contrast to the lower
objectivity of philosophical literature, which focuses on external reality and
the world in general? This higher
objectivity of autobiographical and/or experimental literature transcends the
self for an impersonal realm of post-atomic freedom. Or, at any rate, it will do in the
future. For, in the contemporary West,
it exists on a petty-bourgeois level, and that level is by no means post-atomic.
Probably the greatest petty-bourgeois novelist of the twentieth
century was James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake extended language beyond the
merely national to the international, in its adoption of multi-lingual puns and
phrases. Finnegans Wake is almost
abstract, but not quite! Most of it is
intelligible and therefore subject to a degree of neutron constraint in the
interests of meaning. The words - often
oddly juxtaposed or formed into teasing puns - are perhaps freer than words
have ever been at any previous time in the history of literature, but they
aren't completely free; they don't correspond to free-electron
equivalents. They exist on the level of
some radically Expressionist painting, say a Kokoschka, or some predominantly
atonal acoustic composition by a composer like Webern. And of course they exist in a novel, not in a
volume of fusion literature, which may or may not embrace narrative
writings. Together with their
syntactical predecessors in Ulysses, they constitute a petty-bourgeois contribution
to the decadence of French dualistic civilization. For although Joyce was born in
None too surprisingly, because Americans were asserting
themselves in a like-manner to Joyce and were already set on course for the
coming time of American ascendancy in the arts, when the tide of exile would be
reversed and Europeans flock to America instead of Americans flocking to Europe
and, in particular, to France. Prior to
the Second World War, however, it was generally the other way around, since the
transitional civilization of
At the time of writing, transitional civilization - which, of
course, is more than petty bourgeois - is still in existence, and
Petty-bourgeois literature and poetry have generally failed to
live-up to the challenge set by Joyce in Finnegans Wake and by Pound in the Cantos. The finest artists since them may have
extended creative progress in one or two directions, but, overall, they have
failed to extend it more comprehensively ... right across the transitional board,
as it were, of the higher literature.
Even Henry Miller, who succeeded like no-one else in making
autobiographical literature respectable, could not attain to the same
experimental level as Joyce, and came no closer than Surrealism to the
abstract. Of British writers, both
Lawrence Durrell and Anthony Burgess have surpassed Miller in certain technical
matters, though they haven't produced anything analogous to Finnegans Wake,
despite their commitment to the experimental.
Could it be, I wonder, that petty-bourgeois genius attained to its
zenith with Joyce and Pound, or has someone greater still to arise?
One will have to wait until transitional civilization has run
its course before a definite answer to that question becomes possible! Although it does seem that the
petty-bourgeois literature of the above-mentioned masters has been eclipsed by
bourgeois/proletarian literature which, ever more popular, seeks an
accommodation with film, and thus with proletarian civilization in its
comparatively naturalistic phase.
A
SECOND COMING
'No man will enter the
Kingdom of Heaven unless he first comes unto me,' said Christ, and I, who am
disposed to regard myself in a certain Messianic light, also say it, albeit on
higher terms. For I do not believe that
any man will enter the 'Kingdom of Heaven' and I don't much like the word
'Kingdom', which has an old-fashioned, not to say monarchical, connotation more
applicable to the alpha than to the omega of things. Nevertheless, unless men 'come unto me',
unless they read and adopt my teachings, particularly those appertaining to
religion, they won't attain to Heaven.
That, I believe, is a fact. For I
have outlined, in various works, the direction of evolution, with the life
forms which correspond to each distinct, successive stage of its unfolding -
life forms that extend above man in the guise, firstly, of the Supermen, i.e.
human brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts,
and, secondly, of the Superbeings, i.e. new brains artificially supported and
sustained in more intensively collectivized contexts. These two life forms are destined, I
maintain, to emerge out of man with the establishment of the post-Human
Millennium at the termination of, or climax to, the next and final civilization
- the global civilization of transcendental man. The Superbeings would constitute, in each of
their separate collectivized contexts, a life form antithetical to trees, which
are completely subconscious. The
Superbeings will be completely superconscious, since collectivized new brains
will know nothing of old-brain/subconscious allegiance, as relative to the
preceding superhuman stage of evolution in the first phase of the post-Human
Millennium....
I have dwelt on these and similar themes throughout my
writings, and by now I know what I am talking about! Only from the Superbeings would transcendent
spirit eventually emerge, and its emergence would signify the attainment (of
the ultimate life form) to the heavenly Beyond ... in the guise of Spiritual Globes
which, antithetical to stars, would converge towards and expand into one
another, until such time as all such globes, from whichever part of the
Universe, had joined together to form the ultimate Spiritual Globe ... of God
the Supreme - what I am wont to term the Omega Absolute.
Thus I am saying that unless man is set on course for his
future transmutation, or elevation to the superhuman stage of evolution, by
adopting Transcendentalism as the next logical stage of religious progress, and
unless my teachings are honoured by future generations, there will be no
eventual attainment of life to the heavenly Beyond. I speak with more certainty and logical
authority than Christ probably had ... when he voiced equivalent thoughts at an
earlier, more naturalistic period of time.
Christ was 'God' because the stage of human evolution to which
he pertains demanded that man be elevated to the status of divinity, that man became God in the person of
Christ. This doesn't of course mean that
God the Father, or some such Creator-equivalent, became Christ. It means, on the contrary, that Christ was
entrusted, by men collectively known as Christians, with the honour of
supplanting the Father as the second God in the evolution of human
religion. That he was only the 'Son of
God' to the extent that he was the second deity to emerge, following the Father
or, more correctly, the Creator. Thus
God as man stands between the alpha absolutism of the Creator and the future
omega absolutism of the Ultimate Creation - the 'holy-spiritual' Supreme
Being. Christ, being man, was both
diabolic and divine - abraxas-like, with powers of damnation as well as
salvation. If the Father was wholly
diabolic, by which I mean rooted in the reactive Alpha Absolute, then the Holy
Spirit will be wholly divine, as appertaining to the attractive Omega
Absolute. In between, the man-god,
Christ.
But the era of this man-god cannot last for ever, since it is
human destiny to progress towards the Omega Absolute, as mankind draws
spiritually further away from the Alpha Absolute. With the advent of a transcendental
civilization, man will be so biased in favour of the spirit ... that no
dualistic allegiance to Christ, and so no place for his paternal forebear, would
be possible. Transcendental man will be
exclusively omega-orientated in his religiosity, conceding no right of worship
to the Alpha Absolute, whether in the context of the wholly or the partly
diabolic. Transcendental man will thus
be atheist. For he will know that,
conceived in its ultimate sense, God doesn't exist, since it is the duty of a
superior life form than man, viz. the Superbeings, to attain to transcendence,
and thus to a level of life, viz. the Spiritual Globes, directly preceding the
Omega Absolute. Not until the Omega Absolute
is established, following convergence of these Spiritual Globes to an
indivisible unity, will Supreme Being exist in any ultimate sense. Even the transcendent spirit of a Spiritual
Globe would be something en route to God in the heavenly Beyond.
Higher man will know that there must be evolution towards the
post-human life forms before any prospect of a literal attainment to the
heavenly Beyond can be envisaged. He
will not regard God the Father or Christ as divine, for he will know that the
Father was diabolic and Christ both diabolic and divine. Thus he will be atheist, since there can be
no association of God with the diabolic for him! What existed in the past was never wholly or
truly divine. Only what will exist in the future, as
the consummation of evolution, would be truly divine, because the Supreme Being
of the Holy Spirit. An atheist does not
confound the Devil with God, the supreme level of attractive Being with the
reactive Almighty!
But in the next civilization ... use of the word God will
probably drop out of favour, as a terminology devoid of ambiguous associations,
and transcending all previous so-called world religions, comes into regular
use. If so, then a term like Teilhard de
Chardin's Omega Point or my own more absolutist variation on it would doubtless
be an apt choice.
I, however, am not the Omega Point, and neither am I the
Christ. If I correspond in some respects
to a Second Coming, a more advanced stage of Messianic deliverance, I do so
devoid of mystical associations and beyond the realm of anthropomorphic
necessity. There will be no worshipping
of man as God in the transcendental civilization, and therefore no worshipping
of me, who is but man! I point the way
forward, and those who wish to evolve must lend an ear to my teachings. I do not speak for the wrong ears, the ears
of those who pertain to the dualistic and transitional civilizations, which are
aligned with some abstract Christ. I speak,
rather, for those who are destined to build the next civilization, and so I
avoid, where possible, casting pearls before swine.
Am I therefore the Antichrist?
No, I do not think so, because, to my mind, the Antichrist and he who
corresponds to a Second Coming are two different people. If the former is more 'anti' than 'pro', then
Nietzsche would be a better candidate for the intellectual role of Antichrist,
he who wrote a book bearing that title, and who raved against Christianity more
often than he intimated of a coming post-Christian civilization. If 'anti' is negative, then 'pro' must be
positive, and he who corresponds to a Second Coming would have more to say
about the future direction of evolution than the destruction of what already
exists. The Antichrist and the Second
Coming would therefore be entirely different entities.
But the Second Coming comes as man, not God, and so he does not
require to be endowed with miraculous abilities, such as the ability to walk on
water or to change water into wine. Such
endowments correspond, from a theological point-of-view, to the need to make
the man-god superhuman, to attribute 'divine' powers to him so that his
followers, down through the centuries, will find it easier to worship him as
God. The fact that Christ is
conceived as man-god and not just man ... makes it imperative that he should be
endowed with more than simply human abilities.
Was this not the case, he could hardly exist on the level of a second
deity (after the Father) for his followers.
Was Christ, the actual man, really capable of such miracles as
have been attributed to him? Personally,
I rather doubt it, though he may have been able to do one or two things
bordering on the miraculous. But a
priest who asks such a question and then answers it in a negative fashion, like
myself, is truly decadent. A priest is
supposed to uphold theological expedience in loyalty to his clerical vocation,
and if he can't do so, then he is already on the road to becoming a guru or
something analogous! When priests seek
to de-mystify Christ, it proves that Christianity is drawing towards its close,
drawing closer to the higher religion which is destined to supersede it ...
with the advent of a transcendental civilization. I advocate such a religion, but I do not set
myself up as God. For that would be
thoroughly anachronistic.
In case some confusion may have arisen, earlier in this essay,
concerning the antithesis between the Creator and what I have called the
Ultimate Creation, I would now like to say this: truly, the antithesis between
the Father and the Holy Ghost is an absolute one, which means that if the
former is regarded as alpha and the latter as omega, then the distinction is as
much between the plural and the singular, viz. Alpha Absolutes and Omega
Absolute, as anything else. We
habitually speak of the Father as if there was just one, but in reality what
ends with the One must begin in the Many - its absolute antithesis. The reason that humanity has traditionally
referred back to a single Creator is that religious thinking in the West
derives, via Judaic monotheism, from a partial rather than a universal
point-of-view: namely, from a galactic integrity, as germane to primitive
civilization. We have acted and thought
as components of the Galaxy, knowing comparatively little about the millions of
other galaxies which also exist in the Universe, and therefore tending to
define everything in terms of our own.
Thus we have spoken of a single Creator - which, unknowingly, was
probably an abstraction from the central star of the Galaxy - whilst imagining
that such a spirit counted for and embraced the Universe in general! From a post-galactic, and thus post-atomic,
point of view it should be possible for us to understand that our Creator was
but one of millions of Creators simultaneously at work elsewhere in the
Universe, i.e. millions of central stars of millions of galaxies, and that
evolution therefore proceeds from the Alpha Absolutes to the Omega Absolute,
which is to say, from the Primal Creators (essentially diabolic because
functioning according to the negative standards of the most infernal doing -
the conversion of hydrogen into helium - the very stuff of hell - through
proton-proton reactions) to the Ultimate Creation (divine because 'existing'
according to the positive standards of the most beatific Being - the blissful
passivity of the freest electrons in pure spirit).
Yes, there is indeed an absolute antithesis between the two
extremes of evolution, though this fact can never be endorsed so long as a
galactic integrity remains the accepted religious norm. Only in a post-atomic civilization would the
subjective truth of evolution be recognized and accorded universal
validity. But, by then, the Creator
would have ceased to be a component of religious allegiance, since the
progression of the psyche towards a much greater superconscious bias would have
rendered all subconscious abstractions from cosmic reality anachronistic. As Nietzsche said: 'All gods are dead. We want the Superman to live!' - Ay! But not before transcendental man has done
his bit to bring the superhuman stage of evolution closer. We have yet to witness the full emergence of
this ultimate type of human being. The
Superman cannot be evolved out of Christians!
Nietzsche played an important philosophical role, but those who value
the Truth must come unto me!
TRUE
AND FALSE MESSIAHS
There are, it has long
been acknowledged, two kinds of love.
There is the personal love for another human being, the love experienced
by people who, as the expression goes, 'fall in love', and as an alternative to
this there is the impersonal love of a man for his country or his people or
mankind in general. The first kind of
love is sensual, the second kind spiritual.
The first stems from the Diabolic, the second aspires towards the
Divine. Most people, during the slow
progress of humanity towards the twenty-first century, have preferred the
personal to the impersonal kind of love.
The former is more all-pervasive at a lower stage of evolution, the
latter only begins to gather momentum when evolution reaches a more advanced
stage, such as it is currently at in various parts of the world, and continues
to progress beyond that towards the most advanced stage of all - the Omega
Absolute, in the heavenly Beyond.
It has often been said that God is love, but this is an
inadequate statement. Some people are
inclined to interpret this love in a personal or romantic way, and consequently
come to imagine that 'being in love' with another person is akin to the
Godhead. This is really quite
untrue! For, in reality, few states of
mind could be further removed from the Supreme Being, which would be free from
sensuality and, hence, any degree of animal passion. No, but neither is the other interpretation
of love quite satisfactory in defining God - assuming of course that one is attempting to define
God in an ultimate rather than a merely relative sense ... as appertaining, for
example, to Christ. For in equating God
with impersonal love, and thus with the impersonal love one may feel for other
people, one is limiting God to this feeling.
One is in effect saying that God is this state of mind which corresponds to
impersonal love. But God is or would be
far more than that! For God, considered
objectively, would be the ultimate Spiritual Globe at the culmination of evolution,
that is to say, the ultimate manifestation of transcendent spirit. God would be an absolute corresponding to the
Supreme Being, to a condition of life in pure spirit surpassing all
hitherto-known degrees of Being, as the most supreme level of Being. But such a supreme level of Being would not
correspond to an impersonal love for others, since there would be nothing
outside and beyond transcendent spirit for God the Supreme to feel impersonal
love towards. Such a supreme condition
would be completely absorbed in the bliss of its eternal self, paying no
attention whatsoever to the gradual collapse and disintegration of stars,
planets, moons, etc.
No, impersonal love, such as human beings can experience
towards one another, is not God and is a long way short of being so in either
sense, i.e. whether God is viewed in terms of an existence, a large globe of
pure spirit, or in terms, far more importantly, of a supreme level of Being -
the actual condition of such an existence.
Impersonal love aspires towards the Divine but should not be mistaken
for it, else God will be reduced in stature to the level of the most sublime
human feelings. Unfortunately human
feelings, even when blessedly impersonal, are at least two life forms removed
from the possibility of transcendence, inferior, no doubt, to the most noble
level of mind to which our projected Supermen and Superbeings of the future
millennial stages of evolution will attain.
The highest impersonal feelings will stem from transcendental man, or
man of the ultimate human civilization, but such a man is still in the making
and nowhere fully manifest in the world, which, at present, is still some way
from being post-atomic.
To return to love. The
impersonal variety is morally superior to the personal; the man without friends
may be the friend of humanity or, at any rate, a significant proportion of
humanity. It could be argued that, for
all his faults, Hitler was such a man, and to the extent that he valued love of
his people above love of any one person, he was a better and higher type of man
than the one incapable of living without a personal love. It is perhaps significant that he only
married when his political destiny had run its course and his dream of a Greater
German Reich lay in ruins about him. Up
until the last act, it was the German people rather than Eva Braun that most
mattered to him. Marriage was as much an
admission of defeat as of anything else.
But was Hitler a Messiah, the German Messiah? No, I do not really believe so! For, like Mussolini, Hitler was essentially a
politician, not a religious man, and, to my way of thinking, being a Messiah is
inseparable from religion or a religious destiny. To be sure, there has been much talk of
twentieth-century statesmen as 'Messiahs', and even Stalin was not beyond
consideration to the effect that he may have been the Soviet one! Yet such talk fails to convince one of its
justification, seeming but an example of the elevation of politicians to a
quasi-religious status in the wake of the collapse of traditional religious
values - the elevation of Marxism-Leninism to a quasi-religion being a case in
point. Thus in the twentieth century the
'Messiah' manifested himself as a politician and came not to lead men towards
God (conceived, in any ultimate sense, as the Holy Spirit), but to free his
people from bourgeois constraints and set them on the road to a Soviet
Communist future or, in Hitler's case, a National Socialist one.
No, I do not think one should take these political Messiahs too
seriously, in any ultimate sense. For
just as the first Messiah, the Christ, was a man of religion, whose Kingdom was
'not of this world', so must any subsequent Messiah, corresponding to a Second
Coming, essentially be a man of religion who points humanity towards the goal
of evolution on terms outreaching those of Christ, and thereby confirms the
justification for a Second Coming, a second stage of Messiahship. No matter if he does not come in the exact
terms envisaged by the apostles of old, or if he is not quite a Jew. The important thing is that he should have a
message which bears on religious evolution and shows humanity what it will have
to do if it wishes to draw closer to salvation in any ultimate sense, as signified
by transcendence and the concomitant attainment of pure spirit to the heavenly
Beyond. He doesn't have to be a
miracle-worker or a knight in shining armour.
He must simply possess a logic ... relating to evolutionary
transformations in connection with post-human life forms which, based on sound
rational foundations, is effectively irrefutable, and thus the key to
salvation. Neither Hitler nor Stalin,
nor even Mussolini, possessed such a logic, which is why they were false
messiahs - politicians who sought to drag the essence of Messiahship down to
their activist, materialist level. No
good! The need for a Second Coming
remains as great as before. For the
spiritual direction of evolution hangs in the balance without his guidance, and
any number of impostors can step into the void to do their damnedest.
How, then, will the New Messiah, the second world teacher after
Christ (or Buddha or Mohammed or Zarathustra or whoever), compare with the
first one? The answer to this - with due
respect to Christians - must be ... favourably.
That is to say, he should reflect a degree of evolutionary progress
relative to the historical gap between Christ and himself. If Christ was a simple
carpenter-turned-preacher who could neither read nor write but taught peripatetically,
through word of mouth, then he who corresponds to a Second Coming must spread
his teachings in a superior fashion to Christ - namely, through the medium of
the printed or recorded word. Evolution
has gone forwards, so no Christ-equivalent figure could reasonably be expected
to conduct his evangelical mission on the primitive terms of Christ in this day
and age. A man who wandered about
preaching the 'Good News' from town to town ... would simply be an anachronism,
subject to allegations of crankiness.
Nor need we expect the New Messiah to come from a desert land, like
Christ, since evolutionary progress would seem to require that he who champions
the Truth on a higher and more advanced level than Christ must stem from a
radically different climate - one, by contrast, which is cold, wet, and
windy. A man born into a hot land would
not be in the best of geographical positions to think transcendentally, since
the sensuous influence of the sun, compatible with pagan criteria, is so much
more prevalent in such a land ... that no true spiritual leadership could now
arise there. As evolution progresses
from pagan to transcendental stages, from alpha to omega via Christ, so it is
furthered, at each successive stage, by peoples appertaining to less sensual
climates.
Thus while the earliest civilizations could only have arisen in
hot lands, the ultimate civilization must stem from a cold climate, which will
be conducive towards a more spiritual attitude to life. No second Messiah could originate in a climate
approximating to that which Christ knew.
That is why the
If, then, the New Messiah, stemming from cold, wet, Northern
Europe, compares favourably with Christ, under what terms does he remain
Messianic? I have argued that such a
role is essentially a religious one, so there can be no question of the Messiah
being a political leader. Only so long
as he continues to write and offer the world, or a particular part of it at
this point in time, the irrefutable truths of his evolutionary teachings, which
outline the means by which Heaven may ultimately be attained to, will he
function as Messiah. As soon as this
task is accomplished, or he feels that he has taken the truth of evolutionary
progress as far as it can go, then he ceases to be Messiah. Should he subsequently become a politician or
an artist or a computer tutor, then he will be that and not a Messiah. The role of the second world teacher is only
valid so long as it is being actively fulfilled. There is no reason why it should last the
entire working duration of the man's life, since all or most of the essential
truths appertaining to a Messianic credibility can be committed to paper in a
few years. Christ himself was only a
Messiah for a comparatively short period of time. Prior to the inception of his mission, he was
a carpenter. He died, crucified by the
Romans, at thirty-three. Died to the
flesh in order to be reborn into the spirit as the 'Chosen One', destined to
fill the role of Saviour to millions of his followers - a man posthumously
elevated, by theological expedience, to the status of God. There is no reason why the New Messiah should
not die to the spirit and be reborn into the flesh in his own lifetime, that is
to say, die as a writer of the whole truth in order to be reborn as a
politician or tutor or artist or whatever.
There is no reason why, having terminated his religious vocation, he
should not embark upon a radically different course - assuming he were capable
of doing so!
In the beginning was the Word, and that would also apply to the
future beginnings of the transcendental civilization, which would have to have
received its direction and justification from the Word of the New Messiah - he
who corresponded, while he wrote, to a Second Coming. There is no need to mystify this man. For he does not write to be set-up as God
but, on the contrary, to instruct those who are destined to profit from his
teachings. He knows himself and has
proclaimed himself. But he also knows
what he is not and what, on a wider scale, the New Messiah is not. Certainly not a politician, like Hitler or
Stalin, and certainly not a peripatetic preacher! Not a crank either, though there are plenty
of people who imagine that they correspond to a Second Coming on terms which,
because of their tendency towards the literal or factual, could only be
described as highly dubious! Such people
are quite often Americans, which isn't altogether surprising since, as a
transitional civilization between dualism and transcendentalism, America is the
nearest thing, at present, to the future transcendental civilization, and it is
therefore natural - I might even say 'logical' - that false messiahs (and I don't
just mean Superman) should emerge from a civilization bordering on the
(hypothetical) ultimate one. But to the
extent that they appertain, as Americans, to transitional civilization, then
they can never be the legitimate, logical historical choice for the task of
outlining any future civilization. Such
a task must fall to a man who perceives himself as being outside all mainstream
civilizations of the contemporary West - like, dare I say, myself.
ANTITHETICAL
EQUIVALENTS
Since evolutionary
progress proceeds in the direction of superconscious freedom, and thus away
from subconscious enslavement, it transpires that, at a certain more advanced
stage of its progress, what I have termed antithetical equivalents will emerge. Evolution begins with the stars and ends with
an ultimate Spiritual Globe, which we can term the Omega Absolute (or, after de
Chardin, the Omega Point), but in between come what I believe to be the
antithetical equivalents of the planets at stage two of evolutionary progress
and the Spiritual Globes at stage nine; the plants and, in particular, trees at
stage three and the Superbeings at stage eight; the animals and, in particular,
apes at stage four and the Supermen at stage seven; pagan man at stage five and
transcendental man at stage six; and of course the antithesis within the one
life form of dualistic, or Christian, man at stages five/six.
To take a vivid antithetical equivalent from this list: a tree,
as a completely subconscious life-form whose leaves are naturally supported by
trunk and branches while being naturally sustained by sunlight, rain, etc., and
a Superbeing as a completely superconscious life-form the numerous new brains
of which will be artificially supported by plastic or metallic trunk/branch
equivalents while being artificially sustained by a mechanical pump, oxygen
containers, plastic tubing, hallucinogenic stimulants, etc.
But here I am contrasting, in imagination, what exists, as a
tree, with what I believe will exist, as a Superbeing, in the second phase
of the post-Human Millennium, and therefore at two evolutionary removes from
even the most sophisticated men - those of the coming transcendental
civilization. I am anticipating
antithetical equivalents in advance of their actually being brought
about by qualified human personnel when the time is ripe. Let us now settle, by contrast, for certain
antithetical equivalents which already exist and which we
take for granted as a logical aspect of modern life, rarely if ever ascribing
any evolutionary significance to them beyond their utilitarian functions. The first pair of such paradoxical
equivalents to which I should like to draw attention are natural fish and
artificial 'fish', which we may define as a distinction between, say, whales
(if we allow that large sea mammals are akin to fish) and submarines. The submarine functions underwater, like a
fish, but is constructed of artificial materials and propelled in a mechanical
manner, these days quite often by a nuclear-powered engine. This artificial type of 'fish', in which many
men can live and work, is a much superior phenomenon to a natural fish, since
it exists at approximately stage seven of the evolutionary ladder, whereas the
whale approximates to stage four - that of fish and, indeed, mammals in general.
Let us take another category of antithetical equivalents, this
time as applying to the distinction between natural birds and artificial
'birds', which is to say, between naturally-propelled birds and
mechanically-propelled aircraft. Here,
too, the artificial 'bird', be it warplane or passenger plane, is much superior
to the natural bird and corresponds to stage seven of the evolutionary ladder,
whereas even the king of birds, the eagle, can go no higher than stage four. As to helicopters, which function on a
different mechanical principle from aircraft, they form, it seems to me, an
antithetical equivalent to dragonflies, looking rather more like large
artificial 'insects' than artificial 'birds'.
Some aircraft also seem to resemble moths or butterflies more than
birds, but the great majority correspond to bird shapes.
Another antithetical equivalent which readily springs to mind
is the one between ducks and ships, the latter having long existed but never on
such antithetical terms to the former as in the modern age, when natural
materials such as wood and hemp were superseded by artificial materials like
plastic and steel. A better example,
however, is afforded by the contrast between horses and motorbikes, the horse
having traditionally served man as a creature to ride about on, the motorbike,
or artificial 'horse', of more recent date also serving man in a similar
capacity, albeit on terms far superior to the horse. For the horse is natural, whereas the motorbike
is mechanical and therefore a lot faster.
The man who rides a horse and the man who rides a motorbike do not
appertain to the same stage of evolution, even though both of them are
men. The former attaches himself to a
life form approximating to stage four of the evolutionary ladder, the latter to
an artificial phenomenon which approximates to stage seven. The one faces down towards the beasts, the
other aspires up towards the Supermen.
And while we are discussing this particular antithetical equivalent, we
may as well draw attention to the kindred distinction between, say, camels or
elephants or bullocks and cars or buses or trucks. Just as certain species of larger, stronger
animals served, in the past, to carry two or more people about on their backs,
so these mechanical 'beasts of burden', the latter-day trucks and buses,
perform a similar function in the present, and do so, as a rule, on far
superior terms to the natural means of transportation!
There can be no denying the fact that the creation of
antithetical equivalents to an earlier life form is consonant with evolutionary
progress, as it struggles its way from stages 1-10 in pursuance of the goal of
ultimate spiritual salvation. The age is
fast approaching when man will create the antithetical equivalent to his own
immediate predecessor, the ape, in the form of the millennial Superman, whose
brain will be artificially supported and sustained in collectivized
contexts. Each brain supported in this
fashion will correspond to a Superman, just as each ape on a tree is a distinct
ape, not part of a larger entity. Only
with the removal of the old brain by qualified human personnel, during the next
evolutionary leap forward, would the collectivized new brains resulting from
such a surgical operation amount to a larger entity, which, embracing
artificial supports and sustains as before, I have termed a Superbeing - the
antithetical equivalent to a tree.
Having listed the most significant categories of antithetical
equivalents currently in existence and intimated of those still to come, I
would now like to draw attention to some of the more obvious or commonplace
ones, such as derive from antitheses extending beneath the animal world to
preceding stages of evolution - the distinction, for example, between natural
light and artificial light, as between the sun and/or candles and neon and/or
electric light. The distinction, for
example, between natural heat, or an open fire, and artificial heat, or an
electric fire. The distinction between
natural flowers and artificial flowers, natural trees and artificial trees
(especially as used at Christmas time to intimate of the post-Human
Millennium), and so on. Strictly
speaking, such distinctions do not constitute antithetical equivalents ... in
the sense outlined above, but are extensions of the same thing on radically
dissimilar terms. For instance, natural
light and artificial light are both light, and therefore not antithetical to
the degree or in the sense that a tree and a Superbeing would be. Rather, they are both relative antitheses,
whereas the latter approximate, in their alpha/omega polarity, to absolute
antitheses. Electric light is rather
like an indoor sun, a sort of artificial source of pagan light.
Relative, too, is the comparatively recent invention of plastic
inflatables, otherwise more colloquially known as 'sex dolls', whose shapely
artificial bodies are designed to give the lonely, divorced, or hyperspiritual
male some of the pleasure to be derived from a natural woman's body and maybe,
in certain respects, as much. It is
unlikely that, liberated women aside, all that many natural women would approve
of this artificial alternative, which may strike them as unwarranted
competition. But, like it or not, such
an alternative now exists, and will doubtless continue to exist in the
foreseeable future. Whether or not some
men can derive more pleasure from a plastic inflatable than from a real-life,
flesh-and-blood woman, it would be rather odd, in light of our earlier
contentions, if such a life-like phenomenon had never been invented. After all, even relative antitheses have a
part to play in evolutionary progress!
WITHERING
OF THE STATE(S)
Under a socialist
system, the People are the State and the Government simply the People's
leaders. Under a capitalist system, on
the other hand, the State is not fixed but oscillates, depending on the type of
government in office at any given time, between the aristocracy/bourgeoisie and
the People. The socialist system
'socializes' the State by transferring it from the land, i.e. naturalism, to
the People. The capitalist system,
preceding the socialist one in historical time, signifies a materialist
compromise between naturalism and realism, land and people.
Prior to the inception of parliamentary politics, the State was
only the land, the country as owned by the nobility under the patronage of the
ruling monarch. The boundaries of the
State were determined by those of the country, and it was not unusual for a
monarch to attempt to enrich himself at the expense of weaker neighbours. Here arose the origins of imperialism, which
the bourgeoisie were to perpetuate in a diluted fashion from the inception of
their own reign, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the current
day.
The transference of the State from the land to the People is a
long, slow, and often arduous process, taking many centuries to complete. In contemporary
The British monarch, as head of state, is in the ambivalent
position of having two states of which to be head. Whenever the Tories are in office, the
reigning monarch is head of the State conceived from a naturalist/capitalist
angle. Whenever, by contrast, a
left-wing party is in office, the reigning monarch is head of the State
conceived from a materialist/socialist angle.
In the one case, head of the land.
In the other case, head of the People.
Doubtless the Monarch would be more in his/her political element as head
of the land than head, or at any rate effective head, of the People, since the
institution of monarchy does, after all, derive from and pertain to the
naturalistic concept of the State.
One would be mistaken, however, to suppose that the Monarch and
the State were synonymous, even in the pre-atomic ages of autocratic rule over
the People in the interests of the aristocracy.
The State was always the natural land mass, as owned by the reigning
monarch and nobles, to be worked for their own benefit. The People, as peasants, were stateless
because owning nothing. The Monarch was
head of state in a more directly consistent way than is possible under a constitutional
compromise, but he was not the State itself.
The only reason why Louis XIV's claim "L'État c'est moi!" is
memorable ... is because it is a profoundly false and corrupt one, testifying
to the arrogance of this decadent French king.
Were it based on fact, we would have no reason to accord it the status
of an historical quote. A truism is
quickly forgotten.
Concerning the parliamentary compromise between land and
people, the sphere of ownership of the land is of course extended to embrace
the grand bourgeoisie, who rule the People in the interests of the land-owning
classes. Every Tory government, from the
inception of bourgeois politics to the current day, has upheld the naturalistic
concept of the State in loyalty to landed interests. By contrast, the left-wing or liberal
parliamentary parties have claimed to represent the People, through their
various permutations, and have generally aligned themselves with the social
concept of the State in the People's interests.
This distinction between land and people arose slowly, by degrees, since
the early Whig governments weren't entirely disposed to champion a social
conception of the State, but also upheld landed interests in defiance of the
restricted circles of such interests traditionally prevalent. By degrees, however, the left-wing parties
successively became more socialized - the extension of the franchise from
bourgeois to proletarian elements opening the way to a more unequivocal
advocacy of the People's interests vis-à-vis the landed tradition. But even with the advent of the Labour Party
on the extreme left-wing, as it were, of the parliamentary spectrum, the State
could not become the People, since democratic socialists were a development
within the atomic, dualistic tradition of ambivalent statehood, and couldn't
have entirely liquidated landed interests in the name of the People. They were still representatives of the
People, a title which can only apply to left-wing governments who function
within an atomic framework and represent the interests of the People to or in
the face of the opposition party and/or reigning monarch. One must admit that, in certain respects and
to a limited extent, latter-day Tory governments can also represent the
interests of the People, since evolutionary progress away from the naturalistic
towards the socialistic concept of statehood will to some extent affect
right-wing governments too, even if to a much less greater extent than is
manifested on the left wing of the parliamentary spectrum. Yet, generally speaking, the Conservatives do
not exist to represent the People but to uphold traditional
bourgeois/aristocratic interests, and this whether or not their party is in
government.
In states, however, where post-dualistic politics has become
the norm, the People are not represented in parliament by petty-bourgeois
politicians for the simple reason that, in a post-atomic system of government,
there is no bourgeois opposition against whom the People may be represented -
representation of the People being vis-à-vis that opposition rather than in
complete isolation from it. As soon as a
system of government arises on a socialist basis, which it must do in a
post-atomic state, the People are not represented, but directly govern through
the agency of their chosen politicians, who constitute a People's government. But such a government is not the State, as
many misguided individuals in the capitalist West like to imagine. On the contrary, it is the servant of the
People, who are themselves the State.
The People have thus attained to power and are guided and supervised by
their most able leaders, the genuine socialists of a Social Democracy -
democracy having been extended, on the post-atomic level, to embrace both
quantitative and qualitative maximization, which is to say, a maximum
electorate with a maximum voting satisfaction, every vote effectively a winner.
Unfortunately, 'Power to the People' can be misinterpreted in a
way leading to an exaggeration of the People's stake in democracy, and thus of
their political influence in a People's State.
The leaders of the People - professional politicians with a sense of
destiny - are entitled to curb what, unbeknown to its perpetrators, may be
interpreted as anarchic or quasi-bourgeois reactionary tendencies among certain
sections of the People. A favourite
analogy of mine is to liken the People's true leaders to shepherds. What happens when 'People's Power' is
misinterpreted, in some quarters, is that a situation arises whereby the flock,
or various members of it, are trying to dictate policy to the shepherds instead
of following the latter's leadership, and when such an illogical situation
arises ... it is of course necessary for the shepherds to reassert their
authority over the flock with the help of their sheep dogs (police). This may entail the weeding-out of 'black
sheep' from the flock, contrary to the wishes of the flock as a whole. But, willy-nilly, flocks require shepherds
and should follow their directions, else they will degenerate into an anarchic
mob disposed to wandering everywhichway or in no particularly progressive
direction at all. Socialism is not mob
anarchy, but leadership of the People by the People's politicians in the
interests of the People. Some persons,
regrettably, seem not to realize this!
Of course, there is a good reason for some persons to rebel
against state control, and it is that they are aware that Socialism is but a
means to a higher goal, involving the end of the State, class, work, privilege,
etc., in the so-called Communist Millennium.
Very well, they say to themselves, let us set about opposing the existing
state machinery ... that we may bring about such a goal or, at any rate, help
bring society closer to it. Wrong
attitude at this point in time! For the
State to which they pertain does not exist in splendid isolation in the world
but, on the contrary, is confronted by world-wide capitalist opposition or
seduction, and could not possibly move towards higher things while such a
situation exists and remains a potential threat. These persons aren't fully aware that
socialism and capitalism hang together on a single thread and can influence
each other for better or worse, depending on which way the political wind
blows. They would like their socialist
state to ignore the capitalist threat and progress towards the free, classless,
stateless, society of the future Communist Millennium.
But what do they envisage this Communist Millennium as being -
a stage of evolution when human brains are supported and sustained artificially
in collectivized contexts for purposes of spiritual expansion? No, not at all! Simply a time when the state machinery, i.e.
politicians and security services, cease to exist and the People are
accordingly free to live in peace with one another, no class distinctions,
because no professions, then applying.
Ah, how naive and short-sighted!
They are anarchists without realizing it, through having confounded
anarchism with communism! The
politicians may not have any objective concept of the Communist Millennium
either, but at least they are socialists, or men indisposed to people's anarchy. And so they penalize those who would seek to
effect premature or unrealistic change in their People's State. I do not condemn them for that!
An objective concept of the Millennium is not possible within a
hard-line socialist system. For such a system
can only project forward on realist terms, not on terms appertaining to the
spirit. Only in a transcendental system
with social roots can the objective truth of evolutionary progress be
comprehended and upheld. This is not to
say, however, that the one system should entirely replace the other, the
transcendentalist the socialist, but that they have separate tasks or duties in
the world which should complement rather than conflict with each other. When Socialists have contracted the
natural/material, the way will be clear for Transcendentalists to expand the
spiritual. For one would indeed be
mistaken to imagine that Socialism can take man to the Millennium of
Christ-like reign on earth by itself!
How can it, when the millennial Beyond is a profoundly religious epoch
in time, with nothing whatsoever to do with politics or the continuation of the
State?
But let us now distinguish between Transcendentalism and
Socialism in the profoundest sense! Let
us admit that, considered as this future classless, free, stateless society,
Transcendentalism evolves out of Socialism, so that even Communism, or
international socialism, and Transcendentalism are different phenomena. Very good!
Let us agree that the State 'withers away' with the higher development of
Socialism towards Transcendentalism, and that, by the time a truly
transcendental society is created, the State has ceased to exist. But what is the State in a socialist
society? Precisely the People! So it is really the People who must 'wither
away' and be superseded by the Supermen, as brains artificially supported and
sustained in collectivized contexts, before this true transcendentalism of the
millennial Beyond comes into effect. The
'withering away' of the State on socialist terms has nothing to do with the
state machinery of government and security forces or, rather, the socialist
state should not be confounded with the machinery of state, which is there to
serve the People. Such machinery will
doubtless disappear or be modified ... once the People are superseded by the
Supermen, but it would be quite a misinterpretation of socialist progress to
imagine that state machinery must be superseded by the People, become an
anarchic leaderless mob, or that state machinery and the People are two entirely
different things - the one a hindrance to the other! Were it not for state machinery, no socialist
state would still be in existence, and did it not continue to function in the
People's interests ... no eventual 'withering away' of the State (as people)
would be possible - the People having no real desire, in a majority of cases,
to do away with themselves!
However, the State and the People are only synonymous in a
socialist phase of evolution. Prior to
then there were, as I have attempted to explain, two concepts of the State,
viz. a naturalistic, or landed property, concept as applying to the grand
bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and a materialistic, or capitalist/socialist,
concept as applying to the bourgeoisie and, to a lesser extent, the proletariat. The 'withering away' of the first state began
with the development of parliamentary democracy and was to continue throughout
the duration of the two-party system without, however, this state completely
'withering away'. Only with a
proletarian revolution does the naturalistic state cease to exist, but such a
revolution is unlikely to happen in traditionally bourgeois countries. In
CHRISTIAN
PAGANS
In the Christian
iconography, Christ offers man the possibility of salvation, as He sits in
Judgement between Hell and Heaven.
Atomic religion opens up the possibility of salvation but does not
discount the alternative possibility, for those who have been judged and found
wanting, of damnation. Christ is
abraxas-like, a dual-natured deity who, so the iconographic depictions
demonstrate, damns with one hand and saves with the other, having first
weighed-up the ratio of sins to graces or graces to sins of those deemed
eligible, in the Christian schema, for judgement. Being the Son of God (the Father), Christ,
the second deity in the evolution of gods from the alpha-most to the
omega-most, is perfectly entitled to behave towards the Damned in a manner
owing something to the Father, Who is entirely negative and therefore
indisposed to save anybody, and will accordingly curse those whom He
damns. The Father, if He could curse,
would curse with a capital 'C'. But
Christ, being abraxas-like and therefore diluted, only curses with a small one,
because the better half of Him, in the Christian iconography, is disposed to
bless, albeit with a small 'b', and thus to save. The ultimate blessing or, rather, Blessing
with a capital 'B', would only come from the Holy Spirit, yet not as a deity
separate, like Christ, from those to be blessed, but as one compounded, as it
were, of the Blessed in Spirit, whose very condition is blessed. Christ, however, is not that deity but,
appertaining to the 'Three in One', merely a diluted Holy Ghost. Consequently He cannot offer man ultimate
salvation, but only the relative salvation, still paradoxically couched in
terms of the Father, of the Christian schema.
This salvation is really fictional, though necessarily so for a given
period of evolutionary time. Man cannot
live with the whole truth about salvation when he is still subject to various
illusions, as Christian man inevitably is.
That truth must come with a post-Christian and, hence, post-atomic age.
Throughout the Christian era, however, there were still many
men who could not identify with Christ and therefore didn't place much
confidence in their prospects of salvation, not so much because they were more
disposed towards a transcendental attitude to Christianity as because, being
relatively pagan in their psychic constitutions, they were insufficiently
evolved to properly relate to the 'Son of God'.
A typical attitude of such men when on the point of death would have
been one which emphasized the part they expected the Father to play in judging
them in the Afterlife. They would have
been preparing themselves for a return to their 'Maker', the Creator in whose
image man had apparently been made, and, as such, they would have died with a
pagan heart. Had they been true Christians,
they would have looked forward to being judged by Christ in the Afterlife,
confident, with what time remained to them, that they had done their best in
this life and could expect the blessed hand of salvation rather than the cursed
hand of damnation to fall upon them. The
prospects for even a less than true Christian was at least 50/50, provided that
his life had not been one long orgy of sin in a category approximating to the
criminal. In a borderline case, Christ
would be more likely to show compassion than vengefulness.
A man, however, who looks forward to returning to his 'Maker',
meaning the Father, is not, objectively considered, one who can expect to be
saved but, on the contrary, one who, in effect, passes negative judgement upon
himself. For to return to the Father,
assuming it were possible, would indeed be to suffer damnation, since,
theologically speaking, the Father is at the opposite evolutionary remove from
the Holy Spirit, corresponding, in essence, to the most cursed deity, an absolute
negativity rather than a negative/positive compromise, as in Christ, the
man-god. No man who looked forward to
meeting his 'Maker' in the Afterlife could reasonably be considered a
Christian, nor could he be regarded as a logical thinker if he expected to be
saved in the process! Whatever he
expected, he was effectively betraying a basic allegiance to the Alpha
Absolute, and thus expressing a pagan orientation analogous to that upheld by
certain tribes in pre-atomic America, whose braves practised the custom of
turning towards the sun when death seemed imminent, in order to align their
soul with what was considered to be a return to its source (in the Diabolic).
Of course, there is no return of the soul either to a 'Maker' -
which is really a theological abstraction along the lines of the Creator,
Jehovah, etc., from the First Cause, or literal root of the Galaxy, in the
central star (the major star from which such minor stars as the sun 'fell',
with the theological equivalent of the Big Bang at the root of Creation), nor
literally to the sun, conceived as the source of all earthly creation, for the
simple reason that, as id-like seat of emotions in the subconscious, the
primitive soul is not eternal but decidedly temporal in constitution, and therefore
couldn't return anywhere - least of all to a cosmic entity at a considerable
remove from itself! At death, the
instinctual soul dies, but so, too, does the spirit, or intellectual faculty of
the superconscious, which, though potentially eternal, is unable to survive on
an absolute basis without physiological support, because accustomed to a
relative existence in conjunction with the id.
Thus the man who supposes that, at death, his soul will return to its
'Maker', to be judged one way or the other, is deluded twice over, both as
regards survival and judgement. And even
if he lives in the Christian civilization, he is yet a sublimated pagan for
whom the possibility of spiritual survival does not enter into account, since
he is too wrapped-up in the prospect of his soul returning to its 'Maker' to
have any thoughts to spare on the alternative prospect of his spirit, arising
from the upper half of his psyche, being admitted to the 'Kingdom of Heaven',
viz. the Holy Spirit, by an intermediate Christ in Judgement. Even the anticipated return of the soul to
its 'Maker' would seem, in such minds, to be a matter requiring no reference to
a negative judgement by Christ, but one which can by-pass the Christian Judge,
as it speeds on a directly pagan course
to its alpha-oriented goal! Not,
assuredly, the kind of attitude that a genuine Christian would uphold. For he would never leave Christ out of
account where the fate of his soul and/or spirit was concerned, even if,
objectively considered, his spirit was no more likely to attain to salvation
than the soul of the quasi-pagan ... to be damned.
From the theological point-of-view, a man's fate in the
Afterlife could of course be determined by a Christ capable of weighing sins
and graces on a mental balance, and passing judgement according to which way
the scales tipped. Yet precisely because
Christianity was not
an
absolute religion but a compromise between soul and spirit, will and intellect,
there could be no possibility of anyone literally being either damned or
saved. That may sound fairly obvious to
us, but it wouldn't have been so obvious to medieval Christians. For, as a relative compromise, it can only
follow that the mind of a Christian would have been damned to the extent it was
composed of instinctual soul and saved to the extent it was composed of
intellectual spirit. Being in itself
split between Hell and Heaven, fire and light, emotions and awareness,
Christianity could only offer a split judgement to the split humanity over whom
it elected to preside. The Christ in
Judgement between Hell and Heaven is indeed an apt reflection of the psychic
constitution of Christian man. Every man
would simultaneously have been damned and saved, although this is not, of
course, the impression which Christian iconography strives to convey, since it
functions on the theological basis of either/or, rather than both. But even there, the justification of
Judgement can be questioned when scrutinized with a literal eye. For if the soul is temporal and the spirit,
by contrast, only potentially eternal when intellectually housed in the same
psyche as its great instinctual antithesis, one might be forgiven for adopting
the line that the spirit alone would be eligible for judgement and that, as
spirit, it must be a foregone conclusion for admittance to Heaven. However, as this and other such remarks will
have demonstrated, the literal eye is not the most relevant one to apply to
theology, least of all to a theology so closely associated with a medieval
understanding of the psyche!
Getting back to the inability of so many men to come to terms
with Christ and the transcendental prospect which Christianity was intended to
demonstrate, it would be wrong of me to leave the reader with the impression
that only in medieval times was this actually the case. For although it was arguably more prevalent
then, the adherence of various men to sublimated paganism continued throughout
the Christian era and even into the twentieth century, which was scarcely an
archetypal Christian century but, rather, an incipiently transcendental
one. And not only among the ranks of the
lowly or with such paradoxical examples of alpha-oriented allegiance as Jehovah
Witnesses, who alone of Christian sects strive to reconcile Christianity with
Judaism. One of the most lethal
alpha-oriented people of all time was undoubtedly Adolf Hitler who, as anyone
familiar with writings about him will know, was far more disposed towards
references to Providence, or the Creator, the Father, and other such variations
on an alpha-oriented theme, than ever he was towards references to Christ (and
this despite a professedly anti-Semitic disposition which evidently had no
trouble accommodating Creatoresque monotheism).
Indeed, he scarcely ever mentioned Christ except in derogatory terms -
rather like Nietzsche - and never seems to have conceived of God in terms of
the Holy Spirit. For him, the only God
that existed and mattered was the Father, whose name he would evoke, in a
variety of guises, with the regular persistence of a monomaniac. If he escaped relatively unscathed from an
attack upon his life, as he did on more than one occasion, it was alleged that
the hand of Providence had intervened to save him. If Germany needed a National Socialist
dictatorship, it was allegedly because God (the Father) had appointed Adolf
Hitler to lead the Fatherland to greatness.
If something went terribly wrong with his plans or an unexpected tragedy
occurred, like the flight of Hess to Scotland, it was the Creator's name he
evoked in his moment of tribulation.
When questioned as to what form, if any, religion should take in
Germany, he could answer those around him that man had need of allegiance to a
Creator, since there was a Creator behind nature and man was a creature of
nature who should never stray very far from it in his lifestyle. Should Germany defeat the Allies, he, Adolf
Hitler, would work out his religious views in full for the benefit of
posterity. These, we may surmise, would
not have been particularly transcendental, since the Führer had no inkling of
what true transcendentalism was! All he
cared for was the pagan, and we may believe he was correct to assure his
closest followers that Providence was on Germany's side in the struggle against
Bolshevism, as state socialism in Russia was then called.
As a theological abstraction from the First Cause, Providence
may be traced back to a psychological content of the subconscious, to which
mind Hitler was particularly partial, as his hot temper adequately
attests. But if we by-pass theology and
refer ourselves directly to the First Cause - as, in effect, Hitler would have
been more inclined to do - we may assume that the governing star at the centre
of the Galaxy would, if it could think, be more inclined to endorse Hitler's campaign
of imperialism than to disapprove of it.
For, as a mode of self-enrichment at the expense of weaker peoples,
imperialism most certainly stems from the aggressive nature of the Alpha
Absolute, at a kind of evolutionary remove from its cosmic roots. One might say, to expand the metaphor, that
imperialism would be intelligible to that star ... as an extension of its
frictional influence into human affairs, and consequently Hitler spoke truly
when he claimed that Providence was on Germany's side. What he hadn't bargained for, however, was
that the support of the cosmic roots of the world for sublimated paganism was
no guarantee, in the twentieth century, for the eventual victory of the
children of Providence over their atheistic enemies. For, as things turned out, the eventual
victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany proved that 'godless' man could
get the better, at this turning-point in history, of those in league, as it
were, with the Creator, and thus attest to the fact that man had acquired the
freedom to stake-out an independent destiny for himself in defiance of an
alpha-oriented alignment. Such a destiny
can only lead, eventually, to an exclusive aspiration towards the true divinity
of the Omega Absolute, which it is in man's power to create. Victory over the Alpha Absolute is but a
stage on the way to its creation.
Politics wasn't the only field, however, in which an arch-pagan
came to the fore in the twentieth century.
My own field of creative writing fell victim to a quite formidable pagan
in the person of John Cowper Powys, whose petty-bourgeois philosophy champions
the cause of a kind of Rousseauesque return to nature, and emphasizes, in a
number of publications, the importance, as he sees it, of psychological
association with the root of all nature in the First Cause, which should be
approached in an ambiguous fashion, depending on one's mood or circumstances,
of either gratitude or defiance.
Gratitude to the First Cause for all the pleasure in life, defiance of
the First Cause for all the pain it entails - these are the alternating poles
of Powys' paganism, a paganism which doesn't even express itself indirectly,
through the medium of some theological abstraction, but refers directly back to
the literal roots of the Universe in what, whether or not he realizes it, can
only be cosmic energy. Treating this
scientific term in a theological way, however, only confounds the issue, and we
may be sure that Powys was as baffled as most of his followers must surely have
been by the exact nature and location of this two-faced First Cause! If ever a man was the champion of the
instinctual soul, wallowing brontosaurus-like in subconscious stupor, it was
this latter-day Druid, this anachronistic heathen, this apostate son of a Welsh
clergyman, this antithetical equivalent to Nietzsche, this revivalist of Celtic
atavisms and arch-enemy of the spirit! I
do not think his work will be greatly admired by future generations.
Neither, however, do I expect the work of D.H. Lawrence, Powys'
literary contemporary and heathen counterpart, to serve as a vehicle of
spiritual enlightenment for future generations, since it, too, falls heavily on
the side of the Alpha absolute. As one
of the few men of his time who could logically distinguish between soul and spirit,
instinct and intellect, Lawrence yet chose to champion the former to an extent
suggesting complete ignorance of the existence of its psychic antithesis. For his emotions counted for more than
thoughts or abstract formulations to him - so much more, in fact, that he was
unwilling or unable to grant credence to any intellectual formulation which
couldn't evoke an affirmative response in his guts! In this respect, he was the opposite of a
philosopher, but not on that account a great artist. Rather, Lawrence was an old-fashioned 'man of
the people' for whom the spiritual life remained an enigma, to be guarded
against in the interests of emotional fulfilment and sexual satisfaction or,
more correctly, emotional fulfilment through sexual satisfaction. One might almost describe him as a composite
of Wilhelm Reich and Albert Camus, two Continentals who should also be
mentioned, en passant, as conspicuous for their lack of
transcendentalism in a late, indeed very late, Christian age. With the rock of the Church crumbling to dust
as the Christian civilization became increasingly decadent, one can't be
surprised that so many neo-pagan worms should have emerged from beneath it, in
the twentieth century, to bask in the sensuality afforded by an unobscured sun temporarily
shining down between the dusk of one civilization and the future dawn of
another ... in an interim night of religious anarchy!
TRANSVALUATIONS
Living in a world which
had been transvaluated would be a good deal different from living in a world
such as most people are accustomed to inhabiting in the present century. The 'transvaluation of all values', which
Nietzsche hinted at and partly realized in his own work, would have taken place
right across the spectrum of everyday life, with a consequence that people
would think about life or the world around them through minds the converse, in
so many respects, of what most Western minds currently are.
To explore this prospect in more detail, we must project
ourselves, if only in imagination, into the transcendental civilization of the
ultimate stage of human development. We
will be brought into contact, through this projection, with men who, when
referring to the weather, will incline to regard a fine day as a bad one and,
by contrast, a cloudy, wet, or cold day as desirable - indeed, as much to be
preferred. Such men will be
Transcendentalists and, consequently, they won't be partial to paganism or to
anything which might be associated with a heathen outlook. The sun will be regarded as of diabolic
constitution, its sensual face a denial of the spiritual life, a distraction
from thought concerned with Truth, which is to say, the truth about
transcendent spirit. The sun, together
with other such stars, is at quite the opposite evolutionary remove from
transcendent spirituality, being the most absolute sensuality. Men whose psyche is spiritually biased won't
desire to think too highly of the most absolute sensuality or, for that matter,
of lesser degrees of sensuality, including their own. They will be grateful, in effect, for every
encouragement to avoid thinking about it, and will accordingly treat cloudy
weather with more respect than Christian, or atomic, man ever did. A typical Transcendentalist would admit, if
questioned by an alien from some neighbouring solar system, that he preferred
winter to summer because it was more conducive to the cultivation of his
spiritual life. Man was more
interiorized during the winter months than at any other time of year, and
therefore given to essence to a greater extent than to appearance. The summer was, by contrast, a pagan season,
a season when nature - or such of it as remained - grew to a maximum beauty in
copious sensuality, and man was tempted to admire it at the expense of his
inner life. No, this typical
Transcendentalist would not be as happy in summer as in winter, when the sun
was at its farthest remove from one's part of the earth, and the incentive for
sensual indulgence, including sunbathing, considerably reduced. The cold was good at snuffing-out insects,
and days were shorter than in summer.
That meant more artificial light than natural light and, beyond man's
evening windows, a closer approximation of the world to the essence of the
heavenly Beyond. Daylight all-too-often
reminded one that one was living in a kind of purgatory - an interim composite
realm in-between the blinding appearance of Hell and the soothing essence of
the future Heaven.
Were the alien from outer space to persist in his questioning
of our imagined Transcendentalist, he might learn more than a few things which
either also applied to his own world or had yet to come to pass there. Take, for instance, the question of
sunbathing. Did anybody still
sunbathe? No, absolutely not! Sunbathing was strictly taboo, corrective
therapy attending infringements of the law, whether the guilty party were young
or old, male or female, black or white.
There could be no question of man's ever returning to a situation
analogous to that which had prevailed in the twentieth century, when a kind of
neo-pagan sun worship took possession of so many people, following the collapse
of Christian values and before the transcendental civilization had arisen. Such overt diabolism would be completely
incompatible with a transcendental approach to life, an approach in which only
a direct aspiration towards the Divine counted for anything. The sun was still there, of course, but life
was better if one tried not to notice it!
Those who desired a skin-tan could always avail themselves of artificial
heat therapy, presumably through a solarium, in the privacy of their
homes. Beaches were always deserted in
the summer.
Perhaps this has become a shade too literary, though not, I
hope, too fantastic. There is no reason
for us to suppose that man's current attitude to the sun or nature or the
weather will last for ever, least of all in a civilization which will have
turned against nature to such a radical extent ... as to be predominantly if
not exclusively transcendental in outlook.
Anything that stems from the Alpha Absolute will be, at best, suspect to
this ultimate civilization, which will have no use for an atomic
integrity. Many natural phenomena
accessible to man's control or reach will, in the course of time, be removed -
certain aspects of nature being supplanted by man-made artificial phenomena,
other aspects of it simply ignored. The
shift away from nature will take various forms but have as its motivation one
goal: a closer approximation to the ultimate supernatural ... as achieved
through expansion of the lower, or artificial, supernaturalism of man-made
phenomena in conjunction with expansion of the higher, or spiritual,
supernaturalism peculiar to the superconscious part of the psyche. Eventually this will, of course, lead to the
supersession of man by life forms whose brains and/or new brains will be
artificially supported and sustained.
But by that time the final civilization will have given way to a
post-Human Millennium, which is not something connected with man and therefore
cannot be evaluated according to human criteria. The post-Human Millennium is, in effect, the
free, stateless, classless society which Socialism intends to bring about, the
heavenly goal, as it were, of socialist striving; though, in point of fact, it
will be Transcendentalism rather than Socialism that leads to this millennial
utopia, insofar as, considered in such a definitive light, the post-Human
Millennium is a profoundly religious development peculiar to an advanced degree
of earthly supernaturalism, and cannot directly stem from a political
development, but only from a religious one, like Transcendentalism.
Getting back to the typical Transcendentalist's attitude to
life in the coming centuries, we need not doubt that the 'transvaluation of all
values' he inherited will lead to endorsement of an atheistic position,
contrary to what is officially upheld within the Christian, or atomic,
civilization, where God the Father is still acknowledged as God and shares this
honour with Jesus Christ, the actual principal deity appertaining to the atomic
stage of civilized evolution. With the
transcendental civilization, however, there will be no acknowledgement of the
Alpha Absolute as God, and neither will there be any recognition of the man-god
alpha/omega compromise, but, rather, a direct aspiration towards the full
realization of the Divine, conceived in terms of the Omega Absolute ... of
unified transcendent spirit. God, for
the Transcendentalist, will imply a supreme level of Being which will emerge as
the culmination of evolution in the distant future, and he will know that man
cannot attain to this supreme level of Being, but must be superseded by a
higher life form engineered out of the human ... from which a still higher life
form will be engineered until, following transcendence, Spiritual Globes are
established in the heavenly Beyond, to converge towards one another in a
process which will only come to a climax once the Omega Absolute is
established, with the culmination of all spiritual evolution. The Transcendentalist won't therefore worship
the Alpha Absolute either in a concentrated or a diluted guise, either
absolutely, through the Creator, or relatively, through Christ, but will focus
his religious attention on cultivating human spirit to the extent that it can
be cultivated ... prior to the extensive supernaturalism of a post-Human
Millennium.
Part of this spiritual cultivation will doubtless take place in
specially-designed meditation centres, where the communal practice of
meditation will come to signify a crude approximation to the higher, or
millennial, approximations to the heavenly Beyond still to come. The Transcendentalist will know that this is
but a stage on the road to ultimate salvation, and should not be mistaken for
the end of the road itself. As the final
civilization matures, the state machinery, conceived in terms of Socialism,
will continue to 'wither away', so that the closer men draw to the post-Human
Millennium, the more the spiritual life will prevail. With this transcendental Millennium, however,
the spiritual life will have entirely superseded materialist preoccupations ...
as the post-human life forms - first the Supermen and then the Superbeings -
are directly set on course for the heavenly Beyond in successively greater degrees
of supernaturalism. The free society of
the post-Human Millennium is only objectively conceivable in terms of these
supernatural life forms, not with regard to man, who will always be subject to
some degree of socialist supervision with what time remains to him throughout
the duration of the coming transcendental civilization. Only after that time, when brains become
artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, would the
State, and hence socialist supervision, have completely 'withered away' ... to
make way for the exclusively religious leadership of the post-Human
Millennium. For in a very real sense the
People are the State in a
socialist - as opposed to state socialist - phase of evolution, and when they
are superseded by the Supermen, so the State will have been superseded by the
post-Human Millennium, as well, of course, as its servants in the governmental
and/or bureaucratic context of state machinery, which will then become quite
superfluous.... Although this is not to say that leadership ends with the
complete disappearance of the State.
For, as I have just intimated, the religious leadership - derived, one
can only suppose, from the spiritual leadership of the transcendental
civilization - will take over from the remaining political leaders and have
their own machinery to maintain - at least throughout the lower phase of the
post-Human Millennium, and thus prior to the probable investment of supervisory
authority in the hands of artificial religious leaders, such as robots and
computers, at a higher phase of millennial time. This ultimate machinery will include the
artificial sustain systems (embracing the possibility of a mechanical pump,
oxygen containers, artificial blood vessels which link the natural blood
vessels in the brain of each individual Superman to the pump, etc.) and
accompanying supports, on which the collectivized brains of the Supermen will
be 'housed', together with the requisite supply of LSD or equivalent synthetic
stimulants for inducing upward self-transcendence in the superconscious mind of
each Superman, the means of injecting such stimulants, in specific amounts and
according to regulated practice, and any other machinery relative to this or a
subsequent phase of the quest to bring evolving life on earth closer to
ultimate transcendence.
Whether the religious leaders will be responsible for the
technological aspect of millennial life or whether, in fact, it will be solely
left to scientific technicians ... is a moot point. Though an alternative - and possibly more
viable - supposition is that leadership will rest in the hands of both
technicians and gurus at once - the
former as regards all external matters, i.e. the supervision of millennial
machinery and the injection of hallucinogenic stimulants into the Supermen; the
latter, by contrast, with regard to all internal matters, as directly
experienced by themselves in conjunction with other Supermen. That is to say, the spiritual leaders may
also be artificially supported and sustained, one to each brain
collectivization, and act as go-betweens for both the technicians and the
supernatural life form, informing the former of what life is like 'on the other
side', whilst advising them as to how much LSD, etc. should be injected into
the Supermen at any given time, what the effects are, how the Supermen are
coping, and so on, in order that they may be kept directly in touch with and
respond more accurately to the needs of their supernatural 'charges'.
Perhaps I am mistaken to distinguish between technicians and
gurus in this way? But it seems to me
that spiritual leaders, whether Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu, or
whatever, have an obligation to enter into the 'promised land' of divine
salvation with their flock, and thus share in the religious experience of their
flock at the same time as they are enlightening it. Doubtless transcendental leaders would be
under a similar obligation, since not only instructing their flock as how best
to meditate, but actually meditating along with it, and thus participating in
the same 'promised land', so to speak, as those for whom they were spiritually
responsible. Why, therefore, should
matters be any different for the ultimate spiritual leaders ... of the
post-Human Millennium, who should act as both confidence inspirers of and
instructors to the Supermen ... by actually participating in the LSD or
equivalent hallucinogenic experiences themselves? Surely this would be the only context in
which the highest religious leaders could work - as guides to and counsellors of
their fellow-spiritual travellers, with a duty to act as principal spokesmen,
as it were, for each cluster of artificially-supported and sustained brains,
and therefore ability to liaise, presumably through some artificial channel of
communication, with the technicians in the interests of the spiritual wellbeing
of each individual Superman. The
technicians would thereby learn from these chosen spiritual leaders exactly
what, at any given time, the psychic position for the Supermen was like; though
the actual authority to keep things moving forward, in the interests of
evolutionary progress, would remain largely with them, in their capacity as
external controllers. They may not enter
the transcendental 'promised land' personally, but must nonetheless ensure that
any such 'promised land' spiritual leaders and populace have gone into together
is not allowed to stagnate.
Eventually, however, this Superman-phase of the post-Human
Millennium will be superseded by a Superbeing-phase, when the old brain of each
artificially-supported brain is surgically removed by the technicians ... and a
greatly intensified collectivization ... of new brains, creating an entity
antithetical in context to a tree, arises as the Supermen's millennial
successor. It is with this ultimate
phase of the post-Human Millennium that transcendence will truly be attained
to; for now there will be no spiritual leaders, and therefore no class
divisions, as the collectivized new-brains, constituting a Superbeing, exist in
a wholly post-visionary context of a consciousness beyond communication with
external technicians. This will
constitute, in each of its numerous manifestations throughout the planet, a
truly free society, and it will simply be a question of time before the
hypermeditation of each Superbeing gives rise to transcendence and the
consequent attainment of the earth's most advanced life form to definitive
salvation, in the heavenly Beyond, from its new-brain atomicity. It is with this second phase of the
post-Human Millennium that one suspects the human technicians will delegate
authority solely to artificial supervisors, such as computers and robots, while
they gradually withdraw from active participation in the supervisory process
and allow spiritual matters in the Superbeings to take their inevitably
autonomous course, so that, long before transcendence occurs, the superbeingful
society of the post-Human Millennium, akin in some respects to a communistic or
communal culmination of millennial evolution, will be completely free of human
interference and/or supervision, completely equal one to another in its
numerous new-brain collectivizations, completely stateless in its exclusively
religious orientation, completely leaderless in either a technical or a
spiritual sense, and completely programmed, through meditation of the most
sublime order, for the ultimate freedom ... of spiritual transcendence in the
long-awaited heavenly Beyond.
This, then, is the society which progressive struggle on earth
would seem destined to bring about, and we can be confident that, one day, it
will arise. What we must anticipate,
over the coming decades and centuries, is a 'transvaluation of all values' not
only with regard to such matters as I earlier drew attention to - a mere
handful of all the transvaluations of that order which must eventually come to
pass - but, no less importantly, with regard to Socialism's concept of the
Millennium, a concept founded, all too often, on short-sighted projections of
existing materialism which, instead of objectively portraying a future
transcendental Millennium, serve merely to obfuscate matters and to mislead the
mind along quasi-anarchic channels, to the detriment of Truth. One thing we can be absolutely certain of is
that the Communistic Millennium will not be a human society minus all existing patterns
of bureaucratic and/or governmental control but, on the contrary, the most
profoundly religious post-human society of which it is possible to
conceive. Perhaps, when all's said and
done, that
is precisely the most important transvaluation which needs to be made over the
coming centuries!
