FROM THE PERSONAL TO THE UNIVERSAL

MARK: There are those who claim that Absolute Mind, meaning God in any ultimate sense, is immanent as well as transcendent, is both in the world and beyond it. Aldous Huxley upheld this claim, and he derived it from Buddhist and Oriental scriptures. Would you agree with him?

GERALD: No, not on an absolute basis. There is, to be sure, a distinction between relative and absolute, that is to say, between human spirit and pure spirit, or what we each possess, as awareness, in the superconscious mind, and what is claimed to exist beyond the world in complete self-sufficiency, as the most aware mind of ... transcendent spirit.

MARK: In other words, God.

GERALD: No, not necessarily! God, in any definitive sense of literally applying to a supreme level of being, would be the ultimate globe of transcendent spirit such as could only come about at the climax of evolution. Transcendences could conceivably exist in space at present, compliments of more evolved civilizations than anything we have seen on earth, but they would probably be at one or two evolutionary removes from the climax of evolution in total spiritual unity, and therefore oughtn't to be mistaken for God.

MARK: So, conceived as the ultimate globe of pure spirit at the climax to evolution, God doesn't yet exist.

GERALD: No, and won't do so for a considerable period of evolutionary time!

MARK: A contention, apparently, which need not prevent a distinction between spirit and pure spirit from existing, as regarding the immanent and the transcendent.

GERALD: Indeed, there is no reason why planets more advanced than our own shouldn't have already put pure spirit into space. Wherever life had evolved to the level of a Superbeing Millennium, pure spirit would sooner or later emerge. Now that spirit would be Absolute Mind, because transcendent, and shouldn't be confounded with the immanent experience of spirit, which ought really to be defined as relativistic absolute mind, since the immanent absolutism is dependent on and connected with the new brain and can only be somewhat less divine than the transcendent. One should accordingly distinguish between a relative absolutism and an absolute absolutism.

MARK: How is this absolutism relative?

GERALD: Because awareness would be in the brain and connected with the body. The immanent experience is absolute on this basis alone: that we are solely concerned with awareness, as the psychic attribute of superconscious mind, rather than with any compromise between awareness and emotions such as pertains to the conscious mind, particularly in conjunction with thoughts. Consciousness is a mixture of subconscious and superconscious, whereas the immanent experience of absolute mind demands that we transcend the subconscious and so exist solely for the superconscious, absorbed in painless awareness. But such awareness is relative, because dependent on the new brain. It can only fall short in quality of the sublime awareness of transcendent spirit, which is the perfected attribute of Absolute Mind. The distinction between the immanent and the transcendent is one of degree, as between the personal and the universal. They can never be the same, contrary to what superficial thinkers tend to imagine!

MARK: And yet we can progress from the one to the other in the course of time?

GERALD: Yes, in the course of evolutionary time, which will presuppose further progress on the human level in terms of a transcendental civilization, the ultimate civilization in the evolution of man, which should lead, in due course, to the more evolved life forms of a post-Human Millennium, when first the entire brain and then just the new brain will be artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, bringing life to its highest possible earthly pitch prior to transcendence - the goal of millennial striving in the supra-atomic Beyond ... of Absolute Mind.

MARK: And yet, even with the attainment of immanent spirit to transcendent spirit, further evolutionary progress will presumably be required, in space, to bring all separate transcendences to ultimate unity in definitive divinity.

GERALD: Yes, such separate transcendences as emerge from individual Superbeings will converge towards those nearest to them in space, and thus gradually expand into larger globes of pure spirit, evolving from what might be termed a 'planetary' level to a 'galactic' level and on, finally, to a 'universal' level, the climax of supra-atomic evolution in the Omega Point, which will be at the farthest possible evolutionary remove from the Alpha Points, as it were, of the central or governing stars throughout the subatomic universe - approximately one to each galaxy.

MARK: Could these Alpha Points, as you call them, possibly correspond, by any chance, to what Buddhists call the Ground of all Being, Christians the Father, Mohammedans Allah, and Judaists Jehovah?

GERALD: Indeed they could; though such terms as traditional religions uphold indicate the singular rather than the plural, because religious evolution stems from a galactic base in a kind of microcosmic isolation from the Universe in toto, the governing star of the galaxy in which we exist being the literal source from which theological symbols like Jehovah, Allah, et cetera, were extrapolated in monotheistic partiality. And this would have been so even if, as was probably the case, men had no idea of the existence of a governing star, being unable to see it, but simply posited some creative force behind nature, including the sun and nearest stars - those visible to the naked eye or through some rudimentary telescope. Of course, the ancients may have spoken of a 'Creator of the Universe', but their 'universe' was a good deal smaller, so to speak, than the one we are becoming familiar with today. They had no idea that it was composed of millions of galaxies, not possessing a knowledge of galaxies. Even up until comparatively recent times men thought the earth was at the centre of the Universe! No, if we are to get anywhere near the mark, albeit in anachronistically theological terms, we should ascribe the creation of the subatomic universe to literally millions of Grounds, Fathers, Allahs, Jehovahs, or what have you, because pluralism is the essence of the alpha. Even the idea of a divine Creator is essentially erroneous or, at the very least, morally suspect when regarded from an omega-oriented point of view, since evolution begins with the subatomic and, as pure soul, that corresponds to a diabolic absolute ... in contrast to the future climax of evolution in the supra-atomic, which, as pure spirit, will correspond to a truly divine absolute. To speak of a divine Ground, like Aldous Huxley, is effectively to indulge in a contradiction in terms. The term 'Ground' suggests a root or base, and could only apply to the diabolic absolute which, as pure soul, has nothing to do with pure spirit.

MARK: Presumably the term 'Clear Light of the Void' would be more suitable to the latter, since effectively corresponding, in Christian parlance, to the Holy Spirit?

GERALD: Indeed, it may well be that the distinction between the Ground and the Clear Light ..., as between the Father and the Holy Spirit, is equivalent to alpha and omega, with some avatar, or anthropomorphic man-god, coming in-between as the mid-point of religious evolution. But such terms as the Clear Light ... and the Holy Spirit, while relevant to their respective faiths, would be quite irrelevant to Transcendentalism, which, as I conceive it, will be the ultimate religion requiring a convergence to omega, as it were, on the level of a fresh terminology, so that, not for the least of reasons, no traditional religion may be regarded as surviving at the expense of another. Transcendentalism is not Buddhism or Hinduism or Shintoism or any other traditional faith taking over from each of the others but ... a completely new, all-embracing religious development which appertains to the world proletariat. It signifies a complete break with the alpha roots of the Universe in the stars and, in addition to regular meditation in specially-designed meditation centres, embraces knowledge of evolutionary perspective ... as applying, in the main, to the Superbeing Millennium and the nature and direction of transcendence. No Transcendentalist would ever make the mistake of confounding alpha with omega, or vice versa, and I very much doubt whether, given the right education, all that many Transcendentalists would consider God both immanent and transcendent when, in any ultimate sense, God doesn't yet exist, being the climax of evolution. Neither would they regard their absolute mind as being identical to the Absolute Mind, failing to distinguish between the relative and the absolute, the mundane and the transcendent. A man engaged in transcendental meditation won't mistake his spirit for pure spirit. He will discover, sooner or later, that subconscious emotions are never entirely eclipsed by relative awareness and that even the superconscious is prone to intrusive emotions and thoughts from time to time! He will know that there is a significant evolutionary difference between his absolute mind and the absolutism of a Spiritual Globe converging towards other such globes in the post-atomic Beyond. But he will know, too, that such a difference is precisely what evolutionary progress on earth is determined to overcome. Above all, he will know that man is but a stage on the way to the post-human.