PART TWO: ESSAYS

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FUTURE RELIGIOUS PROGRESS

As life evolves, so it becomes more interiorized, and people therefore spend a greater amount of time indoors than outdoors. Just as the Christians spent a greater amount of time indoors, as a rule, than the pagans of pre-atomic times, so in the coming post-atomic age will Transcendentalists spend even more time indoors than their Christian predecessors - perhaps the greater part of their lives. Indeed, Transcendentalists will spend so much time indoors ... as to be the complete antithesis of pagans, who doubtless spent most of their time outdoors, living in closer proximity to nature and thus enslavement to the natural-world-order. This was because they stemmed from the alpha roots of life in the stars and consequently reflected a preference for appearance over essence, the exterior over the interior. We can't properly understand why the ancient Greeks, to name but one pagan people, built temples on a columnar basis if we do not appreciate the need felt by such peoples to exteriorize their buildings, and thus remain in contact with nature even when they entered them. A classical temple remained open to nature even when, as was not always the case, it possessed a roof. The Greeks would never have dreamt of completely shutting themselves off from the outside world in sealed buildings, and so they built openly, with the use of columns. There is no deeper underlying reason behind their architectural styles than that!

The Christians, however, being dualists, had more respect for transcendentalism than their pagan forebears. In fact, they were prepared to spend as much time indoors as outdoors, and sometimes even more. Their religious buildings, while partly imitating Graeco-Roman styles, albeit superficially and primarily for decorative purposes, shut people off from nature behind walls, though never entirely so! For in every church there were windows, and in some churches, particularly Gothic, there were more windows than walls. Yet, even then, these windows weren't plain and ultra-transparent, but either frosted or stained, and stained, often enough, in a most colourful and religiously educative manner - the tradition of stained glass lasting into the industrial age, though on a largely revivalist basis.

With the ongoing development of Protestantism in certain countries from the seventeenth century, however, walls tended to preponderate over windows, the latter being frosted and mainly utilitarian. People became even more shut off from nature in these buildings, though, thanks to their windows, not exclusively so! There was a plentiful supply of natural light, duly supplemented, in the course of time, by different forms of artificial light. Coming out of or going into a church, one might have encountered columns either embedded in the walls and/or forming a portico. This may have been reassuring for some people, particularly those who admired the Greek ideal. Nevertheless inside the building, walls and windows preponderated, with perhaps a few decorative columns for aesthetic purposes. That was the essence of late-Christian architecture.

But we haven't reached the end of human evolution, least of all in religious terms. For an age is coming when meditation centres will have to be built, and such centres will correspond to a transcendental civilization, a global civilization whose citizens will be even more shut off from nature in their buildings than the Christians were - so shut off, in fact, as not even to have windows in them. Then what? Not thick walls suggestive of materialism but, on the contrary, relatively thin, synthetic walls all the way around, with artificial light to illuminate the interiors when necessary ... Which shouldn't be when people are meditating and thereby striving to transcend appearances! Electric or neon light should replace natural light, where such transcendental buildings are concerned. There will doubtless be need of air-conditioning, perhaps even of sophisticated filter systems, but not of windows. People will enter a building in which the lights have been dimmed and get dimmer as the meditation session proceeds. They will understand that essence is what counts in a meditation centre, not appearance! The Christian churches were, as a rule, less bright inside than the Greek temples, open or partly open to the sky, would have been - indeed, many of them might fittingly be described as dim or even dingy. A bright meditation centre, however, would be a contradiction in terms!

So Transcendentalists will be completely shut off from nature in their religious buildings, and thus exist in a context essentially closer to the post-human phases of evolution in the ensuing Superman/Superbeing Millennium. Evolution will have progressed from appearance to essence, from exterior architecture to interior architecture. This will signify a qualitative improvement - the inner manifestations of evolutionary progress.

But there will also be need of manifestations which, being outer, may be defined as quantitative, in which the diversity and separateness of things at the roots of evolution are gradually transcended - the direction of evolution being from the innumerable stars to the ultimate globe of transcendent spirit via planetary life. The lower the stage of human evolution, the more prevalent is this diversity and separateness. Why, one may wonder, has the world given birth to so many distinct languages? Precisely because lingual diversity is a cultural manifestation of diabolic influence, the great variety of things or distinctions on the pre-atomic and even atomic levels of evolution. Before men evolved to national distinctions, they were subject to the far more numerous tribal distinctions, and of course each tribe evolved a distinct language of its own. Literally thousands of conflicting tongues babbling away in pre-atomic times, a source of deep-rooted hostility and distrust - interminable intertribal strife! Such was the case even when certain tribes joined together to form nations, or when the victory of one tribe over another paved the way for the nation states of today, and the number of languages was reduced in proportion to the number of vanquished or incorporated tribes - the tongue of the stronger tribe becoming the national language of the new nation. And yet, even then, still too many languages, circumstances still reflecting the diversity and separateness of things ... as stemming from the alpha roots of evolution in the stars. Is not the contemporary world torn between literally hundreds of tongues, even though the vast majority of people speak one or another of the half-dozen foremost languages in the world, including English, French, and Spanish? Some people even speak two or more such languages, since capable of transcending national barriers and culturally embracing wider sectors of humanity. But most people are still imprisoned in the language of their particular nation, a language among languages - no more and no less!

Clearly, there is more scope for quantitative improvement here, for a further contraction of diversity and separateness. Such an improvement must surely come when the world transcends national distinctions and becomes not simply an international community, but a supra-national community in the ultimate human civilization of the transcendental future. What will be required is a convergence towards the Omega Absolute, or the goal of evolutionary development, on the level of language, the adoption, in due course, of a supra-national language to supersede the various national tongues which currently exist and will doubtless continue to do so until the world is brought under a central administration in the coming post-atomic age. For there can be no question of one national tongue, like English or Russian, being adopted at the expense of all the others. That would not signify a lingual convergence to the Omega Absolute, but, rather, an imperialistic extension of one national tongue into the future. Yet all national tongues are equally irrelevant to a transcendental civilization, which must be supra-national.

Likewise, all national or regional so-called world religions would be equally irrelevant to the formation of the next civilization. There could be no question of Buddhism or Hinduism being adopted by peoples who had traditionally upheld Christianity or Islam or whatever. Transcendentalism will mark a new beginning in religious evolution, and it will do so as a world religion in the truest sense, not as one of seven or eight contending religions, the co-existence of which simply reflects the divisive and separative nature of things stemming from the alpha roots of evolution. All existing so-called world religions should be superseded by the True World Religion of transcendental man, in which quiescent meditation will enable its practitioners to approximate more closely to the ultimate tranquillity, peace, and blessed being of the Divine Omega, conceiving of the latter as the goal of evolution in transcendent spirit. But there will be no oriental fanaticism about this type of meditation, no striving to attain to transcendence through meditation techniques alone, and for literally hours at a stretch every day of the week! Unlike a Buddhist, transcendental man will know that his civilization is but a stage on the road to the post-Human Millennium, when brains become artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts, and a new life form, post-human and largely supernatural, continues the evolutionary journey from approximately where man left off. Knowing that technology will have an important role to play in furthering spiritual progress, he won't be subject to the delusions of the traditional oriental fanatic concerning his prospects of salvation through natural meditating methods alone! He will be able to meditate rationally, calmly, periodically, uncluttered by superstition. And when the technicians have perfected the means of supporting and sustaining brains artificially, he will be superseded by the Superman of the first phase of the post-Human Millennium, in which not transcendental meditation but hallucinogenic contemplation will prevail, in accordance with the need to open-up the superconscious and have the psyche pass through an intermediate period of internal visionary experience en route, as it were, to higher things.

One of these higher things will of course be the hypermeditation of collectivized new-brains artificially supported and sustained in the second phase of the post-Human Millennium, the truly classless society of the Superbeings, which will exist, in evolutionary terms, as antithetical equivalents to trees. In this ultimate phase of millennial evolution, the interaction of new brains on any given support/sustain system will lead, after a certain period of time, to spirit being cultivated to a point where it becomes transcendent, when electrons detach themselves from atomic constraint and soar heavenwards in supra-atomic freedom. Now whilst electrons climb free of new-brain matter and merge with and converge towards other such transcendences in the void, the protons left behind will probably react against one another in subatomic cursedness, thereby destroying whatever remains to be destroyed. Spirit, however, will have attained to its goal in supra-atomic blessedness, a goal which first became apparent to Christians in the age of atomic balance, but which was sought after more keenly as time went by and life became increasingly post-atomic in constitution. With the final overcoming of matter, ultimately reduced to its new-brain guise, salvation will be definitively attained. All that remains to be done then ... is that the individual transcendences from whichever Superbeing in whichever part of the Universe should merge into one ultimate transcendence for evolution to run its course and achieve completion in a beingfulness that will last for ever.

Not so the remaining stars, however, which will gradually fade, collapse, and disappear, leaving the Universe to the perfection of the divine presence alone. This divine presence - God in any ultimate sense - will be the most interiorized existence possible, the ultimate experiential interiorization of a supreme level of being, towards which all progress in earthly interiorization tends, including that still to be made in the future transcendental civilization.