TWO APPROACHES TO SALVATION

We are entering an age and, to a limited extent as yet, already live in an age when, to put it bluntly, politics is no longer a matter for politicians, but effectively for priest-types functioning in a political role. That is to say, when politics is being transferred from the State to the Church ... with intent to the latter's furtherance, as evolution tends towards an exclusively religious stage from a transcendental base. The priest who involves himself in politics is less an anomaly these days - though Christian purists will maintain otherwise - than an intimation of things to come, and this even when he functions from a reactionary standpoint (as did a certain well-known cleric in Northern Ireland). Previously, throughout the greater part of the Christian era, politics was a matter for politicians and religion a matter for priests. There existed a sharp distinction between materialists and spiritualists, in accordance with the dualistic nature of Christian civilization, torn between state and church. Prior to that, religion, to the extent that it existed, was predominantly in the hands of politicians, as in ancient Greece. We, however, are entering an age the converse of the pre-atomic, in which politics will be in the hands of priest-types who will direct political affairs in the interests of subsequent religious development, seeking, by degrees, to expand the Church at the State's expense. The dichotomy between politicians and priests will be superseded by an absolutism favouring the latter or, rather, their transcendental successors, who will be partial to meditation and have nothing to do with a priesthood in any traditional sense. I merely use the term 'priest' on account of its long-standing antithesis to 'politician'. However, antitheses of any description won't pertain to a post-atomic age, so we needn't expect politics to remain the preserve of materialists.

Of course, in Marxist-Leninist states politics remained, until quite recently, in the hands of Soviet materialists, who functioned as quasi-electron equivalents in a post-atomic society, and even now, under Social Democracy, politics is still, by and large, in the hands of materialists, as before. Doubtless politics will remain in such hands until states upholding Socialism are eventually transformed, through the acceptance of transcendental truth, into genuinely free-electron societies, with the correlative development of proletarian civilization. Then the State will truly 'wither', in Engles' oft-quoted phrase, as spiritual types take over the reins of government and work for the expansion of the Church, as implying the development of transcendental meditation in suitably designed meditation centres. At that point in time, Socialism will be well on the way to its total eclipse by Transcendentalism, as particularly applying to the completely free, stateless, classless, moneyless, paradisiacal society of the Superbeings, or new-brain collectivizations, in the second phase of the post-Human Millennium - the transcendental phase-proper. For Socialism won't be entirely eclipsed with the advent of the first post-human phase of evolution, when the State, in both senses of the term, will be superseded by the Supermen, or brain collectivizations, the millennial machinery of which will stem from the expanding Church. Thus Socialism will lead to Social Transcendentalism and that, in turn, to the post-Human Millennium, which, after a relatively 'socialist' phase, will culminate in the transcendental phase-proper ... of the hypermeditating Superbeings, who, as the ultimate earthly life-form, will be pending transcendence, and thus the attainment of pure spirit, i.e. free electrons, to the heavenly Beyond in ultimate salvation from atomic constraint.

In speaking of the two senses of the word 'state', I was, of course, referring, in post-atomic terms, to what is literally the State in a socialist society, i.e. the proletariat, and to what can be superficially mistaken for it but is in fact the machinery of state which, in its bureaucratic and administrative capacity, is intended to serve the proletariat. I have elsewhere used the word 'state' in a more traditional sense, as applying to politics rather than religion, and I am well aware that, from another traditional standpoint, it can be used to signify landed or property interests, which are its earlier and therefore more concrete manifestations - manifestations still accruing, in some measure, to atomic societies. The socialist use of the word 'state' normally emphasizes, by contrast, an abstract manifestation, since the proletariat are an abstraction, not a concrete entity like an individual or, more specifically in this context, an area of land which, in national terms, signifies the root beginnings of the State from which bourgeois landed/property and property/people compromises were successively derived, these atomic manifestations of the State in turn being superseded, in socialist societies, by the ideologically Absolute State ... of the proletariat (initially in theory only).

Thus the overall evolution of the State, to speak in atomic terms, is from the proton absolutism of the aristocratic concrete manifestation to the electron absolutism of the proletarian abstract manifestation via the atomic compromises of the bourgeois concrete/abstract manifestations. With the post-atomic stage of this evolution, however, the approach to salvation, that is to say, to a post-Human Millennium, requires that Socialism should accommodate itself, through Social Democracy, to Transcendentalism, in order that materialism may eventually be superseded by the development of an exclusively spiritual orientation of post-atomic society, as quasi-electron politics gives way to free-electron politics and Socialism begins its 'withering' in the name of transcendental progress. As intimated elsewhere in my work, the supersession of materialist leaders, or Marxists, by spiritualist leaders, or Transcendentalists, is the key to the evolution of the Church at the State's expense. All states upholding materialistic socialism will become spiritual in the course of time. Dialectical materialism will be superseded by post-dialectical transcendentalism.

In the meantime, however, Transcendentalists and Marxists will have to learn to work together and to trust one another. This should not be difficult, since both approaches to salvation have evolutionary progress at heart and should exist, in the future, on the same class level, not, as with Nazism and Fascism vis-à-vis Soviet Communism, in a bourgeois/proletarian antagonism, the fruit of which was the bitterest fighting of World War Two. Transcendentalists would not be fascist but genuinely socialistic, if from a spiritual standpoint. Strictly speaking, there are no Transcendentalists in the modern world but only, in absolute politics, Socialists. For Transcendentalism (communism or communalism) does, after all, develop out of Socialism or, more correctly, Social Transcendentalism ... as the goal of earthly striving in the ultimate post-human society of the Superbeing Millennium.