POST-ATOMIC PERSPECTIVES

 

Multigenre Philosophy

 

Copyright © 1982–2012 John O'Loughlin

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CONTENTS

 

PART ONE: MAXIMS

 

1. Maxims 1–46

 

PART TWO: APHORISMS

 

2. Aphorisms 1–16

 

PART THREE: ESSAYS

 

3. Literary Developments

4. Transitional Literatures

5. A Second Coming

6. True and False Messiahs

7. Antithetical Equivalents

8. Withering of the State(s)

9. Christian Pagans

10. Transvaluations

 

PART FOUR: DIALOGUES

 

11.  Knowledge of God

12. Relative and Absolute

13.  Becoming and Become

14.  Evolutionary Stages

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PART ONE: MAXIMS

 

1.   The greater the man the more tragic the life.  Conversely, the pettier the man the more trivial the life.

 

2.   The higher the woman, the more she will function as a quasi-electron equivalent rather than as a proton equivalent on the post-atomic plane.

 

3.   The higher the man, the more he will function as a free-electron equivalent rather than as a bound-electron equivalent on the post-atomic plane.

 

4.   The nearest the greatest man will come to being a bound-electron equivalent is in his dreams, when he may encounter a woman with whom he has sex.

 

5.   The post-atomic man will not revolve around a woman, like a bound electron around a proton, but be free to expand spirit towards the Divine.

 

6.   The post-atomic woman, who functions as a quasi-electron equivalent, will both receive semen and conceive life artificially.

 

7.   Woman as proton equivalent and man, by contrast, as bound-electron equivalent; liberated woman as a quasi-electron equivalent and Superman as a free-electron equivalent.

 

8.   Because women effectively become quasi-Supermen in a post-atomic society, they cannot be discriminated against as women.

 

9.   This fact is already grasped and partly realized in the transitional, or bourgeois/proletarian, stage of civilized evolution, such as still prevails in the greater part of the Western world in the present century.

 

10.  But transitional civilization still falls somewhat short of the free-electron status of a post-atomic society.

 

11.  Considered from a historically objective point-of-view, a continuity may be discerned from one stage of civilized evolution to another, cutting across the divisions of class integrity ... as appertaining to each stage of civilization, and manifesting a progression towards the Divine.

 

12.  But considered from a contemporary relative point-of-view, there exists only the opposition of one class to another and the unwillingness of the prevailing class to further the higher evolutionary aspirations of what may be called the under class.

 

13.  Thus on the relative scale, one cannot expect bourgeois/proletarian civilization to further the development of proletarian civilization on the post-atomic plane per se.

 

14.  That which appertains to the bourgeois stage of evolution is sufficient unto the needs of the bourgeoisie.

 

15.  Proletarian civilization, with its post-atomic bias, can only be furthered by the efforts of the proletariat in opposition to the preceding or prevailing evolutionary class.

 

16.  Thus arises the need for Transcendentalism and Socialism to champion the interests of the proletariat in the face of bourgeois opposition.

 

17.  The material interests of the proletariat are championed by Socialism, their spiritual interests by Transcendentalism - the one concentrating upon a contraction of materialism in the world, the other, following in its wake, upon an expansion of spirituality there.

 

18.  The materialist limitations of Socialism lead it to denounce abstract art as petty bourgeois, and to regard all degrees and kinds of abstract art as decadent.

 

19.  The spiritual insights of Transcendentalism lead to a denunciation of petty-bourgeois abstraction in the arts not so much because it is abstract but, rather, because it is insufficiently abstract: in other words, because it doesn't correspond to proletarian transcendentalism, as appertaining to a post-atomic civilization.

 

20.  But post-atomic civilization is not the prerogative of Socialism, and so Socialists limit themselves to a denunciation of decadent bourgeois civilization.

 

21.  The socialist responsibility is sufficient unto itself and an integral part of historical necessity.  Just so, the transcendentalist responsibility ... of effecting spiritual progress on the proletarian plane in the wake of socialist influence in the world at large ... will be an integral part of historical necessity, corresponding to the addition of a spiritual superstructure to the material foundations of post-atomic society.

 

22.  Thus proletarian civilization will arise as the ultimate human civilization preceding the post-Human Millennium.

 

23.  The twentieth century was, by and large, a century of bourgeois/proletarian transition - the most representative transitional nations being America, Germany, Italy, and Japan.

 

24.  The older European countries, such as Britain, France, Belgium, and Holland, were still basically bourgeois but subject to the influence of the transitional nations, and therefore stood closer to their level of civilization.

 

25.  Thus the bourgeois nations were conditioned towards bourgeois/proletarian criteria by the bona fide transitional nations without, however, entirely betraying their middle-class roots.

 

26.  Not being genuinely bourgeois/proletarian, these older nations could never take the lead in developing transitional civilization but were obliged to follow-on behind the leaders.

 

27.  Their lifestyle was thus often not their own but, rather, what the genuinely transitional nations had injected into them.

 

28.  They resembled an old patient being kept alive by an influx of fresh blood from a young doctor.  If they appeared to be truly living, it was more often than not a semblance of life or a veneer of zestful living imposed upon them from without.

 

29.  They couldn't stand properly on their own feet, for their legs were old and shaky, requiring the crutches of bourgeois/proletarian civilization as support.

 

30.  Without the continuing support of the truly contemporary nations, the passé ones would have either collapsed into internal anarchy or been destroyed as civilizations by post-atomic barbarism.

 

31.  Bourgeois/proletarian civilization cannot last for ever, but will be superseded, in due course, by proletarian civilization.

 

32.  For the universal establishment of proletarian civilization ... a nation specifically dedicated to the expansion of the spiritual side of life will be required, to disseminate transcendental truth throughout the world when the time is ripe.  Such a nation will be transcendentalist.

 

33.  From the fact of the alpha absolute to the truth of the omega absolute; from the fiction of 'the Creator' to the illusion of a benevolent cosmos.

 

34.  The internal fiction of the Father derived from the external fact of the First Cause; the external illusion of a benevolent cosmos derived from the internal truth of the superconscious.

 

35.  The internal appearance of the subconscious projecting the theological fiction out into the external context as a pseudo-fact; the internal essence of the superconscious receiving the scientific illusion in the internal context as a pseudo-truth.

 

36.  The complexity of the modern atom is no less an aspect of scientific subjectivity than the complexity of the Cosmos.  Microcosm and macrocosm are subject to identical evaluations.

 

37.  Considered literally, the atom is no more complex now than formerly, when man first became aware of it.  Electrons still revolve around a proton nucleus, with neutrons in attendance.

 

38.  Only our scientific bias regarding the atom has changed, and it conforms to the subjective need to complexify the external, whether microcosmic or macrocosmic, in response to the corresponding simplification of the internal, or superconscious, as required by quasi-theological expedience.

 

39.  A sick man cannot regard the world from the viewpoint of a man who is well, and vice versa.  Similarly, a mind in which the superconscious predominates over the subconscious cannot regard the world from the viewpoint of one in which the subconscious predominates over the superconscious.  This explains our changing attitude to the world, as indeed to the Universe in general.

 

40.  But it doesn't follow from this that the world or the Universe has changed independently of ourselves.

 

41.  Just as there are degrees of nature, from the most densely natural in the stars to the least densely natural in man, so there are degrees of Supernature, from the least purely supernatural in man to the most purely supernatural in the omega absolutism of transcendent futurity.

 

42.  Man, who is not a static life-form but an evolving one, progresses from the least human degree of supernaturalism in paganism to the most human degree of supernaturalism in transcendentalism via an intermediate realm of balance between the natural and the supernatural.

 

43.  Beyond man, however, the Superman of the lower phase of the post-Human Millennium would attain to a still superior degree of supernaturalism, as the superconscious was opened-up through participation in artificially-induced visionary experience.

 

44.  Beyond the Superman, however, the Superbeing of the higher phase of the post-Human Millennium would attain to the maximum degree of supernaturalism prior to transcendence, as the superconscious was completely freed from subconscious constraint, and post-visionary experience became possible.

 

45.  With the attainment of transcendence, however, the ensuing Spiritual Globe would be completely supernatural, as it escaped from the physiological constraint of collectivized new-brains and so became a fragment, as it were, of absolute mind converging, together with other such fragments, towards the heavenly goal of evolution in ultimate spiritual unity.

 

46.  The attainment of ultimate spiritual unity would bring the evolving universe to completion in the Omega Absolute, the most supernatural of noumena, at the opposite extreme to the most subnatural of phenomena - the stars.

 

 

PART TWO: APHORISMS

 

1.   I have long entertained the opinion that a reproduction of a modern painting in poster form is a more civilized medium of aesthetic appreciation than the original work from which the reproduction was derived.  One might say that whereas the possession of an actual canvas signifies a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois allegiance, the possession of a poster-reproduction bespeaks a proletarian orientation, in which the materialism of canvas and paints has been eclipsed in response to proletarian criteria.  And very often a poster-reproduction is of a smaller scale than the original work.

 

2.   To my way of thinking, women who take part in erotic posturings for purposes of photographic reproduction are sublimated prostitutes.  They signify a superior type and stage of prostitution to the literal, personal and material type, being, by contrast, sublimated, impersonal and spiritual.  With recourse to them, sex is elevated from the body to the mind - most of the pleasure one obtains from them coming through the eyes.  They constitute the most appropriate sex partners for the free-electron male, whose sexuality is necessarily sublimated, i.e. free of the flesh.

 

3.   Arthur Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Aldous Huxley were all, in their different ways, outstanding petty-bourgeois authors.  But considered from a proletarian standpoint, their writings have little or nothing to offer the future.  Like all petty-bourgeois writers, they do not assist the advancement of the proletariat but, on the contrary, oppose such advancement in loyalty to their own class standards and integrity.

 

4.   The expression 'Free World', so often bandied about in the West, is largely hyperbolic; for, in reality, the West is at best two-thirds or three-quarters free, as pertaining to the levels of civilization that prevail there.  Anyone who writes on behalf of a higher degree of freedom, such as would correspond to proletarian civilization, soon finds out just how free the West really is!  For his work is invariably rejected by publishers who, for the most part, reflect bourgeois and petty-bourgeois levels of freedom.

 

5.   The 'freest' literature will only arise in a post-atomic civilization, or in a nation moving towards such a civilization from a transcendental standpoint.  The socialist nations do not and cannot produce a truly free literature; for they are constrained by a materialist integrity into maintaining the expedient lie in the material interests of the proletariat, and are accordingly bound to a traditional or conventional technical approach to literature.  Socialist Realism, which normally prevails in socialist states, uses bourgeois genres on behalf of the proletariat, treating such genres in a conventional manner.  Thus proton- or, more correctly, neutron-oriented literature is transformed, by reference to the proletariat, into quasi-electron literature, functioning on behalf of bound electrons from a pseudo-neutron base.  Only a transcendental nation, dedicated to the expansion of the spiritual in the wake of a universal contraction of materialism, could at some time produce free-electron literature on behalf of a free proletariat from a like base.

 

6.   A Marxist-Leninist state can only contract the material, not expand the spiritual.  Its entrenched opposition to petty-bourgeois transcendentalism, e.g. the adoption of oriental mysticism by Western states, is justified by loyalty to proletarian criteria.  But such loyalty exists solely on a materialist level, without reference to proletarian spirituality.  The Communist opposes petty-bourgeois mysticism, but he doesn't envisage replacing it with proletarian spirituality, or transcendentalism.  His chief concern is to contract the material, i.e. oppose capitalism, and a by-product of this mainstream activity will be the rejection of accompanying levels of religion.  The construction of a higher level of religion is not an integral part of his programme.  That must be left to future Transcendentalists, whose ideological bias entails an understanding of and commitment to spiritual values - in their case the ultimate spiritual values of full-blown Transcendentalism.  Not being tied to the materialist criteria of State Socialism, these spiritual socialists would encourage the publication and dissemination of literature bearing on a higher religion.  Theirs is the only possible base from which to launch a transcendental crusade.

 

7.   It cannot be denied that the first manifestation of nature gave rise to the second, that the second gave rise to the third, the third to the fourth, and so on, until man was reached as the highest manifestation of nature, possessed of a supernatural capacity.  Man arose, one may believe, from the apes, and proceeded on his uniquely human course away from the natural and deeper into the supernatural.  At first the supernatural was a part of the natural, nature being invested by early man with magical powers, mostly evil; but, by degrees, it gradually acquired a distinct, transcendent status, as in Christianity, and became the goal of human striving, an otherworldly ideal which could only become reality if the flesh, meaning human nature, was defeated and escaped from.  With the advent of a post-Christian and exclusively transcendental age, such as the world is now tending towards, this striving will be continued on higher terms, as man acquires greater mastery over nature and increasingly learns to identify himself with Supernature.  The way to the distant goal of heavenly salvation, however, will lead, in due course, beyond the final human stage of religious striving to the post-Human Millennial stages, in which the supernatural will preponderate over the natural to an extent inconceivable in man.

 

8.   Thus as a superior manifestation of nature developed out of a preceding inferior stage, so must each superior stage of Supernature  develop out of inferior preceding stages, beginning, as we have seen, with the human, which progresses through successive stages from paganism to transcendentalism, continuing from the human to the post-human in the Supermen and Superbeings (see below) of the ensuing transcendental Millennium, continuing on again from the post-visionary supernaturalism of the Superbeings to the absolute supernaturalism of Spiritual Globes, and culminating in the ultimate supernaturalism of the Omega Absolute.

 

9.   Man is thus responsible not only for effecting increased degrees of supernaturalism within himself but, in addition, to effecting supernatural progress beyond the human stages in what I have defined as the millennial ones.  By 'man' I refer, in particular, to those men whose duty it becomes to endorse and supervise succeeding stages of religious progress, to chosen leaders of one cast or another who, as a rule, don't directly enter the 'promised land' of religious striving themselves, but lead others towards it on whichever level they may happen to be.  If this is generally the case where humanity and the human stages of evolution are concerned, how much more so must it be for the future post-human stages of evolution, when the 'promised land' of the transcendental Millennium will not only require to be supervised but, first of all, created by certain men, who will stand apart from it in their capacity as leaders, responsible, amongst other things, for achieving technical perfection in the artificial supporting and sustaining of human brains, which, once established, will exist in the collectivized contexts of Supermen - as antithetical equivalents to apes on trees.  The means of achieving this perfection will be explored by a chosen Few whose destiny will be to serve the Supermen and ensure they are maintained in good working-order.  Yet the substitution of artificial supports and sustains for natural ones ... is only one side of the problem.  The other is, of course, to produce brains for those supports and sustains, and to produce them in such a way that they will exist independently of human bodies.

 

10.  No, the leaders, whether technical, spiritual, or whatever, won't enter the 'promised land' of the Supermen personally, but will be as shepherds to the flock, creating and maintaining a higher level of life for the post-human life forms.  This will also apply to the superbeing phase of millennial evolution, when an entity - one of a number of such entities - antithetical in constitution to a tree will be created by the responsible leaders, as they elevate life from collectivized brains artificially supported and sustained to more intensively-collectivized new brains supported and sustained in a similar way.  Each cluster of new brains will become a Superbeing, and doubtless this most superior life form on earth would also require supervision, lest some malfunction were to occur in the mechanical sustain apparatus or injury to various of the new brains arise in consequence of neglect and/or surgical inadequacy.  As a gardener waters and carefully tends his plants, anxious in case any harm should befall them, so would the technocratic leaders of each phase of the post-Human Millennium be solicitous of the wellbeing of their spiritual 'plants', conscious of the important role they play in ensuring the continuity and amelioration of evolving life on earth, if the goal of evolution in absolute transcendence is eventually to be attained.  Conscious, above all, of the preciousness of these spiritual 'plants', superior to anything created by nature, almost completely supernatural in their positive orientation towards the heavenly Beyond.

 

11.  Whether the leaders, human and therefore inferior to the post-human life forms, would continue to exist in the higher stage of the transcendental Millennium, the transcendental stage-proper, will remain to be seen.  We can't be certain, at this point in time, how long the post-Human Millennium will last (not necessarily a thousand years), nor whether the superbeingful phase of it would be longer or shorter than the preceding superhuman phase.  Possibly, as evolution advances, artificial leaders will supersede human ones, as men entrust the supervision and maintenance of the supernatural life forms to robots and computers, withdrawing themselves into the background or maybe even absenting themselves from millennial duties altogether.  Doubtless robots and computers would be less disposed to envy of those already in the millennial 'promised land' than human leaders, were they obliged to sit out the progress of supernaturalism right to the very end!

 

12.  The definitive Beyond ... of transcendence would, of course, correspond to Heaven, a Spiritual Globe from any given transcended Superbeing being but a fragment, so to speak, of Heaven en route, in space, to the definitive Spiritual Globe of the Omega Absolute.  One might term this the Absolute Beyond, in order to distinguish it from the Relative Beyond, which will precede it in and as the post-Human Millennium.  Whether relative or absolute, millennial or heavenly, the use of a term like 'the Beyond' is justified by reference to what lies beyond us as human beings - it being accepted that evolution will continue above the human level to a post-human and, finally, an absolute level.  The post-Human Millennium is beyond us, as 'heaven on earth', but heaven with a small 'h', not the definitive Heaven ... of the Absolute Beyond.  Likewise the transcendental civilization (of the ultimate stage of human evolution that could paradoxically be regarded as post-humanist) is beyond us, whether we are Christians, Moslems, Socialists, or whatever.  It appertains neither to the Christian West nor to the Socialist East, but to that which will emerge in the world at large at some future time, when the current dichotomy between an atomic level of civilization and its post-atomic enemies no longer exists, and the world is ripe for elevation to a post-atomic civilization.  Thus, in the present century, we are confronted by the prospect of three beyonds, viz. a human, a post-human, and an absolute, which is to say, a transcendental, a millennial, and a heavenly ... in succeeding stages of evolution.

 

13.  With Christian man - the man of the middle civilization in the evolution of human civilizations from pagan to transcendental - phenomenon and noumenon are approximately balanced in a context betokening dualistic compromise.  The will and the spirit each claim an equal part in his religious integrity, the one linking him to the Father, the other reflecting an aspiration towards the Holy Ghost; these antithetical tendencies finding their theological focus in the person of Christ, the Man-God Who is both of the flesh (nature) and of the spirit (supernature), and therefore 'Three in One' - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Not literally, however, because being man precludes one from becoming either of the absolutes, the alpha or the omega, at the same time.  Christ was, in effect, a diluted Father and a diluted Holy Ghost, reflecting the condition of psychic compromise between the will and the spirit which must apply to mankind over a given period of evolutionary time - namely, after the psyche has ceased to be predominantly dominated by the will, and before it has become biased on the side of the spirit - as during the era of Christianity.

 

14.  With the era of Transcendentalism, however, the constitution of the psyche is the opposite of what it was in pre-atomic pagan times, and so man becomes more noumenon than phenomenon, more given to the superconscious than to the subconscious, a being directly aspiring towards the Omega Absolute in a religious orientation exclusively favouring the cultivation of spirit.  Unlike a Christian, the Transcendentalist will not pray, sing hymns, attend Mass, read the Bible, inhale incense, confess to sins, or whatever, but will simply meditate, in the company of others, in a context approximating, no matter how humbly or crudely initially, to the heavenly condition.  He will not meditate, however, with the fanaticism of an oriental devotee of spiritual salvation, who knows nothing about the future need to support and sustain brains artificially in collectivized contexts.  On the contrary, he will conduct his meditation on a level commensurate with a knowledge of things to come, and thus in a relatively relaxed fashion.  Transcendentalism is not Buddhism, nor any other oriental or old-world religion.  It is potentially the ultimate world religion of the final human civilization.

 

15.  And so it will lead, by degrees, to the post-Human Millennium, when spiritual aspirations are stepped-up in a context favouring the artificial.  It isn't, however, something that should be stepped over, as though the periodic practice of meditation in specially-designed centres was of little or no account.  Everything proceeds by degrees, and the development of religion is no exception!  When men have learnt to congregate specifically for spiritual purposes and not, as with Christianity, for a combination of sensual and spiritual purposes, then they will be ready for elevation to the superhuman stage of evolution in a context more radically spiritual than anything known to man.  Even if, personally, they are not destined to be transformed into Supermen, their descendants will be better qualified to embrace a superhuman level of life in the wake of the preceding high level of spiritual conditioning known to them.  For psychic attitudes are, to some extent, handed on from generation to generation.  The baby of a pagan couple in 2000 B.C. would not have inherited the same psychic predilection from its parents as the baby of a transcendental couple - assuming couples still exist - living sometime in the next few centuries.  The sins of the forefathers are indeed visited upon the children and grandchildren, but so, too, are the graces!  Intelligence, and thus one's psychic constitution, is to a significant extent inherited.  So, naturally enough, is a lack of it!

 

16.  Civilization, of whatever degree, will always provide some official institution in which people can congregate for religious purposes.  The final civilization would be less than civilized were it to refrain from endorsing the legitimacy of this fact, and thus leave it for people to meditate in private - assuming they wanted to then.  Meditation in private - the very opposite of what meditation should be - is something that is more likely to occur in barbarous societies, where religion, of whatever persuasion, has been officially placed under ban and consequently no encouragement is given for people to form meditation collectives.  This is of course perfectly logical within such a context, but it would be totally inappropriate in a nation purporting to be civilized, especially on the highest terms.  Then the building and endorsement of meditation centres would proceed as a matter of transcendental necessity, and people be encouraged to participate in a public expression of spiritual earnestness.  And not just a minority of people but, rather, the vast majority, since there would be no excuse for staying away from such centres in a thriving transcendental civilization, as there is for staying away from church in a decadent Christian one.  If Christianity is passé and inadequate for a majority of people - mostly proletarians - who live at the tail-end, as it were, of bourgeois civilization within environments incompatible with an atomic attitude to life, then the same could not be said of Transcendentalism in any future civilization, which, by contrast, would be specifically geared to reflecting a post-atomic attitude to life.

 

 

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 Ireland, his native country could not at that time have championed or encouraged his work.  He was simply one of a number of brilliant exiles forced to seek approval from decadent bourgeois civilization.  And he found it not through the generosity of the French but, none too surprisingly, through the courage and open-mindedness of Sylvia Beach - an émigré American publisher.

     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 America had yet to come into its own, being, until that time, in the process of formation.  Paris was still the most important cultural centre in the West, and so it was to France that such up-and-coming American talents as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and, later, Henry Miller gravitated.  Pound, especially, did much fine work in Europe, including England and Italy, but it was with his enforced return to the States, following capture by the Americans for allegedly treasonous activities on behalf of Mussolini's Italy, that his best poetry was written, and then in the lunatic asylum where he was destined to spend the next twelve years.  This poetry, which came to be known as the Cantos, surpassed all previous levels of poetic creation in terms of its technical freedom and lingual internationalism.  Dispensing with the traditional constraints of rhyme, regular metre, and stanza division, with their concessions to appearances, Pound pursued a relatively free-verse style commensurate with the aspirations of a transitional civilization, and utilized, in the process, a variety of foreign languages, including French, German, Italian, Arabic, and Chinese.  What Joyce had achieved for literature with Finnegans Wake, Pound was to achieve for poetry with the Cantos.  If Joyce was the greatest petty-bourgeois novelist of his time, then Pound arguably qualifies for the equivalent honour with regard to poetry, which became, in his most outstanding work, an intimation of what poetry will be like in the future, when it is finally released from neutron determinism by the free-electron works of a post-atomic civilization.  An intimation, yes!  But no more!  For Pound remains a petty-bourgeois poet for whom the separate genre of poetry, created in a moderately free fashion, though constrained by a transitional loyalty to some grammatical determinism in the service of meaning, continues to be the norm.

     At the time of writing, transitional civilization - which, of course, is more than petty bourgeois - is still in existence, and America is its chief exponent.  Not surprisingly, the most notable developments in literature and poetry since Joyce and Pound have come from America, and thus from Americans.  Probably the two most outstanding artists to have emerged in the wake of the above-mentioned geniuses are William Burroughs in literature and Allen Ginsberg in poetry, both of whom have experimented along paths similar to those first explored by their creative predecessors.  Burroughs developed a quasi-abstract serial style of writing which, in his most controversial novels The Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, borders here and there on unintelligibility, and thus on free-electron literature, without, however, completely sacrificing meaning or indeed the petty-bourgeois right to work in separate genres, such as the novel.  To say that Burroughs had gone beyond Joyce would be to overstate the case; for while his 'cut-up', or serial, technique signifies progress in one direction, namely towards greater abstraction, his lingual confinement to English, with only an occasional use of foreign words, does not so much represent progress towards that multi-lingual literature which should emerge with post-atomic civilization ... as signify a bourgeois shortcoming commensurate with a more nationalist type of petty-bourgeois writing.  Likewise Ginsberg, for all his relative technical freedom in the construction of poetry, has not sought to emulate Pound in the manipulation of foreign languages, and therefore cannot be said to have progressed beyond Pound in that respect.

     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 Middle East must be ruled out as a potential source of spiritual leadership.  It played an important religious role in the past but, fortunately, history cannot stand still, nor be reversed!  Jews are no longer the 'Chosen People' but just another people - in the case of Israelis just one of a number of Middle Eastern peoples.  If in some respects they are more modernistic or sophisticated than the Arabs generally show themselves to be at present, that is largely because so many of them retain the influence of Europe in their blood.  They are drawing upon their spiritual inheritance from the Diaspora.  The Arabs have no such inheritance to draw upon.

     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 Britain the process is still nowhere near completion, nor is it ever likely to be completed, since it may require other than gradualist means to effect the complete transference of the State from land to people.  Should Britain subsequently become a People's State, it will doubtless be compliments of pressures from peoples or powers other than the British themselves - not least of all those of the European Union.

     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 Britain, the naturalistic state withers very slowly, at times scarcely perceptible, and will doubtless continue in its snail-pace withering for many decades to come.  However, in a People's State, properly so-considered, the stage is set for the higher 'withering away' of the socialist state, the state as people, though one need not expect any radical withering of it while bourgeois compromise states still exist and thus threaten, by their continual presence, the very existence of People's States.  In due course, history will doubtless permit the state as people to 'wither away'.  But those who expect this to happen from the vantage-point of misguided opinions, and who strive to overthrow the socialist state from inside, must beware the legitimate wrath of the People's servants, whose duty is to guard this state from premature withering!

 

 

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!

 

 

PART FOUR: DIALOGUES

 

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

 

BRIAN: How, Martin, would you define faith in God, if someone were to ask you?

MARTIN: Not in the way that most religious people would tend to do, anyway.  For when they ask themselves whether God exists, they are more often than not either referring to the Creator, alternatively known as the Father, or to Jesus Christ, the Christian deity per se.  To have faith in God in this sense is to answer such a question by saying: 'Yes, I believe that the Creator exists and/or that Christ lives and is awaiting the time for His return to earth'.

BRIAN: Yet, presumably, you don't share such a belief?

MARTIN: No, I possess a different and, to my mind, superior belief - namely, the idea that the real purpose of our living here is to evolve towards God considered, in a supreme sense, as the Holy Ghost, which would be the culmination of evolution.  I said 'belief', but in point of fact I have knowledge of this purpose, since I am the possessor of an irrefutable logic appertaining to successive stages and types of life in an evolutionary spectrum which stretches from the Alpha Absolutes (of the stars) to the Omega Absolute (of the ultimate spiritual globe), conceived as the Supreme Being, or supreme level of Being in eternal bliss.

BRIAN: Briefly then, what are the successive stages and types of life in this evolutionary spectrum?

MARTIN: They are as follows: the stars at stage one, the planets (including mineral formations) at stage two, the plants at stage three, the animals (including fish and birds) at stage four, pagan men at stage five, Christian men at stages five/six, transcendental men at stage six, the Supermen at stage seven, the Superbeings at stage eight, the Spiritual Globes at stage nine, and the Ultimate Spiritual Globe at stage ten.  Stages one and ten are absolutely antithetical, which is to say, antithetical in every sense; for what begins in the Many must culminate in the One.  Stages two and nine constitute the most radical manifestation of what I term antithetical equivalents, which status is shared, albeit to a lesser degree, by the plants at stage three and the Superbeings at stage eight; the animals at stage four and the Supermen at stage seven; pagan men at stage five and transcendental men at stage six - the Christians combining stages five and six in their dualistic integrity.

BRIAN: If the Superman may be said to succeed transcendental man, then what animal life form preceded pagan man?

MARTIN: Man is descended from the apes, so it is with regard to a line of evolution stemming from the apes that pagan man should be seen.  Now, of all the plants, the ones most appropriate for apes are trees, in which they virtually live.  So trees, or a certain type of tree, preceded apes; apes preceded men, in all three stages of their development; and the Supermen, as brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, will succeed them.

BRIAN: But what is it that particularly distinguishes one stage of life from another?

MARTIN: Constitution of the psyche, which is to say, whether the life form concerned is predominantly subconscious, balanced between subconscious and superconscious, or predominantly superconscious.  The higher the life form, the more the superconscious will predominate over the subconscious, although as evolutionary development approximates to the absolutes at opposite ends, as it were, of the evolutionary spectrum, the distinction between the subconscious and the superconscious ceases to apply.  Thus while the plants are beneath superconscious affiliation and are accordingly incapable of autonomous behaviour, the Superbeings, as our projected antithetical equivalent to trees, will be above subconscious affiliation and therefore incapable of or, rather, indisposed to autonomous behaviour for the opposite reason.

BRIAN: So, as the projected antithetical equivalent to trees, the Superbeings will presumably be new brains artificially supported and sustained in more intensively collectivized contexts?

MARTIN: Yes, for the removal of the old brain from the Supermen would elevate life to a wholly post-egocentric status of exclusive superconsciousness.  And from then on, the resulting Superbeings would be pending transcendence, and thus the attainment of pure spirit to the heavenly Beyond.

BRIAN: This is incredible!  You have acquired knowledge, through such logic, that the outcome of evolutionary progress must be pure spirit, and that such spirit, converging from all parts of the Universe, must eventually attain to a maximum unification in the Ultimate Spiritual Globe.

MARTIN: Precisely!  And that is why I am above faith, in my assessment of the purpose of our being here.  I know that the evolving universe is destined to culminate in the Omega Absolute.  There is no way that anyone could deny the essential truth of evolutionary progress from stages 1-10.  My logic is irrefutable!  Willy-nilly, 'Man,' to cite Nietzsche, 'is something that should be overcome.'  And, doubtless, in due course he will be!

BRIAN: Provided the Superman can be brought to pass!  Tell me, what do you believe concerning God the Father and Christ, in whom you have apparently little or no faith?

MARTIN: I have no faith in either of them because, once again, I possess a knowledge of what they are.  For me, God the Father doesn't really exist because my psyche is too superconsciously biased to be much under the sway of subconscious psychic contents originally extrapolated out from cosmic reality.  As I see it, the Creator as Jehovah was largely an extrapolation from the central star of the Galaxy, which, in all probability, was the original creative force behind lesser stars, planets, et cetera, whereas the Creator as the Father was largely an extrapolation from both the sun and the core of the earth combined.  God the Father is - or was - an anthropomorphic white-haired, bearded figure responsible for Creation.  So runs the theology.  But, in reality, no such Creator has ever existed in the Universe, which probably came into existence through various explosions of gases giving rise to stars and planets.  Stars most certainly exist there, but Jehovah/the Father doesn't exist anywhere except in the minds of those who are subconsciously biased.

BRIAN: Then what about Jesus Christ?

MARTIN: Christ exists in the mind for those whose psyche is approximately balanced between subconscious and superconscious in egocentric dualism.  Again, for a person like me, Christ doesn't really exist, since the ratio of superconscious to subconscious is such in my psyche that no dualistic, egocentric affiliation is possible.  If God the Father corresponds to the alpha-based inception of evolution, then Christ signifies a dualistic integrity which stands chronologically in between the Father and the Holy Spirit.  So long as one's psyche reflects a dualistic integrity, one can relate to Christ and thus have faith in God conceived as man.  But as soon as one's psyche becomes superconsciously biased, as it must do as evolution proceeds towards a transcendental stage, then Christ becomes irrelevant, since this more advanced psychic constitution requires that man turns his religious attention towards the creation of the truly divine God which will only fully emerge at the culmination of evolution.  Man must therefore set about expanding spirit, and while he may do so to a quite significant extent during the ultimate phase of his evolution in the transcendental civilization to-come, nevertheless the literal attainment of spirit to the heavenly Beyond, in the guise of Spiritual Globes, will require that such a phase be superseded, in due turn, by the superhuman and superbeingful stages of the post-Human Millennium, which will permit of a much more radical expansion of spirit.  In fact, the ultimate life form on earth will be able, through a form of supermeditation, to expand spirit to such an extent ... that transcendence should result - a transcendence corresponding to the salvation of pure spirit from the remnants of the 'flesh' ... as signified, at that highly-advanced juncture in time, by the collectivized new brains of each individual Superbeing.

BRIAN: So, in any ultimate sense, Heaven really is in the Beyond, and not in the self?

MARTIN: One can only get to Heaven through the superconscious self, which is to say, through the cultivation of spirit.  But one should not make the mistake of taking our projected Ultimate Spiritual Globe of the future Omega Absolute for the comparatively tiny amount of spirit within the superconscious self, or vice versa!  Man is not God in any absolute sense, though we know that man became God in the person of Christ in a relative and, hence, anthropomorphic sense.  One day, however, proletarian man will become transcendental man, and one day thereafter transcendental man will become the Superman and the Superman become the Superbeing and the Superbeing become the Spiritual Globe and the Spiritual Globe, in converging towards other such transcendences, ultimately become the Omega Absolute.  Ah, how the Truth liberates!  Faith in God, you say?  But one day soon people will acquire knowledge of what I know through the study of my teachings, and then they, too, will be above faith.  Such a day is fast approaching, my friend, even though there are various people who, in their dualistic blindness, would like to prevent it!

 

 

RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

 

STEPHEN: I have long been puzzled about the relationship of mind to body, wondering whether, in the final analysis, the two aren't completely independent, as I have occasionally had reason to believe.

PAUL: There is no such thing as a mind that is completely independent of a body, despite what certain mystical types may tell you.  Mind and body hang together in an interdependent relationship.

STEPHEN: Then mind grew out of or developed from the body, instead of coming to exist with it from an independent source?

PAUL: There was no independent source!  Reincarnation is a myth, not a reality.  Mind evolved out of matter, and it continues to do so.

STEPHEN: But what is mind?

PAUL: The essence of spirit.

STEPHEN: The essence of spirit?

PAUL: This is the converse of the appearance of the flesh.  Mind is the essence of the spirit; body the appearance of the flesh.

STEPHEN: Then mind and body are antithetical in constitution?

PAUL: Of course!  Mind is a composite of the workings of the spirit, whereas the body is a composite of flesh shaped into recognizable features.  The flesh is the substance of the body, but the spirit is the quality of the mind.  The flesh is apparent, but the spirit essential.  You can never see the latter.  Yet it works both through and independently of the flesh, in the same person and, considered chronologically, at different stages of evolution.  'By the works of the flesh is the spirit known', though that can only hold true for a given period of evolutionary time ... before man or society becomes sufficiently advanced to be able to cultivate spirit independently of the flesh.  While, however, the spirit works through the flesh, it corresponds to atomic mind.  As soon as it becomes radically independent of the flesh, the mind becomes post-atomic.

STEPHEN: I have never learnt to distinguish between them.  To me, all minds are alike.

PAUL: Quite wrong!  The Orient has long sought to cultivate a post-atomic attitude of mind, whereas the Occident has concentrated on an atomic subservience of mind to body, and thus stressed doing rather than being.  Individually, within the confines of a given culture, it is of course possible for some people to approximate to a post-atomic attitude of mind when the majority are atomic or, conversely, to approximate to an atomic attitude of mind in the face of post-atomic convention.  My own mind is now more post-atomic than atomic in constitution.

STEPHEN: And thus functions independently of the body?

PAUL: Tends to place more importance on the direct cultivation of spirit independently of the body than on indirectly manifesting spirit through bodily works.  You may call this a post-Christian attitude, though it isn't so much Oriental as transcendental.

STEPHEN: The difference being?

PAUL: That one bears in mind the necessity of technological assistance in the development of spirit independently of the body.  One has got to a point where one can envisage spiritual progress only being made through a kind of symbiosis of East and West on a higher, or transcendent, plane.  The flesh must be overcome if the spirit is to attain to salvation in the heavenly Beyond.  But, ultimately, it can only be overcome on technological terms, such as would eventually imply the artificial sustaining and supporting of human brains in collectivized contexts, while spirit was being cultivated through intensive meditation.  This period of time would be the post-Human Millennium, and it would signify, at its furthermost point of development, the maximization of the spiritual life with a correlative minimization of the flesh in a context pending transcendence and, thus, the attainment of pure spirit, as Absolute Mind, to the heavenly Beyond.

STEPHEN: Absolute Mind presumably being the essence of pure spirit?

PAUL: Yes.  Spirit is, as it were, the 'apparent' or superficial definition, as though transcendence was being considered from the outside and a Spiritual Globe was accordingly regarded as a 'thing'.  A Spiritual Globe would be composed of pure spirit, but the actual workings of that spirit, its interior condition, would correspond to Absolute Mind.  To be 'inside' a Spiritual Globe would be to know Absolute Mind as the very essence of one's Being.

STEPHEN: Which, however, human beings can never or only very imperfectly know, since they are victims of relative mind, or of mind tied in varying degrees, depending on the individual, to the body, and dependent on that body for survival.

PAUL: Correct!  No relative mind could possibly attain to Absolute Mind.  There is no survival of the spirit at death, for the simple reason that it can't be cultivated to a point pending transcendence in a context, such as the human, where the flesh has not been minimized, i.e. reduced to the new brain, but, rather, maintained in its natural state with regard to the body as a whole.  Death would be the last time when transcendence occurred, for it presupposes a maximum spiritual development on earth before it can happen, and no such development is possible on the human plane, least of all at a time when the body is wearing out, as it tends to do with age, and, at the point of death, ceases to function even subnormally.  Death isn't so much the cessation of adequate physiological workings of the body to sustain life as ... the killing of the spirit by the cessation of those bodily workings.  When the heart stops beating, death occurs to a person because the spirit can't survive without physiological assistance.  The spirit of a human being, being relative, is dependent on the brain for survival, and the brain is in turn dependent on the proper functioning of the heart to receive fresh oxygen from the blood being pumped through the body.  As soon as this functioning ceases, the supply of oxygen to the brain is cut off, and so the spirit dies.  There is never any alternative.

STEPHEN: Because spirit is generated in and by the brain and depends on the workings of the brain for its survival?

PAUL: Yes, the spirit is the immaterial quality co-existing with the material brain.  It is akin to the wavicle aspect of matter, matter being an amalgam, as it were, of particles and wavicles in oscillatory motion, forming what modern physicists term a complementarity.  There is an atomic integrity about this interpretation of matter, which I incline to regard as bourgeois/proletarian.  The future, I feel certain, will witness the birth and development of a post-atomic interpretation of matter along lines stressing the wavicle aspect at the expense of its particle aspect.  Likewise, the mind/body dichotomy, as currently applying to the brain, will be superseded by an interpretation exclusively favouring the mind or, as we have been saying, the spirit.  This post-atomic interpretation will stress the independence of mind from the brain, but it won't on that account fall into the traditional trap of deriving it from some primal source external to the body.  On the contrary, this exclusive concept of mind will stem from the de-materialization of the brain and have attainment of Absolute Mind as its goal.

STEPHEN: But what exactly is mind?

PAUL: Simply the functioning of the spirit, the raison d'être of spirit, as pertaining to psychic interiorization.

STEPHEN: Is thought therefore mind?

PAUL: The physiological functioning of the brain gives rise to thought, so thought does not derive from the mind which, on the contrary, knows thought, is conscious of thought, and arranges it into coherent, meaningful, systematic patterns.  Being conscious of thought appertains to the essence of spirit.  But mind is never more itself than when it is conscious of itself as spirit, just as the body is never more itself than when it is conceived as flesh during or preparatory to sex.

STEPHEN: Now you are talking of meditation.  Consciousness of the higher self.

PAUL: Yes!  But such consciousness, which is mind at its most refined level, is only one aspect of the total mind experience.  Being conscious of thought and ordering this thought into coherent patterns is another.  Applying one's consciousness to the study of what other men have written is yet another vital aspect of mind behaviour, one connected with evolutionary progress and the mind's cultivation.

STEPHEN: Is what I see around me connected with this consciousness?

PAUL: No!  Mind is not the world you see through your eyes because mind appertains to essence, the visual experience, by contrast, of the external world appertaining to appearance.  This appearance actually dilutes mind, just as the use of the other senses - of hearing, touch, taste, and smell - dilutes mind by imposing apparent phenomena upon it.  Mind, or consciousness, is still there when one closes one's eyes and stops one's ears and forbids oneself to touch, taste, or smell anything.  In fact, mind is more there then than it would be when one was using one's senses, because one is not diluting it with apparent distractions.  It is only by blocking out one's senses that one can become more conscious.

STEPHEN: Though if one keeps one's eyes closed for any length of time, one may fall asleep and thus lose consciousness.

PAUL: Only if one is intending to sleep, not if one is set on meditating!  With sleep, one does of course lose one's conscious mind as consciousness slides down into the subconscious realm of dreams.  But the subconscious is sensual, whereas the superconscious, towards which meditators aspire, is spiritual.  Consciousness is really an amalgam of subconscious and superconscious influences.  It doesn't exist in complete isolation from the lower and higher reaches of the psyche as an independent entity, contrary to what psychologists once imagined.  It isn't the tip of an iceberg, to coin a well-worn cliché.  It depends for its waking-life constitution on the degree to which the superconscious preponderates over the subconscious or vice versa, that is to say, on the ratio of psychic ingredients - these ingredients also balancing each other over a certain period in evolutionary time for the great majority of people, who then function according to atomic, or dualistic, criteria.  Post-atomic criteria presuppose, on the other hand, a consciousness in which the superconscious is the predominating psychic influence, whereas in the pre-atomic ages of pagan civilization, the subconscious predominated in the overall constitution of consciousness.

STEPHEN: Would one therefore be justified in contending that consciousness is the psychic equivalent of the corpus callosum which, as the organ responsible for linking the old brain to the new one, functions as a bridge between the two main physiological components of the human cortex?

PAUL: Yes, in a manner of speaking!  For what the corpus callosum is to the physiological constitution of the brain, egocentric consciousness is to its psychic constitution - a kind of fusion-point of psychic influences from both the subconscious and the superconscious.

STEPHEN: Then consciousness isn't so much homogeneous as divisible into two main parts - one part stemming from the subconscious and another part stemming from the superconscious?

PAUL: Absolutely!  There are, in effect, two minds at work in a psyche subject to an atomic integrity, so that consciousness is an amalgam of instinctual will, or id, and spirit, the former deriving from the subconscious, and therefore responsible for ordering and comprehending emotions; the latter, by contrast, deriving from the superconscious, and therefore responsible for ordering and comprehending thoughts.  The atomic mind is dualistic, with the lower, or instinctual, consciousness functioning as a proton equivalent, and the higher, or spiritual, consciousness functioning as a bound-electron equivalent, which, in any atomic integrity, revolves around, and is therefore subservient to, the proton equivalent.  Thoughts, in a typical atomic mind, are subservient to feelings.  And consequently the atomic mind tends to be enslaved to the flesh in more senses than one!

STEPHEN: But, presumably, one day the higher consciousness will be freed from the lower one and thus exist in a post-atomic context?

PAUL: Yes, though not in an absolute sense before the Superbeing-phase of the post-Human Millennium, when, so I believe, the old brain will be surgically removed from individual Supermen and new brains become hypercollectivized into contexts suggesting a life form antithetical, in psychic constitution, to trees.  The resulting Superbeings will be completely beyond subconscious influence and subject to post-visionary consciousness of a nature approximating to Absolute Mind.  The collective mind of each individual Superbeing, or arrangement of artificially supported and sustained new-brains, would experience hypermeditation pending transcendence, and consciousness would therefore correspond to a free-electron equivalent, the proton equivalent having been escaped from with the removal of the old brain - a task reserved, in all probability, for the millennial servants of the post-human life forms.  Human consciousness, however, can only remain divisible between subconscious and superconscious influence.  There is no question of a truly post-atomic mind being attained to while the old brain is still intact and thus able, through the medium of subconscious sensuality, to dilute consciousness in the interests of an atomic integrity.  Human consciousness is, in Koestler's memorable phrase, a 'divided house', and so, to varying extents, it must remain until all psychic dualism is transcended, come the Superbeing Millennium.  Even the preceding Supermen would, as brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, be subject to some subconscious influence, and would undoubtedly spend time asleep each day.  But they would be conditioned away from the subconscious and further into the superconscious through periodic recourse to such synthetic stimulants as LSD, which would make for upward self-transcendence on a visionary or, rather, hypervisionary level.  Prior to them, the men of the transcendental civilization would be conditioned away from the subconscious and further into the superconscious through periodic recourse to transcendental meditation, a spiritual discipline which is designed to free consciousness from preoccupation with thoughts and feelings, and enable the higher part of the conscious mind, the part we identify with the superconscious, to come to the fore, though in a contemplative rather than a cogitative role.  The stage will be set for a post-atomic attitude of mind, such as is already prevalent in the West among devotees of meditation, albeit on a minority basis and as pertaining mainly to the transitional civilization of contemporary America.  Western transcendentalism is derived from Buddhism and other oriental sources, and thus corresponds to a bourgeois/proletarian, rather than to a full-blown proletarian, level of transcendentalism.  The Transcendentalism that I advocate, and envisage as applying to a future post-atomic civilization, transcends all traditional world religions, including Buddhism, and is intended to signify a convergence to Heaven on the basis of an ultimate world religion - a religion embracing, besides the practice of meditation, a knowledge of subsequent stages of evolutionary development.

STEPHEN: Such as would be signified by the Supermen and Superbeings of the ensuing post-Human Millennium?

PAUL: Plus, of course, the subsequent attainment of spirit to the heavenly Beyond in the guise of Spiritual Globes, and the gradual convergence and expansion of such globes of pure spirit towards an Omega Absolute - the sum-total of all convergence and expansion.  A relative understanding of Absolute Mind would not be inappropriate in any serious attempt to extend religious education among the masses, over the coming decades.  The highest truths will, of course, remain the preserve of the most intelligent.  But something of the ultimate truth should become intelligible to the average man in the course of time.  A knowledge of the importance of technology in minimizing the flesh should preclude a repetition of the kind of spiritual fanaticism which history has witnessed, down the centuries, in connection with the more naturalistic Orient.  One won't attain to ultimate salvation through meditation alone, no matter how earnest one's endeavour!  Mind can only be cultivated in proportion to the extent that one's commitment to the flesh is minimized, and to achieve a radical minimization of the latter and corresponding maximization of the former ... it will prove necessary, eventually, to have the natural body superseded by artificial supports and sustains for the brain.  Thus the spiritual life will be expanded without the threat of bodily disease and/or starvation - there being no body to succumb to such a tragic fate.

STEPHEN: On the subject of disease, I wonder whether the prevalence of schizophrenia, particularly as signifying a disparity between thoughts and feelings, is not connected, in the present century, with the evolution of the psyche from an atomic to a post-atomic status, with the result that thoughts are drawing further away from feelings as the higher part of the conscious mind gradually acquires ascendancy over the lower part, and connections or interactions between the two sides of the 'divided house', to return to Koestler, become both more tenuous and less frequent.  Perhaps, in that case, schizophrenia is more a reflection of evolutionary progress, as bearing on the changing constitution of the psyche, than an isolated, incidental disease?  Perhaps we are all a little schizophrenic these days, because consciousness is evolving away from feelings and deeper into pure mind, in consequence of which we find it harder to relate the latter to the former, or to mediate between them with the aid of thought.

PAUL: You may well be 'on to something' there, as Jung would say, and what you have just said doubtless applies in some measure to yourself, since I was alluding to bodily disease, such as leprosy and cancer, and you jumped straight onto the psychic plane.  However, we needn't doubt that consciousness is divided, and in the future the lacuna between the spirit and the id, or between that part of the mind influenced by superconscious spirituality and that part of it influenced by subconscious instinctuality, will become even greater, as the higher mind adopts an increasingly post-atomic orientation in defiance of subservience to proton determinism.  Not before the radical post-atomism of the ensuing transcendental Millennium, however, will evolving life on earth be in a position to attain to salvation from the flesh in the Being of Absolute Mind.  We needn't expect to survive death, as our ancestors did, but for that reason we have all the more incentive to prolong life and program ourselves for coming to terms with Absolute Mind.  It will take a long time, and we have yet to get properly under way!

 

 

BECOMING AND BECOME

 

KEITH: Concerning the subject of transvaluations, one of the most revolutionary transvaluations you have made is surely with regard to transcendent spirit being, as you conceive it, essential rather than apparent.  In other words, the idea that pure spirit would be the very opposite of the stars in appearance - indeed, not something that could be discerned as phenomenal because purely noumenal, and therefore beyond the realm of sensuous appreciation.

COLIN: Yes, transcendent spirit, whether in the penultimate context of Spiritual Globes converging towards one another, or as the Ultimate Spiritual Globe ... of the Omega Absolute, would be completely essential, as befitting an absolute at the very opposite extreme from the stars which, as we all know, can be highly apparent, particularly on a clear night!  I don't envisage pure spirit shining in the dark, like a star.

KEITH: And consequently you tend not to look upon enlightenment in terms of light, whether metaphorically speaking or otherwise?

COLIN: Certainly not in any apparent sense!  For all such traditional valuations seem to me but an extension of pagan criteria - like, for instance, the idea that the heavenly condition would be blissful.

KEITH: Yet you don't envisage it being so yourself?

COLIN: No, because I regard bliss as a feeling, a very strong and positive feeling, and feelings can only be connected with the will, which is to say, the subconscious part of the psyche.  By contrast, I regard spirit - which should emerge from what is now the superconscious part of the psyche, but will eventually become the only part of it for a superior life form than man - as lying beyond feelings, emotions, and passions, in a realm of pure consciousness that transcends everything but itself through the most complete self-absorption of psychic fulfilment.  As men, we can't know exactly what this supreme state-of-mind will be like.  For, besides being relative, our spirit is regularly subjected to instinctual intrusions, as feelings, emotions, et cetera, of one kind or another condition our thoughts or, conversely, as our thoughts engender certain usually appropriate feelings, et cetera.  Value judgements concerning the heavenly Beyond are therefore liable to reflect our own psychic limitations, and that is why one should be extremely sceptical as to their literal applicability, especially when conceived in terms of an instinctive feeling like bliss, which is undoubtedly the strongest positive one.  If evolution were a journey, as it were, from one extreme feeling to another via the world of man, one could take the idea that it will culminate in bliss more seriously.  Yet it seems to me that bliss can be attained to, over intermittent periods of time, on the human plane, whereas evolution must go well beyond that plane to a purely spiritual one, such as would transcend feelings altogether, and thus culminate in a context antithetical, in every respect, to how it began - namely, as the most absolute will of the stars.

KEITH: So from agony to bliss and then on again to some as yet unimaginably abstract psychic fulfilment?

COLIN: Yes, that is approximately how I see it anyway.

KEITH: Then, presumably, you would agree with the Buddha, who strove to get away from feelings, of whatever description, in an attempt to escape from pain.

COLIN: Yes, insofar as he realized that pleasure and pain were interconnected and that one couldn't escape, in any absolute sense, from pain simply by indulging in pleasure.  Sooner or later one would have to pay one's dues, through fresh pain, for the pleasure in which one had earlier indulged, so that one would remain trapped in a vicious circle of pleasure/pain alternations.  Consequently the Buddha sought no pleasure in order to avoid pain.

KEITH: A highly paradoxical procedure that doesn't necessarily lead to spirit being cultivated to any significant extent.

COLIN: Indeed not, because non-evolutionary and too naturalistic.  Sitting under a tree all day, every day of the week, won't change the basic constitution of the psyche.  For one will still be the victim of a subconscious mind, and this lower mind will prevent the superconscious mind from expanding in the direction, so to speak, of the Divine.  Of all places to meditate, the jungle or forest is among the least suitable, because the air is heavily leaden with the sensuality of surrounding plant life and one's psyche is therefore likely to be conditioned in a manner favouring the subconscious.  No, the radical cultivation of spirit, in the future, will require the assistance of technology, in order that the brain, or physiological base of the psyche, can be artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, and provided with such artificial stimuli as may prove necessary to the facilitation of psychic development.

KEITH: No doubt, you are alluding to LSD or to some such equivalent synthetic hallucinogen which artificially induces upward self-transcendence in the psyche?

COLIN: Yes, a stimulant that should develop the superconscious at the same time as it neutralizes the subconscious.  The Supermen of the post-Human Millennium will be fed specific quantities of this vision-inducing drug and thereby partake of an aesthetico-religious experience superior, in essence, to what the men of the preceding age - that of the transcendental civilization - were fated to experience when they meditated in front of holograms in specially-designed meditation centres - the hologram approximating to a kind of external 'trip'.

KEITH: And thus preceding, in chronological time, the widespread recourse to an internal 'trip'?

COLIN: I believe so.  External visionary experience of a static nature would signify an inferior phase of aesthetico-religious development to internal visionary experience of a similarly static nature, and should accordingly precede the latter in chronological time - it being accepted that evolution proceeds from apparent to essential levels.

KEITH: So art and religion would become inseparable again, as they were during the most religious centuries of the Christian era?

COLIN: Yes, because, at its height, art is designed to facilitate religious development, being the handmaiden, as it were, of religion.  I cannot conceive of a meditation centre being without a specific quantity of the finest art, particularly holograms, though holograms, needless to say, of a religious character.  There might also be room for certain kinds of laser and/or light art, whether with fluorescent tubes or plastic tubing; though, as you know, I tend to have a relatively poor opinion of light these days, even when artificial.  Possibly, meditation will mostly be practised in the dark, with strategically-positioned holograms close-by in order to facilitate concentration and act as a kind of psychological focal-point.

KEITH: Some people might prefer to meditate without recourse to such a focal-point.

COLIN: Which they could continue to do, and simply by closing their eyes or looking straight through or above it, as the case may be.  Yet meditation ought not to be encouraged to become too naturalistic, as in traditional oriental contexts, but should be accompanied by such artificial stimuli as I have just alluded to, if only to prevent some persons - perhaps less spiritually earnest - from dozing or falling into thought traps.  The more profound persons will still prefer to interiorize their meditation as much as possible.  But the existence of holograms shouldn't present a serious obstacle to that!

KEITH: One could argue that the deeper persons, being introverted, would prefer to take some hallucinogenic stimulant, and thus contemplate internal 'holograms' rather than their external equivalents?

COLIN: True.  But that would only apply to a relatively small minority of people, who might well be catered for in that respect during or before the latter stages of the next civilization.  I cannot see hallucinogens being used on a truly widespread or comprehensive basis, however, much before the advent of the post-Human Millennium, when human brains become artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts.

KEITH: Why ever not?

COLIN: Frankly, because most people wouldn't be psychically mature enough to properly appreciate them, with consequences not unknown to those of us who lived in the late-twentieth century.  Not everyone is born to become a sophisticated 'acid head', the majority of people being more disposed to alcohol or tobacco.  No doubt, this fact will still apply over the coming decades; though we may assume that alcohol and tobacco will cease to be available with the advent of the transcendental civilization, a civilization which could not encourage the use of natural drugs.

KEITH: Then surely it would be necessary to plug the gap, as it were, with the help of synthetics ... in order that people could have a superior alternative with which to carry on?

COLIN: In theory, this may seem so.  But, in practice, I rather doubt that so potent a mind-expanding hallucinogen as, say, LSD could be brought into regular, sustained use much before the post-Human Millennium.  Perhaps a diluted variant could be adopted in the meantime.  Yet I still can't envisage the next civilization as being an out-and-out 'acid' one.  For a comparatively small minority of people - possibly.  But not for any Tom, Dick, or Harry whose chief inclination, under the influence of such a powerful stimulant, might well be to do either himself or someone else a grievous injury!  The meditation centre should be a place of calm, quiet, concentrated consciousness, togetherness, and happiness, not a place where, at any moment, one's neighbour might throw-up, freak out, jump about, or cause bodily violence to those in the immediate vicinity, and all because LSD was proving too mind-boggling an experience for him or her to handle!  I witnessed quite a number of such disturbances at music festivals and rock concerts in the past, and often enough it seemed to me that they took place less through any fault of the drug than because the persons concerned were insufficiently spiritually mature to cope with it.

KEITH: A situation analogous to the sight of the Cross to Count Dracula, or even the purity of the Clear Light of the Void to Eustace Barnack, that character from Aldous Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop, not to mention the complexity of a great tome to a simpleminded person.

COLIN: Precisely!  Which is why I cannot envisage LSD being put into regular, widespread, and intensively-sustained service much before the post-Human Millennium, when there won't be any arms or legs to thrash around with, and no tongue to cry out with, and, in all probability, no cause for alarm - each brain being enclosed in its own psychic world and therefore not subject to the fear-provoking distraction of sight vis-à-vis other people, which of course applies to the human world.  The superhuman one would be much more interiorized anyway, since deprived of or, rather, elevated beyond the usual senses ... as applying to the body.  Probably there would be some kind of artificial means of communication, whereby each brain could tune-in, as it were, to the thoughts of another or to instructions coming from without at certain fixed times of day, either before or after the 'trip'.  I am thinking along the lines, for example, of an artificial voice-box linking the Supermen, or a chosen representative of their number, to the external world of the scientific technicians.  Possibly the most intelligent brain of each commune would be responsible for liaising, in such fashion, with the human technicians, and it would appertain to the superman who, for reasons of spiritual suitability, had been elected to function as a priest-equivalent for each gathering of Supermen.  This priest-equivalent would actually be in the spiritual 'promised land' of the post-Human Millennium, not external to it like a technician.  For it seems to me that spiritual leaders in whatever stage of evolution always enter the particular 'promised land' to which their leadership appertains - as, in another sense, do artists.

KEITH: Whereas politicians and scientists remain relatively aloof from the flock in the interests of their respective external roles as coercive or controlling agents?

COLIN: Precisely!  And for that reason they do not identify with the flock after the manner of priests or artists, who create and maintain the successive spiritual 'promised lands' on route to the ultimate 'promised land' ... of the heavenly Beyond.

KEITH: But will there be artists at work in the post-Human Millennium?

COLIN: No, not in the professional sense!  For every Superman, in experiencing the 'trip', will witness his own superconscious mind and thus effectively be his own inner 'artist'.  What man would ordinarily witness but for the opaque veil of the subconscious mind, the Superman will daily witness because LSD, or some such synthetic hallucinogen, will have drawn the veil across by neutralizing the subconscious.  He will be dreaming awake, and thus experiencing the antithesis of sleep dreams.  So he won't require an external artist, in the sense that transcendental men of the ultimate human civilization would have required one to create the various holograms as incentives to meditation.  All he will require is a priest-equivalent, a fellow Superman with a stronger mind who, besides liaising with the scientific technicians, will offer encouragement and advice, if needed, to the surrounding Supermen on any given artificial support.  Thus the priest- or, if you prefer, guru-equivalent will supersede the artist - just as, in the external realm, the scientific technician will supersede the politician - with the advent of the post-Human Millennium.

KEITH: So a class distinction between priest-equivalents and lay Supermen, as also between technicians and post-human life forms in general, will persist into the Millennium in question.

COLIN: Yes, but only throughout the duration of its first phase.  For, with the second phase of millennial life, such class distinctions will be totally eradicated, since the Supermen will be elevated, by the technicians, to the post-visionary consciousness of collectivized new brains, and the ensuing entity will have no need of priest-equivalents to liaise with anybody - each Superbeing, or collection of new brains, being beyond communication with the external world, as their consciousness is directly programmed, through hypermeditation, for transcendence, and thus the eventual attainment of the most free life form on earth to the ultimate freedom of the heavenly Beyond.  There would be no class distinction between one Superbeing and another - no more than there is really any such distinction between, say, one Oak tree and another, or one Beech tree and another - and so the higher phase of the post-Human Millennium would indeed be classless.... As regards the human technicians, who would become completely external to the superbeingful society, following the operation designed to elevate Supermen to a post-visionary life form, my guess is that they would thereafter have very little to do and could accordingly entrust supervisory responsibility to artificial 'technicians', viz. robots and/or computers, while the spiritual life of the Superbeings continued to expand towards transcendence.  Having placed such supervisory responsibility as was still required into the hands of artificial overseers, the technicians would increasingly remove themselves from millennial duties and die quietly in their own time.  For it could well transpire that transcendence would take decades or even centuries to occur in each of the superbeingful communities, and that the only sensible thing for the human technicians to do, in the circumstances, would be to let matters take their preordained course under the watchful 'eyes' of overseers capable of surviving for centuries.  Besides, it is doubtful whether, at that advanced post-atomic juncture in time, man would be capable of propagating himself anyway, so he would probably die-out sooner or later - there being no real justification for his remaining alive.

KEITH: Presumably because he had done what was necessary to set the Superbeings directly on course for transcendence?

COLIN: And also because his continued presence would constitute an infringement of the classless society, even if the Superbeings were oblivious of anything or anyone outside themselves on account of their being so wrapped-up in the hypermeditation of the most free earthly society.

KEITH: What you are saying suggests that evolution proceeds in a kind of zigzagging fashion, since lower-level meditation would be the spiritual norm for men of the ultimate human civilization - a norm which would be eclipsed with the LSD-experiencing Supermen of the ensuing post-Human Millennium?

COLIN: Evolution does indeed proceed in such a fashion, and you might alternatively choose to define it in terms of a romantic/classic alternation - the religious focus of the Superhuman Millennium betokening a kind of romantic interlude between the lower classicism of the transcendental civilization and the higher classicism of the Superbeingful Millennium.  To trace this development right back to its beginnings, one could contend that what began, with the First Cause, as the lowest romanticism ... is destined to end, with the Last Effect, so to speak, as the highest classicism - the definitive classicism of the ultimate Become.  Even on the human level there were alternations between the classic and the romantic in this respect, the lower classicism of pagan antiquity being superseded by the classic/romantic dichotomy of Christian modernity, its early, or Catholic, phase being romantic or, as we prefer to say, gothic, and its later, or Protestant, phase comparatively classic, emphasizing the Become rather than the Becoming.  Well, above Christianity will come the lower classicism of transcendental futurity, as men congregate together in meditation centres in order to approximate to Heaven through a supreme human level of Being.  Now you ought to see why LSD would be inappropriate in this context, which must stress togetherness.

KEITH: Yes, LSD, corresponding to a romantic orientation, would simply segregate one person from another in their individual preoccupations with such psychic contents of their superconscious minds as the drug was designed to free.  Wrapped-up in his individual 'trip' - and therefore largely if not completely oblivious to other people when the lights were off - each person would exist as a law unto himself, and thus as a refutation of the group or communal context which this phase of human evolution was intended to signify.  There would be no real justification for people being in a group at all, if all they intended to do was to experience the visionary contents of their individual superconscious minds.

COLIN: Absolutely!  Which is why the widespread use of synthetic hallucinogens like LSD is unlikely to be endorsed until the advent of the Supermen ... with the first, or romantic, phase of the post-Human Millennium.  The transcendental civilization, on the other hand, should signify the highest human classicism, placing due emphasis on the spiritual togetherness of each meditating community in whatever meditation centre, in order that a superior approximation to the Become may be achieved.  By contrast, the first phase of the post-Human Millennium will signify a romantic Becoming, as each Superman experiences his own 'trip'.  He will of course be part of a community of similarly artificially-supported and sustained brains, but this community will be more apparent from the outside, i.e. from the scientific technicians' standpoint, than from the actual internal experience of each Superman.  If this phase of evolution seems a little zany in its post-human romanticism, so should the antithetically-equivalent phase to it ... of the pre-human romanticism of apes, our own direct ancestors, swinging collectively in trees ... be regarded as a little zany - indeed, as more than a little zany; though we tend not to be particularly conscious of that fact these days.  Apes, too, would have formed a paradoxical community!

KEITH: And still do, wherever they exist in the world.  However, as the Supermen will signify a romantic Becoming, the highest earthly Becoming, we may assume, I take it, that the ensuing Superbeing phase of evolution will represent the highest earthly Become, as the post-visionary life form indulges its penchant for hypermeditation in the most communal togetherness of which it is possible to conceive in earthly terms.

COLIN: Indeed we may!  And that penultimate classicism will lead, via the romantic Becoming of numerous Spiritual Globes converging and expanding in the heavenly Beyond, to the ultimate classicism of the Omega Absolute in the most perfect Become - a Become in which essence is maximized, in the perfection of spiritual unity, and evolution accordingly attains to its culmination.  At present, however, it is still some way from that culmination.  For we have yet to attain to the spiritual classicism of the transcendental civilization!

KEITH: In which, presumably, people will meditate collectively in specially-designed meditation centres?

COLIN: Yes, and with the assistance, if needs be, of suitably religious holograms.  The classical age which lies before us will be far superior to the classical age behind us ... in the Graeco-Roman past.  We need not rush headlong into the post-Human Millennium, as if this ensuing age were merely an obstacle to further development.  That is something it most assuredly won't be - not if properly explored and evolved away from when the time is ripe!

 

 

EVOLUTIONARY STAGES

 

STUART: I like this idea of yours that evolution proceeds in a kind of zigzagging fashion with oscillations between the romantic and the classic, as emphasizing a distinction between the Becoming and the Become.  It begins, you say, with a romantic Becoming in the First Cause?

KEVIN: Which can be equated with the central star of the Galaxy, as of any galaxy.

STUART: And then proceeds to a kind of classical Become in the planets?

KEVIN: No, more precisely in the smaller stars, such as the sun, from some of which there eventually emerged the planets as a kind of romantic Becoming.

STUART: Ah, the minor stars!  Yes, of course!  They precede the planets, which go through various changes until ...

KEVIN: Nature emerges on earth as the first planetary classical Become, with particular reference to the trees - the oldest and most noble specimens of nature.

STUART: There then follows, however, a romantic Becoming in the animals...?

KEVIN: Including insects, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, et cetera, which are all life forms, irrespective of their size or habitat, capable of movement and conscious decision, and therefore stand between the plants and man in the evolution of life.  Of all the animals, we must single out apes, or a certain species of ape, the way I singled out trees, as integral to a line of evolutionary ascent leading, in due course, to man.

STUART: So from the classical Become of a tree to the romantic Becoming of an ape swinging in its branches, we move on, at length, to the classical Become of a man descended from that ape?

KEVIN: Yes, in a manner of speaking!  The man you are alluding to arose at a rather later phase of evolution than the caveman of prehistoric times, being of pagan civilization and, in particular, a certain phase of it ... such as we nowadays tend to equate with Graeco-Roman classicism.  This man signifies a classical Become on a predominantly sensual level.

STUART: Whereas the tree presumably signifies such a Become on an almost exclusively sensual or, at any rate, sensuous level.

KEVIN: Yes, since somewhat closer to an absolute than is man.  With the next, or dualistic, phase of evolution, however, we enter the realm of a romantic Becoming, particularly with regard to Catholic Christianity, and from there, with the inception of Transcendentalism in a post-dualistic civilization, we shall progress to the highest human Become, a classical Become of predominantly spiritual constitution, and therefore quite the reverse of the pagan Become.

STUART: I have now counted from 1-8, beginning with the First Cause and ending with transcendental man.

KEVIN: Then let us continue on up the ladder of evolution to the ninth rung, so to speak, which will be the romantic Becoming of the Supermen in the first phase of the post-Human Millennium.  The Supermen will require artificially-induced upward self-transcending visionary experience and signify a stage on the road, as it were, to the next classical Become - the highest earthly Become ... of the Superbeings who, as new-brain collectivizations, will stand at the opposite evolutionary remove from trees (rather than to apes on trees) and thus signify classicism on a near-absolute spiritual level.

STUART: Which level will in turn be superseded, I take it, by a fresh romantic Becoming in...?

KEVIN: The convergence and expansion of Spiritual Globes in the heavenly Beyond, which would constitute the ultimate romantic Becoming prior to the ultimate classical Become of ... attainment by such separate transcendences to unity in the Omega Absolute at the climax of spiritual evolution.  And that, believe it or not, would be stage twelve - the complete antithesis to the lowest romantic Becoming ... of the First Cause, at stage one.

STUART: How amazing!  One could argue that evolution comes full-circle with its return to an absolute.

KEVIN: Except for the fact that the Omega Absolute will be as different from the alpha absolutism of stars, both major and minor, as it is possible to conceive.  What began under the negative principle of proton-proton reactions should culminate under the converse principle of electron-electron attractions - the ultimate positivity!

STUART: Thus evolution proceeds from the subatomic to the supra-atomic via the atomic.

KEVIN: Precisely!  Atoms are at the base of matter, but before matter arises one has the alpha absolutism of the gaseous stars, and after electrons have escaped from matter one will have the omega absolutism of transcendent spirit.  The most absolute soul, whether in its romantic or classic phase, is beneath electron emergence.  Transcendent spirit, whether in its romantic or classic phase, will be above proton constraint.  The former is absolutely evil, the latter absolutely good.

STUART: So when do atoms first emerge in evolution?

KEVIN: With the formation of matter in the romantic Becoming of the planets, particularly on planets, like the earth, which were rich in mineral formations.  As matter ascends it becomes less dense; but the lower manifestation of matter in rock/crystal formations is especially dense, thereby testifying to a considerable preponderance of protons and/or neutrons over electrons in an atomic cohesion which defies the emergence of consciousness.  However, consciousness as we understand it doesn't arise with the plants either, but only with the animals, and then on a comparatively rudimentary level.

STUART: This suggests that the ratio of protons and/or neutrons to electrons in the overall constitution of the animal brain is still heavily biased on the side of the former, and consequently impedes the development of consciousness.

KEVIN: Particularly with regard to spiritual consciousness, which requires for its expansion a preponderance of electrons over protons and/or neutrons such as one only finds in man, and then after millennia of evolutionary struggle.  Animal consciousness is predominantly sensual because of the preponderance of protons and neutrons in the atomic constitution of its brain.  But the atomic structure is such that a degree of spiritual consciousness becomes possible, because the electrons are more numerous than in the matter of, say, a tree, and not so densely smothered by protons and neutrons.

STUART: So even a tree, to the extent that it is atomic rather than subatomic, must possess mind in some degree?

KEVIN: It possesses a subconscious, or sensual, mind derived from a preponderating proton constitution.  But although the rudiments of a conscious mind are present in the electron ingredient, so to speak, of the tree's atomic structure, there is no consciousness as such, because the electrons are too greatly outnumbered and tightly smothered by both the protons and neutrons to emerge as a distinct consciousness.  A tree can feel, but it can't think!

STUART: Thus feeling is the quality of proton-dominated matter.

KEVIN: Yes, feeling corresponds to the wavicle aspect of matter, proton and/or neutron and electron cohesions to its particle aspect.  The wavicle aspect is the soul of matter, the particle aspect its body, whether as regards protons and neutrons or electrons.

STUART: You mean, an electron, no less than a proton, is a tiny material entity?

KEVIN: Considered literally, yes!  But, unlike a proton, an electron will have consciousness as its quality, so that the electron wavicle will be spiritual rather than sensual or intellectual, and therefore akin to the spirit of matter.  Thus a distinction arises, with the wavicle aspect, between the soul and the spirit of matter, which is paralleled, in the particle aspect, by a distinction between protons and electrons. Obviously, the ratio of soul to spirit, or vice versa, will vary according to the kind of matter under consideration.

STUART: You mean, a piece of wood will possess a different wavicle integrity from the neo-cortex of a highly intelligent man.

KEVIN: Absolutely!  The wood will be proton biased and therefore its wavicle quality will be soul, whereas the neo-cortex will be electron biased and possess, in its wavicle aspect, a spiritual quality.

STUART: Then surely there must be a similar distinction between the two main physiological components of the human cortex, viz. the old brain and the new brain, which would suggest a different atomic structuring at the base of each - the one being of a proton bias and the other, by contrast, of an electron bias?

KEVIN: Oh, indeed!  And that is precisely why the wavicle aspect of each brain is so different, the subconscious being soul and the superconscious ... spirit, the former betokening feelings and the latter ... awareness, with intelligence coming in-between.  Were each brain identically structured in the ratio of protons to electrons, then their wavicle aspects would be identical, as either soul or spirit.  But the neo-cortex, or new brain, is in the process of evolving in the direction of greater electron freedom, its atomic integrity being rearranged, through spiritual striving, in such a way as to create an imbalance favouring the electron component, an imbalance which, taken to its logical extreme, should result in the disintegration of any remaining atomic structure and the attainment of electrons to transcendence, in complete freedom from proton and/or neutron constraint.

STUART: An eventuality which could only happen, presumably, in the latter phase of the post-Human Millennium, when life, in the guise of Superbeings, was directly programmed for the heavenly Beyond.

KEVIN: Yes, for by then the old brain would have been surgically removed by the millennial technicians and only the new brain would remain, its wavicle aspect being spirit, and the raison d'être of each Superbeing, or new-brain collectivization, being the expansion of that spirit towards transcendence in an endeavour to bring evolution to a supra-atomic plane of ... electron-electron attractions in the heavenly Beyond.  Each Superbeing would be expanding spirit through a hypermeditation made possible by the interaction of the various new brains in any given collectivization and the complete absence of subconscious constraint, thereby changing the new brain's atomic structure in the direction of greater degrees of spiritual freedom ... until, with transcendence, the ultimate degree of spiritual freedom was attained to, a degree entailing, in all probability, the collapse of the physiological base - the new brains disintegrating into flame as the electrons broke free of the remaining proton and neutron constraints, and thus shattered what atomic integrity there had been.

STUART: Why do you suggest the possibility of flame?

KEVIN: Because once electrons had departed for the heavenly Beyond, the disintegration of what had formerly been an atomic integrity would result in protons reacting against one another in a subatomic context akin to that of the sun, and the sun, as we both know, is a great ball of raging flame.  Thus would the world gradually destroy itself in the wake of departed spirit - flame spreading from each collapsed new-brain collectivization to whatever lay in its path until, eventually, everything was consumed.

STUART: You said electrons would break free, but would they actually soar heavenwards or would particle husks be left behind, as their wavicle aspect attained to transcendence?

KEVIN: Yes, I said electrons and I meant electrons!  I can't imagine spirit existing without its particle base in the electron.  Does the sun's flame exist without its particle base in the proton?  No, of course not!  And neither need we expect wavicles to exist without electrons on which to dance.  They have to emerge from somewhere, after all.

STUART: But would that make for transcendence?

KEVIN: Oh yes, because these wavicles would not be attached to matter, as in an atomic integrity, but to pure electrons, which would be as far above matter as pure protons, in the subatomic absolutism of the stars, are beneath it.  Maybe even more so, insofar as electrons are the pro-spiritual elements in an atomic structure, whereas protons remain aligned with the emotional realm, and neutrons with the intellectual one.  But when pure spirit arises from the Superbeings, it will create a nuclear reaction releasing proton energy in every direction, and this in turn will give rise, I am quite convinced, to a holocaust, albeit one destined, in due course, to burn itself into nothingness as the proton fires subside.  Thus will the protons destroy themselves as the electrons wing their way heavenwards, as it were, in various-sized spiritual globes.

STUART: The smallest size presumably arising from any given Superbeing, and the largest ...?

KEVIN: Eventually being the Omega Absolute itself.  Though while Spiritual Globes were converging towards one another and expanding into larger wholes in a kind of romantic Becoming, they would pass through evolutionary stages corresponding to the successive star changes ... from the galactic central star to the individual planets via the minor stars of each galaxy.  However, these supra-atomic stages would be the converse of the subatomic ones, so that, beginning in Spiritual Globes as antitheses to the 'material' globes of the planets, supra-atomic evolution would progress from a 'planetary' to a 'galactic' level, and on, eventually, to a 'universal' level, as the individual Spiritual Globes became larger and fewer in number, following successive convergences and expansions.

STUART: Your genius overwhelms me and obliges me to request a clarification, on the basis of this more comprehensive perspective, of the respective evolutionary stages ... from the first to the last.

KEVIN: Very well!  Let us begin with whatever number of governing stars there are in the Universe, one to each galaxy, which correspond to X number of first causes.  Let us then proceed to an XX number of minor stars, millions to each galaxy, and consider them as stage two.  Then let us proceed to an XXX number of planets, possibly billions to each galaxy, which in turn give rise, on certain planets, to an XXXX number of plants, including trees, at stage four.  Next let us proceed to an XXXXX number of animals on these life-sustaining planets, and bring ourselves to stage six with the advent of XXXXXX numbers of pagan men.  The ensuing Christian, or equivalent anthropomorphic, stage is really a combination of two stages, since dualistic in constitution, and leads, via XXXXXXX numbers of atomic men, to stage seven with XXXXXX numbers of transcendental men.  Then follows stage eight, with XXXXX numbers of Supermen, which are human brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts.  After this first and lower phase of the post-Human Millennium, however, we proceed to its second and higher phase in new-brain intensified collectivizations ... with XXXX numbers of Superbeings at stage nine.  This in turn leads to transcendence with XXX numbers of Spiritual Globes, these small transcendences continuously merging into one another until, at stage eleven, they become more the size of stars than planets and may justifiably be regarded in terms of XX numbers of Galactic Globes.  It now only remains for these larger transcendences to converge towards one another, from whatever part of the Universe, into one ultimate globe ... for evolution to be complete in the Omega Absolute at stage twelve, the final X.

STUART: Thus what began in the many First Causes will culminate in the one Last Effect?

KEVIN: Precisely!  Evolution proceeding from the subatomic to the supra-atomic via intermediate degrees of atomic compromise.

STUART: And in a kind of zigzagging fashion of romantic/classic alternations?

KEVIN: Yes, though that particularly applies to the intermediate, or earthly, stages of evolution, where a Becoming/Become alternation derives from and appertains to the variously-constituted atomic integrities which prevail there. With the subatomic stages, however, evolution broadly reflects the proton absolutism of stars and planets in terms of a continuous romantic Becoming, whereas with the supra-atomic stages of evolution there will really be a continuous classical Become, in accordance with the electron absolutism of spiritual globes en route, as it were, to the Omega Absolute.  Viewed from the human standpoint, this convergence and expansion of Spiritual Globes will suggest a romantic Becoming.  But Absolute Mind, the essence of transcendent spirit, would be unaware of any such Becoming because entirely wrapped-up, so to speak, in self-absorption ... as sole witness to its divine Being.  Conversely, although the stars may suggest to us, as we view them from millions of miles distance, a classical Become, they are continuously engulfed by the negative Becoming of their proton-proton reactions, and are thus consumed in apparent activity.  Transcendent spirit, by contrast, would be completely immersed in essential passivity, the quality of electron-electron attractions.  There could be no greater distinction than that!

STUART: So now I understand, for the first time, how evolution proceeds and where it is tending.  Man has now reached the point where he can split the atom of crude matter, severing electrons from their proton and/or neutron constraints.  But he has a long way to go before he can split the atomic structure of the new brain apart!

KEVIN: That's true.  Though there is no reason for us to be pessimistic as to its eventual achievement.  The Superbeings of the higher phase of the post-Human Millennium will most certainly progress towards transcendence, and when they attain to it ... the result will be salvation for the liberated electrons but damnation for the abandoned protons, which will then react against one another in diabolic fashion.  Just as well that, by then, all human technicians would have departed the scene, to leave the prospect of witnessing the ultimate nuclear holocaust to their artificial colleagues - the robots and computers, whose material constitutions will be impervious to conscious pain!

 

                             

LONDON 1982 (Revised 2012)

 

 

POST-ATOMIC PERSPECTIVES