Trunk Chapter 5 of Silent Oracle
Once we had elbowed the postconscious out of the way, we began to establish a norm which dominates us to this day. Truth is anathema to this norm, because truth belongs to that supreme faculty which we chose to ignore. Human thinking is, and has always been confined to the conscious mind, and our reality occupies the conscious sphere of influence. The normal human self, locked in this sphere and aware of no truer alternative, is complacently proud of, or sadly and resentfully resigned to this as the inevitable human reality. Consequently, not only is it difficult for a human to discover truth, but then almost impossible to explain it in a way which conscious minds can, or will, accept. The human race has failed to rise to the truth because we commonly think with minds which individually gravitate to competitive argument, not to true agreement.
Human civilisation has grown out of the very powerful resources of THE CONSCIOUS MIND being applied to the competitive drives of instinct. It is not concerned with absolute truth, because such truth could in no way live with it. We humans have always been troubled by CONSCIENCE - by basic moral truths which the postconscious tries to imprint on our awareness - but we have watered down their impact by institutionalising them into competitive religions and making them just one of many legitimised choices.
Most of us are resigned to living with our unrequited consciences, sometimes uneasily, and perhaps taking the view that life is too short to be troubled by any but the most simple and obvious moral truths; otherwise we should fit in to amoral reality. Reflecting that charity begins at home we look after number one and make the best of things as they are. This is our worldly position, which we are prone to support with appropriate opinions and strengthen with comforting beliefs. We often feel the need to justify our position and defend our identity to the point where we are unprepared, almost unable, to hear and consider a contrary belief or critical opinion. That we are divided in this way is acceptable to a competitive economics and conflicting society, giving us to think that automated society deserves the MACHINE, and vice versa. Truth has little power to persuade the individual conscious mind whose wilful self, feeling already overburdened, refuses to admit it. Humantruth is not sought or recognised by the supposedly intelligent in high places. Politicians believe they have to be realistic, not idealistic. The media, even though they may not share public opinion, pander to it for the sake of sales and ratings. Top people tend to ridicule moral crusades, obscuring from their feeling awareness the daily fears and struggles of the much less fortunate.
It is possible for humans to be happy by not fulfilling but ignoring their higher postconscious potential, whilst fulfilling instinct and the conscious. This is not complete happiness because of awareness of one's potential being lost, and that helps to explain why people take up religions - artificially to fill the gap. The matter of happiness does strongly affect all these issues. As we have seen, emotions are tools of instinct, means of persuading creatures to do what is good for them by making it enjoyable to do so. Having progressed to the stage where we are able to choose, humans still choose to follow instinct, though disruptive or destructive, because of the primitive good feeling it can bring. Perhaps this explains football hooliganism. Soon after the conscious mind was formed the conscience became known and was respected, but with the advent of civilisation it became misunderstood. Human reality came to pretend to but not represent human morality because the honest and compassionate side of human nature could actually be indulged only where the mores and laws of harsh reality allowed.
The gap between private morality and public amorality existed in individuals, but also existed in the religions which many joined for the sake of their private morality. Human instinctive competitiveness had naturally been implanted in the different religions which humans invented and founded. This largely explains the situation in Ireland, where people were murdered and maimed merely because they were either Protestants or Catholics, religions which both recognised the same Jesus Christ, and which both supported gentleness and condemned violence. One obvious logical solution to this sad conflict would have been for the two churches to waive their differences and become one. That they did not do so demonstrates how firmly trapped in the conscious sphere humans can be, so that they will not give way even when it is a matter of life or death for many of their men, women and children.
Our reality is like a fast-flowing river comprising one positive mainstream and two modifying tributaries. The mainstream rises from the energetic application of our conscious powers to the competitive drives of instinct by every conceivable means. One of the tributaries arises from the inevitable contradictions and conflicts of interest inherent in the mainstream, and takes the form of Machine-justice, law and law-enforcement by police, also war by military forces resulting from differences of self-interest boiling over into battle. The other tributary arises from conscience; awareness of basic moral truths which go contrary to reality; awareness of beauty, sympathy with suffering, and the wish to identify with truth and compassion. This second modifying influence we are obliged to keep largely private because publicly we have to co-exist and comply with false reality.
The framework and powerhouse of our civilisation, theMachine, was founded on two principle practices - authoritative leadership and competitive money economics.
Leadership is a common feature of nature which logically transferred to the human species. It is both a means of entrusting the conduct and defence of a group or tribe to its fittest and strongest member, and of ensuring that the best genes shall be carried into the next generation by the restriction of mating also to the strongest and fittest. In the course of time, when humans were gathered into large separate nations, their leaders became those who were most successful in war; supreme commanders or kings, who were given absolute authority. Later, when responsibility was divided out among members of a council, or senate, the leader became more of a negotiator and persuader, a spokesman with diminished power but still with deciding authority.
It has been necessary for humanity to retain the practice of authoritative leadership because, in an amoral, competitive society there arise many conflicts of interest and ambition. The commonly dominant conscious mind being incapable of truth it is not possible to reach agreement, so that matters have to be tackled by way of compromise, through the institution of politics, and settled by the decision of an elected authoritative leader.
Politics attempts to mediate between public amorality and private morality, supposedly on behalf of and elected by the latter. Since the former must take precedence in Machine-reality, the public regularly becomes disenchanted with politics. This explains the two or three-party system. Public dissatisfaction can be expressed at election time, when one party may be deposed and another given power, but little really changes because the Machine continues to dominate. Individual voters may try to make up their minds by listening to the speeches of opposing candidates but find each equally convincing. This is because political thinking is governed by partisan principles which the self wilfully chooses and imposes, and which the mind adopts and positively expresses, negating contrary principles and either deliberately or unconsciously ignoring truth.
We have become so accustomed to being led by powerful and prominent figures that we believe a human society cannot survive and prosper withoutDOMINANT LEADERSHIP. HISTORY regularly proves the reverse - that initial advantages are succeeded by collapse, for extreme examples the cases of Caesar, Napolean, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin. It is true that societies in the conscious sphere which are managed by competitive money economies would soon collapse in chaos without the control of governing authority. It is also true that practically every country on Earth presently comes under that heading. We appear no longer to have examples of the alternative - a society such as the Bushmen of Africa, without permanent leaders, its affairs prearranged and managed by INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. But such a society is shown to be viable, by reason free of present prejudice in Chapter 7, Supraconsciousness.
This brings me to the other principle practice of the Machine - the COMPETITIVE MONEY ECONOMY. This first arose from the notion of possession - A BASTION OF INEQUALITY - that once an individual secured something for itself, such as a banana or a piece of meat, that became its possession. In unruly animal packs others would try to rob that individual. In the human race, eventually it became convenient to recognise possession as lawful and robbery as crime, and some of the instinctive satisfaction derived from sheer survival was transferred to possession of things for its own sake. There logically ensued the practice of barter, whereby, if one person possesses something surplus which a second person wants, the first person will hand it over in exchange for something else which the first person wants and is surplus to the second person's need.
The significant feature of barter is that whilst it is an improvement on raw nature in that initially it avoids dangerous conflict, it is a root of inequality in that it retains the natural principle of putting self-interest first and therefore is not giving, per se, but giving only in exchange for something of more or less equal value. If one person has something surplus which another desperately wants but has nothing acceptable to both sides to offer in exchange, the first person will not part with it. Or, if the other is very desperate, a ruthless first person will demand much more than the actual value of the article he is trading - perhaps including the demand that the other bows the knee to his authority - take it or leave it. Alternatively, the second person might become so desperate as to seize the article by brute force. These are important points to bear in mind, because the principle of barter also became the basic principle of the competitive money economy which replaced it.
The money economy was born of the difficulty of transporting large and heavy articles for the purpose of barter. As an alternative, one person in a barter situation would give the other a promise to supply the item he had undertaken to give in return for the item he had already received, the promise to be redeemed later. In time coins were used which had an actual value in gold or silver, or which were made of low-value metal but with a higher value inscribed on them, which could be exchanged widely for goods of equivalent value. In due course money acquired an added value of its own. Money surplus to requirement was accumulated by some, who then lent it to others who had no money but needed goods which were only to be obtained in exchange for money - lent it in return for extra payments as interest. This lending of money for the purpose of making more money is an invented practice, usury, born of heartless opportunism and irrelevant to human need, but a practice upon which is founded the entire, unjust, unwieldy and insane world economy, or management, of human affairs. Usury is to blame for the insupportable burden of third-world debt.
This financial economy is beyond our control because affected by so many conflicting variables, and it goes generally contrary to true human interest. It puts a money value on everything. Money provides a false motive for human behaviour which has largely replaced honest and true human motivation. It promotes greed and wastage. It can command loyal obedience to immoral causes. Bloody crimes are committed for money. It is argued that money controls are necessary for the fair distribution of goods and property, but this ignores the principle of equality in that money is not and cannot be fairly distributed. The money-economy employs the principles of the market-place where the industrialist will manufacture anything that the public will buy, the trader charges as much as customers will pay, and of the workplace where the employer pays the lowest wage he can get away with.
The money-economy introduced the concept of employment, which was an improvement on serfdom excepting that it included the twin concept of unemployment. This amoral concept makes human individuals into labour-units of a certain money-value, to be employed or not by the Machine - and therefore provided for or not - according to money-economic, not human, requirements. It makes the Machine all-important. In truth society is its human members who should form a community supported and sustained by the efforts of each and every one, according to their ability.
It is the false motivation of our economic system - the need, or greed, for money - that lies behind the drugs scene, the armaments trade, the smoking and drinking habit, and crime. People would not sweat and slave to provide millions of others with unnecessary or harmful drugs, tobacco or alcohol were it not for money. Most crime is committed by people whom the Machine does not recognise as worthy of legitimate rewards - whom society denies and neglects, and who try to redress the balance by helping themselves against the law. Much crime is drink or drug related. Violence must often be seen as revenge for violation-by-neglect, or prejudice, of society.
Nevertheless, the principles and practices of reality remain in place. They are so familiar as to be regarded as necessary parts of life and it takes deliberate effort to hold them up to the question 'do they or don't they make sense?' The answer to this question depends upon the orientation of the mind addressing it. A supraconscious mind must judge the ways of our present world to be insane, but conscious minds geared to this reality view it in a very different light. They judge the ways of the world to be necessarily determined by human nature, failing to recognise that our existing, apparent nature is falsely dictated by the Machine. It is not our true nature at all.
In order to judge truly, take the case of house-building. Suppose a group were starting a community from scratch. Needing to build the first house, they would select a site, then sketch out proposals, gather materials and form themselves into a work-team, arrange for services and begin building. There would be certain rules and regulations to follow regarding health and safety. There would be standardisation of materials used for building, taking ready availability, moral and aesthetic considerations into account, and a system of stockpiling based on future building intended in any locality. As far as possible, materials would be obtained in the locality. Being members of the local community, the work-team would have personal interest in the house, its situation, appearance and durability. No money involved, you see, or required, as long as there is no Machine.
Now consider the process of building in today's (western) world. Normally you have a speculator who has bought the land, obtained planning permission, and who proposes an estate of houses to be built at a certain cost and sold at prices which will yield him a profit. He employs an architect who prepares drawings of houses, roads and services at a fee calculated to enable him to earn an adequate living. The architect has to be covered by an insurance policy with a heavy premium to cover his liability for the possibility of faults occurring years in the future. A quantity surveyor prepares bills of quantities detailing all work and materials involved. A copy of these bills is sent to each of several builders wishing to tender for the work. Each builder employs people to go through the bills, getting competitive quotations for materials from a host of suppliers (who are pressured to pitch prices at the lowest level possible), to judge labour costs and price each item accordingly. Supply of materials is governed, or confusedly affected, by preferred bias, comparative prices, sales pressure and its effects on demand, quality, profit-margins and their effects on viability, and the effect of demand on costs and prices. Suppliers employ an army of sales representatives, each with a caseful of glossy literature, a company car and expense account, and pay them largely by results. These salesmen entertain their existing and prospective customers in restaurants and so on and may use other inducements and persuasions to get business.
Consider, this is the present norm, but doesn't it show the amoral Machine and its competitive money economy to be an unnecessary, intrusive complication?
The speculator normally awards a contract to the lowest tenderer, a builder who may have under-priced and so will be looking for extra costs unforeseen in the bills of quantities. The builder will push his workers in an attempt to keep their wages within anticipated costs, and they will exert opposite pressure for the most payment for the least work, possibly by cutting corners and skimping on quality. The speculator may employ a clerk of works whose job is to detect and prevent these shortcomings. If materials fail to arrive or are condemned, or it rains heavily, workers are kept hanging about on normal pay, or laid off at no pay. All along the line there are large conflicts and small clashes of interest which make the building site a minor battlefield which has little or nothing to do with the object of the whole project - the provision of good houses for people to live in.
The object being to build many acceptable houses, the presence of money does nothing to make them better houses, often quite the reverse. And it means that materials are selected more on grounds of cost to buy and work with than environmental acceptability or local availability. On grounds of saving money, materials might be imported from the other side of the world, involving increased cost to the environment in transport and fuel.
The house-building scene illustrates the general situation in existing reality. The main interest being served is not vital home-providing but the Machine, indicated by the fact that the 'best' housing goes to the well-off, the worst to the poor, and that there are never enough houses for all, many people being homeless and many others overcrowded. The speculator may be a large company whose success is measured by its bank statement and stock-exchange quotation. Of all the individuals engaged in building during the prime time of their waking hours, none is truly fulfilling his or her life, and while a few may enjoy the work, most probably wish they were elsewhere. Their jobs may well involve considerable stress, and have the effect of narrowing the mind and outlook.
We are not yet finished with the subject of housing There is the question of mortgaging - one of those features of the Machine economy which is difficult intellectually to pin down because it doesn't make sense to true reason. Having been built, with all materials and labour paid for and profit added, the house is sold. The purchaser normally can't afford to pay for it in cash, so takes out a mortgage. This is a loan, raised to pay the speculator and builder. The loan is secured on the property, meaning that if the purchaser can't continue making the repayments the house will be repossessed - another example of the human individual being put second to money. The loan carries interest and is usually repayed in 25 years, meaning that at the end of that period the purchaser is likely to have paid to the mortgagee three times the original value of the house.
This could mean that over a 250-year period ten purchasers had paid to each other, in sequence, the value of the house. But in addition those ten people would have paid twenty times the value of the house in interest. Where has all that money gone to? It certainly hasn't gone into building all the new houses required, particularly to replace those no longer habitable, for, here in the UK at any rate, there is still a huge shortfall.
When there are not enough houses to go round, one function of the money system is to determine who shall be housed and who not, largely based on income. It is the system's own failure to pay enough income to people without housing that makes it apparently unable to afford to house them. This is further confirmation that our society does not serve the interests of its people but of the Machine. In effect, because of the financial complications, it is the money system which prevents the building of enough houses to meet demand.
At this point the true mind boggles. It becomes clear that if we are tied to the money economy we cannot think truly, and if we are to think truly we cannot sustain the money economy.
So the norm is that those interests and activities which should be the simple means of life, become for most individuals the ends which they serve. This is the logical outcome of a society of people who are not co-operating in maintaining a simple but contented lifestyle with the minimum stress, optimum satisfaction and abstract interest, but a society of people who are forced by the Machine into sustaining an ever more unnecessarily complex way of life with maximum stress, lavish consumption and artificial entertainment but the minimum of true and deep happiness. People have become themselves competitive, interested in things money can buy, but communally and intellectually impoverished.
It should not be surprising that our affairs under the false Machine periodically collapse. Consumer societies depend on a cycle of manufacture employing and paying people who then demand and are supplied with its products. For superficial reasons demand eventually falls below supply and/or manufacture outstrips demand. Prices are reduced in an attempt to raise demand but this means also reducing wages, with the effect that demand is further reduced. It also means reduced profit, so that in time factories are closed as uneconomic and workers thrown out of work, making the situation progressively worse. It's important to note that none of us wants anybody to be made idle and deprived. Everybody should be employed, meaning that the community depends upon the shared work contributed by everybody. Unemployment, I repeat, is an amoral nonsense visited upon us by the Machine, a feature of the cold-blooded money-economy.
Why do we not avoid such disasters by stepping in and ourselves overriding the Machine? Because we are conditioned and blindly divided. Our competitive education and the influence of institutions, plus the normal individual conscious mind's inability to master more than one biased speciality, lead us to occupy separate compartments of knowledge and to give priority to progressing these special interests more or less regardless of overall human concerns. This is particularly so in science, mathematics and technology, in which experts are able to confound true reason with irrefutable fact. Scientists even insist that their persistent marching, or stumbling from fact to fact should be called progress, and that it is an irresistible feature of human nature. Admittedly the discoveries of science are fascinating but, when the normal practice is for scientists to continue them willy-nilly because that is their paid occupation, and for others to develop them technologically because the Machine aims to capitalise on them financially, clearly they should be subject to great restraint. There is little public support for this view because people are impressed by the certainty of fact, and, in an uncertain world, it can be comforting because it is irrefutable. It is easy to hide behind established fact. It is much harder and less comfortable to pursue, and agree, true reason.
These few examples, given to illustrate the falseness of our existing reality, are meant to stimulate your conscious mind truly to reason under guidance from your postconscious, when it shall produce many more examples. Machine practices like these are inevitable when the competitive money economy permeates every square inch of the fabric of human life, so that every activity is enmeshed in it to some extent. It's not a case of the people being served by their social system, but of the people having to adjust to the Machine. If you live in the countryside, thinking to be far from the Machine, you still have to pay income tax, council tax and purchase tax. You will find that for some of your needs you must go to the nearest city. If you go by car you pay road tax, MOT., petrol and oil, and parking fees. If you go by public transport, buses are few and far between and fares are high. If you live in a city-outskirts tower block on a low income, you pay more heavily for poorer food because the nearby small shop is limited and expensive, but the cheaper super-market is an even more expensive bus-ride away.
One other example needs a special mention - the National Health Service in Britain. Whilst in third-world countries health-care is often sparse, as a country becomes more wealthy not only does its health service improve but its people also tend to live longer. In Britain the point has been reached where rising health-costs have outstripped our ability to pay, according to present standards. The nation can no longer sustain this continual advance, and the high level of service is bound to decline. Medical science concentrates more on developing ever more effective techniques for curing disease, rather than on ways of improving health. Whilst prolonging life by curing illness, this makes us dependent on more and more medical care. Society has to carry an ever-increasing number of non-productive old persons, eventually caring for most of them in rest homes, nursing homes or hospitals. The NHS, a humanitarian but still money-dependent institution, steadily approaches the chilling predicament where the money system digs its heels in and humanitarianism is somehow forced to give way, possibly by withdrawing care from the old or cutting scientific research into disease; or by the reintroduction of apartheid into medicine - only giving care to those who can afford to pay. A truly human society, to be outlined in the next two parts, would be good for our health so that our need for medical care would be much reduced.
Though insane, the madness of the general human situation is not publicly recognised. The reason for this is not obvious, though essentially simple. Every child enters the world as ignorant novice and is seen as requiring EDUCATION, ie to be stuffed with knowledge, much of it misunderstood, most soon forgotten and in any case largely irrelevant excepting to the Machine. On this basis they are required to think, but most of all they need to understand how to think truly. This they are not taught, for it is not yet understood by humanity. It is accepted that they shall be taught first by parents and secondly by school teachers. But parents themselves may be limited and prejudiced one way or another, and shall certainly be falsely conditioned and so most unlikely to be supraconscious. Even if parents are non-conformist this is likely to be an inner defensive position and, realising that their children have yet to make their way in a hard, conformist world, in dealing with them the parents might outwardly pretend conformity.
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