Trunk/Chapter 6 of Silent Oracle
As we have seen, our reality has always been driven by instinct, but our personal behaviour is often prompted or questioned by conscience. The better humanity inter-communicates, the more clearly we may see the sort of world we live in and the further our awareness should increase. The average person can rub along, contentedly enough, but may be rudely awakened every so often and now more frequently, by news of some disturbing event - a bitter dispute, horrific massacre, or other tragic man-made disaster. Those who isolate themselves, all unaware of world affairs, can remain unmoved in their ignorance. Equally, those who are avid for news can make the mistake of thinking it's all horror and tragedy out there. There are yet others who recognise both good and bad in the world but still accept it as the way it is - our allotted reality.
Against this accepting attitude is set a growing semi-supraconscious understanding, weak but reaching towards a complete mutation and the realisation of humantruth, that truth, if it is to mean anythingmust mean everything In all conscience, if we abhor inhumanity then every single act of violence is unacceptable. Yet we have had to witness, if not endure, countless horrors this century. Two world wars, Hitler's holocaust, Stalin's and Pol Pot's genocide, the cruel campaign in Vietnam, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosavo and East Timor - these and so many other blood-curdling events. And then, bringing the instances of man's inhumanity nearer home in Britain, the unimaginable crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, also the Wests. Then the child murderer Mary Bell, and the tragic killing of little James Bulger. Now paedophile cases are cropping up everywhere. Cases of rape, drug abuse, racism, mugging, hooliganism and vandalism are extremely common.
But let me repeat that none of the individuals who committed these crimes actually admit to being evil. So why do they commit them? Because they act on incomplete thinking and twisted emotion; also because they live in an amoral reality - these reasons arising from the fact that their thinking and their actual experience belong to the confines of the lesser, incomplete conscious sphere.
Our defence against being so far influenced by our false reality that we too become inhuman - our conscience - prompts us to question the morality of ourselves and our world. If we honestly and strongly persist in the questioning, we are practicing what I call intellation - thinking to the optimum. Knowingly or not we are raising questions which can be answered by one faculty alone, the postconscious mind which makes its presence felt within the brain of each and every one of us. The postconscious has almost infinite capacity to pursue our questions until, having made every conceivable interconnection, it gives us truth in answer.
We might well put the following question - why do violent and highly disturbing inhumanities happen? - and the answer is 'for no good and true reason.' One might go further and suggest, rightly, that there is no good reason for most of our principles and practices within the Machine. An entire race of intelligent beings, occupying a whole planet, is acting out life in general and particular ways which do not make sense to high intelligence. It is not a truly reasoned, tenable position.
Nevertheless, this is the position we find ourselves in. Privately, most of us manage to strike a balance between morality and reality in our behaviour. Some extremely disturbed individuals, however, such as psychopaths, are unable to find that balance. Because of genetic malfunction, brain damage, childhood abuse or other unjust and violent experiences, their minds are set in powerfully emotionally bizarre modes so that they behave in various anti-social and disruptive ways and, of course, such adults can then themselves become abusers. Society, as it exists, is well aware of the problems caused by disruptive behaviour, also of the direct causes of them, and tries to find sympathetic solutions. But existing society does not see the indirect cause of disunity and conflict underlying the whole world situation - that this is the wrong reality for us. The false principles and practices to which we all subscribe, and to which our conscious thinking is basically geared, is amoral, and it is not reasonable to suppose that a balanced and peaceable world can ever be built on such a foundation.
The worldwide framework of our lives, the overwhelming Machine, does not serve our true interests. We serve its interests, and make believe they are ours too. As much as local community supports the good in us, the Machine encourages the bad; it diminishes the truth in us and brings out the false. Apart from a few relatives and friends, in this wrong reality we are inclined not to trust but fear each other. Morally, we are helped in doing what is wrong and discouraged from doing right. There is a gulf between what we demonstrably are and what we feelwe are and deeply wish to be.
A struggle is going on between our reality and our intelligence, or intellect. Humanity is in a difficult situation in that we require to get our minds right in order to determine the future, but need to be already in our right minds if we are to see that this is so. We will never see it with our conscious minds, and this is why intellation is vital. It is a matter of consciously putting our trust in the postconscious - of accepting its absolute independent wisdom. This is a big step to take - from domination by the familiar conscious mind and the Machine, to total guidance by the unknown independent postconscious, but awareness is increasing and, if we are to survive and be fulfilled, this is the step we must take.
How is this step actually taken? What difference will it make and how will it feel? The conscious SELF, the presently normal focul-point of awareness, moves about the conscious mind, from a memory to an experience to a thought-construction, and a combination of these becomes the momentary basis of the individual person, and the springboard for action, speech, or further thought. The supraconscious self, on the other hand, whilst also exploring the conscious and being the focul-point for action, speech and thought, is actually firmly based in the entrance to the postconscious, subject to its truth. Therefore the supraconscious self does not simply reflect and react to the lesser conscious mind but acts as mentor, advising, guiding, correcting the conscious and influencing it to deny and reject its former conditioning and to become truly morally aware. Instead of anger, duplicity or hatred it shall feel the compelling rightness and goodness of truth. Being at the core of this new philosophy, the foregoing is picked up again later in this chapter and explained at length in subsequent articles.
In Trunk 4, I described how the Machine's money-economy periodically collapses. If we react realistically and deal with this on its own financial terms, we must uncomplainingly accept that booms and busts will inevitably occur, and put up with all the other consequences of money-economic rule. Otherwise, if we seek truth, supraconscious awareness would make clear that to be ruled by the Machine in this way is utterly unacceptable to intellectual humanity, and that we ourselves should determine our own affairs.
This would bring us to the recognition that the Machine cannot be brought under human control, but must be abandoned altogether and replaced by COOPERATION - the equal provision of genuine needs, with both the concept of employment and unemployment abolished.
In the meantime, faced with situations like the closure of a recently built multi-million pound Siemens micro-chip factory in northern England, where a reduction in world price from £70 to £1.50 has put 1100 people out of work, the possible associated downward spiral to general financial depression could be halted by replacing economic values and motives with human ones. This could be done by a deliberate decision of all concerned to freeze everything - prices, costs, wages, production, shares and bank-accounts - at the levels obtaining before the crash threatened, not allowing any circumstances such as fluctuating stock exchange rates and prices to interfere.
One of the ill-considered aims of autoprogressive science is to create ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. The question of artificial intelligence throws light on the significance of the postconscious. If a scientist were on the verge of making a robot whose artificial mind is superior in capacity and range to the human postconscious he (the robot) would be in a similar position relative to his artificial mind as we are to our natural postconscious mind.
The scientist, having put in place the brain mechanism which carries the mind, must make a decision. He must decide whether or not to build into it the conditioning typical of the average human - the drives and inhibitions of instinct, the lessons of upbringing and education, knowledge of the world as it exists and of the obligations and restraints that are presently normal. If he decides to give the artificial mind average human emotional and mental conditioning, we would have reason to fear his robot because it could bring even more public chaos and destruction to Earth than we ourselves already do, notwithstanding that at the opposite end of the behaviour scale it would be capable of greater private compassion and morality than we.
But what if the scientist were content simply to give his artificial mind maximum potential equal to the human, but with none of our preconceptions or prejudices; to switch on his robot and turn it loose in the world? Having no bias it would expose everything to truth, for that is the inescapable function of such a mind. In this case we would have nothing to fear but much to gain, for the robot's free outlook would stimulate our postconscious minds also to discover human truth and to set about realising it in the world.
In the absence of perfect robots as examples, humans have little but their own postconscious minds truly to guide them. We take scant notice of any fellow-humans' supraconscious guidance that comes our way. It is part of present Machine-conditioning that having constructed a mind-set which supports our worldly character we defend it. Looking out from within that mind-set we are not only persuaded that it is right but also recognise, knowingly or not, that our strength and success comes from believing it to be right. Consequently criticism from outside, however true, is automatically categorised by the conscious as wrong and resisted or ignored. Even where truth promises advantage it can only offer jam tomorrow, not now.
Any mind of optimum capacity, if it is to be fulfilled, must be self-dedicated to truth. Since the human race already has such a mind its aim is clear - to fulfil that mind's potential. There is no point at all in specialised science following its nose in the development of artificial intelligence because it could not do better than the postconscious, fully capable as it is of itself discovering truth and requiring only that the conscious submits to it. But if the robot's total intellectual power were wide open to usage by human-like willpower and competitive ambition, just as the human conscious mind is used but without our conscience, our life on Earth would indeed be much worse.
The ideal balance for any living intellect is to have the conscious mind divided from the postconscious. Whereas the conscious deals with application of its intelligence, according to instinctive or other instructions, to appropriate thought and the body's subsequent actions, the postconscious should be kept scrupulously free and independent to pursue its function of truth. The postconscious is, when we enable it to be, our chief, supreme faculty, and the conscious should submit to it. That is how a brain must be organised if it is to serve the supreme aim of life - truth.
The robot scientists don't understand how to build perfect artificial intelligence because they don't yet recognise the necessity for this rearrangement of the human mind, nor the parallel need for absolute truth. So their artificial mind shall probably be arranged in the same way as existing human minds - divided into different chunks to deal with specific relative truths, 'organised' through wilful selection by the focul-point of self. To keep robots from going to extremes they shall be subject to external human laws. It is likely that the robot-scientists will also build-in a set of personal morals something like the human conscience but more akin to the simple Christian ten commandments. However, appreciating that the Machine would break down were its laws, also personal morals, not made to be broken, the scientists would have to ensure that the self-will of robots, as it is in humans, were free to choose between obeying and flouting them.
The perfect artificial intelligence requires the same qualities as the human postconscious possesses for the fulfilment of life's purpose. It needs to be capable of, and utterly bound by truth. Not only does this call for supreme intellectual capacity but also for independence - freedom from any kind or degree of conditioning. A robot that was equal in every way to the human and similarly confined to and dominated by the Machine, would be no better, nor worse, than we presently are. Whatever is required to make the robot perfect the human similarly requires. It is for us to perfect our own minds. Clearly it is not the duty of imperfect human minds to tinker with artificial intelligence, nor to build robots in our own image, but to fulfil our own mental potential by reconciling our two minds the postconscious and conscious. And when human minds are perfect, they shall not need to duplicate themselves in robot form.
True moral awareness is growing and spreading, and humans are becoming ever more conscious of the shortcomings of their society. It may be that given time they will reach that awareness without the help of deep thinkers. But that's doubtful, in view of the Machine's tight grip on our reality and our minds' preoccupation with its interests and affairs. Against human conscience is ranged a host of Machine-temptations - consumer goods from cars to trinkets, also drink, competitive sports such as football, drugs, holidays abroad, convenience foods, and all kinds of sophisticated entertainment. There needs to be some strongly expressed counter-influence in favour of shedding these Machine-attractions and replacing them with the joys and satisfactions to be found in humantrue interests and activities. We need persuading that by sacrificing artificial pleasures to the true interests of the whole Earth community we shall not lose but gain in happiness.
It has been mentioned already that people turn to religions for the moral values which they find to be lacking in Machine-reality. This is understandable but unfortunate in two respects. Firstly that adopting a religion usually involves a degree of acceptance of some form of god, and secondly that religious faith concentrates the attention on asserting moral values despite our false reality rather than upon making our entire reality the expression of humantrue morality. I am bound to say that acceptance of god, or heaven, or cosmic consciousness must be a matter of conscious will, because at no time, throughout my own lifetime of intellation, has such a thing been remotely suggested by my postconscious. On the contrary, my intellation has concluded absolutely that truth is of the utmost significance, and that our most important feature is that faculty whose function is truth - the postconscious, with nothing outside of its place in the human brain that is of greater meaning. My own intellation has also made it obvious that our personal and communal good morality depends upon our whole world constitution being humantrue. Given that all postconscious minds are alike, with the same true function, I cannot but believe that this same understanding will be shared by any supraconscious individual.
I believe that supraconsciousness is the right state of being for us, by which both our minds and our reality shall be attuned to humantruth, giving the best foundation for optimum happiness. It is this intellectual approach that I have concentrated on because I think it must come first. This is not to say that things of the 'spirit' are hollow or nonexistent, only that they are not supremely meaningful. They are the emotional accompaniment of life, secondary to postconscious intellect and its foundational truth which would make for harmony of feeling. The present tangles and deceptions of the conscious mind cause disharmony.
Intellect's job is to ensure that we live in a truly human world situation, that we are thinking truly, in co-operative agreement, and fulfilling our chief faculty, the postconscious mind. Such a state of being provides the basis of satisfaction, but happiness might still elude us, for some of the elements of happiness seem to lie elsewhere. It is important, though, that we don't look to these other elements to make life right despite its wrong reality. The first essential of human happiness is a world society founded on truth.
However, happiness is a matter of emotion, and has a long history of change as it has adapted to evolution. It seems certain that we are endowed with means of communicating with and influencing, also helping and healing each other which seem mysterious only because such practices have fallen out of use. The sense of comradeship and comfort that comes of belonging to and sharing common interests with a flock, herd or tribe, has faded and needs to be reinforced. On the other hand, feelings of aggressive and exclusive self-interest need to be put away.
In the present human case wires can become crossed in the depths of conscious emotion, causing unhappiness and consequent disturbed behaviour for which no obvious cause can be found. Even in the most ideal general circumstances it can be anticipated that this shall still happen, because the wires can become crossed due to an unintentionally hurtful act or remark plucking a string of emotional resentment which should be redundant but which festers for years below the surface.
I have recently come across Shamanism, described as a means of healing whereby a lost part of a person may be found and replaced. In view of evidence that this healing works and seeing it as nothing more mysterious than an ancient ability to heal restored to modern man, I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, having achieved the ideal state, there shall be no point in living in it unless we can be generally healthy and happy.
I have already alluded to the underlying purpose of life - to develop intelligence to the ultimate, and so to discover and realise truth. Alone of all life-forms on Earth, human potential is now so developed that we are able to carry out life's purpose.
Notwithstanding all these my arguments for radical change, there is a strongly opposed opinion that the result would be dull sameness and that our existing reality, whatever its blemishes, is at least lively and exciting. Maybe so, but the one answer to all such criticism is that it comes from the lesser conscious mind. Our chief faculty is the postconscious, its ultimate function truth. If we are to achieve optimum satisfaction we must fulfil our true potential, which is to discover and realise truth. Anything less is failure.
If we are able, one day, to look back on this present predicament it shall mean that we survived it which, in turn, shall mean that we became supraconscious. For that to have happened, our conscious self, perceiving the weakness of its conscious mind's arguments compared with the postconscious's true strength of reason, must have submitted to the postconscious.
That is what I believe is going to happen. The state of our reality as it exists in 2000 gives ample cause to perceive that postconscious reason is right - the competitive drives of instinct and the Machine have to be abandoned utterly, and true moral principles applied absolutely, with no half-measures. We have clearly seen where compromise between instinctive consciousness and postconscious morality has led us. Such compromise on the part of politics, religion and philosophy has given free reign to lesser intelligence applied to the Machine, the resultant amoral and immoral chaos which engulfs us making a mockery of our pretended morality, equating it to dull boredom by comparison with the bright face of reality. But we have only to look back at the Bushmen of Africa to see how happiness can rest on morality. Have we learned nothing since the hunter-gatherers?
The point will come when all the arguments against existing reality and the Machine shall build and strengthen, just as the opposition to communism did in the Soviet Union. The catastrophe theory shows how, while the status quo continues apparently undisturbed, contrary reason supported by emotion can mount to the point where it is irresistible. The status quo suddenly shatters and falls back down to a new level where a contrasting situation forms and begins to develop along different lines. In the Soviet case the whole social structure of an entire nation was turned upside down, and it was not motivated by morality but by hearty dislike for the secretive and ruthless regimentation of the communist system, (which had, however, a strict moral code,) and a hankering for something akin to the American Dream which is so much more attractive but only superficially moral, fundamentally very much the opposite.
The supraconscious revolution will be yet more overwhelmingly sudden and very different. Its motivation shall be common awareness of the mountain of good reason accumulated in the postconscious showing that we should abolish the false Machine and live according to human truth. The strength of this revolution would be total, in an intellectual species, because everything in favour of it is perfectly true. The Machine, as soon as the overwhelming influence of its actual, all-pervading existence has melted away, will stand feeble and naked, with centuries of misunderstanding, contradiction, unwise ambition and inhumanity behind it, and only false logic in its support.
When the conscious mind of humanity has submitted to the postconscious and is exposed to its pure reason, then the many and various current, sometimes strident arguments against such a revolution shall fade away. Chief among these arguments has been the claim that it can't happen - that people will not rise to it. But consider. The truth is true, and every single individual has a postconscious mind whose function is truth, a conscience also. There must be a key which shall suddenly and spontaneously open every conscious mind to aware admittance of true postconscious reason, truth which has been accumulating there, disregarded, for centuries. Clearly, this postconscious reason shall be submitted to consciousness through the already open back door of conscience. This route will be centralised and enlarged until a new arrangement is reached - see Diagram 2.
Another argument is that even so people will be fundamentally the same as always - not to be trusted, even by themselves - that were we to set up a society which depended on individual responsibility, on voluntary sharing and cooperation, there would always be dishonest individuals to disrupt and spoil everything by self-seeking and violent intimidation. But such individuals are governed by the instinctive drives which presently govern the whole of our society. That they choose to flout the moral inhibitions that guide most of us is chiefly because our society as a whole regularly does the same, but may also be because society has subjected such dishonest individuals to abuse or neglect, or that their upbringing and education and experience has failed to give them a firm and true moral base. I repeat, we cannot expect the present amoral and inadequate reality to bring forth a totally moral population. On the other hand we can fully expect that a society based on practical equality, supraconsciousness, individual responsibility and abstract fulfilment, shall do so. After all, the human thinks and does what is in its mind to think and do. There is no reason why healthy human beings, thinking truly and living in a society which is wholly conducive to good, should turn to 'evil'. Not only is there no reason - in such an ideal society wrong doing would be virtually as impossible as it presently seems inescapable.
The establishment of such a society shall mark the completion, at long last, of the mutation that gave us our potential for supraconsciousness all those thousands of years ago.
1. OPENING
2. EXPLAINING LIFE
3. FROM UNCONSCIOUS TO CONSCIOUS INSTINCT
4. MIND MUTATION ENDS IN DIVISION
Last Chapter 5. CONSCIOUS RULES DESPITE CONSCIENCE
Current Chapter 6. CONSCIOUS SUBMITS, POSTCONSCIOUS PREVAILS
Next Chapter 7. SUPRACONSCIOUSNESS
8. COUNTERFEIT EXPLANATIONS AND PERSONAL EFFECTS
9. THE TRUTH ABOVE ALL
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