The Wrong Reality. PartVIII - 51a Contrary Concepts - continued

He sees matter as the macro-manifestation of micro-particle behaviour. He sees life as the organisation of matter into intelligent consciousness which is the macro-manifestation of an ancient underlying micro-cosmic consciousness, and which, by its influence on the sub-atomic micro-particles, can influence, and eventually determine, the behaviour of matter. Earth nature, guided by cosmic wisdom, though expressing to the full the opposing universal extremes, has achieved a living balance between them. The human race, by excessive application of rational intellect to its activities and the neglect of intuitive moral influences, has become dangerously imbalanced. By renewing contact with cosmic consciousness (through meditation) we can consciously alter our behaviour by changing our values and attitudes in order to regain the spirituality and ecological awareness we have lost, and by adopting the systems view of nature we can construct a meaningful scientific framework for approaching the age-old questions of the nature of life, mind, consciousness and matter.

There are four fatal flaws in this argument. The first is the erroneous belief that we once had, but have lost, the ecological awareness that we now vitally need, for humanity has not yet achieved the intellectual potential which will wholly bring such awareness (that the hunter-gatherers, for example, lived in comparative sympathy with nature derived from the way they conceived their own interests in their particular circumstances, free from competitive pressures, not free from awareness of whole-Earth ecology). The second flaw is a failure to recognise that moral intuition comes fromintellect - that our autoprogress has been the result of consciously wilful misapplicationof intellect. The third is that there is no cosmic consciousness, for there is nothing in nature or in the universe (other than intellect) that reveals or realises truth in all its meanings. The fourth fatal flaw in this argument is its failure to recognise the existence of the human postconscious mind which, as I have already gone to some lengths to explain, is the supreme achievement of evolution (here on Earth and wherever else such minds have evolved) and should be our true guide.

Of course we must achieve a balance, but it must be very different from the innocently cruel balance of nature. In Passage to the Solar Age, Capra has many encouraging things to say about sensible sources of energy to replace present non-renewable and ecologically unfriendly sources. Yet his systems-view of life seems to envisage a society founded upon much the same principles as now apply, and to depend upon a mysteriously enlightened population to make it work humanely. I have tried to show that supraconsciousness is a necessary prerequisite to the building of a humantrue society, and that a humantrue society is necessary to the sustenance of a supraconscious humanity. Such a society has to be stable because humantruth is not changeable by wilful manipulation. If you want conscious freedom, with continual flexible fluctuations and changes of values and attitudes, then you have to accept all kinds of destructive and inhuman behaviour. You can't have it both ways.

Capra's thinking is representative of the general growth of a belief which seems to be similar to that of Christianity. It has a benign but mystical and incomplete message - ecological awareness and concern for the well-being of life - and it has a god, a subject of faith rather than truth - cosmic consciousness and transpersonal being.

As a matter of wishful thinking and sublimation this new belief is also spreading, but, because it too is incomplete and not truly founded, it too will fail, and much vital time will have been lost.

Person/Planet was the next book I read. Its author, Theodore Roszak, is another advanced thinker of compassionate concern whom I regret having to criticise. But criticism is necessary to our campaign for the promotion and realisation of humantruth.

The crux of my disagreement with Roszak is that he believes in self-discovery, 'the irresistable fascination of the project of creating an original identity'. In my view this preoccupation with the conscious self is an instinctive characteristic carried to extremes by the misapplication of semi-intellect, and it arises from our failure to complete our mutation from the instinctive to the intellectual condition.

The point has already been made that in the practical affairs of a humantrue society self-identity would be invested in the common life while the intellect would be enabled to flourish in every abstract way. Our present position is different, however, for it falls to the present human generations to win through to humantruth, ie the self-discovery of truth that we presently fail to achieve because we do not yet permit our minds to work truly; because we do not understand humantruth; because humantruth is not reflected in our environment, and because our feelings are unreliable guides. We, the present generations, have to sacrifice our self-interest to the communal and abstract interests, not of ourselves but of future generations.

Roszak, too, demonstrates belief in cosmic consciousness - that we naturally belong to it and may embrace it by the self-discovery of our original identity - when he refers to evolutionary continuities that relate mind to matter, and to a planetary dimension to the spreading personalist sensibility which links the search for authentic identity to the well-being of the global environment.

I think it is true that personal sensibility is spreading, but whilst it contains an element of deepening awareness it is chiefly a growth in self-interest which is now overthrowing controls (such as communism) set up to counteract the gross injustices of competitive self-interest in the past. This is a case of irresponsible instinctive drives overcoming ineffective repressive restrictions. This sounds like economic freedom but, through exploitation of humanity and Earth, it will soon become yet more oppressive. The spread of personal sensibility heralds a contrary spread of insensitive automated chaos. That the personal (conscious) sensibility of some people presently embraces ecologically aware concern is incidental, not inevitable.

The universe evolved the brain, yes, but the mind is greater by far than the sum of its past and parts. Our intellect is the consummation of evolution and, I believe, the objective of the instinctive drives. Surely it is nonsense to neglect its true potential by subjecting it to the inferior mechanistic forces that blindly produced it. Roszak says that the needs of the planet are the needs of the person and therefore that the rights of the person are the rights of the planet. This is poetic, but I would prefer to say that the needs of the person are the needs of all life, dependent on the planet; that there are no rights, but that human intellect gives us responsibilityfor all life and for the planet, the responsibility to achieve a nature and state that is truly acceptable to intellect.

Person/Planet proclaims that we all have the sovereign right of self-discovery. It declares that there is no single ideological formula that can corral such a rich and often tragic variety of human experience as the world presently holds. I believe, however, that we have no god-given rights (nor any god to give them), and it is instinctive self-interest that has maintained the present reckless and conflicting competitive chaos. But we do have the potential to fulfil our chief faculty - intellect, and this complete self-discovery would bring us to common understanding of one and the same humantruth. By this humantrue understanding we would peacefully cooperate in all practical things, confining our other experiences, which would be just as rich and varied but genuine and never tragic, to the abstract.

Roszak asks how the people of contemporary America came together to work out their liberation (can they be said to be liberated?), and answers - not as a mass, but as all kinds of sects. As examples of this liberating process he gives 'the network' (mutual awareness and concern within sects) and 'the age of therapy'. But these are examples of humanity declaring itself at one extreme of its struggle within the Machine - at the other extreme these sects are conflonted by groups such as the multinational corporations and the military. These sects and groups are coexisting features dependent upon the same overall system - the Machine - and all must be accepted if the Machine is not to be rejected. Americans falsely conceive of the self and live in a false reality, as do the rest of us in the West. They are liberating themselves only from some inhuman concepts and features of their automatic roles, not from the conscious arena, and not from the Machine. Roszak dislikes mass movements, preferring small-scale human initiatives of different kinds, but he expects the impossible - that those initiatives will somehow humanise the present system. Mass movements, in the shape of crowd-hysteria or overbearing ideologies of emotionally appealing religions, are not the only alternatives. Remember that there is one common potential human mind, and but one body of humantruth. The humantrue system of world human life requires to be framed by the common postconscious mind and responsibly sustained by each and every supraconscious individual.

Person/Planet adopts a foundational premise which is incomplete, in my view, and which confirms that overmuch erudition inhibits intellation. As does Capra, Roszak makes a link between physics and mystical and oriental traditions, reflecting the general tendency to return to mysticism on discovering that physics fails to explain everything. He takes such things as morphic science, systems science, holistic healing, religious experience and anthropology to indicate that nature and human consciousness are one and the same. It is true that these are things of nature, and that nature has a guiding relevance to us as sophisticated consciously instinctive animals, confined to the conscious arena and ignorant of absolutely relevant truth. But such things as systems science, except where they have practical physical uses, are not wholly true of us, nor of significant guidance or overruling importance to us. Our true destiny is to be that which we potentially are, and truly ought to be - a supraconscious race.

Roszak supports the spreading anarchy of self-discovery against what he describes as the opposing call for social relevance and intellectual rigour which, he believes, closes the inner self. But supraconsciousness does not close that which is presently regarded as the inner self - wilful consciousness. Instead it opens the lesser conscious mind and self to its true mentor - the postconscious mind. That widespread fear of losing our personal freedom to a rigid and unfeeling intellectual regime does not apply here. Supraconsciousness would free us from the present free-for-all which can be as harsh, cruel and dull as it can be easy, kind and exciting, and which is accelerating downhill. Supraconsciousness would open us to our full potential and, by re-building society in sympathy, would open the true inner self to such fulfilment as we have never experienced.

We should remind ourselves that present society, under the Machine, is dominated by persons who are confident that they havediscovered their inner selves, but these are conscious selves, incomplete, false and dangerous, albeit often unknowingly so. They are necessarily employed by the institutions of the Machine as controllers of people who, in the mass, are similarly incomplete. Not being truly themselves and therefore not knowing what they ought to be and do, the people can be persuaded, or self-persuaded, to be and do anything at all, whether good, indifferent, or 'evil'.

Roszak is much more concerned with the person than is Capra. Perhaps the core of my argument with him is the difference between his view of the human person and my view of the human individual. He distinguishes between 'person' and 'individual' in a way which I do not find helpful. I regard the individual as the indivisible basic unit of society; that which society's completeness should represent. He regards the person as having an inner, pre-destined personality which, if it can be discovered (by the implied means of combining external cosmic awareness with internal faculties), would make that person complete and altogether good. This difference between us may appear very wide, for on my side is an almost totally unrecognised idea that the happy perfection of the human world lies in the fulfilment of intellect, whilst his belief on the opposite side is, at present, almost universally shared, even by today's so-called 'intellectuals'. Yet the difference is actually narrow, for it is simply the difference between descriptions of one and the same thing - the postconscious mind. Roszak's description is vague - the awareness of a mysterious cosmic consciousness or universal nature which makes the person complete. My description is of a physical human faculty that factually exists, the neocortex, which furnishes the postconscious mind which, if we consciously open to it and become supraconscious, will fulfil our humantrue potential.

I see the individual as potentially sharing this same essential completeness with all other individuals, whereas persons are in numerous ways divided from each other. I see the person as a temperament, a pattern of instincts and conditionings, a specific construction of thoughts, all contained within the same conscious arena that contains the present world. This personality is closed to its chief faculty, the postconscious, excepting for intuition, or conscience. This personal self is incapable of behaving humantruly because it is closed to full awareness of humantruth. For the same reason it is capable of morality or immorality - it may be both the benign social reformer and the cruel slave-driver. Unless a society of such persons is quickly to collapse in chaos, it needsthe governing control of such as our present Machine to both encourage and restrict it, but if it continues in ignorance of humantruth its collapse will merely have been delayed by this control.

Were the majority of people to assert this 'personhood' they might well overthrow the Machine but could offer nothing better to replace it. Roszak believes that there are existing human qualities upon which a worthy society could be built, whereas I believe that a humantrue society can be achieved only by general supraconscious agreement. Don't make the mistake of thinking that his examples of people who exhibit those qualities, the 'superbly literate' or 'supremely artistic', have really found themselves. They are merely expressing the perfection of part of themselves, a part which, were they complete (ie supraconscious), they would not project in this way but would indulge, simply, when and only when all other responsibilities had been fulfilled. What Roszak calls the 'essential divinity' of self, as it exists, is also insufficient as a foundation of human society, for it is the guiltless innocence of absolute conscious/ instinctive identification with a restricted and workable set of mores, similar to the innocent 'personhood' of the animal. The 'essential divinity' of humans depends upon ignorant or deliberate isolation from an otherwise guilty reality, or from awareness of its crimes. It is similar to the undoubted rightness of instinctive animal behaviour, a sense of freedom on the part of creatures who are in fact rigidly programmed, whose minds are closed to anything which does not directly concern them, and who are unaware of any possible alternative.

Roszak says that society has hardly any leverage with innocent people other than to use physical power. This fact is evident from events in Eastern Europe in 1989/90, where the united will of the people has prevailed, even overcoming the physical powers of secret police and army. But society is,or should be, the people. Present societies comprise governments and people, often in conflict. The conflict is least when the competitive money-economy is prosperous and the people have opportunity to win what they feel they want. The conflict is greatest (though not openly expressed) when there exists a moral vacuum, with the people unable to get what they think they want, unable openly to express themselves, and unwilling to give to the state, and with the state oppressing what it sees as an irresponsible populace, and seeing it as its duty to enforce law and order. Such disunited systems can't work. Prosperous economies appear to work, after an amoral fashion, but their conflicts will come to a head once their economies inevitably decline. As I have said, society isthe people, and ideally depends not on a wide variety of persons pursuing their own limited ends but on each individual wholly sharing in the common responsibility.

Again, the difference between Roszak and myself rests on our interpretation of personhood, and the key is supraconsciousness. If all people were supraconscious then that would be their common essential personhood, uniting them in humantrue agreement. But if they are less than supraconscious, imagining their fundamental selves as being invested in a mysterious external cosmic consciousness which does not exist and devolving responsibility onto it, then they will always be in a state of conflict, and they will always need some kind of narrow governing rule and enforced law and order. Let me reiterate the fundamental significance of supraconsciousness - that it holds the individual to humantrue morality, not immune to lesser influences but determined not to act on them; unableto do so.

When Roszak writes of 'mind-forged manaclesl of social domination, caused by such as self-loathing (possibly evoked by Catholic upbringing) that opens people to emotional intimidation, he is referring to such lesser influences. The Machine and its competitive money-economy have made these lesser influences all-powerful, so that they dominate us emotionally and mentally. These influences can be rejected by the postconscious which, because its natural aim must be to establish a humantrue society, will eventually do away with such false domination by removing these influences. The dominance of such influences is presently tolerated because our thinking is false, and little can be gained from rejecting them until our minds are humantrue. An example of such influences is the money-economic expedient by which industry is persuaded to dispose of the dangerously toxic wastes it sees fit to generate by emptying them into rivers and seas. The Greens valiantly oppose such practices, but their political proposal to punish polluters by laws and taxes does not remove the influence at the root of all such practices.

In the kind of society which the Greens appear to be proposing, of which Roszak seems to have been the inspiration, the Machine would remain the framework of life but the people, given complete freedom to discover themselves by, for example meditation, would find an inner goodness by whose influence the Machine would become benign. In my opinion this goodness, in a competitive reality, can only be allowed to more privileged persons at one extreme and must be countered by the 'badness' of the underprivileged persons necessarily occupying the opposite extreme. As a result we would end up with yet another conflicting regime which, though it might achieve unprecedented freedom at the top level, would descend to complete subjugation at the bottom. This attempt at balance would thus simply re-establish a state of imbalance, an intensified reflection of existing reality in which we find the supposedly free USA on one hand, and the poverty of Bangladesh, or, until recently, the oppression of Eastern Europe on the other.

I have to say that Roszak quite fails to comprehend the phenomenon that is humanity, this combination of animal instinct, and intellect capable of discerning truth. His talk of personal sanctity, magic, charisma, covers with confusing mystery that which can and must be sensibly explained away and put in its insignificant place. By criticising the 'Age of Reason as the sweeping rejection of all sacramental experience' he demonstrates a failure to appreciate that the true age of reason is yet to come, or to understand that religions have failed because they have not wholly revealed or completely upheld true human morality.

Roszak is staging a battle between forces which I am regretfully bound to say are of his imagination. On one side is the enemy - bourgeois liberalism and social democracy - and on the other side the home team, magical personhood. But liberalism and democracy are not states of being but weapons used by humanity in its moral struggles with the Machine, and magical personhood is surely our otherwise concealed personal moral and instinctive yearning coming, where permitted, to the surface. I think his difficulty is that he has not yet discovered what a person inherently is because, although he has widely explored the conscious mind and illuminated its dark recesses; he has not fully opened to the postconscious mind in order to experience supraconsciousness. The result is failure to comprehend that at the bottom of all our superficial speculations is the fact that we have not yet realised our true potential; that there is no future in being, dealing with, or catering for the personalities we presently comprise because they are not yet complete. If our object is to discover truth, let us observe truth in the process. Truth will not be found in the outcome of a battle between limited, and thus false forces of opposite conscious opinion and belief.

Roszak mentions the 'Personalists', who did not elaborate their system into an ideology. He proposes, in my view quite rightly, an exodus from the cities into the country (as long as it is accompanied by eradication of the very concept of city), but I am quite certain that he is wrong in rejecting any kind of ideal system of living. All other forms of life work to a system and, except that we must take over from instinct the responsibility for ourselves, we are no exception. I agree with him that we should live in small communities, but unless all communities express and reflect the agreed humantruth vested in each individual, contributing to an agreed worldwide cooperative system and moral code, they are bound to degenerate into competitive groups, eventually amalgamating into warring kingdoms, and so on - a repeat of history. The experiences of communes in America and elsewhere do not prove anything, for they are miscellaneous conscious attempts to survive against the tide of an unsympathetic Machine. I am envisaging a world of small, closely internet-connected communities whose members are all supraconscious and all supportive of the same humantrue constitution, a world dependent upon individual responsibility - the only possible means of our Earth-life fulfilling itself, or even continuing.

Person/Planet continually returns to questions whose answers lie in the fact that the existing Machine andthe person are both contained within the conscious arena which renders them unable to satisfy the inner, true human self whose fulfilment will be found only in supraconsciousness.

I have said earlier that there is no real intellating going on, and nothing has since given me cause to change that view. But there has been some heartfelt and brilliant thinking. The authors of the books appraised in this chapter - Porritt, Pedlar, Capra, and now Roszak, are fully aware of, and deeply concerned about the appalling state of the world and our prospects. It is remarkable (until we remember once more that our reality is locked into the conscious arena) that their warning revelations have made such little real impression on humanity. These books are not in the mainstream of publishing, but those who are genuinely seeking truth probably gravitate to them as the only serious attempts to find it. To most people, particularly those who most need to read them (seriously, not condescendingly) - economists, industrialists, politicians, Philosophers etc. - they are unknown, or pushed aside, and those who are willing to read them may have to go out of their way to find them.

Of those few such books that I have read, Person/Planet goes deepest into the relationship between humanity and reality, and Roszak would have gone all the way had he waited until all his 'certainties' had been fully exposed to doubt, until all avenues had been explored and correlated by his postconscious so that all questions were answered and no doubts remained, before committing his conclusions to print. By hastening he has not escaped the conscious arena (in which there is an infinite variety of half-truths) and, failing to identify with his postconscious, has jumped to incomplete conclusions. I believe the reason for this to be that those whom the education system raises up in its hierarchy, even those who oppose the Machine, are in consequence expected to know,and to be all-wise as the result of that knowing. The fact is that their much greater than normal volume of knowledge means that they require even more time to digest it, if that digestion is, as it must be, a matter of supraconscious reason through intellation.

He sets out a declaration, made to children, which is beautiful. But he is envisaging a continuation of the present competitive governing reality, a generally hostile world in which it is necessary to have local allies, and in which family loyalty is a valuable support. But unconditional loyalty puts conditioning shackles on thought. It is the way of non-intellectual nature, the law of survival of the fittest that maintains the balance of nature. It is and has always been characteristic of our competitive, warring history. It is inappropriate because giving and loyalty withinfamilies inevitably, under pressure, means the opposite betweenfamilies. It is ultimately genocidal because our conscious/instinctive powers of thought can carry our hostilities to the limits of destructiveness.

This idea of exclusive family giving does not include the most important of our gifts - intellation. It can not do so, for intellation would soon make it clear that we must be loyal to everybody, and our best efforts must be given to everybody, if our society is to be humantrue. I realise that Roszak envisages the economy being brought down to a domestic scale, as I do, but as long as the competitive money-economy exists, and family units remain divided, the local domectic enterprises which are successful will eventually grow into big business - another repetition of history, bringing us back to the present chaos. This is another example of failure to intellate to true conclusions, Failure to learn this important lesson shows in Jonathan Porritt's conviction that people will only do things when a certain self-interest is involved. This conviction is founded upon the belief that the basic facts and concepts of existing reality are inescapable. We have yet to see that they are utterly unacceptable - that wholesale fundamental change, from the minds of humanity to the entire constitution of our society, is vital to the achievement of our full and true potential.

The foregoing comments cover two-thirds of Person/Planet. The remaining one-third deals with some aims of world reform, many of which I agree with but with the means of which I disagree, for Roszak's concepts do not yet fulfil humantruth. I believe that all differences between us shouldbe thrashed out until we reach true agreement, but it is not possible for me to pick up every point in detail in the space of this one book. Having dealt with the principles I must leave it largely to you, if you wish, to make your own comparison between the practices proposed by Roszak and those which I have suggested earlier in this book. I will content myself with pointing out the most fundamental disagreements.

Roszak believes that the self-discovery of individual resources is the wealth of nations. I believe that we must first discover humantruth to which we must then be primarily responsible - our skills and talents must be adjusted and moulded to the necessary tasks, not the other way round.

He envisages a society of people with infinitely variable lifestyles. I believe we must cut our physical coat according to our cloth, for our bodies and environment and interpendence limit us as to what we can be or do. Our physical/emotional beings must be content with simple common satisfactions, but we can fulfil intellect in an infinite variety of abstract ways.

He suggests that education is a matter of learning the discipline of truth. This presumably means submission to the evidence and argument of the Philosophical discipline of thinking and experiencing within the conscious arena. I believe that the object of upbringing and education must be primarily to encourage and help every individual to achieve supraconsciousness by intellation.

I agree with Roszak in his views on artificial and indirect employment, but he still describes it as 'work' in a way that still separates it from the individual in relation to the true collective interest. I believe that as long as we have a competitive system like the Machine it will be necessary to harness human effort to 'work' by means of the incentive of self-interest. Humantrue responsibility would translate 'work' into normal living activity, and to achieve this we have to get rid of the Machine and make local community concerns the summit of world reality and of human practical interest. To continue click here