Trunk/Chapter two
Tr2 EXPLAINING LIFE
Explaining life on Earth, the meaning of life, or its 'secret', entails revealing the purpose of life.
The purpose of life is to evolve INTELLIGENCE, then intellect. What other meaningful purpose can there be to living progress?
The function of intellect is utter truth. What other function makes sense?
Therefore the discovery and realisation of utter truth - the only possible objective of the optimum reasoning-power of this supreme faculty of intellect - must be the ultimate purpose of life.
That we possess two minds, the conscious and postconscious, is a yet unacknowledged fact of human life. Of course, we are familiar with the lesser conscious because our wilful selves are situated within it and use it all the time, influencing it, listening to it, manipulating it, expressing it, and choosing from it the decisions to be acted upon. This is our present version of CONSCIOUSNESS.
We are practically unaware of the other mind we possess, our higher postconscious faculty, except for its CONSCIENCE. For vital reasons the postconscious mind is free and independent, so the wilful self cannot penetrate and interfere with it; for this and other reasons we have become isolated from it. There is no unconscious mind (this is a necessary interjection because Freud's interpretation of the unconscious is so widely accepted.) Unconsciousness is the vast areas of thought and action in the conscious mind from which, both short and long term, the aware attention of self is absent. The postconscious mind is not open to the attentions of self and might therefore be described as unconscious, but it is a different faculty, with a different function and as yet unfulfilled relationship with the self. It is my main aim, in the rest of this website, to describe and explain this all-important relationship.
The postconscious mind is an amazingly complex, honest, gentle and benign faculty, yet firmly rooted in flesh and blood. Although it has so far remained closed to us, excepting for conscience, it is the faculty that makes us human. I am not very interested in its exact physical location, but am in all other ways assured that it is an existing faculty.
That science has not discovered it must be because the postconscious's activity is so extremely complex, its boundaries subtle, and because its sum is infinitely greater than its biological parts so that science may not know how or where to look.
Our thinking has always been carried on in the lesser conscious mind, and all our affairs, including science, are contained within the same conscious sphere.
To be truly human we vitally need to open to our postconscious whose function is truth - to discover human truth and consciously realise it in the world. The author of this book is a postconscious mind whose conscious has opened to it and has spent a lifetime in understanding its thinking and is now passing that thinking on to you.
But postconscious thinking doesn't come to consciousness easily, or joyfully. These words may be unacceptable to you because the ideas they are trying to form (and the language used) might be unfamiliar to your conscious mind and might not awaken emotional response.
However, we do vitally need humantruth, and finding and realising it shall bring greater joy and satisfaction than we have ever known.
The aim of this book, then, is not so much to inform but to stimulate in yourself a thirst for whole truth and make you determined to test my statements by breaking through to your own postconscious mind - to your true awareness.
All over the world millions of humans are fruitlessly searching - those who look at themselves and society honestly and are unable, or unwilling to escape into some protective zone of make-believe. They might find life meaningless, frightening, confusing, and themselves to be lacking and lost. They may be looking outside themselves for life's meaning - in spirituality, god, COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS, hoping that in these things of what they call 'spirit' they shall find glowing contentment, deep satisfaction and pure love, qualities sadly missing from the world as it is.
There is no true virtue in the individual or group contriving to attain personal goodness in a false world. It is the responsibility of every one of us to make way for general goodness by making our world humantrue.
So-called spiritual things sometimes seem to be proven by apparent miracles or transcendental states or paranormal events. We are prone to believe in these because we have deep need for what they promise, but this is a mistake. The meaning and purpose of life is to be found in a place in our minds, but this place has been closed off, discredited and ignored for so long that we don't think to inquire there.
You may be one of these 'spiritual' searchers, and you could find what you seek. But it is to be found in the biological brain, not (with the exception of holographs - see the final articleThe Holographic Dimension) floating in the ether. There is no spirit, no soul, no external god, cosmic consciousness, heaven or holy ghost which is physically apart from us. There is just us. There are phenomena such as telepathy at the depths of consciousness, but they may be merely superceded survival aids or vehicles of communication with no impact on true reason. There are unexplained phenomena, but as living intellectual entities, on Earth, within our solar system and discounting other similar planets elsewhere in the universe, we are alone. Yet we are not really alone. We have some six thousand million fellow humans to keep us company. In any case, we are as wonderful as any of our imaginary gods. We are capable of making our heaven on Earth. Why have we failed? Yes, we have made or preserved some heavenly places, but more generally we have created many versions of hell, both public and private. General peace, contentment and happiness elude us. Although we might be lucky enough to live in a heavenly place the surrounding hells are there, nowadays in full and dismaying view.
This world situation has been building up for centuries. It has shown little sign of changing radically because although humans have spasmodically seen the light, for every humane step we take forward, the mechanics of our social system tend to take us a step backwards. Humanity has never sat down to discuss and decide the best way to live; we just continue a process of cause and effect.
Why do we put up with this ongoing situation? Because of a strong tradition of acceptance. We see it as responsibly adult to accept reality as it exists and to make the best of it. This is one reason why we turn to religions - as artificial substitutes. To reject reality is seen as feckless and naive. On the contrary, rejection of reality arises from intelligence, because reality is unintelligent. Acceptance of it arises from other influences.
In the beginning, as life forms evolved they became more physically complex. To serve this complexity they required bigger and better brains. Of first importance was survival, of course, and this required rigid control - the drives and inhibitions of instinct. If progress was to be sustained, however, instinct had carefully to adapt to change, first by way of slow natural selection, then by means of consciousness which enabled creatures to make tentative changes more quickly, by intention, but still under control of instinct.
The human species resulted from a brain mutation giving a vastly increased conscious capacity. The capacity had to be vast because if this conscious faculty was to take over from instinct and continue to win progressive survival, it had to take everything into account in order to make correct decisions. This gave humans the potential to break with their now inappropriate instinct and conduct their affairs entirely by intelligence. But to the instinctive human the whole of this newly extended conscious faculty appeared to threaten rather than assist survival because its deep and complex thinking made for initial indecision. So the new human consciousness divided into two. The greater part, the postconscious mind, with five extra levels giving the potential to discover and realise truth, was cut off from the rest and left to its own devices, fully aware of everything that was going on but barred from directly interfering.
The lesser part formed into a much enlarged conscious mind, with very extensive reasoning capacity but on one level, without the potential for humantruth. It contains the self, the focal-point of consciousness with power of instinctive will. This self selects from the conscious mind to form its opinions and uses this mind for making decisions. As the result, the limits of the conscious mind form the boundaries of our perceived reality. The human race, instead of being guided by its supreme intelligence, identifies with its lesser conscious mind and self-wilfully applies it to the drives of instinct, making us the most dangerous of Earth's creatures. All human affairs are confined to the conscious arena, and we might well have driven ourselves to extinction already but for one saving grace.
Our saving grace has been that the postconscious mind, though cut off, went on working towards the fulfilment of its potential, the discovery of all-embracing truth. Not only was it able to reach simple but vital conclusions; it also found a way of conveying these true conclusions, or morals, by a roundabout route to the conscious - conscience. The source of conscience, its only possible source, is the postconscious, which also gave us our moral awareness, or MORALITY, a code of behaviour which some of us mistakenly credit to imaginary gods and which we can wilfully choose to follow or ignore, but which is a pure, unshakeable token of our own abused intellect.
The reality which the human conscious has helped to form makes up the entire framework of our lives, and, since it does come from the lesser conscious mind, it is essentially amoral. Human life, therefore, has become a battleground on which one side of us fights for survival, by whatever rules are laid down and using whatever necessary amoral or immoral means are at our disposal, and on the other side is the moral awareness given by our conscience.
This means that our present reality, or actuality, consists primarily of overwhelming amoral institutions and practices founded on the competitive drives of instinct, then of secondary background institutions and practices relating to conscience, between them engrossing the incomplete reasoning of the lesser human mind, the conscious. This describes the reality we now live in, and explains its shortcomings.
If you are one of the great majority of humans who are bound by your conscious mind and immersed in existing reality, it may be very difficult for you to look critically at that reality and see it for what it is. You may ridicule the very idea, insisting that our present reality is inevitable. To recognise the truth about ourselves and our present world really requires that we stand outside it, taking a bird's-eye view. This has proved to be almost impossible for most. People are very resistant to changing their minds and contemplating a true reality.
In fact we all have the means of standing outside our reality and taking a critical view of it, because we all have a postconscious mind. Our right and natural state is to be bound by our postconscious mind and for our reality utterly to reflect its true fulfilment. Fulfilment is the secret of happiness. For wild animals, happiness follows from the faithful fulfilment of instinct, even though it involves a perpetual life or death struggle. For humans it means the co-operative fulfilment of intelligence, ie truth, with no unnecessary struggle. Truth is intellect's happiness.
We are our selves, situated in a mind within a body, combining to make an individual who is living in a particular section of one overall world reality. It is without doubt that if we are to be happy and contented all these things - our selves, our minds, our bodies and world reality - should be in harmony, but equally without doubt that they are presently in disharmony.
Taking one average man to be representative of the present human norm, as a self he is the centre of his being. He sees everything outside from his self's viewpoint. He asserts his self, to a greater or lesser degree. He defends his opinions and beliefs doggedly, right or wrong. He pursues self-interest without shame because he is persuaded that this is as it should be.
His overall reality is in chaos. If he's lucky his own personal reality may seem peaceful, happy and contented but he knows, from the torrents of news and comment from radio, television and in the newspapers, that the world is not.
This 'ordinary' private person considers that he is bound outwardly to pay lip-service to this amoral reality but chooses, in private, to try and sustain a separate, peaceful, moral life as far as possible. If he is some kind of AUTHORITATIVE LEADER, in order to be effective he has to identify predominantly with worldly reality in thought and action, taking care to project a realistically acceptable public image.
As a consequence, if any right thinking is going on it's in private, within individual minds. It doesn't reach the public domain because humantruth does not belong there; is not taken seriously. Furthermore, the media are controlled by the owners and concerned predominantly with realism. It has always been so. Leading figures, seeking a formula which reconciles human morality with an amoral reality, have always failed. Socrates and Plato couldn't do it, nor Caesar. Neither could Martin Luther, nor Karl Marx, nor even Gandhi. And certainly not Bill Clinton. However wise; however they aspire to higher things, their reason is and always has been rooted in the existing false reality. Perhaps history will show that Nelson Mandella came nearest to success.
This world's prominent and brilliant people struggled hard yet got it wrong not only because they were submerged in the wrong reality but also because they relied on the wrong mind. Their thinking, and practically all acknowledged human thought throughout the ages, has taken place in the conscious mind, a mind which is tremendously powerful but incapable of truth. The conscious is incapable because it is our lesser mind, restricted to one level of reasoning, denied guidance by the greater postconscious. But the postconscious is presently ignored and ineffective, leaving the conscious to be controlled by the wilful self and subject to the influences of instinct, emotion, conditioning and the pressures of the system that constitutes existing reality, THE MACHINE, because that's how it has to be if, as we believe, this present reality is inescapable. We use the conscious mind, which raises the question, who are we? - and the answer - at present we are wilfully selected part-constructions of conscious thought represented up-front, currently wrongly, by the point of focus which does the selecting - our self. We actually believe that the intellectual process is necessarily this usage of the conscious mind, particularly in learning, opinion-forming and decision-making.
As a result, whilst recognising solid fact we perpetually disagree in our reasoning. Disagreement is a torture and curse of humanity. The reason for it is that we do confine ourselves to the conscious mind which, because it is incapable of truth, is good at building spurious argument into all kinds of different and incomplete constructions of thought which only that spurious argument justifies. The egoistic, wilful self - the focul-point of awareness - has freedom to surf its conscious mind and select, then give allegiance to the thought-construction it finds, for a variety of reasons, to be most persuasive.
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DIAG
1A. PRESENT ARRANGEMENT OF THE HUMAN MIND,WITH CONSCIOUS
PREDOMINANT AND POSTCONSCIOUS EXCLUDED APART FROM CONSCIENCE
The above Figure 1 clearly shows the CONSCIOUS MIND and all its trappings as separated from the postconscious excepting for the latter's one-way channel of influence - the conscience - and the other-way information duct along which all conscious knowledge and experience is passed to the postconscious. The composition and functioning of the postconscious is explained later, especially in Trunk7. For the time being, consider the conscious.
This diagram simplifies a situation which is very far from simple. Had the conscious submitted to the postconscious at the very beginning, the practical structure of our reality would not have been anything like so complicated. In the event, the wilful self divided off and dominated the conscious mind, and the complexities of modern reality are the direct result of this powerful mind being wilfully manipulated and applied to the instinctive drives, and the consequent development of all the intellectually meaningless possibilities that this opened up in every conceivable direction. Straightforward requirements for survival have been converted into the endlessly shifting demands of consumerism, and the direct, uncomplicated hunter-gatherer way of life which embraced all provision, and all strategies for survival, has changed into a heavy artificial burden on life as we strive, indirectly, to supply those insatiable demands.
The self is advised by the conscious mind but also uses it in pursuit of its objectives. These objectives are shaped by pressures from the external world to find a place in theMachine - the framework of world human life which has been constructed to serve our past and present pursuit of the instinctive drives. The self constructs a person, which in turn makes decisions and takes actions appropriate to it. The self then goes on to consider the results, in the light of personal interest, but then comes under the influence of postconscious morality, simplified and muted because restricted to the narrow channel of voluntary conscience. In order to cater for conscience, but at the same time to render it virtually innocuous, the Machine has set up religions. By adopting one of these the person is able to pay lip-service to morality while simultaneously serving the amoral and often immoral Machine.
The existing state of human reality is bad news, but not the end of the story. The good news is that we possess that other mind, the free and independent postconscious. The function of this neglected faculty is one and the same absolute truth, due to the fact that it is a faculty with almost infinite reasoning potential, for it is free and independent of any interfering influence, and I deduce that it operates on five levels over and above the single level of consciousness. The human race has never truly recognised the existence of the postconscious. We have remained locked into our version of reality, the wrong reality for us, bounded by the conscious sphere excepting for that narrow door open to consciousness, through which the postconscious passes us its basic admonitions by way of its 'still small voice of conscience,' which is the source of our moral awareness.
Consequently human individuals are able to hold almost any conceivable opinion, belief or faith, and to hold it true. Unable to penetrate to absolute truth, we allow ourselves to recognise relative truth, to our continuing confusion. The human self has no right to dictate to the conscious mind and determine which of its versions of truth shall be adopted, no right to choose from among incomplete and false constructions of thought produced by this limited mind, and insisting on them to the point of killing for them. Rather do we have, as intellects, a grave responsibility to discover optimum truth, agree upon it, and have it realised in the world.
The conscious self and mind, acting together, have no right to imprison the postconscious, denying to us our chief faculty. The inferior conscious has no right to assume superiority, even though it is supported by a general consensus of humans swayed by the facts of a false reality. The conscious mind is presently entrusted with all political and diplomatic affairs, with the result that our affairs are in permanent turmoil. It has discovered, and mastered, such as the theory of relativity because that is a matter of fact. The conscious accepts, but cannot understand or control, the artificial subject of money-economics because that is a matter of instinct attracting to its support, one way or another, all kinds of contrived and contradictory reason. Whereas postconscious truth is clear, compelling and complete, conscious disciplines of thought such as Philosophy, or writings such as the Bible, are not. As a result ultimate truth, although actually or potentially clear and compelling to the postconscious, is obscured from human understanding because the conscious mind, unable to produce it, can't recognise it but turns to artificial substitutes.
These are highly significant disclosures, meaning that not only has the human postconscious the capacity to discover and realise humantruth but also that, this being the chief of all our faculties, it is our nature to be humanly true. It is only the deep conditioning of our consciousness by instinct which presently has us convinced otherwise - that conscience is either to be ignored as a matter of expediency, or heeded when it holds no great disadvantage. This is a question of choice, allowing contradictory impulsions to co-exist, for example common public duplicity in pursuit of self-interest co-existing with mostly private honesty in pursuit of truth.
The conscious and postconscious approximate to the priest and the oracle already mentioned in Opening. I deduce that the Ancient Greeks, for a time while living in the conscious arena, sensed the existence of the postconscious and gave it the name of 'oracle', perhaps with conscience its 'voice'. This phenomenon might be associated with the right and left-hand lobes of the brain, with commissurotomy, and schizophrenia. The Greeks' idea of a bicameral mind could be seen as merging into one conscious mind as they came to accept the latter's complex thinking as their own.
As I have said, this book was written by a conscious mind in close collaboration with a postconscious mind, (The presently ABNORMAL SUPRACONSCIOUS STATE). The present norm is that any proposition, if it is to be accepted as true, must be proven by evidence and argument. But that means evidence and argument coming from the conscious, which is incapable of whole truth. The postconscious, however, is itself the guarantor of its truths. It cannot allow consciousness to enter it for the purposes of proof. This would cause it to fail in its true function by giving up its freedom and independence. However the conscious can tirelessly question and criticise postconscious truths until they are fully confirmed and it is, inevitably, convinced.
Another reason why right thinking may not yet have seen the light of day is that, coming from a body of thought which the human conscious does not normally recognise, it is difficult to interpret and express in a way acceptable to this present reality. Right thinking is generally regarded as outlandish, ill-considered or naive, and is not taken seriously because it fails to run the gauntlet of the academic and politically conditioned erudite establishment geared to existing reality in the conscious sphere and backed up by its history. The true proposition that, as postconscious reason shows, existing reality and its history is false, is not presently accepted because it is a small minority view, whereas the opposite belief - that this is the proper and only reality because it actually exists all around us - though wrong, is overwhelmingly the majority opinion.
The postconscious mind depends upon the conscious for its information (somehow translated from language into its own code), but it does not think in the same wilfully directed way. Every postconscious mind finds truth by taking everything into account all the time - referring all things to all other things by every possible interconnection.
Last Chapter 1. OPENING
Current Chapter 2.EXPLAINING LIFE
Next Chapter 3. FROM UNCONSCIOUS TO CONSCIOUS INSTINCT
4. MIND MUTATION ENDS IN DIVISION
5. CONSCIOUS RULES DESPITE CONSCIENCE
6. CONSCIOUS SUBMITS, POSTCONSCIOUS PREVAILS
7. SUPRACONSCIOUSNESS
8. COUNTERFEIT EXPLANATIONS AND PERSONAL EFFECTS
9. THE TRUTH ABOVE ALL
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