It seems certain that we will contrive means of locally utilising our own sewage. With minimal packaging and no planned obsolescence, there will be little rubbish which can not be re-used or composted for return to earth. Without cities we will not need great labarynths for underground drainage. We will no longer need many of the major road networks, and can return the land to agriculture. We will never again jerry-build. We will not waste huge quantities of water for needless industries, and surely much domestic water shall be locally supplied. Our use of electricity will be much reduced, and some locally generated, harnessing wind, sun and tide. Our telephone system will be simpler, and neither it nor any other system will be complicated by economic means to measure usage and extract money payment from users, or by constant pressure to autoprogress techniques. That nobody wasted or abused these services shall be a matter of humantrue awareness and individual responsibility.

A system of general information communication will have to be carefully devised which meets all the needs, but no more than the real needs of a humantrue society. In considering such a system, it has to be born in mind that all human life will be reflected in the activities of each basic community, and that nothing of greater interest or importance than the living experiences of each individual, and the common experience of all individuals, shall actually be happening. Therefore there will be no news as we know it - no call for regular and lengthy news services. Newspapers, for instance, which reflect the competitive, fluctuating, conflicting diversity of automatic affairs and the emotional, prejudiced and divided response to them of our instinct and applied intellect - newspapers, which are governed by and financially dependent upon the contentions of this autoprogressive reality - will disappear. On the other hand we willneed rapid communication in case of emergency - means of exchanging useful information and things of intellectual and vital cooperative interest. It shall be possible for any individual to speak to any other, anywhere in the world.

It should be remembered that a humantrue society will be first and foremost one of supraconscious minds. Our physical beings shall be similar entities all contributing equally to an unchanging cooperative whole. Our close awareness of one another in community will be sufficient for our instinctive needs and responses, similarly reflected in every community and needing no artificial extension. There shall be no personality cult, nor any special significance placed upon physical identity, and this will be difficult enough to achieve in our close personal relationships. We can only wholly know one another as individuals by mutually experiencing our interplay of instincts, emotions and intellectual interests in close proximity. Other than for practical purposes, therefore, our communication will be on an intellectual level, supraconscious of common compassion and general understanding, rather than specific and personal. On that level visual impressions are of little meaningful significance - it is not then truly necessary or helpful to see who we are communicating with, or in other ways to be fed with emotional images. Television or film shall therefore be used for conveying the images of impersonal things, with communication between persons entrusted to radio and telephone, direct or recorded. There will be one common language world-wide. It seems likely that our communications will be the most complex technological system needful in a humantrue society, but not so advanced as to need rocketry and Earth satellites. And let it be reiterated - this will be a horizontal communications system between human individuals, not between groups - not vertical communication between the Machine and its servants, or government and the governed. Nobody will be answerable to anything but common, humantrue awareness.

The technicalities of communication have advanced extremely rapidly in the 1990's, and go on advancing at increasing speed. In the year 2000 we already have the basic structure of an internet system that is entirely appropriate to a humantrue society. In such an ideal society, instead of the old hierarchical system, when information and general instructions were passed down from top to bottom and edited and manipulated by authority en route, every single individual shall be open to receive everything. Instead of authority being responsible for conducting human affairs and everyone else for executing instructions, it will be the responsibility of each individual (already conversant with the worldwide system of living,) to keep abreast of events and, where necessary, to respond with appropriate action. It will be the job of a group studio, representing ten Gatherings, ninety Middlehouses and 900 Mainhouses (about 60,000 individuals) to act as server to its group, facilitating smooth running and ready access.

The communication system's intellectual function is admirably served by the internet which makes potentially everyone's thoughts available to everyone else. Individual or community contributions are easily presented on a website and printed out by anyone interested, anywhere. The internet system, when it is shorn of unnecessary concerns such as money and business, comes as a boon to the principle of Individual Responsibility.

There will be little other than personal need of a postal system and, when we are no longer clinging to the bonds of blood relationship and special friendship to protect us from general competitive hostility. Post might be passed along by travellers and others working the transport system, making it their voluntary responsibility to get it to its destination, slowly, perhaps, but surely. Transport of goods will be enormously reduced, and mostly between Mainhouse communities or to and from their Middlehouse depots, perhaps using horse-drawn vehicles. Between depots it will be by rail and canal, and between continents, wherever essential, by sea. Personal travel will be by the same systems, or locally by bicycle or on foot, and whether it were for necessity, interest, goodwill or pleasure, it would be subject to our responsible will to be where we are most useful and not to burden or hinder the system unnecessarily. However, it might be that everyone who wishes shall at some time make a long journey, this being recognised as of value, to avoid stagnation locally and to help the spread of common understanding and comradeship worldwide. There will be none but a limited emergency air service.

Education as we know it, which is largely the inculcation of automatic knowledge and reason and encouragement to form specialised constructions of mind which conform to the existing concept of automatic reality, will cease to exist. It will be replaced by the introduction of children and adolescents, up to the age of eighteen or whatever age it is decided that they become adults, to the basic principles and worldwide practices of human society, ie to the foundations of human being. A fundamental essential is that the young intellate from the very beginning, and become supraconscious. The individual mind shall be free, and shall be so stimulated, encouraged and challenged as to determine, above all, to fulfil itself in its own way and time, with the information it needs made available as and when it needs it. Children will learn the activities and skills of community life, to take a fully responsible part in it, to fully understand the humantrue constitution of the world, and to develop and give abstract outlet to their intellectual powers. From the very beginning, community life will provide optimum stimulation to babies, so that their brains maintain the optimum numbers of neurons, grow the maximum numbers of dendrites, axons and synapses, and so lay down the best possible intellectual foundation. Up to the age of eight or so, children will be given the devoted, tolerant and affectionate care, but firm guidance, of the whole community. Between eight and eighteen they will move up a sliding scale of responsibility related to growing ability and skill, towards parity with adults who will cooperatively respond to them accordingly. After the age of eighteen all individuals will be on an equal level, supraconsciously aware of their communal and worldwide responsibilities related to their own abilities. All will accept their responsibility and give of their ability to the optimum, and shall be valued, by the self and others, for the willing fulfilment of both, not for the kind or quality or quantity of contribution.

I have suggested already that life will be in four stages (a) childhood, from birth to eighteen years (or as otherwise agreed,) (b) parenthood, from 18 to 38 (c) generally needful work, from 38 to 55, (d) community help, then rest, from 55 to death. There are one or two points to be made about these proposals. It is suggested that we marry as soon as the female is biologically fit for bearing children because, in a humantrue society, there would no longer be economic reasons for having to wait to marry. It would be ideal if our young were to become humantruly aware, and sexually awakened, at the same age at which girls mature into women, fully prepared for childbirth, making it in every way the right age for marriage. At present, however, it appears that the human female (as already mentioned) may be capable of conceiving a child as early as 12/13 years of age (or, in some cases, not until the age of 17), but will not be fully fit to bear that child, in good health and safety, until the age of 18. I think it inevitable that in the course of a few generations in a stable and secure humantrue society these presently conflicting factors shall reconcile themselves. In the meantime we have the problems of sexual frustration, promiscuity, contraception and abortion. Unless we deal with these problems in the most sympathetic and effective ways that we possibly can, it will be much harder to bring about that which will solve this and all our other unacceptable problems - humantrue society - for the emotional and physical effects of this transition from child to adult can seriously disturb the mind. Humantrue socity would have built into it the means of making this transition as painless, sure, smooth and fulfilling as possible. Whilst children of 14 would then be already supraconscious, they would need something more than the community's understanding support to cope with the strong sexual instincts presently first experienced at that age. Perhaps the answer isto marry at 15, but (provided that a safe and effective means of contraception isfound) to delay childbirth until 18.

There are several advantages in the practice of parents staying together, in the community, for 20 years after marriage. Wives and husbands will benefit from sharing the same family and community responsibilities. Children will thrive on having the full-time care of both parents and on the varied interest, stimulation, teaching and growing responsibilities of community life. When adult individuals reach age 38, at the end of this stage, their children will be married and perhaps parents already, or soon to be so. The ex-parents, now embarking on the next stage of learning new skills and going away to work for the community at large, or concentrating on work in the home Mainhouse, will still be young at 38. They will bring to bear on their work a thorough knowledge of the concerns, needs and cares of life within any Gathering, and whatever they do and wherever they go they will still live in a local community Mainhouse, sharing in those same concerns and helping to provide those needs and cares. When individuals reach age 55 and give up their special work, they will return to devoting their time entirely to the local community, perhaps the Mainhouse of their birth. They will then pass on to others the benefit of their wisdom, experience and special knowledge, and will do their share of the daily chores for as long as they are able. Eventually, in old age, they will submit to the loving support and care of the general community.

The question arises - how will we keep happy in a humantrue society - what part, if any, will entertainment play? It seems to me that entertainment should never be a formalised performance but always a matter of spontaneous expression as part of the pleasure of all, including oneself, even if that which is expressed is a well-known song or story. I suppose the most fundamentally satisfying form of such expression is music. Music is bound to be basically a formalised pattern of notes, and intellectual music a complex interrelationship of many such patterns. Therefore perhaps it shall never be given as formal live entertainment (as distinct from spontaneous playing) thus avoiding the creation of three divided and unequal elements - the written or remembered musical pattern, the performer, and the audience, which puts barriers between the composer, performer, and listener which are, or can become, class distinctions. Perhaps musical performances shall be always for the direct enjoyment of the performers alone - to enjoy music you will have to perform or play it yourself. The playing of recorded music might not seem to set up the same objectionable triangle, yet the recording has to be performed in the first place and might create undesirable demand for the best, for professionalism and unfavourable comparison with amateur effort. Perhaps all music already recorded by the autoculture shall be preserved and privately played, but never again publicly performed or newly recorded by the humantrue society. In this way it might be simply enjoyed but without competitive comparisons, so as to inspire rather than discourage amateur musicians.

But it might be that we shall rule against recorded performances, deciding that music shall be entirely an individual means of fulfilment, like the blackbird singing in the bush of a summer's evening. We might agree that an individual's musical compositions could be printed and distributed, for good music is an emotional reflection of intellectual exercise, and that which takes its character from humantrue society shall surely have the good effect of always promoting humantruth. In the meantime, when the ideal society has yet to be achieved, newly composed humantrue music could become a vehicle of intellation, having itself no meaning but urging the mind to discover and realise truth - the feelings evoked by its true harmonies inspiring us to seek true correlations in the mind.

It is noticeable that people who compose or perform good music do not normally engage in highly competitive or violent activities. This may be partly because they are more sensitive than normal, or because they are entirely preoccupied with the complex disciplines and techniques involved. But it would appear to be mainly that this play of emotion totally absorbs their whole being because it is enmeshed with their highest faculty of intellect, giving satisfaction far beyond that of instinct and automated consciousness.

Whether we come to know all truth - factual truth - is unimportant. Much potential knowledge exists despite us, without the need of our knowing it, unaffected by our ignorance of its fact. What isimportant is that for as long as we dolive, we live truly. Most fact, however presently true, will become progressively redundant with the advance of true realisation, and true only of the past.

The cooperative comradeship of humantrue society shall give us such deep satisfaction as to make us well content with our lives. But however content our intellects may be, it is likely that our emotions will find cause to swing high or low from time to time, so that we willseek entertainment, to let off high spirits and raise low spirits, and such entertainment willbe local, and mostly spontaneous - games, charades, sing-songs or story-telling and the like. We might still feel the need for gathering to celebrate, or to cheer ourselves, on certain occasions such as the coming of spring, mid-summer, the bringing in of harvest, or the bleak mid-winter. That we presently hang over television and radio, or sit and drink in pubs, or attend more formal entertainments, surely indicates the poverty of our communal life, and our reliance on the Machine's substitutes.

Given the stressless humantrue way of life - good diet, plently of physical and mental activity without conflict, tension, fear or anxiety - we shall be healthy. That is to say our bodies, allowing for old age, shall function as they ought, easily able to eliminate toxic wastes and to kill off any normally invading diseases. Such good health helps to keep us on an even keel in any case, and increases the savour of life. Whilst human mutations will no longer be needed, the randomness of reproduction would remain desirable if only as the source of interesting variation in human character and ability, in a society which shall no longer present opportunities for, or make demands on individuals to put their ability or temperament to false and inhuman use. Members of a humantrue society shall be people who want above all to do the right thing, and to repress impulses arising from a false past. Such things as wishing to make the most of, or flaunting one's appearance will no longer appeal. And eventually, as all people live similar lives, their physical differences shall become less and less pronounced. The effect of understanding and actually livinghumantruth will have a dramatically good effect on our health in that every feature of individual being, from the basic individual cell to the deepest cortex layer, will be happily oriented the same way.

Honest research is needed to decide what abnormal diseases there are, if any, which healthy bodies and minds cannot fight alone, and what special manufactured drugs other than herbal remedies are vitally required to cure them. Medical skills will be needed, and hospitals, but on a far smaller scale than at present, to treat accidents and any such unavoidable diseases, to care for mothers in childbirth perhaps, and to treat infirmities of the very old. Our chief concern will be to maintain good health rather than minister to ill-health. In particular there shall be much less mentally-caused illness of mind or body. A question to be investigated is this - given a healthy way of life, how much must humans expect to suffer from any cause and how far ought we to expect that suffering to be relieved, or eventually eliminated? When the accent is on a useful and fulfilling life, there will surely be less importance given to holding on to life at all costs. When it becomes a burden on us and we see it to be a burden on others, however willingly they bear it, we ought to have the free option of voluntarily ending our life. We might have to draw a line beyond which the individual could not expect the community to prolong life artificially.

There is the question of medical training. How far is the present long training of doctors and the complexity of the medical institution necessary, and to what extent is it the unnecessary product of the Machine and autoprogression? I think a humantrue society will be well served by everyone acquiring basic knowledge and skill enough to deal with childbirth, also minor ailments and accidents - this to be passed from generation to generation and by books, radio , television and the internet. Some of us between 38 and 55 might then learn further by apprenticeship at hospitals.

Unlike the existing reality, this will be a reality for which we are physically, let alone mentally, designed. As flesh and blood creatures we must put in to the biosphere as much as we take out. By relying chiefly on our own labour, we will fall in with the natural evolution which equipped us for the purpose. In this way the energy we get from our food will be equal to that which we use up in the process of producing that food, so sustaining the natural cycle as nearly as possible.

All these things seem to be right and necessary to the upholding of humantrue principles, principles which answer to supraconscious awareness and will allow our lives faithfully to reflect that awareness. They do not, of course, represent more than a sketchy outline of a humantrue framework of life - a whole book could be devoted to the detailed deliberations required before its concrete constitution were fully agreed and decided. There are many questions and doubts, most of which arise from our present conditioning by a false concept of reality and shall be answered simply by supraconsciousness, but others are not so simply resolved.

For example, when parents reach the age of thirty-eight, after their children mature (or thirty-five if girls mature at fifteen), will they stay together, or part? Where will they find sexual outlet, if parted? Promiscuity has present bad effects, from the betrayal of trust to AIDS. Shall we eliminate these bad effects in a humantrue society, and will we still see free sexual activity as a betrayal when the children are no longer dependent on us, nor we on one another, alone? Will it be a matter, after thirty-eight, of either remaining with our original mate, or changing to another, permanently? What happens to those who cannot find a second mate, or, for that matter, a first? How shall we overcome the problem that some women are pretty and some men handsome, others not, and most of us find the former more attractive? Shall we try to find some means of putting an end to our sexual drives, at thirty-eight? The sex drive is vital and powerful, but outside of necessity for reproduction of our species it can cause much harm.

Whilst there is no doubt that the Machine presently threatens our destruction, in certain areas of the drug-oriented medical sphere it could be said to accomplish human survival. In planning a humantrue society we have to consider the appalling actuality of AIDS, to combat which is requiring huge resources of science and technology established by the Machine. Leaving aside the question whether all this iseffective against the disease, shall a more simple humantrue society deal with a similar threat? But shall such threats arise in a humantrue society? And if they do, despite the best efforts of that society to protect itself by simple and reasonable measures, shall we not then be ready to die, or to accept the risk of dying, rather than compromise humantruth?

Another question is this - shallwe be able to rid ourselves of the custom of preferred relationships? I suggest that in a humantrue society, apart from the special needs of marriage and parenthood, all our love, affection, care, interest and attention shall be fully given to everyonein our community, and everybodywe meet or give hospitality to. Other than this, though all humanity are our sisters and brothers, when they are beyond our reach we leave them to give their love and interest to, and receive it from, the community where they presently belong, knowing they will be caring and cared for. We shall expect no one to reserve this giving exclusively for us, nor ourselves reserve it for any absent loved one on the grounds of blood ties or special friendship. Yet there shall be no strangers, and everyone we meet shall be met as a friend. Though we may doubt our ability to change in this way, we should recognise that our present habit of forming exclusive relationships with our own kith and kin and allies is part of the concept of false existing reality in which such discrimination is needed as a defence against general hostility. Humantruly we shall haveto change in this way, by intention, until it becomes itself habitual, for preferred relationships can lead to different preferred aims, contrary interests, distinct groups, and the growth of conflict between them, and so also between individuals who have no real reason to quarrel.

Whilst all that has been said envisages the eradication from human being and society of such as competition, elitism, autoprogression, self-interest, corruption and brutish aggression, it is to be expected that doubts and questions shall stilllinger strongly in our minds whether all these things canbe eradicated. This is because they are so much part of our existing reality that at present it is hard to imagine everybody forsaking these characteristics. For example in sports we automatically take sides and want our chosen side to win. Competing to win, in sport and for any reasons other than survival, is an adopted human habit, a sublimation or corruption of basic instinct. Instinct has the object of achieving the general healthy survival of a species, otherwise the competitive drive is a waste of effort. For humans, competition, having been made a way of seeking survival which now threatenssurvival, is certainly useless but has become a habit which is hard to break, so that no other way of living seems possible for humans.

The whole idea of competing, winning or losing, even in sport, shall have to be expunged from our minds. Humantrue society entirely depends on the growth of supraconscious awareness to the point where everyindividual is so responsibly aware that such automatic characteristics will be wholly abhorrent and unthinkable. It then depends upon supraconscious humanity constituting a society in which those existing habits are uncalled for, unnecessary, unheard of, unknown - non-existent.

You may have found these last three chapters on the Constitution to be somewhat calculating and unfeeling, with little of that tender emotion of which the best in us is capable and which such as romantic poetry expresses. But the objective is to replace a reality in which such delicate emotion can co-exist with its opposite of blank indifference and hateful violence. It is seeking a pattern of living which is in itself truly logical and practical, but excludes that which presently brings out the worst in us - a pattern which will become our unquestioned humantrue foundation, a cradle of tenderness and compassion, a platform of benign creativity.

It is difficult to detach ourselves from the here and now, and to detach our intellations from the contrary influences of everyday reality. Our persuasive instinct is to live life as it is, and to put our whole range of emotions into it. Our present impulsion is to obeyexisting instinct, in terms of which the intellectually better humantrue ways might seem to be lack-lustre. It could well be for this reason that you might have found these last three chapters unfeeling. The same unwillingness to break with the Machine and to detach the self from domination by conscious automation might make the following four chapters seem tedious. But it is necessary to uncover every last conception, practice, attitude and habit of the present human society because all are influenced by automatic conditioning. That influence needs to be rooted out. It canbe a tedious business, if it is not done with a will, but if it is notthoroughly done the Machine will keep its fundamenmtal grip on our thinking, though we protest to the contrary.

Pt.VII REALISATION
DECIDING THE CONSTITUTION
Previous Chapter
42 Definition of Human Being
43 Code of Individual Behaviour

Current Chapter
44 Framework of Life

Next Chapter
Pt.VII Realisation. Prep. the Way for Change. Chap.45 Personal Orientation

Back to Home Page INDEX.htm