It is necessary that the whole human race changes its mind. In order to do so we have to change the ways in which we arrive at understanding - to put reason before feeling. This is necessary because our existing reality iswrong, which is why it offends our moral sensibilities so much. It is amazing that humanity as a whole has failed to reach this conclusion. Amazing that for all our mental capacity we still prefer to satisfy our instinctive sensibilities, putting feeling before reason.
It is possible to get used to anything, and then usual to resist change. The great majority of us have adjusted our feelings and values to the reality that exists, accepting the here and now as natural. We try to select and reduce our experience to a personal reality whose joys and sorrows we can more or less handle. But this allows autoprogression to roll on unabated, unseen because it grips the world behind our backs, pulling the strings that we imagine to be in our hands. And although it never gives us best overall we save face by pretending that this is the best of all possible worlds.
Our present realities, our own concoctions of memberships - of a family, a community, a racial group, a nation, an ideology - are combinations that may be workable on a small scale because they can be made to fit locally for the sake of close relations but not worldwide because they are then found to conflict uncontrollably. To understand our present world we have to look at it as a whole, which our literature is supposed to do. Our failure to achieve this understanding is demonstrated by the fact that James Joyce's Ulysses is considered to be one of the foremost examples of literature this century. This brilliant book throws penetrating light on the personal realities of a handful of people in Dublin and through them reveals the general plight and delight of humans everywhere. It does not reveal the nature of automatic reality that makes the universal character what it is - this hopeless and insane struggle between animal instinct and the intellect. Neither does Ulysses reveal that this undeniably real human actuality, that so recognisably doesexist, need notexist; would notexist but for this obscured yet universally accepted fact - that the founding automaton makes us the ridiculous victims of an unequal battle between our true humanity and the almighty Machine. If we are to probe meaningfully into humanity it is not our present reality we must explore but our intellect, its ultimate advance in mind evolution, the postconscious and its humantrue findings.
If we aspire to better things why do we not attain them? Should we not be ashamed of the novel Ulysses, as a prominent example of the failure of human beings to achieve intellectual potential, rather than be proud of it as a work of genius? Consider the characters in this book, ordinary persons motivated by the same factors and contained by the same limitations as all humans on Earth. What good effect are they having on the generally bad state of our society? Are they likely to prevent war, for example, or to stir it up? Do they tend always towards reason, compassion and co-operation, or always towards reckless chaos? It is so much easier to tolerate or take part in the random interplay of instinctive emotions and bodily functions because understanding of these things exists, ready-made, in all of us. There is a kind of comfort in it. It is so much more difficult to stand apart and successfully make the case for humantruth, because understanding of ithas to be personally created and newly developed in each and every mind and goes against the grain of reality.
Existing reality allows nobody to experience whole happiness. Generally speaking, the happier persons appear to be, the less complex their thinking must be. The reason is that our whole happiness lies in the fulfilment of truth and this has nowhere been achieved. When we talk of happiness, few of us have any clear and complete conception of what it can be. If we could commonly conceive of the happiness that humantrue society, the right reality, would bring, and which we sadly lack, then that ideal society would not seem so remote a prospect. I shall try to convey a sense of that whole happiness in Chapter 44 Framework of Life. Our present joys are of a lesser kind; foreground highlights against a dark background, automatic attractions that are the delights of unfulfilled minds. It is the automaton that is satisfied, not ourselves, because our society fulfils its aims rather than ours. That is why it is easier for automated individuals to find apparent contentment.
Animals have conflicts, but every instinctive activity is for the general well-being of the species. Ideally we should have no conflicts of interest because our intellect can care for us better without them. But the Machine bristles with conflicts of interest, such as between employer and employed. This was illustrated some time ago by a British Miners Union debate called to decide whether Coal Board proposals for the running of a new pit, made in the interests of productivity (i.e. profitability), were also in the interests of the miners. The debate failed to find clear issues and the matter proved impossible to deal with except on the basis of conflict of prejudice, and therefore impossible to resolve, because the aims of humanity and the Machine are irreconcilable. What is best for the Machine is not good for its human workers and what is best for the workers would be bad for the Machine, in the long term if not seemingly in the short term.
This irreconcilable conflict was also illustrated at Christmas in 1914 in the trenches of France at the beginning of the Great War. Humanity, which had no true reason to fight, was represented by soldiers facing each other across no-man's-land, who climbed out of their trenches and met together in friendship. Had humanity then grasped responsibility for its affairs this must have marked the end of the war. But the Machine was in command, represented by a leadership which had committed itself to war, and by military marshalls who had committed all these young men to battle and who now asserted their legal authority by opening artillery fire. The sound of carol-singing was drowned out, the soldiers fled back to their respective trenches, and the war went on for four years and millions died horribly for no good reason.
The general instinctive human will to survive as a species has been translated into the selfish will of the individual or group to survive within and according to the Machine. With religions and ideologies and national cultures, also with higher ranks, professions and other privileged positions, it is a will to preserve these limited realities and their automatic recognition and protection.
Only the free and independent mind can contain whole supraconsciousness of humantruth. But in a humantrue society each individual will would be reinforced by the humantrueness of world society, and by the general will to keep it so.
A chief obstacle to humantruth is that we refuse to accept it for the reason that our overwhelming reality does not acknowledge it. Yet that which would be true in a perfect world isperfectly true; it is true that we would prefer a perfect world, therefore we should prefer the truth to false automatic reason both because it is true and because it alone can prepare the way for a humantrue world. We are only required to release our minds from the shackles of prejudiced opposition. Thereafter, if we take intellect as our guide, we shall be faced with great upheavals and apparent sacrifices but shall inevitably arrive at humantruth, the nearest we can get to perfection.
As a general rule, insofar as weighty humantrue ideals have occurred to them, the young presently manage lightly to shrug these off, excepting where such ideals are given a popular temporary image like 'Live Aid' in Ethiopia, or are primarily a matter of feeling like the present wave of opposition to war. The hard-working, money-earning, child-rearing middle-aged person normally has no time to spare for high ideals, and the old who have learned some true lessons no longer have energy to spare, or much opportunity, for impressing their wisdom on the world. We, the conglomerate human race, our conscious selves, are given to the Machine, our minds largely made over to automatically calculated thought. We are not our true selves, which, situated within the postconscious sphere, would make our society in intellect's true image.
It can be argued that we havesurvived, despite everything. We even increase in overall numbers, despite the Machine and all its inhumanities. We might go to the extent of arguing that nuclear war would not exterminate us but so reduce our numbers as to benefit our survival as a species. But that is a callous argument which ignores the suffering in such a war, and in its aftermath. Imagine the agony and grief inseperable from the stark fact that ordinary (not nuclear) wars have caused the deaths of one thousand five hundred million humans since the battle of the Somme. Even this sombre fact does not impress upon us that our rightful destiny is to observe truth, and that we are clearly and dismally failing to achieve that destiny. Our present reality is a matter of survival mostly in terms of the sheer unthinking and instinctive life-force purpose to express energy, even to the point of nuclear holocaust. If we go on surviving in this way, without annihilation but becoming ever more automated, we shall come to know even deeper dissatisfaction, but, not understanding our own intellects, we shall never know why.
The majority get some satisfaction from their role as cogs in the Machine, whether as members of the governing or executive elite or as units of the work-force. But at best there are satisfaction-gaps, partly filled by ambitions, future hopes or fanciful dreams. The gaps are then topped up with substitutes; from music, books, travel, games and hobbies, to alcohol, cream-cakes, sports, strip-shows and fruit-machines. All this does not amount to true fulfilment, whatever we pretend. It is overshadowed by knowledge of injustice, hunger, neglect, aggression and despair in the world - the other face of the automatic economy's coin - and it is challenged by our lurking awareness of abdicated responsibilities.
The human condition is presently relative to automatic reality and the individual's position in it, which can be anything from extreme privilege to utterly miserable poverty. The concept of humantrue society, on the other hand, is of an optimum standard of life that everybody equally enjoys. Humantruth could not countenance such states of being as are a normal and inevitable part of automatic reality, for example deprivation, which I have referred to frequently and now try to describe more fully.
Deprivation is never fully admitted or truly acknowledged because the normally pictured national character is on the privileged side of the social scale. It is this character that is the voice, and manager, of the media; that may look at the deprived with sympathy but does not look at reality from their viewpoint. Automated privileged persons look mainly to their own interests, and to the interests of the underprivileged only when these involve no sacrifice and present no threat. The underprivileged, by the very nature of their deprivation, lack opportunity, will, energy, confidence and inclination to take the initiative in their own interests.
To be poor in worldly terms is not necessarily to be deprived. The Scottish highlanders before the infamous clearances had very little but were happy and contented together. To be wretchedly poor is to be deprived of life's joys andbodily needs. Modern poverty is being deprived of sufficient money, and therefore of automatic satisfactions rather than basic necessities, yet can damage mental as well as physical health. The urban poor are subject to all the accumulating horrors of living below the standard of life to which society in general is geared. The Machine has obliterated much of the natural open countryside (which gave joy to the highlanders) and replaced it with concrete jungles, admission to whose pleasures and privileges requires money. The urban poor lack the normal facilities so that their shelter, environment, food and clothing are of a low quality and their mental stimulation, emotional satisfaction and general contentment is impaired. As a consequence they themselves, in the quality of their beings, also tend to become sub-standard, even to some extent in their genes, so that their defects may be passed on to their children. This means not only that they become even less able to fight back, but that they seem incapable, in the blinkered eyes of the thoughtless privileged, of appreciating anything better than they already have. This was the cause of racial discrimination in South Africa, and in the southern states of America, which is not primarily a matter of skin colour but of the emotional inability of the privileged (white) to treat as equals those who are underprivileged (particularly black), because they are notpresently actually equal. Overcoming this discrimination is a matter of understanding that all humans are potentially acceptably equal; a matter of bringing in a humantrue society that enables all to reach full potential; a matter, in the meantime, of recognising and condemning unnecessary differences and inequalities, but understandingly tolerating those that are presently inescapable until they disappear.
It is evident that the mental and physical condition of humans, and so the quality and length of their life expectancy, is lower the further down the existing amoral social scale they are. That this is still true, despite our pretended morality, is indicated by the apparent fact that upwards of one quarter of the children in Britain, one of the 'richer' countries of the world, are living in poverty and are undernourished - a fact that might be expected to rouse us to urgent action but does not. This situation will continue unless humanitarian initiative istaken, because an effect of poverty is also to rob us of the will to rise above it, relieve its ills, and make our own differently satisfying standards of life. Travelling further to the better shops, or cultivating the garden to get healthier, cheaper food becomes too much of an effort. So does visiting health clinics. It is virtually impossible for the long-term unemployed to bolster their confidence to the point of convincing and persuading a prospective employer that they should get the job. When we are poor, pinched, undernourished, cold and shabby, most institutions of the Machine - run by the better-off, who are employed by others even better-off - feel closed to us because of our class. And when we are subject to all the pressures, such as housework and children, but with almost none of the pleasures of adult consumerism, we turn for release to smoking and drinking, habits which are not good for the body or the pocket but which may be the only things to keep us going. Against this mean and empty background it is hardly surprising that many of us should turn to crime, and be condemned for it by others of very different background.
There are other facets of relative deprivation. In the competitive Machine anyone who does not belong to the upper ranks of the hierarchy might well feel deprived - of authority, power, influence and responsibility for human destiny, particularly that of the self. For instance, there appears to be a marked deterioration in health and life expectancy in the descending ranks of the British Civil Service. The unwarranted power of 'superiors' and enforced subservience of 'inferiors', in an unnatural automated version of the pecking-order, evidently imposes greater stress on the latter and is likely to cause them to suffer many and various unhappy and unhealthy consequences of stress. This must be especially so where Machine 'inferiors' would have been instinctive dominants in the naturalpecking order, and whose 'superiors' would have been submissives.
In humantruth we should not allow ourselves to tolerate the fact that anybodyis deprived. We must all equally benefit from life, and give to it, according to the same standard. What that standard should be in material terms must be determined for us by the safely available and replaceable resources of Earth. Otherwise it is up to us supraconsciously to decide the constitution of our society.
It is worth noting that about one in six of the world's population is a Chinese peasant, newly liberated from the old landlords and the more recently imposed cultural revolution. Eight hundred million of them live directly off the land, feeding the other two hundred million Chinese and self-surviving almost entirely by their own skill and physical labour. We might think this a hard and primitive life. To them it seems to be their eternal and inevitable struggle alongside nature, with so many all in the same boat, and so little technology interfering as not to awaken those dreams of easier ways and tempting things that give rise to dissatisfaction. They periodically suffer natural disasters, particularly floods but, where the automaton has not yet introduced them to the false delights of the competitive money economy, it is doubtful whether many of them feel deprived. To them life is naturally hard, and to be contentedly endured. If their labour burdens were lightened by a few simple mechanical aids, their rivers controlled in order to prevent flooding, their population stabilised and, most of all, were they to achieve a state of supraconscious awareness, then their way of life could be yet more happy and contented, and infinitely more fulfilled. This could possibly represent the humantrue norm.
But, as I have mentioned, the Chinese government is beginning to introduce the peasants to money-incentives. Their situation illustrates the crucial human choice between its humanity and the automaton. If China allows the competitive money economy to gain this foothold, she will achieve the objective of raising productivity but at the cost of growing dissatisfaction having to be met by accelerating material consumerism and general automation. She would end up producing food by mechanical means and joining with the West in selling out her true potential to the Machine and exploiting whole Earth resources to exhaustion.
The alternative for China, as for all humanity, is supraconscious awareness in support of humantrue society. This might not achieve the immediate objective of increased productivity that the prospect of gain can persuade people to achieve, but even if people do not readily respond cooperatively and voluntarily no other solution should be attempted. The humantruth should be constantly reiterated so that individuals, seeing the results of humanty's failure to take responsibility for itself, will eventually understand that each is fully responsible for the life of all. And as supraconscious humans begin voluntarily to give their labour in the common cause (not because they are made to, as under communism, but because they intelligently wish to) they will know new and deep satisfaction. Both labour and satisfaction will then cause each other to increase, enriching rather than exhausting the whole. This understanding is vital - that without supraconscious awareness there is no humanfuture.
It is possible to see the Machine as a logically balanced reciprocal system. Such a view is likely to be elitist, for it does not show sympathetic awareness of ordinary worldwide human experience. To apply the laws of physics to humanity and its society in this way is to ignore this fact - that truly reasoned opposition to automatic society arises from the most broadly advanced intellects. It follows that a society which is to be acceptable to intellect must be arranged by intellect - it must be humantrue, which means it shall be acceptable also to honest common awareness. Creatures of nature do not criticise instinct for its brutalities because they dofollow the laws of physics and so can notcriticise. The whole significance of the birth of intellect is that in order to grow it must lay down and keep to its own new guide lines, for it transcends all that has gone before. It represents not a continuation of the same evolution but a revolution.
The following remarks relate to the foregoing but presuppose belief in my theory that realisation of truth, in its various meanings, is the purpose of life, with universal true equilibrium as its consummation. I have said that I do not insist on this belief but also have to say that the further my intellation goes the more the probability of this theory being true is confirmed. Garrett Hardin's three laws of thermodynamics are :
I believe that the scientifically accepted second law of thermodynamics states unequivocally that the entropy of a closed system must increase. Without doubt we must eventually die as individuals, and as a species. If universal life fails to achieve its objective - truth - then this universe is also doomed, but not exactly to die. It, and its governing physical laws will be converted from expanding to imploding, then eventually back to expanding and so ad infinitum.
If we remain automated as a society we certainly shall not get out of the game. But if we begin pursuing our true objective we will enter another reality with different values; no longer a game but the essential stuff of life, to arrive at which was the ultimate objective of the game. The laws of thermodynamics, and the reality of which they are part, need not necessarily be absolute.
It has been suggested, according to the belief that the laws of thermodynamics areabsolute at least in the present universe, that world human society is becoming a closed system and so is doomed. There is a relationship between this belief and the so-called political 'new enlightment' which rejects controlled socialism and praises free enterprise. To keep the present system open it is held that autoprogression must be continued and accelerated, though hopefully in a humane way. The suggested means of making it humane is the observance of moral influences, ultimately by submitting ourselves to supposed superior intelligences - to consciousness of 'god' or 'cosmos', through prayer or meditation.
These suggestions arise from misunderstanding. If we remain harnessed to the machine we will be dependently subject to autoprogression which can notbe made humane. There is no god or superior cosmic intelligence, only our own postconscious minds. And we cannot be guided by the moral influence of intellect when autoprogression demands the applicationof our intellect to its aims and interests.
Dissipative systems increase in entropy because they accumulate toxicity, which, in our case, means that our will and ability to regenerate energy declines. The reason for this is that such systems are not designed to so cleanse and renew themselves that they operate perpetually. Under the influence of life-force, the development of life is accomplished by continual reproduction and mutation of its forms and systems in competition. This ensures advance in complexity with the object of achieving intellect. Once a fully intellectual system is achieved it shall be capable, under the influence of truth, of making itself perfectly viable and stable. The stable intellectual system (such as human society, which can be totally reformed, as distinct from our physical bodies that probably can not and should not change so dramatically) will independently dispose of its toxicity and regenerate energy, in observance of truth, so as to fully serve its purpose of reinforcing the universal influence of truth. Intellectual systems must end, of course, when matter breaks down as the physical universal dissipative system comes to an end, but the universe which the influence of truth brings to succesful conclusion will not die, nor be explosively reborn - it will have been already permanently transformed.
The Machine sustains its expression of energy by continually changing its systems through autoprogression. As an automatic overall system it presently thus contrives to keep itself open, its entropy now decreasing, if anything. But it keeps us from realising our objective, truth, which has always been the unknowing objective of life everywhere. So we must overcome the forces underlying autoprogression, in order to gain that objective, by observing our true morality. Humantrue society shall rise above the laws of thermodynamics and, when our job is done and the influence has grown strong enough, these laws will be superceded by the principle of true equilibrium - the ultimate, perpetual state of being.
In Chapter 7, and Chapter 8, I dealt with the way in which the Machine conditions our thinking and characters eccentricto our fundamental nature. Humantrue reality would be entirely concentricto our true nature Our adult minds would be already reformed supraconsciously and intellating truly. When we came into the world we would find it true. We would not have systematically to falsity our minds, split into two and think deviously in order to live We would not have to accept parts of the world, its institutions and practices, and reject the rest. We would be able, willing and happy to be part of it all. We are great intellects, able to make life wholly agreeable. There is no good reason why it should be so hard, fearful, confusing, frustrating and disappointing.
Since my ongoing intellation continually confirms the concept of true equilibrium I am bound to return to it constantly as the ultimate explanation of everything. For instance - the universe is composed of energy, which exerts enormous influences; electro-magnetism, gravity, heat, light and so on. Truth is greater than energy, for it would still exist were energy to cancel itself out, but truth lacks the potency of substance. If truth is to achieve its aim its influence in the universe must increase, by way of intellect, whilst the substantial potency of energy reduces. It is conceivable that the present universal expansion and evolution, beginning with the Big Bang, was triggered by a weak true influence and has now reached the point of depending on us, one example of its sought-for achievement, to increase that influence by pursuing truth rather than being impelled by energy.
I am inclined to believe that the true influence seeks the state of 1 x 1 = 1 because this represents maximum perfection with minimum strife or disturbance. By way of our intellect it determines our morality. It prefers stable to volatile conditions, simplicity to complexity, goodwill to illwill, tranquility to stress. It prefers life to be peacably co-operative, rather than aggressively competitive, as a step towards eventually having all animate and inanimate matter reduced to simple harmonious energy. By making our society humantrue, shall we not boost the influence of truth in the universe, and by turning our backs on autoprogression, material consumption and all such features of the Machine, shall we not reduce the influence of energy? But, just as the true influence had to use energy to produce human intellectual life, so must we make painstaking and determined effort to achieve the humantrue ideal. Not by actively (or idly, even though caringly) but fundamentally thoughtlessly going along with the here and now.
The idea that there is one body of truth for humanity - humantruth - is commonly resisted. This idea is seen as the imposition of dull conformity whilst the concept of individuals being entitled to their own versions of truth is equated with variety and freedom. But this preference is founded on experience of a false reality, on inertia of the human intellect which has allowed itself to be carried along by the sheer momentum of the giant Machine, treating reform as yet another game. The ultimate function of intellect can only be to arrive at truth. Were its function to lie we would not be morally concerned with anything. Where it is permitted to function either way, as at present here on Earth, it is difficult to distinguish the true from the false with certainty. But it is impossible that two or more intellects, given the same knowledge and correlating it thoroughly, should arrive at different versions of truth. That we do presently arrive at different versions indicates that we are not fulfilling intellect, and is the reason why we continue living in chaotic confusion.
Putting aside their mental conditioning, and the fact that their values, preoccupations and lifestyle are dictated by automatic reality, most people, at the periphery of all this intellectual questioning, are reasonable, kind, and considerate within their particular sphere and amongst their circle of friends, relatives and colleagues. So if you attack the Machine to which they are firmly attached you seem to be attacking them. A breakthrough can be expected only if they themselvesbegin criticising their own personal reality and everything on which their being rests. To continue click here