An article in a newspaper, headed 'How to Market your Talents', is really about how to sell-out your true virtue in order to be bought by the Machine.
Individuals who are unwilling to sell themselves in this way because they are in doubt about the morality of our existing reality and dissatisfied with the ethics of the Machine, tend to express opinions which, although suggested by supraconscious intuition are not backed up by all the intellation needed to build full awareness of humantruth. As a result such opinions, though pointing in the true direction, are easily dismissed not only because they are eccentric to the here and now but also because they are not wholly complete enough to be truly convincing.
Certain limited progress has been made in this regard. Humane concerns which officialdom would once have thought naive, such as identifying the needs of disabled persons, concern for the rights of animals and opposition to war, are now much more widely accepted as human rights by the institutions, in principle at least. Progress is being made in the extent and degree of ecological awareness on the part of peoples and authorities. The authors of the books appraised in the last chapter carry this awareness further and deeper into peoples' minds and the consciences of institutions. Yet even these authors regard it as naive to talk of absolute truth, to consider our entire reality as wrong, and to contemplate complete change. But one thing that experience doesshow us, I think, is that half-baked reform never succeeds but eventually allows the old false principles to re-assert themselves, and we no longer have time and space for half-hearted trial and error; we have to choose humantruth quickly, and must get it right first time.
People often say that radical ideas (even the half-baked ones) are too far-out for them. The truth of it is that such people are too close to existing false reality; their minds need to be far removed from their presently preferred and limited centres-of-self if they are to find their true selves and to fulfil their true potential. If this is done they will be able to look back and see just how mean, false and unworthy was the reality in which they were once immersed.
Figure 16a shows the presently normal individual. It illustrates that nothing much is really changing. Our children are being conditioned as before, oriented to jobs in the Machine. But they, and we, are the individuals who must change contraryto reality, without the help of a sympathetic framework of life. We and they must change ourselves voluntarily, sacrifice automatic advantages and rewards, break the Machine's stranglehold, assert the human right, avoid taking refuge in religion and build a humantrue reality for future generations. Those future generations will continue to be humantrue because they will be supported by that sympathetic reality as well as by their own true awareness. But the first to change must be those individuals now living. Only wecan do it - there is nobody and nothing else. If we don't take up the challenge, there will be no human future.
How to humanise ourselves? First by intellating and becoming supraconscious - otherwise we will never know who or what we really are. If humanity at large does not do so it will never know what could and should have been. I believe in the possibility, if not the probability, of a humantrue future because my own postconscious mind has been able to break through to my consciousness. If this can happen to me, and prove itself true, then it could happen to everybody. The effect must be that everybody would insist on their humantrue conviction becoming a reality, as is the human right.
The conscious self, illustrated by Figure 16a, is represented by a centralised construction of thought. For purposes of comparison this construction might be taken to contain, on average, 100 units of preferred thought, out of a total conscious capacity of maybe 10,000 units and in contrast to a postconscious capacity of possibly 1,000,000 units. This centralised construction determines the characteristic behaviour of the conscious self, whose limited reason and instinctive reactions dictate the conversion of input to output in response to disciplines imposed by the conscious arena and pressures from the Machine, especially from that area of reality (about 1000 units) which this individual has experienced and which, therefore, influences the thinking which goes to the making of this conscious self. It can be seen that there are many possible differences of input, influence, choice, compulsion, chance, and situation, which result in many distinctly different and disagreeing characters.
We, the great majority of Earth's 6,000,000,000 human individuals, do not realise how incomplete we are becausewe are intellectually incomplete; because our whole minds have not been fulfilled. Therefore, when one of us talks to another we are not talking to the true them,nor they to the true us-it is a matter of inadequate communication between inferior substitutes for the true potentials of two selves, in a reality which neither of them recognises as being similarly inferior and inadequate.
Consider what the thousands of millions of humans are really doing when they rest content with minds such as that of Figure 16a above. It is like building a house, stopping halfway without the roof and windows but calling it a house even so. Or like binding a book, leaving half its pages out but still calling it a book.
A person may know less than true judgement requires, and reason less than is necessary to true awareness, yet is still called a person and entitled to an opinion. Of what value is that opinion? Yet our attempts to direct human society are made by persons with such opinions, responding to the opinion of the majority of others or compromising between many different opinions. I am not suggesting that peoples' opinions should be ignored but that presently, being generally wrong or inadequate, they are unsuitable guides for society. Rather than trying to perfect means of representative government within the Machine - attempting the impossible - we should be encouraging every mind to be supraconscious.
If you take a computer, feed into it the moral obligations which most of us learn and pretend to, then face it with the decisions we are all required to make, it could notdecide except morally. Yet we, with mental potential which no computer can or, we argue, ever could match, are not so honest. I have already explored the reasons why we believe ourselves frequently compelled to ignore our moral convictions. But if, at last, we all stood by those convictions, the contrary compulsions would soon disappear and, as they did so, the world would notcollapse.
We know that thinking (as distinct from intellation) is not exclusive to humans. Animals think. A computer thinks in the calculating sense already discussed. It is a matter of correlating a number of influences and producing the seemingly most appropriate response (ie relative truth) as the answer. On that basis the Machine can think also; with human help it can persuade, oblige and instruct humans to do its will, like a large-scale conscious mind.
The potential human mind is capable of correlating to the ultimate truth, but in existing society we allow our minds to be restricted to a much lower level of active awareness. The individual submits to the institution, yet the individual, potentially if not actually, is infinitely more capable of taking responsibility. Actually, virtually all of us act and react according to the automatic concepts and facts of our circumstances, though to varying degrees. It is said that of all school-children in the UK only about one-third graduate from 'concrete' to 'formal' thinking, ie., as an approximate illustration, from a field of thinking of about 500 units (50 preferred) to a field of 2000 units (200 preferred). This means that two-thirds of the current population are so mentally unstimulated as to be unaware that they are automated. But the one-third, who havegraduated to formal thinking, chooseto be similarly unaware. They take up positions of service to an institution of the Machine and, in order to be successfully effective, preferentially identify themselves with its particular interests and aims (eg 'I am an engineer, a philosopher, a physicist'). They may well profess to understand everything, but the key to their minds, apart from overall acceptance of the Machine, is their position in the institution and identification with its peculiar outlook, as shown in Figure 16b below. These are automated characters, their thinking consciously or subconsciously biased to the possible extent of overriding intuitive or inbred morality and committing, or permitting, immoral acts of inhumanity.
As an example of this currently normal thinking, take the case of a stockbroker at the time when the British and Argentinian governments were in conflict over possession of the Falkland Islands, a dispute over sovereignty and loyalty which, particularly in that it had no true human significance, was typical of our conscious/instinctive society.
The stockbroker is made aware of the possibility of war between the two countries. His free awareness, or those of its findings that he cannot altogether ignore, may question the attitudes of all concerned, cast doubts on their motives or criticise their actions from the humanitarian viewpoint. But when it comes to himself taking hard, Machine-realistic decisions, he puts such 'soft' moralising aside. Adopting, instead, the guides to opinion and decision which the Machine works by, and on which his worldly success (and, he imagines, his happiness) depends, he subjects the Falklands incident to questions raised in his conscious mind by this realistic, automatic approach. How do the parties stand in relation to international law? How is the British government permitted to act by the (unwritten) national constitution? How may it act as a result of its political persuasions? What is the mood of the Argentinians? What forces are available to each side in the area? What is the popular mood in Britain? What is the likely attitude of uninvolved nations - will they support or oppose British military response to the Argentinian invasion?
So far the stockbroker's thinking has been general, passing quickly through a train of human reactions, then dwelling on a worldly realistic analysis on the events and predictions of their outcome. Now he subjects that analysis to his group of preferred elements - the instituted interests which he professes and which he has made the self-interests of his specially contrived superficial identity. These interests make their own specialised final analysis of the general picture, concerned with how the predicted course of events will affect the movement and valuation of stocks and shares. The fundamental element of these interests is profit.
This final analysis is then translated into his own action as appropriate to his position in the stock exchange institution and to his own advantage, and is backed up by his conscious/ instinctive will. This train of specious reasoning which has formulated his professional opinion, his choice, his decision, and which has finally resulted in his action, is part and parcel of his outer personal identity. His action is to sell shares likely to go down in price and buy those likely to rise, thereby to some degree causing events to fall out as predicted. It is not for him officially to support or condemn the war that ensued, only to capitalise on it. He is reinforcing the amoral consensus which supports the concepts of possession and sovereign authority which, in turn, were the causes of this war.
The stockbroker's mind is full of precepts which ideally should not exist in any memory, much less dominate the personality. It is animal instinct that he calls up to defend his contrived personal identity against his own conscience and against the humantrue opposition of others. He constantly patrols the defences of his preferred thought-construction, confirming and reinforcing those elements and connections which contributed to his action. Otherwise he admits to his consciousness only that additional thinking which is not critical of him, and ignores or denies that which iscritical, in order to prevent the truth coming out and to avoid rendering himself unsure. This contrived thinking is characteristic of all members of the automatic institutions.
This wilful process of convincing his already conditioned mind by further conditioning reinforces the stock-broker's self confidence, which increases his chance of success. Confidence and success in the Machine gives credibility to him and his automatic reasoning, convincing others of the well-informed authority of the institution he represents, though it is founded on myth, and establishing his right to a key place in it. When he speaks about himself he sounds confident, because this limited subject is exactly suited by the limited sphere of fitting reason that he applies to it. This is his ego, the self that commands his conscious mind's approval and chief interest, and he is talking about the concerns and affairs of which that mind knows more than anything else.
The stockbroker is open to criticism but has many reasons for acting as he does. The stock exchange exists; it is part of the competitive money economy that presently runs the world. He has a family to keep, and may as well earn his living this way as any other. He feels he could not do it were he to take the road to supraconsciousness because that would weaken his present resolve by raising critical questions and doubts in his mind. He regards the following of that road, as does the automated world in general, as a weakness of character, a failure of duty. So this is the main reason why the stockbroker, like all the other Machine-realists, unswervingly continues as he is - he believes human reality to be necessarily and inevitably confined to the Machine and (albeit unknowingly) to the limited conscious arena, with no viable alternative.
Some present-day Philosophers do seem to be seeking alternatives, but they too confine themselves to the conscious arena in which no true alternative is to be found. It seems paradoxical that although the conscious arena is strictly limited in capacity it contains arguments that never come to an end, but the simple reason for this is that to bring complex arguments to true conclusions requires a very much larger, almost infinite capacity. Such unending arguments are characteristic of the established institution of Philosophy. That which escapes Philosophers, and realists in general, is the awareness that their field of argument is the wrong (conscious) field - that it can never yield the truth. In support of this contention is the specific that Philosophy, for all its long history, has not discovered humantruth. I challenge anyone to provide any better reason why this essentially straightforward truth has escaped the human intellect. Were the ever-arguing Philosophers to open to the guidance of their supreme faculty, their postconscious, they would be unable to continue arguing until all internal doubts were resolved, at which point they would find themselves in agreement, with further argument unnecessary. They would then be able to jettison the huge accumulated mass of irrelevant argument that presently weighs so heavily with their adopted, and defended, mental discipline.
Life can seem good when blindly confined to exclusive compartments in which we see and hear only what we want to, but to be humantruly fulfilled we must be fully aware. Such awareness would reveal that the world must be altogether good if it is to be truly good for any of us - that none of us must live in specialised compartments. We must each take full responsibility.
The following Figure 16c shows four individuals who are typical of the six thousand million occupying the same collective consciousness.
All of these four individuals accept the same concepts and facts of existing automatic reality. Nevertheless, in the case of these particular four (see also Chapter 49) even though the experience of all is that of the same overall reality, in essential character no one's conscious self has anything in common with any of the others. Why is it that these individual conscious selves are centred on separate thought-constructions that are so small by comparison with total conscious capacity? The reason is that their reality is highly competitive and admits of every contradictory possibility that can be imagined. Whereas every individual tacitly accepts the Machine as a whole, none can embody all its many contradictory ideas nor pursue all its conflicting interests. It is necessary for each to select a small number of preferred elements to motivate the self and steer a personal course through life. Not only are all individuals contained by a consensus which is incomplete and false (because it excludes the postconscious), but each individual's meaning and purpose of life, and bias of opinion, is founded upon approximately a mere 1% selection from the Machine's already limited ideas and interests. This is the cause of the enormous amount of disagreement and conflict in present human society. Everyone feels compassion, and is aware that it should feature in all our affairs, but at the same time the different competitive position of each individual puts him or her in conflict with most others and largely rules out compassion.
Every conscious self is pre-formed, to some extent, by upbringing and education, and this is influenced by position in, and experience of the Machine, as shown in the following Figure 16d.
I think it is true to say that any reasonable individual would be disturbed by the suggestion that humanity deliberately compartmented its individuals according to these different degrees of privilege and satisfaction. Of course it does not, but the Machine does, and humanity serves the Machine. These compartments are very roughly designated by numbers. The further and very approximate divisions of outlook, opinion and belief - A, B, C and D are partly predetermined by the previous numbered compartments, partly by the influence of our true humanity in its struggle against the Machine. In an ideal, humantrue society, as a matter of natural human right, it would be our aim to have none of the differences shown numerically and alphabetically in Figure 16d. It would be the objective of all communities to bring all individuals to a similar level of learning and understanding, and to make no differences between them whatever the course of their subsequent abstract fulfilment.
Now let us put the four individual selves from Figure 16c together with their conditioning as shown in Figure 16d above, and show four typical resultant characters A5, B10, C7, and D4 - demonstrated as part of our collective conscious thinking; in relation to the Machine and the overall conscious arena and, in their distant and vague relationship with the postconscious (conscience). The result is the following Figure 16e.
This Figure 16e illustrates the reality of the normal individual as being made up of a preferred self, conditioned and condensed out of the surrounding chaos, out of a collective consciousness, and out of a false and incomplete concensus. This consensus is formed by compromise, between the automated desires and interests of the disunited and competitive human multitude, its contrary human morality, its contrary common morality, and the governing interests of the Machine. Its final shape is affected, usually to a small degree, by such postconscious influence as is allowed to infiltrate consciousness. Figure 16e also shows the potential truly human person - the supraconscious individual E, a self maintaining (mentally, also physically as far as is presently possible) its independence of the whole of present reality and its conscious arena, and keeping direct contact with the postconscious.
Consider the four typical individuals A5, B10, C7 and D4, shown in Figure 16e in their established and false present reality. They are governed by an inappropriate substitute for animal instinct, a substitute which has failed to find a balance in sympathy with nature because it has not embraced the chief human faculty - the postconscious. They represent the human race in its present reality, a society which is imbalanced and heading, one way or another, for utter automation or premature extinction.
A most important thing to be understood about existing humanity is that although there is but one body of humantruth, equally acceptable to all and by which we would live in contented harmony, individuals are presently so conditioned as to hold every conceivable different opinion and belief, to pursue every possible objective, and to project and defend these, often with violence and without regard for consequences.
Such conditioned minds are enabled to deny even factual humantruth if it suits their book. The same is even more so of institutions, for they are instrumental in the conditioning of humans, and in instructing them, often against the good personal judgement of individuals, within or outwith the institutions. As a UK example of this, it is said that the British government some seventeen years ago suppressed research and development of wave-power technology in order to protect its interests in nuclear power. An invention, known as the Duck, had proved itself in trials but the project was abandoned for lack of official support despite the crying need for such safe, clean sources of power.
The character and freely independent position of individual E (see Figure 16e above) is the key to the human race avoiding extinction and achieving happy survival. Whilst individuals A, B, C and D are prepared to follow their predetermined ways regardless of the surrounding chaotic confusion, E cannot bear disagreement, or to leave any question unanswered. A - D follow different lines of conscious thought according to their narrowed interests and objectives, also according to self-oriented instinctive emotion. E, on the other hand, is guided by the postconscious whose interest, being the truth and human right, is therefore concerned with the total welfare of mankind and the whole Earth, and which, though sympathetically aware of all emotion, cannot be directly swayed by any biased feeling.
A revelation results from a physical process, that of dendrites, axons etc. exploring and finding true connections. In a supraconscious person's mind, intellation raises questions as to beliefs of sufficient influence that this person's mind puts out new feelers in the search for truth. That which is different about this process, taking place within the independent postconscious, is that it considers allessential factors, subjecting them to utterly exhaustive correlation so that when it produces an undoubted conclusion that conclusion is absolutely true. Computers are believed because they are designed for rigid accuracy and their conclusions can be checked. Post-conscious truths, being unconsciously correlated, can not be consciously chacked, but if they are consciously trusted and followed they will be found to be true, in every sense of the word, and confirmed by experience. Automated individuals like A, B, C and D, and like the stockbroker exemplified earlier, have main characteristics which are determined by their automated functions. The Machine imposes concepts and practices which shape the social framework which lays down the bases of human character. Pretending to redress the balance between the Machine and our humanity, we take up other concepts and practices, which the Machine tolerates, such as religion, or art. But these subsidiary ocupations do not change the norm, nor are their best values reflected in the norm. If we wish to practice art or religion seriously we have to detach ourselves from the norm as far as possible. If humanity is to realise itself truly, every individual will have the same basic characteristics as E, as shown in the following Figure 16f.
Each of us will have to break away from the conscious arena and become supraconscious. We will be conscious creatures still, but able to cope with our instinctive consciousness in a detached way by virtue of submitting ourselves to the guidance of the postconscious. This will not be easy, for the automatic institutions give out all the material rewards and privileges. Independence from them brings many disadvantages and can put a strain on morale. The alternative intellator cannot also be a normally acceptable character who is well adjusted to automatic reality. Consider further the reasons why the postconscious mind (by which I mean the independent, major part of it) is a trustworthy guide. The independent postconscious has sufficient capacity to comprehend the whole truth: it is unconscious, which means that whilst it is aware of the conscious arena and all that it contains, it is detached from consciousness and not directly influenced by the pressures of conditioning and circumstance to which A, B, C and D are continually subjected. The postconscious is able to know all that is essential, and freely and independently to reason to the ultimate, without any interference and then to present consciousness with the most important, ie moral conclusions whose truth is known, absolutely. Part of the process of becoming supraconscious is that we learn to recognise this absolutely known truth and to distinguish it from the part-truths of limited conscious constructions of thought.
The difference between conscious thinking and postconscious reasoning can be illustrated in this way. Mathematics is a process of calculation, every stage of which can be consciously worked out and made available as convincing argument and proven, factually true, evidence. It is a tool, with no in-built morality, which can be used for good or ill. Postconscious reasoning, on the other hand, is dedicated to truth, the living expression of which is morality. It comes before mathematics, and all other disciplines of conscious thinking, deciding whether, when, where, and in what way they may be used. Major examples of our betrayal of our postconscious faculty are our subjection to the mathematical calculations of the competitive money economy and to the logical calculations of Philosophy.
The main obstacle to conscious selves making the break and becoming supraconscious is that, being locked in the conscious arena, they are for the time being incapable of recognising whole truths, including the absolute knowing that to make this break is a vital step to becoming truly fulfilled. Having not taken this step the conscious self is able to say of know truth, with as much conviction as that self can muster, that it is false. But this won't do. It is necessary for the conscious self to make a 'leap of acceptance' - deliberately to accept as true that which it believes to be false in order to discover that absolute knowing. It is understandable - a point of honour - that 'free' individuals resist giving way to the unfamiliar ideas of others. Noam Chomsky, for example; even he expressed unwillingness to make that leap. Their convictions must come, they rightly feel, from their own minds. But without that leap of provisional acceptance - without breaking free of the conscious and opening to the postconscious - they might never discover the full and true extent of their own minds.
In the present human reality the truth is thought to be inaccessible and the human right unattainable. Facts are all-important in the conscious arena, but the individual conscious mind can contain and retain only a small proportion of them, and is incapable of fully correlating any in order to arrive at wholly true reason. As the consequence, every new event is seen in a varity of lights and interpreted in many different ways, producing reactions that constantly add to the existing confused conflict. It is only when the individual is fully informed, by a completely correlated postconsciuous mind, that he or she will be capable of truly evaluating anything.
Figure 16f shows a humantrue society in which all individuals are supraconscious. It is not an impracticable figment of the imagination but a logical basis for contented life by comparison with which our existing society is impracticable, and inhuman. It is not a vision of Utopia but simply a pattern of human society as it truly ought to be.
Pt.VIII FURTHER ILLUMINATION
Previous Chapters
49 The Flaw in our Accepted, Philosophical, Mode of Thought
50 How to Humanise Reality
51 Contrary Concepts
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52 How to Humanise Ourselves
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