Our future depends on all individuals making the effort to achieve the common intellectual potential of the human mind.
Our central problem is that our present selves, far short of their potential, are a scattered multiplicity of different conscious versions of reality, united only by an overall false automatic concept of reality.
If we are to solve all our other problems we first have to solve this central problem. To do this requires that we all become supraconscious, but we cannot do so or even appreciate that it can and must be done as long as we remain imprisoned in automated consciousness.
The key solution, which can unlock the central problem, is intellation - the opening of consciousness to the postconscious mind by which the self may be identified with its intellectual potential.
By intellating we honestly exercise intellect, the faculty of knowing and reasoning whose function is truth - humantruth. By seeking and finding humantruth we do become supraconscious and unable to be other than true. When all humans become so world society will be in humantrue agreement.
So our destiny, and possibly the destiny of this universe, depends above all upon the fulfilment of each and every individual mind, and if it is possible for one mind to achieve supraconsciousness it is possible for all.
For us this means happiness. That we truly co-operate and are united in supraconsciousness will mean that we commonly fulfil truth which, in that it is our optimum fulfilment, is our ultimate satisfaction.
There is a quite common belief that idealism is a waste of time because humanity is incapable of realising it. But humanity has potential intellect and can not be happy until it is fulfilled, when our true awareness will be satisfied with nothing less than the ideal. He or she who rejects the ideal has not attained true awareness. Those of us who are not intellating are not advancing towards our full human nature, and until we commonly practice intellation we shall not begin to achieve our full humantrue state.
Yet suppose my theory of true equilibrium is not true, and Big Bangs and multi-million year universes are to go on in succession without end. Would it then be necessary for life to achieve intellect, and then to fulfil it? Well, it is necessary for us to fulfil it, having achieved it, if for no other reason than that we are dangerous to ourselves and all life otherwise. Apart from that, intellect would not be necessary to a random and totally indifferent universe, nor to the temporal instinctive happiness that can be achieved by the self-fulfilment of consciousness alone. But all life-forms are in competition to succeed and subject to a natural influence to progress. Perhaps intellect would never be achieved if all creatures were to reach a state of optimum happy consciousness, like whales, dolphins and elephants, escaping from direct competition and, therefore, from the impulsion to progress, so that no further evolution was necessary. But whales, dolphins and elephants are exceptions. Most creatures are compelled to compete and strive in order to survive, and it only requires that one species be impelled to evolve furthest of all and achieve potential intellect, as we have done, for disaster to result. We have brought disaster and the threat of extinction to many creatures, including whales, dolphins, elephants and ourselves. Again, were we happy, unaware of the consequences of our actions and morally unaffected by the influence of truth, then the fate of life on the small planet Earth, or on any other planet, or the fate of the presently expanding universe, would have no dread significance, only the plain, unnoticed fact of its existence. But we are morally aware, and unhappy, and the universe does matter to reason, and therefore to us.
If more than one species had achieved the faculty of knowing and reasoning perhaps there would be a much greater likelihood of realising truth in our world on Earth. We are surrounded by animals of lower mental capacity and, having no critical mental equals, we as a species tend to believe that our activities are altogether superior and do not see that our civilisation does not make much sense. Perhaps the situation is similar to that of the conscious self that cannot truly assess itself unless it is willing to accept the aid of the postconscious - both its own postconscious and that of another self. We, being mostly blind in this sense, will not credit any of our own kind with the capability of seeing wholly and truly. We lack an undeniable example of the true, living, intellectual nature and state that would surely show us a supremely high level of happy satisfaction and contentment appropriate to our species, a state which is as yet beyond our experience. But we can foresee this perfect state by way of reason, bringing true awareness of its possibility.
Consider once more the chaotic confusion of our world, which comes of humanity applying irrelevant ancestral instincts to an inappropriate Machine. In literature this is represented by the novel, which grabs the emotions but betrays true intellect by going along the familiar road of automatic reality. The true road leads another way and has no familiar landmarks. It has to be negotiated by the dead-reckoning of reason. Born again, 'fundamentalist' Christianity provides an example of emotion ousting reason by attacking intellect and accepting as true that which is unknown, unnecessary, unhelpful and, to say the least, unlikely. It self-righteously raises one set of 'virtuous' emotions in its followers but can also arouse aggressive hate against its opponents, because blind faith needs emotional causes to reinforce it as well as false reason to underpin its self-deception.
There exists throughout the world a Sherlock Holmes cult, a strange phenomenon the basis of which is the strong desire of many individuals to attach themselves to an imaginary omnipotent figurehead and invest it with realistic power. Belief in god, or cosmic consciousness, is a related example of this desire. Such cults and faiths contain some elements of truth. In the case of Sherlock Holmes this element is the fact that he did exist in Conan Doyle's stories. In a similar way god exists in tradition, backed up by holy books. In the case of cosmic consciousness, as well as god, the element underlying this conception can only be the twin influences of truth and energy. The influence of truth promoted the principle of unity and co-operation as a means of realising truth. Energy responded by organising itself into atoms, then molecules, then chains and groups of molecules, i.e. by forming matter. In this present era on Earth, humans should resist the influence of energy by bringing autoprogression to a halt. Rather than attributing wisdom to these influences and looking to them for guidance, we should perceive that energy is open to our guidance, and the true influence looks to our potential wisdom for expression. Our minds are the spearhead of the true influence, to further which they should clearly tell us that we must now unite and co-operate.
At this point I think it would be helpful to reconsider the reasons, as I see them, why we humans are in our present predicament and why we cannot extricate ourselves by our own individual effort of mind having collective effect.
First of all, to get ourselves into perspective, let us ask the question - what exactly are we? We are an intellectual species of life that came into being between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago. For the 15,000,000,000 years or so since the last Big Bang, previous to the appearance of ourselves or any similar species, no mind, no potentially intellectual consciousness, existed in the universe. The sparse but virulent growth on the Earth's surface, our civilisation, which might be described as a blight, is the product of the instinctive employment of part-intellect. That which represents our whole intellect - such written or spoken language as transcribes pure intellation - has arisen solely and entirely from the postconscious mind (in our human case the neocortex) with the encouragement of the universal influence for truth and the obedient help of consciousness. So outside of our minds, and the like minds of others, there is no true awareness in the universe, for living intellect is its furthest and ultimate advance.
The immediate purpose behind the development of instinctive consciousness is reproductive survival, and that development ceases once survival is secured, as in the case of whales, crocodiles and elephants. Most animals continue to develop because their survival remains challenged and insecure. Where this consciousness has developed to the point of being assisted by dawning intellect, as in the human case, its purpose is still survival but it partially breaks with instinctive inhibition and advances by reasoned intention, then calls a voluntary halt once survival success is attained, e.g. the Bushmen of Africa and the Australian Aborigines. Intellect used by instinct founded the automaton and gave basic form to the Machine, which first flourished in favourable climates - for instance the Egyptian, Chinese and Indian civilisations - which eventually ran out of challenges, became locked in convention, and stagnated. The much more vigorous application of part-intellect on the part of Northern peoples, probably to meet climatic challenges associated with the last ice age, has resulted in almost the entire human race becoming locked into automatic conflict with itself, facing new and escalating challenges created by its own competitive conditioning of that consciously controlled part of intellect (distinct from postconscious intellect), and threatening its own survival as nations of people throw their mental effort into commercial, ideological and military struggles against each other. Such is our present reality which produces copious thinking and writing of great significance to the false Machine but little true meaning, for it represents the intellectual confusion of a society suspended between its wrong reality and its true potential.
Yet it would appear that every intellectual species in the universe must pass through this false and dangerous phase in order that its intellectual capacity be developed to the point where it is capable of achieving its two objectives - chiefly to further the true influence towards equilibrium; then, as the vehicle of that chief objective, to establish, by intentionof supraconscious intellect alone, a true society, in our case a humantrue society, as the means of our own survival and that of the whole Earth. We certainly already possess the necessary mental capacity - we cancall a halt and meet the supreme twofold challenge of truth, first to understand what we have to do and then to do it. The question is, shallwe do so?
The prospect for humantruth is uncertain because, almost unbelievably, it is questionable whether we shall achieve our potential. General awareness is advancing but as yet the pure supraconscious intellect is bound to resemble a poor traveller in a hostile country. It is so ignored, ridiculed, spurned or threatened as usually to be persuaded, if not forced, to go in disguise or into hiding.
The mystics and meditators would have us imitate the benign and stable hunter-gathers' mentality, but without stepping back into their actual physical reality. But the hunter-gathers' mentality and reality were mutually appropriate. Our minds and circumstances, having arrived where they now are, cannot go back to where they were but we can seek, in another direction, humantrue minds and circumstances which are equally benign and stable. We can unlearn false lessons but cannot forget past experience and feeling, only pass beyond it. We have to rest on our knowledge but re-assess it as we carry reason forward until the truth is reached. We have to break with our present egos because the automaton created them out of instinct and in its image, so that they are components of the motors of the Machine, not, as they should be, human motors of the world. Were we to go back to the beginning again, unequal, divided and automated as we are, we would merely re-enact our evolution from past to present because we would be contained by the old, familiar framework that demands motivation by the same competitive ego. The ego is no more fixed than the Machine, for it is simply emotional and wilful support presently attached by instinct to the competitive automatic drives. To create a humantrue society of equal individuals requires that we detach our egos from automatic reality and reshape them to support our truly constructive, co-operative, supraconscious intellectual effort to that end.
It has been suggested that just as an individual's mind can be instrumental in curing its body's cancer, millions of people meditating would get rid of the cancer presently diseasing human society. But to begin with, as I have said already, there is no cosmic consciousness, so in this regard the act of meditation does no more than affirm vague personal wishes or desires for good - it is not a united, informed and agreed determination to make society true. In the case of the individual with cancer the central conscious will expresses a strong determination to get well and the body's immune system, that determination being shared by each of its individual cells, responds by attacking the cancer with renewed vigour. However, in the case of the human body the cancer is an unwelcome and destructive intruder, while in the Machine it is a dominant function. In the case of present human society the Machine is its body and we are its cells - allits cells, including those which serve its immune system andthose which serve its cancers. We all wish to survive, if possible in happy contentment, but the automaton's will is dominant and to survive under its competitive rules we all have to submit largely without thinking, to some degree passive and benign but in many ways malignant to the whole organism. So despite the fact that the general human conscience desiresa humantrue world, and this desire might be strengthened by widespread meditation, as long as a strong structure of contrary interest and desire - the Machine - overwhelmingly dominates our wilful ego and effective conscious thinking, our humanitarian desires can have little effect.
Consider the fact that the natural world survives successfully, according to its own lights. All animals strongly desire to survive and to experience a satisfactory life, as we do. But this they largely succeed in doing (viewing survival as that of the species overall, disregarding the fate of individuals) whilst we, though more conscious of our individual satisfaction, as a species seem well set for extinction. They succeed because their pattern of instinct not only imparts to them the life-force impulsion to live but also subjects them to a strict code of behaviour that ensurestheir overall satisfactory survival, as far as can be foreseen. We fail because our social pattern and code of behaviour works contraryto our best interests as a whole species, and so against our satisfactory, i.e. happy. survival. Therefore a vague common human wish for reform is not enough. The will of individuals has to combine into a collective will, and then individual minds have to combine in collective agreement as to the means of making society humantrue, with a common understanding of those means and a willingness to employ them in order to achieve the desired ends.
The circumstances of cells in the body can be likened to those of automated humans in the Machine, and to those of ants in an ant-hill. All are governed collectively by an overall instinctive will and pattern (in our case automatic will and Machine-pattern) and individually by precise personal instructions. If cells or ants had individual awareness and free will (which humans have), their systems could succeed (which ours does not) only if they themselves were agreed, cooperative and willingly supportive (which we are not).
To get out of our present predicament we need to have all minds raised to a high level of awareness so as to be capable of enlightenment. This is in some sense acknowledged, for a commonplace objection to moral reforms is that, however truly good they may be, they are impracticable because the majority of people resist them for a variety of bad reasons, or unthinking feelings. But it is not at all generally understood what constitutes intelligence, awareness, enlightenment or truth, nor what is the point and purpose of these qualities.
The conventional view is the automatic view. It recognises a need for better education but sees this as instituted training by the Machine that children are inherently capable of absorbing at varying levels from very low to very high. This contains a minority view that children of all degrees of intelligence can benefit from 'hothousing', a means of forcing mental development from the earliest age in order to raise the level of educational attainment. This minority view is that if children are given a benign and stressless prenatal experience, then brought up in a similar environment without question or doubt about the self, about this special environment, or about the imposed programme of concentration on learning conventional knowledge and reason, they shall be better and happier achievers at school and in the Machine. Those who respond well to this process are described as 'bright', and the outstandingly responsive as 'geniuses'. These are automatic terms of respect that measure intellect, its point and purpose, in terms of its contribution of yet more knowledge, and its successful application to the Machine, and of the automatic rewards of status, money and power that this attracts. According to this view the supraconscious mind which rejects automatic reality might be described as clever but naive, dull and impractical, and is normally dismissed as irrelevant because it is 'out of this world' - regarded as eccentric, by which is meant next door to lunatic.
The supraconscious view is that intellectual capacity does not naturally vary widely, and that conventional education is the amoral application rather than fulfilment of the mind. Of course it is highly desirable that parents should be positively but tranquilly benign in an ideal world, but that they can be so in this troubled world means that they are closed to true awareness. There is no doubt at all that mental stimulation from the earliest age is vital, but a cocooned, specialised upbringing and education produces a narrowly oriented mind for the use of automatic reality, like a computer or electronic calculator. The filled mind is not the fulfilled intellect that must doubt question and criticise from the first and might appear stupid because it is stressfully preoccupied with seeking answers, which the educators are not providing, to its constant question 'why?'. This question was probably first prompted, in the womb, by the same question in the minds and on the lips of parents. The so-called genius may brilliantly advance in the mastery of a special subject, on a narrow front by virtue of the vast specialised knowledge this necessitates, but will not forward vital reason, on a wide front based on general information, becausethat brilliant mind is so full of knowledge as to have little room for broad, and especially for critically constructive, reasoning The important thing in mind development is that it should first establish a sound, true, broad reasoning base, using only essential knowledge. Only thus can further knowledge be given true meaning as it is taken in, so that, by being exposed to all possible correlations, it finds its rightful place in the true train of reason.
There is a view, derived from scientific observations of dissipative systems leading to a belief in the desirability of a human 'high synergy' society, that increase in human population is a vital contribution to the complexity on which evolution builds and therefore to the success of such a society. This view implies that the larger and more powerfully complex the Machine becomes the happier we shall be, and that science and technology are well able to provide for the vast populace by operating on a highly automated universal scale. In my contrary view the opposite is true. Earth evolution has already achieved its objective - our intellectual potential. That potential will be fulfilled by supraconsciousness and a humantrue society, with a population kept to a level that Earth can sustain without strain. The energy of a humantrue society has to be self-generated by thoughtful intention. A 'high synergy' society would automatically generate rising energy so that it might not decline and stagnate, but it would not be humantrue, must autoprogress, and could self-destruct.
Humantrue society, and its regulation, must come from the collective effort of independently developed but agreed and co-operative individual minds. The evolving Machine may be presently supported by the will of humanity but it is the will of automated individuals whom the Machine has then centrally to control. This, whatever method is employed, is a recipe for unrest.
This whole book is really about making life happy and satisfactory all round, and that is the inner concern of everyone. As individuals we all try to arrange our private family lives as happily as possible, and a world of individuals should do the same for life as a whole. What the individual can envisage, the human world can realise. The collective mind should reflect the individual true inner mind, supported by individual postconscious will. What is truly good for one is good for all. The individual reason and will for good should multiply into a collective reason and will for good. All that stands in the way is mental conditioning which convinces us that that which should logically be inevitable, because it is so reasonable, is in practice impossible.
It is generally thought that social evolution, nowithstanding the automatic evolution of the Machine, can be influenced for the better by human personal or 'spiritual' enlightenment. But such enlightenment is expected to come in spurts, and more in private than public. Mental spearheads or forerunners of thought rise, fall, but rise again to advance awareness, but in isolated pockets. They are followed by others, in many little columns of separated, specific, conscientious thought constructions, piecemeal, disconnected, and therefore ineffective. In the meantime the Machine, which goes contrary to the best of that thinking in any case, continues to govern regardless and to hold the main attention of our minds, subject only to sporadic superficial humanitarian changes. The only way for our humanity to impress itself on our society is, as has been said already, for minds to turn away from further autoprogression, work out a complete alternative humantrue social system, and face the absolute necessity of putting it in place of the Machine as soon as possible.
As it is, our broadest and most advanced thinking is not going on in the public minds of supreme leaders, or university dons, or politicians, or scientists, or industrial tycoons, or well-known authors, or newspaper editors, or recognised philosophers, but it might be going on in the mend of some unknown individual here, some deprived individual there, or ignored individuals elsewhere. In the minds of such individuals, whoever and wherever they may be, and all of those who are also intellating privately despite an automatic public image, rests the hope for the salvation of ourselves and our world.
Sometimes I find it hard to concentrate on reading this, my own work, so as to make sense of it. But when I am concentrating well the true meaning comes through. Should you have the same difficulty, please do not assume that the work is boring, or meaningless, and put it aside. I would ask you to consider whether it is not the case that you too are failing to concentrate your attention. Persevere with making new connections in your mind if necessary for your understanding of what I am driving at, or for improving on it. This process of intellation is the only way to realise truth, which, in turn, is the only way to make the world good.
Remember the proposition that the way we want or need to be is the way we shallbe when our own mind has reached truly significant conclusions and is in agreement with all other minds who are commonly founded in humantruth - i.e when we are supraconscious. I imply that my words are humantrue (though not necessarily giving the wholehumantruth) not because of personal vanity but because every honest correlation of my mind confirms it. Your disagreement will prevail only if it is the product of deeper and wider correlation, and therefore truly better reason, not if it is merely the expression of wilful prejudice.
I repeat : the prime responsibility of intellectual creatures is to observe truth, and we have no right to anything which falls short of truth. That the truth is rejected by the whole world does not make it untrue but confirms that the world is assuredly false. Those who claim to be right because the ways of the world support them are those who yet fail to see that they, like most of humanity, are mentally harnessed to the false Machine.
Pt.VI ILLUMINATION
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35 Further Catastrophes
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