Br2 Truth, Our No-Go Area
Many, if not most people think that the way we all live, the system we generally conform to (I call it The Machine), is basically crazy. I think that is the view of the general public who are nevertheless resigned to the belief that they're stuck with this way and can only make the best of it, reflecting that to cry over the system is infantile and angrily to protest is fruitless. So we humans make a pact with ourselves; to work for and give way to the dictatorial Machine whilst doing what we can to blunt its sharper edges, then to take advantage of the many and varied artificial entertainments it has to offer. This describes most of human thought and experience in today's world.
It's as if our world were in the middle of a nervous breakdown, but without us rightly knowing it, for Earth is intellectually isolated in the universe. The human race is not in contact with any other, wiser, planet. There is no known civilisation, similar to ours but much more advanced in its thinking, able and willing to give humanity the counselling it needs. So this large organism, our world, must cure itself; and that's to be done, as in the physical body when it becomes ill, by its immune system and all its constituent cells - i.e. all its human individuals, united by their common moral awareness - understanding what reformation is required and putting it in place by means of willing co-operation.
What we live in, and refer our lives to, is Machine reality; a sort of game, with its own regulations, like chess - a game that makes sense in terms of its own rules but makes no sense to true intellect.
Now, maybe all this would not matter were our Machine-world nevertheless happy and harmless, for all its faults, but it isn't. The essence of our humanity is surely our intellect but our basic way of life is driven by wilful instinct. It should be obvious that happily to fulfil ourselves like any other creature we must live according to our every faculty, including, in our case, the chief human faculty, intellect. But on the contrary our undoubted intelligence is geared to our unintelligent Machine-reality. To fulfil intellect it is necessary to think in the abstract which means, in the world as it is, being at eccentric odds both with our present reality and with our fellow humans. To be concentric with our existing world, and with our worldly friends, we have to manipulate our thinking; we have to play the game, making it impossible for us to fulfil intellect.
Fulfilment of intellect is a matter of relentless questioning of our own minds until, by making every conceivable correlation, they reveal to us what they absolutely 'know' to be true. But the presently recognised idea of intellectual fulfilment is a matter of wilfully applied intellect being bound up with acceptance of existing reality, which makes it necessarily untrue. Normal thinking is brought to balance on its own terms so that what is untrue is made to appear broadly true. So how do we judge truth? How is truth to be recognised by minds which are untrue because founded upon false premises?
The fact is that truth, coming from an unconventional source, is rejected on sight by untrue minds - i.e. by the great majority - denied as false without further deep thought which would show it to be true. Not only that, but the untrue minds, it has to be said, include our leading authorities, our recognised thinkers, our established academics, priests, politicians, scientists. This is because the professions are of the Machine, and regard realism as strong, idealism as weak. Our most influential people are Machine-people, whereas optimum true thought must go contrary to the Machine. But reality regards revolutionary protesters as naive cranks. Some of them are naive, having not done the necessary deep thinking, but the others, the true thinkers, whoever and wherever they may be, are nevertheless lumped together by today's realists into the same cranky category.
Our present world is insane. We have the intellectual capacity to perceive that the world is so and collectively to humanise it. The question is - how to release that capacity from the grip of the Machine reality which is strangling it, and from the preprogrammed thinking which befogs it? Surely the only way is to put the alternative true view forward, strongly and persistently, so that its truth may sooner or later erode the false opposition.
There are two elemental facts about our world which are contradictory. One is this - (From 'Journey to the Centre of the Psyche' - Dr. Oliver Sach's travels in the human mind - Guardian October 19th. 1996.) - 'On the subject of empiricism, it's worth remembering that in the brain's cortical mantle - the size of a large table napkin when it's spread out - the number of possible combinations of nerve connections is hyper-astronomical, of the order of ten followed by several million zeros. By contrast, there are only ten followed by 80 zeros' worth of positively-charged particles in the whole known universe.'
The other equally remarkable elemental fact is that despite this mega-intelligence our world is in nonsensical chaos.
This contradiction deeply worries people, but not - not yet - to the extent of recognising that it is a nonsense which must be put right. The reason for this failure of recognition is that the nonsensically chaotic world actually overwhelmingly exists, and that we ourselves are involved in it up to the neck.
We fail clearly to see and know ourselves and our world because we don't take a bird's-eye view of it. In general we view our reality from the inside looking out, not from the outside looking in, and in order to understand why we do that it is necessary to go back to the birth of the human race. The fact is that we are capable of seeing ourselves overall, but we are unaccustomed to doing so. It is this capability of the normal human mind, not the text books, that produced to me the following as the most reasonable explanation it could deduce. Therefore, although it may not prove accurate in every factual detail, I am satisfied that this explanation is true in essence and as to consequence.
The mutation that created the first human was a dramatic enlargement of the brain. It was in answer to this species' need of the ability to override instinct. It can be deduced that there comes a point in the evolution of intelligence (towards what we may call intellect) where rigid rules of instinct become a hindrance.
However, the human instinctive code had been built up over many millions of years. It was a guarantee of security and survival success. To tamper with it would be to court disaster. Somehow the governing functions of instinct had to be replaced by pure reason, but the necessary reasoning faculty did not yet exist, and might take an age to evolve, by which time the species could be extinct. It was a problem, and there was a solution.
The solution which evolution hit on was the rapid formation, in the first human mother's babyhood skull, of millions of additional neurons with billions of possible inter-connections forming a new outer layer of the cortex, a large extension of the conscious mind: I call it the postconscious. It had to be large, and immediately completely functional, because it must be able to foresee problems, and work out intelligent solutions which embodied good reasons for taking action - more compelling reasons than the contrary urges of instinct. But - and this is a vital point - it had also to be separate from the conscious mind because it must also be fully independent of the normally compelling edicts of instinct. It needed to be free of interference and manipulation by consciousness because the conscious mind was biased towards ego and wedded to instinct.
For this mutation to be successful it was necessary for the human self to remove itself as far as possible from the influence of consciousness (while necessarily remaining within the conscious mind because it could not enter the postconscious) and to submit to the truly reasoned conclusions of the postconscious, i.e. to our moral awareness.
The cause of human difficulties is that we never successfully completed the human mutation. We failed to break with instinct. We overcame many of its inhibitions but, whilst we did convert most of this brain-extension into the postconscious, the rest was used to enhance the powers of our conscious minds and applied to furthering the drives, as well as overcoming many of the inhibitions, of instinct.
In order effectively to pursue the instinctive drives we learned to close ourselves off from the postconscious almost completely. I say almost because we have never escaped the moral awareness of the postconscious faculty, brought to us as intuition, embodied in conscience, often to be disobeyed but never altogether banished.
The postconscious mind, as our chief faculty, ought to represent us, but we have chosen to be identified with our conscious minds, which makes us a very different kettle of fish. However, the strength of the postconscious mind's influence, even on the most lawless and ruthless, is shown by the fact that everybody claims to be basically moral - nobody claims to be, or admits to being, evil, and that is a light at the end of a tunnel.
Human morality is a matter of TRUTH. In the postconscious, whose function is truth, when any thing is considered in every possible way and from every possible angle, the resultant gathering or thickening of positive cross-connections and parallells is part of truth, and the ongoing inter-connection and binding together of all part-truth becomes whole truth.
Arriving at this truth can be compared with the mind's selection giving rise to 'inspiration' behind the composition of music. Appreciation of perfectly genuine harmony is similar to the mind's recognition of true constructions honestly deduced from among millions of cross-references and incomplete combinations.
There is the question of what is meant by truth. The answer is to be given by your own postconscious. It is hard to find words to describe truth, and this is as near as I can get:
Truth is not just that which is confirmed by fact. It is related to good - good and true, we say. And good, to be true for humanity, must be common good. An arrow that is straight, we call true. Also a structure that is level and plumb. We talk of true love. A perfectly tuned bell is true. Truth is the harmonious and inescapable conclusion arrived at by optimum reason. Truth is a state of being devoted to the simple results of pure reason, and it is the source of right, honest and good morality on which that state of being is founded.
Now the conscious mind, although it has enormous capacity, is not capable of deducing truth. It cannot be, because it is not independent; it contains the self and is subject to the self's wilful ego which can manipulate thought, and to all the influences of the drives of instinct in a competitive, amoral, false world. Ideally, all this would be subdued and put aside by the greater influence of the postconscious, but that good influence is made ineffective by being firmly shut away or ignored by the wilful conscious ego.
Human life, then, is lived within the conscious mind, contained by the conscious sphere of reality. It does not recognise pure or absolute truth because it excludes all but the peripheral influence of the postconscious mind from its everyday affairs.
In the conscious sphere, we recognise many specific or relative truths. We regard it as normal to be inundated with complex contentious theories, contradictory views and conflicting interests. We accept a reality in which all kinds of disagreement co-exist. The obvious has not yet dawned upon us - that such a state of affairs is utterly unacceptable and dangerous to a species with our brain-power.
The delights of our present society range from the pleasures of unadulterated instinct to the raptures of higher applied intellect; from 'go-as-you-please' to 'praise the Lord' or 'praise the dollar' or 'applaud the lofty', to genuine appreciation of 'the arts', sometimes leading to 'academic upper-crustedness'. All these have their adherents, in a world whose substitute for truth, and closest approach to freedom, is to allow every individual the right to her or his different opinion or belief or taste, regardless of overall truth.
The reason for this is that we are presently self-restricted to the conscious sphere, in which truth is not to be found. It is possible and not unusual to subject the mind almost wholly to totalitarian rule of the instinctive will. When a whole nation is in that state of mind it takes a human dictator's ruthlessness to control, because the people are not self-controlled by their own potential true intelligence.
That we are falsely motivated by the Machine, and our lesser conscious minds under its influence, is a truth we don't see though it stares us in the face. It is time we looked again at the principles and practices we currently follow and regard as perfectly natural and acceptable.
Even the lowest animal forms agree amongst themselves, in that each follows its species' instinct to the letter. It is obvious that we too should agree, but by following our chief faculty, intellect. The only proper basis for our agreement is the function of the faculty of intellect - truth. But we base our society on the principle of disagreement, because we pursue the competitive drives of instinct in every conceivable direction in the interest of self, not species, which rules out agreement.
This competitive, unintelligent, disagreeable way of life is facilitated by the money economy, which allows some of us legally, others illegally, to prosper by creating and supplying the demands of the rest. The money economy decides what the rest shall receive by paying them well, or poorly, or not at all, according to how useful they are to the Machine.
This means that the provision of human needs is not entrusted to an equitable worldwide arrangement put in place by human intention. It is in the hands of an unintelligently evolved unpredictable system, partially restrained by law but motivated by competitive ambition, principles of exploitation, profit, usury, and instincts of self-interest, possession, greed, stealing and hoarding.
Yet at the same time as we submit to an amoral framework of living, we have a strong personal code of moral awareness. We attempt to impose this code on our world by way of politics, a system of compromise which has superficial effect but no hope of humanising the Machine.
Politics has little effect on the existing reality because its aim is not to discover truth and realise it in the human world, but to fight a running battle between Machine interests and human moral aspirations in the hope of bringing the former more into line with the latter. So politics operates in the conscious sphere, concerning itself with the varying impulsions of the Machine and the different opinions and beliefs of humans. It has to be a matter of compromise, with opposing parties or factions representing different interests and objectives, because one agreed body of truth is not its aim, and because truth is not to be found in the conscious sphere in any case.
Politics normally relies on majority rule, but for day-to-day and arbitrary decisions appoints a government and a supreme leader. He or she can usually rely on controlling people at second-hand through the money-system rather than directly but sometimes, when the differences between the people and authority prove irreconcilable, a dictatorship is borne.
If we take existing reality to be inevitable, then politics will seem to be making the best of a bad job. But seen through the eyes of an unbiased intelligence, politics looks as balmy a waste of stress and energy as the reality it messes with. However, this radical attitude is hard to sustain if the Machine goes on unchanged. A strong desire for reform has to be accompanied by really determined expectation of an intelligent new development of human evolution bringing a complete change of affairs and reversal of conditions.
It is possible for the luckier humans to wrap themselves in a cocoon and claim that despite everything 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds', but this is a denial of our full humanity, of our awareness and compassion.
As we all well know and can hardly ignore - the world faces impending disasters; rising population, rising sea-levels, rising average lifespan (in the West), increasing competition for fewer resources, but such things are not 'the worst-case scenario' as we like to call it.
More difficult to stomach than what we are doing to Earth is what we are doing to each other. An age-old principle which we have long toyed with but still fail fully to acknowledge so as to implement is that of equality. The human race is segregated into rich and poor, mind-stimulated and unstimulated, provided for and deprived, respected and despised, hopeful and hopeless. All are aware, and capable of recognising what they are doing, and what is being done to them.
For the fortunate ones, in the well-favoured nations, it is possible to be happy, contented and optimistic. For the unfortunates, at the other extreme, especially when they rub shoulders with the fortunates or watch them on television, it is difficult not to become disillusioned, depressed, resentful or ill. To one half of the world the other half appears callously indifferent. It's bad enough to think of nearly six thousand million people being misled and disunited, but worse to think of three thousand million of them being coldly disadvantaged.
To the average individual, such inequality would be unthinkable in the family home, unacceptable in their neighbourhood, regrettable in their town, but beyond that these matters become impersonal because they seem beyond individual control. That we do not cast our mind-nets more widely, seeing the world as our community, is because the Machine is in command, not we.
Far and away the worst human misfortune, however, is that our overwhelming Machine-society has prevented us from fulfilling our chief faculty whose true potential distinguishes us as human - our postconscious mind. We do not even acknowledge its existence (because science has not yet discovered it), much less that it gives us the solemn responsibility to follow its truth - our humantruth.
Through awareness of this truth we would clearly see that most of the precepts and principles that presently influence our thinking and behaviour, the practices that govern our world preoccupations and affairs, are unnecessary. With true awareness we would suddenly understand that most of our present fears, worries and concerns were a sheer waste of time and effort.
The necessary thing for us is to fulfil our true nature. This means ceasing to rely on the conscious sphere, abandoning the Machine, and submitting to the guidance of the postconscious mind, that is to say - becoming supraconscious. The first step to this fulfilment is actually to recognise that we do have this postconscious mind and that it is our chief faculty. How is this recognition to be achieved?
Taking account of contrary opinion, and thinking embedded in consciousness, such recognition would seem to be impossible of achievement. It is alarming that so many minds are confined to closed-circuits or loops, which oblige them to think one way and, believing it to be right, refuse to change their thinking. It is also alarming to see how vested interest in this reality causes many individuals to refuse contemplation of any alternative.
Protest is dismissed by realists because often proposed by people whom reality regards as misfits, yet it is to the misfits that the falsities of reality are obvious. Of course, the misfits are easily dismissed because often uneducated and inarticulate. But education contains a strong element of realistic conditioning that obscures the subtler comprehensions of truth. So the misfit, being without that conditioning, may be more likely to open to whole humantruth but, to fully discover it, must work hard. Even then, until the Machine gives way, that misfitting truth is unlikely to be broadcast because the media are presently in the hands of realists.
I have said that a radical attitude is hard to sustain unless accompanied by determined expectation of intelligent and gently renewed evolution of the collective human mind, bringing a complete change of affairs and reversal of conditions. I think this renewed evolution of reason will be spearheaded by a few supraconscious thinkers who will persistently put forward suggestions that have been so truly and thoroughly reasoned as eventually to appeal to the deep-seated moral-awareness of people despite their contrary conscious conventions and thinking, and that this new awareness shall itself bring about in humanity our natural, supraconscious way of thinking and behaving.
List of Branch articles, in no particular reading sequence:
PREVIOUS :1. The Nature and State of the Human Race:
CURRENT : 2 : Truth, our No-Go Area :
REMAINING : 3. Facing Yourself : 4.Explaining the Mind : 5. Moral Mind : 6. Great Men : 7. Comment Pinker : 8. The Way We Think : 9. Sanity for Humanity : 10. Evolution of Mind : 11. Free Thinker View : 12. Reality : 13. Understanding Consciousness : 14. Bottom Line : 15. Brain-Mind Relations: 16. Open Letter to Philosophers : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18. Self Twixt 2 Minds: 19. The Holographic Dimension:20. Transhumanism Transcended :21. Mind, Will and Self
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