The Wrong Reality. PartVII Realisation - 48 Peaceable Action - continued

The main purpose of this book is to trace the path of intellation which inevitably ends in humantruth. So far this chapter has given just a few examples of the practical and possible ways of preparing for a humantrue reality which supraconscious intellation then suggests. If it nevertheless seems to you impossible to imagine that whole humanity will ever take them up, then you are tacitly admitting to the belief that the humantrue nature and state of human being, though it be our desired destiny, is not in our hands to achieve. This is clearly not true, but it arises from a part-truth - that we have not, nor ever had, the slightest hope of achieving that destiny through institutions of the Machine, ie whilst still pursuing automatic drives in the opposite direction.

Every weekday the leading newspapers of the world portray and reflect the various interrelated facets of automatic reality with authoritative certainty and almost absolute credence. Those who share this belief in the unalterable inevitability of the here and now are demonstrating that a wilfully closed mind, which fails to see that the roots of its reality are false, can invest the complex artificial reality that grows from these roots with its own construction of specious truth.

It is here assumed that you, on the other hand, have fully embraced humantruth, that you recognise our existing reality as false, that you believe we canindependently achieve the ideal alternative society despite the Machine, and that you are likely to discover many more ways of preparing for it than I have put forward.

The best that national leaderships have been able to do, to try and express or give effect to conscientious humanitarian wishes that the inhuman results of automatic conflicts be counteracted, was to form the United Nations Organisation which, for obvious reasons, has been unsatisfactory. Voluntary groups and campaigns have been more successful, if limited, in supporting our struggle against inhumanity.

Some twenty-five years ago Green Peace came into being, as a refreshing and welcome focus of growing awareness. Because of the dedicated determination and courage of its members it has been able to reveal practices that demonstrate the gulf between our humanity and the established Machine, beginning with the beating to death of baby seals and whale hunting. Such revelations appeal to the sentiments, the more strongly because of the adventurous ways in which the evidence is gathered and presented to the world, and because to most people these events occur far from home and do not involve self-criticism or affect personal interest. Equally inhuman practices occur in the local abbatoir, or hen battery, or even the farm where the mother cow is separated from her calf so that we can have her milk, but we are not so outraged because our own jobs or profits may be involved, or because we like to eat red meat, and cheap chickens, and must have our cow's milk.

But Green Peace has also resisted the madness of nuclear war, by trying to stop a bomb test in the Pacific. It has also been at the forefront in disclosing how the Machine is damaging Earth by the dumping of toxic wastes into the sea, causing acid rain and contributing to the 'greenhouse effect'. People have responded to these protests, worldwide. And so have officials, for although Green Peace's 'positive non-violent actions' have been frowned upon and resisted by the establishment, and are sometimes unlawful, they have often been effective in obliging governments to back down, and nowhere has Green Peace been outlawed as an organisation. That human individuals, private or in office, dorespond demonstrates what has already been said - that underlying the support which our outer shells give to the Machine is our innate and genuinely intellectual sense of humantruth.

Green Peace and several other independent organisations such as The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Friends of the Earth, have become identified with a general Green movement that reflects growing criticism of automatic reality, especially amongst the young. Out of it the Green Party has emerged onto the political scene. It might be thought that all these factions of one concerted movement will be enough to bring us to supraconsciousness - that it is unnecessary for me to propose yet another reformist movement when the Greens already have the bit between their teeth. But the objective of my concern is the pursuit of intellation to the ultimate humantrue conclusions of supraconscious awareness. This, too, depends upon and gains strength from its utter independence of the automaton, but it must also stand back from the concepts and practices of the entire Machine, with the object of getting the wholeof existing reality into proper perspective.

Any enlightened individual has to applaud the Green Movement in general and would hesitate to criticise it. But the truth is that none of its factions goes deep enough. To fully and uncritically subscribe to them, one really has to accept and adopt their specific aims emotionally,like a religious faith, against the background of present reality, and only then to applythe intellect to those aims. As with CND, so with Green Peace - what happens if and when they achieve all their realistic aims? We would be left with a society which partially knew what not to do in the name of humanity, but with no new and better ways to follow or methods to adopt; only those which it had always pursued and employed - ways and methods which brought about those inhuman practices in the first place and would surely bring them about again. For example, Cruise missiles have been excluded from the Greenham Common protest site, but the kind of conflict which causes them to be produced, and elsewhere deployed, remains.

Individuals who wilfully contain the bulk of their thinking within existing constructions of mind, tied to existing reality, cannot admit ultimate humantruths and normally regard them as unrealistically extreme. The Green Party, presumably realising this, has entered politics seemingly believing that only by this realistic way can progress be made. But whilst its aims and intentions are most encouraging, the likelihood is that this party will become bogged down in the treacherous path it has chosen to take - confused, divided and lost through being forced to make compromises with the Machine, with economic reality, and with existing political postures. Humantrue reform, on the other hand, would be a movement devoted first to intellation, before action - to individuals seeking fully to knowhumantruth, progressively decliningto act and think in automatic ways, finally reaching worldwide humantrue agreement and only thenpositively acting - in voluntary, cooperative unity.

Nevertheless, it would seem that the growth and progress of humantruth needs both kinds of movement - such as humantrue unity to establish in our minds that humantrue reality is our ultimate aim, and the Green movement in general to stimulate our awareness of that vital aim and to battle, both in the field and politically, to deal with some exceptional obstacles to that aim which are most powerfully upheld by automatic reality - such as the power of market forces to defeat morality in practical ways - but the two movements remaining separate in the sense that our minds are separate from our bodies. This is not to belittle the Green movement, whose stated aims are humane. It is to distinguish between action and intellation, for until the former results from widespread supraconscious fulfilment of the latter our actions may easily lead us astray and fail to achieve a wholly humantrue objective. If we choose to take action towards that objective we should remember that the end we seek ishumantruth, which constrains the means we may use to achieve it. The means must not acquire first importance in our minds so as to obscure the humantrue end. Reckless or compromising means can never serve humantruth, any more than deceipt and violence has done in the past.

The presently accepted principle of separate, ultimately independent nations is a serious obstacle to humantruth. As a potentially big step towards world unity a humantruth movement might adopt a national and international code of behaviour. Massive support could result in this being imposed on governments by referendum. Each government would have to agree to submit to interference from all others in any of its internal and external affairs coming under the code; that all proposed measures or actions affected by the code shall be subject to public vote, either through parliament or directly where no parliament exists, both in the country directly concerned and in all other countries; that any government which refuses to submit to this code and practice shall have the strictest world-wide sanctions imposed upon it, which every individual has the right and duty to carry out short of causing actual suffering to its people; and that any government which subsequently breaks with the code forfeits the willing support and lawful duty of its own people, of all humantrue individuals worldwide, and again faces the strictest non-violent sanctions.

This code of international behaviour would, initially, be quite simple, concerned with preventing the most dangerous and clearly inhuman practices of the Machine. Its aims would be to have some of the same constraints applied to nations as are ordinarily applied to individuals, and such as presently ensure the relatively peaceful co-existence of countries of the British Commonwealth, the states of Switzerland, the states of the USA, and now the countries of the European Community.

The code would really amount to a body of human law which overrode national law, making it illegal for heads of government or leaders to order military action in the name of the people, and rightful, indeed obligatory, for individuals to refuse conscription. The same would apply to any corruption or oppression on the part of any authority. This could eliminate terrorism, by giving victims of internal injustice a real opportunity to express their grievance externally and have it justly acted upon, rather than having to resort to violent protest.

Provisions of the code might be: that no government which disrespects or contravenes the code shall take or retain office; that no government shall use aggression or fail to observe 'human rights' as presently conceived; that no government shall maintain an army, nor manufacture or use arms excepting the minimum temporarily necessary to keep internal order; that none shall hold or manufacture nuclear weapons, without exception;that no individual shall, or shall be required to, use violence against any other, to take any loyal oath, to wear military uniform, carry arms, or take part in the manufacture, sale or siting of weapons, nor that he or she shall take up arms excepting temporarily, where humanly necessary, unavoidable, and morally defensible. The ultimate object will be to destroy all weapons of war, when this ban will be total. No authority, or group of authorities, shall be allowed to adopt any measure, or make any decision, for any reason, which can be shown to be against the interests of humanity at large, and no individual shall take or support such decisions or measures against the code, or against her or his conscience. In the interest of individual influence over authority, and in connection with the introduction of a world language, no government may restrict or censor the free flow of individual communication throughout the world, or keep its own doings secret. That a government has popular support does not permit it to break the code, nor affect the duty of all individuals of other nations, and their present governments, to restrain it and its people from doing so.

I have suggested already that newspapers will hardly be necessary in a settled humantrue reality, for 'no news is good news'. If a present function of newspapers is to entertain, this can only be necessary as a counterbalance to the horrors of its news function - two extremes of a false reality which will no longer apply when it is superceded. Towards this end it could be made a present rule that all newspapers must be run as non-profit concerns, with editorial boards drawn from the general public, like juries, but adhering to an agreed general code and spirit of practice. Newspapers will then be freely open to the contribution of responsible articles by everybody and anybody.

That radical proposals should be adopted, and honoured so that humantrue reforms actually take place, may still seem fantastic to we who are today grimly attached to a very different reality. Yet nobody wants inhumanities, particularly wars. This being so, is it not more amazingly fantastic that they nevertheless occur? The competitive Machine gives cause for wars, governments declare them, and we fight them. As has been said before, if we decline to fight there can be no wars. Where governments are supposed to be responsible to humanity, they must respond to responsible humanity. Where they are not so they can surely be made so in response to worldwide humane pressure. When humanity is fully aware of itself, and taking humantrue responsibility for itself, there can be no inhumanity. That is not fantastic, but utterly sensible.

Of course, humanity is not fundamentally amoral or immoral, nor is our reality wholly so. Humanity's fault is that it does not subject its way of life to its morally aware intellect, but rather subjects its morals, and its intellect, to the exigencies of automatic reality. If it were true that mankind could oppose the existing concept of reality, and its effects, only through the political and diplomatic channels of the Machine, on its own time-honoured terms of competitive conflict, contrived manipulation and duplicity, then we would be condemned already to an automatic future, whatever it might be - irretrievably automated, with no hope of realising our true humanity.

It is true that some humane moral advance is made by political means, and that new initiatives by Socialist and Green Parties may achieve further successes by these means. But we cannot depend upon political victories of this kind to make humantrue progress. Political progress has inbuilt automatic limitations which so clog it up and slow it down as to ensure that it can neither challenge nor outstrip autoprogression. If we do not accelerate the growth of our intellectual awareness, automatic reality will bring us to impotence or disaster before we fully achieve that awareness. The spread of humantruth is also likely to be slow, to begin with. It is to be hoped that reformist movements will so sharpen our doubts, questions and criticisms of the Machine as to slow down its autoprogression too, and to altogether halt its most insane and dangerous activities. In this way time will be gained for intellation to open the floodgates of awareness, and so accelerate humantrue progress as to overtake and overcome the Machine.

The human world is ruled by the Machine. All main actions presently decided by humans are determined for them by automatic considerations. So all predominant human activity is automated, perpetuating the Machine and so determining that all future action will also be chiefly automatic. Always remember the reason : that hardly any human beings are represented by their higher postconscious minds - few have risen to their true state of supraconsciousness but remain in the lesser though realistic conscious state, still falling short of responsible awareness which is their potential humantrue fulfilment.

During the recent past our enormous fears concerning nuclear energy - both the threat of nuclear holocaust and then the dangers inherent in nuclear power -have receded. But they haven't gone away from the prosperous North and are poised to re-emerge in developing countries elsewhere. Therefore I am reproducing a slightly edited version of my original comments dated 1990.

Human protest against nuclear fission began with the atom bomb, then spread to the growing practice of harnessing the huge forces involved to the generation of electricity, partly because this process also produces plutonium for weapons. The danger from nuclear power stations, barring accidents, comes chiefly from the low-level radiation escaping from the process itself and given off by waste products. Nuclear weapons are designed to explode, of course, as they did on Japan in 1945 and in many test trials since, producing more devastating high-level radiation.

Pressures to proceed with nuclear energy came as a matter of course from the Machine and our heavy demand for electricity. Protest against the nuclear policy has been largely concerned with public distrust of automatic institutions and vested interests of the money economy, a distrust that is surely well-founded. (As a related example, I can remember a prominent, titled scientist, some thirty years or so ago, solemnly stating on television that there was no truth in the allegation that smoking tobacco was connected with lung cancer.) There is a long history of workers being employed for profit but to the detriment of their health. Supporters of nuclear power stations declare that these are safer than coal-fired stations (and many common activities of everyday life). Doubters of all official pronouncements are not encouraged to believe this declaration by the thought that those coal-fired stations have been pouring poisonous fumes and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for years, without official concern. Looking at the worldwide situation they see that some governments are now taking steps, some half-heartedly, to scrub clean a small overall proportion of these effluents - can they believe whole-heartedly the assurances of their own governments on nuclear safety? here