The objective of this book is to help in bringing about a benign, peaceful, happy - i.e.humantrue - society. This will be a worldwide society whose basic values and practices are in accord with the fundamental understanding, thinking and feeling of every individual. These values and practices will be constantly and universally upheld because they have been fully and willingly agreed. This society will ensure that the minds of its children are fully opened so that they share in this common, and true, understanding, thinking and feeling from the beginning.
In a humantrue society there will be a great sense of trust in all mankind and a feeling of total security. There will be no locking of doors to protect property. Children shall go out to play without fear. We will have the comforting knowledge that everyone in the world shares the same basic concerns. We shall be free of anxiety, because the reason for our living will be the well-being of each other.
A great feature of humantrue society will be co-operation. We shall conduct our affairs according to true reason. We shall be enabled to understand and follow our moral code, which requires that we co-operate rather than compete, and to show the utmost kindness and compassion to each other. By way of reason, co-operation ensures that the species survives with the minimum of pain, hurt and damage, either to itself or to its environment.
We shall give and share. This is the intelligent thing to do and the one way of ensuring that all people are equally provided for. A humantrue society will be unable to do otherwise, because this is a true principle, and our intelligence makes us perfectly capable of carrying the principle out.
A humantrue society will be united. Based upon intelligent agreement, we and our framework of life shall treat everybody as equal, with no artificial differences. This makes sense, because our chief faculty is our mind; the function of the intellectual mind is truth, and essential truth is one and the same for everyone. Responsibility for a humantrue society can be entrusted to no other than each and every individual. This is the only way of ensuring that society is humantrue. By dividing 'power' amongst all individuals it loses its separate influence and reduces to nothing, whereas the strength of responsibility increases with wide sharing. Life in a humantrue society will be simple. It will be entirely understandable to every responsible individual member. There will be nothing of more consequence than the gentle, loving, constructive everyday concerns of the individual. There will be general concern to put the minimum strain upon Earth. The practical processes of living will engage our minds only as far as is required to carry them out thoroughly; otherwise our intellects will flower in every possible abstract way; through music for example.
That is how life on Earth should, and could, be. It is not how human life currently is. We are, or seem to be far from achieving such a society. This is not because it is an impossible dream, but because we have not yet made the effort to break the bonds of conditioning and to realise our intellectual potential.
Without doubt we are a race of superior intelligence, yet it does not strike us that the basic practices of our society are far from intelligent. Consider some of these practices and our consequent behaviour (fully explored in Part IV.) Our subjection to a competitive money economy, for example, which employs most of us (but unemploys many of us) in its interests rather than being employed by us in the human interest. Under this demonstrably false economy, or management, many people waste enormous effort and time in simply handling, calculating and multiplying money and measuring everything in terms of money. As another example of unintelligent practice, take the fact that we continually progress, materially, technologically and politically. We accept material progress as an inevitable fact of life, hardly stopping to consider the opposite view - that it is undesirable, unjustified, and that we accept it merely out of habit. Finally, look at our practice of submitting to the institutions of a system dedicated to ruthless pursuit of the instinctive competitive drives (finance, commerce, industry,) but also to other institutions of the same system (law, police; military) which curb some of the inevitable inhumanities of that pursuit, and are supposed to protect us when it goes recklessly out of control.
Some of the extremely traumatic recent events in our history are at last beginning to bring home to us our own shortcomings. War is a feature of amoral, competitive, divided, authoritative society, a phenomenon resulting from small differences escalating to huge conflicts because society lacks benign self-control. Within the last seventy-five years many, many millions of humans have died in two world wars and countless smaller ones, in the course of which human behaviour has descended to unbelievably callous, merciless and bloodthirsty levels. During the same period millions more have died of cruel oppression; also from starvation, neglect, and disease because society has failed to look after them.
These enormous figures are easy to quote dispassionately, but just imagine the suffering and heartbreak surrounding each death.
Occurring in a period of only sixty years, and still going on, is brutality of a more disturbing kind, behind closed doors, by ruthless torture often ending in execution. One way of persuading oneself of the need for fundamental radical change is to remember that human individuals just like ourselves gassed the Jews in Hitler's concentration camps, enslaved and slaughtered peasants and politicians alike in Stalin's regime of terror, degraded, terrorised, maimed Cambodian civilians on the orders of Pol Pot, and then, in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, were murdering, raping and displacing whole peoples because of cultural and religious differences.
The fact is that mankind is unpredictable, dangerous and uncontrollable, and shall remain so unless and until we become what this book shows we ought by nature to be - supraconscious. The whole purpose of this book is to make clear the full significance of this word, and to show without doubt that it is our true nature to be supraconscious.
It is when ruthless leaders come to believe they cannot control or neutralise people in any other way that they order, and we perform, unspeakable atrocities. These horrors result from the accepted amoral norms being taken to extremes. In certain circumstances all humans are capable of this terrible behaviour. For all the complexities of our applied intelligence, our intellect is yet unfulfilled. Though we believe ourselves to be, or try to be gentle, compassionate and peacable, too many of us, too often, show the characteristics of sophisticated predators.
Our present false habits and standards, chained to existing society's amoral rules and instinctive practices (competitive money orientation, political dishonesty, self-interest, racial and other forms of discrimination) contain the potential for exploding into these extremes of horrendously violent and inhuman behaviour. That is the false picture we have always had before us. This book sets out along the road to the altogether happier, humantrue outlook already briefly described. The book reveals humanity's true potential for supraconscious awareness. If we fulfil that potential we shall bring about a world where anything other than gentle, compassionate and peacable behaviour shall be impossible.
A humantrue world would be right and good for us, but it is a prospect so remote from present reality as to need great initial mental effort to envisage. There is no doubt that we are capable of that vision, however, and once we see it, and determine to make it our reality, we shall achieve a humantrue world relatively easily. The question is‹are we willing to make the initial effort?
You, I, and all human individuals throughout the world, have brains of enormous capacity. There may be about one hundred thousand million neurones in the human cerebral cortex. Of these, about ten thousand million comprise the covering cortex, the neocortex, separated into six layers, with a huge potential number of correlating dendrites, axons, and synapses. Some other animals, such as whales and dolphins, have actually or comparatively larger brains but not this same layered neocortex. It is this that gives us our infinitely superior, and in my view optimum, reasoning power.
Were we truly represented by our faculty of higher intelligence, unique on Earth, we would surely now be living in peace and contentment. But our instinctive impulsions are much more representative of us than this faculty or knowing and reasoning, or intellect.
It is the animal character of humanity, using its brain as calculator, which has aided and abetted our astonishingly rapid, yet essentially retrogressive development, from individual rivalry to world war, for example, and from local pecking orders to the wealth and poverty of nations.
Yet we each have the ability to be morally aware of right and wrong, good and bad principles, and our reasoning capacity gives us the responsibility for applying those principles in our world.
It is with our active assistance, and despite our mental capacity, that our world functions on wrong and bad principles. Society is a permanent battleground, with competitive aims and interests locked in continual combat. The inner intelligence of the mind looks on like a horrified, protesting spectator, wondering why life cannot be altogether benign and pleasant. It is the nature of high intelligence to answer all questions and solve all problems - to make life in its own image, so to speak. This thoughtful process must result in continual improvement of society towards perfection - unless it is prevented. Since existing human society is progressing otherwise, it is clear that in our case the process has been prevented.
We do try to improve our society, with some success, but this is a fringe activity, not that to which our energies are mainly applied. Humanity is not making intelligent progress towards answering and solving its questions and problems, is not building a growing body of agreed truth which shall be our infallible guide. This is the process which is being prevented, for the reason that we are not guided by our intelligence. We are driven, body and mind, by an automaton.
The automaton is a self-acting influence, the mainspring of our society. It embodies the principle of competitive conflict, an instinctive driving force. This is the principle on which our world society is founded, its chief motivation, the first and foremost influence over our development so far, and the basic cause of our problems. The stressful state of human society is not primarily due to the present conflicting characteristics of its individuals, but is inherent in the automaton which developed those characteristics, which has imposed this conflict on us, yet with our help.
The bulk of history has been made by the application of our minds and bodies to the automatic drives. We have pursued a growing complexity of competitive aims and material interests, and these have become the norm. The whole interconnected system of practices and institutions which dictate, represent, and control our activities needs a name - let it be called the MACHINE.
We are harnessed to the automaton, whose influence permeates every inch of the fabric of our lives. And we serve the Machine whose institutions, representing every conceivable aim and interest of those automatic drives, have taken over the exploitation and control of our resources and activities. The Machine includes institutions which we suppose to be working in the interests of our own protection and well-being. But whilst serving even these institutions we remain harnessed to the automaton, in whose interests we are acting contrary to our well-being.
Even though we become aware of our true interests and opposed to the Machine, it is extremely difficult to throw off our harness and escape from servitude. The Machine provides most of the necessities of life, to obtain which we have to serve it, or conform to its practices. The Machine has weaved most of the fabric of society, and provides the framework of our community. It also controls the means of widespread communication, by which we are not so much humanly united as wired-in to a network which connects our automatic selves together.
Were we to become wholly and fully true to ourselves we would have to be isolated individuals, but such personal independence is hardly practicable because of humanity's overwhelming dependence on the Machine. As things stand, if we are to provide for ourselves, join in community, and attach some meaning to our lives, we are obliged largely to conform to the norm. We do not find it easy to express our true inner thoughts to others, or even to ourselves, because those thoughts are abnormal in the eyes of automatic reality.
In this book which you are now reading - an attempt to express wholly true reasoning - every word and every construction of meaning has to fight against enormous pressure from the Machine to crush it down into conformity. If this writing is to have any hope of breaking the iron grip of that normal conformity, it must make automatic reason wither and die from exposure to truth. If that makes it so unfamiliar, abnormal or intense as to be hard to read, so be it. Maybe the conclusion to be drawn is that writing which is easy to read may not convey truth, and true breakthrough requires much hard work on the part of both reader and writer.
We are born into this world with some instinctive inherited intelligence, but no ready-made complete processes of true reason. The human baby is expert at recognising its mother, for example, but not at judging whether she is right or wrong. Several years must elapse before every component of our faculty of intellect reaches full potential, and we become fully capable of reasoning for ourselves. In the interim we are exposed to direct experience of the world as it appears to be, or to indirect experience by way of TV programmes, comics and books. We are also exposed to the influence of parents, peers and teachers. Before our minds are fully fledged and potentially able to work out the truth of it all, we have been subject to about fifteen years of brain-fixation. Despite the crazily unreasonable picture which human life presents, if anybody reaches this stage with determination to discover truth, almost nobody sustains it.
We are also born with temperament, a series of emotional capacities each varying between strong and weak, mostly evolved as the accompaniment to instinct for coping with life in the natural world. In the process of growing up we have to learn how to adjust these emotions and adapt them, first to the Machine, then to the human community.
Normally our realistic characters are formed in three ways. 1.By our fixed mental conditioning and circumstances in existing reality. 2. By our reasoned and emotional reactions to the concepts and facts of our reality - whether we accept or reject, like or dislike them. 3. By the balance or imbalance resulting from 1 and 2 - whether we react destructively against reality; whether we passively accept and make the best we can of the here and now; or whether we act constructively to gain for ourselves an advantageous position in the Machine.
What constitutes our willing brain fixation is either that we have allowed our minds to be so conditioned that we cannot perceive any but these three ways or that, seeing another possible way, we deny it. Whether our character is formed by the first, second or third way, or by a combination of all three, practically all of us accept the underlying facts of existing reality. Many people protest against the inhuman effects, but almost nobody questions the fundamental principles of the Machine.
For example, we think law and order depends on strong government and do not consider an alternative view - that government causes lawlessness by relieving people of responsibility for their society. We consider that the competitive money economy reflects the facets of human nature, and do not normally think to the contrary - that apparent human nature has largely been formed by the characteristics of the money economy.
The Machine is our motivation, and the framework of our society. It depends on us to keep it accelerating along, which we do because we believe there is no alternative. But this is our public activity. Privately we observe different standards. So although our public activity supports the amoral and immoral affairs of the Machine, we are unwilling publicly to admit this because it contravenes our private morality. Yet at the same time we believe it naïve to expect that our private morality could possibly govern our public activities, so we pretend that we want to be moral but are continually frustrated by events which we also pretend are beyond our control. We pay lip-service to humane standards whilst at the same time methodically betraying them. For example, humans talk endlessly about peace, but forever make war. We increase efforts to fight escalating crime, but steadily move ever further away from understanding and removing its causes. The divorce rate increases as our general failure to co-operate, tolerate and agree seeps more deeply into our personal lives. Were we making true progress, war, crime, policing and divorce would be steadily declining.
We keep these double standards by dividing ourselves into two; a public, hard outer shell of self, and a private, soft inner awareness. We are able to sustain our outer shells by the fact that the hard reality to which they belong constantly confirms the belief that we have no alternative. Also, our outer shells employ the denial factor, refusing to respond to the still, small voice of conscience. And we demand Machine satisfactions to make up for the loss of true fulfilment. We defend our automatic selves, and these satisfactions, on the grounds that they are the most that we can expect or hope for. It is the hard outlook of our outer shells that we mostly act upon. When it comes to a choice between morals and lawful gain of money, for instance, the great majority choose money. From this viewpoint the virtual eclipse of our true awareness can be justified, because the soft inner shell can be seen as a weakness, having to take a back seat in the tough, real world. Under the surface, our lives are really a struggle between our humanity and the Machine, and the Machine always comes out on top. We are hardly aware of this fact because, on the surface, we are all working for the Machine, on its side in the struggle. To move out of this wrong reality and into the right one, we need to wake up to the fact that our true humanity is fighting a losing battle. Whoever we are, we need to realise that each and every one of us belongs on the human side. The Machine is the common enemy on the other side. It can be defeated of we become united.
The subject touched upon so far shall be returned to later, more fully and from different angles. This is the beginning of an exploration, and I hope you will reserve critical judgement until it is completed.
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