My aim has been to try to discover and reveal the truth about all things by process of pure reason - an abnormal process but one that anybody with a normal knowledge of the world can carry out. I hesitated whether or not to miss this chapter out, for according to my own convictions all religions are false, therefore might they not be ignored? But they so powerfully exist that nobody escapes their influence. So this chapter is included, because religious faiths are rivals of pure reason that have hindered or prevented intellation for centuries and it is necessary to counter their practiced but fallacious counter-arguments.
Religions against reason are examples of our conditioning, or our habit of adopting specific limited constructions of mind which then limit our thinking. False faiths are their own justification for individuals upholding the various thought constructions that uphold blind faith. They may differ only in their interpretations of the same thing, but it is the wrong thing. They illustrate the way we use or consciously dictate to our minds, pretending to enlighten but only confusing and darkening our understanding. Religions need to be held up to question because they are ways of escape from human responsibility in a world that desperately needs radical change. There is no virtue in allowing that this or that person holds this or that recognised belief when the vital need is that all should equally truly understand.
Conflicting religions are, of course, part and parcel of our competitive reality, akin to opposed political dogmas, and are mostly contained by automatic institutions. In a reality that does not make sense, all must be tolerated but none must be true. In a debate in the British House of Lords, on the government's proposal that instruction in all the established religions should be included in the general school curriculum, one member persisted in questioning the truth of god-religions as the basis of his opposition to the proposal. In this he was perfectly justified, for truth is the all-important consideration. But this member was not permitted to continue speaking, on the petition of a majority of members who objected to him 'rubbishing their cherished beliefs'. Beliefs should not be cherished unless absolutely true. If false, then the faithful are hiding behind make-believe and making truth taboo. If undoubtedly true, they should be able satisfactorily to answer all critical questioning. This is a delicate matter because we confuse truth with freedom - the freedom to believe what we wish. But, as I have pointed out already, our true freedom is not to 'do our own thing' but to undertake the fulfilment of our intellects, which means commonly to attain to and agree to one and the same humantruth.
Each mind should be its own guardian of truth. It should intellate, accepting nothing without good and true reason. This should not be a process of building on that which has gone before without question. We have to probe our preconceptions and remove those that are false. To such a mind the questions 'does god exist' and 'is the Catholic faith true' are not admissable because they refer to preconceptions which, whether you believe them or not, humanity has accepted without good and true reason. A mind that had never been introduced to these concepts would find the questions meaningless and could not ask them. A mind with Catholic conditioning would undertake to answer both questions in the affirmative, with conviction and without willingness to question this, its own faith, because of the rigid way it had been conditioned.
A problem is that each evolving individual human is presented with one or more ready-made concepts of god. Whether we believe or disbelieve, the idea of god is then lodged in the mind where it has no business to be, because it is not only unproved but also far-fetched. The young individual might adopt a faith unthinkingly, when not yet in a position to decide whether to believe or disbelieve. And what must be the effect, at the backs of childrens' minds, of adults who hold to different faiths, all claiming that only one, their own, is true? A chief virtue claimed by any such faith lies in its being held with an indomitable strength of conviction; consequently, once it is taken up it is rarely given up or doubted by the faithful. The individuals who choose to disbelieve, wishing to be certain that their view is true and then to have their reasoning prevail over that of the faithful, might spend a lifetime trying to disentangle and prove false the mountain of heavy complex argument that religions have built up on a light foundation of mere assumption. In a society in which almost nobody intellates there are large bypassed voids of unexplored reason, or mystery, and these we allow various forms of religion to fill with substitutes for true reason, from full blown faiths to the vaguest of superstitions.
The best way for intellect to determine the significant meaning and purpose of life would be to start with no knowledge at all of religious preconceptions. If religions have no foundation in truth they will not suggest themselves to the intellating mind. The last thing to do is to study them, for theology compounded on a false foundation leads away from and not towards truth, and what true light it throws only confuses because it does not penetrate most of the darkness. But it is clear that religions cannot be ignored, though they deserve to be dismissed. Since they are not proven, and are very doubtful and questionable, our honest course is to disbelieve them, and change to belief only if and when every pure path of reason suggests, if not proves, their truth.
It seems to me dishonest and foolish to believe in a religion when none is supportable by utterly true conviction. It is even more so to inculcate such unfounded beliefs into the evolving minds of children, for this stunts their true growth. If we are to shoulder our full human responsibility we must, from early childhood, seek and adopt that which is undeniably true, reject that which is clearly untrue, and honestly and persistently investigate that which is doubtful. By adopting false faiths we twist the truth and then must contrive to believe nonsense in order to uphold that faith.
I return to my previous contention that we have no right to ill-considered and wilful opinions and beliefs but a responsibility to ensure that our mental constructions are wholly true. This means that we do not consciously make up our minds but supraconsciously allow that they make themselves up; we do not arrive at any belief until fully convinced of its truth. This requires that in the interests of humantruth all preconceived religions are rounded up in the mind, encircled by reason subject to the postconscious, fully examined and dismissed, because, like the false concept of reality of which they are part, they contaminate the purity of truth and thus cripple the intellect.
The truth, or humantruth, should be made absolutely clear, for intellects cannot live in harmony except by the truth. If you hesitate to reject religions because of the good they do, you should recognise that this is partial good, counterbalanced by much that is bad. We shall not attain to humantrue society unless guided by that which is wholly good and true.
To refuse to recognise god is not to disbelieve, when there is no deity to believe in. It is simply to keep the mind open to unshakeable reason. It is not humantruly acceptable that we persist in global disagreement. To my own certain belief, religious convictions are aberrations of reason that stand in the way of agreement. Agreed truth is more important to us than keeping an iron grip on any faith. By putting aside religion and opening our consciousness to our higher reason we shall lose nothing, for if that religion is fundamentally true its truth shall be unnerringly and persistently indicated. But if we keep our minds open only to one faith and closed to whole reason we shall never know the truth.
It is our supraconscious which shall show us that which is wholly good and true. The supraconscious mind, seeing religions as contrivances of an automated civilisation, does so from the position of a single high intellectual faculty looking out from a point on Earth at a universe whose actual and possible totality is veritruth, but which is not of itself intellectually endowed. The universe represents no higher faculty, contains no capability of recognising truth, other than the supraconscious intellect of living brains - no greater meaning, potential wisdom, truer morality or deeper compassion. We, and similar creatures elsewhere, are the lone trustees of truth.
Humanity - that is to say every single human being expressed collectively - desires happiness, or fulfilment, with an underlying peace and secure contentment. We know that this desire is not granted by our existing reality. We also know that it is regarded as our duty to achieve optimum human happiness and we try to achieve it as best we can, as far as the limitations of our automatic circumstances allow. But there is no human reason why we should not achieve optimum happiness. Not a muscle may be moved without a signal somewhere; humans do not act excepting with the approval, by the intention, or through the acquiescence of their personal constructions of mind. Clearly, since in general we are acting wrongly, most of the signals we permit ourselves to act on are coming from the wrong source. We turn to religions, which pretend to good morality, but that is not the main signal-source, for we do not behave accordingly. Religions are largely moral reactors to amoral reality rather than correctors of it, which, in order to keep up their pretence, find they have to resort to mystery.
It is our automatic reality that gives these main signals which we obey. Yet, I repeat, the Machine is nothing without our active support and we are not truly represented by it, nor by religions, but by our intellect. By intellating, and so rising to supraconsciousness, we may give our society a humantrue constitution whose signals, on which we then act, come from the best in us so that we achieve that optimum happiness. But we have yet collectively to take the first steps in this necessary direction.
Why do we resort to make-believe rather than take these first steps? Because humantruth can be understood and realised only by supraconsciousness, a state of which we fall far short. We do not see the world as something which it is within our power, and is our collective mandate, to put right. Living in a seemingly inevitable reality that is a competitive conflict between extremes, we see ourselves and our world in terms of these contrasting extremes - of good and evil, love and hate, kindness and cruelty, right and wrong, weakness and strength, losing and winning, poverty and wealth, misery and satisfaction.
Once reality is comprehended in this way it is difficult to envisage the possibility of actually changing to a different, humantrue alternative, though that is what we innately desire. So we take the easy course of accepting this unjust and dangerous reality. We reject the difficult task of envisaging a benign and harmonious alternative in favour of a device of the imagination. This device is chosen to counterbalance the Machine by expressing our humantrue desires in an abstract way. The device, religion, can allow escape into fantasy and shows a preference for things imaginable that do not have to be explained by reason or proved in fact. We are attracted by religions whose power lies not in their truth but in their mystery - in the fact that the core of truth attributed to them is never revealed; indeed cannot be revealed because it is supposed to be a mystery so profound as to be beyond our understanding. We are not likely to be attracted in the same way to supraconsciousness because that transfers the hard responsibility for realising truth to ourselves.
So we adopt religious faiths, disciplines, and modes of thought in order to answer, counteract or cope with a reality that we believe to be unavoidable, if only because we think there is little human will for humantrue reform and no real chance of overcoming the Machine. Such faith, beginning as a device of the imagination contrary to intellect, goes full circle in its denial of reason; for example when it suggests that Galileo, when his findings were eventually accepted having first been condemned as profane, could never have accomplished his great revelations without divine intuition. In this way independent reason, if not discouraged, can be condemned as immodest if it contradicts the normal tendency to believe in divine wisdom. Because of the fact that we invented religions they view us as we view ourselves, with a mixture of realism and mystery, as automated individuals but also as unique spiritual selves to whom life is a personal experience. Therefore we indulge in imperfect, incomplete and impure reasoning, as is appropriate to our insane automatic reality, helped and redeemed, we fondly imagine, by divine powers and knowing spirits that do not actually exist.
It is instinctive to submit to the domination of superior all-round strength; to something greater and more powerful than we. So it is easy to understand why primitive humans might fear the sun. Yet it would be their dawning power of reason, investing the sun with characteristics of the most-feared animals, or the strongest and most wise of their own tribe, that gave humans to worship it and make sacrifices to persuade it to continue rising and giving them the daily warmth of its rays. But as reason advanced the realisation came that the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon and tide, the coming and going of the seasons, were of all things most predictably certain. It is just such practical reasoning on the physical level, harnessed from its beginnings to the developing Machine founded long before and thereby given impetus, that has continued on its straightforward and almost uninterrupted way right up to the present, when physicists and mathematicians say they are within an ace of explaining everything physical. We have never had difficulty in making 2x2=4 because, in the field of mathematics, rather than be swayed by instinct we have listened attentively to that of our reasoning-power which is available to conscious direction for application in this field, and have accepted its proven results.
But from the beginning the broadest conscious thinking, not narrowed in this specilised way, was unable to find a satisfactory explanation for life as it was, nor to perceive an all-embracing meaning, nor to discern a worthy future purpose to strive for. Our continuing failure to apprehend truth in our worldly affairs is equivalent to making 2x2 amount to 3, or 5. We, the forerunners of modern mankind, originally failed because we were already automated, and the main thrust of our existence was the pursuit of automatic targets by the utilisation of our automatic powers. From the very first we began manipulating reason so as to adapt it to developing reality - to make sense of the senseless. We tried to adopt, with a will, the restricted meaning and purpose of the automaton - autoprogression for material gain - each limiting and adapting it to a suitable personal reality. It was this application of reason to competitive conflict, rather than allowing reason to take its own pure course, that necessitated the human habitual practice of lying and deceiving. But the postconscious mind could not be so easily silenced, or obliged to put up with the resultant circumstances. Moral intuition, or conscience, could not condone the injustices and inhumanities of our way of life and caused us to institute laws and punishments. The result, with its inequalities and cruelties of all kinds, was still unacceptable to that morality which intellect prompts us to follow and which we intuitively sense, even without fully understanding, however we may try to deny it. A further mental manipulation was required to enable us to follow, with a relatively clear conscience, wherever autoprogression should lead. We needed religions, which first gave compelling causes why we must maintain the status quo; then, why we must mend our personal ways despite the public Machine; and then, why we should empty our minds and rely on 'enlightment' from elsewhere somehow to put it all to rights.
The main line of advancing human civilisation has been human service to the automaton according to its lores. The accompaniment of this autoprogression has been an oscillation between obeying or breaking Machine-laws and observing or ignoring moral laws, (according to our individual position relative to others), the pressures of survival or ambition, the degree to which we have succumbed to good or bad instinctive feeling, and the extent to which we have followed our own reason contrary to the false norm and towards humantruth. So far the false conditioning of automatic domination has generally prevailed over our intellectual potential. Our only achievement of honest reasoning, in mathematics and physics, has not escaped confinement to the conscious sphere and has either been applied to abstractions within its own limited field or applied to automatic technology. Its utter regard for honest and accurate correlation has not overspilled into other fields in the conscious sphere such as politics or economics or general reasoning, let alone expand itself into pure supraconscious reasoning, as it should. This is partly because mathematics and physics are exact sciences whose hypotheses can be proven by experiment and whose area of operation, the conscious sphere, is the sphere in which we and our automatic reality presently have our existence. Other reasons why the scientific method has not entered into our highest reasoning are that science as it stands is an essential tool of autoprogression whereas pure and true reasoning would be useless or dangerous to the Machine, and that postconscious thinking is independent and cannot be proven by experiment, evidence or conscious argument, only by itself. Our efforts, either to correct human failure to become entirely subservient to the automatic ethos and law, or to mount a human counter-attack against the Machine, have so far been confined, mostly and ineffectively, to ill-considered ideologies and religions in the conscious sphere. Thus, in our general affairs, we have by-passed pure reason which would have led us to true understanding, and left ourselves suspended between false thought and action on the one hand and contrived thought and reaction on the other.
In ancient China the Machine was well established on the automatic principle of a dominant, powerful and privileged leader exerting authority, down through a hierarchical class system, over a huge underprivileged majority. In a bid to overcome undue tyranny and injustice on the part of the privileged and resentment bordering revolt on the part of the underdogs, Confucius tried to introduce an ideology whose fundamental principle was total acceptance of lawful authority and tolerance and willing support of the status quo. Everyone, from emperor to common road sweeper, was to respect the person and function of all others and to properly and meticulously perform his or her own function, both receiving and giving obedient service willingly, politely, and with good grace. Confucius intended that the morals and rules that people recognised and believed in should also be strictly lived by. It did not work because this was an automatic society with built-in inequality that was upheld by the privileged because it logically worked to their advantage and could not prevent them furthering their privileges whilst still exacting obedience from the underprivileged who must continue to endure uncomplainingly. It did not work because people are not fundamentally very different from each other - their differences result from variations in treatment past and present - and as they grow in awareness they come to demand reform, underlying which is a call for equality, to which authority must respond if revolution is to be avoided.
Confucianism aimed to have all people accept the whole of their society as good by intertwining civil law with the moral code - with tradition, custom, and habitual thinking - making a continuously cohesive, self-supporting society. The religion of Islam is a similar but more equable blend of civil and moral law that is still practiced widely in the less automatically advanced countries of the East. In the West, however, autoprogression has raised monetary economic materialism way above morality, forming a gulf between the practical establishment and human ideals that politics is occasionally allowed to bridge in a tentative, shaky fashion. Modern worldly reality is represented by the Western city, which has no place for the supraconscious mind. So until recently religious observance, the nearest thing that any institution of the established Machine has got to supraconsciousness, was given space on Sunday when shops, factories and offices were closed and churches opened. Nowadays Sundays are becoming ever more like Saturdays, given over to commercially oriented relaxation and pleasure.
Confucius was a member of the establishment of his day. Jesus of Nazareth was an intellectual rebel, or the equivalent of the present-day drop-out. When he founded his religion he faced a situation in which authority and humanity had grown violently apart. Roman rule was intellectual application to the instinctive principles of dominant power, the competitive drives, and disciplines of the pecking order. It was enforced, but Romans submitted to it willingly enough whilst it was progressively and gloriously succesful, and whilst it provided improved standards of material reward and crude emotional satisfaction to the majority. Human awareness, even that of the best minds of the time, was limited by ignorance of its own true nature and of the true nature of the automaton and the extent to which the former was being, and was yet more to be, denied by impositions and attractions of the latter. People possessed goodness but this was more and more being supplanted by worldly wisdom. Human reason had not advanced independently and broadly so as to withstand autoprogression. Most minds were little stimulated to reason much at all so that lores automatically imposed, and laws and loyalties imposed by executive authority, carried much more weight than private inner morality.
So Jesus was faced with strict Roman law, a conditioned, biased and subject people, an intolerant temple and a hostile money economy - an establishment not much different from that facing radical thinkers today. But the fact that he was tortured to death on a wooden cross-piece suggests that his message was near enough to the truth as to be dangerous to the establishment. That it seems to have been half a century or more before publication of an account of Christianity was permitted suggests that it took that long for the dangerous initial impact of the innately undeniable truth of Jesus's essential message to subside and be obscured. It is impossible to be certain of his true thoughts but he must have realised that the people, in order to follow him, needed some more powerful emotional cause for accepting his message than the good moral arguments of true reason alone. He could not know that in general the cause was to be accepted but the essential message largely ignored. Did he himself really believe in god, and in himself as the son of god, in any other sense than as the messenger of truth (as far as he knew it)? Or was it that others made him the fulfilment of ancient prophecy and he accepted it as the means to what he foresaw as a great and good end, a means which, though eventually proved false, would be justified if that true end were achieved? Or was he a mystic, a believer in cosmic consciousness as the source of true enlightenment, whose personal charisma was the powerful emotional cause why the truth of his message at first caught on and spread, whose miracle-working and personal magnetism were handed down as remembered figureheads of a body of belief which became distorted in the handing down? To continue click here
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