The Wrong Reality. PartV Interpretation. 33 Religions Against Reason - continued

In considering Jesus it is necessary to separate him, as possibly the most nearly humantrue of thinkers, from the Christian church that followed, an automatic institution unworthy of him whose morals have been adjusted to the practices of the Machine. Gnostic testaments, the latest discovered in 1945, suggest to me that his actual philosophy opposed and exposed Roman law, the established temple, and the money economy, which was why it was suppressed by authority and only allowed to emerge, much modified, some fifty years after his death; that the book on which this modified version was founded was a censored, elaborated and romanticised account of Jesus' life and times that made Christianity acceptable to the then Machine in Rome and to much of the world since. Such is the anti-human effect of automatic authority.

Whether or not Jesus' original message was true, the significance of humantruth to human life lies in its being totally understood, observed and applied, whereas that which Christianity has passed down is a combination of outright untruth and adulterated half-truths that have managed to survive the similarly false amoral pressures of world reality because designed to do so. If Jesus' concept was the pursuit of truth it was converted into good automatic behaviour, obedience to the Machine (like Confucianism), for the sake of a very different concept - that of god as another but all-powerful emperor in the sky, armed with added strong persuasions; the gift of heaven or curse of hell after death. That the Christian institution has lasted so long is because it has salved the human conscience by giving our amoral and immoral civilisation a cloak of righteousness. It has blessed our wars and forgiven our inhumanities so that as long as we believe in it we can believe ourselves good whatever we do. But as human awareness has grown Christian belief has declined, partly because its theory of god has no satisfactorily evident foundation, partly because of its two-faced institution, partly because it has failed to change the world significantly for the better, but mostly because it has neither represented nor sought after good and true morality nor aimed to put this above all else.

It seems to me that whilst Jesus may have seen the road to truth, and perhaps some of his immediate and courageous followers also, the sincere and well-meaning members of the eventually established Christian church did not. They made the mistake, not surprisingly in the circumstances, of thinking that the Machine itself was neutral, life's inevitable systematic arrangement which could be turned to good or bad means and ends according to the morals of the people of all stations, high and low - a necessary mechanism which at that time was brutalised but could be humanised by men with love in their hearts. They did not recognise the automaton as a self-acting mechanism, intent on material progress but indifferent to true human well-being through moral fulfilment, which simply utilised human energy, both that motivated by love and hate. As it stood, and still stands, the Machine could never be prevailed upon by human love alone, for contrary emotions and calculations have strong vested interests. Expecting love to prevail is like expecting a man without eyes to see. A good social structure is as essential a part of our good human morality as our bodies are essential to life. The Machine calls for the use of our minds in its service, with the aid of instinct and with survival at stake. Morality can not really get a look in. It is not sufficient that we may be, or feel, moral - the whole structure and working system of our world has to be humantruly moral also. As I have said, we are sitting on the fence, with the Machine before us engaging most attention, and the still small voice of conscience behind us, perhaps represented by religion, the two sides never actually mixing but occasionally brought to compromise by politics.

I have mentioned equality as an obviously desirable virtue that the not so obvious humantrue alternative reality must surely incorporate. As human awareness grew, society tried to edge nearer to this principle of equality, but the Machine also grew, and with it the contrary principle of competition, and converted our wish for equality into a demand for parity in the desirable consumption and accumulation of material goods. The automaton has increased its power to make us serve its interests through our self-domination by the desire to work for it in order to consume its products. Thus, though we autoprogress, we truly advance little, if at all. We remain divided, dominated, undeveloped and unfulfilled. We are to some degree aware of the fact that the automaton has learned to a nicety how to manipulate us by exploiting our weaknesses, and has infiltrated the Machine so thoroughly and made it so powerfully omnipotent that we, no longer believing in the power of a Christian god to help us, also no longer believe that we can prevail. This is because we do not understand who we are nor how we are dominated and conditioned.

Nevertheless religious faiths persist. Civilised human moral conscience has always examined our earthly reality and found it wanting at the same time as our consciousness has supported it out of necessity, believing it to be inevitable. We once had faith that by changing ourselves we could change reality for the better. Then we thought that by certain acts of obedience to Christian and similar creeds we scored a moral victory by remaining sitting on the fence and refusing to go over entirely to the automatic side. Now those who hold some kind of religious belief do so for the sake of personal help and comfort by the fortification of self-supportive constructions of thought and denial of contrary reason. At one extreme of the pecking order the human dictator can look at his eminence and power, and his place in history, and may fortify this self-image with the belief that he is chosen by god. At the other extreme, ordinary persons have their private beliefs, their personal gateways to god, which give them a link with the powerful energy of their own life-force and have nothing to do with intellectual truth, but which nothing can take away provided they cling tenaciously to those beliefs.

Here in the West the present tendency of the more thoughtful, who have already abandoned conventional religious faiths, is also to abandon any expectation of human reason ever making good our society (just as Eastern mystics did long ago on the grounds of a belief that it is human reason which has made society what it is) and to pin their faith to an unknown extra-terrestrial wisdom, just as Christians and others chose a mysterious god to worship. The idea is that we are incapable of enlightenment by our own intellectual striving but only by opening, through transcendental meditation and the like, to cosmic consciousness or universality. Shades of divine intuition again. It is clear that the only source of enlightenment is our own postconscious mind, but does it matter that we imagine it to come from outside ourselves, as long as it does come from somewhere? Certainly it matters, because only by the process of pure intellation can reason supraconsciously reach enlightenment and know it to be true. Transcendental meditation, however, if supposed to be an emptying of the mind, may give the self over to conscious, subconscious and instinctive awareness (as well, certainly, as the balancing influence of conscience) which may then wilfully block out the free and independent reasoning of the postconscious. Since there is no cosmic consciousness, the mind's remaining capacity - its supposed emptiness - can then be filled only by the permission of consciousness, subconsciousness or instinct. This lays the mind open to adulteration and dictation by wilful prejudice which, rather than be examined and rejected by true reason, gathers round it a defensive construction of contrived reason.

It is vital to examine this new religious departure, spiritual mysticism, because rather than learn from past errors we seem to be passing on to yet more make-believe. In that it does involve the wish for a better world and, despite its opposition to intellectual striving, includes a certain amount of thinking on the subject, no doubt such religion has some good effect in an otherwise automated world. But it is remarkable how many gaps and weaknesses are to be found in this kind of belief-structure, yet that it is nevertheless widespread, though usually not so much in the form of a positive faith as a negative refusal to disbelieve in its mysteries.

It would seem that those who believe in some form of mysticism do so out of dislike of the worst effects of existing reality, and dissatisfaction with conventional Western interpretations of it and antidotes to it. Believers are against striving with, or what they see as trammelling up the mind because they equate reasoning with ruination: we are capable of reason and our world is in ruins, therefore the former is responsible for the latter. In fact the reverse is the case - rather it is our failure to allow the mind to strive for true reason that has caused our downfall. Believers in mysticism confuse reason with misdirection of intellectual power and evidently fail to recognise the automaton as the driving force responsible for this misdirection. Those who turn to such belief are in turn utilising incomplete reason falsely to establish that belief, mistaking it for the very truth that is to be discovered only by complete reason. They too are dictating to their higher minds with lesser conscious will, and thus convincing the self and keeping it the prisoner of consciousness.

There is some confusion surrounding this subject and it arises from different concepts of what the mind is, how it really works, and of its place in human identity. Before going any further let me clarify this confusion, beginning with the fundamental truth that we are all individuals possessing potential intellect, and all subject to the Machine.

The self is normally viewed, in a vague and imprecise way, as being separate from and in charge of the mind. The automated human conscious self treats the mind like a personal computer, not to be respected as a true guide but to be used for survival in the Machine and to enhance automatic experience. God-religions regard this self as the spirit, subject to the influence of a divine wisdom that is much superior to the mind. Normal thinking is this wilful striving of the self with or against the mind, to impose on it and make it work for automatic ends, worthy as well as unworthy, but limited and fundamentally against its own values.

The mystics rightly object to this wilful striving with the mind but wrongly identify this mental manipulation as the only reasoning of which the mind is capable, whereas it is lesser conscious reason, far surpassed by postconscious reason, the human mind's optimum potential. They see the mind as a receptacle which, when opened and emptied, will receive enlightenment from a superior universal consciousness.

But we potentially are our highest faculty of mind. It is consciousness which should be opened, not to any external enlightenment (though its awareness may be triggered by external argument) but to that of our own postconscious which shall surely come if our conscious will encourages, helps and allows it to perform this its true function. This is real reasoning, the only way to truth - striving by the mind, in the mind, by we who potentially are and constantly try to be our minds. I can vouch for the fact that enlightenment comes in this way and surmise that others, having shared this experience in the distant past, invented the notion of a cosmic consciousness by way of explanation, especially since its conclusions often come to the conscious mind as sudden inspiration. But there is no doubt that the neocortex is the source of such enlightenment, which cannot presently be achieved without the persistent, hard, reciprocal effort of individual intellation, but which will be sustained, eventually, by humantrue reality.

The strong attraction of the practice of mysticism lies in the fact that it can convey a sense of truth without its substance. Therefore, like music, it can be invested with gentleness, beauty, and good feeling, portraying the sounds and shapes of a perfect reality without responsibly tackling the task of reforming our ugly existing reality. To accept such belief is to take a tranquil course rather than pursue the frenetic activity required to discover and realise truth; to entrust any such discovery and realisation to the gift of some vaguely imagined mysterious spirit. This allows the believer to ignore the postconscious and its vital significance and to see being human as simply existing in consciousness which, perhaps by way of meditation, imparts elements of an incomplete enlightenment which the believer then attributes to that supposed cosmic consciousness. Otherwise, the self has simply to be itself, to follow wherever the degree of partial enlightenment thus granted to it shall guide it, and to take life as a personal experience that is not in our power or province to direct with the brain but to savour with feeling.

The profound error of mystical religion is that it rests upon belief in nonexistent cosmic consciousness. What it calls the spirit is, in fact, crude life-force plus conscious awareness, a state which humans shared with all animals but which has evolved, presently only in us on Earth, as a stepping stone to supraconsciousness, the true peak of intelligence to which evolution aspires. To suggest that cosmic consciousness already understands all truth, and has existed at least for as long as this universe's 15 billion year history, implies that evolution, and humanity's part in it, is merely a pointless game for it suggests that since enlightened intelligence already exists life's great struggle to evolve has no meaning or purpose. This religion has invented unsolved puzzles posing as enlightment in an attempt to fill the gap between sensing truth and fulfilling it. Our lives possessed internal genetic security until intellect came along and broke the self away from the protective custody of instinct, leaving us exposed to ignorance of truth which intellect was developed to enlighten. But intellect has since failed to provide true moral security by way of that self-enlightment.

Mystical religion may be effective as a means of rounding off the conscious self , where that is a matter of the personal internal balance wrought, in a single individual of a certain automatic conditioning and circumstance but with good moral aspirations, by way of its own self-contained intercommunication of conscious intellect and instinct which ignores the postconscious excepting for conscience. But a collection of selves that are complete according to their own differently limited moral orientation, though perfect in their own eyes according to their own terms, do not combine to make a perfect society, only a more efficient, imperfect Machine. This would become clear were the numbers of such individuals, who usually withdraw from the rough-and-tumble of the Machine, to become so large that their dependence on the Machine for survival required that they also took part in its amoral and immoral activities, to the extent that their independently contrived personal moral balance must break down.

A chief weakness of this and all religions is the fact that it springs from false assumption as to the nature of self. We all refer to ourselves as 'I' and 'we' but what are we actually referring to? Not to supraconsciousness, identifying with the postconscious mind as the self should. We are referring to the inferior consciousness in which the human self presently remains rooted. Yet we have to refer to that superficial, personal conscious self as 'I' - it has to be distinguished. But we do not have to allow that it makes our important decisions and determines our beliefs. On the contrary, the inferior conscious 'I' can embody an ever-increasing awareness of the higher (independent) postconscious mind which, though not yet able itself to take over the identity of 'I', can subject the conscious 'I', and our entire automatic reality of which the inferior self is a product, to doubt, question and criticism. This is a delicate and difficult relationship to establish, but it is the one true way.

The practice of meditation seems to be inseparable from mysticism. The verb to meditate actually means 'to consider - to exercise the mental functions'. This meaning surely casts doubt on the practice by implying that meditation is a subtle manipulation of the higher mind by a lesser separate self and not, as is claimed, an emptying of the mind. The mental process would ideally consist of four activities - the conscious sphere working within itself; the approach of the conscious to the postconscious; the postconscious working within itself; the postconscious referring back to consciousness. The interaction of these four activities would be subject to postconscious will; that is to say that the process would be supraconscious, beginning with the independent postconscious striving to take over the being of the individual and realise humantruth. However, it is presently normal for this process to be dominated by conscious will so as to be restricted to two activities; the postconscious voluntarily working within itself but closed off from and ignored by consciousness excepting for the prickings of conscience, and the conscious allowing its self-contained thinking to be manipulated by its conditioning and striving with that thinking to survive and prosper according to the Machine.

The meaning currently given to meditation is rather different. It implies a process by which personal consciousness transcends or rises above ordinary awareness and enters another higher state of cosmic consciousness that enlightens the self. When asked what this consciousness and enlightenment consists of, some mystics say that part of the truth is that when you fully understand it you do not talk about it. The objection to this is that if the enlightened do not talk about it how can others recognise it and that which is to be derived from it? Such an attitude is explained by the fact that this is not whole truth that needs to be shared and commonly understood. This can be no more than a full understanding of the self's limited truth in relation to existing reality. It does not relate to others because they are expected to seek their own self-truth, and it expects nobody to strive for a humantrue world.

In the light of reason which makes us aware that there is no cosmic or universal consciousness or spirit, what is transcendental meditation and why is it practiced? If it were a total shutdown of all mental activity, high and low, then it could not be described as meditation, the exercise of mental functions. A relaxing emptying of that which we regard as the mind, which reduces stress by cutting off our full awareness of the mad world outside must be physically beneficial. The mind is then not being stimulated by outside events, although it is alert to any unusual sound and in a state of readiness, nor is it said to be working within itself (which I doubt is ever actually the case). I take the heightened, sharpened alertness that meditators experience to be an effect of narrowing down consciousness in this way, ignoring the wide range of normally meaningful stimulations, sinking back into the anumal state of watchful rest, closed to any activity at the higher human level. This is not a colourful heightening of true awareness, or opening to deep moral questing, but a return to the black and white simples concerns of instinct - retreating, not going forward. We already commonly ignore our postconscious minds when they are trying their best to break down the iron defences of conscious will and bring true awareness. It is adding insult to injury to submit ourselves to regular periods of shutting them away altogether. On emerging from this meditation the subject is usually able to face the world with renewed vigour and confidence. Occasionally he or she may also experience some sort of true inspiration, reinforcing belief in cosmic consciousness. But this must come from awakened awareness momentarily opening to the intuition of the independent postconscious that has been working privately despite neglect; that would function infinitely better with our conscious co-operation, and that will make us wholly humantruly aware if we remain permanently open to it. This so-called meditation reflects a desire to return to the morality of living intelligence at a much simpler level - like the awareness of instinct that all is as well as possible with the world and no more can be done than is already accomplished by nature. To aware intellect, this is not morally permissible in a chaotic world where so much requires to be done.

Suppose, however, that transcendental meditation actually makes the conscious oblivious of all but the most insistent outside stimulation, but arouses both it and the unconscious postconscious to heightened activity. In order to clarify the relationship between the two main parts of the mind - between the combination of instinctive consciousness and the utilised postconscious under the domination of instinctive will, and the unconscious independent postconscious - let us call the former Mind B, and the latter Mind A. Since Mind B consists of a chief construction of prejudice to which all thinking primarily refers, this state of heightened activity, free from interference, will simply result in its thinking even more effectively (though subconsciously, as in a dream) in its usual way. Although Mind A's independent true and critical intellation has also been heightened its influence will thus be no greater. The only way in which Mind B can be influenced by truth is by allowing itself to be so externally stimulated as to become highly critically self-aware to the point of breaking down its own wilful conditioning; by giving freedom and encouragement to its independent postconscious Mind A, and, by supraconscious intellation, growing in humantrue understanding. This beneficial process can not take place with the consciousness of Mind B closed down; therefore this kind of meditation can be of no truly fundamental benefit.

It will simplify matters from this point if we generally refer to Mind B (including the utilised part of the postconscious) as the conscious mind, and Mind A (the independent postconscious) as the postconscious mind. I suggest that you keep your intellation processes fluid on the question of the exact structure of the mind and the inter-relationship of its parts. I have not yet found the complete answer, but I am quite certain of having travelled some way along the right road towards it.

What would be the effect of this kind of meditation, with the conscious closed down and the postconscious fully awake, in the mind of an intellating person? It would give the postconscious mind extra time for reasoning that would be beneficial in theory. But exactly this activity takes place during deep sleep, and the natural balance between time spent awake and asleep seems to be that which the mind requires for its daytime duties and observations and its night-time sorting and reasoning. The practice of meditation would seem to reduce the mind's daytime observations whilst increasing its capacity for sorting and reasoning, perhaps with the result that less sleep is required so that the balance is restored. In this case, then, meditation would seem to do no harm but for the fact that sleep is largely dictated by postconscious need, whilst to meditate is a decision of the conscious that strengthens its wilful dominance, whereas it is desirable, indeed vital, that we submit increasingly to postconscious will.

It can be seen that the postconscious mind will get much more rest and will not require our conscious help when, by its guidance, we have realised humantruth in the world. Instead of working hard at night untangling the contradictions of existing reality and making the correlations which that hostile reality does not allow it to make during the day, it too will be able to sleep like all the other faculties. But the Machine and the present automated thinking of humanity is already working on a complex, amoral level, autoprogressing and taking over our minds at an accelerating pace. That is why striving of the mind is presently vital, day and night, at full stretch.

The Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement contends that its enlightenment can spread other than by teaching and example; that given about one hundred truly enlightened persons it would spontaneously change the world. This is insupportable because apart from goodwill there is nothing tangible to spread, and I think this notion comes from a vague awareness of the influence for truth but failure to recognise its vital source. Only supraconsciousness can humantruly change the world; there is no other road. Meditation heightens awareness of the benign, co-operative part of instinct whose influence must have good effects, just like the power for good in the Christian message. But to rely on this feeling rather than look to the striving of our minds means leaving the Machine undisturbed, and leaving ourselves in all ways vulnerable to the other ancient instincts that hold sway and make our reality the violent competition it now is. Whilst the Machine rules, the benign instinctive or moral influences do not, because they may not, prevail.

It is naive to believe that the world shall be put right by emotional right-feeling and wishful thinking. To work out a social structure which would sustain that good spirit requires tremendous effort of intellation and responsible sacrifice. It is necessary once again to remind ourselves that we are presently saddled with a vast, complex, overwhelming, ingrained system, a Machine that accentuates our natural differences and gives us many artificial differences - of education, status, possession, reward, authority. To enable our true inner selves, our intelligent humanity to shine through, all these differences must be removed and the system replaced by a humantrue constitution. There is no question but that this shall require great general striving of mind, also tolerance and patience.

The sensory input that meditation closes off from the mind when purporting to make contact with a universal consciousness is the information output of the world as it is. The postconscious mind of the intellating individual needs to be constantly aware of this worldly output so as never to lose sight of what it is up against. In the ideal world supraconsciousness would be tuned in all the time to the calm, benign, reassuring output of the humantrue reality it had made. The animal is already in its own reassuring world of instinct that nothing within itself or in its external experience contradicts. It is this sense of reassurance, recalled from our instinctive past, that meditation embraces in mistake for something ethereal. So mysticism and its practice of meditation is an artifice that does no more than bypass our intellectual responsibility whilst periodically refreshing the automated self so as the better to cope with our presently existing wrong reality.

The ultimate effect of such as TM, well-meaning as it surely is, would be to retard the progress of true human evolution by keeping our behaviour linked to emotion, the higher mind in limbo, our society firmly subjugated by the automaton, the self exclusively anchored in consciousness. We would continue to experience life mainly through our full range of instincts which, whether benign as expressed by some or malignant by others, are both applied and are equally appropriate to the mixed morality of the Machine. It shall not produce peaceful simplicity or higher morality because it shall not help or enable us to emerge from the existing situation which, like the balance of nature, must give free reign to bad as well as good morality (to use human terms) in order to work. (To continue click here)

For overview, return to Wrong Reality SubINDEX