All creatures on Earth, excepting ourselves, pursue life with vigour and without question, requiring no more than the instinctive impulsion of energy, or life-force, to give them their singleness of purpose. We, having the faculty of knowing and reasoning, or intellect, require a reason for living, a purpose other than merely to live - a meaning to warrant our presence here. What we really want to know is truth, but growing understanding of truth would bring increasing desire to live by it. Existing reality is false and requires, on the contrary, that we automatically ignore, deny, or flout truth. Our present reality is a welter of concepts and values arising from misunderstandings such as caused the ancients to worship the sun, and modern society to believe in evil as an actual entity. These false concepts have uncritically accompanied the building up of a series of facts, practices and institutions of the Machine which have engendered further false concepts - misinterpretations of the evident world resulting in false convictions - for instance that children must be brain-fixed for living in tommorrow's world; that money is what makes the world go round; that crime and punishment are natural features of human society.
Our fanciful interpretations of life's natural phenomena have been so strongly felt, and automatic lores are so strongly imposed, as to overwhelm us, with the result that, in our search for life's reason, meaning and purpose, we allow ourselves to be forbidden the truth. Consequently we have found those substitutes for truth - religions - and contrived to believe them in order to give peace to our conscious selves from the nagging of postconsciousness and in order to reinforce certain disciplines of conduct that have become required supports of civilised human behaviour. These substitutes are acceptable to the Machine, to our automatic selves, and to our contrived beliefs. They provide false answers to our questions that sound true because they are echoed by false reality. They provide false solutions to human problems because they conform to automatic lores, and they provide necessary solutions to existing false problems that seem right because they are presently necessary.
The different religions are instituted and take their place alongside the many other different institutions of automatic reality. All religions should be rejected, for two vital reasons. Firstly, because they do not seek to realise humantruth but to compromise it. They promote true moralities yet at the same time deny and betray them by also supporting a false world reality that neither reflects true human reality nor makes its practice possible. Secondly, religions should be rejected because they represent some form of human deference to supposed divine power or superior enlightenment, allowing us to shrug off responsibility for ourselves, our world, and even the universe, and place it on the shoulders of gods whose existence can neither be demonstrated nor reasonably deduced. The most enlightened Christians may agree that truth is the object of the intellect which is its judge, but may go on to say that the point must come where intellect falls short of truth, requiring further light - exclusively the light of god - which it must cease striving for but must merely open itself to receive, not from the exhaustive dialogue with its own independent postconscious by way of intellation - the striving that I propose - but from god, without question, through high priests who were or are supposed to be nearer to god than we. This demonstrates the retreat of faith from the advance of reason; its falling back behind stubborn defence of that faith in god on which it depends for continued existence as a hierarchical institution and which stops its followers from reaching the recognition that their faith is false, and unnecessary. The process of intellation and the supraconscious state can not be content with limited opinions, unfounded beliefs, or imaginative faiths superimposed on the unknown, for nothing can be accepted as true in itself that does not have its place in the construction of whole truth. Therefore an act of compassion towards a victim of oppression is truly a loving act but it is not humantrue unless primarily dedicated to the elimination of oppression, so that there shall be no more suffering victims.
Yet it has to be recognised that to many people of good intention and kindly disposition their religion does represent truth. Though it is not evident or reasonably arguable that gods exist, in fact they do exist, in some form, in the minds of most individuals. So religions cannot be ignored. They require to be explained, in order that they disappear as faith in them is washed away by advancing humantrue reason. It is necessary to show that all the many and varied religions are substitutes for truth, both as a matter of fact and as a way of life, and that they do take away human responsibility from that to which it properly belongs - our supraconscious intellect.
At the start of human civilisation, and probably to some extent amongst our apefolk ancestors, religion was a matter of fearing, placating, and contriving explanations for phenomena that were beyond our understanding. These explanations were sought through growing curiosity and then required by the new faculty of knowing and its developing reason. To begin with, human morality was still entrusted to the positive drives and negative inhibitions of instinct, the natural survival balance between fierce competition and benign caring. Later, as the Machine harnessed our energies to amoral instinctive drives regardless of inhibitions, religions arose out of human desire to counteract these drives by the voluntary opposite expression of virtue and compassion. Such religions tried, and still try to replace the balance of nature, that we long ago passed beyond, with this artificial moral balance between our humanity and our reality - to keep us sitting on the fence.
But, as the moral messages of religions have failed to exert any real humanising effect on automatic authority, and now that the Machine is autoprogressing at an accelerating pace, people are resigning themselves to the conviction that nothing can be done. Consequently, morality has come to have no more real meaning to the religious institutions, their officials and followers, than to non-religious persons. Yet reason and benign enotion yearn for true morality. Nobody identifies with immorality, or sees himself or herself as fundamentally evil. As their ancient autocracies stagnated people long ago turned, and in the most automated West are again turning as they are similarly demoralised but in a more complex way, to kinds of mysticism.
Like the ancients the new mystics abandon the world to its fate, ceasing to strive for moral responsibility as religion at its best had originally done in the shape of Jesus Christ, and making life an issue between the individual self's experience and some outside power. In the beginning we worshipped evident gods like the sun, in fear. Then we prayed to a hidden, spiritual but humane god for succour. Now we meditate - not only in organised disciplined ways but also privately, as a kind of secret, intuitive dreaming - thinking to open ourselves to a mysterious cosmic divine wisdom with universal power, and gaining some personal satisfaction by being enabled to rise above or evade that which is personally distasteful or burdensome by walking away from it. Our expanding discoveries of scientific fact, which had earlier encouraged atheism by throwing out theories of god's creation and which could have taught us pure fatalism, did not provide an explanation of the meaning and purpose of our existence but so impressed us with revelations of the minuteness and enormousness of the universe as to reawaken the impulse to wordship these things, as we once worshipped the sun. In a sense we have gone full circle - from standing in awe of the biggest objects to be seen, turning in disappointment to imagining a god with the interests of humans at heart, then once more turning in disappointment to the most complex scientific subjects open to discovery, and to the belief that since the universe is beyond our ability to fathom and explain, it must be wiser than we. Thus, whilst we automatically advance with the Machine we still refuse to admit that our own intellect should be our guide, with the result that our minds have advanced little into supraconsciousness but remain primitive as far as truly significant awareness is concerned
Let me try to break down the barriers that religions have put in the way of the supraconscious realisation of humantruth by giving my own explanation of the meaning and purpose of life. I can not verify it, of course, but it seems to me to provide answers which are as close to the truth as the widest correlation of reason can approach. And I think it probable that a vague sense of these answers lies behind the actual false constructions which religions have put upon them.
Universal history, as far as I can imagine it, is a series of 'Big Bangs' each followed by a progressively further advanced but not completed evolution that ended in implosion. Our present Big Bang occurred when all energy, suspended in momentary balance between implosion to the point of disappearance and explosion into a renewed universe, was triggered to 'explode'. It can well be imagined that the gigantic forces involved, at that perfectly balanced moment of choice, were propelled into forward or positive movement by 'quantum bias' - the decision of just one infinitesimal micro-particle to go left rather than right, and that this tiny decision could be prompted by a force of extreme weakness compared with the tremendous energies it released. This weak force is the influence of and for truth, which at the point of decision re-created the positive influence of energy-expression as the intended vehicle of the realisation of truth. Herein lies the key to the universe, and to the meaning and purpose of human life.
It seems probable that in between the repetitive Big Bangs each universe more or less repeats the evolutionary sequences of the last. The genetic influence left behind by previous life-forms enables roughly the same forms progressively to develop once more. In new universes matter is re-created that contains pictures from the past, like the frost formations detectable in water, (even boiling water); a sequence of patterns to be repeated and extended by evolution. So in this present universal cycle these patterns, through influences such as genes, have helped to trigger the re-birth of all those life-forms, from crystals upwards, that the influence for truth, in its constant quest for its perfect realisation, caused to be newly developed in past universal cycles, goes on causing in the present and shall continue to cause in the future until its objective is secured. This objective will finally be achieved if and when such advances can reach fulfilment, throughout a universe (which will be the final universe, to be perfected, not replaced), before energy can again decline in positive vitality so as to begin sinking negatively into death, represented by contraction ending in implosion.
So the true influence presses for significant advances to be made towards realisation of truth whilst the universe is still positively living. The energy influence responds by making changes - mutations that appear to be experiments aimed at improving chances of survival. But it is clear that progress, seen as constant improvement of survival techniques that enable each species to keep abreast or go ahead of the competition, is only necessary as long as its competitors are also progressing. It has been pointed out already (Chapter 5) that the food chain, in which a sequence of creatures live by consuming each other, seems pointless. The hover fly is a precisely evolved, amazingly intricate creature, with two pairs of wings on swivel joints beating opposite ways at 175 beats per second. Many such creatures survive only briefly before they are eaten, so they increase their numbers to ensure that some survive, and they continually evolve better defence strategies which would improve their prospects were not their enemies also continually developing better means of attack. Overall survival, and the optimum expression of life-force energy, would be equally well served by a general drastic reduction in the numbers of all species (for dead creatures do not express energy) and a complete halt to all progress (for escalating competition cancels itself out). This argument can be carried much further, but I think the following conclusions are inescapable : that the process is too inexorable to be without prior purpose; that another objective, more significant than mere survival of species, is suggested by the ever-increasing complexity of species.
As life-forms become more complex they require more elaborate intelligence. The life-force impulse to progress, which makes creatures ever more complex, evolves super-predators at the ends of the food-chains, some with consequently highly developed brains; lions, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, and humans. Now we see once more the objective of the true influence which underlies that of life-force - to have living intelligence rise above consciousness to the level of intellect and therefore become supraconscious. That objective has been partially achieved with the evolution of the human species. It remains to be wholly achieved when we realise our supraconscious potential.
Let me put this another way. Life that includes death, especially death by continual mass murder, can not of itself be the fulfilment of a genuine purpose - neither for the worm nor for humans who contrive their own artificial reality and separated objectives. Its only achievement that indicates a purpose is the evolution of intellect. Since the only possible fulfilment of intellect is by way of realising truth, the purpose of human life, and the ultimate purpose of all life on Earth, must be to realise truth. Since life, and especially intellectual life, is obviously and without doubt the supreme achievement of the universe, it can be deduced that realisation of truth is also the purpose or objective of the universe.
The evolution of life has been achieved by the life-force continually impelling the expression of energy, but by processes that constantly leave open tiny opportunities for change by way of quantum mechanics and biological bifurcation which, when aggregated, are capable of producing circumstances that could lead to total change. Whilst realisation of truth is ultimately the only means of achieving total change, the whole living process must first not only engineer the creation of intellect but must also give protection to the evolution process by maintaining a sympathetic environment. To carry out these functions also requires a kind of intelligence but it would seem to be very different from the intelligence of the human brain.
For instance Gaia, which I have mentioned already, seems to be an intelligence impossibly operating without mental processes. However, is this so different from the evolution of the stick insect which I have also mentioned, and are not these two reactions employing the same principles as apply to the working of the brain? The brain triggers a certain activity as the result of selecting, from a whole series of possible activities, that decision which has accumulated the greatest signal strength, i.e. the decision that is most appropriate to the whole knowledge and reasoning of the brain in the circumstances. This is basically a matter of the strongest of a range of small influences of choice towards a particular large and energetic action. In the normal animal case it is a relationship between cortical neurones and physical muscles by way of nerves. To continue click here