I have tried to establish the fact that this book is not a product of existing automatic reality; that it is not an offering to the critical attention of automated humanity with the hope of entertaining or arousing interest but with no real expectation of the here and now being fundamentally changed. It is an attempt to discover the true mind of humankind, the realisation of which would result in an utterly changed reality.
It is said that an author should have a particular audience in mind when writing. This is to accept that there are groups of different kinds of individual each with certain group characteristics. I am writing to individual minds, each of which has similar capacity and for all of which there exists one and the same potential understanding of humantruth.
It is not possible to know how many individuals will eventually read this book. Although my remarks come from a great confidence in the true understanding of my own mind, and I increasingly imagine you, the reader, as following my reasoning because you share that understanding, I have no way of knowing whether you were enlightened before you began reading or how far this book has helped, or to what extent you have actually released your mind from its previous conditioning. Are you still wilfully attached to some of the false principles of this reality or do you see it all as false? If the former, I beg you not to reinforce your solid instinctive conscious self but allow the postconscious to break it down - make supraconsciousness your aim, without prejudgement of the truth then to emerge.
This Part V is to explain how and why the false make-up and situation of the majority - the normal 'I' who has not yet come to understand - has caused and still causes us to explore false concepts of the earthly and universal destiny of human beings and adopt religious faith.
Just look around you at all the people and imagine what is going on inside each head. Each person, as a detached physical and mental entity, may be very different in opinion and activity but all are conducting, to some degree, a private and perhaps totally secret but essentially similar struggle in the mind.
From the time that humanity acquired its postconscious mind, its faculty of knowing and reasoning, it became a species whose true destiny is to fulfill this intellectual potential and become supraconscious. The achievement of this fulfilment depends, initially, on humans themselves perceiving that this is their true destiny, and then on their making the vital effort to adopt entirely new concepts and facts of reality in order to acquire an appropriate nature and state. We have never yet risen to that perception, but though we don't see it, we sense it. That sense gives us the vague awareness that there is, somewhere to be found, a true purpose and meaning to our lives, and gives us the desire to try and define it. The Machine imposes its automatic purposes and meanings on us and practically all of us conform to most of these but chiefly with our outer shells, inwardly finding them in many ways unsatisfactory, or suspect.
We have not succeeded in defining this true meaning and purpose of life because, whilst we strongly desire it from the depths of our inner being, we yet resist the truth of it. A reason for this is that to break through to that truth can be extremely difficult, requiring abnormal and sometimes excrutiatingly persistent effort and awkwardly radical sensitivity. It is so much easier to follow automatic instructions in accordance with instincts with which we have long been familiar. Our normal inner mental struggle may be between our private morality and the obvious immoralities of the Machine, i.e. our postconscious's battle with consciousness for control of the self, but it is generally obscured by a yearning for sure and positive but relaxed and tranquil feeling, and dislike of the uncomfortable and unrealistic tensions of striving for truth. We are mostly looking for some comforting, protective, all-embracing personal dream which shall both fulfil our moral desire and counter ugly realities.
We are struggling not to solve our problems but personally to surmount them. We evade the essential process of intellation - the tortuous process whereby the conscious self gives way to the critical judgement of the postconscious mind and inferior consciousness is displaced by a supraconscious state of being. The present normal human mind not being supraconscious, the human self is incomplete and wrong. So the self makes a pact with the wrong reality, not feeling right but neither believing itself wrong - only looking to penetrate some mystery which shall, it is imagined, make an emotional balance that does feel right. The human race has instinctively careered on its reckless way for thousands of years without ever getting into top gear, mentally. It is as if we were a race of children who never grow up, or as though we all suffered brain strokes at birth and almost none of us fights to recover and fulfil our mental potential, and the very few who do fight fail in the face of overwhelming odds.
We try personally to surmount rather than collectively to solve our problems for two reasons, One is that we think these problems inescapably endemic, and the other that our minds think this way because they are emotionally bound up with our bodies - both our own bodies and those of our close kith and kin - and our bodies are bound to the Machine, our existing reality. This reveals another reason why we resist the urge to discover the true meaning and purpose of life. Existing reality puts pressure on our private reality not to address itself to humantruth - not to address itself to the gentle and careful consideration of the fundamental facts and responsibilities of intellectual life - but to take a back seat, whilst our outer shells fight the automatic fight. We join in the competitive battle not only to win its rewards but also to defend or shelter our inner selves, as best we can, from the hurt they must otherwise suffer. Automatic reality seems to allow our private morality no other means of escape into relative safety.
The city is the acme of automatic reality. It represents the predominant concentration of present human thought and activity, all geared to the automaton and allowing us little real choice but to conform or go hang. The city assumes that we are harnessed to the automaton and that our desired objective is to comply with the norm. It takes the patronising approach that humanitarian sentiments are commendable, and may be practiced or pretended to wherever convenient, but that when it comes to the important basic business of the here and now it is not the human conscience but the Machine that calls the tune. The media take the same approach, most of the time, which is reflected in the predominantly automated attitude, behaviour and general conversation of most of us.
Minds which the Machine recognises as foremost - whose interpretations of reality are its own and generally accepted by us - do not supraconsciously intellate but reflect or address the preoccupations of automatic reality. The effect of this can be felt in the public library of a large city. Here are many thousands of books written by such recognised minds, far more than any one person can read and absorb, implying that to wholly understand our world is beyond any individual because nobody can know everything, and we each must bow to the Machine as our collective interpretation of reality. But the great majority of these books fall into two categories. Those in the first category are dispensable, being concerned with the automatic interests and affairs of existing reality which have no humantrue significance. The second category contains a great deal of detailed fact but the essential truth of it can be briefly and simply summed up. Science, for instance, can be summed up as fact about the phycical universe that the mind does not require to know in detail, only in general principle, in order to be humantrue. However, the Machine pursues the instinctive drives, not pure human reason, and its affairs automatically follow the technological application of scientific discovery. If an individual mind is to take part in this application it must first be strongly automated; then it requires to know the science thoroughly, to be well versed in its significance to the money economy, and then to keep abreast of its discoveries and the autoprogression of technology. It is such thought constructions as these that determine a mind's interpretation of reality. These exclusive minds are but shadows of their supraconscious potential, but are the automaton's priveleged lieutenant's who help to rule the world.
So the truth, or rather humantruth, is not recognised because apparently nobody out of this world's five or six thousand million individuals has achieved his or her full mental capability so as to be able to judge the wholly true relationship of anything to everything else. The general consensus of opinion and belief is related to false automatic reality and represented by the total content of one week's newspapers. This week's doings of the Machine determine the affairs of next week which automatically follow, just as this week's consensus forms the basis of next week's opinion, and so on, with automatic logic. There is no evidence of whole reasoning going on. Nobody has the right reasons for doing what is done, and none of us is aware of the true significance of what he or she is doing. It is a most disturbing fact that almost everybody believes consciousness, set in this automatic reality, to be the supreme human self, its will the decision maker but with the Machine laying down its options. Thus it is that humantruth, that which should inspire, guide and govern us, presently serves only to confuse us by pricking our conscience.
That pricking of the conscience is the postconscious knocking on the door of consciousness, reaching the awareness of even the most automated of minds dominated by the strongest of conscious wills. We retain our inner selves and feelingly know them to represent the true 'us', despite the subservience of our outer shells to the Machine, not only because of that moral awareness but also because of the emotional influence of the benign instincts. The most cruel despot can see himself as kind and just, because he lovingly cares for his own family. Our moral awareness and gentle instinct does not turn us against our outer shells, however, or collectively against the Machine which is the cause of our general immorality and inhumanity, but merely prompts us, whilst serving the Machine on one side, to tend our humanity on the other, as best we may and as far as the conventions allow. We are sitting on the fence.
We sit on the fence because we are in the wrong reality, in which the private thinking of all individuals who cannot make the world conform to their inner morality, but will neither capitulate to the amoral norm, tries to reconcile these apparent irreconcilables so as to make life livable. It is a compromise, a truce that the majority of us call for a lifetime, opting out of responsibility for the struggle between our humanity and the Machine by taking a neutral personal position. Certain individual or group characteristics and classes of activity come down on one side of the fence, some on the other side. On one hand we pursue competitive drives according to automatic lore, in the positive interests of the Machine but contrary to the true interests of humanity. On the other hand we try automatically to control some of the ill-effects of these drives with instituted laws, and meet some others with charitable compassion. The general truce is broken from time to time as collective opinion or action shifts now closer to the Machine, now to the human. Politics, as it swings from Right to Left and back, is one agent of this shifting which, like the extremes of war and peace, effects no real change but leaves the human race, its potential unrealised, sitting on the fence. Some praise to us that at least our senses insist on this balance - that we have not yet gone over to the Machine altogether. But the great weight of our reality is on the automatic side, and we could not have contrived this balancing act had we not invented something to which we gave equal and opposite weight on the human side.
Think back to Mussolini, or Franco, dictators in their countries, depriving the people of their freedom. This is generally thought, recognised and agreed to be unhealthy and intolerable, yet the whole world is dictated to by the Machine, and worse - almost every human postconscious higher mind is dictated to by the inferior, wilful thinking constructions of the conscious self.
Our existing world has little to do with our inner selves but everything to do with our outer shells, so the present stance of the normal human mind is very much more automated than intellated. Therefore almost everybody comes to the same conclusion - that the individual is impotent; absolutely powerless personally to change world reality for the better, the inner self being faced with a reality and an outer shell that are not and have no intention of ever being humantrue. Despite the fact that every individual is equipped with a superb mental instrument whose potential, in terms of true reason, is superior to the whole physical, natural and automated world; despite that fact, unreasonable, reckless autoprogression continues.
Although this is moral madness, unacceptable to our inner selves, the fact of its continuation implies that the instinctive automaton is and must be our most powerful and inescapable motivation, compared with which our purely human morality is of inferior consequence. It further implies that the Machine is dependably logical whilst humantruth is irrational, and we allow ourselves to be convinced of this whereas the reverse is true. For example, the money economy defeats our attempts to make sense of it and we cannot believe the true reason - that this complex system that governs us and all the world does not make sense.
When the automaton draws human affairs down on the side of the fence opposite to our true morality we can be persuaded to commit all kinds of inhumanities. Although torture and mass murder is obviously and strongly against humanitarian values, the Machine does not have, and never has had, any difficulty in getting humans to perform such atrocities. The reason is that the Machine has much more comprehensive power over us than our consciences. Yet even while we commit these inhumanities we cannot escape our mind's awareness that we are contravening our true values, though we may temporarily, or even permanently, obscure our conscious perception of that awareness. There is a difference between what we will do in obedience to the Machine because it is required of us in our position in automatic reality, and what we will openly admit to doing, either to the world or to our own inner selves. For this reason, torture and mass murder is usually carried out behind closed doors, or otherwise out of common sight. The doors of the prisons, and the doors in the minds of the torturers and executioners, are closed to full recognition of these acts, just as the minds of the indirectly involved public are shut against the guilt of admitted knowledge that they are actually taking place. If and when the prison doors are flung wide at last, also forcing open those doors in the mind, the guilty may be as horrified as the innocent.
Our history burdens us with guilt and our past neglect of truth is visited on us in the present. Even though we are well practiced in applying the denial factor to many of the worst features of existing reality, it still offends the conscience enough that we would be unable to bear it, or our automatic selves, but for the invention already referred to. This is religion, of course, by which is meant some system of faith in and worship of, or deference to, a supposed divine power or wisdom. Religions afford an escape from human moral responsibility by giving weight to the humane characteristics on the automaton's side of the fence on which we are sitting. As long as we are prepared to believe them, and sustain our faith, religions restore the balance between our humanity and the automaton but only in our wishful imagination. And in any case, even if this balance were a fact, that still leaves us sitting on the fence, only half way human. Religions strike this balance by calling acts such as torture 'evil', and repentence good; by isolating the good self from bad events so that faith can be maintained without having to eradicate acts such as torture. The fact of 'evil', which is allotted a fantastic place - Hell - is balanced by pretensions to good which are also given a place - Heaven. But it is true that our reality is imbalanced on the automatic side, which means it's going downhill towards dehumanisation or destruction. Even if an unequal balance between our humanity and the automaton were a fact, it might ensure our survival but nothing approaching our true fulfilment. Nothing but a wholly humantrue reality can be acceptable to morally aware intellect.
If you are to become truly aware you have to keep your head above the vast sea of automatic conditioning in which practically the whole of humanity is immersed. When you are sunk in this sea you may not see it as conditioning. You will then judge with a mind conditioned by a false reality, and therefore falsely. You have a sense of the true meaning and purpose of life, perhaps arrived at by applying reason to your instinctive feelings of care and compassion, yet cannot find these adequately reflected in the world. So you may well turn to one of the religions, because it satisfies your moral senses and feelings yet does not disturb your conditioned reasoning because it has been made to fit acceptably into the automatic norm.
It is unlikely that anyone with firmly and wilfully fixed religious faith will have been able or willing to read this far, but likely that the minds of the persevering reader and this writer shall be broadly in sympathy. It is easy for us to dismiss religions just as it is easy for 'believers' to dismiss us. Yet we share the same moral concerns, so what stands between us? It is that they put a false construction on the meaning and purpose of life that they sense, whilst we are dedicated to realising its truth. What matters about this difference is that religions take away from humanity its responsibility for ourselves and Earth.
Surely it must be accepted that truth is the prime object of intellect. Whatever may be the humantruth the honest search for it should not begin with any fixed prejudice such as that against religion. On the other hand that search, however well-intended, will be brought to an abrupt and unsuccessful end by the adoption of a blind faith in things of the imagination. Such faiths might keep the fence-sitting human race from toppling over too far into automation, but they bring to a halt or at least hinder true progress.
Pt.5 INTERPRETATION
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31 Sitting on the Fence
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32 Roots of Religion
33 Religions Against Reason
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