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    The Transcendental Future
    The Transcendental Future
    The Transcendental Future
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    The Transcendental Future

    By John O'Loughlin

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    About this ebook

    A volume of philosophical dialogues with an introductory essay originally dating from 1980 and having a transcendentalist dimension which embraces evolution from a religious standpoint, as well as factoring-in correlative kinds of art and literature, including examples by Salvador Dali.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateOct 16, 2010
    ISBN9781446642641
    The Transcendental Future

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      Book preview

      The Transcendental Future - John O'Loughlin

      The Transcendental Future

      John O'Loughlin

      This edition of The Transcendental Future first published 2011 and repubublished (with revisions) 2021 by

      John O'Loughlin ( of Centnretruths Digital Media) in association with Lulu.com

      Copyright © 2011, 2021 John O'Loughlin

      All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author/publisher

      ISBN: 978-1-4466-4264-1

      CONTENTS

      Preface

      Introduction: The Ultimate Purpose

      Spiritual Truth for Third-Stage Man

      Environmental Transformations

      The Transcendental Future

      From the Ego to the Superconscious

      The Rise of Transcendental Art

      Biographical Note

      PREFACE

      This collection of philosophical dialogues, dating from the spring of 1980,  begins with an introductory essay and progresses through  some five fairly lengthy but stylistically and thematically-related dialogues revolving around the subject of transcendentalism. Subjects tackled in this way include spiritual truth, environmental transformations, the concept of a transcendental future, psychic evolution, and the rise of transcendentalism in art, a subject that was to occupy me throughout the remainder of 1980 as I launched into three loosely-related novels on modern art and artists, beginning with Thwarted Ambitions.         

      John O’Loughlin, London 1980 (Revised 2011, 2021)

      INTRODUCTION – THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE

      Is there an ultimate purpose to human evolution, and, if so, what? This is a question which serious writers have been asking themselves for some considerable time now and providing a variety of answers to, according to their individual bents. For some, the answers have been flatly negative.  For others, by contrast, highly positive. There are those who believe that evolution is a haphazard affair without any ultimate purpose, and others who are convinced that it signifies an important trend in the direction of greater spirituality. There are those who believe that evolution is drawing to a close, and others who are convinced that it still has a long way to go.  No matter how diverse the opinions or answers may happen to be, the question remains one to which writers generally apply themselves either negatively or positively, pessimistically or optimistically.  It induces a 'yes' or a 'no' response, rather than incertitude.

      In this essayistic introduction and most of the ensuing dialogues, I propose to take a 'yes' stance and investigate one or two of the possibilities which human evolution may undergo during the course of the next few centuries.  I am going to assume that there is an ultimate purpose to evolution which takes the form of a spiritual transformation of mankind into the Divine, but I'm not going to pretend that such a transformation will come about merely in the course of a few decades.  If there is a progressive advancement from matter to spirit, it is not one that proceeds quickly but, rather, in accordance with the overall pattern of higher evolution from ape to man and then on to whatever lies beyond him.

      Yes, I am going to contend that we began in very unspiritual circumstances, progressed, via our ape-like ancestors, to beings capable of religious experience, and are still progressing, slowly but surely, from the cultural state in which we have intermittently existed for the past 6–7,000 years towards a higher state of predominant spirituality, after which the material aspect of our being may disappear altogether as we merge into the omega absolute of pure spirit, following transcendence.  If that sounds like Vedanta, then so be it!  But I am not going to pretend that the ultimate purpose of evolution will be achieved before some considerable period of time has elapsed – enough time, in fact, to enable us to transcend our current identity.  For at present we are still men, not godlike entities, and so we shall remain until such time as the next great spiritual revolution and/or evolutionary leap comes about.

      We are men, and therefore victims of and participants in history.  History largely hinges, we learn from Spengler, a prominent philosopher of history, upon cultures rising and falling, upon a succession of cultural developments – some great, the majority small.  It appertains to that compromise between the sensual and the spiritual which is man.  Before the compromise, there is no history.  Likewise there can be no history after it.  Ape and Superman (to use a Nietzschean term) are each devoid of history and, consequently, of culture.  Only man makes history, which will be the greater the more finely balanced the compromise between the sensual and the spiritual.  Therefore history must continue, in one form or another, until man is extinguished in the Superman.

      But what of cultural history, the history pertinent to great cultures, which Spengler considered the only true one?  Does what he saw as the decline of the West, the last great culture to have appeared in the world, signify man's approaching end, or is there likely to be another such culture in the near future?

      Of great cultures there have been, according to the aforementioned philosopher, seven or eight, and of this relatively small number the Christian, or Western, was in his opinion the greatest, having had the most far-reaching effects on the world and achieved cultural wonders unprecedented in the entire history of man.   It was the last of a succession of great cultures and the most extensive of them all.  No previous culture had developed art or music or literature or sculpture or architecture to such a high and complex level, and it is difficult to imagine any subsequent culture surpassing it.  If we try to imagine a hypothetical future culture producing great art, we are immediately confronted by the immense difficulty of trying to imagine paintings or music or literature of a superior order to the greatest works of each genre currently in existence.  We would have to reconcile ourselves, under duress of this hypothesis, to the implausible possibility of artists producing works superior in essence to Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Van Eyck, Breugel, Dürer, Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo, et al.  Composers producing works superior in essence to Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, et al.  Writers producing works superior in essence to Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Swift, Goethe, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, et al.  Needless to say, we are unlikely to succeed in doing that!  And so, its being supposed that the arts have attained to their egocentric zenith in the last great culture known to man, we must assume that the cultural process, properly so-considered, has come to an end, never to be supplanted by another such development in the near or distant future.

      For what would another culture require in order to establish itself on a proper footing with cultural development generally?  It would require Nature, above all regular contact with the best possible type of Nature – a type peculiar to temperate rather than tropical zones.  A great culture is unlikely to arise in climates which are either too hot or too cold, too fierce or too sultry.  It requires proper nourishment, and this can only be obtained in certain regions of the world.  Rule out those regions, such as Western Europe and North America, where the representatives of the last great culture still exist, or those regions, including China and India, where

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