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In this world, as I observe it, capitalism has created a socio-economic environment in which life for most is supremely unfulfilling, oppressive and lacks any higher purpose. It is relentlessly eroding human character. This in turn is engendering a kind of behaviour in people which is increasingly unnatural.
To enable people to behave in a natural, desirable and mutually beneficial way, they must all be put back into an environment which can provide all the needs of a balanced human life. This in turn demands a complete revamp of how the land and resources of the planet are divided and utilised. It requires the dispossession of all capitalist elites and constituted nation States, and the repossession by each individual of his rightful share of the planet on which he was born. This is necessarily far more than a mere political issue. Its fundamental nature puts it firmly into the realm of religious morality.
Whatever may take place in those parts of a capitalist's mind which deal with notions of morality, he does appear to follow a definite creed which determines the way he behaves towards those in my position in society. This I know because there can be no misinterpretation of the real and unwelcome effects I have suffered as a result of this behaviour.
On the other hand, there seems to be some kind of moral dimension built into my mind which convinces me that any socio-economic system which allows any individual to exploit another is wrong. I think I have the necessary level of intelligence and ability to have been a very successful capitalist had I so chosen. If my singular quest in life had been to make money by any means, then that is what I would have done. When my business was at its zenith in the mid-1980s I was well on my way to doing so. But I was never comfortable simply 'doing the accounts' while others were doing the work. Unfortunately the capitalist system and its free market are not conducive to one-man bands in which the proprietor is also the artisan.
When I confront people of a capitalist mind with the problem of natural conscience regarding the exploitation of others for profit, I get a variety of replies attempting to justify the capitalist system. So does the capitalist himself have a natural conscience, or does he see no need to justify his behaviour on moral grounds?
It appears that strongly taught and constantly reiterated peer beliefs can suppress, or at least attenuate, the human life-form's natural moral conscience. This has caused many thinkers to accept that a majority labouring poor was an essential element of any advanced economy. Nevertheless, having accepted this, many had trouble reconciling it with their moral consciences and religious beliefs.
Why should one person's income be augmented by a vast profit element and another's not, for no other reason than that the one inherited capital and the other did not? Why should one person be able to borrow money to capitalise a business and live by profit while another must survive on a wage, just because one happens to be blessed with charisma and persuasiveness and the other only with knowledge, skill and dedication?
Try as I might, I cannot establish any honest moral justification for the vast disparity in wealth and well-being which has been inflicted on vast numbers people in the world by capitalism and its so-called free market system. So I have to ask myself, why does this system exist and dominate the world today? As I look around me, I sense that many others share my moral view. Yet we all live together in a society ruled by an elite who, apparently with clear conscience, do not. I am therefore forced to ask the questions: "Whose morality is right?" and "How can we possibly know?"
It is clearly self-evident to me that the human life-form possess the power of abstract thought. This awakes it to a state of conscious self-awareness which in turn imbues it with the power to make free moral choices.
However turbulent and unpredictable the material universe may appear to be, it is governed by physical laws. As such, its behaviour must be deterministic. But the power of free moral choice enables every human being in his own small way consciously to alter the effects of the blind determinism of physical law, and thereby influence destiny. This suggests that the seat of this power could lie beyond the physical - making it a kind of enigmatic interface which joins the material universe to a higher reality which exists beyond the constraints of physical law.
Exactly what is this mysterious human power of free moral choice? Many people think it is so complex as to be beyond analysis. However, I can see only one free moral choice. It is the choice between passively accepting a default, and actively choosing a harder alternative. It is the choice between allowing oneself to be driven by natural selfishness and living by a conscious decision to love one's neighbour as oneself.
All other conscious thought is concerned with working out the tactical details of how to achieve the objective one has chosen. That is, either how to maximise one's self-gain for least effort, or how to ensure that, what one does, benefits one's neighbour as much as it benefits self. The first alternative is like falling off a log. One just lets the force of gravity take one. One just free-wheels under the sway of one's natural instinct. The second is like lifting the log. It requires deliberate effort, but it puts the conscious 'you' in control of your intentions. It thereby empowers you to shape your own character and influence your own destiny.
Unfortunately, though most people can understand the notion of loving neighbour as self, the human life-form isn't naturally equipped with the power it would require to actually be able do it. People may think they have this power but they don't. It is an illusion. And since they lack the inherent power to realise one of the options, they do not have a choice. The human life-form has thus been forever powerless to do other than simply free-wheel under the control of its self-seeking natural instinct. History itself is thereby bound never to be any more than a study of the tactical details by which individuals and groups have sought to expedite their instinct's prime objective of maximising self-gain for least effort.
Society is a vast number of human beings interacting with each other. Collectively they form a complex dynamical system whose even more complex behaviour is determined solely by the natural laws of physics, mathematics and logic. So, though its behaviour be complex, it is deterministic.
However, the self-seeking instinct (which is a feature of the physical human mind, and of which capitalism is its advanced collective manifestation) causes this vast complex dynamical system we call society to be economically destructive towards its own component parts, namely individual human beings and their families. The behaviour of human society does not gravitate towards a stable strange attractor. So although it has been known to exist for over six millennia, its existence under its present constitution is destined to be no more than transitory.
For society to become a pleasant place for each individual, every other individual would have to make, and live by, the harder free moral choice to seek his neighbour's well-being with equal vigour with which he seeks his own. But this would require the presence of a power which the human life-form in its present state does not appear to possess, and which is not observed to be available within the physical universe. If it exists at all, it must be beyond the reach of physical human observation. Indeed, there may be a source of such a power beyond the limits of the material universe. And the laws which govern it may indeed define a higher reality. But since few if any even have a wish to possess such a power, it can have no influence on the overall behaviour of the wholly physical complex dynamical system we call human society.
Nevertheless, though all human beings are, by nature, self-seeking (most being wilfully so) there are some who do have this inward desire to be otherwise. Or, perhaps more correctly, it should be described as an inward conviction that they have some sense of duty or obligation to be otherwise. Since this sense (or conscience) is not natural to any kind of life-form, including the human kind, it must be 'breaking through' from a universe which is beyond, or outside of, the physical one we know. It must emanate from a kind of spiritual universe which cannot be perceived through physical senses.
The human life-form contains a 100-billion neurone supercomputer called a brain. Somehow, within this brain, is housed what we call the human mind. From input signals received via its 5 physical senses, the human mind has the ability consciously to perceive, classify, model and respond meaningfully to its terrestrial and social environments. It possesses all the necessary and sufficient means to survive and prosper as a physical being within a physical universe. In this role alone, it is complete.
But there seems to be a lot more to the human mind than merely what is required to deal with its physical universe. It has powers which enable it to conceive of cogent realities which are clearly beyond the physical. Yet it cannot know them because it does not have the necessary senses.
It is as if reality were an iceberg. While our physical senses allow us to sense only what is above the water, our minds are able to conceive that the reality we see above the water may continue below the water where we cannot see. So although we can speculate about this 'higher reality', we currently lack a frame of reference (in the form of tangible experiences) on which to build our ideas or notions as to what this 'higher reality' might be like.
Analogies are imperfect and limited. But it seems that the human mind is also equipped with an awareness of a higher reality and the curiosity to investigate it, but it simply does not yet have a tangible connection to it. So, being unequipped to be able to sense this higher reality, yet being at the same time burdened with a curiosity born out of our inherent power to conceive of it, how can we ever hope to discover anything about it?
The only way you can know about something you cannot sense directly is for somebody who can sense it to tell you about it. For instance, you cannot see, hear, smell, feel or taste anything much beyond the vicinity of your body. But you can know what is happening in the world beyond from visitors and through radio broadcasts, newspapers, telephone calls and letters. What you learn about through these means are things which other human beings like yourself have sensed directly. They are objects and events which you could have sensed yourself if you had been there.
However, there are things in the physical universe which no human can sense directly. For example what would the world look like if your eyes could see infra-red and ultra-violet as well as visible light? What would it sound like if you could 'listen' to the signals emitted by an atom as it changed state? Now, in the late 20th century, you can know using man-made instruments which can transduce many physical effects we cannot sense, into ones we can sense. Even if you do not have such instruments, those who do have them can tell you about the phenomena they reveal.
But who can tell us about this higher reality which no human can sense, and which no instrument can transduce into a form which can be humanly sensed? Religious people believe that there is somebody who can and who has already done it. They call him God. The way they say he did this was to speak to chosen human beings who wrote down what he said in a book. He often enhanced his verbal message using a vision. In this case, the writer described what he saw directly during the vision. These writers wrote their messages from God in many books which were all put together and bound into a single volume. Different religions have different volumes. The particular volume recognised as the words (or messages) from God by the Christian and Jewish religions is called the Bible. Other major world religions recognise different volumes.
If you observe something directly through your physical senses, provided your senses are not impaired by injury or intoxication, it is pretty certain that what they are telling you is the truth. This is not necessarily so with words. Words are not physical realities. Neither are they the direct effects of physical realities. They are merely symbols or labels, invented and arranged by human beings, to represent realities.
And herein lies the problem. Because a word only represents a reality, both he who speaks it and he who hears it must have the same understanding or vision of what that reality is. Both must use the same Vital Key (explained fully in Chapter 3) to interpret it. If they don't, the message received will not be the same as the message sent. It may not be totally garbled. In fact it may appear to make sense for the most part. But its meaning will have been twisted and corrupted during transmission through no fault of either the speaker or the hearer.
Nevertheless, any message about a higher reality can only come from a form of life which exists within that higher reality. For convenience and clarity I shall adopt religious terminology and refer to the species of life which inhabits this higher reality as god. [I have not used a capital letter for god here because I am referring to a species of life as opposed to a person who is a member of that species.] The only way we could know anything about the existence and nature of this higher reality is by god sending us a message telling us about it. But as our senses can't detect this higher reality we can have no experience it. Consequently, we have no mental frame of reference against which to understand and interpret the words of any message we may receive which attempts to describe to us this higher reality.
The bounds of physical reality have no other definition but that they are the limits beyond which our human senses are unable to perceive what surrounds us. The reach of our senses is continually being extended by scientific instrumentation. Nevertheless, it is evident an outer limit must exist beyond which no form of physical instrumentation can penetrate.
The interface between physical reality, and any higher reality beyond, is therefore nothing to do with the nature of the universe itself. It is to do only with the physical limitations of the human senses and of the frame of reference against which we interpret the signals we receive through them. This suggests that the postulated higher reality, which our minds seem to be equipped to perceive, is nothing other than a continuation of physical reality. In other words, physical reality is nothing other than that subset of the higher reality which our human senses can actually detect. It is the part of the ice berg we can see above the water whose seeming discontinuity at the sea's surface convinces us that it continues beneath.
We may therefore think of this higher reality as that part of a combined reality which is beyond our ability to sense. Therefore, if god lives in a higher reality, yet is able to communicate with man here in this physical reality, he must exist in - and be able to sense and influence - both. Yet if man is not equipped with the means to sense the higher reality, or the beings which inhabit it, how can those beings communicate with man? What possible common frame of reference could there be, in terms of which god could explain the higher - or spiritual - reality to man?
The only way I can see of constructing an effective frame of reference is for god to make physical reality an analogue of spiritual reality. This would give man everyday experience of physical events, processes and mechanisms which are analogues of events, processes and mechanisms which exist, and take place, in the higher reality. This experience would then build within the mind of man the mental frame of reference against which he could interpret and understand any language-borne messages from god which describe and explain the nature of this higher reality. It would allow god to explain spiritual things in terms of physical things.
This, as far as I can see, is the method used by the textual messages of the Bible to explain that higher reality which is beyond the reach of our human senses. The analogies it draws on include human relations, geophysical objects and agricultural processes, of which it is assumed that the human recipients have extensive personal experience. In the model society of ancient Israel - and for that matter, in most societies throughout most of history - this was probably true.
But for the vast majorities in today's modern capitalist economies it is not. Deprived of direct daily participation in basic agricultural processes, the subject of the modern capitalist state is never able to acquire the mental frame of reference he needs to be able to interpret and understand the messages of the Bible.
Furthermore the message as we see it today has undergone many stages of distortion and corruption. The message was first put into the words of what is to us an ancient alien language and expressed in terms of the culture of the society in which the original writer lived. This was vastly different from our modern work-a-day world. It was then translated at least once to get it from its original language into our modern English.
Translation is not just a matter of substituting words and changing their order to suit the different grammar. Concepts of the higher reality were expressed as analogies of agrarian objects and processes familiar to the ancient writer and his contemporaries. They were part of their everyday lives. The wage labourer of today, on the other hand, is confined by his industrial economy to live in isolation from the agrarian processes upon which these analogies of the higher reality are built. For him to be able to understand the ancient message expounding the nature of the higher reality, the analogies themselves must be changed. Spiritual things must be explained as analogies of physical things with which he is familiar.
Herein lies a problem. Geophysical and agrarian objects and processes with which the ancients were familiar are natural. They are governed by the natural laws of physics. The social and economic processes on the other hand with which today's wage labourers are familiar are artificial. They are governed by the entirely artificial 'laws' of parliament and the protocols of commerce.
The message of the Bible implies that all natural objects and processes were created specifically to serve as physical analogies of the objects and processes which form the higher reality. Geophysical and agrarian objects and processes familiar to the ancients must therefore be perfect analogies of those of the higher reality. These physical things therefore facilitate a perfect understanding of the spiritual things they represent.
But the artificial objects and processes of a modern capitalist economy were never designed by their makers to be perfect analogies of spiritual things. They were designed specifically to facilitate unlimited individual self-gain by some through the free exploitation of others. This principle of selfish gain is the very antithesis of the way nature's systems operate. The man-made objects and processes of capitalism can therefore never serve as analogies of the objects and processes of the higher reality.
The modern wage-labourer has day-to-day hands-on experience only of the objects and processes of a capitalist economy. Capitalist economics has severed the links with the economic objects and processes of nature which his ancestors had through their agrarian economy. Capitalism has thus deprived him of the analogical key needed to be able to understand and validate any received message claiming to unveil the higher reality.
The slaves of modern capitalism lack more than the vocabulary of physical analogies needed to understand a message claiming to reveal a higher reality. They have inherited beliefs and superstitions from their ancestors. These are at odds with all objective observations of reality. Consequently they inhibit the understanding of such a message.
These beliefs and superstitions which had been implanted and perpetuated by their exploiting rulers were the only context within which the ancestors of the modern wage-labourer could understand anything. Any message, forced upon them by zealous evangelists, which proved incompatible with their established beliefs and superstitions therefore had to be bent and warped until it fitted. But it was then no longer the same message.
Although the ancestors of the modern wage-labourer had the advantage over him of agrarian experience as a means of understanding a message about a higher reality, their established beliefs and superstitions twisted it in a myriad different ways as it entered their minds. Consequently the single original message (assuming it ever existed) was regurgitated as a plethora of competing creeds which evolved in an uneasy co-existence.
These creeds were thus passed down to the wage-labourers of modern capitalism. The messages they promulgated did not make much sense to start with. But being deprived of the experiences of nature needed to facilitate his understanding of spiritual things through physical analogy, the modern wage labourer is unable to make any sense of any of them. As a result, most have rejected that original message. The rest pay it lip service for no other reason than to avoid offending those of their ageing relatives who still believe. Almost all see it as being irrelevant to them.
This is not surprising. The modern wage-labourer doesn't see his needs of life as coming from autonomous processes within the terrestrial biosphere at the command and by the power of a supernatural god. On the contrary, he sees his food as coming from shelves and freezer cabinets in his local supermarket at the command and by the power of some big-name capitalist. His faith is not in a supernatural creator god, but in the movers and shakers of the free market economy who long ago severed his access to, and knowledge of, the natural processes of the biosphere. So he not only lacks the analogical knowledge to understand the higher reality: he also lacks any awareness that its existence could be relevant.
Under a régime which denies me access to the mechanisms of nature as a means of turning my labour into my needs of life, how can I ever gain the experience necessary to understand a message which uses physical analogies to illustrate spiritual things? I think that the only way is to get as close to nature (physical reality) as I can, given the constraints of life under which I find myself.
Providentially I took the sciences at school and college. Science is simply the study of nature and the laws through which it operates. I then decided to follow a career in engineering. This is simply the application of scientific knowledge to the design and production of artificial mechanisms to perform useful tasks and processes. The field I went into was that of writing computer software - at first for engineering applications and then for applications in general.
My knowledge and appreciation of science, applied to systems engineering, taught me a lot about how nature works. It gave me a glimpse of the very fabric of the universe, the mechanisms to which it gives body, and the processes they support. It gave me a microscopic view of our physical reality as opposed to the macroscopic view which the ancient agrarians saw. Nevertheless, these two views were of exactly the same thing. They were merely seen from two different viewpoints. The same underlying laws applied. Laws which were never violated. Laws which formed a systematic continuum. Laws which were of one cogent mind.
I have no knowledge or experience of agrarian systems. Nevertheless, my scientific and engineering background has given me a good feel for the nature and character of the laws which govern all things physical. I thereby feel reasonably equipped to build a sufficiently accurate model within my mind of the agrarian systems used by the Bible as analogies of mechanisms, systems and processes which exist in the higher reality.
Scientific knowledge and engineering experience can never provide as perfect an analogical vocabulary for understanding the higher reality as can experience of using nature to turn one's labour into one's needs of life. This is because the only messages available concerning the higher reality use agrarian analogies. Nevertheless, the scientific mind is much better equipped to understand analogies based on physical reality than is the business or political mind whose only bases for analogy are un-natural rules and conventions invented by self-seeking humans beings.
The great cacophony of inconsistent religions messages, echoing around the world and down through history, suggests that different people see a very different message in exactly the same text. The text is rich in analogy. The differences must therefore stem, at least in part, from the different personal experiences against which these different people interpret the analogies used in the text. But this is not the only cause of the great diversity in the systems of belief, or doctrines, which conflictingly exist in the world. Another cause is the diversity of pre-existing beliefs and superstitions. These twist the way in which different people interpret the analogies they see in the text. They act like a malformed lens, distorting the otherwise sound analogical frame of reference provided by their practical experiences of the natural physical world.
Yet another cause of this great diversity is the blinkered approach many people have towards reading and understanding the text. Many groups set themselves apart from all others by belief in a doctrine which hinges entirely on just a single sentence. Such a small sample of syntax is very susceptible to multiple historic copying errors, and also to mis-interpretations resulting from shifts in the meanings of words. These errors are compounded by global causes of mis-interpretation such as the differences in culture and circumstances between ancient writer and modern reader. For this reason, my method for reading an ancient text is first to gain an overview to serve as a framework on which to hang the bits of detail as they materialise over the long term.
The fact that there is no reliable frame of reference against which to discern what is already a heavily corrupted message is bad enough. But that is not all. The content of the message has been intentionally arranged in a fragmented way to ensure that even the pure signal is inherently difficult to unravel. The message actually describes itself as:
"...precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
here a little, there a little..."
This message is, by its own admission, a bitch of a jig-saw puzzle depicting something which is beyond human experience, with no established context to work from. To have any chance of unravelling it at all, you must therefore approach it like a spy planning and expediting an act of espionage.
The best methodology I have been able to come up with for unlocking the message of the ancient text comprises the following rules.
However, following these rules provides no guarantees. You can never be certain that what you understand the message to say is right. You can only take steps to maximise your probability of being right. This is consistent with the principles by which all natural mechanisms acquire and exchange information.
So, having tried to apply faithfully these rules of study, what did I find to be the message buried within the ancient text? I shall give it only in broad overview. To cover it in detail would need a whole book in itself. However before I begin, I first want to make clear the following.
This account of the message contained in the ancient text is the message as I see it. It is as viewed from where I stand within time and space. It is as viewed from my position within the socio-economic system of the U.K. during the second half of the 20th Century. It is the meaning I have abstracted from the syntax by interpreting it against the only reality-based frame of reference I have. And that is the knowledge I have absorbed on my journey so far through the natural, educational, social and economic environments which have filled the time and space between myself and my unique personal self-relative 'event-horizon'.
It is with this clearly and firmly in mind that, should you wish to do so, you must read my understanding of the message itself.