History of the World

The history of mankind is the evolution of unhappiness.

At the beginning of time the individual man or woman was the ruling authority on earth. There was no emotion in this authority: no past, no likes and dislikes, no unhappiness, no self-interest. Each individual was responsible for himself or herself in a way that is unimaginable today. There was no concept of the masses.

There was no notion of what would be good or not good for others, society and the world or even for oneself. There was only one good.

No good is seen in the future.

The good, the only good, was seen, realised or known now, in the individual. And it was known by the absence of unhappiness in himself or herself. So it was not ‘a good’ as we think of ‘good’ today. It could not be given to another or shared with someone who did not have it. That would have been to create another or secondary ‘good’, a notional (not-existent-now) good.

Everyone was responsible for their own good. It was an utterly individual and just authority. One simply took responsibility now for the good — the absence of unhappiness in oneself. And all that followed was naturally right or good.

As anyone or everyone could do it, and did it, no excuse existed for not doing it. Consequently, notions of mass good, social or family good, or even of social equality, had no meaning. If all are equal in the timeless good within, all are equal in the unfoldment in time of the good without. What happens is then right, and known to be right, leaving no place for doubt or unhappiness.

These first terrestrials were free of unhappiness or emotion because they were not identified with the physical animal body — the source of all emotion, all unhappiness. They used the senses to perceive the natural wonder of earthly existence, but were detached from them.

They retained the self-knowledge that they were the life or consciousness within the body and behind the senses. And in that self-knowledge they knew that what they perceived through the body — the heavens and the earth — was only a tiny fragment, represented in time, of the timeless universe of life within.

The first terrestrials are you and I now, in a different time.

Man and woman today are almost completely identified with and emotionally attached to the animal body. This means they accept the body’s mortal nature as their own, along with its justified fear of death and extremely limited vision of life. This forces them to behave according to the rudimentary psychology of the animal. And that creates problems. The animal body, concealing its vulnerability from itself, finds its comfort and peace of mind in the notion of the masses, in belonging to the herd. This is natural to the animal instincts of the body, but not to the individual man or woman, the consciousness behind the animal body.

When there is identification with the body, individuality vanishes. The original terrestrials, detached from the body although still within it, were individuals. So when the earth was ruled by these people it was not a collective or tribal rule. And it was not rule by one privileged person, chief or king. Each individual ruled; by ruling himself or herself.

There was no place for group responsibility — the misguided attempt to produce a notional, secondary good. Such a divisive and disruptive authority would have been utterly irresponsible. Man and woman’s one and only responsibility was to life. And that meant keeping unhappiness, the emotion of the fearful herdal instinct, out of themselves. This required no consultation, no consensus, no division, no decisions, no tomorrows, no time. It was done now.

Being free from unhappiness, each man and woman was the pure joy of life on earth. Conscious of that joy as no instinctive animal can be, each was responsible for the joy on earth of all life, simply by refusing to have unhappiness in himself or herself. For life on earth only suffers from man’s unhappiness. When he is joyous within, nothing suffers, including himself.

At that time, all life, though outwardly discrete in myriads of physical forms, was united in man’s consciousness and inner sense of responsibility, the endless joy of being himself in such a wondrous existence. He was the timeless consciousness in time; the miracle that is man. In beautiful male and female bodies, he was the flower, the fully conscious head of the stem of all earth’s beautiful instinctive species. He felt and perceived his nature as inner joy and bliss; a continuous awareness within him, independent of the physical senses and yet reflected through his senses in every form of nature on exquisite earth. He was indeed sovereign of the earth, the only authority and power required to maintain and preserve the joy of life on it. 

Mankind was (and is) in paradise on earth.

He had no desire for exclusivity, no fear; because fear only arises from the herdal fear of the death of the body. So immortality, justice, truth, love, life and the law, were inseparable from the joy and bliss of his nature. Today’s society, organised as a necessity to provide a sort of justice, law or truth outside the individual, would have been unthinkable. In fact, thinking had not been thought of. Man and woman did not think, because thought only arises when the natural joy of life is missing: thinking about the past or future only arises from unhappiness.

As within, so without. As each individual was free of conflict and problems within, so life on earth without was free of conflict and problems. Today the whole of society is psychically possessed with unhappiness and lost in the body-consciousness. So everyone has a problem or is a problem. And the whole world is a problem, a mass of problems.

The problem behind it all is choice. Everyone’s life is spent trying to choose that which attracts what is liked, and that which keeps away what is not liked. They do not realise what’s happening. Their likes and dislikes are assertive reactions of the body’s instinctive herdal fear, made self-conscious by the identification of man’s consciousness with his body. As the likes and dislikes become more numerous and subtle in everyone’s life, so do the choices, the thinking, and the problems.

This increasing subtlety is regarded as cultural progress. But really it is the pointless and uncalled-for sophistication of the animal instincts, their evolution or expansion being forced along by the identification of the immortal consciousness with a mortal body.

This sophistication created the notional fear of other herds (other nations) and led to the development of the Bomb and other genocidal weapons. More recently it engendered a contradictory notion; a global concern for the safety of the whole herd of humanity, the masses, now endangered by the same thermonuclear devices that were previously intended as deterrents.

The two opposing notions of what is good — survival of humanity or survival of myself — tear at men and women relentlessly, dividing them in themselves and in society. Since the animal body cannot know the one and only good, it has to continuously chase after countless secondary, notional ‘goods’, which can never be realised because they exist only in unhappiness.

Unhappiness is the evolution of a thing wholly sinister and alien to life on earth. The thing does not exist: it achieves its existence in individual men and women, through their unconscious identification with the body. 

Something alien came to earth.

The thing is extracosmic — from outside the immediate cosmos that mankind is involved in. To the reality of our cosmos it is an inferior parasite. And yet its existence through man and woman has created the psychic world of life after death and has degraded their original freedom and pristine spiritual state. There is no death (and never was) but it has created the illusion and fear of death and therefore the need of its opposite, an existence after death.

For man and woman to get back to the original, pure state of life beyond the existence of unhappiness, they have to repossess the psychic realm — their own subconscious or psyche where unhappiness is lodged. They must do this while alive, by consciously entering their subconscious and ridding it of the invading parasite.

The process starts in your own experience with the awareness of the thing’s existence in you, and how it works.

The alien is time and thought itself.

The extracosmic alien appears in the mind, every mind, as attachment to time. This manifests as age, as cause and effect and as the evolutionary and historic principle. Thus, it expresses itself in any logical development linking the past with the present.

The alien is the thinker in man, the reasonable man or woman.

It is completely false. It is false because it compels man and woman to reason and believe that the present is dependent on the past, or is the outcome of the past. It deludes them into thinking or believing that the original timeless state of unending joy, bliss and freedom can only be achieved in time, and not now. Imprisoned in this past ignorance, they pursue the impossible, striving through unhappiness to be free of unhappiness; and depending on time to be free of time.

The alien is in everything thought or felt. It is in everything apart from the awareness of bliss within or natural joy without object. In that perception alone are man and woman free of the alien. That awareness is always now, timeless.

Before the alien gained its existence, there was no time, no interval. Everything was and is, now. Man perceived the beauty or reality of the earth direct, through his awareness now, the eternal now within him. So there was no self-consciousness, no self-interest, no ignorant and unhappy subconscious to provide the notion of time, reflection, past or the continuity of existence — no psychic world between mankind and the beautiful earth. Everything was and is immediate, discontinuous, ever new — the eternal consciousness of the earth itself, present in man’s perception, as man’s perception.

With no past existence or subconscious between the earth and the eternal, there was no evolution. Only when the alien force of time entered man’s awareness, and attached him to impressions of the past, did evolution or change start to occur. From then on he started to lose his inner awareness, his one and only good sense, his perception of the one and only good.

As the alien was intolerable to timeless consciousness, it was instantly ejected; so it formed subconsciousness, the human subconscious on top of the timeless consciousness.

However, the alien intelligence had formed an impression in itself, in time, of the timeless sense of the one and only good. As it was only an impression of the good, and not the real thing, it differentiated necessarily into several secondary ‘goods’, secondary senses which in time appeared as the physical sense organs of hearing, tasting, smelling, seeing and touch-feeling. This manifestation of the senses marked the beginning of the evolution of the species and the externalisation on earth of a physical world.

Thus there are three realms of existence, one on top of the other: eternal consciousness, subconsciousness, and physical consciousness.

It took immense epochs of unhappiness, the suffering of all life in time, to evolve what we now know as the five human sense organs, fixed in the head as the ears, eyes, nose, palate and skin. Like stalks, they emerge from the human brain, itself the product of time, past pain and the same evolutionary trauma that produced all the earth’s mortal or sense-perceived creatures.

The earth as we know it, in its familiar shape and form, is also externalised in time. It is the physical externalisation (two levels up) of the pristine terrestrial psyche, the timeless and the changeless — the eternal.

Once externalised through the senses, the earth-image and human psyche entered time and change: and evolution began. Immediately, the manifested earth, representing the previously joyous human psyche, re-enacted with cataclysmic violence the agonising effect of the invasion of unhappiness. The evolutionary evidence of these primordial convulsions and the successive upheavals are preserved today in the dramatic rock formations of the earth’s surface. Geological history represents the petrification in stone of the fundamental unhappiness in the human psyche and the existence that came out of it.

The evolution of unhappiness continues to be demonstrated in the earth. Just a few miles below the solid crust, a fiery ocean of molten rock, like the endless unhappiness seething in the tormented human psyche, intermittently boils to the surface with uncontrollable destructive force.

The geophysical evolution or manifestation of the earth is for the time being stable and could be said to be complete. So is the organic evolution of the species that culminated in the human brain and body.

When the physical realm was complete, the alien unhappi-ness evolved in a new medium — mankind’s unhappy brain with it’s fears, doubts, violence, cruelty, greed, loneliness, depression, anger and despair.

The multitudes of emotion in the subconscious were externalised in the people of the earth as the unconscious masses — a massed unconsciousness. As men and women find comfort, excitement and a personal identity in their multitudinous emotions, so they hide from the truth of themselves in the unconscious activities of the masses.

But the masses do not exist. Like the unhappiness they represent, they are only a reassuring dream of the human brain, a notion that evolved out of the instinctive animal brain which finds safety and identity in the herd.

In the unconscious dream of the masses, man and woman can cling to unhappiness until they die; unable to exist as individuals. In living they never really come to life; they only think they do. They live, not as individuals, but through the instinct and notion of the herd. Only the individual has the power to come to life in existence, beyond the herd. There is no hope for the herd.

The masses have no hope.

The masses always live on hope. In the modern western world, it was thought that democracy would make everybody happy. Hopefully.

The introduction of representative democracy was the first concerted attempt by unhappy people to make themselves happy. Through the democratic vote, each man could express his unhappiness by choosing an unhappy man or party to express his unhappiness for him to other unhappy parties. These unhappy parties working unhappily together would produce happiness. That was the notion. That was the hope.

Getting the vote did indeed allow the unhappy masses to express their unhappiness. But as the masses do not exist, predictably their vote has no effect.

Thus men were no happier; their unhappiness no less. Then, less than a century ago, they suddenly discovered that the other sex, the female partner in unhappiness, did not exist democratically. So they gave her unhappiness the vote too. Now everyone could express their unhappy choice and everyone would be happy — it was hoped.

But that didn’t work either. Men and women were still unhappy.

So both sexes got busy. As woman tried to contribute her unhappiness to the non-existent happiness of democracy, man proudly extolled its merits to unhappy natives of other lands, who like himself, do not really exist. They were so busy working out their unhappy self-interest that they utterly failed to grasp the awful truth of what they had done. All power comes from the people.

All power comes from the people.

Through representative democracy man and woman had willingly handed over responsibility for their unhappiness, for all time. In all the thousands of years of trying to cope with unhappiness, man had never done anything so foolish or irresponsible. There had been a gradual, creeping transition towards this point, but now, with one seemingly progressive act, the individuality of man and woman disappeared into the ignorance of the masses.

Throughout the ages, violent and unhappy men had destroyed or seized possessions, tortured enemies and taken slaves. Under countless unhappy kings and tyrants, man had accepted his unhappy lot, accepted it as his own, and dealt with it in himself as best he could. He had never voluntarily given other unhappy men the right to make him unhappy. But now he had done it.

In fact, throughout his long history, man frequently died to keep that right — that extraordinary inner responsibility or power — rather than surrender it to anyone. He called it his honour or integrity. That power to him was God. In that power alone resided his individuality. And only he, the individual, could answer for it, or to it: none other than he. For this was not a notional god or good, as God or good is today. It was a living state, a being within, the being of himself; the unmistakable presence of his own rightfulness.

In those earliest of days, life as the feeling of being alive was far more vital in man. He was not the mental creature, living mostly in his head, that he is today. He possessed far less notional and theoretical information about living; far more knowledge of life (self-knowledge). He was informed from within. But over the centuries, as he slowly degenerated towards the folly of democracy and the notion that freedom could be attained through others, he became aware of a growing inner unworthiness, battling with his inner rightfulness. This was like being two opposing, living realities at the same time. And due to his more conscious state, it was more intensely real to him than we can know today.

After a long interval of further degeneration from consciousness to self-consciousness, man called this inner struggle, his ‘conscience’. By then, the struggle was no longer real. Because he now lacked the inner knowledge of the one good, the struggle of his conscience was little more than a confused contest between the various notions of good and bad that others had planted in him. From a spiritual struggle deep in his vital being, it had deteriorated into an emotional struggle on the mental surface of himself. 

While the struggle was still vital, man had a continuous experience of the invading force of unhappiness, the mortal in himself, literally grappling like a wrestler with his inner power, the immortal or eternal in himself. He was both combatants simultaneously, both the force and the power, and while the battle raged, did not know which would win. But he was always aware that it was a life and death struggle.

It was extremely painful at times, as though he was being killed. And yet out of that dying, when the power temporarily overwhelmed the force, came a spiritual awareness of the ineffable sweetness and beauty of life or reality within him — his integrity.

Man lived with death, within him.

Death was a constant presence; not the cessation of activity, but an extraordinary energetic activity, and when he faced it — alone, as he must face it within — he won the battle.

Death brought life! In this inner death and dying was salvation. Living with the presence of death within enabled man to know the living reality of life within — honour, integrity, living power, living God, living good.

For only in the face of death are honour and integrity realised, made real as oneself.

Man and woman today have little opportunity, and even less inclination, to die for their integrity or honour, the one good, the one God within. Today they die for democracy, the god without; or some similar notion of a good or god outside themselves. The introduction of democracy marked the end of man’s inner fight for life. Men and women chose to no longer live with death within. It was too painful, and inconvenient.

Death had won. And man gave up the ghost. He surrendered unconditionally to the outer good or god, the notional existence of the masses. The ghost (his false impression of himself) stepped out of his body and attached itself to a new body, the body politic, the notion that he was one of the mass of everybody. Now his power and integrity could only be expressed through force and emotion. He would have to fight for what he thought was right. Whenever he did so he would be misunderstood, bringing more unhappiness upon himself and everybody else.

Since man had abandoned the reality of himself for the dream of mass salvation, the massed unconscious now took over with its popular notions and emotions. What was popular was what mattered; not what was right. Individuality was being superseded. The chance of an individual discovering the truth and having the power to rid himself of unhappiness was enormously reduced. Such individuality was not popular. The individual within was dead.

God was dead.

The disease of death spread outwards. Life on earth was dying. The more it died, the more the disease, the masses, lived and multiplied. And the more the masses lived and multiplied, the more they killed life on earth.

All power comes from the people — as all unhappiness derives from the power of the people who have surrendered to the force.

The democratically elected unhappy politicians were now responsible for man and woman’s unhappiness, and they did the job well. They made men and women very unhappy. And unlike any other time in the evolution of unhappiness, this time they were made unhappy indefinitely.

Not even the most wicked kings and tyrants had been able to manage that. The old despots could be murdered, or when they died their inhumanities vanished with them: the King is dead, long live the King, for the new King might be compassionate and just.

Democracy did away with individuality. So now no single individual was responsible with his or her life and certainly was not responsible for the injustice and cruelty implicit and endemic in democratic society. Therefore these inhumanities would continue indefinitely. No more would the murder or death of anyone in authority, or even of many in authority, make the slightest difference. Another person or persons, similarly not responsible, would simply step in and fill the gap.

Democracy, with its injustices, cruelties and politicians, just goes on and on and on and on…

As democratic societies became progressively unhappy, so faceless law enforcers and upholders were needed in increasing numbers (‘forces’) to protect democratic society from itself. Similarly not responsible, these firm men were there to defend democratic law which, being legally arguable, is therefore unjust.

All this raises the question that nobody in a democracy, or in their right mind, dares to ask:

Someone must be responsible. But who? The people. All power comes from the people. So surely the people must be responsible?

— No, not any more. The people handed over responsibility to the politicians.

— Then the politicians must be responsible?

— Impossible. Politicians are not responsible. Everyone knows that. Politicians don’t take responsibility for the poverty, greed, dishonesty, cruelty, exploitation, crookedness and inequality which democratic systems preserve and foster. Political initiatives or an individual politician strong enough to remove the iniquities might make the people happy; but then politicians would be out of a job. So they are not responsible (except for making people more unhappy).

— Then it has to be the people who are responsible ?

— No, it can’t be so. Because there are no responsible people any more. Where are they? It’s not allowed.

— Then no one is responsible?

— That’s right.

That’s democracy and that’s its invincibly popular appeal. Freedom without responsibility is the popular notion arising from the instinct of the human herd.

Under democratic rule, people thought they were happier. That was the popular notion. Increasing creature comforts and material convenience (at the expense of someone else’s poverty) helped to keep the mind off the personal pain of unhappiness that just would not go away for long. But the common pay-off, the common wealth, was shared out no more justly than it ever had been.

The popular notion that justice and happiness had increased were just two more spurious arguments devised by man to compensate for his loss of contact with integrity, honour or God within. If justice and happiness were increasing then everybody must be doing well. In fact the unhappy rich (I like) got richer and the unhappy poor (I dislike) got poorer. The unhappy in-betweens multiplied marvellously; these masses, led by unhappy politicians in unhappy assemblies, stoutly maintained their position by defending both rich and poor at the same time, while doing absolutely nothing about getting rid of either.

With the superstructure of democracy creeping over the globe, the status quo of unhappiness on earth was now fixed to the end of time.

With all this distraction going on outside, man became less aware of the pain of unhappiness inside himself. And yet, as awareness of the pain diminished, so strangely, did the feeling of being alive. He was far more knowledgeable in his opinions, had an immense wealth of information in his memory, and knew what was right and wrong for the world. He also knew he was alive. That was unarguable. Yet he couldn’t feel it. Which, if you look at it, is what a clever computer or robot might say.

To bolster the feeble feeling of life within him, he required more contrived excitement. And democracy did not let him down. All was provided.

There was more alcohol, more fancy food; more entertainment, television, radios, music; more news and information, cars, business, holidays; and more sexual stimulation through the fantasies of films, magazines, newspapers and sex shops.

But man remained unhappy.

Unhappiness drove him deeper into material escapism to try to forget that he was unhappy. Then, adding to his burden, the awful truth gradually dawned on him. Never again could he, as an individual, do anything to stop the politicians or the democratic system from making him unhappy. No matter how much he tried to protest and publicly demonstrate his unhappiness, there was no one in authority to hear him; and no one who would do anything lasting about it. Because no one was ever responsible enough. Things only got done according to the likes and dislikes, the self-interest of the politicians (or whatever the ruling authority happened to be). The only right of protest, outside the notion of hope of it, was the ballot box every few years. But then his vote only gave some other unhappy person the right to protest on his behalf — perhaps.

Sometimes, in extreme unhappiness, he took the law into his own hands. He tried to force a particular result. Acting as an individual he tried to rectify the injustice and inequality of the system. When a man is responsible enough as an individual to take the law into his own hands, putting his freedom or life at risk, it is always in an attempt to correct or expose a fundamental wrong in society. In an effort to eliminate the gap between the rich and the poor, the privileged and underprivileged, he stole, cheated and otherwise abused his fellow man and woman.

Then quite rightly, with the full force of democracy, the blind statute of democratic law came down on him like a ton of bricks. He was beaten, humiliated, tortured, punished, locked up. The message was clear: Never interfere with ineffective democratic processes. They were designed to perpetuate the unhappiness in the system, not to eliminate it.

To eliminate unhappiness would destroy the system.

Behind all the nicely documented democratic laws, there is another highly secret, unwritten law. It is seldom discovered by anyone other than the would-be individual who breaks it.

The penalty for infringement is democracy’s ultimate atrocity and sham. Here it is:

— A man (or woman) who puts his life or freedom on the line by taking responsible action, and who is caught breaking the democratic laws, must on no account attempt to expose the injustice or cruelty of the system that drove him to transgress. For as soon as his disclosures become too convincing or worrying for his interrogators, he’ll be declared insane, in secret if necessary, and put away without trial, drugged into submission by unhappy, faceless doctors acting in collusion with the unhappy, faceless law. And no one will be responsible.

Of course no one is responsible for this unwritten law. For, if ever the effect of it is accidentally publicised, the highest democratic authority can then confidently declare that it does not exist.

So, the man who took the law into his own hands was punished because he acted as an individual, and that was not to be tolerated. The law was there to protect him — from himself. He had to remember he could forfeit his life if he took responsible action. And anyway, responsible action would only cause more unhappiness, more irresponsibility. He should understand this now that he’d had a taste of trying to act responsibly and had been punished for it. If he must try to right wrongs, he should do it irresponsibly; act in secret, disguise himself, deceive and blame others, misrepresent himself and lie so that no one would suspect what he was up to.

He could cheat, rob, exploit, injure, defraud or steal — but he must never get caught. And the justice of this? While he gets away with his irresponsible actions, democratic society can continue to get away with its irresponsibility. This situation was quite tolerable; in fact essential. 

Democratic law only punishes those who get caught.

In fact, lawbreakers are as essential to democratic society as law-enforcers. The law is only there to allow those two minorities to fight it out, providing a distraction from what is really going on. For the rest of the people it is open slather all round; a free-for-all. Take what you can get away with, and call it either healthy competition or socialism.

The Democratic Edict:

• Never forget that you willingly surrendered to politicians and their self-interest your right to be an individual. You must live with the consequences until you die. There is no escape in democracy except escapism itself; but that is all provided.

• Conform to the Good and Bad that is laid down for you.

• Understand that you are a part of the masses. That the law represents the masses, the unconscious herd. That the masses must never be disturbed by responsible action.

• Get it through your head that it’s forbidden for anyone to be responsible in a democratic society. Because only in that way can the masses be protected from having to face up to the unhappiness on earth.

The masses are the human ass of an irresponsible god.

The Truth of the Democratic Way of Life:

• Only the individual suffers, never the masses, because the masses don’t exist except as a notion of the dreaming individual.

• By eliminating the individual until only the notion or dream of the masses itself is left, no one is left to suffer.

That is the philosophy of the democratic way of life. It is also the philosophy or truth of communism, of every dictatorship, every regime. For in the evolution of unhappiness on earth, which is the history of mankind, all systems produce the same result — the endless tyranny of unhappiness. 

In the democratic way of life man discovered that he was entitled to criticise and blame others for making him unhappy. He called this new freedom ‘The Freedom of Speech’. Really it was a lofty euphemism for the licence to pass the buck for his unhappiness.

Out of this crazy notion of freedom arose the quintessence of irresponsibility and misrepresentation — the modern newspaper. Here at last was the The Defender of Democracy, The Voice Of The Masses — the mouthpiece of man’s irresponsibility to man.

On behalf of the masses, and in exchange for a few pence or cents a day, the newspapers indiscriminately blamed everything and everyone under the sun (except themselves) for mankind’s unhappiness, without ever mentioning or pausing to perceive the cause of it. This oversight, naturally, made everyone more unhappy, including the unhappy newspaper people themselves. For newspapers, like the rest of the media, are made by people. So morning, noon and night (and with an occasional Extra!) news people chorused their unhappiness — every day more loudly and more sensationally; presenting the unhappiness in the Latest News as important and meaningful, which of course it was not. No one believed what the papers said, or agreed with it for long, because it was never the truth. What was represented changed as often as the date. (The date was usually reliable).

A daily mouthpiece to bellow the world’s unhappiness gave the masses some inexpensive entertainment, without any individual having to take responsibility for the monstrous untruth of it all. There was also the notion that some sort of protest was being made. Perhaps something was being done. Something was happening … perhaps. But nothing was done and nothing happened that was really worth reporting, and so it continued. And all over the earth conditions representing the unhappiness of mankind continued to get worse.

Sometimes politicians, in troughs of unhappiness and egged on by the inexhaustible wailings of newspapers, sent brave young men off to war to be maimed and killed; while equally brave and unhappy women were left behind to cheer them on and weep. The politicians went on beaming, while to serve their own self-interest the newspaper people, with the stroke of a half-true report or a headline, made heroes of whom they liked; and with the detached irresponsibility of a firing squad, assassinated whomever they disliked.

God save the Queen! Or the King. But what about the people?

They didn’t matter too much. No one exists for long. Which is why all the unhappy people who survived the wars or stayed behind, soon forgot those who went away and died. And they soon forgot what the wars were supposed to be about, anyway.

‘To our glorious dead!’

Who?

Things on earth were going along nicely: very unhappily indeed. Remember that all power comes from the people. And all the forces of unhappiness come from the power the people have surrendered. As the people were hiding in the irresponsibility of the masses, the evolution of unhappiness continued, especially through newspapermen, hiding in the irresponsibility of their mass circulations and ratings.

The Press: licensed to fool all the people all of the time.

Democratic society now invented a new golden god and sacred idol: Freedom of the Press. This is the licence to avoid the truth every day and to blame the unhappiness of the world on everything, including death and war.

Freedom of the Press was a slogan originally invented by politicians to fool the people they were supposed to be representing. It simply meant the liberty to publish the likes and dislikes of the ruling authority without question. This authority, of course, was made up of politicians and their self-interest.

The politicians cleverly chose the word ‘freedom’ to imply that what was printed would be the truth. The public still believes this: ‘If it’s in the newspaper, it must be true’ despite the quite contrary experience of most of the people who have ever been quoted by newspapers.

At first the politicians, with an assumed air of public respectability, controlled and used the newspapers by exercising the weight of their new democratic authority. But due to their obvious duplicity and stupidity, this started to wear thin. So they bribed the newspaper people to keep quiet or only mention them in a good light. They did this by revealing confidences and non-attributable secrets that had been entrusted to them. These made the headlines and of course created more unhappiness.

Dishonesty only disappears when there’s no one to buy the loot.

By quietly altering (or failing to alter) legislation, the politicians managed to favour the newspapers, giving a creeping legality to their status as responsible and accountable to no one.

Now the politicians had two faces: one for the public, who did not know them; and one for the Press, who did. This led to the deceit of reporting to newsmen ‘off the record’, or speaking behind the public’s back.

A great modern conspiracy had begun. The Government and the Press were to conspire against the people. Through the public posturing of being responsible and with the connivance of the newspapers, democratic politicians were able to institutionalise their most brilliant lie: the notion of The Public Interest.

By claiming that whatever they liked or disliked was ‘in the public interest’, both the newspapers and the legislators were able to protect and further their own narrow self-interests; and at the same time say they were acting in the name of the broadest, most acceptable notion — the good of all. Of course this is false, as the public good is only served when a serving individual is free of unhappiness.

Institutionalising this brilliant fiction was a consummate cover-up; the ultimate in subterfuge and skullduggery. But between them, the conspirators managed it. Everything the politicians and Press now did could be said and done ‘in the public interest’. If this couldn’t be proved, it couldn’t be disproved either; it was a matter of opinion, or endless debate. As only the media and politicians possessed the means to broadcast their opinions, their likes and dislikes, and debate what they liked or didn’t like, all went well. The public interest (the lie) was being served.

All unhappiness lies in repetition.

Previously in history, the conspiracy against the people was between the rulers and the religious leaders, the King and the Church. In order to gain emotional control of the masses, the wicked priests had institutionalised an even more seductive fabrication: the notion that a saviour — one good or God — could exist outside the individual now; that it could have some verity or true substance in the past; and that some creed, belief, priest or book was needed to find it.

The individual who lived with the presence of death and faced death within, had found his saviour and crucifixion in inner death and dying (though every notion of good and bad fought in him against this, the truth). But the wicked notions of the priests finally entered him as his conscience of good and bad, and in their unhappy worldliness, the priests corrupted him into believing that there was a saviour, a crucifixion and a resurrection outside himself.

Nevertheless, over many, many years, the authority of the priests, or the Church, being based on emotion and falsehood, inevitably lost its force and could no longer trick and delude new generations. A new form of force was needed to dupe mankind and allow history, or the evolution of unhappiness, to repeat itself. By selling their souls to the media, the politicians provided the opportunity. The ghost of unhappiness that had passed from man into the body politic, now stepped into the sensational body of media people, the unhappiest of the unhappy. And, like those before them who had surrendered their individuality to the notion of democracy, the politicians would not immediately realise what they had done — what their dishonesty and chicanery had unleashed upon the world. For nothing was to have such awful consequences. The owners of the media and their journalists seized the right to speak directly for the unhappy masses; and at the same time decide what the masses should and should not be told each day. The tricky politicians had at least had some authority from the people: but the media had no such authority. It was an outrageous usurpation of supposed democratic rights by an utterly irresponsible section of the unhappy people. These were men and women trained in habitual distortion to present the untruth as the truth and to make everyone more unhappy, including themselves.

Nothing makes man more unhappy than the untruth appearing as the truth. The only news that is new and real is the news of the cause of unhappiness and how to be rid of it.

That alone is the truth. But everything on which the media feeds and thrives — the murders, robberies, rapes and wars; the opinions, vanities and problems; greed, corruption, slavery, illness, violence, death and grief — everything is an effect of unhappiness, not the cause.

To report, investigate, discuss and expose the effects of unhappiness, day in and day out, is as unreal and meaningless as saying in endless different ways that water is wet. Water is wet. And existence is unhappiness. The intelligent question is: Why is existence unhappiness? Why is water wet? And since it is an intelligent question there is no answer — only the solution. Water is wet only when you go into it or it goes into you. Wetness is not water. Wetness is an effect. Water, in fact, is life. Existence is only unhappiness when you lose yourself in it; when you serve or believe its unhappy effect; or you allow its effect, unhappiness, to enter you. Existence, in fact, is bliss.

So when it is a person’s full-time occupation to misrepresent the effects as the cause, the unhappiness engendered in him or her is prodigious. In the young journalist or TV reporter the excitement of such power-without-responsibility manifests as frantic enthusiasm, and blind dedication to the propagation of the untruth as the truth. The position he or she holds is the utopia of the herd; and not given to many. But in maturity his or her unhappiness ossifies into chronic world-weariness, a sterile scepticism that comes from having seen all the effects but never the cause. Alcohol, the outer spirit, frequently provides the only relief; and for many, the only escape.

The Mass Media, gathering more and more power without responsibility, quickly took over as the new ruler of the world.

Originally there had been rule by man, the individual. Then kings and despots. Then democratic politicians. Now it was rule by newspapers, television, radio and magazines; a new and far more emotional, irresponsible and uncontrollable authority.

The self-interests of the newspapers, television, magazines and radio stations were paramount. The people knew almost nothing about the world except what a small minority of media people chose to tell them. ‘Public opinion’ was now the opinion of the few unhappy people who reported and handled the news, and the even fewer unhappy people who owned or controlled the means of disseminating it. ‘Public concern’ was whatever these few chose to focus their capricious attention upon, to inflate as being important. Not one person in the media was responsible or accountable. 

Every action, comment or report was said to be ‘in the public interest’; or could be debated inconclusively with other irresponsible and unaccountable men and women.

Democracy is the Media.

The media takeover was made possible by the funk and greed of the politicians and the shameful deception they initiated and legitimised. ‘Freedom of the Press in the public interest’ had been repeated often enough for the hopeless masses to believe in it, and for politicians dependent on the lie of it to have to support it publicly and constitutionally. 

For their infamy in selling out the people to the Press, the politicians had a terrible price to pay. Until the end of time they would be persecuted by their new masters — whether rightly or wrongly was irrelevant. Never again would the owners of the media or their journalists allow them any rest — unless they compromised or did nothing. Any politician would be privately hounded and then publicly crucified — until he sold his soul to the media again, or quit. And this could happen any day, in any democracy in the world. Especially if the politician was proposing to do some good by eliminating some of the fundamental evils of democratic society.

The lie of ‘the public’ was now complete.

The public is not the people. The people are the good, hidden in the corruption of the public.

Some politicians, still tricky but intuitively closer to the good of the people, glimpsed the truth of what was happening. But they were powerless to speak out. For there was only the media to speak through. And you can’t ask the burglar to fetch the police.

The politicians were crooked and cowardly, or opportunistic and hypocritical, but they knew their shortcomings. They always knew what they were doing. Many of them knew there was a greater good somewhere, but none would die to find it in themselves. They settled for a secondary good; and so were forced to compromise with someone else’s notion of good, and then someone else’s, and someone else’s … Until what they did, by the time they were able to do it, was hardly any good at all, and they knew it.

They were doing their best in the circumstances — compromising.

The media people, however, never knew what they were doing — blind ignorance devoted to being blind and ignorant. The good was in what they were doing. They were serving the truth. They were serving the public. They believed in themselves. So they never questioned themselves or what they were doing or where they were going. There is no greater ignorance, no greater irresponsibility.

Sometimes in the evolution of unhappiness the army stepped in and snatched the right to rule from the unhappy politicians and the raving media. It shut up them up or shut them down. And for a while there was no unhappiness to speak of. This of course made everyone very unhappy indeed, including the army whose strength lies in never having to pretend to take responsibility for anything.

When the army tries to take responsibility for anything except force it becomes political and devious, loses its way and strength and destroys itself. When there is no power other than the army itself (inevitable when it seizes power) it becomes corrupt, political and unjust.

The force must at all times obey the power.

There is always degeneration when the force does not obey the power. That’s what lies behind the whole story — the first irresponsibility followed by the people’s loss of their own power; the herdal notion of the masses; the invention of democracy; the faithless politicians and the ignorant media. With the example of the army we almost come full circle. The army is force itself, the force of arms, the ultimate physical violence of the unconscious mass, the herd. So distant is the army from the truth that it actually comes close to representing the truth — life or death now, no time, no considerations, no problems, nothing in-between.

Pure force is neither just nor unjust. Force is force. It must be obeyed or the penalty is death. That’s the virtue of pure force. You know exactly where you stand. There is nothing in between pure force and death, no compromise. Obey instantly; or die. No choice, no complication, no emotion. Pure force does not take prisoners; it has no consideration.

The army only loses its pure force, its real strength, when it is burdened with considerations — when it takes prisoners and has to pretend to be responsible for them. Its strength lies in not being responsible for anything except killing the enemy or forcing obedience. As soon as obedience is implicit in the numbers of prisoners taken, or there is outright victory, the army has nothing to do. Peace makes it emotional, unsure of itself, unsure of what to do next.

In peace the army’s force is spent and the power of the people returns. But not for long. The prisoners (unhappy of course) are freed and absorbed into the people. The people in their unhappiness hand over power to the unhappy politicians and become the helpless masses; and the army becomes the unhappy prisoner of the politicians, pure force in the hands of corrupt force. So once again the army seizes power, in peace or war, and for a time again becomes pure force: no prisoners, no prisons, no compromise, no consideration, no discussion, no escape — just unconditional surrender, or death. But only for a while. It’s only a while before the cycle is repeated.

The army can never realise that force itself is the essence of unhappiness. If it did, force would change to power. The people in the army would lay down their arms and say ‘We solve nothing’. The people in politics would lay down their promises and say ‘We can do nothing’. And the media people would lay down their lies of freedom and declare ‘We have nothing more to say until we can say the truth’. Then the force of unhappiness, the lonely god outside man, would step back into him.

For a short time it would give him hell — but only until he regained power over it; the power to be himself, to once more be responsible and accountable with his life for the joy of life on earth.

As it is, in the dream of existence, when the army is not in charge the media through the politicians will be; and each in their cycle will give man hell until the end of time.

The spread of unhappiness on earth was intensified by a proliferation of telecommunication systems and by the incestuous worldwide interbreeding of the media’s likes and dislikes. The beautiful earth and its people, on every continent, were objects of distress and calamity seen by an eye for profit.

The nose for news smelled only the ignorance of life. The occasional report of a happy event was sure to be followed by doom, disaster, and death; with death seen as a tragedy, for the truth of death was unmentionable. And the news of the world got worse and worse and worse.

Able to cast around the whole world in an instant, the newsmen had run into a goldmine of problems and unhappiness. Never before — and this is today, while you are reading this — had there been such a diversity of unhappiness to report. Significantly, wherever the media reporters went in the world, the conditions and unhappiness there got worse. No one noticed this sufficiently to mention it or make any difference, for everyone thought the events were making the news. But it was the news making the events.

Particular events did not last long in the headlines because something more depressing, more sensational, more shocking always came in from the tireless reporters; news so bad, such a lie, that it was even more stimulating and exciting. Instant eyewitnesses, instant experts, instant seriousness, instant laughter, instant emotion, instant charity, instant everything; except the truth behind it all.

Just watch the TV News tonight.

A sign that something had gone cosmically wrong on the planet were the proliferating systems of space satellites orbiting earth. Twenty-four hours a day they provided instantaneous global communication. They should have been beaming the good news to boundless life throughout the cosmos — the knowledge that all on earth is well and on time; ‘Come on in’. But the satellite systems, which symbolised man’s finest technological achievement, transmitted only information, bad news, and entertainment. Information — no knowledge of any value. Entertainment — pleasure or what I like. Bad news — what I dislike; or if it’s close enough to home, pain.

As the ceaseless interaction of liking and disliking, the polarities of unhappiness, got more and more intense, man’s finest technical achievements poured out in a mind-boggling stream. No one person could any longer appreciate them; and certainly could not catalogue them. In spite of best intentions, they were all the product of unhappiness. And as such they caused more and more discontent. The worst (like the best in electronics) was always yet to come. But time was no longer a protection or a barrier. Any day could be the day of the final break-through.

And so the rot went on, unabated. A continuous process, unseen and unheeded. The politicians continued their compromise and the masses remained unconscious. On no account was the massed unconsciousness to be disturbed, for to disturb it is most dangerous thing in the world. The tricky, but intuitively wise politicians always knew better than to disturb the masses, unless their massive emotion could be pointed away from home towards a distant enemy (as in the World Wars).

No one involved could see where it was all leading. Especially not the media people. They had not the slightest inkling of what was really going on. Along with fooling with masses, they fooled themselves, right to the end. Cocksure of their superficial ‘good story’ importance, they were too irresponsible to comprehend their role and its appalling consequences in another time. They had the feeling of being in charge, as a child might feel sitting at the controls of a great airliner while the Captain, crew and parents look on and applaud. But like the child, they could not comprehend the overall significance and responsibility of such power and position, the intelligence of which must know what it is doing and where it is going.

The way was clear for the new god of the world, the blind force of unhappiness, to do what it wanted.

If you are serious in the endeavour to free yourself of unhappiness you will be able to discern the truth or otherwise of this ‘history’. It was written in 1985 and by the time you read it, things will have become even worse. Much that is said here has already been revealed in your own experience. But continue to observe events as they develop. Watch for signs of what is to come. Some are extremely subtle. Others grotesquely obvious.

The person of the unconscious masses will not notice anything very unusual until the final panic starts to set in. Even then the causes will not be seen and those culpable will never know what they did — for no one will be responsible. Coming to all nations on a scale not before experienced or imagined are civil strife, economic disruption, political instability, morale-destroying assassination and public murder; terrorist mayhem, massive breakdown in democratic law and order, riots and warlike destruction of property and security; open police violence, reprisals and savage army intervention against the democratic masses.

Leading up to all this, home television screens will increasingly show unprecedented police, army and paramilitary brutality against civilian populations, all in the name of maintaining law and order.

These film-reports will be designed — unconsciously, because the media does not know what it is doing — to accustom and harden the viewers to unparalleled acts of violence yet to come against the people. The public is being surreptitiously prepared and educated to accept outrageous demonstrations of cruelty and intimidation by the democratic authorities. It will put to them that all this is normal, necessary and commendable.

If I am wrong and foolish this will not happen and is not happening. But do keep watching the television screens — without becoming inured to the violence or excusing what you see.

Civil disturbances in all countries will continue to increase against the background of mounting international distrust and fears for national survival. Along with encouraging signs of co-operation, there will be menacing re-alignments. Politicians of all nations will parley and announce agreements to raise the people’s hope. But the rot will persist, nurtured by the naive media.

The bad news the media puts out will increase in exact proportion to the entertainment they broadcast. One will balance the other, so that the significance of either, or what is really happening, will not be noticeable.

Television viewers, multiplying throughout the world at about the same rate as the bad news, will be treated to an almost endless feast of human misery and wantonness — grand entertainment, like a good seat at the Coliseum on a Lions-and-Christians day.

The coverage of both news and entertainment will slowly reduce in focus, while at the same time the effect will intensify. And this will raise the emotional temperature of the masses. To see what I am saying you’ll have to watch it happen as future events and as technological advances unfold.

The news will continue to be even more riveting and exciting (very bad news for someone but very exciting for everyone else). Entertainment will be coming from various hook-ups around the world and therefore appear to be happening as different events in different places around the globe. But eventually the separate events will come together and be seen as one meaningful whole. Entertainment (what I like) and bad news (what I dislike) will merge. The excitement of the bad news will become the main entertainment: no one will want to see or hear anything else. The pleasure will then become the pain, and the pain the pleasure.

Just before the end, liking and disliking will start to lose their meaning, their value. Unbridled excitement will not be far away.

Panic.

And still no one will realise the simple truth of what is happening, and how it is being done, although many will sense the approach of something unprecedented in human history.

The simple truth is that the world only exists to give you what you want: the truth, or untruth, whichever you are looking for. If you are looking for untruth — or towards the untruth as a way of life — you will find it. The more you look, and the more vigorous and determined you are, the more you will find more quickly. And so you will become much more unhappy.

This is precisely what is happening to the world and only the approach of the end of time, the end of the age, allows the individual to see this. Only then can the individual be rid of time, the unhappiness of the race. At such a time, time is intensified. It reflects its own destruction in timelessness; or lack of unhappiness.

As the world only exists to provide what is wanted — untruth or truth — the media people, like the politicians before them, have to get what they are looking for. Together with their readers, listeners and viewers, they never get enough of the excitement of unhappiness which they so avidly pursue and therefore find so plentifully in both the world and their personal lives. Were they ever to get enough of it, they would start to look for the truth. The good news would be reflected in their own lives, and in the newspapers, on radio and television; and they and the world would become happier. But of course they never get enough; they get unhappier and the news gets worse. Or, as the news gets worse, they all get unhappier.

Keep watching the media and see the truth for yourself as the world is driven towards the final crisis.

And so it went, to the end of time, when the media people produced the most sensational story of all time — the end of the evolution of unhappiness on earth, the end of the world itself.

There was no stopping them. As they were in charge of the emotions of the push-button world, there was no way of preventing the consequences of their ignorance. The future was theirs.

In extremes of unhappiness, and the frantic day and night search for it, the media, uncontrollable and utterly irresponsible, eventually succeeded in disturbing the masses, the massed unconsciousness.

Media lies, distortions, half-true reports and speculation inflamed the masses into a global emotional frenzy of fear and excitement; and the massed excitement drove the media into unbelievable hysteria. Everyone thought The News was the report of events; now the reports themselves became news. And the actual events even started to lag behind the latest reports of them. Media insanity engulfed the politicians. Madness started to consume the whole global society, East and West, providing the waiting armies with an excuse for the final fling of force, the final solution.

The masses had been disturbed. The sleeping giant of unhappiness was awake.

The masses represent the fundamental unconsciousness of matter, the atom itself, in which the power of creation or the annihilating force of ignorance is concealed. Once that inert and basic stability is penetrated, shattered, a catastrophic force is released. All power is in the people and the atom, and all force comes out of the power that the people and the atom have surrendered.

In the media’s global society there was no distance between home and the enemy. Humanity was its own enemy. There was nowhere to go. Wherever you were was the battlefield.

Stoked with fear and expectation, the emotional frenzy of the masses became self-generating and started a fission reaction.

Emotion triggered by the latest media reports created the final explosive event. The communication of nuclear missiles as the latest news was instantaneous.

It was the last news.

The final disintegrating release of force was accompanied by unprecedented natural disasters. The earth, representing the tortured human psyche, repeated the primordial convulsions that followed the original invasion of unhappiness — the psyche’s conception of unhappiness at the beginning of time. Now, at the end of time, terrestrial upheavals represented the unhappiness in its death throes. And all unhappiness disappeared with the masses from the face of the earth.

Since the masses and changing face of the earth do not exist in truth, so the end of it all did not matter. The whole history of the evolution of the world was only a dream of the dreamer, lost in a notion of good outside himself.

Only the dream was shattered.

The dreamer was untouched. And freed of time, freed of the notion of unhappiness, the dreamer, the individual, awoke to the reality of timeless life on this blessed planet — the earth within himself that by the grace of almighty God is still the same as it was when he dropped off into unconsciousness, when he left the good and the truth to build an unhappy world and existence of his own.

Thank God it was only a nightmare.

He would not drop off again … for a while.

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