THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD

In our last chapter, we saw that the dominant feature of the evolution of Aether has been an immutable attractive force, dragging it ever onwards and upwards, i.e. towards Alpha, the highest part of Alpha-Holon. We deduced that this divine attractive force was that which has its counterpart at the human level as the force of Love.

Since all Aethers are parts of Alpha-Holon, they must partake of His attributes. The higher the order of Aether, the more it must so partake. Our further upward development must therefore consist in the progressive development of Alpha-Holon's attributes within ourselves.

This is the inescapable conclusion of our metaphysical hypothesis. We assert that this is the foundation of ethics, of true morality.

Can we discern what these attributes are - in addition to Love? We can suppose that they fall into two classes. First must be those which are implicit in Alpha-Holon's very existence as the Supreme Aether and prescribe that He must be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-creating and that His free-will must be unlimited. The second class of his attributes are those which we can only infer, by ascribing to Him, in supreme measure, those attributes of the Aether which appear to be developing with its evolution.

But first, the necessary attributes of Alpha-Holon: Power, Knowledge, Creativity and Free-will.

P O W E R

First I must define what I mean when I say that Alpha-Holon must be all-powerful, for 'power' has several meanings. Obviously, I don't mean power in the scientific sense 'rate of doing work', as when we talk of the power of a car engine or the power of a muscle. Nor do I mean physical energy, as when we talk of nuclear power or wind power. Nor do I mean absolute power, with its connotation of ruthlessness. No, my definition of power, as applied to the SuperAether is "The ability to influence lower-order Aethers". This of course for ALpha-Holon amounts to power over everything. But it is important to note that this is not complete omnipotence: It is not absolute power. This is because, since all things are parts of Alpha-Holon, they must share, to however a tiny degree in His attributes, in particular they must share in His free-will. To remind ourselves of this point, I shall replace 'omnipotence' with a made up word 'omni-influence'.

Since influence over lesser Aethers is a divine attribute, culminating in Alpha-Holon's omni-influence, then its development should be discernible throughout evolution and indeed it is. For example, when the first unicellular speck of living matter took its bow upon the stage of this planet, its principal characteristic was the ability of its higher-order self to influence and order the more primitive molecules of which it was composed. And later, multicellular creatures developed the ability to influence and order their individual cells to meet the purposes of the whole.

Increased inlfluence then, in the sense that I am defining it, does indeed seem to have characterised evolution and it therefore seems logical to accept that, being an attribute of Aether, greater influential power must accompany higher order Aether, culminating in the omni-influence of the Highest.

The pursuit of power is most vividly illustrated in man by his almost universal pursuit of material possessions. It is because this drive is so innate that all governments, all political ideologies, are primarily concerned with satisfying it. 'Economic Growth', 'development', 'under-development', 'capitalism', 'communism', 'socialism' are all to do with the creation of material possessions and their distribution. Indeed, the forerunner or counterpart of this drive is exhibited in more primitive species by their naked struggle for survival, which is essentially the battle to secure the material necessities of life and procreation.

The pursuit of power then is the drive to acquire one of the divine attributes. But how can we reconcile this with the fact that the pursuit of power has throughout history led to massive crime, to tyranny and the enslavement of billions? The answer is that the power being pursued in such cases is not the divine attribute that I am defining, which is the ability to influence and order Aethers which are of a lower order than our own. Indeed, to be strictly accurate, we should perhaps limit its scope to Aethers which are part of us, like the cell Aethers of our body. The evolutionary imperative is emphatically not that we learn to exercise power over other human Aethers - over Aethers which are of the same order as our own - but only in association with them.

This really means that only Alpha-Holon has the right to exercise influence over us, his parts. Unless, of course, we are also parts of some higher intermediate being or beings within the hierarchy of Alpha-Holon, who would also have the right to exercise influence over us.

By this I do not mean the angels that we are evolving into becoming, but higher entities of which they, like us, would be parts.

It is important to remember that influential power is only one attribute of Aether and it is morally neutral. Other attributes, such as love, determine how it is used and to what purpose. And just as man's Aether may not stand very high in the hierarchy of the Ultimate, neither also may his attributes, whether of influential power or of those others which determine its application.

For these reasons, I can assert that when man seeks power over other men, he is in error, illustrated by the adage "Power corrupts".

[As an aside from our main discussion, it is perhaps worth bearing in mind that vile actions which we attribute to the lust for power may in fact derive from the simple emotion of fear: the tyrant murders possible opponents before they can murder him. In such cases, the vengeance ('justice' we call it) sought by international organisations like Amnesty International may have the opposite effect to that intended. Far from deterring the fearful tyrant, it may increase his fear and both prolong and worsen his tyranny.]

INFLUENCE

There is one way in which we can legitimately achieve a measure of power over our fellows and the touchstone of such legitimacy is their consent. It is this crucial matter of consent that marks the difference between the leader and the tyrant. A further legitimate source of power (legitimate because it does not involve coercion) is persuasion, for successful persuasion, through the divine medium of communication, results in influence.

The exercise of influence is morally neutral. It derives, like the attractive love force, from communication of thoughts and vibrations, for the influential are those who have the ability and the means to communicate.

THE LESSONS OF THE POWER IMPERATIVE

INSTITUTIONAL

What implications has all this for the ordering of our human institutions?

Our objective must surely be to maximise the opportunities of the members of society to develop their individual attributes of influence. It is an affront to the imperative of evolutionary development to deny the right to do this to any of our fellow men and women. Oppression, the denial of this right, whether of a majority or of minorities, or indeed of any single individual, must be outlawed as morally unacceptable. Wealth must be distributed to the extent that no-one is destitute or hungry or unclad or homeless or otherwise unable to live a life of dignity, for this is to deny the most basic of powers, that of controlling and ordering the ordinary processes of life and the material possessions necessary to them.

In order to maximise the number of those who can exercise leadership and practise its responsibilities, all common enterprises, whether public or private, governmental or industrial, commercial or professional or social, should be kept as small as is practicable. The criterion of size should be set by the developmental imperative to communicate. Enterprises too large to permit all participating members to communicate personally with one another are unsuited to human needs. The trend towards increasing size, whether of public or private organisations must be ruthlessly addressed and reversed. As Schumaker divined, "Small" indeed "Is Beautiful". Where there really is no small alternative to large enterprises, then these must be organised into smaller sub-units with maximum autonomy, maximum decentralisation, maximum devolution: the aim at all times being to maximise the opportunities for citizens to exercise leadership and influence.

If all this amounts to little more than a commendation of "democratisation", it is none the worse for that. It serves to provide the metaphysical justification for such a socio-political system.

But in practice democracy never amounts to self-rule or rule by the people, but at best only to rule by the representatives of a majority of the people. So what about the interests and rights of the minority or minorities? Their protection can be greatly helped by decentralisation and devolution, particularly when the minorities are geographic. A 'bill of rights', constitutionally enshrined, can give protection to the individual and to racial, religious and social minorities.

CRIME AND CRIMINALS

And what of the 'anti-social' minority, the criminals?

First of all we must be careful not to equate crime with immorality, for many laws have no absolute moral basis. Some indeed may be the actual instruments of oppression. Some may protect entrenched privilege. Some may have been enacted simply for administrative convenience. Others may just reflect ideological or religious dogma, their morality no more than a matter of debatable human belief or conviction.

But even when the crime involves real moral outrage, there can never be any question of punishment in any absolute sense, in any moral sense. As we saw earlier, criminal behaviour may arise from the inexperience of a 'new boy' Aether, still subject to overwhelming pressure of the animal behaviour patterns which are still its subconsciously remembered heritage.

Crime can be the consequence of an inability to communicate or relate with others.

Often crime stems from the misdirected love force operating within a small group (i.e. what we call "bad company").

Criminal behaviour can be simply due to a disadvantaged environment or upbringing, or to any of a host of factors.

Penalties can never involve any absolute moral judgement, for we, the judges, are ourselves too ignorant and imperfect. No, we may condemn the crime, but never the criminal.

This is why Khalil Gibran wrote:

'And you, who would understand justice, how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light?

Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight beween the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self.'

There are three reasons, and only three reasons, why penalties may be exacted:-

(1)

Protection. To protect the majority from individuals pursuing power at their expense;

(2)

Deterrence. To deter such individuals from pursuing their selfish interests at the expense of others, outside the framework of law and morality.

(3)

Appeasement. To assuage the victims and the bereaved and to deflect them from the corrosive path of vengeance and vendetta.

Throughout history, many penalties have been tried, but civilised societies have now generally discarded all but three - these are fines, imprisonment and (recently) 'community service'.

The trouble about the first two is that they also penalise the innocent families of the criminals. Fines are manifestly unjust: a hundred pound fine can blight the lives of a poor family, while meaning nothing to a wealthy transgressor. Imprisonment is even worse, not lightly to be imposed. It involves depriving the individual not only of his right to the pursuit of power but also of many of the opportunities to learn and develop, of much of the purpose of incarnation. Nevertheless, since it meets two of the requirements of a penalty - that is, protection of the majority and assuasion of the wronged, it will probably remain a sad necessity. But it is doubtful whether it is much of a deterrent: a high proportion of criminals are recidivists and the protection that their imprisonment affords to others is therefore only temporary.

What then? First, we need volunteers to visit prisoners and try to forge personal relations with them. We must try to reduce the inhumanity of simply locking a man up. Perhaps we might invoke the human principle of restitution or reparation: instead of sentencing criminals to simple imprisonment, we might sentence them to pay a fixed amount of restitution, to be earned, depending on the crime, in prison enterprises or outside them. We would pay them commercial wages and since their term in custody and their period of repayment would depend on how quickly they could repay the prescribed restitution, they would have every incentive to learn a skill and apply it to useful work in partnership with others.

You might like to ponder some of Khalil Gibran's provocative thoughts on the subject:

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'As a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, So the wrongdoer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.

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'When one of you falls down, he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who, though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.

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'The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder... The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked.

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'And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the axe unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots; And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.'

PERSONAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE POWER IMPERATIVE

How should our personal behaviour be guided by the developmental imperative to seek power (strictly as we are defining it), leadership and influence?

The first thing we can be clear about is that, far from there being something to be ashamed of in seeking to acquire mastery of a skill or profession, of pursuing responsibility and leadership, of trying to succeed in a career, of striving to influence others by communication, of participating with a view to excellence in group interest activities, there is a moral imperative to strive for self development in these ways. Competition in itself is stimulating and harmless, but what is impermissible is to suppress the right of others to strive in similar fashion.

A RIGHT TO INFLUENCE ?

I must now tackle a question which immediately arises: 'If we must try to influence others as part of the divine developmental imperative, how can we be sure that such influence will be beneficial to the person being influenced?' I shall be examining this question more fully in a later session, when I consider the problem of 'Good and Evil', but for the present I shall simply consider the implications for it which arise from our 'reincarnational school' hypothesis.

To recapitulate: life on earth has been characterised by progressive evolution of Aether. Incarnation or reincarnation has thus to be seen as part of that evolutionary process. We are here to develop our Aethers, presumably by developing our God-like attributes. We are here to learn what we have to learn. And we learn by thought, communication and experience.

When I discussed 'classes in the School of Earth', I deduced that mankind must comprise a spread, from 'new girls and boys' in the lowest class to 'senior girls and boys' in the highest, those who have learned enough to be promoted to a higher plane, who are about to graduate to become angels.

Suppose now that Mr Wise or Ms Best in the top class seeks to influence Mr Low or Ms Worst in a lower class, then such influence must by definition be beneficial. If Mr Low seeks to influence Mr Wise, on the other hand, Mr Wise's superior development must ensure that he cannot be influenced for the worse: indeed, without the choice presented to him by Mr Low's 'bad influence', how else could he test and consolidate the superior development he has achieved? Attempts to influence one another between members of different 'classes', therefore, can only be beneficial.

We are then left with the only other possible case, the case where both Wise and Low are in the same class. Here, the influence either exerts on the other could be for the better or for the worse. But either way it will stimulate thought, will be mediated by communication and will provide experience. All these are essentials in the developmental learning process.

A RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE

Communication and mutual opportunities for exercising influence thus fulfil a high purpose. It follows that society should be so ordered as to encourage the proliferation of groups meeting together for joint interest or social purposes, not least because such groups offer the opportunity to develop influence to those to whom it may not be available in their work-place.

Likewise all media of communication - books, lectures, newspapers, journals, radio and TV stations - should be deliberately encouraged and fostered. There is a moral imperative here, not to be set aside for any political, ideological, theological, so-called 'moral' or commercial reason whatsoever. For it is part of the high purpose for which each man and woman incarnates amongst us that he or she should have the right to enjoy maximum exposure to the thoughts and opinions, wisdom and follies, of this School of Earth.

SELF-CONTROL

The second guideline of the power imperative at the personal level is that we should at all times seek mastery over our behaviour. We incarnate to become truly human, to put aside the primitive behaviour patterns learned over the eons of our evolutionary development since the Big Bang of creation launched us as individual Aethers. The superior subconscious communication with Alpha-Holon which we now enjoy as higher-order human Aethers, comes to the surface of our perception as human conscience. We become increasingly aware of what we should do and we must struggle to impose the promptings of that awareness onto our behaviour in our daily lives.

The third guideline is that we should seek to develop mastery over our own bodies, for the body is itself a hierarchy of orders of Aether, subordinate to ourselves.

Exercise, sports, yoga, fasting, meditation and bio-feedback practices are all means to this end.

GUIDANCE TO LOWER ORDERS

Fourthly, despite the difficulties of communication, we must try to influence more primitive creatures to assist the development of their Aethers. An animal or plant Aether that leaves this life bearing some small imprint of the higher Aether of man will be better able to develop and evolve in succeeding incarnations and disincarnations.

It would be absurd to suggest that we might achieve this by verbalised thoughts which would be meaningless to a lower order Aether, but unformulated emotions may well translate into vibrations which are a common 'language' of all Aether. In particular there is the universal presence of the love attribute, without whose attractive force no evolutionary progress could have taken place. So we can certainly try to project loving thoughts towards every creature and every plant that touches our awareness; or thoughts of beauty, of colour, of symmetry, of form; or thoughts of the harmony of music, or of tenderness and hope:-

'Listen to these thoughts, little brother, little sister, and I will lead you a step or two along the road towards what you, like me, are in the process of becoming.'

There is evidence that animals and plants can indeed respond to projected thoughts, particularly if these are emotional.

Human power carries responsibility - responsibility for the welfare of the multitude of fellow creatures, plant and animal, with which we share planet Earth.

GUIDANCE FROM HIGHER ORDERS

If such projected care and influence is an obvious task that we should undertake, then equally obviously a similar duty must fall to higher order Aethers with respect to us humans. This assumption is of course implicit in the prayers to saints, to minor divinities or other presumed higher beings, which is enjoined by many religions. Suffice it to say that it is a possibility that the thoughts of Alpha-Holon are so unimaginable to our relatively primitive Aethers that we can be helped if higher order Aethers transmit to us, through that all-pervading subconscious communication which binds together the Whole and all His parts, a more comprehensible interpretation or translation than we can arrive at unaided.

It is possible that it is partly such guidance from higher Aethers which surfaces to human awareness as that a priori knowledge of ethical imperatives which we call Conscience.

It can be seen that the proposition that we have Guardian Angels would follow logically from the angelic attributes of influential power and love.

K N O W L E D G E

Some great philosophers have pointed out the impossibility for a human being of acquiring knowledge in any absolute sense, of ever being able to assert 'I know'. They then insist that since the only thing that we can know is that we do not and cannot know, therefore what appears to us as knowledge is nothing but an illusion.

But there is no need to quarrel with this reasoning, simply because it misses the point. Of course we cannot know in the absolute sense that Alpha-Holon knows. We are but tiny sparks of Alpha-Holon and our knowing is correspondingly tiny. But we are parts of Alpha-Holon Who does know and, just as we derive our partial influence from the omni-influence that is Alpha-Holon's, so also is it Alpha-Holon's omniscience which is the source of our partial knowledge.

In other words, since omniscience is an attribute of the Superconsciousness, knowledge must be an attribute of consciousness as such: the higher and more evolved the Aether, the greater its knowledge and the nearer its perception to absolute truth. This is why the striving for knowledge, however imperfect or even illusory, is a necessary activity in the evolutionary development of the Aether.

But 'knowledge' involves two related but distinct activities of the human Aether. For example:-

'I 'know' that a dog is walking across my lawn' or 'Alpha-Holon 'knows' what I am thinking' In both these examples, the 'knowledge' arises simply from perception and does not involved any learning process.

On the other hand:-

'I 'know' that if I put my hand into boiling water it will get scalded' or 'I 'know' that the area of a circle can be calculated by multiplying 3.1416 (? by the square of its radius' In these examples, the 'knowledge' does arise from a learning and remembering process.

To distinguish between them, I shall call the first 'awareness' and the second 'learning'.

Why the distinction?

Clearly, 'all-awareness' is a necessary attribute of Alpha-Holon and therefore one of the attributes we must strive to develop within ourselves. But is this true of 'learning'? Has Alpha-Holon learned? Does He learn? The answer to this question is in fact of such momentous consequence that I shall defer discussion of it to our final conclusion. For the present, I shall simply make the assumption, whose truth I hope to demonstrate later, that learning is indeed a necessary attribute of Alpha-Holon.

AWARENESS

I am suggesting that the lessons learned in the School of Earth, the incarnate phases of the progress of the Aether, must be sandwiched between periods of discarnate non-material existence, probably periods of reflection and reorientation of high developmental value.

With what, then, would a discarnate Aether, lacking a material body, be able to clothe itself?

First and foremost, surely, with the thoughts and emotions generated by the memories of things perceived, experienced and learned during the material phase and stored as those vibrations which are the very stuff of the existent individual Aether. For example, have you ever tried to imagine a colour quite different from anything you have ever seen? Sit down, close your eyes and try it. You can't! Why? Surely because the creative power of the human Aether is not up to it. No, we cannot do it here and after we die, since our Aether is not changed by death, we will not be able to do it on the aetheric plane either.

It follows that the yarn for the cloth we shall have to weave there, the notes and the chords for the vibrating music we shall have to harmonise, will be composed of the thoughts, perceptions and memories we carry with us from our incarnations on earth. The greater our awareness has been in the School of Earth, the more we have absorbed of knowledge and the more we have perceived, the richer will be the tapestry we shall be able to weave to clothe ourselves in our Aether phase. And the richer our clothing, the more attractive we shall be to other Aethers.

The greater then our self-awareness, the greater will be the awareness of us by others and the more the love force will have to operate on. It is this which will surely determine the plane we shall be fitted to inhabit. It is this which will determine our vibrations and the companions they attract. It is this which will determine the extent of fulfilment and happiness we enjoy in our aetheric phase - and therefore how long we shall want to remain in it.

Conversely, if our awareness has been poor, if the clothes we can weave are thin, uninteresting and uncomfortable, if our vibrations are attractive only to others with similar meagre clothing - or worse, then the loneliness and poverty of existence on the aetheric plane will soon prompt us to end it, will draw us inexorably back to further reincarnation, back to more learning, back to yet another opportunity to enrich the soul by a more fruitful exercise of our spark of divine awareness.

And so, armed with this insight, that every lovely thing that truly touches our awareness becomes part of us for ever, we can understand the true meaning of Keats' inspired lines:-

'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health and quiet breathing. Therefore on every morrow are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

All lovely tales that we have heard or read:

An endless fountain of immortal drink

Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

"Nor do we merely feel these essences For one short hour; no, even as the trees That whisper round a temple become soon Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast, That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast, They always must be with us, or we die."

All this has brought us squarely back to our earlier deduction that the higher the state of development of a human Aether, the longer the periods it will choose to spend on the aetheric plane and the less time it will need to spend in the classrooms of earth, culminating in its final graduation to the next higher plane of existence. This is the true goal of all human endeavour.

The implications of this for the ordering of society are clear enough: to make available to all citizens the leisure and the facilities for them to enrich their awareness, to perceive and remember as much as possible of the infinite variety of sights and sounds with which this earth abounds, of ideas and stories, of laughter and tears, of great art, music and literature.

We have discussed how economic growth, the creation of wealth, finds its moral justification in making possible for all men and women the exercise of power over material possessions. We can now see that it has a second moral justification in that it can increase the leisure of each citizen to free him or her to pursue and enrich the divine attribute of awareness.

LEARNING

By 'learning' I mean acquisition of the knowledge to answer the interrogatives Who? What? How? When? Where? Whence? Whither? and Why?

As emerged from our investigation into evolution, the development of Aether has been characterised by a cumulative process of learning, however tenuous and discontinuous in the short term. We saw that human life - and indeed all life - is essentially a school of learning for the Aether. Thought is so much the hall-mark of Aether that it is almost synonomous with it. The importance of learning, of acquiring knowledge and retaining it in the memory, therefore, can hardly be exaggerated. It has been the instrument by which Aether, drawn by the attractive love force, has over the eons inched its way onwards and upwards.

HEALTH

"Mens sana in corpore sano" - "A healthy mind in a healthy body" goes the Latin saw. But it contains a message of deep importance. The health of the brain is critically dependent upon the health of the body. As we discussed earlier, the prime function of the body is to nourish the brain with the energy it needs to service the aetheric entity and its indwelling Consciousness (Aether or soul) which is the real human individual.

It must be a top priority for any society to assist its members to good health through adequate nutrition, sanitation and medical services. Of course, nothing can cripple an immortal soul, but a bludgeoned body and a vitiated vitality can retard its development. We must bend every sinew to ensure that no fellow citizen is thus retarded for lack of medical care.

EDUCATION

For each incarnate Consciousness, learning is almost wholly dependent on its living brain. Therefore it must be a prime duty of any society to provide for all of its members the means of training their brains to achieve maximum effectiveness as instruments of their incarnate souls. Such training is the principal objective of education.

Society must therefore also provide the material for every Aether to acquire knowledge: books, films, radio and television programmes, lectures, newspapaers and magazines, meetings, the internet and all other opportunities for learning and exchanging information and ideas. Systems of government which deny knowledge to those who seek it are an affront to that divine imperative which is addressed to every Aether: "LEARN!"

IMPLICATIONS OF THE LEARNING IMPERATIVE

What then are the implications of this imperative for us individual human beings to whom it is addressed?

First, that the acquisition of knowledge should be a life-long process. The person who says at any stage of his life "My learning days are over" has missed the point of his incarnation.

The second implication is that we owe it to our fellows to impart such information and knowledge as we have. They are truly amongst the most important servants of their fellow men who have the power to teach and, above all, to evoke a hunger for knowledge.

Knowledge and Influence are inseparable, two sides of one coin. Like Influence, Knowledge is morally neutral, but powerlessness is not morally neutral and nor are ignorance and heedlessness: they are immoral, for they represent a useless stagnation in the struggle to develop a higher order Aether.

Knowledge and influence can be applied wisely or mistakenly, but ignorance and powerlessness can be applied for nothing.

C R E A T I V I T Y

"You say: 'He who works in marble, and finds the shape Of his own soul in the stone, Is nobler than he who ploughs the soil;

And he who seizes the rainbow, to lay it On a cloth in the likeness of man, Is more than he who makes The sandals for our feet.'

"But I say: 'That the wind speaks not more sweetly To the giant oaks than to the least Of all the blades of grass; And he alone is great Who turns The voice Of the wind Into a song.' "

Kahlil Gibran

Yes, when we talk of 'creativity' in man, we mistakenly confine it to people who create something that others can sense and appreciate, people such as artists, composers, craftsmen and writers - people, in short, who demonstrate the ability to communicate to others the fruits of their inspiration.

But, as Kahlil Gibran insists in the quotation above, these are only the tip of the human iceberg.

For what do we really mean by 'creation'? Surely, the production of something that did not exist before?

When we discussed evolution, I proposed that it has always been spearheaded by innovative behaviour, by the creation, in other words, of a behaviour pattern which did not exist before. Without such innovation, or creativity, there would have been no evolution, no onward march of the Aether, no animal and plant kingdoms, no man, no life.

Thus we can see that there have been four indispensable attributes for the evolution of the Aether: the attractive force of love, which has been the motivating attribute, and the three enabling attributes, the power to influence lower order Aethers, the ability to learn and remember, and the ability to innovate, to create. Thus creativity, a necessary attribute of the Supreme Creator, can be seen to be most demonstrably a universal attribute of all the lower order Aethers which are His parts.

This has important lessons for morality. An act which denies to any individual creature its right to evolve, must be an act which is morally wrong. An act which opposes the dynamic of evolution, opposes the attractive love force of Alpha-Holon. This means that when we put the tiger in a cage, we do wrong. It means that modern factory farming is immoral. It means that if we sterilise a creature's environment, we do it more harm than if we kill it. This is because living stagnation is much worse than death for an immortal reincarnating Aether. For death is simply a door from one phase of life and evolution to another.

Moreover, there is a point of fundamental importance which must now be emphasized. Alpha-Holon is aware of the smallest particle of matter: He is aware of the conscious impressions and perceptions of the ant and the owl, of the rose and the earthworm, of the bacterium and the crocodile. The Aethers of all these are His parts and inseparable from Him: and He is inseparable from them.

Consider, then, a small area of earth. The Aethers of the atoms and molecules which comprise it will reflect their own limited apprehension of the tiny electro-magnetic world in which they "live" and move. The ant's perception of the area will be totally different, as will those of all the other creatures inhabiting it. Man's purview of it will be more comprehensive and of a higher order altogether, though not, in absolute terms, more true.

All these various Aethers, by virtue of their capacity for awareness, because of their telepathic communication with Alpha-Holon, contribute to His total awareness.

You and I, my friends, at our particular level of awareness, are the eyes and ears of Alpha-Holon. Part, but only part, of His perception is through us. Part, but only part, of His absolute truth dwells in us.

A human example will illustrate this. Consider a landscape. This is a human conception. It does not exist in the dark. It comes into being when rays of light, which in physical terms are trains of wavicles of certain frequencies, strike the landscape and are reflected at different frequencies. This is all that impinges upon the observer's eye. These photons of reflected light then set up different electric pulses in the retina, which travel up the optic nerve to the brain. There it is the human Aether which integrates these pulses to give them meaning and thus to create the landscape. And it is the human Aether which creates its beauty.

"Every beauty and greatness in this world Is created by a single thought or emotion Inside a man"

Kahlil Gibran

"The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended"

Shakespeare

Yes, a beautifully wrought table is a thing of beauty only so long as it is so perceived by the craftsman who creates it. When his attention is withdrawn, it becomes just a meaningless (in human terms) lump of matter, to remain so until a human Aether perceives it again and recreates its meaning and its beauty in his or her Aether.

The perception of beauty and ugliness, of harmony and discord, of truth and untruth, are all acts of creativity: and so too is the simple exercise of free-will.

And since Alpha-Holon is aware of every unspoken thought, of every insight into beauty, then this must be part of our high calling: to contribute our tiny sparks of light to that greater light and treasure house, the sublime memory of God.

F R E E -W I L L

"Our God, who art our winged self, It is thy will in us that willeth"

Kahlil Gibran

We have already discussed how, if Alpha-Holon exists, then He must have unlimited free-will. We were further able to trace the progressive development of free-will in the evolution of Aether. We saw how the behaviour of even the most primitive particle is not wholly predictable, and how this fact could be explained by the proposition that even the atom, whirling along its ordained path, possesses, by virtue of its speck of Aether, its own minute portion of free-will.

When we later examined a creature that had life, we could plainly detect a mighty jump in the amount of free-will possessed: the bacterium can choose, the amoeba can choose.

Similarly, ascending the evolutionary ladder, we were able dimly to discern a growing measure of free-will buried under the layers of 'instinctive' over-learned behaviour. By the time we reached the mammals, this had become very apparent, as any cat or dog lover - or rat hater - could attest.

"I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul"

W E Henley

Yes, we saw that the free-will of man far exceeds that of the higher animals, but it must still be comparatively tiny compared to the Ultimate. It is circumscribed by the burden of two thousand million years of primitive memories and emotions, by its own powerlessness, by its lack of knowledge and understanding, by the physical constraints and infirmities inherent in material life, and by environmental and social conditioning.

"O Thou, who man of baser earth didst make,

And who with Eden didst devise the snake;

For all the sin wherewith the face of man

Is blackened, man's forgiveness give - and take!"

Omar Khayyam

Yes, never believe the priests when they tell you that you bear full responsibility for your actions, in any absolute sense. For as our free-will is partial and as our knowledge is partial, so also is the responsibility we bear.

The moral wrong of all types of tyranny lies in its denial of the exercise of free-will to the oppressed. Since free-will is a divine attribute and since therefore its exercise must be a divine imperative, essential to the development of every human Aether, then the criterion of its misuse must be when its exercise denies to others the liberty to do the same.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE FREE-WILL ATTRIBUTE

Let us now take a look at the obvious practical guide-lines which flow from the imperative to develop the divine attribute of free-will - to enjoy, in fact, what we call 'liberty'.

It is how to reconcile without conflict the need of all men and women to develop freewill which is perhaps the central problem of political theory. The clash between modern "Left" and "Right" is focused on it. But even the noblest of political sentiments can be abused. "Liberty " alas, can mean freedom for the stronger to oppress the weaker. "Equality" alas, can mean the drab regimentation of the majority by a powerful ideologue minority. Even "democracy" alas, can mean oppression of the minority by the majority. And in all these cases, what do we really mean by oppression? Surely, the denial of free-will to the oppressed, the curtailment of their liberty.

At the root origins of human laws lies the need to restrain the individual from exercising his free-will to the detriment of his fellows. This is the primary function of human justice: to provide a framework within which man's pursuit of free-will is prevented from encroaching too much on that of others.

At the political level, society should be organised to maximise the opportunities available to its members to exercise choice, the practical manifestation of free-will, though always within constraints that its exercise by one does not prevent its exercise by others. This is why bigotry in society is both harmful and immoral: the proposition that "there ought to be a law against" people exercising choice in ways which, while harmless to others, run contrary to the prejudices of the bigot.

At the personal level, we should at all times seek challenge, face up to alternatives, make choices and decisions, exercise personal responsibility.

Free-will, like power, knowledge amd creativity, is a morally neutral attribute, but its neglect by apathy or servility is immoral, in that it inhibits the development of the soul.

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