The Tribes today have two mottoes: "Do your own thing," and "Get it together." The great Tribal civilizations of the past (Greek, Gothic, Renaissance and Enlightenment) succeeded in doing both simultaneously. Getting it together means creating a new synthesis of cosmology, ethics, humanities and religion. Getting it together also means relating everything to the whole and rejecting the Faustian compartmentalization of cultural life and the trivialization of practical life.
The World-Machine is failing. 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold' and banality and anarchy are the results. The dominant middle class men of outward turning Practical consciousness have succeeded only in creating Heroic Materialism and scepticism about any sort of inner life. IT IS NOT ENOUGH, just as it was not enough for the similarly 'successful' Stoic Romans of the ancient world. The arrogant self-destructiveness and fragmentation of the Faustian men of the museums and universities cannot help, wasting its energies in shocking the middle classes.
We must find again the inner life, the mythic meaning, the roots of our being which we have lost since Gothic times. We must find again the humanism, the sense of a whole, the balance and harmony which flourished in the Enlightenment, and in China, and in the early Renaissance. We must complete the dream of the Enlightenment with value science and religion science. If we succeed in this, fantastic new possibilities await us, as these pages will tell. If we fail, a new dark age is possible, as is predicted by computer simulation in THE LIMITS OF GROWTH.
Under the aegis of a humanist synthesis, you will find here the scientific method (of proposing testable solutions to problems and eliminating alternatives by experience) used with inner experience as well as outer, and used with evaluative and conceptual problems as well as explanatory.
Here you will find psychonics, which is a comprehensive outer theory of occultism; the Great Way, the inner meaning of things; the mythic science of sacred arts and rites; the Whole-Earth ecolomat, telenet and aristarchy; and the eleven theorems of value science; and the humanist synthesis.
This is not an utopian book; many reasons are given here for saying that utopias are both unjustified and impractical. Neither is it a laissez-faire book. We cannot 'control' things should not hope to try, but we can create a persuasive synthesis by transforming our own lives, and this will change things.
World government and an ecological world economy which eliminates poverty and inequality...these things are not impossible, as these pages will show. But we cannot create a persuasive new form of government, suitable to the Whole-Earth problems now facing us, without value science and the humanist synthesis.
Whole-Earth religion, rational, empirical, ecumenical, tolerant...this is not impossible either. Again, it must be scientific religion, in order to be persuasive. There is absolutely no reason why religion must be a matter of faith. There's plenty of conventional scientific evidence about psychical reality to get us started, and from there we can leap into the rich world of inner experience, of avatars and LSD experience and mythic intuition. Can this still be considered part of science and rationality? Why not? The only rule of science is to put ideas to the test of experience. If inner experience turns out to be as revelatory as outer experience, and consonant with it, why not use it?
Christopher Carter Humphrey, Ph.D.
Stillwater, Oklahoma
August, 1973