VLAD KREIMER

REDEFINING CONSCIENCE IN AN ERA OF

RAPID CHANGE
 Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 2
Chapter 1. Foundations for the investigation of conscience ............................................................... 6
Chapter 2. How should we discuss conscience in society in the postmodern era?...................... 20
Chapter 3. The evolutionary pattern for the emergence of society ................................................. 39
Chapter 4. The history of the emergence of conscience .................................................................. 45
Chapter 5. The higher and lower emotional centres .......................................................................... 50
Chapter 6. The objective laws of conscience...................................................................................... 63
Chapter 7. Manipulation ......................................................................................................................... 74
Chapter 8. Some strategies for restoring fairness.............................................................................. 84
Chapter 9. Love ....................................................................................................................................... 90
Conclusion............................................................................................................................................... 93

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 Introduction

I wrote this book because I have been watching modern society grow increasingly,
alarmingly starved of integrity, and of what was known in the old days as conscience. This
deficiency has even been accompanied by a sometimes-outright rejection of the concrete
ethical foundations that help us determine “what is right and what is wrong”1. An inability to
arrive at the truth in consequential – and often unambiguous – situations has become the norm,
from personal relationships all the way through to events of international or even global
significance. Lying has become a part of the job description for politicians, journalists, PR
managers and more. In private conversation, attempting to reach a consensus on even the
basics increasingly leads to disagreement around the kinds of terms and fundamental concepts
that a person should really have been clear on by the age of 6 or 7. In the best-case scenario,
this kind of disagreement ends with a phrase like “let’s agree to disagree” or “everyone’s opinion
is equally valid”, and in the worst-case, with angry words and open hostility.
It’s growing increasingly difficult to be a citizen in a society where you can’t access reliable
facts and figures on crucial economic, environmental and political issues. Worse, the facts and
figures that regularly emanate from different sources contradict each other completely. It’s
growing increasingly difficult to talk about rights, choice and respect in a society where the
same technologies and manipulation techniques are used to promote the president as to
promote a brand of washing powder, creating an image rooted in a fictional reality, built upon
whichever graphic or slogan grabs the public’s attention best.
How can we foster friendship, family or business in a culture where good and bad are
relative, values of any kind are labelled as whimsical fancies and any kind of rule, structure or
law is primarily seen as an attempted act of violence and domination? What do we have to build
those relationships on? What kind of commonality do we have? Can we expect anything more
substantial from those relationships than shallow companionship? How could the education
system not be undermined when the existence of different and inequivalent levels of
consciousness is denied, and with it, the possibility of developing this consciousness? What,
then, is left of that system but mindless rote learning for those yet to master Google Search,
coloured with disdain for those who teach? And how can democracy flourish in a society whose
people are deprived of education, critical thinking skills and any ethical foundation, immersed in
a fabricated world of “alternative” facts propped up by propaganda and advertising? How can
they make informed decisions in this environment?

Worst and most frightening of all, however, is the tolerance and indifference of all those
people prepared to accept any lie, any manipulation of reality, any dirty war (so long, as they
can continue to park themselves in front of a TV and stuff popcorn in their faces), any act of
degradation or destruction, provided it is followed by the right rose-tinted image of reality. Our
instinctive capacity to distinguish good from evil, honesty from deceit, is being lost. Our ability to
think critically is being weakened, mocked by fashionable new-age gurus as the pathetic
struggles of the conceptual mind hindering our progression to a state of bliss. Sufficient
attention is not being given to the most crucial questions, such as the rationality of our current
economic system, the model of supply and demand that dominates in our society, the nature of
our relationship with the world around us and, ultimately, the shape of our presumed future. At

1
“What is Right and What is Wrong” is a poem for children, written by the 20th-century Russian
poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
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the same time, much attention is focused on matters not only unimportant, but often
unnecessary.

The more of these observations I made, the more I have come to think and feel how crucial it
is to identify stable, objective foundations for ethics and conscience. In other words, the
foundations that support genuine human interrelationships – the kind in which real commonality
and partnership can flourish based not purely on using the same currency, the same bank cards
or the same messenger emojis, but on common values and goals that will allow us work
together for the common interest, in bad times as well as in good. It is through such foundations
that the violent conflict and confrontation endemic in our society, from the living room to the
halls of government, will be curbed. While this conflict – which is war, at its essence – may
change its form, it remains an act intended to achieve subjugation and mutual destruction.
Certainly, war may seem milder these days, as it is so often carried out via economic,
information-based, social, cultural or environmental means that kill more slowly and less
obviously, though more reliably and more lucratively for those in power that benefit from these
conflicts. But the essence of war remains the same: our preferred approach to interpersonal
relations seems to be to try dominating the other party’s life and property by force or, failing that,
destroying them. It is telling that the two sides in a war will often sling identical, yet mutually
exclusive accusations at each other, while not a single voice offers truth, transparency, or even
a little kind-heartedness.

This illustrates that despite the power of our (increasingly global) technologies, we have yet
to find a technology that will allow us to become a global society, and not just a fragmented
patchwork of opposing groups and individuals lacking the necessary foundations for a truly
peaceful, useful coexistence. Meanwhile, it is plain to see that the rise of globalisation in all
spheres of activity has led to an increased interdependence between all sections of humanity.
Today, we make use of a multitude of technologies that are of critical importance to both our
current prosperity and our future growth, and which could not be developed by even a
government working alone, much less by a small group of individuals. Obviously, this
interdependence is only going to increase further. And that makes the following questions even
more pressing: what values, what ideas, what kind of social contract are we going to found this
cooperation upon? What will we found our interdependence upon?

If we could work out a broadly accepted, dynamic foundational framework for human
interrelations – a broadly-accepted ethical code – the same way we have worked out, say,
mathematics as a dynamic and evolving concept, it could radically alter the fate of humanity. It
would be difficult, certainly, but isn’t it at least worth trying? Is it not the most important
technology of all, and one of which we are in dire need? What use are humanity’s many
magnificent achievements, when the most brilliant ones are turned into weapons of war or tools
for concentrating unimaginable wealth and power in the hands of a tiny group of people with
questionable or egotistical intentions? What use is scientific knowledge, if we use it to hasten an
impending environmental catastrophe? Doesn’t it matter what kinds of goals and values we
choose to guide us when we apply our knowledge and power, and what kinds of relationships
they help us build? Shouldn’t this question be answered before we take up the powerful tools of
the modern world – tools capable of utterly changing both humanity’s face and the face of the
Earth? The more powerful the tool, the higher the price you pay for a mistake, and the power of
our modern tools is consistently scaling up. This could have drastic consequences in all spheres
of life, from the societal to the environmental.
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 And so, in opposition to the postmodern-era world view currently accepted in western
society, which claims that objectivity in ethics, as well as an objective hierarchy of values and
philosophies of conduct, does not and cannot exist, I have decided to search for this objectivity
and these philosophies anyway. This is because without them, I see no sense in undertaking
any endeavour of significance, in raising children or in generally taking on responsibilities or
expending my energy on consequential work. Without them, I have no reason not to lose myself
in childish diversions, to start collecting trinkets and to withdraw from society and relationships.
Better to indulge myself in various pleasures and remain oblivious if this is the case. This search
is what I will share in this book.

I’m not a writer, though I was raised on literature, nor a professional philosopher, though my
life has been dedicated to the search for truth for as long as I can remember. I’m not a scientist,
though I have a good understanding of the key points of modern science, nor an adept of any
kind of recognised spiritual belief system, though I like to think that self-insight and self-
discipline are most valuable traits I possess. This book does not provide the references to other
sources or the lengthy bibliography that are both essential for a scientific text, since I gathered a
significant portion of the information through “rapid” modern methods online. Instead, this work
should be considered my own, independent research report, which I offer to both your heart and
mind for appraisal, since living hearts and minds are precisely the magical tools capable of
changing the world for the better, and that is exactly what I’d like to see more of in the world.

And so, the aim of this work is as follows: to search for an objective understanding of ethics
and determine the laws of conscience, such as may be inferred on the level of scientific
knowledge, proven and accepted by all of humanity, as with any objective field of science.

To attain this knowledge and then put it into practice, we will need a certain amount of
willpower and discipline. We will principally need these in order to uncouple ourselves from our
comfortable fantasies, as well as from the positive and negative emotions we hold so dear –
those emotions we love to wrap around ourselves like a comfort blanket, both as individuals and
as entire eras and civilisations. We will need to see things as they are, not as we want to see
them. In my experience, when we step out of our emotional comfort zone by adopting a habit of
discipline based on reliable goals and methods, our quality of life improves rapidly and
significantly.

This is an integrative work. It sets out to contextualise facts familiar to the modern, educated
individual, draw connections between them, and link them together into a comprehensive
picture which can be used to draw higher-order conclusions and map out an approach for
building interrelationships and resolving violent conflicts – an approach that might tip the
balance of the world in favour of peace and friendship. In today’s world, this kind of approach is
practically impossible to observe. Opposing groups who find themselves at war will immediately
begin trying to inflict as much harm on the other side as possible, while attempting to extract as
much benefit for themselves as they can. In the arena of public opinion, people dig up nasty
details and expose their opponents’ worst sides with the aim of blackening each other’s names,
all while carefully concealing their own sins and working to present themselves in an exclusively
positive light.

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 If they do attempt to address each other in a civil manner, it is only to avoid being socially
shunned, and only when they are in the public spotlight. And if there does happen to be a truly
decent person, or a well-intentioned, conscientious group of people, they most often adopt a
passive position, choosing to stay out of world affairs and let them be resolved by someone else
entirely.

I can honestly say that I would much prefer to be writing a book on the practice of meditation
or the art of sound synthesis, but those are secondary subjects, and devoting attention to them
in a society which has not yet answered its central question – who are we to each other and
how should we treat one another – is, in my view, pointless. That is why, despite the fact that
the twin topics of conscience and the objectivity of ethics are deeply complex and many-
layered, demanding extensive research and the kind of knowledge accumulation that is almost
beyond the reach of an ordinary person living in the post-truth era, I have decided to dedicate
my first book to the fundamental topic of interrelationships.

This work will by no means be a complete examination of the topic; as the author, though I
have done the best I could, I am nonetheless confined to working within the limits of my abilities.
Much research, refinement and detailed explanation is still required, many examples and
references are still needed. If you come across these weak points and agree with the overall
thrust of the argument nonetheless, then consider this an invitation to collaborate. This project is
too significant to be undertaken by a single person; it needs the collaborative research of
specialists from many different fields, because only then can the knowledge produced be
considered truly objective. And so, above all, I ask you to view this book as an impetus towards,
and possible roadmap for, the kinds of consciousness and relationships – with both ourselves
and others – that we will not be ashamed to possess.

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 Foundations for the investigation of conscience
Let us begin by defining the primary focus of our investigation:
Conscience and ethics are, in essence, a set of behavioural strategies, rules, attitudes
and values that serve to establish the kinds of human interrelationships that allow
individuals and separate groups, each with their own private interests, to form a society.
To put it in technical or scientific terms, they are a collection of behavioural algorithms that allow
separate individuals to come together in a unified system that is radically more effective, and
better designed for evolutionary success, than its constituent parts.

If we accept this definition, it reveals a clearly defined function for ethics and conscience: to
efficiently merge individuals into a society. Thus, once we have identified what a society is and
how it is useful, we can identify the tools and functions it needs, and the kinds of qualities and
interrelationships its members must possess in order to fulfil those functions.

For brevity, we will refer to conscience and ethics, which are essentially identical, as the
singular “conscience”.

To begin, we must define the approaches, world view, system and methods of inquiry we will
use in our research, as these will guide us in the search for an objective basis for conscience.

After lengthy research, I have concluded that the tool best able to provide clarity on the
subject is the scientific method, and that it should be the primary tool for this kind of
investigation. At this point, we can reasonably ask – what about religion? What about spiritual
and esoteric systems? After all, they were the authority on questions of morality for thousands
of years, and it is to them that one traditionally turns for answers on the subject of
interrelationships. This is true. Religions, along with spiritual systems of self-development, have
also contributed immeasurably to the development of ethics. However, ethics is a question that
has not been fully answered, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that we cannot answer it
using religious tools alone. Nonetheless, there are a number of useful tools created by religions
and systems of self-development that we should certainly make use of, albeit in an
appropriately modernised reinterpretation. This may sound like a strange assertion, which is
why we must delve deeper into it here.
If we wish to establish an objective, universal basis for ethics, why can’t we rely solely on the
religions and systems of self-development founded on a myth-based, religious worldview?

1) Religion was born and fostered in a time of perpetual war between different states
and groups. In that context, uniting disparate peoples into a single, peaceful society was
unthinkable. As a key social institution, mass religion naturally incorporated the psychological
tools and beliefs used to wage these wars successfully.
Because of this, religion could only partially answer the questions of ethics, and only through
the lens of the period in which it emerged. But our modern world presents us with an entirely
different set of challenges. In the modern context, religion is not just a poor helper, but actually
a significant impediment on our path to attaining vital clarity of conscience. This is compounded
by the fact that religions are, by their nature, very inert institutions, practically incapable of
moving with the times, revising their principles, or keeping up with humanity’s general
development.

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 As a result, no religion has produced a truly universal value system that might be accepted
by all of humanity. The systems that have been produced contain too much fabrication and
subjectivity to make sense except within that religion’s origin culture and among its followers.
Religion has always been one of the greatest motivators for people to inflict war and
violence, hostility and judgement on each other. Despite what the teachings may say on love,
religions have always split humanity into two parts, one “wrong” and one “right”, and taught us
that the former must be subjugated to the will of the latter by any means necessary. Not one
major world religion has managed to open its arms to everyone on Earth. No two major religions
have ever extended a hand of friendship, mutual acceptance and cooperation to one another,
providing an example for us all of how human relations should be. Instead, they have gone on
regarding each other with contempt, or even with open hostility – although the aggression or
openness of the approach does, admittedly, vary greatly between different religions.
Organised religion has always been a key tool for big business and politics, which is to say, it
supports to the self-serving interests of specific groups of people in control of a country or
region, but never humanity as a whole. Religious leaders are frequently a study in deceit and
dissimulation, concealing their dealings in business and politics behind righteous sermons about
love, piety and the will of God. Examine the worst abuses of authority in modern power
systems, and you will often discover the mark of established religion.

In other words, religions have committed serious acts against conscience, and have
hindered humanity from forming a peaceful, global society.

Again, we should remind ourselves that religion is the product of a harsher, less enlightened
era. Like any societal tool, designed for a concrete purpose in the real world, its primary function
was to reflect the psychological, economic and societal stages of development of both the social
system and the individual, including all the contradictions, ignorance, cruelty and selfishness of
each. For this reason, the above is not a condemnation; religions did what they could with the
tools they had. What matters to us is that we need to cut deeper, using cleaner and sharper
tools, if we are to find answers to the questions of ethics. Just as alchemy led to chemistry, so
must we, in our inquiries into conscience, pass from religious doctrine to the scientific method.

In contrast to the bloody history of organised religion, science is a gleaming example of

friendship and cooperation. From its very inception, science has been one. India, Russia and
America all use a single, common mathematical system, not three separate systems that fear
and condemn each other. Mathematics, like any science, is developed through the
collaborative, coordinated effort of the entirety of humanity. In this effort, contributors of every
race, nationality, gender and age are valued for their work, and obtaining accurate, reliable
knowledge is what matters most. Science does not pursue selfish interests nor serve any one
group of people (barring the possibility of cover-ups, of course, these activities are practically
unheard-of in the basic sciences). Science belongs to no one individually, but it benefits
everyone. Integrity and veracity are paramount in science.

2) Almost all religions are retrograde, i.e., they claim that we are moving away from a
state of sublime perfection and towards a decline, the end of the world, Kali Yuga, etc. – and
that we can do nothing about it.
Why attempt to build a prosperous, worthwhile society if the whole thing is only headed for an
imminent demise? Why not just try to hang on, sobbing and wailing, until the end of the world –
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the most significant thing that will ever happen to us – arrives? Why worry about personal
development if the train you’re on is heading for a cliff? How can anyone muster the will or joy to
carry on, looking at the world through that lens? This bleak predetermination paralyses our
positive will to act and pushes us into negative states and behaviours.

With science, meanwhile, we can taste the sweet air of uncertainty, joyful in the knowledge
that we are sitting front and centre for the show – and that we are the lead actors! Only when
you control your own fate can you take on true responsibility, and only then can you build your
relationship with conscience.

Virtually all religions regard themselves as perfect from the moment of their inception. In
declaring themselves perfect, and therefore subject to neither criticism nor change, religions
and spiritual doctrines have completely stifled their own potential for growth and surrendered
their ability to keep pace with the rapid change of the modern world; instead, they are forever
frozen, static apparitions of imagined past perfection.

Science, meanwhile, is an evolving organism. It is future-oriented and only grows stronger

and more majestic with the passing of time. Science, as a body, monitors itself rigorously for
flaws, is prepared to call every inch of itself into question and will unflinchingly erase anything
found to be inaccurate or unreliable. Science is open to additions and expansions. It gives us
the joy to go on, because it rewards our efforts with success and extends our horizons.

3) Religion espouses a variety of misguided claims and views that hinder a clear
understanding of conscience. Let us examine a few:

“God created the world and people”, i.e., some kind of being created the world exactly as it
is now. This particular myth stymies evolutionary thought and conceals the true story of
humanity’s origins. But if we are to understand conscience, as well as why humans behave the
way they do and why they are what they are, we need to acknowledge the truth of our origins,
learn how we came about, and study the circumstances in which our various traits and
behaviours were formed and why. If we don’t, the answers will escape us, and the solutions we
need will go with them. If we attempt to analyse the story of humanity’s origins in which God
created man, it inevitably leads to questions like: “Why did God decide not to make man perfect,
but instead, to give him so many terrible qualities, fill him with contradictions and cause him
such anguish?”, and: “Why was I created, what is my purpose, and what personal impact or
responsibility can I have if this was always someone else’s project? And where’s the manual, or
the technical specifications or something, damn it!” And this is where clear thought and full
responsibility inevitably flounder.

“God controls the world and decides the course of events in it.” If behind the evil, the cruelty,
the mindless destruction and stupidity in our world, claiming responsibility for it all, was a
sentient being endowed with a consciousness similar to ours (i.e., capable of forming values
and distinguishing right from wrong), that being would be a sick, twisted sadist. What could we
expect from a world ruled by a being like that? And what could we ask of ourselves and others
in that world? Ancient scripture is filled with graphic depictions of atrocities seemingly committed
at God’s command, and sometimes, even by God himself. If we were to take that as the
standard for our behaviour (what higher standard is there, after all, than God himself?), how
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would it shape our understanding of conscience? As a matter of fact, our modern understanding
of conscience has been shaped by exactly this. Friedrich Nietzsche, in one of his works,
declared “it very fortunate that God didn’t exist, or the world would be hopelessly cursed”. In my
opinion, this is one of the greatest blessings modern humanity has ever received.

Only a scientific approach based on evolutionary theory can offer a forgiving explanation for
the horrors of human history, with all its wars, executions, sophisticated torture techniques and
other delights: no one created us, and there is no higher power presiding over events – there is
only the process of incremental growth, in which nature, like a child learning to walk, progresses
step-by-step along a new and unfamiliar path. Consciousness develops in tandem with this
process, meaning there is no one we can ask the question “why?” to; instead, we are the ones
responsible for our future.

“There is life before and after this life” – whatever form it takes, be it heaven and hell or
reincarnation and advancement to a higher state of being, religion stretches our existence far
beyond the boundaries of reality. Once again, this prevents us from taking true responsibility for
how we live and act, which in turn, prevents our conscience from developing fully; we all get as
many chances as we need, after all, and in the end, as Soviet punk artist Yegor Letov sang, “no
one has to lose”. No need to worry, then! Why conserve water when you’re sitting in the middle
of the ocean? The belief in an alternative state of being (which we will discuss later) and others
like it keep us from the pinnacle, the peak of developed conscience: love.
The sobering realisation that we only live once, and that, for better or worse, our only chance
is the one we have in this moment will, initially, come as a shock to those comfortably
accustomed to thinking of themselves as immortal. But once this realisation has been made, the
strength to live and act authentically, and to feel true appreciation, love and care for the world
around us can finally be found.

Going on, it is an important point that all spiritual and esoteric doctrines use specific
psychological tricks to powerfully alter their followers’ mental states for sustained periods, as
well as to foster emotional attachments in them, both of which can develop into obsessions.
This is certainly the shortest path to spiritual elation, abundant energy and optimism – but the
cost is a decreased capacity for clear, critical, independent thought. And without clear thought,
conscience cannot exist, for although the roots of conscience are in emotion, it is nonetheless
much more akin to consciousness than to an emotional state. This, incidentally, is why people in
thrall to organised religion are so willing to take part in holy wars; in their religion-induced states,
they actually tend to be greatly out of touch with the intuitive senses necessary to understand
what’s really happening. And if religion does expand consciousness, then it is only up to a
certain threshold; beyond this, it becomes an obstacle to expansion. The consciousness of the
religious follower is bounded by illusions, and an individual’s consciousness cannot extend to
touch the boundaries of the real world while they are immersed in the mythical world of religion
– just as a driver cannot follow a road while the image of another, imaginary road is being
projected onto their windscreen. This projection may be much nicer than the real road the driver
is actually following, and that may boost their mood or make them pump on the gas, but it
probably won’t help them complete their primary objective – namely, to drive the car safely
down a road that exists. Nor does it help with conscience, the primary objective of which is to
correctly evaluate our own actions (and the actions of others) and make the right decisions.
Illusion and enthrallment, in this case, lead us astray.

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 “The alternative state of being”. The claim that it is possible to attain an alternative state of
being – a claim that all the major religions and spiritual and esoteric doctrines of the past 3,000
years have worked together to make us believe – requires careful and dedicated examination.
The rainbow body, the world of pure nagual intent, which you pass into burning with a fire from
within, paradise planets and other dimensions, nirvana, the Kingdom of Heaven – these have all
been held up as worthy dwelling places for the decent, self-respecting individual. Anywhere, it
seems, but this bleak, sinful world, drenched in suffering, ignorance and desire, this stupid
samsara, barrelling towards Kali Yuga, steered by the Devil and awaited by the end of the
world...
As a result, the best hearts and minds set on the path of spiritual development have stayed
hidden away in their hermit caves, their retreats and their monasteries, never applying their
dazzling awareness and open-heartedness to the everyday life of our everyday world. Why not?
Well, who makes repairs to a run-down old rental apartment, especially one they’re hoping to
vacate as soon as they can?
Of course, the successful religious practitioner, waiting with his bags packed for his trip to
some infinitely better world, also harbours in his heart a thin sliver of arrogance and contempt
towards all the ignorant fools left behind on this dreary samsara. Does this foster the
development of conscience, intended as it is to steer the everyday actions of the everyday world
and everyday relationships between everyday people?

The outcome of this is that the imagined world of spiritual perfection has become our most
prized possession – the world you can disappear to, ideally leaving nothing behind but maybe
your haircut – while this world, with its humdrum relationships, crying babies, dull trees and
rocks, predominantly grey sky and dull, hard daily grind really does seem cursed. We have
been trained to prize the imaginary and non-existent over the things we actually experience and
possess – things to which we are directly connected. And this capacity to trust in authoritative
fantasies, which is stronger than our capacity to believe the things we see and hear for
ourselves, plays a key role in the manipulation of the modern world. Through consumption of
television, newspapers and other forms of mass media, the modern person begins to fear
imaginary enemies coming to cause them imagined harm, and imaginary problems of
catastrophic proportions that in reality, don’t affect them at all. In response, the individual
distances themselves from the real world, wallowing in fluffy entertainment or, in an attempt to
rid themselves of fear, becomes enraged and goes out into the real world to murder real people
and destroy real countries, trying to change something but not knowing what. This story usually
unfolds to the benefit of the powers and people who constructed the frightening, tantalizing
bogeymen in the first place, or who at least have successfully exploited them. After all, it’s very
convenient to have other people fight your wars; you can stay safe and sound, sacrificing
nothing but your money – and ultimately, even that belongs to someone else. Better still, you
can convince people of how useful and necessary it is to destroy their own country, hamstring
themselves and turn on the hand that bore them, fed them and raised them. And this is where
the propensity of obedient people to trust the imaginary at the expense of reality truly comes
into play, because a virus can’t infiltrate a system unless it finds the right chink in that system’s
defences. The credit here must go to our religions, who have so diligently fostered this “gift” in
us for thousands of years.

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 4) The age of religion is clearly coming to an end. Science and technology rule the world,
the decisive contributors to humanity’s advancement are people who see the world in scientific
terms, and quite clearly, this trend is only accelerating. This means, however, that as we enter
the scientific age, we must find ways to preserve ourselves in spirit and soul. We must carry the
brightest achievements of religious thought and ethics with us into the future, and we must
incorporate them into the scientific thought from which we draw our power. In other words – we
must learn to understand faith, hope and love in scientific terms.
Let us start by highlighting the most welcome, most valuable gifts our religions and systems
of spiritual self-perfection have given us; we should carry these gratefully into the world of the
future.
First are the invaluable skills of self-observation, self-awareness and self-transformation. As
humans, each of us has an inner world (or psyche) so powerful, it does more to shape our
individual lives (and these days, even the world around us) than any external factor. As a result,
the subjective has very tangible objective consequences. Thus, self-reflection and self-control
will be essential skills for the free, powerful person of the future. Without these skills, we are
likely facing a slow transformation into spineless lumps of biomass, sitting obediently in our
cubicles while our electronic devices control every aspect of our lives. After all, isn’t that the
logical end result of a system that strives constantly for efficiency and optimisation in all its
billions of units, each brimming with their own desires, traumas, problems, entitlements and
ambitions, most of them doing nothing productive, pointlessly consuming oil and electricity and
generating tonnes of rubbish in the process? Because in the equilibrium of the modern world,
humanity is increasingly becoming a problem that needs to be solved, and the root of this
problem is not in the body, but in the mind. We can hope, of course, that an all-powerful
computer, advanced enough to rearrange the ninety billion neurons of the human brain into a
more enlightened pattern, will come along and debug our minds. We are still a long, long way
from understanding the brain in that kind of depth, however, not to mention that kind of
computer power. And even if we make these advances, thanks to the unscrupulous economic
and political systems of modern society, these highly complex technologies would probably be
in the hands of the business and political elite, who would jump at the chance to enhance our
newly enlightened minds by inserting, say, an advertisement for soft drinks into our brains,
creating another nook for the dominant system to lodge itself in. In that sense, it’s a blessing
that this is still beyond our grasp.
The result of all this is that for now, only humans themselves can truly understand the human
being. Working in the world of the subjective requires very specific tools and approaches that
are meaningless beyond the bounds of the human psyche. However, if we are trying to reliably
differentiate the internal world from the external – without trying to measure bioenergy through a
voltmeter – then the tools offered by the spiritual and esoteric systems are best methods of
achieving self-awareness and self-control. Incidentally, when we understand these systems
correctly, we see that they do not have to contradict science.

Our ability to prize the imaginary over the perceptible also deserves its due; it has played a
key role in the evolution of science, the vast majority of which resides in the theoretical space.
Indeed, this space is where many scientists spend much of their time. It is important to note,
however, that science requires rigorous confirmation of theory through experimentation and
real-world application, and that a purely speculative theory will never be accepted as truth until it
has been tested in practice.

11
 And finally, we must recognise the spiritual tradition for its contribution to the development of
ethics in human thought. Its basic moral laws, which tell us not to kill, steal, sleep with our
mothers and sisters, etc., are unquestionably sound. It is significant that these basic laws of
behaviour are the only thing on which all the world religions firmly agree. The obvious
conclusion, then, is that they are the truest element of religion, because that which genuinely
exists is seen by everyone in exactly the same way. However, we hardly need such a grand
parade of gods, miracles and myths to understand that thieving and killing are wrong. I think the
modern individual is capable of exercising discipline on these points in an uncomplicated,
common-sense way.
The religions of the Axial Age, including Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, also took a vital
step in advancing the unification of humanity. The religions of the ancient world were based
strictly on clan and lineage and could only be born into, not joined; consequently, they did
nothing to contribute to the unification of different groups of people. The religions of the new
era, in contrast, openly accepted any person, state or nation. This opened up new paths for
economic and cultural development, leading, in effect, to the advanced society of the modern
age.
Also, we must recognise the spiritual traditions of the past for their contribution to the
development of selfless love – the highest achievement of developed conscience that we will
discuss in the last chapter. Both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions of the past 3000 years
contain selfless love as a core principal for achieving a higher state of consciousness and for
strengthening the inner link to the divine by serving others. It is the highest ethical quality a
devotee or spiritual seeker can practice and apply in daily life: Selfless, detached love for
others. Charity, in its original meaning (not the current one of giving to the poor), is the highest
form of love in the Christian tradition. It stands for the reciprocal love between God and man
which is expressed through unselfish love of one’s fellow men. In Indian Vedanta philosophy,
the principal of Karma yoga is the path of service through selfless action for the good of others.
But all of these ancient ways to spiritual, selfless love contain tricks and illusions that make
the way faster and easier but in some point become an obstacle for the practitioner in achieving
its highest, purest and, actually, most balanced and practical state in daily life. The point is that
all ancient traditions promise you something much more important in return if you will follow
selfless love: the kingdom of God, paradise, good karma, a better reincarnation in a blessed
place, enlightenment – all these things in the religious worldview are worth much more than
what you lose doing good things in the way of selfless love. So it is still profitable business, i.e.
not so selfless, although it certainly brings great benefits to others and is very kind. The reason
why this trick that shows selfless love as a profitable acquisition was applied – it’s the easiest
way to get positive consent from our animal emotional centre (which will be discussed in the
chapter “The higher and lower emotional centres”) with its primordial, egoistic instincts that have
such a strong influence on the human psyche and such low flexibility, that it was better to spoof
it than try to change it. But evolution doesn’t stand still and it’s time to switch selfless love to a
more pure, balanced and strong state. We will show in the last chapter called “Love” a way that
doesn’t contain any imaginary entities, tricks or illusions as the foundation, but instead is based
on real things, confirmed by both everyday life and science.

We will conclude this section with the observation that religion arose at a time when
humanity was simply incapable of unlocking the mysteries of evolution or discovering the true
workings of the Universe. The people who created religion were doing the best they could. They
discovered what they could, and where there were gaps in that knowledge but the need to

12
construct an attractive comprehensive cosmographical system remained, they filled the gaps
with fantasies. What falls to us, then, is to thank them, correct their mistakes, adopt their best
ideas and move on.

***

Let us now turn to science.

I need to begin with a few words on the veracity of scientific knowledge. Too often in modern
society, I encounter the perception that science is just one of many viewpoints, all of which are
equally valid, and that science, consequently, contains just as many errors, fantasies and
biases as any other world view.
For anyone who doubts the reliability of scientific knowledge, allow me to carry out two very
straightforward demonstrations here, neither of which requires a lengthy explanation or any kind
of specialist knowledge:

1. Take out your smartphone. Consider the following: your beloved device is made up of
several hundred billion individual components, created using tens of thousands of different
technologies. Those technologies, in turn, are built upon thousands of mathematical, physical
and chemical laws. Every one of those components, technologies and laws was discovered and
refined through science. If even one of those laws, technologies and components had failed to
work, or been untrue or inaccurate, your device would have been rendered completely useless.
Therefore, every time you use your functioning smartphone, you are demonstrating that all the
scientific knowledge behind it is reliable. And the knowledge behind it is broad, from the fields of
mathematics and chemistry all the way through to quantum physics.

2. Look around you. How much of your surroundings is natural, and how much is man-
made? Unless you’re a member of an Amazonian tribe or have been raised by wolves, you are
probably looking at the man-made environment that dominates the globe. Streets, houses,
furniture, cars, computers, clothes, purple hair-dye – all of it is exclusively the product of
science. The rapid pace of change so evident in the world around us would be impossible
without scientific knowledge, and it demonstrates both the immense power of science and its
unparalleled reliability compared to other methods of obtaining knowledge.
And knowledge equals power! Which is precisely why, if we want our basis for conscience to
be solid, it must be scientific; specifically, it must be objective.

Let us now identify the scientific tools and information we will need most as we formulate an
objective basis for conscience.

First is the method of using incremental, collaborative research to produce information that is
as accurate and universal as possible; science models the ideal approach to studying
information of societal significance. Any claim accepted by science is reliable and entirely
suitable for further application, including as a foundation for more complex systems; if every
single scientist had to personally test every law they used to figure out true from false, we’d all
still be travelling around in carts. Contrast this with the information space of the modern mass
media. It is a vital source of societally significant information, and yet, almost nothing it
produces can be taken as true without careful analysis and screening for the influence of
13
advertising or propaganda. The scientific approach is also very different to that of the spiritual
and esoteric systems, which consider any success a positive result, even if the cumulative
outcome of an effort is failure. In science, just one properly executed, unsuccessful experiment
is enough to discount the entire theory. This grants science an extraordinary strength: within the
given limits and to a given degree of precision, scientific knowledge is always accurate.

Moving on, we will need the principle of growth. Science grows constantly as information is
added and refined and more complex structures are built on the bones of simpler ones. This is
another clear indication of the reliability of science, since the Universe, broadly speaking,
follows the same pattern of growth, which means it is a natural phenomenon. Take, for
example, the fact that Einstein’s laws of physics, far from disproving Newton’s, actually defined
the field (i.e., the energies and speeds) under which they were accurate enough to be applied.
Einstein’s laws expanded the field of physics rather than dominating it to the exclusion of
Newton’s laws. Science is internally structured in the same way; when we reach advanced
mathematics, we do not discard the arithmetic we learned as five-year-olds, nor do we consider
it childish or backward. No – we keep using it as a solid, singular foundation for our further
studies.
The same happens in nature: elementary particles were not negated by the emergence of
the atom (just as quarks were not negated by elementary particles), but instead became the
solid foundation for a new stage in the organisation of matter. Likewise in biology: organisms
are composed of cells, but although the cell is an earlier form of biological life, the organism
does not reject it. And even human beings contain a version of all the earlier life-forms in our
evolutionary tree. Clearly, this is a powerful blueprint for creation!
But how does this play out in the social sphere? Let’s take Russia, my beleaguered
homeland, as an example: first, paganism was denounced and destroyed by Christianity, then,
Christianity and capitalism were both denounced and destroyed by socialism, which was
eventually denounced and destroyed in revenge by capitalism, with assistance from
Christianity...
How can you build a stable house if you keep destroying the foundations? This is why, for
things as vitally important as interrelationships, we need such principles that we will expand and
build upon, not negate or reject. And if we see some principles giving way to others, it simply
tells us that the truth has not yet been found, which means we must continue the search.

And so, to construct an objective science of interrelationships, we must approach the task as
we approached geometry and physics: first, we define the fundamental axioms we perceive
through direct observation, and then, we identify the broadest, most general facts and laws we
can. Next, on the basis of these foundations, we can move on to second-tier laws and studies.
Then we can address the third tier, the fourth, and so on, until we have reached a solution
applicable to every situation imaginable. Everything that exists and evolves in the Universe,
including scientific knowledge, exhibits a branched structure.

The fact that the Universe, life and humanity all occurred as a result of evolution is at the
very core of our investigation. The theory of evolution is one of the key scientific achievements
of the last two hundred years. Unfortunately, few people understand its true importance or
practical application. Discovering the world’s evolutionary origins has allowed us to identify the
same laws at work in the creation of all its elements, from the atom to the human being, and has
granted us not only great insight into the nature of the world and humanity, but also the power to

14
predict their future course. There are, of course, blank spots on our map of the evolutionary
origins of life and the Universe, but while some stones remain unturned, the overall picture is
visible: everything that exists arose as a result of evolution, which operates according to its own
laws. We will examine some of these laws later in the book, when we attempt to understand
why conscience arose in the Universe at all. It is though unravelling the continuous,
incremental, evolutionary chain of development of our species that we can finally figure out what
we are doing here and why, see that we and our world are actually on the right overall path and
get down to some constructive work.

To continue our analysis, we need to identify how best to observe and analyse both human
society itself and its building block, the individual. Which model should we adopt to illuminate
the patterns of interest to us with the greatest clarity? After much study, I have come to the
conclusion that the best model currently available is one which represents these living
structures as dynamic systems of interconnected elements, embedded within other, more
advanced structures of greater complexity and depth. Representing this system through such a
mechanism, or even simply analysing it using the concrete analytical approaches applicable to
mechanical systems or modern chaos theory, offers us many constructive options.
First and foremost, it lets us do away with arrogant anthropocentrism and the belief that one’s
origins, spirit and consciousness are somehow set apart from the rest of nature, that we occupy
a special position in the Universe, that we have a unique destiny, and so on. These ideas are
often the final word from those who would prefer to leave the truth of these relationships
unexplored while they manipulate our society in favour of injustice. The truth is, we are just
another link in the Universe’s chain of development; we arose from the ceaseless process of
evolution, and we will eventually morph into whatever comes after us. We are a system, one
that processes energy and information and has its place within the much larger dynamic system
of Earth and the Universe. If we examine ourselves as a dynamic system that processes
energy, we can then apply to ourselves such concrete criteria as efficiency, levels of internal
and external integration and so on. We can also analyse points of stress within the system in
terms of their influence on the overall dynamic, which will allow us to make better choices and
clear-headed decisions. With this approach, we can avoid getting bogged down in the muddy,
controversial topic of our divine destiny, and instead, can simply examine our relationships to
energy, time and information, both as individuals and within the system of human society as a
whole.
At the same time, when we reduce the vast, diverse spectrum of human activity to such a
simplified model, we must not lose sight of the fact that the model is just that – simply a tool with
which we can attempt to unravel some small strand of a very complex phenomenon. Beyond
this, as in the sciences, once we have mastered the fundamental laws, we can move on to the
next and more complex stage of analysis, maintaining the clarity of our methods and results as
we go.

If we wish to uncover the full potential of conscience and discover love in its pure form – the
form capable of actually effecting change in the world around us – we need to take a scientific,
materialistic view on the nature of our life, spirit and consciousness. In essence, we must realise
that all the layers of our internal world, all our capabilities and potentials are, at the personal
level, inseparable from our body; they cannot exist without it, and when the body dies, they will
cease to function. I say “at the personal level” because spirit and consciousness as principles
are separable from the physical body, like algorithms of a sort, in the same way that the laws of

15
mechanics are separable from a vehicle, or the circuit diagram for a TV can exist independently
of the TV itself.
Thus, we only live one life, and we do not live either before or after it. All the broadly
accepted scientific research on the topic points to this conclusion. This theory is supported by a
plethora of laws and data, whereas there is not one single piece of significant, objective data or
research attesting to the existence of human life, in any form, before birth or after death. All the
esoteric experiments and phenomena ever recorded – events often used as a pretext to
investigate life after death – can be attributed to common psychological occurrences linked to
altered or borderline mental states, pure coincidence, or trickery. This, it should be noted, is
where the border lies between real science and the work of charlatans and occultists, including
work that attempts to mimic scientific theories. The question of the nature of human
consciousness and the human mind is the dividing line. According to the scientific
understanding of nature, these things are inseparable from the physical body and can neither
exist nor demonstrate substantial independent activity in isolation from it.

I should add that I am not the kind of hard-line materialist for whom nothing is real but
arithmetic and machine data. I have immersed myself in shamanism, meditation and other
esoteric disciplines and have achieved great results from doing so – when the results were not
generated through illusion or trickery. However, I was studying science at the same time, and
when I considered my experiences in the context of modern knowledge and plain common
sense, I couldn’t avoid drawing the conclusions I state here; though less comforting and
appealing, they opened the door to a new level of clarity on the fundamental questions of
existence, which are still so opaque. Strange as it may sound, science can often explain the
workings of our inner world better than the esoteric arts, and the scientific view on the origins
and development of the Universe reveals wonders every bit as captivating as the most colourful
myths. If you do adhere to an esoteric world view, try to entertain this argument and see where
it leads you; far from turning grey, the world will bloom with new, fresh, vibrant colours, and you
will find yourself with much more energy and ability to act.
Why do receptive, sensitive souls tend to shun science and scientists? The answer to this
lies largely in the imbalance that arose in the philosophy of science in the era of Newtonian
physics. During that period, simple, universal laws were being discovered for the first time – the
law of gravity, for example, which described the interaction of all bodies, from elementary
particles through to galaxy clusters, in one simple rule and a succinct formula:

The scientific world held a euphoric belief that it would soon be able to explain all of creation
with a collection of simple formulas, use these formulas to produce unambiguous results, and
become masters of life and the Universe, all its secrets laid out before them like a mechanical
clock with its apparatus exposed. In essence, it was a moment of glory for extreme
reductionism, a time in which the simplification of phenomena to their absolute limit really did
yield incredible results. Naturally, scientists believed they could also reduce the human spirit
and consciousness down to a few clicking cogs, thereby gaining total control over them (man
has always wanted to play God).
But the moment was short-lived. From the mid-19th century onwards, when physics arrived
at thermodynamics and began to engage with complex dynamic and chaotic systems, more and
more phenomena would no longer “obey” simple, unambiguous formulae and began to require
a completely different approach. Physics moved into the era of probability, chaos theory and the
16
world of physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, in which the likelihood of a certain state occurring
within a specific complex dynamic system could scarcely be suggested before a totally different
set of laws would come into play, rendering extreme reductionism unworkable.
A more detailed account of this fascinating period can be found in Ilya Prigogine’s book,
Order out of Chaos.
As it happens, life, nature, the body and the mind are complex dynamic systems that express
chaotic behaviour. Any attempt to investigate or control them as though they were mechanical
systems built from a few ball bearings and springs is, for better or worse, doomed to fail. In any
case, who wants to be a mechanical doll in the hands of some bespectacled professor in sterile
gloves and a white coat, dissecting all life on Earth with soulless indifference? No one,
especially not the receptive, sensitive souls among us.
The legacy of religion in Europe has added further fuel to the fire by spurring the
condemnation and repression of the natural, healthy functioning of the subconscious and
unconscious mind. In Western culture (which is the cradle of modern science), there was no
subconscious and unconscious until Freud solemnly declared to have discovered them at the
end of the 19th century; before that point, the European psyche consisted solely of the
conscious and the controllable. By force of inertia, this “soulless” approach has been
internalised in both science and the European mentality, which is why many people associate
science with the suppression of natural, healthy behaviour to this day.
Add to that the fact that the real driving forces behind scientific advance have always been
the arms industry, which engages the best inventions and brightest minds primarily to destroy
people more efficiently, and big business, which seeks to maximise profit even at the expense
of society, the economy and the environment. In that light, it is understandable why receptive
souls and clear thinkers frequently shun science – and European culture, for that matter – in
favour of the poetic, the ambiguous, the intuitive, the eastern and the pre-monotheistic.

However, we should not confuse the instrument with its application. Science is the best
method we currently have of understanding the world and ourselves, and it is already advanced
enough to explore the complex dynamic phenomena that make up life. Admittedly, plenty of
scientists are still stuck in the Newtonian era, trying to frame everything exclusively in terms of
simple rules and doggedly narrow, linear logic. But we must bear in mind that dynamic,
probabilistic, multivariate, graduated thinking and logic are much more complex than binary,
linear thinking, and that it will naturally take some time for them to become the common
framework for scientific thought.
Modern science grants us extraordinary insights into the world and ourselves and gives us
the power to answer age-old unanswered questions. It also shows us that a bright future is
becoming an ever more distinct possibility. We simply need enough clarity and courage to draw
our scientific conclusions with the necessary humanity and vitality, and to realise that this
matters for humanity. To do so, it will be essential to employ integrative thinking that facilitates
cross-disciplinary synthesis. We will also have to take responsibility for what happens, as well
as for the information that falls into our hands, as this is an intrinsic quality of the developed
conscience. Just as vital as this, will be a receptive, sensitive spirit, capable of feeling what
happens and intuitively discerning right from wrong.

To conclude this part of our work, we will discuss the objectivity of studying the human
psyche using its own tools. In my view, this is a key method of understanding the self, and it has
been used extensively in the study of conscience.

17
 The crowning feature of the human mind is its capacity to observe its own actions. One of
the functions of higher consciousness (a capacity formed in the later stages of the brain’s
development) is to perceive, analyse and govern the activity of the rest of the nervous system.
This function is the key evolutionary accomplishment of the human race and the quality that
distinguishes us the most from other species. In everyday terms, we call it self-awareness. Most
of the time, self-awareness operates in a latent, mechanical state, but there are specific
practices through which it can be awakened. Perhaps the highest achievement of the spiritual
and esoteric doctrines is the discovery of self-awareness, the realisation that it can be
awakened, and the creation of methods by which to awaken it.
Science does not recognise introspection as an objective research method even in
psychology. There are legitimate reasons for this; not only is self-awareness, in evolutionary
terms, a recent cognitive function that is still developing, but it is also actively repressed by our
culture and civilisation in many ways. Developed self-awareness is a powerful tool that lets us
look at the outside world through the prism of every level of our perception, including our
primordial brain, and see all the lies, perversions, and hidden fissures that run through our
families, our countries and our cultures. None of this is comfortable – or pleasant – for anyone.
But the only way we know how to tidy our house and make a good impression is to sweep the
trash under the rug, hide the demons behind the bed and conceal the signs of moral decay by
applying a little makeup. And the average mind, through which the broom of serious
introspection has not been swept, is dominated by chaos and confusion to boot. Many of our
cognitive functions are stunted, feeble and poorly differentiated from one another, and some
parts of the brain are simply blocked (the forbidden, repressed subconscious and unconscious).
How could introspection be an objective exercise under such conditions?

Remember, scientists spend a long time learning how to conduct experiments. They
painstakingly calibrate all their devices and measuring tools, figuring out which conditions
produce which errors and how to correct for those errors in the right way. Once they have
isolated their object of study from random influences and interferences, they devise a method
that will facilitate the clearest possible expression of the phenomenon they are looking at. Then,
they carry out a series of experiments, the point being to collect enough data to identify a
pattern and distinguish it from the random variation between different instances of the
experiment. This data subsequently undergoes advanced, sophisticated analysis. This is the
process that creates objectivity in science. Note, however, that both the final analytical subject
(which draws the ultimate conclusions) and the subject which poses the initial question for the
experiment are, in fact, the higher consciousness of a human being. This time, it is simply
operating in a different mode – that of the logical and analytical apparatus, engaged in abstract
thought, adept at defining causal links and universal laws.
If we can prepare our own psyche the same way a scientist prepares themselves and their
laboratory – gathering the relevant psychological objects, seeing what needs cleaning and what
needs repair, putting them in the proper places and assigning them the correct names, creating
a tool for the perception and analysis of this wealth of internal data, and so on – our results will
also be objective enough to merit serious attention. Our observations, in other words, will be
universal enough to matter to other people, and the ultimate measure of objectivity is whether
the knowledge you have generated is universally applicable. As people, our similarities far
outweigh our differences, and our brain contains the primordial brain of previous life forms and
obeys the fundamental laws of the Universe. If we dispense with the proud, arrogant notion that

18
our inner world is something special, unique and separate from nature that cannot be
understood and recognise, instead, that it is just another part of nature and is subject to the
same laws of creation, existence and growth as the rest of the world, and if we then apply to it
the appropriately calibrated instruments of perception and analysis, the data we get back will be
quite objective. Self-awareness cannot be measured by a needle on a graduated dial, which
means we cannot approach it using mathematical analysis. Remember, though, that humanity
was acquiring objective knowledge long before it took up mathematics, and that those early
objective observations laid the foundations for science. Such observations often take the form of
an axiom, and to this day, are expressed in plain language without the use of mathematical
equations. Take, for example, this axiom of geometry: “For any given line, there are points that
lie on it and points that do not lie on it”. This is a direct, organic observation, made without any
instruments or calculations and for which there is no proof. We are simply stating that we all see
it that way.

Once we have cleansed and calibrated our mechanism of self-awareness, we have the
unique opportunity to study the evolution of the brain in a compact, independent laboratory –
that is, inside ourselves. Because the entirety of this evolution, including all of its previous
stages, is contained within you. It is worthwhile to investigate the nature of your reactions, your
behaviour and your interrelationships, because every other unit in the dynamic system we call
society is also you, simply calibrated differently and under different conditions. This is
undoubtedly hard work, and it requires considerable discipline and distinct talent. But doesn’t
everything else worthwhile, everything that has the power to yield extraordinary results, require
the same?

Thus, the investigation in this book includes information acquired through direct observation
of both the internal and external world, aided by the tools of a cleansed and calibrated
consciousness. Science has always required – perhaps now more than ever – the participation
of a living, feeling, consciously observing human being. Simply obtaining accurate facts and
figures isn’t enough; what matters is drawing the right conclusions from them. What matters is
knowing that how we change our thinking and behaviour based on the knowledge we acquire is
important for humanity. And yet, so few scientists dare to draw conclusions in this human way!
To do so requires courage, because it means accepting responsibility. Without that courage,
everything is decided by mathematics and the measurements of machines, while the scientists
themselves simply set up the right conditions for those things to do their jobs. But aren’t we
ourselves a gigantic computer? Aren’t we the product of billions of years of evolution, and don’t
we contain within us almost every fundamental law of the Universe? Let’s not willingly throw
ourselves onto the rubbish pile, then, nor bow down before the steely face of the all-powerful
machine. Likewise, let’s not forget that the primary responsibility for the continuation of evolution
and all life on Earth now lies on our shoulders. When we discover a new law or read the results
of a new experiment, we must use that information to draw good conclusions – conclusions that
not only strengthen scientific theories and build powerful machines, but also support the
continuation of life on our planet.

19
 How should we discuss conscience in society in the postmodern era?

Before we take up our core line of inquiry, there is one further issue we need to examine.
This issue is significant in relation to the world view of postmodern philosophy, the dominant
mode of thought in the advanced modern society.

This book seeks to understand ethics objectively, and thus, declares the existence of
objective values. From this, it follows that people’s behaviours and qualities are not equivalent;
some are better and some are worse, and we should strive for the former while avoiding the
latter. According to these criteria, however, it also follows that there are different types of
people, some of which are better, in the context of this enquiry and in questions of conscience,
and some types that are worse. This a value statement that risks triggering alarm bells from that
part of modern society engaged in a fierce battle against inequality, oppression and
discrimination. Likewise, exploring the question here could be seen as yet another attempt by
one group of people to dominate another through violence.

Thus, to avoid having to end this exploration before it begins, we must start by addressing a
number of modernity’s thorny issues.

Every age, every society and every individual has its own biases, its own cognitive
distortions. These often mesh together into a complex web of many elements, making them
extremely difficult to study, and they are most certainly at work in modern Western society, the
single greatest influence shaping the present and future of our planet.

In this chapter, I propose we touch on the following modern phenomena:

* The desire for universal equality, taken to the absurd, which has led to the assertion that
no differences exist between different sexes, races, nations, personalities, psychological types,
states of consciousness, value systems or methods of obtaining knowledge, despite this
assertion being paradoxical to common sense.

* The increasingly unhealthy desire for unfettered personal freedom, which aspires towards
the complete rejection of authorities and rules of any kind.

* The desire to protect one’s emotional comfort zone at any cost and to avoid any kind of
constraint, limitation or placement within a structure where each participant has their place and
submits to mutual subordination; any discipline that might say “you are wrong, you must do
differently”; any effort of will capable of opposing the desire to engage endlessly and exclusively
in pleasure and indulge in selfish, childish amusements.

In meditation practice, these blind desires, which grow into overwhelming obsessions and
throw the system severely out of balance, are known as attachments.

* The deep and increasingly normalised neglect of mental issues, through which trauma and
illness begin to be seen as a person’s core identity and are designated untouchable, and
instead of seeking treatment, people deliberately put these ills to work in art and public life,

20
parading them as achievements and alternative viewpoints – which are then equal to all the
other viewpoints, of course.

It is difficult to discuss conscience in a society dominated by this kind of world view, or the
fact that interrelationships are subject to objective laws, or even that good and bad exist. While
the unscrupulous individual often enjoys their actions greatly, following one’s conscience can
involve emotional, and even physical, discomfort. In the same way, restoring balance once it
has been upset must involve upsetting somebody’s comfort zone.
As for the essentially extremist viewpoints listed above, it is curious that the activists involved
in these kinds of movements, while supposedly opposing dictatorship and defending freedom,
often become dictators themselves, launching attacks and committing acts of violence. We also
see the situation in which a person simply expressing a fairly inoffensive opinion (which,
according to the prevailing philosophy, everyone has the right to do) can suffer literal social
annihilation in a matter of days, their activism discounted completely.
Meanwhile, in my observation, some of this fighting is really just a guise used to justify
nothing other than the individual’s own desire to aggressively dominate other people and be
free to attack them with impunity. In other words, the individual creates for themselves the ability
to free their own psyche from social constraints and unleash their aggressive instincts.

It goes without saying that freedom and rights must be defended, as must people of all
kinds, and that is exactly the point this book wishes to make. But this must be done in a way
that considers the interests of society as a whole, not just this particular group of people, and is
free of fanaticism, so to speak. Swapping one form of violence for another, or one form of
dictatorship for another, even if the second form is the polar opposite of the first, will only rock
our system into instability, inevitably provoking counter-resistance, more war and more pointless
deaths. Similarly, any defence of rights and justice must be undertaken with an understanding
of the actual state of things, rather than on the basis of imaginary events and fictitious facts or
the presumption that we are already living in the ideal situation.

It is interesting that the modern world, in which the battle for freedom is being fought so
fiercely, is much less free by many parameters than the world of, say, the 19th century. Today,
we are literally under the control of the system at every step: visas, licences, permits, fees,
borders and customs, a constant stream of check-ins and check-outs, full access to and control
over your personal finances, zero protection of your personal communications, data or
information, full tracking of all your movements, the degrading requirement to undress before
boarding a plane and the security officer authorised to literally inspect the contents of your ass –
and, of course, the financial shackles, so impossible to break. These can hardly be framed as
the great accomplishments of freedom, nor of equality, because the other end of the string is
always grasped firmly in someone else’s hands.

Later, I will briefly summarise the results of my investigations into the causes and
mechanisms of our current situation, which I hope will help us tackle this situation in the right
way. To my regret, I am not a historian, nor do I have the kind of encyclopaedic knowledge that
would permit me to make this investigation as full and complete as it should be. I have relied
heavily on my personal observations and conclusions, though I have tried to form these as
objectively as possible.

21
 There is one trouble of the human psyche that stems directly from its capacity for self-
awareness, which is advanced enough today to function but not yet advanced enough to
function well. The fact is that our brain has the capacity for self-regulation; it can encourage
healthy mental activities and states by releasing different euphoretics and generating impulses
that provoke pleasurable sensations. To borrow the language of dynamic systems and chaos
theory, we could say that our brain possesses attractors – poles of attraction representing the
states, goals and behavioural algorithms that are effective in critical situations.

For the primordial brain, these drives/strategies/attractors constitute maximum domination

over individuals of the same sex, the ability to mate freely with the opposite sex, control of vital
resources, the option to expend as little energy and avoid as much danger as possible, and so
on.

For the modern brain, which is represented primarily by the neocortex, attractors may
include: being the best and most righteous (the socialisation attractor), reducing all of existence
to a single, unifying god, law or foundation (the attractor of integrative thinking), achieving the
simple, powerful, harmonious ideal (the attractor of developing the most efficient, economical,
streamlined, balanced strategy for anything), etc.
One of the most deeply embedded attractors for consciousness is the Inward Light, the
element of the psyche that allows us to perceive and be aware of things at all. Attachment to
this is one of the single greatest barriers on the path to deep meditation.
The primordial and modern brains in symbiosis, meanwhile, have produced such attractors
as the pursuit of immortality (a melding of the primordial attractor of achieving total safety and
the higher consciousness recognition of the imminence of one’s own death).

As we move closer to attaining these attractors, we experience feelings of euphoria, pleasure

and bliss. But nature, of course, did not create attractors so that we could reach their perfect
poles and then dig ourselves in there (it would hardly be desirable to have some random male
beating all other opponents for eternal control over all the females and resources, ensuring
immortality for himself in the process). Attractors exist to keep the seesaw of the dynamic
system in motion, both internally and externally, with maximum efficiency. The system itself,
meanwhile, both in isolation and as an element of a larger dynamic system, must remain in
balance and must keep moving.
One of the key features of higher consciousness is the ability to directly perceive the state
and activity of the mental organism, or, to put it simply, the ability of the brain to recognize what
is happening to it. In the course of the development of self-awareness, the existence of
attractors was naturally revealed, along with the fact that moving closer to their poles elicits very
pleasurable states of being, these states growing increasingly pleasurable the closer one gets
to the pole. Thus, immature self-awareness makes an obvious choice: to try to reach the
summit of the attractor once and for all, because of how pleasurable it is to do so. Then, using
its power over the mental organism and the behaviour of the psyche, higher consciousness
begins pushing towards this goal with all its might. Greater and greater attention is then focused
on achieving the desired goal, and less and less on all other conditions. This mental process
grows increasingly isolated and internally focused, losing touch with, the rest of the psyche and
a significant portion of external phenomena. As a result of this imbalance, stresses and mental
instabilities naturally begin to appear both within this inwardly turned mental process and
around it. In this way, a useful mechanism becomes a tumour on the mind. The psyche begins

22
to resemble that of an addict or compulsive masturbator, and all the problems that come with
painful addiction – substance tolerance, the need to keep increasing the dose, loss of the ability
to perceive and act correctly – begin to arise.

In ancient meditation systems such as Tantric Buddhism, this occurrence is known as an

attachment. During my research into this phenomenon, I christened it the “Devil’s Loop”. An
illustrative model of the Devil’s Loop would be lifting a microphone up to a loudspeaker into
which the amplified signal from that microphone is being fed. It will start to buzz and whine
horribly – something I’m sure you’ve seen at a gig or concert. And unless something is done
immediately, the equipment will overload and be destroyed. Something similar happens with the
internal “buzz” that occurs inside the positive feedback loop which arises within the brain. The
constructive attractors and strategies become the source of a “psychic whine” (frozen,
compulsive states), cause the accumulation of intense stress, and ultimately, render the system
more and more imbalanced, inoperable and incompatible with life. All good things that fall into
this loop sour into mental illness. Just as the Devil’s Loop exists within the individual psyche, it
can also arise as a collective phenomenon, expanding to such a scale that the majority of
people in a given group may be consumed by some form of that infernal “psychic whine”.

The key to the Devil’s Loop is usually the ego, both of the individual and of the group. The
pursuit of exceptionality, importance and uniqueness, or at least a hidden understanding of the
self from that perspective, is the ego’s main attractor. In essence, this is a vestige of the
primordial desire to be the alpha animal in the pack, i.e., to occupy an exceptional position that
affords exceptional opportunities. The developed and multi-faceted human psyche has
significantly lengthened this primordial aspiration’s list of ways one can be unique, including by
adding a range of paradoxical, and even negative, qualities. If you’re not good enough to call
yourself the best, then you can call yourself the worst, and if you can’t be the most beautiful,
then at least you can try to be the sickest. What matters is that you are the most at something,
and it doesn’t really matter what your being so is built upon.
Thus, the qualities and strategies that make up the Devil’s Loop are usually very closely tied
to the selfish pursuit of exceptionality, and the two tend to operate together. The result of this is
that these qualities and abilities, absurdly inflated to their absolute limit, become a means of
either secretly or openly declaring one’s superiority over other human beings and basking in
one’s own exceptionality.

In its current form, the psyche of the individual and society is generally incapable of
voluntarily breaking and holding back the Devil’s Loop as long as its own imbalanced system
continues to function, and until the larger external system, displeased with the growing stress
and imbalance, gives its whining element a hard slap. As such, the Devil’s Loop is usually
broken through breakdown, crisis and catastrophe. It is generally possible to gain awareness of,
and power over, the Devil’s Loop simply through a deep practice of active self-awareness. The
Devil’s Loop is a fundamental occurrence which greatly determines the drama of the individual
psyche and shapes its fate, and likewise, that of a society’s psyche and the shape of its history.
This negative phenomenon merits extremely deep examination, because by freeing ourselves
of it, we can live a much healthier, happier and more effective life. But that, of course, lies
beyond the focus of this book.

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 Later, I will try to describe the problem of modernity, which is essentially a whole basket of
attachments clumped together into one bizarre phenomenon that forms the links in the chain of
the modern Devil’s Loop and has heavily impacted postmodern philosophy. Regretfully, due to
my lacking the necessary historical knowledge, this is not a complete analysis, but I hope that
the main thrust of the problem has been captured accurately, and more specifically, that it will
support the claim that this problem really exists.
The story probably begins during the French Revolution, which birthed the concepts of
freedom, unity, equality and brotherhood and sparked euphoria in the minds of its
revolutionaries by activating a range of attractors linked to social behaviour and personal well-
being. At that time, social reform was genuinely needed and long overdue, and the movement
had a constructive direction for its forward momentum, despite being idealistic and utopian in
character from the very start. But gradually, sane need transformed more and more into sick
attachment. The demand for unanimity, and the concept of equality that went along with it,
gradually evolved into a Devil’s Loop, in which the object of pleasurable attachment was the
pursuit of a society that was monolithic, homogeneous and coherent. The sane pursuit of
collective existence and action, meanwhile, turned into the need to attack anything that rose
above the mediocrity of the masses, distinguished itself, or made it less comfortable to wallow in
a state of unfocused homogeneity.
Later, an even greater attractor was triggered: the will to perceive absolutely everything as a
homogeneous plane or mass, thereby attaining a blissfully slack, unfocused and essentially lazy
mental state which would actively shut out all the stresses of thinking, wanting or paying
attention. It was at this time that Buddhism became popular in the West and Russia. Particular
emphasis was placed on the effortlessness of the enlightened consciousness, while the
immense effort and discipline an adherent must embody on the path to realisation were
completely ignored.
The idea of liberation from the oppression of the ruling class (the original interpretation of
freedom) gradually transformed into permissiveness of the individual, i.e., the absence of
external boundaries or rules of any kind, along with hypersensitivity to any kind of coercion of
the individual.
The ruling elite adapted quickly to these changes, realising that these developments
presented no threat to them, but, on the contrary, could be used to manipulate society to great
effect if handled properly.

Later, in the 20th century, a new attractor was added to the Devil’s Loop: that of positive
self-esteem, which mutated into narcissism to the refrain of “no matter who I am or what I’ve
done, I will always be good and always be right”. To fulfil this attachment meant dismantling a
large part of our system of norms, rules and values, declaring all viewpoints and approaches to
be equivalent while calling the conception of good and evil relative, and thus, irrelevant, and
championing chaos, lack of structure and subjectivity. This constrictive Devil’s Loop, with its
demands for us to increase the dose of untouchable positive self-regard, has brought society to
a state where what is sick, warped, damaged and strange often overshadows what is sane,
effective, sustainable and natural, the former pushing to make itself centre stage. Added to this
is an unhealthy emotional hypersensitivity that demands a guarantee of complete emotional
safety. This is expressed in the desire to prolong childhood eternally, along with the emotionally
enjoyable states intrinsic to childhood, such as lack of responsibility, the absence of struggle or
confrontation (“the world is my happy playground”), the lack of any commitment, serious goals
or growth, and the push to turn everything into a game.

24
 If we link all of this together, we arrive at the standpoint that dominates our current moment
as an intrinsic element of the progressive world view. Taken to its extreme, it may be expressed
as follows:
“All viewpoints are equal, the concept of good and evil is an illusion, there is no right or
wrong, there are no objective values. This means that I am good in all ways and I am always
right. No matter what I’ve done or who I am, no one has the right to reprimand me or try to
change me. Nor must I make any effort to change myself – that’s difficult and unpleasant, and
anyway, I’m already such a good person. Whatever brings me pleasure is the truth. No one and
nothing has the right to disturb my emotional comfort zone. No one is better than me in any
way, and no one is better than anyone else in general. Any vertical structure whatsoever that
exists between people, anything that ranks people or tries to show them their place is an act of
aggression, violence and domination, and therefore, is strictly forbidden (though, to be fair, it
should be noted that vertical power structures really have been the source of plenty of misery
and the blame isn’t baseless). There are no levels of development, no differing states of
consciousness, no depth; everything is flat and equivalent. Chaos and anarchy are better than
order. Pleasurable debauchery is better than discipline. It is harmful and pointless to make an
effort.”

Ken Wilber aptly labelled this state “aperspectival madness” – that is, an affliction
characterised by the absence of values. Wilber discusses this in detail in his remarkable book,
“Trump and a Post-Truth World”, a work which essentially illuminates a new era of
consciousness and which I strongly recommend reading. Wilber also includes detailed
explanations of such terms as worldcentrism, and describes the hierarchy of levels of
consciousness in the context of social interaction.

This world view can also be called “radical individualism”, or individualism trapped in the
Devil’s Loop. One of the characteristic traits of the individual in whom this state is dominant is
an urgent need to put their own whims and fancies front and centre at all times, rejecting as
they go any norm or rule that limits their ability to do “whatever I please”.

And all this in combination is, of course, an enormous roadblock on the path to developing
conscience and establishing what is right. This is because it is, in essence, egocentric. Because
in a situation where there are no common, objective values, no rules, where nothing is better or
worse than anything else and everything is led by subjective viewpoints, emotions and whims, it
follows that my emotions, my views, my whims will matter most.

Let us examine where this state of affairs has gotten us so far.

Have we ended violence and aggression? No. In the time since the French Revolution, we
have witnessed two world wars. These were the bloodiest, most brutal wars in the history of
humanity, and the second was more brutal than the first. We are currently living under the
possible threat of a third world war, and it is reasonable to suppose that this war, if it occurs, will
be even more bloody and brutal than the one before it. What’s more, aggression has mutated
and taken on new forms; why bother destroying the physical body when you can mete out
destruction by economic, cultural, informational or social means? It takes longer and requires
much greater cunning and skill, but it is also silent, eco-friendly and, most importantly,
25
imperceptible to the vast majority of people, who are sufficiently uneducated and incapable of
forming a critical awareness of reality not to notice. Because of this, we have drifted
imperceptibly into a state of permanent war, which has become the ever-present backdrop of
modernity. To the canonical wars between countries, we have now added generational war, war
between parents and children (a purely European phenomenon not seen in African or Eastern
countries) and a burgeoning and truly nasty war between the sexes.

Have we eradicated the domination of one group over another and solved inequality (in the
sense of injustice)? No. Right now, the richest 1% of people on Earth possesses more wealth
than the other 99% combined. Meanwhile, the wealth of the world’s sixty richest individuals is
greater than that of the poorest half of humanity. If we take the view that in a fair society, a
person’s wealth should be equivalent to the amount of useful work they have performed, and
then say that these sixty people have earned their wealth, that means each of them has done
roughly fifty million times more work than a person from the poorest half. To make it simple, let
us imagine that the amount of energy a person has across their lifetime is more or less equal for
everyone, and that life is one hundred years long. In that case, in order to work so astonishingly
hard, the richest people on the planet would each need to live for five billion years. For
comparison, the Universe is fourteen billion years old. Clearly, their talent and work ethic is truly
astronomical!
Given that we live in a society ruled by money, the influence these people have, or in other
words, their capacity for power and dominance, is proportional to that wealth.

Is the modern individual really free? No, despite the great changes that have taken place
over the last two hundred years. They can freely follow any religion, become an atheist, a
Satanist or a voodoo witch doctor, screw whoever and however they like, hold any world view
they want, read any book under the sun and dress however they please. But all of this is
meaningless and ineffective in modern society, which has its own, particular ways of
manipulating events, controlling people and disseminating information. In declaring values to be
subjective, society has grown unreceptive to ideas themselves. Words like truth, spirit, honour
and duty are now almost meaningless and matter much less than a fresh, entertaining pitch
(ideally, a nice short one). In an age in which mass media shoves propaganda and advertising
down society’s fairly distended throat around the clock, the voice of one solitary free-thinker, or
even a group of them, unless propped up by the hulking giant of big media, will be swept away
like a drop in the ocean.
There is no longer any need to put people in shackles; the modern individual, instead of
having an iron chain around their neck, is held on the end of an invisible but very sturdy
financial leash. Shackles can be broken or undone, but how can a financial leash be snapped
when every breath we take, every step we make literally has a price? You can play at
democracy, certainly, casting your vote in your presidential election – but what about the
economic and social system you are forced to obey, and which influences every moment of
your day, every day of your life? Do you get to vote for that, too? Do you get to choose the
system for how essential goods and services are priced, or the system that decides how much
your work is worth or how much tax you pay? When the majority of people earn just enough
money to make ends meet, work is hard to find, and everyone is saddled with almost lifetime
loans, which they must pay on time or risk being turned out onto the street with their families,
keeping people in check couldn’t be easier. What is the point of democracy when there is no
reliable information about the most important developments of the modern era and lying has

26
become an integral skill for a range of respected, highly-paid professionals including politicians,
journalists and PR specialists? To put it another way, even if you have the freedom of choice,
what information are you going to base that choice on? What good is the inviolability of private
property if all you are is a few data bytes stored on some distant, unknown computer, a handful
of electrons in someone else’s hands? What does the inviolability of human life matter when
technological advancements have already made it possible to establish total surveillance over
each of us in real time (something already happening in some provinces of China), and when
The System now knows you much better than you even know yourself? Whenever the chance
to establish a new level of control over society and the individual has arisen, some group or
power has always been there to take advantage of it. Do you think things are different now?

Have people joined together in unity, closer to one another? No. Atomisation – a well-
documented woe of modern society – is increasing year on year. And besides, what do we base
our potential interpersonal connections on when no common values exist, any serious
conversation ends in “you have your opinion, I have mine”, and no common truth can be found?
Each of us is better off just sticking to that opinion and staying put inside our own little concrete
box, where we can communicate exclusively by tapping little hearts and smiley faces on our
smartphone screens.

Thus, in reality, we have failed to achieve freedom, equality, fellowship, unity, justice or an
end to violence. Exploitation, inequality, injustice, violence and manipulation have simply taken
on new forms, shaped by the current iteration of collective consciousness. Evil, as always, slips
in by the back door, in places where society’s attention and consciousness are not sufficiently
developed.

We should note that good has also been achieved, thanks to the evolution of the prevailing
world view over the last two hundred years.
We have laid the social and economic groundwork for science, technology and industry to
flourish, although these achievements, in the hands of those not guided by conscience, will
most likely be turned against humanity.
We have learned to appreciate diversity, to look far beyond the tried and accepted, think
outside the boundaries of norms and rules, find alternatives, new solutions, new forms and
pathways. But if all this is to be more than just a collection of meaningless baubles, novelties for
novelty’s sake, we need to critically reflect on what we’ve found and determine its usefulness.
We have demonstrated the value and necessity of the pre-monotheistic, the subconscious,
the spontaneous, the wild and the natural and have found ways to unite ourselves with these
ancient forces. But without a developed human understanding of ethics and the correct
hierarchy of values, these achievements risk dragging us backwards into an animal state. If
combined with technology and an intelligence capable of manipulation, meanwhile, the result
could be intensely vicious and destructive.
We have mapped out a path towards a worldcentric (rather than an egocentric) world view,
one which has the potential to end conflict and exploitation and unite humanity and the world at
large as one. But to get there, we will need fundamental, common values and a common
understanding of conscience, which will allow us to solve problems and relate to one another as
well and as fairly as possible.

27
 To summarise this section, we can conclude that the progressive world view which
dominates in today’s society is in need of a significant overhaul and clean-up, corrections and
new additions because, quite clearly, the goals and objectives life is setting for us demand a
much cleaner, much sharper instrument. Or, to put it another way, these goals and objectives
should not be accepted as immutable, but should be subjected to critical appraisal, correction
and further development.

And one of the best ways out of the current situation – in which trust in the dominant system
of governance, as well as in politics and the economy, is so low – is to foster critical thought in
the individual, conscience in the individual and consciousness in the individual. This means the
ability to wipe all the advertising and propaganda from one’s mind, wean oneself off the globally
imposed, identical interfaces and the strictly regulated means of expressing one’s thoughts and
feelings and begin to think and feel for oneself. It means beginning to trust your own experience
and your own path. It means opening your heart and extending your hand to the real people
around you. Because humanity is us. The single greatest force pushing civilisation forwards is
us. We have the power to make the kind of future that has a place in it for us and our children,
and we most certainly have the power not to destroy the very best things we have – not to tie
that loop around our own neck.
In a society where enough people possess a higher understanding of conscience, it becomes
much more difficult to engage in deceit, manipulation and the provocation of senseless wars in
the name of personal wealth. It becomes much more difficult to turn us against each other, to pit
parents against children, men against women, black people against white people and the
various other essential elements of our unified system against one another.

***

At this point, we should try to set a few things straight.

* Evolution can be delineated into the evolution of life, the evolution of species and personal
evolution, or the development of consciousness of the individual. That is to say, we go through
stages of development which are objectively different from one another and exhibit different
configurations, qualities and capacities.
This is the natural process of growth and flexibility, and in terms of our biological life, it is
currently our only option. Obviously, we cannot say what the ultimate goals, values or purpose
of this whole process are. To do so, we would need to learn the goal and purpose of the
existence of the Universe, what came before it, and what will come after it. But we can
accurately determine the goals and purposes of the various levels of development within the
context of the world in which we live, within the life and objectives we know.

* Both the evolution of life and of consciousness have a distinct path of development. These
paths are long and twisting, and are not perfectly straight but a little more chaotic, with a slight
(on the evolutionary scale) fluctuation back and forth, left to right. However, if we examine this
movement over a long enough interval, we see the clear emergence of a path which could
broadly be described as the increasing sophistication of the structure and activity of the
organism, and more specifically, of its brain. We also see an increase in individualisation,
flexibility, learning ability and multifunctionality of the nervous system.

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 * At any point in time, within the same society, different people will be at different levels of
evolution of consciousness. Represented on the spectrum of levels of development are roughly
the last 5,000 years in the evolution of the brain. This is not a statement made with malicious
intent; chaotic fluctuation is a central driving force and tool of biological evolution, and on the
evolutionary scale, 5,000 years is a truly insignificant time period, equal to around one hour on
the human time scale.

* An individual will experience different states of consciousness within the same lifetime.
These states are not equivalent: under different conditions and within the context of different
goals, they will produce different results. A person can transition from one level of
consciousness to another, both as part of the spontaneous flow of life and through conscious
effort.
Here, we need to note an important point: we can only say that the most advanced world
views and states of consciousness – those based on the highest and most universal values –
are preferable when we talk about their impact on other people. It is particularly important to
discuss these concepts – and stress the variation within them – when we discuss world view
and values as the foundations for society, i.e., when they impact a large number of people.
Within the context of one’s individual life and journey, personal development and work on one’s
own psyche, however, each of us is free to adhere to any viewpoint, live by any values, and
foster within ourselves any state of consciousness, no matter how insane, no matter how
nightmarish it may appear to others. This is the hallowed territory of individual freedom and
personal choice. But, as we know, one person’s territory and freedom ends where another’s
begins. Because of this, as soon as our views and values, which are expressed through our
actions and behaviour, begin to significantly impact other people, our responsibility inevitably
comes into play. And the more significant our actions and behaviour, the greater that
responsibility becomes. In our personal life, however, as well as in the company of like-minded
people who share our views, our only responsibility is to ourselves, and to the cosmos, so to
speak. As long as our behaviour does not affect others negatively, we are free to do what we
want in the personal sphere. The mutability of the individual psyche and the variability of
personal history are both very strong, and strange and remarkable variations sometimes occur;
if we picture views and values as a kind of programming for our brain, it makes sense that an
unusual piece of “hardware” will require equally unusual “software”.

* People are naturally endowed with different qualities and abilities, both physical and
mental. Given that this is one of modernity’s particularly sensitive topics, it is worth examining in
detail. What we come up against here, understandably, is the fear that this difference will be
used as a basis to institute hierarchies, and that discrimination and aggressive domination will
follow.
The first thing we must recognise is that trying to solve the problem of unjust inequality by
denying the reality of objective difference is like trying to hide by closing your eyes; it will never
be an effective solution, although it may seem like the simplest one. The real solution to the
problem is, having recognised difference, to do the right thing with it.

Firstly, then, to figure out that different people possess different physical characteristics and
capabilities, all we generally need to do is use our eyes. Scientific and medical research also
supports this conclusion unequivocally. Different races and peoples, as well as men and
women, also differ in their average physical attributes, characteristics and capabilities. These

29
differences were not created by a group of humans with malicious intentions, but by nature;
different groups happened to develop under different circumstances, and thus, they were
endowed with different abilities and skills, all of which are useful and positive and arose to
support life.
Physical differences between the sexes is quite simply the natural separation of functions
(similar to the later division of labour) which has long existed in nature. The separation of
functions can be found in any integral system in nature. The human body, for example, contains
different organs, each of which has its own specific characteristics and unique function, rather
than one kind of all-purpose tissue or multiple copies of a single organ capable of fulfilling every
function. And the body needs kidneys just as much as it needs a neocortex. In an ant colony,
there are worker ants, the queen and her mates, food gatherers, nannies, guards and builders.
Having different elements of the system specialise in completing different tasks renders the
system more efficient and sustainable. Whenever we discover difference, then, our first thought
should not be to hunt down the evil-doing discriminators behind it, but to try to understand the
advantage of this difference, bestowed by evolution, in the self-organisation process of the
system in question. For this, it is very helpful to be able to set aside our ego (as an individual
and as a member of our gender, nationality, race etc.) and look at the role a certain quality,
species or group plays within the system and how the system benefits from this.

Differences in mental capacities between people can also be uncovered simply through
impartial observation of behaviour and the outcomes of mental endeavours. According to
scientific evidence, the brain is the most variable organ in the human body. For instance, an
identical region of the brain may have several times more neurons in one person than in
another, while a sub-region may have several tens of times more. A similarly significant
difference may occur in “brainpower” and the mental functioning related to it. It is important to
stress here, however, that individual variability far surpasses the statistical average for
difference between races or genders. Alongside brain mass, which is relatively simple to
measure, an element much harder to observe objectively is the structure of the interaction
between the various areas and sections of the brain, which determines the effectiveness and
character of its functioning to an equally great degree. There is well established research on this
area in the field of neurophysiology.

Nature, then, created us to be different. Different groups of people developed under different
conditions and for different objectives, and then natural genetic variability plus location-specific
environmental influences added even greater individual diversity to the mix. This, by the way, is
the great affirmation of diversity so deeply sought after by postmodern philosophy. At the same
time, however, people of different races, nationalities, sexes, social groups, and simply
different individuals with different qualities and abilities all possess the same value, and
all are necessary for the existence, continuation and advancement of life to the same
degree. This means they all have the same right to live a dignified life in society, be free
to achieve self-realisation, have their needs met and have the agency to shape society in
the areas in which they can be useful. In other words, we must not confuse sameness with
equality.

As for differences between groups or individuals being used to justify discrimination,

violence and inequality, it is almost always the case that the desire to harm and discriminate
comes first, and later, in the search for a rational justification, evidence of differences (usually

30
heavily distorted and falsely interpreted) is produced. It is very hard for a person to admit, even
to themselves, that they are bad simply because they are bad, and that they want to dominate
simply because of their desire for domination. Harder again is to openly declare as much in front
of others. Thus, a fertile breeding ground is created for fraudulent research, pseudo-theories
and manipulations of all kinds. To tackle this kind of situation without getting bogged down in
the endless debate over facts and figures, we should first start by observing whether any
honest, impartial research aimed at advancing the common good is being conducted, and
whether there is a willingness to accept the honest results, no matter what they are, or whether
the research is primarily driven by the desire to benefit individuals or small groups at the
expense of others. If the fundamental motive is personal gain (either material or psychological),
then you can be sure that the figures needed to justify the actions will always be found,
especially in this post-truth era with its creative approach to facts.

In this light, arguing over the definition of which people are good and which are bad is the
wrong approach. The very formulation of the question itself indicates that it comes from a low,
egocentric level of consciousness, and that, one way or another, it bodes violence. In place of
this, we must attempt to identify the optimal position in society for every person (or
group of people); the place where they can realise their capabilities and talents to the
fullest extent and be as useful as possible; where they can be successful, secure and
happy, and where they can make others happy. Or, to speak in terms of dynamic systems,
for each element, we must find the position in which it will make the system most efficient,
economical, balanced and future-oriented, for the good of both the element itself and its
environment. Given the considerable flexibility, pluralism and unpredictability inherent in people,
society and living systems generally, each of us actually has the capacity to be useful in quite a
broad spectrum of activities. And the more multifaceted the individual – and the more flexible
their psyche – the broader this spectrum becomes. It is particularly broad for those who engage
in self-development and manage to break through their own boundaries. In all cases, however,
the key to choosing well (and to successful self-development) is discovering and recognising
one’s specific traits, how these traits are advantageous or limiting, and where these advantages
can be used to greatest effect while rendering the limitations as harmless as possible. And in
my observation, it is in their own position that a person has the greatest chance at happiness
since, from the viewpoint of the dynamic system, the right position is nothing more than the
location and connection which allows the most intensive, constructive cooperation and the
strongest, most harmonious exchange of energy and information between the internal and
external environments.

Naturally, this prompts the question: who is going to choose or decide this position, and
how? This question is certainly both important and complex; that choice, especially when made
on behalf of another person, can be a powerful tool of discrimination and injustice. However, the
question stops being so frightening and complex if we reformulate it correctly: upon which
values and aspirations will this position be chosen? If the choice is made based on egocentrism,
the result is bound to be injustice, accompanied, in one way or another, by a wave of violence.
This is true regardless of whether the decision is in the hands of the individual or has been
made by outside interests, as this simply determines which banner the injustice will be
committed under and which way the wave of violence will surge. If the choice is made based on
universal human values, ideally those of worldcentrism, what results is realisation, balance,
benefit, growth and the greatest happiness for everyone, without triggering waves of destruction

31
in the process. Again, this is true regardless of who makes the choice. And the closer a position
to worldcentrism we take, the better the final result will be for everyone.

At this point, we should pause to examine and define the term “worldcentrism”. Human
interests and values may be classed in a variety of ways, and we can delineate the following
types:
1. Egocentrism. A person’s attention is predominantly focused on their own personal
advancement, well-being and comfort.
2. Centrality of the family or kin, i.e., a group of people who share a commonality based on
sexual relations. This may be your direct sexual partners, children born through your sexual
relations or people who bore you through their sexual relations, as well as people connected to
you in any other way through the uninterrupted chain of sexual relations. The individual
recognises themselves as part of a family, and the well-being and advancement of the group of
people within that family becomes the core value.
3. Ethnocentrism. Centrality of the interests of a group of people connected by specific traits
that extends far beyond your family. Obviously, the individual themselves also possesses these
traits and identifies as part of the group. These traits may be based on country, region, religion,
race, political affiliation, nationality or anything else powerful enough to bestow a specific
similarity on a large group of people. At the same time, one’s own family may not possess these
traits and may not belong to the group; for example, they may practice a different religion.
4. Worldcentrism. The individual’s core value is focused on maximising the well-being of the
entirety of humanity, and beyond that, the entire world and the planet. This individual recognises
themselves as part of a global society, part of nature and part of evolution.

As we move through these types, we see the individual’s spheres of interest and concern
expand progressively. Thus, we can say that the focal point of one’s interest and the
understanding of one’s own identity undergo evolutionary development in the transition from
egocentrism to worldcentrism.
To return to the main point, the best approach for correctly placing an individual or group is,
thus, to have a society that agrees on the question of universal values and goals – a society in
which the right choice will be clear to most and can be made uniformly by many.
Meanwhile, the option that lets a specific person or group make the choice, such as in our
society, is clearly problematic.
Few people have advanced to the stage of worldcentrism, and when applicants apply for a
job, we do not test them on the values they intend to be a conduit for if given the position. And
anyway, who would take that kind of test? And who would verify the values of whoever took the
exam, and of whoever took the exam from whoever took the exam...?

This may be the reason why evolution has decided, so to speak, that it is still too soon for this
level of order and that we are better off wallowing in the chaos of struggle and uncertainty, all
stamping on each other’s heads to get a leg up, until each of us finds some position or other for
ourselves in the fray and the resulting balance is no worse than that of a well-developed animal
biosystem. But if we want to achieve a truly human society in the future, we need to develop our
awareness, or at least attempt to pinpoint the foundations for such development.
By this approach, we can avoid both the dissolution of society into a meaningless,
featureless, undifferentiated mass and the discrimination caused by the attempts of one group
to dominate and declare its universal supremacy over others.

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 Our task now is to start studying this question and, of course, to search for our own right
position as a matter of priority – the first real experiment that each of us can complete.

In order to complete these tasks in society, we need to put a number of things in order. First,
every position must be made honourable and respectable. The system has a use and a need
for each of its parts, and the parts generally are all equal from the perspective of life; respect for
the various parts, then, should be free from any crude biases. We currently have very strong
biases of this kind. The highest praise is lavished on people with outstanding wealth, political
power or religious authority, scientists and inventors, actors, artists and models and, drawing
the most attention, particularly brazen troublemakers, thugs and hooligans. It is worth noting
that many of these people do more harm than good for society, and that often, they have gotten
where they are through deceit, violence, aggressive domination, hypocrisy, arrogance,
propagandising a destructive lifestyle and other such activities.
Furthermore, there is generally a lack of respect or esteem for, among others, the quiet
foundation of society – the group that does essential work for all of us, day in and day out. For
comparison, ask yourself whose disappearance would hurt society most: models, singers,
actors or mothers? What about clergymen and religious authorities versus doctors, teachers
and caregivers? Scientific inventors or the people who supply our food, water and sanitation? It
goes without saying that the disappearance of the first in each case would, at worst, make our
lives less interesting or hinder progress, while the disappearance of the second would lead to
the complete demise of humanity, or at the least, its very rapid deterioration. And yet, the
unspoken consensus is that the first group is broadly seen as exceptional, successful,
enlightened big-shots and are treated like royalty, while the second group are seen as losers,
nobodies, failures and slaves, doing this work because they are incapable of anything “better”
due to some personal defect.

It makes sense that our head of government should appear on our TV screens more often
than, say, a janitor, but this is not because the politician is a better person than the janitor
(frequently, alas, the reverse is true). It is because the politician possesses important
information and makes decisions that affect society as a whole. The same is true of actors,
scientists and clergy; a lamp gets hung from the ceiling not because it is the best and most
important thing in the room, but because that way, it can share the most light. Thus, what
matters is not the fact of a person’s power, wealth or fame, but the reason for it, as well as how
they use it and what they do with their position.

If we can conquer this bias and give rightful credit to the useful section of society that is
currently silenced and overlooked, if we can make their positions comfortable, prestigious and
respectable, we will see much great harmony, peace and prosperity in society. Women will no
longer be forced to try and emulate men or adopt strong masculine qualities; women have their
own strengths and qualities, which are often much more essential to life and society than
masculine qualities. Mothers will no longer be forced to try and achieve the body and face of an
anime model, a feat which is almost impossible to combine with motherhood. None of us will be
forced to try and become successful business people, convincing public speakers, creative
inventors, hyped-up startup founders or success machines. It will be enough just to be
ourselves, and using our innate strengths, to do whatever we are best at that is useful to people
and the planet.

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 Every position has its own positive and negative aspects. Being a top business executive
makes you rich, powerful and famous, on the one hand, but on the other, it means you work
insane hours and live in a perpetual state of stress, worry and preoccupation. You are
surrounded by competitors waiting to swallow you whole at the first sign of weakness, women
who mostly see you as either a cash cow, a status symbol or a career opportunity, and men
who pretend to be your friend for as long as you are valuable to them. You yourself, minus your
wallet or your power, simply you as a human being, are generally disliked and cared for by no
one. The inner world of a person like this is usually dominated by stress, anger, frustration,
disappointment, mistrust and emptiness.
To draw an example from society’s opposite pole, take the quiet guardian of a small railway
crossing, whose job is to lower the barrier and hold up the small red flag until the train has
passed. On the one hand, he has neither power, fame nor fortune, nor does he have any future
prospects. But on the other hand, his mind and spirit are unburdened by any monumental tasks
or colossal endeavours, and he, having the good fortune to be unimportant, is free to simply
follow the flow of life. He forgets entirely about his work as soon as he goes home, and when he
lies down to sleep at night, he does so unburdened. Anyone who forms a relationship with him
will be most interested in him for his personal qualities. The internal world of a person like this
tends to be much quieter and more peaceful than that of a top executive. He is capable of living
in the here and now, of savouring life in its simplest, most immediate forms. These people often
live long lives and die easy, natural deaths.

And so, there are no perfect positions in society. Instead, there are forces that pull the
elements of the system in different directions, forcing the system into motion. The sweet,
delicious high points occur not so that we can all climb into the sugar bowl, but because the
system requires a dynamic. Thus, there are also bitter pitfalls, a shove of the swing in the
opposite direction.
We are not all called to become a man/business leader/president/messiah/Einstein/Michael
Jackson. No, we are all called to become a stronger and more harmonious society, to engage in
the division of labour based on the inherent, unequal distribution of our abilities and to enjoy the
fruits of our collective efforts. And the first step on that path is to begin valuing positive
individuality (that which is natural, beneficial, vital), whatever form it takes. We must respect
useful work of all kinds and honour every position within the system we all share.

Let us now look more closely at the idea that different people in society exist at different
stages of development, these stages being “stretched” over a time period of 5,000 years. This is
a very complex topic, and before we begin, we should make a small digression and do some
groundwork.

There are many phenomena in our lives that, although we can identify them as negative, we
are nonetheless unable to eliminate either completely or sufficiently. Examples of these include
death, ageing, violence and conflict. Since no fundamental solution to this problem currently
exists, all we can do is try to move things in the right direction – to alleviate, elucidate, equalise,
transform and patiently wait while our understanding and ability gradually grow, solving the
problem step-by-step as we go.
And the first step we must take is to acknowledge directly that the problem exists, and that
we do not have the perfect solution for it. Ignoring the problem, or attempting to block out its

34
symptomatic surface manifestations, reject it or mentally suppress it will eventually lead to an
explosion, worse and uncontrolled, that destroys everything in its path and ends in serious crisis
or breakdown.

We happen to be facing exactly this kind of difficult situation regarding the “stretched”
evolution of consciousness, and it is one for which a complete and definitive solution does not
yet exist. On this point, it is important to remember that the development of consciousness is
also the development of conscience, which makes this topic highly relevant to our main theme.

The difficulties and complications this phenomenon presents are as follows:

* People at different stages of development will have different values and behavioural
strategies from each other, and these values and strategies will clash on key issues. This will
inevitably lead to conflict during cooperation.

* Although consciousness unequivocally develops from egocentrism towards worldcentrism,

and even egocentric individuals, when given the choice, tend to favour cooperation with
worldcentric individuals rather than people at their own stage, those in the early stages of
consciousness almost never possess enough force of will to transition to a more advanced
stage. Usually, they lack the capacity to even realise that something needs to change.

* People who gravitate towards egocentric consciousness cannot understand worldcentric

values and behavioural strategies. An attempt to explain other values to them or elevate them to
a higher stage of consciousness will generally be perceived as an attack on their territory and
their person, and the worldcentric individual who has made the attempt, as an aggressor intent
on domination to further their own interests. Trying to take people beyond the boundaries of
their personal interest, or to take a person’s consciousness beyond the boundaries of their
group interest, in the case of collective egocentrism, yields the same result. The egocentric
individual’s first response to any external influence will be to interpret it as a threat, and as a
result, either go on the defensive or attack back. It is critical to be aware that this is not a
conscious choice for these people – they simply know no other way to observe and interact.
The language of egocentrism is violence and domination, and thus, any external influence is
primarily regarded as an attempt at violence and domination.

* One’s base level of consciousness depends largely on gene fluctuations and is very hard
to control. A worldcentric child may be born into an egocentric family, while an egocentric child
may be born into a worldcentric family.

* The egocentric individual is usually more active and industrious and will be more brazen
and forceful about getting what they want, which often tips the odds in their favour and gives
them a great deal of influence over the world and affairs.

* The worldcentric individual, a more sensitive soul, because of their inherently kind, peace-
loving, tranquil nature, will often step aside at the moment of conflict, discreetly distancing
themselves and thus creating space for egocentric individuals to take the reins and turn the
situation to their advantage.

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 On the positive side, we have the following points, which are key to resolving the problem:
* The worldcentric individual is capable of understanding the egocentric individual, since the
worldcentric stage of development contains all the previous stages.

* Worldcentric values may, to a significant degree, be imparted through upbringing and

education.

* Worldcentric behavioural strategies gradually de-escalate situations of conflict, restoring

balance and steering them towards a place of mutual understanding, trust and cooperation.

* The worldcentric consciousness and development of conscience paves the way for
intellect, the brain’s higher creative and integrative capacities. In the context of modern society,
which is scientifically and culturally oriented, this allows for more successful realisation, thereby
demonstrating the advantage of the worldcentric world view.

Things we need to avoid doing in the current situation are:

* We should not judge, ostracise or criminalise people who are at earlier stages of
development. First of all, they are blameless in this situation. Our base level of consciousness is
largely determined by the genotype and its fluctuations, as well as by the environment in which
we grow up. Thus, although an individual is capable of increasing their level of consciousness
by working on themselves, broadly speaking, their level is not their choice, and consequently,
not their fault. Secondly, judging, ostracising and criminalising people will elicit frustration,
mistrust and bitterness in response, and this, in turn, will lock egocentric people even more
firmly into their current stage, interfering with their ability to perceive new values and hindering
their transition to the next stage. Third, the earlier stages of consciousness are the progenitors
of the later, more advanced stages, and without the discoveries and achievements of the
egocentric stage, the worldcentric stage would not exist. As such, the egocentric stage should
be afforded the respect and gratitude it deserves. Returning to the scientific world view is very
helpful on this point; taking the evolutionary perspective, we are reminded that events arise
without our influence and unfold of themselves, we see our realistic capacity for self-awareness
and self-transformation, and we realise that no blame lies with people at earlier stages of
development. The mythological world view, in contrast, which claims that the sins of your
ancestors, the bad karma you’ve accumulated over your past lives, the fact that you’ve chosen
an inhospitable planet or the way you’ve angered God are what matters, often leads to loss of
drive, depression and despair in this context. It is also notable, however, that for a strong-willed,
responsible individual capable of intense effort and transformation, this approach may have
entirely the opposite effect: the person will begin to seek out reason and investigate their own
qualities and behaviours, and will learn and change. What is categorically useless is judgement
expressed by people who are at a higher stage of consciousness simply because they
happened to be born with a certain starting level or come from a particular environment.

What we need to do to improve the situation is the following:

* Society must have a robust and universal value system, a clear delineation between good
and bad, a clear understanding of ethics and prospects for future growth. With these in place,

36
educating people both academically and socially will be much easier, and it will be much simpler
to make a clear-eyed assessment of one’s own behaviour.
* Instead of withdrawing to a state of nirvana, indifference, blissful idleness or arrogant
detachment from worldly affairs, holders of worldcentric values need to exercise interested,
active participation in collective life, cultivating and demonstrating those values and their
benefits in society. To do so, worldcentric people will need to have influence, weight and power,
and they must start by removing the rose-tinted glasses of illusion inherent to the spirituality of
past millennia. This is because they are the ones capable of seeing things clearly and taking the
right actions, and thus, they bear the primary responsibility for what happens.

* Society must do the work of education, both inside and outside the classroom. Conscience
and the worldcentric world view must be fashionable, “trending” topics.

* There must be a decent position and dignified occupation in society for the egocentric
individual, based on their strategies, abilities and level of perception. This is not to say that
these people are not useful, or indeed essential, in today’s society!

You could call this the outline of a utopia, which is to say, a place that does not currently
exist. But the word “utopia” can also be translated from ancient Greek as “good place” – a
place, then, worth trying to turn into a reality. After all, it is through our minds that the evolution
of consciousness flows, by our hands that society is built and history shaped. And if we want a
brighter future, then we must, unequivocally, investigate the possibility of achieving it.

***

To summarise this chapter:

People are different and have different abilities, qualities and talents from one another. This
is the natural consequence of genetic fluctuation, diverse developmental conditions and
differentiation of both the organs and the parts of the societal system.

All of us are links in a single evolutionary chain, a single living system, and thus, are all
important and valuable from the perspective of life.

There is always an appropriate and dignified position in the system for the individual traits
and talents that arise naturally, whether in the individual or a group; this is the position in which
the person will be happiest and their usefulness to society will be maximised.
Naturally arising traits, in this book, denotes those features formed as part of the normal
development of life. This clarification is intended to avoid the confusion of individual traits with
trauma or illness. Individual traits are always positive, essentially providing solutions to
challenges or tools for existence. Conversely, trauma and illness are negative and make life
goals harder to achieve. For clarity, consider this example: first, we have person A – a natural
introvert by process of genetic variability and a quiet, a sensitive soul. He goes unnoticed in
company and prefers to be alone. And it is precisely when he is alone in peace and quiet that
he is happiest and most productive. Then, we have person B, whose parents pressured her as
a child and repressed any attempt she made to express herself: “don’t run, don’t laugh, don’t
get mad, don’t cry, you do everything wrong, you’re ugly, you’re a failure”, and so on. As a
37
result, this person became depressed and neurotic. From the outside, person B will seem very
similar to person A. She, too, will be quiet and unremarkable around others and will seek out
solitude. But her internal state and the reality of her situation will nonetheless be the mirror
opposite of person A’s. If solitude is home for person A, for person B, it is the prison her cruel
parents put her in. In reality, she might actually be a true extrovert who wants nothing more than
to lead others. Therefore, we can call person A’s disposition natural and see it as a positive
attribute that should be used, while we identify person B’s as an illness or trauma from which
she needs to heal as soon as possible so that she can become her true self, and once she is in
her natural, normal state, can look for her position. It should be noted that psychological trauma
happens not only to individuals, but also to entire peoples whose mindset and subconscious
have been damaged by historical violence.

There are different stages of consciousness, and thus, of conscience, and they are not
equivalent in the context of social relations. Different people will be at different stages of
development. A person can transition from one stage of development to another, and one of the
ways this can occur is through conscious effort. All stages should be respected and given a
dignified position, since they are all links in the same evolutionary process.

Every position in society, every positive contribution of any kind, should be valued and
respected. Being useful must be our first priority in our activities, rather than status, popularity,
or the accumulation of power or personal wealth.

Hopefully, having now discussed these questions, we can begin our exploration of
conscience without fear that our objective discoveries will become the vehicle for discrimination,
exclusion or repression. Adopting universal values on the level of personal awareness and
responsibility will, on the contrary, allow us to reject vertical systems of control and the
excessive concentration of power in the hands of the few that goes with them. Through a wise,
kind approach, we can convert our evaluation of our own behaviour and that of others towards
each other and the world into a method of self-perfection, comprehensive education and
elevation of the level of consciousness. In this way, we can gradually lower the levels of conflict
and tension within humanity. Our starting point must, unquestionably, be ourselves, and we
must be more demanding of ourselves than of the world around us.

Now that we know what to build our investigation on, how to look and how to relate to what
we see, let us explore why and how society and its essential element, conscience, came to be.

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 The evolutionary pattern for the emergence of society
We will now attempt to describe one of the fundamental patterns of development in the
Universe: that which amalgamates simple structures into complex ones, giving rise to new
characteristics, properties, strengths and types of interaction at each level of complexity. To do
this, we will trace the key stages of the branch of the evolutionary tree that includes humans,
from the first moments of the Big Bang to the present day, and guess at what future
developments might look like.

The most basic building blocks of matter known to science are quarks and leptons. According
to current research, they have no internal structure and cannot be divided into constituent parts,
even though the broader logic of the development of matter suggests they must have been
preceded by an even simpler, more unified substance. These hypothetical, foundational,
elementary particles of physics are called preons. The existence of preons has not yet been
confirmed, even though their existence has been proven by a variety of significant theoretical
hypotheses. Quarks are never seen as free particles under any known energy or temperature,
but the best known and most stable of the leptons – the electron and the neutrino – can exist
both as free particles and as part of an atom (electrons).
Six types of quark and six types of lepton have been discovered. These are 12 of the most
basic building blocks of creation – the stuff that matter is made of.

On the next level of complexity in the structuring of matter and grouping of simple objects
into more complex ones, six types of quark combine to form hadrons, which are split into two
classes: baryons and mesons. We know of 26 types of baryon and nine types of meson.
Baryons are comprised of the proton and neutron nucleons, which form the structure of an
atom’s nucleus and are fundamental elements for the further evolution of stable matter.
At this stage of grouping and complexity, then, we have 35 types of hadrons, two of which
(protons and neutrons) determine the further evolution of the Universe. All of these stages of
evolution were completed in the first few seconds after the Big Bang.

Protons, neutrons and electrons, in varying quantities and combinations, make up every
possible atom of all the chemical elements (best known through Mendeleev’s periodic table)
that our senses are capable of perceiving and which we know as matter in our daily lives. 118
chemical elements have been discovered to date, of which 94 were found in nature and 24 were
artificially synthesised. By all accounts, it appears that more chemical elements remain to be
found, and that Mendeleev’s table will be expanded.

Thus, at the third stage in the organization of matter, we have 118 different types of structure,
all composed from earlier, simpler types. The age of the chemical elements began roughly a
billion years after the Big Bang. The synthesis of these elements still occurs through nuclear
fusion inside stars.

The chemical elements, combined in various ways, make up chemical compounds

(chemicals), of which there are currently more than 125 million, with around 15,000 new
chemicals discovered every day. Furthermore, the lion’s share of known chemical substances
consists of organic compounds, which perpetuate the branch of evolution that includes human
beings.

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 At the next stage of grouping and complexity in the “human” branch of evolution, organic
compounds form different types of living cells from which all life is then composed, from bacteria
all the way up to humans. Even attempting to count all the different types of living cells would be
impossible. The human body contains 230 different types of cell. By the time life appeared on
Earth, 10 billion years of evolution had already passed.

The increasing complexity of structure led to the development of organs, composed of

different types of tissue formed from different types of living cell. The human body is considered
to have roughly 79 organs. The fuzziness of this figure is due to the fact that some organs are
ambiguously defined and may be labelled differently depending on how the various structures
that make up the body are grouped. The number of distinct structures is much higher; the
skeleton of a single adult human for example, contains 205 bones, while there are roughly 50
regions in the cerebral cortex, each with its own function.
Thus, by this point, living cells were forming organs capable of performing a great diversity of
tasks.

At the next stage of grouping and complexity, organs became the building blocks for
organisms. As we have seen by now, the number of distinct structures increases at every stage.
It is impossible to tell how many different types of living organisms have ever existed on our
planet, but the number is certainly in the tens of millions, just a small percentage of which has
been studied. Among the many varieties of living organism is the human being, who appeared
on Earth around 0.2 million years ago, or roughly 14 billion years after the Big Bang.

With that, we have completed our brief outline of evolution, from a single, homogeneous
starting point – preon matter – to the human being, the form of organic life to which we all
belong. We can now identify several broad patterns at work in the developmental process:

1. Evolutionary development progresses from simple structures to complex ones. The

proton, for example, is comprised of two u-quarks and one d-quark. Insulin, an important
hormone in the human body, is comprised of 337 carbon atoms, 65 nitrogen atoms, 75 oxygen
atoms and six sulphur atoms, connected in a complex dimensional structure. Each of those
atoms, meanwhile, has its own internal structure – take the sulphur atom in insulin, which is
made up of 16 protons, 16 neutrons and 16 electrons. The human body itself contains around
6,7×10^27 atoms, connected in an astronomical number of different structures.

2. The Universe is structured as a hierarchy, a chain of existence in which simple

structures become the components of later, more complex structures, which in turn
become the components of still later, even more complex structures. This pattern
determines the fundamental course of evolution in the Universe and ensures the integrity,
interconnectedness and continuity of existence.

3. The number of distinct structures that can be built from the given elements, forces
and interaction types already in existence increases with each stage. Quarks can only be
used to create a few dozen different elementary particles, but the number of potential organic
life forms is over ten million – on our planet alone. Alongside this pattern, we can also observe
that existence takes the shape of a tree; it begins with a single, central root, which then expands

40
and multiplies out into peripheral branches. It is worth noting that this tree has an outer limit,
which is expanding in step with the development of the Universe.

4. At every stage, structures acquire new properties not contained in, and not
stemming directly from, the properties that make up the parts of those structures which
belong to earlier stages of evolution. Thus, at each evolutionary stage, new and
previously unavailable possibilities for existence are mastered, while a new niche, a new
dimension in the broader evolution of the Universe, is carved out and occupied.
This is why, for example, the chemical properties of the elements cannot be observed in their
constituent protons, neutrons and electrons, nor can they be inferred through observation of
their qualities and behaviours. The ability of living cells to self-replicate (that is, the ability of
daughter cells to reproduce, or accurately replicate, the structures and functions of the mother
cell) is impossible to observe, and it does not stem from the properties of the chemical elements
from which the cells are composed. Meanwhile, things like the human ability to create, for
instance, the science of quantum mechanics or the film Avatar in no way stem from the abilities
and characteristics of the cells that make up the human body. We could consider this the point
of the evolution of the Universe, as well as an explanation for the enormous diversity of distinct
forms of existence: existence, like water, seeks to fill every possible empty space, both extant
and potential. In doing so, once it has filled all available space, it creates new spaces and
possibilities as it goes. It then begins again by filling these spaces itself, thus executing the
extraordinary recursive process that is the unfathomable fractal growth of the Universe.

5. Each stage of grouping and complexity will have its own specific forces and laws,
its own homeostasis and equilibrium that hold the elements of the structure together,
enabling it to effectively maintain its integrity and take a unique shape, occupy time and
space, operate with energy and possess the will to exist in the Universe. This is how, for
instance, nucleons in the nucleus of an atom maintain a strong nuclear force (a very powerful
force observable on the elementary particle level). The integrity of an atom is ensured by
electrical attraction, a force that arises between the positively charged nucleus and negatively
charged electrons. This stage sees the emergence and development of such fundamental
forces and laws of physics as gravitation, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces,
the law of conservation of energy and more.
At the stage of chemical compounds (chemicals), the laws in effect are so specific and so
different from those of physics that it has been valuable to establish a field of science dedicated
entirely to their study, known as chemistry. Nonetheless, the laws of chemistry are founded on
the general laws of physics, and naturally, do not contradict them in any way.
The kingdom of the living cell, again, presents such a radical shift from previous patterns that
it has given rise to two dedicated branches of science: biology and biochemistry. Both of these
are also based on the “earlier” branches of chemistry and physics and do not contradict them.
The integrity and viability of the living cell is ensured by much more complex processes and
laws and cannot be reduced to a handful of simple interactions like, for example, those in the
nucleus of an atom. This is when we start to see the phenomenon of homeostasis, and with it,
the unique ability of living systems to actively resist environmental changes and maintain a
stable structural state despite unfavourable external factors.
When we get to the living organism, we see another shift in properties and laws so radical
that the need arises for very specialised sciences – things like psychology, for example. As
previously, the integrity of the organism is maintained through homeostasis, but its influence is

41
now much more extensive and multi-faceted. And yet, we can still trace it back directly to the
very origins of the continuity and interdependence of forces, structures and laws at the different
organisational stages of existence.

***

We have now described a cross-section of the organisational and developmental hierarchy

of the Universe, outlining in simplified and intelligible terms the ability of simple structures to
combine to form more complex ones across many repetitions of the process, transitioning to
ever more advanced stages of organisation and complexity. Now is the right time to return to
the present, and to the moment of evolution that you and I, as human beings, represent. Let us
use our incredible ability to apply the patterns we’ve found to similar phenomena and
extrapolate their processes, predicting the future based on our study of the past and the
behaviour of its systems, and look for answers to a range of obvious questions.

1. Is the process of evolutionary development, i.e., the combining of simple structures into
more complex ones, going to stop with human beings? Obviously, the answer is no. We
possess all the prerequisites for further development of the “human” branch of evolution.

2. What will the next stage look like, then? Obviously, it will be a kind of integral whole made
up of separate living organisms. And this whole already exists in a transitional state – it is called
human society.
On this point, we should investigate, if only briefly, why it is human society and not, say, the
ant colony or the herd of bison that takes this formation, as well as why it is in the transitional
developmental stage and not already fully developed.
As we have previously noted, when a new stage arises, it necessarily triggers the
development of new characteristics which do not stem from its constituent parts. The behaviour
and motivation of a herd correspond directly to the biological needs and behaviour of the
individual animal, namely, the basic drives to defend and capture territory, find food and avoid
danger. All of these aims and their corresponding strategies can be observed in any individual
animal, meaning that no quantum leap occurs in the transition from animal to herd. Instead, we
simply see the abilities of a single animal repeated many times, the basic motivations and
strategies remaining the same. Indeed, this is the advantage of the herd; hunting and defence
are much easier in a group than alone.

In a society, the picture is completely different: first, the interests and values that arise along
with the development of society often totally contradict the biological instincts of the individual,
and the ability to suppress basic instincts around aggression, sexual behaviour, taking our
neighbour’s territory or food, etc. is an essential skill for survival in society. The appearance of
society marked the development of a completely new stage, as well as a new method of
accumulating information and the activities based on it, namely, culture, art and science. This
method is essentially the defining force behind our civilisation’s incredible might, and it is also
radically different from the method of information accumulation dominant in pre-human forms of
life. Culture, art and science are not transferred genetically, but by way of upbringing and
education. They cannot belong to any one person, nor can any one person advance them
significantly. Only society is capable of transferring and developing them effectively. The core
knowledge accumulated by pre-human life forms, meanwhile, is transferred genetically, and all
42
that is required to successfully transfer the sum total of a species’ experience in order to
perpetuate its existence is two opposite-sex specimens of that species, or a single sample of
DNA. The herd or flock, as a type of being, does not evolve, and it will appear in the same form,
with the same behavioural strategies, in creatures at such different levels of development as
fish and mammals. Human society, meanwhile, shows a pronounced and very rapid evolution,
evidence that in us, nature has discovered a new and truly powerful principle, rather than just a
stronger iteration of something that already exists. This is an appropriate moment to recall the
ant colony, within which, despite its highly organised cooperative activity, which is markedly
distinct from the life of the individual insect, there is no evolution; ant society has existed in its
current form, without any significant changes, for more than 100 million years. In the last 200
years, meanwhile, human society has undergone several radical and pronounced evolutionary
changes, with even more most certainly lying ahead. Thus, although nature has discovered
many principles based on ant society and societies like it, the limited abilities of the actual
structural unit of the ant colony – the ant – has prevented these principles from developing into
a radically new form of existence as happened with humanity, the human brain evidently
containing enough potential to make the breakthrough.

Now, we should briefly discuss why human society is not yet fully developed. If we take
some examples of systems that have already developed to a point of stability and completeness
and compare them to human society, we see that our society more closely resembles a
dynamic balance of disparate elements – similar to the ecosystem of a forest – than the
homeostasis of an organism. Consider, for example, the body of any stable biological species
that represents an organism in this state of completeness. The different elements within this
body never engage in mutual destruction, while this is the number-one pastime, so to speak, in
both the forest and human society. Within the organism, every organ “knows” its position and its
task, all of these positions are equally valued and all tasks earn the same “reward” (a sufficient
supply of blood and other essential substances). In current society, meanwhile, there are “good”
positions desired by all and “bad” positions avoided by all. There are tasks that bring enormous
rewards, and equally valuable tasks that earn pennies. The rapid dynamic of this process also
clearly attests to the unfinished development of our society. Our question, then, remains
unanswered, and there is much work left to do.

4. Obviously, for this new stage of self-development, existence requires a new force or
principle to ensure homeostasis and the integrity of the structure. And that force exists – it is
called conscience. This means that conscience is, in fact, one of the forces that allow
simple structures to combine into complex ones. Accordingly, the emergence of
conscience is natural and objectively necessary, just as the laws it obeys while fulfilling
a very concrete purpose are objectively real. The difficulty and confusion still surrounding
this topic can be attributed to the incredibly complex, non-linear structures of both society and
the individual, which make it exceptionally difficult to draw clear, unambiguous conclusions. But
the fact that it is difficult to identify these laws does not mean they don’t exist.

5. Can we imagine a further development in the principle of unification that could occur in
our branch of evolution? Yes. Different types of living organisms with the ability to accumulate
and apply information (the core principle at the basis of all life), when combined in an integral
and effectively unified society, will merge together, achieving completely new states and
abilities. Beyond this, if we suppose we are not alone in the endless expanse of the cosmos, we

43
can imagine the unification of societies that arise on different planets. Of course, to reach the
stage of development at which we are capable of expanding our spheres of knowledge and
activity beyond our home planet, we must have a highly developed society – a properly
cohesive and stable organism. Given that developed consciousness wields power over matter
and energy, we can suppose that the further development of the principle of
consciousness as the fundamental ability of the simple to become the complex might, at
its limit , lead to the unification of the entire Universe into a single organism, resulting in
a qualitative transformation of the Universe itself.
Obviously, this is all just wild conjecture, but it is precisely through this kind of thinking that
we build truly worldcentric consciousness, learning to think and live in the interests of all
humanity, the interests of all life on Earth, and ultimately, the interests of the entire Universe.

Finally, let us review the ideas presented in this chapter. The unification of individuals into a
society is a natural stage of evolutionary development. A special, binding force exists to
facilitate this process. This force is called conscience. Conscience has a concrete role and
purpose, which arises naturally, and thus, also has its own objective laws, which can and should
be studied. In other words, conscience is much more closely aligned with physical reality, which
is subject to concrete laws, than with random imaginings or chance, although it certainly does
contain an arbitrary, chaotic element, as all things do.

Because conscience is the key to the further evolution of humanity and has objective laws,
these laws should be discovered, studied and applied. This will spur such a leap in the
effectiveness of our behaviour, it will be like transitioning from a strictly bodily-intuitive
understanding of the physical world to discovering the laws of physics and using them in an
informed way. The study and conscious adoption of these laws will significantly reduce the
chaos, confusion and destructive high-handedness so prevalent in relationships both between
individuals and between different groups, governments and formations. This is because, when
we shift from the individual to the group, the values and laws of conscience remain unchanged
on all key points.

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 The history of the emergence of conscience

We will now attempt to trace the history of the emergence of conscience, which will grant us
a much greater understanding of its laws. But first, we need to take a moment to examine what
actually makes biological life so radically different from the rest of the known world, that which
we identify as non-living. In the broadest terms, any being, any object, any formation will always
have the following three properties: it will occupy space, it will possess some kind of energy and
it will interact with its environment, reacting to and influencing it.
These three properties are a prerequisite for any kind of existence. Both a neutron and a
galaxy cluster occupy a defined space. Electrons, human beings, radiation, mass (the famous
Е=МС^2), coiled springs, chemical compounds, moving trains and absolutely every other thing
that can possibly exist all possess energy. When the space occupied by an object touches or
intersects with the space of another object, it creates an interaction, to which each object will
react in a defined way. A foot pressing down on a stone compresses the stone’s matter. This
has the effect of pushing the stone’s atoms closer together, triggering a force that pushes
against the foot with an intensity equal to the force of the foot on the stone, but in the opposite
direction. By reacting in this manner, the stone maintains its integrity. Gas molecules, when
captured in a voluminous shape, will begin to interact with the walls of that container, positioning
themselves so that there is the least possible total pressure – also known as potential energy –
trapped in the force of repulsion that triggers between the gas molecules. Water molecules in
gravity poured onto a surface will move in a way that lets them occupy the position with the
least potential energy, or, in simple terms, lets them get as low as possible.
Pre-biological, non-living elements of nature, in the majority of interactions, only use those
forces that are triggered immediately and directly at the time and place of contact. This either
results in some kind of unidirectional process that eventually leads to static equilibrium, as in the
examples with the stone, the gas and the water or in the case of a cooling kettle, or it triggers a
periodic process that may end up at the same static equilibrium eventually. Take the example of
a swinging pendulum, or a planet revolving around a star; in these instances, we can say that
the object’s reaction and the interaction it triggers occur in a single step and an extremely
simple order. Let us call them simple, single-step interactions.

The interactions of biological life forms, meanwhile, are shaped by one radical difference:
the basis for all life is the DNA molecule. In fact, it was with early forms of DNA-like structures
(RNA molecules) that the evolution of life began. DNA has two unique properties: first, it is
programmable, i.e. it stores the code that defines the way a structure capable of generating a
sequence of actions and reactions will unfold in time and space, and second, it has the ability to
copy, or reproduce, itself. The result is that any living system can accumulate information on the
sequence of transformations and interactions it performs both with itself and with the outside
world. This has given living systems the unique ability to interact with the outside world based
on laws and mechanisms that are in no way derived from the physical forces triggered at the
point of immediate contact between the interactive substances. These reactions and
interactions have multiple steps, i.e., entirely different mechanisms and principles are engaged
at different points in the time span across which they unfold. Compared to the interactions of the
non-living elements of nature, they can be many orders of magnitude more complex. If we are
to examine a human life in these terms, as a multi-step interaction, the number of steps in the
sequence will be astronomical.

45
 The ability to self-replicate, which is, at its core, the ability to copy information and then use it
to create a new, autonomous process of interaction with the external world, along with random
variations in the information itself and the process of natural selection, gave us the phenomenon
of biological evolution. More on this can be found in Richard Dawkins’ excellent book, The Blind
Watchmaker.

The result of all this is that organic, DNA-based life forms have developed an entirely unique
way of collecting and converting energy, as well as exchanging it with their environment, using
structures and patterns unavailable to the non-living elements of nature.
The process of biological evolution has always operated by increasing the complexity of
entities, the information that shapes their structures and interactions, and interaction itself.
All pre-human evolution transfers its accumulated information exclusively through DNA.
While primitive forms of initiation, education and information exchange do emerge amongst
developed life forms, the volume and significance of the information transmitted in this way
pales in comparison to that of the information transmitted via DNA, which is essential for life.

How did the fundamental changes that led to the emergence of humans occur, and what
was it that changed so dramatically?
I think a plausible answer to this is outlined in S.V. Savelyev’s book, Возникновение мозга
человека (The Emergence of the Human Brain), which I highly recommend, along with his
other book, Происхождение мозга (The Origin of the Brain), to anyone interested in
neurophysiology and the evolution of the brain. Savelyev, in addition to being deeply
knowledgeable, has a rare gift for drawing philosophical and human insights from his research,
as well as having the courage to do so. Some of Savelyev’s more radical statements have been
criticised; however, this does not negate his contribution as an evolutionary scientist who has
given us a remarkably complete and intelligent picture of the development of the brain. In the
context of this book, that evolutionary picture is precisely what we are interested in.

Savelyev’s hypothesis, then, is that some of the great apes – our ancestors – found
themselves in a kind of “paradise” situation when, through a random confluence of events, food
became easier to obtain while the threat from natural predators and other mortal dangers was
low. This group of apes stayed in this “paradise” for quite some time. Because of the weakening
effect this had on natural selection, weak individuals were able to survive, and the gene pool, as
well as the strength and fighting ability of the physical body, were considerably degraded. We
could find arguable proof for this theory in the fact that the human being has one of the weakest,
most vulnerable and least practically designed bodies in the entire animal kingdom. In the
absence of external threats, the “paradise” apes turned to infighting and internal squabbling with
their own kind.

Later, their “paradise”, as paradise does, vanished. Rapidly deteriorating living conditions
forced a mass exodus, and our ape ancestors found themselves in harsh conditions with a body
ill-equipped to handle them. “Acquiring” a new, strong body quickly is tough, because another
lengthy period of random fluctuation and natural selection is required. Our ancestors were faced
with a choice: figure out a radically different survival method, or die. And the only quick solution
under the circumstances was to stop infighting and focus the coordinated effort of every
individual on the common goal of fighting for survival. In other words, it was necessary to build a
cohesive structure, many times more efficient than the individual, which would be capable of
46
coping with the harsh environmental conditions. This had already been done in nature – think of
the ant colony or the beehive, for example. But the unit from which this structure was built was
immeasurably more advanced, with a vastly more responsive and adaptive nervous system and
much more developed and complex relationships.

The apes had to give up the infighting that had weakened the tribe, learn to find food
together and distribute it in the way that was best for everyone, care collectively for infants and
the weak and fight external threats as a group. This decision proved wise; the structure was
able to withstand every challenge, and the group of apes who had “fallen from heaven”
managed to stay alive.

That moment was the birth of conscience: a new collection of behavioural strategies and a
new organ of thought, capable of countering the aggressive, egocentric strategies of the animal
emotional centre (a term which will be explained in detail later) and uniting separate individuals
into a system in which their relationships are interdependent and mutually beneficial.
These events would seem to be reflected in the multitude of stories and fairy tales from
cultures around the world that feature a cruel young boy or girl who commits evil deeds despite
living a comfortable life, and who is then punished for their cruelty and falls from heaven to hell.
This harsh experience causes them to repent and turn to conscience in earnest. One of the best
examples of this is Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale, The Star-Child.
Spiritual doctrines say the same thing: an open heart is most often reached through a fall,
rupture, tragedy or total breakdown of the drive to satisfy the ego.
As we know, the evolution of the individual mirrors the basic stages of evolution of the
species, which means that if we examine the evolution of the development of consciousness in
the individual (using the correctly calibrated tools of our own psyche), we will also be able to
draw conclusions about the stages and events in the evolution of the collective psyche of our
species.
Sadly, it remains the case that nothing stirs up conscience or the human heart so effectively
as a good, hard slap in the face from life or the world. One of the main aims of this book is to
provide readers with the tools to go about developing conscience in a conscious way, without
having to wait for that slap.

The emergence of a new type of relationship, in which highly developed individuals had
close connections and common interests, as well as sharing common labour, required a new
and efficient means of communication, spurring the development of language. This later paved
the way for the emergence of a completely new, exceptionally powerful phenomenon which was
to set the course for humanity’s further evolution, leading to the absolute evolutionary
breakthrough we are all living so intensely through at this very moment: the collaborative,
multi-step, non-genetic accumulation of information. The carrier of information in this
situation is no longer the sequence of nucleotides within the molecules of DNA, created and
used only at the moment of conception, but a multitude of carriers of symbolic information which
can be accessed and used by a human consciousness, or by a machine, at any time.

The previous method of transferring information, i.e., through DNA, has some substantial
downsides:
1. There is no reverse transcription (though some esoterically-minded scientists are trying to
find it). This means that an individual’s genome involved in reproduction doesn’t change over

47
their life span and will be passed on exactly as it is. As a result, essentially all the experience
we accumulate over a lifetime is thrown on the trash heap as soon as we die, given that there is
no possible way to transfer it to our offspring. Everything comes down to whether an individual’s
code will allow them to survive and reproduce effectively, able to pass on the same genetic
code that created them.
2. Information exchange can only occur between two individuals who mate. It is worth noting
here that sexual reproduction, a feature of all relatively advanced life forms, arose specifically to
facilitate the exchange of genetic information and accelerate evolution.
3. Because it is transmitted exclusively through the sequential synthesis of biopolymer
structures, the information is extremely limited in scope. All further development of the structure
and activity of the organism occurs through “inertia”, so to speak, meaning that the information
contained in DNA will have only an indirect influence on the higher-level functioning of the
complex organism.
4. Information can only be passed on through conception and birth. Living individuals cannot
exchange information.

In comparison to the genetic method of information transfer, our new method has the
following crucial advantages:
1. An individual’s life experience may be transferred successfully.
2. Any number of individuals may exchange information.
3. With the development of language, both the scope and complexity of information are
practically limitless.
4. Information may be passed between living individuals an unlimited number of times, at any
point in time and at very high speed.

All of this led organic life into the era of a new and much more efficient method of
accumulating information, one that enabled living beings to interact with their environment and
work with energies on a totally new level, unthinkable for other forms of life.

The human being began to develop a new mental organ: the intellectual centre, a higher
form of consciousness capable of abstract thought, and of using repeat observation or
experimentation to discover universal causalities, laws and methods which would unlock a
whole new level of power when applied. This led to the emergence of science and technology.

And that is how we find ourselves where we are today. And it is this information accumulated
through the collective effort of countless people over the course of hundreds of thousands of
years, that is clearly our greatest treasure. Because if we simply took our genome and placed it
in the wild in the form of human infants, the best we could hope to get back would be apes with
a more agile psyche, able to adapt more quickly to their environment. Every achievement of the
previous millennia upon millennia would be lost. It would be like taking today’s most powerful
computer, wiping clean its memory (ROM, RAM and hard drive) and sending it back to even
such an enlightened place as Ancient Greece. Naturally, our supercomputer, previously fully
operational, would suddenly have about the same functional capacities as a wooden desk.

Thus, through the use of its tools and connections, human society developed completely
novel abilities and characteristics, things which the individual working alone could never have
achieved. This means that, based on our understanding of the vertical hierarchy of the
48
Universe, what we are seeing is the transition to a new stage in the organisation of existence,
complete with new laws and new potentials. We can also expect to see radical changes in
characteristics, comparable to those of, say, the transition from separate elementary particles to
the atoms of chemical elements. The enormous progress we have made in such a meagre time
span (on the evolutionary scale) is clear evidence of this.

And playing the key role at the core of this rapid breakthrough has been conscience itself; it
started everything, and everything continued because of it. There is a well-known fact among
deep spiritual disciplines that should be noted here: developing a conscience is the key to
developing higher consciousness. This is because the path of personal evolution must
recreate the evolution of the species, and the stages on this path can’t be skipped. Thus, in
order to attain higher consciousness and such mighty tools as abstract thinking, we must first
deal with conscience. This is precisely why, in all major spiritual doctrines, the path begins with
a code of behaviour to which students must strictly adhere, a list of yamas and niyamas (what to
do and what not to do) that are nothing other than a pure, developed conscience set down in
concrete laws. In essence, these rules tell you how to treat other people, your teacher, your
fellows in the monastery, laypeople, knowledge you receive, and so on. They tell you which
actions are good and which are bad. And only those who actually follow this code are permitted
to practice meditation, yoga, deep prayer, or any other practice at the heart of their doctrine.
This is not because the teachers of antiquity were miserly with their doctrines, but because they
knew that without a developed understanding of conscience, higher consciousness cannot be
unlocked, and if it is unlocked, it will be of little use.
We always get the same message from fairy tales, whose heroes are defined by their kind,
true, conscientious heart. It is this heart that gives the hero their strength, ultimately enabling
them to overcome any kind of adversity. On the other hand, you’ll notice that fairy tale villains
are often extraordinarily smart and powerful and have lots of advanced technology, which is
usually better than the hero’s. But without a true heart, all that knowledge and technology will do
no good for others, or even, ultimately, the wrong-doer themselves.
Don’t these stories hold a message for our awfully smart, terribly tech-obsessed civilisation,
which long ago convinced itself and the world around it that good and evil are an illusion, and
that conscience is an arbitrary, insignificant fantasy?

We have now established the pattern of the emergence of human society as the unification
of separate living entities into a system that possesses fundamentally new characteristics. We
have also established that for this to happen, we objectively needed a new mental organ, a new
strategy for behaviour and interrelationships – in plain terms, conscience. But before we move
on to a detailed examination of this phenomenon’s objective laws, let us examine a fundamental
neurophysiological conflict that heavily influences both the individual’s fate and the fate of
humanity as a whole, as well as being the biggest obstacle on the path to conscience.

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 The higher and lower emotional centres

Nature has built the behavioural strategies responsible for the interrelationships between
animals, as well as the mental organs that contain those strategies, over the course of hundreds
of millions of years and in innumerable species. At their core, these relationships are simple:
most animals live their lives alone, only coming into contact to reproduce, and even then,
usually only for as many minutes or hours as conception takes. This is why animals
overwhelmingly see one another as either enemy or prey. If you can’t eat it, then it’s a
competitor for your food, your territory, that member of the opposite sex you might be able to
mate with, and so on. The ability of some species to form herds or bond in stable pairs, or even
the rare phenomenon of symbiosis, make little difference to the overall picture, although such
species do form associated behavioural strategies.
The core goals animals face in the course of interaction naturally give rise to the primary
instruments used to address those goals: aggression and violence. These are needed to obtain
food, protect territory and fight for a mate. The only universal exception is in raising offspring –
the only time when all species swap aggression for care and attention.
Alongside these strategies, corresponding mental organs have also developed. Given that
we are all part of the same family tree, these neurophysiological formations are highly similar
between different species. Their structure and “programming” having been tested and refined
over a vast time span in a huge number of species and individual creatures. These structures
are relatively simple and reliable, and are not hugely adaptable.
Since emotion is nothing more than a product of the thinking and language of that part of the
primordial brain responsible for interrelationships, let us call it the “animal emotional centre”, or
“lower emotional centre”. “Higher” and “lower” here refer primarily to the placement of the
phenomenon in the hierarchy of evolution.

The core goals of the animal emotional centre are:

1. To obtain food, either through hunting or through competition with members of one’s own
species.
2. To claim territory for living space, subsistence and reproduction.
3. To compete with members of one’s own sex for the chance to reproduce.
4. To be dominant in the herd or pack in order to live, eat and reproduce successfully,
securing the best for oneself.
These goals are all achieved primarily through aggression and violence (to pursue its own
interests, the animal acts against the will and to the detriment of other animals). Females are
most often convinced to mate with the male, again, through violence (although there is another,
more “peaceful” strategy in this case).

Let us now look at how the goals of interrelationships have changed with the transition to
human society, and the things humans have had to learn to do:
1. Exchange accurate information in order to coordinate and execute collective operations.
2. Collaborate effectively, agreeing on the division of labour, tasks and roles.
3. Distribute the rewards of collective endeavours in a way that pleases the greatest number
of people and makes them appreciate the advantages of being part of a society, working
collectively, over being alone.
4. Try not to fight over women or men for the continuation of the species and try not to take
them from other people, because this will spark animosity and conflict between people and

50
make it harder to live and work collectively. The statement of this goal is mitigated by the word
“try”, since both women and men are a common limited resource that has to be distributed.
Unlike, say, food, which we can produce more of with more effort, no amount of effort will
increase the number of members of the opposite sex in a society. Thus, this goal can never be
100% achieved, so to speak. Nonetheless, human society is radically different to the herd or
pack on this point; while the herd gives the alpha animal priority (or even exclusive) access to
reproduction, society tries to give everyone the chance to reproduce.
5. Generally treat others in a way that elicits pleasant emotions and positive experiences,
and a corresponding desire to be together and, once again, engage in collective work.

To achieve these goals, humans have needed to develop the following characteristics:
Honesty, truthfulness, sincerity – in order to exchange information, assist other people in
making good decisions and collectively do the right thing.
Industriousness, amenability, awareness of one’s place, responsibility – in order to
work together effectively and be able to divide up responsibilities.
Fairness, integrity – in order to distribute the fruits of collective labour in a way that is of the
greatest use and benefit to everyone, fostering the right relationships and the right qualities in
people by doing so.
Self-restraint and adherence to the rules – concerning sex, i.e., a person’s sexual
behaviour should not pose a threat to those around them or interfere with the connections
between people.
Peacefulness, friendliness, kindness, care for others, empathy, a cheerful disposition
– in order to make the experience of cooperation as positive as possible for others and,
accordingly, to spark in them a wish to be together, exchange information and work collectively.

To achieve these goals, and to act as a vessel for the traits and associated interrelationship
strategies outlined above, a dedicated mental organ has developed within humans: the “human”
or “higher” emotional centre. The term “higher emotional centre” is one I have borrowed from
the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, which provide excellent insight and shed much light on the
concept.

Notice that not one of these goals is achieved through aggression or violence! On the
contrary, aggression and violence are actually the primary obstacle to achieving them. Similarly,
violence is incompatible with the characteristics described above. Thus, humans possess two
distinct emotional consciousnesses, each forming relationships, and the goals and
strategies of the higher and lower emotional centres, being diametrically opposed, are
mutually incompatible. Or, to put it another way, the two are in fundamental conflict.
The goal of the lower emotional centre is to benefit oneself at the expense of others, while
the goal of the higher emotional centre is to benefit others, often in contradiction to one’s own
immediate interests and wishes, in order to reap a much greater reward over the long term.

When we make this direct comparison, the benefit of the strategies, goals and values of the
higher emotional centre to humanity’s overall well-being is indisputably clear. Therefore, we are
entirely justified in using determiners like “higher” and “lower”.
But if the advantage of the higher emotional centre is indisputable, then why does the conflict
between the two still exist? A conflict, moreover, shrouded in ambiguity, which often sees the
lower emotional centre prevailing in practice?
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 One answer lies in the brain’s overall development pattern. Our brains have grown vastly
more complex over the course of evolution, but this progression has taken on a very particular
form. Essentially, the newer and more progressive sections of the brain have always developed
on top of older ones, like a kind of superstructure, usually functioning as an integrative centre.
Which is to say, the brain has never wiped the slate clean. Even today, we possess a fish brain
in the very centre of our brain which makes up its most basic structures, surrounded, in turn, by
a mammal brain in the middle of our brain, which is finally surrounded by a human brain, right
on the periphery of it all. The functions and sections of the brain are, unquestionably,
considerably confused and by no means linear or unambiguous, but the evolutionary process of
the brain, in simplified terms, is essentially as described above.
This young superstructure, which usually has more powerful and flexible strategies, as well
as more powerful computational capacities, gradually assimilates the previous sections of the
early brain, assuming control over the organism. The older sections of the brain, however, carry
on functioning as before! Except that now, they operate in a new mode, one that sees the
product of their activity transmitted to a higher level, where both the final evaluation and the
decision on which behaviour to choose will be made. At the same time, some decisions are
made by the early brain as before, without significant involvement from the new brain. In the
developed brain, this usually happens with subjects and situations in which the early brain is
naturally more competent or, at a minimum, has a useful strategy that does not conflict with the
strategies of the new brain. A tangible example of this in the human being is provided by the
basic bodily functions – things like breathing, the heartbeat, eye movement, the working of the
intestines, etc. The early sections of the brain also take charge in extreme circumstances, times
when the life of the organism is in imminent danger and the body needs to be immediately
rescued, even to the detriment of status or relationships. Here, science comes to our aid once
again; it tells us that the entire evolution of the brain, as well as biological evolution as a whole,
has always been characterised by a drive for physical survival, rather than, say, a drive to enact
God’s divine plan. Thus, it follows that when the organism’s life is under direct threat, the
strategies mobilised will be the ones capable of saving it, including those that compromise
higher values not directly involved in keeping the body alive. To illustrate, this is why we torture
people by destroying their bodies and causing them physical pain, rather than, say, showing
them ugly, tasteless pieces of art or math equations filled with glaring mistakes.
In times of “peace”, however, a stable balance is established between the different sections
of the brain, one in which the new sections have the edge, wielding power over the older ones
and free to assimilate and transform their work in the right way.

The human being presents us with the following complexity:

First, the higher emotional centre is a very recent development on the evolutionary time
scale, and this new brain configuration simply hasn’t had enough time to properly fine-tune itself
or establish a new, stable homeostasis free from internal conflicts or contradictions. In
programming terms, we are in a fairly crude beta phase, filled with glitches and bugs. Nature
requires much more time to develop a stable model for the assimilation of ancient instincts and
higher centres of consciousness using the tools of biological evolution – it simply can’t “keep up”
with the rapid pace of civilisation, whose growth is founded on the non-genetic transfer of
information.

Second, the higher emotional centre’s strategies do not complement or enhance the
strategies of the older animal emotional consciousness, but are placed in harsh and often

52
intractable opposition to them. The ideal solution, in other words, would be to eliminate the
lower emotional centre altogether. Many writers and directors, who tend to be more open, direct
and honest than, for example, modern philosophers, have explored this idea in depictions of
perfect aliens or future humans who are devoid of emotion, impartial, and capable of simply
getting the job done without wasting copious time and energy on pointless, and often harmful,
emotional experiences. At the same time, this perfection ultimately tends to be negatively
portrayed as something cold and alien; the film will end with the hero and heroine, having
escaped the soulless clutches of the perfect world, embracing in a passionate kiss as the sun
sets (or, alternatively, rises). As to why this is, we will investigate shortly. The key point here is
that the two emotional centres are irreconcilably opposed in many ways, and one of them, by
rights, should really have quit the scene altogether.

Now, to the question: why is that kiss against the sunset ultimately more important to us than
the perfect civilisation, with its rigorous, conflict-free order? The fact is that integrated,
progressive superstructures have only ever arisen in response to the demands of life as it
already exists (life does not develop towards imagined, non-existent ideals, but emerges from
the need to solve immediate problems), which is to say, in response to the demands of life as it
already exists and the consciousness it contains. This means that all higher forms of
consciousness are activated by impulses from the primordial brain, and having too few
of these impulses will cause the higher forms of consciousness, including the emotional
form, regardless of how amazing and progressive their strategies are, to be left frozen,
dormant and ultimately highly unproductive.
The brain has always been a cohesive unit, and healthy activation of the primordial brain,
responsible for hormone regulation and the body’s overall form, is the basis for a productive life.
And for both the primordial brain and its integral element, the lower emotional centre, healthy
activation includes the ability to express anger freely and effectively. Aggression is also
necessary for most forms of human endeavour, since it is our degree of aggression that
determines our activity level, sharpness of perception, intensity, perseverance and ability to
keep going in the face of hardships and obstacles. We need this for actions as simple as
digging a pit, and as complex as making a breakthrough in fundamental physics. In fact, the
majority of active, vibrant, productive people – the kind of people capable of doing remarkable
things – generally possess a remarkable ability to express their aggression, their passion, with
total freedom. Or, to put it another way, they have managed to establish a friendship, or at least
a cordial agreement, between their higher and lower emotional centres.
Of course, not all active, productive people benefit society; some of them do harm, its
severity in direct proportion to the success of their activities. Needless to say, this friendship
pact must be made in line with conscience, and in the interests of society.
So, in order to live a full, active, productive life, we have to keep our lower emotional centre
healthy, happy and active. This means also having the ability to express anger freely and
effectively, “freely” here primarily meaning without being repressed by the impulses of our own
higher consciousness. It is normal and natural for aggression to meet external resistance; the
hare flees to resist being eaten, the male goats butt horns to resist giving up the female, etc.
The real problem starts when we ourselves start repressing our own aggressive impulses and
activity.

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 Is it an easy thing to live wild and free in a system, when the foundations of its prosperity are
diametrically opposed and based on the regulations of conscience? Of course not. Indeed,
without a skilful method and some wise decision-making, it can’t be done.

Ultimately, in a society where large amounts of wealth are accumulated through collective
effort, the temptation to seize that wealth using cunning or violence, for one’s own ends and
enjoyment, is very great. It is the lure of appropriating solely for oneself that which has been
produced collectively, and which should, by rights, belong to the whole of society, or at least a
large part of it. This temptation naturally rears its head in hard times, such as, for example, if
you have access to the collective food stores during a famine, and everyone receives the same
meagre ration from these stores, and this ration is objectively too little for you. In this situation,
the self-preservation instinct kicks in. But this temptation is also present in comfortable,
prosperous times – the desire to appropriate the fruits of collective labour and collaboratively
accumulated information to acquire unfair power and wealth and satisfy one’s thirst for
domination, profit and pleasure. After all, according to the lower emotional centre’s strategy, if
you’re well-fed, glossy-haired, in great shape and the sun is beaming down on your front lawn,
you don’t just sit around doing nothing – you attack your neighbour, capture someone else’s
territory, steal someone else’s food and take someone else’s mate. These things will make you
happy and will be useful in the future. In this, nature mirrors the cosmos; large astronomical
objects, because of their mass, swallow the matter around them and become even larger, while
objects of lesser mass are eventually pulled in and swallowed. The fat get fatter, while the thin
get thinner.
In our society, we often know these deft, glossy individuals as successful, enterprising
business people and politicians. And as long as you don’t go to prison or publicly “lose face”,
then you’re free to claw your way to the top by any means necessary. And how could you go to
prison, anyway, when the laws are written and enforced by your stakeholder business partners?
As for losing face, well, that can quickly be remedied with a little Photoshop – thanks to the
almost 100% virtual nature of the modern information environment, no one but an unlucky few
have ever seen your real face.
And so, wherever significant wealth is created through collective effort, the strong temptation
to appropriate it for personal gain will be created in parallel. And we can’t argue with the fact
that doing so is beneficial, fun and opens up undreamt-of vistas for the genitalia.
And if the sensible rationale during “peacetime” is to “exercise restraint, because in a
successful, prosperous society, you and your children will be prosperous and successful too,
and maybe it’ll take a while, but when you get there, it’ll be with a clean conscience, surrounded
by friends, and for the long term” – and under an equitable state, that kind of restraint could
certainly be asked of deft, glossy individuals – then in hard times, when a person might actually
be required to sacrifice themselves for the common good, the sensible biological rationale no
longer works. In that situation, the only thing that can keep us on the side of higher emotional
consciousness is love, which we will discuss in the final chapter.

And so, we have a real problem, a genuine conflict which we cannot currently resolve fully,
thoroughly and definitively. In short, the rules and interests of society contradict our primordial
animal instincts, which, although we almost never actually need them to prosper in the modern
environment, are very deeply and firmly engrained within us.

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 The problem is complex, but not unsolvable. And while we may not currently be able to solve
it 100%, we do have some solid solutions available, and we have actually had them for a long
time already.

The first solution is to channel natural aggression and violent impulses into socially beneficial
activities. As we have seen, much of what benefits society requires aggressive energy and
violent behaviour, but rather than being directed at other people, it is here directed towards an
inanimate object, process, task, etc. The lower emotional centre, which is simply a neurological
automaton at the end of the day, doesn’t really mind what it directs its anger towards. Because
of this, it can be “convinced” to redirect its forceful intensity towards something inanimate,
towards conquering new knowledge, defeating technical, societal, biological or environmental
problems, or dominating in terms of positive, socially-beneficial successes or good acts
completed.
For this kind of qualitative transformation, of course, you need a clear boundary between
right and wrong, as well as a clear understanding of what is and isn’t allowed. And for that, you
need good upbringing, because it is in the home and during childhood that the foundations must
be laid for the understanding of good and bad, fairness, and the subject of our exploration –
conscience. But to do that, parents themselves need to understand these concepts and be able
to demonstrate them through their actions and behaviour. They must be able to inspire trust and
appreciation in their child through the unconditional kindness they manifest towards them, as
well as inspiring respect through their own lives and their deeds. For that, a person’s parents
and family must be a rock-solid foundation, never in doubt.
Later, of course, the knowledge, skills and experience of this period must be maintained and
furthered at school, as part of the education process. As with the home, the school must be a
rock-solid foundation, a place that the child will have a purely positive relationship with.

But here, we find a serious problem. Speak to any psychologist from a “civilised” Western
European nation, and they will tell you that most mental issues are the result of psychological
trauma suffered in childhood, usually within the home, i.e., inflicted by parents, and caused not
just by all kinds of violence, but also by coldness, indifference, rejection, contempt, etc.
Speak to some schoolchildren – how often do you hear respect and appreciation for teachers
and the education system as a whole? What you’ll actually hear is unprintable for reasons of
propriety.
What, then, can we expect from a young person growing up in that environment when they
finally gain their independence? How could we not expect them to smash their family ties, run
away and join a gang, fry their brain with drugs and spend their time playing video games, or at
best, getting heavily into hardcore music and experimenting with all sorts of lifestyles?

But the question is, could things be different? By all accounts, yes. I once went on a retreat
given by a famous Tibetan meditation teacher, and he told us the following story from his
practice: in his tradition, as in almost all Buddhist traditions, they had a practice of developing
compassion towards all people, and all living beings generally. This practice taught that:
“because all living beings have been reborn innumerable times across the immense time span
of samsara’s existence, all living beings were, at some point in a past life, your parents. So
imagine the people around you, the whole world around you, as your mother and father”. Our
teacher remarked that followers of the practice in Tibet at that time usually found that it opened
their hearts and filled them with unconditional love. When he began to teach this practice in

55
Europe, however, he was surprised to observe that instead of love and peace, people became
filled with anxiety; their faces would flush red or glisten with sweat, their breathing would
quicken, their knuckles would tighten and the exercise would produce entirely the opposite
overall effect. When he’d had enough, he asked one of his European students, “why is this
happening?” The reply he received was: “You know, dear Rinpoche, imagining everything
around you as your parents isn’t exactly the most pleasant thought. Here in Europe, parents are
often the source of a person’s problems, and often, they can even be their biggest enemies”.
The teacher was stunned, but once he understood the cause, he gave up teaching that form of
the practice in Europe...
While travelling through Asia, India, the Muslim world and Africa, speaking to people along
the way, I was repeatedly stunned by how much their family relations differ from ours, at how
full of kindness and devotion they are. Most of the people I met spoke about their parents with
genuine love and appreciation, and about their teachers with genuine respect. Naturally,
teenage rebellion – the period when a young man or woman sticks their middle finger up at their
family history, their childhood, their school life in an attempt to salvage the remnants of their
mind and soul – is practically unheard of in these so-called “backwards” countries.

How can good, solid values be passed on under such conditions? Can we solve the problem
through conscience without healthy family, upbringing and educational structures? Of course
not.
We should also keep in mind that the family and school are parts of the state, i.e. a larger
system that sets the ethical tone and dictates both the conditions for existence and the rules of
the game. Can we have healthy family and school structures within a state where the greatest
power, fame and fortune often goes to sly, unscrupulous, arrogant, evil people? The answer is
obvious...

One very important, challenging way to transform instinctual aggression is to turn it into
righteous anger. Righteous anger is aggression directed towards a person, group or
phenomenon that is causing significant harm or disruption to the system, acting against
conscience and, in doing so, unfairly or dishonestly hurting a section of society or individual
people who have done nothing to deserve such treatment. Righteous anger is like the immune
response of an organism; it restores order by clearing out what is harmful or unnecessary. The
capacity for righteous anger is an essential characteristic for both a healthy individual and a
healthy society. Because we do not yet live in an ideal state of perfect camaraderie, harmony
and security, we are obliged to defend our lives and our well-being, our values and our
homeland, our relationships and our love.

But here we have another significant problem. In essence, legitimate righteous anger is
frequently mimicked, then used as a cover for a person’s instinctive desire to display
aggression, commit acts of violence, dictate their own terms, occupy a special position with
special privileges and engage in domination. In this situation, the person’s false righteous anger
is nothing more than a way for them to launch their own attack, using a desire for equality, self-
protection or the restoration of their rights as an excuse. For this to work, their target must first
be accused of something or have some fault found with them.
And this is where things get complicated – this tactic has been used since time immemorial
and can be tough to detect. In modern society, in the post-truth era, in the age of “alternative

56
facts”, it is even tougher. In the chapter on “right strategies”, we will identify several tricks for
distinguishing genuine righteous anger from righteous anger used as a cover for manipulation.
The next way to reconcile the desires of the lower emotional centre with conscience is
through sublimation. Alongside the uniquely important activities that contribute directly to the
survival of the species, such as agriculture, resource extraction, medicine, and science – all
fields in which we can put our force and aggression to work – there are many activities not
directly connected to survival, but which are indirectly valuable or, at least, in no way harmful to
society. Examples of such activities are sport, theatre and art. We can pour all our natural
aggression into climbing an unscalable cliff, all our insane courage into an extreme cycling trip,
we can do serious battle against each other, joyfully dominate others and be victorious in all
kinds of games. And it’s obviously far better to become the soloist in a death metal band and
sing about bloodied corpses and axes chopping off heads than to go around chopping off heads
in real life.

If the first two methods prove ineffective and the natural desires are intense, we can try to
adopt a healthy, conscious compromise between conscience and the animal instincts. Not all of
us are meant to be righteous and holy – most of us, to achieve a healthy internal equilibrium,
need to sometimes do genuinely bad things, which is to say, we may objectively be lacking the
sufficient internal, and indeed external, resources to only do what is good and right. And there
are two ways that this can be addressed. First, we can ignore or fail to see the reality of the
situation, then struggle intensely to do something we’re incapable of doing while driving the
demons into the depths of our subconscious. Second, we can accept the reality of the situation,
face it head-on and consciously search for a more sustainable, less harmful way to resolve it. In
the first case, the demons are practically guaranteed to break out of their dungeons sooner or
later, and when they do, it will usually be at the least opportune moment and in the worst and
most uncontrollable way. This is common knowledge in contemporary psychology; pushing
issues or conflicts down to the subconscious and leaving them unaddressed is a sure path to
either breaking yourself, by developing some kind of chronic disease, for example, or causing
misery for those around you.
If you can be courageous and honest enough with yourself (and, on occasion, with others) to
say “yes, I actually do want this”, without twisting the situation, lying or trying to sugar-coat
things, that action will open up the possibility for dialogue, reflection, searching and growth, and
will ultimately help you resolve the problem in the best possible way.

This approach is far too rarely seen! Our painfully coddled society, which tries to eliminate
even the slightest possibility of certain unpleasant or disruptive natural phenomena at any cost,
ultimately creates the conditions for those phenomena to arise in a much worse, more
destructive form than before.
This is how the push to eliminate infant mortality during childbirth led to the European
practice of medically assisted births, in which the mother, high on narcotics and stimulants and
laid out listlessly in an unnatural birthing position, would have the baby pulled out of her with
forceps and a scalpel. Then, instead of its mother’s embrace, the child would be put straight into
an incubator as a precaution. We did manage to eliminate the final one percent of deaths during
childbirth this way, but at a cost: a lot of mothers do not form a proper emotional bond with their
children, while a lot of children suffer serious mental trauma or do not receive proper initiation at
the time of birth, which results in a sluggish, listless psyche.

57
 The desire to fully shield children from any conceivable ill or danger is one that has reached
paranoid extremes, and its end result is often that, sooner or later, a child finds themselves right
in the thick of those ills and dangers without the slightest ability to handle the situation, and
often, without even the capacity to clearly understand what’s happening to them.

The fight against discrimination, in a similar extreme, has deprived us of our ability to say
“sorry, pal, but you aren’t capable of this, or you’re not all right, so you’re better off doing
something else”. This is causing such significant loss of the abilities and qualities needed for a
productive life, there will soon be cause for discrimination against the better part of humanity.
And discrimination can go all the way down to a piece of biomass, all stuck with tubes and
electrodes, only being entitled to over-aged technical specifications.

One of the best ways to resolve this kind of complex, multi-faceted issue is through
conscious, healthy compromise. Once we have openly acknowledged that we have a problem,
and that we cannot solve it adequately or fully at present, we then, rather than searching for the
ideal solution, try to find the best solution for the given circumstances, with the intention to
gradually advance the issue, to the best of our abilities, towards a full future resolution. First, in
this scenario, we honestly acknowledge the real state of affairs, which means we have a more
accurate understanding of what’s happening and can keep an eye on it all. This gives us the
chance to find the best possible solution. Second, we inform society about the real state of
affairs, which means society will be alert and vigilant towards the problem and will also search
for a solution. And on top of all this, the system will be in optimal equilibrium, i.e., it will be in its
healthiest and most efficient possible state, which also means that problems will be resolved
optimally within it.
With this approach, we can avoid chasing small-picture wins at the expense of big-picture
losses, a mistake which is very widespread in our society.

And finally, of course, one space that is wide open for unbridled instinctual expression: sex.
Obviously, these instincts should be expressed with the consent and enjoyment of one’s
partner, but when aggression and domination are wanted, they are not violence. Whatever goes
on between two (or three, or however many you like) consenting adults is nobody’s business as
long as it doesn’t cause objective harm to those around them, a metric which is easy to
distinguish from moral prejudice. For examples of this approach, I will leave you to rely on your
own imagination...

It is important to realise that for transformation, sublimation or healthy compromise to work,

the primordial, animal part of the psyche must be healthy. A healthy lower emotional centre is
the only kind that can be properly understood and sensibly “negotiated” with. If our animal
emotional sphere is instead wounded by family or outside violence or a cold, callous
environment, if it has not gone through the proper initiations and is a tangle of traumas, fissures,
blockages and dead zones, then it is hard to expect any constructive dialogue from that part of
our psyche. In that situation, unfortunately all too common in the “civilised” world, all we will get
is hysteria, depression, painful attachment and obsessive need, and in venting our trauma,
either commit violence ourselves or experience violence at the hands of others. Obviously, this
will not lead to any kind of constructive cooperation, including with ourselves.
These are definitely tough issues to resolve in our world and our families, with their complex
and frequently horrific past histories and the increasingly unnatural, stressful nature of modern

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life. But we can at least acknowledge these realities, explore them openly, establish our
intention to solve our problems and start actually doing something. After all, our own
consciousness and actions are actually the only thing imposing this life on us. Thus, if we truly
consider ourselves Homo Sapiens, this life is within our power to change.
The reality, however, is that we are increasingly guided by aperspectival madness,
pronouncing trauma and illness to be a person’s core identity or even an achievement, and
instead of consulting with a competent doctor, we parade this trauma in front of an audience or
hang it in a gallery, to be rewarded with money and praise. And the worst part is that we idolise
illness, telling our children: “here’s a good role model for you!!” What kind of future are we
building this way? This is a vital question for anyone who considers themselves not only
rational, but also responsible.
In the interests of fairness, it should also be said that creating art can be a good way to
identify and address your traumas and afflictions, as well as a way to share your experience
and warn other people. Also, many such artworks contain important social criticism of the
society, using these destructive states for pointing out the problems that are much greater than
just the personal. So it can have positive social effect as well. Nonetheless, it still needs to be
acknowledged that illness is a problem, and the primary goal should be to treat it, not place it on
a pedestal.

To conclude this chapter, we need to examine a very nasty, dangerous form of manipulation
seen frequently both throughout history and today. At the core of this type of manipulation is the
previously outlined conflict between the lower and higher emotional centres, which the lower
emotional centre perceives as an oppressive restriction of its freedom of action. In any society,
there will be many people whose lower emotional centre is the more developed of the two – by
my estimate, at least 50% of the population. For these people, the rules of society are largely
unpleasant restrictions that cause varying degrees of tension within the individual.
Consequently, if it wasn’t for the social institutions that preserve order and public opinion,
people would gladly break free of some of those restrictions. And if there is a political power,
stance or doctrine that makes it possible to lift those restrictions, people will gladly follow it.
Thus, in practically every society, you will find lots of people prepared to rally behind a societal
force that supports their lower emotional centre and gives them “official” freedom of action.
Given that the strategies and values of the lower emotional centre are the very same as the
strategies and values of egocentrism, we could say that there will always be plenty of people
who will rally behind a force that supports their egocentric drive. This phenomenon manifests
most clearly when a power or doctrine resonates with the lower emotional centre of a large
group of people, all linked by some common feature that lets them identify as a distinct and
separate community within society. Or, otherwise phrased, a power that supports group
egocentrism. The most striking example of this phenomenon is fascism in its various
expressions.

What crucially makes this form of manipulation so dangerous is the fact that once a person
has unleashed their primordial aggressive instincts, they will often experience an
unprecedented surge of strength, desire and capacity to act. Naturally, this is very appealing for
many people – particularly when it comes along with a sense of self-assured righteousness and,
frequently, a sense of existential meaning and belonging. This is how fascist (and similar)
movements and ideologies acquire a powerful, literally magical hold over the subconscious
minds of many.

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 All aggressive group egocentrism of this kind will inevitably contain the following key
elements:

1. A characteristic or value will be claimed that links a significantly large group of people
together and makes that group exclusive, called the in-group in sociological terms. This
exclusivity creates the potential for this group of people to oppose some other group not
possessing the feature, and against whom future acts of violence will be committed. Anything
will do as an exclusive feature: race, nationality, home territory, particulars of formation, etc.
What matters is that the feature can be used to construct a theory that will justify a special
entitlement by the in-group to use violence against another significantly large group of people
who do not possess that particular feature. In harsher cases, the “victim” or out-group cannot,
under any circumstances, adopt the feature that bestows these exclusive rights and permits
entry into the in-group or “aggressor” group.

What comes into play at this point is group behaviour, in which the powerful instincts of the
crowd (the herd) are activated and every unit of the group senses the protection, support and
solidarity of its comrades. The individual person, meanwhile, immersed in the collective flow,
feels power on the one hand, and on the other, a weakened sense of personal responsibility for
events. Because from then on, from the moment the group becomes strong enough, you and
everyone else will simply be carried along on the general wave of events as it gathers
momentum. The carnage will keep intensifying, engaging your mind or your heart will get harder
and harder, and after a certain point, stepping out of that flow will become practically
impossible. This is what sociologists refer to as groupthink.

2. The next essential element is, accordingly, a special theory or ideology that justifies the
right to violence. Why is a theory necessary? First and foremost, because even when a
person’s higher centres are extremely underdeveloped, they still are sufficiently capable of
controlling the lower centres to be able to largely block them. Therefore, the higher centres must
first be pacified, meaning they must be fed whatever information and fabricated world view will
make them shut up and stay out of the primordial brain’s way. If they can be persuaded to join
the lower emotional centre’s side and team up to execute aggressive strategies, all the better. A
false declaration of our vast superiority over our victims, which lets us claim that our domination
is going to benefit the world, works well for this. This, in fact, is a claim of our usefulness to
society, which is of interest to the higher centres of consciousness. False righteous anger also
works, as does falsely evoking the fight for equality to justify one’s aggression. This kind of
trickery is often exceptionally sophisticated and extremely difficult to spot. For example, the
aggressor group will often evoke some kind of genuine injustice or harm which has been
inflicted on it at some point in the past. But dig under the surface, and it will be revealed either
that the injustice or harm has been hugely exaggerated and taken out of its historical context, or
that the original events have been heavily distorted and incorrectly interpreted. Alternatively, the
injustice and harm suffered by the aggressor group may pale in comparison to the violence that
group is planning to commit, i.e., the story is just a smokescreen for unleashing much greater
aggression and harm. Another option is that the actions of individuals belonging to the victim
group are blamed on the entire group of people who share their common features, and this is
then declared as cause to discriminate against the whole group. Other such tricks are described
in the chapter dedicated to manipulation.
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 A special theory is also essential for debating opponents and those who show resistance
since, ideally, you will start by defeating your enemy intellectually, proving your moral right to
aggression, and only then move on to massacring them with the blessing of “the people”, state
or god. Obviously, this kind of debate tends to be an explicit display of demagoguery.

3. Clearly, a theory which justifies violence cannot be taken as true, reliable knowledge. This
means that it must be largely fabricated. This fabrication relies on false or heavily distorted
facts, historical ones in particular. Thus, the next essential component of this kind of
manipulation is historical revisionism. Without heavy repression, distortion and substitution of
the actual facts of history, legitimising unjust acts of aggression against a large group of people
is a serious challenge. Because of this, most of the time, the aggressor group will need to
present society with their own version of history – a version full of “new” information. A
particularly brazen aggressor group may try to do the same thing with science, twisting and
reworking scientific facts. A society’s conscience, its accepted safeguard of justice, has to
depend on reliable evidence, primarily in the form of facts: historical, economic, scientific, etc.
This is why a group of people seized by aggressive group egocentrism has to try and distort the
objective basis of social conscience.

By putting all of this information together, we can build a psychological portrait of a person
swept up in this kind of aggressive group egocentrism. First and foremost, their lower emotional
centre is ecstatic, unbridled, self-satisfied and self-assured. They feel a sense of entitlement to
violence, power and supremacy. Beyond that, we discover a stupefied higher intellectual centre,
essentially lacking any clear awareness of reality and focused on fabricated ideas, information
and theories. Such an intellect is, of course, incapable of honest inquiry, investigation or
dialogue. With the psyche in this configuration, the intellectual centre is guaranteed to be put to
work in service of the aggressive instincts, which will be overtly dominant in decision-making
and actions. Essentially, the higher psychic functions will serve and justify, in their own
language, the violent strategies of the primordial brain. You can frequently observe these
justifying theories and facts morphing in real time, an effort to avoid triggering doubts and
impulses that might block the expression of aggression. And almost entirely blocked, of course,
will be the higher emotional centre, with its empathy, compassion, openness, honesty and other
qualities that categorically bring people together, as well as, incidentally, facilitating open-
minded thinking.

It is important to note that the possibility of removing social restrictions and giving oneself
over to aggressive group egocentrism is so enticing, people swept up in it will willingly
cooperate with political and economic powers to attain it, even if those powers act against their
other interests. Crucially, these political powers will “officially” give them the exclusive right to
domination and violence. Naturally, this will be followed by great destruction. History confirms
this pattern, providing many painful examples.

Thus, modern humanity needs to understand clearly that when these manipulative tricks are
used, it can provoke the rise of aggressive group egocentrism in almost any society, any
country. The threat of the rise of new varieties of fascism is much more real than it may seem,
because it is based on an objective neurophysiological phenomenon that occurs to a greater or
lesser degree within each of us.

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 And so, as we tackle the issues of collective existence and the acquisition of conscience, we
must be alert to the conflict that exists between the lower and higher emotional centres, as well
as to its consequences. We must search for a way to ease tensions and turn problems into
opportunities.

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 The objective laws of conscience

As we have established, the fundamental tendency of the Universe is towards the sequential
combining of simple structures into more complex ones, with completely new, previously non-
existent characteristics and capacities emerging within these new structures. One combination
that conforms to this pattern is the formation of society from individual people. Due to our
particularly advanced and adaptive nervous system, it was specifically humans that made this
breakthrough, the most important aspect of which was the shift from the genetic accumulation of
information to the neuronal. It was this change to a much faster and more efficient method of
accumulating information that became the source of our staggering power in comparison to
other biological life forms. Thus, it is unsurprising that the entire history of humanity has
followed a pattern of people uniting into ever-larger structures with ever greater levels of
integration and complex interaction – or, in other terms, a pattern of progressively developing
social relations.

The transition from herd to society required new interrelationship mechanisms, which were
in direct conflict with the older, animal mechanisms in a range of key areas. This conflict can be
summed up as: where animals are either foe or prey to one another, humans are friends and
partners. To execute this new type of behaviour, a new neurophysiological formation developed
– a new mental organ whose interrelationship strategies were radically different from animal
strategies. We call this organ conscience.

Conscience arose for a concrete reason, has a concrete purpose, and thus, is governed by
concrete laws. This means laws that are not an arbitrary fabrication or the product of random
fluctuation, but stem from meaningful external circumstances and are the result and
continuation of other, more fundamental laws.

To avoid getting bogged down in the world of the subjective, internal and imaginary, of which
different people may have very different understandings, we have agreed, for our purposes
here, to reduce our model of human society to a dynamic system that interacts with the external
world by exchanging energy and information. For the purposes of this attempt to clarify the
concept of relationships, we can start by focusing on just a couple of key parameters within this
system.

One of the primary parameters of our system, then, is its efficiency – or viability, in biological
terms.

The system’s efficiency is determined by its ability to take up space and accumulate energy
while maintaining its integrity, stability and internal equilibrium, as well as by its potential to
adapt to changing external circumstances. Whether all this can be effectively achieved depends
heavily on the capacity for further evolution; this is the core process at work in the Universe and
the force that determines its structure and growth. And as with anything, if you want to be
successful, you have to be on trend.

For the purposes of our examination of human interrelationships, we will focus solely on the
three capacities of the societal system that matter most for its efficiency:

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 1. The capacity to gather collective resources

2. The capacity to receive and gather information

3. The capacity to be an integral, integrated structure

The system’s resources are those things that allow it to interact with the external world. The
outcomes of those interactions are what determine the current state and future path of the
system. Thus, this capacity is the most important of the three. The two other capacities facilitate
the gathering of resources – in effect, different forms of energy. These resources are our
“domestic affair”, so to speak, since the external world is unconcerned with how we collect our
energy, so long as that energy exists and allows us to be.

In exploring the model of human interrelationships that will best help the system develop
these capacities, we will also arrive at the objective laws of conscience.

As we begin our examination, it is essential to remember that society is composed of

individual people, each of whom is a whole and independent life and consciousness, and that
society, as an evolutionary choice, historically arose to give those individual people a better
chance at survival. Thus, our basic individual values are the glue that binds us into a single,
unified whole. And this, in terms of the formation mechanisms of complex systems, is nothing
new. The atoms of chemical elements, for example, form into the molecules of chemical
substances through electrical “interrelationships” between atoms and the forces of electrostatic
attraction that affect them; in other words, these molecules are a product of their constituent
atoms and elementary particles manifesting their natural tendencies and “desires”. The same is
true of society. But in both the molecule and the society, these basic values and desires are
expressed in a new way, different to that of an atom or a living creature that exists in a free,
solitary state.

Thus, turning to the question of collective resource accumulation, we will remember that this
need arose for humanity due to the necessity of collective labour, which revealed itself to be
much more efficient than each individual trying to meet all of their needs alone. Collective labour
includes both the simultaneous application of roughly equal effort (“let’s drag the heavy rock
together”) and the division of labour, not just in terms of activity (“you grow the linen and I’ll sew
the clothing from it”) but also in terms of time (“I’ll make sure the fire stays lit during the day, and
you watch it at night”). Collective labour proved to be drastically more efficient, and its three
basic forms are still in use today, at the core of all the most advanced modern production
technologies.

But the output of collective labour is, unavoidably, collective. And once this output – the
actual goal of all that labour – has been produced, it must be distributed between all
contributors in a way that is of maximum benefit to each and creates a premise on which to
further continue and develop collective labour in the most efficient way possible.
Thus, the first law of conscience states: the output of collective labour must be shared
equally between the people who have produced it, “equally” meaning in accordance with
the amount and significance of the labour contributed.

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 People do not have identical abilities, nor do they have an identical desire to work. The best
way to deal with this inescapable reality is to promote those who are ultimately most useful to
society. This is because individual interests will inevitably coexist with the interests of the
society as a whole, as a system – interests which, if things are as they should be, will align as
closely as possible with the individual goals and values of the people that comprise it. This is to
say that if we pay appropriate concern to society’s common interests, in a good society, each
individual will ultimately reap the greatest possible benefit. As such, the laws of a society should
rightly promote those who make a larger contribution to its prosperity and development.
On this point, it is important to note that the rules of societal ownership and fair distribution
apply to all common resources. This includes the acquisition of knowledge, which is also
performed collectively – like all of humanity’s cultural assets, from language to quantum
physics, it is the product of the collective efforts of hundreds of billions of people over tens of
thousands of years (in fact, out of all forms of labour, the acquisition of knowledge and
accumulation of useful information may require the most cooperation, given that it is completely
unachievable alone). “Common resources” also includes those natural resources that have
fallen into our laps, so to speak, in their untouched form (not counting the labour involved in
acquiring them), without any effort on our part. Obviously, as with cultural assets, fairness
dictates that natural resources which have been created over thousands of years should belong
to all members of a society. This applies to all resources created by people not currently living,
as well as those not created by people at all, but which fall at our disposal in one way or
another. When distributing non-created resources, it also makes sense to consider the
usefulness of a certain individual or group of people – or, to put it another way, to consider how
much benefit this person or group will bring to society as a whole with those resources at their
disposal.

It is also important to note that society is made up of various formations of different sizes
which are, to a significant degree, independent entities, despite still being very much a part of
the overall system that is humanity. Family, race, city, state and nation are all such formations.
And just like the individual person, these formations all possess private assets, i.e., resources
which are at their unique disposal. At the same time, they exist within certain interrelationships,
including the interrelationships of collective labour. Naturally, the laws of fairness apply both to
the distribution of common resources and the protection of the private assets of individual
formations, while the interrelationships between formations should be guided by the laws of
conscience.

However, we digress. So, in order to fairly distribute both the output of collective labour and
our common resources, it is necessary to evaluate the size and value of the contribution made
by a person or group. People have both different abilities and differing desires to work, which
means that one person’s contribution will not be equivalent to another’s. By promoting those
who are most useful, we can advance the societal system in the best and most beneficial way,
including for those who did not or could not contribute well.

When the division of labour and relations of production develop to a high level of complexity,
it will become very challenging to carry out this evaluation and fairly distribute resources
between people. It will require an equally developed system for keeping track of work
performed. While tackling these challenges, humanity realised the need to create a universal
measure of the quantity and usefulness of work performed. And so, money was born. As the

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economy grew and the social-relations of production became more complex, money evolved
into a distinct and very complicated phenomenon. In modern society, it has become virtually the
only means of accessing any kind of resource, including those essential for life, and is accepted
as equivalent to practically anything of value a person or group can possess.

And yet, the distribution of the output of collective labour in our society is far from equal.

Take the fact that our society has always been starkly divided into rich and poor, and that
this divide, rather than shrinking, is actually growing. The richest individuals on Earth control
wealth measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, while the wealth of the people belonging to
the poorest portion of humanity (roughly half of the planet) can be measured in a few tens of
thousands. Unsurprisingly, the income disparity is similar. This means that when we distribute
the output of our collective labour and our common resources, one group is receiving 10 million
times more than the other!

And it is fully apt to describe this state of affairs in terms of distribution of collective output,
because every sphere of modern production is now so complex, so intertwined with the rest of
human activity that it cannot be carried out start to finish by any one person or group alone.
Take the example of modern agriculture, which uses machines and chemicals produced by
many different branches of industry, from mining to microprocessor manufacturing, not to
mention drawing on the entirety of science and education, scientific knowledge and the
education system. The activities of modern humanity are so heavily interconnected that
whenever you buy an item, you are essentially purchasing the output of the collective labour of
humanity itself. And yet, in our society, this output is distributed at a ratio of 10 million to one!
How can that be fair?
Imagine, say, the creative engineer who invents new products and technologies, or the
factory manager who performs essential integrative and administrative functions, and compare
them to a freight handler; clearly, the value of the engineer and manager’s contributions to
production, as well as the level of talent, education and responsibility required for their positions,
are much higher than that of the freight handler – but not 10 million times higher!

On top of that, the people who fall into the lower portion of society are often those directly
involved in the extraction of essential natural resources and raw materials, working in
dangerous conditions that put their health and their lives at risk, as well as women who cannot
work full-time because they have to raise children – children who then grow up to become
society’s main source of labour, or who care for the elderly that have spent their whole lives
working for society. The richest portion, meanwhile, is often comprised of people who profit by
forcibly seizing other people’s businesses, embezzling from the state budget or plundering
entire industries or even countries, or who make their “economic miracle” happen by destroying
the environment, and thus, harming society outright.

How has our society ended up with such a bias in the distribution of our common output,
when it blatantly cannot be justified by the value of the work completed?

The key that opens the door to this inequality is the many types of manipulation that become
possible in the complex, highly developed system of modern industrial and economic relations.
These manipulations primarily involve either the self-serving use of one’s privileged position in
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the system to gain an exclusive grip on the worlds of power and business (and the
corresponding ability to be the one who dictates the terms and reaps the profit), or the warped
misuse of elements of the system for one’s own benefit. A sensible society has to study such
manipulations carefully so that it can uncover them and cut them off in time. For a dedicated
study on the types of manipulation that stem from the monetary system of labour evaluation, I
recommend Karl Marx’s seminal work, Capital.

And finally, of course, manipulation is flourishing in the duplicitous, unaccountable modern

information environment, where it steals our capacity to tell truth from fiction (reaching its apex
with DeepFakes, where it is no longer possible to know if a video of a person is real or not), as
well as throughout a large swathe of modern philosophy and our declining education systems,
where it steals our ability to think critically, and even our capacity for thought itself.

We will discuss manipulations in more detail in the chapter dedicated to the topic. We can
now note that much, or even most, of the common resources and products of labour in our
society are, sadly, unfairly distributed, i.e., in a way that harms the overall system, and thus, the
vast majority of people. The same thing happens in families; according to the law, all gains are
shared equally within the family unit, which means that someone who manages to enter into a
relationship with a working partner but who is not really working themselves can profit
dishonestly. It also happens in governments; with a key cabinet position and access to the state
levers of power, you can personally appropriate resources that are rightfully intended for
millions of people. Similarly, it happens in industry; once you’ve gained monopolistic control
over a technology that all of humanity has worked to create and everybody needs, you can
make most of the planet fall at your feet for having monopolistic control over something that
doesn’t rightfully belong to you.

A good way to make sense of these situations is to recall the history of the emergence of the
societal system and its tools, and remind ourselves of their foundational, evolutionary purpose.
We can think back on how they emerged, and from that, identify which objective laws they must
obey.

The second aspect to successful collective resource accumulation, and an absolutely

essential element, is the protection of private property and anything else that belongs to a
person or group on an individual basis. Once the product of our collective labour and common
resources has been distributed, it comes under private ownership. From that point on, it belongs
to that specific individual or group, and assuming it has been fairly gotten, it must be kept safe
from any infringement on the part of other members of society. If this rule is broken, key aspects
of societal life will no longer work to the benefit of individual people and our system will suffer.

Here, once again, we uncover some big problems that will require honest searching and
good decision-making to fix. For instance, we all have to pay for essential items and services,
meaning we can only obtain them in exchange for money – the most basic form of private
property in the modern world. The cost or procurement method of these things, often
established through manipulation, is one of the ways a small group of people enriches itself at
the expense of others; out of all that wealth, the product of so much intensive labour, the greater
part of humanity sees barely enough to meet its basic needs. This is how a person ends up
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having to spend everything they’ve earned just to stay alive another day. At that point, what
difference is there between that person and a wild animal in the forest, both spending all their
energy on basic survival? What is the benefit of living in society for that person? Is this not a
subtle form of theft? Think about how a large percentage of people in the civilised world either
cannot purchase a home or must take on a crippling mortgage to do so, tying themselves into
decades of rigid repayments at an unfavourable rate. Meanwhile, even a field mouse or a bug
can easily find itself a home in a matter of hours, as soon as the need arises. So why, in spite of
all our knowledge, technology and labour, are we worse than the bugs and mice when it comes
to this basic need?

***

Let us now turn to the capacity to accumulate information. This capacity can be split into two
parts: the acquisition of reliable information about actual current events in different parts of
society, and the accumulation of abstract information that helps us understand universal laws
and the technologies that stem from them.
The first of these is like a nervous system, functioning in the moment to help both individuals
and groups react swiftly and appropriately to events, tipping the system back in whichever
direction is necessary. For this to work, all important information must be transmitted
without being distorted, with all significant details included and in the most convenient
format for analysis and response. Which is, in fact, the next law of conscience.

And this is where we meet one of our biggest problems, because one of the best ways to get
away with manipulation is to make sure its victims are unable to detect it. To do that, you need
to cover up important information, skew it or falsely interpret it by putting out fraudulent
connections and conclusions based on fabricated patterns. The ideal, of course, is to have all
three of these in action at once. These tactics are widely practised by governments, endlessly
rewriting history to consolidate their own power and military campaigns, in business, to
hoodwink partners, and in personal relationships, to use love, friendship and other positive
connections as a pretext to solve one’s own issues and seek mental and material gain.

In contrast, the accumulation of abstract knowledge, which has turned into science and
advanced technology, is, surprisingly, healthy. It could be said that our behaviour in this area is
almost perfectly in line with conscience. Open up a physics textbook, any research paper or the
technical specifications for a modern microchip, and you will find the most accurate, detailed
and reliable information possible, presented as truthfully as possible and free from any hidden
agendas, embedded efforts to secretly further private interests or attempts to trick you. This is
why we can apply this information so incredibly efficiently, as well as why our technologies are
so powerful. Thus, this is the area in which we are making the greatest progress – which
confirms, once again, that conscience and efficiency always go hand in hand.

***

And finally, the capacity to be an integral, integrated structure. Obviously, a successful

collective endeavour requires the parties to agree on the sequence, method, location and
division of responsibilities for the job, and then be able to carry that out collectively. This
requires a specific kind of interrelationship, which is defined by the capacity to build vertical and
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horizontal structures. Within these structures, we can be subordinated to something else,
something else can be subordinated to us, or we can engage in an interaction of equals, and
whatever we achieve, be it making a decision or moving a heavy load, will be the result of
collective effort. Things we can be subordinated to include laws, orders, decisions, people,
conclusions, etc. Likewise, the links in the system that depend on us will be subordinate to our
activity.
The existence of these horizontal and vertical structures, or hierarchies of interdependence,
is absolutely essential for the majority of complex collaborative processes. And in spite of
modern, cultured society's horror of hierarchy and subordination in any form, it cannot be denied
that in any structure of particular efficiency, be it a computer, an army or a successful
corporation, we will always find a vertical structure or hierarchy of mutual subordination.
And for this structure to be constructive, it must satisfy the following fundamental rule of
conscience: any structure, vertical or otherwise, as well as any individual’s occupation of
a specific position within that structure, must exclusively work for the functionality and
efficiency of that system, for the good of all, and never for the purpose of personal gain,
which would harm the other members of that structure or society.

By this rule, in a good society led by conscience, our boss, king, president, head of
household, project manager, police officer, inspector, etc. would be granted their power
exclusively to work for the greater good of the system, integrating and coordinating its
operations, or serving as its immune system and monitoring its cleanliness and functionality.
And the greater the power and authority of a person or group, the greater their influence and the
more people they have subordinated to them, then the greater their responsibility, and the more
developed their understanding of conscience must be. Otherwise, the evil, selfish actions and
mistakes made at the top will be what hurt the system the most.

Looking at things from this perspective, it becomes clear just how far off track our society is.
Very often, becoming the king, the major politician, the boss or the inspector is little more than
an opportunity to use one’s position and authority to aggressively dominate other people, profit
off the system’s resources, do bad things with impunity and commit all kinds of violent and
manipulative deeds. And worst of all is that the employees, colleagues, fellow citizens, ethnic
groups and family members of these people often view these positions from more or less
exactly the same perspective, i.e., as some form of alpha-domination, and are willing to quietly
accept this domination, robbery and violence as normal behaviour. When it comes to these
things, we are largely accustomed to noticing and admiring the prestige of the position, as well
as the status, influence and affluence of the person in it, but not remarking on that person’s
responsibility, wisdom in decision-making or cleanliness of conscience.

It is unsurprising that smart, sensitive people begin to violently reject all vertical structures,
all forms of power and subordination, and choose anarchy over order. This is quite clearly a
hysterical reaction to the situation, but, as any psychologist will tell you, hysteria occurs when a
problem cannot be resolved in any other way. This means hysteria cannot be meaningfully
resolved until we have resolved the issue that triggered it. Obviously, we have some serious
work to do here.

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 The next rule of conscience relating to the formation of structures is: when assembling
different structures and undertaking collective labour, we must be able to trust and rely
on one another.
Otherwise, collaboration – using the output of someone else’s labour efficiently while offering
our own for further use – will be impossible.
Again, science and technology provide a template for this. In science, if a principle, law or
structure exists within a part of the system that is considered sound and is operational in
practice, we will be able to use it without the need for verification, according to the objectives
and conditions to which it may be applied. And if the conditions for implementation are
observed, we are guaranteed a one hundred percent accurate result. What we have, in other
words, is a space of absolute trust. This always pays off, and thus, as previously mentioned, we
also have a very high level of efficiency.

And finally, the last element we will touch on in this book: the capacity of individuals and
groups to befriend, understand and support one another, to help one another, to make
hard things easier, heavy things lighter and sad things happier. This is essential for
forming a unified, integrated structure out of separate individuals or groups – after all, we are all
organic beings, each with our own unique emotional world, history, situation and other qualities
and circumstances integral to our person. Without it, we will be alien to one another, with
nothing but a shared morsel of bread or ATM keypad to unite us. A society like that will surely
fissure at the first sign of real hardship, and hardship, as we know, is an inevitable fact of
natural life.

To make this capacity possible, evolution gave us a unique tool: empathy, or the capacity to
directly experience another person’s state of being, to see each other’s inner selves. On this
point, please forgive me, but I have to throw another stone at the greenhouse of the postmodern
worldview, which holds that since each of us has our own unique point of view, it is impossible
for us to understand one another. The only option we have is to shout from a distance: “yes, I
accept your emotions and experience, you’re entitled to them”. Ah, but what a difference there
is between detached acceptance and the active, human participation, empathy and compassion
of the old days, when people made strong emotional bonds and stood on common ground...!

In order to be useful to each other on a personal level, we need to genuinely be able to

understand one another. Naturally, this requires us to be driven by good, sincere intentions, and
to be in a positive internal state.

But while we might see these kinds of truly amicable relationships between individuals, the
connections between states, as well as between many large groups of people, are purely
negative, a far cry from friendship or any good, sincere intent.
State-state relations are a dog-eat-dog world of machinations and egocentrism. In this
sphere, the other is still primarily seen as foe, competitor or prey, and if groups do come
together, it is in military or economic alliance against someone else, with each party trying to
carve out the biggest piece of the pie for themselves along the way. Everyone looks out for their
own interests first, and conscience, in this scenario, is an error and a pesky nuisance rather
than an achievement. As a result, this sphere is in a state of perpetual conflict, confrontation
and mutual destruction, with one large swathe of humanity trying its best to wreak havoc on
another. Does this make our system stronger and more efficient? Of course not.
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 ***

Through the lens of the modern perspective we have explored, we can now revisit and
rediscover the age-old qualities that make up conscience. These were described in the old days
in phrases like “a pure heart” or “a solid, decent person”.

Honesty and sincerity lead to healthy information channels between people. Within these
channels, things are said the way they are and done the way they’re said, there is no
discrepancy between feelings and words, and feelings translate directly into actions. Information
flows freely through a person with these qualities, facing no barrier between the internal and
external worlds.

Integrity ensures a person’s actions are right with regard to common resources and the
output of collective labour, as well as towards the private property of others. With this kind of
person, all such resources are safe.

Responsibility and being true to one’s word mean that this person works excellently within
structures where everyone does their own part of the job. Division of labour is easy with them,
because you can trust the agreement you make with them and rely on them to do the job. When
this person has a job that is important for other people and society, they will do it thoroughly,
even if it is difficult or conflicts with their individual interests. This person is someone you can
depend upon.

Modesty, humility, meekness and knowing one’s place divert us from clambering mindlessly
towards the “most prestigious” positions in the hierarchy, coveted by immature souls as a ticket
to adulation, domination and stacks of cash, and steer us to the position where we will actually
be useful. This person is ready to subordinate themselves in the right sense of the word, that is,
work productively in the middle of a vertical structure. Incidentally, the most useful king,
president or manager would be this kind of person, because they will seek power primarily to be
useful, rather than to satisfy their own ambitions or line their pockets.

Willpower and discipline let us do what is right and useful for the system and other people,
even when it is at odds with our own emotions and interests. These qualities are vital for
resolving conflicts with the lower emotional centre, which, as we have seen, is often against
what is useful for other people and society. Willpower and discipline help us rein in our emotions
and do what is right and good in spite of them.

Patience enables us to do difficult things that require lots of time and effort.

Diligence and industriousness help a person overcome laziness and invest as much
concerted effort in their task as they can.

Conscientiousness – this quality allows us to carry out common endeavours well at all times,
and not just when we might be punished or denied a reward if our work or deeds are bad. This
person is not one you need to stand over with a whip, which frees you up to do something

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constructive instead. If conscientiousness and integrity are the norm in a society, then hordes of
police officers, guards and supervisors, all of whom produce basically nothing, are unnecessary.

Empathy and compassion enable people to understand one another, care for each other and
become friends. These qualities are what make contact and interaction truly constructive.

Kindness, generosity and altruism let us do good deeds for others, help them, be a part of
their lives, support them and make their lives better.

Magnanimity and peaceableness smooth over inevitable conflicts and difficult situations,
enabling us to turn war into peace and reduce the amount of violence and conflict in society.

Joyfulness, positivity, good humour, cheerfulness and a love of life foster a positive
emotional atmosphere, making it easier for all the other positive qualities to work effectively.
These qualities generate constructive mental energy and a positive mental state, helping us
behave and act with humanity.

Courage and bravery allow us to stand up for what is right and do what is necessary, even
when it threatens our own well-being. The absence of these qualities endangers the things that
are right and good and even society itself, leaving them vulnerable to being damaged or preyed
upon by predators out for other people’s resources.

Honour and virtue give a person the strength to strive for the best qualities and actions,
choosing a clear conscience over easy solutions to difficult situations, profitable but
questionable actions or getting rich at any cost.

Wisdom allows us to do all of the above optimally in complex, ambiguous, real-life situations
where interests are woven together and details and events contradict one another.

Naturally, people will want to be together, raise a family, run a business or engage in any
collective endeavour with a person who possesses this list of qualities. This is a person you can
build any kind of structure or collaboration with, with whom you can divide the labour, the output
of that labour and your common resources. You can trust this kind of person in good times or in
bad, happy times or sad. In short, all of the qualities that make up conscience objectively
facilitate the unification of separate people, with their own lives and interests, into a
single, integrated system, capable of acting coherently and efficiently at a level that is
unattainable for an individual acting alone.

This statement is also true and applicable, practically word-for-word, to any group of people,
all the way up to states, nations and civilisations.

***

And so, conscience objectively exists, and we objectively require it to tackle our urgent
evolutionary challenges. Conscience has clear laws which can be studied, proven and
effectively implemented for the common good.

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 This means we have the right to demand that the people around us follow the laws of
conscience! And the more power and responsibility a person or a group has, the louder and
more persistent our demands should be!
Which means we have an evolutionary, or even Universe-given right to stand up for those
who are preyed on and unfairly abused, as well as for the essential good things that are
destroyed to serve the selfish, egoistic interests of individuals or groups.
And that means we have the right to think critically, distinguish right from wrong, and say a
firm “yes” to what is good and “no” to what is bad.
And most of all, of course, it means that we ourselves need to live and act according to
conscience, study its laws and try to put them into practice.

There is one crucial catch to conscience: in order to reap its rewards and use it as the
foundation for a more advanced society, the majority of people need to follow it. Likewise, the
vast majority of socially important processes and events must be subordinate to its laws. This is
unquestionably a challenge; the societal, economic and psychological realities of our times
present many obstacles to living a life of conscience. But what we can do right now is this: first
and foremost, we can recognise that conscience exists and that it has clear-cut goals and laws;
we can overcome the aperspectival madness that justifies egocentrism, deceit, theft, violence
and manipulation as an “alternative viewpoint”, an “identity” or a “non-standard behaviour with
the same right to exist as any other”; we can repair our ability to distinguish between good and
bad, and gradually, wherever we can, begin to nudge things in the direction of what is good and
right, moving towards that happy day when we will become a society in the true sense of the
word.

And to do all this, we need clarity. I have often heard it said that the mind and the heart are at
odds, divided, and incapable of perceiving the world in the same way. But this is only true for as
long as the mind is clouded and the heart is dishonest. If the mind is able to understand the
causes and purposes of events around it and the heart is filled with the right qualities, they will
become best friends and partners. The heart gives us the ability to react instantly and intuitively
to a situation, to purely feel what’s happening, who’s doing what and which qualities they really
possess. The mind enables us to deal with situations that are messy, complicated, stretched
across time and space and spread across different people, i.e., things that don’t happen at a
precise point in space or time, which makes them very difficult to feel. But ultimately, both types
of situation will be understood and felt in the exact same way, meaning there will be just one
answer. This is how the well-calibrated mind and heart become a single entity. And if we can
combine this with a transformed animal emotional centre, our aggressive beast converted into a
fearless defender of fairness, we get an unstoppable team!

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 Manipulation

In this chapter, we will delve more deeply into what manipulation is and how it is usually
carried out. Manipulation is a key element of dishonesty in the modern world, which is why we
need to examine it thoroughly.

Let’s begin with a definition:

Manipulation is the deliberate misuse of the various mechanisms, elements and
instruments of the system, its properties, connections and person-to-person
interrelationships in order to benefit one party at the expense of another.

An act of manipulation is drastically different from a direct attack, theft or act of violence. A
direct attack does not engage any of the tools or mechanisms of the system of
interrelationships, but simply executes a crude capture by force of someone else’s property, life,
freedom, information, etc. A direct attack is always clearly noticeable and identifiable, both to
the victim and to observers, meaning it will often meet resistance, which can easily find societal
support. This makes a direct attack disadvantageous, especially in a society which has, in one
form or another, declared the necessity of orderly conduct and fair interrelationships.

Manipulation, in contrast, always exploits the “bugs” in the system – the blind spots,
inaccurate reports and descriptions, patchy security and other chinks – to seize someone else’s
property, life, freedom or information by applying the useful tools and mechanisms of the
system, which, thanks to these bugs, can be misused to benefit the malicious actor. The
process is very similar to hacking a computer system using “Trojan horse” malware. If the
manipulation attempt is successful, all the victim and society will see are the normal
mechanisms and procedures seemingly doing their useful jobs, and thus, our vigilance will not
be alerted, out righteous anger will lie dormant and no one will condemn what has happened.
And then – bam! Out of nowhere comes damage, destruction, degradation, denial of natural
freedoms and rights, and more. But because the harmful actions have been hidden within useful
things and mechanisms, no one can figure anything out, and everyone just shrugs their
shoulders and says “well, this is unfortunate, but we have no idea how it could have happened”.
This kind of manipulation is very advantageous – it does not arouse opposition, and it also
allows a person to attack and steal from others while maintaining a respectable reputation.

Certainly, manipulation requires cunning and skill, and at the upper levels of society or
government, it also takes exceptional knowledge of the system’s rules and mechanisms. But for
a homo who is already sapiens but still unscrupulous (or already unscrupulous?), it is, in fact,
manageable. “Professional” manipulators often manage to conceal the reality of their
unscrupulous behaviour even from themselves, convincing themselves that everything they’re
doing is fair and legal. If you blur, replace and distort your facts, twist your values inside out and
inaccurately interpret your goals, this is an easy leap to make. Good manipulation requires
distinct acting talent, but a talented actor will often act so well that they believe their own
performance.

Manipulation is also possible – and widely used – in all interrelationship verticals, from the
personal to the intergovernmental.

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 Let us now look at some common manipulation methods and techniques. We will start with
the forms of manipulation commonly used on large groups of people, though many of these are
also seen in modified form in personal relationships.

1.

First is one of the most common manipulations of the modern age: manipulation based on
the monetary system of mutual settlement. Historically and evolutionarily, money developed as
a universal way to measure completed work, allowing people to exchange the fruits of their
labour such that each person would end up with what they needed, in line with the amount of
work they had done, and received in the optimal way. This necessity arose along with the
division of labour, under which each individual did not produce or obtain everything they needed
themselves, but made only what they could make best, in large quantities, and then traded the
surplus for all their other necessities. But that created the need to determine the value of the
items exchanged in order to ensure the fairness of the trade. As the trade system expanded, it
became time-consuming and inconvenient to bargain over how many sacks of rice a pair of
shoes was worth, how many pairs of shoes a donkey was worth, and so on. This led to the
logical decision to introduce a standard common unit of exchange; the value of each item would
be expressed in terms of this common unit first, and this would then allow different products of
labour to be exchanged in a fair trade. This is the basic purpose of money, and its usage in this
sense was kept up for a long time. For example, lending money with interest (usury) was
historically forbidden in many societies because it went against the meaning and purpose of
money, sullying both the concept and the relationships built upon it, which made it harmful to
society. In Islam, usury remains prohibited to this day.

Over time, the way money was used was increasingly twisted and changed, the mechanisms
that protected monetary mutual settlement from misuse were gradually stripped away, money
became divorced from its original purpose and using it as a tool of manipulation for personal
gain became a possibility.

First, the link between money and the amount and usefulness of completed work was slowly
severed, and money simply became a universal unit that would buy you anything, if you had it.
The connection to completed work remained possible, but not necessary. In other words, it
didn’t matter how you got the money, only that you had it. For the first time, it was possible to
use money as a tool of manipulation, through usury and other tricks. These days, with money
not taken to represent useful work as a matter of course, it’s enough to just get your hands on
however much you need in any way that works. As a natural result, it is now very beneficial and
enjoyable to amass it in sums that far surpass the value you have provided through your
labour.

In the old days, in order to deter forgeries, money was made from rare materials that had a
recognised value in their own right. These materials were gold, silver and copper. The value of
a coin (i.e., the number of items that could be bought with it) was equivalent to the value of the
metal the coin was made from. This made forging money practically impossible. But large
quantities of these coins could weigh hundreds of kilos and take up a huge amount of space,
which was extremely inconvenient if you were, say, a travelling merchant. Additionally, the
natural wear on a coin would lead to a partial depreciation of its actual value. These and other
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considerations led to the very logical, practical decision to replace metal with paper, but with the
understanding that the paper currency would be strictly equivalent to the metal coins and could
be exchanged for gold, silver or copper at any time. This principle was in force for a long time
and, for instance, the banknotes of the Soviet Union, bore the inscription: “guaranteed by the
gold, precious metals and other assets of the state bank.”

After that a new stage of manipulation occurred. Paper currency, not linked to any material
possessing actual value, became a purely abstract universal symbol, extremely cheap to
produce but tradable for any item of value in the world. Suddenly, the people with the power to
print paper currency could make as much money as they wanted. Metal money, with its actual
value, fell entirely out of use (modern coins, which always represent the very smallest
denominations and are closer to pocket lint than to anything of value, can’t be counted), and
paper currency, made from the cheapest of materials, came to rule the world. This split people
into two groups: those who can turn paper into limitless amounts of money and buy anything
they like, and those who are forced to use this money, for whom obtaining it with their own
actual labour is a crucial necessity for survival.

But the “fun” didn’t stop there. Next, ostensibly in the name of convenience, paper currency
became digitized with electronic money, virtual currencies, digital financial services and mobile
‘virtual’ wallets. Now, we see the “pinnacle” of the form: all the wealth a person or company
possesses is nothing but a couple of digits inside a computer – nothing more than a cloud of
electrons. Money can now be made almost literally out of thin air! The alchemists’ dream of the
philosopher’s stone has come true: we can now make endless quantities of gold! Except that
their philosophy hasn’t worked out so well; the split that divides humanity into two unequal
halves has only gotten deeper. Whoever controls the mechanisms that enable money
circulation can carry out any kind of monetary manipulation they like, and it will be absolutely
impossible to detect or monitor – because now, it’s all just inaccessible data on someone’s
computer. What’s more, these people enjoy full knowledge of, and control over, every financial
transaction the second half of humanity makes – people whose purse strings are now always
quite literally in the wrong hands. The second half of humanity is now forced to spend its whole
life labouring for the sake of a little cloud of electrons on a computer somewhere.

It is relevant on this point that, while money was being divorced from its original meaning and
purpose, its protective mechanisms being stripped away and the opportunity for monetary
manipulation increasing, the role of money in society grew too. Whereas before, you could have
lived your whole life without ever laying a finger on a note or coin, today, nothing is possible
without money, and everything is possible in exchange for it.

This is how money shifted incrementally from being a way to trade the output of one’s labour
fairly to a key mechanism of global manipulation, inequality, deception and theft. As an
example, think about when a national currency defaults or depreciates; suddenly, as if by
magic, tens of millions of people lose large chunks of their wealth – money they have earned
through honest labour. These kinds of events defy basic common sense, and under a healthy
system of monetary mutual settlement, they simply couldn’t happen. It says something that the
coffers of gold and silver coins buried by people hundreds of years ago still retain their value
now. In fact, finding some of this buried treasure is still a ticket to fortune even today! In
contrast, modern money melts away all by itself, even if we don’t spend it – and now, not even
adding to our bank deposits can save us.
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 Alongside this basic form of financial manipulation, many other warped mechanisms have
been introduced to the system, doing nothing to promote fairness or usefulness to society and
expanding the potential for unscrupulous gain. This can be seen at work in the disparity in
purchasing power between different national currencies, as well as in the disparity in labour
costs between different countries. The same labour will cost ten times less in Asia than it does
in America or Europe! And virtually all mass production in the modern age is founded on this
system; you make something in China for 1 dollar, then you sell it in America for 10. This means
that the person or people who produce the item, including obtaining and preparing all the raw
materials required and supplying all the necessary production processes and technologies,
receive 10% of the item’s final sale price, while the person who simply moves the item from
point A to point B gets 90%. What is that but pure inequality and discrimination?

Naturally, the damaged economic system becomes “sick”, a problem that inevitably
manifests itself in inflation, crisis and the many other ills of modern economics (which,
nevertheless, always fatten somebody’s wallet).

Which methods of manipulation do we see in these examples?

* Depriving an essential and heavily influential mechanism within the system of its basic
meaning and purpose, as well as its defences against misuse, while simultaneously
strengthening its significance. This constitutes a manipulation (i.e., a covert, harmful act)
because the overwhelming majority of people believe that our monetary system is fine, and are
prepared to fight for any number of insignificant things, but not for the thing that shapes
practically their entire lives: how they are paid for their labour and how they can meet their
essential survival needs. It’s like the actual controls of a car being hijacked by a malicious actor,
but the steering wheel – the most visible external element of the control system, now rendered
basically ineffective – remaining in the driver’s hands. Later, when the car is involved in a crash,
the perplexed driver will stammer: “I don’t understand how this could have happened, I was
driving safely”, and the malicious actor will reply: “you are a bad driver, this is your fault”. This
scenario has played out countless times in the lives of people who have spent all their years
working hard and saving every penny, only to end up with nothing. Isn’t this true?

* Intentionally misusing the system’s existing structure to reap unjust rewards – as in the
example of the item produced in China. This is much the same as how any electrical circuit will
always have two points which, when connected, will deliver a very powerful current. In
electronics, this is called “short-circuiting”. Short-circuiting these two points allows us to extract
immense power for a short period of time, but our apparatus will then break, ceasing to do any
of the useful work it was created for, and lengthy and complicated repairs will be required. Isn’t
the same thing happening now on the circuit board of global economics?

To conclude this section, an essential note: modern economic relations are deeply complex
and multifaceted, and this book is not a work on economics. The purpose of the discussion here
has been to provide concrete examples that illustrate what manipulation is, as well as to draw
readers’ attention to one of the core mechanisms in manipulations of inequality, domination and
control, something which receives virtually no real attention in modern society.

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 Exploring these ideas also brings up inevitable questions about assorted conspiracy theories,
global plots and the like. I, being simply an ordinary person, don’t have access to the
information needed to reach definitive answers on those questions. Thus, I can only judge
based on circumstantial evidence and broader patterns. As far as I can tell, the reality is closer
to a collaboration between the business-political elites and chance events, where such events
are turned to the advantage of the elites, than a wilful, deliberate plan to mould world history.
Within the natural processes of society, various phenomena arise, some of which may well be
used to consolidate power and wealth. Some are picked up and then slowly cultivated in the
right direction, channelled into serving particular aims and interests. However, this process has
never been fully controllable, and the control panel marked “world” – the one with the dictator or
villain looming over it – doesn’t exist. In fact, the business-political elite themselves exist in a
precarious state of constant infighting and rivalry. In spite of all their status and power, by all
accounts, they feel like animals in many ways, fighting for their lives in the depths of the forest,
surrounded by the uncertain and unexpected and alert for the danger lurking behind every bush.
Thus, here as everywhere, we see that some kind of dynamic equilibrium and evolutionary
system are at work, the fundamental laws and key variables of which are far beyond anyone’s
control. However, we do have enough intelligence and control over events to steer this
movement and development onto a more beneficial course, one that contributes to the future
and is useful to humanity and the planet as a whole. That is what this book is about.

2.

The next common type of manipulation, which is often used on large groups of people but
can also be applied to individuals, is the deliberate misuse of the legal system to one’s own
advantage. We generally record socially significant valid strategies, along with important facts
and principles, as laws or other documents which must be adopted and observed. But the law is
just words on paper, and in all but the simplest of cases, it needs to be interpreted by a human,
who will also make the final judgement. And if the person interpreting the law and making the
judgement sides with the manipulators, if that person stands to benefit from a successful
manipulation, then it is in their power to turn the law against the cause of fairness.
Even greater success is possible for the manipulator who can write laws and documentation
to benefit themselves – laws that society will subsequently be forced to obey. And where this is
concerned, we all know that politicians and big business are as thick as thieves.
Furthermore, many contracts and legal documents are so complex, especially on the state or
major industry level, that unfair rules and agreements, damaging to society or individual victims
but lucrative for a certain group of people, can be hidden in a document that seems innocuous
at first glance.

This involves:
* Drawing individuals who are supposed to be the guardians of fairness into collusion for
personal gain, causing them to side with the manipulator.
* Intentional misuse of the system’s key tool.
* Exploiting the blind spots and ignorance of the masses, as well as the incompetence of
one’s negotiation partners, to introduce “viruses” and “trojans” into important agreements that
turn them into vehicles for the enrichment of individual people or groups. These blind spots are
unavoidable when agreements are so complicated in nature that understanding them requires
the kind of knowledge and expertise very few people possess. In essence, the malicious actor
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exploits the natural complexity of interrelationships and their mechanisms, alongside the
ignorance and incompetence of their victim, to make that victim agree to regulations and
interrelationships which appear beneficial to them but will actually cause them harm.

3.

Society needs to have information connections. These should behave like a nervous system,
delivering important information to everywhere decisions are made. This is vital, because a
person cannot be everywhere at once nor follow every event that affects them or falls under
their influence. As a result, it is critical for us to exchange information from a position of
information confidence in one another and in the system as a whole. The system contains
special organs of information whose purpose is to alert people to current events. They are like
an organism’s eyes and ears, and are usually referred to as the mass media. In modern,
advanced society, with its very large and complex structure, there are vast numbers of
important events and occurrences that people have no way of learning about except through an
information intermediary, based on the premise of information confidence.

And in this, an excellent opportunity for manipulation arises: if you feed people false
information, you can make them take the wrong decisions and do the wrong things, to the
benefit of the manipulator.

There are many ways to feed people false information without provoking a backlash.

* You can simply silence important information, preventing people from finding out that there
is something they should be informed about. This will let you keep your actions under the radar
while you carry them out.

* In complicated, multifaceted situations that involve numerous events and occurrences, you
can choose to present only those that play into the manipulator’s plan, putting them in the
spotlight while keeping silent about the rest. For example, every state, every time period will
have its moments of wickedness, cruelty and injustice. If we carefully cherry-pick these events
and then assign central significance to them, omitting the rest, any state, any time period can be
made to seem monstrous. The same can be done to practically any individual.
To get an honest picture of something, you obviously need to analyse it as a whole and make
your judgement based on the ratio of good to bad elements, not just on the bare fact that those
elements are present.

* You can take an action, statement or event out of context and present it as something
completely different. If the motivation behind a certain action or a statement made during a
certain conversation is unknown, it can easily be made to look like something else, to the
benefit of the manipulator.
Imagine hearing this news, for example: “person A went up to person B and sliced his
stomach open with a knife”. What would your first reaction be? Now, let’s add context: “person
A was a surgeon performing a life-saving operation on person B”. The entire situation is turned
on its head, and the killer becomes a saviour.

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 * You can establish false connections between different events or present them in the
incorrect order, imbuing them with the significance the manipulator requires.

* You can artificially portray something in an emotionally charged way that bears no relation
to actual events. This often happens in advertising; a vacuum cleaner, for instance, might be
pictured next to a buxom young lady placed in a suggestive pose, with the caption “sucks better
than the rest”. And our gullible brains will send us rushing out for that vacuum cleaner,
subconsciously hoping the purchase will deliver an experience that has nothing to do with
vacuuming at all.

* And finally, you can always just lie; offer false details and fabricated evidence of events the
rest of us weren’t present for, and no one will be able to verify the credibility of your
information.

4.

An excellent way to launch an attack or war of aggression while maintaining your personal
reputation, and even winning the support of those around you, is to blame the victim in advance
for some attack or other terrible deed that demands a response. This will let you disguise your
aggression as righteous anger, ostensibly needed by you to protect yourself, protect someone
else or restore fairness and the rule of law. A variation of this is to try and convince everyone
else that attacking the victim will be a useful act, in that it will correct for the victim’s negative
qualities and serve some sort of positive goal. For this to work, the victim needs to be accused
of, or implicated in, something bad in advance.

In international war, pretexts that fit the bill include:

- “you might be getting ready to attack us, so we have to attack you so that you can’t attack us
by surprise”,
- “this state or nation is inherently bad and harmful, and the world will be much better off if we
destroy or enslave it”,
- “this state has a bad economic or social system, it’s done lots of bad things in the past, it’s
causing environmental damage and other problems, and everything will be fixed if we attack
them and impose our own, correct order on them instead”,
- “those people are non-believers, heretics and barbarians who squander their whole lives on
the wrong world view. If we conquer and subjugate them, we’ll actually be doing them a
favour”.
This last pretext also helped the Inquisition burn witches at the stake, though that, of course,
was a question of brutally murdering people in order to save their souls, for their own benefit
and for the good of others, naturally.

This form of manipulation is very prevalent in personal relationships. It’s why the thug on the
street who’s looking for a fight might initiate by accusing you of dressing wrong, looking the
wrong way, looking at them the wrong way, walking past wrong, and so and on.
Domestic violence also often begins with victim blaming. Any trivial pretext will do, as long
as it can be blown up to suitably grandiose proportions – the dishes not washed right,
something said the wrong way, some silly thing broken by mistake, some small detail
overlooked, etc.

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 This tactic of blowing trivial things up to monumental proportions in order to justify aggression
or violence is also seen in groups of different sizes.
This type of manipulation has the added benefit that, if the manipulator/attacker can convince
the victim of their own guilt, or even just plant a seed of doubt about who the guilty party really
is, the victim’s will and ability to fight back will be paralysed and they will put up no real
resistance.

5.

The next effective method is to start from a correct, useful position that the victim will support
and happily associate themselves with, and then slowly, quietly turn the course of events to the
benefit of the manipulator. In our society, which tends to value dishonesty as an achievement,
these techniques are actually explicitly taught. The pushy dealers of a million useless products
and services, for example, learn that you open with something the victim will firmly agree with,
and then, in a slow and seemingly logical manner, you turn the conversation in such a way, that
the victim will also agree to a deal that is not in their favour. This craft is taught in prestigious
NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) courses.
The same technique is regularly employed by religious cults; a good-looking person
approaches you on the street and straight away asks you something like “do you think a person
can be happy?”, and then, if you stop to seriously consider the question, which is valid and
harmless in itself, if you start to answer honestly, they will gradually turn the conversation
around to why you need to join the cult.

This also works on groups of people, such as a group that rises up in defence of its rights, for
instance. By slowly shifting the group’s goals and causes, its attention and activity can be drawn
to a totally different issue, unrelated to its original goals, and its resistance can then be
neutralised or turned to one’s own advantage, totally divorced from the interests of the group’s
members.

Next, we will look at several types of manipulation that often occur in personal relationships
and relationships between small groups of people. However, modified forms can also be used
on large groups of people.

1.

If you enter into a relationship or partnership with the agreement that everything you produce
will be tallied and split evenly, and then you do as little as possible while still demanding your
half, you can profit nicely without lifting a finger. You can achieve doing nothing in various ways,
such as making it look like you’re trying your best but nothing is working out, or that external
circumstances are posing an insurmountable obstacle. At the start, you can do a couple of
small, easy, useful things for show, and then, when you do nothing else, you can constantly
refer back to those things, heavily emphasising the importance of your contribution. You can
choose the easiest tasks for yourself but demand the same share of the profit as the person
who does the hardest ones. You can bustle about doing an imitation of hard work, constantly
drawing attention to how busy and involved you are.
This is a common form of manipulation in both marriage and business.
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 2.

An effective way to make people accept bad things is to disguise them as good things. This
is the trick an angler uses when they stick a tasty piece of bait onto their hook, the trick a
poisoner uses when they pour cyanide into the wine. The victim goes straight for the desirable
object, not noticing the deception concealed within. This is how you can, say, make someone
sign a very unfavourable contract by baiting them with incredibly profitable opportunities, which
will then either fail to materialise or be revealed to have terms and conditions attached that
overhaul the entire contract – to the manipulator’s gain, of course.

3.

An effective way of making a victim agree to a manipulator’s unfavourable terms is to find

some shared interest that is very important to the victim and dependent on the manipulator. In
marriage, that shared interest is usually children, whom we will often do literally anything for,
even against our own interests. In business, it could be shared assets or important deals that
depend on both parties. It could also be the case that the manipulator possesses information
which is important to the victim. That method is known as blackmail.

***

It should be noted that even a perfectly executed manipulation will not bring the manipulator
true peace and happiness. Because it always takes lies and insincerity in one form or another to
carry out a manipulative act, the manipulator’s psyche is always two-faced, split in half, never
whole. Their relationships will also end up being just as duplicitous, insincere and incomplete,
even when the manipulator tries to build them sincerely.
A manipulator lives in constant fear that their true face, their real intentions and actions, will
be exposed, and thus, manipulators can never relax or feel carefree.
Acting against conscience stifles the higher emotional centre, and this in turn stunts the
growth of the higher intellectual centre, the evolutionary stage that follows the higher emotional
centre and is dependent upon it. For this reason, manipulators are unable to engage in
integrative, abstract thinking, and their minds will only be capable of scheming and trickery.
Their stifled higher emotional and intellectual centres will prevent them from making good
decisions and choosing the right actions at critical moments, meaning that sooner or later,
manipulators become victims themselves, often as a consequence of their own manipulations.
Thus, in spite of all their (sometimes great) wealth and power, a manipulator is often deprived
of the greatest pleasure of all – that of being a human being, of having at one’s disposal the
unique mental capabilities and connections that are evolution’s greatest gift to us and are, in
essence, what make us human.
Thus deprived, the manipulator, like an addict, is often forced to keep increasing the dose,
committing more and more bad deeds in a bid to compensate for the negative consequences of
past manipulations that have thrown the system and its connections out of balance and demand
reparation. A circle of tension and rage, the just response of a system that has been stolen from
and pulled out of balance, start to close in around the manipulator; in effect, they pull the noose

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ever tighter around their own neck, often dragging innocent people, especially friends and
family, over the precipice with them.

To conclude this chapter, it’s worth noting that the techniques used by manipulators to turn
the healthy tools of healthy systems to nefarious ends can also be used for the opposite
purpose – to make sick tools in a bad system do good. Sick tools and phenomena also have
bugs, weak points and challenges, through which they can be controlled, redirected towards
positive goals and healed. Sick tools and systems display even more of these vulnerabilities, in
fact. Thus, with the right approach and the necessary skill, we can turn bad into good using the
very same principles that were once used against us. Members of the resistance, take note.

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 Some strategies for restoring fairness

This chapter will present a number of effective techniques and strategies that can be used to
resolve conflict situations, even complex ones, for the greatest common good and return the
system and its relationships to a state of balance and well-being. Within any interrelationship,
from the personal to the intergovernmental, clashes of interest or differing opinions on important
questions will inevitably arise from time to time. These are the moments when conflicts occur.
And in order to carry on being one family, company, country or human race, we must know how
to resolve these conflicts in the right way. The principles and approaches outlined here largely
stem from an approach that sees the issue as a dynamic system of interacting forces, the goal
being to bring the system back into balance and restore constructive interaction between its
elements.

The core principle of fairness is that conditions must be equal for all participants in a given
situation, both in terms of receiving benefits and exercising freedoms, and in terms of
shouldering responsibilities and obeying rules and laws. Only then can our decision-making
further the central goal of fairness as an integral part of conscience, which is to unite people.
Thus, no party should be given exceptional rights to benefits, and conversely, should not be
subject to exceptional obligations or the exceptional responsibilities that go with them. In the old
days, they had a clever test of fairness – keep the methods and approaches the same, but
make the sides trade places. In other words, whatever conditions one side lived under would be
applied to the other. If the sides could be randomly repositioned and still leave our conclusions
and actions essentially unchanged, it meant the rules of fairness were being observed.

When we try to assess a situation and figure out how to proceed, we should endeavour to
think of all the sides, all the people involved in the conflict, to the extent that’s possible. If we
think only of ourselves, or only of the group we associate ourselves with, we will never achieve
peace and equality. Even if we have been attacked or experienced an injustice, trying to get
revenge by obtaining exclusive rights to power and imposing our own dictatorship is the wrong
approach. Doing so will infringe on the rights of the other side – rights which they will inevitably
attempt to restore. And because people are rarely capable of solving conflicts wisely, our
opponent will almost certainly do the same to us, i.e., try to get revenge by seizing exceptional
rights to power and establishing their dictatorship, infringing on our rights even further and
possibly causing us greater harm than they would have originally. And so, the aggression will
ricochet from side to side, destabilising the system and hurting everyone.

Think of it as a swing standing between person A and person B. If A decides, for some
reason, to push the swing so that it hits B, and B, enraged, pushes it back even harder so that it
hits A, and then A does the same, then the next time the swing reaches B, it will, of course, be
travelling at high speed and will hit B three times as hard. What it definitely won’t do is stop.

The correct strategy, then, is not to try and get revenge by destroying or discriminating
against the other side, trumpeting our own power and superiority, but to find the part that has
come loose within the system, upsetting its equilibrium, and return it to its position. It goes
without saying that this position must be a dignified one, and not behind the toilet bowl in a
public bathroom, so to speak. It’s worth remembering that all races and peoples are necessary

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for humanity, all professions for industry, all partners for business, and both men and women for
the robust continuation of the human race.

Obviously, if a wrong-doer cannot be changed, they have to be punished and isolated.

Similarly, we should not tolerate injustices perpetrated against us by groups of people, nor
infringements they make on our rights. But what we should really be fighting against is the
behavioural error the person or group has made, rather than the simple fact that they exist or
possess different qualities than us. This is especially important in relation to groups. While a
specific person may, as a result of significant individual genetic variability and personal
circumstances, become genuinely troubled and be simpler to isolate from society than try to
rehabilitate, when you view a whole class of people – a large group possessing some kind of
unifying feature that has arisen naturally in the process of their emergence and development –
as a problem that can’t be fixed, you are making a big mistake. At the same time, a group of
people can certainly occupy a position that is destructive and harmful for the system, but in that
situation, the fight must be against the position, not against the fact of those peoples’ existence
or the qualities nature has given them.

This means a person should not be blamed for being black or white, Russian or American,
male or female, young or old, intellectual or emotional, fast or slow or anything else. All these
qualities, all these types of people, are integral, essential parts of the system. Nonetheless, we
need to identify and interrupt whatever mistake this person is making in their interrelationships.
If they tend towards this mistake because of their natural qualities, then they need to be given a
position in the system where they can apply those qualities and tendencies in a way that is
useful for those around them and for society at large.

To do this, it follows that we need to be able to understand all of these very different people.
And for that, above all, we need to see them as people, not enemies. The first mistake in this
regard, and a very widespread one, is to label them as inhuman, monsters, scum, etc. – in other
words, fundamentally different from good people like me/us. This is called dehumanisation. This
is a popular manipulation technique in modern geopolitics, used to pit two groups against each
other and make them fight amongst themselves, usually to fatten somebody’s wallet.

It’s important to understand that other people are simply us under different circumstances –
quite possibly much worse ones. And that is a scientific fact, because we know that genetically,
we are all 99.9% identical, and that our remaining differences are acquired, i.e., dependent on
the individual’s environment.

First of all, let us try to understand, to feel the people we think of as others. Evolution has
given us a unique capacity for just this – the higher emotional centre, which is the first centre of
abstract thought. The lower, animal emotional centre is only capable of feeling its own problems
and needs, having no need to feel for other animals. It has a concrete sense of “me” and “my
desires”, while everyone else is either foe or prey – and who cares what they feel? With the
higher emotional centre, we have, for the first time, the ability to detach our feelings from our
own immediate experience and start to feel for other individuals, and even for whole groups. It is
thus appropriate for us to describe this thought as abstract, i.e., untethered from its original
object. On this point, it’s worth reiterating that without a developed capacity for abstract
emotional thinking, we cannot meaningfully develop the abstract intellect. Thus, to pursue
spiritual development and self-perfection, our heart must be developed first.
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 We should try to find good qualities in our opponents, and there will certainly be some. We
need to try and understand their actions: what drives them? Why are they making this mistake?
What positive desires went astray and led to this wrong behaviour? What external
circumstances have caused them to act the way they act, through no fault of their own? And
from that point on, we should be fighting the mistakes and circumstances, not the people or
their positive qualities which are involved in the mistake.
If we can do this, not only will we be restoring order in the best and wisest way possible, we
will also meet much less resistance from our opponents, who will sense in one way or another
that we genuinely want them to have normal lives.

However, if you are experiencing a violent threat to your life or the lives of your loved ones,
or to the foundations of your well-being, your first priority is to make that violence stop, even if it
requires brute force. Otherwise, you will be unable to apply your good higher centres to the
benefit of society and will be nothing more than prey for the attacker to enjoy and exploit, their
confidence in their bad deeds feeding off that success.

Furthermore, it goes without saying that the process of creating order should always begin
with ourselves. We cannot demand greater fairness or more good deeds of other people than
we perform ourselves.

When choosing a conflict resolution strategy, then, we need to think: will this action create
more connectedness and balance within the system, or will it instead pull the system even
further out of equilibrium? Will it ultimately strengthen fairness and conscience in society, or
weaken them? Our deliberation, where feasible, should take into account as many different
aspects as possible in a long-term perspective.

Next, let us look at some specific examples of a few different methods and strategies.

A very common situation is one where each side accuses the other of being the attacker and
violating the rules of fairness. By that point, an all-out war has usually broken out, and it can be
hard to untangle the details. Nonetheless, in order to resolve the situation fairly, we still need to
figure out who really attacked whom, which party is the victim and which one is the aggressor.
Most of the time, there will be some distinct element of unfairness in the situation that can be
pinpointed. If the situation is unclear and each of the parties is both the victim and the aggressor
in more or less equal measure, just in different parts of the interrelationship, then the overall
situation should be broken down into smaller ones, in which it will be possible to determine a
clear aggressor and a clear victim. Next, we need to establish order in these small situations,
restoring fairness to each of them in turn by figuring out who made the mistake. After this, we
can constructively untangle the bigger, broader situation and restore order to the overall
interaction.

There are several approaches we can use to spot the aggressor.

Our task is to try and figure out who started the conflict and disturbed the balance. In any
halfway successful family, any halfway successful intergovernmental relationship, there will be
points of relative well-being and equilibrium. What we need to do is unravel the situation back to
the closest of these points and then figure out who disturbed that equilibrium – who deviated

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from the rules of constructive interaction and broke the social contract first. This will be our true
aggressor.

However, the aggressor has several common manipulative tricks they can use to try and
blame the victim themselves for the aggression or unfairness, framing their attack as righteous
anger or a bid to restore their rights.

The first of these is to claim that the established equilibrium point was never real at all, and
that the individual or group making the claim has actually been badly cheated because “the
territory you live on was ours 1,000 years ago, so you should return our lands to us”, “your
ancestors insulted our ancestors 100 years ago”, “when you married me 15 years ago, you
weren’t really a virgin”, and so on in that vein.

In that kind of situation, it is easy to point to some wrongdoing that has harmed the well-being
of the system of interrelationships.
No long, complex, multifaceted relationship, whether between family members, sexes, states,
peoples or races, will ever be perfectly harmonious, smooth or conflict-free. At some point in
history, something bad will surely have happened, and almost all the world’s borders have been
erected because of wars of one kind or another, every one of which has had a loser. This
means that in any long, multifaceted relationship, something bad can always be dug up. But if
we decide to take this as licence to launch a new attack, then we will be free to start a war with
practically anyone with whom we have ever had significant contact. Clearly, this will lead to the
downfall of society, and is thus impermissible.

One sign that the party claiming righteous anger is engaged in manipulation and simply
looking to find fault, then, is if they base their accusations on a problem or bad deed the
opposite side was responsible for long before the current peace was established. This
chronological distance means that the current generation of accusers has not been directly
affected by the events in question, while the current generation of accused has not caused the
harm. Another reason to reject this kind of accusation is the fact that the causes at the root of
that bad deed no longer exist today: that state, political or religious system, ruler, world view,
series of events etc. ceased to exist long ago. In other words, the impetus or situation that gave
rise to the problem in question has long since played out, come to an end or changed so
completely that assigning blame to it in the past is pointless, since it has no continuation in the
present and presents no real threat in the future.

If we decide that claims like “our border ran through here 200 years ago” or “your great-great-
great-grandfather oppressed my great-great-great-grandfather” are legitimate grounds to launch
an attack, it would mean, for instance, that everyone in the United States except the Native
Americans would have to vacate the continent and return to their historic homeland, while
Russia would be entitled to attack Germany on the grounds of their erstwhile fascist regime.
Obviously, this would turn the world into a global war zone, all against all, and lead to
unimaginable disaster.

The second common trick consists of using some minor wrongdoing on the victim’s part to
justify a much greater act of aggression – “I smashed your face because you accidentally
pushed me as you passed by”, “I’m going to mock you for the next week because you forgot to
buy me beer in the supermarket yesterday”, and so on.
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 The aggressor/manipulator will often add to this by claiming that this very minor problem is
actually a big issue for them and has caused them serious damage.
The way to repel this attack is to say: “ok, if it’s really that serious, why don’t you do me the
same harm that I did you?” This means that if the princess really is unbearably bothered by the
pea under her mattress (which, indeed, may well be the truth), she has the right to put a little
pepper on your toilet seat – but not a bomb under your car! And if a person’s life really is
irreparably destroyed by an unwashed mug left out on the table, let them restore justice by
leaving their dirty socks in the hallway.

This allows us to observe whether the party claiming righteous anger and seeking to have
justice restored is actually planning something even worse than whatever they are pointing the
finger of blame over.

The next good way to identify the aggressor is to look at whose territory the fight is on – and
usually, it will be the territory of the victim. Aggression is always active, always expressed in
action, and the first act of the aggressor, which starts the whole interaction in motion, will be to
enter the victim’s territory. Obviously, then, in order to end a conflict interaction, a victim will
need to leave their own territory, while an aggressor will have to get out of someone else’s.
Thus, a good way to resolve a conflict is to suggest to whoever is on someone else’s territory
that they leave. If the conflict subsides after that, you have your answer.

You can also identify the aggressor by observing the mental states of the two sides. This
method works well in situations where the facts are so scant or contradictory and everything is
so confused and ambiguous that proceeding logically is a challenge. Likewise, it is helpful when
numerous clever manipulations are employed at once, creating confusion.
The animal emotional centre, with its aggression, egocentrism, thirst for battle and hunger to
attack, will always be more activated in the aggressor than in the victim. The victim has been
quietly minding their own business with no intention of going to war, and any aggression they do
display is for the purpose of defending themselves and restoring balance, not so that they can
barge into someone else’s life and onto someone else’s territory. The victim is not interested in
war, but in restoring peace as quickly as possible.
Thus, if the side claiming to be the injured party has the mental state of a raging bull, keeps
pushing for a fight, seeks out more and more pretexts for war and ignores potential avenues for
negotiation and reconciliation, then you are most likely looking at the aggressor/manipulator,
trying to disguise their attack as righteous anger.
The victim, on the other hand, will have a more activated higher emotional centre than the
aggressor in one way or another. It goes without saying that not all of us are capable of
experiencing universal love and acceptance while being attacked, but at the least, such feelings
as genuine dismay, a desire for help, regret over the situation and resentment are usually
present. If the victim feels helpless, they may enter a state of hysteria, but will never be seen in
a state of agitated ecstasy or smug schadenfreude.

The next useful method for determining who is in the wrong (and who is right) is to take each
side’s demands and proposals for resolving the conflict and assess what would happen if these
were applied to the actual situation in question, within the actual system of existing
interrelationships. The proposal that would bring greater equilibrium and balance to the system,

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do more to reduce violence in society and open up more potential for constructive cooperation
probably belongs to whoever is in the right. The demands of the aggressor, on the other hand,
will decrease the overall amount of fairness and conscience in the system while increasing
tension, conflict and violence, and if they do benefit one part of the system, the price will be
harm on a much larger scale to all the other parts.

And so, to conclude this chapter, if we hope to bring order to our interrelationships and
restore fairness, we will have to think with all parties in mind and with concern for the system as
a whole, try to find the best position for every party and seek the best future for everyone, and
not just try to carve out as many rights, opportunities and privileges for ourselves and our
people as possible.

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 Love

Up to this point, we have mainly focused on how we can benefit from friendship and
cooperation with other people. This is the essence of what fairness, a strategy for mutual
usefulness and common well-being, addresses.

But there is something that lets us go beyond our worries about our own interests, safety
and well-being, to reach a totally new level of awareness and action and move towards a life
where fear, worry, resentment, trauma, depression, laziness, doubt and petty thoughts of
personal gain lose their power over us. From there, we can spread our wings and fly to the
highest peak of all, the thing that truly gives life its meaning: love.

Love is at once the crowning jewel of the higher emotional centre and a step beyond its
limits, as well as beyond the limiting constraints of methods and strategies.

So then, let us talk about love. Since time immemorial, poets wishing to discuss love have
always included death as a player in the tale. Like them, we too need death in order to talk
about love. This means death in the real, solid sense – not in the religious or esoteric sense,
where death transports us to a different state, a different life, a different dimension, heaven or
hell, where the soul and consciousness, the most important parts of us, continue on, but
scientific death, meaning death as it really is, beyond our hopes and illusions. This death means
that when the body dies, the soul, consciousness and any other mental activity, no matter how
enlightened, also cease completely.

Dear reader, let’s experience this right now.

Go ahead and feel your body, noting the sensations that are present, and notice the feelings
and emotions you are currently experiencing. Look around you, listen, smell, reach out and
touch something. Think of your relationships, your loved ones, your goals, plans, challenges
and victories, hopes and dreams.
You are alive. Right now, in this moment, you are unquestionably experiencing life.
Everything you feel, everything you know, everything you want and don’t want, everything you
are connected to – all of it is life, and it is happening right now. Go ahead and recognise it, feel
it – you are alive.

And now, recognise that you, just like anyone else, are one day going to die, and all of this
will end for you forever. All the smells, the sounds, the plans, the hopes, the fury, the joy, all
your wealth of knowledge, all your accumulated experience, all your skills, talents and abilities
will completely cease to exist and will disappear.

At this moment, your spirit and mind will be experiencing shock – shock that we are
inescapably going to lose everything we have, that sooner or later, the thing all living beings in
the history of evolution have tried diligently to avoid is going to happen to us, and worst of all,
that this is inevitable and we can do nothing to stop it!
This greatest drama of the human psyche, which is so advanced that it has discovered and
acknowledged the inevitability of its own death, is the subject of one of the earliest works of
literature ever discovered – The Epic of Gilgamesh.
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 Upon discovering the inevitability of its own death, the consciousness will begin to thrash
about spasmodically, searching for a way out or something that can save it. But no matter how
powerful or well-connected we are, no matter how incredible our knowledge or skills or how vast
our wealth, it doesn’t change the reality that in the end, we are going to die and lose it all. No
matter what you do, there is no way out, and no strategy or trick is going to help you.

And it is here, at this most unbearable point, that we take the only real step beyond the
boundaries of our situation that we can possibly take.
The only thing I can do to save what I value from certain death is to transfer it to
something is going to stay alive.
Because regardless of my personal death, the lives of other people, of humanity, of Earth
and its residents, and of the Universe, will all continue.
And this decision is very different from all our others, which see us putting money in the bank
so we can take it back with interest, or planting a seed in the soil to gather a hundred times
more seeds in the harvest. Now, for the first time, we gladly give away our most precious
possession, intending to lose it forever! That is love – your selfless gift to the life that
continues.

Thus, the reason why only the reality of death can lead to real love: if they still hold out hope
of dying with a favourable interest rate, dying at a profit, or at least dying without a tangible loss,
why would a person give it away for free? For them, it makes much more sense to hoard and
conserve it, and if they do decide to give some away, it is unlikely to be genuinely valued and
selfless.

In this way, the spiritual traditions and their message of life after death have brought us
comfort, peace and serenity, but have robbed us of something very important, perhaps our most
valuable possession – real, selfless love.

When love arrives, you awake from a deep slumber that is the false sense of security
“immortal people” have, realising that you are alive right now, and that at any moment, you
might lose this forever. There is therefore no time for laziness, for lying to yourself, for
meaningless, insincere relationships, for quietly rotting away in a stagnant sea of pointless
tasks, for any of the useless fuss and commotion that has nothing to do with what you truly think
is valuable.

When love arrives, staring death straight in the face, the will to live finally arrives too. The
will and ability to act finally appear.

When love arrives, fear finally leaves, because you have already made the most frightening
decision of all: to give away your most valuable possession and die. And when fear leaves, true
freedom arrives. Freedom to do what actually matters to you. Freedom to say what you actually
think and feel. Freedom to dance in the face of certain death.

Love illuminates what matters most in a person, their biggest talent, their greatest strength.
The thing that lets the greatest stream of life come flowing through you. The thing that gives you
a reason to pass something on to those who come after you.
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 These things may be very different for different people, and they can only be identified by
each individual for themselves through introspection. Similarly, they can be passed on in very
different ways. It could be your children, who inherit your qualities, care, experiences and traits.
It could be your contribution to science or art. It could be your contribution to the environment or
preserving our unique natural world. It could even be your contribution to the evolution of the
Universe, because in one way or another, we are all a part of it.

The important thing is that your contribution, your gift, the best you have to offer now has a
real shot at immortality! Because there is no compelling reason why human life, all life on Earth
or evolution as a whole should inevitably perish. Yes, a major comet or some strain of
coronavirus could suddenly destroy us all, and that would be unsurprising – life is unexpected
and eternally full of change, and it is dangerous. But the river of life that flows through us is, by
its nature, immortal. And if we use the best we have to do the best we can, that act will, in all
likelihood, carry on living, flowing through innumerable transformations into eternity and infinity.
And somewhere in that immense river will be a tiny particle of our love, our selfless gift to life.

And for the person who has love in their life, it will suddenly become easier to embody the
qualities needed to develop conscience. It will become easier to break down the barrier of
egocentrism, to see and feel other people and be truly useful. Because now, it is a way to
transcend death. Conscience is now your ticket to immortality.

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 Conclusion

Throughout our investigation, there is one very important point we never touched upon.
Certainly, the unification of separate highly developed organisms into a single, integral system
of a higher order is, one way or another, inevitable. But this unification may be achieved in
different ways.

Unifying on the basis of conscience uses the resources of our own consciousness. In this
situation, each of us is the bearer and protector of the relationships that turn us into a society.
This makes us society’s masters. Our choice, our decision to be friends and partners, our will
and our freedom are in force.

But there is another way to unite people into a single system. You can establish such rigid
control over, and dependence on, the system, its technologies and mechanisms that people
simply will not have the physical choice to live any other way. If a person’s every important
move is strictly regulated and watched through the crosshairs, they will simply be forced to obey
the system’s algorithms, whatever those may be, fulfilling their assigned role within it and
subordinated to something over which they have no real power. All the technologies required for
this already exist – all that’s necessary is to apply them correctly.

And if that happens, things like honesty, integrity, sincerity, honour, kindness and the ability
to understand one another will no longer be needed, because when we have no choice in how
we live, our choice in how we act disappears too. And when we have no choice in how we act,
all of our qualities become meaningless, including the qualities of our heart and consciousness.
And, as a result, conscience becomes unnecessary for further evolution. You see?

To be frank, one of the reasons I wrote this book was because I see and feel that both
conscience and love are in danger. How we are united into a single system makes no difference
to the Universe or evolution – what matters is that that system should be able to process energy
and fill space with enough efficiency, and that it contains sufficient potential for further evolution.
The Universe, in its current form, follows no code of ethics – only the laws of physics. The
Universe obeys the law of balanced forces, and the force that wins is the force that dominates.
The Universe will not waver if, for example, Earth and every life form on it, Einstein and Billie
Eilish and everyone else, get swallowed by a black hole and turned into nothing more than a
superdense, monolithic fragment of matter a few centimetres across. Nor will the Universe
waver if humanity becomes a monster, devouring all life on its own planet before moving on to
devour others. For the Universe, it’s all just matter and energy.

But the Universe also has space for an infinite number of possible forms of existence. It
offers all entities true freedom to choose what to be and how to shape the future. This means
that there is an iteration of the Universe in which conscience exists. Because conscience is
much bigger than just humanity. Conscience is the principle that makes it possible to consider
the interests of other beings, other life forms and other modes of existence. It is the principle of
coming together in accord, not in conflict.

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 Evolution, then, will continue no matter what, and we have two options: stand together with
goodwill as our foundation, using the natural resources of our psyche, or be united into a
system by mechanistic force. And the choice is in our hands, because we are the conduit of
evolution in the era of rapid change.

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 Redefining Conscience in an Era
of Rapid Change
Vlad Kreimer
omhohom@gmail.com

This e-book is distributed free of charge.

However, if you think what is being said here is important and want to support the project, you can
help by sharing this e-book with others who could be interested.

Editor – Tanya Belinskaya

Translator – Liath Gleeson
English Editor – Inga Vlasikhina
Proofreader – Thomas Lundberg

2020

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