Author Description

This substantial collection of aphorisms and maxims is taken from a variety of projects, including (besides the aforementioned genres) volumes containing either dialogues or essays like 'The Illusory Truth', 'The Way of Evolution', and 'The Importance of Technology to the Transcendental Future' or both dialogues and essays like 'Future Transformations', 'Post-Atomic Perspectives', 'The Will to Truth', and 'Social Transcendentalism', which John O'Loughlin wrote between 1977 and 1984, and is therefore representative of a comparatively early stage in his philosophical development. The subject-matter of each section ranges widely between mostly cultural, social, political and religious concerns, and somewhat eludes single-subject definition, in spite of the author's attempt at concise titles, some of which appear unavoidably similar. But despite the inherent problems characterizing anthologies of this nature, it gradually narrows down towards a specific ideological stance which he has equated with Social Transcendentalism, and thus with a kind of ultimate politico-religious orientation less concerned with man than with his hypothetical future transmutation or transfiguration towards what has been called the Post-Human Millennium, a period in time or, rather, eternity when, hypothetically speaking, man is superseded and/or transcended by what stands closer to the godly if not, in a profounder sense, to godliness per se. Such, in a nutshell, is the drift of this chronological collection of aphorisms and maxims, which set Mr O'Loughlin on the road towards his mature writings (1985-2015) and thus to the eventual apotheosis of his development as a writer of philosophical-cum-theosophical works, the latter part of this hyphenated term implying - contrary to standard practice - a greater concern with metaphysical truth than with physical knowledge.