Links to the
files of which follow the brief
introduction below:–
This
collection
of
essays is taken from a variety of projects, including (besides
essays) volumes composed of dialogues, aphorisms and/or maxims which I
wrote
between 1979 and 1984, and is representative of a comparatively early
phase of
my philosophical development, when my struggle towards truth was still
in the
shadow, as it were, of knowledge and hence of a massive if not
voluminous
presentation.The subject-matter ranges
widely between mostly cultural, social, and political subjects, but
gradually
narrows down towards a specific ideological stance which I have equated
with
Social Transcendentalism and thus with a kind of ultimate
politico-religious
orientation which is less concerned with man than with his hypothetical
future
transmutation towards what has been called the post-Human Millennium, a
period
in time or, rather, eternity when man is superseded and effectively
transcended
by that which stands closer to the godly if not, in a profounder sense,
to God per se and therefore to a higher and
more radical order of godliness than anything that has obtained
before.Such, in a nutshell, is the
drift of this chronological collection of essays, which set me on the
road
towards my post-essayistic writings and to the eventual aphoristic
apotheosis
of my development as a writer of philosophical-cum-theosophical works.
– John O'Loughlin.
John O�Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic
of Ireland,
of mixed Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split
he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who had initially returned to Ireland with her daughter upon the death of her Aldershot-based husband after a lengthy marital absence) in the mid-50s and subsequently attended schools in
Aldershot, Hants and, with an enforced change of
denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been put into
care by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his ethnically-protective grandmother, Carshalton, Surrey. Shortly after leaving secondary school in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an
assortment of CSEs
(Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs
(General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived
jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford
Square, where he eventually became responsible for booking ABRSM examination venues throughout the British Isles.
After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, he returned to his former job in the West End
but, due to a combination of factors, left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which,
despite a brief spell as a computer-cum-office-skills tutor at Hornsey YMCA in the late '80s and
early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), An Interview
Reviewed (1979), Secret
Exchanges (1980), Sublimated
Relations(1981), and Deceptive
Motives (1981). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself to
philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned numerous titles of a
philosophical nature, including Devil and
God (1985–6), Towards
the Supernoumenon(1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and,
more recently, The Best
of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth
(2009), Insane but not Mad (2011) and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).
