CYCLE FIFTEEN

1. The distinction between extroversion and introversion is also, in some degree, a distinction between freedom and thraldom, or being free as opposed to being bound, i.e. committed to a centre. For freedom and thraldom, as we are here attempting to define them, are akin to sensuality and sensibility, the former centrifugal and the latter centripetal, an alpha/omega distinction, in short, between appearances and essences, the 'once born' and the 'reborn'. One is born free but privileged, as a human being, to cultivate a binding to some virtue, 'born under one law, (but) to another bound', as Aldous Huxley, quoting from Fulke Greville, was often keen to remind us. Born heathen, but fated to be baptized, it may be, into Christ, and so on. Hence freedom is, in its identification with the senses, with outer sense, something to be escaped from, to be saved from, since no more than a precondition of a sensible alternative.

2. A so-called 'free society' is apt to stress sensuality at the expense of sensibility, and is thus the opposite of a sensible or bound society, in which the cultivation of sensibility, on whatever plane, will be given every encouragement. In fact, the freer a society is the less sensibility there will be in it, with evil consequences for all concerned! People will be reduced to extrinsic valuation, becoming no more than commodities to be bought and sold in the market place of commercial exploitation. Human dignity can only suffer, as that which is best in people is snuffed out or spurned. Only 'hollow men' can prevail in this Heathen/Superheathen society, the most 'hollow' rising to the top as 'stars', 'tycoons', 'heroes', 'rulers', and such like. These leading 'free men' inevitably enslave the masses to their sensual will. Becoming enthralled by their spectacular shows, the masses cultivate a secondary order of hollowness in the reflections of the prevailing freedoms to which they are exposed. They do not escape the woes, humiliations, hatreds, and pains that are especially characteristic of the Free, but live them vacariously, in the shadow of the primary vacuums. Nor, of course, are they immune to such scourges themselves, given the loss of self-respect which follows from a hollow premise. Freedom has a price, and one pays for it with one's soul, spirit, mind, or id, as the case may be. Ultimately, one pays for it with one's life!

3. If freedom is evil, then thraldom, in the context of being bound to one or other of the sensibilities, is alone good, and we may hold that, whatever the virtuous form it takes, such thraldom is deliverance from freedom. Whether, like freedom, one's thraldom is moral, amoral (objectively or subjectively), or immoral, it alone provides the solution to the problem of freedom. One is not saved until one is in thrall (not to be confounded with enthralment, as to some sensational spectacle) to one's self, whether that self be natural or supernatural, which is to say, physical/metaphysical or chemical/metachemical. Only in sensibility is there deliverance from the freedoms of outer sense, the freedoms with which we are born but from which, if wise, one can escape into the bindings of rebirth. Only the Reborn are saved, though only the reborn to humanism (the womb), nonconformism (the brain), and transcendentalism (the lungs) can be saved eternally. For Mass, Volume, and Space are potentially, if not currently, beyond the ravages of Time.