CYCLE SEVEN

1. Philosophy treats of truth and joy, religion of God and Heaven. For religion is in many respects the practical fulfilment of a theoretical precondition. One does not live by philosophy: one thinks by it. In the metaphysical context, what one primarily lives by is religion. For transcendental meditation, the praxis of metaphysical religion in its sensible manifestation, is not a philosophy but the practical vindication of a philosophy, which understands the nature, as it were, of truth and joy.

2. Being God and Heaven is obviously different from theorizing about God and Heaven from the standpoint of truth and joy. One could say that being graceful and holy is equally distinct from theorizing about grace and holiness from the standpoint of calmness and peace. For calmness and peace are arguably preconditions of grace and holiness, just as truth and joy presuppose the possibility, through religious praxis, of God and Heaven or, alternatively, of godliness and heavenliness.

3. Such pedantic distinctions notwithstanding, it is certainly true that the metaphysical will is centred on calmness and the metaphysical spirit on peace; for calmness delivers peace no less than the lungs deliver the breath. Whether that calmness is going to be transformed into grace and that peace into holiness, however, will depend whether religious praxis takes over from philosophical theory, whether, that is, an insight surrounding the nature of the metaphysical context is turned into a consciously-determined principle of religious praxis. If so, then one is not just calm and peaceful; one becomes graceful and holy.

4. For he who passes beyond the natural metaphysical condition of calmness and peace through a philosophical theory of truth and joy soon finds himself in the position of actually experiencing grace and holiness through becoming God and Heaven. He can move forward from metaphysical nature to philosophy (the transcendent theory), from philosophy to religion (the meditative praxis), and finally from religion to sublimity (which some have called theosophy, meaning actual experience of godliness and heavenliness).

5. Hence a path of ascent, within metaphysical nature, from subnature to subconsciousness via subhumanism and subastralism, as from will to soul via ego and spirit, as, in general terms, from calmness and peace to grace and holiness via truth and joy and God and Heaven.

6. Subnature is the base metal, so to speak, that has to be transmuted into the refined gold of actual subconscious fulfilment. For this purpose it is necessary to have become subhuman in one's metaphysical philosophising, and to have given oneself over to the subastral commitment of religious praxis.

7. For the subhuman becomes subconscious via the subastral having once appreciated the significance and utilized to a sublimated end the subnatural, 'the Son' becoming 'the Holy Soul of Heaven' via 'the Father' and 'the Holy Spirit of Heaven', ego duly transmuted into soul via will and spirit.

8. Thus the taking of the metaphysical ego is transcended by the being of the metaphysical soul as the God-Self achieves self-transcendence in the Heaven-Self, and all because it partook of the doing of the metaphysical will and the giving of the metaphysical spirit, the godly not-self and the heavenly not-self of, for example, the lungs and the breath, identifying with the out-breath only so far, which is to say, until self-preservation induces the self in question to recoil from the threat of self-annihilation posed by the heavenly not-self and rebound to selfhood more profoundly (as soul) than would otherwise have been the case.

9. The God-Self, being primary, has been identified with 'the Son' and the Heaven-Self with 'the Holy Soul', while the godly not-self, or God-Not-Self, being secondary, has been identified with 'the Father' and the heavenly not-self, or Heaven-Not-Self, with 'the Holy Spirit'.

10. There is no other raison d'être to religion than the achievement of self-transcendence by the metaphysical ego in the metaphysical soul, 'the Holy Soul of Heaven', which is at the core of the self in question. Anything that falls short of this is indicative of 'bovaryized' religion, which is to say, of non-metaphysical religion, be it physical, chemical, or metachemical. And 'bovaryized' religion is pretty much everywhere the rule rather than the exception!

11. Whereas genuine religion is alone transcendentalist, manifesting self-transcendence in relation to the metaphysical soul, false religion either glorifies the physical self, the ego-of-egos, or else, over on the female side of the gender fence, subordinates the self, in due objective fashion, to one or other of the not-selves, with a result that either the spirituality of the chemical not-self or the instinctuality of the metachemical not-self becomes hegemonic.

12. Hence whereas what may be called humanist religion glorifies the self in its per se manifestation in relation to physics, nonconformist religion denies the self (which is not commensurate with self-transcendence) in the interests of a spiritual per se in relation to chemistry, and fundamentalist religion denies the self in the interests of an instinctual per se in relation to metachemistry, with, in consequence, a bias for will rather than spirit or, in the physical context, ego.

13. For you cannot achieve self-transcendence in a context where the self is either the mean, as in the vegetative realm of physics, or fated to be subordinated to one or other of the not-selves in typically chemical or metachemical fashion. All that is achieved is a religion that is earmarked either to play second-fiddle, so to speak, to economics (humanism), third-fiddle to politics (nonconformism), or fourth-fiddle to science (fundamentalism).

14. Obviously, to judge by the world in general, false religion suits the majority of people, for economics and politics are more characteristically of the world, and science tends to hold a ruling, if not dominating, position in relation to it. Only world-denial sets one on course for the metaphysical transcendentalism of genuine religion, and world-denial, as the world adequately confirms, tends to be the exception to the rule!

15. Thus the Transcendentalist, as we may call the devotee of genuine religion, is very much an elitist outsider in a world where not religion but economics, politics, or science is destined to be hegemonic. Many are called but few are chosen ... by religion, as, indeed, by that other elitist discipline, science.

16. Therefore religion can only be of genuine interest to the subjective Few, who, when being metaphysical, know themselves as gods in pursuit of heavenly redemption, whether in sensuality or, more profoundly, in sensibility.

17. As I have argued in the past, metaphysical sensibility is the salvation of metaphysical sensuality; for the latter, centred around ears and airwaves, tends to be surbordinate, in typically 'once-born' or sensual fashion, to the optical first-mover of things, as music to art, whereas the former stands a plane above its metachemical counterpart in what amounts to an ascendant position.

18. It is precisely the ascendant position of metaphysical sensibility that constitutes metaphysical salvation, as from ears to lungs, airwaves to the breath, music to meditation, sequential time to spaced space. For salvation is a male prerogative solely germane to the subjective axes of time-space (as here) and of mass-volume, and constitutes deliverance from the under-plane curse, in sensual contexts, of being 'fall guy for slag' and other-dependent, meaning subordinate to the female aspect of things, and hence to females.

19. Being saved from time to space, as from ears to lungs, is the noumenal and, in some sense, upper-class equivalent of being phenomenally saved from mass to volume, as from phallus to brain. It is the salvation of gods as distinct from the salvation of men, and would only appeal to those who were avowedly metaphysical in the first place.

20. Hence metaphysical salvation is the salvation-of-salvations, the ultimate 'kingdom within' that exposes the Christian 'kingdom within' as penultimate and therefore as something germane to a 'First Coming' as distinct from a 'Second Coming', the coming of an ultimate Messiah whose destiny is to complete, in upper-class terms, what Christ started or, at any rate, what the Church has continued to the effective exclusion of metaphysical sensibility.