CYCLE FIFTY-FOUR

1. The worldly wise know that there is more pleasure in Giving than in Taking, and continue to give accordingly.

2. Likewise, the heavenly wise know that there is more joy in Being than in Doing, and continue to be accordingly.

3. It is easier to cultivate culture in a cult than by oneself ... in a solitary context that, in its individuality, owes more to civilization than to culture.

4. The semantic connection between cult and culture is no less significant than that between sect and section.

5. One might even go so far as to contend that no true culture can be cultivated independently of a cult, which exists expressly for the purpose of enabling the individuals who form it to merge themselves into the communal identity towards which it strives.

6. Unlike a crowd, which is a motley collection of individuals, a true community transcends the individuals of whom it is composed in the transpersonal unity of the cult.

7. The cult member has no individuality in the way a member of the crowd has; for he has left his individuality behind, in pursuance of the transpersonal identity to which his cult aspires.

8. The crowd is always vulnerable to chaos and violence because the individuals of whom it is composed retain their individuality, both physically and mentally, which, under pressure, can easily burst out of the collective framework in reaction against other individuals.

9. A commune differs from a crowd to the extent that the individuals who compose it share a common purpose in living together as equally and harmoniously as possible.

10. However, unlike a cult, a commune can be purely secular, and hence socialistic, in its basic structure, with no transpersonal aspirations beyond the day-to-day management of community relations in the interests of the physical wellbeing of all its members.

11. In this regard, a commune stands somewhere in between a crowd and a cult, with potential to devolve or evolve in either direction, so to speak.

12. On another level, a club also stands somewhere in between a crowd and a cult, though its members tend to be less communal and correspondingly more individualistic, if on phenomenal rather than, like the crowd, noumenal terms.

13. Unlike a commune, members of a club tend to develop or assert their individuality within the confines of the purpose for which the club exists.

14. One might argue that a club is essentially a bourgeois commune in which the individuals of whom it is composed hone their individuality to the greater purpose for which the club exists, while remaining free, as individuals, to come and go as they please.

15. The biggest (and worst) clubs tend to allow their members maximum freedom with regard to the pursuit of individual goals, thereby approximating to the crowd.

16. By contrast, the biggest (and best) communes tend to adopt a cult-like status in pursuance of some cultural or transcendent goal.

17. There is nothing particularly evil or vicious, in this context, about the word 'communism', which is semantically close to commune, community, communion, and other such words expressing the desire of individuals to lose themselves in a greater whole for purposes of social and/or moral self-improvement.

18. There are of course individuals who wish to lose themselves in the crowd, but that is usually for other than moral purposes; indeed, it enables them to express their individuality under cover of the collective, as in the case of football hooligans and vandals.

19. Such individuals may live a part of their lives in the collective, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with community or cult. They reflect the diabolical tendency of certain wild beasts to hunt in packs.

20. Indeed, whereas the club individual is largely a lunar/purgatorial phenomenon, the crowd individual is fundamentally a solar/diabolical noumenon, a creature who moves more easily and feels greater security in the noumenal objectivity of the crowd than in the phenomenal objectivity of his specific or chosen individuality.

21. Generally, the commune expresses the secular collectivity of the World, which is largely socialistic, whereas the cult expresses the religious collectivity of those whose 'Kingdom' is not of this world but of the heavenly Beyond. In the one case, the individual is able to lose himself within the phenomenal subjectivity of the group, which functions on a predominantly mundane basis, whereas in the other case, that of the cult, the individual is swallowed up, more completely, within the noumenal subjectivity of the cultural aspiration, which stands to the commune as transcendentalism to humanism or, in economic terms, as corporatism to socialism.

22. Official religions were once cults that achieved recognition by the State and were, in large part, taken over by the State, as in the cases of Christianity and Islam.

23. A cult that is taken over by the State, becoming its official religion, is fated to splinter into sects which, backed by state power, are likely to war on one another in the interests of their respective dogmas.

24. For, unlike a cult, a sect reflects the objectivity of the State with which, completely or in part, it is aligned, and will utilize every means, including violence, to serve its dogmatic interests at the expense of weaker sects.

25. The history of Christianity affords us a poignant example of inter-denominational conflict brought about by the utilization of state power to back its sectarian divisions and advance a variety of conflicting dogmas.

26. The revolution in religion will only come when a cult effectively takes over the State and absorbs it into itself, thereby establishing the basis for peace through the gradual 'withering' of state responsibility proportionate to the advancement of religious culture.

27. The cult of Social Transcendentalism, to which I subscribe, has no intentions of allowing itself to be taken-over by the State, but desires nothing less than to take over the State, democratically and peacefully, in the interests of the Centre, which is my definition of the context of mass religious sovereignty that I equate with 'Kingdom Come'.

28. Thus it is not the will of the self-proclaimed Messiah of Social Transcendentalism to allow his cult to be hijacked by the State, becoming thereafter its official religion, with all the attendant moral disadvantages that such a fate entails, including the possibility of sectarian schism. The 'Kingdom of Heaven' will only come universally to pass, in this age of mass sovereignty, when Social Transcendentalism is in a position to democratically take over the State and thus transmute it towards the Centre, ending, once and for all, the Devil's grip on religion and thereby freeing it for culture in the cultivation of Visual and/or Spiritual Being.