CYCLE FOURTEEN

1. Correlations between drinking and writing (lunar) and smoking and reading (solar), as regards water and fire. The writer (a novelist) is often inebriated, while the reader (whether poet or not) is just as often given to smoking. For drinking assists the writer no less than smoking ... the reader.

2. Analogous to the above, one could contend that eating assists the speaker, e.g. after-dinner speeches, etc., no less than snorting or, at any rate, sniffing ... the thinker. For correlations also exist between eating and talking (planar) and sniffing and thinking (stellar). In this latter regard, the incense in Catholic churches is primarily intended to facilitate religious thought, or prayer.

3. The important thing about prayers is not whether or not there exists a God to listen to and answer them, but that people are given, through religion, a pretext for thinking in the first place. For, being a mode of religious thought, prayer sustains the devotee in his commitment to a heavenly alternative to speaking (worldly), writing (purgatorial), and reading (hellish). Thought, and hence prayer, may not be the ne plus ultra of spirituality, but it is still preferable to speaking, writing, and reading, and if the only way that a person can be induced to think is through prayer, then so be it! His prayers will not be the complete waste of time that cynics and moral ignoramuses might mistake them for! Yet, when all's said and done, prayer is still only relative to a phenomenal age or society, not to one that, through the Second Coming, had passed beyond the intellect to the noumenal 'Kingdom of Heaven', wherein only meditation could do adequate justice to the spirit's quest for divine resolution ... in the 'Peace that surpasses all understanding'.