CYCLE TWENTY-SEVEN

1. When intellect is focused, we have relative, or phenomenal, mind. But when consciousness is focused, we have absolute, or noumenal, mind. Relative mind, being intellectual, is purgatorial, whereas absolute mind, being spiritual, is divine.

2. People tend to think that they are rooted in the senses and accordingly conditioned by sense impressions, but, in reality, they are rooted or, rather, centred in the spirit, which is dependent upon the air one breathes for its being. For without air there would be no consciousness and therefore no life. Yet to get air we have to breathe, drawing it into our lungs and expelling it again in a continuous process that goes on twenty-four hours a day every single day of the week. In fact, breathing is so natural to us that we carry-on inhaling and exhaling air during our sleep, long after we have closed our eyes and effectively turned our back, so to speak, on the senses. Thus we are essentially creatures of the spirit, whose consciousness continues to flicker on the wick of our breaths even when we are sound asleep, albeit in a comparatively subconscious fashion. We can manage perfectly well without our eyes and ears during all that nocturnal time we are asleep, but without our breathing we would be dead in less than five minutes. Truly, the senses are peripheral to our true being, since no more than means to enable us to get about in the world and relate ourselves to it. How is it, then, that most people act as though the senses were everything and the spirit next-to-nothing?

3. Whatever the individual's case, it is clear that those who allow themselves to become dominated by the senses ... are less Christian than heathen, since they tend to imagine that man is an alpha-stemming creature whose true home is the Cosmos and, at the very least, a more vacuous approach to life which may well lead to the eclipse of consciousness by the light and, as a corollary, to a greater respect for optical sensuality. For there is of course a connection between light and optics, and the more a man goes against his true nature and seeks to take himself back towards the Cosmos, the greater will be the chance of his simply tumbling forwards from this spatial death into sensuous life and an enslavement, all the more poignant, to the senses, the sense of sight not least of all. Thus what was intended to be an escape becomes a trap, and the individual concerned is more at variance with his true nature than before. And yet he, like everybody else, carries on breathing, but so unconsciously as to be scarcely aware of it! His true self is still there, but as though an aside to the sensuous distractions which claim his attention and which he foolishly mistakes for real life. Small wonder that the spiritual life is regarded as a 'rebirth' in a world where most people have seemingly substituted a life dominated by the senses for their true one, unaware that the latter is more natural than the former and that when we home-in on it ... we become supernatural, and thus completely beyond the senses. In fact, that is precisely what saves us from the world of sensuous delusion, making us realize that we are essentially omega orientated, and thus potentially divine. If only people would accept their true centre, they wouldn't carry on behaving like devils, blown hither-and-thither by an eccentricity which has its roots in optical, aural, and other forms of sensuous idolatry. Alas, the World is still too much with them!

4. Thus while man's appearance might suggest that his origins are somewhat less than divine, his essence confirms him in an omega bias which, stretching from the lungs, points towards a divine ending ... in absolute mind. Yet it has been said that man is fashioned in God's image, which would suggest, by contrast, that his origins were divine, since it is in the image of a Creator-God that such a doctrine perceives man, and images are nothing if not apparent. A divine appearance? But surely that is a contradiction in terms! And how can a creature whose appearance leaves so much to be desired from a spiritual point of view ... possibly be fashioned in the image of a divine God, no matter how negative this God may be when judged by truly divine, or omega-oriented, standards, which have nothing whatsoever to do with images? A strange God, indeed, whose image is found on the countenance of man! For what is such a countenance, after all, but a composite, together with the body in general, of disparate and heterogeneous elements, some of which may arguably have been extrapolated from some primal and therefore negative divinity, but assuredly not all of them! Else one would be reduced to conceiving of the Divine in comprehensively composite terms, quite overlooking the moral distinction which indubitably exists between, say, the central star of the Galaxy and peripheral stars like the sun, which exist in a 'fallen' relationship to the central one. No, this image of God may be negatively divine - and thus extrapolated from the Galaxy's central star - so far as the so-called 'Third Eye' of the forehead is concerned; but as for the eyes and ears as well, surely the sun and the moon would be the more likely sources of origin, sources at once diabolic and purgatorial, with the right eye/ear deriving, in their more aggressive nature, from the former and the left eye/ear deriving from the latter, a comparatively more passive source. Hence a 'solar eye' and a 'lunar eye' either side of a 'stellar eye', the 'Third Eye' of mystical Godhead, with an aural back-up for all these eyes (even, I would guess, for the divine eye, with its 'voice of conscience').

5. As regards the nostrils, a similar left/right distinction can also be made, though less in terms of the sun and the moon than with reference to the 'Third Eye' in the case of the right nostril and to the spirit in that of the left one, the former slightly more biased towards exhalation and the latter towards inhalation, a reactive/attractive distinction which points-up a parallel with the light and the air respectively. Thus where the right nostril might be regarded as being, in some sense, alpha stemming on account of its bias towards exhalation, the left nostril would seem to reflect an omega orientation by dint of its slighter bias towards inhalation, thereby running contrary to the 'Third Eye' ... of pineal imagination. Of course, neither nostril is literally of the Divine, since a physical channel for the passage of breath to and from the lungs. But the nostrils are rather more spiritual than sensual, given their close connection with the air. They pander to the spiritual essence of mankind ... as beings for whom the lungs are primary and the senses secondary. We cannot live without them!