THE SENSIBILITY OF HOLINESS

1. The ratio of sensuality to sensibility in people is not fixed but tends to fluctuate according to a whole range of factors - gender, age, class, race, profession, environment, nationality, and so on, so that individual differences become modified in the course of time.

2. In general terms, it is fair to say that young people tend to display more sensuality than sensibility, and old people more sensibility than sensuality, with middle-aged people falling somewhere in between the two extremes.

3. All, however, are both sensual and sensible to greater or lesser extents; for human beings are a combination of both and cannot expect, even in countries or societies which purport to be cultured and civilized, to remain exclusively sensible. Neither, on the other hand, are barbarous and natural countries or societies exclusively sensual, even when they are at their evil and/or foolish worst.

4. Certainly the individual can develop an enhanced capacity for sensibility at the expense of sensuality, and this is only likely to happen to any appreciable extent within societies or countries which encourage sensibility because recognizably cultural and civil.

5. Such countries or societies will be Christian and 'reborn' rather than Heathen and 'once born', tending to encourage adherence to the 'kingdom within' as opposed to the 'kingdom without', whether the latter be stellar or solar or lunar or, indeed, terrestrial, which is to say, of nature.

6. However, there is the 'kingdom within' which is subjective (and male), and the 'kingdom within' which is objective (and female), as well as lower- and upper-class manifestations of each according to whether phenomenal or noumenal, relativistic or absolutist criteria happen to be paramount - the Christian West traditionally being an example of adherence to a phenomenal 'kingdom within' which, whether subjective or objective, directly moral or indirectly so, tended to remain partial to the sensibilities of volume and mass in Christic and Marian means which, however sincere, would never do justice to space and time.

7. For space and time, and space in particular, are the only contexts of sensibility in which the 'kingdom within' has to do with truth and beauty in relation to the lungs and the heart, as opposed, like volume and mass, to knowledge and strength in relation to the brain and the womb, and to achieve the institutional embodiments of such a 'kingdom within' would be to go beyond culture and civilization as they have existed in the West in the past to an entirely new manifestation of culture and civilization which, while allowing for modified levels of traditional, or phenomenal, culture and civilization, was geared to the advancement of that which did the most justice to sensibility on noumenal terms, with especial reference to the lungs.

8. For only in connection with the lungs can God and Heaven come to wise and holy fruition, and therefore only in connection with a religious praxis based, like transcendental meditation, upon the lungs ... can religion come properly and ultimately to pass. For there is no wisdom in godliness and no holiness in heavenliness prior to metaphysical sensibility, as I hope presently to explain.

9. Before I do, let it be said that religion per se, and therefore God per se, is not about knowledge, still less strength, much less beauty, but about truth, and that truth it is which distinguishes the godly individual from men, women, and devils, or devilish individuals, for whom knowledge, strength, and beauty are - certainly in organic supremacy - the respective virtues.

10. That said, we can, I believe, establish that the godly individual, being metaphysical rather than physical, chemical, or metachemical, will be one for whom truth is the means to a joyful end, since his sole intention will be to achieve soulful redemption of his self by utilizing his ego to find a conscious accommodation with the will and spirit of his inner (sensible) metaphysical not-self, the lungs and the breath, in the interests of enhanced selfhood.

11. Now the ego that is into the will of the lungs to breathe is conscious of meditating, and in meditating one is thrown back from the threat to self of the out-breath upon self more profoundly than would otherwise have been the case, thereby achieving what religion would call a resurrection of the self (ego) in the form or, rather, content(ment) of the soul, which is its redemption in what amounts, for the nonce, to heavenly joy, to what I elsewhere called the Holy Soul of Heaven.

12. For the Holy Soul of Heaven is the reward for the Wise Ego of God-the-Son when it plunges, identity-wise, into the Wise Will of God-the-Father, the graceful will of the lungs to breathe, and is transported upon the wings of the Holy Spirit of Heaven towards that selfless threat to self which necessitates recoil, in the interests of self-preservation, to what becomes the redemption of the self in the aforementioned Holy Soul of Heaven.

13. Heavenly holiness only exists, as I have said, in relation to inner metaphysics, or metaphysical sensibility, and therefore as either the Holy Spirit of Heaven or the Holy Soul of Heaven, the former secondary (to the self) and the latter primary, since affiliated with the self in what amounts to its soulful redemption.

14. However, there is such a thing as earthly holiness, which is germane to physical sensibility, and it has to do with the utilization of the inner physical ego for purposes of achieving some kind of soulful redemption, via inner physical will and spirit, in the soul of physical sensibility.

15. Such a soul, however, which we can call the Holy Soul of the Earth, is no true religious end but, rather, something which, being pleasurable, tends to be subordinated to a false end by dint of the fact that the per se manifestation of physical sensibility is not soul but ego, since ego corresponds to form and form is the attribute, in this case qualitative, that is most correlative with vegetation (earth), the physical element par excellence.

16. Hence the Holy Soul of the Earth tends to be subordinate to what may be called the Wise Ego of Man-the-Son, for whom not truth but knowledge is the principal characteristic, with pleasurable associations, as already noted.

17. Nevertheless it can be said that the achievement, whether intermittently or otherwise, of the Holy Soul of the Earth necessitates a willingness by the Wise Ego of Man-the-Son to plunge, identity-wise, into the Wise Will of Man-the-Father, the will of the brain to think, before recoil to soulful redemption can be anticipated in connection with the Holy Spirit of the Earth, the actual thoughts which issue, in mental cogitation, from the brain.

18. In general terms, the utilization of intellect - for that is what we are actually alluding to here - for a (necessarily false) religious end is called prayer, and prayer it is that confirms a person, especially when male, as a Son-of-Man (like Christ), as opposed to a Son-of-God (like the Second Coming), for whom holiness can never be more than earthly, and hence relativistic.

19. However, inner physical ego and will, the former primary (as germane to the masculine self) and the latter secondary (as germane to the not-self, i.e. brain) are wise after a relativistic fashion, but only in terms of the phenomenal, the physical, and therefore on a basis that falls short of absolute wisdom, the wisdom not of man (knowledge) but of God (truth), which is, of course, noumenal and metaphysical, or noumenally metaphysical, in relation to an altogether higher order of sensibility such that only appeals, as a rule, to a superior type of human being, whom we have called godly and can identify, quite literally, with God - primarily in terms of the Wise Ego of God-the-Son and secondarily in terms of the Wise Will of God-the-Father, the will, in other words, of the lungs to breathe, and to breathe out what becomes, in conscious recognition, the Holy Spirit of Heaven from which the Wise Ego of God-the-Son must recoil, in self-preservation, to the Holy Soul of Heaven as the profoundest manifestation of self and per se manifestation of soul, as germane to metaphysical sensibility.

20. For a per se manifestation of soul, being deeply essential in joy, can only exist in relation to the essential element, the air, and not in relation to the qualitative element of vegetation (earth) where, as pleasure, it is 'once bovaryized', still less in relation to the quantitative element of water where, as pride, it is 'twice bovaryized', much less in relation to the apparent element of fire where, as love, it is 'thrice bovaryized' and therefore neither of Heaven nor the earth, still less of purgatory, but of Hell, the positive, or organic, Hell whose egocentric and wilful preconditions have less to do with Sons and Fathers than with Daughters and Mothers.