CYCLE THIRTEEN

1. East and West draw together to form global civilization - not as East over West or vice versa, but as a compromise between and combination of both, whereby the dynamic artificiality of the West is put to the service of the preponderant transcendentalism, and even fundamentalism, duly modified, of the East.

2. I say 'duly modified' because Eastern religion is premised upon a naturalistic base, and no such base can prevail - whether inorganically or especially organically - in relation to Western artificiality, i.e. industrialization, urbanization, secularization, modernization, and so on.

3. Social Transcendentalism takes transcendentalism, specifically with reference to meditation, and fundamentalism, specifically with reference to a metachemical basis, in Time, for Eternity, and transforms them relative to its concept of a triadic Beyond (also composed of transmuted forms of humanism and nonconformism) and an administrative aside, as properly germane to 'Kingdom Come'.

4. It is this combination of Western technology and Eastern religiosity which makes it virtually inevitable that, in the development of a global civilization from the coming together of East and West (not to mention, in a narrower sense, North and South), the evolutionary dynamic of the West, largely founded on artificial modes of inorganic primacy, will impact upon the religiosity of the East, with its noumenal biases for both naturalistic, or cosmic, forms of inorganic primacy and in particular naturalistic, or universal, forms of organic supremacy, and in such a way as to drive transcendentalism beyond man or mankind, and not simply in the sense of a transcendentalist hegemony over humanism and nonconformism, but with evolutionary implications that point towards a post-human culmination of life in a variety of omega points, so to speak, having their basis in cyborgization.

5. For no more than the extensively urbanized and industrialized West can be reduced to religious naturalism by the East, can the East be reduced to secular artificiality by the West, since both traditions are too deeply entrenched to permit of anything but the artificial service, and synthetic transmutation, of Eastern religiosity principally with regard to the noumenal alternatives of fundamentalism and transcendentalism, both of which are traditionally premised upon naturalistic forms of organic supremacy.

6. Eastern religious traditions could only really thrive in the West among Western peoples on the basis of a naturalistic precondition. Such a precondition, whether inorganic or organic, is however largely absent by dint of the West's cultural commitment to the artificial transmutation of life, both environmentally and technologically, which means that the West escapes simply being Easternized, as it were, and effectively subsumed into the East on a largely transcendentalist or fundamentalist basis.

7. Neither, by a converse token, can the East be simply subsumed into the West, even if extensively Westernized in certain key areas, including technology. But its higher religious traditions, both diabolic and divine, metachemical and metaphysical, can only be affected by Western influence, and therefore become part, whether under Social Transcendentalism or otherwise, of an evolutionary dynamic marching ever onwards towards some, as yet, unglimpsed omega point in the distant future - the culmination, in effect, of all civilization and culture.

8. We have seen, particularly with the Americans and the Russians, the achievement of artificial alpha points, so to speak, in space, as rocketry and space stations have blazed a trail of exploration and study. This objective approach to space effectively parallels, on an artificial basis, those sensual aspects of the Cosmos which, like the sun and stars, are directed outwards in 'once born' fashion.

9. We have yet to see or, rather, achieve the 'reborn' and sensible counterpart to that, as and when a parallel with those sensible manifestations of the Cosmos, like Venus and Saturn, is established, and established on a no-less artificial basis than the basis with which rocketry and research stations are currently sent out into space.

10. But these artificial vessels to which I allude, whatever their size and eventual scope, will be as omega points to the Cosmos, and therefore not simply parallel to the sensible cosmos but also antithetical to the alpha points of secular space endeavour, scientifically rooted, as it invariably is, in exploration and other such objective concerns.

11. Our projected omega points, on the other hand, will be largely if not solely subjective, concerned to enable a higher life form, avowedly post-humanist, if not post-human, to live to the maximum of its religious potential in contexts sufficiently removed from earthly gravity as to permit of unprecedented degrees not simply of transmuted transcendentalism, but of modified forms of humanism, nonconformism, and even fundamentalism, within the pluralistic totality of the ideologically uniform contexts in question.