CYCLE EIGHT

1. People die and their corpses are disposed of - exceptions to the rule, whether at sea or in tombs - notwithstanding - in one of two ways: either by burial or by incineration, the one arguably more ecclesiastical and the other more secular.

2. For it does seem that, for Western people, the options are simply between the Christian tradition and the non-Christian present; between the earthy disposal of sensible Civilization in relation, by and large, to the temporal Son/Mother, and the fiery disposal of sensual Civilization in like relation to the eternal Daughter/Father - in short, between alternatives that strangely parallel either suburban sensibility or, up and back from that, rural sensuality, phenomenal subjectivity or noumenal objectivity.

3. Be that as it may, one thing we can be sure of is that burial, whether strictly Christian or otherwise, is a luxury that belongs more to the ecclesiastic past than to the secular present, and that while it is still possible and even morally laudable to be buried, the future prospects of this method of disposal and/or respect for the dead, with implications of afterlife experience in the self, cannot be too good, in view not only of the entrenchment of secular values but of the shrinking availability of suitable land in a society which is becoming ever more subject to the pressures of commercial expropriation and exploitation even without American influence, and in which space is scarcer and more sought-after, more commercially precious, than ever before, notwithstanding the increase in populations and greater degree of multiracial cosmopolitanism which, with correlative ethnic distinctions, further complicate an already complicated situation, reducing respect for traditional criteria and conducing towards a more secular outlook.

4. In short, commercial pressures in relation to larger populations will continue to impact on land and life to such an extent that, even without outside take-overs of the sort that result in a more profitable enterprise on a given area of land, the cost of burial will continue to rise and drive more and more people towards the crematorium, towards that grisly fate for the self which, no matter how scientifically efficacious, few people with any degree of sensibility, Christian or otherwise, could possibly wish on either themselves or their relatives.

5. So what is the solution? The temporal Son, in the sensible-to-sensual decadence of Western civilization, has given way to the eternal Father, the phenomenal omega to the noumenal alpha, and the grisly pall of smoking crematoria now hangs over the land from a standpoint effectively rooted in the hell of raging flame, in a context owing more to the alpha of an absolute manifestation of sensual Civilization than to the omega of a relative manifestation of sensible Civilization, and therefore one that is effectively antithetical to, or the polar opposite of, the omega point of ... the city, which we have argued to be the absolute manifestation of sensible Civilization - in short, the omega-of-omegas.

6. But the city has still not come into its religious prime, as noted earlier, and therefore it is bereft of both an official religious commitment, centred on and led by transcendental meditation, and an alternative approach to death than that applying in both the burial and crematorial contexts of the suburban omega and the rural alpha. The vegetativeness, or earthiness, of humanism has been effectively overhauled and even eclipsed by fundamentalism, but the overhauling of fundamentalism by transcendentalism, of fire by air, has not yet taken place, and consequently no alternative approach to death such that, rather than disposing of corpses at the expense of the self, affirms the self at the expense of the not-self, psyche at the expense of nature, immortal life at the expense of mortal death (and on equivalently noumenal and eternal terms), has or could be officially sanctioned, no matter how desirable it may be from the standpoint of higher life and a sensible respect for its capacity to generate afterlife experiences of the kind that tradition has equated with Heaven.

7. In short, until the reign of the eternal Son comes to pass in relation to 'Kingdom Come', and in consequence of a democratically expressed majority mandate for religious sovereignty by the relevant electorates at that juncture in time which, through the most paradoxical of elections, I have eschatologically equated with Judgement, there can be no noumenal alternative to crematorial fundamentalism, and therefore no transcendental possibility of the transcendence of earthly burial in an order of sensible Civilization that affirms Eternal Life from the standpoint of a cyborg-to-post-human transmutation of human kind, in keeping with the hegemony of transcendentalism over humanism, not to mention feminine nonconformism, as the coupling of this revolutionary situation with the traditional dynamism of Western civilization leads mankind beyond itself to a prospect infinitely open to evolutionary refinements, and to refinements of the sort that are bound to culminate in an omega point and/or points which lie even beyond the Earth in centres set in space at an antithetical remove, as it were, not so much from the Naturalism of the Cosmos, whether alpha or omega, sensual or sensible, as from the sensual Civilization of secular modernity, in which the exploration and colonization of space from an objective standpoint takes precedence over any sensible alternative, or prospect of the subjective kind we have in mind.

8. Therefore not until the coming to pass of 'Kingdom Come' as the religious empowerment and vindication primarily of the city, of urban sensibility, will such a celestial prospect loom above the horizon of mankind, like a beacon of free psyche come to deliver them from the darkness of natural freedom and liberate them not only from the crimes and sins of the sensually-dominated triangular present, whether inverted (Protestant) or perpendicular (Catholic), but also from the awful prospect of crematorial self-abasement and annihilation through a religious lead that will ensure, ultimately, that no-one and nobody dies in the flesh but only to the flesh, as technology is brought to bear on the transmutation of mankind, the 'overcoming' of mankind, to use a Nietzschean expression, in the interests of Eternity, whether spiritually, intellectually, or soulfully, according to the elemental tier of my projected triadic Beyond and its scope, respecting class and gender, for infinite transmutation towards the utmost omega points.