CYCLE TWELVE

1. The Arts, considered together, are important, but they are not all-important, and should not be regarded or treated as an end-in-itself.

2. Unfortunately, in the West (and England in particular), it is all-too-easy, under materialistic pressures, to exaggerate the importance of one or another of the Arts, in view of the female bias that both historically and contemporaneously tends to result in the predominance of particles over wavicles, whether in sensuality or in sensibility or, indeed, a paradoxical combination of both.

3. Small wonder if, with the decline of traditional faith, this process has been taken to a point where only the particle, or apparent/quantitative side of things, counts for anything, as the qualitative/essential side, corresponding to the wavicle, is squeezed out.

4. But illustration is of little value without something to illustrate, something more than the tools of illustration itself, and the Arts become less meaningful in proportion to the degree of estrangement from that which they were intended to serve, be it science, politics, economics, or religion.

5. Ultimately, no art form can survive for long without a correlative discipline to illustrate. Nor, by a converse token, can the absence or withdrawal of art from those disciplines which directly avail of fire, water, vegetation, and air be particularly beneficial to them.

6. Science, politics, economics, and religion cannot exist within a vacuum, but require a certain degree of illustrative exemplification if they are to be both fully intelligible and broadly accessible to society in general.

7. Such exemplification will, in a sensibly-run subjectively-biased society, underline rather than threaten the significance of each of the direct disciplines, since, depending on the bias of the particular civilization, it is science, politics, economics, or religion which should take precedence in the conduct of that civilization's internal affairs.

8. If this has not always been the case in the West, it has more usually been so in the East, particularly with regard to religion traditionally, but also with regard to economics and politics in no small measure.

9. For it is easier in a male-biased, subjective society to grant precedence to cultural amplification than to cultural exemplification, and the result will be far more conducive to experience of the wavicle side of life than to endurance of its particle side.

10. Whether the West can ever become the East or vice versa, is a moot point. Fundamentally, the world is divisible, in elemental terms, not only between East and West but also, if less characteristically these days, between North and South, and it must remain doubtful that regional differences could ever be entirely overcome, even with recourse to a growing assembly of technological stratagems aimed effectively, if not specifically, at a more homogeneous end.

11. But a hierarchy of moral priorities, based on sound logical procedures, is possible, at least theoretically, and there is no reason to suppose that some practical accommodation of it would be impossible to sustain on a global basis.

12. The West may not be the East, but the world is becoming an increasingly smaller place in which interaction between its various hemispheres is slowly ironing out age-old differences, and bringing peoples closer together on more than simply physical terms.

13. In another hundred years, this process will be so much more advanced ... that what was thought impossible will no longer be so, as the West and the East gradually blend into one vast civilization that, coupled to the North and the South, will be able to respect, if with differing emphases, the same philosophy and even religion.

14. For, ultimately, there can be only one philosophy, one cultural illustration of it, and, more importantly, one religion, since truth is not beauty, strength, or knowledge, even if beautiful, strong, and knowledgeable manifestations of truth will co-exist, in one form or another, with true truth, the pure truth that affirms, through transcendental meditation, the inner metaphysical will as the means whereby the inner metaphysical self may achieve union with the inner metaphysical spirit and become not merely pure, but joyfully universalized through superconscious transcendence.