CYCLE TWENTY-NINE

1. To be above the ego of intellectual sensibility is to be above the 'I' who writes from a personal, and hence phenomenal, standpoint, the 'I' of the intellectual self which thinks, and thinks of itself in relation to others.

2. The mind, or spiritual self, is not personal but, as I have attempted to prove, universal, in that it derives from the omnipresent medium of the air one breathes as a spiritual being, and can only exist or have experience of itself in relation to universality.

3. Hence the mind, when true to itself, does not think, but is that which allows itself to be imposed upon and to remain receptive to such thoughts as the intellectual self, the inner knowledgeable self or sensible ego, may choose, in its phenomenal relativity, to think.

4. The mind, when true to itself, is beyond the boundaries of thought, which issues, by contrast, from a personal self, the sensible ego, that is made possible by the prior existence of a brain from which, having first stored them there, the inner ego draws the concepts which it wishes to utilize for purposes of thought.

5. When 'true' to itself, the ego thinks personally, about what concerns the individual whose self-identity derives, in no small degree, from his thoughts.

6. It is also possible, as I have shown, to bend thought in a universal direction, as when one thinks about God or truth or spirit or other noumenal subjects, and such thought is quasi-universal, since it stems not from the ego, in personal vein, but from what we may call the superego, which is the type of idealistic intellect one would more identify with genuine philosophers than with, say, novelists or dramatists.

7. Even the superego is fundamentally personal, in that it stems from and pertains to the brain of a specific individual, who uses it to think in a quasi-universal way.

8. In this respect, prayer is also a manifestation of superegocentric quasi-universality, in that it orientates the religiously-thinking, or praying, individual towards that which is conceived, as God, etc., to be universal.

9. One prays, as, say, a Christian, not to a personal being but to a universal one, the 'Risen Christ', whose spiritual essence is conceived as existing above the planes of phenomenal reference, in what amounts to a noumenal transcendentalism of extraterrestrial significance.

10. Philosophical thought differs from prayer in that it is not a mode of religious praxis but a theory of life centred in the pursuit of wisdom, which therefore points the way towards the possibility of enhanced being.

11. The philosopher's thought, if sufficiently universal in scope, may well pave the way for a higher order of religious praxis than has generally obtained within his culture-complex, as and when meditation is advocated over prayer as being more conducive to the attainment of a higher state of mind, one in which the mind is totally liberated from the last vestiges (superegocentric?) of ego, and accordingly achieves true spiritual redemption in that which, being omnipresent, is genuinely universal.

12. Prayer never transcends the quasi-universality of superegocentric intellectuality, but meditation, as advocated by the genuine philosopher, has the effect of diminishing ego and enhancing spiritual self, as the mind surrenders, through the breath, to that which, as air, is truly universal.

13. Only in the conscious breathing routines of transcendental meditation is the mind liberated from egocentric personality and/or superegocentric quasi-universality by the true universality of the air itself.

14. The inner metaphysical self, or mind, uses both the lungs and the air to bring itself, first, to an accommodation with God and, then, to an accommodation with Heaven, passing from truth to joy in an unending cycle of metaphysical power and glory, divinity and sublimity, which is the salvation and resurrection of the spiritual self.

15. The lungs are no more God than air is Heaven, but the inner metaphysical self achieves both God and Heaven for itself in proportion as it becomes increasingly committed, through transcendental meditation, to both the metaphysical will of the lungs and the metaphysical spirit of the air, in the interests of enhanced being.

16. Mind that is truly spiritual, purged of everything but the breath that sustains it, is alone genuinely universal; for universality is a noumenal experience that transcends the phenomenality of the brain and its egocentric extrapolations.

17. It is on a similar basis that, at its highest tier, the triadic Beyond of the Centre to which I subscribe would transcend the Church, raising the fulcrum of subjective experience from sin to grace, the genuine grace, that is, which flows from meditative praxis rather than the pseudo-grace of verbal absolution.

18. It is this meditative praxis which, in its deistic airiness, is atheistic, and thus beyond any form of theistic allegiance, including, not least of all, the fundamentalist theism which makes a God out of fire and the Cosmos a fit object, in consequence, for worshipful idolatry!

19. With genuine spirituality, there is no room for idolatrous objectivity in relation to fiery or watery or even vegetative shortfalls from true religion, but only room for the most intense subjectivity possible to human beings.

20. Such an intense subjectivity would only be possible, it hardly needs emphasizing, to the Elect of Spirit, the higher men whom democratic institutions and world idolaters prefer to ostracize as an extremist threat to the phenomenal status quo.

21. I can only add that, in the triadic Beyond, even people who were less than an Elect of Spirit would have a place for themselves, provided they recognized the ultimate legitimacy of spiritual nobility, and were prepared to defer to it during the course of their more terrestrial devotions.

22. For the Centre which Social Transcendentalism wishes to democratically establish at the expense of state/church traditions would not be interested in extraterrestrial partisanship, but be pledged to the development of new terrestrial parameters for those for whom a New Purgatory of watery femininity and a New Earth of vegetative masculinity could only prove more relevant than a New Heaven of airy supermasculinity, religiously hegemonic as the latter would unquestionably have to be.