CYCLE THIRTY-TWO

1. That which merely exists rather than lives may be susceptible to appearance or quantity or quality or essence, in due elemental fashion, but it will not be capable of doing or giving or taking or being.

2. Conversely that which lives rather than simply exists ... will be capable of doing or giving or taking or being by dint of the fact that it utilizes appearance or quantity or quality or essence, as the case may be, to that end.

3. Elements exist but do not live, in the sense of having the capacity to directly experience, through sentience, a range of emotions, sensations, thoughts, or feelings.

4. Hence although fire, water, vegetation, and air most certainly exist, they do not experience emotions, sensations, thoughts, or feelings in the manner of a living person, whose sentience exposes him to a variety of psychic states having their origin in some subatomic equivalent of the basic elements.

5. A human being is thus more than merely existential, even if, as a composite of elemental factors, he has an existential dimension. On the contrary, he is principally experiential, and it is through his varied experiences of and in life that he actually lives.

6. The experiential transcendence of existence by human beings is what makes for love or pride or pleasure or joy or, indeed, for their negative counterparts in hatred, humility, pain, and woe.

7. It is also what makes, in a broader sense, for science and politics and economics and, above all, religion, which transcend art and literature and sculpture and music in much the same way that love transcends beauty or pride transcends strength or pleasure transcends knowledge or joy transcends truth.

8. Even the hatred of antiscience or the humiliation of antipolitics or the pain of anti-economics or the woe of antireligion transcends the ugliness of anti-art or the weakness of anti-literature or the ignorance of antisculpture or the falsity of antimusic in such experiential terms, leaving the anti-arts as the same sort of testimony to anti-existence, as their positive counterparts to the testimony of existence.

9. The Arts indubitably exist, but they do not experience doing or giving or taking or being in the manner of a sentient creature, even if a degree of their creators' experience of certain emotions or sensations or thoughts or feelings is conveyed, directly or indirectly, via them.

10. In this respect, the Arts will always be a poor substitute for the experience of doing (through emotions) or giving (through sensations) or taking (through thoughts) or being (through feelings) by those who actually live in a scientific or a political or an economic or a religious manner, as the case may be.

11. The significance of the Arts is not as a substitute for life but as an existential guide to its experiential fulfilment through one or another mode of direct experience, whether in relation to Hell, Purgatory, the Earth, Heaven or, indeed, to any of their negative counterparts.

12. In this respect, the philosopher, as a positive type of the literary artist, is an existential guide to the experience of being through essence, since his penchant for wisdom makes the pursuit of joy through truth of paramount theoretical concern to him.

13. Air is not only the essential element but the mystical element, on account of its hidden nature as that which is not detectable to the eye in the manner of fire, water, and vegetation.

14. Air is thus not only mystical but supernatural and extraterrestrial, in its noumenally subjective elevation above the phenomenal mode of elemental subjectivity, viz. vegetation.

15. Air is omnipresent and therefore universal, but nowhere to be seen on account of its essential nature, its supernature, as that which rises, extraterrestrially, above the vegetative heaviness of the earth on the basis, necessarily comparative, of gravity-defying lightness.

16. Likewise the self which utilizes air to a beingful end, the inner metaphysical mind, is hidden from view and only achieves superconscious awareness of itself through joy, which is its experiential fulfilment and transcendence of conscious existence.

17. For the mind that is sensibly conscious of itself through aware feeling is existential and therefore spiritual, but the mind that achieves a joyful transcendence of such consciousness is experiential and thus truly heavenly, the difference, one might say, between the existence of being through essence, which is truth, and the experience of being in and as -though at one with - essence, which is joy, if not bliss.