CYCLE TWENTY-FIVE

1. The worship of power for its own sake, as in relation to theism, rather than as a means to a glorious end ... is idolatrous, as well as self-defeating.

2. The self, in whatever context, uses power as a means to a glorious end, which is to say, to the redemptive fulfilment that comes from identifying with and being affected by the spiritual goal to which one aspires. Therein lies the glorification of the self.

3. Mind into will as a means to the end ... of the glorification of mind through spirit. For mind enhanced by spirit ceases to be personal (in the phenomenal sense) and becomes universal.

4. Ultimately, the conscious self is a product of the breath, since without the air one breathes there would be no spatially-aware consciousness.

5. Consciousness rises to superconsciousness when it is informed by the breath to such an extent that there is no room for anything else, including thoughts, dreams, and emotions.

6. Consciousness freed from the manifold and often conflicting claims of thoughts, dreams, and emotions is truly spiritual, and thus superconscious, having achieved the purification of spaced space.

7. Thoughts stand at a vegetative, and hence naturalistic, remove from spiritual consciousness; dreams stand at a watery, and hence realistic, remove from spiritual consciousness; and emotions stand at a fiery, and hence materialistic, remove from spiritual consciousness, which is idealistic through and through.

8. Although mind is a composite, in addition to awareness, of thoughts, dreams, and emotions, it is essentially spiritual consciousness, since thoughts correspond to the intellect (brain), dreams to the id (libido), and emotions to the soul (heart). As awareness of Space, mind is a product of spirit.

9. Mind enhances itself in proportion to the degree to which it identifies with spirit, becoming pure.

10. Thus the more spiritual the mind becomes, the less will it have to do with thoughts, dreams, and emotions, which are all obstacles to the quest of mind to return to its source in the air.

11. At death, one 'gives up the ghost', as they say, and ceases to breathe. What remains is devoid of life and therefore a corpse. It has no spiritual consciousness.

12. To the extent that we identify consciousness with the air we breathe, then it is incontrovertible that consciousness survives death, since it escapes on our last breath and returns to its source on the higher plane of the air in general.

13. Yet this is not a personal thing, but a universal thing which defies the notion of independent or individual survival of death by each and every person.

14. One's last breath is soon dispersed into the atmosphere and ceases to have any independent or individualized significance ... after the fashion of, say, ghosts, those figments of an imagination constrained by personal and phenomenal criteria from projecting universally into the Beyond. We do not survive death on the personal level where the spirit, or breath, is concerned, but are absorbed universally into 'Heaven'.

15. A corpse may be bereft of spiritual consciousness, the consciousness that is dependent upon and inextricably linked to the air we breathe, but it will not necessarily be bereft of intellectual, instinctual, or emotional consciousness, those orders of mind that are less essential (or religious) than qualitative (or economic), quantitative (or political), and apparent (or scientific), having less to do with air than with vegetation, water, and fire respectively.

16. Hence it is possible to survive death personally, and most if not all corpses would in fact do so, but this survival has little or nothing to do with Heaven (air) and everything to do with Earth (vegetation), Purgatory (water), and Hell (fire), the latter of which overlaps, depending on the circumstances, with a kind of negative universality that precedes the personal where spiritual survival may be said to succeed it.

17. Corpses can and often are burnt, or cremated, and thus subjected to the evil universality of that which effectively parallels cosmic fundamentalism, and which contrasts, absolutely, with the wise universality of heavenly transcendentalism.

18. Such a conflagrationary Afterlife is commensurate with Hell, and it normally ensues upon both the 'giving up of the ghost' of heavenly universality and the instigation of personal survival of death through one or other modes of visionary experience attendant upon sublimated consciousness of chemical transmutations taking place within the brain or even (especially in the case of women) throughout the body more generally.

19. Such personal survival of death, taking place within the phenomenal parameters of bodily decomposition, is in some sense the Christian norm, since it has to do with earthy and purgatorial shortfalls from Heaven, as germane to a religion centred not in spirit but in both the intellect ('the word') and, below this, the id, or instinctual will of the womb. The Christian expects to be buried and to meet either 'the Saviour' (Christ) or 'the Virgin' (Mary) 'face to face'. He/she fights shy of Heaven and Hell, since the respective survival of spiritual consciousness and emotional consciousness through air and fire are separate issues seemingly in conflict with the grave.

20. In reality, however, people are composites of different selves, different minds, even if ethnic and religious distinctions tend to emphasize one self rather than another for convenience's sake, or because that would seem to be generally more relevant to a majority of the people involved, or because of climatically-conditioned factors, etc.

21. All things considered, at the end of the day the red man, the white man, the black man, and the yellow man, broadly corresponding to fire, water, vegetation, and air, will respond to the Afterlife, the concept of life-after-death, according to their own ethnic biases, so that humanism and nonconformism will remain at a phenomenal remove, in personal survival, from the noumenal universality of fundamentalism and transcendentalism, as woman and man from the Devil and God. You may be subject to two or more Afterlives, but you will be conditioned to look forward to just one of them, and to regard the others with indifference, if not contempt.