THE LIE OF THE HEART

1. If the reduction of life to phenomenal terms fails to do anything like adequate justice to its noumenal dimensions, particularly to those dimensions in time and space which, being metaphysical, owe more to air than to fire, then the reduction of the soul to the heart, or the notion, in other words, that the heart is the 'seat of the soul', which is always widely prevalent in the West, does a grave injustice to the soul.

2. For the heart is not the self, neither in physiological nor in psychological and/or psychical terms, but one of the principal not-selves which the self, and the metachemically-biased self in particular, uses for purposes of expressing metachemical will.

3. The heart is, in fact, that not-self which corresponds to repetitive time on the space-time axis of noumenal objectivity, and is thus the sensible mode of metachemical not-self, the mode at the opposite extreme from its sensual manifestation in the eyes.

4. Thus if the heart and the self, conceived as the central nervous system, are not one and the same thing but really quite distinct entities, how has the soul, which psychically pertains to the self, come to be identified with the heart?

5. Surely the short answer to this seemingly impossible question is that people have treated the heart as a metaphor for the soul, as when the soul is understood to lie 'at the heart of', i.e. the core, of the self, and have then taken the metaphor too literally, so that the core of the self was thought to be the heart.

6. Hence they have substituted the heart for the metaphorical reference which the word 'heart' was intended to convey, and have then accepted the false conclusion that the heart and the 'heart of the self', viz. the soul, are one and the same.

7. Frankly, it is better to refer to the soul as the 'core of the self', if one is not to risk following in the fallible footsteps of those who have substituted the heart for the metaphor it was intended to convey. For the 'core of the self', the soul, is most certainly not the heart, even if the soul 'lies at the heart', so to speak, of the self.

8. Now the core of the self can be an expression of soul, a compression of soul, a depression of soul, or an impression of soul, depending on the self to which it is affiliated as its psychical extrapolation.

9. That is to say, the soul can be emotional on either a loving, a proud, a pleasurable, or a joyful basis, depending whether the self to which it is affiliated has a metachemical, and hence fiery, temperament; a chemical, and hence watery, temperament; a physical, and hence earthy, temperament; or a metaphysical, and hence airy, temperament - at any rate, predominantly and/or preponderantly, according to both the gender of the person concerned and his/her prevailing class in relation to either the phenomenal, and lower, planes or to the noumenal, and upper, planes.

10. Thus not all people are equally disposed to love, pride, pleasure, or joy, any more than to the negative converse of those emotions, and this is because, despite contingencies and fluctuating circumstances, people differ from one another on the basis of the four main categories of self, as outlined above.

11. Even to look at people, and thus perceive the outer manifestation, the concretization, of their inner self, is to know that they differ from one another not only on a gender basis, but in terms of their builds and heights, which, genetically speaking, are a rough guide to their prevailing class, be it phenomenal, and lower, or noumenal, and upper.

12. Thus we can distinguish 'the tall' from 'the short', with those in the noumenal categories (of space and time) generally tall, and those in the phenomenal categories (of volume and mass) generally short, whether or not we then proceed to differentiate 'the thick' from 'the thin' in each category, as between fire and air 'up above', and water and vegetation 'down below'.

13. Certainly build owes not a little to genetic factors, which can be traced back to the transpersonal self, or central nervous system, and it would indeed be strange if ruling types, governing types, representing types, and leading types, to take a politically-biased paradigm, differed not at all in their physiological profiles.

14. For it generally transpires that the most suitable height and build for a ruling disposition is tall and thick, or muscular, whereas the most suitable height and build for a leading disposition, at the other extreme of the noumenal spectrum, will more usually be tall and thin, i.e. gangular (of ganglia and/or gangly).

15. Likewise it generally transpires that the most suitable height and build for a governing disposition is short and thick, i.e. glandular, whereas the most suitable height and build for a representing disposition, at the other extreme of the phenomenal spectrum, will more usually be short and thin, i.e. vascular.

16. Whatever the exact case, people differ just as much in their emotional experiences as in their physiologies, and while some will be especially capable of and disposed to the emotional per se of joy in relation to a metaphysical disposition, others will be further removed from airy soul in what amount to pleasurable, proud, and loving 'bovaryizations' of soul in relation to physical, chemical, and metachemical dispositions respectively, so that one might be forgiven for describing their prevailing emotional experiences as second-, third-, and fourth-rate, as the case may be, compared to and/or contrasted with what is, by any logical reckoning, the first-rate emotional experience of joy in the soul-of-souls.

17. For the soul is only in its per se manifestation in association with the noumenal element of air, not in association with the phenomenal element of earth (vegetation), the phenomenal element of water, or the noumenal element of fire, which are respectively egocentric, spiritual, and instinctual elements in which soul is accordingly 'bovaryized', or exemplified, in other words, on terms which fall short, in retrogressive degrees, of its per se manifestation in joy.

18. Thus the self which is into the heart will be at the furthest possible remove from joyful sensibility in the loving sensibility which tends to characterize the emotional experience of a metachemical disposition, a disposition in which only a fourth-rate order of soul can exist.

19. For the heart is a metachemical type of not-self that tends to exemplify a first-rate, or expressive, order of power, affiliated to which will be found a second-rate, or fiery, order of glory, a third-rate, or repetitive, order of form, and a fourth-rate, or photonic, order of contentment - the contentment, as has been argued, of emotional love.

20. Emotional love correlates with fundamentalism, whether in scientific, political, economic, or religious terms, and it tends to be the case that societies rooted in fundamentalism identify the soul with love, and hence the heart, to the detriment if not exclusion of pride, pleasure, and, most especially, joy.