CYCLE FIFTEEN: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHANTING

1. Although vocal music can never be strictly religious, on account of its watery shortfall, via the tongue, from air, and hence the utilization of wind, there is certainly a case for chanting as the traditional approach to and mode of 'sacred vocal music'.

2. For chanting differs from singing as the windpipe from the voice and is, in effect, a means of bypassing the tongue through the utilization of the breath for the production of simple monosyllabic or non-verbal sounds in constant repetition.

3. Hence chanting is not only deeper than singing, it is a spiritual as opposed to instinctual or intellectual approach to the production of sound utilizing natural means.

4. Yet much as chanting is religiously superior to singing, its main disadvantage, from a spiritual standpoint, is that it tends, when indulged in too regularly, to take the place of meditation, since it utilizes both the lungs and the windpipe for fundamentally musical purposes, and thereby detracts from their inner metaphysical potential as instruments of transcendental meditation in soundless being.

5. Hence the more chanting a person does the less likely he is to meditate, since the one tends to exclude, if not eclipse, the other when indulged-in to any appreciable extent, and meditation is either aurally subverted via sound or spurned altogether in favour of what are fundamentally musical considerations.

6. The only solution to this traditional approach to religious music is, and has long been, the utilization of wind, particularly pipes, for purposes of conditioning the mind, in chant-like vein, towards a beingful quiescence, thereby freeing-up both the lungs and the windpipe, and enabling one to categorically distinguish between aural being and respiratory being, music and meditation.

7. For the advantages accruing to lungs that have been freed-up, by pipes, from the subversive substitution of chanting ... are too great to ignore, since they are then effectively delivered from aural sensuality to the possibility of respiratory sensibility, and can serve the superconscious mind independently of subconscious distraction, the sort of distraction that inevitably occurs when ears are utilized to listen to what is being chanted.

8. For whilst ears are indubitably a divine power when utilized for purposes of listening to aural productions at large on the airwaves, they are a power affiliated not to the superconscious mind but to the subconscious mind in connection with subnatural manifestations of power and glory, and thus fall short, in 'once-born' mode, of supernatural 'rebirth', the sort of 'rebirth' guaranteed by that which, ever meditative, transcends metaphysical sensuality in the utmost being of metaphysical sensibility.

9. Thus the difference between religious music and religious praxis, in genuinely metaphysical terms, is that between being in its sensual manifestation and being in its sensible manifestation, the former affiliated to subnaturalism, and hence to the subman; the latter affiliated, through supernaturalism, to the superman.

10. Verily, the more music is differentiated, through pipes, from meditation, the easier it will be to choose either a submasculine or a supermasuline course rather than, as in the case of chanting, to risk the subversion of respiratory sensibility through aural sensuality.