SAVING AND/OR DAMNING FROM THE WORLD

 

1.   The distinction between sensuality and sensibility is ever, in effect, between public and private, extroversion and introversion, centrifugal and centripetal, outer and inner, 'once born' and 'reborn', wrong and right.  It is even, in broad terms, a distinction between state and church, society and the individual.

 

2.   None of us can be exclusively sensual or sensible, outer or inner, extrovert or introvert, but we are certainly capable of being predominantly the one thing or the other at whichever elemental level is most typical of our particular type of self, be it objective or subjective, female or male, in either noumenal or phenomenal manifestations.

 

3.   Neither would any of us be capable of being exclusively positive or negative, supreme or primal, cosmic/geologic or universal/personal, but we are certainly capable of being predominantly the one thing or the other at whichever elemental level is most typical of our particular type of antiself (twisted self), be it objective or subjective, female or male, in either noumenal or phenomenal manifestations.

 

4.   In fact, given our organic constitutions, we are naturally biased, as it were, towards the positivity of supremacy, and therefore are if not naturally good - since supremacy can be evil or good as well as foolish or wise, depending whether sensuality or sensibility is the prevailing factor - at least naturally supreme, and thus given to the positive manifestations of evil, good, folly, and wisdom as a matter of organic necessity.

 

5.   But Nature, as we have seen, is a comprehensive and variegated entity or, more correctly, collection of entities, and it will always ensure that not only will some be female and others male, but that some will be upper class and others lower class, meaning of space and/or time in the one case and of volume and/or mass in the other, with noumenal and phenomenal implications.

 

6.   It will also ensure, over and above nurture, that some will be predominantly extrovert and therefore sensual while others - not everywhere a majority - will be predominantly introvert and therefore sensible, with the former more given to the outer than to the inner, and consequently more likely to favour the scientific and/or political aspect of things in relation to 'the State' than the economic and/or religious aspect of them in relation to 'the Church', using those terms with regard to the more genuine manifestations of each (which are not necessarily germane to the same type of society or individual, but tend to exist as real outer/inner alternatives within their respective cultures).

 

7.   Therefore whereas one type of society will favour maximum state freedom for itself and the individuals of which it is largely composed, another type will favour maximum church binding for itself and the individuals which go to make up the majority of its population.  You can't mix these without undermining both and creating a paradoxically amoral and liberal society which is neither particularly free nor particularly bound, but a sort of quintessentially worldly mongrel that sits on the fence between libertarian and conservative alternatives, neither partial to the objective immorality of the one nor to the subjective morality of the other, but determined or obliged to steer a middle course between each.

 

8.   Obviously such societies exist, and they tend to be composed of people or peoples who have no great desire for either freedom or binding, the Devil or God, but are more socialistically and/or capitalistically sensitive, by and large, to the needs of women and/or men, and who are accordingly inherently democratic in their lower-class dispositions towards mass/volume phenomenality.

 

9.   I would like to think, on the other hand, that where 'Kingdom Come' is concerned, one could not really 'do business' with such deeply amoral societies but would have to have some confidence in a given people that, no matter how apparently worldly, they were more disposed to morality (and its corollary of constrained immorality) than to either amorality or immorality (and its corollary of enslaved morality), and likely in consequence to respond positively to advances made towards them by any prospective deliverer of the people in question from the world and its mundane limitations.

 

10.  I do not say that all the people in a given society have to be like that, but certainly a significant majority of them, who would want deliverance from worldly situations and the possibility of a new moral directive superior to the old in the extent to which it did justice to truth and made self-transcendence more sublimely rewarding in consequence.

 

11.  However, deliverance to the triadic Beyond of 'Kingdom Come' is not simply to a heavenly top tier but to earthly and purgatorial lower tiers as well which, quite apart from the subsectioning of all tiers along tripartite lines, would have more appeal to those who, in their democratic phenomenality traditionally, fought shy, and continue to fight shy, of the noumenal heights.

 

12.  Therefore the triadic Beyond to which I subscribe is sensibly geared to women and men as well as to gods, to mass and volume as well as to space, and would allow the world to overcome itself on a basis parallel to that in which it had previously existed, whether in relation to the 'down below' or - less worldly perhaps - to the 'up above', and all with reference to enhanced sensibility, and therefore to that which if it wasn't overly moral (and bound in relation to self) was at least less immoral (and free in relation to not-self) than would otherwise be the case, whether relatively or absolutely.  I look forward to the coming of such a Beyond, for I know that one day it must if the peoples concerned are to do proper justice to themselves and escape not only from the amoral bog of worldly limitations but, no less significantly, from the immoral blight of religious primitivity and schismatic division.

 

    

LONDON 2000 (Revised 2012)

 

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