RETURNING TO MEANING

1. Human life requires meaning if it is to progress and not simply stagnate in a swamp of moral decay. For without meaning it becomes reduced to a matter of mere survival, and survival too easily revolves around propagation, and hence sex.

2. Perhaps things are not quite as bad as that these days, but it was not so long ago that sex and, via sex, propagation was the virtual be-all-and-end-all of things, as people lived not in relation to something beyond and greater than themselves, but merely in relation to physical survival in a meaningless universe.

3. Such, at any rate, was the negative doctrine under which so many of them lived, and it is small wonder, in consequence, that sex became so all-important, and eternity (to the extent that the term figured at all) was reduced to generative persistence through propagation.

4. Such must continue to remain the fate of those who refuse to attribute meaning to life or who, blinded by intellectual mentors of an Existentialist or a Nihilistic persuasion, find it undesirable to do so. For so long as life is regarded as meaningless, it ceases to have any value beyond sexual reproduction. But as soon as you introduce meaning into life, it becomes an experiment in self-transcendence in which the world is but a passing parade and life - human life in particular - an ongoing voyage of self-discovery.

5. Meaninglessness hails from a vacuum and is accordingly of female persuasion. Meaningfulness, on the contrary, stems from a plenum and is accordingly of male persuasion. An age or society that champions or recognizes the pre-eminence of meaninglessness will be dominated by female criteria in typically 'free' vein. One that recognizes the pre-eminence of meaningfulness, on the other hand, will be led by male criteria in typically 'bound' vein. The former will be 'open', the latter 'closed'. The one will be secular and ... left wing, the other religious and ... right wing.

6. The twentieth century was, by and large, an age of meaninglessness. It remains to be seen whether the twenty-first century can officially embrace meaningfulness in one or a number of countries and move beyond 'freedom' into a higher order of binding than that which obtained during the more authentically Christian centuries of, for example, Western civilization.

7. Only binding or loyalty through faith to a 'higher way', a new meaning for life or interpretation of life, can deliver man from the vacuous freedoms which continue to reduce life, in typically meaningless vein, to survival, both physical and sexual. But only where man has the courage to be 'true' to himself, or his gender, and stand up for that which stems from a plenum and gives meaning to his existence ... can a new meaningfulness, a new doctrine of progressive life, come to pass. Man needs the courage to be loyal to himself if he is to have the will to subscribe to this new doctrine and the confidence to advance it.

8. And what is this new doctrine? Precisely that life, if it is to have meaning, real purposeful meaning, must depart the worldly rule of the not-self and selflessness and return more absolutely to self conceived in terms of the soul. Only thus will redemption of the ego come to pass, especially of the metaphysical ego, and life become orientated towards a final paradise which owes nothing to the so-called Edenic paradise from which mankind expelled themselves during the course of their evolution towards the world.

9. Thus because the world increasingly manifests itself as a context of 'freedom', of meaningless survival in relation to not-self and selflessness, it is fitting that the world should be rejected by those men who are capable of being 'true' to themselves, in order that progress can be made in climbing beyond it towards the heights of that paradise where binding to self is of the very essence of meaning, and nothing more meaningful could ever be envisaged.

10. For it is only with regard to binding to self at the expense of freedom from self or, rather, of freedom for not-self and selflessness that the world, conceived in relation to the dominance of, in particular, the female, or objective, manifestations of these latter entities, can be overcome, to be replaced by a society in which otherworldly criteria of a truly paradisiacal order become paramount. Such is the meaning of 'Kingdom Come', which will be a kingdom beyond the world rather than either of or before it.