Akin in structure to 'From Satan to Saturn', its immediate predecessor, this second 1994 text is nonetheless arguably more cyclically methodical and aphoristically consistent, as it develops its curvilinear style through some seventy-two cycles comprised of varying numbers of aphorisms, which continue the author's quest for philosophical - or, more accurately in relation to their metaphysical scope, theosophical - perfection along both old and new channels of speculative investigation.

Another and more structurally-advanced example of John O'Loughlin's non-readerly style of abstract poetry or, depending on your point of view, poetic word art and/or sculpture, 'Ultracontemplations' (1994) is comprised of some sixty-four 'poems' which have been entirely constructed with the use, along monosyllabic lines, of upper-case characters, thereby passing beyond the mixed-case style of 'Supercontemplations' (1993) and the lower-case absolutism of 'Contemplations' (1985) to what could be regarded as a conceptual plateau of poetic abstraction which, like its predecessors in the genre,...

Continuing in the vein of the revolutionary transvaluations characteristic of both 'Occasional Maxims' (1994) and 'Maximum Occasions' (1994-5), this volume of aphoristic philosophy nevertheless returns us, in due cumulative fashion, to the cyclical style of writing adopted by John O'Loughlin in 'From Punishment to Grace' (1994), albeit with the addition of side titles to recurring numerals, and with a view to bringing to completion a task which really began several years ago ... when he boldly set-out on the long and difficult path that leads to Truth, or metaphysical knowledge. Little did he...

Progressing through 125 cycles of sequentially-numbered essayistic aphorisms (supernotes), 'Eternal Life' ... subtitled 'Supernotes from Beyond' ... brings John O'Loughlin's philosophy to a kind of theosophical head in what is arguably one of the most thematically perfect of all his works, and one that, so we believe, should stand near the conceptual apex of his oeuvre, as he both sums-up and elaborates upon previous truths, or aspects of metaphysical knowledge, with a view to advancing the cause of eternal life in a world which is still, alas, all too temporal

This 1996 project, the title of which, viz. 'Book of Beliefs', arguably owes something to Henry Miller's 'Book of Friends' in its informal structure and the subtitle of which, viz. 'The Omegala', is an oblique tribute to anything omega-orientated, is more informally cyclic than 'Eternal Life' (1995), its immediate precursor in John O'Loughlin's aphoristic canon, but remains, nonetheless, one of the most comprehensively exacting and demanding of all his philosophical works, and also, in the long run, one of the most thematically rewarding.

Conceived in a chronologically continuous aphoristic terms, this 1998 project by John O'Loughlin is nevertheless divided into twelve sections, each of which bears a headed title in quasi-essayistic vein. Examples of such titles include 'Fair to Life', 'Collective and Individual', 'Self vis-a-vis Not-Self', 'Form and Content(ment)', and 'Metaphysical Salvation'. There is also, at the end, a fairly long appendix which has the merit, not uncharacteristic of the author's appendices, of both summing-up the text and, in this particular case, illustrating the 'reculer pour mieux sauter', or stepping...