John O'loughlin

Devil and God: the Omega Book John O'loughlin First edition

Originally intended to be John O'Loughlin's last and ultimate work, this project, dealing with distinctions between the Devil and God, embraces over 250 ?supernotes?, his definition of which is something between an essay and an aphorism, not generally as long as the former or as short as the latter. In fact, it is the indeterminacy of this genre which most characterizes 'Devil and God', since one can proceed straight from a two-line entry to one that is several pages in length. Also significant of his definition of supernotes is the fact that they are anything but scrappy or off-the-cuff, as notes often are, but have been carefully fashioned with the attention one would give to an essay or an aphorism. They also follow a strictly determined philosophical path, not veering wildly between disparate subjects the way notebooks often do, and are subject to the sorts of evaluating and revaluating first introduced into his work with the previous title, 'Evaluations and Revaluations (1985), so that no theme is ever wholly laid to rest until it has been explored from a variety of angles and reconsidered in the light of enhanced insight. In such fashion, any project based on these supernotes will have a curvilinear inner structure which is the product of spiralling ideas, and which contrasts with the outer, book-based rectilinear structures more typical of academic or conventional philosophy. In that respect, it is effectively theosophical, using that term in a metaphysical sense.