Spencer Heath Archive

Item 35

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

Winter 1957-58?

 

 

 

     It shouldn’t be difficult to identify the behavior of men with respect to one another under different circum­stances with the behavior of molecules under different con­ditions. Each acts in accordance with the action of others in a manner that is predictable, the manner of action depending on circumstances and generally uniform when the circumstances are the same. Law in this sense, as observed among the units of any organization such as the organs constituting the individual or the atoms constituting a molecule, and also among the individuals constituting a society and the molecules constituting more complex com­pounds, are laws which are not arbitrarily imposed but which express the natural behavior of the organizational units and of the organization of which they, by reason of such behavior, constitute and comprise.

     The behavior referred to has its positive and its negative aspects. The one tends to maintain and increase the establishment of the higher organization. The other tends to diminish or extinguish the organization. The second is not the same as the first; it is the negative of the first, which is the positive — the integrative. This negative, which consists in failure to act according to the positive norm, carries its own sanction. It tends to disintegrate the higher organization and thereby frustrate the inherent tendency of the unit to enter into it. The wages of sin is death.

 

     A law is not absolute for all circumstances. It is absolute under specific circumstances. It is the natural law of men to breathe, but if they attempt to breathe under water, they are violating that law. There is a mode of behavior under water which is the law. To attempt to breathe under those circumstances is to violate that law, and likewise to attempt to swim in the air . .  likewise to attempt underwater behavior under circumstances of air is a violation of the law requisite to these circumstances.

     Where society has not evolved, there can be no social behavior. The law of tooth and claw must prevail until the interrelations we call social have evolved and supply us with an alternative law. It is like an organism persisting in behavior appropriate to conditions no longer continuing. In the social realm the only legitimate behavior is that which is appropriate in that realm. Evil is archaic. (Conceivably there might or could be behavior in the social realm without any antecedents. Just as walking on one’s hands alone probably has no antecedents under any circumstances.)

 

     The criterion through it all is that order tends to prevail above disorder. The more durational (real) is dominant in nature above the transitory, which is recessive. Life on the whole must evolve, and this is effected by its units persisting in modes of behavior that serve life and at the same time moving into modes that better serve — leaving all the old that retards life, retaining all that still serves, and acquiring that which better serves.

     God has a right hand and a left hand, you know. But He is right-handed. The integrative is dominant. His left hand operates at the level of higher frequencies — shorter periods — while His right hand is engaged with the lower frequencies and longer periods of organization. The right hand cannot function over on the left. The left is only evil when it gets over on the right-hand side. This is no less true in the biological and cosmic than in the social and political realm. The left is primitive, but can be abandoned only by the practice of the right. It is all a matter of the cosmic order prevailing over disorder — nature moving into those living relationships of lower frequency, greater reality, longer period.