Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1107

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath at 11 Waverly Place, NYC.   Slightly amended by Heath in pencil.

6 May 1957

 

 

 

Plea for a Personal God

 

There may be a great deal of uncertainty in our lives, but there is one thing of which we can be absolutely certain, and that is that I am I. I am certain of my own selfhood, my own consciousness, my own personality.

 

     Now as to whether there is a God, a personal God or not, we may not have the same intimate, direct knowledge that we have of our own personality. But a very short process of reasoning may bring us to some conclusions about God the same as we have about ourselves.

 

     In the first place, is there any God? In the sense of being a father, a source, an origin, there has to be. One of the things that we know about ourselves is that we were not always as we now are. Whatever is organized in us must have come from some source other than ourselves. That includes every atom in our bodies, every molecule, every tissue, every bone, every organ. It had to be a part of our environment before it became a part of us.

 

     What is true of those things is also true of everything that is any part of me. /There is/ one thing that I am certain of as a part of me, and have more direct knowledge of than I have of any atom or molecule in my body. That is my personality. Of that there can be no possible doubt. And this personality, like the bones, molecules and atoms, had to come from somewhere else. It wasn’t always where it is. That makes it absolutely necessary that whatever it is, the like of it must have been where it came from. Just as I couldn^’t have an atom in my body unless there had been atoms outside my body before my body was organized, so I can’t have any personality in my consciousness unless there was personality in that whence my whole being came — physical and whatever other kind of being that I may have. So there must have been something of like kind if not like quantity.

 

     No experience gives us ground for ascribing any limits to the universe outside of ourselves, material or immaterial. So until we can have some evidence of limitation to the external world corresponding to the limitations which we know exist in us, we must logically accept that the universe is infinite — the universe including us of course.

 

     That being so, the personality whence our personalities came, must be without limits, and since we know the quality of what we have is personal, peculiar and particular, and unique, so the same must apply to that whence our personality came — out of which it has evolved. And so the only difference in personality between the personality of myself and the personality of the universe is necessarily only a quantitative one. There can be no qualitative difference. Now if personality is a qualitative characteristic, distinguishing me uniquely from all other personalities, then the same characteristic must obtain in the universal whence my personality originated and the nature of which it partakes.

 

/You say that the characteristic of your personality is that it distinguishes you from all other personalities, and that that same characteristic would hold true on an absolute scale in the universe. Does that mean to say that that will distinguish it from all other universes?/

 

     Yes, exactly /chuckling/. That’s like you with your incisive logic, incisive rationality.

 

     Whatever quality it is that distinguishes me from other personalities, that same quality, whatever it is, must have been in the place where my personality came from.

 

/Oh I see; so, all the distinguishing qualities in everybody’s different personalities, they all…/

 

. . .are merged in God. We are pieces, particles, offshoots, chips off the divine block. Not every chip is alike…

 

/. . but every chip partakes of the block./

 

. . but that block has got everything in it that the chips have, plus a damn sight more /chuckling/ — probably.

 

/Well some people say that personality is that which distinguishes you from others — that whereby you are not someone else. And so in that sense personality presupposes others, and therefore you cannot say that the universe has a personality, because the universe includes them all./

 

     Well, its parts, its elements, are distinguishable from one another, the same as the three parts of the Trinity are distinguishable from one another.

 

     Whatever is peculiar and unique in me is necessarily limited. But that particular, special, unique characteristic is unlimited in the not-me. So that not-me includes on the infinite scale everything that it possesses, everything that it has. Everything that characterizes this is built on the infinite scale, exactly as everything that characterizes us is built on the finite scale — finite with respect to mass, finite with respect to motion, finite with respect to durational quality.