Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1110

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation

No date

 

White envelope has items 1110-1112.

 

Freedom of will is the exercise of choice and is the prerogative of man alone. The inferior animals, including primitive men, live necessitous lives. Their conduct within narrow limits is prescribed by their situation, and highest success consists in keeping alive. But man, in his higher development, is unique. He is endowed with wider choices. He has the gift to dream and, in conjunction with his fellow men, the power to create what he dreams. And his dreams transcend his experience. In building his dream into his world his future transcends his past.

 

 Thus man is not merely a creature, subsisting on what his environment affords and depleting it. In his higher development he is a creator because he has the creative power — and thereby the spiritual power — to enrich his world and thereby raise and extend his own life in the direction of his immortal dream. The human technology far transcends that of the animal. The animal technology converts plenty into population. The human technology increases not only the population, but the length of the lives as well. Such sharp distinction between results betokens vast difference in the method employed.

 

 In common with the animals, the human life form has all the advantages of familial, tribal, and other forms of biological cooperation and association, all limited to the actual or supposed blood bond of common ancestry. But since the Christian era the race of men has been coming into its heritage of a higher relationship embracing all of yet none but the human kind.

 

 In all earlier ages men were but little organized in any relationship but that of dominance and subservience, master and slave, the governing and the governed. Coercion and compulsion was the organic bond. The equal and reciprocal relationship of contract and of mutual service by exchange had but little evolved. The golden rule in its positive aspect was but little practiced, and under the iron rule of physical force men were but little more than creatures. Men in that form of association consumed all that they created and more. Even the bounties of nature were destroyed. Civilizations rose and fell, and rose and fell again. Until well into the Christian era, such was the experience of all the world. But among Western men of the Christian tradition, under a new dispensation, a higher and definitely creative organic relationship has slowly and without much recognition evolved.

 

 The new technology was first dreamed by the Poet of Palestine. He proposed that beyond the brotherhood of race and tribe there was a universal brotherhood to be had not by being born to this or to that but only by the practice of a simple rule of association. This rule, called the Golden Rule, was that men should cease their dominance over one another by the practice of an equal relationship by which each should be equal in authority over his own person and possessions without need for equality in any other respect. It was that each should treat the other in the same manner as that in which he would have the other treat him. Thus violence, coercion, slavery, and even political government were ruled out, and a new kind of kingdom was to be entered into, a kingdom aptly and poeti­cally termed the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. In this there was wonderful promise. Men entering that new kingdom through the practice of that new rule were promised greater riches and glories than ever were known on the earth before.

 

 The materials of life were not to be sought directly for one’s use, but to be prepared for and supplied to others through the golden rule of the Kingdom of Heaven in which it is far more blessed to give than it is to receive. This greater blessedness follows from the fact that the giver can prepare with great quantity and efficiency far beyond his own needs that which he gives. This enables him to receive in both quantity and variety vast gifts from others likewise prepared for him. He is thus the recipient of far greater blessings through giving than he could have been had he sought only to receive. Doing for himself, he would have but little. But doing for many others, he is enormously enriched by exchange. What makes the giving blessed is that it yields such enormous returns, far greater than by serving one’s self alone.

/Blessed is synonymous with beneficial, according to Heath. –Ed./