Spencer Heath Archive

Item 109

Penciled by Heath on notepad paper.

Sept-Oct 1942

 

 

 

 

Springing from the infinite Unity of Cosmic Energy, its forms ever more differentiate into action integrate, man has two wholly distinct and distinguishable conscious lives. His physical life is experiential, limited, finite and circumscribed, helpless and dependent upon the environ­ment to which it is bound. But he has also a life of mind and imagination, a conceptual life that transcends all the limitations of physical experience and knows no bounds of being, space or time. Of these two lives the one alone is merely existential, the other merely conceptual; one is substance without conception, the other conception without substance. Only in the union of act and word, the linkage of experience and imagination, bios and logos, does man have any creative, that is to say, any spiritual or divine life. But in this union of conception with experience, of thought made manifest in flesh, men integrate these two partial and divergent yet reciprocal lives into a unity of divine and creative spiritual power, a veritable Holy Spirit and life divine. In this union do men realize the third and highest aspect of the Cosmic Divinity of which all things are the parts. This third, creative and spiritual life of man grows out of his other two — his limited physical and experiential, and his unlimited conceptual, imaginative and intellectual. And the supreme desire and aspiration of man is to exercise and develop the creative power with which his body and mind are potentially endowed. To do this he must have materials on which to work and with which to create. This he finds in so much of the Cosmic Whole as comes directly to his hand — his environing world. And this divine task is not for man but for Man — for Mankind. Truly and often it has been said that religion is essen­tially social — the spiritual life a brotherhood and com­munion of creation. There must be a divine, a golden-rule, relationship between men before they can come into their divine inheritance of creative power, their creative king­ship over their world.

First of all, men must subsist, but until they unite to create they must rival and raid each other as well as the beasts of forest and field for the little that exists. The law of rivalry and of “justice” by retribution is antecedent to the golden law of mutual love through services exchanged.

This love relationship is at first wholly empirical and undesigned; its creative consequences are little realized and even less understood. Most primitively it is the blind biological urge whose fruit is family, gens and tribe, the conscious bond being blood and not service or love. Hence all creative spiritual relationships, like all the religions in which they are symbolized, are at first familial and patriarchal and tribal and their development and application is limited by the size of the tribes and the destructive relationships of conflict among and between them.

Finally, and still without conscious knowledge of its creative import, the recognition of property and practice of ownership is evolved. Contractual relationships by measured exchanges are now possible and these are not limited to family or tribe but ramify with no limits except the restrictions and violence by governments and wars interposed. Thus under divinely creative relationships of service and unconscious love, be its motivation high or low, is evolved the bond that unites families and tribes into Societies and gives them power to subdue and transform the world.

 It is here in this sublime though often dishonored and maligned social relationship of freedom through contract and consent, ownership and exchange that the unlimited conceptual life of man, mind and imagination, music and dream, is progressively realized in his limited, objective and experiential world. This creative Kingdom of Heaven does not come with pomp and pageantry like a conqueror to enslave but all subtly and sublimely conferred through Sublimation of the acts and usages of men long before their minds or hearts awake to the divine significance. The human spirit is no epiphyte growing in air without a material base in which the seed of the spirit can flourish and bloom. All earth’s annals record no blossomings of beauty and spiritual (creative) power but from well-placed if not royal circumstance where the growth of mind and play of imagination were least constrained. The spirit of creation that out of chaos brooded the finite world of man and planted its own creative power in his sperm still ministers as a descending dove awakening men, however dimly, to the creative power of mutual service as a universal and impersonal love. The heights are for the few who are free; the bondaged many have ever been lifted and led.

 Masters and rulers, men of resort to dungeon, cross and sword, have ever inculcated the piety of submission and treason of revolt. Formal and official religions have set salvation above creation, and made a sacrament of suffer­ing while they sanctified the sword. So our Classical culture down from the enslaved millions of the Mediterranean World has given us a barren tradition of acceptance or escape in place of a joyous and triumphant seeking for spiritual and creative power.

 Yet the stars hold their appointed courses and the spiritual destiny of man is not to be denied. Out of the Dark Ages new stars feebly flared and on the mountain peaks of the Renaissance new evangels of freedom and creation were born. The body and the works of God in His Cosmos, manifested in finite forms, were measured in their three-fold aspects of substance, power and time. The nature of these finite realities was learned. Techniques for combining and for recombining them were found and modern science, a new Hercules to strangle perverted ancient wisdoms with its power was born. This new wisdom, this new approach to Reality, was banned as Satanic and, as being unspiritual, reviled. Even its own evangels were but little aware of its divinely Trinitarian nature nor did they comprehend its power, when linked with the golden rule of service by consent and exchange, to answer the prayers of the multitudes for their deliverance from hunger and disease and /for/ the realiza­tion of age-long cherished dreams and desires. Yet this new evangel of God lays its power at the feet of all men to heal and bless them as they are free and inspired to create or to curse and condemn them as their freedom to own and serve by exchange is circumscribed and they are constrained to stratagems and wars. Thus only from the heights do its blessings descend. Its subtle secrets are searched by an inspired and devoted few who are bound not to the wheel of labor nor to blind traditions of a darker age. Their creations of spirit and mind can bring services and thereby new freedoms to the multitudes only as they are embodied in myriad material forms. Here again the divine blessings in their material forms must descend from above and never rise from below. They must be physically created and produced before they can be distributed and this can be done only by the comparatively few whom a society entrusts with the social ownership, that is, with the supported power of making free contracts with respect to the distribution or use of the natural things and with respect to both the production and the distribution of the artificial things which constitute the materials and the instruments whereby all production and distribution is carried on. This golden rule technique of giving and receiving, of exchanging services through the system of production and exchange transforms the energies and materials of the earth into the things conceived, dreamed and desired by the universal mind and heart of mankind. It projects, parallels and continues the original creation of the world. The logos still conceives and the bios creates first the grosser requisites of material sustenance and then, with increasing abundance, the requisite conditions for the more highly creative life. In this objectifying of men’s aspirations and dreams the divine in man creates a new world of quality and value and beauty, a high heaven on the earth, and makes into kingship his kinship with the divine.

 

The Diagram of Cosmic Process on its one side sets out in order the religious and philosophic terms in which the infinite conceptual life of man and of his Source is commonly and most frequently described. On the opposite side are arrayed the corresponding scientific and practical terms that are applied to the experiential and finite life. The second is finite creation ________ out of infinite conception. As intellect, through discoveries, illuminates the paths of infinite aspiration. /Sentence? Check original./ The rational sciences of the natural world bear witness of this guiding light of the mind. They exhibit no limitations save those imposed by the empiricism with insufficient rationality that until now limits the functioning of man’s social realm and exposes it to engulfment by unsocial-ized political and compulsive power. Nevertheless the empirical social processes, instinctively followed, have wrought the rational powers of the sciences and of their predecessor techniques into all the spiritual worlds of quality, value and beauty and creative life that civilization has ever known. Within these limitations the divine thought implanted in man has been made manifest through his social relationships into spiritual values out of a hitherto only physical and material world — new life and beauty divinely wrought into the dust.

 This divine fulfillment of the spiritual nature and potencies of social-ized mankind is indicated in outline in the diagram facing this page. The whole primordial Universe of Cosmic Energy in its three-fold aspect is represented by the three concentric circles at top center. Like the pri­mordial atom, its nucleus is mass, mass is affected with motion and the whole is enclosed in an eternal duration. Homogeneous and without structures or parts it is only poten­tially creative and has no spiritual or creative aspect in operation, no options, selections or alternatives, no world of quality or value or beauty, prior to its differentiation and the creation of man. In this act of differentiation and creation, foregoing its structural unity the Cosmos realized, in measure, the potentialities of its thought in the higher functional unity and integration of its differentiated parts. The thought, the conception, of order becomes manifest in organization. The word becomes flesh. And, as there is no limitation on the conceptions, even of a finite being, so the cosmic organization and development goes on and on, the Uncreate realizing Himself and manifesting His spiritu­ality in His perpetual creation of heterogeneous order out of the relatively homogeneous chaos of lower forms.

 This process of continuous creation into higher relationships and forms is not a constant and unbroken flow; like everything in nature, it is discontinuous. Its eternality depends upon this. For in a perfect uniformity, even of motion, there would be nothing by which any continuity could be distinguished or ascertained. Change and time are reciprocal — the same in opposite aspects. Just as there can be no change without time, so there is no time without change. Progress and regress, as the words imply, are by steps. Their prefixes distinguish them only from one another, wherefore it may be supposed that there is no real, but only an arbitrary distinction between them. But this is not so. The Universe is not neutral. It is dynamic in a positive sense. It has a definite direction of time and change. Progress is antecedent. Its product is always further progress — continuity without uniformity. Regress depends upon progress; it is only a by-product, a vanishing eddy in the ceaseless stream. “Life is ever lord of death,” for in growth alone is there any possibility of decay; death is nothing and hath nothing of its own.

 The conceptual life of man has, in most respects, the universality of its divine origin, but when it reflects upon its manifestation in flesh — in finite substance, power and continuity — it cherishes an ideal dream of self-fulfillment in an infinite duration of immortal and everlasting individual life. This dream, this will to infinite life and power is characteristic of men of and from the higher altitudes and latitudes, the more stimulating and less luxuriant parts of the earth, and chiefly in the Western World where relationships of freedom and consent evolved and the Golden Rule of service by exchange has in practice most prevailed and brought into being the vast and intricate division of labor and high specialization of capacities that constitute the industry and practiced sciences of the semi-social-ized modern world. Even though dimly and by instinct more than by insight, the Creative Spirit in this dream of immortal life in a heavenly world has wrought the Cosmic environment as it touches man into such intricacies of beauty and use, such mighty service to his nature’s needs, that even amid the governmental practices of enslave­ment and wars, it has vastly raised his powers and multi­plied his length of days. Thus does the Divine Spirit in man re-enact the drama of Creation, not to incept human life but to enlarge and advance and elevate it towards infinite fulfillments in never ending days.

/An asterisk indicates additional material was to be inserted here./

 The Diagram of Cosmic Process on its one side sets out in order the religious and philosophic terms in which the infinite conceptual life of man and of his Source is commonly and most frequently described. On the opposite side are arrayed the corresponding scientific and practical terms that are applied to the experiential and finite life. The second is finite creation ________ out of infinite conception. As intellect, through discoveries, illuminates the paths of infinite aspiration. /Sentence? Check original./ The rational sciences of the natural world bear witness of this guiding light of the mind. They exhibit no limitations save those imposed by the empiricism with insufficient rationality that until now limits the functioning of man’s social realm and exposes it to engulfment by unsocial-ized political and compulsive power. Nevertheless the empirical social processes, instinctively followed, have wrought the rational powers of the sciences and of their predecessor techniques into all the spiritual worlds of quality, value and beauty and creative life that civilization has ever known. Within these limitations the divine thought implanted in man has been made manifest through his social relationships into spiritual values out of a hitherto only physical and material world — new life and beauty divinely wrought into the dust.

 As the empiricism of the social order yields to the more rational technique of a natural and practicable true Science of Society this process of social creation will enormously accelerate and expand. The conceptual and experiential lives of men will flow into the perpetual crea­tion of a more and more spiritualized world not fortuitously and intermittently as in the past but in an infinitely grow­ing design ever transcending the visions of mankind but in which their individual ideals and aspirations they will know to be integral yet component patterns and parts. In this endless realization of age-old dreams the whole environment of man, through the agency of his divine spirit will become constantly more highly organized and alive. And as it grows, so under its beneficence will grow mankind towards the perfect Beauty conceived as immortal life in a completely spiritualized heavenly world.