Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2197

Pencil draft by Heath leading up to his Philosophic Chart reproduced in Citadel, Market and Altar without any text. At Spencer MacCallum’s urging for a future printing of the book, Heath produced this and Item 2198.

March 25, 1957

 

 

 

/THE SPIRITUAL ASCENT OF MAN/

 

The irreducible fact of all knowledge is the individual ego, both unconscious and conscious, self-aware. It is manifest in the “organization center” that directs the specific development of the embryo and its autonomous functioning, actions and reactions, and in the entire adult nervous system that determines uniquely all conscious actions and reactions.

                                         

     Philosophy has to do with knowledge. It presupposes a knower that knows and that which is known and to be known.

 

     Considering knowing as being aware or being conscious, we recognize that the knowledge, conscious or unconscious must be of something — that the verb must have an object.

 

     The ego or consciousness thus is seen to be the subject of which the outer or objective world is the object, and that consciousness springs from interactions through sense impressions between the inner and the outer, the self and the not-self, the subjective and the objective worlds.

 

     All knowledge in its acquisition, therefore, is a process, an interaction, actions and reactions, a succession of happenings or events.

 

     The human individual is so constituted that sense impressions set up trains of events within the conscious (and the unconscious) ego. Such inner trains of events or processes are called memory, thought, imagination — inner events in the image of the outer stimulus, or its source.

 

     Now the inner ego, the field of conception and imagination, for each individual is unique. It has a genetic endowment that, like the bodily structure, is distinctive for each. Though they all are generically similar and have much in common they are individual, not precisely alike. Their reactions to sense impressions thus are peculiar to each, as are the patterns of thought and consciousness and memory into which they organize sense impressions uniquely according to their genetic origins and accumulated past reactions.

 

     Now the bodily constitution and frame is definitely finite; but its processes of thought and imagination are not so limited. They are constituted of elements originally derived through sense impressions for their raw material, as it were, but are under no limitations as to extension or repetition /?/ either as motion (space) or as duration, or time. Thought and imagination can range without limit through all conceivable magnitudes, all spaces and through all past and future time. However, while it determines only partly the external events to which it reacts, it does, according to its own genetic constitution, determine the manner of its reaction to them and thus so react as in large measure to determine the kind of events to which it shall in future be exposed and react.

 

This subjective inner world of the individual is his central and his chief existence, the center of all his loves and hates, his hopes and fears, his sensations, joys and dreams. But the self is conditioned by the not-self wherein alone it can be fulfilled. The life itself is dependent on a working arrangement between the two. At the animal level it is a matter of adjustment only. Here the animal man, like all other animals is the product of its environment, creature of its creator, and slave of circumstances he does not determine and that do determine him. But man, above all creatures is unique in this: He has a potentiality towards creatorship. He is not forever bound to make his habitat less habitable, and thus self-limiting, as other creatures are. He can emerge to a higher state, a new birth out of his creaturehood into creatorship, out of the dominion of necessities and needs into his spiritual heritage of a creative dominion over all the world and all else that inhabit it. And he shall be molded ever increasingly in the image of his desires and dreams. Thus, for man the objective world is destined to become as clay in the potter’s hand, an extension of himself, home and embodiment of his creative spirit as his flesh is the embodiment of his animal life. But before he can command he must first learn to obey. (He must learn the way of life by) There is for him a way of life that is good, a way in which he must walk if he would live, and so far as he walks therein he is privileged to learn and to know and understand the works and ways and thereby the rational mind of the cosmos whence he springs.

 

     The subjective mind of man finds within itself an element of rationality that is ineluctable /?/ and so far as it is possessed at all is common to all men, for it reflects the rationality of the cosmos whence they evolved. Now the subjective mind of man is a cosmos in itself. By its own genetic nature it of itself determines how it shall react to its myriad sense impressions from the outer world. It has option to entertain such as are messengers of life and light and to cast into the limbo of its unconscious such as point towards death and darkness. His reactions are not bound to be mere tropisms, automatic and immediate, for he may delay them and in this interim reflect and choose and in choosing determine that with which his conscious mind shall dwell — what he shall learn to know and understand. And it is between two kinds of knowledge that his conscious mind is privileged to choose, knowledge of life and its ways that are called good and that mixed and conflicting kind of knowledge that is called the knowledge of good and evil and brings conflict and death among men. The subjective mind, at its own option, may drink and be nourished by the waters of life or it may accept the fatal beguilements of the notion of good and evil and untimely darkness and death. But so far as it heeds those sense impressions that inspire with a sensation of life and its fulfillments the conscious mind acquires a knowledge of the rational harmony of its outer world and comes into a growing accord with it. It builds within strong patterns of rationality in correspondence with the rationality it discovers in the outer world from the self, and thus the human mind comes into rational as well as emotional rapport with the universal mind and in this at-one-ment becomes co-creator in the cosmic whole. This is the kind of knowledge that gives passport /?/ to man’s creative dominion, ________, over the whole world of ever enlarging yet ever finite objective experience. But so far as it heeds those sense impressions that inspire, like the exquisite in a flower, the color symphony of a sunrise or a wondering receptivity at the majesty of a mountain storm, it responds to the life-ward aspect, to the spirit of beauty that dominates creatively the processes of the evolving whole.

 

     Those inspirations — responses to the sense impressions coming from the outer to the inner world — are spiritual, for they motivate creative action. And this in two ways: in the concrete and in the abstract arts. The one is a direct inspiration to impart its vision of beauty in concrete forms in ways that are but little or not at all rationally or intellectually understood. It /is/ a kind of tropism similar to the instinct for breeding and nest building in birds, except that it is not uniform to the race but is the unique creation of the individual and conspires towards higher modes and forms of life instead of mere utilitarian maintenance of the particular type.

 

     The other motivation, the abstract draws away from the immediately /?/ objective and concrete. It tends towards the pause of reflection and the subjective discovery /of/ rational relationships and the construction of rational patterns of thought within the consciousness in correspondence with the sense messaged rational harmony of the objective cosmic world. The abstract constructs of the reflective consciousness in man spring from the inherent unity between his inborn rationality and the intrinsic growing and evolving actuality of the cosmos as a whole. This kind of knowledge is called science. This knowledge is not limited and specific to particular actions or events but is generalized over wide classes and ranges of similar actions and /events/ making the human spirit ever more at home in its cosmos and giving it keys to the source /?/ of creative power. Such are the facts of rational, as distinguished from intuitive human artistry, in its constructs of abstract laws and forms /?/.

 

     But the abstractions of the intellect are not private to the individual and self-enacting as are the intuitions of religion and art. Ritual and art take objective form out of feeling, out of the heart more than the mind, whereas the objectification of intellectual abstractions requires the complex cooperation in many ways of many men. When this cooperation is coercive, arbitrary and not rational, the result is public work, governmental and public art to the glory of conquerors and in spectacles and public charities to appease the poverty they engender and impose. Under the iron rule, the political relationships of authority and subservience, religion and art are bereft of their spontaneity, intellect, except as the servant of power, goes into decline, and the creative capacity of mankind is inhibited and suppressed. Religion and art are the spontaneous expressions of conscious concepts wrought out of death-fearing and life-inspiring, sense-born intimations of the extra- or super-personal outer world. Both in their origins are grotesque, in their ultimate sublime.

 

But the rational constructs of the consciousness are accretive. Little by little the subjective rationality comes into recognition of the rationality whence it evolved. The cosmic consciousness stirring in atom, leaf and star yields its secrets bit by bit to many minds. The bits are tested and compared and when so proved are composed into /a/ general pattern that reflects the rationality of the outer field whence its parts are drawn. Thus the separate sciences arise each in its field to picture in quantitative (measured) and thereby rational terms the processes of the outer world. And the special sciences, as they grow, intermingle in a larger pattern that reveals the workings of the cosmic mind. In this sciences

describe the events they measure in units of mass, motion and

time. In this descriptive stage there is no attempt but to

understand, by ratios, the composition of sense-reported

objective events. The symmetry and beauty of their rationality

brings the researcher’s mind into a conscious at-one-ness, a

spiritual awareness of the Cosmic Whole; for its abstract

generalizations are not limited as sense-impressions are but

pass all limits of motion, space or time. As the arts exalt the

feelings so does science exalt the mind and its purposes are

served. But while the utility of the arts, as such, is

wholly aesthetic, science has also a mighty utilitarian role.

Revealing as it does in what proportions nature unites the

elements of mass, motion and time that constitute her events,

the mind and ________ will of man can bring about and preside

/?/ over the composition of events that transpire only in his

dreams until he builds them back into his environing world from

which the substance of them but not the pattern is drawn. Man

does not wish merely to repeat and extend what nature at a

given level does. He wishes as her child to participate in her

perpetual self-transcendence, to build into the rational order,

in accordance with its own rationale that he has learned, such

compositions of events as his own unique genetic nature dreams

and decrees. He becomes a god in the practice of a creation of

his very own and known as such within the total cosmic trend.

His own personality is exalted into functional /?/ unity with

the ultimate and divine.

 

     But little or none of this can he do as an individual alone. Art may thrive on but little from others. The one can inspire and thus serve the many though they but little inspire or serve him. But he who would employ the generalizations of science to objectify the plans and dreams of his mind must have the aid of myriads of past and present men. Many must serve the one in order that the one may many serve. An inter-service of many serving many and being by many served is the only relationship in which the vast intricacies of technological detail can be brought to focus in vast, mass-produced specific services and commodities that raise the richness and extend the lives of all.

 

In this mighty creative process, to be effective there is one key condition imposed. It is a spiritual condition in that otherwise men cannot become creators and must as but creatures live and die. Their relationship must be spontaneous and voluntary without coercion on either side. And it must be rational and harmonious, the contributions of each to the whole being measured in the sight of all in the terms of some value unit recognized by all; and the participation of each must be likewise measured that the distribution to him shall be in ratio to the contribution by him. This balanced harmony is achieved in the psychological relationship called contract in which there is no need or use of equality save one. The parties to the contract must be equal in authority each over his own person and over his own property that it may become the subject matter of his contract. In this creative relationship, reciprocal and non-coercive, there is but one rule, the Golden Rule of balanced exchange in the practice of which men rise to a new order of being in which their creative potentialities are liberated and the door opened for their divine destinies to be ever more fulfilled.

 

     The spiritual ascent of men as co-creators with the Universal under the divine command to do each unto others in the same manner that he would have others serve him is diagrammed by means of the accompanying philosophic chart.

 

     At the base is the relative chaos involving all potentialities and out of which all order and beauty evolves. For the purpose of understanding (and none other) it is divided into two worlds, the metaphysical (original) and the physical (derivative), the world of the universal and the world of the particular; of the spirit and of the body; the infinite and the finite. These two worlds are separate only in thought or imagination; for they interfuse; neither is complete without the other. It is in their interfusion that the Cosmos continually transcends itself (as the material universe expands) and that the spiritual nature and destiny of man, through his participation in that transcendence is ever more fulfilled.

 

     The Cosmos in its absolute and universal aspect is represented ascendingly on the left hand side of the chart. Its relative and particular aspects are represented on the right. The primordial cosmos has always some degree of differentiation. It is not wholly homogeneous. Its parts are interrelated in actions and reactions that constitute discrete happenings or events which taken in the general sense are called “action” or, more colloquially, simply work. This action or work has a property of discontinuity whereby particular happenings or events can be distinguished from other events and from the whole. The individual consciousness as a succession of interior events acts through sense impressions with its total environment in what is known as experience. Action is not only discontinuous; it is also composite of three elements all of which must be united to  induce any sense reaction that constitutes objective experience, but any two or one of them can be entertained subjectively without any limitation as to motion, space or time. Except in unity they are metaphysical conceptions wholly beyond the realm of objective sense experience. Central to all action is the element of mass or inertia, force or resistance to force (in the ordinary acceptance of these terms). When the mass aspect of an event is …

/Breaks off here./