Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2804

Several undergraduate divinity students from Pepperdine College met informally on two different days in March, 1962 at Claremont Men’s College for discussion with Heath, who was seriously ill. This was the second of two such visits (for the first see the preceding Item 2803) and proved to be the last occasion on which Heath discussed his ideas. Spencer Heath MacCallum, who had joined his grandfather in California because of his illness, taped the sessions and later transcribed and very slightly edited them. The recording on this, the second occasion, was poor, as shown by the many penciled corrections in the transcription. Because of this, use judgment when quoting from this material. Note: Words stressed by Heath are marked in the transcript with a dot, which is helpful when reading aloud.

March 1962

 

 

 

SECOND CLAREMONT TALK WITH PEPPERDINE STUDENTS

March 1962

 

Heath: Now I can see everybody’s faces. I like to see the expression on your faces; it’s stimulating and inspiring to me.

 

/Lengthy tape lapse/

 

        … more than anybody else I’ve ever known, the creative opportunity, especially in his retirement of having intimate discussions with everybody, but especially the young bodies and minds. I never had that opportunity. My career such as it has been has been partly in law and partly in engineering, partly in aeronautics and then a considerable period of vacation, which was filled up with the study of all the sciences on my own, with considerable satisfaction to me and with considerable, or so it seemed, creative results. Because I was always studying the fundamentals, the a-prioris, the basis of things. The superstructures are confusing; they have many and varied forms. But the foundations of things are simpler and simpler as you go deeper and deeper. I like to emphasize that — in all life. The foundations of things are simpler and easier to understand as you go deeper and deeper. It is only as you go higher up into the complexities that you get confused ________________. Also, we give a great deal of attention to what we call evil in the world, notwithstanding the command that we should resist not evil but overcome the evil with good. History is replete with evil. Happy is that people whose annals are uninteresting, have little evil in them, don’t make the headlines in history as elsewhere. And I made it my particular interest to discover the life in history and exhume some of it. Not what we died by, like armies and governments and plagues of all kinds, but what we lived by in the past. When we discover what we live by, then we are getting at the secrets of life. Not the secrets of death and decay, but the secrets of the continuity of life than which there is nothing more obvious. Life is always like energy or action in the physical world, always changing its proportions and kinds and modes of manifestation, but like the rest of the universe, it is infinite. We have no grounds for supposing that there are any limits to anything in the universe. If so, there would have to be more than one universe. So it is these infinite things that are the simplest, most easy to understand. The difficult things are the ones that we call evil, so complicated that we can’t make much of anything out of them.

 

         Today we are working at two ends of our lives. The current end which seems to be, in this time, filled with terror for almost everybody. The original ends, the beginning ends, or the farther back since there is no beginning, we are giving comparatively little attention to. As one of the Gospel writers says, the things which are eternal, that never perish, are the simplest. And the things that are transitory – dissolving and decaying and disintegrating and going into higher frequency waves and rays are going back towards homogeneity, what the scientists call entropy — going back towards nothingness, but of course never getting to nothing, because there isn’t any such thing as a nothing. It’s like the absolute zero temperature; you can get closer and closer forever [laughing], but you can’t ever get to it. So it is with everything, all the fundamentals of this cosmos of ours. We can know it only in part because we are parts. If we were the whole it would know itself as the whole, as God knows Himself as the whole. But since we are only parts – we know our­selves to be parts – then the knowledge which we get of the whole has to be part knowledge. But this part knowledge can go on and on indefinitely without ever reaching any end, any infinitude, any Ultimate Reality, final or finished Reality. To do so would be to catch up with God, and while it is a very happy pursuit, it is a rather unattainable one in any absolute sense for finite beings.

 

         So in our sciences we are trying to get into the knowledge of man’s mind, the rationale of how God carries on. How God does his work. The first thing we find about Him is that it’s rational. It goes by units and numbers. Pounds, feet, minutes; grams, centimeters, seconds. And there is always a proportion, or a ratio, between these numbers which constitute an act, or an event. And the whole cosmos is a cosmos of acts and events, some of very high frequency and correspondingly low duration — short wave — and some of very low frequency, perhaps a million light years would be its term, and one-millionth of a million life-years would be the period of the wave. /Check this sentence./ So the cosmos is always moving, as well as perhaps expanding. It is always moving from higher frequency events into lower frequency events. And when we, as events, live longer lives we are coming into lower and lower replacements, through longer lives. And as we approach that Ultimate indefinitely, we approach the limit of immortality, simply by doubling our lives as we did in the 19th century. Which of course we can do again — perhaps not at the same rate, but the mere matter of progressively and geometrically multiplying our lives is an absolute promise of not quite absolute immortality, but for finite beings, something just as good. — The Irishman said that if Shakespeare didn’t write those plays it was another fella by the same name, and it would be just as good.

 Questioner:  Mr. Heath would you explain to some of us who don’t quite understand your expression of higher and lower frequencies?

 

 Heath:  Nothing happens but events. Particles are only one aspect – structures and bodies. There has to be a time element – a motion or velocity element and a duration or time element. Now a wave has those three aspects. A high frequency wave has a very small mass aspect and a relatively high motion aspect. So it repeats itself with great frequency. And you have to multiply that frequency by the number of units of time through which it continues, to get the total energy involved in the whole series of waves. Now our bodies, our generations of men, are masses of material — bodies. They average out statistically all the same of course. They have a lot of motion which averages out statistically all the same. A man-year, or a life-year on an average statistically are all the same. They average out that way. But the generation of people who has the greatest number of life years lives the longest, is the most enduring, most near to God, most resembling Him. Whereas in Asiatic populations in which children are born to die almost as soon as they are born, in which the race doesn’t live more than perhaps 25 or 30 years on the average, they must multiply frequently to maintain the race. Whereas a more Christian nation, living under the golden rule instead of the iron rule characteristic of all primitive people and all coercive people, war making people, that gives men a longer hold on life. They replace themselves less frequently. The same quantity of life, which is the product of the three elements, can be made up in a large amount of time which is low frequency — time for each one — or, a small amount of time for each one which requires a high frequency of birth to replacement.

 

 So as we look about the world today we find that the Christian peoples replace them­selves less than half as frequently as the non-Christian people do — which is another way of saying they live more than twice as long. And that isn’t any accident. Because the Christian people of the world, and practically none other, practice a rule with relation to one another which is called the golden rule, in which each treats the others – all others – in the same manner he would have them treat him. And that’s the only rule, the only fundamental rule of free enterprise, which characterizes Western civilization. We have been doing God’s will. And the reward for doing God’s will has been more and more of that promised eternal life. As we do God’s will more and more, the more that eternal life is given to us. And it’s obvious throughout the world today, those people that don’t practice it live short lives – perish. We need to practice it. So far as we practice it, we have greater and greater measure of the dream of immortality realized in this world as well as in worlds to come. In fact the Christian philosophy doesn’t have to wait for worlds to come. “Thy kingdom come on earth” was the prayer. And that by the way was a prayer to be uttered in secret, by the individual to his Maker. “Thy kingdom come on earth”. It implied a promise that this was the place for it. Not that it could not go on on other earths and other worlds as well. But the Lords Prayer, or model of a prayer as it is, prays that Thy Kingdom shall come right here and now. And, so far as people practice that golden rule which gives us the passport to longer life, it does enter right here and now, and has done so throughout history. That’s why I’m telling you, that the Christian nations are the nations who live long because they live better, they live by the golden rule and justice, and mercy and peace and mutual service. They live long, whereas the rest of the world is suffering the sins of disobedience, following the iron rule of doing unto others as you would not have others do unto you.

 

 Now in all of our societies, these two rules more or less prevail. In the Western world, the golden rule is the only rule by which men relate themselves in large numbers on the basis of peace and service which is love in action: Service. In the Eastern world, broadly speaking, the people relate themselves largely by government authority. Statuses, as Sir Henry Maine called it. They are fixed where they have to be, they are compelled to do what they have to do. So they live short lives. The peasant has barely enough left from the tax collectors to produce another peasant. So nature responds to this danger of extinction by increasing the reproductivity — stimulating the reproductive functions. As she does for a weed; if you cut it down, it puts up many seeds and many stems and so on. You let it grow to maturity, it has broad thick stems, few flowers, few seeds. So it with all life. Where the life is precarious, God preserves it by making a lot of them. And where life is secure, God preserves it by making longer ones. The security is in the higher mode of life, because the higher mode of life endows us with greater measures of immortality. The best lives are the longest lives. And they are longest lives because they are the best lives, the most real lives. Not the transitory and passing away. As Plato and St. Paul agreed, reality consists in enduringness. That which most endures is most real.

 

 There are many points of departure from where I am now. If I could feel your pulse and know just where your minds are reaching out in which direction, I’d like to follow that direction. I’ve said enough I think to form a basis for some inquiries or further suggestions.

 Q: The last time we talked to you, you mentioned something about a Utopia here on earth. Do you think that this is really possible?

 Heath: God promised it didn’t He? — Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?

 Q: This is something people don’t think about very much.

 Heath: They are thinking too much about war and the iron rule. And they are thinking too much about evil, and planning how to resist evil, or hide from it and escape it and so on. Good only exists through the doing of it. Not through the being of it or thinking of it. It is the doing of it. Doing Thy will is what gives man his measure of likeness to his Creator, his measure of immortality. Now science supports all this. Science when looked at profoundly, fundamentally, supports all this. It shows us how even atoms are held together — which is their function, to hold themselves together…it used to be thought their ultimate function to hold themselves together and intact. They have been found to be highly complicated, highly complex. But some of them have the units of which they are composed in collision with one another, not doing unto each other as they would be done by, but colliding. And that radium atom is scattering its energies out into its environment in higher frequency and less durational waves. You can go all through the realm of biology and astronomy. You can go through the realm of history, and find that those people who were most cooperative, most loving each other by serving each other and doing it in return … the universe wouldn’t be in balance if it were not done in return. If everybody did unto others as he would wish them to do to him, and they didn’t reciprocate, it would throw the cosmos out of balance. God would be, what shall we say — off His trolley (laughing). The cosmos is in balance, and it is only kept in balance by these things that do balance. So in men’s relations to one another, the trading relationship, as accountancy shows us, wherever it succeeds, is one that keeps accounts in balance, keeps the cosmos on an even keel. But a relationship by coercive, involuntary — servitude, taxation, war, violence of any kind — between men and men or nation and nation or nations and men — all that is putting the universe out of balance. And that balance has to be corrected; that imbalance brings less life. So men become less immortal and increase rather in numbers than in the goodness and lengthiness of their lives.

 

 Q:  Mr. Heath, in correcting this balance that has been thrown off, what would be the procedure of this nation now, do you feel?

 Heath: Now, when you say this nation, you’re speaking probably of two modes of organization among men which are quite in contrast with one another. There’s the golden rule organization by which we live. All that we spend or waste or use, waste on war or whatnot, is created by the golden Rule relationship. That’s the foundation for it. Taxation makes the munitions. Seizures make the compulsions. And so the political arm, which is based upon the iron rule, is always drawing life downward. Diminishing life. It is not to be blamed, but that is the way it is organized. But our economic life is organized on the golden rule of each doing unto others as they would be done by. And this is the source of all our strength, all our life, and all our power. However much of it we may utilize and however much we may destroy, that’s where it comes from. This divine relationship between men called contract. Contract re­member. I didn’t say covenant, purposely. Because there is a vast difference. The contract that binds men together in economic systems of trade and creates the wealth of the world, whether it is to be destroyed by governments or used for the uplift of men, the instrument of contract is an agreement on both sides to do good, and never to do harm. But a covenant, or a treaty, is always an agreement not to do harm. Promise not to aggress, not to steal, not to violate the Ten Commandments in any way. The peculiar difference between the engagements that are made by free men in a free economy – in a golden-rule economy — and engagements that are made by men who are either suffering from coercion or practicing it upon others, which is to say our field of taxation and war – so called public services — the great difference is that in one field men create life, enjoy life, in the other they destroy life. And in the one field we are commanded to perform it; in the other, we are forbidden. The golden rule is commanded — to do unto all others. The iron rule is not only forbidden, but we are forbidden to resist it. Resist not evil, because the only way you can overcome evil is by doing good. There is no such thing as nothing in nature. God is always there. “Standeth God behind the shadows, keeping watch above His own.”

 So today we are in great terror, lest our organization of arms   — taxation, coercion, compulsions, regulations and pseudo charities which always have to take away more than they can give (laughing). Notwithstanding all those, we have a golden rule creating everything for us. And we haven’t had our eyes opened enough, we have been too blind to it, and because we have not noticed that, we have noticed the evil and not noticed the blessings and the opportunities that lie all around us. For that reason we are terrorized by the activities of men who are organized under the iron rule of taxation and war. And we have so accepted it that we think it is natural and we think we must always have it. Not because it shows any merit in itself, but because we don’t remember any time when we didn’t have it. And therefore it is taken as necessary evil and inevitable.

 

 Q: Trent and I were speaking the other evening about a right and a left, an extreme one way or the other. And our conclusion, after we had spoken with you the other afternoon, we thought that either we are for Christ, or for the devil. Now then, these are strong viewpoints. Do you feel in your mind that there is any median, any between-place that you can still stand and be effective?

Heath: The question would be a little more significant to me if we could find Christ on either side, on the right and left, of politics or war. Christ proposed that we overcome evil by doing good. That automatically displaces it, eliminates it, doing good. You don’t stop going down by stopping; nature never stands still. Events always have motion in them; things that happen always have motion in them. So when we try to think of something as stationary, as holding back evil, resisting evil, we are not getting anywhere. We are out of God’s order. God’s order always has force, motion, and time in it. Those are the three ingredients of the Christian Trinity. In our official articles

 of belief they are called Substance, Power and Eternity, the correlates of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, symbolizing these things stated more, shall I say, scientifically. Find this in your prayer books: Substance, Power, and Eternity. So what was I saying about it, if someone will prompt me?

 

 Phyllis: You were saying that if we could find Christ on either side.

 

 Heath: So where we have conflict. Political party arrayed against political party. Armies arrayed against armies to defeat on one side and win on the other side. Wherever we have them, we are ignoring the .. what you call the middle ground. Let’s take right and left: those which believe in more force applied to human beings by other human beings. Is that fair for left? — And those who believe in less governmental force applied by human beings to one another — the right. Must we choose between either the left or the right? Must we really make that choice? Has the race given us no higher choice than that? Aren’t there three dimensions? Isn’t there an up dimension? Which of our political leaders are leading us upward into the kingdom of heaven, which is the modern word for Utopia .. or rather the more ancient word for Utopia. Let us think awhile about this third dimension, and cast our eyes upward toward that third dimension and discover there that that is the transcendent side of life. That’s what gives us more and more measures of immortality. So while we depend upon the rule of force, whether it may be called left hand or right hand, liberal or conser­vative or whatnot, the rule of force, it shifts from one side to the other, but it can never take us up. On the contrary, it always takes us down. And history is replete with examples of how the rule of force and sovereignties has always pulled mankind down. Men have never risen by the use of the sword, or the club, or the tax system, or any kind of an instrument of force. All their rising has come from the men practicing, perhaps unknowingly many times, the golden rule of doing unto others in the same manner you would have them do unto you. That creates all the values in civilization, including the values which are spoiled in war, and in such things as scattering our resources over the surface of the earth for people to enjoy who do not create them — holding ourselves down to a lower standard of living by so doing, thinking that it is our duty to uplift other people who are not
making any corresponding effort to lift up themselves. And
of course that doesn’t strengthen them. We had no one to
give us foreign aid; we found the secret of serving one
another and doing God’s will, and we got the reward. And so we
got the longer and longer life. Did I cover the question
that was asked? I cover so much territory sometimes that I forget my bearings. Somebody has to tell me which way I was going.

Q:  In other words don’t go right or left but go up.

Heath:  And some say, “Where is this up you are talking about? I don’t see it.” Eyes that are blind, eyes that don’t see, how much keener our sight seems to be for what hurts us, scares us, than for what blesses us.

 

 I and my grandson, Mr. MacCallum here, have been advocating in small and narrow ways for some years a discovery of an alternative. It’s in history, it’s in nature, and it’s all around us — an alternative way of doing the necessary things that we have to have in common with one another, such as police and fire protection and multitudes of other things that we can’t have each one for himself. We have been doing them by relegating it to the authority of what we sometimes call the “man on horseback,” and he is authorized to seize our property so that he can do us good with it — the vain idea that good can come out of evil. And we practiced it for centuries, that strange belief, that strange but almost all-pervading belief, that force can relieve force, and men by more or less enslaving one another can serve one another the most important services, perhaps, that they have, which are the services they have to have in common with one another.

 

 Prehistory — Mr. MacCallum is an anthropologist, by the way, and knows something about that — affords a great many examples of communities whose head man looked after the common services and distributed them by the will of the tribe, perhaps, and when that will got regulated and custom confirmed it, by a process called contract, that I referred to, the only free relationship that can exist between men in large numbers. I am not speaking now of persons intimately related by kinship or some other emotional bonds, even religious bonds; I mean people who are related by contract. The head man functions — and function by the way is the only way to truly describe anything; if you want to describe me, don’t describe me by how much I weigh, or how tall I am, but by how I act. And so with all of us. And the function of this head man is to dis­tribute the territory, the area, of the tribe. If it were not so distributed, then everything would be everybody’s and nobody could have any peaceable possession. That man came to be known among northern European tribes as the landlord because he was the giver of the land. Lord in that language means giver, and the landlord is the landgiver. And in those, what Sir Henry and many others call village communities, there was growing and becoming almost dominant by the time of the Norman Conquest, a system of village life in which the principal parties were the landlord and the free men. And these men were free because no violence was practiced upon them by the public authority. The only authority practiced was that of contract and consent. No landlord ever makes war upon his tenant, unless it might be to get rid of a tenant who has forfeited all of his rights and would be imposing slavery on somebody else if he weren’t gotten rid of. No landlord takes any rent by force — unless he may be collecting it through some political organization for the collection of debts by government. Now gamblers don’t have government to collect their debts, and if devils don’t need it, why should saints need it (laughing)? Why should humans need it? Accountancy — which we usually call money and which we properly should call accountancy — keeps account of what everybody does for everybody else, and any time they want to see how they stand with reference to one another, they just balance the books. As soon as the books are balanced, nobody thinks of resisting it. If he is, he’s out of the kingdom of heaven; he’s playing the iron rule somewhere. He’s a government, or he may be some gangsters or pirates or something like that.

 

 So we have a device called accountancy, even in prehistory — anthropology tells us of it — and in pretty much all of pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon England, with respect to our public services which were conducted under the golden rule of contract. And that golden rule is an eternal rule. It just wasn’t invented by somebody or legislated. As I asked some faculty members here one time, a year or so ago, talking about government by laws instead of government by men, “Well gentlemen, that’s very good, but what do you mean? What kind of laws are you talking about? Are you speaking of laws that have to be discovered in nature, or the mind of God, or are you just talking about laws that men have to enact by legislative measures and enforce by the sword, as it were?” Well nobody seemed to know the answer to that question, and so the discussion ended at that point. And so the discussion frequently ends when bishops, let us say, — just to give an example of good people — when they hear someone present to them the thought that Christian people live better and thereby longer lives than anybody else in the world. Well that usually stalls them. Is it an accident, Bishop? No, they are practicing the golden Rule, which we call an economic system — free, so far as it can be free, from our political system. Just as trade practices on the seas, so far as it can be free from piracy. And the functioning of piracy,

of course, is exactly the same functioning as _______. I am not speaking about the goodness or badness of the people; piracy functions in exactly in the same manner that taxation functions. Is that not correct? And this incubus of iron rule is something that we must outgrow to be spiritual beings. And we are outgrowing it. Mysterious are the ways of God His wonders to perform, and His wonders are always mysterious until we understand them. So we don’t understand today how underneath are the everlasting arms. We don’t understand today how God is bringing us out of all of this terror. So far as we discover and heed this single, simple golden rule.

 This must be mysterious to you, because it is so unusual. If you had never seen a multiplication table, and we all had it done up on the blackboard there, would it look simple to you? Maybe a terribly complicated affair? Or any other simple thing. Once you have gotten accustomed to the form of a complex thing, as fast as you get the rationale of it it’s perfectly simple. You wonder why you didn’t know all about it before. And so we have in recent centuries, and especially since the Norman Conquest in the West, we have been operating our public services under the iron rule of William the Conqueror. I’m too delicate to mention his formal, historical, official title. We have conducted our public affairs on the political method carried on for centuries by the Roman and other empires, the political method of seizing and forcing people, depriving them of their properties and their liberties without their consent. But on the other hand we have in our midst, drawn from Saxon sources, the landlord-tenant relationship. And in this we have the public affairs appertaining to the land, especially if it is wide-spread land and includes police and fire protection and other things, provided by the owner of the property. And he, owner, or lord, or giver, distributor, dis­tributes it by the golden rule of contract. And that is springing up today in the wake of a huge economic development that did not include public services. It included private capital as we call them, private goods and services. This is the real estate business now aggregating itself in huge communities providing the municipal services on the landlord-tenant basis. Insurance companies are doing it and hundreds of billions of capital – isn’t it hundreds, Spencer, in total? And in a single one like having little places for mobile homes to stand and have water and police and fire protection, there are some dozen more billions as I think the trade papers tell us_, of capital invested in those communities, to give services to all and sundry and not to any particular one. So this practice of assembling real estate as other forms of capital have been during the last century or so assembled in large corporate forms is making them extremely productive. Real estate is now coming to be a capitalized business gathered together in large communities and operated for income — doing things for which others would like to pay, instead of being held for capital gain, just waiting for other people to do things so that your real estate appreciates because it becomes more in demand because of things that other people do requiring the use of it. So instead of

burying our real estate talent, leaving it in the ground where it is now, we are putting it together in vast organizations. You may not have seen it. it is not in the headlines, but it is in the trade papers plenty. It is the most striking phenomenon of present-day business. Probably as much written about it as any other business that’s known, perhaps more, and coming to be ever more rapidly known.

 

 Spencer: You might give some examples as to what these communities are you’re talking about.

 

Heath:  An example would be .. the simplest would be a hotel, where they do everything for the guests, and the guests pay what it is worth. They get police and fire /protection/ chapels, kindergartens, art galleries, outside recreation in some hotels, and the people pay for these things gladly. All these things are necessary to have in common. The shopping center is another example of one, that lies mostly out of doors. It has buildings on it, it has all of its departments of any other town. It may be in hundreds of acres, some of them are, very large. And they have diversified industries going on in them. They provide their municipal services by the landlord, same as in the hotel. And everybody is happy there, or he doesn’t have to stay. If he wasn’t happy he wouldn’t stay, the landlord wouldn’t want him. And the landlord himself provides such magisterial services, all on the basis of free arbitration and free consent, to keep the peace and harmony among all his inhabitants upon his property. No taxes on anybody, no force applied on anybody. The lease itself specifies how people shall behave, or they don’t belong and must be cast out by violence if necessary, because self preservation is the first law of nature. That’s the only case where violence has any occasion. Where it is a case of live or die, self preservation is the first law. And that’s because men are not animals. I speak as one who is familiar with the fundamentals of the physical sciences and the biological sciences. Men are animals plus. The process leading to the development of animals from single cells up to the next thing to man, is called evolution, and the earth is replete with evidences that that took place. But man wasn’t created at that point. Man didn’t become man until he had a divine breath breathed into him and he became a living soul. Now the evolution of man begins when man became man. Animals have no imagination. They have no conceptual lives; there is small evidence of it. They have instincts, a program printed into them and so on. Those who followed a certain rule live more or less without understanding what they are doing, and those who more or less accidently fall into other ways are lost — and they are all losing because they have no golden rule. They don’t need any imagination without the golden rule; they are always cannibals on one another because they are all preying on one another or eating up the substance of one another, which comes to the same thing. Animals have no creative spirit. It was not breathed into them as it was in man. The first man had the divine spirit, the creative power, breathed — inspired — into him. And he became like his Maker with ability to conceive things and then create the things, to image them and then to create them in the image of them which he held, as any artist or architect does. The image must be there before he can create, otherwise things just happen by a chaotic fashion at a lower level like animals.

 

 So the evolution of man begins where man as such begins. Not where man as an animal begins, because there is no such things as an animal man, unless we want to consider his physical part alone and consider that the whole man. But what makes man a man is by how he differs from the lesser forms. If he didn’t differ in one particle in respect to his physical constitution, he wouldn’t be man. If he did not differ a particle. But if he differed as God made him different when He breathed His divine breath into him, now that’s a man. That’s the beginning of a man. That’s the finishing off of the lower order and the beginning of the higher order. And this order of evolution is a marvelous thing to behold. It’s the story of anthropology. The proper study of man is man, not animals. Men are not subject to all the limitations, they are not on the way to the grave all the time, they are not going extinct all the time. Paleontology is not full of extinct men; it’s full of extinct forms of every other kind, because every other kind of living thing except man is marching to the grave, marching to extinction. But because man has this vision, this mind of God in his own mind, this power to conceive, to dream and to create, man is building his environment, and making it ever more and more habitable for him — as against the less than man, who is always depleting and toxifying and destroying their environment, making it less and less habitable for them and thereby making their extinction inevitable. But because man is the creator, under the divine rule of serving one another, and only under that rule, man creates the world in which he lives. He lives a better life and thereby lives a longer life. That’s the distinction which we’ve been all too slow to appreciate. It’s plain in Holy Writ, but we just gloss it over, pay no attention to it. And the only blessings that there are in the Holy Writ are those we give attention to. Except that God won’t let us perish altogether, and so there is the lesson, Underneath are the everlasting arms. If all the men perished from the earth today — atom-wise or otherwise — there is some of the divine breath left to be breathed into some higher form of animal that would create him into being a man, into being a creator instead of a destroyer as all other living forms are.

 I’m fascinated by the supposed conflict between the materialist theory of man, which relates only to animals — because animals are material. Their evolutionary rules are all right if they are talking about animals, but if they would take Pope’s essay and learn that the proper study of mankind is man, then they would begin with man. And then we’re on our march to understanding ourselves. When we understand our intrinsic selves, we’re understanding the God who made us. That’s His work. How do you know anybody’s nature except by how he works, the results of his work? By their works shall ye know them, and that applies to God as well as to anybody else. By His works ye shall know Him.

 Maybe I’ve wandered far from what your present interest might be.

 Q: What do you think of Ayn Rand?

 

Heath: Ayn Rand? She’s a very vigorous personality. She was when I knew her in 1930..somewhere along..31. A very vigorous personality.

Q: She feels sort of like you do on this government stealing, when they take from the people.

 

Heath: Yes, well the Bible doesn’t say anything about who does it.

 

Q: Pardon?

 

Heath: The Bible doesn’t say anything about there being any difference — stealing is stealing whether it is done by one person or somebody else, or some group of persons. And so to that extent she’s following the Bible, although I think she chooses to call herself an atheist, or something like that. Which I think is one way of getting a lot of people not to listen to her.

 

Q: What do you think of her writings as a whole?

 

Heath: She has a very fine technique, of a rough and ready kind. A very powerful technique.

 

Q: I found them real good, real interesting. But then it seemed like she needed one more step, like the recognition of God and she’d just have it right there.

 

Heath: Many of us do come up somewhere near to the top, and don’t quite make the high grade.

 

Q: Have you ever had this trouble of maybe thinking that there

wasn’t a God, somewhere along in your studying?

 

Heath: Oh plenty in my youth! And the reason of that was that those who taught me about what they said was God, taught me about monsters and demons, to a large extent. And I said, if that’s God, then I’ll have none of it. But as I approached middle life, I began to find out that God is what the New Testament said God is: God is love. What is love? Service. Doing for one another. And doing it systematically, we live systematically and approach immortality in a systematic manner, doubling our average lives in a single century.

 

 I think we’ve run a little bit off of our main theme, haven’t

we?

 Q: I think we’re all involved in this to a certain extent. What is you concept, mainly between time and Eternity? What is your thinking of this?  What is the distinction between the two?

 Heath: Everything is to be understood by how it acts, functions. And when power is put out, it acts rhythmically, or with what they call discontinuity, and so on. And so the rhythm that you can count, you can feel it in your breath, in your heart, in your blood and so on, the rhythm of nature is time. And because nature has rhythm and the units of the rhythm can be segregated in our minds and largely in our experience also, then we can practice time. The time is the third element in the Christian Trinity. It’s the discontinuity, it’s the repetition of things, it’s the ongoing of things one after another. It can be counted, because if there were nothing there to be counted, we’d be back into utter homogeneity, utter chaos, and no organization, no possible numbers, no rationality. Time is that which goes on and thereby accumulates, makes energy or action larger and larger — builds it up. But matter and motion are organized in different proportions, and they are the first two elements of an event. They qualify the event. It is a certain kind of event, because matter, or force, and motion are in a certain proportion in numbers. And in some proportions they can go on in greater and greater repetitions, they continue for longer times. And those we call creative organizations, which among men we call it love, or mutual service — because love has no way of demonstrating itself except through serving one another. It isn’t just a matter of the mind, it’s a matter of functioning: how you function with respect to your fellow man?  If you function under the golden rule, then that’s a spiritual relationship because it’s a creative relationship. I wish I had time to take that alone as a theme. What is spirituality? Whatever advances the purposes of God is spiritual, isn’t it?

 

 Q: Maybe you can dwell on this a while.

 

 Heath: What is the purpose — I’ll  try to do it for a moment. What are the purposes of God? Life or death? More life, more abundant life, or less abundant life? I won’t pause to talk about no life, because there are no nothings, they’re just a figment of imagination. So the will of God is that men should have more abundant life.

 

 Now what was the question exactly? How was it framed?

 

 Q: The difference between time and Eternity.

 

 Heath: Well then, how abundant a life is, other things being equal of course, is how long it endures. A life one year long, a life of two years long is twice as much, other things being equal of course. So time is the quantifying /qualifying?/ element in nature. This is quite an abstract, a philosophical conception, but any conception, philosophic, scientific or otherwise, if it is simple enough, can be understood by relatively simple minds. I was illustrating a day or two ago, chess isn’t anything but complicated checkers, is it? And three-dimensional chess is still more complicated checkers. What principle is involved in any of the higher complications that is not involved in the checkers themselves? They merely complicated the thing; no fundamentally new relationship is introduced. And so with all of nature when we get down to the simplest. And this great Book that we revere in the Western world has so many simple illustrations in it that it makes it understandable by simple people. You don’t have to be a high scientist and learn to understand higher mathematics and all that sort of thing —fine as they are in their places and do wonderful things. But to understand the funda­mentals is the main objective, and we get that by simple parables, simple metaphores. Simple words like Father, Son and Holy Ghost, representing the universal Substance, the universal Power, and the Universal Time, which is Eternity.

And you were asking me what was time? Was that the question?

 Q: No, would you connect time with Eternity, or how would you conceive the relationship between the two?

 Heath: Well eternity is something like the star that guides the mariner. It gives him direction, but he doesn’t expect to drop his anchor there. And all our ideals, all the perfection that we’re commanded to exhibit in our lives, our counsels of perfection, direction towards it, never arriving. Finite beings can’t be infinite in any respect or absolute in any respect. If we were all of God, the we could attribute those things to ourselves as God can to Himself. Since we are only part of God, God’s creation and especially given His own gift of imagination to imagine things and create them, since we are only part of God, then we can never experience the whole of God. We’d have to be equal to God to do that. Is that plain enough? We mustn’t expect _____________. Our whole lives are in a spectrum of action or events, or energy if you want to call it. There are things below which our senses don’t tell us anything, small magnitudes, and others above which they don’t register, as the ear only takes a certain range of sound, or the eye a certain octave. We don’t know what goes above and below these limits. We don’t have any direct knowldege. But we can reason a lot about it, because we find that what we do experience and understand is rational and reasonable and can be reasoned about and understood. So we can reason about the whole spectrum of nature, not only what is experienced but what is in its nature experienceable, capable of being at some future time understood. And as we expand this octave of our objective lives, we can

reach towards zero on the one hand, or towards higher frequencies of action …

(tape ran out)