Spencer Heath Archive

Item 247

Penciling by Heath on notepad paper (title supplied).

May 24, 1957

     

 

 

/THE COSMIC PROCESS IN REVIEW/

 

     The Universe is a Cosmos of phenomena, happenings, events. We know of it through sense impressions and what we infer or deduce therefrom and our senses verify and con­firm. It is the objective aspect and source of the events we know as sense impression.

     What lies beyond this we can only infer. We take it to be infinite in all respects, for it gives us no ground for setting bounds, no warrant for imputing beginning or end or, in fact, any bounds. We know it only so far as our senses respond and we are able to infer and to verify objectively, and uniformly with one another, what we have deduced or inferred. This faculty of deduction we derive, as we do all else, from the cosmic whole. Our rationality is one with and part of the cosmic rationality whence it is derived — else it could not be.

     Our consciousness, our entire subjectivity, in all its individual uniqueness and its common uniformities, is the reflex of the cosmic uniqueness and uniformities whence it comes — microcosm in macrocosm — in its metaphysical no less than its physical aspects and manifestations. We are, in fact, finite and in all respects limited events within the limitless event, within the absolute infinitude whence we spring. We are organized sub-entities within the total cosmic organization — distinguished from it only by our actual yet diminishing limitations. So far as consciousness is concerned, we occupy, objectively, only a very narrow band in the total and infinite actuality of cosmic phenomena, action or event.

     All events are interrelated. This necessitates them being, in some sense, individual and discrete. Their rationality lies in their numerical multiplicities — in the ratios among numbers.

     Every organization is composite of basically similar unitary events.

     We are so constituted (and limited) that the events that constitute our objective world impinge as unities, yet always in three distinguishable and measurable aspects — as mass, having a quality of force or inertia; motion, having a quality of velocity; and time, having a quality of succes­sion and thereby rhythm and duration — frequency and interval or period.

     Looked at analytically, events are called cycles and may be classified qualitatively, according to their rhythm, from highest frequency, shortest period — approximating zero — to lowest frequency, longest period — approximating infinity.

     Every organization of units is itself a composite unit with quantities and proportions of mass and motion specific to its kind and such durational period from integration to disintegration as it has achieved.

 

     The transformations of organizations as events, through interactions among them are marked by changes of proportion in the relative quantities of mass, motion and time of which as individuals or as species they are com­posed. In this, some kinds of events are bound to attain increasing proportions of time in their composition. Such more durational events necessarily become more general and thus always prevailing above otherwise similar organizations as events. Accordingly every part and department of the cosmos is evolving ever towards compositions and organiza­tions having that infinite and absolute duration that is characteristic of the whole.

     This, then, is the rational inference and deduction from the data supplied by our sense impressions from the cosmic flux and flow in which we are involved as acting and interacting organized units and parts:

 

     That it is a cosmos of happenings, action or events, each organized as a discrete unit in itself but in a rhythmic succession of similar yet more or less persisting, never precisely repeating like type or kind and forever interacting directly or indirectly, with all other organiza­tions or events.

     That these actions, as organizations or events present themselves to us in the three aspects of mass, motion and time, always implicit, inseparable and integral in the event, be it a single high-frequency wave or single cosmic organization in a series involving virtually unimaginably large periods of Time. Whatever other properties or characteristics, if any, may be inherent in the cosmos we do not know. We only know that we ourselves are so physically organized that we react in only these three ways.

     Yet we do know, and most intimately, that we are organized subjectively in a world of inner events and experiences, a world of conceptions and imaginations in which we are not subject to any quantitative limitations as to mass, motion or time. Here we can conceive of magnitudes far beyond any that we can experience — always beyond and beyond. We are vividly conscious of these vast conceptions, but of them objective experience, being limited to what the senses report, can afford no scientific verification. Science has its domain in the world of objective and not subjective experience. Its discoveries cannot be verified outside of the objective world in which they are made — and in this it can verify only such properties and proportions as the senses report. Science can check its data only in the same field from which they are drawn. However, it may reasonably be inferred, by analogy at least — perhaps by necessary analogy — that the objective world does include a subjective counterpart informing it — the source whence our unlimited subjectivity may be drawn, precisely as the limited objective (bodily) part or side of /it/ is a partial integration out of the infinite objective world.

     The whole universe may be an integrated infinitude of interacting organized events — cycles of action — all of which are being constantly transformed into cycles of ever longer period — lower frequency — in the whole cosmic cycle which is infinite and thus beyond all limitations as to mass, motion or time.

     In nature there is a definite hierarchy of action, in the order and emergence, the evolution of organizations and events.

     First there is the inorganic. In this realm the cycles extend from highest frequency waves down to the long cycles of atomic structure — from integration to disintegration of the atoms themselves. Every organization acts, above all, in such manner as to maintain itself. In a wave, the cycle is precarious. It is poorly stabilized, easily broken and transformed. But in the atom its cycle of action is highly stabilized. Radiant action is unbound energy. The atomic energy is tightly bound within the atomic structure. All inorganic structures, from waves to atoms, maintain themselves according to their capacity to resist the influence of external energy. In the wave this capacity is small; in the atom it is large, hence its cycle long.

     At the organic level of organization, in the living realm, the atomic organization persists unchanged. Here the unit is the organized biological cell. These too have their cycles and successions of birth and decay. But, unlike the atom their continuity does not depend on the exclusion of external energy. On the contrary, it depends on its capacity to take on and accept selectively certain variant forms of energy that its environment affords. It must transform the energy so received by converting it into its own cellular structure as in continuous growth terminat­ing in the cyclic succession called reproduction. Nutrition, growth and reproduction. This is the whole vital cycle in the organization of the vegetable world.

At the animal level a new and further characteristic appears. Here growth and reproduction does not continue without ceasing until death. Growth ceases at maturity. Thenceforth the energy taken on from environment is utilized not to make /?/ increase of structure. It goes immediately into the structure, more than enough to maintain it, to be sure, but there it is further converted and the surplus above maintenance goes into locomotion and the other higher functions that characterize the animal forms.

The plant forms are chained to their habitat, and as it changes so must they — or pass away. They store up energy only in their structure and as they exhaust what environment affords cannot seek new supply. The animal forms are so specialized to the organic in their environment that they can take on only such energy as has been organically transformed. With this dependence and limitation, they perform, in degree, every function of the plant. Structure is maintained to the point of maturity. Above that it is further converted into higher functions. They can not only store energy in their bodily structures but owing to their power of locomotion they can take on stores of unconverted energy as food and thus fare far afield for stores and varieties of food and of amelioration. Up to the level of primitive man, beyond very crude attempts at shelter and clothing, they make no improvement in the circumstances of their lives. On the contrary they deplete and otherwise deteriorate their environment to the point either of extinction or of their numbers being drastically kept down. And during times of more abundance than they consume, their vital energies go into increase of numbers and not into the creating of conditions permanently favorable to the maintenance of their race and their lives. And the merely animal man is under the same limitations as his humbler kin.

     Under natural conditions very favorable to human life, ancient men have fed and bred prodigiously and decimated themselves under great slave empires of early times. Under mass bondage as slaves and the less personal bondage through taxation by sovereign powers vast public works arose until fertility was depleted and the proud work half buried under desert sands. Through all ancient and Classical times the major energies of men were forced into unproductive and unrequited toil, and in the Age of Darkness that ensued population had fallen doubtless to lower numbers and less in years than for thousands of years before. Man was like any other animal, making his habitat not more but less habitable as the cycles of his generations rolled.

     The Modern age, for all its stress and strain, is the beginning of reciprocal and creative and thereby spiritual relationships among men. The last five centuries have wit­nessed the slow development of a new kind of organization among men, a veritably new form of organic life born out of and sustained by the free interfunctioning of regenerate men, men attaining new life by the practice of reciprocal rela­tionships in a world-wide system of property, contract and exchange. For four centuries until the twentieth this system of productive freedom developed in the Western World more rapidly than the ancient power of sovereignties could be resumed. Enormous wealth was created under the wide freedom achieved. But the new creative relationship was not extended to those fixed services and goods that men must have in common and cannot be separated from the place or community where they are provided and performed. The free relationship brought men into prodigious private wealth and power but it did not invade the field of public services and needs and into this has grown again the mighty public and destructive powers whose prototypes were ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. These powers are now in rivalry to enslave mankind.

     But the Free Enterprise rela­tionship, the societal organization of men, is vital to their lives and length of days. As the minds /of/ men become enlightened to understand it, the motive of profit in exchange for service will prompt the supplying of community needs through the non-political administration of public capital by the organized community owners themselves, employ­ing in this enterprise none but the spontaneous revenues that the occupancy of the community property by its inhabi­tants, as in a permanent hotel community will yield. This proprietary community administration performing services in place of disservices, creating public profits in place of public deficits, being non-political and non-coercive, will social-ize the public enterprises into a complementary and reciprocal relationship instead of an inimical and destruc­tive relationship towards the private enterprises that it serves.

 

     The emergence of free enterprise in place of slavery has been only a partial social-ization of mankind into the life of freedom long ages dreamed. But it has yielded a marvelous yet still insecure abundance of life and length of days. It now remains to complete the process by substi­tuting the Golden Rule technology of property and contractual freedom in place of seizure and coercion in the conduct of community affairs.

     With this consummation the societal organization of men will have fully emerged as a free and creative new organic form of life. The emergence will be like unto and as profound as that from the inorganic to the organic form, the plant to the animal form, the animal into the human /form/, and the merely human, as creature, into the societal and creative and thereby spiritual form of life, each /successive life form / carrying within itself all the properties and powers of the earlier forms with added transcendent modes of operation peculiarly its own.

     Beyond the societal organization of mankind it does not yet appear what we shall be, but in the midst of all its bondages in past and present times, the human spirit has sent out gleams of life and beauty and of invincible power towards the heavenly mode of life upon the earth long promised and of which the divine in human nature has ever dreamed.