Spencer Heath Archive

Item 248

Start on an explanation of the Philosophic Diagram (title supplied).

March 1957

 

 

 

/CONSCIOUSNESS AND COSMOS/

 

     The primary datum of all knowledge is consciousness, the subjective side of subject-object, self-and-not-self, experience.

     Consciousness is of two kinds, both incomplete and capable of extension—knowledge of what goes on within the self and knowledge, through its sense organs, of exterior events, of the objective side of experience. Sense organs are the nexus of communication between the self and the not-self—the world of feeling, conception and imagination and the exterior world with which it interacts. Neither exhibits any boundaries or ascertainable limits. Hence both in their entirety may be taken as infinite—infinite consciousness and infinite cosmos—universal body and univer­sal mind. Each has its modes of action, its uniform process within itself and both interact, each acting on and being acted on by the other.

     The field of physical science is objective. Physical science deals with that which is outside and apart from the subjective consciousness and with which, through its sense organs the consciousness interacts. This interaction is called experience. Whatever can be experienced is called action. Action has proved to be discontinuous, atomic—composed of distinguishable indivisible units of action. These are experienced separately, and in multiples of interrelated units, as events—the field of objective experience, the objective element in all consciousness other than of self. This is that field of reality from which, through the gateway of the sense organs, comes all consciousness of outer experience, in which the intuitions of art take concrete forms and in which the sciences are created by the imagination and the rational mind of man.

     Experience feeds consciousness, supplies basic data from without which consciousness organizes and thereby expands

     The data that experience supplies to consciousness is called action. Action is known to be discontinuous—organized in separately distinguishable events the basic and indivisible units of which are called units of action, or quanta—the least quantity of action that experience brings into consciousness. These quanta singly and organized..²⁴⁸