Spencer Heath Archive

Item 359

Two typed pages

No date

 

All life is experience. All experience is either objective or subjective, factual or fantastic. It is always made up of interactions between an organism (or structure) and its environment – the self and the not self –  or it is composed of interactions among the constituent parts of an organism (or structure). Objective experiences modify subjective experiences. Subjective experiences modify objective expe­riences. Objective experiences, as they modify subjective ones, either integrate and maintain the organism or fail to maintain and thus disintegrate the organism. Under objective experience alone the organism is merely a creature, supine. Subjective experiences, as they influence and modify objective ones, also either integrate and maintain the organism or fail to do so.

 

     Subjective experiences thus are either functional or disfunctional. They are also both somatic and psychic, both physio­logical and psychological.

 

     Physiological experience is mainly autonomous; psychological experience is mainly voluntary and conscious. Yet each is greatly dependent on and modified by the other.

 

     Both kinds of structures, both somatic and psychic, are the long accumulations of objective experience – of action by and reaction to environment evolving structures (inorganic and organic) of all degrees of permanency and of complexity. And the tendency of the cosmos is predominately favorable to
those organizational forms having, primarily, the greatest
permanency with least complexity and, derivatively, those forms in which both permanency and complexity are most highly achieved. Every specific organism is primarily an abstraction from the general environment. Its whole development has resulted from the action, first, of environment upon it and, second, of its reaction to environment. By this process, consisting of both objective and subjective experiences, the organism, throughout its various forms and transformations, has con­tinued to exist