Spencer Heath Archive

Item 435

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath, edited and titled by MacCallum for a possible article. The unedited version follows after page six, set in a different typeface to avoid confusion between the two.

September 17, 1955

 

THE PATH OF LIFE

     Many advocates of traditional Christianity are obsessed with the idea of sin, not in the sense of any overt act but as a kind of infection, a kind of a poison inside of human nature that is constantly there, ready to break out and become virulent any time. Even a person on a religious pilgrimage might be said to be a wolf in disguise; for he carries a tendency towards wickedness inside of himself.

This tendency toward wickedness is claimed to be the cause of all human distress, all human woe. The only remedy proposed is traditional Christian religion, and especially Protestant Christian religion, acting entirely within the psychology, the subjective, the conceptual side of man, the interior of man.

Sin in this view is a state of being, a state of inherency, that must be met by a countervailing state of inherency, and this can only be supplied, it is said, by some kind of mystical, miraculous, subjective experience called by various names, “repentance,” or perhaps more broadly, “getting religion.” But against all this, I wish to present an entirely different view of human nature and human vicissitudes, human disappointments and human hopes.

I see a human form of life as the highest level yet of organic evolution, and one which is sharply marked off from all previous organic forms in that it has power of determining itself, through creating, recreating, determining the kind of environment in which it acts and interacts. The lower forms of life have a technology which enables them to continue to live; it is the technology of making terms with a pre­existing, or independently existing, environment whence they sprang. It means that they must modify their actions, their behavior, in accordance with what happens outside of themselves — and they are thus enslaved to their environment.

      Now this process of adjustment is what we have in common with the lower forms of life, which has gone so far with them, and with us in our previous development, that circumstances have not only impelled them and us to act in certain ways, changes in our behavior from how we had behaved before, but they have also brought about changes of structure, so that our rather imperfect, but yet very excellent, physical structure and psychological structure is a result of changes that have come into ourselves perhaps as a reflex of changes in behavior. However, the whole adjust­ment business is a matter of acting as circumstances seem to require and of changing our bodies as we may need to change them under changing circumstances.

      When we look at the history of man for the last two thousand years, and look at it objectively with a view to trying to see just what is there, and not what I am expecting to find there or ought to find there, we find that the life of man consists of a lot of behavior, and that men always seem to have dreams and aspirations of one kind and another towards which they are struggling. They have been more or less obliquely and staggeringly moving along, trying to reach these good ends which they conceive — with almost as much failure as there has been success. But not quite, because there has been advance through the ages; the success has preponderated over the failure.

A Way of Life

      This tells me that there is a pathway, a way of life, not in any metaphysical or miraculous sense, or in any sense prescribed by some kind of a despot according to his will, but that there are certain ways of behaving that lead to greater possibilities of more behavior of the same kind. And there are other ways of behavior that tend towards the shortening of the life of the individual and reducing the numbers of his race. Now the way of life, as contrasted with the way of death, has a reward, which is life abundant and, in the ideal, ultimate sense, life everlasting, whereas the consequence of the other modes of behavior is expressed in the Biblical quotation, “The wages of sin is death.”

      So virtue in the practical sense, that is, behavior which leads to the abundant and eventually immortal life, may be called the “way of life.” Virtue consists in walking in that way. Sin consists in walking in other ways — walking away from life instead of towards life.

      The solution of our anxieties is to get the power to determine beforehand what we are going to do and what is going to happen to us. To have that kind of knowledge or understanding, we must examine carefully what kinds of things people have done and still are doing in history and in contemporary life, and separate out those which we may say are in the way of life from those things which are in the way of death. If we do that, then we will be able to “think upon these things,” and then act upon these things. And our action will be rational action, because we will find that only the rational things do serve life. Contra-rational things on the other hand, — mind I don’t say the non-rational, or emotional, but the contra-rational things — the things which have no self-consistency in themselves, never favor life.

      Meantime, we have been favored, divinely if we like to say, by a circumstance that has brought us to our present relatively high eminence in the scale of life — /a circumstance/ that has not depended upon our understanding anything about it. The circumstance is that without regard to understanding, so far as we have traveled in the way of life, we have been rewarded with life. So that automatically we live in the world by reason of the good things, the life-giving things our predecessors, including our own past of our own lives, have done, that have sustained us at the point where we are. Those persons and races of men who have walked less in that path are at a lower level, and those that walk still less in that path and thereby walk in the way of death, have passed out of existence, out of this world.

      Men can understand the things that I have been talking about in two ways. One is by a kind of strange illumination that some men have. This seems miraculous to us because we don’t understand it. Perhaps sometime we will understand intuition. It also can be found out by examining things bit by bit, rationally so. But a marvelous thing happened in the world about two thousand years ago. An intuitive poet, one among many others of antiquity and since, had an illuminated mind, that is to say, he had supreme intuitional powers. He divined all this that I have been saying to you and laid down in general terms, exactly what the path toward the abundant and the immortal life was. He advised his hearers to turn their faces away from everything else, to resist nothing, but to seek this path and walk in it. It seems too simple, too true to be good, by reason of which it must be that his followers have tried to translate that into something subjective, into how a person feels, his faith, his belief, the doctrines he holds, the ceremonies he goes through and all that sort of thing, as being the way of life — instead of the particular path in which men walk in the course of their actions and experiences.

      What we need to learn, fundamentally, is from Christ himself, out of his own vision of the way of life, — which contained nothing in favor of institutions as they were in his day, which he called “the world.” It contained nothing in favor of the Roman Empire or of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, the local courts and authorities, the scribes and Pharisees. It had nothing in favor, for or against any of these things. He had some goods of his own, as we say in our commercial vernacular, goods of his own to sell, and that was his prescription of the kind of behavior that men needed to have with respect to one another if they would attain the abundant, eventually the immortal life.

      What we could most profitably do would be to examine the prescripts of action rather than the prescripts of faith, doctrine, conceptions, beliefs, inner conscious­ness or states of being. It would be to examine the practical procedure laid down by the founder of Christianity and, as it appears to me, never seriously taken up by those who are his organized, institutionalized representatives.

Christianity in Action

We need to discover that around the Middle Ages or towards their close the powers of “the world” had dissolved; there was not, at least in the Western World, any empire. There was no large nationality. The Roman power had absorbed all the lesser powers, and then the Roman power had broken down, till there was nobody strong enough to prevent people from forming spontaneous relationships. Piracy was quite old, but it could flourish now without being put down by Roman galleons and Roman arms, or Carthaginian or Phoenician for that matter. So pirates were free to work out their own salvation, which of course they knew nothing about. But there was opportunity in the world then for them to discover that there was a way of relating themselves one to another, and to other persons who were not pirates, that was creative, productive. They discovered by mere unevaluated experience that they could live better lives if they would trade with one another, and with other persons, rather than raid upon other persons, and that if they continued their raiding behavior, all suffered and would live meaner and shorter lives.

      So Christianity came into the world after going into darkness for about a thousand years. It came into the world like a thief in the night; it was thieves, in fact, who began to practice the precept of the Golden Rule, because instead of treating other persons as they would not wish to be treated by them, they began to trade with them — which means that they treated them in the same manner as they would wish others to treat them. So Christianity came out of the grave of a thousand years when robbers began to practice the prescript, the precept, of Christ in how they should behave if they wanted to live well and to live long. By behaving that way, they did live better and longer.

      And so we had the institution called capitalism, by which persons could serve other persons extensively, provided they could own the instruments by which they served other persons, because only through owning them could they perform any contract involving their use. So, this thing called capitalism is Christianity in action, not a subjective but an objective Christianity, which in this objective life gives men a stronger hold, a greater continuity of existence.

      Now this is what the world is seeking, because today the great tension of the world is the world’s anxiety and insecurity. We are all afraid of being cast down, or being blown up, being mutilated, and starved, everything of that kind. We are afraid of those things because we continue to put our trust in two vain idols. One is the old Caesar, the power of “the world,” the power to rule and the power to destroy, the power to ex-propriate. And the other is that we take refuge in a kind of subjective escapism — which is traditional, institutional Christianity.

The Ultimate of All Values

      So we needn’t be critical of anything that the Church is doing, nor of its subjective doctrines. Its subjective side is the ultimate and last of all values. That field of experience, the consciousness of the individual within himself, is the last, and ultimate, highest of all values. But it is only to be attained through objective circumstances that liberate the individual to become himself, to evolve his own inner personalities, his own inner delights, his own self-realization of what is truly himself.

      We need not criticize traditional Christianity for what it does; we can only urge, sometimes perhaps deplore, that it has neglected what it has neglected. It has neglected the outer life and the simple rule by which the outer lives of men, with respect to one another, can be so adjusted that they confer mutually and reciprocally upon one another a higher form and a greater permanence and a greater freedom to flourish in the environment in which they are set, and to rebuild that environment into greater service to themselves.

______________________________

 

 

 

/Original version:/

 

 

Dr. Wale, like most of his kind and class, is obsessed with the idea of sin. His idea of sin, however, isn’t so much in the active sense as in the sense of a kind of infection, a kind of a poison inside of human nature. It is constantly there, ready to break out and became virulent any time. He speaks of a religious person on his pilgrimage to the shrine, saying that he is also a wolf in disguise. He carries a tendency towards wick­edness inside of himself and this tendency toward wickedness, in Wale’s view, is the cause of all human distress, all human woe. The remedy for this, he claims, is the traditional Christian, and especially the Protestant Christian, religion, which acts entirely within the psychology, the subjective, the conceptual, conscious side of man, the interior of man. From what he says, only through this does it have any relation to the active world. Sin is not, in his view, so much an action as it is a state of being, a state of inherency, and it must be met by a counter­vailing state of inherency which can only be supplied by some kind of mystical, miraculous, subjective experience, which is called, by various names, repentance, or perhaps more broadly, “getting religion.”

 

 Now against all this, I wish to present an entirely different view of human nature and human vicissitudes, human disappointments and human hopes. I see a human form of life as the highest level yet of organic evolution, and one which is sharply marked off from all previous organic forms in that it has power of determining itself through creating, recreating, determining the kind of en­vironment in which it acts and interacts. The lower forms of life have a technology which enables them to continue to live. It is the technology of making terms with a pre-existing, or independent­ly existing, environment whence they sprang. It means that they must modify their actions, their behavior, in accordance with what happens outside of themselves. They are thus enslaved to their environment.

 

 Now this process of adjustment is what we have in common with the lower forms of life, which has gone so far with them, and with us in our previous development, that circumstances have not only impelled them and us to act in certain ways, changes in our behavior from how we had behaved before, but they have also brought about changes of structure, so that our rather imperfect, but yet very excellent, physical structure and psychological structure is a result of changes that have come into ourselves perhaps as a reflex of changes in behavior. However, the whole adjustment business is a matter of acting as circumstances seem to require and of changing our bodies as we may need to change them under changing circumstances.

 

 Now when we look at the history of man for the last two thousand years, and look at it objectively with a view to trying to see just what is there, and not what I am expecting to find there or ought to find there, we find that the life of man con­sists of a lot of behavior, that men always seem to have dreams and aspirations of one kind and another towards which they are struggling, and they have been more or less obliquely and stagger­ingly moving along, trying to reach these good ends which they conceive with almost as much failure as there has been success, but not quite because there has been advance through the ages, so that the success has preponderated over the failure.

 

 Now this tells me that there is a pathway, a way of life, not in any metaphysical or miraculous sense, or in any sense prescribed by some kind of a despot to agree with his will,

but there are certain ways of behaving that lead to greater possibilities of more behavior of the same kind. There are certain ways of behavior that tend towards the shortening of the life of the individual and reducing the numbers of his race. Now this way of life, as contrasted with the way of death, has a reward, which is life abundant and, in the ideal, ultimate sense, life everlasting, whereas the consequences of the other mode of behavior, and all other modes of behavior, is expressed in the Biblical quotation, “the wages of sin is death.

 

 So virtue in the practical sense, that is, behavior which leads to the abundant and eventually immortal life, may be called the “way of life.” Virtue consists in walking in that way; sin consists in walking in other ways, walking away from life instead of towards life.

 

 The solution of our anxieties consists in getting power, power to determine beforehand what we are going to do and what is going to happen to us. To have that kind of knowledge or understanding, we must examine carefully what kinds of things people have done and still are doing in history and in contemporary life, and separate out those things which we may say are in the way of life from those things which are in the way of death. If we do that, then we will be able to “think on these things” and then act upon these things, and our action will be rational action, because we will find that only the rational things do serve life.

The contra-rational, mind I don’t say the non-rational, or emotional, but the contra-rational things, the things which have no self-consistency in themselves, never favor life.

 

Meantime, we have been favored, divinely if we like to say, by a circumstance that has brought us to our present relatively high eminence in the scale of life, that has not depended upon our understanding anything about it. The circumstance is that so far as we have traveled, without regard to understanding, in the way of life, we have been rewarded with life, so that auto­matically we live in the world by reason of the good things, the life-giving things in our predecessors, including our own past of our own lives, have done, that have sustained us at the point where we are. And those persons and races of men who have walked less in that path, are at a lower level, and those walk still less in that path and thereby walk in the way of death, have passed out of existence out of this world.

 

 Men can understand the things that I have been talking about by two ways. One is by a kind of strange illumination that some men have. It seems miraculous to us because we don’t understand it. Perhaps sometime we will understand intuition. It also can
be found out by examining things bit by bit, rationally so. But a marvelous thing happened in the world about two thousand years ago. Jesus, an intuitive poet, one among many others of antiquity and since who had an illuminated mind, that is to say, he had supreme intuitional powers and he divined all this that I have been saying to you and laid down, in general terms, exactly what the path toward the abundant and the immortal life is and advised his hearers to turn their faces away from everything else, to resist nothing, but to seek this path and walk in it. It seems too simple, too good to be true, by reason of which it must be that his followers have tried to translate that into something subjective, into how you feel, your faith, your belief, your doctrines you hold, the ceremonies you go through with and all that sort of thing, as being the way of life — instead of the particular path in which men walk in the course of their actions and experiences.

 

So what Dr. Wale needs to learn, fundamentally, /is/ from Christ himself, out of his own vision of a way of life, which contained nothing in favor of institutions as they were in his day and which he called “the world.” It contained nothing in favor of the Roman Empire or of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, the local courts and authorities, the scribes and Pharisees. It had nothing in favor, for or against any of these things. He had some goods of his own, as we say in our commercial vernacular, goods of his own to sell, and that was his prescription of the kind of behavior that men needed to have with respect to one another if they would at­tain the abundant, eventually the immortal life.

 

 So what Dr. Wale could most profitably do would be to examine the prescripts of action rather than the prescript of faith, doctrine, conceptions, beliefs or inner consciousness or states of being — examine the practical procedure laid down by the founder of Christianity and, as it appears to me, never seriously taken up by those who are his organized, institutionalized re­presentatives. He needs to discover that around the Middle Ages, or towards their close, the powers of “the world” had dissolved. There was not, at least in the Western World, any empire. There was no large nationality. The Roman power had absorbed all the lesser powers, and then the Roman power had broken down, till there was nobody strong enough to prevent people from forming spontaneous relationships. Now piracy was quite old, but piracy could flourish now without being put down by Roman galleons and Roman arms, or Carthaginian and Phoenician for that matter, so pirates were free to work out their own salvation, which of course they knew nothing about, but there was opportunity in the world then for them to discover that there was a way of relating themselves one to another, and to other persons who were not pirates, that was creative, productive. They discovered by mere unevaluated experience that they could live better lives if they would trade with one another, and with other persons, rather than raid upon other persons, and that if they continued their raiding behavior, that all suffered, and all would live meaner, and shorter lives.

 

 So Christianity came into the world after going into darkness for about a thousand years. Christianity came into the world like a thief in the night. It was thieves, in fact, who began to practice the precept of the golden rule, because instead of treat­ing other persons as they would not wish to be treated by them, they began to trade with them which means that they treated them in the same manner as they would wish others to treat them. So Christianity came out of the grave of a thousand years when robbers began to practice the prescript, the precept, of Christ in how they should behave if they wanted to live well and to live long. By behaving that way, they did live better and longer.

 

And so we had the institution called capitalism, by which persons could serve other persons extensively, provided they could own the instruments by which they served other persons, because only through owning them could they perform any contract involving their use. So, this thing called capitalism is Christian­ity in action, not a subjective but an objective Christianity, which in this objective life gives men a stronger hold, a greater continuity of existence.

 Now this is what the world is seeking for, because today the great tension of the world is the world’s anxiety and insecurity. We are all afraid of being cast down, or being blown up, being mutilated, and starved, everything of that kind. We are afraid of those things because we continue to put our trust in two vain idols. One is the old Caesar, the power of “the world,” the power to rule and the power to destroy, the power to ex-propriate. And the other is that we take refuge in a kind of subjective escapism, which is the traditional, institutional Christianity.

 

 So our fault with the Church, as represented by Dr. Wale, need not be critical of anything that the Church is doing and its sub­jective doctrines. Its subjective side is the ultimate and last of all values. That field of experience, the consciousness of the individual within himself is the last, and ultimate, highest of all values. But it is only to be attained through objective circumstances which liberate the individual to become himself, to evolve his own inner personalities, his own inner delights, his own self-realization of what is truly himself.

 

 We need not criticize traditional Christianity for what it does; we can only urge, sometimes perhaps deplore, that it has neglected what it has neglected. It has neglected the outer life and the simple rule by which the outer lives of men, with respect to one another, can be so adjusted that they confer mutually and reciprocally upon one another a higher form and a great permanence and a greater freedom, to flourish in the environment in which they are set, and to rebuild this environment into greater service to themselves.