Spencer Heath Archive

Item 459

About 1941?

 

Original in item 458

 

 

 

 

/TRANSCENDENCE/

 

Every act and every moment of consciousness, all insight and experience, teaches and admonishes man:

 

First, that he is not ALL. That he is particular and individual and not infinite and universal.

 

Second, that there is a Universal that may and does include him but, not /being/ limited as he is, cannot itself be included in anything——whether in Substance or in the Activity within the Substance or in the Duration of that activity. He dreams of these three aspects of the Universal——Substance, Activity, Duration——as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

Third, that he himself has become an entity, not dividual but individual. That he is an integration of Substance, of Activity, and of Duration in his finite and limited degree. That he is a shadow, a reflection, a product, a child of the Universal, in all its aspects, in his limited degree. That he is microcosm in the Macrocosm.

 

Fourth, that just as he is a creature, born of the Universal, of the Creative, of the Divine, and thus in his limited degree possessed of its attributes and powers, so he may attain by this inheritance an atonement with God and become a creator in his own right.

 

To achieve this creative divinity, the individual man is born into a new Kingdom of which he is at first and for a long time unaware.

 

The individual man was formed of the Cosmic dust of the earth——a creature and a creation out of the void. He was inspired with a breath of the Universal. This it was that gave him substance, activity and duration, his limited likeness to the Divine.

 

Alone, as an individual, as a creature, he can only exist and cannot endure. But his divine nature draws him slowly, and all unaware, into a communion with his fellow men and thus a new creature, a new creation, a new Kingdom is born from above, a Kingdom of Heaven on the earth. This is the New Jerusalem, the New City of God, whose walls are of jasper and whose streets are of pearl.

 

Man cannot escape men. To do so would be to die and leave no succession. Men must clash in conflict or commune in mutual accord. In conflict they are thrust apart; the gage of battle is the wage of death, it cannot endure. But in communion men are drawn into a new and higher unity of spirit and of life.

 

The soul of the individual is not in his substance or structure but in his activity and life——the rhythmic repetitions of process and change by which life matures into a definite structure and mass or substance which, being constantly dissolved and renewed, may continue to grow into higher patterns of complexity and beauty, an evolving spirituality and creative capacity, to the full extent that his rate of activity (potentiality) and the duration of his life allows.

 

As an individual, man is a creature of environment made from the cosmic dust and subject to it. Single and alone he has no sovereignty over the earth, no power to rebuild the world.

 

The life of an individual man, strictly alone, would be but an instant spark in blank darkness. It would lack all the abidingness, the duration, the reality of God. To be real, imperishable, life must be divine. Only as a duration, a continuum, of activity in substance can it endure.

 

As a flame is kindled of many sparks, so God draws together his flashes of individual life into familial and biological groups, into herds, clans, and tribes. In this first integration of men they are but parasites on the bounty of the earth. Whatever garden they possess they despoil. In the guise of a grim necessity, God sends them forth as wanderers, as nomadic tribes seeking what they may destroy and devour. As they come upon lands of plenty their numbers thrive and thus plenty flees and numbers die and they are cast out again ravening the earth and rivaling and ravishing all other tribes for the scant bounties of an earth they have not yet inherited and divinely subdued.

 

Thus in the knowledge of evil, in the practice of destruction upon the earth and upon each other, do men, tribes and nations run their brief courses only to perish and die, for as men destroy, so, measure for measure, must they be destroyed. Destruction is the gage of sin, as death is its wage.

 

Thus the Divine Spirit reincarnates itself in the successions of life, in rhythmic pulsations that rise and fall between birth and death. The individual lives are as sparks from the divine, brief flashes of god-ness in their triune finite likeness in structure, in activity and in duration. But the essential nature of the divine is its ever going-on, its perpetual transcendence. As in all His lesser works God does but partially manifest His infinite nature, so in the individual man His integrative process, His creative labors are not at an end. These single labors are brought together in the higher organic unities of family, clan and tribe, each higher life-form, in turn, manifesting more of the Fatherhood in its larger structure, more Sonship in its greater power of activity and more of the Holy Spirit in its durational wave /?/.

 

But still the life even of the tribe is brief. The associative bond is biological, the bond of blood-brotherhood and of self-identification with the mass or group. The tribe is parasitic upon its world, it lacks creative power upon its environment; the Divine Spirit has prepared it but not yet invested it with the power of continuing its creation of the world. The tribal man, the unregenerate man, unawakened to the golden rule of mutual service by exchange, lives but briefly in the violence and subtleties of his ab-original sin. He has little if any sovereignty over his world; his substance lacks duration, and his knowledge of good and of evil divides his divine nature with strife and war and numbers his days.

 

But the spirit of God abides in the unregenerate man. All unconsciously and unperceived, the divine love transforms raiding into trading, combat into agreement and slavery into service by consent and exchange. This infusion of impersonal love in the form of service by the golden rule of exchange, unconsciously and empirically applied, has civilized the tribal man into cities and states and prospered him into a potential creative sovereignty over the earth——the promise of a new Kingdom of God.

 

In this creative Kingdom, this activity of Brotherhood and Sonship of service by exchange that makes many the servants of each and gives each the service of all men, blindly groping, finds all the freedom he has from barbarism or tyranny, compulsions and wars. It constitutes him into a society, a higher human organization, that serves him with ampler subsistence, improved conditions of life and consequent lengthened days. In this lengthened duration, this greater eternality, it gives diviner reality to its individual lives.

 

Society survives many generations of imperfectly social-ized men, but it has a limited term. It is born out of

 

 

                                                     /Breaks off/