Spencer Heath Archive

Item 669

Pencil by Heath on three 3-hole ring-binder pages at Winter Park, Florida.

March 28, 1948

 

 

 

 

/KNOWLEDGE, PSEUDO OR SOUND/

    

    

Knowledge is either pseudo or sound. Pseudo knowledge is false because the practice of it leads to experiences or ends contrary from those sought and desired. Sound knowledge prompts to practices that yield results desired. Pseudo or false knowledge is primitive, child of the hind brain based on feeling and pain, the assuagement of uncertainty and fear by credulity and faith.

     All sound knowledge is based upon and thereby resolvable into experience. It is the subjective counterpart of objective experience and, finally, when creative, it gives rise to objective counterparts of subjective experience — the objectification of plans, realization of dreams.

     Most knowledge is empirical, the outgrowth of fortuitous experience, preserved and protected by tradition, limited to particular and accustomed situations, formalized but not formulated, imitative and lacking any rational or generalized technology.

     Empirical knowledge is sound and of use only under the particular conditions whence it derives. It is a form of adaptation to environment, habit acquired from predecessors, not founded on any rational investigation or discovery.

     Most sound knowledge is rational, being based on ratios, objective measurements called dimensions. Only three fundamental elements are manifested in objective experience. They are mass, motion and time — force (or inertia), space, rhythm. Their units of reference are gram, centimeter and second (all others are multiples or fractions of or otherwise dependent on or derivative from these).

     The three elements of experience are dependent entities. They can be measured separately or in combination, but they are experienced only as actions or events — as integrations into three-fold unities.

     All dimensions are ratios — ratios between quantities of mass, motion or time and their respective units of reference. The ratio of a quantity to its unit of reference is the dimension of that quantity in terms of that unit. (Take note that the dimension is not the quantity itself but merely the numerical ratio between the quantity itself and another quantity taken uniformly as its unit of reference.)

     The unit of reference for mass (force or inertia) taken in combination (not aggregation) with the unit of motion is the unit of energy (potential of action) called the erg, and the unit of energy times the unit of rhythm or time is the unit of actuality, as action or event, called the erg-second.

     The magnitude of any action or event, however simple or complex, is the product of its three fundamental dimensions. Its number of mass units appertaining to one unit of motion taken in combination with the number of its motion units is its number of energy or erg units; and this number of energy units appertaining to one time or rhythm unit taken in combination with the number of its rhythm units is its number of erg-seconds or action units as actual event. This is the gross quantitative characteristic of any event. But events of the same numerical magnitude may be and are enormously variant with respect to the proportions of the mass, motion and time magnitudes integrated in them.

     All events are rhythmic, tending to repeat. Among events of equal over-all magnitude, that event which has the greatest time dimension is most durable and thus most real. Those events in which the time dimension increases are evolving into a rhythm of lower frequency of integration and disintegration, a more enduring reality — durationality. Those in which the time dimension recedes are dissolving into a rhythm of higher frequency of disintegration, less enduring reality. The universe is a cosmic complex of action, of actuality as events, of the integration, disintegration and reintegration of mass, motion and time. Its reality consists in the . . .

     Throughout all their myriad process the cosmic elements mingle and disperse, form and reform, rhythm upon rhythm, ripples merging into waves, waves into billows, billows into tides, the integrated (individualized) energies at each level or organization merging and emerging into unities of higher durationality, ever thus self-realized and fulfilled. Or, per contra, they clash and pass to a lower level of durationality, into a greater frequency of integration and disintegration.