Spencer Heath Archives

Item 12

Penciled by Heath on notepad paper.

No date

White envelope also contains item 200

 

     Mind is the functioning of the brain. The brain is a finite portion of an infinite Cosmos.

     There is a Universal Reality, an Infinite Cosmos. It is composite of three properties: Mass, Motion and Time — Mass as aboriginal, Motion as springing from Mass, and Time as proceeding from the rhythms and repetitions within Motion and Mass. All action, all existence, is in the unity of this trinity. There are no other fundamentals. Mass and motion together are called Energy or Power. The pulsations of Energy within a larger rhythm (such as the motions of the earth) are called Frequency or Time.

    Every mass is some portion of the earth’s mass, every motion some portion of the earth’s motion, every frequency of motion some part of the earth’s frequency or time of motion.

    Time or frequency, then, is the rhythmic relativity or relationship between two quantities of energy. Hence the frequency into the quantity of any energy is the mea­sure of its quantity of action or effect upon any other energy. As mass and motion together constitute energy, so do any quantities of Mass, Motion and Time, taken together, constitute a quantity of action or effective energy. Thus it is seen that the effectiveness of any quantity of energy, its quality of acting upon and affecting other energy, depends upon its frequency and continuity, duration or time. Events, integrations of energy and time, of highest frequency have least continuity, least effective action before disintegration. Successive integrations of energy having lowest frequency have longest continuity, hence maximum effective action. Quality resides in continuity. Long lives are more effective than short ones. Lives are events. The properties (mass, motion and time) of a single life are, like those of an electron, indeter­minate.  [Editorial note: The above lines were struck out.] The dominant tendency of the Cosmos is towards higher functional integrations; life-forms of extended continuity; from the ephemeral into the durational.

     The Cosmos is divisive. Below a definite and certain level of united magnitude (the quantum of action), mass, motion and time do not combine. Like molecules of gas, they flee apart; the Universe expands. But above this level of magnitudes the Cosmos, beyond being divisive, is also inte­grative. Mass, motion and time here do combine into quanta of action; these organize themselves, each with others, into atoms; these into molecules; these into starry /?/ sys­tems and into living cells; these into higher organisms and into men; these into tribes and into Society. And Society is the supreme organization of energy and action as life — supreme and unique in its capacity to transform and create, according to its own image and imaginings, its environing world.

     Society is the least ephemeral and most durational of all organized life forms. It is composed of succes­sive generations of men. Its continuity comes from the overlapping of their life spans. Men and their generations are successive; but society is continuous; it achieves con­tinuity out of their discontinuity.

     But society is not merely repetitional, it is pro­gressive. Alone of all life forms it has creative power. It rebuilds continuously its environing world, not in quantity but in variety, complexity and in beauty. And in the ever new heaven and new earth that it creates it lowers the frequency and extends the continuity and thus the creativeness of its individual lives. Its generations are lengthened by the lengthening of its lives. As it lengthens its own generations as energy waves, it raises the duration of its members and thus confers increasing continuity, an ever growing measure of immortality upon its individual lives.

 

     Men may exist, as do animals, with none but familial and biological bonds. They may exist without the universal impersonal bonds that alone can constitute them into a society. For society is not simply men; it is a peculiar and transcendent relationship among men. It is an organiza­tional form in which men become united under a new rule, a golden rule, a mutual and reciprocal rule of impersonal love through a system of measured services and mutual exchange. As they extend this golden rule relationship, men enter into their inheritance of the world and come more and more into their creative power and dominion over it — into the “Kingdom of Heaven” of the Mystic’s dream.

     To understand this high relationship that extends the power and duration of men^’s lives, analogies must be employed. In the physical world, the continuity, period of existence, of an atom, as such, depends on its internal energy being so organized that its constituent electrons do not collide — so that the energy changes within itself are exchanges, reciprocal and not collisional. So long as its electrons do not collide the atom is permanent — highly dura­tional. But when its elements collide, as in the radioactive atoms such as uranium, then its durational quality is low; the atom dissipates its internal energy and disintegrates to some lower form of organization. And the result is the same whether the collisions be wholly internal or by a sufficient impact of unbalanced energy from without. The same may be said of the organization of a living cell. It too depends upon the reciprocal action of its internal energies; and this notwithstanding that, like all living things, its continuity also depends (except during dormancy) upon its constant taking in, transformation and discharge of external energy. (Atoms and molecules are regarded as non-living chiefly because they do not appear to have the power of or any such dependence on the transformation of energy within themselves as do biological cells.)

     And in the higher forms of life it is still upon the harmonious interaction of their organs and parts and the taking on, transformation and functional discharge of energy that its continuity depends. But only as the social organization of men evolves does there come into being any form of life having the function and power of taking energy from its environment and so transforming it as to re-create and raise the quality of the environment and thus preserve its own continuity and increase the duration of its individual lives.