Spencer Heath Archive

Item 214

Incomplete writing in pencil by Heath on lined tablet paper. Title supplied.

No date

Not exactly the same because different title.

 

An Ever-Growing At-One-Ment

With the Most High

 

Man, at his best and worst, is the highest and the lowest, the most wondrous of all created things. He is highest in that he has risen farthest beyond the primordial dust whence he came; lowest because in his degrading he has so far to fall. His ancient and still living highest wisdom is “know thyself,” that he may not merely be and exist but that he may grow and become; for he is an animal on its way to becoming a god and as a god forever transcending himself in an ever-growing at-one-ment with the Most High.

     In this divine progression there are, for the indivi­dual, three stages of attainment. There is the existential man whose sole ambition is to exist, to remain the animal that he is, self-satisfied in his animality and, like amoeba and octopus, preferring repose but always shrinking and escaping what he cannot enfold or grasp and destroy. Of higher processes within himself he has no dream and their possession by others he both enviously and arrogantly denies.

     Next above this existential is the intuitional level or stage. The intuitional man continues to be an animal but not merely as such. He has come to sense within himself and beyond himself entities and powers that his animal nature does not possess. He divines the transcendent and clothes unusual or invisible things and visible though distant objects with magic and miraculous powers. He has become religious and through the intuitions of his religion he becomes the intuitive artist. For he now embodies in shape, in colors and in sound his dreams of spirits and of gods, and these he offers in hope of their favor or appeasement, as he knows the like would pleasure him. No longer is he content merely to exist; he feels within and beyond himself potentialities before undreamed, aspirations not alone to exist but to become, to attain, to transcend, and he builds out of himself and into his little world about him in clay and wood and stone graven images of the unseen, as reflections of light he can but dimly see, echoes of sounds he only faintly hears and none of which he can clearly prove or understand.

     Next above the intuitional and artistic is the creative, the spiritual stage.    The creative man also continues to be an animal and he continues also to be intuitive and an artist, but his intuitions reach out not merely to the existence of a super-physical world. He has found in himself a power of abstrac­tion, the employment of abstract (ideal) units wherewith to count and to measure numerically the concrete quantities of his objective world and thereby discover the constant ratios that constitute the rationale of his cosmic world. He has found correspondence (at-one-ment) between an innate and constant rationality within himself (and uniform with that of other men) and the rationality that pervades his objective world of sense and sound. He no longer, as animal, merely seeks instinctively only to escape or to destroy and devour. No longer, as artist, does he intuit a meta­physical world and objectify his conceptions in concrete symbols, rituals and forms reflecting these. He seeks now not what he can destroy nor yet what he can glorify or to his own salvation appease, but what he can under­stand. His quest is for the constant rationale that under­lies the world of every-day, for absolute beauty in the enduring laws his rationality divines and his experience confirms. Whether deliberately or by custom of his prede­cessors, he premises a reality that he can not only feel but can rationally understand. Accordingly, within his chosen field, be it physical, biological or astronomical, he examines in terms of mass, motion and time——grams, centimeters and seconds——the events that transpire under his observation. He ascertains the basic numerical ratios in which the events are composed and thereby gains a rational understanding as distinguished from emotional or sentimental reactions to them.

 

     Thus he finds in the processes of nature, in the works of God, the rational operation of the rational and impersonal and thereby the universal mind of God. His own mind merges and attains at-one-ment with the divine mind. In that union he is exalted beyond the limita­tions of personality into universality and spirituality, for he now has the key to prophecy, to the conceiving of events he desires. He perceives how, mind and mind and hand in hand with God or nature he can re-compose the three basic elements of events in proportions that serve his needs and satisfy his dreams. Jointly with his fellow men he has knowledge, know-how, that is power, technology that can create for him abundance of life. /But this technology/ can also be employed to shorten and destroy; for the animal man and the intuitive but irrational elements within him remain in large part unregenerate. For lack of understanding, his bodily behavior as animal, his intuitive responses as artist and his emotional reactions to the unknown remain largely negative, as lacking apprehension of the creative, the inspiration of beauty and exaltation it brings. These impel towards negative action with respect to and among his fellow men. Their cooperation in mutual service by numerically balanced exchanges remains empirical and uninspired, for it is looked on with suspicion or worse and hardly under­stood at all. So much of human energy, for lack of under­standing and transformation, remains uncreative. Under the restrictions and coercions of political powers, the creative technology is periodically perverted in international rivalries in armaments and wars.

 

     The inspired mind discovers the rationale of cosmic energy as organized three-fold in quanta, particles and waves, in atoms and molecules, in the architectures of the stars and in biological cells and in the multi-cellular organic structures and living forms. In all these the rational mind has found modes of operation as rational and understandable as its own. This knowledge gives power, and blind empiricism gives way to rational technologies that rapidly expand, so far as the non-human world is concerned.

 

     But the similar organization of human biological units in socially functioning structures and forms has been treated as a thing apart from the rational and understandable cosmic scheme. The structure and organization of the human units and the internal transformations of energy that keep them alive are being more and more objectively examined and understood, yet the interfunctioning of its units in the social organization with its quantitative transfers and transformations of human energy has not been similarly ob­served. Fundamental distinctions such as anabolism from catabolism remain obscure. The mind of nature and of God manifested in the creative relationships among men are not discovered as such. Their order and beauty are confused with the disorder, impermanence and essential tyranny of political administration and expropriation as against the freedom of contractual and proprietary administration without force or rulership, especially in necessary public services and affairs. Not enough of this vast beauty and benevolence has thus far /been revealed; it is the promise of the future./  

 

/Breaks off. Words between slashes are supplied to make an ending. -Editor/