Spencer Heath Archive

Item 113..

Penciling on notepad paper.

No date

BRASS TACKS

Human psychology consists about ninety per cent feeling and (we hope) perhaps ten per cent rationality.

Consciousness, as feeling, was God’s gift to all His creatures, from lowest to highest. But rationality He reserved only for man, that man, made in His image, might become free, not pre-determined like dumb driven cattle but a creator in his own right, in virtue of his divine inspiration — a dreamer and a doer of his dreams.

All creatures are but reflections from the world from which they spring, of the soil or circumstance in which they grow. Their actions are but reflexes of the conditions that bind them and impose their necessitous ways. All mere creatures and their world, including unregenerate man conditioned in and subservient to that world, are born of the creative Mind. They are only once-born: for them there is no indefinitely enduring, no immortal life. They are one-lived, bound in death, moribund to their unregeneracy.

But for the creature man there is exception. In him there is a spark of the divine. There was breathed into him a breath, a spirit, an inspiration. Under this inspiration, and so far as he follows it, he is perfect and divine. Thus he becomes, more than mere creature, a spiritual being, a creator in his own right. For he is born again, regenerated from creature into the creative power and thereby into a very child of God.

All creatures are produced by, and evolved from, their environment. Thus they are subservient to it, must conform to it, and are not free. But man is inspired to dream, to aspire, towards the absolute and perfect, and with the inspiration comes the spiritual, the divine, the creative power, dominion over environment, to build his dreams into his world. Thus it is the mission of reborn men, of men working divinely——creatively——to continue the divine creation of their environing world into the likeness of their dreams——a habitation for their lengthening and at last unending and immortal lives.

Of all God’s creatures man alone is inspired. He alone comes into spiritual, into creative power. He alone can come into a Kingdom of Heaven with creative dominion over the earth and all its creatures.

But there is an imperative condition, a necessary process of his being reborn into this creative kingdom. He cannot constitute this kingdom alone. He must enter into a new relation with his fellow men, a creative and therefore spiritual and divine relation in which there can be neither master nor slave. And to make this relation reciprocal he must do unto others in the same manner that he would have others do unto him, that is, in the manner of free men without duress, deceit or coercion or any form of violence in any form. This is the word, the dream,/the/ necessary ideal in the doing of which alone and not in the saying or hearing, can love be made manifest among men. And this doing is the sole and only passport to his Kingdom of Heaven, from which high membership there is neither exclusion nor exit, save self-exclusion in the not doing of the word. Thus are all men eligible to this practice of reciprocal love.

In the ancient and classical world there was but one condition for the great generality of men. They were slaves. They could not own even themselves, much less anything else, unless by permission or consent of those who owned and thereby ruled and provided for them.

All political organization was the organization of the masters and rulers of men. All these were sovereignties, as empires or states, limited or unlimited. Empires were sovereignties over bondages of states united by conquest or by alliance——maintained by but not subject to tribute or taxation and therefore without any limitation of power.

/In the last paragraph, I substituted a dash for the word “and”——trying to show more clearly that the reference is to “Empires.” -Editor/