Spencer Heath Archive

Item 664

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

August 1956

MAN THE VICEROY OF GOD

 

When God created man, He breathed into him the spiritual power to have dominion over all the created world. He made him potentially His viceroy, to rule and determine all lesser things than himself. He was to have dominion over all the earthly and animal forms, including his own animal body and instincts. To make man thus a ruler, a viceroy of God, He gave him a portion of the infinite Godhead Himself, in his bodily form, and of the infinite indwelling creative spirit that He breathed into and thereby inspired the material substance in which man’s body became thus incarnate.

That he should have dominion, God gave man a limited portion of His own unlimited freedom and creative will.

[/Aside:/ See how he couldn’t have dominion if he were going to be subordinate to another will. That’s something for the Church fathers to think about. …

Isn’t it interesting that he couldn’t exercise dominion unless he had been endowed with a portion of the Will of God./]

All this is implicit in that portion of the creative spirit with which he is endowed.

In the Garden, there were two trees, first of all the Tree of Life, the fruit whereof is immortality. To achieve this life in the transcendence, man must develop a rational understanding. He must learn the mind and ways of God not alone through love in his heart, but through understanding the mind and ways of God as manifested in the continuing and enduring works of God. Love, and love alone, can motivate. But only through understanding can man successfully create. Only through understanding can he build perpetually a diviner order as God created His order in His created world, including man.

So man has two knowledges, a greater knowledge and a lesser knowledge. The one is called good, the other evil. The one light, the other darkness. The one order and beauty, the other chaos and confusion — out of which all good proceeds.

The second tree in the Garden was the tree of these two knowledges. The animal nature was gifted with the one alone, not endowed, as was the human, with the creative spirit and thereby possibility of eternal life.

All animals, including the animal man, the unregenerate, are circumscribed by death. They are not real, for they cannot indefinitely endure. But man is endowed also with the creative spirit of God. He alone can have the divine knowledge of good and thereby of His spiritual power to create. So far as he dwells in this knowledge and in the exercise of this power, he is at one with God’s spirit and is God’s viceroy in the exercise of His divine dominion. His only obstacle is self-imposed, through accepting the limitations of his merely animal nature, and through these limitations yielding to death as all merely animals must yield. To be creative and thereby redeemed, man must exercise his spiritual endowment. Thus alone can he identify himself and become one with the Divine Spirit.

In the arrogance of his ignorance, man attempts divine ends through futile means. He seeks to build by tearing down, to create by destroying. He does not match means with ends, and is thus bounden unto death. But as, in all true humility, he seeks knowledge of the good, he learns the living ways of God and becomes co-creator with Him, entering into the joy of the Lord.

As he practices this divine dominion, all things come under his hand. All other animals come to live only under his sufferance or under his creation and care. Without him, every living thing is destined to give way to more enduring forms. Only through his dominion over them, and subordinate to him, can they have any enduring life, precisely as he himself in his animal nature alone cannot endure.

The glory of man is that he can overcome evil with good, ignorance with knowledge, weakness with the power he has received from on high. But in not denying evil, let him not resist evil; let him turn away from ignorance, learn to understand the good and thus overcome evil by the creation of good. However dense the dark, however poignant the pain, let him find his redemption in his pursuit of knowledge of the good and thereby in creative power, which is spiritual power and through which alone his high destiny is ever more to be achieved.

In all this, and above all, he must gain knowledge of himself; not knowledge of his deficiencies, his limitations, his ignorance, his evil, but knowledge of the good, of the creative power with which he and he alone is potentially endowed. And most of all must he seek to understand his greater self that lives and moves and has its being in all those free and creative relationships, non-political and non-coercive, in which men are divinely united inter-functionally and universally in a heavenly kingdom under God’s golden rule, God’s way of life.

 

 

 

The fundamental principle of all this is that our cosmos is vibrant; life moves in rhythms at ever successive, higher levels of organization. The spirit takes form, a growing hierarchy of forms, from radiant waves, through atoms, cells, species, systems and nebulae, out of all of which succeeding and more enduring forms evolve.