Spencer Heath Archive

Item 642

Taping by Spencer MacCallum during conversation with Heath.

December 1955?

 

 

/MAN’S POTENTIAL DOMINION

OVER THE EARTH/

 

Any science, chemistry, mineralogy or what-not, purely as a science, as a pure science, holds things exclu­sively in contemplation. Nothing is experienced objectively in the development or in the learning or understanding of an abstract science. But in order that we can experience it, the science must be applied. And as soon as science is applied, we bring it to bear upon something concrete — or something concrete to bear upon it. And now the thing which is both objective and subjective can be experienced.

 

     We should remember, however, that our subjectivity is like our objectivity: it is limited. While the conceptual powers of man are vastly more flexible, and modifiable, than his physical powers are, and are not subject to any limitation of time or space, nevertheless the fields into which they can go are limited by his experience. He can only conceive of his experience in greater or lesser magnitudes; he can’t conceive of any kind of experience that he hasn’t had.

 

     But of all the things that happen objectively, they all have a subjective too. That’s the subjective side of nature, from which our subjectivity is only a particular abstraction, a “chip off the old block,” as it were. It still remains that we can have, and often do have, much experience that we didn’t understand or didn’t even expect to happen — it was not planned. It is quite the reverse sometimes. And that is not to say that there was no subjectivity there, because that subjectivity of which we are conscious in ourselves is abstracted from the total subjectivity of the cosmos. And so the thing that happened to us that we didn’t anticipate and had no idea about, even if it was an evil thing or a good thing which we accomplished empirically without knowing how we did it, it doesn’t mean to say that there wasn’t a rationale. It was the general rationale of nature.

 

     When we come to understand this general rationale of nature, we make a part of nature’s subjectivity our subjectivity, and now we have knowledge that enables us to do what nature does — to dream something and then objectify the dream. The empirical process is reversed. The empirical experience leads us to discover the rationale, or the dream of nature that is behind the process of nature, and then having that rationale in our minds we can now re-order it and re-compose it, re-pattern it, and impose it back upon the realm of nature. Now we are functioning as the Universal functions: we are functioning as creators. All of which comes from the fact as set out in Holy Writ that the experience of God was breathed into the dust and it became a living soul /(consciousness)/. And it had potentially dominion over all the things of the earth.

 

     To exercise that dominion, and to come out of its creaturehood, these creatures had to associate themselves under a divine command: to practice contractual, or Golden-Rule, relations with one another. And in the practice of that, they entered into a new mode of existence, a new Kingdom called the Kingdom of Heaven. They were born into it. And now they are born to be gods, because now they have achieved the power to dream the dream of nature, or of God, and to execute the will of nature, or of God, by the at-one-ment of the human will with the Divine Will.