Spencer Heath Archive

Item 005

Penciled by Heath on notepad paper

No date

     For every conscious being there is an inner and an outer world, subjective and objective. The inner world of consciousness has two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of self through introspection, and knowledge of the not-self through experience. Introspection is life, mind, purpose, spirit realizing itself. Experience is realizing of the outer world through these gateways of the senses.

     Every conscious being, like the cosmos itself, is two-fold. It has a physical aspect in which, taken alone, it tends ever towards uniformity, homogeneity, un-relatedness, and it has a psychic element which tends ever towards novelty, variety, differentiation, interrelations. On the whole it is organic and ineluctably alive. On the physical side, it tends towards lower degrees of organization, less life. On the psychic side it moves towards ever higher degrees of life and organization, out of the merely physical, more complex and more enduring forms. The individual psyche derives from the universal whence comes its novelty, uniqueness, individuality. It organizes its material embodiment, infusing it with purpose and will. As the psyche derives from its universal, so does the soma, the physical embodiment, derive from the universal soma. And each in its finite degree reflects the qualities and powers of its original. As the universal psyche reflects itself in the particular, so does the cosmic body reflect itself in the individual soma.

     The psyche knows itself and its kind and the psychic cosmos through introspection, but all its knowledge of the physical cosmos must come from sense impressions through the soma. With the spiritual it may communicate and commune, but only through its soma does it have communication either with its own embodiment or its environing physical world. The universe is a cosmos of orderly and never ending change, not of substance or structure merely but of process and suc­cession, the rhythm of ever changing yet ever more evolved and ever more enduring forms of substance, power, and time, which in their threefold unities constitute the succession of events, the rhythmic actions of the phenomenal world.