Spencer Heath Archives

Item 4

Penned remarks in a Spiral Composition Book. Continued in Item 6?

No date

     Every sentient being, every self, from amoeba to man, lives on the hither side of a wall of sense. More or less consciously, as spirit, psyche, mind or thought, it has imaged and organized this wall as body, or soma, and in it spirit breathes, psyche dreams, and thought is limned in lineaments of flesh. Thus incarnate, the particular spirit, the self or psyche, performs its cycle and returns to the universal spirit whence it came, and the soma, bereft of psyche, resolves back into the void, the lifeless order whence it was drawn. Such is the rhythm of Nature in ever lengthening cycles, from higher frequencies to lower, from the lesser order to the more enduring, in a universal self-fulfillment, the creative progression, the transcendency of Time.

     The science of physics — physical science — consists of the incarnate human psyche through the sense receptory walls of its soma finding more and more of the correspondence between itself and the cosmic order. When this comes through mere sense impressions alone we call it perception; when we arrange these in orders and classes we call this knowledge; and when through imagination and reflection, hypothesis and verification we discover uniform consistency, we call this understanding; and when the elements of this understanding are quantified in numerical terms as the dimensions of events, then it is rational in the full and literal sense as natural law. This completely and literally rational understanding is the knowledge that is power — creative power — for in such understanding the human psyche, in its degree, runs one to one with the cosmic and thus has purposive power to create in the image of its dream.

    The motivation in physical research is esthetic; it is inspired by visions of beauty beyond; and its achievements are hailed and celebrated in wonder and joy. It lifts the human spirit into ever greater awareness of itself and of its power and rightful place within the total cosmic scheme. But outwardly and beyond all this it implements the human spirit with an outward-going power. It not only appreciates and enjoys and feeds itself upon the beauty that the rational order reveals to it; it also implements the human will with outward creative power. Beyond the narrow confines of the soma itself, the creative spirit in man now reaches out not in a blind empiricism alone but with a rational technology freed from particulars, abstract and universal in its objective world. The vital breath expands. Not only does it organize its own biological soma and form. Not only 

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Commentary by Alvin Lowi, Jr.

III  B.1.2.5&6

SUBJECT:  The body and the spirit of the human person and the rhythm of Nature. The development of the creative and lengthening cycles of endurance and the role of physics in this. Perception, knowledge, understanding and rationality defined in relation to purposive action and development.

REMARKS:  Good on the motivation and rationale of science, research in cosmic terms. [See Item 6 for continuation.]