Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1109

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath in which MacCallum asked Heath (before Heath had got up in the morning) to explain his using the words “spiritual” and “creative” as synonyms. MacCallum was regretful afterward that he interrupted Heath so much in answering. 11 Waverly Place, New York City

May 6, 1957

 

 

/SPIRITUALITY AS CREATIVITY/

 

Matter, or mass, or substance, is not anything but an abstraction. We can no more experience it than we can experience motion apart from matter, or than we can experience time apart from anything that has a rhythm in it. Energy. So that creativeness is the organization and re-organization of events, or of action — action realizing itself into proportions of its elements that are successively transcending themselves. “Saith Life, ‘I am that which must always transcend itself.^’” And now that means going in the direction of the Holy Ghost — Substance, Power and Eternity. These three elements of the cosmos are constantly re-proportioning themselves in ways that involve more and more of the third. … We can never drive a wedge between any two of the three, but they can be constantly re-proportioned in ways in which the first two play lesser and lesser roles. If it were conceivably the other way, then the self-realizing of itself in the cosmos would be towards less and less until they would be approaching a form of organization in which the time would become at a minimum.

/How does this tie in with what we were talking about, the relation, or the identification, of spirituality with creativity?/

     Well that is the spiritual character of the universe, that events resolve themselves into forms of organization in which time, __________, actuality, reality, becomes the

greater and greater.

/That is the rationality, in other words, of the universe./

     Yes, the rationality — and it is the spirituality.

/Because the rationality has that character./

     Yes — the character of carrying us evermore into the eternality, more and more into the reality, of the … the cosmos as a whole is doing so.

/Well you feel a justification now for identifying spirituality with creativity? That’s a new idea so far as I know./

     It is the enduring, the transcendent aspects of events, /which is/ to become more and more enduring, more and more eternal, more and more everlasting.

/This is spirituality?/

     Yes. And we have that reflected in our notion of immortality, in all of our psalms and in all of our rituals, and in all of our attributes to the Deity — in our attributing to the Deity those everlasting qualities. “Thou art from everlasting to everlasting,” says the psalmist. Take our sacred writings, Biblical or any other kind of sacred writings, and count up the attributes of the Deity. They are all constellated around the idea of everlastingness, and of evermore everlasting. But men’s…

/And also around the idea of creation, although the two are not linked together, are they?/

     Well, it’s like the difference between the path and the goal, the ever receding goal, the ever receding ends, /in it/ ever being attained and ever being more and more attained. Pick out the attributes of the Divinity as all sacred writings describe them, and pick out all those affairs of men which are most honored in history, and in folklore and everywhere. It is always the enduring things that are the spiritual things. That’s why enduringness is spirituality. …things coming about that are more and more enduring are the things that are created. When you make anything less and less enduring, you are destroying it, not creating it.

     Now the human place in the cosmos is to participate in the joy of God in ever more and more self-realization — and we get joy and create really positive happiness in more and more realization of that in ourselves which is capable of more and more realizing itself. And as we more and more realize ourselves, we more and more practice the divine technology of self-realization, and we enter more and more into participation, identification, with the Divinity — which is the poet’s intuitive idea of union with God, you know.

     But as I pointed out to somebody yesterday or the day before, the Asiatic idea is that we must lose our personality when we go into the Nirvana — because their idea of this world’s life is to get out of it. There is nothing attractive in this world to an Asiatic. That’s why they are so ready to die. They’re fatalistic. They’ve no hope of anything here.

     Now the Christian ideal of union with God is of the preservation and the aggrandizement, so to speak, of the individual personality. The Asiatic ideal is to lose the things of this world, including the personality of the individual, and find their happiness in being lost completely in God, so to speak, which they call Nirvana — the particular individual being completely merged and lost in the universal as a drop of water loses its identity in the ocean. But the Christian idea is that this very thing which gives him more and more union with the Universal gives him more and more self-realization as an individual. I brought that out so beautifully, that it’s not through sacrifice of the individual that he becomes united with the universal, but his union with the universal carries with it his own individual self-aggrandizement. (I don’t like to use that word, “aggrandizement,” because it has nearly always been applied to physical power, you know. That’s a perfect word, except its usage has been putting it in a particular place.) That’s Christ over the Buddha. Christ gave us the way towards “gettin’ to heaven without losin’ anything,” gaining in every angle, every level, every phase — whereas the

Asiatics, and all other religions that I know of, the ______________ of them means that you have to forfeit your own divinity in order to be united with the universal divinity.

 

/Well, Popdaddy, would you try to make a definition right now of spirituality that you think would be comprehensive and that we might use in the glossary of the second edition /of Citadel, Market & Altar/?”

 

     Haven’t I got it in now?

/No./

 

     Yes — Spirituality is that aspect of events in which they are constantly forming and reforming themselves into new kinds and proportions of events towards greater and greater enduringness. Period.

/Period? Would you want to bring creativity into it? To tell the reader that you mean creativity by it and that “creative” can he substituted for “spiritual” anywhere it occurs?/

 

     Yes. This transcendence of higher order of events beyond that of lower or previous orders, we recognize as creativity of the cosmos, ever creating and re-creating itself into diviner forms. We are in this process, whether we know it or not, and when we do not know it, we can mistake it. We can undervalue it. But our spiritual life in the conscious sense comes from our developing a consciousness of our participation in this, from which we are immediately motivated to take a conscious and rational and far more effective part in this cosmic process — which is our self-realization — through practicing the divine prerogative of creating, whether it be with material things or immaterial things, whether it be as artists or as philosophers, whether we handle clay or whether we handle the nuances of music and poetry, in our creating things. That’s where we get the real lift, is in being like God, doing as He does and consciously creating, consciously dreaming __________things beyond that never, never were before, and bringing those things to pass.

 

     That kind of stuff I think is fairly intelligible to most people and is pretty bound to be accepted if it is presented to them. That’s why I have fairly live hopes for a good reception to this book — not in a big explosion of popular acclaim but in a growing appreciation of it, a growing interest in it, /a spreading one./ /Pessimists,/especially existentialists and people who are smeared with some of that muck, they are disposed to say, “But how are we going to get people to respond to the inspirations of life? So many people are dead to it. So many people are not attracted by it. So many are even repelled by things of __________________.” My own notion is that that is purely accidental and occasional and due to some unhappy experiences that have distorted the personality from its tendency towards life and inverted it — which causes suicides and causes people to punish themselves and destroy themselves in various manners and degrees — and that those things are not characteristic of mankind in any general sense. If it were true in a general sense, then the vast majority of people would die by suicide, the vast majority of people would be starving themselves instead of feeding themselves, the vast majority of people would be looking into darkness instead of turning their eyes towards the light — if that were at all generally true. And it is the over-all effect which has to prevail. The transitory and accidental can never have any extensive, especially any predominating influence.