Spencer Heath Archive

Item 713

Partial recording by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath.

No date

     I feel that men’s bodies have been slowly improving through the ages as animal bodies have done — by adjusting and modifying themselves according to necessities of environment. In this, men have been merely creatures, as the animals are. But during recent centuries, men have so interrelated themselves in the freedom of contract, that they have made vast, permanent and progressive /changes/ in the environment in and from which they live. This has made it possible for nature to standardize the human body while the mental faculties of men go on evolving through their continual and increasing transformation of the world. Their minds function creatively more and more, and grow through functioning. But up until recent times, men’s minds have functioned mainly to maintain their bodies, and not to create anything. From now on, they will employ their mental powers rather to create more and more favorable environment for a kind of body of a relatively standardized perfection. The function of transforming environment, being performed, will encourage growth of the mind which directs it.

     We may thus foresee that the mind may eventually come to that degree of perfection in which it can be standardized as the body will have been, and /men/ will then come upon a realm in which their awakened spirits can practice self-development — a higher and higher subjectivity, spiritual evolution, in which men will not only enjoy the exercise of their bodies as the Greeks did, and of the mind also as they did, except it will be used for not merely subjective pleasure, but for the creation of a vastly humanized world in which both the human form and its self-created environment will have reached such standardized perfection that the human spirit can take wings into its own subjective empyrean and be at one in actuality, as it has ever been in aspiration, with the Spirit that is universal and divine and the material cosmos its royal habitation.

     I omitted reference to primitive men, whose unlike bodies reflected unlike environment, but whose mental qualities were but little differentiated, in contrast with modern men whose mental differentiation enables them to create new and stable standards of environment. Until environment is so perfect to the physical needs of man that he will no longer need to direct his mental powers for further creation of environment objectively, but rather for the re-creating of himself, subjectively. For the self-development of his own spiritual and intrinsic nature — that ever-continuing self-realization which is the prerogative of the divine both in man and in the cosmos of which he is a child.

     Rather clumsily, but that hits it off the sort of three stages — man as creature, subject and slave to environment; man as creator, creating environment in accordance with his needs and dreams; and men as free individual spirits, carrying on a self-creation in a progressively humanized and thereby spiritualized world.

     In this last statement of the three stages, it implies that the second, namely, creation of the world, never becomes a plateau. Probably the truth is that the physical man never quite stops evolving, that the mental man never ceases to refine and increase his powers, that the physical world never reaches any absolute ultimate, and that the spirit of man will go on evolving. But the spirit that informs all things will be forever the determiner of the bodily man, the mental man and the material environment as it is in itself. We have here in the whole cosmic life of men, in the trinity of his bodily self, his development of mental powers and thereby building his dream into his objective world and in the intrinsic spirit of man, informing these (meaning his body and his world), we find man as cosmic energy paralleling the physical energy that manifests itself as mass and motion with velocity having impact on environment for recurring periods of time. This seems to be the fundamental character of the universal cosmos, intuitively perceived as Substance, Power and Eternity — Father, Son and Holy Ghost.