Spencer Heath Archive

Item 217

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

April 21, 1960

 

 

 

 

    

     Science teaches us that the physical world in which we have all our objective experience is a world of happen­ings or events. It teaches that these events have three measurable aspects which, taken together, we call energy or, more precisely, action. We are further taught that there is a certain magnitude of event called the quantum of action which is the least that can come into our physical experience. This, however, does not prove that there are no events of less magnitude. So far as the mind is con­cerned, we can conceive of any number of events having magnitudes less than that of the quantum of action.

     Just as there are no magnitudes beyond which the mind cannot conceive a greater, so there can be no magnitude so small that the mind cannot conceive a less. A mind, therefore, is under no limitations as to what it can experience as conception. The body, however, only responds to those events which lie within what we can call the objective octave, below and above which the body does not respond — just as the eye does not respond above or below the visible spectrum.

     But there is no ground for supposing that the cosmic spectrum has any limits. Our minds themselves suggest this. For we can conceive no limits in either direction. So, leaving the body out of account, the mind may conceive and thereby subjectively experience not only sub-quantal events but an infinite range of such events approaching but never arriving at the point of no event. Who shall say that the mind cannot animate any or all of the events occurring within this miniscule range?

     Likewise, who can say there are no bodily forms in which events of the utmost magnitude may be manifested, far beyond the physical forms of which we know?

     But the objective spectrum occupying but a portion of the range between zero and infinity, we know to have been an increasing octave. As the minds of men animate their experiences, the bodily structure itself further and further and perhaps infinitely evolves. And this evolution may evolve metamorphoses similar to that which we observed in the lower forms of life.

    

     Our limited experience tells us of a limited cosmos, a small objective world in which the soma functions as a limited manifestation of the psyche. But the psyche itself has no such limits — limitations — as the soma. It is without any limitations as to space or time. While the soma experi­ences no events of less magnitude than a quantum, the psyche can conceive not only within the range of what the soma can experience but also (subjectively) events of both infinitely less and greater magnitudes. For there is no event so small that it cannot be further divided by the mind, nor so large that the mind cannot conceive a double or a multiple of it. Therefore, in the whole cosmos of events, the soma is imprisoned within a small but perhaps expanding octave, while the mind ranges infinitely between zero and infinity — two opposite but equally unattainable extremes even for the mind. No sooner does it approach zero at any degree of proximity, but what it can mentally get closer without arriving. Nor can it conceive any event of such great magni­tude that it cannot conceive a greater. /This sentence was first, “Nor is there any event…” Heath changed it with the remark, “I don’t like the is.”/

     All the events within that range which the body can experience are sensory events. All other events are extra-sensory. Mind can experience them without any limita­tion in either direction.