Spencer Heath Archive

Item 638

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation

January 26, 1956

/The Identity of God/

According to the Articles of Faith, He has neither body nor parts, nor anything of that sort. They say so.

“Well that may be fundamental

doctrine, but what do you think about it?”

Well, I think, God has plenty of parts. You and I are a pair of them. Because God is the principle of the energy of the cosmos under which it is ever changing into new com­positional forms. Energy itself is a composite of the three elements of the Trinity — mass, motion and time, or Power, Substance and Eternity — and these three are everlastingly combining themselves into changing forms and changing propor­tions. It is these recompositions, reorganizations of energy, that constitute the variant forms of organization, both non­-living and living, and that these forms of organization are continuously re-organizing their elements into higher unities, and the higher unities in turn are assembling themselves and inter-relating themselves into still higher organizations. And so each form of life, each form of organization, each mani­festation of the divine principle is in turn becoming the unit of higher organizations. And in this process, those organiza­tional forms which have the greater durational element are naturally the ones that carry on when others disappear. So the term God should refer — with me it refers to that principle of the cosmos under which, in its organizational aspect, form after form is forever transcending itself.

“Then God is manifested in experience, or events, but He is not Himself an event? Because if you say, the principle of existence, that’s something different from existence.”

When we take all these phenomena and consider them as a whole, we may consider that there is a principle under­lying them all which is the same throughout, just as there is a principle of personality underlying our body, our whole personality, which is the same throughout, but is not the body; it is the mode of its operation. That mode of operation is the creative principle. Creation consists in the bringing together of units of organization in such manner that they relate themselves to one another in an orderly fashion through interfunctioning with one another. By that activity, they create a new organization transcending any one of them.

“Well can you say that the principle underlying the body is distinct from the body?”

Yes; the principle underlying a lever or a wheelbarrow is distinct from the lever or from the wheelbarrow.

“Then God is that principle, and God is not the body; therefore God is limited.”

 

The peculiarity of the principle is that it is not … whereas the body is strictly limited, by metes and bounds for instance, or in many ways, the principle — mani­festing itself through the wheelbarrow, for example — has no such limitations. It transcends all limitation. God is an abstraction from the things which have limitations.

“These things which have limitations, then, are not to be considered part of God — except as they manifest the principle.”

… and inasmuch as the principle pervades all things, then all things become a part of the principle. And besides, the moment we place limitations on God, we have taken Him out of His infinite and absolute aspect and made a finite something of Him which means He is less than all.

“Well if you can really distinguish between the princi­ple and the body, and then you say that God is the principle, then it follows that God is not the body. If God is an abstraction, then God is not experience.”

You seem to have something there, I grant you. But if I had said God was a mere abstraction, and I had excluded Him from anything else, your point would be better taken. The moment we put a limitation on God, His Godhood is revoked. If one little tiny fly is not a part of God, then God is less than infinite, less than absolute. So God can’t get along without you and me, and the worms, and grains of sand. Because the moment they become something apart from God, God has a limitation.

When I said that God was the principle, I properly should have said, if I didn’t, that He was the absolute and infinite principle, including all things. Only, He had a how about Him. His how was transcendence.  That is to say that He is constantly re-creating, re-organizing that of which He Himself consists into higher unities with greater durational capacity.

Some would say that I had Him pretty well attenuated. When you think the second time, though, you can see that I have only enlarged Him into His infinitudes — by rejecting all limitations.

“Didn’t Spinoza have a very similar conception in his ‘pantheism’ in which he thought that everything was God?”

Very, very similar.

“How do you differ from Spinoza, if at all?”

I haven’t noted myself doing so. But if I should differ from him, it would be matters of detail, I’m sure — not matters of broad conception, not matters of larger import. One of the few places where I line up with Einstein, who when asked by some newspaperman if he believed in God, he said, “Yes, I believe in the God of Spinoza.”

“Is there any difference between Spinoza’s God and ‘pantheism?’  Does ‘pantheism’ have any connotations that you would not accept?”

I think Spinoza stands for pantheism. I think that’s an unobjectionable term to apply to the Universal God. Because if in all respects everything isn’t God, why then God is less than everything; so, God can be put, perhaps, in your pocket, the way the theologians put Him in theirs: You can’t have Him unless they take Him out, and give Him to you. /Chuckling/ It’s only by trimming God down to their size that they can handle Him, the way they’re doing, and dish Him out /chuckling/ together with His mercy and His forgiveness, salvation and all that sort of thing which they peddle to people. If they had let God up to His true stature, they wouldn’t have been able to handle Him with such great facility as they pretend to do. They wouldn’t have been able to make a pack of cards out of Him and deal Him out to dif­ferent players under their direction — who buy their chips! /Chuckling/