Spencer Heath Archive

Item 157

Text to accompany Heath’s Philosophic Diagram reproduced at the end of Citadel, Market and Altar but without an explanatory text. See also Item 2198 of the same date, which may be a slightly earlier version. /I don’t have at hand at the moment the original of this, but 2198 was in pencil, and if 157 was typed, then 157 must have been the transcription of 2198. It is slightly longer. Title Supplied./

July 29, 1957

 

 

 

/The Psyche in Cosmic Evolution:

A Schematic/

 

The central certainty whence all thought proceeds is the individual consciousness, the mind itself. It conceives of itself as a specific unity circumstanced within, yet not apart from but constituting a portion of an indefinitely greater and all-inclusive, a universal unity. The mind knows itself both as pattern, process and as being — as unchanging and yet changing, yet as having a degree of order and congruency in each.

 

The mind knows itself also as integrated with a specific physical structure over which it has a large measure of automatic dominion and control and through which, as sense impressions, comes its knowledge of an indefinitely extended objective reality — its environing world. The mind is conscious directly of itself and, in general, of the physical structure over which it exercises much unconscious and also conscious control. But for knowledge of its external, objective world, it depends primarily on the data of sensory reports from its physical structure.

The mental and the physical structure, psyche and soma, are interdependent. The soma is of the same materials as the objective physical world, yet its specific development and growth and its continued maintenance, its entire organic character, is directed and sustained by its integration with the psychic, upon cessation of which a physical disintegration immediately sets in. This dependence of the organic upon the psychic gives conclusive evidence of a dualism between the living and the non-living world. The inorganic is that portion of the objective world that is not infused with any such integrating or sustaining vital principle from the world of mind. Apart from the psychic element such as determines the organization and development of an embryo, the materials of which living structures are formed exhibit no capacity for the employment of external energy to bring themselves into increasingly complex organizational forms. Instead, they are under a helpless tropism (entropy) towards a theoretical primordial homogeneity in which only the least possible (if any) organization could be. The inorganic is wholly negative. But when endued with a psychic determiner, it forms living units that both singly and in combinations exhibit the cyclic phenomenon of reproduction, development and growth and thus enter into the dominant evolutionary trend towards ever more complex and ever more enduring organizational forms. Though it be discontinuous — periodic — life is like time; it knows no reverse.

The part played by life, especially human life, in the Cosmic Progression as the Ascending Order in Nature, is indicated, to a degree, by the diagram annexed. This diagram, at its base, begins with assumption of a cosmic condition in which the psychic or creative principle is at its least possible and near-zero effect, in which all action is potential and out of which all events, all happenings arise. The vertical division on the left represents the psychic and metaphysical aspect of the total Cosmos. The physical and wholly /word omitted – check original/ aspect — giving rise to sense impressions — is represented on the right.

These two worlds are conceived as mutually inters acting and interfused. The world in its physical aspect alone, excluding the psychic and vital, is rigidly determinant under what is called “natural law.” The world, in its vital and psychic aspect is not so determined. It is not limited or confined within those aspects of mass, motion and time in which the inorganic is bound and to which the physical senses respond. It carries elements of novelty. It affords a directive element, an organizational influence that is pervasively dominant over disintegration and, when highly integrated as in the human psyche, capable of critical intervention to redirect and control the otherwise physically determined course of events.

The human organization has the same two aspects as the cosmic. On the one hand it is physical — a finite abstraction drawn from the whole and, in itself, subject to all the physical determination of “natural law.” But on the other hand, it is organic and psychic and exercises a high degree of direction over what would otherwise be a lifeless, inorganic structure subject to mechanistic determination and entropic disintegration. This psychic element, both consciousness and unconscious, is what directs the development of the organism within its specific yet not rigidly and precisely determined pattern, maintains the organism throughout its life cycle and is the intrinsic source of all its voluntary behavior.

The nature of the psychic element is obscure, for it is seen only in its effects. The sense receptors yield no report of it. It is experienced only subjectively and does not yield to any objective examination. Yet it is uniquely in command over the entire life cycle and transmits itself always in a succession of similar but yet not identical structures in all the species that survive. It thus not only invests the inorganic with organic function and form but, in virtue of its freedom from mechanistic law, it is the source that determines the cosmic evolution into ever more enduring organizational forms.

The psychic aspect of the cosmos is not elusive. It is ever evident in the persistence of life and ever present directly in all the consciousness, the imagination and in all the orderly concepts of human thought and will — a world of self-determination, of subjective experience transcending all objective or physical experience and all its limitations as to space and time. The mystery is not in any elusiveness of the psychological but in the fact of its transcendency.

Physical science deals with and examines only such events as can be physically experienced and are susceptible of objective measurement directly or indirectly in standard physical units of mass, motion and time. But even scientists are prone to arrogate to the finite human organism capacity for experience to the utmost degree. Accordingly, it is supposed that any body, particle, life-cycle or other event that is too minute to come within the range of physical and objective experience does not and cannot happen or exist. The limitations of finite human experience thus are imputed to the infinite. The quantum of action, discovered and verified by Professor Max Planck, is universally treated not only as the least magnitude of event that comes within the range of objective experience but that no less or fractional magnitude can in any manner exist.

The necessity for abandonment of this gratuitously narrow view enforced the probability, even the necessity, of there being not only a macrocosmic and a microcosmic world of objective events, but also and interfused with it a sub-quantal world of processes and events that can be subjectively but not otherwise experienced. And this gives ground for an apprehension of the physical cosmos not only as deterministic and tending, of itself, towards indefinite disintegration but also as being interfused with an even more universal psychic element in its composition, an element that dominates its merely physical limitations and is to the material cosmos as the human psyche is to its physical soma.

Such point of view is borne out by modern biological discoveries. It is now well established that throughout the physical body, and especially in its neural and genetic structures, there are sub-microscopic and sub-atomic particles and processes that may well be also sub-quantal in their dimensions and, in their functioning, constitute the entire psychic and vital department of the total scheme of things.

Returning now to the diagram, the concentric circular figure at the base represents the relatively unevolved cosmos of action or events. The ascending column on the left represents its metaphysical, conceptual, vital and creative and hence its spiritual aspect, unlimited as to space or time.

The ascending column on the right represents the cosmos in its materialistic aspect.

The process and progress of the cosmos is through interaction between the left and the right, between its spontaneous and creative aspect and the rigidly determined physical aspect. In this interaction, the spiritual and spontaneous is dominant. It increasingly infuses the physical world with its evolutionary trend. A continuing creation moves forward in a continuous transformation of the cosmos from a condition of relative disorder into a spiritual world of quality, value and beauty, as indicated in the highest part of the diagram.

In this ever rising stream of action from chaos to order, from collision and conflict to harmony and peace — from the sordid to the beautiful — the human organism knows itself to be in the cosmic forefront. Through ages of evolution it has been infused with the cosmic psyche above all other living things. Under its direction, the human species has developed a consciousness and a cerebral system whereby it can dwell consciously in its physical environment and in a psychic world of conceptions, imagination and dreams whereby it can adjust to every kind and condition of earthly clime.

The psyche in man has governed his physiological development, has prompted him to organize in families and tribes for defense and in political governments for rulership, for aggression and defense. In modern times these biological units have developed world-wide non-coercive interrelationships involving reciprocal energy exchange. In this relationship as presented by the Christian Founder, mankind, in the Western World at least, have entered into a new

phase of life, a creative and thus divine kingdom in which each gives himself to the service of many or all in the same manner as he would have them serve him. In this contractual and non-coercive relationship of free enterprise, Western man has attained vast capacity to build order into his material world in accordance with his desires and dreams. But he has not evolved out of the disorder of his bondage to the iron rule of government in the administration of his community services and affairs. Hence his civilization is a house divided against itself and must periodically rise and fall. His future now depends on the further development of the free enterprise system and its extension, through the community-wide organization of real estate for the creation of community services and their contractual distribution to the inhabitants peacefully and for profit and advantage to all concerned.