Spencer Heath Archive

Item 155

The most comprehensive of several efforts (Items 157, 221, 248, 409, 2017, 2097, 2197, 2198) to create an explanatory text to accompany the Philosophic Diagram, now appearing alone on page 247 of Citadel, Market and Altar, in a new edition of the book. Titled by Spencer MacCallum from a phrase in the text.

No date

 

 

Philosophic Diagram

———

The Spiritual Ascent of Men as

Co-Creators with the Universal

 

Spencer Heath

 

 

1   …The irreducible fact of all knowledge is the individual ego, both unconscious and conscious — self-aware. It is manifested in every living objective entity by what is called in the embryo its “organization center” that directs or controls the specific development of the embryo and its autonomous functioning, actions and reactions and is further manifested in all the operations of the adult nervous and glandular systems through which it keeps all normal bodily functioning under its control. The fact of this irreducible ego is the basic premise of all knowledge and wisdom.

2….Philosophy has to do with knowledge. It presupposes a knower that knows and that which is known and to be known. Considering knowing as being aware or being conscious, we recognize that knowledge, awareness or consciousness must be knowledge of something — that the verb must have an object. Yet in all knowledge the basic datum is self-hood, consciousness of self as distinct from environment, and of interaction between self and environment — objective experience. In this interaction, environment exhibits to experience interactions within itself — happenings, events. That which interacts, that which happens and is experienced, is called energy-in-­action — the external subject-matter and ground work of all objective experience.

3    The ego or consciousness thus is seen to be the subject of which the outer or objective world is the object, and that consciousness springs from interactions through sense perceptions between the inner and the outer, the self and the not self, the subjective and the objective worlds. All knowledge, therefore, in its acquisition and its contemplation, consists of processes, of interactions, actions and reactions, successions of happenings or events. Thus there is an inner world, a metaphysical world of subjective events, in large measure reflecting but always distinguishable and to be distinguished from the world of the not-self – wherein all objective experience has its ground.

 

4    This phenomenal world, infinite and absolute, is the

realm of energy-in-action, as action or events, which in their totality constitute the entire Cosmos, some aspects of which enter into and constitute the measurable and thereby rational elements of objective human experience. These aspects are three in number, namely, (1) mass, (2) motion and (3) time, whose units of measurement respectively are gram, centimeter, second; foot, pound, minute; etc. These are conceived and considered separately, but are experienced only in their three-fold unity as actions or events. Note that the element of time enters twice, once to establish the rate and again to measure the quantity of actual energy, or of energy-in-action, by multiplying its rate by its period — by the number of units of time through which the event continues or extends. Any number of units of mass (or of force inherent in mass) conceived as moving through some number of units of motion (or of length) per each one unit of time is called a rate of energy or of energy-in­-action. The product of the rate of an event multiplied by its period is called either energy, meaning a particular quantity of energy-in-action, or it is called simply so much action, using the more technical name.

5    The human capacity for resolving objective events (compositions of mass, motion and time) into experience is not infinite or absolute. It is limited. It operates in an ever increasing octave, so to speak, between two unattainable extremes. Because of this there is a minimum magnitude in which or in multiples of which and not otherwise, events can be objectively experienced. This unitary event, this almost infinitesimal fraction of an erg-second, in its physical aspect, is called the quantum of action.

6    Energy-in-action, or action, as events, is not only composite, being composed of units of force and motion in any relative proportions, acting at a rate and through a period of time. It is also to be taken as discontinuous in its least organizational units (of mass, of motion and time) that can enter into the composition of an event, and in distinct whole multiples of these least units. It thereby exhibits waves, rhythms, cycles, recurring events and specific structures in succession or repetition of form, type or kind. All those actions or events called quanta of action, which have the least over-all magnitude that can be objectively experienced are thereby, so far as human experience is concerned, objectively equal and indivisible. They are also called “atoms” of action or the “building blocks of the material universe.” They may be conceived as those actions or events that take place at the border line between what can be objectively experienced — as well as subjectively imagined or conceived — and that which can be only subjectively experienced or conceived, where the physical shades off into the meta-physical realm.

7    Nature is not only dynamic and vital; she is also rational with the same rationality whence comes our own. Therein her creative beauty lies. She manifests herself always in units, in specific events and in forms and types of organization that are repetitional, as are waves, each giving succession to others of similar form, type or kind. As visible light is composed of units of energy organized in waves of only three primary colors, so nature exhibits her discontinuous objective actions or events, always in numerically organized and proportioned threefold compositions of (a) the number of mass (or force) units per each motion unit, times (b) the number of motion units per each unit of time, times (c) the number of time units contained in the composition of the event.

8    In the above, (a) refers to the uniform or mean measure of mass which is related to each unit of motion, (b) refers to the uniform or mean measure of motion related to each unit of time — velocity of the mass, /and/ (c) refers to the measure of time during which the event continues or occurs. This element of time is not measured in relation to any fourth aspect of or element contained in the composition of the event. These are the three dimensions of any event, whether a single unit of action or any simple or complex multiple thereof.

9    The product of (a), (b) and (c) is a purely quantitative over-all description of the objective (inductively ascertained) event as a completely specified over-all quantity of energy-in-action. Its specific qualitative characteristics (how it interacts with other events) depend on and are determined by the ratios in which its aspects or elements (a), (b) and (c) are related or proportioned in the composition of the event. Its degree of reality, in the sense of durationality — not passing away — is determined by (c), the element of time in its composition.

10   The human individual is so constituted that sense impressions set up trains of events within the conscious — and the unconscious — ego. Such inner trains of events or processes are called memory, thought, imagination — inner events, primarily in the mirror-image of the outer stimulus, or its source. Now the inner ego, with its field of conception and imagination for each individual, is unique. It has a genetic endowment that, like the bodily structure, is distinctive for each individual. Though all are generically similar and have much in common, they are not precisely alike. Their precise reactions to sense impressions thus are peculiar to each, as are the patterns of thought and consciousness and memory into which they organize sense impressions uniquely according to their genetic origins and accumulated impressions or memories of past reactions.

11   The bodily constitution and form is palpably finite; but its processes of thought and imagination are not so limited. These are constituted of elements originally derived through sense impressions for their raw material, as it were, but are under no limitations as to magnitudes of mass or force, of motion or extension (as length) in space, or as to either duration or direction in the objectively irreversible element of time. Thought and imagination can range without limit through all conceivable magnitudes, all space and through all past and future time. Moreover, while the ego determines only partly the external events to which it reacts, still it does determine the manner of its own reaction to them, according to its unique genetic constitution and inborn will. Thus the ego at its own option can so react as to determine in large measure the kinds of events to which it shall in future be exposed and react.

12   The subjective inner world of the individual is his central and his chief existence, the center of all his loves and hates, his hopes and fears, his sensations, aspirations, joys and dreams. But the self is conditioned by the not-self wherein alone it can be fulfilled. Life itself depends upon at least a working arrangement between the two. At the animal level it is a matter of adjustment to circumstance. At this level the animal man, like all other animals, is the product of its environment, dust of the earth. He is the creature of his creator. Circumstances determine him, not he them. But man, as man, above all creatures is unique: He has a potentiality towards creatorship. He is not forever bound to make his habitat less habitable and thus self-limiting as other creatures are. He can emerge to a higher state, out of his creaturehood into creatorship, out of enslavement to necessities and needs into his spiritual inheritance of a creative dominion over all the world and all else that inhabits it. Thus for man his objective world is destined to become as clay in the potter’s hand, an extension of himself, an embodiment of his creative spirit as his flesh is the embodiment of his animal spirits and life. There is a way of life that more than sustains him. So far as he walks therein he is privileged to learn and to know and to understand the works and ways and thereby the rational mind of his Cosmos as the Source whence he springs.

13   In the subjective mind of man there is an element of rationality that is ineluctable. So far as it is possessed at all, /it/ is common to and the same in all men; for it reflects the rationality of the Cosmos whence all — mind as well as body — evolved. And the subjective mind is a kind of cosmos in itself. Its own genetic nature determines how it shall react to the myriad sense impressions from its outer world. This is self determination. For it can choose how it shall entertain those which present themselves as messengers of light and life, and how it shall cast into the limbo of its unconscious such as point to darkness and death. Its reactions are not bound to be mere tropisms, automatic and immediate, for it may delay them and in this interim reflect and choose and in choosing determine that with which his conscious mind shall dwell — what it shall learn to know and understand. And it is between two kinds of knowledge that the conscious mind has power to choose: knowledge of life and its ways that are called beautiful and good, and that mixed and conflicting kind of knowledge that is called the knowledge of good and evil and brings conflict and death among men. The subjective mind, at its own option, may drink and be nourished by the waters of life or it may accept the false beguilements and the bitter waters of good and evil and untimely death. But so far as it heeds those sense impressions that inspire, like the exquisite in a flower or shell, the color-symphony of a sunrise or a wondering receptivity of the majesty of a mountain storm, it responds to the life-ward aspect, to the spirit of beauty that dominates creatively the processes of the evolving whole.

14   Inspirations such as these — responses to sense impressions coming from the outer to the inner world — are spiritual; for they motivate creative action. And this in two ways, in the concrete and in the abstract arts. The one is a direct inspiration to impart its vision of beauty in concrete forms in ways that are but little if at all rationally or intellectually understood. It is a kind of tropism similar to the instinct for breeding and nest-building in birds, except that it is not uniform to the race but is the unique creation of the individual and conspires towards higher modes and forms of life instead of mere utilitarian maintenance of the particular type.

15   The other motivation, the abstract, draws away from the immediately objective and concrete. It tends towards the pause of reflection and the subjective discovery of rational relationships and the construction of rational patterns of thought within the consciousness in correspon­dence with the sense messaged rational harmony of the objective cosmic world. The abstract constructs of the reflective consciousness in man spring from the inherent unity between his inborn rationality and the intrinsic growing and evolving rationality of his Cosmos as a whole. This kind of knowledge is called science. It is not limited and specific to particular actions or events and concrete forms but is generalized over wide classes and ranges of similar objects and events, making the human spirit ever more at home in its cosmos and giving it ever more accessions of creative power. Though without substance, these abstract formulations yet spring from intimations of beauty as yet unattained no less than do the objective forms in which intuitive artists materialize their dreams.

16   Moreover, these abstractions of the intellect once made are not private to the individual and not self-enacting as are the intuitions of religion and of intuitive art. Artistic and religious inspiration alike take their objective forms out of the heart more than the mind, whereas the objectification of intellectual abstractions require the complex cooperation of many men in many ways. When this cooperation is coercive, arbitrary instead of rational, the result is public works, government and monumental art to the glory of conquerors and in spectacles and public charities to appease the poverty they cause. Under political relationships, under the iron rule of authority and of supine subservience, religion and art are bereft of their spontaneity. Intellect goes into decline except as the servant of power, and the creative capacity of mankind is inhibited and suppressed.

     Religion and art are the spontaneous expressions of conscious concepts wrought out of death-fearing and life-inspiring, sense-borne intimations of the extra- or super-personal outer world. In their origins both are grotesque. In their ultimate they are sublime. But the rational constructs of the consciousness are accretive. Little by little the subjective rationality comes into recognition of the rationality whence it evolved. The cosmic consciousness stirring in atom, leaf and star yields its secrets bit by bit to many minds. The bits are tested and compared and when so proved are composed into general patterns that reflect the rationality of the outer field whence all its parts are drawn.

17   Thus the separate sciences arise each in its field to picture in quantitative (measured) and thereby rational terms the processes of the outer world. And all the special sciences, as they grow, intermingle in larger patterns that reveal the rationality of the Cosmic Mind. The sciences describe the events they measure in units of mass, motion and time. There is no attempt but to understand, by ratios, the composition of sense-reported objective events. And the symmetry and beauty of their rationality brings the researcher’s mind into a conscious at-one-ness, a spiritual awareness of the Cosmic Whole; for its abstract generalizations are not mere sense-impressions but pass all the limitations of space and time.

18   As the arts exalt the feelings, so does science exalt the mind. The motivation of science, like that of the arts, is esthetic. But science has also a mighty utilitarian role. Revealing as it does in what proportions nature unites the elements of mass, motion and time that constitute her events, the peculiar will and mind of man can bring about and preside over the composition of events within his dreams and build them into his environing world from which their substance but not their pattern has been drawn. Man does not wish merely to repeat and extend what nature at a given level does. He seeks, as her child, to participate in her perpetual self-transcendence, to build into the rational order, in accordance with its own rationale that he has learned, such compositions as his own unique genetic nature dreams and decrees. He becomes a god in the practice of a creation of his very own, a creation of his own within the total cosmic trend. His own personality is exalted into functional unity with the ultimate and divine.

19   But little or none of this can he do as an individual alone. Art may thrive on but little from others. One can inspire and thus serve the many though they but little inspire or serve him. But he who would employ the generalizations of science to objectify the plans and dreams of his mind must have the aid of myriads of past and present men. Many must serve the one in order that the one may many serve. An inter-service of many serving many and being by many served is the only relationship in which the vast intricacies of technical detail can be brought to focus in vast mass-produced specific services and commodities that raise the richness and extend the lives of all. In this mighty creative process, to be effective, there is one key condition imposed. It is a spiritual condition in that otherwise men cannot become creators and must as creatures only live and die. This relationship must be spontaneous and voluntary without coercion on either side. And it must be rational and harmonious, the contributions of each to the whole being measured in the sight of all in terms of some value unit recognized by all, and the participation of each must be likewise measured that the distribution to him shall be in ratio to the contribution by him.

20   This balanced harmony is achieved in the psychological relationship called contract in which there is no need or use of equality save one. The parties to the contract must be equal in authority each over his own person and over his own property that it may become the subject-matter of his contracts. In this creative relationship, reciprocal and non-coercive, there is but one rule, the Golden Rule of balanced exchange in the practice of which men rise to a new order of being in which their creative potentialities are liberated and the door opened for their divine destinies to be ever more fulfilled.

21   The spiritual ascent of men as co-creators with the Universal is diagrammed by means of the accompanying philosophic chart.

22   At the base is the relative chaos involving all potentialities and out of which all order and beauty evolves. For the purpose of understanding (and none other) it is divided into /two/ worlds, the metaphysical (original) and the physical (derivative), the world of the universal and the world of the particular; of the spirit and of the body; the infinite and the finite. These two worlds are separate only in thought or imagination, for they interfuse. Neither is complete without the other. It is in their interfusion that the Cosmos continually transcends itself (as the material universe expands) and that the spiritual nature and destiny of man, through his participation in that transcendence, is ever more fulfilled.

 

 

 

23   The Cosmos in its absolute and universal aspect is represented ascendingly on the left side of the chart. Its relative and particular aspects are represented on the right. The primordial cosmos has always some degree of differentiation. It is not wholly homogeneous. Its parts are interrelated in actions and reactions that constitute discrete happenings or events which taken in the general sense are called action or, more colloquially, simply work. This action or work has a property of discontinuity whereby particular happenings or events can be distinguished from other events and from the whole. The individual consciousness as a succession of interior events interacts through sense impressions with its total environment in what is known as experience. Action is not only discontinuous; it is also composite of those elements all of which must be united to induce the sense reaction that constitutes objective experience, but any two of them can be entertained subjectively without any limitation as to motion, space or time. Except in unity, they are metaphysical conceptions wholly beyond the realm of objective sense experience.

24   Central to all action is the element of mass or inertia, force or resistance to force, whence proceeds force or resistance to force (in the ordinary acceptance of these terms). When the mass aspect of an event is measured in terms of some objective unit, it is called particle or force. When its motion is measured, it is called velocity. When its rhythm or frequency is taken, that measures its duration, its period of time. These three measurements together constitute the over-all magnitude in which alone its three subjective abstractions so united can be sense-experienced as a unitary event.

25   On the two sides of the diagram or chart, left and right, respectively, are represented the world of subjective conceptions arising from within, not dependent on sense impressions and therefore not subject to any of the physical limitations as to mass, length (motion) or time, and these conceptions arising out of interactions, through sense impressions, with the outer, objective and experiential world with its intrinsic determinism and “natural laws.” The one is the unconditioned world of aspirations, ideal desires and dreams. The other is the outer and objective world wherein all things are physical and governed by physical and quantitative laws.

26   All sense impressions are finite and relative, as are the sense organs through which they are received, yet they present no data upon which to ascribe any like limitations to the objectivity from which sense impressions are received — the infinite cosmos of events whence they came. The physical senses respond only to physical events, events that are composite, always and only, of mass, motion and time. As seen only in these aspects and only within these ranges of magnitude to which the physical senses respond, the physical world is finite in all its three dimensions and, like the sense mechanism that reports it, except as it is maintained by some vital or psychic element, it must inevitably run down and expire. Like the sense mechanism itself, the physical world, as limited to it, attains to any level of order and complexity only as directed by an influence, an order-building influence, that can determine the direction of physical events. While this influence obtains, there is development and growth and the structure, during its length and term as an event, is maintained.

27   This vital or psychic element or influence gives evidence of its own unique yet infinitely variable (variegate) determinism that accounts for the myriad types and forms, organic and inorganic, in which it manifests itself in the structures of the physical world. This organizing influence pervades the physical cosmos and thus redeems it from the physical processes acting under which alone it could only run down. And the organizing element not only maintains the cosmic structure; it so directs the organization of events that among their myriad forms increasingly more stable orders appear by reason of their longer cyclic periods, their greater duration relative to their mass and time. This is the Ascendant Order in Nature, in which a cosmos of relatively high-frequency events evolves ever into relatively more enduring lower-frequency events of ever higher organic complexity (heterogeneity). Thus the organic process is not towards variety and complexity alone but towards structures and forms of ever greater durationality — of increasing reality in the Platonic and the Pauline sense of that so widely misconceived word. It is in this ever increasing enduringness that the cosmos ever tends towards the timeless infinite that is ever more nearly approached but never absolutely attained — the immortal dream of men.

28   Man, whether he chose or not, is in some manner participant in the cosmic scheme. All his aspirations of quality, of value and of beauty derive from his dim consciousness of it and his knowing participation in it. He apprehends it in two ways, by feeling and by thought. In the one he takes joy in symbols and forms that communicate feelings. This is his art. In the other, he employs symbols to represent not feeling but thought, not quality but quantity, and for this his symbols must be numerical, for his rationality deals with ratios, the proportions in which quantities are composed. Herein lies the beauty of all things — in the proportions, the balanced harmonies, in which these elements are composed. And in the events with which he acts and reacts, he is most inspired by those so composed as to advance and extend the life of himself and of his kind towards greater realizations of his immortal dream.

29   The Philosophic Chart thus symbolizes the Ascendant Order both in Nature and in Man. There is the metaphysical and spiritual, the creative side, which is conceptual and synthetic, and there is the physical and material which is experiential and analytic. These are his two kinds of relatedness to the cosmic whole. This is represented between them as the totality of relatively undifferentiated events. His part in the Ascendant Order is to realize himself as a finite participant in the conceptual, the creative and hence spiritual aspect of the cosmos; and likewise, through his physical structure, to realize himself as a finite participant on the physical side. In these two participations, he finds his metaphysical side as potentially creative, having capacity to rise out of his mere creaturehood into a position of determination over the processes of his physical world. Thus is he destined to rise into the cosmic creation of quality, value and beauty, into the never-ending creation of his ever new and ever renewing spiritual world.

30   All creation is organization. All organization is through the reciprocal interaction of units of similar type or kind into more complex integral structures possessing higher properties and powers. Man, as creature merely, has no creative, hence no spiritual, powers. Like all other creatures, the utmost he can achieve is a time-limited maintenance of himself and his kind, and this he does by depleting and deteriorating the environment on which his life and the continuance of his type depends. Only through his integration through reciprocal relations with other units of his kind does he come into his exercise of creative and thereby spiritual powers. He is now only partially so organized and so only partly emerged from his creaturehood in bondage to necessity and to his fears of extinction. As this reciprocal integration — this societal relationship and organization — develops, it gives him increasing freedom and leisure to apply his rational powers to understanding his “natural” world. By this he has gained much knowledge of its organization and, through his widespread non-political enterprises of production and exchange, he has applied this knowledge to abundant life and length of days. It remains only for him to gain a like knowledge and rational understanding of his voluntary societal organization that he may extend its practice into the public realm as well. In this he will emerge from world-wide domination and destruction by “principalities and powers” and his civilization truly live and bloom.

 

 

1    Consciousness of self.

2    Philosophy is knowledge, consciousness of something — energy-in-action.

3    Ego subjective

     Outer world objective

     Actions and reactions — events

     Inner and outer worlds

4    Phenomenal world

     Three aspects of action

     Rate times period — quantity

5    Capacity for experience limited

     Minimum unit of action

6    Discontinuities in action — Rhythms

7    Nature dynamic, rhythmic successions of threefold events

8    Three elements in events

9    Two relative, one absolute, giving them reality

10   Sense impressions prompt inner processes—conception, memory, imagination. Unique in each individual. Not precisely alike.

11   Bodily limitations

12   Subjective world — Intimate and chief to the ego. Conditioned by the objective. But potential to determine it. Creatorship.

13   Rationality — of the subjective

     Reflects the rationality of the objective

     Subjective rationality chooses what kind of knowledge it shall seek — of life or of death.

14   Inspirations motivate creative actions. In the realm of art.

15   Also in the realms of science. How these differ.

16   Artistic creation private to the individual — directed by individual feeling — intuition. Scientific creation guided by a rational abstraction common to many men.

17   Growth of the sciences as measurements of events. Revelations of the Cosmic Mind.

18   But also a utilitarian role. Creative — imaginary events can be objectified — created. Like the divine.

19   But the creative process in science requires the cooperation of many in harmonious relationships without coercion on either side.

20   This is achieved in the psychology of contract in which each party exercises equal authority over his own under a Golden Rule of exchange.

21   Diagram of the spiritual ascent of man. Philosophic chart. (3 lines only)

22   Relative chaos at the base. The metaphysical (original) and the physical (derivative). Infinite and finite.

23   The universal versus the particular. Interrelated. Action always discontinuous, composite, threefold in unitary events.

24   The three elements of action again described.

25   The diagram’s two sides (again). The free and unconditioned versus physical laws.

26   Sense impressions relative and in finite units or events but give no warrant that the objective world is finite. Only our experience of it is necessarily finite. Subject to psychological influence and direction. Without this or so considered it must fail.

27   The vital (psychological) principle, unique and variable, imparts novelty and thereby gives rise to myriad forms. Causes more stable orders to evolve.

28   Man interacts with his cosmos through feeling as art, through his rationality as science and thought.

29   The Ascendant Order in Nature and in man — The conceptual (ideal) and the physical. Through the one he rises into creative determination, dominion, over the other.

30   Man as creator only through the rationality of his societal relationships in public as in private affairs.