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THE TEST OF THOUGHT
Whoever considers man as a portion of nature fails utterly to grasp the significance of man. Man is born to solve a problem which nature poses; to solve it by emerging from nature, after having thoroughly experienced its energies, its whirlpools and its constant trend toward deterioration. Man experiences himself man through nature but in this interpenetration of man and nature the two protagonists move in opposite directions. Nature deteriorates; man, in as much as he emerges victorious in the contest, integrates. If defeated, if pulled downward by nature's entropy, man is not man. To be man is to be victorious over nature, thus fulfilling both himself and the purpose of nature. The star of man is the pentacle of victory.
The essence of this victory is the transmutation of nature into intelligence. It is this process which is called thought. To think means for man to struggle with the multifarious, ever-changing problems which his experience of nature presents to him at every moment. It is to transform the legacy of the past body, memory, karma into an intimation of the future. To think is to release from all natural downflows the power to build with light a super-ordinate expression of universal Being. This implies the accentuation of this downflow into a man-made "waterfall" by the damming up of the natural energies. Not repression, still less suppression, but compression. A dam does not push back the flowing water a practical impossibility! It contains them. It forces the turbulent stream to develop depth and stillness. Thought can only be released out of stillness and of depth.
"Be still, 0 my heart! and know God". God is the absolute fullness of intelligence. God realizes Himself through the victories of "men" in countless universes. Each victory is an atom of intelligence. God is the perpetual and total transmutation of nature, everywhere, into intelligence. The substance of God is thought. In God all problems are solved; for God is the absolute victory. Man, the apprentice in victory, can only fulfill his destiny and purpose through thought through the transmutation into intelligence of that field of nature which is his own possession. He accomplishes his transmutation as he emerges from his contest with the energies of his nature by the power of thought. He emerges into intelligence by synthesizing intelligence out of the disintegrative energies of nature. So does the engineer synthesize light out of gravitation out of the weight of the river he has dammed.
Man may fail and become caught in the entropy of the universe in which he lives; the dam holding the deepened river may collapse, in part or completely, and the violently released waters may spread destruction. Thought may lead to destructive outbursts of the root-energies of human nature if man's thinking fails in its connective and synthesizing task if the mental wholes built by thought cannot contain the essence of intelligence, which is to unify all things and dissolve all problems by seeing them from the level of the universal Whole. Thought, the associative and integrative process, may collapse under the conflicting pulls and the load of all that it is to unify into a form of intelligence the great Idea, the redeeming symbol, the dynamic reconciliation of cosmic opposites.
But thought does not belong to the realm of nature. Thought is not an expenditure of energy. It is not energy. The successful thought process compresses energy into ideas and meaning. Organic energy may appear to be used in the act of thinking, but it is not actually spent; or very little of it is measurably expended, it is compressed and transmuted into intelligence. The waters of the river contained by a dam are not used up. They are given depth; their level-height is raised. They are transmuted into the potentiality of electricity and light. But the water is not lost. Man does not lose; even though his natural organism misses that portion of energy that could normally have become spent for some of the many functional activities of the human body and its psychic overtones.
What man loses in natural energy, he gains in intelligence. Man establishes by thought the foundations of his being in intelligence his being in God. These are foundations of immortality, because in intelligence there is no death. Intelligence, in its ultimate state, establishes a condition of complete correlatedness and integration with all there is with the victorious, because his victory makes him share in universal intelligence; with the defeated, because his defeat is the very next problem which the man of intelligence will have to solve in order to reach the more inclusive experience of more advanced stages of natural deterioration, and through it a greater victory whence a more divine state of intelligence.
Nature and man are opposites, but therefore complements. They need one another. If nature's trend were not to run down, man could not gain the power to transmute this down-flow into intelligence. The river must flow to the dead level of the sea if the engineer is to gain the hydroelectric power he needs to light the civilization in the very fabric of which he will achieve social immortality.
It is the same with every man who dares to be man. He must experience nature, the very fullness of its energies, the very death it promises to all organisms and all substances. The more powerful the river's flow, the greater the light he may eventually release if his be the victory. Some men will be swept by the gravitational force of the stream. Others will build ambitious, sky-thrust dams, only to see them crash into a cataclysm of destruction which may engulf perhaps many more men and lay waste fields 6f ripening crops.
Intelligence is the prize of a glorious gamble. Many are afraid. A few gain immortality. The energy they have condensed and repolarized into Ideas will create new worlds. Once more, in due time, they will be called upon to dam up the down-flow of the energy of nature the nature of these very worlds that had come into being out of their Ideas. Once more, victory may be theirs. Cycle after cycle, the victorious performs again his renewed victory and each time a more profound, a more far-reaching victory. Cycle after cycle, the immortal Self re-establishes itself through victory in intelligence, ever closer to the absolute of intelligence that is God.
This is the challenge which the earth and its natural energies present to man. A similar challenge was made at a lower level of being when life was born on earth. Life, like intelligence, is an attempt to overcome the universal deterioration of energy. It is an attempt to transcend the mortality in nature through the immortality of the cyclically reborn seed.
Yet, this integration and self-perpetuation which occurs within the shrine of the seed is unconscious; the perpetuated selfhood is generic, not individual. The species immortalizes itself, not the particular organism in which there is life. The organism itself belongs to nature; it too has its entropy, which is death.
The seed, while it is in the organism, is not of the organism. It may break down and become a mere particle of nature we call this decay just as any dam may collapse. But if the seed can survive the deliquescence of autumnal soils and the freezing of winter, it wins its victory over death, and the vernal sun crowns it with the prize of victory: rebirth in the new cycle. Germination is not death for the seed. It is fulfillment in tomorrow. It is the achievement of the seed's destiny: to bridge the hiatus between two cycles to establish the continuity of life in a universe spasmodically rushing to chaos.
What the seed accomplishes for life in unconscious, generic instinct, the truly individualized self performs in terms of intelligence. Life operates within set geographical and climatic limits; it is conditioned by space and bound by the rhythm of time and seasons. Intelligence is not bound by space or causality. Thought operates everywhere at once throughout the Whole. For thought does not act as energy. It is the polar counterpart of natural energy in man. Life, likewise, is actually not energy. It is the result of the transmutation of energy into "desire", or sensitivity, toward the re-establishment of the seed. The biological species releases the power that is life. Man, the individual self, releases intelligence.
Life is, truly, the foundation for the release of intelligence, yet man's purpose and cosmic destiny is to rise out of the unconscious field of the biosphere the realm of lifeinto the conscious field of the noosphere the realm of mind and intelligence. He must fecundate life by intelligence, transform its power into light: the power of the seed into the light of the thinking self.
Intelligence is commonly defined as the capacity of conscious adaptation to the requirements of man's environment. But the environment of man is established by life, by the organisms through which the seed perpetuates the species' character, by the successes and the failures of these species in the earth's past. The biosphere is the past which transfigures into future.
All that pertains to the biosphere is, for man, the past. Man should not be considered as a biological species. He is that divine agent to whom it is given to own all that the evolutionary effort toward life-integration has already produced. In his body-organism man meets and experiences the sum-total and synthesis of all this vast effort of the biosphere. It is for him to attune it to the greater pattern of universal integration; to transform "time", which binds life-instincts into that creative cyclic "duration" which is an ever-renewed formulation of intelligence to release life's bondage to geography into the freedom of thought which is universal and instantaneously spread throughout space.
Intelligence has its shadow: intellectuality. During the binding process and the damming of nature, man may feel frightened by the possibility of failure. He crystallizes the thought-process into a system; further still, into a dogma. Thereafter, intelligence imprisoned in systems begins to deteriorate; it too, like any physical organism, becomes caught into the cyclic death of all natural compounds. Intellectuality is intelligence running to dead level. All intellectual systems must disintegrate, and he who clings to them the intellectual must know the death of intelligence. For him, there can be no immortality in God.
Intelligence is re-established at every moment of universal time by the victory of "man" everywhere in the universe. This intelligence timelessly pervades the entire space of the world. Every mind can resonate to it. Every man partakes in the victory of every other man. He partakes also in the defeats, the fears, the crystallizations of all men who fail to achieve victory. Victory must be a daily performance, if man is not to freeze intelligence into intellectual systems and reduce thought processes into automatic cerebrations.
To be truly man is, every day, to win conscious and individual participation in the universal process of creation of intelligence which, every moment, counteracts the down-flow of energy. The performance is constant. Natural deterioration forever must be polarized by integrative thought. He who stops after a day's victory loses intelligence, retains but intellectuality. To be divine is forever to serve in the perpetual rebirth of intelligence.
