control and overcontrol

118:8.1In the time-space cre­ations, free will is hedged about with re­straints, with lim­i­ta­tions. Ma­te­rial-life evo­lu­tion is first me­chan­i­cal, then mind ac­ti­vated, and (af­ter the be­stowal of per­son­al­ity) it may be­come spirit di­rected. Or­ganic evo­lu­tion on the in­hab­ited worlds is phys­i­cally lim­ited by the po­ten­tials of the orig­i­nal phys­i­cal-life im­plan­ta­tions of the Life Car­ri­ers.

118:8.2Mor­tal man is a ma­chine, a liv­ing mech­a­nism; his roots are truly in the phys­i­cal world of en­ergy. Many hu­man re­ac­tions are me­chan­i­cal in na­ture; much of life is ma­chine­like. But man, a mech­a­nism, is much more than a ma­chine; he is mind en­dowed and spirit in­dwelt; and though he can never through­out his ma­te­rial life es­cape the chem­i­cal and elec­tri­cal me­chan­ics of his ex­is­tence, he can in­creas­ingly learn how to sub­or­di­nate this phys­i­cal-life ma­chine to the di­rec­tive wis­dom of ex­pe­ri­ence by the pro­cess of con­se­crat­ing the hu­man mind to the ex­e­cu­tion of the spir­i­tual urges of the in­dwelling Thought Ad­juster.

118:8.3The spirit lib­er­ates, and the mech­a­nism lim­its, the func­tion of will. Im­per­fect choice, un­con­trolled by mech­a­nism, uniden­ti­fied with spirit, is dan­ger­ous and un­sta­ble. Me­chan­i­cal dom­i­nance in­sures sta­bil­ity at the ex­pense of prog­ress; spirit al­liance lib­er­ates choice from the phys­i­cal level and at the same time as­sures the di­vine sta­bil­ity pro­duced by aug­mented uni­verse in­sight and in­creased cos­mic com­pre­hen­sion.

118:8.4The great dan­ger that be­sets the crea­ture is that, in achiev­ing lib­er­a­tion from the fet­ters of the life mech­a­nism, he will fail to com­pen­sate this loss of sta­bil­ity by ef­fect­ing a har­mo­nious work­ing li­ai­son with spirit. Crea­ture choice, when rel­a­tively lib­er­ated from me­chan­i­cal sta­bil­ity, may at­tempt fur­ther self-lib­er­a­tion in­de­pen­dent of greater spirit iden­ti­fi­ca­tion.

118:8.5The whole prin­ci­ple of bi­o­logic evo­lu­tion makes it im­pos­si­ble for prim­i­tive man to ap­pear on the in­hab­ited worlds with any large en­dow­ment of self-re­straint. There­fore does the same cre­ative de­sign which pur­posed evo­lu­tion like­wise pro­vide those ex­ter­nal re­straints of time and space, hunger and fear, which ef­fec­tively cir­cum­scribe the sub­spir­i­tual choice range of such un­cul­tured crea­tures. As man’s mind suc­cess­fully over­strides in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult bar­ri­ers, this same cre­ative de­sign has also pro­vided for the slow ac­cu­mu­la­tion of the racial her­itage of painfully gar­nered ex­pe­ri­en­tial wis­dom—in other words, for the main­te­nance of a bal­ance be­tween the di­min­ish­ing ex­ter­nal re­straints and the aug­ment­ing in­ter­nal re­straints.

118:8.6The slow­ness of evo­lu­tion, of hu­man cul­tural prog­ress, tes­ti­fies to the ef­fec­tive­ness of that brake—ma­te­rial in­er­tia—which so ef­fi­ciently op­er­ates to re­tard dan­ger­ous ve­loc­i­ties of prog­ress. Thus does time it­self cush­ion and dis­tribute the oth­er­wise lethal re­sults of pre­ma­ture es­cape from the next-en­com­pass­ing bar­ri­ers to hu­man ac­tion. For when cul­ture ad­vances over­fast, when ma­te­rial achieve­ment out­runs the evo­lu­tion of wor­ship-wis­dom, then does civ­i­liza­tion con­tain within it­self the seeds of ret­ro­gres­sion; and un­less but­tressed by the swift aug­men­ta­tion of ex­pe­ri­en­tial wis­dom, such hu­man so­ci­eties will re­cede from high but pre­ma­ture lev­els of at­tain­ment, and the “dark ages” of the in­ter­reg­num of wis­dom will bear wit­ness to the in­ex­orable restora­tion of the im­bal­ance be­tween self-lib­erty and self-con­trol.

118:8.7The in­iq­uity of Cali­gas­tia was the by-pass­ing of the time gov­er­nor of pro­gres­sive hu­man lib­er­a­tion—the gra­tu­itous de­struc­tion of re­strain­ing bar­ri­ers, bar­ri­ers which the mor­tal minds of those times had not ex­pe­ri­en­tially over­rid­den.

118:8.8That mind which can ef­fect a par­tial abridg­ment of time and space, by this very act proves it­self pos­sessed of the seeds of wis­dom which can ef­fec­tively serve in lieu of the tran­scended bar­rier of re­straint.

118:8.9Lu­cifer sim­i­larly sought to dis­rupt the time gov­er­nor op­er­at­ing in re­straint of the pre­ma­ture at­tain­ment of cer­tain lib­er­ties in the lo­cal sys­tem. A lo­cal sys­tem set­tled in light and life has ex­pe­ri­en­tially achieved those view­points and in­sights which make fea­si­ble the op­er­a­tion of many tech­niques that would be dis­rup­tive and de­struc­tive in the pre­set­tled eras of that very realm.

118:8.10As man shakes off the shack­les of fear, as he bridges con­ti­nents and oceans with his ma­chines, gen­er­a­tions and cen­turies with his rec­ords, he must sub­sti­tute for each tran­scended re­straint a new and vol­un­tar­ily as­sumed re­straint in ac­cor­dance with the moral dic­tates of ex­pand­ing hu­man wis­dom. These self-im­posed re­straints are at once the most pow­er­ful and the most ten­u­ous of all the fac­tors of hu­man civ­i­liza­tion—con­cepts of jus­tice and ide­als of broth­er­hood. Man even qual­i­fies him­self for the re­strain­ing gar­ments of mercy when he dares to love his fel­low men, while he achieves the be­gin­nings of spir­i­tual broth­er­hood when he elects to mete out to them that treat­ment which he him­self would be ac­corded, even that treat­ment which he con­ceives that God would ac­cord them.

118:8.11An au­to­matic uni­verse re­ac­tion is sta­ble and, in some form, con­tin­u­ing in the cos­mos. A per­son­al­ity who knows God and de­sires to do his will, who has spirit in­sight, is di­vinely sta­ble and eter­nally ex­is­tent. Man’s great uni­verse ad­ven­ture con­sists in the tran­sit of his mor­tal mind from the sta­bil­ity of me­chan­i­cal stat­ics to the di­vin­ity of spir­i­tual dy­nam­ics, and he achieves this trans­for­ma­tion by the force and con­stancy of his own per­son­al­ity de­ci­sions, in each of life’s sit­u­a­tions declar­ing, “It is my will that your will be done.”