by Dr. William Pierce
transcribed by Vanessa Neubauer
WE HAVE ready tonight the first of a series of pamphlets intended to serve
not only as guides for us, but also to aid us in enlightening new people and
bringing them into our community.
This particular
pamphlet,
The
Path, is the first in the series because it’s the most fundamental. It
states in very concise form, and also, I hope, in relatively easy to understand
form, the essence of our truth, the essence of the idea on which our community
is founded.
It doesn’t state, however, a great many very important things – namely,
everything which is
implied by our Cosmotheist truth, everything which
can be derived from it. It says essentially nothing, for example, about ethics,
about race, and about many other things, some of which we have talked about in
our earlier meetings here. And the reason that it says nothing about these
things is simply that it would have taken a book ten times the length of this
pamphlet to say them, and we couldn’t have had that book ready tonight, perhaps
not even by this time next year. We eventually will have a book, but first we’ll
have a series of pamphlets dealing with ethics, and with race, and with
everything else of importance to us – and this is the beginning.
Now, in choosing to commit our Cosmotheist doctrine to writing in this
step-by-step way, which is the only practical way for us at this time, we make
some difficulties for ourselves, and we leave ourselves open to some dangers –
and I’ll talk about those in just a minute. But there’s at least one advantage
to this way, in addition to the strictly practical one of not having to wait
forever to have at least
something down on paper. That advantage lies in
stressing to ourselves – and to those we come in contact with – what’s
fundamental and what’s
derived. This work is first because it’s
fundamental. It’s the source; it’s the essence from which everything else will
grow.
So having this first will, I hope, help us all to avoid the error of putting
the cart before the horse – of attaching more importance, more significance, to
derived things than to fundamentals. It should remind us, and it should remind
others, that Cosmotheists are not people primarily – and I stress the word
primarily – interested in promoting certain racial goals, or certain social or
political or economic goals. We are people primarily concerned with fulfilling
our mission as the bearers of the Creator’s purpose, as agents of the universal
will. That comes first.
Everything else – race, politics, culture, economics – is a means to that
single end. The reason I emphasize that tonight, the reason I’ve emphasized it
many times before, is that it’s easy to slip into error in this regard. We want
to always make sure that one of the distinguishing features between us and
others who pursue similar racial or political or social policies is that we
don’t put the cart before the horse. Everyone else almost certainly will.
But
we alone are working for ultimate things, for eternal things, for
infinite things – and we must never forget that.
Now, having noted that, we should also understand that we will have
difficulty in using this pamphlet by itself in carrying out our work. The truth
in it is in too concentrated a form for most people to get their minds around it
very easily. They need the derivations, they need the secondary things, the
specific examples and illustrations which follow from this truth, in order to
begin to comprehend its meaning fully. I know that that will be the case with
most ordinary people, even though I took pains to state things clearly and
carefully in this pamphlet. So we’ll have to put up with some difficulties and
do the best we can until we have actually produced some of those other pamphlets
dealing with ethics and race and so on.
Now, beyond this difficulty, there are some real dangers inherent in the
generality of our truth as expressed here. Those are the dangers of
misinterpretation, of drawing false implications either accidentally or
deliberately. Let me give you a couple of trivial examples.
The
Path states: “Nothing in the universe exists entirely independently and
of itself. Everything is a part of the Whole.”
Therefore, some will
reason,
Whites and Blacks are brothers and we should ignore the superficial
difference of race.
Another example from
The
Path: “We’re all parts of the Whole, which is the Creator. Our destiny
is Godhood.”
Therefore, it will be said,
all human life is sacred, as
a part of the Creator. We mustn’t hurt or kill anyone. That is, we must be
pacifists and humanitarians.
Well, among ourselves, we hardly need to go to the trouble to refute these
transparent errors. We hardly need to point out in the first example that in a
certain sense we are indeed brothers to the Blacks – but in the same sense we
are brothers to rattlesnakes, to sea urchins, and to crabgrass, and even to
every stone and lump of dirt. We’re all parts of the Whole – but we don’t ignore
the differences between the parts. Those differences are as essential a part of
the one Reality as is the unity of all things; because it’s a dynamic reality,
an evolving reality. In the second example, everything is indeed a part of the
Creator and therefore partakes in the Creator’s divine nature – in the same way
that every wart or pimple or blackhead on our bodies is a part of us and
partakes in our nature. In that narrow sense, everything is sacred in itself.
But the overriding importance lies in the particular
role a thing plays.
It lies in the particular way in which the thing serves the Creator’s purpose.
And the fact is that not all things which are parts of the Creator serve that
purpose, any more than our warts serve ours.
This is a big topic in itself; we could talk a lot more about these two
errors and we could think of a lot more examples of the way in which our truth
might be misinterpreted. But I just wanted to illustrate the general nature of
the problem that we face, which is inherent in the inadequacy of human language
itself.
We can certainly refine and improve the way in which our truth is stated, but
we cannot ever entirely eliminate the danger of misinterpretation. If we were
the only ones involved, that would be one thing – but we are not the only ones
involved in interpreting our truth. There are many others involved. That has
both its good and its bad aspects.
Many others are involved because Cosmotheism is an idea whose time has come.
I told you before in earlier meetings that we can find partial expressions of
Cosmotheism among the writings of the ancients, 25 centuries ago. A great many
of the Greek and Roman philosophers understood parts of our truth. The same was
true of the pagan philosophers of northern Europe – and also of certain
outstanding Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages, despite the fundamental
contradictions of Cosmotheism with the teachings of the Church.
Then in the 18th and 19th centuries there was an enormous outpouring of
Cosmotheist feeling. Cosmotheism, or at least one aspect of Cosmotheism, was the
underlying idea of the entire Romantic movement in art and literature, from
Alexander Pope to Joseph Turner and William Wordsworth. And Cosmotheism is the
underlying idea of 20th century science. Today, more and more thinkers,
scientific thinkers in particular, are coming to understand that fact and also
to give explicit expression to that understanding.
I pointed out to you in earlier meetings some of the specifically Cosmotheist
statements of some of the medieval thinkers and also some of the more modern
philosphers: Hegel, Fichte, and others. The more one looks into the matter, the
clearer becomes this Cosmotheist thread running through the spiritual and
intellectual history of our race.
Every week I run across more and more examples. Just last Thursday someone
sent me this statement by the novelist D.H. Lawrence – and I quote just a part
of a longer statement by Lawrence: “We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a
vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose
tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming
nerve-center from which we quiver forever… Now all this is literally true, as
men knew in the great past, and as they will know again.”
Hundreds of other Cosmotheist expressions by prominent men during just the
last few decades can be found. There can be no doubt that our people down
through the ages have been groping for the Cosmotheist truth – and today, more
than ever, they are finding it. Tomorrow, it will be the dominant idea in the
world.
Now it’s possible to understand just why this is our moment in history – just
why the Cosmotheist trickle over the last 2500 years should have become a flood
today. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this tonight, but I will just
point out a confluence of things which has led to this flood. Perhaps we can
talk about them in more detail at another time.
One of the things in this confluence was the reorientation of Western thought
during the 19th century from an essentially
static to a
dynamic
view of the universe. Darwin, of course, is the man who played the key role
in this reorientation, though it began before him and it was not complete at the
time of his death. The medieval view of the world was as a
finished
creation. Since Darwin, we have come to see the world as undergoing a continuous
and unfinished process of creation, of evolution.
This evolutionary view of the
world is only about 100 years old in terms of being generally accepted.
Before that, the people who expressed Cosmotheist ideas expressed primarily
their feeling of the unity of the universe, in particular of the
oneness
of God and man as opposed to the Church’s view.
These ideas fall under the
general heading of pantheism. But pantheism is only one aspect of Cosmotheism.
The pantheists, at least most of them, lacked an understanding of the universe
as an
evolving entity and so their understanding was incomplete. Their
static view of the world made it much more difficult for them to arrive at the
Cosmotheist truth.
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Church doctrine...is fundamentally opposed to our truth.
************************
Another thing in the historical confluence leading to the acceptance of
Cosmotheism today has been the drastic decline in the role of the Christian
church in the last hundred years. Until fairly recently, the Church dominated
the intellectual life of the West. Church doctrine, which as I just mentioned is
fundamentally opposed to our truth, strongly influenced the outlook of most – in
fact, nearly all – thinkers, most teachers, and most writers. Today the Church
directly influences only a relatively small minority of the leading thinkers. So
this fundamental barrier to the acceptance of the Cosmotheist truth, a barrier
which stood for more than a thousand years, has crumbled. I don’t mean, of
course, that Christianity is dead, or that the Church has no more influence.
Among the masses of the people, Church doctrine is still relatively powerful –
but it is no longer so among the leading minds of the West.
Finally, there is the inescapable fact that Cosmotheism is
the outlook
towards which one is led by modern science – whether one approaches the world
microscopically or macroscopically, whether one is studying elementary particles
or stellar evolution. And so I repeat – Cosmotheism is the wave of the
future.
But just as we rejoice that this is so – that there are many more people now
than before who are able to understand and to accept our truth – we must also be
gravely concerned because of the dangers that this brings with it.
A minute ago I gave you a couple of examples of ways in which our Cosmotheist
truth might be misinterpreted. We can be sure that it
will be
misinterpreted, both accidentally and deliberately. In fact, it is now being
misinterpreted. It’s being misinterpreted accidentally – or, we might say,
without malicious intent – by people who have found their way to the essence of
our truth and accepted it, but who simply do not have the courage to follow that
truth when it leads them into areas which have been made taboo by modern
liberalism. They do not have the strength of character, the degree of
independence from peer pressure, to allow themselves to draw the correct
conclusions from the fundamental truth they’ve accepted when those conclusions
are contrary to prevailing liberal dogma.
And so they try to bend that truth,
unconsciously, to yield conclusions which are socially acceptable to a
degenerate and decaying society – to a society which is morally and
intellectually corrupt, to a spiritually empty society.
It’s worthwhile noting here the difference in the type of opposition we face
from the liberal establishment today and that which pantheist philosophers faced
from the Church in past centuries. The Church was opposed to pantheism and to
Cosmotheism on
fundamental grounds. The Christian church had men who were
genuine philosophers, true intellectuals who were deeply concerned with the
nature of reality and with knowing the truth. They were wrong, but they were
still sincere men concerned with fundamental ideas. When Meister Eckhart was
charged with heresy in the 13th century, it wasn’t because he refused to say the
Mass according to the prescribed manner or because he rejected the dogma of the
virgin birth or any of the other things having to do with his duties as a priest
of the Church. In all those things he was strictly orthodox. His heresy lay in
his deepest philosophical writings, and the church immediately spotted this
deviation and jumped on him for it.
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Liberalism is not a philosophy but a disease of the soul.
************************
Liberalism, on the other hand, is not at all concerned with truly fundamental
ideas. Liberalism is not a philosophy but a disease of the soul. The true
liberal is never a true intellectual because liberalism is fundamentally
anti-intellectual. Liberalism consists of a collection of related tendencies,
which at any particular time may be given concrete expression in a body of
dogma. But liberal dogma is not derived from any fundamental philosophy which
can be held up for comparison with Cosmotheism and the contradictions noted. And
so we have a situation relative to liberalism today which is essentially
different from the situation relative to the church in the past. A person who
follows the herd in observing liberal dogma can nevertheless accept our truth
with no danger that his liberal friends and co-workers will shun him or stone
him. There’s no contradiction, no heresy, no social penalty –
until one
draws conclusions which don’t jibe with liberal dogma. And so there is, and will
be, a strong social incentive for the people who are finding their way to the
Cosmotheist truth to draw the wrong conclusions from it or to refuse to draw any
conclusions at all.
Cosmotheist truth is
arrived at through the synthesis of subjective and objective knowledge, or, to
use the same words that are used in
The
Path, through the perfect union of the Creator’s immanent consciousness
in man with man’s reason. Our truth comes to us through a blending of the
universal consciousness in our race-soul and our genes with our reason. Thus our
way at arriving at truth is fundamentally different from the way of most major
religions, which depend in a very basic way on revelation, whether through
oracles or prophets or what have you. It’s also different from the purely
mystical, purely subjective religions of the East which are a fad among so many
lost souls in the West today, just as it is different from the pure rationalism
which used to be the undisputed philosophy of science until recently.
We’re not subject to the sort of problem that the revealed religions have, in
which the prophets may contradict one another, or some fine morning someone may
claim that he had a vision – or that an angel showed him a book written on
leaves of gold – or that Jehovah appeared as a burning bush and handed him a
couple of stone tablets inscribed with a new set of laws. And no Cosmotheist can
get away with babbling whatever nonsense comes into his head, like the Maharaj
Ji and the other yogis can, because our truth is absolute: It
must agree
with our observations of the universe. And, because our truth comes from the
soul, it’s something toward which everyone who shares the same race-soul, the
same genes, naturally gravitates. This is, as I pointed out before, is why one
can find a Cosmotheist thread running through the entire length of Western
spiritual history, including those periods when fundamentally opposed ideas
ruled.
But despite these advantages, we do have problems. We do face dangers. As I
said, one danger is that of misinterpretation so as to draw socially acceptable
conclusions. There’s also the danger of
deliberate perversion of our
truth. The Jew, after all, even with a different race-soul, is heavily involved
in the intellectual and spiritual life of the West. Despite fundamental
tendencies which have historically expressed themselves in an entirely different
way, he is playing a role in modern science in particular. It may be generally
true that the Talmud is the typical expression of the Jewish race-soul and that
the Jew with intellectual pretensions is epitomized by the modern
hair-splitting, haggling lawyer. Nevertheless, some Jews
have seen the
Cosmotheist truth underlying modern science, and they are quite clever and quite
energetic enough to try to establish for themselves a dominant position in
giving expression to this truth – and in interpreting it for everyone else, so
that they can blunt the danger it poses to them, and so they can turn it aside
and guide it into safe channels. It would be quite naïve of us to say that
Cosmotheism is
our truth, not theirs, and that we have a natural
advantage in interpreting it and that it would be as unnatural and awkward for a
Jew to try to set himself up as a Cosmotheist as it would be for a White man to
set himself up as a Talmudist and try to debate the rabbis on points of Talmudic
doctrine. After all, a Jew, Baruch Spinoza, was one of the foremost expounders
of pantheism in the 17th century, at a time when that was hardly a safe or a
popular position for anyone to take. He was, in fact, excommunicated by his
fellow Jews as a consequence. But because Spinoza was a Jew, he couldn’t help
but give a Jewish flavor, a Jewish interpretation, to his pantheism. In
particular, the ethical conclusions that he drew from his pantheism were
strictly Jewish, and I think it’s only fair to assume that Spinoza had no
ulterior motive.
We are in a rather
different era today and ulterior motives abound. The danger exists and it’s a
very great danger, but there
is a way to overcome it – just one way. That
way is to give
concrete form to our truth, to spell it out not only in
its generality, as in
The
Path, but also in all its particulars – and then to
embody those
particulars: the ethics, the racial policy, the social policy, and all the rest
in a living, growing community of consciousness and blood. That’s what we must
do, and that’s what we’re beginning to do now.
William L Pierce circa 1985. 
