Identity, Purpose, Survival
Identity, Purpose, Survival is an early Cosmotheist-related article written by Dr. William Pierce. It first appeared in the No. 50, April 1976 issue of ACTION: Internal Bulletin of the National Alliance.
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Dear friends, we have come a long way in five months. Do not be deceived by the brevity or the seeming ease of our progress. What we have learned so far can be stated in a few words, but a full appreciation and understanding of the meaning and implication of those words call for much careful thought. In the coming months we shall devote some of the necessary thought to the elucidation of those parts of our message already revealed, but it will not hurt us to look ahead occasionally to see where we are headed. We can always go back and digest more carefully what we learn.
We have been asking certain questions, and we have begun receiving partial answers to those questions. Taken altogether, our questions can be restated as just three inquiries:
Who are we?
What is our purpose?
What should we do to pursue our purpose?
Viewed as an answer to these three questions--who? what? how?--our message can be broken down into three general categories: Identity, Purpose, Survival. These three categories are all-encompassing.
The first category tells us that we are a part of the Whole, which is God. As we shall see, we are a very special part.
The second category tells us that the Purpose of the Whole is the self-realization of God. We shall see, in detail, how our purposes as individuals and, collectively, as a race, coincide with this One Purpose.
The third category tells us that the Whole has pursued its Purpose through the process of natural evolution--where we mean by the term “natural evolution” the whole process of God’s creation, both in the inanimate and the animate realms. This has for us the very special requirement that we, in order to pursue our proper purpose, must safeguard our racial identity. We must preserve the very special set of attributes which the Creator has given us. We must, in other words, first insure our survival as a race if we are to proceed further along the Path determined by the One Purpose.
Now we have bitten off a great deal. It is time to back up and look at details, so that we can understand what the above generalities really mean.
Identity
So, once again, who are we? What part of the Whole, and why special?
The Whole was the primordial fireball, and we are a part of that Whole, in that we are constituted from the same particles which constituted it.
Then the Whole became the vast array of young, condensing galaxies, and we are a part of that Whole also, for the same reason.
As the Whole continued its evolution, solid worlds formed in the galaxies, with stony mountains and heaving seas and soft, enfolding blankets of air. And the only life on these primitive worlds--in particular, the primitive earth--was the immanent Life of the Whole, the same Life which existed in the primordial fireball. God’s Urge toward self-realization, toward self-completion. And we are also a part of that Whole.
Then the Urge brought forth a new manifestation of Life--biological life--on the earth. And this new life multiplied and diversified and evolved, over a period of a billion years and more. While the biological life of the primeval slime gave rise to ever newer, more versatile, higher creatures, the older Life caused the mountains to descend into the seas and new mountains to rise up in their stead and chasms to open in the earth and mighty rivers to form and then dry up again. But it was in the newer form--in biological life--that the Creator's Urge most dramatically manifested itself. For therein the first glimmerings of a new self-consciousness arose.
Before there had been only the deep, immanent self-consciousness of the Whole. But then that self-consciousness began sharpening and intensifying itself in a myriad of different animate creatures. In some it never reached a level much above that in the stones and the stars, but in others it climbed higher.
And a living hierarchy was formed, a hierarchy based on the degree of consciousness of the Whole, on the degree of self-realization of God. And we are a part of that Whole.
The races of man occupy the uppermost levels of the hierarchy (at least, in this corner of God’s universe). They are stretched out near the upper end of a continuum which includes every living creature. The turtle, the sheep, the leopard, the gorilla, the Negro, and European man all have their places in the continuum, but at the very tip, the uttermost pinnacle, God has wrought something new and qualitatively different: a new step upward as significant as the step from non-living to living matter.
This new step, this new level of consciousness, which has been attained only by the highest elements of man, and only tentatively even by them, is a level from which its attainees may participate actively, rather than passively, in the Creator’s ongoing process. They have attained the capacity for becoming the conscious, willful instruments of God, the ordained bearers of the upward Urge. In them--in us--the Divine Spark, which glows to a greater or lesser extent in all created things, has finally burst into a tentative, flickering flame.
A full understanding of the meaning of this new development--and of the responsibility which it entails--is something which we will acquire later. Only then will we be able to answer fully the question as to our identity. (An aid to this understanding is a series of articles, now being prepared for ATTACK!, which will trace the history of our race though the last few hundred thousand years and describe the basic characteristics which determine our uniqueness.)[1]
Purpose
And only when we have fully answered that question can we fully comprehend our propose. Nevertheless, we can gain a partial comprehension now, based on what the foregoing tells us of our identity. In fact, knowing our identity is, in a sense, equivalent to knowing our purpose. The two are merely different aspects of the same truth.
Another way of saying that is this: Our proper purpose is to be true to our own inner nature. And we have already seen that we are, in essence, the bearers of the Creator's upward Urge. Our purpose, then, is to further that Urge, that Divine Motive.
The One Purpose toward which the Divine Motive is directed is the self-realization of the Creator through the never-ending, always upward-striving process of creation. Each stage in this process manifests a higher level of self-consciousness of the Whole, a closer approximation to the ultimate self-realization of the Creator, than the previous stage.
We are now the cutting edge of the Creator's tool, his principal instrument of creation--and, as already mentioned, a willful, conscious instrument. We are now also the principal raw material of the creative process. We must, therefore, necessarily be transformed ourselves--we must transform ourselves--in that process.
Our purpose collectively, as a race, is to transform ourselves in such a way, through countless future generations, that we continually achieve higher and higher levels of collective self-consciousness, a fuller and fuller comprehension of the Whole of which our race is a part, a more and more nearly perfect manifestation of the Divinity within us.
And our ordained purpose individually is to further the purpose of the race to the extent possible during a single generation, a single lifespan.
Survival
Finally, we come to our third question: how? The answer to this question is quite long, and we must postpone most of it until later. It involves, among other things, the entire subject of ethics. That is, it tells us how we must behave, how we must order our lives and our relationships with others and with the rest of the Whole.
But we can say two things of a very general nature at this point:
First, we must continue to learn. We must develop a fuller understanding, despite the unnatural conditions under which we live today, of our true inner nature. As mentioned in the message for February, we must learn to read the runes which God has engraved on our souls. Only then can we fully attune ourselves with the Whole. Only then can we plan for the future with confidence.
Second, we must make our understanding the basis of a movement which will acquire all the necessary means for putting into effect our plan for the future.
That is, we must teach ourselves, and then we must teach others, and then we must act to secure an unopposable power base for the implementation of our teachings.
Next month: some preliminary considerations on ethics.Notes