Global Research Assembly

June 30, 1975

Just recently the youth house had a very fine banquet. They didn't invite any mature people, but they invited a couple of us old folks to come. They asked me to talk. My wife insisted that I should speak five minutes, that they wouldn't be interested in what I had to say. But my wife was wrong. I talked about my recollections of coming into humanness, and I felt that they would have let me go on for a couple more hours. That may not be true, but I enjoyed what I had to say.

I was born up in the mountains of Pennsylvania in a little town named Breezewood. Before I was two years old our family had moved to Spencer Station, sometimes called Eldon, in Ohio. From there we moved to Hammondville, then to Wellsville, then to Upper Sanddusky and then we moved to Ada, Ohio. I was five years old by that time. So Ada is where I come from in terms of coming into humanness. It was there I experienced with some degree of self­consciousness that I would like to call Primal Community.

It has taken me a great many years to grasp the fact that the family as it has been invented in western Civilization and perhaps, the family as the construct that has been inven4ed in any civilization, is not and cannot be Primal Community. Primal Community is that social millieu in which a family grasps itself as a family, whatever its particular sociological form. For example, Ada is where I experience my sociality, not in my family. How do you get this said? In existentialistic philosophy as it has been articulated in our time the emphasis has been upon the individual and rightly so. But before any individual can come to self­conscious selfhood a community has to have self­conscious selfhood. And Ada, however, you might wish to criticize it, had self­conscious selfhood which enabled my family to be a family and finally myself to begin to be a person. You see, until a family grasps that which is other than itself, it cannot grasp itself as a family. My family needed Ada, and if not Ada, then Timbuktu or Paducah, Kentucky or White Deer, Texas. Ada was the social given that I emerged from. It was the social given my family emerged from. You could not understand my father if you did not understand Ada. Anyway, Ada was the presence of Primal Community for me.

However, I began to reflect upon my emergence into humanness, for, mark you, I was not born human. When I reflected on that, my mind went very quickly to those moments of what I might call non­community. In recent years I have been passionately in rebellion against people like Spock and Geselle, those guys we started rearing our kids on. Sure, what they say is right; but it is wrong­ that to become human, to become a person, to become a self means hanging on to the right bosom of Momma until you are sixteen, or that one must be in a community where you are accepted and where things are nice. That was not the way it was or me. When I look back, it was in those unbelievable, lonely, solitary moments, that in so many cases were associated either directly or indirectly with suffering and tragedy. Can you remember, or are we all too old, the painful suffering of childhood that no one, especially adults, seems to? It is in these moments all by yourself. Maybe from the outside, from the perspective of some grownup person, they may seem like mosquito bites, but from the inside I remember those moments of sheer solitude. I used to get up before anybody else and sit on my back porch (stoop, we called it), and look out past the woodshed and watch the sunflowers wake up in the morning as the sun was emerging over the horizon (all by myself). Oh what moments!

I think of Grass Run, that was a little creek ("crik" , we called it), a half mile or so south of Ada. It was about four feet wide and, at its best, three feet deep where we did our swimming. I used to go there a'1 alone. I can't quite remember what I was doing, but I was all alone. Do you understand my recollection of these moments of solitude? The sheer cut­offness from my mother or from any other comforting givenness? I remember Walnut Grove. I used to go by myself with a burlap bag in the fall after the first frost and pick black walnuts. I would take a board that had a knothole in it and shell them right there. You put that walnut on there and take a rock and hit it and, oh, boy, you'd come home with stained hands. And for six weeks or two months you could not get the stain off. Then your mother always pretended that she was a bit upset with you. Those were moments of solitude. They were the moments when the primordia1 awakenment took place. I'll not rehearse the sufferings that are associated, and I do not mean that these were simply painful moments at all, but they were lonely moments. I began to waken like the sunflowers themselves. Mark you, it was far too many years later that I was awakened in the profound way that enabled me to grasp even what was going on at that moment.

The next arena that I have given so much thought to that it almost turns my mouth dry, is education. I am in rebellion with the youth of the world against the educational structures. When did I get an education? I remember Mrs. Solomon who spanked me in the second grade when I wet my pants. I remember Mr. Black­­ but, I am talking about education. I think that when I "came to" in this arena I was sitting in a class in geometry in high school. It's interesting it was geometry. For now I think that what I would call living eptitude, eptitude for living, or functional eptitude, which is what I think education is; if it is not that, it is not education. That began to happen in the arena of methodology. But oh, now too many years later did this grasp of education deliver me to be my own man.

My mind went to the word vocation. I am almost ready to go back to the Anglo­Saxon word "work". At one time it was a clean word, but we Protestants came along with our work ethic and then it got awfully dirty, didn't it? "Work". Oh my, how I like physical work. I have often made a distinction between the smell of the sweat that I have got now, which is just out of nervous anxiety, which is horrible, and the kind of fine smell when you are out in physical labor. You remember how that smells? Or' it's like in a game of basketball. In the midst of the game that smells great. Later, it smells terrible. That describes work for you. And yet, that is almost analogical to what I really am trying to fool with. I mean the kind of work where you get that ball of creativity which is you into history­ That work. Where did this happen?

This morning I was talking to some of my younger colleagues who are Roman Catholic, and I wondered if they had ever just considered being Priests. Now you have to go back a few years or all of this just sounds terrible. But it is like the disjunction between that kind of a vocation and all others. If you even considered it. you were forced to think vocationally in a profound way that sometimes we avoid. It's like the young people in the 1960's. I am not sure I like them in the 1970's, but in the 1960's they irritated me. But, troy, I respected them; and I respect them more, even at this distance. They were not about to go into medicine, law, the clergy, teaching, like their papas and grandpas before them had. Even though they could not put it into words, they were experiencing the claim of a deeper participation in the historical process than perhaps their fathers did.

I am trying to get my mind around when the whole area of vocation dawned on me. I am not against being a cowboy, when you are young, ­ I have never completely gotten over it, and I would not want you to take those memories from me. I have a hard time here, but, I think the hard time was that, like most everybody in this room, I was before my time. It even seems to me that it has only been in the last four or five years, when I could begin to talk about something like paravocation or primordial vocation, that a cloud has been lifted from my life.

One more arena that I have to think about if I am to talk with any kind of integrity about how I emerged into humanness, is "spiritual" prowess. This is the hardest of all for me to talk about because what I am talking about has got nothing to do with religion. Yet I have been programmed in such a way that all I hear when I hear myself talk about it is the religious dimension of life. I do not like the word secular because, in an inverted way, it does the same thing I am trying to avoid here. It is something as everyday as my cleaning my rug, or my being bathed in the socio­cultural milieu that the term Ada means for me. Or, it is just as much a part of the same fabric of humanness as that state that you are educated; not when you know information or facts, but when you have the methods that enable you to aptly and eptly deal with life as life rushes at you. The arena I am trying to talk about has to do with spiritual prowess. But I am trying to find another word than "spiritual."

You know the word I have almost decided on? "Netherly" ­­ Netherly prowess. On this last trip I just stopped in the Netherlands to change planes at the Amsterdam airport. It was a fine stop, for it dawned on me that the name of that country was the Land of Nether, or Nether­Land, the Deep Land. And the word "nether" means profound, deep, down underneath. The Netherworld excites me, for this is the realm of depth consciousness that I am talking about. It is like you are not fully human until you know, not somebody told you ­ you know ­ that there is another world precisely in the midst of this world. How was it we put it? The Lard of Mystery! There is a Land of Mystery right in the midst of this world. There is a River of Consciousness right in the midst of this world. There is a Mountain of Concern right in the midst of this world. There is a Sea of Tranquillity. Or maybe you like what my friend Paul says. There is finally only three things in life and these have to do with the Netherworld. These three things are faith and hope and love.

I am trying to say that when you take the artichoke of consciousness and peel it down to the core, or take life as an artichoke down to the core, right in the midst is this Netherworld, the world of the transrational­ the Other World in the midst of this world. No one has emerged, finally, into humanness, who does not have some understanding or the highways and byways of the realm of profound consciousness. Standing where I am, looking back, I knew about that land long, long, long before I knew about that land. Sometimes I get angry at Ada. That Ada was not capable, when I was sixteen or fourteen or ten or six to communicate something about that realm of consciousness. It is like I walked in that realm and did not know I was in it. Can you understand my passion and Just a little bit of irritation?

I used to teach at Colgate University. In my tire they were still talking about the "well­rounded" man. Well, recently I have seen they were right, but they were wrong in what they conceived it to be. I would sort of like to go back and teach in a time when they were concerned with the fullness of humanness. Wouldn't you like to go teach in a place like that? For now it is very clear to me that looking at myself and my fellow man through the screen of historica1 humanness, that there are but five things that are important. One is Prima1 Community, One is depth Awareness, one is Functional Eptitude, one is Historical Engagement and one is Netherly Prowess, and that is all. And sometimes I think the greatest is Primal Community and sometimes I think the greatest is Self Awareness and sometimes I think the greatest of all five is Functional Eptitude, and other times I really believe that the greatest of all is Historical Engagement, and then I have to admit that there are times when I think the greatest of the five is Netherly Prowess.

Now you wonder what they sent me out here to talk about. Actually, my assignment was to try to say what the Intra­Global Movement was about in this time in history. Need I say anymore? How is it that you build a New Social Vehicle, Primal Community? Depth Awakenment? What does it mean to be really human? I say Primal Community and Depth Awareness and functional Eptitude. What does it mean to be Those who Care? I mean CARE If you like it in other language, what does it mean to be the People of God? It is to be concerned for every man about Primal Community, about Profound Awakenment, about Living Eptitude, about Historical Engagement. Now what is it that a perpetual revolutionary movement must be about, minus nothing and plus nothing? It is to catalyze the building of Primal Community. It is to find the ways and means to provide the Last Fat Lady the opportunity toward depth awareness. It is to find the ways and means for people to experience the kind of methodological education that enables them to eptly deal with their unrepeatable life. Obviously, it is to provide the opportunity for all men to get their unique unrepeatable ball of creativity into history, to engage themselves, not simply in doing this task or that task, but in the great assignment of mankind to build history. And then it is to find the instruments that would give everyone an opportunity to know of the topography of that Other World ­ in the midst of this world. To know that when Plato and the philosophers talked about happiness, they were not talking about giddy psychological stuff. They were talking about the profundity of engagement. To give people an opportunity to experience life in the deeps of consciousness. Well, this is how I understand what we call the Primal Community Experiment. This is the way I understand what we mean by Global Community Forum.... providing the opportunity for awakenment. This is what I understand our Academy and our training courses to be about. This is what I understand our Social Demonstrations to be about. ..providing the opportunity for whosoever to participate in the shaping of history itself. This is what I understand our Odysseys, our spiritual stews to be all about ..providing the possibility and the means whereby from early days to the dawn of life itself, we can enjoy the profound depth of being alive.

This is what the Intra­Global Movement is now about. You may be hazy about any particular practical objective. Yet, in terms of the large vision with which we walk into the future, we are clear where our serving role is. When you return in your other life in a thousand years you will find this body or another body marching in its tracks like this body marcher in the tracks of those who have passed from the dawn of time itself, concerned with Primal Community, with Depth Awareness, with Functional Eptitude, with Historical Engagement, with Netherly Prowess.

In our time here together this summer, this is what we ate about. The body itself is serving the function of Primal Community. The Town Meetings you will deal with are awakenment. The methods that you are going to carve out together, the tactical systems you build are providing you with the eptitude which will enable you to do your own march; the Social Demonstrations are the concern with Historical Engagement.

In these two weeks together, we are going to have the unbelievable opportunity that I felt I was denied as a young one to look into the spiritual realm of Faith, Hope and Love.

­­­­­­Joseph W. Mathews