Global Research Assembly

Chicago
June 1979

Tonight we are going to continue our dialogue on the category of the Way. Every summer we have done two things in research. We have done research based on our practical experience that resulted in the development of more effective methodologies for releasing human creativity. Second, we probed the deeps of human consciousness in order to discover methodologies to release the profound motivity required to build the earth. You can chart our journey as a whole group through the summers by looking at those categories.

This summer we are probing a new category called "the Way" It is significant to me that "the Way" shows up as a poetic image in all the established religions of the world. To probe this arena is a key to our future capacity to develop simple, effective spirit tools that can be used by local people everywhere, of any religion.

I find it necessary first to relate this arena to the moral issue of our time and our direct engagement in the campaigns of awakenment and engagement. The moral issue, or the gap between the 85% of the world's humanity who lack access to the world's wisdom, resources and services and the 15% of the world's humanity who do have access to those services, this issue is what has raised the question of style for our century. Everywhere you go, whether the village, the city, the corporation or the school, the question of style ­­ of authenticity, of what life is all about and what it means to participate in it ­­ is present for every person. It is in dealing with the moral issue that a new style will come into being. We are not attempting to suddenly transform the dispossessed 85% into the 15%; nor are we out to change the 15% into the 85%; for it is out of the dialogue and tension between the two that a new style of being human will emerge. I believe that style will be the style of service.

Our talks, discussions and writings on the Way are concerned with recovering the style of profound service to the globe which is rooted in the local, and which demonstrates that care is acted out in primal community. This, of course, is what we have intended in our awakenment and engagement efforts.

In the most recent Maliwada Training School, nine village women participated. The faculty decided that one of the keystones of the School was to ensure that those women came to be seen as the greatest human beings that had ever lived. We created the tactics to enable this, we implemented them, and it happened! On opening night the women sat huddled together in one row near the back of the room, their heads down. Every time a different dish of food was to be served they jumped up to help, assuming that they were supposed to serve it. By the end of the School they thought nothing of standing before the whole group to lead art form conversations, team leadership sessions and workshops. And they did as well or better than anybody else! When I experienced that I realized that, I don't intend to have anything less than that happen to any human being who participates in any of our programs. That's how you get hooked ­­ in encountering the Way.

Tonight I will talk about the Finality of the Way. The Way is very difficult to describe because it is formless. It doesn't fit in boxes of rationality, no matter how you try. It's not something you can put in your pocket and reach for at the right moment. It is just there. You run into it in the midst of your life. It is there for every person and every person knows or can know, participates or can participate in the Way.

I want to share some phrases that I believe point to what the Finality of the Way is. The Finality of the Way is like floating down a river in a raft and being swept downstream by a strong current. The Finality of the Way is like driving down a road and waking up facing a truck with seconds to maneuver from its path. The Finality of The Way is like being the judge, jury, and witness at your own trial, and having to decide your own sentence.

The first thing you notice when you experience the Way as the Other is that the Way always wins! You do not win except as you participate in the win of the Way. In October in West Bengal, rain began one day and continued for four days. We were flooded, the city was flooded, villages throughout the state were flooded, thousands of people were drowned, a million homes were lost. We were trapped in our one­room office. The rising waters reached the top of the steps when I decided to go out to buy some cigarettes; consequently I had to swim to the cigarette stand. I will never swim the streets of Calcutta again! Then we ran out of food because transportation of food from the villages was impossible. We also ran out of kerosene for the stove, but that was no issue, for we had nothing to cook anyway. The current was off ( which is a normal occurrence anyway.) There was nothing for us to do. Here we were, sitting in one of the cities of the world which is marked by more suffering than I ever imagined possible, and I was sitting at its heart, and could do nothing! In the midst of that experience we decided that to be human in that situation was to participate in the win. We wrote a song to the tune of Blue Skies.

Later that week our development team came to the city after having been waylaid for four days because of the flood conditions. We spent a very poor week with them trying to make development contacts. Everybody, it seemed, was being visited and being asked to give money for the flood victims. No one was interested in Human Development Projects or Town Meetings. This was not our model; our plan did not call for this situation. And yet this was our situation. In the midst of it, I experienced a strange kind of wholeness. It was the wholeness of having been in and through a situation in which I had always told myself I could never live in; and yet I lived through it! That is wholeness. When the harshness and pain of life no longer is enemy, but is friend, is companion, that is an experience of the wholeness of life. To participate in the Way is to participate in the unconditional. The Way does not change; it does not alter. It is the way it is. The only question which gets raised is," Will you participate in the way it is in this situation ?"

For the last three years we have been engaged in doing Town Meetings, Human Development Projects, LENS seminars, Youth Forums, and Women's Forums across the globe. We have made development calls day in and day out; we have traveled here and there. In the midst of that kind of activity, the Way sneaks up on you. As we were preparing for this Research Assembly someone said, "I don't know what happened to us this year, but whatever it was, we didn't happen it to us. Something else got us!" We are now in the midst of discovering that something else has got us.

It reminds me of the old style horror movies about the mad doctor who lived in a castle high on a hill. He liked to do experiments on what being human was. He spent his nights out looking for nobodies to kidnap. Then he would conduct his experiments on them. He grabbed his victims, brought them to the castle and got them engaged ­­ mowing the lawn, doing carpentry, moving cement, digging toilets. While all this was happening, the victims were having a great time. Fulfillment was around them everywhere. What they didn't know was that the food they were being fed contained a substance that changes people. One day they looked into a mirror, and saw what had been done to them ­­ they had been unrecognizably changed. This is what happened to us this year. Something got done to us. Another phrase to describe it might be "the trap of fulfillment". It is the fulfilled life, and only the fulfilled life, that traps you into seeing that you are claimed by the Other; you are claimed, not partially, but entirely, by the perpetual Other, by the endless Other. You have been chosen.

I realized this year that I was being used. I experienced that something was using me, and was not doing what I wanted it to do with me. That is the claim of the Other, the perpetual, endless care that is the Way. That is the impartial care that is the Way. I experienced a crisis in my style which raised for me the question, "'How do I live as a transformed person who no longer has to have anything to be happy, but whose happiness has already been provided?" We are all up against that crisis in style, I believe, for we have been transformed as human beings and as a corporate body. When you realize you have been transformed, you want to wreak havoc, create chaos, like the characters in the horror movie did. Your propensity toward defiance is intensified 300% as you struggle to escape this situation, and prove that change has not really occurred. Or, you want to relax, sit back and be an armchair general, holding onto your old position and cherished ideas. You believe that unless you can find a situation in which you experience honor, you can never give yourself to being used by this Other­than­you.

I had another birthday this year. With great delight, on this occasion, my wife called my attention to the fact that I have some gray hair coming in. I quickly responded that I thought that was fine, because by now I deserve gray hair. Nevertheless, that gray hair was an assault on me, for it announced to me that the prime of my life has already been used up. And in doing so it raised for me the question of the rest of my life: is it going to be used up in this action of care? I am no longer naive about the cost of laying down my life. I realize this is nothing special. Every single human being lays down his or her life. That is not an option. The scandal is that one must decide right now to lay down the rest of one's life, and must choose that. The perpetual, the Way, has already chosen me and now I must choose the Way.

But to choose the way is to not to choose some other way. In one sense that's a relief ­­ to know you can decide now for once and for all. It allows you to bracket all other issues. Coming of age is deciding now, for the rest of your life, what you are going to do. I experience doubt because I discover that my life has already been laid down, and I am tempted to look for something to help me pick myself back up. An old sea story tells of sailors on a long journey who saw a mermaid swimming by, and leapt overboard. When they hit the water they realized they were chasing a phantom. If you want to get out of this life of care you'll soon discover what the sailors did: there's no way out. Your only option is participation, participation, participation in the Way. Now I am speaking of submission to the way it is. This is submission to your chosenness, submission to being used by the corporate, submission to being used by history, submission to being used by every concrete situation that eats you up with details, mud, people, issues and problems. Submission is participation in the Way. It is answering for the creativity of all.

When we arrive at the gates where our eternal destiny will be decided the question will not be about us, but rather, about the lepers of the earth and our relationship to them: "Did you surrender to the plight of the dispossessed in the time you lived your life? Were you willing to bear the burden of the masses of humanity as you lived out your live?"

When you leave here for a new assignment, as I did last year for my assignment to Calcutta, you love mankind, you love history, you love everything. Then after 375 dishes of dahl and rice, you have to make a new decision about that. Participation in the Way is eating your dahl and rice, or your bread and butter, if that's what you have been given.

Living is risking. It is a risk to decide what you are going to do with the rest of your life. It scares me as much as it scares you. But it is still the way it is, and it requires being detached from the fruit of our action and from our securities. It requires living like the character Dirty Harry, the policeman who was driven to do only one task with his life: be a great policeman. In one scene Harry has been up all night. He's hungry and tired. He goes into a hot dog stand, orders a coke and hot dog, and as he sinks his teeth in for his first bite, he looks out the window and spots three men about to rob a bank. You can appreciate how he feels, "Couldn't you guys have waited ten minutes before you had to rob this bank." But he casually walks into the street, munching his hot dog, surveys the situation, removes the distributor cap from the getaway car, unbuttons his jacket, leans back and waits ­­ still eating his hot dog. He waits for all three of the robbers to emerge from the bank, shoots all three, and then finishes his hot dog.

To be a person who not only participates in the Way, but enables others to participate in the Way, requires demonstrating that it is possible to be detached in the midst of your living. It is possible to be detached from your values for the sake of getting things done. We used to say that perhaps a thousand of us ought to cut off our left ear as a sign that there are those who care, who are detached, in this world. Perhaps that symbol these days is putting on blue as a symbol of total service. Those on the Way have only one cause which is the cause of the Way. One on the Way is contradiction­oriented, for the sake of breaking loose the future. One on the Way employs tactical action, for he understands that it is in the course of millions of details that people are enabled to live the Way in any situation.

The third campaign is a demonstration of what authentic care is, and how it is possible to be the cost of your care, and live out your care in your village, community or job wherever you are. It is a demonstration of that possibility . It is a demonstration of the fact that the life of service is a glorious life, a fulfilling life.

I learned this year that Ghandi was assassinated the day I was born. I don't think my birthday will ever be the same again, for now I know why every person has been born. Every life born is the effort of Being to have love happen in this world. It is the effort of Being to have service, concrete service happen in this world. This is an awesome claim. Those who have gone before us have been signs of what is possible in living the life of service.