Global Research Assembly
Chicago
July, 1977
WHAT HATH BEEN WROUGHT?
My beloved colleagues, all and each, though I've
not been temporally ordained to do so, wax bold to bring you greetings
from the globe-at-large and from all of history. Forthrightly,
I intend to be a bit tedious relative to time, and I intend to
display a touch of kitchensinkness, but I do not intend
in any way whatsoever to be practical. I must begin by confessing,
that a year ago, before this Assembly, I misstated the truth,
unintentionally. It was not the truth when I said that the greatest
year of my life was my 65th year. The truth of the matter is,
the greatest year of life is my 66th year.
You can't keep things quiet in the Assembly; most of you know
that for some five days of the Assembly, I was in the hospital
and there wasn't anything really wrong. They found certain things
that disturbed them about my kidneys, my back, my heart and my
lungs. They summed it up as normal deterioration along with age.
I, too, feel like a young man with something gone wrong. But I
have not told you the good news. They must have taken my blood
pressure twenty times. I began to get curious, not to say a bit
frightened. So I asked them about my blood pressure. They said,
"Every day it shows up normal."
Then my mind went back to this past year, I have never lived through
such a hectic time in my whole life. I have been humiliated more
deeply this year than ever before. And I am an old pro at being
humiliated. There were times on an airplane when I thought, literally,
that I would get up and start screaming, but I didn't. Time and
again I considered just getting myself lost in Bombay, never to
be seen again. I experience my insides as just ground to pieces
or as if they were an atom bomb just about ready to blow me and
everything around me into kingdom come. But my blood pressure
was normal!
I asked them what blood pressure meant. They said, "Well,
first of all, it determines whether enough of the waste matter
has been eliminated. Secondly, it tells whether, at the moment,
enough blood is being forced through the body to maintain the
mind and physique. But, most of all, it checks on your state of
anxiety, or the effects of strain." And I was normal. I read
into that what I'm not sure they would have read. I confess to
you that in the midst of the agony of this last year, my total
life has been one of effulgence. My life has been one of fulfillment.
That is not because of anything I've done, because fulfillment
is a state of being over which you finally have no control. And
mark you, I have been under strain, what in the world have you
been under. Not once during this year have I even come within
several miles of a live bullet. I have not been in a fox hole.
I can tell you from experience that being back at the command
post in a war has a certain calm about it that even visiting the
front lines does not have. As I sat here this morning I was tremendously
and overwhelmingly impressed. I thought, if they took our corporate
blood pressure, much to our humiliation and embarrassment, it
would be normal!
Two years ago at this time, I warned you that if you didn't take
care of yourself you were not going to make it, because the group
could not, for the next 18 months, take care of you. I warned
you that it would not be the young ones who would pick up their
two suitcases and go because they wouldn't believe that you have
to take care of yourself. It would be the old ones. That has happened.
Now, I believe that along about next March, a kind of corporateness
will be at hand such as you and I have never dreamed possible.
And we're old hands at the experience of corporateness. Another
time I'd like to describe what I think that will look like. This
morning as I listened, I saw extremely visible signs of that kind
of corporateness emerging, but I warn you, you are going to have
a few more months without the group's care.
I want to remind you why it is necessary to take good care of
yourselves. You and I understood that, two years ago when we started
out to literally move the universe, we would have no time to take
care of ourselves. I was very pleased with the training report
today, as long as somebody doesn't think it should start tomorrow.
We do not have time to train ourselves. Whether you know it or
not, you are on what Sun Tzu called "death ground."
You've been there for two solid years. When you are on "death
ground", you have no time to train anyone to use a rifle.
You just hope he shoots out of the right end, that's all. That
will still be true this year. You don't think for a moment we
could have possibly done 24 Social Demonstrations, 1500 Town Meetings
in 23 countries if you cared about whether Rodney or I or somebody
else got proper training or got proper care. No! There comes a
time when you are on "death ground", when you just have
to move, and not care who it is that takes the hindsight.
Secondly, two years ago when we probed into the deeps of profound
consciousness we found that there was no way to be of assistance
to each other, that finally, every individual is all alone before
the Final Reality. Husbands, wives, children, colleagues and friends
are of no assistance.
We have to learn for ourselves, as unrepeatable individuals, to
walk in the Way; to live in the Other World in the presence of
this world. That can only be done in total and absolute solitude.
In anything else we can assist each other. But in the profound
deeps of consciousness we walk alone. It is a quality of consciousness
itself. In the last two years, if you have not learned to walk
alone, you either built an illusion around yourself like never
before in all your life, or you got your two suitcases and got
off the front lines.
Sometimes I hear people talk as if we should have had the practical
wisdom we have today five years ago. Well, nobody else in the
world had it five years ago. There are few who have that kind
of practical wisdom today. You get that kind of wisdom only through
raw experience. I am trying to say God knew when to send the "death
ground". And, by golly, you either learned or you didn't
survive. The kind of knowhow that went into your reconstructing
the weaponry of our task this summer did not come out of textbooks.
Experts were of little use. It was learned in the raw experience
of hell, in Kwanyung Il, Kawangare, Maliwada, Majuro and Oombulgurri!
It could have been learned no place else. In that kind of learning,
the kind of established structure, whether it be a group like
ourselves, or the educational or scientific institutions of the
globe, is quite secondary.
The last reason why you have to take care of yourself we'll be
able to explain better a year from now. You see, what we never
intended to stumble onto, we stumbled onto. That is the awareness
that is humanness universal. If you think that is not a profound
statement, you did not even hear me. I mean, we stumbled onto
the fact that the most profound bigotries in our existence were
capable of having a fist stuck through them. The most profound
bigotry in me, as I have admitted to you, is the religious poetry
I grew up in. It is with a kind of sense of pride that I can say
that I do not experience myself as an American these days. I experience
myself as a human being. I do not experience myself, I tell you
true, as a white man. I experience myself as a human being. Maybe
you women will not even want me to say this: I do not experience
myself first of all as a man but I experience myself as a human
being.
Now, moving into that depth beyond all depths of life, is a kind
of wrenching of the spirit that goes beyond any communal association.
For what it requires is that you tear yourself asunder, not from
the external, communal relationships you have, but from those
relationships which are buried, rooted firmly in the deeps of
your psyche. We have been alone in our togetherness and we have
had no other course.
A few months ago, when I first began to see that the life force
was coming, I tried to draw together the statement of what it
was that we have wrought, and then, quickly, I changed that into
the statement of what has God wrought in us. Or, what have the
powers that are beyond our activities and efforts made of us.
I listed these. First, He has made of us a global service network.
Secondly, He has made of us a global corporate style. Third, He
has made of us a worldwide credibility net. We have far to go
but this has been done. Fourth, it has made of us a worldwide
development system. Again, we have far to go. Fifthly, He has
made of us a worldwide support force. I mean by that, and I want
the word "US" to be very large, it includes patrons
that would never be guardians. This includes the guardians who
would never live the kind of life you live or I live. And it includes
the local men and women in the villages of the world who would
never find themselves in the blue, but who care. This is the support
net. Mark you, if all the patrons put the blue on, then we embarrassedly
would have to go out and constitute another patronage. Do you
understand that? Sixth, we are a comprehensive philosophical ground
and I want to start talking in a minute from that beginning. And
lastly, we are a comprehensive methodological schemata.
Now, the question that lies ahead is, what in the world are we
going to do with this? That is the issue! Any sense of virtue
we may have at arriving at this hour turns into nothingness as
we face the horrendous decision of, now what are we going to do
with this? In another way, what I am talking about this morning
has to do with precisely that. The dynamics are something like
this. To win this next year means sticking your fist through the
dynamics of the three campaigns. Guess where your fist will come
out. In the midst of knowing, doing and being, exactly where we
began. This is what I mean when I say that, when all is said and
done, I am not a practical man in terms of popular and common
definitions of Practicality. I could care less about glazed, heat-resisting,
lightweight, lowpriced roofs. I could care less about an
effective design of global economy. I care not about tripling
total village income in two years. What I am concerned about is
profound humanness. I am interested in any company and its product
only to the degree that it finally ministers unto the possibility
of the poorest of the poor of this world experiencing themselves
profoundly as human beings. This is true whether it be ferryboats
in Majuro, comprehensive cooperatives or any other practical things.
Now we have gotten around to the practical. But, to be honest
with you, I am not impressed with your excitement about the practical.
This September we will have been in existence for 25 years. The
greatest thing we ever did was not to allow ourselves to become
publicly known. Never to publicize ourselves in any way, but to
try to focus our attention on what we accomplished. Twentyfive
years ago, we looked very carefully at the historical renewal
forces in Europe that came after World War II, and every one of
them was practically oriented. They were moving into the practicalsocial,
the practical-economic, the practical-cultural issues head-on.
There is scarcely one renewal force still alive today.
At that time we made a decision that was far more significant
than we had the intellectual capacity to understand. That was,
that we first had to ground ourselves in the profound deeps of
humanness. We used other language in those days, but that is what
we meant. Only when we had broken through into the dimension of
what it means to be the full and the fulfilled human being were
we ready to deal with what books call the practical.
That was a long journey. The symbol of that journey that covered
years is in this little triangle. We believe that, whatever your
culture, whatever your cultural conditioning, that when you are
able to see what this is pointing to, you say, "Yes".
That's what it means to be human. It has to do with knowing and
doing and being. It has to do with profound awareness, with historical
engagement and fulfilled humanness, attuned to what is the Mystery.
The awareness, and finally, the heart of consciousness is there
to seize upon and to understand. Than you can talk about it any
way you want, or use any kind of poetry to ground it existentially
in your existence, or in history's being. But it is, first of
all, an acknowledgment of that reality that begins the journey
of what it means to be a human being and nothing else.
The second thing that we discovered was that one did not really
know, save he "doed". Which is a way of understanding
that there is a dynamic in consciousness, or profound humanness,
that was beyond what we usually isolate as awareness of knowing.
It had to do wish activity, historical activity, not busy-ness,
with shaping, forming, forging, bending history itself. Where
you, grasp yourself in the service of no other Lord; no other
Sovereign, save the Mystery itself, before which the arena of
action could be nothing less than the whole world and the length
of history itself. The acknowledgment of the Mystery and serving
of the Mystery are but two sides of the same coin.
The third thing we discovered was not a third dynamic, but was
the fact that once you intensify awareness and once you intensify
engagement, there comes a sense of plethora. The fulfillment of
full humanness which though it does not exist in itself as a third
element, becomes a reality in the intensification of the first
two poles. This I call re-presenting; re-presenting the Mystery.
Now another way to talk about these three dynamics is faith, and
love, and hope.
Last week, in New York, I had lunch with the Chairman of the Council
of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in India, Archbishop Fernandez.
He told me a great story. Some people in his church who had been
proselytizing and educating for years decided that now they'd
go help the local people. They decided that they would do that
by enabling then to intensify and expand their agriculture. So
they went to the Ministry of the government for authorization.
The Minister was a Hindu. He said, "Gentlemen, we would be
very delighted for you to work with the local people, but from
our perspective they need one thing, that is just a little bit
of hope. If and when you bring that, you will find that all the
practical things that you are concerned about will take shape."
That's what I mean by presence.
I have been brutal on you who have been in the front lines of
these projects. I have been brutal when I did not see visible
change, economic progress, or new housing and intensification
of farming. I say to you now that that is your great power and
your great strength. That is the secret of it all; your presence
there. What is presence? It is sharing the presence of Mystery
itself which is the hope beyond all hope and itself remaining
a mystery. Now, can you understand that the definition of those
who care, I mean those who care in this room is found in
this bit of symbolism, this triangle. We spend years of our life
while people told us were doing nothing, forcing through to the
bottom. What we are finally about, whether we are doing Town Meeting,
Social Demonstration or anything else, is nothing more and nothing
less than giving the privileged opportunity of experiencing what
it means to be a genuine human being to the last man and woman
on this earth in our life time.
What is the job of those who care? We already know in Chardin's
language that it is to go out and reconstruct the times in which
we live in order that the possibility of humanness may be there.
What is the content of this? Where is it that we see to it that
that which every man knows, that all the earth belongs to all
the people, finds a new social container which is a kind of abstract
idealism. Any such understanding is always within a temporal container
which denies forever anything that people win by perfection or
completion. History is, in one sense, an endless process of rebuilding
the earth. But if "all the earth belongs to all", that
means all the fruits of nature, however they are distributed,
finally belong to every man. Then it is important. The decision-making
process, the opportunity to participate in deciding not only one's
own destiny, but the destiny of history itself, belongs to every
man. Up to this moment in history, I believe that less than 5%
of the people who have ever lived have directly and authentically
participated in determining the course of history. What an hour!
And then all the gifts of humanness...
We throw around the 15% and the 85% figures so much I feel we
may get callused. Nor are we aware that most people would not
have the slightest idea what we mean when we say 85 and 15. To
say it again: the 15% of us who have all the education, we have
all the health, we possess the resources and the means of "the
good life." I'm saying on your behalf, and on behalf of all
who care, all who have experienced profound humanness, that what
we nave also belongs to that 85% of havenots. We care not,
in our lifetime, that history is wrapped up. That's not our job.
Our job is to stand and to stand tall, rebuilding the earth, keeping
for our moment in history a move toward the realization of the
common human awareness that all the earth belongs to all.
Now we come to how we do that. First of all are the large ontological
maneuvers, that's the maneuvers of the void to use the terms of
one Japanese man of long ago. Secondly come the historical maneuvers.
The historical maneuvers are within the circles of our global
campaigns. How many years did it take us to finally come up with
this? My mind gets foggy with time, for instead of 25 years, it
seems like you and I have been at it for several centuries. As
a matter of fact, what I am doing this morning is attempting to
interpret who we are under the rubric of space, as over against
the rubric of time. When interior space has been exploded, it's
only filled up with the concretizing of love or concern. When
you're dealing with temporality or time, the sudden interior explosion
is only filled up with acknowledgment or faith which confines
time in such a way that you can get your being around it.
My point here is, that it's not enough to know that all the earth
belongs to all. One has to be able to decide, in the historical
scope, however modestly, precisely how. That can become a possibility
in your lifetime. Thus, the campaign of awakenment of all men.
The specific form of this, right now, is Town Meeting. Second
is the task of engaging every person in the world. Providing the
possibility of engagement to every man in the world is the meaning
of Social Demonstration.
I want to talk a little bit about Town Meeting. You know that
sometimes I've been amused at Town Meeting. My amusement has to
do with the things we've learned in the midst of that campaign.
We've chickened out about the idea of doing ten thousand. So we
dropped it to five thousand. It'll get funnier in a minute. Then
we made the mistake of holding the five thousand up in front of
us, which paralyzed all of us. Rather than becoming great generals
and breaking that down, and breaking ourselves down into groups
so that at any moment we would only have one Town Meeting to do.
That's the only way you win. You put up figures like 10,000 and
5,000 and try to get your spirits up enough, and to get something
big enough to give your life to. Then when you mean to do it,
you absolutely invert that and get it down to the smallest requirement
with the troops you have. Now, that's funny, too. But we've learned
it, haven't we? Well, you see, the 10,000 and the 5,000 was a
joke in itself. We joked ourselves. Why, 5,000 and 10,000 had
nothing to do with our mission. Do you know how many possible
rural villages there are in this world? Two million, they say.
We would have died if we put two million up. But that is what
Town Meeting is all about.
Now there is one other little amusing thing. You have to always
say that one of these days we are going to turn our methods over
to somebody else. Then you say, "Goodie, goodie", because
the strain of doing them is something. Now, granted we must be
willing to have anybody, at any time, take our methods and use
them. But you don't go out and try to create people to take over
your methodology. If you hand them over to the educational system
in the United States of America, which is shot through with the
decadence of "Deweyism", you have destroyed not
only the future possibility of Town Meeting, you have destroyed
every ounce of blood you have already put into it. The only thing
we should be worrying about is how to get Town Meeting to the
two million rural villages of the world. Why? Because it is THE
crucial instrument of awakenment in our time.
In recent days I have begun to talk to myself about the "magnificent
seven" revolutions that are happening all at once at this
moment in history. There has never been anything like it before.
One is the revolution of the third world. What a revolution! We
have noble firsthand members of that revolution in our midst
today. We have some secondhand members, and I am one, who
symbolize the fantastic dimension of the revolution of the third
world.
The second of the "magnificent seven" is much harder
to explain. It is the part of the technological revolution that
has to do with people. It has to do with the thrust toward globalization
of humanity. It is nothing more or nothing less than the so-called
international communities of the world, The heart of this is the
national and multinational corporations which, are doing
the revolution. No matter what your abstract liberal friends may
have to say about such corporations, they are revolutionizing
the world. And if you live long enough, you are going to see that,
in spite of your abstract criticism, that is the way history is.
The next, and this may be first of the "magnificent seven",
is the feminine revolution. I want to witness to this body that
I will continue to say that over the years I have not been one
who has appreciated the rise of women in history. In this last
year when I saw that 300,000,000 of the women of the world are
a part of the poorest of the poor and spend their total life in
a way that is worse than that in which a dog or a donkey lives,
I have become a full convert to the women's revolution. Maybe
in the long run, that will be the most important one that has
happened in our time in history. If you have any questions about
whether we should make every effort to reach the last of these
300,000,000 through women's courses and through the Social Demonstrations,
don't let me hear it. Tell somebody to come and tell me. That's
because I want to get to heaven and be angry as few times as possible.
The next of the "magnificent seven" is the minorities
revolution. It is the black man of America who enabled other minorities
in this country and the rest of the western world, to rise up
and demand of us nothing less than an equal opportunity to make
of their lives what you and I have the opportunity to make of
our lives. The next revolution is the youth revolution. It's calmed
down now, but don't you ever think that it will ever be the same
again to be a youth. Don't you think that it will ever be the
same to be a parent. Women who suckle their existence from their
children are going to find their lives changed. And we hemen
who have taken such great pride in being the proper father while
we saw all the mistakes of our brothers, our hour is also gone.
The youth course is going to be important.
The last revolution of this type is the educational revolution.
I don't think we've seen the profundity of that. One thing I'm
clear about, even though right now the universities in our country
are experiencing a kind of resuscitation in terms of their ancient
image, somebody else is going to see to it that the whole approach
to education around this world is changed. I think it is going
to be the college students in the third world who are going to
carry the revolution and require a totally new understanding of
what it means to be an educated person.
Now, I've been saying all this only to get to Town Meeting. Profound
as these revolutions are, THE profound revolution in our time
is the rise of local man. Though it is still the morning star
on the far horizon, save for those who have eyes to see, local
man is on the move. He is going to radically, profoundly alter
history in terms of any image that anybody up to this moment in
history has ever conceived.
I am going to recommend to the Area Priors that we turn on all
of the impactment current we can with LENS, with the women's course,
with the youth course and with a way to get back to the university
with more emphasis on the third world. But anybody who does not
see that Town Meeting is the core of all impactment has not been
doing very profound thinking in the last couple of years. Town
Meeting is the key. There are two million such communities in
the rural area alone.
Social Demonstration, which has to do with engagement, is held
with the 24. In one way, compared with the whole historical task
we have, they are but comedies. I have even thought during this
year, and mark you, I have put my life blood into getting 24 of
these under way, that the only real significance they had was
to give us the credibility in the world so we could do Town Meeting.
Do you hear that? At least I know it has already done that. When
a human being is awakened, his creativity begins to flow. I mean
the creativity the he is begins to flow. In principle, that creativity
will find its own point of engagement. Now the Social Demonstration
assists that creativity in that it is a demonstration of how the
most local of the local of all local men can engage himself in
a way that will affect history itself. Therefore, for the sake
of Town Meeting, you need so many of these demonstrations. But
finally, you have to see that the task for those who are concerned
with the three campaigns is to emphasize awakenment and not engagement,
except in terms of theoretical presentation. Do you hear that?
There is no way to stand over some 2 million social demonstrations.
If we are concerned with mass awakening of the 4 billion people
in the world in our lifetime, then we understand the vocation
of profound consciousness.
Even to suggest that any of these social demonstrations has not
come off is enough to make me explode. Not because of what that
says, but because it gives evidence of not knowing what it means
to be a general. Without generals we are lost. The job has not
yet been to do these social demonstrations. The job has been to
set them up and keep them alive until all the plates were spinning.
Our colleagues, who have been in those social demonstrations have
done that, and with a sense of victory that overwhelms us. Now,
next year we have to "do" them. That is the time to
do them. Thank God that they are set up and ask for strength to
get them done next year.
Both Town Meeting around this globe and Social Demonstration has
just been set up. Town Meeting in this country had to reach 1500
or we were not talking about anything to do. In principle we have
reached that. Town Meeting is set up in this country. Now we have
to do it. It is in the same position as every Social Demonstration.
The most overwhelming thing in this whole Assembly was the 24
flags of the countries where we had community forums. We have
Global Community Forum set up. Now, let's go do it globally.
Look at those 24 consult documents. The life blood that's gone
into them is overwhelming. The human development projects are
set up. Next year, we do them. This means in one year from now
every one of those 24 projects be "doed". That means
the ones that started last month as well as the ones that have
been under way for eighteen months. We do them and we do them
all within one year. One auxiliary, who has become a symbol of
mine, says he believes they can be done in six months. I'll give
him twice the time. But, he of all characters around here, had
better have his project done when he shows up here next summer.
Now, I'm not too much interested in replication. I'm not interested
in replicating anywhere but where we are, which is India. Replication
is an experiment that has never been carried on in history before.
To think that we know the methods of rapid replication and, if
it isn't rapid, it's not replication, is to deceive ourselves.
I only want to see us replicate in places where a fortyfive
pistol is at our head. There are a couple of places here, if we
don't begin replication, we are not going to be able to do the
project we're in. That's what I mean by a forty-five at our head.
We do what we have to do in order to bring that project off so
people can see what local individuals around the world are capable
of doing themselves toward self-confidence, selfdependency
and selfsustenance. What we are doing in Latin America is
not replication. Nor is what we are doing in the United States
replication. But if we move into Kenya, that's replication. If
we move into the aboriginal people in Australia, that's replication.
If we move into the Philippines, that's replication. If we move
into South Korea, that's replication. Now, I'm not saying that
I don't think we ought to replicate this year. But I want to warn
you, we are not prepared to replicate. If you don't believe that,
ask to be assigned to India in Maharashtra State this next year.
Then come back and make this speech. I just do not know how in
the world we are going to do 250 in one year. But I believe we
are going to do 250 because there's resolve in this Assembly beyond
any measurement of blood pressure machinery.
This doing is to get ready for next year. A year from now, and
only at that time will the meaning of this pluriform yinyang
come into being. We have no intraglobal movement campaign
there yet. Now, the core of that is going to get our minds and
spirits fixed in spelling out practically the new spirit mode
of the 20th century in a global sense, plus creating a new sociological
instrument that will effectively nurture those who care around
the world. That latter is going to be the important one. You're
not going into the State of Maharashtra and awaken 232 villages
into caring if you do not find a social instrument whereby their
care can be continually nurtured. In one sense this is what we
have been looking forward to. It is not going to be easy hut we
won't even dare put our mind to it if we do not do Social Demonstration
and Town Meeting this next year.
What's the key to this doing? Four of the words are on the summer
symbol. It is going to take certain qualities in order to do these
campaigns. One quality is just caring. I mean caring about the
whole world; not about your children; not about your spouse; not
about your nation; not about your culture, but caring about humanity.
Unless that posture is honed into that, in the 19th century would
have been called a quality of character, you are not going to
stand long.
The second word up there is courage. Fundamentally, what I mean
by courage is integrity. You decide who you are and spend your
whole life being that and nothing else, no matter what the external
circumstances are. Without that kind of ontological courage you're
not going to win.
The next word is cooperation. I don't mean some superficial getting
together to make the task easier. I mean the awareness that you
and I are first of all social beings and, secondly, individual
beings. The corporateness that you exist in and that other people
wonder how you can live in, is simply the sociality that is at
the bottom of humanness itself. Without that kind of corporateness
you are going to fail in Town Meeting and Social Demonstration.
The last word is creativity. What I mean by that floats out of
all the others. It is not true that sometimes I'm creative and
sometimes I'm not, or that some of us are creative and the rest
of us are not. Man is his creativity. I repeat what used to be
in old lectures. Some people think I'm just fat. That's not true.
That happens to be where the creativity that I am is located.
Without guts enough to allow that creativity, wherever you store
it, to be released, there is no doing. That is another way of
saying that there is no place you can telephone that will tell
you how to go about doing your village. They never install telephones
in heaven. That's why I want to go there.
Down underneath these qualities are decisions. This is the profound
resolve that's behind the concept of winning. If you do not decide
all over again you have only one life to live, you are not going
to win. Oh, how long do you young ones go on really thinking that
you are not going to die? No, you know better. You only go around
the clock once. The question no longer is, what is the meaning
of going around that clock once. The question you have to face
now, and you have to face it in absolute solitude, is what in
the world are you going to do with that one life that goes around
the clock once, not twice. In one way, you never get a second
decision.
The second decision you have to make, and you have no choice,
is to decide where the moral issue is in history. Let's say it's
not where we've been saying it is. That's fine. You have to decide
it. Once you decide that you have only one life to live, then
you are going to decide where THE moral issue is. For you are
going to use that one life where the crucial import of your time
in history is. Nothing moral about the moral issue. The moral
issue is an ontological reality. No longer do things such as salaries,
badges, and degrees have meaning for you. It is where the issue
of history lies in your own lifetime.
The third decision you have to make is whether or not you are
the anointed one. I remember Jesus and his disciples one time
getting awfully clear that somebody had to knock their skulls
against the establishment, which was smothering the suffering
people of the time. Jesus asked who is the anointed one to knock
his skull against the fortress that was the establishment. Those
disciples said, "You are the anointed one." When you're
dealing with your own life in the moral issue, it's a vocational
decision. There's a chemist, there's a doctor, there's a lawyer.
When you're dealing with what I am talking about, those things
seem quite incidental. The real vocation of life is what you decide
that you are anointed to do in history. Then you do it. You alone
can decide it.
Now, the last decision you have to make. Isn't it funny, Sun Tzu
and the others were right in the arena of winning and they come
down heavy on this. You have to decide all over again about your
death. You understand what I mean? You have to decide whether
you are a dead man. If you have decided you are a dead man, Maliwada
can't throw you. If you have not decided, it will chew you up
and spit you out. If you have not decided that you are a dead
man, filling in all of those counties in the United States of
America and then starting on the townships of the United States
of America is going to chew you up and spit you out. You have
to decide that you are a dead man. You have to decide whether
your death is embraced. You have to decide that you have one life
and that it is stuffed into the moral issue and that you are anointed
by the powers that be. I'm just dealing with the hardheaded
realities of being of service to the poorest of the poor of this
world.
There is another category of words which has to do with maneuvers.
You can make all the battleplans to fill the field reserve and
that is not going to accomplish anything. You have to learn maneuvers,
which gives a context for all your tactics. In the book, The Five
Rings, written in Japan, Murashi says that to be a Samurai you
carry two swords. One is a short sword that you carry in your
belt. The other is the long sword that you wear in a scabbard.
When you enter into combat, you have them both. The long sword
is for maneuvers. The short sword is for the infight. To exaggerate
just a touch, your long sword gets the maneuvering done so that
your tactics can drive home to the core. We are going to learn
to do that, or we are going to fail.
As a matter of fact, battleplanning is nothing other than arranging
your implementaries within a context of effectivity. There are
four principles. One is timing. Timing means there never are "ants
in your pants." The guy who has ants in his pants has a failure
mentality written all across his mind. There is a time to move.
And there is a time not to move. The author calls that "applicable
timing". First of all there is the timing of life itself.
If you have not decided that you are going to spend all of your
life struggling against any power that keeps you from being a
profound human being, then you are back in basic maneuvers. That
he calls "the maneuver of the void". Then you are not
going to be capable of dealing with historical maneuvers. Historical
maneuvers has to do with the profound change of our time. Is local
man on the rise? I ask you now. Is the way to bring about profound
humanness to have campaigns of awakenment, engagement and one
that makes possible the fullness of humanness? Then, in every
area and in every task maneuvers have to be built that have timing
in them.
The next thing is that you have to know your enemy if you are
going to maneuver. In our situation, that enemy always remains
half invisible. Now, he isn't an enemy until he becomes incarnate.
You have a hard time seeing that enemy of principalities and powers.
Those forces, whether they are in established form or simply in
mindset, keep men in darkness, in inertia and in despair. This
is what you are finally attacking.
The next quality is weaponry. When you said that this assembly
was all about advising the Council, that's right. But it is not
the heart of the matter. If this Assembly had any opinion to pass
on, it wasted its time. What you were out to build is the weaponry
for the effective doing of Social Demonstration and the effective
doing of Town Meeting. The Council will be able to make up its
own mind about where and how the forces shall be committed. That
does not mean your work will not help them.
The last thing is the deployment of troops. This is far more complicated
than assignments. Some general who lets his religious houses go
while he pulls all his troops out to do some little old battle
out here has lost, even though he thinks he wins. Deployment is
complicated. The crucial thing is how you get your troops at all
times in a position of advantage.
I asked my brother, the Bishop, what it was that he thought, above
all else, that held this group together. He thought for some time
and he said he thought it was discipline. That pleased me, but
I was trying to get him to agree with what I would say, corporateness.
Then I decided that both of us were wrong because corporateness
is discipline and discipline is corporateness. And when you put
those two together it's unity.
In this year of doing I would call upon you to guard your unity.
That means guarding any kind of reductionism. Wherever you are
you must think blue, guarding against the propensity in yourself
and in your neighbor to be somebody. Any awakened person in our
group ought to realize that you, I and everyone runs our whole
group. The power is in the center of the table. Unity is the key.
Finally, guard irrational conflict. Maybe I can plead a personal
statement. I am extremely grateful to all of my colleagues over
the last twentyfive years who have with patience that, in
my solemn moments, astounds me, put up with all my stupidities,
my personal flaws, my personal mistakes, my wickedness, my stumbling,
my downright sinfulness. In case I never get a chance to do it,
I express my gratitude to you. It has occurred to me that if you
could put up with my flaws, stupidities and mistakes through all
these years, you ought to be able to forgive the mistakes and
the flaws and the stupidities of each other.
Joseph W. Mathews