Global Centrum: Chicago
Global Research Assembly
6/30/75
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 Sandusky 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 what 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 that construct that has been invented
in any civilization, is not and cannot be Primal Community. Primal
Community is that social milieu in which a family grasps itself
as a family, whatever its particular sociological form. For example,
Ada is where I experienced 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 self-conscious-selfhood
a community has to have self-conscious selfhood. And Ada, however,
you might wish to criticize it, has self-conscious 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 wrongthat 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 for 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 ant 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 those
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 all 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. Ant 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 primordial awakenment took place.
I'll not rehearse the sufferings that are associated, ant 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. Blackbut,
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, how 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
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 distinction 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, boy, 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 atop, 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 Land 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 takelife
as an artichoke down to the core, right ~n the midst is this Netherworld,
the world of the transrationalthe Other World in the midst
of this world. No one has emerged, finally, into humanness, who
does not have some understanding of 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 wee in lt. Can you understand my passion
and just a little bit of irritation?
I used to teach at Colgate University. In my time
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 historical humanness,
that there are but five things that are important. One is Primal
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 marched
in the tracks of those who have passed from the dawn of time itself,
concerned with Prima1 Community, with Depth Awareness, with Functional
Eptitude, with Historical Engagement, with Netherly Prowess.
In our time here together this summer, this is what
we are 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
7/27/75