Global Research Assembly
Chicago
July 10, 1979
I want to share a bit of poetry with you first.
Is it Atlas?
Casually balancing the world
Easily carrying the weight
Of his 4 billion brothers...
Is it Atlas?
A superhuman giant of a man
Is it Atlas?
Or is it you and I?
The common, more ordinary
Everyday men and women of the world
Who smell the everyday smell
Of urine in the hallways
Who step in the everyday
Contamination of the feces in the streets
Who touch and greet the smiles
And the distended bellies filled with parasites...
Is it Atlas...
Or is it you and I...
Those everyday people...
Who live with the everyday...
Sloppy...raggy...women dragging their youngsters...
Women in curlers eating candy
And watching soap operas and game shows...
Women in veils who never are allowed to leave their homes...
Is it a casual strongman Atlas...
Holding up the world...
Or is it just a you and an I...
Who live with those who can't read the newspaper...
Or bible...
Or can't read a book on how to raise chickens...
Is it just you and I who care...
Who hold up the world...
You and I who drive out on Sunday morning
To see our neighbor lying drunk along the roadside...
It's just you and I...
Common and everyday...
Who never seem to know the answer
Who ourselves are helpless against despair
Who can only point to the mystery
And ask and ask and ask
What makes it possible
To say yes. . . to love life
To decide. . . to grab a hold
What mysterious love of life...
Gives you and I and John and Maria
The will to live a yes to our vitality...
This evening, we are going to look at the fifth of
a series of talks on the Way. The first was the introduction,
then we talked about the Finality of The Way, the Thinking of
the Way, and the Action of the Way. Tonight we want to talk about
the Presence of the Way.
We have been driven this past year, in working with
communities to begin to form practical ways of taking care of
"Those Who Care." I remember going into Kuh De E Ri
one morning at 10:30 and most of the staff were out. There were
only two people left at home, and they were doing Town Meetings
in other villages close to Kuh Du E Ri. They would leave the house
early in the morning, walk for three or four hours, do a three
to four hour Town Meeting, and come back late in the evening.
We were there when they returned one evening. They had been running
all the way; and were breathing hard when they came in. It was
strange to encounter that, and we asked them why they were running.
They replied, "Once you encounter the vitality in a community
coming alive, you are forced to run." They tell me that in
Mississippi, there are people who have done one Town Meeting every
evening for the last six months. I wonder, is it like eating ice
cream every evening? The richness of life is but the first aspect
of the vitality.
I remember one day in the village when we were working
in India, there were two women and seven young men working with
us. One morning, we had a fine collegium and breakfast and we
had given everybody a task to do, open the preschool, dig a ditch,
and things like that. At 8:00, I was at the preschool and had
opened the door and cleared up the place. I expected the person
who was coming to work in the preschool, but she did not come.
An hour later, she had not come. An hour and a half later, she
had not come. And then my husband walked in and said, "She
is not going to come. They have all decided that they will not
work today." We did not know why, but later found out that
our colleagues had a very full life, and suddenly they realized
that it would cost them all of their lives if they continued.
There would be no return of the kind they had anticipated. We
have been forced to begin to create the tools that will practically
nurture those who care
The Way is a path, it is a journey, it has no end,
it has no goal, it is solitary (the solitariness is what we have
all experienced and known this last year), and it is corporate.
You sense that you walk with the saints of history when you walk
on the Way. It is tension filled, with both the male and the female
dynamic. The Way is always pushing you to adventure forward, pushing
you to conserve. It is tension filled. From what we have talked
about, those on the Way live before the final reality of life.
They are forced to build the earth for every last human being.
This experience is seen in the life of Mahatma Gandhi. He was
once thrown out of a train in South Africa. He had to come to
terms with the fact that because he was a "black" person,
he was not allowed to travel first class in a train in South Africa.
That event forced him to stand before the fact that 1) he was
not in control of his life, and 2) he'd been given one unique
life to use. It was he himself who must forge that out of his
own creatureliness. The awesomeness of that encounter forced the
decision that allowed him to take the journey that was his life.
The Presence of the Way is like the high shrill note
of a dog whistle. Only dogs can hear it; human beings cannot hear
it. But this whistle, once you have heard it, it will grow on
you until such a time that it comes clearer and then extremely
discernible. You cannot run away from the clarity.
During the consult in Maliwada, the first time we
raised the question of a symbol for the community, the people
talked about the fort. It was very strange, but slowly, over the
next three months, that symbol became more and more important.
I remember one community meeting when one of the old men stood
up and said, "The fort has been talking to me these last
three months." History had claimed him and that community
in such a way that they could never turn back. That which was
beyond the fort had altered their minds and hearts and would not
allow them to forget the claim on their lives. You walk through
Maliwada and at times you can be very close to the fort, and it
looks very small. You can go far away and it looks huge; there
is that kind of pervasive presence of the fort in the minds of
the people.
This last year on three occasions, I had the opportunity
to go to Fifth City. The first time was when the theologian, John
Dunne was here, and on a Saturday afternoon we took him around
the community. You can hear people hear the whistle. I heard it
when John Dunne walked up to Floyd Stanley who is in charge of
the laundromat in Fifth City. Floyd Stanley had been with us in
one of the groups when we studied John Dunne's book. I said, "John
Dunne, this is Floyd Stanley, Floyd Stanley, this is the gentleman
whose book we were reading the other day." Floyd looked up
and said, "You know something, I got something out of it."
His eyes were big and shining and John Dunne knew that he had
been captured by a reality that neither he nor Floyd Stanley could
ever forget. We went through the community center and found Ruth
Carter giving her life dancing with the children. You could hear
the whistle in the presence of her vitality. People hear the whistle.
They know that their lives are changed and from then on, they
cannot forget it.
I have been overcome with my one visit to Pisinemo,
Arizona. Before we drove to Pisinemo, our colleagues had said,
"Pisinemo is the best project of all the projects in the
United States." We met with the people when we arrived and
that visit stayed with me for a long time. When we received the
picture of the newly built laundromat, I kept taking the photograph
to everybody and saying, "Hey, what a fine laundromat"'
People would look at me and say, "Why are you doing this?"
Then I went to Minto, Alaska, and I saw Kee Lee there. Kee Lee
is an eighteen year old from the community of Pisinemo. Minto
is a community where the space has been neglected. Kee Lee's room
was the most intentional space that I encountered in Minto. The
intentionality of her space was caring for Minto. There is a story
about Leonardo Ortega, also from Pisinemo, who did an Economic
Issues Forum in a small community in Arizona. He gave the context
that proceeds one of the workshops and everyone clapped because
it went very well. He was pleased with himself. One of our staff
who has been around for many years, turned to Ortega on the way
home and said, "Now Leornardo, do you think that you would
like to coordinate a Forum one of these days?" Ortega turned
to him and said, "If you can do it, then I can do it."
Pisinemo has been building up inside of me, and I have wondered
why. They have a myth, though they do not talk about it too much
in Pisinemo. You can see it in the patterns on their baskets.
It is the story of the man in the maze. This man walked to the
center of life, overcame all the complexities, and walked back
from the center, so that he could tell everybody the secret of
life. When he came back, his body was torn into pieces, and out
of the pieces, came the new people of Pisinemo.
All of these images have been building up in my consciousness.
Then I realized that when I had my first encounter with the people
of Pisinemo I looked into their eyes. There I had seen both the
terror of being a human being and the wonder of being a human
being. It is the terror of knowing that the past is approved,
the future is open, and all is good. In that same look was the
wonder of knowing that the past is approved, the future is open,
and all is good. And it was knowing that they were going to journey
as a community on that balanceon a razor's edge
knowing that every second of that journeywas their fulfillment,
that that journey was never going to end. In that encounter of
my first visit, they had claimed my life on that journey. The
Presence of the Way is like a dog whistle shrill.
Then you hear it more clearly, and you cannot hide your face from
the clarity that is there.
There are three aspects to the Presence of the Way.
It is the certitude of life, the peace of life and the joy of
life. All of these are very objective. It is an awareness, it
is human, and it happens in the midst of the mundanity of life.
When Mahatma Gandhi was seventyeight years old, India gained
her independence on August 15, 1947. Gandhi refused to go to the
celebration and he refused to send a word of greeting, though
he was asked to do both of those things. People asked him why,
and he said, "I had not wanted for this to happen; I had
not wanted for people to be divided by their hostilities. I cannot,
therefore, participate in this." Then he spent the day praying
and fasting, and, I am told, he wrote a letter to a very close
colleague of his in which he said, "No path that is basically
just can ever be lost." That is the certitude of life on
the Way.
The women in the village where I worked had been
able to get a market for a special industry. The women just had
to sew the edges of a rag and it would sell for an adequate price.
We had a market, we had a request for the loan processed in five
days, which would normally take six months, and we had a woman
all ready to go negotiate the loan. Five minutes before the only
bus left for town, the woman came to the house and said, "I
am not coming. Everybody has convinced me that you are going to
get me to take this loan and then leave, and then I will be left."
The question was not, why did it happen, or where is it going
to leave you. It is simply, how are you going to make use of the
situation. During the Human Development Training School, in the
sixth or seventh week, we ran out of money. We had nothing to
eat for breakfast the next day and we had about 120 people to
feed. All of our creditors had given more than they had ever,
ever decided that they would give us. You go into town, and you
ask a person, "Would you please give us just a 1000 rupees
worth of food? We will get money; we will surely pay you."
They said, "Sorry." The question is not why did you
get into this situation, but how are you going to make use of
it.
The second aspect of the Presence of the Way that
is certitude on the Way is the peace of life that is no peace.
When Gautama, the Buddha, went around preaching, his cousin was
very offended and sent a mad elephant to kill him while he was
walking through the forest. The story goes that the elephant stopped,
and instead of running into him and tearing him apart, paid his
respects to Gautama, the Buddha. Some of you will say, "That
is mystical nonsense." I remember when we first started working
in the village of Kendur, the community was very angry with us,
for this reason and for that reason. There was a seventeen your
old young man, called Lala Divakar who had just finished high
school. His task, like ours included going to stake meetings every
week and working to clean out a growth of congress grass in the
village. I am told that congress grass is ca]led milkweed here.
It grows all over the place, and when it dries up, it is very
ugly. People do not like to touch it because they are likely to
get an allergy that swells up their face. So every day we would
work from morning until night, clearing the grass. After many
days, some people walked by and called us all kinds of names,
and kept saying, "These people have nothing better to do",
and things like that. One day, one of the teachers came up to
Lala Divakar and said, "What is your name," and so he
said, "My name is Lala Diveka." "Where is your
home?" "My home is near Maliwada." "How far
have you studied?" "I have just finished high school."
"What are you doing here? Why are you doing this?" "We
think that this is important" "Don't you have a family
to take care of, don't you have sisters to take care of?"
"Yes.'' "Do you know that if you worked in a hotel,
you could get twentyfive rupees every month and they would
give you better food than you get here." And he said, "Yes,
that is true, but I would not want to do anything else."
He offered no excuse, no defense; no explanation, no justification.
Three months later, when you walked into LaLa's community there
was no congress grass to be seen anywhere. That is not mystical
nonsense.
The Presence of the Way has to do with the joy of
life. I am told that Francis of Assisi was hoeing his garden one
day and one of his colleagues walked up to him and said, "Now,
if this were the last day of your life, if you were to die tonight,
what would you be doing?" He said, "I would finish hoeing
my garden." The joy of the Presence of the Way is that life
has got you in its hole and you are a part of it. Everything that
you do is significant. This year's assignment has been a very
peculiar one for me. The Panchayat gets to know all the news (the
bad news first), and then you feel paralyzed because you cannot
just go out and do anything about it. It has been a very good
year. Everyday, it is like sitting on a volcano, your blood just
boils with what life is about. Listen to the details from one
day in our life eighteen hours of work all held in
this one sheet of paper. First, we set up the system for Panchayat
selection including getting somebody to count the ballots, then
we walked through the financial situation of the Institute, the
debts, the salaries the program money, that took about
five hours of intensive work. All of the past came crashing in,
all of the future came crashing in. A call from Jamaica reported
that the InterAmerican Development Bank's visit to Woburn Lawn
went very well, a complete victory, and everybody was very happy
about it. Then a call from Brussels involved us in a talk about
registering the Institute in Europe as an international organization.
Then someone walked in and talked about an assembly that he had
attended. Then, we heard a report on the plans for the July 25
anniversary celebration. Then we did some individual work, and
reported together. Then someone walked in and said that a newspaper
reporter had called and wanted some information. Then a call from
Maharastra at 9:00 p.m. reported that the 232 villages were done,
and the celebration will be on the 16th if June. In one day, you
have been through panic, you have been through rage, you have
been through passion, you have been through hilarity there
is no end to that and your blood boils at every moment and there
is nothing you can do about it. It has to do with mundanity, everyday
nittygrittiness, and yet, in the midst of that, you stand before
the holy presence of the mystery of life. You are grateful, extremely
grateful for the wonder of that one thingand this is everyday!
The Presence of the Way is a touchstone of authenticity.
It can not be possessed, you can not deny it, you cannot argue
with it. Being bends you to be his or her presence, and you experience
yourself as "phoney." I am told that Gandhi had prayer
meetings everyday, and occasionally he would go and sit on a platform
and not talk at all. People would come and they would pray, they
would cry, and they would weep. In the encounter of that presence,
they come to terms with their election of their very own life.
I remember in the village of Sevagram, one of our colleagues had
a very fine spin on the economic principles at the consult. A
very respected young man who is the teacher from Sevagram stood
up and said, "Oh, that is very good, it sounds really fine,
but does it really work?" Two men from Maliwada who were
participating in the consult walked up and one opened a little
book, and said, "These are the accounts. We have put in this
much money, we have had so much of a return, and it has taken
three months, and all that David has talked about is in this book
plain to see." You cannot argue with that. Being uses you
and you experience yourself as very phony. During this year as
we visited the Houses, people were busy setting up guardians meetings,
showings of the film, polishing the brass and making your bed
perfect and things like that. They forget that it was human beings
who were coming. They come to the airport to meet you and they
said, "Hello." Suddenly, the encounter happens. "Oh
it is you..." I experienced myself as being very inadequate,
but it is yourself in the Presence of the Way, you experience
an irrational vitality. A year ago, we had a consult in Maliwada,
and there was a rumor that all of our extranational staff would
have to leave because of expired visas. I was deeply addressed
by the fact that nobody mentioned it during the consult. There
was confidence right through the consult that indicated that whether
the extranational staff stayed or went, it did not matter. Nava
Gram Prayas would continue. This last year, in Diwali time (a
celebration time), it was decided in Maharastra that all of the
staff should be given time to visit home. When they left, out
extranational staff wondered if they would return. The food is
bad, they have hard work to do, and the stipends have not been
given for a long time. The irrational part of it is that they
all came back, some of them even decided not to go home. There
is irrational vitality for those who participate in the Presence
of tile Way.
A peculiar aspect of those who are on the Way and
those who participate is that you are intimately related to the
historical edge of our time. For us, in our time it is the issue
of the 85% and the 15%. What a shock it is to us to realize that
the 85% of the world are capable of their own catalysis! They
run ahead of you. You are offended by it, but they run ahead of
you, and are able to do much, far beyond what you would have ever
been able to do. Not only that, the 85% are able to catalyze the
15%. You look at those of us who have been in Maharashtra this
last year. I do not believe that they would have done one bit
of work there in one month, not knowing the language, not knowing
how to travel, and with all the confusion of a new consult manual.
They come back aware, and extremely alive! The catalysis of the
15% by the 85% is very offensive, but it is there. Those on the
Way have two powers. First, for those on the Way, there is equality
of all, they know the equality of all men. They live the equality
of every creature. They grasp themselves as being neither more
or less. The greatest temptation that we can face is to be somebody,
to be somebody in a very special way. The strange thing about
wanting to be somebody is that the only person who really wants
it proved is yourself. The only person who needs proof of the
fact that you are somebody special is yourself. Once you know
that, you do not need to do it you are who you are.
Second, the heart of the Presence of the Way is the sacrificial
life. In Kendur, the village where I worked, there is a big temple,
and the temple is dedicated to a man who went to a saint wanting
to be made whole. The saint looked at him and said, "People
say you are a saint yourself. That cannot be true, because you
have a wife and three children." So the man went back and
threw his wife and three children into the well, and was made
whole by the saint. When he went home again, he found that his
family was alive and well. That story is depicted on the wall
of that temple even today. The sacrificial lifestyle for us means
that we are called to abandon that which we hold as precious;
the family, the refrigerator, values, and your uniqueness so that
we can participated in the Way. Life will be given back to you
in its fullness. The Way is about releasing care in every last
human being.
In essence, this spin was about the fact that the
Presence of the Way is like a dog whistle, a shrill, high whistle
that becomes clearer until it is extremely discernible. Presence
is when you are aware that things are not the same. Presence is
that in which change takes place. One is forever different in
the Presence. Presence is when the mystery of life shines through,
motivates you and makes you stand in its aweful Presence.
And now to go back to the poetry:
It's just you and I...
Common and everyday...
Who never seem to know the answer
Who ourselves are helpless against despair
Who can only point to the mystery
And ask and ask and ask
What makes it possible
To say yes . . . to love life
To decide. . . to grab a hold
What mysterious love of life...
Gives you and I and John and Maria
The will to live a yes to our vitality...