Global Priors' Council

Chicago

July 26, 1979

This is a context for our continued work on the Way in the coming year. There are several images I have drawn to get hold of this arena.;­ The key question is why work on the Way this year. The reality of convergence we have been struggling to articulate is the edge happening in the world today. For the globalis, the seven revolutions have come as sweeping trends. The question each causes is how to awaken and engage humanity in fulfilling its vision of the future. For the localis, the edge is how to awaken, engage, and fulfill the hope of every local community on the earth. To say it in another way, the three campaigns is what every locality and person is up against ­­ not simply a task of our body. The Movement from the beginning has understood itself to be formulating the indicative campaigns that do history. There is only one task of all the campaigns, and that is to be vehicles of awakenment.

Some of our previous images have held these dynamics within them. We have used the images of the new religious mode and the new social vehicle to talk about the task of civilization. What is this task? It is perpetually rediscovering and reinventing the poetic modes that allow every human being in society to have the profound deeps of life self­consciously available. It is forever having to figure out the social forms that enable primal humanness to participate effectively in creating history. We have said that when the NRM and NSV begin spinning, a new style of being human emerges. Convergence is pointing to the center of this "X". That is one way to describe what has happened to us.

We have been doing the three campaigns ever since we have been around, whether you talk about it as contextual re­education, community reformulation, spirit remotivation, or witnessing love, justing love, and presencing love, or research, demonstration and training. Awakenment, engagement, and fulfillment are the happenings in which people participate when they are being history.

Another image describes what has happened to us: the biggest happening of the last 25 years is discovering the happening of transparency. It is the intensification of knowing and doing that is falling through to being, where knowing and doing reveal the profound meaning of living life in the midst of assignment, task, family, and community. The earthrise picture symbolizes what it means to be human and reveals as parochial all previous images of this. It does not expose them as wrong, but as non­unifying in the face of the earthrise.

Our experience is that of the universal human. It is everyone's experience who is awake today. The Way is a category through which the profound deeps can be guarded and the classical wisdom of humanity honored. Otherwise, the new myth would be ungrounded in history and a joke. That is one reason why we need to work on the mythology of the Way this year.

A corresponding image that someone held up is the inversion of the knowing, doing, being image. (It's like falling up!) When the happening of awakenment and the happening of engagement start spinning with intensity, fulfillment appears. That is the happening of convergence. It is a sociological happening akin to the spirit happening of transparency. One person described convergence as the formula of synergism: one plus one equals 79. The mystery takes your one plus one and gives you a leap into the new. What do you see when awakenment and engagement are intensified? You see the new human, the life of service appears and fulfillment is exposed as the meaning of history. In order to relate this to the myth factor, the image of the whistlepoints is key. Here you must begin with the action factor. Myth is born in the turmoil of building the earth in concrete doing relative to the moral issue of the times. In the last ten years, we have experienced an intensification in the action factor. People have used images like hype ­­ space, like the ship in Star Wars that went into light speed ­­ it leapt into a new universe.

If the articulation of the new myth is not grounded in action, it is not a new myth, but another abstract ideology.

Myth is blown through the whistlepoints, which are places to act. It is the myth that is the key. This is why we are only about one task, which is awakenment When there is intensification of the action factor and the myth factor, the human factor is manifest. The acceleration of impact, demonstration, formation, and interchange in the last ten years has produced this new "we," this "third X," the dynamics of guild, cell, and order forces. Maybe call it the presence of the League, but the human factor is never manifest unless action and myth are happening at the same time.

We have encountered in the world outside of ourselves the breakloose of the human factor; it is the yearning to be significantly participating in determining the course of history.

The poetry of the Way is very important in describing the human factor in our time. Because the intensification of action and myth has been pointed to by all the established religions and urs. The Way is a historical link to the profound. Now how do we enable the poetry of the Way to be the glue that releases the diverse richness of humanity to be a corporate body. An image out of Boulding is helpful here. He points out that the period in civilization of the invention of the self has been going on for the last five hundred years and at this moment we are, as a global civilization, up against inventing the corporate; or the new morality. This is true whether you are standing as a family unit or as the whole globe. The need of the invention of the authentic corporate is at the center of this shift.

Another way to approach the newness we are in is through the transparentization of the church. The issue is the new shape of Those Who Care. Everywhere in the world we are very practically experiencing the indicative of this new shape in our shocking and delightful pluriformity. This is a practical ordering of modes that release the life of service, or the new morality. It is the appearance of the Way. We have said to ourselves that we have done the transparentization of the Son in the work on RS­1. The contentless Christ happening is that. The Other World represents that transparentization of the Father, and the sanctification, dark night, long march represents our work under the rubric of the Holy Spirit.

Now we are struggling with the practical relatedness of local leadership to its task in communities. Our questions are, how to structurally catalyze villages to awaken other villages, what training is required, and how are those on the Way guided in effective engagement and awakenment in and beyond the local. Another way to say that is, we are about the recreation of primal community. It is true that that is what is happening across the planet. That is one reason it is good that we are about the re­creation of primal community. The local has a profound function that has been lost. We bet our lives on that local in 1970 and won ­­ now the promise of primal community must be fulfilled. We have seen how complex it is to get our external vision separate from our internal vision. That is a manifestation of the issue that primal community, the corporate, is at the center of what everybody is struggling with. The "team" has emerged because of that fact.

We are sociologically transparent as an Order; that is our gift to history. We are the presence of the new religious in primal community; that is what has happened to us. That is what we have seen. We are the new corporate ­­ globally, historically, covenantally, and locally; that is our transparency. Everything we do is a demonstration. We have always said that. That has become increasingly clear in terms of the issue of how bodies of people across the world serve and effectively - corporately ­­ engage in caring for history.

The recovery of profound covenant is at the center of primal community. We have said the end run is over and we need a new play. Now some of the shimmerings of the future I have heard emerging this summer. The end run, this red arrow going out here, was the END RUN OF THE CHURCH. That was the decision to bet on the local as the key to the future of history. The local church was the concrete symbol of that, but it is the local community that is the fulcrum of

history. It is where history becomes transparent and where history is altered. The local is just there. It is everywhere - town meetings, women's forums, LENS. An image mentioned the other night was that we have to do an end run on the world. That is our next step. That puts completion of projects in a radical context beyond our accomplishments. It raises the question of what it means to do history right now. The third campaign is not us, or the service force in terms of the title, but it is something like the fulfillment of primal community. That is what the third campaign is. That is what we are doing everywhere we are. I have been imaging we have to figure out how to do a quarterback sneak. What that means is moving through projects, doing circuits, getting villages to do other villages. We have to figure out how to get local community to realize it has the football. This is the key to the three million human settlements coming off. We have just

spent the last ten years letting them know they were in the game. Up to now, they thought the other side had the football. They now have the football. That is what it means to say that the end run play is over. The trick is going to be getting Willie and Susan to do the quarterback sneak; to get primal community to be in service to primal community. In that sense, we are moving into the direct building of the new social vehicle. How to move the villages that care into service? That is not some moral imperative in the negative sense, but the fact that living a life of awakenment, engagement, is what fulfills humanness and history. That is what being profound humanness is. The Way is the category by which we can wrestle with the style of the primal community that lives that profound life of service.

One more image. I keep asking myself, what story can I tell this year to remind me that we are all doing one thing. We have said the last few days that everywhere we are is primal community; the communities where we do impact are primal community; the human development projects are primal community; the cadres are primal community. Everywhere there is a primal community there is the task of awakenment, engagement and fulfillment. We are the global demonstration of primal community in service to and on behalf of primal community for the sake of the future.

To learn to work on the category of the Way is to give us some handles on the edge of the one task of awakenment. What is the universal myth that releases the depth motivity of humanity in our time? The Way mythology will release the Leap. What are going to be the stories and images about our times and being primal community in service that are going to compel people to complete this century with power? How do we document the Human Factor for the world? What is going to compel people to solidify the consciousness that has happened in order to give them an authentic option of resurgence over against revolt as the complexity and interdependence becomes clearer and clearer in this new world. The next 20 years have to anchor the foundations of post civilization. That is what we are doing in our work on the Way.