SUMMER '72 JULY 3, 1972
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY LECTURE SERIES
The most astonishing thing that has resulted from
the body of awakened people who more than half a century ago made
the great resolve to renew the Church in this century was that
they stumbled upon the Other World that is right in the midst
of this world. I never dreamed even ten years ago that such a
thing could happen in my lifetime. I suspect to the day I die
there will always be a vapor of awe surrounding my existence just
because of this happening in history.
I want to try, child as I am, to talk a bit about
the Other World in the midst of this world, I suggested that it
has been a hidden world for centuries, a lost world. I am reminded
of a motion picture about the dinosaurs I saw years ago called
''The Lost World.'' The lostness of the Other world in the midst
of this world seems to me to be a much greater lostness. To have
it disclose itself afresh forces one, regardless of his years,
to experience himself all over again as a stumbling child first
learning to walk.
This Other World was not discovered by church people
or religious people; it was discovered by ordinary people in the
twentieth, Century. It was discovered a long time before it was
recognized as the Other World in the midst of this world and before
it was acknowledged as the Other World.
There is nothing, "super" about this Other
World. It is as ordinary, once one has beheld it, as any mundane
activity that you and I engage in. It has to do with the explosion
of consciousness that has taken place in our day, in and through
which the radicality of humanness became clear as never before
in history. Therefore, I would anticipate that what happens from
the disclosure of this Other World to man in our century may be
more colossal than those other great moments in history, when
this same Other World made its presence powerfully known to man.
But you must be clear when you talk about the Other World, that
you are dealing with the ordinary secular world and secular consciousness
of man.
The Ontology of the Other World
One way to comprehend the broad picture is to grasp
that the Other World involves an understanding of the ontological
dimension of life beyond the moral. Rut when I say "understanding,"
that is not quite right. To experience the being that the Other
World is in to understand that Other World. That is the way that
world is. It may help those of you who know Nietszche to think
of his "beyond good and evil." This is the realm of
the Other World. It is the realm of wild self-consciousness beyond
the superimposition of man's rational capacities upon it. That
is a rather difficult statement to make, because to even talk
about the Other World is to get your rational faculties engaged
in it. But one of the remarkable things about reason is that it
points beyond itself. The Other World is the world beyond reason
that reason itself points to. As reason attempts to understand
and talk about that world, what is being said is not that Other
World itself, but is only indicative of that Other World. The
Other World is radical being or raw self-consciousness, and to
make any interpretation of it is to take one step backwards into
this world which is the world of reason that reason invents.
Another way in which you could talk about this philosophically
is to say that in our time we have succeeded in a rather admirable
way in destroying the two-story universe. We understand that we
live and die in one world, and when we are dead, we are really
dead. That means the two story universe has been smashed. A more
direct way of saying this is that we have gotten rid of metaphysics.
That needs qualification, because man never lives without metaphysics.
The trouble is with the term "metaphysics." It was related
to the second-story universe, or the understanding, that finally
reason was the king of the universe.
In our day we are building a new metaphysics. Man
grasps himself as living on one plane, but he has experienced
the transparency of that plane itself. I like to think of it as
holding a match underneath a paper, and first seeing little streaks
come out. Then it turns brown, and then it breaks through and
pops into flame. That goes through my mind when I think of transparency.
Or perhaps it is more like sticking your fist through life itself.
Maybe I can illustrate it this way you and I have
lived in a time in which the uniqueness of the person was emphasized,
and this had to be so. This is what happens, I suspect, whenever
a culture collapses in telling man as an entity what it is to
be man. Then you have a new birth of existentialistic reflection.
(I am not talking about abstract philosophy, but something has
happened even to that in recent years.) An illustration of this
principle is that the black man in our day, in order to be a human
being, had to embrace his blackness to the hilt. It so happens
that in doing so, he enabled some white folk, for the first time
in their lives, to embrace their whiteness. But when they embraced
their uniqueness to the hilt, black or white, they experienced
transparency. It is as though their fist went through their uniqueness.
Right now we are discovering all over again what it means to be
man beyond our uniqueness -- not by going around our uniqueness
but by going through our uniqueness. That is the experience of
transparency.
One would like to talk about the youth in our age
exactly the same way; and one would like to tall; about the women
in our age in precisely the same way. As a matter of fact, the
same thing is happening in tile relating between the West and
the non-West. The last time that I went to other cultures, I experienced
something I never had before, and talked to a great many people
in the non-Western world about it. After World War II, when tile
intensification of the collapse of our society was experience
across the globe, there was an emphasis upon the particular and
the unique, especially regarding parts of the world and nations.
The outburst of nationalism, in my opinion, was precisely that.
But I discovered in the East that some of your colleagues had
stuck their fist through their uniqueness and were discovering
again humanness itself.
In this transparency, in which there is one world,
or one plane, the transparency of that plane- is the new metaphysics.
But what I suspect history is going to call this, in one way or
another, is phenomenology, or phenomenological thinking. The metaphysical
question of "the real" as an abstraction apart from
my consciousness is bracketed. You bracket that, and then concentrate
on states of consciousness. And the state consciousness is the
Other World. Rather, it is your experience of the Other World.
I think you will soon discover that a state of being, a state
of awareness, a state of consciousness, is the most objective
reality that you have ever experienced. I want to warn you not
to let the epistemology you were trained in, in which subjectivity
and objectivity are divided, get in your way.
Now let me come at this through theology. Tillich
is a good example there. Those of you who know his systematic
theology know that he begins with the ontological situation and
then moves to the interpretation of Christ, which is the existential
for Tillich. Tillich himself made the case that when you talk
about the essence of man being the kind of essence that creates
its own essence, the first use of the word "essence"
in that sentence is dealing with the ontological. There is more
to that than it sounds, for man could not even make the decision
that determines his selfhood if he did not already have a montage
in his being through which he looked at reality. (That is the
ontological for Tillich.) Therefore, those of us who have come
down hard on the existential pole, on freedom and decision, were
always taking for granted an understanding of humanness in the
midst of which that decision was made. The discovery of the Other
World in terms of this transparency is the forging of a new montage.
In this case, because the revolution is global, it is going to
be a global montage that finally defines man. That is the Other
World. The movie "The Gospel According to St. Matthew"
showed a man who lived his existence from beginning to end in
the Other World, and in the midst of that made decisions that
defined the concretions of his life.
Now I want to speak a little more about a state of
being. A state of being is made up of an image, an accompanying
affection, and a pre-decisional resolve. I do not know how many
of you have read Golding's Inheritors, but it was about primitive
man breaking into consciousness. One of the figures that he used
over and over again was the primitive man coming into a new situation--at
least it was new from the outside. The way he experienced it was
as though chaos had suddenly taken over. That is, the images in
his mind were not capable of giving meaning to the overagainstness
that was impinging upon him. So he would have to seek for a new
image, he would have to invent a new image that would give this
external situation meaning. In the book he is pictured as pushing
on his head to produce a new image. I like that. I have seen people
who were not so primitive sometimes push on their heads to get
that new image. Now I call what was going on in him a big Think.
Grasping the Other World involves a Think---I do not want to say
an image, I do not want to say an idea, I do not want to say a
construct, I do not want to say a concept. It is almost down underneath
all those. When you are dealing with a state of being, you are
after the Think.
The second thing in a state of being I call a great
Feel. I have a colleague that calls the Think impressionistic
and the Feel expressionistic, and that is not too bad. For me,
the impressionist painters were starting with what could be seen
and pushed it until it bent into the Other World. Then the expressionists
went clear through it. Do you grasp that?
If you call that Think a primordial Think, then you
have to call the Feel a primordial Feel. That Think and that Feel
cannot be separated.
When you boil them down, to the bottom, what the
great Think fundamentally is composed of is mystery--not the kind
of mystery that may be solved tomorrow, but the mystery that never
goes away. This is what they mean when they talk about ''No-thing-ed-ness,''
when they talk about "Nothingness " --The big Think
of nothingness, I mean absolute nothingness. That is the mystery
which in that big Think, becomes the final overagainstness of
your total existence, not because you say it is, but because you
have the big Think in which it is for you. Now that is the primordial
big Think.
It has many faces and many forms.
The big Feel that always accompanies that big Think
is awe. I mean awe. And awe too has many faces, but it is awe.
Awe, as Otto pointed out so clearly in his book The Idea of the
Holy, is always dread and fascination at the same time. When you
deal with that big Think, you are splitting reason, you are breaking
through reason, dealing always with that which is just beyond
reason. And in the awareness of your overagainstness to that mystery,
you are shattered with terror. I like to think that mankind came
into existence through awe, that many stabs toward consciousness
of consciousness that could have produced the human race failed
because that un-man was rocked by the terror he experiences, of
the sheer mystery which consciousness about consciousness is,
and pulled out. (You want to use the word "God" here?
you do not need to use the word "God," but when you
talk about God, the God who is God, you are not talking about
the moral delineation of some metaphysical principles. You are
talking about One who sends cyclones and the gentle rain to grow
the wheat; who rocks the ocean with mighty storms, and simmers
there like a mirror itself. You are talking about the One who
pulls you from a woman's womb and stamps you, like a cow, back
into the earth. You are talking about the one who makes you sixty
years old, and you do not have any choice about it.)
And yet, with this terror is fascination. Oh, that
is harder to describe than terror. It is a compulsion over which
you grasp you have no control whatsoever, which pulls you on,
in the midst of and through the terror. And these two are there
at one and the same time. I remember not so long ago, I thought
I was caught; I thought people were on to me. Yes, that is what
I mean. And before I knew it, I ended up over a toilet with my
hands on each side, vomiting. But in the midst of that terror,
I perceived a fascination. Oh, at this time you do not say this
is the leading of Providence. When you are finally able to get
back up on your feet, you know this was the hand of the One who,
through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, you have come to call
your God and your Father. He does not look like your God and your
Father when he beats you, but he is. I am a proud man to have
lived in the twentieth century, in which this has become clearer
than it ever was, I believe, in all of history. But its roots
are back there from the foundation and the dawn of consciousness
itself. Ohhh, in our time, how this Other World has broken in
upon us,
Perhaps you have thought of the area of psychology.
In a recent book, Joseph Campbell deals with schizophrenia. I
am not sure he says it, but if he did not he ought to, that the
difference between a spirit man in the Other World and the schizophrenic
is that the spirit man swimming and the schizophrenic is drowning.
Here I make a prophecy. Before twenty years are up, you are going
to see the psychiatric profession turned upon its ear. It has
to meet the times in which it is in, for the times which bore
it are gone. And new times have come.
Or, I mention to you mythology. You have been taught
to believe that mythology is kind of a fairy story that mankind
has outgrown. No, not by any Means. Mythology is the frame whereby
man has held his experience of the Other World. The mythologies
of the past are gone. They no longer communicate to us. You could
not call them fairy stories. Therefore, probably the biggest contradiction
in our time is the absence of an adequate mythology whereby a
man has a roadmap over and through the terrain, the topography,
of the Other World. Ant perhaps, if you seriously intend to renew
society, one of the major jobs that is going to rest upon your
shoulder is to create the mythology which feeds into the top triangle
of the social Process, Inclusive Myths, the top of the whole system
built in Summer '71. Maybe this is the little capsule that will
flow out through the whole society.
The Poetic Topography of the Other World
In our time the world has become slowly conscious
of the Other World in four areas. I have mentioned one. To use
a little poetry, we have called it ''The Land of Mystery.'' In
our lifetime, man has rediscovered this mystery. As a matter of
fact, the natural sciences have discovered it; the psychological
sciences have discovered it; the biological sciences have discovered
it; the mathematical sciences have discovered it. And I need not
reiterate that the whole existentialistic thrust in the twentieth
century unveiled for man his overagainstness of that which is
No Thing or nothing. This is the first breakthrough of a fantastic
arena in the Other World.
The second breakthrough has been the area of freedom.
We call it "The River of Consciousness." This is Jean
Paul Sartre's poetry of the en soi and the pour soi or Kierkegaard's
understanding of the self as a relationship which relates itself
to itself, and when it goes about its proper business of being
a relationship which relates itself to itself, it grounds itself
transparently in the power that constituted it But these are only
two of the hundreds of people who have broken through in this
area. I need not mention again the area of psychology.
The third way in which men in our time have broken
into the Other World is with the concept of engagement. It seems
to me that the next two areas have been broken loose more by social
upheavals than by any intellectual schools head on, although the
intellectual schools have dealt with it. I think of the youth
culture in our time. This was a sociological manifestation, it
seems to me, of a search for a dimension of existence that this
present world was not capable of providing. One of the crucial
insights they saw and held before the world was authentic engagement
in life itself. They are the ones who, however sickly, began to
recover the word "love" in any serious meaning whatsoever.
In the midst of their lostness--and no one could blame them for
it--they began to grasp what it meant to be genuinely concerned
with that which was unsynonymous with oneself. Their revolt against
vocations, and their revolt against money for the sake of money
itself, were indicative of this kind of awareness of another realm,
in which love--if you please, agape--was giving yourself to the
journey of mankind and not giving yourself to yourself. This area
we call "The Mountain of Care." The Other World, which
is tile realm of the aweful mystery and the realm of radical consciousness,
la also the world of taking upon your back responsibility for
the whole journey of man, for the whole globe.
Before I go on to the last one, I pause a moment
to remind you that because the Other World is beyond the realm
of good and evil, it is in the ontological and not in the moral--that
whatever you say about the Other World, if you are talking about
the Other World, is always in the indicative and never in the
imperative. The Other World knows nothing whatsoever about imperatives.
That is in this world, and a crucial part of this world, and without
it, you would not have this world. In the Other World there is
only the indicative. When you talk about the Mountain of Care,
or picking up the burden of all mankind, you are not talking about
something that says you ought to do it. The indicative is that
the man who lives in the Other World has the world on his shoulders.
When you live before the mystery, the world is yours.
The last arena we call "The Sea of Tranquillity."
I rather like that. It dawned on me when the astronauts were walking
on the moon, that when you stand on the moon the earth is "up
there." I always knew "heaven" was "up there."
But when you are on the moon, "up there" points exactly
to this life here, where the Other World is. I want to go there
one of these days and see, just to be sure, that the Other World
is right here.
The Sea of Tranquillity is the recovery of that weird
kind of peace right where there is no peace. There is no sentiment
here, for the Other World is right in the midst of this world,
and there was never been any peace in this world for a man who
has the world on his shoulders. I just heard a few moments ago
on the television a conversation in which they used the words
"peace" and "tranquillity." I pricked up my
cars, and as they began to spin it, they were suggesting that
they see signs of a new, fresh concern, however warped it may
be. They said that they were remaking, that old movie, "Lost
Horizon." Remember the kind of romanticism it had? It came
back in 1937 or so--some of you were not even alive then. I would
like to see if you could detect in that movie why they remade
it right now--whether it is just another escapist attempt, of
whether they are sensing after some kind of present reality.
I never dreamed that this awareness would break loose
in my lifetime. We who worked for the renewal of the church had
to fight with a broadsword every second any nonsense about peace
or joy in this world. Do you understand that? You would never
have had the renewed church if you had not slain that sentimental
misunderstanding of what authentic peace and joy are. I never
dreamed that in my lifetime there would be a possibility that
we could use those words authentically. I have understandings
inside myself in this arena that I never dreamed could be. Yes,
and it came out of our time.
I have never been kindly disposed towards the hippies,
but I have known for a long time they were pointing to something.
And I have hated sensitivity training like Satan itself. My, what
that has done to scar men and women in the spirit dimension for
the rest of their lives you could not begin to articulate if you
had a thousand years. And yet, many of the most weird warpings
that you find in history are trying to point to something, and
I will give them that credit.
Actually, in the Other World there is only one state
of being, not four. For where consciousness is, there is the mystery,
there is the world on your back, and there is the peace that passes
reason's capacity to grasp it as peace. There is no sentiment
here I tell you, this world, in which the Other World is, is a
tragic world. Unamuno is quite right when he talks about the tragedy
of the world, in the sense that existence is itself tragic. If
the whole journey of man is not your specific vocation, you would
never have the slightest idea what you mean when you talk about
the joy unspeakable and full of glory. They are woven together.
When you dare to live your life before the mystery, there is peace
and joy. If you have authentic peace and joy, you can be sure
you are living your life before the mystery. The charts which
we have developed on the Other World are the superimposition of
the rational capacity of man upon that which is beyond the rational
capacity of man.
You could have drawn the road map a million other
different ways with different poetry. We have delineated four
areas which we think broke loose in our century, and then we divided
each one of those into four of what we call treks, which makes
a total of sixteen treks. When we divided those treks into four
states of being. That means that on the charts sixty-four states
of being are delineated. But remember they are all one. ~ would
like to read you an illustration of some poetry in the language
of a state of being. What I will do is weave together four states
of being into one state of being in a paragraph that represents
a trek.
You understand there is nothing new at all in what
we are doing. What is actually going on is a translation from
one language to another. When you deal with the Other World, you
are translating from the language of the intellectual dimension
of life into the language of the state-of-being dimension of life.
It is a poetic language.
"One day a man is driven by whatsoever vicissitudes
of life into the consciousness that he himself must die. It is
like being in a state of shock. A strange force intrudes. Suddenly
he is submerged in awe, he feels it hovering all about him; he
feels its penetration into the deepest corners of his innermost
being. In quiet terror, and with an inexplicable fascination,
he knows the fragility of his total existence; he feels his contingency,
and beholds the passingness of all things. It is like unto a mortal
wound from which he knows he will never recover. As the absurdity,
the irrationality of it all seeps deep within, a burning, objectless
anger rises and rages until futility itself turns into a heavy
numbness and everything becomes disoriented; all is nothingness;
there is no place any more to stand, Just terrifying mystery.
And hanging helplessly, swirling in emptiness, engulfed in awe,
it dawns at long last, like the rising of a black sun, that exactly
here is the finally real before which he is fated and invited
to live and die his life. This is the great encounter with the
aweful mystery."
The Basic Significance of the Other World
In conclusion, the fact that in dealing with the
Other World which is right in the midst of this world, you are
dealing with what it means to be a human being. Thirty years ago
our whole world was hanging on with its fingernails on a cliff,
as its world wars going to pieces, raising the question, "'What
is life all about?" Now we have come out of the trough and
are moving on the crest of the wave. Once again in history, man
has found the answer, his answer. This does not mean that there
will not be many crests in the future. But in our time, it is
here. Now when someone begins to ask you what life is all about,
you have something to bear witness to.
Outside of the fact that that is humanness, I have
said one thing. The Other World may be the most crucial key there
is for actually turning on the processes that will snowball the
arrival of a new web of relationships that define society. Very
likely also, within the poetry of the Other World chart--or if
not that poetry, the poetry that you build--is the secret to the
new mythology that will enable mankind to find his way to swim,
if you please, in the rivers of radical consciousness and become
man. It has been a long time since man with any sense of genuineness
could speak of what fulfillment meant, of what happiness meant.
I mean Happiness.
And then, you know as well as I know, that moralities
rise out of new definitions of man, of new experiences of what
it is to be human. As you delineate the topography of the Other
World, you are building the basis for the new morality that every
sensitive person is screaming for--not only the youth, but old
men and old women. It has been long time since within the church
we have known what we meant when we talked about a "Christian
Man," or a "Christian Woman." You beginning to
define again what you mean when you talk about a man of faith,
a man of spirit in the world.
In working on the Other World, you are also building,
the tool for the new evangelism. I do not mean by "Evangelism"
anything that you have been previously programmed to mean by that
word. I mean the means whereby you can elicit out of other people
the decision that renders it possible for them to decide to live
an authentic life. Years ago when I was teaching in seminary,
one of the problems people screamed about is that they had no
way for the new theology to really get down into the pews. It
was not that the clergy could not articulate it. They could. But
lives are not changed by inte1lectual ideas. The work on the Other
World is the beginning of the creation of an instrument that will
enable people to have self-consciousness about the states of being,
that define them.
We have talked frequently about popular preaching. You are going, to see that in the world. It is the kind of spin you do with somebody sitting next to you on a commuter train and they do not know until ten years later because you do not use any language that sounds religious or anything like that, that new possibilities and new life flooded into their veins. I suspect that if you had 200,000 people located according to a rational grid across the world, you could design a popular preaching curriculum, so that on April 28, in 1982, 200,000 people would be spinning on "Box 36." If the church is going, to build a-new society, this kind of tactical work will have to go on.