November 29, 1968

You are not interested in ideas, but in the human being that is over against you in this; you are interested in the self. You have not charted unless you are other than what you were when you began. You may have gone through some intellectual rational process, but you have not charted. Charting is changing your posture and your being in history. Or to put it another way, it is the gimmick whereby you alter your existence through the genuine encounter with another human being. That is why this is not simply a dialogue, but a trialogue. … Charting is a way in which you are related to the Mystery through your dealing with the Other in his relationship with the Mystery. This is why you have to say at the beginning of any charting you make a decision to Love. Without this you can't get to first base. What does it mean at the beginning to Love this Other. You don't know him yet.

This paper before you is a great big hunk of Mystery. It is like looking in the eyes of the one you meet, before you know him. Here you make a decision, a kind of intensified relaxation, that is just crucial. There is a decision within yourself that man is to be honored, that he is a person of integrity. You may very well disagree with him, punch him here or pat him there, but you are open to him ­­ you believe he is dealing authentically with what is there. You probably noticed that there are three paragraphs within this paper itself in which the basic operating methodology of his approach is discussed. And mind you he charted, for charting is the way you write and the way you have listened. If you do not love...

Too often in study you have learned to hate, rather than love; and when you learn to hate you do not really study or learn. I shall never forgive some of my seminary professors who taught me to listen to what was wrong. Can you imagine that, rather than to teach me to love the institutes and let come what may. When I was looking for something that was wrong I could not study because I could not change, for I had all the answers before I looked at that document. Therefore, I despised God.

Studying is a relationship to God, and the charting method is a means by which that can become a reality. This is why it is Art. To love that Other is to love the Self. This decision has to be made at the beginning --that I am willing to be changed. Now mark you, I am not deciding to be a push­over. My heels are not run down. I decide to stand, but I am open to come out of it other than what I went into it. If that decision has not been made, you still do not know what changing is. It is a kind of abstraction. It is NOT rationalizing, it is dramatic; it is art­form; it is humanness; it is the relationship to God; it is the Love of the neighbor.

You approach this like you do a piece of art. First you must see it as a whole, not in pieces. You haven't got the slightest chance of being any different than you were before save you understand that you first look at the whole. You read the poem as a whole, a unity. It has many parts in it, but it is a totality. Even as you begin to deal with the whole, in order to begin to get ahold of what the whole really is. That's what charting is.

The external relations of the unit within the whole, in which you have to look at the internal relations of the unit that you decide to operate with. Concern with that paragraph's relation to every other paragraph; but then you have to deal with that paragraph as an entity within itself, which is broken down into units, so when you reach the bottom you reach infinity itself, and find there are no units in it. Only when you get to the bottom of infinity itself does this­ external relations­ you find no end to the external relations. If you lived 1,000 years studying this paper you would never get to the end of it. You are dealing with the Mystery of the Other. You are not dealing with a picture on the wall - you are dealing with your neighbor in this, and the bottomless Mystery of your own Self. That is what you see up on that board. When the Mystery of myself, before the Mystery of the other, becomes a reality there, we are before the Mystery beyond the Mystery beyond the Mystery beyond the Mystery, of God. This is spiritual exercise. That's charting. Nothing rational about it.

On the other side of that, this is the rationality that out-rationalizes rationality itself. When you put it that way you see that the rationality that out­rationalizes rationality that out­rationalizes rationality is spelled MYSTRY ­ GOD. Any kind of study is a practical living relationship with the depth of 1ife, to the depth of the neighbor, the depths of the self, the depth of God Himself. This, it seems to me is just crucial. Our chart have got to reflect that. November 29, 1968

Joseph Mathews