Chicago Nexus Week II of week 7
I. Saturday Breakfast:
Read World Events Synopsis
1. Read events by Areas: Around the group.
which do you want to know more?
what unusual or what came as a surprise?
what triggered your imagination?
3. Where do you see relationships between events?
4. How is history changing out of these events?
5. What is the trend in the process (choose E, P, C)
6. Where in these events is the new world being created?
II. Saturday Lunch:
Read "New Castle"
1. What words, phrases struck you?
2. Where did you sense dislocation in society?
What elements of the internal landscape are being dissolved?
i.e. what stories are obviously inadequate?
Where did you experience that deep universal yearning?
3. What new actions appear to portend a new vision?
4. What are some components of that vision?
III. Saturday Dinner:
Read Sandburg
1. What images struck you?
2. Where did you laugh?
3. What was the sequence of events?
4. Where has history done this recently (set out from the land where every
thing is the same as it always was?)
5. What was the experience of this happening?
6. What was the desision posed by this happening?
IV. Sunday Breakfast
"Fog" conversation context: This is a time of un focus when you experience your self in a fog of activities and demands. Then occasionally something happens like a break in the fog for a brief moment. Something happens that strikes you as "right" or "on target" for a moment and then it settles back into the fog again.
1. What have been some recent occasions when you've seen through the fog?
What have been some experiences of a "crack" appearing?
2. What's been your interior response to these occasions?
3. What have been the practical implications of these events?
4. What have they disclosed about this world?
Perhaps this is the experience of hope appearing.
The vision of the new Castle has already appeared to millions of men and women throughout our modern world. Not in images and not with concepts, but without intermediaries and directly to their inner selves, for there is no other wet open to such a vision. Like previous castle visions, it promises a substance for their hopes, an answer to their doubts, and a new way of knowing and living. Its greatest harbinger is the dislocation we daily witness more and more in our political affiliations, social structures, establishment outlooks, personal morality and life values.
For the moment, this dislocation is all most of us can know of the new vision, given our modern approach to reality. We have been taught not to recognize any vision. Only the self in us can do so; but we have learned also to deny that self's existence or to dissect it into "parts," and in any case to tune out from the knowledge it alone can afford us. We UNKNOW it, and therefore we cannot respond to what it perceives. Nevertheless, the new vision goes on looming ever larger in the unknowing perception of more and more people; and in the increasing discomfort of its earls thrall many would deny the vision's existence or explain away its effects.
Together with this difficulty, we have one other: before the vision becomes a visible and tangible reality, we cannot put its outlines into words; we cannot conceptualize its qualities. For our words and concepts now are hewn only in terms of what is visible and tangible.
We can, though, begin to describe the vision in its happening....
Our sense of dislocation must, paradoxically, be the same as that of many past onlookers of the human scene, as they witnessed the unfolding of one or other Castle vision in Mecca, Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, Angkor Wat, and Pekin. They had been used to a relatively changeless face in the world around them. In Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, the normally saw large groups of human beings on the treadmill of an established way of life. The landscape fashioned over a long past dictated the framework within which they all lived and sought to maintain, while the cycles of seasons, years, and centuries rolled on and spent themselves over the unchanging shores of human affairs. But, at certain places and at particular times, as we have seen, the whole dimension of human living seemed to overturn. There was each time some very particular human implosion followed by a total revamping of man's living dimension.
Such a vision, when it has come, has always dissolved instantaneously without noise or foreknowledge an entire inner landscape formed in men and women over previous millenia of living. In its place, there has appeared an unexpected landscape, new and impatient of any fallow time...
So new was the landscape of each new Castle vision that its only portent was a deep and nearly universal yearning, a sense of dislocation between that which was and that which was about to be. In each case, some imageless force gripped men and women, thrusting them beyond all reason and memory and image, far outside any plan predictable from or inculcated by their past. The resultsalways concrete, never abstract were surprising, unforeseeable, empirically unmistakable...
And whenever such a vision occurred, it was not a matter of imagination,
of pictures in the mind merely. It did not wait upon hindsight.
It was no daydream or night fantasy, no seer's musings and no
philosopher's theorizing. Rather, it was action and always a new
sometimes seemingly instant reality:
the quicksilver transformation of North Africa, the Near East,
and Eastern Asia into the cohesive Muslim world of the eighth
century A.D.; the fever of Maoism running through 700 million
Chinese in 1949....