Chicago Nexus 1975­76

Research Centrum

Wk. 10, Qtr.IV

From a year of practical engagement, the Order has learned that effective action arises from a response to the depths of life. Our familiar poetry of the depths has come alive with new practical relevance. This week the readings are from Nikos Kazantzakis Saviors of God, but no longer putting emphasis on their profound meaning so much as on their practical implications.

I. The Cry

1. What images came to you with new life?

2. If you were to write some truths about "the cry," what points would you make?

3. Where are people hearing the cry today?

4. What are the cries that are calling people forth these days?

5. What implications toes this have for us?

II. The Ego

1. What lines struck you?

2. What insights came to you about caring for yourself?

3. What exercises provide effective care for people these days?

4. What are some ways of acting out these canons of generalship?

III. The Race

1. What images spoke to you this time?

2. How does this consciousness move people to action?

3. Where do you see people acting out this responsibility?

4. What are the practical manifestations of this stance?

IV. The Action

1. What phrases lit up for you?

2. Substitute words: If you are . . . then . . . .

3. What is the critical factor in doing a social miracle?

4. How do you break spirit loose from matter these days?

Sample Readings:

The Cry (page 64)

6. Amidst our deepest despair someone within us cries out: "I do not despair! I fight on! I grasp at your head, I unsheathe myself from your body, I detach myself from the earth, I cannot be contained in brains, in names, in deeds!"

7. Out of our most ample virtue someone rises up in despair and cries out: "Virtue is narrow, I cannot breathe! Paradise is small and cannot contain me! Your God resembles a man, I do not want him!"

8. I hear the savage cry, and I shudder. The agony that ascends within me composes itself, for the first time, into an integral human voice; it turns full face toward me and calls me clearly, with my own name, with the name of my father and my race.

9. This is the moment of greatest crisis. This is the signal for the March to begin. If you do not hear this Cry tearing at your entrails, do not set out.

10. Continue, with patience and submission, your sacred military service in the first, second, and third rank of preparation.

11. And listen: In sleep, in an act of love or of creation, in a proud and disinterested act of yours, or in a profound despairing silence, you may suddenly hear the Cry and set forth.

The Ego (page 67)

6. I put my body through its paces like a war horse; I keep it lean, sturdy, prepared. I harden it and I pity it. I have no other steed.

7. I keep my brain wide awake, lucid, unmerciful. I unleash it to battle relentlessly so that, all light, it may devour the darkness of the flesh. I have no other workshop where I may transform darkness into light.

8. I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart-to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.

9. The Cry within me is a call to arms. It shouts: "I, the Cry, am the Lord your God! I am not an asylum. I am not hope and a home. I am not the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Ghost. I am your General!

10. "You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade­in­arms!

The Race (pages 72-73)

18. You have a great responsibility. You do not govern now only your own small, insignificant existence. You are a throw of the dice on which, for a moment, the entire fate of your race is gambled.

19. Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.

20. When you shake with fear, your terror branches out into innumerable generations, and you degrade innumerable souls before and behind you. When you rise to a valorous deed, all of your race rises with you and turns valorous.

21. "I am not alone! I am not alone!" Let this vision inflame you at every moment.

22. You arc not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of clay, a thousand­year­old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain.

23. Your invisible body is your dread ancestors and your unborn descendants. Your visible body is the living men, women and children of your own race.

24. Only he has been freed from the inferno of his ego who feels deep pangs of hunger when a child of his race has nothing to eat, who feels his heart throbbing with joy when a man and a woman of his race embrace and kiss one another.

25. All these are limbs of your larger, visible body. You suffer and rejoice, scattered to the ends of the earth in a thousand bodies, blood of your blood.

26. Fight on behalf of your larger body just as you fight on behalf of your smaller body. Fight that all of your bodies may become strong, lean, prepared, that their minds may become enlightened, that their flaming, manly, and restless hearts may throb.

27. How can you become strong, enlightened, manly, if all these virtues do not storm throughout your entire larger body? How can you be saved unless all your blood is saved? If but one of your race is lost, he drags you down with him to destruction. A limb of your body and your mind rots.

28. Be deeply alive to this identity, not as theory, but as flesh and blood.

29. You are a leaf on the great tree of your race. Feel the earth mounting from dark roots and spreading out into branches and leaves.

30. What is your goal? To struggle and to cling firmly to a branch, either as a leaf or flower or fruit, so that within you the entire tree may move and breathe and be renewed.

The Action (page 122-123)

21. These are the labors each man is given and is in duty bound to complete before he dies. He may not otherwise be saved. For his own soul is scattered and enslaved in these things about him, in trees, ~in animals,; in men, in ideas, and it is his own soul he saves by completing these labors.

22. If you are a laborer, then till the earth, help it to bear fruit. The seeds in the earth cry out, and God cries out within the seeds. Set him free! A field awaits its deliverance at your hands, a machine awaits its soul. You may never be saved unless you save them.

23. If you are a warrior, be pitiless; compassion is not in the periphery of your duty. Kill the foe mercilessly. Hear how God cries out in the body of the enemy: "Kill this body, it obstructs me! Kill it that I may pass!"

24. If you are a man of learning, fight in the skull, kill ideas and create new ones. God hides in every idea as in every cell of flesh. Smash the idea, set him free! Give him another, a more spacious idea in which to dwell.

25. If you are a woman, then love. Choose austerely among all men the father of your children. It is not you who make the choice, but the indestructible, merciless, infinite, masculine God within you. Fulfill all your duty, so overbrimming with bitterness, love, and valor. Give up all your body, so filled with blood and milk.

26. Say: "This child, which I hold suckling at my breast, shall save God. Let me give him all my blood and milk."