CHARTING IS: I. A Decision­making process

II. A Life­Method

III, A Study Method

IV. A. Teachinq Method

Every person is always charting. That is the given in life. Your rationality is always gridding and charting what's going on. You may be doing it unconsciously, but you are gridding across certain rational intuitions you have. The charting methoc is simply trying to pull together your whole civilizing process ir terms of Western man's Ui-image, and utilizing that process to the ''enth" degree.

This process of ordering chaos so your whole psychological mechanism, your sociological and intentional mechanisms are going on, is to participate in making decisions.

INTELLECTUAL BASIS OF THE CHARTING METHOD­­this relates to the philosophical basis, and ties in with the Academy and our finding the best course to begin with:: Sociology-History, with pre-dominance on the history pole.

A student is always a teller-of-tales, or a history-makiing animal,

What you are doing in the chcrting method in terms of your intellect is that you are deciding to listen to another person say something, but you are listening in 20th century fashion­­or scientifically, rather than just listening as if you were just "happening to hear", This is an attempt to listen to what the person is really saying.

The second arpect is the participating in objectifying the limits of what is going on, so you can objectify the limits of your current trialogue with the author, his document, and that which he is pointing to. This means you participate in a process similar to what goes on with what we tal2 about as the his'cory process­­this is sectored out so you have the objective type of historian, the rational historian, and the intentional historian. This process of charting as a study method, a life method, and decision­making process has to do with all three. If you attempt to collapse any of these three poles, the whole process has not been partipated in in the 20th century study.

You can see that the objective historian wants to find out what happened. The rational historian wants to impose some pattern or rationality on history; and this rational historian is talking about the intentional dimension of both of these. You are the conscious participant in looking at what you observe; putting rationality on what you observe; and you cannot collapse ary of those three.

Your intellectual basis of the chartinq method ties in immediately with imaginal education, or in the decision­making process. You have to have an image between your idea and your action. No one ever got anything done without a practical operating irnage of his action which participates in both his picture of the Future and his participation in his images out of the past. T'hat refers you back into our whole construct in which a person creates a model in the present moment, out of his anticipation of the future, which throws him back to pick. up what he has out of the past in order to create that model so he can flow into the future as a decision­making person.

How does this apply, then, to the process of charting. First of all, chart-makiing intellectually involves. both the inductive and deductive processes of reasoning. That is fairly obvious. Your chaos is going on below the line. Above the line what you put is your super­imposition of your rationality, and your dialogue with the rationality of the author in order to create that super­structure above the chaos so you can see what is actually going on through the eyes of that rational pattern you placed upon it. The intentional dimension is that of interpretation of that.

Or if you applied it or contrasted it, or compared it with the humnaization process, the art form methodology, this, of course, is the impressionistic dimension of the art form process. If you were dealing with induction and deduction alone and at the process of deduction being like Charlie Chaplin or Sherlock Holmes do you see how you would impose rationality upon them. I see such-and-such going on in the life of this person therefore this-and-so must be his or her motives for doing this crime. Your rational perspective on the situation shows you what is going orr in the objective dimension.

The intellectual basis shows you the limits of what is going on.

PSYC HOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE: CHARTING METHOD I like to use the.followng gimmick to keep these in .mind. The psychological basis is pointng to your possibilities and limits. What are the possibilities in my limits? This has to do predominantly with the psyche, or the way the psyche functions. You will notice, for example, when the motion­piccure industry was threatened by television whose screen is like the postage­stamp screen of the early motion picture that did not create a larger square screen but a horizontal picture to point psychologically that you contain ifinite number of imaginal pictures,.more horizontal than vertical, because your hands and eyes, through which you get `'our most dramatic images beaming to you on a horizontal basis. In moving your head horizontally you are attempting to get yourself a centimeter.larger, wider, picture of what is going on. In ou: work, of course, we would have to point out the depths and heights of that too; but your predolr~nant images are held horizontally more than the up­down outlininq images,

Also, in your charting method you are participating psychologically with possibilities of natural curiosity. When you see a given crossword puzzle, and it is half­worked, your natural curiosity, I suggest, is to want that filled out. You are cooperating with your psychological tendencies to be curious about that type of game.

Another aspect, is that charting is like meeting a person ­­ you never meet another person so that you have his whole life time­line from the day he was born until he dies. You meet him as he is at a given moment, and you start a conversation. For example, in the Tillich paper you meet Paul Tillich at a given point, describing a given reality to which he is going to speak. I do not need to know everything that went on in his life before or everything afterwards. I need predominantly to meet him saying what he has to say right then.

THE LIFE­STYLE OF THE PERSON STUDYING ­­ You are in the process of placing the self­consciOus demand upon yourself to transcend your chaos, not to actualize your situation. You are participating in your life style in saying that my job is not to actualize this but to have an open­ended dialogue. Therefore, always having to transcend what is going on as I create the super­structure out of a given paper . In terms of teaching, you are not interested primarily in the concrete answer a person gives about a given issue, or an answer the person can give in the conversation ­­ though that is part or the seminar and conversation. What you are interested in is that he is grappling with the context of what he is saying.

As a pedagogue, you should be pleased when people are grappling with the context, rather than whether they come up with the answer you have, although that participates in it. You should be delighted when the people are trying to figure out the context in which something is being said, and especially when they are trying to figure out the context out of which one of their colleagues around the table is grappling.

This ties in with the EXPRESSIONISTIC DIlMENSIONOF THE STUDY AND LIFE METHOD ­­ In other words, this method tries and does participate in the whole aspect of beiny a person who, imaginally speaking, has chaos to bring that chaos to order; or you are participating with a decisional being.

Important to emphasize in teaching is the concretizing dimension of this. We need to find ways and means of enahling people to see why these particular gestalts organize the chaos of his life; and to see that he has the handles, the tools, by which he can think through the chaos in his life. If he just has this little "pimple" that popped up in his life which delighted him, made him happy or sad, then you are failing as a teacher. You want him to participate in the entire process that organizes his chaos.

(ACTUALIZE: to freeze, crystallize, let this situation be final; therefore, I won't have any more problems (back to the womb). Because of: man's consciousness of his consciousness he is constantly dsemanded by life to transcend every transcendence he had before.)

Joseph Pierce