Fifth Guardian Consult Ecumenical Institute

October 12­14, l973 . " Quarter II

Opening Address 1973-1974

Grace and peace be unto you, from God our Father. and the Lord. Jesus Christ.. Amen

For some time now, for two reasons, I have wanted very much to see the top echelon of one of the great corporations in this country. Yesterday, due to years of work of Guardians, that opportunity and great joy came to me. First, I wanted to sit across from such a giant in the business community, on the other side of our having turned, as we say it, toward the world - having turned to the direct address of the secular; having turned to the masses, to the world at large; having turned toward the social, toward society directly, having turned to the entire globe. Secondly, I wanted to sit across from some such figure and talk. Secondly, I wanted to speak with someone like that about LENS. I wanted to discover for myself how one would sell this course, LENS In that opportunity of Thursday LENS sold. No matter what comes of it directly, it sold. I captured the man. There was no doubt that, busy as he was, he was delighted to spend his time talking to one manifestation of this turn to the world. We were supposed to be there thirty minutes, but stayed for over an hour, while he listened with passion in his eyes. Finally, when he got a chance to speak, he began to pour out of his own internal being to those, who a few minutes before were entire strangers, and would hardly let us go.

I would like to share very briefly what I said to him. After saying how we happened to arrive there in his office, I told him we were a group who for some twenty years had been interested in discovering ways, in this complex world, where human beings, as individuals and groups, could be­authentically engaged in the social process; of how a person in our moment could grasp meaning­filled integrity; and of how a sense of profound fulfillment could be appropriated at this moment in history. For at least twenty years we approached this through the religious structures. We were revolutionaries within the churches, as we moved toward those goals. Our master strategies had to do with contextual re­education in which you gave people a new context to know what they know in the midst of this new kind of world. Our second strategy was that of primal community reformulation, grasping again what it means to be corporate on the grassroots a level. Our third strategy was to discover the ways and means of the remotivation of mankind in our time. We did this through holding short­term seminars (running some thirty thousand people through them a year), through our experiments in places like 5th City, and through our probing in research into the deeps of the meaning of consciousness of consciousness.

This was a bright man I was speaking with. Sometimes, when you use words of more than two syllables, you have to pause and explain for about forty minutes. He needed no explanation; the fire went on! When I began the conversation, I told him I wanted to ask two things of him, but that I was going to say who we were, first.

Then I took the turn in the conversation. I said that in recent years certain secular men in the business. profession had urged us to create a course you could use directly in the business community. We spent three years building such a course, with the help of literally hundreds of people, spelling out the thousand people who have come here for the last three summers, who pioneered the way in building that course. I told him that we had tested it out, teaching it last quarter in thirty­four major cities across the globe. I pointed out, further, that it had to be taught around the globe, because the economic community was the signal global society in the world today (in the Middle Ages it was the Church).

The course deals with three things (only at this moment do I pull this out, which itself sells the course). The first thing we do is to give any individual in this course a means whereby he can "reap, in his own imagination, the total process of the complex processes which define the social systems in which men live. Secondly, we more into methodologies of corporateness, and remind him that he is going to have labor problems in the next few years like he has never had them before. But this time it is not going to be for more benefits or more salary; it is going to be for an authentic participation in the decision­making processes by which that person's destiny is determined, for an architectonic structure, in the business world or in any other manifestation of corporateness, is gone. (He nodded his head.) We deal, first, with the methodologies by which a body of people today can push through the problems to the underlying contradictions underneath; secondly, with the methodologies by which a group can build together the proposals whereby those contradictions are turned into creative agents for the future; and third, methodologies by which you build a consensus not from the top down but from the bottom up. At this point I reminded him that one of these days I will be looking for a plant of twelve hundred people in which every single person, from the sweeper up to the president, goes through this course, to see what would happen. (Again I got nods from him.) I pointed out that we are going to teach it in sixty­four cities around the globe, thirty two of which are outside the continental limits of North America.

Then, I went on to say, "Now, I am here for two things: first, participation, and second, money. Participation is to send your top­echelon people you trust in this kind of arena, if you feel you could, to the course we are going to have in New York, after which we would come back and talk about how you could use it directly in your own area. The second thing is, we need money. Now, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations helped on our research by giving us fifty thousand dollars, which did not even begin to pay for it. The Rockefeller Foundation looks as if they will fund the follow­up research. But we have another problem, and that is 'launching', or seeding money. It looks to us as if we will be down about sixty thousand dollars for the first year but after one year we believe the course will pay for itself. To get that sixty thousand dollars will necessitate going to four of the major corporations. Because this is geared to their problems and concerns, I want to go to Union Carbide; I want to go to General Motors; I want to go to IBM; and then I want to go to AT&T at the top level. I would like to ask those four companies to give fifteen thousand dollars apiece. Now my interview is really over." That is when he begins to talk.

I come away from that interview most encouraged. He has not the slightest doubt in his mind that he was addressed in his spirit deeps, although not a word of "religion" entered into it. Secondly, he is impressed by LENS. One of the reasons I am encouraged is because that was evidence of the moment of resurgence.

"The Hunter Warrior" from The Lessons of Don Juan on the Journey to Ixtlan is a secular articulation of what it means to 1ive a great life. Every culture has to articulate that. It is done by a culture forging an image of what it means for you to be human. Certain sentinel individuals move into and explore the deeps of human consciousness, forging a poetry whereby they articulate what it means to be engaged, what it means to be a person of integrity, and what it means to embrace fulfillment of life. Every culture does this.

What I am going to read from, now, probably comes out of the Mayan culture. If you remember, one day they just suddenly disappeared. Most people think they wandered north, for whatever reasons, and that the Pueblo Indians are what remain of them. Out of that background came the poetry that comprised the best selling novel, The Journey to Ixtlan, by Castenadas. It is fantastic how much it is selling, and how the youth have been taken by that novel. On the little card you have been given are twelve statements which focus upon the qualities that represent what a fulfilled and complete life was to these Indians. The hunter­warrior is what this typological figure is called. That is to say, to be a fulfilled man in that culture, to be an engaged man, a man of integrity, was to be a hunter­warrior. This, for me, is an articulation of resurgence.

(See attached readings)

Probably the most important thing that has happened to us, is that our identity has started to come clear again. It is going to take some time: ­­I think two or three more years ­­when you undergo the kind of metamorphosis that we went through.

For twenty years we have been part of the religious revolution for the renewal of religion in the world. At the same time, as you well know, the reformulation of society has been going on, in a striking fashion, although fragmented. There is the religious body, and the revolutionary forces, or the invisible piety of any group of people. Then there is the social body, and the revolutionaries relative to that.

Now in this shift from the emphasis on the religious to direct emphasis on the social, we discovered the religious. This has nothing to do with priests, ministers, or rabbis, but with those people who are concerned with the total world, who are concerned that their lives be bottomlessly meaningful, and that all men are fulfilled. That is not a bad definition of the religious. I think, in our day, you are not going to find them, first of all, as clerics, such as I do; but you men represent the new form of the religious in history. I am sure not all of you, and I am aware that you wil1 find in a year or two this burden so hellish that you will collapse, just. like many before you. But not all of you. The center circle is the eschatological religious (if you will allow me to use that word). The eschatological religious is the perpetual revolutionary. Sometimes he is not seen very clearly, but in our time he is being seen. Sometimes he solidifies; sometimes he becomes very f1uid. This is the key to the ongoing humanization of mankind. Finally, he has to be concerned with both religious and social at the same time. That, it seems to me, is how we are discovering, at this particular moment, in our history, as if we had never seen it before, what our identity is.

Now in discovering that, you begin to look again at your master strategies. Keeping in mind contextual re­education, communal reformulation, and human remotivation, in order to attack the religious body we built a course, and that was RS-I. And this course was a happening. Anyone who ever quarrels about ideology in it has had a bad teacher. The course is an impact, not a series of ideas you agree with or not agree with. You will never accomplish a revolution without that kind of impactment instrument or vehicle. Then we had to build the machinery for teaching. Since this could not be finally delimited, it had to be a global machine, Then we had the problem of how to nurture the people who began to wake up. This is how the wayside inns came into being (represented by the eighty four circles of the "resurgence swirl). These rationally cover the world. We now have Houses in Brussels, Paris, and Frankfurt. We are now hitting Europe. Then, you had to build a kind of corporate structure, out in the grassroots. This was the realm of the cadre.

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When with the move into the world, there are some parallels. The LENS course is an impactment course. RS­1, direct toward the religious body, was indirect toward the world. LENS is direct toward the world, but will be indirect toward the religious body. You must he doing both always. Thank heavens, we have the teaching machinery already established. Just think how that will save twenty years in itself, because it just took about twenty years to build that kind of global teaching machine. The exciting thing about these Houses, is that you are going to have to have wayside stations, or none of this will go at all. We finally gave to our eighty­four Houses brass plaques that said, "The Bombay House, or "The Paducah House", or "The New York House," or "The Chicago House," or "The Tokyo House," or "The Manila House," or "The Sydney House". We then gave them another brass plaque saying "The Institute of Cultural Affairs." Now, since you are here, we went legal with a secular name: "The Institute of Cultural Affairs." In that interview with Mr. Lilly, when I put out that card saying Institute of Cultural Affairs, and told him that we were legal under that name, he breathed easier. Then we gave him another one that said, "The Ecumenical Institute". Now on the door post of one of those eighty four Houses around the world is "The Bombay House", "The Institute of Cultural Affairs", and "The Ecumenical Institute." That House, by just a sign and perhaps another telephone number, is able to freight this load. That saves many, many years.

Now, the social reality out in the grassroots has to be the Guild. This is the job ahead that we have to move in on. In making this kind of turn, our polity became crucial. For a long time, we have known what any kind of corporateness knows that the polities of yesterday - the architectonic, the hierarchical polities- are gone.

Democracy, as you and I knew it, is gone. I believe that somebody is going to come up with a new term; perhaps something like "humocracy." It will not be going back behind something like democracy, but building on top of it. It will take the theoretical reality, and find a dynamical way in which it can become an actuality for the "Last Fat Lady". Something like that has already begun. We began, in our polity, with Plato. Some of you remember, in his Republic, that he believes that any kind of an authentic power structure has three dynamics: monarahy, oligarchy (aristocracy), and democracy. I have been brooding on Plato a little bit. monarchy would be the symbolic power; the aristocracy would be the power of the accumulated wisdom; and the democracy would be tile power of the masses themselves. All three are necessary.

Now Plato (at least from this distance in time) seems to be static; and with Aristotle helping him, that is where we got our architectonic grasp of polity. Every corporation in the world today is facing exactly this kind of problem. The way we have begun to solve this (you Guardians need to know this, and also to help us with it) is not through our Religious Houses, but the Area Houses. Some of you may remember that we have the world gridded into 3 spheres, 9 continents, 54 areas, and 324 regions. At this moment we have penetrated 20 of the 54 areas of the world There are now 20 Area Houses on seven geo-social continents save Russia and China. If you take Greenwich Time (let us call that London) and were going to fly around the world, our Area Houses would look like this: London, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Nairobi, Bombay, Hyderabad, Delhi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Suva, San Francisco, Winnipeg, Houston, Chicago, New York, Montreal, Caracas. In some of these there are as many as fourteen satellites. In others, there are no satellites. They would all add up to eighty­four.

Now, I believe it is because of the Guardians' last meeting that we decided to speed up our timetable a whole year. Next September, we were going, for the first time, to bring all those Area Priors in from around the world. But things had moved so rapidly, we decided to do it this past September. The first week in September they all came in for our first Global Order Council.

That meeting revealed that we have thought through that there must be loca1 autonomy in this Order. But there is a twist in local autonomy. What we mean by local autonomy is only a reality which has to do with the new kind of world we live in, to the degree that Mr. Local, or that local entity, is global. That local autonomy is a reality which is actualized only where the local entity is globally concerned. Our Area Priors demonstrated that they were concerned with the globe. It is as if you could take some place like Singapore and have it in the center. That is what you mean by local autonomy: where it is the center of the globe. Frank Hilliard, who is in our London House, was "roughing me up" a little bit, because somebody here ''invited" him to a meeting. He said, "Nobody invites me to a meeting." He said, '"Wherever I am, that is the meeting"" He said, ''If you think I am simply in charge of London, and not this whole Order, you had better think again! That is a fine illustration of local autonomy. If Frank did not have that posture, then he is not capable of handling what is meant by local autonomy.

Our center of gravity now, formally, is not Chicago. It is, in principle, these Areas. At first, we thought we would do this continentally. We tried it in Seapac, but it is too large to grasp the local. Then we tried it regionally. It is too little to grasp in a practical, effective way.

What it takes to keep us moving, and what keeps us glued together is an Area House, a complex of four centrums: one is Operations, one is Development, one is Finance, and one is Research. The Development Centrum is. however, now in nine different continents; next year this time we want to put it in four: one in Chicago, one in Bombay, one in London, and one in Hong Kong. At the same place there would also be a Research Centrum, a Financial Centrum, and an Operations Centrum. These are related across the world, which give you a sort of "posey" image, representing their internal life. Neither are subject to the other. They are to hold the postmodern world's perspective: that creativity comes only out of tension, or a dynamic. What is going to keep it moving is that dynamic. Of course, you have a whole complex of dynamics within this kind of scheme.

Now in each one of these, you have another set of dynamics called Commissions. There must be a commission that deals with persons (I do not mean personnel). Fundamentally, this means assignments, though it sometimes means going around and "mopping up" after people. This is not our basic care structure.; we have other care structures for people. This is our Operations structure. Then we have one which has to do with the actual income and expenditure of finances: a commission which guards over the legal, and one which guards over the effective performance of the task.

When we started, there was a group of twenty or thirty of us who came up from Austin, and through the years we have tended to be the "aristocracy." That is, when you had a crucial problem you could not work out in the total group, then that smaller group had to move in to bring their wisdom to the total group. The aristocracy is that kind of dynamic. The total Order, which is the people, is the final decision­making body. But without consensus you could not exist. It is through the procedures of Problem­Solving Units, in which everybody in the Order has the opportunity almost on a constant level to get his own creativity in the stew, that consensus is created. Through that process come the decisions which determine one's own destiny.

Where in this is the symbolism? Well, symbolism is nothing ­­that is in the center. After saying that, then I tell you symbolism is simply crucial. But the symbolism in a body like ours, and in corporations, has nothing to do, in the first instance, with deciding anything about anything. It is the symbolic imprint which releases that decision into the total body, creating the motivity necessary for affecting or concretizing or actualizing that decision.

To put a little flesh on that, I would like to mention the Guild. It has finally become clear that we have had fantastic problems. In fact, we have knot known what to do with the meaning of our research for the last three summers on the Social Vehicle because we could not get clear on that Guild construct. Now it is beginning to come clear. Those of you who have read any of the work of the summer know that we are pretty clear on the function of the Guild. That is because the Guild is a dynamic in humanness, not, first of all, some kind of an organization.

From the dawn of consciousness itself there have always been guilds, that is, those sensitive people who just cared. You can find them in any civilization in the past. Their function has been to rationalize, or rationally organize by the categories of enlightenment. The guildsman was, first of all, concerned that all people be enlightened ­­awakened. Secondly, he was concerned about caring for humanity. This is way, way back in ancient Rome, they started funeral societies because there was no way to get people buried, except the rich. Thirdly, they were the guardians over the social structures. That is to say, the guild dynamic is the dynamic of perpetual revolution in society, relative to the structures of society.

Our problem was with the form of the Guild. That is understandable, because the form of the Guild in ancient China or in ancient Egypt could not be the form today. The Guild today seems to look like this. A

guild on the local level has three dynamics. There is, first of all, the core dynamic. These are the hardened veterans relative to that function in history. They are the ones who have fought through to committing their total life, as long as it exists, to universal benevolence, profound integrity, and endless fulfillment. That is what the "old warrior" meant when he said, "this man has already picked out the space in which he is going to die." That is the space of universal benevolence, of ontological integrity, of undiminished fulfillment. That is his space ­­he has already danced his death. That is why you cannot frighten him anymore. There has to be that hard core. He is, to use our jargon today, the movement

A guild on a local level is a lot more than that. It is also, as one of my colleagues has put it, a task force dynamic. These are the many people who from time to time will move in with the hard core to go out to accomplish a task. You have seen in your lifetime the League of Women Voters come in to do a job and then, so to speak, sort of fade away. The core marches on, and the task forces participate intermittently.

Another dynamic, which in principle can involve the whole community, is the PSU: the problem­solving unit. This means a Guild on a local level would be this core, who from time to time would create the machinery whereby whosoever will in that community participates in getting their creativity into the resolutions of the contradictions that exist in their midst. Then some would likely act in such a way that these would be effectively actualized, all swirling around this hard core of people who have made a decision on behalf of all of mankind, even to the expenditure of their own death.

Now that brings me to the Guardians. I need not remind you that each one of our eighty-four Houses is setting up four cadres in cities within their region, from which four more cadres each will be produced, to begin to get an astounding number of people who could begin to be the core of a Guild. Now these local guilds will not exist if there is not a Guild network -- local guilds, from the area on down, or from the region on down, which finally get themselves related to the Ecumenical Parish on a very local level. Up above the region or the area is what we call the network, without which this will not exist. We originally thought this would be a series of bodies, perhaps labor unions, politicians, educators, businessmen, and doctors, which would come together to focus on the issues of the world, funnel that wisdom down to the grassroots, which would be worked on in a PSU. That funnel would lead back up to these rather inclusive bodies, and you would begin to systematically eat away at the creation of a new social vehicle, or the instigating of social change.

Now, it has dawned upon us that that network exists, only it is a different form. The Guardians is that network. It is already in being. Even if you all went home and never came back, it is in being. But it change the process. It means that this Guild network is not multiple. It is not a matter of multiplicity. It is unitary. It is singular.

Then these are the operations of that Guild. One of these days, I would like to see a group of architects -- awakened ones -- come together. We would begin to think through what are the spatial designs in our day that can point, not like spires in the Middle Ages to a second story universe, but to the radical deeps of humanness beginning to overflow in our moment in history. I do not know whether Randy Johnson is here, but we have been talking for several years about how one of these days, we would get a body of awakened psychiatrists together in this country, along with some of us who are not psychiatrists, and we would begin to think through the meaning of the breakloose of the human spirit for therapy in our moment in history. Or to get together a group of politicians with peole who are not politicians, like us, in which you begin to think through issues on this level. It is rather like seeing down the line a body of men, like this, beginning to instigate these things clear across the country.

This question must be raised on a global level. I believe that before I die there will be Muslim businessmen, Jewish businessmen, Hindu businessmen, with Christian businessmen (whatever all of that means) who are going to be working on these problems. For, to be alive today as a human being means you share.

At the same time, Guardians have this job which you have exercised so astoundingly to me, of providing the practical interior leadership. It is like the man who said that a hoe was simply the extension of an arm. Well, the Guardians, to us, have already been an absolutely unbelievable extension of hardheaded leadership. I will let other peole make their reports about that fantastic hunk of work you did last time and what it has meant, pointing to how we are different because of it. Laugh if you will at this, but I believe that even the way this old man holds himself is evidence of the strength and power and leadership this body of people has injected into the very jugular vein of the movement.

I think, ere you go home this time, you are going to accomplish another transfusion of like power and force. I hope that tonight you have, after you finish your work, dreams like you have never had since you were twenty­realistic, hard­headed, warm, and joyous dreams. Thank you very much.

Joseph W. Mathews

10/13/73