Symbolic Centrum 10/14/73
Fifth Guardian Consult
Last quarter, the first of
the special Guardian Commissions, the Finance Commission, went
into operation. Fifteen men met in Chicago four different times
and spent four days working out ways of setting aside funds for
the education of children, health, and so on.. It is nearly impossible
for me to express the importance of that work. If you men charged
consulting fees, we would go broke. When we think of the extension
of leadership you represent to the Order, it is simply overwhelming.
This quarter, we would like to get on the telephone to men in
insurance, call together a meeting or two, and work out a way
to insure fifteen hundred people. Also this quarter, if it is
possible, I would like to have both lawyers and others who understand
the workings of international corporations come together and figure
out how to legalize this monster that is coming into being.
I consider these meetings
far more than people using their skills as doctors or lawyers
or businessmen. These meeting would use people as human beings,
and I think this is how it ought to be. Of course, this is not
to dismiss the being you have invested in the particular skills
you possess.
Then I want to talk about
something which should be very obvious to you after our meeting
last April. We have begun to get clearer than ever before, on
how to take the wisdom poured into Base in a day and a half and
actually sort it out and put it into operation. I am extremely
pleased with what you produced last April. Much of it has already
been given flesh.
You will notice that you took
a turn this time. Before, you were dealing primarily with enablement
problems. This time, you moved into programming, or forging the
Movement's missional thrust. When we come together again, we will
move further in that direction. To be sure, we will always be
dealing with enablement. But from our extended leadership, we
also need help in our mission in history.
The other day, when I went
to see the head of American Telephone and Telegraph Co., I introduced
myself as The Ecumenical Institute, not the Institute of Cultural
Affairs. We must not get that mixed up. The ICA is a front. We
are the Ecumenical Institute and we are the Church. And certainly,
there are calls you will make where you would not announce that
in the beginning. Now with the visit at AT&T it was clear
what the approach would be. The release that man experienced was
a practical release. He was going to do something about it with
his company. It is not likely he could move under the rubric of
The Ecumenical Institute, but he could operate with a secular
name, like ICA. We are The Ecumenical Institute and we always
intend to be The Ecumenical Institute. For us, the ICA is just
another instrument which we can employ in appropriate places.
I thought that needed to be said in case it had not been said
clearly enough before.
When you look at the people
we are sending out to teach LENS, I don't know whether the course
is going to come off or not. But my sensitivities tell me there
will be no twilight zone. Either LENS will come off, or it will
not. The performance of the course last spring was unbelievable,
but we cannot win with something merely good; it has to be excellent.
It cannot be another fad. I am sure you are not interested in
some fad any more than I. If it comes off, instead of eight Guardians
going out to teach, a year from now there would be twenty four
just for going overseas. And, if we have the same number of courses
in this country, we will need a great many teachers. I do not
suppose anyone needs to further persuade you that the hardheaded,
secular layman out there in the practical arena of creating history,
as you are, needs you teaching that course. What I am trying to
say is this: I hope you start this quarter on the steps whereby
you become a teacher as soon, and as many of you as
possible.
I have also been thinking about what I would do if I were one of you about marketing. The winter quarter has no fixed scheduling yet; it is wide open and so is spring. I think if I were you, I would try to sell blocks of LENS to every institution I encountered. Once things get started in that fashion, I think LENS will snowball by itself.
This quarter, however, there
will have to be some broad, immediate work. If you are fooling
around this quarter rather than being rationally inclusive, winter
quarter will not matter. It is not important to think about having
ten courses in New York. It is important far more important
to have ten courses spread systematically across continent. That
is what does a revolution. If we begin that kind of marketing
this quarter, we will be way down the road by next quarter.
Now, when I intend to be serious
profoundly serious then I say this: Grace and peace
be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I want to talk about the deeps
of consciousness, about being the Religious. The way I myself
handle these wonderful complexities is with the image of two faces:
One face toward God, or the Mystery of life. That is the Hunter-Warrior
after he severed all temporal attachments because his ultimate
loyalty was to the Mystery in everything. I handle my overwhelming
complexity with the face which is turned toward God. In that
relationship, that posture, I am a Religious. My second face
is the face toward temporality. In that relationship, I am a
guildsman.
I like that image, even though
it does not exactly hold up: for the two faces are actually together.
There is no Mystery outside the temporal, and every temporality
is impregnated with Mystery. So actually, it is one face looking
in the same direction at two realities which are never separate.
To talk about two faces, then, has to do with how you handle
the complexities with yourself - not with external reality in
any way.
What I mean by the guildsman
does not exist save he is a Religious. I am certainly aware of
religious people who are not guildsmen and socially minded people
who are not religious. But I am talking about the profound relationship
to humanness. I assume that everyone in this room, in one way
or another, grasps himself as a religious. I am no talking about
any hangover of the two-story universe, in which there is life,
and you superimpose the religious on that. I am not talking about
going from the top down but of going from the bottom up. That
is to say, the experience of the religious is in the deeps of
humanness itself. Being the religious is to say, as Michael Novak,
the Catholic lay theologian says, "I am more concerned with
being a human being than I am with being a Christian." That
is what I mean by the Religious. The man who grasps himself as
a human being is a witness. That is what the word martyr originally
meant: a witness. He is not trying to defend anything, or persuade
anybody, but to witness to the way it is.
In the unbelievable human
community we call the Christian Church, those who grasp what is
meant by the ChristHappening are the religious. I mean the
Jesus Christ happening which enables us to be human not
having anything to do with joining a church (that comes later).
When I talk about the religious, I am talking about something
deeply, foundationally, radically human.
When we began our experiments
in marketing LENS, we selected one hundred key people to visit.
Norman Cousins of the SATURDAY REVIEW was one of these. In 1961,
he had written an article called SIR, SOCIETY FOR INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY,
which impacted our whole order. This article finally jarred loose
for us the concept of the Guild. Early one morning in New York,
we saw him at his club for breakfast. I was prepared to be as
secular as I could in talking with him, to drop all religious
and theological terminology. I was overwhelmed to hear him use
the very theological language I was trying to avoid! I resolved
to be as secular as possible when I went to see Governor Romney
and I encountered religious language from him as well.
This business of being a Religious
is not just for the few sentinel ones of our day. The world is
different than it was even ten years ago. The possibility of being
religious is eating away at the interior of anyone who is remotely
intentional about living his life in our time. In this sense,
we are not the odd ones, the set apart. If we are set apart at
all it is a result of our bringing radical intentionality to bear
upon the intentionality that being a Religious already is. We
have brought radical intentionality upon intentionally being human.
Whenever the image of the
Religious emerges into history through the unveiling of the deeps
of consciousness, we must consider three things. The first is
the Context or deep understanding of the whole event. Such
an occurrence is always beyond understanding, but without the
effort to understand, to build a context over, under, and all
about this even, we cannot become intentional about intentionality.
The second thing is the Structure.
A religious, all by himself, shrivels up and withers away. (I
will return to the extreme danger of daring to be intentional
about being a Religious.) The early experiment of the solitary
monastic movement of the Church could not exist. It had to come
together. There must be structures to hold the Religious in being.
The third thing which I suggest is necessary such an event is a Climate. By a climate, I mean what our fathers pointed to in theological language with the term "ameans of grace". Speaking not as a theologian, I would say there have to be instruments and tools whereby the individual, in his necessary, immediate isolation, can nurture his own interior being. Otherwise he is eaten away as if he had been dropped into acid.
Let me deal first with the
Context for the emergence of the Religious in our time. The Religious
is one who has appropriated Universal Benevolence, Profound Integrity
and Endless Fulfillment, though I am not going to talk about that.
I want to illustrate, however, that those are not ideas; they
are indicatives, happenings in your life. They are so intimately
concrete you cannot separate them from your identity.
I want to illustrate one way
in which Universal Benevolence became a realistic part of my existence.
One Christmas my three boys and my wife and I were having a family
meeting, and my boys were pushing at me a bit about who I am and
about their relationship to me. My wife, out of her eternal sympathy
for her sons, got on their side, too. Finally I said, "Now
boys, I want you to hear this because I am going to tell you the
truth. I just do not care what you do with your life or what your
attitude is toward me. I do not care. Because I CARE about this
world!" My hands were shaking. That was a happening! A man
who cares first for his wife, for his three sons, does not care
about this world.
A colleague knocked on my
door one night and said he wanted to talk a minute. He said he
was just feeling deeply humiliated. I knew he was passing over
the barrier of experiencing ontological humiliation which you
become aware of through temporal humiliation. Though it took me
some weeks to grasp deeply enough what wee going on, I knew this
was the dark night of the soul. Whatever else the dark night of
the soul is it is that experience in which you are burnt out inside
and become aware that life is Humiliation, that you are
going to be humiliated the rest of your life. Secondly, you become
aware that life is your Weakness and you are going to be
threatened by your own interior weakness for the rest of your
life; this is what it means to be you. Thirdly, that you are Hostility,
not just hostile about this or that but pure hostility which is
going to be you the rest of your life. Lastly, that you are Suffering,
suffering the rest of your life suffering without a name
on it.
But in the midst of engaging
in it and daring to take it into yourself as who you are in life,
there comes an unbelievable sense of sorrow. I walked out of a
restaurant with a couple of colleagues the other day and I suddenly
realized I was just skimming along. It had dawned on me that
the universe was glad to have me, and I threw my shoulders back
and floated in dignity to the car. That sort of experience only
comes on the other side of grasping that for the rest of your
life you are going to be humiliated. The New Testament says that
at that moment the heavens open and a voice says "Thou art
my son". The source of the poetry does not matter, just the
picture.
At the moment you dare to
embrace that weakness which never goes away, you discover in a
strange and miraculous way that that very weakness is power.
The heavens open, "Thou art my son."
In the midst of that hostility
if you dare to embrace it, you find it turning into the strangest
kind of love, for everything, everybody - no sentiment, but concern
requiring action. The heavens open, "Thou art my son."
And the suffering? You ought to read St.Teresa and let her talk about spiritual suffering. Suffering that is not anything but everything, when one dares to embrace it . It is like the crucifixion itself. It is strange that the crucifixion of some fellow named Jesus turned out to minister unto the world like no one else.
I remember Rev. Bishop Sheen
in a radio address at a Holiness Church in Los Angeles said, We
must always used our suffering for humanity. "We must",
he said, "never waste our suffering". That is what
I am trying to talk about. The heavens open, "Thou art my
son".
Do you get some feeling after
what I mean by Profound Integrity? That is where you move far
beneath the moralistic understandings and penetrate the ontological
deeps of what it means to be a person of integrity. But I must
not be caught dead in finding pride in my humiliation. (I do not
meant pride-filled pride). Instead, integrity is finding
strength in my weakness, finding love in my hostility, finding
healing for mankind in my own suffering.
I have just described to you
what going to heaven means not bringing any moral criteria
around for measuring, but bringing the criteria of the deeps.
That is what It means to go to heaven. The greatest failure in
life is the failure to go to heaven, to miss being a person of
ontological integrity.
Now, third thing in being
Religious is Human Fulfillment. I have been thinking deeply of
the state called Peace, which I speak of in secular language
as Problemlessness. It dawned on me some time ago that problems
do not exist. I mean that very literally. They are human inventions.
As a matter of fact, in our lifetime we have taken that rather
remarkable work "problem", which means there is an obstacle
outside you that you deal with, and we have turned it inward.
We have psychologized the whole thing. As a matter of fact,
I suppose the whole profession of psychiatry was built on the
basis of having turned a problem into a personal problem. But
I insist that personal problems literally do not exist. You say,
"They do exist - I have them!" That is right, but they
are illusions, which means a problem (in the sense we use it today)
is a man-invented entity. It is an illusion. Illusions exist,
but they are not reality - they are illusions. There are not
any problems.
Again, I do not know how I
would have learned as much as I have learned without my wife.
I usually began my Christ lecture, "My wife is the wrath
of God on me." And people would die, but she did not die;
she knew good and well she was the wrath of God on me. Now she
is the whitehot blast furnace which has to do with interior
deeps of consciousness. For instance, every night she comes in
and dumps a universe of problems on me. I look upon my great
nights as the times when Lyn does not come in and dump the universe
on me. Now the things that irritates me is the gleam in her eye,
and that quality in her voice which is saying down inside, "I
am going to get that old man tonight with these problems."
When I succeed in not having a problem she gets mad and we have
a fight. When something like that happens to me, I do not have
any problems.
You break the illusion that
you have problems bothering you. To use Christian jargon, all
you have is Satan, who is luring you into problems, into attachments
to this world, attachments to temporality, attachments to your
immediate relationships. Therefore you have but one enemy when
you move into the dimension of the spirit and that is Satan.
Satan is the activity that tempts you to reinstate final loyalties
to the realm of temporality, where relationships are problems.
Do you get some idea what
I mean by Human Fulfillment? Human Fulfillment is having no personal
problems. I wish I had the time to talk about Certitude; I wish
I had the time to talk about Joy; I wish I had the time to talk
about Endlessness; in the creative sense of the word. You experience
yourself as utterly whole. Previously, you used to experience
yourself as pretty good here, not so good there, and something
else over there. There was always a sense of fragmentation inside
yourself. Now every fiber of your being appears interrelated,
because you have a foundational core. All our lives we have been
outsiders. I do not mean this term in the "hippie"
sense, but rather in the sense Colin Wilson uses it in his book,
The Outsider. Now, you suddenly grasp yourself as an insider.
You are "together", integral. This is frightening
are "together", integral. This is frightening.
The Bible says that anyone
who sees the face of God dies. Almost every religion has that
same insight. They are all pointing to an empirical reality, not
some daydream. What I have been talking about can destroy you.
For this reason, you have to take care of yourselves.
The first thing the deep spirit
man learns is that he has to take care of himself. This
insight is in our reflections on the style of the Hunter Warrior
in Castaneda's book, JOURNEY TO IXTLAN: the Lessons of Don Juan.
Once the spirit man cares, he is not open to every person or thing
that comes by. He begins to take care of himself, but there is
a twist to his care. When he takes care of himself he is taking
care of his care for the other, for the world.
How do you care for your care
for the other? This is done through prayer, through contemplation,
and through medication. As postmodern men, we know prayer
is not something added to life; it goes on constantly. The only
question is, to what reality do you pray? You can pray in relationship
to the unfathomable mystery; but every man prays.
Prayer to any other reality
than the final one is perversion, and destroys. On the other hand,
when a man relates to that final mystery, the mystery itself will
destroy him, unless he brings selfconscious intentionality
into his praying, and turns it loose.
Prayer is the interior act
before the act. Do you remember the "snake eyes" routine
in the movie, "Little Big Man"? The gunslinger uses
snakeeyes, and just before he pulls his gun, he has already
killed the man. That is prayer. That is why the man of prayer
cannot fail. Prayer is the deep resolve behind the act. You can
tell a man of prayer, because he is always effective. The deed
is done.
I used to get angry with one
of our colleagues who was constantly making models. He would never
put his being into them; therefore, they never were done. He did
not really make a model; he did not pray, for a model is a prayer.
If you have some remote understanding
of what it means to enter into the deeps of consciousness about
consciousness, or if you have been through the deep night, you
will have discovered something about prayer. You will probably
have discovered the meaning of Paul's little phrase, "praying
without ceasing". You are going to find this prayer without
ceasing is flowing constantly in you. My word to you is, "Get
out of is way, let it flow." That is the beginning of the
solitary office. Let it flow.
The second way one cares for
oneself is through Contemplation. Almost everyone knows
a bit about the awe in life: a beautiful mountain, a sunset, a
picture, a wonderful or tragic happening, or some view of deep
suffering. Inside our being are montages built of our relationship
to these happenings of awe of which we were not conscious. When
any external event hits that montage, awe is created for the man
who enters intentionally into the spirit deeps of the meaning
of being human.
Now it seems as if that interior
montage has been sensitized in such a fashion that nothing can
touch it without creating awe. That is what I mean by the empirical
presence of God. My word to you is, "Let it flow."
If you want, you can turn it off. Let it flow instead, so all
day long, in principle, you are dwelling in the awe itself. There
will not be any moment, there will not be any happening, there
will not be any person which does not deliver its own interior
meaning to you. Let it flow. That decision is the beginning of
the religious exercises which enable one to stand as universally
concerned in profound integrity, embracing the fulfillment of
this one lifetime and deathtime we have.
You have probably discovered
that your "meditative council" has become intensely
active, for the third way one cares for oneself is through one's
council, that array of people within the imaginal facilities of
your being, with whom you carry on quiet, secret dialogues about
the concrete issues of your life. I suspect the reason why the
HunterWarrior has spoken to us is the fact that this facet
of our consciousness has become more intense and vivid.
When the deeps of life are
laid bottomlessly bare, then you not only operate with cultural
heroes, but it is that moment when the eschatological hero becomes
a necessity and an indicative reality in your life. This kind
of figure has been there since the dawn of consciousness itself.
Because I am a man, it has to be a man: if I were a dog, it would
be a dog. This figure becomes the exemplar, the epitome of humanness.
In the tradition from which I came, yea verily his name is Jesus.
This figure has nothing to do with the realm of the intellectual
or the moral. It has to do with the ontological deeps of life
and the necessity of consciousness itself. This figure moves,
therefore, not intellectually, but in a realistic sense, to the
center of the imaginal facilities of your being.
Part of our humiliation is
revealed in this statement in the book of Luke: "He set his
face steadfastly toward Jerusalem and went on before." They
could never keep up with him. That man is your figure. That figure
has nothing to do with Christianity in the sense of something
to defend. It has to do with our own interior being. Luther is
on my council, and Amos, but when I look at Luther and Amos I
see the face of Jesus.
There is nothing pious in
this, simply hardheaded empirical reality in relationship to consciousness.
If we lived in another culture, it would be something else. Guess
who the HunterWarrior is? I imagine there will be times
when you wish you had not met the HunterWarrior. He is going
to walk on before you as one more manifestation of the humiliation
contingency itself is.
My word to you is, "Do
not fight it; let it go." If you do let it flow in terms
of prayer, contemplation and meditation, you will be taking care
of yourself. Then, when somebody comes back in one hundred years
to look you up, you will be standing there as people who care
about the world. You will be standing as those who are resolved
to profound integrity. And you will be standing there as those
who are an invisible, but powerful symbol of the fulfilled human
being.
Do not forget that an old man told you, "Take care of yourselves." For those who told you that being a spirit man was simple and easy, lied. Take care of yourself.