8th Guardians Consult

4/11/75

­ It seems to me that we get fuzzier every day about what we concretely have to do, and clearer every day about the inclusive and profound task that we are about. I want to try to say what I mean by that. I would like to say that I know now what life is all about. That is sort of silly, isn't it? It is not so silly, in a way, when we are trying to think about what we are up to now, what it is that we have to do, and when we try to push those questions into the dimension of profundity.

I began to look at my life and Primal Community started me thinking. By Primal Community, I mean something other than what you can bite at. I am very clear that the family is not primal community. No family by itself can open up the deeps of what I mean by the primal. Ada, Ohio, the town~I­grew up in, was far closer to this than ~y family. In one sense, my family did not have the slightest idea who it was, save it was in the context of Ada, Ohio. Now, in our day, that neighborhood sense is QOne.

If you get discouraged about our family situations today, you had better 1Qak at that without which no family can ever grasp what it is as a family. Yet I do not mean simply that the neighborhood in which a family exists is primal community. ~As a matter of fact, as a little boy I did not know about Primal Community in the sense of a thereness that you could point to; however, the dynamic of~Primal Community was workin~ on me.

I could put it very simply and in sociological terms, that a dog only grasps that it is barking when another dog barks back at its barking. That is, there is no such thing as individuality except inside of community, or another way to say that is that our socielity is prior to our individuality.

Later on I grasped more concretely that Primal Community ln the abstraction is the People of God whose fundamental intent is to be Primal Community itself. But by the time I woke up to that, the People of God had lost their sense of being People of God, and therefore primal community did not exist there. This is all by way of getting around to saying that what we are about is the recreation of Primal CommunitY.

The second thing I stumbled upon when I began to relive my experience (and it was forced upon me) is what I want to call my Sol ~ary Awakenment. I had been well conditioned by Spock and Gesells and everybody else ~ho said that one way or another you are made what you are by the neuroses of yo~r momma and your poppa. You can just hear them beating your pap­­ over the head because he was not home with thekids enough. When I th nk about how it is the­. I am who I am, I do not see that as right. Do you knc­^ what I see? I see moment of profound loneliness! About two miles sout~ of Ada, Ohio is Grass Run. It is about 4 feet wide and maybe 4 feet deep in p aces, amd most of the time it s 6 inches wi­de and 2 feet deep. I hever cared much about fishing. I did fish, but mostly I would go out there and sit all by myself.. When I try to grasp the deeps of ­who I am, that is what I think of. Very frequent:y, the days I went there were days of great tragedy for a little boy, whatever form that took.

I remember Walnut Grove. I sued to go by myself and pick up those nuts, then get a board with a knothold in it. Did you ever do that? You could not get the stain off your hands for weeks. You were ~r^u~ of it, not ashamed of it. I would hull those walnuts, as we used to ca.: i<, all over myself. I also rnm~mh­­

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when we lived in the Main Street property in Ada. I would get up in the morning before anybody else. I would go out and sit on the back stoop and look out towards the sunflowers on the side of the woodshed in the back of the lot.

Did you ever wake up in the morning, as the sun comes up, and watch the sunflowera wake upt too? Alone. Solitary. You are not interested in my life. I could tell you about the sibling squeese of one borther before me and one after me, of two sisters on each side of both of them and how my older brother was sort of a wayward one. My mamma used to pay too much attention to him, and all of us know the young one had the brains and that he had to be taken care of. But the way mamma took care of me was to just look at me sometimes. That was all she needed to do. She was enabling my solitude.

I am talking about Awakenment. Yet I was far into my manhood before what I mean by Profound Awakenment took place. I am trying to grasp our mission. I am talking about the early church, and I am not talking about Christianity, but about an instrument, a means of how something could happen. Who ever thought up that fantastic word for "good news" ­­ evanel­ism. We think of it as some silly piety or some abstract theology. No' The good news was whatpeople were trying to­talk about when they experienced some kind of Profound Awakenment in life. What poetry you use to talk about it is quite beside the point. What is it we are up to'­­To enable profound awakenment. I do not know what I would do if that happening that unveiled the deeps of consciousness about consciousness had not happened to me.

I went to school a long time. I went to college and did graduate work. I did not get an education. It was not until World War II grabbed me and knocked my head up against a wall and enabled the profound awakenment, that I got an education. I got what you might call these days, a classical education. But that does not communicate what I am talking about. I really am ta'king about tranarational training. I did not get an education until I grasped what I mean by tranarationality.

I grasped that when you come right down to it, it is methodology. It is that no man~is his own man in the realm of the mind, until he has not the data that is given to him, but themethodologies by which he can make his own mind work for him. What do you mean by creativity? What are we about? It is to c ~ommunicate' met~odologies to individuals, groups, com munities, and, indeed, all of history, that will rnable individuals and groups to be themselves, to release their creativity, to genuinely participate in this strange, mysterioua process we call history. Why did that come so late to me? As a matter of fact, I believe that the whole revolution in education in our time pivots around becoming aware of preciaely this.

Now, when I look again at my life and try to think what it is about, I come to wQrds like Authentic Engagement. It has something to do with your vocation.

­­Tbe word vocation turns me sick in my mouth these days, and I think it is because of the superficiality of it that I grew up with. I am a clergyman, and I

­think­I am a pretty good one, but htat is not enough. That is not what I am talking about.

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When you read the news these days, you know you are living in one of the most remarkable moments in all of history, and sometimes you wipe that sweat off and think, my God! What if I would be a damn good clergyman, and die a damn good clergyman and some way or another had not hooked this ball of creativity into what was happening in my time? You see, you can ask that question as a clergyman, as a lawyer, you can ask it as a businessman,­~you can ask it as a surgeon. It is the question of Profound Engagement.

What it is we are about? It is­to some way or another enable profound enagement. I am not interested in Majuro for the aske of Majuro. I am interested in some way of getting something done that could be a sign for anybody in this world of what it was possible for them to do, if they chose to do it as a doctor, as a lawyer, a businessman, or as whatever they were.

Now comes the one that is even harder, if you try to get this in secular language, and this is the hour in history which demands this. You are going to laugh, I suppose at this ­­ Transparent Prowess. How is it that a man knows his way to that other world of consciousness which is always present in the midst of this world, which is the only one you and I know anything about? How do you find your way through the humiliation of contingency, through the weakness of contingency, through the resentment of contingency, through the suffering of con. tingency, through the rootlessness of contingency, through the sense of ineffec" tivity of~contiegency, through the sense of spent­outness of contingencyj through the never­going­away sense of unfulfillment of contingency, and find precisely in the midst of these ­­ without these every going away ­­ the glory of liv~hg and dying?

This is when hope appeareth. How do you find your way around this world' that is the other world, that is only present within this world? When I taught. at Colgate, we were still takking about the well­rounded man, but people were pointing to the moral level of life. No! When you push that to the profund£ty of the ontological, this pentagon is what it now means to round out your existence. When you walk around that pentagon and come back to primal community' then you know what primal community is.

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Now, what is it that we are about for the next forty years? There is nothing religious about these things. We are out, of course, to build primal community. I do not know what we are going to call that, but in some places they call it the LOCHEX. We are out to establish programs of swakenment, which I want to come back to. We are out to do University 13 and what we call our Academy. We are not doing Academy for the sake of Academy. We are trying to get something done to education. We are out to do social demonstration and we are out to do spiritual odysseys (and I do not mean what your Sunday School teacher taught you).

We have pretty well backeted spiritual odysseys now. But day aEter tomorrow, men and women of this world are going to come togtether for no other reason than to find their way to these deeps of consciousness inrlife.

This is what we are about. There are just five things in life, and I do not know which the greatest is.

I am going to concentrate a bit nere. I am not going to talk about Ma~uro and social demoastration, but I want to say something about framing a social demonstration. We are strucutral revolutionaries, and therefore, we have to work within the structures. We discovered that you had to penetrate the local structures. ~One of the most exciting things that happened in Majuro is their document of itent, signed by the 100 leaders in the Marshall Islands. That had to include the 1~aij or the kings, the symbolic figures, the business community, the political community, the religious community­­all front of the local. We have advocacy in Washington. Then we had to get advocacy on the regional level, which was the territorial government on Saipan, and then on the federa level, and that means Washin~ton.

In the past seven weeks I have spent most of my time in Washington. I felt like the perennial freshman, like a little child starting o~ut all over again. I am ashamed to say this at 63 years of age, but in the last seven weeks I got thru my skull how our national government operates. I would like to teach civics now. Without shame, I will say I am impressed with the dynamics of our federal government as I had never been in my entire life. I have a brand new appreciation, as a hard­headed old revolutionary, of the men we send to Washington. I thought we were the only people in the world who worked as hard we we work. I was shocked to see that was not true. Those men are there night after night after midnight. You call for some young aide and frequently the Congressman or Senator himself answers the phone. They arrive extremely early in the morning. I am saying a word of appreciation.

Any~ay, we had to learn that up on the Hill is the legislative branch and down in the Town is the executive branch and in between the two, there are two lines. F~r~m the legislative angle, there are committees ­­the committees of the House­and the committees of the Senate, and they pretty well duplicate one another. From the President's side, there are bureaus and agencies' the Interior Department, Health, Education ~ Welfare, State, and so on. What you are after is where the power lies. It lies where these two meet, where the bureaucracy and the committee structtres meet. The committees Parallel almost exactly the hureaus nn~l anencies.

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One thing does distrub me a great deal. The people in bureaus have become termited. If you call at 4:30 or even at 4:25, you will not find anybody there. If you go into a bureau with a creative idea, you~might as well stay at home. They grind out what has been told to them. You go from one, you hear the same story at the next one, and at the next one. They are told what to say and they are given a certain amount of money to do this with.

Of course, there are exceptions to this. The legislative side can see the creativity and keeps injecting it into bureaus both in terms of deciding what programs they administer and also in funding, and then, of course, they oversee them and check them. When you try to get a program like Majuro thmough, you have to walk in between these two, where the fire flies. When you are in a daminent Demoaratic House and Senate and meet only Republicans on the other side, you have to be ready for warfare.

Originally, we planned to fund Majuro by going to each one of the bureaus for each single program, and yet to be able to move down there, you have to get certain outstanding congressmen and senators to call them or write a letter or send their aides, or you cannot even begin to break through with any kind of novel pro~ram

I am not really talking about just seven weeks. I am talking about 10 years of trying to get 5th City funded. I wish I had known then a little more than we d1*.­ Anyway, during that battle, it was recommended that we initiate legislation to fund the whole program in Majuro and with Congressional help, that came to $1,800,000* We may not win it, but there is little doubt that Majuro funding will get to the floor of both the House and Senate. You may not think that is a wonder, but I do. It has nothing to do with Majuro or with us. If you want to move in Congress, you had hefter get to the key men.

What I am interested in is that if we move to twenty­fonr social demonstrations around the world, we are going to have to learn~­to work with finesse with the civil structures, not only in our own country, but in South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, India, Kenya, in West Germany , . . . Do you know who opened up this possiblity? You . . .the Guardians. You know, we always dreamed of a Global Guardians dynamic, but when you try to set up something without the necessary mission, you always end up with a Boy Scout troop. flave you noticed that? The time is at hand when we are going to have no choice but to have a Guardian's network because we are going to have to have the pressure and the clout and the know­how to operate in many different arenas in this world in o"de" to do social demonstrations.

Social demonstrations are important right now for us, but they are not as important as Awakenment. Awakenment is the Town Meeting. For awhile, you know, we thought of Town Meeting as social demonstration, because everything that is serious is a demonstration. But Town Meeting is Awakenment. Those of us in the Church, like myself, get all mixed up and do not know it.

I almost hesitate to say this because I love the church, but we in the Church reduced Awakenment to somebody believing a set of ideas. Can you inap,ine?

­That­is not in the New Testament. The New Testament talks about somebody being born all over again in such a way that you can see it. When the New Testament writers talked about someone becoming a new creation they did not mean some ridiculous thing going on in somebody's head. They meant that their whole

Opening Address Pa~e

posture was profoundly altered int the concretions of their life. I am not interested in Chrisitanity. The Buddhists have done the same thing with the cate~orY of illumination.

Hhat is Awakenment? Awakenment is when somebody becomes aware of the pro~ound dBeps of their own consciousness. As I listen to the Town Meeting, do you know what I see going on? People are waking up. ­­ It gives you something to nurture, kf you want to nurture. They are waking up about precisely what I was talking about. Would it nior be fm`~.y if a group like this stumbled on the way in which mass awakenment could happen at our moment in Bistory? It has happened before, and where it has not happened, there have not been great leaps forward in the progress of human settlement and the refurbishment of the ima~e of man.

This Town Meeting that we are doing does not have anyth~ng to do with the Bicentennial celebration of our country. It is nice to be 200 years old and to have our nation stand up and have somebody tell us it is good to have our being in history. As a private citizen, I am very pleased with that, but I am not just a private citizen. I am part of a strange body that cares.

I am interested in Community Forums in the whole of Australia. As most of you know, I drppped the idea of Town Meeting in our meeting there with the Australian­Prime Minister. I am interested in Town Meetings in every middlesex village and crossroads in Japan and South Korea and India. I am interested in local m~an finding a way once again to directly participate in the determination of his own destiny. I am interested in the recovery of grassroots man. I am concerned with human beings having the opportunity to awaken deeply. I am interested in the geography of the United States, the geography of Canada ­­only becau~se they are part of the geography of the globe.

A colleague in London told me a few days ago that the expatriate community is really excited about Bicentennial Town Meeting '76 and that they were going to see Elliot Richardson, the U:S. Ambassador to Great Brita~n. Now Great Britain needs a Town Meeting. It is where we got the idea. What we are about is the whole of these strange islands and every community having a Town Meeting. Germany is readY. I think.

Finally, no one knows what is going to happen across the globe as a result of this, of course. Who made it possible for us to cream of doing 5,000 Town Meetings in this country, let alone the globe? Well, you Guardians did. For the rest of our lives as a group, we are going to be interested in Town Meetings and social demonstrations.

This is what the civilizing process is all about. The People of God are standing there, waiting for this. Our whole Order ­­sy~bolic, extended, movemental or whatever­­stands there. Then you sum ' it up in this way: those who care are st­~dii~ there. This means again that you have to go to one of those symbols with the word love or care at the center

­ _ }f somebody were to ask me now what it means to profoundly love or to profoundly care, I would have to point for my concretion to being about the building of primal community wheresoever; to being busy awakening man to the deeps of consciousness, to giving him methodological skills ho enable him to release and use his own creativity, to constantly pioneering with social demonstrations, and findinP

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ways of nurturing people in the realm that everyman knows about, the world of transparentization.

You can understand how this time the body is gathered to be of service. In a way we have no choice but to do what we will with­;Town Meeting and a little bit on the social demonstrations that will follow. I am thinking that here i~l tilis strange moment of solitude, we had better take a pretty good look at ourselves now, because a year from now, when we gather, we are not going to know each other; we are not going to recognize ourselves. That might even be true if this thing breaks loose by the time we gather in October and November. Who knows?

­­Joseph W. Mathews

4/11/75