Social Methods School
Other World Spin I3
3/14/74
People are concerned these days with improving the
quality of life. The only problem is: what is a high quality life?
People are also concerned about dehumanizing institutions. The
only problem is deciding what is humanness.
I guess what we have been talking about with this
poetry of The Other World in the midst of This World is
the kind of consciousness dawning on us as the life quality of
mankind. Life is mystery, freedom and compassion and joy, or fulfillment.
Or that what it means to improve the quality of life is to intensify
the sense of mystery and wonder in life. Going through life like
a reliable robot would be efficient, but it is not human. It never
was; it never will be. Improving the quality of life has to do
with raising a sense of consciousness, a sense of ambiguity. I
worry about people who would like to modify human behavior without
raising consciousness. Welltended vegetables are not human.
They never were and they never will be.
Becoming more carefilled than you are now,
is being more human. The attempt to delimit responsibility is
dehumanizing. Being a bystander is not human. It never was and
never will be. Finally, dying your death self-consciously and
abundantly is improving the quality of humanness.
That, more completely, is when I experience myself
as Rip Van Winkle. I'm just waking up. It seems like I have been
asleep all my life. I am discovering I have been spoofed by our
society; that I have been fooled about what joy in life is really
all about. Joy has nothing to do with your dreams of coming off
the way you planned. Joy has nothing to do with winning rather
than losing in the task you have taken on in history. Joy is something
that happens at the center, not on the surface of life. Joy happens
in the midst of your Being and transforms your immediate relationships.
It is independent of those immediacies.
One of the occasions I can remember waking up to
this was finding myself on New Year's Day watching the Rose Bowl
parade on television. The theme this year was "Happiness
Is..." Charles Schultz was Marshall of the Parade.
There must have been 150 floats in that parade proclaiming
that "Happiness is a Warm Puppy" "Happiness is
a trip around the world"; "Happiness Is This" and
"Happiness Is That". When it was over, I sat back and
said to myself, "Well it's pretty obvious that happiness
is just a decision."
What I discovered about myself is the way I usually
go about this decision. I make up my shopping list in this manner:
I say, "I could be happy if..." Then I start listing:
l) If my wife would finally develop the interior discipline to
sit on her anxieties for once; 2) if I were assigned to be where
people at least spoke the same language; 3) if I were given, well,
you know how that list goes. After the listmaking, I could
go out to begin the pursuit of happiness. What dawned on me that
morning was, why not make up my list the way life really is. Why
not say I could be happy if, 1) I was married to Marcy Clutz,
and 2) I could be happy if I were assigned to elicit spirit amongst
the most impossible group of people and so be a sign to all mankind.
I discovered that the whole business of making your list is really
starting with the presupposition that I am an unhappy man, and
then grounding it. Why not start with the presupposition that
I am a happy man, and ground that? Why not? I don't know why not.
What I know is that I am getting an education in
joy against my will. Life takes you, just slams you on the head,
and allows you to discover what is wrong. I have noticed a new
form of insomnia. It is related to the way our lives have become,
which is weary. I spent most of the quarter running around the
city of Montreal trying to find people who have been thinking
about the next twenty years instead of the next year's profit
margin. It is exciting when you find one of those people. But
it is hard work. And I admit, I have also been trying to find
diversion from thinking about the next twenty years. It is exciting,
but it is hard work.
One day I got so confused - I had to change from
my clerics into a suit in the bathroom of a gas station, and even
so, I sold a LENS course to a Jesuit priest and got an Air Canada
executive to RS-I. You finally get home after a day like that
and there's usually some kind of a meeting over dinner that you
must attend. And after dinner there is usually some kind of meeting
that has to do with the evening's work. Then, there are so many
things these days, that you meet to find out what is going on.
After the work of the evening is over, there are always people
with special problems. I used to think my life was made up of
getting ready for meetings. Now it's just meetings, with no time
to get prepared.
After all the meetings are over, I drag myself upstairs
(we live on the third floor) and while I am taking my clothes
off and getting ready for bed, I exchange a few comments with
my wife, and suddenly it dawns on me that I am on the front end
of a two-hour conversation on the future of our marriage. I don't
know how it is in your family, but in ours, that is a weekly or
a monthly session. There is no way out of it. Finally, after a
couple of hours, you arrive at a temporary arrangement or stalemate.
You agree to keep it going.
By this time it is about two o'clock. You finally
lay back to go to sleep, which is what you have wanted to do since
you started the day, and the experience is something like shifting
into neutral. Five minutes later I say to myself, "I'm still
wide awake! What is going on?" I check it out and find that
my mind is going BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. My mind is just going like
60 miles an hour. Life is just shimmering. In the midst of my
wanting to just lie down and go to sleep, the possibilities have
seized me and I discover I can hardly wait to see how it's all
going to come out. And I am just lying there-I don't have insomnia,
I just cannot go to sleep because of the possibilities breaking
into every dimension of life.
In the midst of that, you experience spontaneous
gratitude. It's spontaneous because gratitude is not the way I
approach most situations. I have a belly full of indefinite longings
- indefinite because I do not know where else I want to be exactly,
but I know it's not here. Monday evening, when we started this
Social Methods School, I wanted to be anywhere else; and I was
glad that I was leading the first session so I wouldn't have to
think about the last fifteen years of my life. But we began to
talk and to get out happenings and events, and I got hooked against
my will. I don't know what happened in your group, but our group
began to add detail after detail after detail; it wasn't good,
it wasn't bad; it was history and what a history! To have lived
in this time! We couldn't let go of it. It was as if we didn't
want to lose any detail. That was gratitude to have lived now
and not some other time.
There is a lot more going on than nostalgia in the
Arts today. I believe our whole world is going through that kind
of gratitude, trying to recover, in concretion, the joy of having
lived this last fifteen years. You begin to be overwhelmed with
joy when you never intended to have that happen in the first place.
I confess to you that up until this very quarter,
when we would read those reports from around the world on Sunday
evening, my interior response was something like this: We would
read the report from Washington, and it would say John Cock had
150 people at Regional Council; and inside you, was a little voice
that said, " We only had 12. What's wrong?" and there
would be a LENS course in Houston, and this little voice would
say, "We're probably going to lose ours. What's wrong?"
The more the report went on, the more despairing you got. But
this quarter was different. I experienced those reports as absolution
every time. That it didn't matter what we were doing. The world
was coming off. I think what happened is that joy killed the pretense
of you only having to come off, of having to be a success sometime.
The overwhelmingness is when the joy of the future becomes your
report, becomes your future.
Then finally, this joy is a joy that includes death,
or it's not the joy at the center. It's the calmness in the face
of your own death. Last year I was working up in the Boston Area,
and I will bet that Don Johnson remembers the evening we were
having a meeting over in Worchester. We had a fellow at that meeting
who came off and on. Those were the Tuesday night and everyother
weekend thing. I forget what we were talking about, but all of
a sudden, he said, "I'm sitting here thinking about an evening
in the forest before the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.
I am remembering that our outfit was asked, that evening, to volunteer
for a special mission. All my buddies went, but I stayed behind.
I never saw one of them alive again. And ever since then I have
regretted that I did not go. Perhaps, that's why I can't stay
away from these meetings. I'm still hoping I can make that decision."
What he was struggling with, and is still struggling
with, I would venture to say, is not the fact of dying, but the
decision to give his death on behalf of all. Joy is deciding to
say "Yes" to what is required of you. Joy is deciding
now to be about the task you would want to be caught dead in.
If you had been waiting to give yourself unabandonly, uncompromisingly,
to build the earth, then you have denied yourself this very joy.
I will not say that I always experience my life as
filled with joy; far from it, but I am shocked at how pleased
I am to be saved, to be alive, to be doing what I am doing with
my very own life. And as far as I can see, the best is yet to
come; the best is yet to come.
-Ronald Clutz-