Global Centrum Chicago

Global Research Assembly

July 19, 1975

We are doing nothing but the Local Church, the Primal Community. And in order to do Primal Community, we have to do Social Demonstrations to break the world loose to see what Primal Community is. And that depends upon a vehicle like Town Meeting that awakens people to see what is going on in the Social Demonstrations, to where Primal Community can spring loose and come into being. And I take this very, very seriously. Social Demonstration, Community Forum and Primal Community are the sociological manifestations of the 5 things that make up life, based on Faith, Hope and Love, that comes out of the Mystery.

In particular they are products of the profound human revolution of our time. Profound human revolution is not born out of liberal dreams of a better life or correcting the injustices of our times. It comes out of Hope­Hope against hope. It comes out of Humiliation. It comes out of the Dark Night, it comes out of the Long March. Now, if you have not understood this, it is perhaps because you have mistaken humiliation for something to do with your personal history or your personal embarrassment. The experience of humiliation, I want to say, is when the sociological and the ontological combine in a historical occasion that crushes you into the realization of the whole human situation for which you are responsible.

When I was in Australia with Jim Bishop and the Panchyat team, we learned there that 50% of all Aboriginal children are permanently brain-damaged because of a lack of protein in their diet. I tell you that wiped me out. It was humiliation. I guess you could mark it up under methodological ineptitude. It did not have anything to do with Aboriginal children or with me. It had to do with humanness. Just think: those human lives were never going to get a chance to be human life. Do you understand? That was lost and it was not just lost now. It was lost for the next 30, 40, 50 years. I must confess there are psychological aberrations out of the experience of humiliation, but it is not a psychological experience. You grow weak, you weep, you have tears, you are frightened, you are paralyzed, you are inundated. That is humiliation and the Dark Night. It is not a series of personal upsets or tripping over your own big toe. It is God waking you up by waking up your depth human consciousness, wiping out your self­pity and unwillingness to live in awakenment and to be a self. It is God's way of loving me. It is God's way of shaping me for history's purposes. I believe that a self is the surrendering of creativity for the sake of creating history. Anyone else is a zombie. I think, if you take that interpretation and go read the scriptures again where Jesus is weeping over the city of Jerusalem, you see not Christian bigotry but the broken heart of seeing humanness go down the drain..

I believe we are in the moment of Hope, of great Hope. Somebody was talking about residues of Hope being around. It is not like Hope has happened to us and gone away and left some deposits. I guess if you want to find some residues of Hope, you go downtown in the city of Chicago and look at all that stone masonry down there. Chicago was built in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even after they got it built, it burned up. Yet it is there. That is your residue of Hope. Hope is Hope against hope. It doesn't do anything. It is the intensification of Love and Faith, and just by being there, it destroys all our hope. You remember when you read that paper by Heilbrunner? Everybody almost died because he took every hope we had for perfecting the wonderful bourgeois society throughout the world and collapsed them all. Now, that was not Heilbrunner working on us because you have read that before. It was Hope destroying every one of our hopes. And that is the human experience. It is like being in a Social Demonstration when everything goes wrong. There is no way to move and everything is against you and you are not going to come off. And the next morning you get out of bed and you go to Daily Office. And I imagine if you miss that morning going to Daily Office, you have missed your life.

The experience of Hope is seeing that a human is not motivated by a carrot hung in front of his nose. When you come to experience Hope that is against hope, you see that you are nothing but sheer motivity. And a revolutionary covets that experience for every man on the face of the earth. The man who said that he would not rest as long as one child suffered knew something about this. If you were going to say that today, it would have to go like this: As long as there is one unawakened, as long as there is one methodologically inept, as long as there is one outside the camp of historical participation, as long as there is one cut off from the spirit deeps and denied Primal Community, we shall not rest. This is what our life is about. Revolution comes out of that- motivity.

Revolution , also comes out of Mystery, out of Faith, Hope, and Love, out of those 5. Now, to be revolutionary you have to hit the contradiction. The contradiction in our time is local man. Schreiber has an illustration of our situation. He says that we live in a time in which there are three civilizations co­existing ­­one a technological civilization, one an industrial, and one in the stone age. You have to understand that most people in the world today live in the latter. That situation crushes not only those who live in the stone age, but crushes those who live in the technological. What is called for is not an evolutionary process. It is not a matter of moving up the ladder to the next rung. That is not adequate. We are in a totally new situation and what is demanded is a quantum leap. Mankind will not wait.

Now, Marx saw this to a certain extent, though I don't believe that Marx ever knew what humanness was at the bottom. That is why he stopped short, though he was smart enough to know how a revolution has to go and how to set the mechanism into operation. He had himself an image and a slogan: "Workers arise. You have nothing to lose but your chains." He saw that he was in an industrial situation and that the workers had to get ahold of the means of production. That way they could change their situation. How they would do it would be through a class struggle. That is, he pitted the disestablishment against the establishment to achieve something. He lived out of historical determinism in which there was a thesis and antithesis and a synthesis which guaranteed that this thing would come out in their favor. He worked off of the elite in terms of the visionaries and in terms of the Intelligentsia. He was out to do this in the realm of the national, and finally he saw he had to go in the realm of the international. Probably Lenin was the one who saw that clearest.

That is not our revolution. And I suspect one of the things we have to do for ourselves is to get clear about our revolution. Our image or slogan is: "All the earth belongs to all the people." And you have to see that getting ahold of the means of production does not do anything anymore. You look at the countries that have done that and you see that they are in trouble. Can you imagine trying to spend the rest of your life getting the means of production into a bunch of people's hands? What people need today are methods. Methods, methods, methods. If the stone­age civilization is to take their leap, they need methods. You give some Aboriginal people in Australia the methods and they will take care of themselves. They will join in the structures of the civilizing process. You give them methods, all kinds of methods. And it is not just Aboriginals in Australia, but you go and look at your collapsed communities around your religious houses. Methods, methods. And how you do it is not with a class struggle ­ that is futile. You get the disestablishment pitted against the establishment and the establishment will destroy them. We have had more blood in our century than in all other centuries combined. Anybody who is interested in that does not know the situation. We have the blood of martyrs on our backs to live out of. You have to find a way to demonstrate new models. It is not the disestablishment over against the establishment. It is the trans­establishment catalyzing both to participate in creating a brand new way to cut a new swath across history. If you are serious about life you demonstrate. That is not waving a banner, that is putting down a hard sociological structure in the lives of human beings until it is branded in their deeps. Our history is not determined. There is no guarantee that it will go this way or that way. The future is out there to be built. And our elite is Those Who Care and that is local man, the last fat lady. And it is not nationa1 or international it is intra­global. When we show up as those who, wherever we are, do it for the sake of all men, then I think you will have a first glimpse of what we mean by that intra­globality. We have not really touched the deeps of that one yet.

Our revolution, I'm going to say it this way, is a "Cul­Ec" revolution. It is cultural and economic. Now we have not talked very much about that. We are seeing very clearly that while the cultural is at the center, you have to do the economic. Bultmann said that the way you do revolution is to inject a new self­understanding into mankind. The way you have to do that is through demonstration. And it has to be hard demonstration. I mean, the Marshall Islands are a joke, you understand, save that they have a way to participate economically in the rest of the world. They must participate in terms of deciding their future. That is, taking their ancient wisdom and culture and putting it into brand new bottles for the future. Now, one thing makes me angry in this. That is when I find somebody who has been told that we are a combination of Super­man and all the other great things on earth. He is looking at you like you must be from the CIA or something, or he sees you are a joke. We have to understand something between ourselves: We are peanuts. We are peanuts. We are little stuff. I guess you get that clear when you go and visit around Washington. You are just peanuts.

Now, the other thing that makes me even more angry is when somebody comes to understand that, and then decides he can't do anything. This is a peanut world. The possibility for alteration of our time lies with the peanuts. Any revolution that is going to succeed in our time is not from the top down but from the bottom up. There is a story the Aboriginals tell about two little boys who went off and disobeyed the wisdom of their elder. A rainbow serpent came and swallowed them up and took them underground. The elder had concern for them and so he went to find them. He thumped on the ground until he found a hollow spot where he thought they were. He went down, sang to the rainbow snake and got the little boys out of its belly. He took them up on top of the ground, and they were full of all kinds of stuff, kind of wet. He was letting the sun dry them out, and they just lay still. They did not move. After a while the sun got very hot and began to bake those boys. Along came a whole trail of green ants, and the green ants began to bite them on the feet, on the legs, under the arms and on the nose. The little boys woke up. Revolution is this green ant business, and you have to understand that.

Now, Global Social Demonstration is a band. It is out to band the earth. We have got a long history there. We have had 20 years of research and 12 years of actualization. And we have learned a lot. In 5th City, you know, we got out the model, the 5 presuppositions. We learned about indicative battleplanning. We learned the key to it all: You do this on behalf of the whole world. I don't know if you were ever around there about 6 or 7 years ago. Sitting in some of those halls and little meeting rooms, proclaiming that we are on behalf of the whole world and going to take it to the world seemed like a mighty big joke at the time, but it saved our neck. We are on behalf of all. Then Mowenjum and Oombulgurri came along and we found out about economic development. You have to work in terms of the economic to bring off the cultural. And for them to work together, they have to deal with the political. And then in Majuro we found out about framing and miracles and tactical systems. Between MaJuro and 5th City we found out about the consult dynamic. One man who was here from Korea, after he had gone through some of these things, said, "You know this is like a factory." He has a very picturesque mind. "You have built the product and you have made a few kind of trial runs. Now you are at the point of turning up the speed of that machine to just plunk out those Social Demonstrations ­ bang, bang, bang." That is not bad. Now where our edge moves is to the backup. How do you backup all of those Social Demonstrations? The complexification begins to take on a brand new kind of light. I am sure this time next year we will have a lot more clarity. You do 8, you do 16, you do 24, and you do them where there is a sign of suffering. You do them where it is insulated. If you try to do a social demonstration in the Howard Train in Calcutta you will go mad. You would never get anything done. They have to be a place like a still photograph, in a sense, so that you can begin to deal with the issues there and deal with them quickly. You have to find places where there is the impact value, so that once it is done somebody can hear the echo of it. So, you have Majuro. Majuro is part of the forgotten people of our time. I don't know if you know what that would mean to this country and to the world for Majuro finally to come off. I don't know how long they have been neglected. It will be a sign. If it were real early in the morning, I would at this point have everybody turn the lights off and get 4 people to light a match. I saw this done when I was a kid in a big football field. They were trying to show us why we had to have all of our lights off in the house if the bombers came during the second world war. One guy lit a match in that dark stadium and it was amazing how bright that match was. That is what you are doing. You are lighting little matches. You have Jeju Do where people have been cut off. Tourist industry is developing there and people are getting rich. However, those people are going down in the quagmires not able to participate in any of that, or to begin to determine their own future. We have talked a lot about releasing the human creativity that is there in Oombulgurri. Oh, what a sign that is going to be. You have to understand that Australia looks at that place ­­I don't mean just the movement. I mean Australia­­ I mean Canberra, I mean Perth, I mean Sidney. Oombulgurri is the possibility not only of releasing the Aboriginal, but of releasing every white Australian out of the depth guilt that he bears.

Taj Gunj are people who have just been forgotten, cut off. This is the contradiction of India. Mrs. Ghandi is probably one of the most frustrated people in the world. She has said on many occasions, We have the technological know-how and we have the money and the means. If the people on the grassroots level could only get together and move in a creative way, we could assist them." Everything that has been tried, especially in the rural sections, has just gone down the drain. Kawangware is the people who came to live in the city and could not make it there and cannot go back to the country. They are caught in between. They are pinched off. What a sign. Or how about Trastevere? They are blue collar workers and nobody finally has a way to care for them. They are not in the situation of some people so that the communists or some other group are interested in them. Or, the Isle of Dogs. We ought to have some of the British people come up and talk about that. Oh what a sign. And don't forget Fifth City. I wish there were ways to analyze or measure to see the impact that 5th City has had on the world already, and what a sign, what a sign there.

Now, why do you do this? Well, you cut against the cynicism of our age. You block out the parochialism that says, "Well, you can do it in 5th City, but you can't do it here." That has got to be undercut. That is why you do it all around the globe. And you have to beat the kind of liberalism that insists that you cannot work with other people. When we went into 5th City they said, "You can't go into a ghetto and work with people. That is illegitimate, etc., naughty for doing it." Or they said, "You can't go into Asia." When the Church and everybody else was getting out of Asia is when we went in. "You can't work with Asians." Demonstration is the only answer to the liberal, because behind the liberal is his own hatred or his own wish to see that his failure be incarcerated. Behind that is just pure fascism. Then there is the reduced revolutionary, ho wants just to go out and confront something and beat somebody over the head. No future there. Or the failure mentality: you want the picture that the situation is just hopeless so you can just sit back on your thumb.

Now, the actuating models. It seems to me that they are important. Or maybe you call them the actuating systems. First you have that consult system. I am not going to operate exactly off of those triangles, but those triangles are beautiful and invaluable. With that consult system, you have the guardians. The guardians who went to Majuro, they will never know what they did. Here was a bunch of professional human beings who went into a situation for the first time at their own expense. You cannot imagine what that did for those local Marshallese businessmen, to have that kind of honoring going on and also that kind of practical results. Now, when the Marshallese people get ripped off in their country by some U.S. profiteer, they can call Henry. When Henry calls that fellow, he listens, because Henry is running a multi­million dollar corporation and he has some kind of influence. He is not a Marshallese who is way off and does not vote for anybody. You begin to see that.

You should see what has happened to the guardians. Why, a lot of them were deciding to go into some other vocation. They were just sick of what they were doing. Then they went and saw that by being an architect you can run the world. You can give the gift of what you have been trained to do to the people who need the gift, and their lives are altered. You just see them walking down the street. You can spot them a mile away. They are para-vocated. They see that their gifts and their talents can be used to create history. Something brand new happened there. A consult begins to focus the local capabilities and vision and concern, and then it joins them with the whole earth. It joins them with all the institutions that can begin to assist, which is what institutions were made to do in the beginning. The consult gets out a visionary plan.

Then you have the whole tactical system. You have framing, miracles, you have the programmatic, you have phasing. All of that arises out of your indicative battleplanning methodology. Framing gives you permission to do your plan. It releases the plan to become operative by removing the blocks that are both at the local and at the supra­local level, or national or international level. It begins to bring those together to melt into a creative kind of thrust so that things can begin to happen. The miracles provide a way to go in and just very quickly initiate a place. They create the kind of motivity that is needed to roll on. We are going to learn more and more about the programmatic. We are learning how to set up a copra oil processing plant. It is going to be very hard ­­ practical, practical. Right now, some of you who are farmers are far more valuable than any of these preachers around here who can only read books.

The phasing has to do with finding that key programmatic element (in the Marshal Islands it is the ferry system), and beginning to put your weight on that which breaks everything else loose. We have a lot to learn but we have something that is rather unbelievable. Then there is the demonstration team. They are going to be like the Marine Corps. They are going to have to go in an work all day and plan all night. They are going to work in 120-degree heat in some places. It is not going to be any picnic. It will take discipline, discipline. I have noticed, though, in Social Demonstrations that I have been around that you never have a problem with attendance at Daily Office. I don't know why, but it is not even a question that is raised. They are just there everyday, everyday. It is like the Marine Corps. And they are going to have to go in there and go fast. There is only two years. You go in there, hit it for two years, and you are out. You are moving to someplace else. You go in for life, but not the rest of your life, but you go in for life, for life. In those demonstration teams there has to be global commonness. One group worked on this ­­ a monitoring system whereby they can have their activity phased. Obviously, they are not going to do the same thing. Some people have to get cattle rounded up­and other people have to squeeze coconuts, but everywhere on the face of the earth they look alike They are the same thing. There is nobody doing their own thing. There is just one global Social Demonstration, and that lies in your team.

Then the post at Centrum, Global Social Demonstration, up to this time has been about three people who really did not know what they were doing. That is going to be expanded. Maybe as many as 15 people have to be there. Then we are going to do some experimentation. We are going to create a services and commodities company. And maybe this isn't global, maybe it is just the first of many experiments. We found out that Majuro has to pay about three times as much as you and I do. There are people who take the profits and up them and include all kinds of costs they don't have to pay out. This is done under the guise that they have to take a high risk for these goods. This is a historical situation that has those people trapped. No wonder they have to pay out nine dollars to make one dollar. Now we have begun to discover that you can also order direct, and you don't have to pay warehouse storage fees, etc.. You can get it on a ship and send it over there. We need to bring together some people who know how to import­export and break all of that loose. And that is not just in this country. If you begin to think about Oombulgurri, Taj Gunj, Kawangware, Jeju Do, you are fooling maybe with a global company. Maybe we get it rolling and then maybe somebody else comes in and does it. You are doing a dynamic. You are catalyzing a new way to deal with people around this world.

Then you have got to have in that post somebody who is going to be on the doorsteps of the governments and the business community around this world, and know them better than they know themselves. All of the moxie that development has is just invaluable. Those people are worth a million dollars apiece. It is going to take more and more of those people to do this rather delicate tight wire walking act of funding these things. I imagine we are going to begin to handle millions and millions of dollars, and we are never going to see a penny of it. Some of you who are confused and who think we are not interested in the local church might be interested to know that some people are working here day and night to raise about $25,000 dollars for a local church. That will be a sign for that thing to get completed. It is going to take funding, and I mean millions of dollars.

Now, let me reiterate. To do Primal Community, the Local Church, you have to do the Social Demonstrations to crack it loose, and you are dependent on the Town Meeting. Now, in terms of the pictures you operate out of, you have to be very careful that you don't go back and pick up those Marxian pictures all of us operate out of, since the only thing we have known about social change, finally, was taught in our age by Marx. Social change does not come about like a domino theory, and you can see how that is perpetuated even in our own state department. Social change does not come because one thing falls and another thing falls. Social change does not come because somebody goes to an RS-1 and then goes to a cadre meeting, etc.. We ought to learn that by now. Social change does not come because you get 1,000 people which get 100 people which get 10 for which you get 1. Now, all of those things figure in, and particularly that latter one. But social change happens because there is catalytic action going on over here that creates a certain kind of swell, and catalytic action that goes on over there that creates a certain kind of swell, and you never know. Somebody came up to me and said, "Hey, we have a lady here. She has never been to a course and she never even attended a Town Meeting, but she talks exactly like us. Yeah. Where there is mass evangelism, a movement, you wonder where she got that. Well, maybe it was through a neighbor. We always figured in Mowanjum every time we taught one Aboriginal, we taught 30. You knew mass evangelism was going to happen. You have to have some dynamical strategies of a global thread that acts simultaneously.

I have always been impressed by the writings of Giap. He's a masterful fellow and I think he got his military tactics really from the Chinese. He didn't have much of an army, and if he had ever stood up against the U.S. army he would have been wiped out in a matter of minutes. So, he used to get these little teams of rocket people. They had to get their own rockets, by the way. ( They didn't have a central supply.) If they had to, they went and stole them from the place they were going to rocket. Then they all got off in the bush until exactly 8:00 Tuesday night. At 8:00, not 7:59 or 8:01, they let fly over against every military location in South Vietnam. BOOM, like that, and they thought they were surrounded. By the time they got the militia out, they were already home in bed. A simultaneous BOOM is what you have to have. It has to be autonomous. Everybody has to get his own rocket. Now, you may be graced from time to time that somebody sends you a rocket, but you cannot depend on that. You are autonomous, and yet you are one. Everyone is the same, and that is part of the key to intra­globality.

Then, you have to use indirect tactics. It is catalyzation, catalyzation. Getting ahold of catalyzation is transrational. That is just genius. You make 6 calls on those town meetings. You have to transrationalize everything you do ­­ indirect, indirect. Then, it is always within the core of the trans-establishment that you operate, or it is in that kind of motif. Town meeting is going to teach us about that. Then it is grassroots building. There are no short cuts. I don't care how many people tell me that the American Legion is going to sponsor 3 billion town meetings, I am very clear that some one of us has to go out there and catalyze every one of those town meetings, because the American Legion will not. There is no short­cut. You are out after local man. You do the global in the local today. You work locally, but be clear you do the global. There is no help in my home town of Baton Rouge for somebody to further localize that place or to allow those people to think that their problems are their problems. The only way Baton Rouge has a chance in the world is for somebody, probably from South America, to come up there and blow them loose. I mean to globalize the local. And, I suspect that in our heart of hearts, we know that is true of any situation we are in, and that is true about being areal. Any area that is an area is wrong. It has to be areal. I don't know if you know the difference. An area is not an area, it is the globe. It belongs to the whole globe. You set up around the world. You do those ITI's on that kind of schedule. Period. Your key in there is your metro cadre. Roy, that is grass roots. And that construct is the same in Birmingham as it is in Bombay, or you're wrong. When people see they are doing the global in their local that is your key, your form, iron to you Primal Community, Town Meeting, Global Social Demonstration, your Intra­Globality, your Mass Evangelism.

Now, the last thing I have to say is this. We are going to leave here shortly. Some people are going to go back and try to work on their family. You know, work on their wife or their husband or their children because they want to meet them. My son came up to me the other day and said he wanted to hang around this summer because he wanted to know me better. And we had quite a talk out of that. Some people want to find some way to meet their colleagues, really meet them. Well, I want to suggest to you that we are going to go apart. We are going to go apart. And we are not going to meet any more. The way we used to say it is that we'll meet in heaven. I suspect that what I mean by that is that you are going to meet in your doing. You are going to meet in your accomplishment. You are going to meet in the performance. You are going to be out there in Okeephenokee Swamp recruiting a Town Meeting while your wife is teaching a PLC in Dallas, and you are going to meet her. You are going to be over in a Social Demonstration somewhere pouring out your life's blood and you are going to meet that area prior sitting up there in New York. We'll meet, we'll meet in heaven.

~ George Holcombe