Global Research Assembly July 9,1978

Chicago T­500

Let me begin this talk with some poetry. The images from "The Snout" section of Loren Eisely's The Immense Journey are at the center of what these talks are about

It began as such things always begin-in the ooze of unnoticed swamps, in the darkness of eclipsed moons. It began with a strangled gasping for air.

The pond was a place of reek and corruption, of fetid smells and of oxygen­starved fish breathing through laboring gills. At times the slowly contracting circle of the water left little windows of minnows who skittered desperately to escape the sun, but who died, nevertheless, in the fat, warm mud. It was a place of low life. In it the human brain began.

There were strange snouts in those waters, strange barbels nuzzling the bottom ooze, and there was time-three hundred million years of it-but mostly, I think, it was the ooze. By day the temperature in the world outside the pond rose to a frightful intensity; at night the sun went down in smoking red. Dust storms marched in incessant progression across a wilderness whose plants were the plants of long ago. Leafless and weird and stiff they lingered by the water, while over vast areas of grassless uplands the winds blew until red stones took on the polish of reflecting mirrors. There was nothing to hold the land in place. Winds howled, dust clouds rolled, and brief erratic torrents choked with silt ran down to the sea. It was a time of dizzying contrasts, a time of change.

On the oily surface of the pond, from time to time a snout thrust upward, took in air with a queer grunting inspiration, and swirled back to the bottom. The pond was doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the creature would not die. It could breathe air direct through a little accessory lung, and it could walk. In all that weird and lifeless landscape, it was the only thing that could. It walked rarely and under protest, but that was not surprising. The creature was a fish.

In the passage of days the pond became a puddle, but the Snout survived. There was dew one dark night and a coolness in the empty stream bed. When the sun rose next morning the pond was an empty place of cracked mud, but the Snout did not lie there. He had gone. Downstream there were other ponds. He breathed air for a few hours and hobbled slowly along on the stumps of heavy fins.

It was an uncanny business if there had been anyone there to see. It was a journey best not observed in daylight, it was something that needed swamps and shadows and the touch of the night dew. It was a monstrous penetration of a forbidden element, and the Snout kept his face from the light. It was just as well, though the face should not be mocked. In three hundred million years it would be our own.

The journey we have been on as a body can be gestalted several ways. I find myself forced to do this to be able to approach this topic, The Time of the New Reality. One way of looking at our corporate journey together is that we had a time of knowing and a time of doing. Within the time of knowing we emphasized the self and its capacity to know its knowing. Then we emphasized the corporate capacity to know its knowing. All of us remember the products we created in those phases of our life from RS­I to our comprehensive curriculum. There was also a shift in the "doing" in the midst of our service to the world. We emphasized individual grappling. Now we are wrestling not only with corporate doing, but with corporate social being.

Our task force created an image to describe our real situation. We decided we were assigned to the Grand Canyon. We had plenty of room to move about and to think. We found a small manhole cover in the Grand Canyon, just big enough for our task force to get through. Somebody lifted it up and discovered how small the Grand Canyon is when you are looking at it from underneath instead of from the top. Our journey in the spirit is that way. It will always be that way. We will always find another cover to fall through when a fresh awareness emerges out of our concrete expenditure and service to the world.

Another image of our journey is that our corporate life together forces us to wrestle with justification, the possibility of election. We have wrestled with the purge that comes from being the ones who care in the Dark Night and on the Long March. We know that all your experiences remain with you. It is like the time you were a kid, learning how to put up a backyard swing and you caught your finger in ­it. You still carry that scar. The pain­filled experiences of our spirit journey will always be with us. They always remain, guarding the totality of the deeps.

This moment is an intensification of that journey. It is glorification and exemplification. It is like being the elected one, purged forever for the sake of the Mystery itself. In this Time of the New Reality, poetry is very intriguing. One of the clues that civilization is in one of these times, is that some live before the new and others, who do not, are exposed for who they are. That is one indication of this moment that we have been trying to describe in these talks.

The triangle begins to wrestle with poetry that holds this new awareness before us. Certainly, this awareness has been present throughout history. The triangles will hold an objective picture of the dynamics of existence. This is a tool which helps to maintain our dialogue, keep our dialogue open and claim our self-consciousness.

The immediacy of fulfilled living is the transparency of humanness. It is when human existence itself turns transparent. One of our common images of transparency is the hole­in­the­paper image. If you hold up a piece of paper and put a match under it, a hole appears and you see through to the bottom. You see through clear to the other side. You see through the hole that you are participating in radical deeps in the midst of life. That triangle has to do with perception, and you discover that it is the eternal now that is your one and only life to be lived. If anybody is waiting around for a fulfilled life, I have bad news, or good news, depending on how you relate to it.

The primacy of earth's care has to do with the times in history when sociality turns transparent. Not only your own solitary existence turns transparent, but society's entire existence before the Mystery turns transparent. Society itself is seen through the hole that appears. The possibility of the new tomorrow is present in the midst of living out the expenditure of your social being.

The ultimacy of final mystery has to do with the discontinuous pole. It has to do with history itself turning transparent. In the historical process, everyday eventfulness that blows open, blows you through to the radically unknown. It is that unknown upon which existence is based. These talks are simply a frame for the additional brooding and work that needs to go on. They are to stir our corporate imagination so that next year we can work with this fresh awareness for the last human being on this planet. Our job is to make sure that everybody has that awareness about the moment in which they live; so they and we don't confuse it with some other moment in history. For me, these talks have been tremendous events.

This talk is titled To Walk With Being. The four points are that the happening in your life has four qualities: transrational perception, trans­actional engagement, transaffectional fulfillment and trans­temporal union. This is what walking with Being in the midst of life is all about. Let's look at Transrational Perception. I had an opportunity this quarter to see the movie about Martin Luther King's life. I had heard all of his speeches many times before on albums, radio and live. But I confess I have never before had a way to talk about his statement, "l have been to the mountain­top;" and "My eyes hay`` seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." But now I see that, for "those who have eyes to see" that is what they see. They see the coming of the reign of Mystery itself through every single fabric of existence and every single part of life. They see it on the near horizon. It is seeing the new possibility through the mundanity of everyday living. It is seeing a park where a vacant lot stands. It is seeing the possibility for unity where there is discord.

The vision that seizes those who have eyes to see contains new depths of human consciousness and a new sense of the possibility of the human engagement. What is difficult about this vision is your awareness that you are experiencing a new claim on your existence which you cannot articulate. You try to talk about your vision and it is like catching a tiny fish in a huge lake. It's tricky. You are trying to get handles `~n it, to create poetry about it. You know the vision you have already experienced is beyond a human development project, a Town Meeting and beyond any program that we could ever invent. You are seized by that vision and in the midst of the seizure you also experience the wonder at how suffering in all of its tragedy, complexity and agony of life is still sustained. You cannot figure it out. Since I have been in New York, I can't buy a pack of cigarettes without being jarred with the Mystery of how life is being sustained. From visiting villages, you and I have experienced being sustained as an irrational experience. It does not compute but it is there. You wonder as you drive into some of these communities on site selection, "How did this village get here? How does it even exist?" There isn't any way to explain it.

The consciousness that tomorrow is open is part of the awareness in relation to suffering. It does not have to be that way at this moment. Life delivers not only you and me as individuals; life itself delivers society to itself to be re­created. It is amazing that you can see the whole social order being taken out of existence quite apart from anybody's reflection, comment, opinion or plan. You also see the New emerging. Who organized those seven revolutions anyway? What an organizer! They are just facts, and they are not going to stop until the new social order is rewoven through the warp and woof of this whole earth. It is that vision that you see. It burns your eyes to see that whatever the earth is at this moment is what has to be cared for, not something less than that.

You see the gap between the No­longer and the Not­yet and that is the opportunity of the New emerging. Being itself opens that gap and you and I have the opportunity to respond. In our time we have experienced the power of Being to eclipse human significance. We have also experienced the power to destroy every single social structure we ever thought was eternal. It is the eclipse, the darkness, the hiddenness of the Mystery. At some moments in history, it's just dark. It is the trough of civilization.

We have also experienced a fresh new sense of the power of Being to disclose the New-to make way through all of the rubble of the old for the new to be sensed after. It is frightening when you go to these places. Sometimes you get the sense that somebody has already been where you are going. You arrive to do a Town Meeting and you know it is exactly what you need to do . . . but, wait a minute . . . are you sure? This is the beginning of the crest of civilization.

We have experienced the power of Being to be about continuously perfecting society. The creation that has been brought to be is eternally being perfected through the eclipses and the disclosures that happen in the drama of human history. It is the vision of the emergence. It is like being at the beginning of time all over again and first sense after the possibility of human existence in a fresh and profound way. The power of something to come out of nothing is what has seized our consciousness as people through the course of our journey.

The second one is Trans­actional Engagement. That has to do with whollistic action. How do you engage yourself with Being effectively? This is about jarring Being's eternal enemy, the creaturely anxiety that moves in on all of us. Saying "no" is much more possible it seems, than saying "yes." It shows up in everyday forms and in the mindset that history itself has brought into existence. Whenever those mindsets and forms become inadequate, there are human beings who fall through the structures, and there is the existence of wasted creation. Being acts on that creation. In order to maneuver, you must be one who knows you are acting with Being as you act. You are acting not out of the way it ought to be or could be, but out of the way it is-the givenness at the moment in which you find yourself. Being always wins, somehow. If you think of all the wars throughout history of mankind, there isn't any rational explanation for why civilization is still civilization. The data does not support it. Just take this century. In 1950 everybody was getting bomb shelters. That was the thing to have-like a van. Anybody who was anybody had a bomb shelter, except people who already lived in them. When the threat to creation mounts to the point of NonBeing taking over, Being acts.

The tension in the midst of acting with Being lies in deciding to live before the demand concretely in front of you and deciding to live before the promise that life provides. It is to live in the midst of impossible and the possible. It is the hope that life will never show up in any situation other than the impossible/possible tension that you have. It is the tension of the whollistic care for all and concrete signs that allow the care that is present within all peoples to break loose in a fresh way. It is what it means to see through the data to the possibilities of effective action and authentic care. It is imposing "death ground" on yourself when you have decided you are out to win. In the midst of whatever your maneuver might be, you are obsessed with do­meet I thought do­meet applied only to human development projects last summer. I discovered very quickly it was not simply an HDP category. Every situation is consumed with doing creativity and doing humanness that releases Being's effectiveness in that situation. There is a quote we use regularly, "The way of strategy is the way of nature.!" What a statement! This statement is about acting with Being, acting in the way life is and in the way it has been given. SQ rapidity, indirection, advantage, surprise, focus simultaneousness, transrationality and fluidity are the way Being goes about being Being. These categories are not our insights. They are the way life is, and these insights are beginning to break through. I was watching our state of being after the maneuver session the other morning and I caught a little glimpse of fright. Oh, no! You mean I can experience action more intense than I did this year, next year?

Now, the third point, Trans­affectional Fulfillment, has to do with the depth interior emotional happening in the midst of this experience which is beyond the self, though it is related to the self. You and I experience our life these days over against Being as awesome otherness. The kidnapping events in Italy with all their terrorism came to people as awesome otherness. I was out getting a pack of cigarettes in New York one night and some student started hollering out the window, and everybody on the street hit the dirt. He was screaming, "I'll kill all of you." Now, hitting the dirt wasn't a bad model but I didn't hit the dirt. I paused for a second because what occurred to me was that I was had, whether I hit the dirt or not. I experienced the otherness of civilization coming into existence which is always happening again and again. You have to think of this as a leap, not a protracted war that is going on. Through this experience, you and I know the ultimacy of the Mystery. It is as if the unknown is closer to me than I experience myself closer to me. Lately it doesn't take much for me to experience wonder and dread-any little thing at all. It is like I was already there in the event that was pointed out and already surrounded by consciousness of the Mystery. That is our life. Or it is an awareness that the Mystery is in fact acting at this moment and that Being is acting and that creation is being re­done radically.

It is an experience of the Mystery being willing to disclose itself to us nobodies of the earth. When you go into any community you discover that the Mystery has already disclosed itself to those people in a fresh way. Being surprises us with its readiness to move. You experience civilization as having been protected in this century. Although there have been many wars, the potential to eliminate the earth several times over has not yet occurred. Being has been protecting the creation. That protection is like manna from heaven. The signs of wonders and miracles point to the possibility of the nowness of the new society which has sustained us through the darkness of this century. We have been protected and defended by Being. Being takes out of being fads that give shallow appearances of the profundity of what the new sociality is calling for. Being lets structures die, and sees to it that they never show up that way in history again. Being protects its beloved and someone once said that the gates of despair cannot prevail against those beloved that Being protects. It is human expenditure and human awareness that freight the mystery of Being. The happening a million miles below any of our programs is the reason those programs came to be.

Being itself is recreating itself that all might have life. Being itself is willing to have itself destroyed so that all of life might have life. You experience your dreams starting to come true. Sometimes people stand here and list all the things that are happening and I can't take it all. Your being isn't ready for the fullness that Being trusts us with in the course of building and rebuilding this creation. Secrets of the other world are being disclosed to us and to people across the globe in a way which has never occurred before. Being is trusting this creation to be and to win-That no life might be lost nor wasted. Being has signaled this victory with a fresh arousal of human instruments across the globe. When I first became involved here I thought that's what I had decided to do-and I had. Later on, I discovered I didn't have any choice in the beginning. It was one big con job. You've teen stung by Being and here you are. It is easy to think, in the first instance, that we are special people because we see this and we know how to do that. Being is doing this and Being is changing all of us-every structure, every person, every society and every situation.

We experience indescribable gratitude for the opportunity to be part of creation. These days nobody cares what their assignment is because it is all the same task. It is to do creation. It is about discovering that you are­Being's eternal friend. It is honoring your closest and final companion. You begin to sense a new capacity to live the unknown as the only constant in your existence. You are aware that you know the unknown and that the unknown knows you. In this awareness, you experience your life as guarding the human deeps. You are concerned about depth consciousness, the depth engagement and human creativity that is missing from the current ongoing historical flow. We find that we ourselves exemplify that Being cares. I am very clear that the care in me is far more than the care that my own self can produce. It is like setting up your 66th Town Meeting. You have been to 400 communities to get those 66 and one day, out on the road, you pause for a second and say, "Now, wait a minute. I didn't decide to come out here and do this today. How did I end up doing this? Being has just maneuvered on you. You discover yourself submitting to being totally responsibility for all creation without even knowing that took place. It is a shock when you discover that is what you are exemplifying. That is the way of profundity. I ­don't mean some abstraction. It is not some cop­out on realty because the harshness in the world is still there. It is only in this world that everything I have been talking about takes place.

My fourth point is that the Transtemporal Union is in the midst of this. You know you are called. We are called to join Being's battle. The challenge in our spirit existence these days is not one of doing what we said we would do. We already can do that. The challenge is to be those who join Being's battle unto death. it is Being's future that is at stake. Human existence itself is at stake. You think you are accustomed to threats of annihilation. Then you read about the progress of some peace talks and your whole universe turns around. The secret of Xavierism is this understanding about your life. You are doing all of creation wherever you are, not just whatever you are doing. You are doing creation and you are doing this so that creation will live. Then it will be destroyed to be redone again.

In this union you experience a fanaticism and an anger. It's Being's anger over the presupposition that some people will always be hungry. It is Being's anger over the presupposition that human creativity can only be found in the abstract. It is Being's anger over wasted creation. Being is moving and you and t experience that anger in our being. It will never go away. You also experience the delight of being around. It is hard to talk about. You are glad that you were born; that you have the colleagues you have; that you have the family you have, and that you have the brokenness you have which is the only thing you have to contribute. Do you remember Kazantsakis' image of "the crimson line"? The crimson line is what we have discovered in a whole new way. We are participating in creation and Being.

Being has a covenant in the midst of this union. The first part of it is obedience to the all­in­all. You have heard of this poetry before. "I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me; I was naked and you clothed me." Obedience to the all­in­all is the knowledge that in every concretion, your relationship to the situation is your relationship to Being. Hence, the church is concerned over marriage and over those who have fallen out of the structures. The fact is that your final relationship is all there is to life. We, as a people, are not building a utopia. We are not building a big movement. We are a movement participating in the releasing of creation that is already going on across the planet earth-in every last corner and to every person. This is about more than what we said we are going to do. It is more than that. It is doing what the nobodies have to do. That is part of our experience and in the midst of this, we experience being Being's nobodies. This is part of the covenant that Being requires of us to experience the fullness of creativity that is given to every human being. If you can't be a nobody, then you can't care for the all­in­all. You can't walk with kings and you can't walk with villagers. This covenant is about responding to the moral issue of the time in which you live. In our time, it is the 15% and the 85%. That is not the moral issue. That is the poetry we use to point to the moral issue: that the creativity of 85% of the world is not part of the creation process-and this has been revealed to us as a real possibility at this moment in history. For the first time, we are out to see that no human being is left out. We plan to see that every person has the opportunity to have a life of profound awareness and profound engagement. That is what being human is about. It is an unending journey with Being and creation. It will always go on. But this is our moment, and these are our times for this happening.

Now I will describe four warnings that are important to heed: First, we need to be careful that we do not drown in doing. When we saw the solitary possibility of drowning in spirit, we reminded one another to "take care of yourself". Today it is different, although the other remains. This is not an announcement to stop taking care of yourself. Nor do I mean slowing up the pace. Oh, no. We need to figure out the necessary injections so we don't become confused about what we are doing. Maybe it's taking care of the corporate body.

Secondly, we have to guard against seeking proof for our calling. Just why am I doing this, anyway? Is this the way to be spending my life? There is no proof, as you have discovered. There will never be any proof. We can hold four million Town Meetings; we can have 394 billion Human Development Projects. We will still experience the call and drive that is in our life totally mysterious and strange.

The third warning: we need to be careful that we don't yearn for popularity. Or that all we need is the influx of new troops so we can collapse. That is not what we mean when we say the new movement is afoot. We need to intensify our corporate existence as an Order. We need to intensify all the dynamics that we presently grasp as the dynamics of the Order. If we do not, we will be lost in the maze of the new movement. We will not be able to tell the difference between ourselves and someone who decides to work with us for a week. Although their engagement is phenomenal, profound and creative, and we cannot do what has to be done without it, we cannot be confused about who we are as a body, or we won't do what we said we would do in history. We have been given permission by Being itself to be.

Fourth, we have to be careful that we don't become paralyzed by the awareness of this new explosion that is already out of our control. We experience this as if we touched one button and everything is out of control. This is what it means to impact the masses. We have to be willing to live the mystery of that unknownness. Nobody really knew for sure that the Red Sea was going to open in time. If you are waiting over the hill to see the Red Sea open before you start to march, you might as well go to sleep. The Red Sea never moves until the people head for it. I don't know why, but I know it is that way. We have to be willing to risk all we have in a whole new way.

Obviously we have more work to do here. Where in the last days of these talks and your glimpses of the triangle, have these begun to spin for you? Where have you begun to bleed meaning out of some of this poetry, either in the midst of the talks or during your second reflection?

· It reminded me of the horrible anger I encounter every moment. It's related to the profound possibility at every moment and not being able to attain it. You get angry at colleagues, the thousand things that stand in the way of the possibility of the moment. And it all collapses when you push at it hard. Horrible anger at the unattainability of possibility which you grasp in the palm of your hand.

· I found myself thinking about a new category-primal humanness. The only image I have is a real dumb one. It is the image of this Incredible Hulk character. I think that some of the things in these talks would show us something about primal community that we have been wanting to say for a long

time

· Things are just sustained. There is no good reason why New York City keeps functioning-and yet it does, and everyone is very surprised.

· The only way to maneuver was with the mystery. We have just begun to see that. It is not the simple set of rational processes you hand over to somebody and expect 1­2­3­4­5,-they are automatic generals. There is the spirit activity and it is perpetual. You must respond to the mysterious intrusion as you go.

· To me, this shouldn't be a triangle, but a pyramid.

· It is the difference between doing and delivering. You become so busy you almost drown in your doing but you still haven't delivered what you went out to do.

· You were saying we had a time of knowing and then a time of doing. Did you then say we were coming upon a time of being? If you did, then I suggest we make a note of it.

· When you walk into a village in Alaska, the first person that stops you and doesn't know who you are takes you to the key person and pretty soon you're in a house with ten other people. The conversation you wanted starts and you and your partner leave a half hour later with the village chief walking on one side of you, his wife on the other, and the village administrator behind you. They say, "See you again, soon." Your very presence there calls forth something in that community, and they just know it and they have been waiting.

· Under the canopy of "The Mystery got here first and didn't tell me he was going to be the,­e," I have always had a fear of inkinding anything. I will sit before the phone for 45 minutes hefore calling someone to loan me $5.00. One day, I showed up in this motel with Hinkelman and we found out what marriage was really like. Anyway, we worked on a pitch to ask the motel operator, who just happened to own a motet strategic to our turf, for a room for three nights. Before we got the pitch ready, he dropped by to see what we were doing and Hinkleman said, "You've been around longer; you talk to him." I started this thing and he said, "You know, Lake City is right in the middle of where you have to operate." I said, "Yea." Now," he said, "how long do you think you are going to be here'" l answered, "Maybe two weeks." He said, "Well, it would be helpful if you didn't have to move, wouldn't it/" I said, "Yea." He said, "Why don't you just keep this room." And I said, "Thank you.

· What struck me last quarter was "death ground."

· This year is going to be different because we must create the milieu in which people do the maneuvers. That is going to be hard. The shift from doing to being is a painful one.

· There is perpetual dissatisfaction with completion of a maneuver because the maneuver never reaches your vision. The maneuver reveals where the inadequacies are so that you have to reconstruct the temporal hope, the temporal vision that moves you toward the vision. The key is catalyzing people.

· The community kitchen is my favorite grounding for this. It is one thing to get kitchens into being. But in the midst of this you are called to be the Community Kitchen and to engage others in the profound resolve behind all you intended that kitchen to be. I don't know how we do that. It is the flip side of doing where you are initiating and implementing, getting things off the ground and operational in a project. As you participate, you are called to be the profound decision behind what they are called to be. The Primacy of Earth's Care on the right side of the triangle comes to me this way. It is like turning a warning sign into a sign of intensive care. When you do, it can be right in the middle of knowing and doing. You don't even want to talk about being but you want to concentrate. This has to do with maneuvering on the one in time, and you don't take them, one at a time in these times of intensity in which you move through these signs. This is what has moved me in these talks.

· Perhaps I am schizophrenic. If you take the characters from The Beanfield War, I am either the Vista Volunteer, Herbie Goldfarb or Patton. It has to do with being sustained and risking at the same time and there is a profound relationship between the two. Everyone knows what it means to rescue self. It has to do with care for yourself. In these projects, you risk the mission. Twenty years from now, God may not even chuckle over us-and this has to do with courage. You also finally risk nothing, which has to do with creativity. I can't figure out which hat to wear: Patton's, the Vista Volunteer or Herbie Goldfarb.

· I didn't finish the story of the Lady of LaCross. My contradiction is that I am always forgetting the punchline. After that event, she said she wanted to die. She prayed to die and couldn't figure out how anyone could feel so much pain and suffering, total misery, and not die. She thought about committing suicide but, she said, she knew a power other than her was sustaining her life and she was afraid to defy that power.