Institute of Cultural Affairs

Global Team Report

Chicago Nexus

February 4, 1978


TRANSPARENTIZATION

We had the rare treat of taking this trip with the most delightful hyena you could ever imagine. She was totally undaunted in the face of all surprises. There was only one occasion in which her composure slipped a little bit. That was at the project directors meeting, a staggering event to say the least. There were 300 people in the room. A quarter of those were villagers who came along with the new project directors and auxiliary. They asked Lyn to talk over lunch. When she got up to speak there was a standing ovation, and it wasn't started by any white face. The Hindi word for greetings is "Namaste." Lyn's first words were "I must say . . ." and with that, there was a resounding "Namaste" from everyone in the room. Now, that passage on speaking in tongues, where everyone hears in his own 1anguaRe begins to make some sense.

I was assigned on this trip to take a look at the school, to make preparations for the Harvard trip and more particularly, to look at our transparentization strategy. Transparentization is really a grand strategy, in every way comparable to the "end run" strategy as a grand approach to the church. It is an end run on the whole Ecumenical Movement out of which we grew and which has now reached an impasse by getting itself trapped in religious institutions and dogmatic forms.

This has blocked the vast movement of humanity toward unity and profoundness which marked the Ecumenical Movement in its beginnings.: When it is broken loose and given form, which is what we are doing in our grand strategy of transparentization, mankind will be able to take its next leap or, to put this in Chardin's terms, what we are about is issuing the clarion call in response to which mankind will unite­and build a human f1ltl~r.

That's the context out of which we want to work on transparentization. My report is in that arena but I want to come at it indirectly with some observations on what God hath wrought first, then come back to some of the implications for us and for our work in transparentization. The first part will be interesting. The second part will be important.

A few asides first. I am tremendously grateful for our rule of thumb that nobody gives a report until at least a week after he's encountered the event about which he is going to report. This has been a difficult week, but now I am beginning to grasp that phenomenon of strange silence that comes over people who have spent time in India. The first two hours in Maliwada we encountered enough spiritual address to last most people a lifetime, and we had three weeks to go. In that situation, your psychic sensitivity tends to shut down; you keep recording things and keeping track of and participating in great events, but in terms of grasping the profundity and meaning of everything, it is a case of psychic overload. All week, things have been bubbling. They are still bubbling, and in one sense, I don't want to talk yet because it might jell something. But aI1 of us need to be in on this kind of stew, so don't take any of this as a finished product but as bubbles.

I am also grateful that this trip came in the season of Epiphany, the time of the Disclosure of the Christ. I can't think of any more appropriate time to do what we did and see what we saw.

I am going to talk mostly about the India leg of our trip, and I would like to start with a bit of very old poetry.

"Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit came upon him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ and, inspired by the spirit, he came to the temple. And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom and the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy words, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou has prepared in the presence of all people, alight for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory to thy people Israel.' "

Except for old Simeon's death wish, I find myself in sympathy with the comment he made. In fact, I've seen thy salvation and it's the blue. There's not nearly enough blue in India. There is plenty of spirit blue but I mean literal blue shirts. Blue material is hard to come by there. I suggest that the next 16 people going to India pack about ten blue shirts. Men's Small is the size that fits 90: of our forces. That would do a tremendous job. There is a constant influx of people over there. The presence of blue shirts would be a very helpful symbolic gesture, and far more than that, it would help dramatize what is in fact happening in India.

What Has God Wrought? What is history doing with what we are doing? First, God Hath Wrought among us in that great land, a wild movemental outburst that far exceeds our capacity to keep track of, control or even explain. This was brought home to us vividly. When we arrived, there was a minister from Seattle in Maliwada whose church had adopted a village, but there wasn't a village by the name that his church had adopted. It is hard to keep track of what is happening there, and nobody has time to sit down and keep records. They are all out doing villages. It was no problem for the minister. He is an old colleague and was having the time of his life.

We have been sending House packets for three months to two villages that don't exist. One of these village names was made up in a Cabaret on site selection, and somehow it's gotten into all of our printed material. I have the pleasure of reporting to you now, however, that there is an accurate list of actual villages, the 47, with names and addresses.

There are six steps in the actuation process: site selection, the site visit to Maliwada, attendance at the school, the Gram Sabha, the auxiliary in place, and the consult. Some villages have three steps done, not necessarily in order, and the job of tracking them is a monumental undertaking which nobody has time to do. One of our services to India was to compile out of four people's stacks of notes a tracking chart. It would be nice to use this as a working chart but there is rarely anyone around to work on it.

The happening in Maharashtra is clearly more than what we are doing. For this school we targeted 19 villages, each of which was to send ten or more people. On the third day of the school, 36 villages were represented and only six of those were among the 19 villages targeted. Our colleagues went out to get the rest of the targeted ones and they are there by now. but 13 villages were totally unheard of by us.

The rest were old projects (some were six weeks old) and they were sending additional people to the school. An incredible ripple effect is taking place. Assignments have to be redone every quarter because school graduation means more auxiliaries are available for assignment to the villages. In times of transition auxiliary are not always in place all the time. One man arrived at his village as the new project director and found himself all alone. A couple of days later, the division gun got wind of this and called the project director to ask, "How are you doing?" "Fantastic," the man replied, "I have 1,600 people in my auxiliary." He had mobilized the entire village. God has wrought a wild movement outburst among us, and anybody that wouldn't give his eyeteeth to participate in it is somehow opposed to the flow of history itself. We are in the enviable position of selling and telling the story of a reality that is happening among us. We are not selling promises. The reality is there.

God hath wrought also a core of local man advocates up and down the socioeconomic scale. I turned out to be one of them. It took 1ust one thing to change me from an abstract theoretical advocate of local man to a real advocate of local man. In Maliwada we sponsored the building of nine demonstration homes, eight in the Harijan community and one near the castle. Since then, 25 new homes have been constructed and 70 homes had major renovation work done. We didn't have anything to do with that. Local man got a few rupees and decided to take care of his village. Other things turned other people around but that turned me around.

Up and down the socio­economic spectrum there are guardians who don't know it because they are guardians of local man. One member of the four­man Planning Commission doing the five year plan for India is an advocate of the ICA work. People come to him from all over the world to ask what is going on in rural development. He says, "Go to Maliwada." He told us, "I've hot been to Maliwada yet but I'm your PR man." Lyn talked about our visit with Dr. and Mrs. Shah. Dr. Shah is the guardian who went to Vaviharsh with 36 other doctors and distributed 600 pairs of glasses to the village. Lyn didn't tell you that the visit was made at 11:30 at night after we called at 11:15 to ask if we could come over and he said, "Sure." The man is a very devout and practicing Hindi, and in our conversation with him and his wife, who are equally advocates of our work, they commented, "The Lord has been Rood to us, but it wasn't for us; it was so that we might be good for local man." Dr. Shah has organized another team of doctors to go to 15 other villages to do the same work that was done in Vaviharsh.

Local man is rising, and God hath wrought advocacy of that rise. A leading industrialist, Mr. BiJa1, flew Vinod to Calcutta, all expenses paid, to tell the story of the Nava Gram Prayas to 500 businessmen there. Mr. Bi1al also allowed one of our nine­year­old auxiliaries to inkind four motor scooters from him. The most startling aspect of this advocacy of local man to me, is on the regional level. Replication has brought into being public and private sector advocates at the regional level who are guardians of local man. Somehow I had imagined that this operation had one or two key cities and everything else took place in the rural.

We went to Nasik, which is a district city. I grew up in a town of 10,000 which would be considered a district city. Nasik has 600,000 people in it. The project directors who set up consults depend on the resources of those places and attain advocacy that we never heard of before. One village consult reported a traffic lam for the first time in the village's history. There were 60 jeeps at the consult belonging to officials who had come to see what happened. I don't know what that means for our Guardians meeting this­April, but it is going to be a new kind of reality, particularly if we decide that it needs to be a global Guardians meeting.

God hath wrought also, an effective training instrument with impact that goes far beyond the mighty 250. I had the rare privilege of spending a few extra days at the school. My interest right now is not in the sequential flow of the curriculum but more in its basic dynamics. Their modules, which are built from the program chart, include two days per topic. The first day is on "what" and the second day is on "how." The first and opening lecture is called the Substance of the Arena, like agriculture. They call this theoretical, but if that's theory, practice must really be something' A 4x4 deals with principles of operation and guidelines for doing that arena. Next is a field visit.­ They start by looking at the Maliwada tactics, then go out to see where those tactics are being implemented. Next they have what they call a "technical encounter." They go into Arungabad or to a university or to a demonstration farm so they can really see that arena in operation.

The second day starts with an "implementation keys" talk and a resource panel with both public and private sector people, and they draw heavily on Maliwada villagers for this session. Then comes an implementation workshop. I am impressed with the design. It works. I sat in on the Agriculture lecture. It goes something like this:

"The first thing we do is determine who owns the land. If you don't determine who owns the land when you do your farm, you will be kicked off. Here's how to find out who owns the land. You go around and ask people who owns the land. You go to the district recording office to determine who owns the land. Then. when you find out, go look at the land and take a soil sample. You take a soil sample so that you can see what will grow there. You want to see what will grow there because if you don't, it won't come up when you plant it."

This is the theoretical lecture' I learned something. They say that the task of a module is not to create an expert. They think it is a mistake for people in auxiliaries to be experts on any arena. What they're out to do with the school is to create a group of people who have a picture of the reality that is coming into being and who know what resources they can draw upon to get that into a village.

They have done an unbelievable job on materials. They have charts on every subject with full details. They have also created an Actuation Formula Book which has the program chart on the front and a step by step procedure for everything to do. For instance, the first arena is Cooperative Agriculture. Point one is to conduct a survey of the amount of land available and the amount of land under cultivation. There is a step by step procedure for every one of the nine arenas. For each arena, there is a list of possible assistance sources. They have listed, in detail, where to go, locally or regionally to get the expertise you need to do this job. We no longer have to ask ourselves how to do those projects. The training instrument has done that job.

The school's effectiveness is demonstrated by the fact that 85: of the graduates of the five schools to date are now working in projects as volunteers for two years. Additional evidence of the school's effectiveness comes from incidents like the following. A man rode by the Maliwada bus stop in a brand new Massey Ferguson tractor, and Vinod asked how he got it. The man explained he had taken a loan at the bank and was doing contract services for farmers around the area. Vinod then asked how he knew to do that and he replied that he had been talking to participants in­the school one day about what they had learned, what it was possible to do, and he decided to do it himself.

In the arena of training, the school has also catalyzed a Tactical Actuation Book, a step­by­step, day­by­day working guide with a chart for each day. Any auxiliary from the school can take this book, make the daily assignments, use the formulae, and do a project. That is happening.

We have some work to do on this before we go to Harvard. Although this is not Harvard's philosophy of education, what we have can be a miracle. ­We have the local man educational model for the globe. The subject matter may change but the rational, the construct and the approach is right.

God Hath also wrought a core of care, corporateness, courage, and creativity capable of sustaining and motivating people over the long haul. It is still coming into being but you can smell it; you can see it on the horizon. These colleagues are in good shape and they are moving. The project directors meeting, for example, was scheduled in a room set for 60 people. At eight in the morning they had to change buildings and move to a larger one across town. That was no problem, and the spirit motivity is unbelievable. The people giving reports on the 14 consults they had participated in were six feet off the ground.

The liturgy that we worked on for Nava Gram Prayas last summer is being used on Sunday. They have a shorter form of office for every day. It is not good yet, but it is progressing. One sign of progress is that one of the lines of the office is "Life is never the way we want it." That line came up constantly in the project directors reports. You already know that part of the job of ritual is to get these images communicated. There is a good deal more work to be done but there is no reason to hurry to formalize the liturgical forms for Nava Gram Prayas.

Probably the most important thing God hath wrought before our eyes is Profound Humanness. Someone said of us that they didn't understand what we were doing but we never stopped, we have no problems and we always find a way. That describes Nava Gram Prayas perfectly. We have exemplars of profound humanness among us. The general, the saint, the poet, the wise one and the anointed are among us. There is an unbelievable sophistication in effective action in India. Vinod's nickname is "Shevadi." He was a general who managed to drive out the Monguls by using Gideon­like tactics. At night he tied lanterns on a bunch of cattle and headed them toward the fort. When the Monguls came out to attack the cattle, Shevali. entered the fort from the back and captured it. That's Vinod. He does not need confrontation tactics. He just wins and he is not the only one.

One of the consults was blocked because all the people in the village work all day every day. They could not possibly stop for a consult, so our generals said, "Why don't we do it at night?" That consult was held from 8 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. for three days. In another village, the people did not believe that anything would happen. They had come to the Gram Sabha, and it was fine. The story was fine but they still didn't think anything would happen, especially anything that anyone outside the village would notice. But 30 officials showed up for the consult and with that, 300 people came out for the opening session.

Finances are never a block. Fourteen consults were held with absolutely no funds sent to any of them, and there are no debts left over. The people raised the money from the villages and district cities. They inkinded almost everything and said that the program checks would cover any bills outstanding. Now, knowing the irregularity and the amounts of program checks, you can see this means essentially that there are no consult debts. Another group ran into suspicion that we were out to Christianize the village with the consult. Our people responded by saying,

"Don't be silly. We're here to help." Somehow, that solved the problem. The people who were being accused of trying to Christianize the village themselves were Hindus, so it wasn't a very serious problem.

The auxiliaries go into the village to set up before the consults and they reported such things as the launching of a 115 person preschool and the grading of four roads by the government before the consult, and radio and newspaper coverage of the consult. The numbers reported attending closing plenaries ranged from 380 to 700 people. The most excited person giving a report began by distributing copies of his village paper, the Narayan Chincholi Voice. This project had been in operation for about six weeks. We do have generals in the field.

The transrational operating design involves acceleration teams, particularly health and social, which operate out of Maliwada, and visit the other projects all the time. Guardians are constantly flowing into that dynamic. Each of the four divisions has within it seven to nine projects. There is a site selection team and a monitoring team traveling in each division, with project directors and auxiliary in place. It's a fine operating design. We have to make sure it doesn't congeal into a bureaucratic structure with Westerners going around telling people what to do. We have to keep it fluid so that it grows as the 250 grows. It's adequate now, and it is working. People are on the road and they know the way.

As for saints, there is an incredible sensitivity to the celebrative dimension that dramatizes the meaning in the mundane. A saint is not holy in himself; he's the one that leaves a residue of holiness that gives you and me our profound significance. That's what we mean by a human saint.

Our first day in Maliwada, the sucre factory people invited Lyn, Neil and me to the factory, where they anointed us with the red dot and coconut, a pinch of sugar and a garland of flowers. Then the spokesman for the managers, who is all of 20 years old, made a speech. He said, 'Mrs. Mathews, we're incredibly grateful to your husband, but he never gave us anything. Instead, he did something to us that made us do for ourselves for the rest of our lives. We intend to continue that for the rest of our lives." Lyn was very much up to the occasion. She responded by saying that Joe was a global man but always had a special place in his heart for India. At that time (it was around the 16th of the month, the third month since his death) it was most appropriate that she be in India.

There is a profound humanness to the dramatic dimension. Our colleagues show a profound sensitivity to it. We heard that a man from the Bombay Dyeing Company who had been in Maliwada for some time was called back by his company. The villagers, totally unbeknownst to the auxiliary, arranged a send­out and presented him with a very expensive piece of luggage and some china. They invited the auxiliary to come at the last minute. Speeches were made and the man, who at first had resented­:his assignment to the village, was so grateful that tears were in his eyes.

This dramatic sensitivity is not always pious. We were introduced to buffalo milk by one of the three old men of the well story. I always thought you were supposed to be very grateful and formally polite on those occasions. But he knew' In fact, he was laughing at us, and every time we choked down our cup, he filled it again. We have to honor that dynamic wherever it shows up among us. That is going to be the key to the retreat in the future. An appropriate dramatic act gives meaning or communicates sainthood in mundane situations.

There is wisdom among our colleagues. They have a problemless approach to practical details and anybody that believes in problems will have a field day in India. One man on the faculty of the school had not done his assignment to get a crucial piece of material for the seminar that was going to happen in two hours. He didn't do it because he missed the bus. The dean went into an incredible spin on modes of transportation of the past and the future and­wound up with feet as the most reliable mode man has ever found. Then, he turned to the man and said, "Now, in two hours, be back with that item," and he left.

A Canadian colleague reports that he is turning blue. He is very much like a Hindu god now. He understands why their faces were painted blue. He did three of the 14 consults, and he had never been to a full­fledged consult before. A British colleague celebrated his birthday in India. He had written home that 25 pounds would be a fine gift on this birthday. In the mail he received a two pound note and a 50 pence coin and a note saying, "We lust don't have more to send." He was relating this to the Maliwada auxiliary and said, "What a present' I never had a present like that in all my life"'

The beggars are back in Bombay now. One day we were in two cabs and two little boys came up, one to each cab. A colleague was sitting by the window and when the beggars began their pleading, he started singing, "Char Sathe." About halfway through the song he asked the beggar for ten parse. "I sang for you. You didn't sing for me," he told the beggar. "You give me ten paise." With that, Neil gave a coin to the beggar at his car who turned around and handed it through the window to the singer. With that, we all collapsed into laughter -- beggars, cab drivers and all of us. It is sheer problemlessness.

One of our funding sources persistently asked us hard questions about documenting expenditures. It reached the point where he was requesting original copies of receipts. He was visited by our team which wound up pitching him for four leaps after they persuaded him to be satisfied with the regular auditor's report. There are just no problems.

A poetry of profound humanness is emerging. You may have heard the villagers' story of Maliwada. "For many many years, the fort was trying to talk to the people but our ears were closed. On December 28, 1975, suddenly we opened our ears and heard the fort telling us, 'I've stood for these many years -- why don't you stand up?' At this time we woke up and we are standing now. Today we look at the fort and she is smiling at us as we stand together building the future."

The dean opened the school this quarter by saying, "I have two mothers. One mother, my family mother, is a very beautiful woman. She is cultured and educated and I love her very dearly. My second mother is Maliwada. She's ugly, she's illiterate and I don't like her at all. But Maliwada keeps saying to me, 'Don't let me down.' I had my bags packed one time a few months ago. Then Maliwada spoke to me and said, 'Why would you let me down " So I unpacked my bags and I am here."

This was a speech made by a policeman at the Maliwadagaon consult: "At this moment at the close of the consult, our hearts are deeply moved. Prior to Jan. 8, 1978, we were living in a totally different world. Today, we experience new directions in our lives which will create a new world. I am sure that under your guidance of our corporate efforts, Maliwadagaon will become a sign of new life for the whole world. We pray God that we may have the opportunity to meet from time to time to continue our task together. The concept of human development itself is so wonderful ­truly you have introduced us to a new universe. We are all God's children, rich or poor, young or old, black or white, low caste or high caste. There is no discrimination in human development. Caring for other human beings alone helps us to experience the presence of God and of being in his service. We have seen how much thought, planning and hard work has gone into the creation of practical agricultural, educational, social and economic tools that will enable us to realize our visions and hope for the future. We have been deeply impacted by the selfless expenditure of yourselves and your resources on our behalf. It has given us new values for what it means to serve your neighbor. We have literally been dazed by seeing your persistence and passion for work and are deeply grateful. I also want to express my appreciation and thanks to you, my fellow villagers, and the teaching staff for your support and presence throughout the last three days of the consult despite your jobs. What we did would not have been possible without our corporate efforts. I am convinced that even if each of us expends one hour a week for our village, Maliwadagaon will become a great symbol of renewal looked up to by not only other villages and districts in Maharashtra but by the whole nation."

It is not adequate to talk about human development in prose. There have to be images that bubble up out of the reality. We started to keep a card file of all the great stories on this trip. That idea lasted about 15 minutes, but we do need to keep track of them somehow. Emerging is a mythology that is going to sustain profound humanness and be the basis of whatever religious forms emerge in the future. I am intrigued with the possibility of something like this happening in Wales. They have the legendary figure of the Woodmen, the warriors of ancient Wales. They prepared for combat by taking off all their clothes, painting themselves blue, putting pig's fat in their hair till it stood on end then going wildly into battle. (It's the blue paint that intrigued me.) That's where the word "beserk" came from. They were called the Beserkers, and they went beserk. In using poetry and mythology, we have to pick up on the images of an area and allow them to freight the profound humanness that is in fact there. It doesn't have to be invented. It is there

There are some enemies to profound humanness that bear watching because they could be serious. Two are internal and two are external. First, internally, is religious defensiveness. Some people say we've left the church. I wonder what they think the church that we left really is. The Church was never identified throughout its history with being a particular religious institution with a particular dogma. In fact, all of the dogmatic controversies and nitpicking continued purely for the sake of adequately poeticizing and expressing the profound human reality that was in the midst of life. Anybody that says we are not doing that doesn't understand what we are doing. People who says you have to do particular little ditties to whomp up the mood of profound humanness haven't opened their eyes to what we are living in the middle of.

P.T. James told the story of a visit with a family with one Christian member and one Hindu member. The Christian kept asking P.T. to say grace over meals. The Christian would say, "Amen" but the Hindu wouldn't. Finally, P.T. said, "Why do you do this? I'm Christian and I'll pray. But if you can't say "Amen," then you can't participate in what we are doing. So why don't we forget that form and just eat this meal on behalf of local man who is rising around the world?" With that, the whole family said "Amen," and they had a profoundly significant feast in missional collegiality. A new reality is among us that is striving for expression. That's what we are about. Religious defensiveness can be a trap.

Secular piety is another trap. That means getting so caught up in being secular that it becomes religious to be secular. We face this is the lure of community development and economic development. We are not out to do economic development or to end the poverty of the world. If we are, we are doing that very indirectly by creating signs of hope whereby local man himself can handle community development and his own economic deprivation. We are doing something else; we are eliciting profound humanness that is deeply religious.

The sucre factory is supporting four social programs. They are digging a set of latrines near the bus stop. They sent a representative to a stake meeting to announce, "This is the worst looking stake in Maliwada and we are going to fix it up." The sucre factory is also sponsoring the initiation of a Women's Spice Industry in the shed next door. They constructed a volleyball court and are building an industrial park between the two sheds as well as expanding the shed. Their board of directors consists of nine men from all castes and all groups in Maliwada. No legal form or structure brought that into being. They organized and capitalized themselves through the regular commercial standards and structures. Something else has caused the sucre factory to assume responsibility for their village. Secular piety that denies this "something else" has no place in what we are doing.

Methodological amnesia -- I have lots of sermons on this one about how we get so caught up in doing what we don't know how to do that we forget about what we do know how to do, which is precisely what the world needs !. That is imaginal education. The people we deal with have not been brought up playing with erector sets. They do not have images of how things work. That has to be done is training in visual images. The point of the field visits and technical encounters is simply to get images into people's heads. One of the most important images for human development is significant space care. That is not in the imagination of any villager. Every time there is a gathering, the images that need to be communicated have to stand out. We know how to do that: Decor and charts.

On to the external enemies: First, The Abstract Donkey. A donkey is defined by whether or not he produces, not by whether or not he likes us. People can love us to death and still be donkeys deserving to be shot. We had lunch with one. That's another long story. The point is, he called us romantic after hearing a spin on Maliwada. Using the ricochet method in talking to the donkey's host, who was a very collegial banker, we discussed the differences between abstract bullshit which got nothing done, and serious human development. The donkey was pretty quiet after that.

The other external enemy is structural accusations of local man. Those are subtle. The loan rate, for example, by the time it gets to the local villager, is 11 to 17% on what was originally intended to be a 1 ½ % concessional loan. A structure is made that way out of the basic assumption that local man is a schnook who will not pay his debts. In fact, it has been demonstrated in Maliwada that this is not the case. There have been no defaults. The more subtle structural enemy right now is legal forms. Before he went on his first legal trek, a guardian attorney pointed out that the legal profession existed to give form - to breaklooses in consciousness. We've tended to use legal forms as restrictions against perverse intentions.

The sucre factory happened in the established legal form out of the interior reality that had been created. If they had to go through the business of incorporating as a community cooperative, they would have run into all sorts of restrictions. The kitchen of the Human Development Training School was run by the sucre factory people for awhile. This quarter the community in a community meeting decided, although sucre was bidding for the job again, it was time to give somebody else a chance. Legal forms may be unnecessary restrictions when the reality is there. There is no hurry to set up forms until the interior reality has been created. At that point, legal forms and structures may not be necessary.

This is the end of the first part of my talk, the interesting part. The second part is going to be important but perhaps as interesting. I have been trying to say that history has created among us a startling reality that we once pointed to with "religious" categories. Now, something else is required that we have called "transparentization." As we began this trip, I wondered how to do anything at all with transparency. I decided that we had a basic grasp of the contentless dynamics of life and that I was going to see where and how they showed up.

The basic dynamic of the life experience is held by something like this:

That is the way life is for everyman, and that statement has no religious presuppositions whatever. We've invented a poetry for these dynamics that talks about an ultimate upagainstness, a taking placedness, an actingoutedness and a gathering togetheredness.

Every man is up against mystery. Every man has a word event, an intrusive happening. Every man acts out a lifestyle, and there is a corporateness acknowledged by everybody. Using Kierkegeard's model ( | |>), those realities are on the outer level but to even begin to perceive them you have to go through the inner contentful level that goes transparent.

In our teaching we have used the experience of death and solitude in order to allow people to know they are upagainst ultimate mystery. When we allow people to experience that ultimate relationship pointed to by "X", we point to the experience of guilt or brokenness and acceptance. When we have described the adequate human style we have used the categories of freedom and obedience, and when we describe the corporate dynamic of humanness, we have used the image of the pioneer.

What strikes you about every one of these is that they are individualistic. They have to do with the individual's experience of himself as a solitary, which then is capable of becoming transparent in the final mystery. Now, what if there is an emerging metaphor that is not based on individuals in their solitary experience but is social. We have intuited this for some time, but every time I have worked on it, before, I thought that we needed to talk about community awakenment as though the community were the one awakened. But community doesn't have that much of a centered self. Perhaps it is a person's relationship to the social that becomes transparent to the ultimate dynamic of life these days.

Illustration: that which breaks through to fear and fascination among the Indian people is the overwhelming experience of the masses. Lyn and I ran into it on our trip to the Bombay Customs office. We waited 2­l/2 hours to get through 50 feet of space because of the number of people in line, even at 2 a.m. If you are upagainst masses, you narrow down your scope of responsibility to avoid being overwhelmed by the impossibility of dealing with every individual exception. You are always being told, "I don't handle that. Go to the next counter," and there's another line miles long.

You can begin to grasp the interior reality of that response: How else would a person operate there? That is the fear pole.

On the fascination pole there is another phenomenon: in Vaviharsh you look over an incredibly scenic lake, huge open fields, beautiful trees and wide open spaces. Then, you turn around and see a huddled clump of houses built right up against each other with pigs, chickens and cows running in and out of them. There's a fascination with the corporate that extends beyond anything that might occur to a Westerner. By contract, in the rural countryside of Wales, one house is three miles away from the next one. The elements of fear and fascination with the masses become transparent to Ultimate Mystery, at least in India.

That which points to the word event happening is probably the family relationship in India, where the family is still very much a formal structure. This shows up as participants in the Training School, who volunteer to give their lives for two years, occasionally get letters or a call from mama, papa; sister or brother with the request, "Come home, we need you." There is never a second question. It redoes their whole assumption of an individualistic life by an intrusion. I'm not arguing for these metaphors. I am saying that this is an arena of work that we need to push. I suspect that which becomes transparent to free­obedience is the globe. One of the project directors was asked if he would stay his full two years in Nava Gram Prayas. He said, "Oh no. I am in this for life. I'm not doing my village. I'm doing the world through doing India!"

Finally, under corporateness, I put down primal community. People love their villages, and the songs of local villages seem to be touching something deep that goes beyond the significance of that crummy little spot.

Now, I don't want to argue that any of these particular relationships belong under those particular dynamics. But I do want to argue that this is a shift in every way comparable to our turn to the world in its cope and implications for us. I believe it has the smell of the future in it as a radical breakloose. We can see this in North America through the Town Meetings. It isn't quite as firm in this country, with its history of individualism. Institutional religious forms have been trapped by concentration on individual relationships that may be less transparent today than the more social ones. You wonder if we wouldn't avoid many dogmatic controversies by talking through the images of the social experience that cuts across individual differences these days. We have the rare privilege of participating in global unity and in some small measure, we are a sign of it, for the sake of the future.

Patterson and Vinod took us to the Bombay Airport when we were leaving for the last time. We were going through the usual niceties of departure and a symbolic act seemed to be in order. Recalling the Indian custom of honoring someone by touching his feet, I leaned over and touched their shoes. They were appropriately embarrassed because colleagues don't need to honor one another: we just expect miracles of each other and the act was kind of silly. But out of the corner of my eye, I happened to catch sight of an old village man in white, sitting on the bench in the corner. He'd watched that little scene and was grinning from ear to ear. I choose to think he was not laughing at some stupid Westerner trying to act out an Indian custom. I choose to think that old man was recognizing the honor that belongs to local man for his place in history. Today he is the anointed one.