Hey look yeah the inventor, nothing is going to put yeah,
just,
well
he was the chief of everyone. Mhm.
Mhm.
Uh huh.
I can't I can't represent anything. Do anything. So no woman. Our records
, William Thompson.
Mhm Yeah
we do next.
That was everybody's agreed to let me start. They're all my good friends
so I haven't a clue
were discovered. But I guess what we all four have in common is each of us
is experimenting in a different way with communities and this seems to be
also what you're involved in. Uhh so I suppose the best thing to do is to
talk something about community and cultural transformation and I'll try to
talk to just a short time, return the favor to harvey um what I've been
doing the last two years or so is since I first visited Apollo to come out
here in August of 71 to see cassandra and go to the Hopi snake dance and
and look at two different kind of visions of the transformation of human
culture which reminded me a lot of Arthur C Clarke's novel the city and
the stars won the kind of diaspora. The this division of the affirmation
of the city as a vehicle cultural vehicle of cultural human evolution. And
then the Hopi vision of more the smaller pueblo and the idea of
consciousness itself as its own vehicle cultural evolution. And so I've
been traveling around and looking at various kinds of places around the
world going to Oroville and India and the Thin horn community in Scotland
where they talked to plans and have a kind of spiritual community there.
Maybe I'm interested in mysticism and science and the convergence between
these seeming opposite and went to a community in Germany that's a
research foundation uh huh For Eastern wisdom and Western science, which
is concerned with the interface between physics and yoga and the thing
that seems to be happening all around the world is that industrial society
and its limit of growth is beginning to d structure. Sometimes we sense
that is destroying itself. So we generate large mythologies of cosmic
destruction of the limits to growth, variety and ecological catastrophe
ending human culture by the year 2000. But whether or not it's destroying
itself, it definitely seems to be de structuring itself and that a lot of
the things that were necessary before are no longer necessary in their new
possibilities, that you no longer in a sense, once the cities contain the
definition of human culture and you have to go to the city because that's
where it was, that you had to go to London or new york or or whatever. And
now there seems to be an intense kind of energy surrounding the planet
itself that's spilling the energy everywhere in the center is everywhere
in the circumference is nowhere. So that follow salary Scottsdale or bucky
fuller when he used to be in Carbondale or all sorts of people spread out
in all sorts of out of the way, places are more intensely involved in the
sense with the center of things and those sophisticated new Yorkers or
people in paris who are working on a definition of what culture is by
looking pretty much at the past, when sort of profits begin talking about
the future, they're often really just looking at the present and using the
future as an imaginative way to describe the implications of the present
and they see more clearly the present in the way that blake understood
what the industrial revolution is all about, better than the experts did.
And you can see it quite early when other people look at the present,
they look at it and begin to describe the past and see in terms of
institutions, what human culture is all about, that you have to go to
universities to be wise churches to be holy, and you have to go to
concerts and museums to find what art is all about. And now it seems to me
that that's pretty much ending. And there's an intense kind of energy
flowing everywhere and that it's almost as if what to go to Chardon
described as the Noah's sphere is not a metaphor that there is actually a
psychic field of energy, enveloping the planet as a per beautiful
description of this in a novel by Doris lessing called briefing for a
descent into hell, which a guy takes a ride in the crystal and sees the
earth and knows it for the first time, that this psychic field of energy
is an envelopment of consciousness that has contained in it. The seeds of
what will perhaps later become institutions. Although it may be at a we
may be in a situation now in human cultural evolution where institutions
themselves, they may no longer be as necessary as say, once we're in that
we now can afford a kind of anarchism that that was only um imagined by
science fiction writers before. But this, this envelopment of energy is so
intense that it seems to be that the the only way to get at it is in the
sense of one of the ways. But let's say the only way, just for the sake of
rhetoric, uh, so that harvey and I can have something to argue about. The
only way to get at it is in a sense to ask yourself what happens when I
subtract the institution from my identity, What happens when I subtract
the job from my identity and facing the absolute burden of your freedom
and counting, encountering the consciousness of the self that seems to be
withdrawing from civilization and culture. But by a paradoxical turn of
the spiral, you find yourself very much in the center of things that
center that is everywhere in the circumference that is nowhere. And you
come out of walking out of institutional, urban, industrial nation state
culture and finding yourself converging with all sorts of other people
walking out and you find yourself right smack in the in the middle of a
planetary renaissance and that there is something is going on of a an
enormously exciting energizing and re visioning of human culture that
can't be contained by institutions that so now it seems that institutions
are no longer adequate vehicles of cultural evolution and that the
paradoxical relationship between the human group has an evolution of group
consciousness, not the institution. This is more a psychic geometry like
coins tossed a teaching and the individual and his aloneness converge. And
there becomes a very crossing to use a christian metaphor of the unique
individual in all his supremely individuated and uh solitary qualities and
the universal as if you took a snowflake. And you saw that it was a unique
crystal, but that all snow is white. And there was this convergence of
unique and universal and that through the energizing of the unique is the
discovery of the Universal. This is in a sense what the rock groups were
messing around with and what the Beatles were messing around with, the
more you became an individual, the more you had to contribute to that uh
super organic unity. That was the Beatles. That's a kind of mystical
paternity. The old political definition is that the individual doesn't
matter you're a unit and in order to matter you have to be counted because
that's what really counts. And you've got to be gathered together in the
form of votes and dollars and large mass demonstrations and if you've got
enough units in the mass somehow you have power and you could take over
the White house or elevate the pentagon and you could begin to really heat
things up and matt hand matter. So the definition of the self was a
material one and it was very much industrial. So that the incense The new
left movement which we all recognize this failed. It was over just as the
60s are over, counterculture thing is ended and the rock things in And
something else is beginning again, like waves coming in on the shore.
Something else is hitting us now the 70s are very different from the 60.
So that the paradox was that the political people in power were trying to
consolidate everybody and the political revolutionaries outside of power,
we're trying to consolidate everybody and that we were all locked into a
political and industrial model of what human culture was all about. So
that if we wanted on the one hand too revision culture, we still had to
pick up the same old tools of the industrial nation state so that it
became very clear that the revolution had to go deeper than that it had to
be a transformation of consciousness and to do that one had to think in
larger terms than just industrial technology. What happens if you subtract
technology from yourself, You end up getting involved in a mysticism. So
that Mysticism in a way whether it was the Chardin variety that paul is
interested in, but the sri or of into variety that others, It became a way
of putting a man on a cosmic scale and putting the machine in its proper
place by surrounding the machine where the cultural development it seems
like now what's going on in the culture is a is a war are very stylized,
subtle war, but it's a war between
well let's just say institutions in human culture at large, that
institutions are trying to surround culture and trying to subsume all
dimensions of culture into their structures. So that you have say at
stanford Research Institute, research going on in terms of psychokinesis,
psychic powers, uh bending of metal bars and rings by your regular
research into human potential and and other research into how our mythic
images of man generated and how can these be used by management for more
intelligent management of society. So that uh the education business is a
convergence of big government, big think tanks, big foundations, big
corporations creating an absolute enclosing structure. That is that makes
management of the structure and human culture content within it so that
this is this is what what America, for the most part is all about. But
going on around that is an attempt to surround those structures to
surround technology and management with a psychic field of consciousness
with an envelopment of culture that is larger than those structures, so
that the human renaissance is more important than the than the
technological reforms from within our various kind of management
innovations. And so they they're fighting back and forth with one another
and it's it's a very stylized dance and so nobody is winning. And it's
like the tension of opposites. You saw it very clearly and dramatically
expressed as you look um at all the moon shots because they, the Russians
sent up efficient technological instruments of measurement and surrounded
the earth with technology and made man into a content within that
structure. So it's very clear that they were affirming the iron lock that
industrial materialism had upon their own dialectical materialist
tradition. And so human culture was displaced. The americans because we
tend to be a more mythological cowboy oriented people wanting to paste in
in cowboy boots across the moon, insisted on sending up our astronauts and
sending up men to place upon the moon. And what happened was a kind of an
anti Dromi, a movement of from one thing into its exact opposite, where
the astronauts looked down upon the face of the earth and were transformed.
So the astronaut on the way to the moon was like saul on the way to
Damascus and he was knocked off his piece of technology, knocked off his
horse. And a new kind of wonder. And a rediscovery of wonder changed his
whole sense of human identity. And what, what came about was a kind of
mystical affirmation of consciousness being more primary and were a prior
to technology itself. So man surrounded is Nasa instruments with some well
, the cultural affirmation of humanity in this case, many of these
astronauts get involved in a kind of religious awakening. Rusty
Schweickart is doing transcendental meditation. Uh Edgar Mitchell quit and
established an institute for research in this uh consciousness and psychic
phenomenon and others went back to their baptist heritage in became uh
ministers so that whichever way one wanted to take it, one saw A strange
and unpredictable transformation of consciousness just a few years ago
when the movie 2001 came out, we saw how very much there was a situation
in which the astronauts was seen as robots and the machines were seen as
human. And the whole movie was about the war between the machine and the
human as the end of one kind of cultural evolution. And that's what
everyone would have predicted. But what developed was something more
utterly surprising. This rediscovery of wonder, this transformation of
consciousness and this discovery of the costly scale that finally was able
to put technology into its place. So what one can draw from that is in a
sense that the only something that large about cosmic really can put our
technology in place that if we try to humanize our technology with Marxism
, we're restricting ourselves to what was originally a critique of
industrial society and therefore has all the limitations of an industrial
analysis built into it. If we try to humanize technology with the new york
review of books, we're limiting ourselves to a very new york, city
oriented, civilized, sophisticated model, which doesn't have the cathartic
or celestial power to deal with technology on this planetary scale, so
that it seems that man, only at the extreme end of his religious
imagination, is able to find sufficient space to deal with technology. If
you try to deal with technology from inside institutions, you become
reduced to a functionary of the tool. If you walk outside it and grab it
from the outside, which is the only way you can handle the tool, then you
turn it into a tool and you are a man using a tool. And when in terms of
evolution, you no longer want to use the tool, You drop it and go on to
something else, which is the secret of our unique generalized adaptability
rather than being specialized for a function. So Mysticism becomes very
critically involved with uh with what human cultural evolution is all
about in this sense. I think people like Paulo is one example in terms of
architecture. But I think another example of Stockhausen, there's a superb
mathematician, electronic engineer and composer who can use all kinds of
technology is not afraid of it in the way that say we were afraid of
technology in the sixties and wanted to return to nature and and become
primitive in an absolutely rigorous and remorseless kind of way
Stockhausen can use all kinds of fantastic technology, but there's no way
that it's using him. He's just able to surround it with culture and turn
it into an art form and he becomes a kind of Wagner of the electronic era.
So it's very much a I think a battle going on between institutions and
culture and and which is to survive. So that all of these places around
the world, whether it's the planetary city of Oroville or the planetary
town of Finn town in Scotland or or a kind of center for planetary renewal
and architecture here at Arcosanti become very critical experiments in the
in the ability of human beings to uh sense the cultural crisis they had
and change the development of the cultural vehicle by which they move
through space time. It's almost as if we have to get some sense of the
feedback of disasters ahead of us and streamline and get rid of the drag
and get rid of the things that are slowing down and heading us for
disaster. And some of the drag we carry with us are our institutions and
our management structures and the whole attempt to surround consciousness
and contain it. So, the this becomes the critical issue. And this is why
uh I think all of us in different ways, are experimenting with different
forms of human institutions. It doesn't
what
uh huh
try, I think was what is there left to say? Okay,
my name's harvey cox and I'm
I think of myself as a theologian,
I used to be embarrassed about that because
people would say, well, you mean you're really a student of comparative
religion or a sociologist of religion, I would say, yeah, something like
that. But now I'm not very apologetic about that because for me, a
theologian is one who is not just studying about, but it's asking his own
for her own question and is involved in a quest which is personal and
existential and not please academic or scholarly. So that ST Augustine
starts out his great treatise, professions with a prayer
has made this form before thyself. O God. And our hearts are restless
until they find their rest in thee and whatever that the means. I think
that that's really the best theology. Best theology is When you start by
saying this isn't just something I'm learning about. This is a a personal
quest which may also turn out to be a civilisational question. I think the
greatest surprise that occurs is when one asks one's own question
passionately and seriously and tries to live as though that question were
really important, overwhelming question. One does discover that there are
a lot of other resting that same question. So I've been trying and I think
this is something that Bill and I have. I've been trying to see at what
point did things that I'm thinking about and writing about and researching
seem to be contradicting the way I've been living and I'm finding a few of
them and at some points I have the courage to make the necessary changes
at other points. I don't I still teach at Harvard University this year. I
do
On my own for one year. Yeah.
When the faculty at heart, Harvard has been pretty good to me so far, I
want to talk about two things that I've been doing. They have, they have
to do a little bit with planetary consciousness and mysticism and
community. Mhm. Mhm. I'm very impressed by the fact that the points at
which communities seem to be emerging seems to be emerging in the world is
on the planetary basis, that is on the global basis, and in very highly
particular rise local situation. What seems to be dropping out is the and
I hope it will drop out faster and faster as any idea of the sovereign
national state as a viable community for the future of the human race. I
think we've already learned that this is a, an absurd way of organizing
the globe and I find that there is in many of the so called advanced
countries, there is less and less investment of loyalty, energy and
imagination in the sovereign national state. People are really little
embarrassed now says we can apply places very quickly and we meet people
from other countries. The whole idea of the of the national state seems to
be fading away, although it seems to be very important for some people in
the third world country. Now, the question is what replaces that if people
need as I believe they do a sense of community belonging to something
rather than just being isolated. What community replaces that national
community, which since the french revolution, uh, and perhaps in the
period before that, but certainly since the french revolution has been the
way in which Western people have largely identified themselves as
Frenchmen or Germans or citizens of the United States. Maybe that we're
willing a lot of people were willing to fight and bleed and die for that
flag for that concept. That for that abstraction now that's really fading
away and what is taking its place. Um I think the, the idea of the
planetary species is one one community that we now begin to feel ourselves
apart of really for the first time. Yeah, this is although this seems
rather natural to many of us, this is really not a something that our
forebears and generations far removed, identified with very strongly and
still we don't fight yet have the symbols and the emblems and the holidays
and the metaphors to think of ourselves in this auditory community, but
they're beginning to come. I do think the Moonshot seeing the seeing the
earth is that fragile green disc we all see at the share. Yeah, these
sentiments are beginning to grow and I hope they will grow further. But I
think the other thing that's beginning to emerge is the sense of once
participation in a group of people on a day to day or week to week basis,
sharing a turf during a locale, A place that one has responsibility for,
that one loves nourishes, touches that kind of earthy identification. And
I think these are both possible. In fact, I think be there, they're
they're complementary. So I've been working on both of these and uh, in
the following way And this is the feather, three minutes on each as a
person whose major interest has been in religion and in the history of
development, the great world religion. I think we're at that stage in
human consciousness, in which we simply have to learn now how to put
ourselves into the religious consciousness of other traditions and other
cultures by an active imagination or will or playfulness or theatrical
engagement or whatever it is. I don't think it's safe for us to live on
the planet much longer thinking of the other religious traditions other
than our own is somehow remote or esoteric or some way funny. So I'm
trying to discover ways in my own teaching, not just to teach people about
in Judaism or pre literate religion or the band too. Confucian ists or
whoever, but somehow to find ways get people to moved temporarily inside
of the to see how they feel from the inside so that the convergence that
we're all looking for won't be some kind of artificial synthesis in which
we stick together, we glued innate together segments that looks like kind
of awkward and wrongly placed, but there really will be a some kind of
planetary consciousness in which we build up the store of experience of
the various traditions and where they come from. We aren't afraid to do
that. We're not afraid of losing our own selves, our own identities by
projecting ourselves into that into that kind of experience. I think that
can be done. I could say a little more about that if your interest. The
other thing I've been doing, we've been talking a lot about that at
breakfast the rest of, during part of the day. I'm a member of the
Community of 12 families
small, just become regular middle class american. It's all living in north
Cambridge section of Cambridge massachusetts near Somerville who have
formed a kind of hey living
community in which we share a residential ambience. We have bought
together an apartment house in a couple other houses into which we are now
moving most of us are already already in it. We've begun a kind of income
, a modest income redistribution. We're beginning to buy our groceries
together. Some of the families are cooking their meals together. So this
may and this for this may sound at first looked like, I mean we don't like
we like to think of it as a, as a restoration of a sense of community at
the very local day to day basis of our lives. These are all people who are
involved in other things. Were not all taken up completely by this
community. We're working in teaching or in politics or in city planning or
five or six. Right. We have the common place, that's why we call it
commonplace, inc common place. We have a common place that we come back
which has a position on this earth which has a turf under it which has
street surrounded in bricks. Uh huh Have viability place you can touch and
smell and picks up and work on it. Like this place that we had to buy
leftover place, fix it up Nonetheless. We're all getting that sense of
what it means to share a specific location. Uh huh. Yeah, that's we feel
it's important to do this in part because the of the isolation which
dictated for us by the way nuclear family development pursued its course.
And the way in which uh huh mortgages
for 30 or 40 years become the kind captor's family.
Well, that's the way they were. So instead of having all those little
mortgages, families would have, we now have one great huge mortgage. We
all tried to help share the things But at least, you know, it doesn't feel
as bad having one huge mortgage that you're sharing with 11 other families
doesn't quite get to you the way the monthly single mortgage paid. It's a
different feeling we're sharing child rearing. We're sharing a lot of
things including the going to some extent. No,
this is a group of people in the women that have a kind yeah religious, we
have a religious heritage in most of us feel to some extent alienated
really just basic protestant christians
almost kind of sectarian protestant the week that we all grew up in which
there's an emphasis on sharing, there's an emphasis on experience, there's
an emphasis on on lack of pretense and on simplicity, living simply not
and not engaging in a conspicuous consumption and also in involving as
many people as possible in the decision making process. So we try to do
everything that everything in this community that we can like a Quaker
meeting. We take no votes and we try to arrive at a consensus or what we
call a sense of the meeting. We have not yet ever taken a vote on anything
that we take the straw votes occasion. People know everybody else is we
try not to take.
Now what I'm trying to do is to put together in my own life. My uh huh
feeling that we have to develop that I have to develop a kind of
pluralistic conscious, I have to be a Voyager and an explorer in forms of
religious consciousness very different from my own even to the point where
it threatens my soul and at the same time finding that in my own religious
tradition if taken seriously. I've been lived out, not just given lip
service but actually organized into a communal expression that that is
also a terribly important part of my life. And I don't quite know how both
of those go together. I don't really quite know how to be a planetary man
and also a simple sharer in the community in north Cambridge. I'm sitting
out here today because I came on a jet plane last night. I'm not there
maybe next week I'll be somewhere else. A lot of people can put that
together more easily than I can for me that's still attention. It's still
a, I'm still feeling the pain in that kind vision, but I I'm working on
and hoping that I'll eventually get there. Uh
I think I'll stop
but no peeking.
Mhm Let me shrink.
Mhm I think I'd have to talk. It's a very different point of view stopping
it painted.
Mhm I've spent for many years trying to look group and family dynamics
community as it relates to the individual. This no
Address one way of looking at the 60 we offer when he was, all we need to
do is to change the other guy. So
make life richer and better. Many of us went about very vigorously trying
to change the other guy as it works
for any number of reasons, but during that time I spent a good deal of
time and this is something
working with people and Canadians and the casualties
great many based right lack of appreciation
what is involved engage
stressful activity when you put yourself in a new environment.
It's that is so in various point
perhaps much more than any of us had anticipate
after that I was involved no longer working in the ghetto. Mhm. With a lot
of groups based on the idea that see helping community his own country
relationship, that community development love into the health confidence
of into this living.
I guess many of us were working in those kinds of was most of them. Yes,
unfortunate,
very successful
after that. I guess there was a big movement to begin to look at myself
try to change that's not nothing people can always working and trying to
change himself variety of ways. Drugs, sex and politics rotation
responsive activity and through developing nuclear
large communities and squat with some notion one could right kind of
will change me. Yeah raises lots of issues. We won. So she lost Sure
meaningfulness model demonstration power social
because bill can talk more at that point than I but I don't think models
with the basics
in the sense
the other is that many people engaging these kinds of efforts. New
community
perhaps. Uh huh. Walking an act
some way more dangerous they perceived I don't want to send problem
because I feel very good luck I am involved right
last week I saw 42 year old oh, emergency consultation breakdown.
Who was in a group marriage. The man who is a very
Mhm. A lot of thinking and
but somehow had cut the reference. Yes, kinds of stressors. What
particularly one issue life. Uh huh. Fell in love
reached the point where you
week before that I sort Harold
had been in a film that broke up terrible
because she had been so separated many other community back to back it was
her own begins
and she
so what we've been trying to do what I've been just sort of trying to look
at no experimental uh huh family
communal arrangement. Both from the point of view of trying to understand
them particularly wanted impact
and trying to develop some kind support system for them. Okay. The system
outside of the existing system. People think do with some of the crisis
Grazie and Mhm. All right
example, we're just now beginning that is a challenge. Married to get some
sense what the impact definitely until Thank you.
I think the maybe the issue here. Yeah, this is
one of the, one of the major reason came in Los back got to do with the
interest,
let's use the term a living laboratory
in the process here
about
right
kinds of things that we talk. Okay, go to the wall before
fine cassandra.
What is the interaction of social take this is thank you with some big
corporations.
Mhm. So why don't we involve you now start talking among ourselves.
Yeah. Yeah. Mhm.
Okay. Mhm. Canada
you do wait then something. Nothing. Okay. I experienced abuse. Yeah. We
are definitely trying to find some way of surviving
uh in the city. That's a that's a conscious choice we have made not to
leave the city. And we realized that we think we can't do it as isolated
nuclear family. We've seen too many tensions, too many disasters. Too many
cash. We talk about the casualties of new forms. You think of the
casualties of old forms?
Okay. Including nuclear families, isolated nuclear I'm not talking about
group, We don't have a group marriage. What we have is families who are
living together. Uh Well, some people call it cluster, we like to think
that is a cluster, we spatially close together, interacting much more than
families normally do sharing in the financial obligations of each other
and in the property ownership. I think the property ownership thing is
very important. There is a certain truth to where your money is, there is
your heart also. And we all are trying to get away from. We're trying,
we're trying to rediscover a re fabricate something that might have been
there in the old extended family. And we're finding it at least I am
finding it very very rewarding
positive with very little of kind of disastrous consequences of some
people predicted. Yeah, everything that's mine. Thank you.
Mhm react. Mhm.
Well, first of all we had to organize, get the group together. We had to
arrive at some kind of consensus of who we wanted to be. We had to draw up
some basic kind of agreement. We had to decide on the place that we were
going to buy. We had to get to cough up the money and we have to decide on
what basis we were going to cough up the money whether it was going to be
equal or are you don't more from those who could afford more. Uh then we
we we spent we just spent a lot of time together talking about the various
problems we're facing and or we might face
child rearing sex. We spend a lot of time spent and do spend a lot of time
talking about that because it's constantly there as a as an issue of money.
And this is a group of people who share a kind of commitment to what we
understand Christianity today. Uhh not as a thought system but as a way of
life in which sharing and simplicity and honesty and candor with each
other loving each other and resisting the piece. Mm Everybody in the
movement in this group is very active in one way or another in the peace
movement has been in the peace movement. So these are very simple kind of
thing. It's not very elaborate. So we do we sing together, we dance
together, we drink a lot of wine together, not just communion wine. I mean
large quantities we
share child rearing. We
we said we share in the work on the house. The big thing is making it over.
Uh huh.
Mhm.
It's not one house. One it's one large house and one nearby one apartment
houses, one nearby large house. We hope to get another house. That'll be
certain linked really because of it. No because some of the people in the
group don't yet live in the property that we own because not adequate for
the space
where the member pardon? Scale of that operation seemed to be critical.
Yeah we don't think we have anybody else in this particular group. We were
willing to help people. We are we are trying now to help other groups.
They're trying to do the same thing. But we think that 12 families which
amounts I think now that nine people including all the Children Is optimum
and maybe even a little too big. I think maybe if we had eight or 10. Uh
huh. Which provides to other things. But I'll set the personality. Yes
course. Excuse me. These relations brothers for your um going first. Yeah
same sort. Yeah too late. Yeah. Well we're starting we're starting to work
that out. One of the ways would be politically. But as we can begin to do
things in the city of our size politically. If we know each of the other
is economically buying things together. And also we can enlarge the the
grocery co op and get things even cheaper. Uhh and the other thing is
spiritually Cambridge has a lot of religiously based communes and
collectives. Now there's a because the tibetan buddhist place, there's a
sufi commune, there's a jewish that will have I've been called a barrage
alone and there are five or six others were now beginning to be in touch
with each other and I found that kind of interreligious communication has
a reality that the they're just studying comparative religion does.
Mm hmm. Like to ask you is Uh huh. Have to find the size of your uh
decided on its personality by deciding that it will only brussels. All
right. How does the personality of your community deal with personalities
of other community? Is there a selfishness is there? Uh huh. A desire to
find the best bargains for your community though you may also be including
other those same size communities in your dealings? Okay,
I think a certain amount of
All right,
What energy
focuses on your own community? Yeah, I think I think it would be dishonest
to it.
Mhm Well, as long as it's a very very small nationalism, I don't think I'm
not against it. I mean, I think it's okay. As long as your uh as long as
you maintain that kind of openness to other communities and that kind of
pluralism and I don't have to include it in your community in order to
love them or be a part of them, that's been a big mistake of nationalism,
we had to really, it's the imperial, the hidden imperial side of numbers.
Then I more numbers like the single personality of small
fierce pose or have the same potential that the single personality of one
being in dealing with other people. I don't think we've arrived at that
degree of collective consciousness, yet, I'm not even sure we went to.
There is a funny kind of beginning evidence of collective consciousness
that I wouldn't have expected in this group. When you live together and
talk that much about things, you begin to, there's some kind of
communication going on that. I don't understand where people really just
do no what's happening, but it isn't. Uh I don't think of it as a kind of
personality yet. I don't think I would like that too much.
I would say that that's in everything and the and that you're going to
live together for any any period of time, you're going to develop that
good personality where you like it or not. And at that point, you begin to
he's a subgroup for develop factions or lose some people and had some, I
think that's just part of inheriting look like
as some of the communities develop a group ego that begins to have a lot
of strength of some of these planetary groups because what a nation state
has going for it is, in a sense, horrible symbols of blood and soil and
flagged over centuries that really binds consciousness and various of
tradition. And when you step out of that, and you're no longer having the
bonding of consciousness through tradition and an image of the past. But
you're basing on an image of the future, then you have to work in much
smaller kinds of groups because you can't deal with collective
abstractions like the nation state. So you do get a kind of sense of the
growth of a. Now, the group ego, it's not necessarily bad because if you
think of the planetary transformation of mankind as a kind of kinetic
state of consciousness, that it's like boiling water where these tiny
little bubbles that creative gas and then dissipate in the mass. They have
no force. And then a few of them gain, gather together and create larger
bubbles moving up and then boom at a critical state. The whole thing takes
off and evaporates. And so that a lot of this is happening to mankind as a
whole. And there's a kind of inertial, you know, solid mass of the where
we've been. And now there is this kind of movement and you sense in many
of these places the creation not of a collective unconscious in the way of
ST George's hospital young, but a collective consciousness in which the
individual mind is figure against the ground of being now the usual way
and that this has been discussed as in terms of science fiction, prepare
to shut down or paolo talks about it in terms of the organism of 1000
mines in the city of image of man. The first attempt to create this in the
20th century was the elevation of the collective unconsciousness into
culture, which you saw in things like the irish revolution, national
socialism, where archetypes flood the streets and people go out to die in
the streets as if they were living in a drama novel, everything becomes
possessed with kind of a demonic energy. And the second way was the
collectivization of consciousness in the state of the stalinist and Maoist
arrived, which in terms of numbers, is the simplest way to do it. The
difficulty with that is you have to step down the energies of the ego and
you do it through ego reduction rather than ego transfiguration. And I
think in this planetary transformation, which is more like romanticism
with the renaissance, there is an attempt to find the universal by going
through the eye of the needle by going through the unique consciousness of
itself. And as this goes on, it has to go through in small groups, you
can't a lot of people are great at loving mankind, but they have trouble
with men just as a lot of the irish revolutionaries wanted to die for
Ireland the damn few of the ira could live in our gunning people down in
the streets so that the trouble with the whole liberal movement was that
we had this kind of holistic frame of mind when everything had to solve
everything all at once. It had to be take care of housing and development
in one fell swoop so that I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong
with loving, you know, men and women as a start rather than trying to get
involved in universal abstraction, there probably will be the growth of
intense egos in these communities. Where if people are into a behavioral
psychology number as the group bonding, then they'll feel strong effective
attachment to that. If they're into, you know, talking with Davis and
leprechauns and Finn torn and they begin to have become famous around the
world for growing plants through conversation. Uh, then Finn torn begins
to take on a very strong group ego that we are a planetary new age time.
Other people are old age cities or old age nations and uh that's part of
the puberty of the planet. You've got to go through adolescence, get an
identity before. In terms of buddhism, then you can lose your I. D. If you
go into the transformation of consciousness without a strong healthy ego,
you become psychotic selling is the increase in the temperature of this
increasing keep up with the pattern liquid
they're having following long time. Yeah, you have to look at times not to
scale
right? Basic camp, right? I think it's going higher in this transformation
of state. And then I think and here I'd go along with marks when he looked
at the levelers and said that these, you know, 17th century early
movements and other things, packages and things that Harvey study. We're
early pre figuring, but it's a very lonely thing to be a bubble. Three
centuries in advance of your time. But now we see there are more
scientists in existence now in the 20th century that have existed in the
whole history of mankind. We can say the same thing. Statistics. There is
a heating up of consciousness. There is more in science and iron energy
and mysticism than before. In the solitary ST john of the cross or Teresa
available. This is very different kind of situation. So I think we see an
incredible feedback of consciousness back on nature, which generally
because the way the human mind works, we see it negatively, we're
destroying the planet. We see the feedback of consciousness in the air. It
is called Phil but I think inversely by related symmetry, there's a
feedback of consciousness on nature, which is what culture is uh that is
positive and dynamic and that before we can see it on the body of the
planet, we have to discover it in the body of ourselves and rediscover the
mind body interface in the way that swami Rama did and the manager
institute when he stopped his five per 17 seconds under impeccable
scientific observation. So what's going on contained in this planetary
transformation is a redefinition of nature, a redefinition of mine and the
redefinition of consciousness and the whole mind nature consciousness
continuum. And that that's something that's a bit different than just
Romanticism mission. So, I think something is happening. You know of a
very interesting.
It may fail though there's no guarantee that just because it's happening,
we're going to make. Mhm. When you mentioned these terms in this
discussion, you're speaking particular framework. People Knowledge If you
love these two.
But it seems to me, I came from 10 years of being in new york city and
watching people on the subways and busses. I saw them create Vietnam War
1st evaluation, 2nd evaluation. They all look the same. Hold it. So
it seems to me that you talk of consciousness awareness
and a planetary
people of consciousness, which I agree. I think that we are going in that
direction. The question would be,
what proportion
planetary populations is involved in this? The numbers don't matter
because the individual consciousness are like enzymes and enzymes can have
an enormous catalytic change over an organism where the organism is 100
full larger than the size of the Even in times having percentage. Can I
ask you
alternate questions, what would be your comment? The current upheaval in
washing Nixon in relation to Well, they're like you guys three questions
going on. So let me take them all at once.
One numbers don't matter. That's the numbers game where units into a mass
uh, the, you know, the illustration I've used before in terms of blake in
the industrial revolution is if you, you know, if you were a martian and
you can't London came in around 17 90 he said, hey man, there's an
industrial revolution going on here and the people would take it serious
man. You know, it's agricultural civilization all over and you point to
one brick kiln and one factory and you say, so what's one factory get
serious, you know, this, look what's going on. But blake would not, he
would take that one brick kiln in one factory and he would extrapolate and
he would see the industrial transformation so that events macro scale
events like cultural transformations are invisible for the most part
because most of the people are looking at the presidency in the past. But
the, the other guy Is looking at the president and seeing by extrapolation
what it means, understands the present and in order to understand the
present, he describes an image of the future. But those images of future
are right here and now. So I don't think numbers matter, 600 freaks ran
out and took over a few buildings and created the Irish free state. They
were, you know, they were all crazy. So that the uh the numbers aren't
very important in human human transformation. So the other thing is about
the people on the subway. If you were looking at the used online phrase is
if you were looking at them, you saw no change if you were seeing them and
you saw there or as you might be surprised at the different continues. Uh
No. Uh
you gotta go back. Thanks
to Watergate. I think the very energy of the cultural transformation is
hitting the crystal lattice of american government and knocking out a lot
of the impediments and the noise and creating a lot of trouble with the
invisible see the gift, the C. I. A. Government we've had so that our
whole consciousness of the political process, our noble leader who is
virtuous and true and lives in a white leader House are all coming apart.
And that there's a new possibility for regaining the electoral process,
regaining new power for Congress, which is another form of localization.
If you had cable television, you can re achieve the new England Town
meeting on an electronic level. Get rid of the great big bureaucracies of
the Democratic Party of the Republican Party and change the particular
effective relationship of the individual citizen and the nation state. And
I think that's a new, unique universal relationship that is very positive.
And so that if this process can go on and Nixon can be forced to resign,
which I think is even better than trying to impeach him, then we stand a
chance of really having something to celebrate in 17 1976. If americans
still get lost in this category, mistake, that president means good, bad
president is a contradiction in terms like stop go, we can't do anything
about, we have to let him stay in, then that's a disaster. And we end up
with directorships and Dictatorships and we're, you know, like the greek
colonels. So I think this this process is very positive. It's a good
nonsense, just getting rid of a lot of ships. Oh God, Okay.
Yeah. Mhm. Mhm.
I don't think nation States would go away. They'll just be surrounded by
larger structures. It's quite possible for the world state between the
most incredibly authoritarian tyrannical instrument. We could come up with
, it could be a convergence of multinational corporations and sort of
behavioral science, uh, that would have effective means of control and try
to buy off the individual by giving him lots of apparent civil liberties
in the form of the sexual liberation. You know, I'm here. I'm thinking of
the sense that uhh that a lot of things in sexual liberation look to be
liberating. Can but can in some sense be binding. Uh so in the way the
market is a talks about it, the Brothers gone, Cora said in the 19th
century about the role of pornography in the state, that when tames the
people, the way when tames lions by masturbation. So I think you could get
a kind of big new york Tokyo ization planet run by these large
multinational corporations and achieve world government, that it would be
a disaster. So it's a question of uh, surrounding the nation states and
turning them into contents in a larger structure. I don't think there's
anything large enough except the cosmic consciousness of a planetary
mysticism that can handle that. I think anything else is piecemeal
technology management and people are gonna be managed in. So it's, I think
some of the dangers that come from abstract forms of redesigning human
culture and saying, all right, we're going to get rid of the family
information, we're going to get rid of this, we're gonna get rid of that
and we'll all be free is that they're dealing in terms of a fantasy
landscape of abstractions that have no roots in the instincts of the heart
or human emotion, so that some of these abstract communities that have
that are secular and don't have the universal catatonic and celestial
force of religion and mysticism are doomed to failure and last only, you
know, for six weeks until they blow up. So I think it's gonna take
something with much more energy uh, and, and mythological power,
archetypal power to really sense uh, what the implications of this
cultural transformation are all about. But I don't intend, I don't expect
nation states will disappear. They will, they'll just be surrounded by
something, something else position, This is the power of genetic factors
that talk about
It's spiritual, but I think in the period of civilization, which is pretty
much from 3000 to say, 2000 uh the spiritual imagination of man was, was
contained in uh universal religions, churches and things in some ways. If
we take the century of religious genius, the sixth century Bc of Zorro,
Astro and Confucius and Marseille and Pythagoras. Uh we can see that what
Mumford and yes, we talked about that the internal contradictions of
civilization became so extreme that they had to be mediated by some other
force of course, with the universal religions like buddhism, they were, in
a sense, the rehearsal for this planetary integration going on. This is
why all the religions are coming up fast and furious, but I think now,
given the intense energy that's in culture and not in the containers, you
can have the spiritual imagination of mankind express yourself in forms
other than just another planetary religion led by another voodoo or
another soft. And I think in the thing that's coming now, I think it's
gonna be more anarchists and the man will lead religions or churches as
much as a fish needs rubber Swinton's, but I'm sure harvey and I will
probably disagree on you. Got it. Yes. What sort of matter what sort of
Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Thank God. Mhm. Talking about, Right, four. Mhm. Hello.
Well, I think it's more important in the sense to go through some of these
, these techniques, which leads you to certain levels of consciousness
where the word's gonna become so important, whether 11 tries to call it
the unnamed or the ineffable or the ineluctable modality of the visible or
the sartorius ahmadi or enlightenment or the resurrection of the body or
the Second Coming uh are all like hopes of a single wheel. And the
important point is to get to the center uh for the experience and not to
argue theologically about the thinking process, it's uh the center, I
think this is the difference between the mystic and theologian is uh
uh huh,
I didn't say it. How do we know if it's unkind? Uh why? I think mysticism
is more important in a sense, is um it's the affirmation of the
exponential quality of it in theology is possible too not to know what
you're talking about. And in mysticism, one moves into the into the
silence. And so I think when one tries to make the silence spoken, I
paraphrase Wittgenstein to say about that, which we cannot speak. We
should be silent, but we can sing it so that about that, which we cannot
think we should sing about that, which we cannot speak, we should sing.
And there we get things like the B minor mass consisting capital and stuff
like this, so that I think one can see images of planetary mythology being
created by artists like Stockhausen or Doris lessing or people of this
sort or even in the rock culture of the six. But but I don't think
necessarily is going to have to have a cochlear and articulated a theology
, I would hope not. Uh huh.
Talk about corporation.
Yeah. Always. Mhm. Yeah. Right
model
Incorporated only together into one Super Corporation running world, very
real threat to me. And I was wondering how, you know, whether you really
think that the possibility or whether there's any, I think it's it's best
to avoid it through changing the nature of culture, if they're operating
on an industrial model of reality and are trying to distribute that
industrial model of reality through the universities which have a
particular definition that of human nature is rational. And what is
important is your I. Q. That if you're gifted students are a child in the
state of California, that is an asset of the state and therefore you're
entitled to state funds. You can go to state universities to learn how to
be a state educated person because you're a commodity that is valuable for
the increase of the gross national product, then uh the important thing to
do is not to get involved in that structure, but to redefine the nature of
an educated man, to place it on something other than rationality in the I
. Q. And to try and surround their management techniques with a kind of
psychic field that has a totally different image of what nature mind
reality and culture and conscious uh in this sense, you don't use their
structures at all. And this gives you other uh flexibility. But there are
lots sometimes, also the institutions don't understand themselves. A lot
of multinational corporations do not understand what multinational
business is all about. They're still thinking in terms of Of uh profits
and they haven't developed an economics, what are you going to do it
because of multinational American enterprise? You own 50% of Europe. That
puts a drain dollars. The drain on the dollar hurts the economy in America
and you find yourself in a double bind where you can't do a planet's
business on the nation's currency, so nobody really has got anything
profit. The contradiction raises up to the point of collapse. And the
multinational corporation people end up doing all the wrong things because
they simply do not understand what they are doing. Yeah, that's what I
think. So that there are no economics to explain what's going on.
Depression, inflation all at the same.
Can Mhm. If I am
well, I think the noexperience