[Oe List ...] My Witness

[Jack Gilles]

Seth,

It is heartening to hear your response. I do sense you grasp the message I was speaking of. I am replying just to you as it is premature to put this out to all the OE, although I would love to. Too many of our colleagues have “forgotten” the deeps of our short time together. Yes, it can be rekindled, but it will take new insights to do so.I will share with you a bit more, and hope I can stay out of “the weeds of words”. 

One of the great gifts we have for the world is to really ground the reality that all of our social experiences must be seen as a Dynamic based on 3. We built the Social Process by shear mental force in Summer 71. We took it to seven levels, but I am sure some of the levels beyond 4 are a bit off. But that doesn’t matter. The master dynamic template of three, and four levels of triangles are enough to communicate the reality. Ad each triangle is connected to every other!! You soon reach infinite connectivity. But what if were all a Dance??? And we just need to learn how to Waltz??? 1-2-3. 1-2-3 1-2-3……...

Life is dynamic, not static substance. But the human tendency is to make it so. I don’t know if you remember the book we studied, The New Castle, by Malachi Martin. I first encountered it in 1975 as excerpts in Atlantic magazine. It sparked something in me, and when it came out I rushed a copy to JWM, and he got us all to read it. What people don’t know about was our encounter and conversation with him at the Cleveland House. He was speaking at the Newman Center right next door on Case-Western Reserve campus. After his talk we invited him to come and talk with us. When he came in the rest of the House lined up to shake his hand. His first words were: “There is something different about you people.” He refused to speak until we told him about ourselves, which we did. When finished he said: “You people are so far ahead that nothing can sustain you, you must do so yourselves”. 

There is a lot more to the story, but I want to move back to my witness. Just to say that his book was about how history can be seen as a series of attempts to give substance (chapters on spiritual centers) that held the spirit in form, but it can’t be done; thus his last two chapters.

So life is only relationships. Draw a circle and a line from that to the center. They must be communicative. The lines are the “ties”. When the boundary is thought as stable, societal structures and our living our lives in and through those structures, the story of how to live is pretty clear. At the center are the values we hold and that story. The “field” of living is stable, but always slowly changing. Now introduce “radical change” and all of a sudden there seems to be Chaos in our Field of living”. It is just as the poet says, “The Center can not hold!… We need to discover not just new values, but Values, the Universal ones that govern all of life and the entire Universe (which is infinite, not expanding). Compassion, Truth, Mercy and Love (have to use words) must be infused into all the structures. We called that “The New Social Vehicle”. And you can see, that the only way you “know” the Center is through personal experience. And it is not a higher consciousness, it is just having more clarity. It is transparency. We have all been there, but have no way to hold on, we just say “wow!”. Those are called Other World visits. Common as mud. 

Thus, when JWM stated “There will be no NSV, unless there is a NRM”. you can grasp what he is saying. By NRM, he wasn’t restricting it to our nine categories, but they are key.

Finally, re-read JWM’s two talks on Being given in Summer 70. He takes us to the Center. And note the inner circles, and the gaps. 

Peace,

Jack



> On Feb 4, 2020, at 14:55, Seth Longacre via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
> 
> Jack,
> 
> What can I say? This is so powerful, so insightful and so useful. I deeply appreciate the call to be quiet and experience the experience first and also your compassionate observation of what is happening with people in the world now. Personally, I don’t feel so articulate, but I have no appetite for condemnation, fear-mongering or even despair at the political or societal level, so I tend to just keep my mouth shut. Yet, that somehow feels like it is suppressive. I think I will read your message over and over in the coming days.
> 
> Seth Longacre
> Sethlongacre at gmail.com
> Sent from one of my iThingies, please excuse typos and brevity
> 
>> On Feb 4, 2020, at 06:13, Jack Gilles via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Marianna,
>> 
>> Greetings from Litibu! We keep Bill and your spirit alive in our midst with the great stories of beginning the Dream. Just had to get that in!
>> 
>> All who decide to take on this topic walk on fragile ground. By that I mean, we are using words as if they conveyed the same meaning, understanding to all. The RS-I short course of: "First, point to a “going-on-ness” and then give it a name." serves us a reminder of how not to dialogue.
>> 
>> We experience actions taken “out there" and we respond from “in here”. We all have filters that inform us through our senses to somehow make sense of the going-on-ness we point to. Remember that those of us who have spent most of our lives in the West, tend to have filters that require left-brain activity; words, rationality and specifics (particulars). It shapes our speech and images of what is real. This process is especially strong, though of course not limited to, men. The Universal dynamics of masculine-feminine are in both sexes. We need more holistic, non-verbal (arts, symbolic and Myth (poetry) to communicate fully. 
>> 
>> I do not want to reduce this vital topic to a treatise on human behavior. But we do need to stand still, let silence speak, before we rush into sociological answers and solutions. 
>> 
>> Our ability, and indeed everyone’s ability to keep the social fabric within some boundaries is to grasp what is it that tells us: “Stop! you are beyond the boundary.”. We are now experiencing two things, the boundaries have shifted, and the “ties that bind” are breaking. Let me ground that.
>> 
>> Nations, lines on a map, names we gave that which inside the lines, were a great advance in the human journey. It gave us a new “sense" of substance, a story, identity, and a way to create myths that spoke emotionally. We forget it was/is an invention. They don’t exist. Just like we can say it’s raining and cold someplace and not in another we have no problem in seeing that weather is a continuum. it changes and we accept (or curse!) the change. But things that change very slowly, like the coming into being and the going out of being of nations is feared, resisted, fought over, mobilized against, seen as an enemy and even died for. If it kills that which I love, then it has to be Evil. 
>> 
>> We now are living in a time of accelerated change. Everything is changing. We “live” with the fires in Australia, the pandemics, the instant banking and global commerce, and on and on. They came so fast and we are so slow! Hell, I have a phone that I have no idea of all the things it can do. I just want to talk to someone! But we all know there is no going back. And what we experience today will do nothing but get faster and faster. It's like we are standing on a pile of rubble and there is not a bright new shiny house to move into. It's a desert, a swamp, and it is easy to say, “The hell with you, I am going to survive, so let me accumulate a safe place, build a wall, gets some guns and find a few more to keep al the doors covered”. Or maybe I should speak of the Mormon Church with its billions of dollars stashed in growth investments to get prepared for the “end times”. And if you don’t think this is feared, just go out where people are shouting USA, USA and tell them a new world is coming! Let us know the date of your funeral!
>> 
>> The “ties that bind” are breaking. I call these Disciplines. We may go on a diet, but unless we develop a new way of living, the habit comes right back. We have a lot of ties that are more like rubber bands. And now, when they break, there are none to replace them. To what boundary do you hook one end? To what internal capacity to you hook the other? 
>> 
>> I won’t go longer, but you have just entered the start of my new book (still being written). A hint: it has a lot to do with the NRM. 
>> 
>> Peace,
>> 
>> Jack
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