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Call to Renewal Keynote Address
| June 28, 2006
Washington, DC
Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak here at the Call to Renewal's Building a Covenant for a New America conference. I've had the opportunity to take a look at your Covenant for a New America. It is filled with outstanding policies and prescriptions for much of what ails this country. So I'd like to congratulate you all on the thoughtful presentations you've given so far about poverty and justice in America, and for putting fire under the feet of the political leadership here in Washington.
But today I'd like to talk about the connection between religion and politics and perhaps offer some thoughts about how we can sort through some of the often bitter arguments that we've been seeing over the last several years.
I do so because, as you all know, we can affirm the importance of poverty in the Bible; and we can raise up and pass out this Covenant for a New America. We can talk to the press, and we can discuss the religious call to address poverty and environmental stewardship all we want, but it won't have an impact unless we tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.
I want to give you an example that I think illustrates this fact. As some of you know, during the 2004 U.S. Senate General Election I ran against a gentleman named Alan Keyes. Mr. Keyes is well-versed in the Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson style of rhetoric that often labels progressives as both immoral and godless.
Indeed, Mr. Keyes announced towards the end of the campaign that, "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama. Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved."
Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama.
Now, I was urged by some of my liberal supporters not to take this statement seriously, to essentially ignore it. To them, Mr. Keyes was an extremist, and his arguments not worth entertaining. And since at the time, I was up 40 points in the polls, it probably wasn't a bad piece of strategic advice.
But what they didn't understand, however, was that I had to take Mr. Keyes seriously, for he claimed to speak for my religion, and my God. He claimed knowledge of certain truths.
Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, he was saying, and yet he supports a lifestyle that the Bible calls an abomination.
Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, but supports the destruction of innocent and sacred life.
And so what would my supporters have me say? How should I respond? Should I say that a literalist reading of the Bible was folly? Should I say that Mr. Keyes, who is a Roman Catholic, should ignore the teachings of the Pope?
Unwilling to go there, I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates - namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.
But Mr. Keyes's implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.
Now, my dilemma was by no means unique. In a way, it reflected the broader debate we've been having in this country for the last thirty years over the role of religion in politics.
For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.
Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design.
Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that - regardless of our personal beliefs - constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word "Christian" describes one's political opponents, not people of faith.
Now, such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when our opponent is Alan Keyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives -- in the lives of the American people -- and I think it's time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.
And if we're going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.
This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.
Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and they're coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.
They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.
And I speak with some experience on this matter. I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I.
It wasn't until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.
I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.
And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well -- that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.
And if it weren't for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn - not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.
For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.
And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship -- the grounding of faith in struggle -- that the church offered me a second insight, one that I think is important to emphasize today.
Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts.
You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away - because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.
It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn't fall out in church. The questions I had didn't magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.
That's a path that has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans - evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at certain turning points in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives their beliefs and their values.
And that is why that, if we truly hope to speak to people where they're at - to communicate our hopes and values in a way that's relevant to their own - then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.
Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome - others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.
In other words, if we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway.
More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical - if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.
Imagine Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address without reference to "the judgments of the Lord." Or King's I Have a Dream speech without references to "all of God's children." Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.
Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting "preachy" may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.
After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man.
Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers' lobby - but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we've got a moral problem. There's a hole in that young man's heart - a hole that the government alone cannot fix.
I believe in vigorous enforcement of our non-discrimination laws. But I also believe that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation's CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. They have more lawyers than us anyway.
I think that we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys. I think that the work that Marian Wright Edelman has done all her life is absolutely how we should prioritize our resources in the wealthiest nation on earth. I also think that we should give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished.
But, you know, my Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. So I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.
I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology - that can be dangerous. Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith. As Jim has mentioned, some politicians come and clap -- off rhythm -- to the choir. We don't need that.
In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they're something they're not. They don't need to do that. None of us need to do that.
But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of "thou" and not just "I," resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.
Some of this is already beginning to happen. Pastors, friends of mine like Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influences to confront AIDS, Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Religious thinkers and activists like our good friend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality.
And by the way, we need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. When you've got an estate tax debate that proposes a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don't need and weren't even asking for it, you know that we need an injection of morality in our political debate.
Across the country, individual churches like my own and your own are sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives, and rebuilding our gulf coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
So the question is, how do we build on these still-tentative partnerships between religious and secular people of good will? It's going to take more work, a lot more work than we've done so far. The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed. And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.
While I've already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do -- some truths they need to acknowledge.
For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn't the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn't want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.
Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.
This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing. And if you doubt that, let me give you an example.
We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.
Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God's test of devotion.
But it's fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.
Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion.
This goes for both sides.
Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.
The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a Constitutional amendment to ban it. Religious leadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they should recognize this wisdom in their politics.
But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase "under God." I didn't. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs - targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers - that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.
So we all have some work to do here. But I am hopeful that we can bridge the gaps that exist and overcome the prejudices each of us bring to this debate. And I have faith that millions of believing Americans want that to happen. No matter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack. They don't want faith used to belittle or to divide. They're tired of hearing folks deliver more screed than sermon. Because in the end, that's not how they think about faith in their own lives.
So let me end with just one other interaction I had during my campaign. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School that said the following:
"Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win. I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you."
The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be "totalizing." His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.
But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor went on to write:
"I sense that you have a strong sense of justice...and I also sense that you are a fair minded person with a high regard for reason...Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded....You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others...I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."
Fair-minded words.
So I looked at my website and found the offending words. In fairness to them, my staff had written them using standard Democratic boilerplate language to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.
Re-reading the doctor's letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in fair-minded words. Those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.
So I wrote back to the doctor, and I thanked him for his advice. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own - a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.
And that night, before I went to bed I said a prayer of my own. It's a prayer I think I share with a lot of Americans. A hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all. It's a prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come.
Thank you.
www.barackobama.com/2006/06/...dress.php
Call to Renewal Keynote Address
| June 28, 2006
Washington, DC
Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak here at the Call to Renewal's Building a Covenant for a New America conference. I've had the opportunity to take a look at your Covenant for a New America. It is filled with outstanding policies and prescriptions for much of what ails this country. So I'd like to congratulate you all on the thoughtful presentations you've given so far about poverty and justice in America, and for putting fire under the feet of the political leadership here in Washington.
But today I'd like to talk about the connection between religion and politics and perhaps offer some thoughts about how we can sort through some of the often bitter arguments that we've been seeing over the last several years.
I do so because, as you all know, we can affirm the importance of poverty in the Bible; and we can raise up and pass out this Covenant for a New America. We can talk to the press, and we can discuss the religious call to address poverty and environmental stewardship all we want, but it won't have an impact unless we tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.
I want to give you an example that I think illustrates this fact. As some of you know, during the 2004 U.S. Senate General Election I ran against a gentleman named Alan Keyes. Mr. Keyes is well-versed in the Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson style of rhetoric that often labels progressives as both immoral and godless.
Indeed, Mr. Keyes announced towards the end of the campaign that, "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama. Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved."
Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama.
Now, I was urged by some of my liberal supporters not to take this statement seriously, to essentially ignore it. To them, Mr. Keyes was an extremist, and his arguments not worth entertaining. And since at the time, I was up 40 points in the polls, it probably wasn't a bad piece of strategic advice.
But what they didn't understand, however, was that I had to take Mr. Keyes seriously, for he claimed to speak for my religion, and my God. He claimed knowledge of certain truths.
Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, he was saying, and yet he supports a lifestyle that the Bible calls an abomination.
Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, but supports the destruction of innocent and sacred life.
And so what would my supporters have me say? How should I respond? Should I say that a literalist reading of the Bible was folly? Should I say that Mr. Keyes, who is a Roman Catholic, should ignore the teachings of the Pope?
Unwilling to go there, I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates - namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.
But Mr. Keyes's implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.
Now, my dilemma was by no means unique. In a way, it reflected the broader debate we've been having in this country for the last thirty years over the role of religion in politics.
For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.
Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design.
Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that - regardless of our personal beliefs - constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word "Christian" describes one's political opponents, not people of faith.
Now, such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when our opponent is Alan Keyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives -- in the lives of the American people -- and I think it's time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.
And if we're going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.
This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.
Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and they're coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.
They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.
And I speak with some experience on this matter. I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I.
It wasn't until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.
I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.
And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well -- that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.
And if it weren't for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn - not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.
For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.
And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship -- the grounding of faith in struggle -- that the church offered me a second insight, one that I think is important to emphasize today.
Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts.
You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away - because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.
It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn't fall out in church. The questions I had didn't magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.
That's a path that has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans - evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at certain turning points in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives their beliefs and their values.
And that is why that, if we truly hope to speak to people where they're at - to communicate our hopes and values in a way that's relevant to their own - then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.
Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome - others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.
In other words, if we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway.
More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical - if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.
Imagine Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address without reference to "the judgments of the Lord." Or King's I Have a Dream speech without references to "all of God's children." Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.
Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting "preachy" may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.
After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man.
Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers' lobby - but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we've got a moral problem. There's a hole in that young man's heart - a hole that the government alone cannot fix.
I believe in vigorous enforcement of our non-discrimination laws. But I also believe that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation's CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. They have more lawyers than us anyway.
I think that we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys. I think that the work that Marian Wright Edelman has done all her life is absolutely how we should prioritize our resources in the wealthiest nation on earth. I also think that we should give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished.
But, you know, my Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. So I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.
I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology - that can be dangerous. Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith. As Jim has mentioned, some politicians come and clap -- off rhythm -- to the choir. We don't need that.
In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they're something they're not. They don't need to do that. None of us need to do that.
But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of "thou" and not just "I," resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.
Some of this is already beginning to happen. Pastors, friends of mine like Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influences to confront AIDS, Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Religious thinkers and activists like our good friend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality.
And by the way, we need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. When you've got an estate tax debate that proposes a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don't need and weren't even asking for it, you know that we need an injection of morality in our political debate.
Across the country, individual churches like my own and your own are sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives, and rebuilding our gulf coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
So the question is, how do we build on these still-tentative partnerships between religious and secular people of good will? It's going to take more work, a lot more work than we've done so far. The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed. And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.
While I've already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do -- some truths they need to acknowledge.
For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn't the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn't want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.
Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.
This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing. And if you doubt that, let me give you an example.
We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.
Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God's test of devotion.
But it's fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.
Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion.
This goes for both sides.
Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.
The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a Constitutional amendment to ban it. Religious leadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they should recognize this wisdom in their politics.
But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase "under God." I didn't. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs - targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers - that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.
So we all have some work to do here. But I am hopeful that we can bridge the gaps that exist and overcome the prejudices each of us bring to this debate. And I have faith that millions of believing Americans want that to happen. No matter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack. They don't want faith used to belittle or to divide. They're tired of hearing folks deliver more screed than sermon. Because in the end, that's not how they think about faith in their own lives.
So let me end with just one other interaction I had during my campaign. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School that said the following:
"Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win. I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you."
The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be "totalizing." His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.
But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor went on to write:
"I sense that you have a strong sense of justice...and I also sense that you are a fair minded person with a high regard for reason...Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded....You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others...I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."
Fair-minded words.
So I looked at my website and found the offending words. In fairness to them, my staff had written them using standard Democratic boilerplate language to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.
Re-reading the doctor's letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in fair-minded words. Those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.
So I wrote back to the doctor, and I thanked him for his advice. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own - a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.
And that night, before I went to bed I said a prayer of my own. It's a prayer I think I share with a lot of Americans. A hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all. It's a prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come.
Thank you.
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Re: faith
Fri, May 2, 2008 - 4:14 PMAn Eclectics Puzzle Solving Paradise
public - created 05/26/07
Multfiath eclectics will explore the nature of reality, and all of the human paradigms.
we will attempt to make a comparative sampling and then integrate at least 50
religious and scientific pa... more
Multfiath eclectics will explore the nature of reality, and all of the human paradigms.
we will attempt to make a comparative sampling and then integrate at least 50
religious and scientific paradigms.
These will include;
Shamanism, Wicca, Paganism, World Paganism, Judaism, Qaballah, Christianity, Essenes, Gnostics,
Zoroastrians, Hindu, Kahuna, (Huna) Wicce, Comparative religious world history,
formal logic, psychology, ethics, metaphysics, sociology, civil engineering,
Education, Education reform, Physics, Quantum mechanics, Holography, Scalar fractals
Diplomacy, Non Violent Communication, Systems theory, Meteorology Climate sciences, Biology,
Subtle anatomy, Psychonautics,
This tribe is a formal mind your manners tribe, trolling will not be tolerated,
the purpose of this space is to participate in building something together,
not trying to tear each other down.
I'm not interested in which one is better and why,
i only care about how the puzzle fits together.
because everything relates to everything else;
all of our descriptions of reality are one total descriptor;
they all must be describing SOMETHING, so you might as well try to figure out
how it all FITS Together;
how the puzzle dissolves and folds and rewrites itself virally into focus;
how that fractal chooses its quantum wave functions;
why everything dances and moves and sings;
and then pattern and simplicity form a net of light together in your mind;
and you know the fractal because god sears it there with internal lightning.
and the fractal is the equation of how everything connects to everything else.
the uni- verse, and its laws.
what are they in breif, and en totalia?
This tribe is for chatting about it; the public outer shell.
tribes.tribe.net/interparadigmeclectic
an eclectics paradise is the inner core groups home and thought experiment village
--------------
tribes.tribe.net/hybrideclectic
psychology 2.0
religion 2.0
Mass transportation 2.0
Space exploration 2.0
Mars Colonization
Human sexuality 2.0
Social engineering questions
Tribal homelessness (Forest dwelling)
Public bathing/geothermal 2
The end of crime
the end of poverty
the end of war
the end of social violence
Criminal Ethics 2.0
Social Evolution and personal evolution
The path of social evolution
The evolution of technology
Technology 2.0
Spiritual technologies
Trance technologies
Blow up your tv
And end to vice
I know there was more, I'd have to go look at email...
Some of these are approximations from memory. -
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Re: faith
Fri, May 9, 2008 - 12:57 PM
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Re: faith
Thu, May 15, 2008 - 4:38 PMBeing raised in an "Freewill Baptist" Church (similar to evangelical) I have known from a very young age the hate that can be spewed in the name of one who came to forgive, heal and unite. I broke from my church when I was 12 years old and my mother no longer required me to attend.
I studied philosophy and religion in college as a means to try and understand the premise and beliefs of other cultures. I also started reading the Bible for myself and drawing my own conclusions. I am heart-sick with the religious propaganda machine. I am revolted and angered daily at those who use religion as a dividing line of the worthy and not worthy. In my studies of religion (mostly Islam, Hindu, Buddhist) I found much to my surprise common themes among them all. This is when I came to the realization that I truly did believe in a being higher than mankind... a creator if you will.
I do not believe in egocentric religion and do not believe any of them were ever meant to be such. Unfortunately, there are many who are very protective of their core beliefs whether they be right or wrong. When you shake the foundation of one's entire belief system it leaves bewilderment and fear.
I do not know how to fix the problem as a whole. I do discuss with those in my circle of family and friends and have managed to make some progress toward the realization that there is a commonality of purpose and intent among all of these religions. -
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Re: faith
Fri, May 16, 2008 - 5:15 AMI do not know how to fix the problem as a whole. I do discuss with those in my circle of family and friends and have managed to make some progress toward the realization that there is a commonality of purpose and intent among all of these religions.
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this is what is important to focus on. thousands of different expressions of spiritual experience were recorded in different ways. They all have
gems to teach us; and are rooted in the worst anchors of archaic thinking. I suppose its funny the atheist made it here first and telling,
but this is my take on atheism.
In my experience the real truth is that modern culture and materialism spoils everything. religion becomes a bad thing as it connects and
is manipulated by politics. Where abuse of spirituality is rampant, people turn off spiritually. If they are really whacked hard, that off condition
can be a permanent disability; and thisis a condition sadly the majority of Americans Have.
To put it bluntly, why does anybody need a middle man to talk with god?
If the conversation with the priest is effective, the child outgrows the priest.
The simple fact that they will label a person scitzophrenic, or that transpersonal psychology doesn't go more mainstream
tells us a whole lot about this.
And, with incredulity; how does a person get so injured by bad religion that they then abandon both it AND spirituality and STAY BLIND BY CHOICE?
Well, realizing that the masses in the religions grasp don't get to talk to God either, that means that whats really going on sadly is that
Atheism is just another branch of rebellion christianity.
No, theres no bearded dude in the sky; thats an anthropmorphication of a force of nature; or the harmonic laws of the cosmos.
When a person gets learned about two dozen different religions and two dozen different sciences, they start to see connections,
and all of the apparent contradictions dissolve around essentially an unraveling comedy of fixated attachments to polarizations.
The BUZZ in one of the listserves is "thinking purple".
not red or blue.
Well, in this case, we have a false duality;
does god exist?
Yes or no?
WELLLLL
Whos version of what definition of "God" are we talking about here?
ALL of them are political gimmicks and propaganda distortions;....
AND
All of them ONCE WAS somebodies psychonaut report.
The real lucidity to be found is to look at any system and see at least its own internal logic. Wether or not one likes that logic or approves of it, paradigms are generally internally consistant if one includes the doublethink.
lol.
Atheism has a fascinating and very empowering liberating capacity which should not be ignored. modern Science gives us the understanding that all of these cultures had different ideas and we get to see all of those ideas and how well and if they worked.
So if you study religions under the lens of science and atheism; you end up with religious world history and then a puzzle;
an eclectic acrostic goblin riddle; Yeungs collective unconscious, quantum information, and the Labyrinth of the tree.
Neuromuscular electricity and the magnetic body as the aura; science fact proves a few religious assertions; and those are the ones to run
with.
In an election year and an election season, faith is a fascinating hot button issue to try to turn around and look at.
Heres the point I would make. If The States want to subsidize government welfare through churches (Sure, okay, why not....)
then the bar should be lowered such that any ten people can declare themselves a church of any denomination of their choosing
and name what they consider their religious rights and cultural standards.
I guess the point is this; my attack on this issue might hurt more than help and so i wonder how deep i should run down the rabbit hole
and which is the most important to focus on.
Extricating the gems from any given paradigm is the real goal of my own practice.
Other than this, i would just like to affirm that government shouldn't get involved in religion, and that as a pagan, or eclectic, or
taoist, or shaman (Depending on who i am hanging out with this week...) I want to know that my rights are not going to get run over by
a batch of mobby christians, who really ought to come play teacher and student and let me tell them all about the essenes.
So my underlying point is people should take the time to educate themselves; and if they have second sight, the awesome, and if they
can talk to god; awesome. and if via that real connection god tells them that love is the answer, and that all humans should be treated with compassion and respect, and that poverty and injustice can be made archaic, awesome. But if that inner voice is any kind of warmonger,
bully, pack psychology dominant, or, worse, if such voices are based intentionally lies made to conceal and spin the truth....
Then thats a false voice, no the voice of god. there is no such thing as a genocidal god. There is no such thing as a god of vengeance
or a god of hate. There is no such thing, and when we appeal to those states of consciousness we give negative energy to entropy.
I live in a real world and most people live in the matrix. And the primary reportable psychoanutical difference is;
I can perceive neuromuscular electricity consciously and don't understand why everybody doesn't.
I can fly in the collective unconscious. I can chat with the grim reaper.
I have been on my own personal journey to ixtlan, and back again.
And from my perspective thus all religions are the artwork of humanity; drawing the face of god.
And yet; none of these artworks define god; for that is impossible.
AND
SCIENCE also looks upon THE VERY SAME FACE;
and gives us enormous relevant answers; not contradictions, but resolutions.
Quantum mechanics, probability waves, holographic fields;
the simple fact of scalar fractal holomorphism being the fundamental laws of the universe;
that adam kadmon fractal equation written for me IN EVERY ATOM IN THE UNIVERSE...
For ME i cannot fathom anybody not talking to God;
And no; that doesn't make me crazy.
But it does make me eccentric compared to most sheeple,
and it does mean i have enormous lessons to teach them if they will come and learn.
------------------
Were those phantoms allies, don Genaro?
-No. They were people.
-People? But you said they were phantoms.
-I said that they were no longer real. After my encounter with the ally nothing was real any more.
"I will never reach Ixtlan," he said.
"Yet in my feelings... in my feelings sometimes I think I'm just one step from reaching it. Yet I never will. In my journey I don't even find the familiar landmarks I used to know. Nothing is any longer the same."
"Everyone Genaro finds on his way to Ixtlan is only an ephemeral being," don Juan explained. "Take you, for instance. You are a phantom. Your feelings and your eagerness are those of people. That's why he says that he encounters only phantom travelers on his journey to Ixtlan."
At any rate, in your next meeting with the ally, if there is a next time for you, you will have to wrestle with it and tame it. If you survive the shock, which I'm sure you will, since you're strong and have been living like a warrior, you will find yourself alive in an unknown land. Then, as is natural to all of us, the first thing you will want to do is to start on your way back to Los Angeles. But there is no way to go back to Los Angeles. What you left there is lost forever. By then, of course, you will be a sorcerer, but that's no help; at a time like that what's important to all of us is the fact that everything we love or hate or wish for has been left behind. Yet the feelings in a man do not die or change, and the sorcerer starts on his way back home knowing that he will never reach it, knowing that no power on earth, not even his death, will deliver him to the place, the things, the people he loved. That's what Genaro told you.
- What about the people I love? What would happen to them?
-They would all be left behind.
- But is there no way I could retrieve them? Could I rescue them and take with me?
- No. Your ally will spin you, alone, into unknown worlds.
...Spinning with your ally will change your idea of the world. That idea is everything; and when that changes, the world itself changes.
Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge. Because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.
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Re: faith
Fri, May 16, 2008 - 5:15 AMJOURNEY TO IXTLAN
...For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.
Don Juan
Abstracts of Carlos Castaneda's JOURNEY TO IXTLAN (Vol. 3)
by Vera Zlatkina - woman-nagual
Introduction
PART ONE Stopping the world
1 REAFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORLD AROUND US
2 ERASING PERSONAL HISTORY
3 LOSING SELF-IMPORTANCE
4 DEATH IS AN ADVISER
5 ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY
6 BECOMING A HUNTER
7 BEING INACCESSIBLE
8 DISRUPTING THE ROUTINES OF LIFE
9 THE LAST BATTLE ON EARTH
10 BECOMING ACCESSIBLE TO POWER
11 THE MOOD OF A WARRIOR
12 A BATTLE OF POWER
13 A WARRIOR'S LAST STAND
14 THE GATE OF POWER
15 NOT-DOING
16 THE RING OF POWER
17 A WORTHY OPPONENT
PART TWO Journey to Ixtlan
18 THE SORCERER'S RING OF POWER
19 STOPPING THE WORLD
20 JOURNEY TO IXTLAN
Introduction
The basic premise of sorcery as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description. ...a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born.
He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of preceiving the world as it is described. According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.
For don Juan , then , the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership , have learned to make it common.
The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are rarely, if ever, open to question. In fact, the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, could hardly be taken as a serious proposition.
His contention was that he was teaching me how to "see" as opposed to merely "looking", and that "stopping the world" was the first step to "seeing".
PART ONE
Stopping the world
1
REAFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORLD AROUND US
I pick plants , or rather , they let me pick them
2
ERASING PERSONAL HISTORY
I don't have personal history any more...I dropped it one day when I felt it was no longer necessary.
- Begin with simple things, such as not revealing what you really do. Then you must leave everyone who knows you well. This way you'll build up a fog around yourself.
- "But that's absurd," I protested. "Why shouldn't people know me? What's wrong with that?"
- What's wrong is that once they know you , you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you won't be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown. No one knows me with steadfast certainty, the way people know you for instance."
- But that would be lying.
- I am not concerned with lies or truths...Lies are lies if you have personal history.
When one does not have personal history ,nothing that one says can be taken for a lie. Your trouble is that you have to explain everything to everybody, compulsively, and at the same time you want to keep the freshness, the newness of what you do. Well, since you can't be excited after explaining everything you've done, you lie in order to keep on going.
- From now on you must simply to show people whatever you care to show them, but without ever telling exactly how you've done it.
- I can't keep secrets ! What you are saying is useless to me.
- Then change !
You see, we only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real , or we don't. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history ,we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves.
3
LOSING SELF-IMPORTANCE
You take yourself too seriously. You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be changed ! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be annoyed with everything.
You're so damn important that you can afford to leave if things don't go your way. I suppose you think that shows you have character. That's nonsense ! You're weak, and conceited !
Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped, just like personal history. As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you. You are like a horse with blinders, all you see is yourself apart from everything else.
It doesn't matter what you say to a plant. You can just as well make up words; what's important is the feeling of liking it, and treating it as an equal.
So, all in all, the plants and ourselves are even. Neither we nor they are more or less important.
4
DEATH IS AN ADVISER
Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, at an arm's length... It has always been watching you. It always will until the day it taps you.
How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us?
The thing to do when you're impatient is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you.
Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do , that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet.'
We remained quiet for more than an hour, then we started walking again. We meandered in the desert chaparral for hours. I didn't ask him if there was any purpose to it ; it did not matter. Somehow he had made me recapture an old feeling, something I had quite forgotten, the cheer joy of just moving around without attaching any intellectual purpose to it.
5
ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY
When a man decides to do something he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse about them...Death is stalking me. Therefore, I have no room for doubts or remorse. If I have to die as a result of taking you for a walk, then I must die.
You, on the other hand, feel that you are immortal, and the decisions of an immortal man can be canceled or regretted or doubted. In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.
You are complaining. You have been complaining all your life because you don't assume responsibility for your decisions.
To assume responsibility for one's decisions that one is ready to die for them. It doesn't matter what the decision is. Nothing could be more or less serious then anything else. Don't you see? In a world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions that we make in the face of our inevitable death.
6
BECOMING A HUNTER
Don Juan then described the technique, which he said took years to perfect, and which consisted of gradually forcing the eyes to see separately the same image. The lack of image conversion entailed a double perception of the world; this double perception allowed one the opportunity of judging changes in the surroundings, which the eyes were ordinarily incapable of perceiving... You must focus your attention in the area between the two images. Amy change worthy of notice would take place there, in that area.
To be a hunter means that one knows a great deal. It means that one can see the world in different ways. In order to be a hunter one must be in perfect balance with everything else, otherwise hunting would become a meaningless chore. For instance, today we took a little snake. I had to apologize to her for cutting her life off so suddenly and so definitely; I did what I did knowing that my own life will also be cut off someday in very much the same fashion, suddenly and definitely. So , all in all, we and the snakes are on a par. One of them fed us today.
7
BEING INACCESSIBLE
The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible. In the case of that blond girl it would've meant that you have to become a hunter and meet her sparingly. Not the way you did. You stayed with her day after day until the only feeling that remained was boredom. True?
To be inaccessible means that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don't eat five quail; you eat one. You don't damage the plants just to make a barbecue pit. You don't expose yourself to the power of the wind unless it is mandatory. You don't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people you love.
To be unavailable means that you deliberately avoid exhausting yourself and others. It means that you are not hungry and desperate, like the poor bastard that feels he will never eat again and devours all the food he can, all five quail.
A hunter knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn't worry. To worry is to become accessible, unwittingly accessible. And once you worry
you cling to anything out of desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to.
To be inaccessible does not mean to hide or to be secretive. It doesn't mean that you cannot deal with people either. A hunter uses his world sparingly and with tenderness, regardless of whether the world might be things or plants, or animal, or people, or power. A hunter deals intimately with his world and yet he is inaccessible to that same world.
He is inaccessible because he's not squeezing his word out of shape. He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then swiftly moves away leaving hardly a mark.
8
DISRUPTING THE ROUTINES OF LIFE
In order to be a hunter you must disrupt the routines of your life. You have done well in hunting. You have learned quickly and now you can see that you are like your prey, easy to predict.
You have observed the habits of animals in the desert. They eat and drink at certain places, they nest in specific spots, they leave their tracks in specific ways; in fact, everything they do can be foreseen or reconstructed by a good hunter.
There are certain animals, however, that are impossible to track. There are certain types of deer, for instance, which a fortunate hunter might be able to come across, by sheer luck, once in his lifetime.
What do you think makes them so difficult to find and so unique?
They have no routines. That's what makes them magical.
A magical being is a sight to behold.
9
THE LAST BATTLE ON EARTH
I had learned to respect his mastery, which had always been expressed in terms of beauty and precision.
For you the world is weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it....For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.
You always feel compelled to explain your acts, as if you were the only man on earth who's wrong. It's your old feeling of importance. You have too much of it; you also have too much personal history.
There is one simple thing wrong with you - you think you have plenty of time...If you don't think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for ? Why the hesitation to change? You don't have time for this display, you fool. This, whatever you're doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.
You have no time, my friend, no time. None of us have time.
...That change comes suddenly and unexpectedly, and so does death. What do you think we can do about it?
-To live as happily as possible.
Right! But do you know anyone who lives happily?
-No.
I do. There are some people who are very careful about the nature of their acts. Their happines is to act with the full knowledge that they don't have time; therefore, their acts have a peculiar power...
Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or sadness or worryng. Focus your attention on the fact you don't have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have their rigthful power. Otherwise they will be , for as long as you live, the acts of a timid man.
- Is it so terrible to be a timid man?
No. It isn't if you are going to be immortal, but if you are going to die there is no time for timidity, simply because timidity makes you cling to something that exists only in your thoughts. It soothes you while everything is at a lull, but then the awesome, mysterious world will open its mouth for you, as it will open for every one of us, and then you will realize that your sure ways were not sure at all. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men.
- It is not natural to live with the constant idea of our death, don Juan.
Our death is waiting and this very act we're performing now may well be our last battle on earth. I call it a battle because it is a struggle. Most people move from act to act without any struggle or thought. A hunter , on the contrary, assesses every act; and since he has an intimate knowlege of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if every act were his last battle. Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a hunter has over his fellow man. A hunter gives his last battle its due respect. It's only natural that his last act on earth should be the best of himself. It's pleasurable that way. It dulls the edge of his fright.
10
BECOMING ACCESSIBLE TO POWER
...During the hight of my hallucinatory experience I played with a dog that lived in the house where the peyote session took place. Don Juan interpreted my interaction with a dog as a very special event ... the dog was not really a dog but the incarnation of Mescalito, the power of deity contained in peyote.
The post-effects of that experience were a general sense of fatigue and melancholy, plus the incidence of exceptionally vivid dreams and nightmares.
I am going to teach you how to become a warrior in the same manner I have taught you how to hunt. I must warn you , though, learning how to hunt has not made you into a hunter, nor would learning how to become a warrior make you one.
-I experienced a sense of frustration, a physical discomfort that bordered on anguish. I complained about the vivid dreams and nightmares I was having.
A warrior seeks power and one of the avenues to power is dreaming .
What you call dreams are real for a warrior. You must understand that a warrior is not a fool. A warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he's not drunk, or crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff, or to lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that way by making some stupid miscalculation,by taking something for being something else.
Dreaming is real for a warrior because in it he can act deliberately, he can choose and reject, he can select from a variety of items those which lead to power, and then he can manipulate them and use them, while in an ordinary dream he cannot act deliberately.
- Do you mean then, don Juan, that dreaming is real ?
Of course it is real.
- As real as what we are doing now?
If you want to comparee things, I can say that it is perhaps more real. In dreaming you have power ;you can change things; you may find out countless concealed facts you can control whatever you want.
Power is something a warrior deals with. At first it's an incredible , far-fetched affair; it is hard to even think about it. This is what's happening to you know. Then power becomes a serious matter; one may not have it, or one may not even fully realize that it exists, yet one knows that something is there, something which was not noticeable before. Next power is manifested as something uncontrollable that comes to oneself. It is not possible for me to say how it comes or what it really is. It is nothing and yet it makes marvels appear before your very eyes. And finally power is something in oneself, something that controls one's acts and yet obeys one's command.
I am going to teach you right here the first step to power. I am going to teach you how to set up dreaming.
I was hardly following him at all. He explained that to "set up dreaming" meant to have a concise and pragmatic control over the general situation of a dream, comparable to the control one has over any choice in the desert, such as climbing up a hill or remaining in the shade of a water canyon.
You must start by doing something very simple.Tonight in your dreams you must look at your hands...Every time you look at anything in your dreams it changes shape. The trick in lerning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but to sustain the sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded in bringing everything into focus. Then is no difference between what you do when you sleep and what you do when you are not sleeping...
When they begin to change shape you must move your sight away from them and pick something else, and then look at your hands again. It takes a long time to perfect this technique.
...I glanced at him and glanced at the animal, and then something in me arranged the world and I knew at once what the animal was. I walked over to it and picked it up. It was a large branch of a bush...
What you've done is no triumph. You've wasted a beautiful power, a power that blew life into that dry twig.
He said that a real triumph would have been for me to let go and follow the power until the world had ceased to exist.
I felt embarrassed. I began to apologize for my tendency of always being so sure of my ways.
"It doesn't matter," he said."That branch was a real animal and it was alive at the moment the power touched it.Since what kept it alive was power, the trick was, like in dreaming, to sustain the sight of it."
He explained that the idea of making oneself accessible to power has serious overtones. Power was a devastating force that could easily lead to one's death and had to be treated with great care. Becoming available to power had to be done systematically, but always with great caution.
It involved making one's presence obvious by a contained display of loud talk or any other type of noisy activity, and then it was mandatory to observe a prolonged and total silence. A controlled outburst and a controlled quietness were the mark of a warrior. He said that properly I should have sustained the sight of the live monster for a while longer. In a controlled fashion, without losing my mind or becoming deranged with excitation or fear, I should have striven to "stop the world". He pointed out that after I had run up the hill for dear life i was in a perfect state for "stoppping the world". Combined in that state were fear, awe, power and death; he said that such a state would be pretty hard to repeat.
I whispered in his ear, "What do you mean by 'stopping the world' ? "
He gave me a ferocious look before he answered that it was a technique practiced by those who were hunting for power, a technique by virtue of wich the world as we know it was made to collapse.
11
THE MOOD OF A WARRIOR
To seek the perfection of the warrior'spirit is the only task worthy of our manhood...You feel like a leaf at the mercyof the wind, don't you?
The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior. It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so,beleiving that someone is alwais doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less to a warrior.
Self-pity doesn't jibe with power. The mood of a warrior calls for control over himself and at the same time it calls for abandoning himself.
-How can that be? How can he control and abandon himself at the same time?
It is a difficult technique.
I'm going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice.
First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands
Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in the beginning don't look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on, you may enlarge the scope untill you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift, and you feel you are losing control go back to your hands.
When you feel you can gaze at things indefinitely you will be ready for a new technique. I'm going to teach you this new technique now but I expect you to put it to use only when you are ready.
The next step in setting up dreaming is to learn to travel. The same way you have learned to look at your hands you can will yourself to move, to go places. First you have to establish a place you want to go to. Pick a well-known spot- perhaps your school, or a park, a friend's house- then, will yourself to go there.
This technique is very difficult. You must perform two tasks: You must will yourself to go to the specific locale; and then, when you have mastered that technique, you have to learn to control the exact time of your traveling.
One needs the mood of a warrior for every single act. Otherwise one becomes destorted and ugly. There is no power in a life that lacks this mood. Look at yourself. Everything offends and upsets you.You whine and complain and feel that everyone is making you dance to their tune. You are a leaf at the mercy of the wind. There is no power in your life. What an ugly feeling that must be!
A warrior, on the other hand, is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. But once his calculates are over, he acts. He lets go.That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions.
A warrior could be injured but not offended.
The mood of a warrior is not so far-fetched for yours or anybody's world. You need it in order to cut through all the guff.
12
A BATTLE OF POWER
Power is a very peculiar affair.It is impossible to pin it down and say what it really is. It is a feeling that one has about certain things. Power is personal. It belongs to oneself alone. My benefactor, for instance, could make aperson mortally ill by merely looking at him.Women would wane away after he had set eyes on them. Yet he didn't make people sick all the time but only when his personal power was involved.
-"How did he choose who to make sick?"
I don't know that. He didn't know it himself. Power is like that. It commands you and yet it obeys you.
A hunter of power entraps it and then stores it away as his personal finding.Thus, personal power grows, and you may have the case of a warrior who has so much personal power that he becomes a man of knowlege.
-"How does one store apower, don Juan?"
That again is another feeling. It depends on what kind of a person the warrior is. My benefactor was a man of violent nature. He stored power through that feeling. Everything he did was strong and direct. He left me a memory of something crushing through things. And everything that happened to him took place in that manner.
What happened to you last night was neither a joke nor a prank. You had an encounter with power. The fog, the darkness, the lighting, the thunder and the rain were all part of a great battle of power. You had the luck of a fool. A warrior would give anything to have such a buttle.
- My argument was that the whole event could not be a buttle of power because it had not been real...
- And what is real?
- This, what we're looking at is real,-I said, pointing to the surroundings.
- But so was the bridge you saw last night, and so was the forest and everything else.
- But if they were real where are they now?
They are here. If you had enough power you could call them back. Right now you cannot do that because you think it is very helpful to keep on doubting and nagging. It isn't, my friend. It isn't. There are worlds upon worlds, right here in front of us. And they are nothing to laugh at. Last night if I hadn't grabbed your arm you would have walked on that bridge whether you wanted to or not.
... That is the nature of power. As I told you before, it commands you and yet it is at your command. Last night ,for instance, the power would have forced you to walk across the bridge and then it would have been at your command to sustain you while you were walking. I stopped you because I know you don't have the means to use power, without power the bridge would have collapsed.
- Did you see the bridge yourself, don Juan?
- No, I just saw power.
...But what happened last night was only the beginnig, a skirmish. The real battle will take place when you cross that bridge. What's on the other side? Only you will know that.And only you will know what's at the end of that trail through the forest. But all that is something that may or may not happen to you. In order to journey through those unknown trails and bridges one must have enough power of one's own.
- What happens if one doesn't have enough power?
-Death is alwais waiting, and when the warrior's power wanes death simply taps him. Thus, to venture into the unknown without any power is stupid. One will only find death.
Don't tax yourself trying to figure it out. The world is a mystery. This, what you're looking at, is not all there is to it.There is much more to the world, so much more, in fact, that it is endless. So when you're trying to figure it out, all you're really doing is trying to make the world familiar. You and I are right here, in the world that you call real, simply because we both know it. You don't know the world of power, therefore you cannot make it into a familiar scene.
- But why should I want power, don Juan?
- You can't think of a reason now. However, if you would store enough power, the power itself will find you a good reason. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?
-Why did you want power yourself, don Juan?
-I'm like you. I didn't want it. I couldn't find a reason to have it. I have all the doubts that you have and never followed the instructions I was given, or I never thought I did ; yet in spite of my stupidity I stored enough power, and one day my personal power made the world collapse.
- But why would anyone wish to stop the world?
-Nobody does, that's the point. It just happens. And once you know what it is like to stop the world you realize there is a reason for it. You see, one of the arts of the warrior is to collapse the world for a specific reason and then restore it again in order to keep on living.
13
A WARRIOR'S LAST STAND
...This is the place where you will die.
This is the site of your last stand. You will die here no matter where you are. Every warrior has a place to die. A place of his predilection which is soaked with unforgettable memories, where powerful events left their mark, a place where he has witnessed marvels, where secrets have been revealed to him, a place where he has stored his personal power.
A warrior has the obligation to go back to that place of his predilection every time he taps power in order to store it there. He either goes there by means of walking or by means of dreaming.
And finally, one day when his time on earth is up and he feels the tap of his death on his shoulder, his spirit , which is always ready, flies to the place of his predilection and there the warrior dances to his death.
Every warrior has a specific form, a specific posture of power, which he develops throughout his life. It is a sort of dance. A movement that he does under the influence of his personal power.
If a dying warrior has limited power, his dance is short; if his power is grandiose, his dance is magnificent. But regardless of whether his power is small or magnificent, death must stop to witness his last stand on earth. Death cannot overtake the warrior who is recounting the toil of his life for the last time untill he has finished his dance.
So, properly speaking, the posture, the form of warrior, is the story of his life, a dance that grows as he grows in personal power.
-Does death really stop to see a warrior dance?
A warrior is only a man. A humble man. He cannot change the designs of his death. But his impeccable spirit, which has stored power after stupendous hardships, can certainly hold his death for a moment, a moment long enough to let him rejoice for the last time in recalling his power. We may say that that is a gesture which death has with those who have an impeccable spirit.
...Dying is a monumental affair. It is more than kicking your legs and becoming stiff.
-Will I too dance to my death, don Juan?
Certainly. You are hunting personal power even though you don't live like a warrior jet. Today the sun gave you an omen.Your best production in your life's work will be done towards the end of the day. Obviously you don't like the youthful brilliancy of early light. Journeying in the morning doesn't appeal to you. But your cup of tea is the dying sun, old yellowish, and mellow. You don't like the heat, you like the glow.
And thus you will dance to your death here, on this hilltop, at the end of the day. And in your last dance you will tell of your struggle, of the battles you have won and of those you have lost; you will tell of your joys and bewilderments upon encountering personal power.Your dance will tell about the secrets and about the marvels you have stored. And your death will sit here and watch you.
The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness.
14
THE GATE OF POWER
- My own idea was that culture determined the way in wich one would envision death.
- It doesn't matter how one was brought up,- he said.-What determines the way one does anything is personal power. A man is only the sum of his personal power, and that sum determineshow he lives and how he dies.
- What is personal power?
- Personal power is a feeling. Something like being lucky. Or one may call it a mood. Personal power is something that one acquires regardless of one's origin.
Power does not belong to anyone. Some of us may gather it and then it could be given directly to someone else. You see, the key to stored power is that it can be used only to help someone else store power.
Trust your personal power. That's all one has in this whole mysterious world.
A warrior acted as if he knew what he was douing, when in effect he knew nothing. A warrior is impeccable when he trusts his personal power regardless of whether it is small or enormous.
Power has the peculiarity of being unnoticeable when it is being stored.
The reason you keep on coming to see me is very simple; every time you have seen me your body has learned certain things, even against your desire. And finally your body now needs to come back to me to learn more. Let's say that your body knows that it is going to die, even though you never think about it...For example, your body needs fright. It likes it. Your body needs the darkness and the wind. Your body now knows the gait of power and can't wait to try it. So let's say then that your body returns to see me because I am its friend.
15
NOT-DOING
...Well-being was a condition one had to groom, a condition one had to become acquainted with in order to seek it.
You don't know what well-being is, because you have never experienced it. ...He said that the only thing I knew how to seek was a sense of disorientation, ill-being, and confusion.
The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Doing is what makes that rock a rock and that bush a bush. Doing is what makes you yourself and me myself.
The world is the world because you know the doing involved in making it so. If you didn't know its doing, the world would be different.
Then he pointed again to the small rock he was holding in front of my eyes.
I say that you are making this into a pebble because you know the doing involved in it. Now, in order to stop the world you must stop doing. In the case of this little rock the first thing which doing does to it is to shrink it to this size. So the proper thing to do, which a warrior does if he wants to stop the world, is to enlarge a little rock, or any other thing, by not-doing.
I urged him to clarify his point. I argued that it was possible for him to explain anything he wanted to if he made an effort.
" Sure I can explain anything," he said, laughing."But could you understand it ?"
Doing makes you separate the pebble from the larger boulder. If you want to learn not- doing, let's say that you have to join them.
The most difficult part about the warrior's way is to realize that the world is a feeling. When one is not-doing, one is feeling the world, and one feels the world through its lines.
Not-doing is very simple but very difficult. It is not a matter of understanding but of mastering it. Seeng, of course, is the final accomplishment of a man of knowledge, and seeing is attained only when one has stopped the world through the technique of not-doing
...The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. To arrive at that being is the not-doing of the self.
16
THE RING OF POWER
-Let's say that when every one of us is born we bring with us a little ring of power. That little ring is almost immediately put to use. So every one of us is alredy hookedfrom birth and our rings of power are joined to everyone else's. In other words, our rings of power are hooked to the doing of the world in order to make the world.
For instance, our rings of power, yours and mine, are hooked right now to the doing in this room. We are making this room. Our rings of power are spinning this room into being at this very moment.
- Wait, wait. This room is here by itself. I am not creating it. I have nothing to do with it.
- You see, every one of us knows the doing of rooms because, in one way or another, we have spent much of our lives in rooms. A man of knowlege, on the other hand, develops another ring of power. I would call it the ring of not-doing, because it is hooked to not-doing. With that ring, therefore, he can spin another world.
There is no way to escape the doing of our world, so what a warrior does is to turn his world into his hunting ground. As a hunter, a warrior knows that the world is made to be used. So he uses every bit of it. A warrior is like a pirate that has no qualms in taking and using anything he wants, except that the warrior doesn't mind or he doesn't feel insulted when he is used and taken himself.
17
A WORTHY OPPONENT
You're rational, all right. And that means you believe that you know a lot about the world, but do you? Do you really? You have only seen the acts of people. Your experiences are limited only to what people have done to you or to others. You know nothing about this mysterious unknown world.
..you know that from now on you must be on the lookout. She will try to tap you on your left shoulder during a moment when you are unaware and weak.
- What should I do?
-It is meaningless to complain. What's important from this point on is the strategy of your life.
Your opponent is on your trail and for the first time in your life you cannot afford to act helter-skelter. This time you will have to learn a totally different doing, the doing of strategy. Think of it this way. If you survive the onslaughts of 'la Catalina' you will have to thank her someday for having forced you to change your doing.
- What a terrible way of putting it! What if I don't survive?
-A warrior never indulges in thoughts like that. When he has to act with his fellow men, a warrior follows the doing of strategy, and in that doing there are no victories or defeats. In that doing there are only actions.
(I asked him what the doing of strategy entailed.)
It entails that one is not at the mercy of people. At that party, for instance, you were a clown, not because it served your purposes to be a clown, but because you placed yourself at the mercy of those people. You never had any control and thus you had to run away from them.
PART TWO
Journey to Ixtlan
18
THE SORCERER'S RING OF POWER
There is something you ought to be aware of by now. I call it the cubic centimeter of chance. All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess to pick it up.
Chance, good luck, personal power, or whatever you may call it, is a peculiar state of affairs. It is like a very small stick that comes out in front of us and invites us to pluck it. Usually we are too busy, or too preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realize that that is our cubic centimeter of luck. A warrior, on the other hand, is always alert and tight and has the spring, the gumption necessary to grab it.
19
STOPPING THE WORLD
Suddenly I felt that my body had been struck and then it became enveloped by something that kindled me. I became aware then that the sun was shining on me. I could vaguely distinguish a distant range of mountains towards the west. The sun was almost over the horizon. I was looking directly into it and then I saw the "lines of the world." I actually perceived the most extraordinary profusion of fluorescent white lines which crisscrossed everything around me. For a moment I thought that I was perhaps experiencing sunlight as it was being refracted by my eyelashes. I blinked and looked again. The lines were constant and were superimposed on or were coming through everything in the surroundings. I turned around and examined an extraordinarily new world. The lines were visible and steady even if I looked away from the sun.
I stayed on the hilltop in a state of ecstasy for what appeared to be an endless time, yet the whole event may have lasted only a few minutes, perhaps only as long as the sun shone before it reached the horizon, but to me it seemed an endless time. I felt something warm and soothing oozing out of the world and out of my own body. I knew I had discovered a secret. It was so simple. I experienced an unknown flood of feelings. Never in my life had I had such a divine euphoria, such peace, such an encompassing grasp, and yet I could not put the discovered secret into words, or even into thoughts, but my body knew it.
"What was the thing that stopped in me?"
What stopped inside you yesterday was what people have been telling you the world is like . You see, people tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have been telling us it is.
Yesterday the world became as sorcerers tell you it is. In that world coyotes talk and so do deer, as I once told you, and so do rattlesnakes and trees and all other living beings. But what I want you to learn is seeing. Perhaps you know now that seeing happens only when one sneaks between the worlds, the world of ordinary people and the world of sorcerers. You are now smack in the middle point between the two.
-Power plants are only an aid. The real thing is when the body realizes that it can see. Only then is one capable of knowing that the world we look at every day is only a description. My intent has been to show you that. Unfortunately you have very little time left before the alley tackles you.
-Does the ally have to tackle me?
-There is no way to avoid it. In order to see one must learn the way sorcerers look at the world and thus the ally has to be summoned, and once that is done it comes.
- Couldn't you have taught me to see without summoning the ally?
- No. In order to see one must learn to look at the world in some other fashion, and the only other fashion I know is the way of a sorcerer.
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Re: faith
Sat, May 17, 2008 - 12:34 PMwell, this is a thing to think about.
i can dig deeper for ten pages all by myself. that may shoot myself in the foot AND waste my time by overwhelming people or giving them
the idea that i mean to go solo.
So what should i do?
Things reverse from my leadership to yours. The ball is in your court now, not mine.
the problem is, do you get the game or must i play alone still to demonstrate it?
This is complicated.
I have my own good answers for many of these issues. But merely standing on a soapbox doesn't make a great invitation to chat.
So heres me, with a shot in the arm which is a dead end if more people can't embrace this turn and run with it.
Heres one conversation which can mean almost nothing and fade into history, or, which can start the revolution if you will let it.
well, so what can i say? Here i am, talking to myself. I get used it its most of what i end up doing. thoughts drift to what i could do.
I could explore the good and bad in both platforms. I could run google searches to link to more info per plank. I could more fully introduce
other peoples ideas, such as kucinich, gravel, ron paul, ralph nader, and etc.
I could go to yahoo and post questions to their q and a. not that they ever give good answers to high order questions.
I could i could could but what should i do to be sincere here?
how can i serve you all in making this real?
tribes.tribe.net/obamaknig...5e8e81850a
tribes.tribe.net/obamaknig...252709e72a
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