Exploration Into God, Tape #2 Air Copy

I think there's no question to raise about relation of pantheism in eastern religions, the kind of thing that I was trying to say. I would venture to get your reaction, for instance, the kind of position I was trying to articulate. Whether in the pan, it speaks to you where you would want to differentiate yourself from it, where you would see if there indeed is a difference between what I was saying, was pantheism and what I was trying to distinguish from that as panentism. I mean, is any of this ring in a bell? I think the distinctions are a little difficult for me because I'm not sure they were talking about the same thing using the word pantheism and panentism. The best thing I could say is that to try to make a concept in terms of western theology of this identity in our terms between these self-capitalist and god is an impossible reduction.

Yes, I mean, I agree in terms of traditional western theology. This is impossible without saying the self is god. And to that extent, the holistic projection is completely different from anything that you work with in the East. Now, is there any bridge here, is there any means of dialogue? Without necessarily saying we agree, I mean, this is quite a secondary question, whether in fact one can get sufficiently on terms to be able to have common discourse. I think round of being is as close as we have gotten to a common term. I wonder whether I suggest a possible bridge, which for me is being very helpful, and that would be a bridge between the East and the West and the West.

I think Bulba's category is what I, and thou, in a way that us in the West is an attempt to get somewhere near what we mean by the path of the other self. Because Bulba would say the eye of the eye of our relation is not the same eye as the eye of the eye of its relation. And in a way, although we don't live in a dualistic world, we live in what Bulba would call a two-fold world in that we are related to it in these two ways. And what we are concerned to do is to find this identity of the self, the eye of the relation to thou. When we project this into categories of dogmen, we are then already in the category of the eye of its world.

And this is where the confusion arises and they started this discussion talking about good and evil. Well, already you are made of projection, evil, whereas in point of fact you have this reality, good evil. You can't have one without the other, because there is no way about the ending of one without the other. It's not a question of finding God either in the good or in the evil, but not the response of the eye to thou through the good or evil. And I would say, for example, the centrality that I can call this a price for me is precisely a search for this sort of identity. I am not interested in Christ as an individual, this means nothing to me. Someone who has existed before or time or is hanging up my shoulder watching anything I do. It's not the identity of the individual that convicts me.

But this eye in relation, or Jesus' language, about I and the father are one, I think it's to be seen in this sort of category, it's the eye relation who is speaking, and I may be on wrong, but when I read the literature of the East, this sort of rings a bell for me, it's this eye that they are talking about and then talking about the soul. I definitely think that this is a sort of possible bridge or way into the web. Whether they do or not or read it, that's a very significant statement. And I pick up the eye of the phrase a second and say, might there not be a difference in the fact that we have a hyphen in here? You see, we say eye, hyphen, thou. Now, would the hyphen exist in the Eastern religious experience? Because this is still, please suppose, the kind of dualism that is the eye in relation to something other, right? I just wonder if this is in the area of sharpening.

That's a good one, the hyphen ultimately doesn't exist. The oriental asks, he starts with a question, who am I? Who is this eye? And he keeps pursuing that as the ground or the framework in which he is to arrive at his realization of God. Ultimately, all sense of eye disappears and merges through experience, and only God is left. Now, this, I think, is the point ultimately in which I want to put the difference, because I mean, I think one of the reasons why Bubas always spoken to me is ultimately he is still seeing the final state in terms of communion rather than union. That, I mean, he rarely is, what relationship means for him when he says in the beginning is relationship. Is this relatedness with the hyphen, this is where thou, which to him is fundamental and irreducible. And I think to me it's irreducible, and for all expressions of identity and identification which I can go a long way with,

I am not really happy, finally, about a sort of complete absorption, but I think of the individual. Right, I think this is precisely the point here. So let me ask this question. The eye doesn't disappear really quite, because take yourself, for example, you decided to come here to this meeting, it was on your date book, you got here, you're here, and you're not the same as the gentleman next to you, and you're not the same as me. But I mean, there isn't eye operating here. Still, and I would think without raising the question to agree of your own progress and enlightenment, but let's just say at any point, there still would be this person whom we recognize moving about among us as an eye, or as something that is not just part of the wallpaper. Right? I mean, I mean, I mean. So are they both real, or which one is real? The question that we have to ask.

I mean, both you, or both you, and they all, you and they all. We have been mystics, Ronald Krishna, the 19th century mystic, and Trier, I've been to the 20th century mystic who claim that in their own experience, they went, they experienced both of these states of consciousness, one the complete virginity of the void, the one of returning to the level of interaction, but still within the field of the one. Ronald Krishna used the analogy that when he go into a trance, was the salt doll that walked to the edge of the ocean and dissolved into the ocean. And one state, he was in this trance state for about six months, but he did come back. He was force fed, he was literally force fed by his disciples to keep his life. In turn, then he went into a period of calling for his disciples and for followers because he wanted to share all those. And so you could say that he had lived in both states of consciousness. This discussion on selfhood and being was also talked about in context of good and evil.

And one of the obvious differences between East and the West is the difference between being and becoming. And I was wondering, Bishop Robinson talked about evil in the sense of separation at the close of the last session. And it seems to me that separation, basically in Christianity too, has been the definition of evil. Separation is evil. Augustine's talk about evil as the absence of being so forth. If you can talk about selfhood and evil and being apart from any kind of ontology, it seems to me that we're forced in the West to deal with these categories of selfhood and evil in ontological terms. And we can't escape from this. Whereas in the East, they seem to be able to deal with this more in terms of the category of becoming and are free from this ontological overlay of description of what being is,

whereas they can purely describe it in terms of selfhood becoming so forth. Am I making myself clear? Well, I would say that the West is not totally without this category either. I think the growth in grace, I'm using some traditional phrases. The confirmation sentence has the more and more, I think there's this implication of becoming aspect also. I grant that as to the ultimate, it isn't. We tend to say the element is already there. I mean, God is perfect until you come to process philosophers and theologians. Yes, I mean, the people you've been quoting, after all, are all people within the sort of classical ideological tradition of Western theology. And within that tradition, this is how inevitably they express it.

So even within that tradition, what you were saying is evil as separation is after any one strand. I mean, it's once way of seeing even in terms of privation and separation. There's a whole another element which sees it in more dynamic terms of disobedience and so on in terms of history and in terms of historical response and of failure to respond and so on. And I would have thought within the whole total Christian tradition, and particularly within the biblical Old Testament tradition, there's a strong strain of this idea of encounter, of history being taken very satisfactorily, of time being taken of caros and so on, and the becoming element and so far from being alien to the Christian tradition. In fact, it is the Christian tradition much more than the Eastern religions, which really concentrates on history and the significance of history and the movement and goal of history.

And this is the distinctive Christian contribution at this point, and I should add to this problem, and I don't know how far in these kind of circles, people steeped in the red that book I just alluded to of Harvey Cox in the secular city because this to me speaks every bit as much as say the incognito or some of these more mystical things. And I want to have these very family together. I'd like to comment too before we get too far away from it. I have always thought of the results of Eastern Oriental religious and philosophical thought as somewhat world denying or at least different toward the state of the now, and its evils, and the Western, and Western sectors thought as being very much of an atom, as far as evil is concerned, and doing something about it.

But I wonder if we aren't thinking of a roadway recent as dark phenomenon, even in the West here, that may have something to do with industrialization and do other things, because we are perfectly intent for centuries and centuries and centuries of that evil be in the structure of society without any noise at all from the church. I'm just wondering whether we've always been 2,000 years like this, trying to eradicate all the evil in society, or whether this isn't a roadway recent phenomenon with a rise of secularism. I think it's a feature of a post-scientific society that you can at last do something about a good evil, and therefore it is no longer moral and neutral, whether you do it or not. I think it is also true that where it was conceived as possible to do something particularly in the medical field. By and large, I mean this is what we've been a continuing strain in the Christian tradition. I mean the scope may be much more limited, but I do agree that I mean, but the other question of course is why is it that the scientific revolution of the secular revolution in fact occurred in a Christian context, not in an Eastern way?

And this is a subsequent question, and I think it's at this point that the sort of thing that Harvey Cox has got to say is extremely relevant to say that it's no accident these happened in a culture which had this sort of doctrine of creation and so on. And I mean I can't work out this thesis, but there are many who would say that in fact secularization so far from being an enemy of the gospel is in fact a product of the gospel. As is the scientific revolution in which many ways has been seen as great enemy of the Christian faith and so on, but in fact it's because these men had a particular view of creation that in fact this was liberated in this society and not in other societies. I'm not still not sure what this evil stuff is that you're talking about.

Now I could give you some personal advice about thinking of more in a society. Pathological disease, I can use it in this sense, when you talk about evil is there something wafting around like the Holy Spirit, whatever that is, or if you're talking about it as again some polarity of something that hasn't even been defined yet, I don't understand this. If I'm talking to the patient, he says, I just burned down the orphanage, I can try to be understanding and point out that this is a selfish thing to do. And the society does come on this sort of thing, probably as a dick view of some pathology that eventually will not allow me to have the normal way.

The orphanages are limited and soon you'll run out of things to do. I can explain this to him and it makes sense to him and I can help him analyze why he likes to burn down orphanages, how we can find a substitute, maybe churches, something like that. Something more sexually acceptable. I think this letter is good that you don't hold it against him. You're not judgmental and we have grown less judgmental, not through the church so much, which trains people to be more judgmental and secularists are people, but through psychological sciences. So thus we can affirm the same fall, I judge no man, not even myself, even my analyst doesn't know me well enough. I don't know myself out of all my motives, but we don't judge him, but you do judge the behavior that you as undesirable.

You say, this is not a good thing, this is a bad thing. I don't say bad, I say it's not a good warning. Well, no, but I mean all these kind of kids and things, I mean this is too bad. I mean the event, the event is a bad thing. No, the man isn't necessarily to be judged as a bad man. But striking the match isn't necessarily bad, it's stupid and maybe egocentric, diseased, but striking the match and starting in conflagration is not necessarily bad. Charred bodies is bad. But not the action. And he doesn't come out and ask me to forgive the charred bodies. To analyze the charred bodies, he wants me either as a priest to forgive the action or as a psychologist to analyze and rectify the action. And I can't put the action alongside this evil stuff. Oh, here's Jim, without trying to analyze why we, we can now exempt our British guests, why we did this, but the fact is it's a bad result, it's a bad show. I mean people get hurt, is there anything wrong in saying that's evil?

But there are two shingh surely here to getting mixed up in the sense they are mixed up and the problem of evil and the problem of suffering are always intertwined. I mean on the one hand you can say yes Hiroshima is ghastly, I mean this is a poorly problem of human pain and suffering and disease and all the rest of it. And that is in the problem of suffering, it may be caused by evil motives, but I would want to get out of the problem of evil, I think I'm going to go back to constatement that ultimately the only good thing is the good will and evil thing is the evil will. And I would have thought that however much you may bring in all kinds of psychological insights is to why this chap has done this. For me I cannot finally get away from the categories of good and evil in action. At least I can't for myself because I know I'm responsible, I mean all sorts of things may explain why I do this, but I do think the good will and evil will do remain as valid concepts as they do for me.

I mean I do believe in this in myself, I mean whatever may be true of other people. The fellow talking to you, this arsonist or pyrameniac or something, whatever he is, he may not have been able to act other than compulsively. There are, there is a limited area of freedom within most people that are not neurotic as psychotic too extremely, isn't I mean I've it's a firm, a limited freedom. And therefore responsibility, therefore the possibility of good and evil will. But I think we would make the distinction with sharper if we took one more example and then I see the gentleman right back there and that is, let's take something where good and evil will of persons as an involved. Cancer is a good example, nobody wills it.

Effect every most people will it away if they could, but there it is. And then I would say this is a bad thing. Therefore we go to work scientifically. Don't be so sure that cancer is a bad thing. No, no, no, but it's not related to bad will or who will. We're not so sure, cancer, that's right. Alright, let's take another one. That is a problem of psychosomatic medicine here and of other people's will and all as well as the person about I know. Let's take the earthquake in Chile that swallows up a third of the city. Now this one is not exactly psychosomatic in its potential. What about that? I mean I think there's something we just, we would have to say, is an evil thing. Look, if you're a Roman Catholic as I used to it, you can make a little transgression and it may have been a little teeny thing. But according to your priest and your church this is evil.

Now this was probably, at least the way I was raised Catholic, often it was a little thing where I really did and did have free will. Whether they say drink water before communion, which one I would give was a sin. I think I did have free will to do this. So, maybe according to your hypothesis, we could attach evil to this. This is evil or unequal because I did have free will. It's a teeny thing. When we're talking about the real evil things, the most of us think of, like murder and rape and burning up people and hurting and destroying people, then we're getting into an area of a psychic that I don't think we do have free will using, for example, a paramaniac. When you get into this depth of destructiveness, I don't think you would have free will. If you did, you wouldn't have any drinkers and creeps. I think that's how it faces out. I think you're right. It's a grave or the thing that's likely there was freedom, the more minor, the more likely there was freedom. There's a gentleman here trying hard. As all this goes on and on, it raises a question in my mind.

A group like this is, as a mass of men are concerned, probably better educated. He uses his most recent word, more sophisticated, perceptive, and sightseep so far. And we go on and on in these very increasingly fine areas. But how, for example, everything you wish about would have said about God, how to use the comparative situation when, quote, the good news went out across the hill country of Galilee and throughout the Roman Empire. Very simple man understood it. Now, I've heard the last two days, hear people who aren't particularly simple people, saying to each other, they don't understand this, this, this, and then how, in the quote, to use the horrible phrase, the new theology. Does it break through, if you will, to not only the man in the street, but the child of the man in the street? In other words, this conversation's afternoon gets more and more and more involved and precious. But how in the hell do you obtain a slob with kids, and his kids, and say,

brother, have you heard the good news? Yeah, can we distinguish things a bit? Because I didn't think theology is ever good news. This isn't the, as I see it, theology is definitely trying to construct a logos about theology. And it isn't this that you give to kids. It isn't this necessity that you preach. Though I think that any preaching that is not theologically informed and so on, will very quickly, in fact, introduce bad theology, and assuming it is dealing with people who are beginning to think themselves are articulated at all.

I mean, they are constantly raising theological problems. But it isn't theology that you preach. I mean, it is a faith which you're preaching. It is a relationship. It isn't a life. It is a way of life. It is a new being in Christ, as Paul teleputs it and so on. Now, I mean, what we are doing at this point, seems to me, is trying to think theologize about some of these and try to articulate. And we are, let us face it, doing it in an extremely mixed group. Frankly, too large a group for this kind of thing. I mean, what you really want is about a dozen people sitting down all day. When you got to the wide variety of backgrounds and allergies and isms, as we have here, and this is absolutely splendid, but it's very difficult to get very far, I think, in a group this side, it's just by question and answer, because there are all kinds of things that never really come out at all,

and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest where at six and sevens, as we are, what surprises me is we go as far as we have at all. But, I mean, this is a question of understanding. And this is not only a theological malaise. It is, if we were talking about art or music or politics or anything, we should be in exactly the same state in our modern world, because we have no one's common universe of discourse. And I mean, if one wanted to talk about that picture, for instance. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'm a lucid sort of understandable discourse about that from now, and hope to communicate. Now, that doesn't mean to say that this isn't saying something, but it may or may not be, and it may be saying very different things to different people. In other words, this is, we are engaged in intellectual pursuit here,

which I think probably this understanding process across the barriers, most of us normally talk now in in groups, where we use a common language to get on reasonably happily. And it's a tremendous challenge to thread together in a place like this, which is presumably the whole function of a place like this. This does not in itself reflect, I think, on the power of the Gospel to speak to ordinary people. I wouldn't use this sort of language, if I was preaching. I understand. That is my question. The New Testament is very easy for simple people to understand. That's too much. I know it is. Big daddy makes a world, and he makes all the bad little people, and whatever it's good about it, they want to, and he messed the thing up, he's done drowning him, and they doesn't teach him. Then he says, well, then I'll set him right, and I can kill somebody off, so that people catch on to this rather badly.

And this is what we're stuck with in the church today. But this is not a New Testament. This is a particular college, you have a particular myth, a particular projection, which tries to... This is a story of amorphous than the Bible. An anthropomorphization is an easy thing for people to grasp, and my initial question was, how does the thing, which we all admit is being taught in an unusual circumstance here, but how does the thing that we're talking about, how do the words come out to say it simply? The ordinary people, this is... I can give you a hope, particularly watching the watch, slightly, tomorrow morning session. I've been able to attend, isn't it? What was it? Yeah. It involves Ruth Robinson, who has been trying to do this on a late teenage level, and heard to a manuscript, which I've been able to read part. And I think perhaps more will come out on that from that participation.

I just say there's one answer to this. I mean, I think we are dealing with two levels here. What do you say that has the same ring of good news and communicability to people generally represent a real problem? The other thing, though, I think the obvious misunderstanding of what words are attributed to Jesus, which the New Testament itself reflects right in the body of it, where his own followers seem remarkably stupid in digging this, and certainly of the early church and the confusion from the beginning would not suggest that it did get across terribly simply. I think the mythology of it, or one's projection of it, that you very quickly summarize. It's prevailing character in the Christian scene,

is illustrated by an article in Look magazine, an earlier issue, or rather, in US News and World Report, excuse me, which Billy Graham's that's everybody's straight. He depends the Christian cause against God is dead, and it's God is alive by Billy Graham. And in this rather long piece, he does explain the whole Christian saga, that is the salvation story. Very much as you put it. In fact, someone less sophisticated than you put it in that quick summary. And says this is what it is, and this is fine. And when you get through reading that, you wish God were dead if he isn't. I mean, I mean, Billy Graham's God is whole thing. It really, and yet it is a very typical strain, there's no question. And that does seem to get a girlfriend, there's simply to people, but it's so wrong. And the question is how something more right or less wrong can be gotten across. Can I just for one other thing, that this mythology is your speaking of? Indeed, I mean, it was tremendously successful and powerful,

because it spoke to the imagination, just as the devil did in the Middle Ages, my word. I mean, it was tremendously real. And there was no nonsense and so on. And fine, I mean, as long as this, as long as it's Christian, basically to begin with, and what it's trying to communicate is Christian. I mean, one of the trouble is it's so quickly become sub-Christian. But there's nothing whatever wrong with this mythology. If it does this, the trouble is that I think for most people today, it tends to make remote and incredible, as I was saying. Now, this is not in my judgment, necessarily, to condemn the mythology or the thread, I don't say it's absolutely useless. On the contrary, I think we can use a great deal of this, as the psychologists themselves do constantly, except they drive most of their mythology from either person, the sort of classical tradition rather than the biblical tradition. But I mean, you can all of us think in pictures, all of us think in myths, all of us attempt to relate to reality to what we can visualize. And let's try and get in a position where we can once more do this

in relation to the biblical myths, so they're no longer the kind of stumbling blocks they are. And I made a remark as I was waking up the other day, which my wife, Sleeperley, said nice, and that I forgot exactly what she did. She must correct me if I got it wrong. But I think the sun is trying to break through. Now, if you think of that, that is a highly mythological picture. Think of the sun trying to break through. And yet, now, this creates no difference at all. I mean, we know exactly what we mean by that language. Now, if we say, I think God is trying to do something, we immediately take this highly literalistic, fundamentalistic way. In such a way, people say, well, I am believe in that sort of being at all. Now, if only we could get over that hump, and be as utterly natural about this language, but we are caught at the moment in Crossfire. That was my question now.

I didn't see the, I mean, this is a question of working through a lot. There's a good idea of clearing the ground to be done. There's a good idea of trying to show what this language really is. And this is inevitable, just as a hundred years ago, a hell of a balloon, a hell of a balloon about Darwin and Adam and Eve and so on. And people thought this business of Adam and Eve, and they tack on their historicity, was absolutely a sort of a tack on the fundamentals of the gospel. Well, now we can recognize all sorts of things about Adam and Eve, which no longer really worry us that much, because we can see what this myth is trying to do and to say. The time, this is extremely destructive, but I mean for our children, they have a much clearer idea of what Adam and Eve is about, how things result of all this. They can absorb all this, they can use it, without being put or fired. Now, there's a good deal of agony all through the process of this. But the fundamental thing when he's trying to communicate, after all, is not a mythology or a theology or any other,

it is the realities of the human situation, which is represented, say, by Adam and Eve and the suppensate, and so on. If we can communicate what the Christian understanding of human relationship and sin and so on is, which this old story is trying to represent, then I think we may be communicating. I would like to ask Bishop Robinson, if God is not there, God is not out there, but is within us, then I would infer there is no consciousness apart from human beings. Then when all human life is finally distinguished on this planet, will not God really be dead? Well, I have never said God is not out there, not out there, not within us. You can't quote me for saying that.

In other words, if you would do, in fact, locate God simply within the human consciousness, then I think, precise to the consequences, follow that you have drawn. I beg your pardon. No, no. I mean, I would simply not want to locate God anywhere. Or I'm saying is the image of a being up there, out there, in which we sort of imagine God there. I mean, this is perfectly valid. We've got to imagine God in some way, if we're going to communicate. And there's nothing wrong with this. My complaint is that, in fact, this today locates him in an area of people's experience, which they no longer really live. These things are on the periphery of their concern. See, comes in, if he comes in at all, only sort of over and above and after everything else. My concern is to identify God with whatever is most real for people. This is Tillik's ultimate concern.

Whatever people really think matters to them, finally and ultimately, this is where God begins to have meaning for them. Now, obviously, a good deal of this is concerned with their own inner. Selfhood, their own inner convictions, their conscience, their ideals, their relationships, and therefore, for a great many people, I think this is the place to stop because God will be met. Not in the earthquake, not in the storm, but in the still, small voice. This is not to say that God isn't in the earthquake or isn't in the storm, but simply to try and sort of where is the point that you can latch onto? Where is the point? Where? Something mysterious, three-letter word, begins to relate to something in people's experience, which is meaningful and real and ultimate for them. And I would certain enough want to identify it by any means,

simply with the inner human consciousness, but the God is to be met in and through. This, as he is to be met in and through all our relationships. I think he transcends all these relationships, and the sense he is not exhausted by them. But what he is, apart from these relationships or outside these relationships, I just don't know. Not that I am confining him to these, or identifying him with these, but simply that except in and through, what Booba would call the finite thou's, by which one is meets and is met by, the claims and the grace that come through the relationships we know, apart from these relationships, I can personally say nothing about God. In the course of this, you've answered a question of mine already, but since the rest of you didn't know what the question was, that he's exhausted,

I think it's an aid to clarification for me to say, that I had been troubled since last evening by your use of transcendence. Obviously not in the old sense, as a removed thing from imminent. You know, you don't mean that, but I was wondering then what you did mean. I think to say that non-affirmation, and with the principle of parsimony as I call it, would also mean leaving room for transcendence, because not to leave room for it is an affirmation. I mean, it's an affirmation saying he is limited to the explicit relationships, the data, the specific instances of religious experience or of order in the world or whatever, but by transcendence really, you're not prepared to say anything about him beyond what can be known experience. No, what I'm not prepared to say isn't beyond either. It really is.

What I think that I want to say by transcendence is not that he is up there, or out there, or is anywhere outside our experience. What I want to say is that to all experience, in all experience, there is, as I understand it, an openness, a dimension here which stops me in a rate, conceiving of this as a closed universe, in the way that I think a humanism or a secularism does, but that in and through all the relationships of life, that comes and meets us, something the wence of which, I mean, we cannot speak in so far as here is something that cuts through or breaks into that transcendence, anything that we can define in purely humanistic categories, or purely naturalistic categories,

but the degree to which it does so transcend, you could not affirm either its limits or extension. No, I'm really going to be gone where we are in terms of an openness. That's right, that's right. That's right, thank you. Yes, I want to say this is that I've been very much moved by the things you've said. In fact, I'm probably, I said, carefully increased, inordinately in agreement. I do have, however, two poetry reservations, and one gigantic one. I have a gigantic one has to do with the things that have been said about theology. I would take rather severe exception to the denigration of theology. So would I, if I may say so, if I don't want to associate myself with that. I accept that distinctly.

I kept silence even from good words while he was speaking. Yeah, it was morning. There's a good theology, there's a bad theology, there's a simple theology, there's a Caucasian theology. I like to define theology as the, you know, for groups like this, as the conceptual embodiment of the experiential awareness of God as he is in himself or as discovered or discerned in the world of the second city. That's great, I buy that too. But I would like to refer to one passage from the New Testament where Christ defines eternal life as, and this is eternal life, that you may know God and, and Jesus Christ, from the outset. Now, I think it's rather important that he explicitly mentions the two. Now, it seems to me you've been concentrating, you know, admirably,

on the incarnational God as embodied in Christ, not only the historical Christ, but in the contemporary Christ, who fills the world today, you know, that's the whole church. That's great people, God, so in the second stage. However, he does say, God and Jesus Christ, so that I would like to make a rather strong plea for the God in himself. Now, it seems to me not too difficult to adhere to Him, particularly because I think the greatest proof is not the, I'm glad to see that you are moving away from the intellectual proofs, the existence of God. I think the only valid proof of the existence of God is the law, endless line of great human beings who have had what an authentic and realizable kind of communion with Him. And in himself, you know, not just as he has caught here and there

in the Holy Spirit of the world, but in solitude, in silence, in the pure act of contemplation. Now, in the discussion thus far, this is my biggest problem, you know, the act of contemplation, the pure act of contemplation. In other words, the acute and highly experiential awareness of God as he is in himself. Now, this has gone down, this has been experienced in the history of the world, and it might have great, the great mystics, not the other balance of spooky people. You know, by the earthy mystics, my favorite term of the genuine kind of Christian, or the genuine kind of human being, isn't earthy mystic. You know, no, you're just being earthy as a little bit of it. You know, you're just being mystical, that's too misty, but you know, the two things together seem to create by Christian humanism, where we're looking to move on. So I'd love to hear you discuss a little bit more the possibility

of a pure act of contemplation, the possibility of contemplating God as he is in himself. Now, of course, this can't be done if God is dead, but I would like to suggest that I could make, I think, in fact, I think I'd done it a few weeks ago in a Protestant church, where I assumed it. At that time, I was quite dealing with it. The man was dead, and I felt that I made as plausible an argument for the death of the man, as the death of God. And then I suggested that we, since man is dead, that we no longer call him man, but maybe this blindy chap or perhaps call him bishop or a slave. I thought, for something like that, but it's not true. That's what we call something. Good God. That's a question. God really is. It is.

Hmm. He's the one who's always on Storkham God. He doesn't want an answer. I think it is more of an answer than a question. And therefore, I think one says I'm in. But I think the experience of God in Sysa, in himself, as you would describe this, is not limited to those who know about him or is it limited to experiences which are accompanied by religious symbols, though it is more often than not accompanied by religious symbols. But there is reality to these specific moments that can be tested by their fruits, too, that in terms of a new freedom, a new confidence,

a new trust, and something out of life now that was a burden. And in, what Bishop Robbins is talking about, think last night, about the general response to the universe which can carry the awareness of its ground. And my only care would be that we don't limit this to those who use the name or who know the name. And I think what you said is an answer to the question itself. I think it stands on its own footing unless you have any doubt there. Yes, I did it. I've got very much to say. This is precisely the point which I take to Bishop Pax's advice and think it's silent. Very well, one should do, because directly one gets to this field of God in himself. It seems to me that I begin to draw out for words. What I was trying to say, I think, in echoing very strongly

your plea for an earthy mysticism, this is what I was talking about by this sort of secular mysticism, a sort of secular sainthood. Something, well, the something to shard eyes concerned with and others, that are rarely concerned with the sort of luminosity of all things to the presence of God in this. For myself, directly I begin to talk about the pure light as opposed to that through which it is reflected. I find that I have nothing I can say, because one has no sort of gristly way to the mill. There's nothing there that one can talk about. And this is, I think, the point where I want to begin to be reticent, not in denial in the slightest, but in a sense that I can only speak of God in so far as he comes through to me through the relationships in which I am involved, and not apart from them.

How would you justify the action of a man who would somewhat like Christ, go running off to the mountain to the desert very frequently, seeking solitude and to be alone with God? I find it difficult to bring this into the incarnation approach that you've been talking about. How would you justify this? Or would you at all? No, indeed, I want to be doing here for one thing. I would have thought that the whole of life is this rhythm between sort of engagement and solitude between involvement and standing back, and that breathing in, breathing out and so on. I mean, all this is basically linked with our whole metabolism, our whole physical existence. And I would have thought that one of the essentials of the spiritual life is precisely this or standing back. So often, I think it has, in fact, been justified to use it by a false theology that the world is evil,

therefore we must go out of it in order to be with God, or that we must withdraw from the relationships of life in order to require, and there to find God is who we don't find in there. This justification of it seems to me to be totally sub-Christian and it's not what I see in the gospels. But the basic rhythm seems to me quite inescapable. And indeed, as I say, what are we doing in a place like this? If we don't come to this base because it gives us something. And indeed, I find even, I want to get out of this room. And if one is to survive anything like this, one has got to have this solitude. As long as I said, this isn't an inesence bond off with what. So often has been the basis of a false asceticism, I think, in the Christian tradition. Actually, I remind you that Bishop Robinson and Ruth Robinson have had a week here before we came

to disturb their solitude, so that he's not just speaking of the few minutes we've had between events and various things to do this first thing. May I mention my fall tree reservation now? Yeah. The fall tree reservation has to do with the subject of projection. And my suspicion is that if you would project personality in God with the pure enough and logical style, you would be able to divest the personality of all the impure and unbecoming aspects of the anthropomorphic form. And then it would be a pure and adequate concept of God as a specter that the problem with thinking of God as a person is simply because we think of Him as a human person,

rather than as a pure, conceptualized person. Then we would just be able to have you read yourself of this. First of all, let me say that it seems to me that one can't get rid of projection. I mean, there's only wrong whatever in this. It's nice, but project with analytic and logical style. Yeah. In a talk about God, there will be some kind of analogical symbolic speech. I think that there are two factors here. One is to see that the what one is trying to say is, in fact, not simply a reflection of one's own anthropomorphic limitations. And, therefore, so per se, unworthy of God, some Christian, however one likes to put it.

And, indeed, a great deal of talk of God obviously has been and is, and we're all doing this. We're all creating God now an image, the whole time. There is this constant purification of symbols of speech, of analogy, of pictures, and so on. There is also, I think, the somewhat different, the bound up problem, of what kind of projection we do use. And these in themselves may be pretty neutral. They're not necessary in themselves of Christian or sub-Christian. But I think that they have a great deal to do with the way in which we do our ordinary thinking. As I said, this whole supernaturalist sort of projection which depends upon a sort of division between, if not three laws in the universe, then there are two, a natural or supernatural. On the other hand, this is, I think, a pretty distinctively western way of thinking.

Now, this is as easy neutral as far as the Christian faith is concerned. And therefore, I mean, one must recognize it as this. And be prepared to discount it. There is also the, as I was making the point earlier, I mean, the many factors in all our thinking, whatever projection we use, which are clearly just representations of our own human limitations and the projections of these into God. And I think there are two slightly different things mixed up here. But I think this is a very profound question. And I mean, I don't wish in the slightest to suggest that personality is not a category in which one can and must think of God. But that I think a great deal of our way of expressing this has been pretty unguarded. Not on the hoe when Theoragians have done it. I think that they're most careful on their best.

But in a great deal of popular preaching and popular hymnology and popular art, and so on, as this is steeped on, then I think that a lot of it is very seriously distorting. Well, what you say over and over again is that theology collapses with a psychologist. If it has anything, any role to play at all, it's a mapping of psychological stakes. Bishop Pikes remarks this morning, to me, said that he was willing to base theology on the fact that he feels nicer when he's being nice to people. And that doesn't seem to me to be fundamental to, I'm sorry, that's reducing it pretty far. But it seems to me that the question about the box book or the question about the contemplation of God and solitude does raise the mystical experience.

And we can maybe use James Criteria of ineffability, of oneness, and of the ensnoledic quality. And also the fact that people who've had this experience and it comes up over and over again, are willing to say everything that's ever been said about God is incomplete, is wrong. And then, given this experience, they come back into Western culture and they use a rather personal notion of God, and they talk about Christ, perhaps, or if they're in the East, they have a more impersonal way of symbolizing it. Now, it seems to me that all the theology can do is to agree or disagree that this is somehow fundamental to what we're going to be talking about in theology, and then start setting up guidelines for when it say an incomplete or a sick or an anthropomorphic or a projected experience and when it's one that carries the authority.

I'll tackle this because, as you recognize, this is an over-simple occasion. I position it for your first day, but I'm all with it. It's very much, and I'm not affirming that what we can discern by psychology of the nature of religious experience and we can discern a good deal. Answer the question of the reality experienced. We're talking about methodology, and that's fine, that's psychology. But the reality itself, I did make the point that no particular projection out of the experience is necessarily authenticated by the fact of the experience, a point that's in John the Cross made rather sophisticatedly way back in the 1700s, where he said for the benefit of junior mystics coming along the route that if you see visions and images, don't think they're necessarily out there,

they may well be protections or out of you. The important thing is not to shape the image takes, but the reality of the experience, which he saw it really as touching the element. But this still doesn't say that which he experiences in the mystical relationship is not the element. I mean, how he pictures all is or what happens to him is a lot to do with the conditioning he brings to it. Now, and therefore this is theology. We're often that broad statement for the end of theology. I simply feel there is much less to it in terms of subject matter and topics than we've thought. I think here is the realm of theology. I think the very thing, Mr. Robinson, and Losing with Great Care, about what we can say, the meaning for him of transcendence, and what I was trying to say this morning, this is theology, of course. So, another thing I would say are not departments

of theology primarily. They are otherwise departmentalized. For example, once one except that you're miles real and tearing that up more specifically, the servant role, then, when validates that selection along the aesthetic line that I'm talking about, I think, in terms of intuitive response, it's a certain kind of truth-hyphen goodness to hyphen courage that you see manifests on all kinds of places that we're having at the end of Jesus. And we're talking now about the life pattern image making, I suppose, really, we call it ethics that close from a meaning you feel is grounded in the ultimate. Unbeheld. And then, when you talk about eternal life, I think we're talking about psychology of personality. I don't regard this as gift from the Supra natural for the elect. I think it's for the nature of persons. Or it isn't. I mean, if it is, it's a psychology of personality. I think it is. That's what it is. I think it's a departmental device.

I think the... what is good for people, if you want to do them good, granted that's your commitment. We need sociology, urban planning, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, all the other specialties to tell us, to guide us. I don't think there's any word from on high in a code ethic that tells us what is the good in this regard. There's where I think we are. So therefore, theology has been too large in umbrella. But when you get right down to the core matter, of course it's theology. May I have a little comeback on this? Because I didn't want to do a little broadside. And as though I do find myself wanting to defend theology a good deal more, I think, than you do. But on this one point, which is one of the things that I wanted to up and question this morning is on this eternal life of business. Now, it doesn't seem to me eternal life is a psychological category, whatever else it is.

Eternal life in the New Testament seems to me essentially a relational reality of being in relation to this eternal ground of one's being in God. It is being related to the love of God as being held in this, as was quoted earlier at the back to know God and Jesus Christ. And this is eternal life. It is essentially a relationship in a certain depth which has begun an experience now, but which is essentially defined by the fact that it is in relation to this ground, this is God. It isn't a psychological thing. As such, nor need it necessarily be defined in purely supernaturalistic terms. And nor need yours, it seems to me, a parody, heaven and hell, almost out of existence. Again, I read a thought that, to me, the definition of heaven,

the definition of hell is the same. It is simply to be with God forever. And for some, this is heaven. For some, this is hell. For most of us, a bit of both. Anyone forever. It's a pretty formidable thing. This, basically, is to find oneself related inescapably to this grander one, being in love. And this is a theological category. Now, there are all sorts of psychological things one can say about the nature of the psyche and the possibility of survival and all the rest of it. But this, to me, is secondary, though fascinating to the basic theological conviction that eternal life is something in relation to this ground which we call God. I don't disagree with that. And therefore, I will make a more careful distinction.

That may not use the word eternal life for the first category, I mean. The question of human personal, conscious, individual, survival forever, which I do believe in is the more plausible of the two alternatives. That is, to me, not a psychological question in the sense that it is an imaginary thing or something that you have to look at and say, why does the person think that way? Is psychology in the sense that it has to do with the nature of human personality? Is a human being so made up that he survives the death of this body or not? Either answer you would give it still is something universal about everybody and not a gift of resurrection to the elect. Now, that I would say, but back, I will say, eternal life, as it's meant in the fourth gospel, particularly, has a right relationship to the ground of being through Jesus Christ

or otherwise, as one has liked from whatever quarter, one has it. But for those who know Jesus Christ, through Jesus Christ, is a theological matter, of course. But since I do believe in individual personal survival, the point at which one will come into some kind of conscious relationship with the ground of one's being could be after death before it or along the road or it can be a gradual unfolding of reality in relationship. That's what I mean by psychology there, that I would not believe in eternal life beyond the grave as a special gift for the few. Unless I would see personal survival of the personality by nature as a plausible hypothesis about all of us. That's what everybody means. There's two things, Jim, that I'm going to tell you. That's awesome. Bishop Robinson and Pike, an open discussion

from Exploration in the God, a residential seminar held at the Eslan Institute, Big Sur, California, will return to Exploration in the God, following Station Identification. We continue now with Exploration in the God, highlights of a residential seminar held May 13 through 15th of the Eslan Institute, Big Sur, California. We hear now the final session of the seminar led by Bishop John Robinson and his wife Ruth. Mrs. Robinson begins. Well, this material that I'm just throwing into the pool this morning, I'm really quite as interested to listen to as I hope you are

because I haven't in fact read it for about three months when I first wrote it. The circumstances are with where that I wrote it, this small book in the form of a birthday letter, to one of my children, my 17-year-old daughter, and it really grew out of her whole series of discussions over the year when she and I have often shared what we called our Saturday evening depressions of the thought of what faced us the next day and what, in Catherine's words, she called the boring services and the crummy sermons. We both of us felt that we shared real deep conviction commitments and wanted to make a response to this, but we knew somehow this wasn't how we wanted to do it. And I was very conscious that for her, as for me,

somehow all we found in the church was failing to meet this sense of commitment and this need for response. And knowing that she shared many of my deep spiritual feelings, I was anxious that she should be given something to hold on to that would might as it were be a growing point, a point from which she could move out to work out for herself how she felt about things before she threw over the whole Christian idea altogether as irrelevant. And so I wrote this and there are three short chapters. The first one was really, in a sense, an introduction to Booba because I thought that she might find the eye thou, sort of second person singular, vocative category,

helpful in trying to distinguish this sense of being related to God, which is destroyed if you try and project it into the third person singular, into the eye it world, and say that all you're trying to respond to in God means that he is this or that he is a supernatural person or there is another world. The second chapter was trying to see how Christ, her idea of Christ could be meaningful in this context. And what in fact we mean by saying that Christ is central. Both she and I have often asked ourselves and in fact I still do, I just really don't know am I a Christian? And I think if I ask this question my answer depends entirely on the context and the people with whom I am talking and who asks me the question because in some context it seems misleading to say yes I am a Christian and in other context

it is obviously misleading to say no I am not. And so this chapter which I want to read to you today which will perhaps sort of spark of some discussion is on the Christ section and then I go on in the third chapter to try and work out this idea of relatedness, I then as in the context of the church and the fellowship of Holy Spirit and in what sense these overlap and in what sense they don't. But for this morning I thought perhaps to concentrate on the section about Christ might spark of some discussion. You have to remember that this was written specifically for her so I may in some instances address her directly as you and you will understand. It is important to be able to discern when the world of vow is in question and when the world of it above all when talking about Christ. For where as God the eternal vow can only be directly encountered in the world of vow.

Jesus because he was a human being belongs like me to both worlds. At no point is it more necessary to have my lenses in focus. This refers to an image which I developed in the first chapter. Sooner or later I am pinned down to the question what think you have Christ? Is he unique, divine, the Son of God, sinless? Did he exist before all time and is he alive with us now? To all these questions a Christian is expected to be able in some sense to answer a wholehearted yes. Hold to Christ and for the rest be totally committed, uncommitted. Leave me rather asking myself am I really a Christian at all? Let us consider first the Christ event as a whole. By this I mean the birth of Jesus on the human scene and his impact on human history. Was this event unique? Here I find myself wondering what it means to describe an event as unique except to say that every event is unique and unrepeatable simply because it has happened.

It is surely not that a divine person is poking his finger into human affairs and making momentous decisions to set things right when they are in a mess. This is to relegate God to the world of it. To infer God from history is to cheapen both God and history and to take neither seriously. Nor can we isolate an event from what went before or what comes after. An event has no hard edges. Some events are momentous because they come upon their hour. The world is as it were ready for them and ceases upon them with recognition. The significance of such an event lies as much in its repercussions as in its immediate historical context. We recently had an example of this on a more trivial level in the honest to God event. In one sense this was simply a man using the opportunity of enforced inactivity to share his thinking with others. Its significance was not that it was new and starting but precisely that it was not. It was recognised as belonging to a great undercurrent of thinking, seething below the surface

and waiting for a channel to open for it. There have been so many who have said this speaks for me. It is in this sense of belonging that Jesus belonged to the age he was born in. He was expected and the world was ready for him. People said not only this man speaks for me too, but this man lives for me. Indeed so close has been the identification that for me has tended to become instead of me and has led to many debased and sickening theories of atonement. In what way then was the world ready for Christ? I am not concerned here with expectations externalised in the racial and ecclesiastical terms of a Messiah but with the underground spiritual consciousness of man itself. Jung in his essay A Psychological Approach to the Trinity suggests that both personally and collectively man comes to the point when he must recognise his own sonship and be able to detach himself from the father in order to stand in reciprocal relation to him.

On the collective spiritual level he has to emerge from the unreflecting completely passive dependence on God and begin to recognise his own sphere of responsibility and response. To put it on its lowest level he must stop believing his neighbour's evil eye has caused his sickness and think in terms of medicine not witch doctors. He must give up thinking that every time it thunders the gods are angry. For it is only when he is freed from this automatic unquestioning dependence that he is able consciously to enter into a direct relationship with God and meet him face to face. This corresponds in boobers terms to an acknowledgement and acceptance of the relationship of eye to vow. Jung suggests that Jesus represents historically and psychologically the point where man is inescapably brought up against this question of his sonship. In the Old Testament God is seen as distant and awesome. His face cannot be seen, he cannot even be named and men may not approach his holy mountain.

In Jesus the question of sonship is brought to a head and resolved. It had to happen in the sense that collectively or personally the issue cannot be avoided. It is interesting at this point to notice how hard we do try to avoid it. Christians still seem to be doing their best to voice the responsibilities of sonship entirely onto Christ. We talk about him bearing the sin of the world, meaning that he took on the whole load himself in order to let us out. He did take on the whole load in the sense that he accepted for himself not only that man is responsible for the state of the world, but that he can change and redeem it by loving it and forgiving it. But we can never say that he took it on instead of us, nor that he did so in order to make it possible for us to take it on. All we can say is that in him, we see the implications of accepting sonship and acknowledge that what holds for him must hold for us. In this context the story of the prodigal son is significant for me.

Though I do not mean to suggest that this particular point I am making was the point of the palibol as recorded in the gospels. This is just a quote in the New Testament Theologians whose hassles might rise. But it seems to me to be of the nature of a palibol that it has a life of its own, not necessarily limited to a particular interpretation. It constantly forces one to stand inside it and listen afresh to what it may be saying. Let me then share with you what it has said to me about sonship and the opportunity of the claims of the father. I have sometimes found myself wondering how long the returned wanderer managed to stick it out without making off again. His motives for coming back were entirely selfish and calculating. He would not have come if there had been any other way out of his economic difficulties. As it was, he was still hoping to be able to sit lightly to the family situation. I will sit off and go to my father, he thought to himself and say to him, Father, I have sinned against God and against you. I am no longer fit to be called your son.

Treat me as one of your paid servants. In other words, he was still hoping to stay on the fringe and not get too closely involved. But no such luck. As soon as he was inside of home, there was the old boy smothering him as usual with love and affection and making such a thing of it all. I can hardly think he enjoyed it any more than his brother did. What a pathetic family tragedy. One recognizes in the old man the irksome opportunity of the widow claiming her rights or the king organizing the party no-one wanted to go to. And in the sun, the shrewdness of the bailiff who knew which side his bread was buttered. This is a parable of sonship declined. Not for me, thank you. Neither brother had any love to offer the old man. The elder knew where his duty lay and the younger was only too glad to let him carry the cam. Some Christians in their turn are relieved to think that Christ carries the cam for art for them. His life, Christ's life on the contrary, is a parable of sonship accepted.

It expresses for us some of the deepest archetypal insights of the human spirit. Hear the conscious awareness of God as thou, meeting man with a direct personal claim, is seen to be openly acknowledged and accepted. Mind and spirit, as it were, join forces. Man's spirit is saved from having to go underground as a sort of resistance movement, and is able instead to work out in the open, giving depth and dimension to his conscious rational existence. This is the event in man's spiritual history, which is pinpointed in the son-father relationship acted out in the life of Jesus. As Jung puts it in his essay, Arlsiter Joe, in this respect, he does, in fact, prove himself a saviour. He preserves mankind from loss of communion with God and from getting lost in mere consciousness and rationality. That would have brought something like a dissociation between consciousness and the unconscious, an unnatural and even pathological condition, a loss of soul such as threatened man

from the beginning of time. Because his companions and followers were aware of this spiritual event as a happening of great moment involving the whole of humanity, the events of his lifetime have absorbed the rub off of its spiritual significance. It is as if the communication lines of the vow world of the relation and the it world of history got crossed, or to put it another way as if the events of the vow world in order to be communicated consciously had to be translated and projected in the time and space scale of the it world, just as a natural landscape is projected onto a map. Perhaps we've just not known how to handle this sudden confrontation with the vow world, this awareness of the vow world in the realm of consciousness. And I've had to accommodate it to the familiar terms of the it world. We've not been able to recognize an entirely different mode of being. And so it is that the unnatural events of Jesus' life have acquired a magical significance,

awareness of the decisive spiritual event of his life as far reaching implications. Associated the incident of his birth with extraordinary occurrences in the material world, spontaneous pregnancies, strange movements of the stars, the opening of the heavens, and choirs of angels. After his death, his immediate friends drawn into this new mode of being joining his life were now joyfully aware of its power released among them and interpreted the inner event in terms of the outward circumstances later the process was reversed. The spiritual event was inferred from the circumstances of the burial and thereby dragged into the it world of doctrine and belief. Now if it were proved beyond doubt that Jesus will the illegitimate child of a human father or his bones were unmistakably identified in a Palestinian grave, this would make no difference to my commitment in Christ. In fact, it would clear out of the way many misconceptions and make the real claim

on my own life less easy to escape. Such evidence is unlikely at the distance of two thousand years but why be afraid to allow the possibility or even the probability who is more likely than an illegitimate child wondering who his real father was? God is your real father dear. To be passionately concerned with the father's son relationship especially if he is more than ordinarily intuitive and intellectually precocious. No doubt he gave his mother much to ponder in her heart but whatever the circumstantial facts the historicity of the Christian gospel for me lies deeper than that. But this is not to answer no to the question do you believe in incarnation or resurrection? The theme of the son of the gods being born to a mortal woman and of his miraculous rebirth is one that recurs many times in many cultures. It is one of those threads of archetypal knowledge I don't mean intellectual knowledge or perceptiveness which link us to the source of all our being being.

We may in one sense become of age but in another we are still in the womb dependent on the umbilical chord that safeguards our full and potential humanity. Perceptions of incarnation and resurrection are threads in that chord and represent real factors in our existence. We can no longer however limit these concepts to external events and revisit these events may be for us as symbols. It always seems to me that the Roman Catholic Church is in this regard in a much stronger position than the other churches who have compromised and distinguished between what is historical and what is not. There is really no difference in kind between the dogmas of the immaculate conception and assumption of Mary and the dogmas of the virgin birth and ascension of Christ. We shall be left holding the baby and trying to explain a historical virgin birth. We may say then to sum up thus far that the uniqueness of the historical event of Jesus is that there is here acted out

in terms of a human existence a spiritual event in the unconscious being of mankind namely the bringing to consciousness of man's relation to his eternal vow. But what are the man himself this particular man Jesus? How does uniqueness apply to him? I find it easier to start by asking how he is unique or it any rate special for me. He is special for me as he takes his stand within relation in Booba's sense. My commitment is to the eye of the sun as he meets the vow of the father for this is where I too would stand. But Booba has shown us that the eye of I thou is different from the eye of I it so it is not to the individual the man called Jesus of Nazareth that I am committed. Such a man is unknown to me. It is true that a picture of him has been built up in my mind from various sources. But this is largely imaginary and unverifiable. I can never know for myself

what he was like as a person nor am I really concerned to know apart from natural curiosity. I have no more to do with an individual in my life than he with me. Nor am I committed to an extension of this individual backwards or forwards in time. I have ever as someone who has always existed or as a ghostly figure hovering at my back watching my every move. Theologians have sometimes tried to distinguish between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. But this is a false distinction for me. My commitment is to the eye of Jesus claimed by and responding to caught up within the relation in which he takes his stand. He is for me the man who most clearly puts in focus the two-fold world in which I live. It is he who shows most dynamically the impact of the one world, the eye-their world, upon the other, the world of it. Revealing at once their interdependence and their incompatibility. Here I shudder before the awful implications of standing truly in relation

as eye to thou in every encounter of my life. I should like to consider by where illustration a conversation recorded in the fourth gospel chapter 8 between Jesus and the Pharisees in Jerusalem. Jesus begins by saying, I am the light of the world. No follower of mine shall wonder in the dark, he shall have the light of life. Now if we understand this eye to be spoken as it were with the whole being by the eye of Jesus responding to his thou and not by the eye of self-consciousness separation and individuality, the whole conversation indeed takes on a new light. What Jesus is saying can then be translated something like this. The eye of the whole being related to its thou is the whole meaning of existence. No one who follows me and takes his stand in this relation, I thou will be in despair or without purpose. His whole life will light up with meaning. This theme is very close to the heart of the fourth gospel

and is indeed the note on which it opens. When all things began the word, which we may say, I thou, already was, the word dwelt with God and what God was the word was. That is to say the component parts of I thou can never be split when the eye of relation is spoken, the whole relation I thou is involved or to put it another way, when the father R1. The word then was with God at the beginning and through him all things came to be. No single thing was created without him. That is, there is nothing outside the scope of I thou. Thouness is implicit as it were in the whole of life. All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of men. As Booba would say, all real living is meeting. Jesus on in the dark and the darkness has never quenched it. That is, the world of relation can never be absorbed or understood in terms of the world of it.

In their conversation, Jesus and the Pharisees are speaking on two entirely different levels. Jesus speaks the eye of I thou and is hereless imply the eye of I it. That is, the individual standing before them. Jesus is in fact attempting to communicate across the frontier of language. It leads to utter confusion. The word I is the true shibboleth of mankind, says Booba, as in the original story of the shibboleth in Judges 12, it shows a man up for what he really is. They complain that his witness is invalid because he is pleading his own cause. But Jesus claims it is valid, even though he is speaking about himself. Because I know where I come from and where I am going. That is, he understands the relation in which he stands when he speaks this eye. The Pharisees ask him, where is your father? His answer is, you neither know me nor my father. If you knew me, you would know my father as well.

That is, if you were aware that it is the I of I thou who speaks, you would recognize the thou by whom I am claimed. Later he says, I am revealing in words what I saw in my father's presence. I, trying to communicate in words what is beyond language and can only be known in relation. And you are revealing in action what you learned from your father. That is, showing by the sort of people you are, the cash value of the doctrines you have inherited. Why do you not understand my language? It is because my revelation is beyond your grasp. Of course it is. The world of relation can never be possessed it can never be neatly buttoned up in the mind, but only known by the whole being standing within it. Any language about it is never more than a hint. Jesus then goes on to say, it is the father who glorifies me, he of whom you say he is our God. That is, the object of your belief. Though you do not know him as your thou.

Your father Abraham was overjoyed to see my day. He saw it and was glad. Abraham, that is, knew what it was to be claimed by thou and to answer as the eye within relation. This then is the context of the much debated in very truth I tell you before Abraham was born. I am. The Pharisees can only understand him to be speaking the eye of the individual and to be asserting the precedence of this eye. The point, however, is not that Jesus existed before Abraham did, but that the eye within I thou is always the primary response of man to the thou who claims him. This is true both of the emerging human race and the growing personality. What precisely Jesus consciously meant in the intellectual sense when he spoke these words, or what the writer of the fourth gospel understood in putting them on his lips is one factor but not the only one to be considered. For when a man is able to speak directly from his inner being, with archetypal intuition of our common destiny,

he knows that the surface of his man is also true of a painter in relation to his art. But the Pharisees listening to these words take aim to destroy this man, this individual standing before them, by hurling in his teeth the sharp lifeless arguments of theological dogmatism. Such weapons, however, are useless when it is the eye of relation under attack. Of this eye they are simply not aware in the pregnant words with which the chapter ends. They picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus was not to be seen. This also is the light in which we can understand the parables if we have ears to hear. It is the nature of a parable, a tale or a fairy story to have meaning on many different levels. It is a question of where the hearer takes his stand. The sleeping beauty means something very different for the child and the psychiatrist. The fascination the story holds for both and recurrence of the theme is an indication that we are all more deeply involved in the story than we know.

The Zen and Sufi masters who teach by means of tales do not involve themselves in interpretation. The meaning can only be known by the pupil himself as he puts himself in the way of it. So it is with the New Testament stories told by Jesus, who, he who was ears to hear, let him hear. The eye who is claimed by thou will hear differently from the eye who is struggling my brains to understand the illusions. Consider some of the parables about the kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is not to be taken as another world in the sense of a life after this one or separate from this one, but as another mode of being in which I take my stand in relation. The world which appears to you in this way says Booba is unreliable, for it takes on a continually new appearance, a grain of mustard, you cannot hold it to its word. And indeed, how often the parables seem to be taking a rise out of us. The master actually commending the unjust steward, the man condemned for not having a wedding garment.

They are askable old judge, settling a case not from any sense of right but simply to get a bit of peace. St. Luke found them a bit too uncomfortable at times and took to adding a few tamely pious words of explanation to tone them down. But opportunity is a characteristic of the world of thou. Go out onto the highways and along the hedgers and make them come in. It comes even when it is not summoned like the thief in the night, and vanishes even when it is tightly held, like the buried talent. This then is the context in which the New Testament gospel speaks to me in Christ as good news. It is also the context in which I understand the Christ that dwell within me. It is not that I am invaded by an invisible presence as an extension of Christ's human personality, who is thinking my thoughts or acting as my conscience. Rather is it that I am called by the vow who claimed him to speak the eye that he spoke and to speak this eye with my whole being? This is my beloved son, claims this eye from the depths

of my being and calls me into living sonship. But just as the significance of the spiritual event of Jesus Christ has rubbed off onto the external presence of his life. So is the spiritual significance of his eye in relation, rubbed off onto his individual personality. His oneness with the father, his claim to be sent by the father, has been projected onto a flat map of divinity for all to observe, and translated into a lifeless schedule of sinlessness for all to admire. The result is that his true humanity has been missed. He has become a semi-magical family belonging to this world, but lent to it for a season. Such a man lays no claim upon me, nor do I feel one. His true humanity, the humanity to which we are all called, lay in his unbounded readiness to speak the eye of relation, to spawn to his vow in all the daily encounters of his life, even when it meant death. He said yes to life

with his whole being, accepting and forgiving the world to be healing and renewing it wherever the word was spoken. Such a man does claim me. I take my stand alongside him not in belief but in trust. I cannot say I believe in a personal being called God. Nor can I say I believe that Jesus was the son of this God. These statements belong to the world of it where God and Christ remain objects of my belief. But in any encounter of my life personal or social, artistic, important or trivial, I know I am required to take my stand in trust, wholly committed, holding nothing back, ready to meet and be met by a hundred daily vows and through them to encounter the eternal, unqualified vow of my life that hounds me down the arches of the years. There is no proof that this is the meaning purpose and destiny of life. I simply live within this trust and no other.

No, it's going to be. Well, I call the whole book 17 Come Sunday because it's a quotation from an English folk song and it's a sort of symbolic title because what I'm trying to provide for a 17-year-old among others is some capital which comes Sunday will give her some spiritual capital which comes Sunday will give her something to go on. In terms of knowing that we are together whole selves in any moment to encounter this we're even supposed to look at what we do with every moment that we have in which we can't give our whole selves

because we're not whole selves so frequently. It sounds good in terms of what I know I'm supposed to do now but having cut this off from so much of what used to be Christian used to need redemption what do we do? How do we get redeemed or something in terms of becoming involved and looking for the character? Well, obviously because we are human beings our world is as Booba would say twofold. Booba said that a man cannot live without I is but he who lives in this realm alone is not human as it were I described it in the first chapter rather like those stereoscopic spectacles that you were you know the red and the green pictures without the spectacles

just aren't in focus that the two worlds the thou world and the it world are all part of the whole of life that we live in and obviously I mean in fact if we are conscious by definition we're not sort of in the world of relation but I mean what we are committed to I think is a sort of openness and awareness of readiness almost you might call a sort of spiritual relaxation so that all our spiritual muscles aren't sort of tensed up and sort of saying what the thou is and claimed by thou in the terms of any thou that it may come to us in any dealing in our life no because I think if we at least not for me it isn't. I mean obviously sometimes one has decisions and choices one way and one

recognizes that consciously that there is a claim and then one consciously lays one self open to it but often one is only conscious of these claims in retrospect it is only afterwards but one recognizes now there was something in this encounter you know I really was involved with this I didn't recognize it at the time because I was within the relationship and therefore there was nothing of me standing outside to say oh look this is me in relationship but afterwards one is intellectual consciousness in the world of which one can often look back say yes there was something there and I was involved and committed way back yeah we are not understanding Jesus is saying yes to a lot of life where do we hear the affirmation of sexuality I don't think we do I mean in Jesus I don't think one has to look for

specific instances in every sphere of human activity which Jesus' own personal life may have covered it is just that one is one recognizes in the response to the commitments that he in which he was involved this saying of yes which we may be drawn to say in our own commitments I mean some people aren't drawn to or involved in this sort of sexual response when we have the affirmation mostly interpreted as a negation in what the church in its understanding has said little or nothing oh yes I am not talking about the church's response I feel that lots of mistakes were made right from the very beginning I am not talking about the church's response I feel that lots of mistakes were made right from the very beginning I am not talking about the church's response I am not talking about the church's response my advice about the church's response

that we may have made right from the very beginning in even by the disciples in the misunderstanding of the language which Jesus was talking of the language which Jesus was talking of the language which Jesus was talking of Jesus talking I know that you disagree with it I know and knowonce I know and know nothing I knew and know now But I knew and know Now, it may not in fact have been in terms of sex, though. I mean, his whole association with prostitutes and so on, I mean, suggests that he hadn't this fear of sex, which, obviously, I think is underlaying a great deal of Christian response at this point. But a certain in contrast with John the Baptist, I mean, he had the reputation of being this sort of gluttonous man, the wine bipper, the person who really mixed, the person who didn't stand back from this sharing of life in all his fullness and richness, and the contrast between those two figures shines very much through the New Testament.

The ascetic Baptist, who stays out in the wilderness, people must come to him and leave the world and beat him. Jesus, who goes right into the very texture and stuff of everyday relationships and takes his palibals from this world. I think when we're dealing with religious perceptions, we're still caught up with this longing for perfection, which, in a sense, blinds us. If anything is true, it has to be absolutely perfect in every respect. So if there's any truth in Jesus, we can't accept it. Unless he, in every respect, is an integrated human personality, whereas I think, I mean, the world is much more like sort of a shot silk and that goodness and truth and reality shines through even where there's a lot of

shoddiness and towardiness. And simply on a sort of psychological level, I would think on this sexual question that any child who had grown up in the circumstances he did of doubtful parentage is likely to have very mixed up feelings about sex. I mean, it doesn't seem to me that this, in any way, need blind us to spiritual truth, which does, as it were, is shot through this life. But why this community, which says some very special things about itself, and in that context goes on and says, perhaps quite with great validity, special things about how it eats together and what this means. The central question is, why this community, as opposed to say a group therapy community, a ministerial association, which, you know, is having friends over for dinner. Having friends over for dinner.

Why this community? And I think this is the question some of us are really grappling with. Yeah. Do you want to ask the same question? Well, just hit me, as we were talking about this, in our cellma crisis last year, there were five people who were there involved in this tremendous love and this tremendous fear. And all these emotions were going on inside of them. And here in this car on the way, too, they broke up a cookie and had communion. Now, this was so much a part of what they were doing that it occurred to them to do this. It was almost like they had to. I don't know what this says, but it certainly says something to me. But the body was, you know, if the community, Nadine has any validity at all, that there was broken community in cellma. I mean, some of the people that you were going out to witness against could not have partaken of that cookie. Now, this may be their fault, that's fine. But what does this got to say about this community,

this theological community? I'm not even comfortable with this language at this moment. I mean, isn't, I don't think there's neither or firm line here. But the point it sees to me at which the church comes together as the church, as the ecclesia, in its own New Testament sense, is the point in which it is trying to respond to and articulate what it means to be the holy community, at the point in which it is acknowledging itself in Christ, not saying that, I mean, these things are, I mean, there's holiness, there's all over the place. And indeed, Christians know all these other things. These are not non-Christian things. But the point it sees to me that at the level of becoming as the church, I mean, one is trying to respond to and articulate a reality which has brought you together, which has acknowledged. You end up saying something about Christ then.

I mean, you are then saying that there is something about special about this community, because there is something very special about Christ. I think this is the community which is centered in the reality responded to in Christ. This is why New Testament speaks of it as the body of Christ. And this is only a conscious sort of focusing and acknowledgement of something which is made real, made flesh at this point for you, not that it, as in the incarnation. It's not made flesh at other points, but here it is. Where the word is broken, where the life is shared and participated in at a particular level and intensity. But the difficulty for me here is that we're some unknown reason when something very wonderful and exciting is happening inside of me. He's always popping into my thoughts. Well, I can't put it down to sensible intellectual language, but it's just that he's there. And I think this is what these people were feeling in this thing that I described.

Well, I don't feel this. I don't find him popping into my thoughts in this sort of work. I recognize this relatedness, but I recognize also that many are conscious of this same sort of relatedness who don't define it in terms of Christ. Sure. But there was something different. A few minutes before the march started in someone, Bishop Kim Myers, if I know her or so before, the Michigan Health Communion in front of Brown's Chapel. And it was one of the two real communions of my life. He did the other one one night. And when he was doing the communion, there were a couple thousand people staying there. And we were all linked arms, and they were humming. And it was really beautiful. We should overcome. You're just humming the background. And my first thought was, oh crap, here I go again. I'm hung up with a bunch of social workers, and we're going to go out.

Psychologists have this problem, world. You know, we're going to go out, and we're going to save somebody, and this semester, this is Negroes. And it was just fine, you know, you're there. So, obviously, that's what you want to do. But as I watched the liturgy progress, and there had been community, how it would been sharing peanut butter for two or three days, three days by then. And there was this kind of community you're talking about. But as a liturgy progressed, and I listened to Bishop Meyer, and he really listened, because everybody was scared and you were in need, so you listened more carefully. I found that the fact that I had something to do with this guy Christ was important, that it had something to do with Christianity was important to us. You know, if we had been a group of Buddhists, he would have been equally important, I believe this. But here it was something that was tangible. It was overt, and it was familiar, and I'm comfortable, just like a child, by the familiar. And it wasn't just that we had to have a kind of a theological pep talk before we did something.

It was the fact that what was about to be done was done within a certain context. Now, most of us, God hopes, we do. We run around loving each other up and trying to help, you know, be nice to each other, and enjoying each other. It's a trade. But here was an instance where the participants in the mass, in the liturgy, did not have any conscious, and I doubt even unconscious, feeling that there was a fair trade. For all the days, as soon as they were going to get their heads kicked out, we're all. But this is what Bishop Pike was explaining to us at the table last night. It didn't make any difference, because it was being done within a context. And a psychologist, as you know, I know all about martyrs and complexes and self-familiarization and all that. And this had nothing to do with it. It was the fact that whatever was being done didn't have to be a trade. You didn't have to love me. I didn't even like someone that grows there. And the point that Leigh is making, I think, somewhat what was almost about is that we really believe that having some kind of frame of reference,

an overt thing, some context, in which to love each other up, to share, to get to know each other, even though sometimes, because of our feelings, not necessarily because of the liturgy's feelings. Usually it is, I think. It becomes dry and pallid. But all of us have these dry periods. And then there are sometimes when we go to communion or what a morning prayer. And it hits us. And the liturgy hasn't changed. We've changed. We were receptive. Just like sometimes my wife can say, gee, I love you. I'm like, yeah, I want to watch television. But that's not her feeling. That's mine. And what we're, I guess, her ranging about impressing for is some nice, simple overt statement for you all, which I think you've given the last few minutes, that it's all right. I think the Christianity has this body, mind, and spirit, in which I think the Jewish and Jewish churches

offer the body aspect of Christianity. I think lots of, there's a little difference between the Lutheran and the Christ-centered kind of philosophy. You wish, I think, that you have to communicate mystically with the spirit, every being. And the first question that he lost, he said, how moment by moment I lost my touch with Christ? What can I do? By will? And this is the question, which you, the Yogi aspect of Christ, the mystic aspect of Christ, was not being preached, but how do we do it? Is the what the circulation of the life? How did you, Jesus, really reach for Christ? How did he do it? In that respect, the body and respect of body, mind, is being integrated approach. Do you find the difference between the grocery and Christ-centered community? There's a difference. There's a tiny difference between the biblical and the spiritual.

A good place to be there. Lutheran, you can't even Christ-centered all of a sudden. That's what I'm going to have. And in the second time that he was talking about, was a almost a weekend group kind of thing with some Methodist college students. We couldn't call it a group, but that's essentially what it was. And we were all very warm and loving each other up, in the group sense. And then at the end of that weekend, Bill, you might want to speak to this when we broke bread and shared the cup suddenly, we'd shifted gears. And it was no longer what it was before. And I liked it. It was infotessible, the difference. But it made all the difference in the world. That's the mystery that we're groping for. And we're trying to find some way to conceptualize. Maybe it can't be conceptualized. We're probably just having it. We're conceptualized. You're right. You can have a question to seek. And where would your growth come from? Where was your mystery being? There would be another question. Is my immediate answer to that? Every concept.

I don't think that we are involved in a process of asking questions that have no answers. I cannot accept that. I think that we do ingest these things finally. And then we have other questions. New questions present themselves. I don't know. Do you remember? Well, we have to let us to talk today. I agree with you down here. Well, this is Robinson to relate two passages of scripture for us in some way. Great for me. I think it pertains to our literature question. I am the light of the world. And if I hold body, if I be single, I hold body shall be filled with light. What is the single eye and how symbolic or how real is this word light? How has the eye become single?

Well, for me, the first one I am the light of the world is only real. If by eye, I mean this eye in relation, not the individual person of Jesus Christ. I mean, as it is that I was trying to express, if we live in this light, will our world, will never be dark. I just haven't thought about the other one. If then, I would be single. I just never thought of these two sayings together. So anything, as I say, at the present moment, would only be on the spur of the moment and probably have much to do it. Does it relate to your image of the vision, the two visions merging and becoming single? Well, I see what you mean, the two-fold, the two-fold world is to say this, though. Rather like the lenses on the, because so often one

has the eye I've had recently in the past, this feeling of living almost a schizophrenic existence, which is sort of once brought up against in the sort of snide remark that people say, how do you think you can pray to the grand of your being? Or you people, you want to have your cake and eat it. You don't want to believe God is a person. And yet you go on talking about things as if he were. You want to have your cake and eat it. When, in a sense, I do. And in a sense, I'm bound to, because my world is two-fold, but one needs this sort of single eye, which draws both these two-fold aspects together, so to be right. Yeah. Could I just say what, I mean, what he was saying at the end about this sort of infinitesimal difference, the sort of shift of gear, and so on, that one found one, so in a sense, at another level of being. Now, this is, I think, the point at which some of us

find it inescapable to get into this sort of God language. Now, what we mean by it, I mean, I can't define what the word God connotes, I don't know, what it denotes. I can, from time to time, say, yes, this is it. And this seems to me what the Bible is doing. Yes, here it is. Here again, here it is again. Here it is in Christ. Here it is in this fellowship. Here it is. And one sort of gradually sort of feels, well, there's something here, with which one is an intermittent sort of constantly growing and fading relationship. And it's this kind of exploration into this, which seems to me the quest that we're engaged on. None of us sort of are there. None of us know how we can grasp it.

In fact, we can't, I mean, by definition. But it's this reality, which is constantly teasing, constantly, as it were, going on before us. And which the purpose of a weekend like this is to sensitize ourselves to in the company of those who are also seeking after and feeling out after and searching for. Bishop and Mrs. John Robinson, concluding the fourth and final session of exploration into God, a residential seminar held at the Esselen Institute, Big Sur, California. Seminar leaders were Bishop James A. Pike of the Episcopal Dases of California, and Bishop John Robinson's suffrage and Bishop of Woolwich, England. This program, Exploration Into God, was produced by the Public Service Department of KXKX FM San Francisco. 14 Thanks for watching.

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