I Am Through You So I Page 16

  When we began, the Fetzer Institute gave us a starting grant and asked two questions to which we were supposed to find the answers: (1) Is the Internet suited to spirituality? and (2) Can one build a community on the Internet? Today, the answers have become so obvious that the questions sound like trick questions. The internet has enabled countless new forms of community and can be understood as potentially spiritual in and of itself. It can become the cyber-technical support structure for what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noösphere—essentially a network of all-connecting love that spans and unites the world. Life is connection, and if spirituality is, by its very name, aliveness (the Latin spiritus means “breath of life”), then the cyber network is itself a spiritual phenomenon, since it leads to increased aliveness through connection.

  The closer our website comes to its goal, the more revolutionary—and also contemplative—it will be. Our goal is it to provide online support for off-line groups of people the world over who support one another in living a grateful and, therefore, joyful life. Any such effort aimed at building a network of networks in our power pyramid society must be considered revolutionary. And to be revolutionary in the true sense, one must be contemplative.

  It is a widespread misconception that contemplative must mean “turned away from the world.” As early as my novitiate, I learned from Father Damasus how important the little syllable con is for understanding contemplative life. Just like the Latin cum (with), it indicates connection. The things that are to be connected in contemplation are an ideal image and its realization. Looking up at the sky shows us an eternal order, represented by the constellations, and this presentation is realized amid the world’s chaos by the building of a temple. The syllable temp is ancient and originally means “measure.” By looking up at the heavens, a contemplative person gains the measure by which the temple will be built on earth. That is why the earliest temples—such as Stonehenge—are something like giant sundials or star clocks. And in India, there is a saying: “When the temple’s measurements are right, there is order in the world.” As human beings, we are called to look up at the sky by our upright gait, and our free hands permit us to turn the ideal image into tangible reality: “on earth as it is in heaven.”

  In this way, work on the website becomes for me a new form of living contemplatively and of sharing this approach to life with untold numbers of people. This even turns out to be the beginning of that revolution to which I felt committed. Thus, to my surprise, at the threshold of a new millennium, my life continues and new opportunities arise.

  Dialogue

  JK: At first glance, mysticism and politics do not seem to fit together too well. We think of mysticism as a kind of interiority that is highly personal and thus not comprehensible or accessible to others. And politics, too, is often taken to mean merely the public exercise of power and its strategic preservation. You consider mysticism and politics together in your word pair of contemplation and revolution. Why is this impulse for social change so important to spirituality?

  DSR: Understood correctly, spirituality means aliveness. The term comes from the Latin word spiritus, “life breath.” Full aliveness means being awake to the responsibility we have in the face of the Great Mystery, but also to the responsibility we have in the face of the community, the polis, “politics.” In this field, too, spirituality is an awakening. If we sleep through our responsibility to the public good, we are not truly spiritual. Not fully awake; not fully alive.

  JK: As far back as Greek antiquity there was a distinction between the polites, those who were interested in and working toward the public good, and the idiotes, those who thought for themselves in private and were active only for their own prospects.

  DSR: So, we do not want to be idiots.

  JK: Regarding the revolutionary: In which spiritual tradition do you see yourself there? What role models are you thinking of?

  DSR: Above all others, my role model is Jesus Christ as a revolutionary. He definitely was one and was recognized as such, in his time. Death by crucifixion was not a punishment for religious transgressions; those were punished by stoning. Crucifixion was an overtly political punishment, reserved for escaped slaves and revolutionaries—for transgressions by which the so-called criminal had undermined the existing social order. Jesus did that by inaugurating the kingdom of God on Earth. By saying, “The greatest among you ought to be the servant of all,” he is undermining the power pyramid of his time—and of our time as well. Is that not decidedly revolutionary?

  JK: What did he radically question at the time that we might still profit from today?

  DSR: The abuse of power. In our surroundings, we all have more power than we realize: over our children, friends, colleagues, family, and so on. The only legitimate use of this power consists in empowering others. If we do not do this, then power turns to violence. Violence seeks to control, subjugate, exploit. That was the misuse of power Jesus turned against.

  JK: Empower others, yes, but empower to what end?

  DSR: Empower them to actualize themselves in community, to bring forth their best creatively.

  JK: Living their full potential.

  DSR: Their full potential. Precisely! What parents do for their children and teachers do for their students, if they are doing it right: drawing the best out of them.

  JK: Can that also work in conditions of scarcity and crisis?

  DSR: Crisis? Scarcity? The idea of scarcity is an interpretation arising from a lack of trust in life. We cannot allow ourselves this mistaken interpretation of the situation. If we live out of a consciousness of abundance, which is much more realistic than the idea of scarcity, we will also approach crises with a completely different attitude. Then the crisis is no longer the end of everything.

  JK: And no longer without alternatives.

  DSR: Correct! The word crisis comes from the same root word as sieve. Crisis means a process of “straining,” of “winnowing out.” In every crisis, all that is capable of life becomes separated from what is no longer capable of survival. There is a similar process in nature: when it pulls off the dried husks so that the young shoots can unfold freely.

  JK: But one can also misinterpret that as Social Darwinism or misuse it for certain economic interpretations, such as, only those best adapted to the system survive—survival of the fittest. The strong then have the advantage over the weak because the latter have not had as much opportunity, are less well educated, or had the misfortune of being born in the wrong time, in the wrong place. Then fate, as it were, spits the weak onto the rubbish heap of history.

  DSR: I do not want to deny that danger. But I would say yes, what is strongest survives—but—what is strongest is not violence but cooperation. Working together with others makes us stronger, that is, cooperation in service of the common good. Building one another up rather than keeping one another down. That is what I mean. The strongest are those who recognize that what makes us strong is that we orient ourselves in the direction of life, and life aims at cooperation, connection, networks.

  JK: Coevolution?

  DSR: Yes, coevolution. The strongest are those who are alert to coevolution and contribute to it. That is how things work. We can read this fundamental rule in nature and in history.

  JK: In what do you read that, for example?

  DSR: In the development of life. Without cooperation, living organisms could have never evolved this far. It is a misinterpretation to think that competition was the only force moving evolution forward. In that approach, we are forgetting about motherly love, for example. The supposedly strong would never have grown up if, at all advanced stages of evolution, there had not been the strong mother caring for her weak children. We forget that too easily.

  JK: We also forget fatherly love.

  DSR: It may be autobiographically typical that I am forgetting to mention that.

  JK: It has its qualities too, of course. To return to your role models, you have already mentioned Jesus. Are there any contempora
ry role models as well?

  DSR: Yes. I can immediately think of a woman: Dorothy Day. I visited her on my very first day in the United States, in 1947, and greatly admired her and the Catholic Worker Movement.3

  JK: That is an organization that dedicates itself to those cast out by society.

  DSR: Yes, and this organization is still extraordinarily alive and successful. It grew out of Dorothy’s compassion for the poor and her struggle to overcome social injustice in the United States. Soon other communities grew out of the one she initially founded, in 1933, with Peter Maurin in New York City. Just like Mother Teresa, she cared for the poorest of the poor, but she went beyond that and questioned the social structure responsible for such poverty. That is why she spent years of her life in prison. Brazilian archbishop Hélder Câmara understood that when he said, “If I give food to the poor, I am called a Holy Man; if I ask why the poor are poor, I am called a Communist.” Many Christian communities in Latin America also questioned the pyramid hierarchies of power based on their reading of the glad tidings of Jesus. Such approaches are often denounced as Communist.

  JK: Correctly or incorrectly?

  DSR: Correctly in the best sense of the term communist, meaning “strengthening community,” but incorrectly in the sense of the international, political Communist movement.

  JK: So, not in the sense of Communist party ideology.

  DSR: Definitely not.

  JK: In your pair of terms—contemplation and revolution—you redefined revolution as the dismantling of the hierarchical power pyramid and the rise of communities organized as networks. At first glance, that seems admirable, and I think I understand the kind of networks you have in mind. But to clarify, I will offer a critical counterargument, and as a devil’s advocate, consciously misinterpret you. A subversive nongovernmental organization like the Mafia has recently also begun to organize as a network. Even terrorist organizations like the so-called Islamic State, with its streamlined, autonomously acting cells and network structures, have been highly successful in their attacks in Belgium, France, and Turkey. If a network has inward trust, that fact does not necessarily say anything about the ethics of that networked organization, only about its effectiveness. So, I am afraid that the new spirit you have in mind cannot be attributed solely to the form of organization.

  DSR: No, not to the form of organization but to its use of power. The question is whether power is used to empower everyone in their uniqueness and interdependence. That is required. And it must apply to everyone. It must encompass all human beings, not merely a specific group.

  JK: Meaning, the networks you are picturing have a universalist orientation?

  DSR: Universalist and borne by respect for every individual person. But respect may be too pale a term. It is about deep care toward your neighbor, toward all other people, and toward life in all its forms. This great care, this reverence for life must be central.

  JK: So, what Albert Schweitzer said: “I am life that wants to live, in the middle of life that wants to live.”

  DSR: Precisely that. That would be the spirituality of the networks I am referring to, and that fundamentally distinguishes them from those of the Mafia and the terrorists.

  JK: You describe how in the 1990s, as a teacher at the legendary Esalen Institute in Big Sur, you had the opportunity of seeing these differing organizational structures—the pyramid and the network—firsthand, including their consequences. The community that had grown in and around Esalen wanted to live precisely this innovative, supportive, empowering network. In the end, however, a traditional model prevailed, with a board controlling the business. Is it possible that all-too-human motives worked more strongly there than an altruistic, cooperative spirit? Might these networks you are describing not also require, in some sense, reformed humans, or conditions for humans living and working together that are not a given in today’s social system?

  DSR: Yes, I think we need a new consciousness to accomplish the necessary change on a large scale. The prevailing structures and the established powers are still too strong. It takes great effort and courage for a pioneering vision to succeed. At Esalen, unfortunately the death of Dick Price meant the defeat of a more humane and egalitarian business model; his vision did not prevail.

  JK: And why not?

  DSR: The community’s courage and moral strength were no match for the Board’s power to fire those who stood up for Dick’s vision.

  JK: It probably also takes patience—it takes a long time to drill through thick boards—to stand the pressure that one might be exposed to for a long time.

  DSR: Patience is definitely a virtue. But the exploiters will always tell you that you need to be more patient—to give them more time to exploit you. I am thinking of the medieval peasant uprisings that were put down in one bloodbath after another. They were demonized as outbreaks of impatience in our history books, because history is written by the winners. Those same books belittle all groups that, in the past, stood up for the power of love against the love of power.

  JK: One can see the same thing when one looks at religious orders such as the Franciscans, who were quite revolutionary in the beginning. They were only able to survive because there was a humble pope at the time.

  DSR: But in their original form, the Franciscans did not survive; the spirit of St. Francis was domesticated in their second generation. The Rule of their order was changed, and even the original stories were censored and altered. That makes me wonder: was destruction simply the end of all the promising beginnings in history that were nipped in the bud? Was there not something in them that cannot be destroyed? Did they not—for a moment at least—make something shine forth so genuine, so promising, so sublime that it must find completion—if not in time, then beyond time? I find consolation in Hölderlin’s words: “What we are here, yonder, a God is able to complete.”4 I put this together with T. S. Eliot’s deep intuition:

  “What might have been and what has been

  Point to one end, which is always present.”5

  The more I ponder these poetic insights, the more I come to trust that all positive efforts are somehow finding completion in a timeless realm. I cannot give any evidence of this, but the good, the true, the beautiful is, in its essence, not subject to time. All that we sacrifice for the true, the beautiful, and the good, all the effort we expend out of love, cannot be lost. What can I say? We need this conviction or else we would despair.

  JK: The dominant model of thought propagated so successfully in the 1990s and still prevalent today is the idea of competition: we all are competing with one another, and that has been implemented even in the educational system. Advocates of this model argue that the competitive idea is ingrained in human nature; the goal is merely to steer it toward the good of society. One can see it in kindergarten, where children compete for the best toys and the teacher’s affection; then in school, they compete for the best grades; at work, we compete for the best position, or the biggest paycheck; in art and culture, we compete for the highest degree of recognition; politicians compete for votes. Wherever we look, there is competition. But competition also means that there are winners and losers. Deep within us, we have come to believe that without competition, there would be no drive to expend effort and develop ourselves, to do something great. Therefore, it seems that competition and selection are important drivers of progress. Is that true, in your opinion?

  DSR: Only to a degree. The idea of competition as we know it contains two aspects: the desire to excel, and the desire to outdo someone else. Those two are different, but so intertwined in our thinking that we can hardly tell the difference. Yet, it is a decisive difference.

  JK: The difference might be between being good and being better than someone else.

  DSR: Wanting to be good, wanting to surpass oneself is positive. But measuring how good I am based on how far down I can push someone else is not in harmony with life. We can see in nature what life intends. Here, every plant wants to realize itself and
its full potential, not suppress the others.

  JK: There are also weeds that will outgrow other plants and spread at the cost of the others.

  DSR: But to understand the fact that plants spread at the cost of others as cutthroat competition would merely be an interpretation, and an anthropomorphism on top of that. Plants simply unfold, thereby influencing others and being influenced by them in turn.

  JK: But in the plant world, there is also displacement. For example, several years ago, a plant from the Himalayas was introduced to the Alps and is crowding out endemic species on a massive scale simply because it is so much heartier. So, your image may not quite work.

  DSR: Of course, I am all in favor of biodiversity. And the less we interfere with nature, the more its diversity thrives. But with plants, crowding out other plants is a by-product of their self-fulfillment, not its goal; that’s the difference. When humans crowd each other out, they do it intentionally—and in the long run, it doesn’t bring them fulfillment. We humans find our highest self-fulfillment through loving cooperation with others. I remember a report about Native American children who were given a soccer ball. They played with it enthusiastically, but as soon as they were divided into teams that had to play against one another, they lost interest. Their joy came from playing with each other, not against each other.