The following are mostly quotes, with some paraphrases and summaries. I sometimes include my own ideas and questions.
1. There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana, raised in the mystical hills east of Fort Wayne.
2. The Master learned of this world in the public schools of Indiana, and as he grew, in his trade as a mechanic of automobiles.
3. But the Master had learnings from other hands and other schools, from other lives that he had lived. He remembered these, and remembering became wise and strong, so that others saw his strength and came to him for counsel.
4. The Master believed that he had power to help himself and all mankind, and as he believed so it was for him, so that others saw his power and came to him to be healed of their troubles and their many diseases.
5. The Master believed that it is well for any man to think upon himself as a son of God, and as be believed, so it was, and the shops and garages where he worked became crowded and jammed with those who sought his learning and his touch, and the streets outside with those who longed only that the shadow of his passing might fall upon them, and change their lives.
6. It came to pass, because of the crowds, that the several foremen and shop managers bid the Master leave his tools and go his way, for so tightly was he thronged that neither he nor other mechanics had room to work upon the automobiles.
7. So it was that he went into the countryside, and people following began to call him Messsiah, and worker of miracles; and as they believed, it was so.
8. If a storm passed as he spoke, not a raindrop touched a listener's head; the last of the multitude heard his words as clearly as the first, no matter lightning nor thunder in the sky about. And always he spoke to them in parables.
9. And he said unto them, "Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and to sickness, to riches and to poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another."
10. A mill-man spoke and said, "Easy words for you, Master, for you are guided as we are not, and need not toil as we toil. A man has to work for his living in this world."
11. The Master answered and said, "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.
12. "The current of the river swept silently over them all -- young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.
13. "Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.
14. "But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'
15. "The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!'
16. "But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
17. "Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
18. "And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!'
19. "And the one carried in the current said, 'I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.'
20. "But they cried the more, 'Saviour!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Saviour."
21. And it came to pass when he saw that the multitude thronged him the more day on day, tighter and closer and fiercer than ever they had, when he saw that they pressed him to heal them without rest, and feed them always with his miracles, to learn for them and to live their lives, he went alone that day unto a hilltop apart, and there he prayed.
22. And he said in his heart, Infinite Radiant Is, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me, let me lay aside this impossible task. I cannot live the life of one other soul, yet ten thousand cry to me for life. I'm sorry I allowed it all to happen. If it be thy will, let me go back to my engines and my tools and let me live as other men.
23. And a voice spoke to him on the hilltop, a voice neither male nor female, loud nor soft, a voice infinitely kind. And the voice said unto him, "Not my will, but thine be done. For what is thy will is mine for thee. Go thy way as other men, and be thou happy on the Earth."
24. And hearing, the Master was glad, and gave thanks, and came down from the hilltop humming a little mechanic's song. And when the throng pressed him with its woes, beseeching him to heal for it and learn for it and feed it nonstop from his understanding and to entertain it with his wonders, he smiled upon the multitude and said pleasantly unto them, "I quit."
25. For a moment the multitude was stricken dumb with astonishment.
26. And he said unto them, "If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?"
27. "Of course, Master!" cried the many. "It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask it!"
28. "No matter what those tortures, nor how difficult the task?"
29. "Honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked," said they.
30. "And what would you do," the Master said unto the multitude, "if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.' What would you do then?"
31. And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood.
32. And the Master said unto the silence, "In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime. So it is that I have learned this day, and choose to leave you now to walk your own path, as you please."
33. And he went his way through the crowds and left them, and he returned to the everyday world of men and machines.
In those days (and even today?), science was believed to be "value-free" and not guided by "emotions."
{Added 12/01/98}
I had two paper bags, and the first of these I opened, producing a freshly cooked crab, which I placed on the table. I then challenged the class somewhat as follows: "I want you to produce arguments which will convince me that this object is the remains of a living thing. You may imagine, if you will, that you are Martians and that on Mars you are familiar with living things, being indeed yourselves alive. But, of course, you have never seen crabs or lobsters. A number of objects like this, many of them fragmentary, have arrived, perhaps by meteor. You are to inspect them and arrive at the conclusion that they are the remains of living things. How would you arrive at that conclusion?"
...the question [is]: Is there a biological species of entropy?
Both questions concerned the underlying notion of a dividing line between the world of the living (where distinctions are drawn and difference can be a cause) and the world of nonliving billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impacts are the "causes" of events). These are the two worlds that Jung (following the Gnostics) calls creatura (the living) and pleroma (the nonliving). I was asking: What is the difference between the physical world of pleroma, where forces and impacts provide sufficient basis of explanation, and the creatura, where nothing can be understood until differences and distinctions are invoked?
In my life, I have put the descriptions of sticks and stones and billiard balls and galaxies in one box, the pleroma, and have left them alone. In the other box, I put living things: crabs, people, problems of beauty, and problems of difference. The contents of the second box are the subject of the book.
... "Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality."
I offer you the phrase the pattern which connects as a synonym, another possible title for this book.
{Added 12/01/98-12/08/98}
What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another?
I want to tell you why I have been a biologist all my life, what it is that I have been trying to study. What thoughts can I share regarding the total biological world in which we live and have our being? How is it put together?
What now must be said is difficult, appears to be quite empty, and is of very great and deep importance to you and to me. At this historic juncture, I believe it to be important to the survival of the whole biosphere, which you know is threatened.
What is the pattern which connects all the living creatures?
{Added 12/08/98}
Let me go back to my crab and my class of beatniks. I was very lucky to be
teaching people who were not scientists and the bias of whose minds was even
anti-scientific. All untrained as they were, their bias was aesthetic. I would
define that word, for the moment, by saying that they were not like Peter
Bly, the character of whom Wordsworth sang
A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him;
And it was nothing more.
Rather, they would meet the primrose with recognition and empathy.
By aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects.
So you see, I was lucky. Perhaps by coincidence, I faced them with what was
(though I knew it not) an aesthetic question: How are you related to this
creature? What pattern connects you to it?
By putting them on an imaginary planet, "Mars," I stripped them of all thought of lobsters, amoebas, cabbages, and so on and forced the diagnosis of life back into identification with living self: "You carry the bench marks, the criteria, with which you could look at the crab to find that it, too, carries the same marks." My question was much more sophisticated that I knew.
{Added 12/08/98-12/09/98}
Yes, indeed, the two claws are characterized (ugly word) by embodying similar relations between parts. Never quantities, always shapes, forms, and relations. This was, indeed, something that characterized the crab as a member of creatura, a living thing.
Later, it appeared that not only are the two claws built on the same "ground plan" (i.e., upon corresponding sets of relations between corresponding parts), but that these relations between corresponding parts extend down the series of the walking legs. We could recognize in every leg pieces that corresponded to the pieces in the claw.
And in your own body, of course, the same sort of thing is true. Humerus in the upper arm corresponds to femur in the thigh, and radius-ulna corresponds to tibia-fibula; the carpals in the wrist correspond to tarsals in the foot; fingers correspond to toes.
The anatomy of the crab if repetitive and rhythmical. It is, like music, repetitive with modulation. Indeed, the direction from head toward tail corresponds to a sequence in time: In embryology, the head is older than the tail. A flow of information is possible, from front to rear.
Professional biologists talk about phylogenetic homology (see Glossary) for that class of facts of which one example is the formal resemblance between my limb bones and those of a horse. Another example is the formal resemblance
That is one class of facts. Another (somehow similar?) class of facts is what they call serial homology. One example is the rhythmic repetition with change from appendage to appendage down the length of the beast (crab of man); another (perhaps not quite comparable because of the difference in relation to time) would be the bilateral symmetry of the man or crab.
{Added 12/09/98-12/10/98}
Let me start again. The parts of a crab are connected by various patterns of bilateral symmetry, of serial homology, and so on. Let us call these patterns within the individual growing crab first-order connections. But now we look at crab and lobster and we again find connection by pattern. Call it second-order connection, or phylogenetic homology.
Now we look at man or horse and find that, here again, we can see symmetries and serial homologies. When we look at the two together, we find the same cross-species sharing of pattern with a difference (phylogenetic homology). And, of course, we also find the same discarding of magnitudes in favor of shapes, patterns, and relations. In other words, as this distribution of formal resemblances is spelled out, it turns out that gross anatomy exhibits three levels or logical types of descriptive propositions:
1. The parts of any member of Creatura are to be compared with other parts
of the same individual to give first-order connections.
2. Crabs are to be compared with lobsters or men with horses to find similar
relations between parts (i.e., to give second-order connections).
3. The comparison between crabs and lobsters is to be compared with the
comparison between man and horse to provide third-order connections.
We have constructed a ladder of how to think about... the pattern which connects.
{Added 12/11/98}
My central thesis...
{Added 12/eie/98}
The President knew the man needed no introduction, so, without a word of identification, he simply told the employees of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare assembled to hear his speech: "Peter Drucker says that modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency. It's the aim of my administration to prove Mr. Drucker wrong." If Richard Nixon thought he did not have to identify Peter Drucker thirty years ago, must I do it know? Drucker's fame is planetary. (The test of planetary is to have one of your novels be a best seller in Brazil.) According to a recent book on management gurus, Peter Drucker is "one of the few thinkers in any discipline who can claim to have changed the world: he is the inventor of privatization, the apostle of a new class of knowledge workers, the champion of management as a serious discipline." Drucker has been called everything from "the father of management" to "the man who changed the face of industrial America" to "the one great thinker management theory has produced."
{Added 12/30/98}
term: "society of organizations" -- compared to what?
{Added 12/30/98}
For sixty years Drucker has taken on a new subject every three or four years and read up on it to the capacious limits of his curiosity. One year it might be Japanese art, which he taught on the side for six years at Pomona College; another year it could be sixteenth-century finance; yet another the history of technology or of work -- or of American statesmen or of British rule in India. He recommends intellectual omnivorousness as a form of self-renewal.
{Added 12/30/98}
Miss Elsa devised a way to make Peter responsible for his own learning. She gave him a notebook and required him to record what he expected to learn at the beginning of each week and then to check his expectations against the results at the end of the week. (Miss Elsa, it appears, invented "Managing by Objectives," Drucker's signature management concept.)
{Added 12/31/98}
a) Things can be measured.
b) If effect X happened before, the same causes will cause X to happen again.
c) Single things are a part of a class of things. Abstraction tends to be forgotten. So, for example, all humans are treated alike, because they are all human.
d) The future can be predicted.
e) Statistics and probability apply to the real world, and can be used to predict the future.
f) It is possible for people to be objective.
g) People are motivated to seek objectivity to alleviate their anxiety, fear, and tension. [Philip Slater]
My father decided in the sixties that he would try as much as he could to present his ideas in an aphoristic style. Aphorisms, as Francis Bacon said, are incomplete, a bit like cartoons. They are not filled-out essay writing that is highly compressed. ...
Tested P-47 "Thunderbolts", formulated emergency procedures, and ordered changes in the plane's design, which helped save lives.
{Added 12/17/98}
Submitted himself to medical testing at Mayo Clinic, and came up with idea to train himself to become aware of hypoxic condition and switch oxygen tanks, which became part of indoctrination program for pilots.
{Added 12/17/98}
As those Thunderbolts entered production--becoming the most effective bomber escort planes in the European Theater--Lindbergh steadily devoted more time to United's development of the Navy Marine Corsair (Vought F4U), which would be used as both a carrier fighter and a land-based plane. Between December 1942 and July 1943, Lindbergh made eight trips to Hartford, where he taught pilots the fine points of flying the plane, with its unique, upturned-wing design. Trained as a fighter pilot and frustrated at not having seen action, Lindbergh participated in maneuvers and mock combat. Deak Lyman, formerly of The New York Times, then working as an executive for United Aircraft, recalled Lindbergh's taking his plane up and engaging in a high-altitude gunnery contest against two of the Marines' best pilots. Lyman said the forty-one-year-old civilian "outguessed, outflew, and outshot" both his opponents, each practically half his age.
{Added 12/17/98}
Until the arrangements were made, Lindbergh continued to test planes, mostly single-seater or two-place planes at military bases. The work was dangerous, as some of the planes were experimental and others were obsolete, many with untried or overworked parts. During four days in January at Eglin Field in Florida, Lindbergh flew eight different planes--including the Boeing B-29, which America was about to release into the skies. This superfortress--capable of flying 350 m.p.h., with a radius of over two thousand miles, and a maximum bomb-load of twenty thousand pounds--was the pride of the nearly one hundred thousand planes the United Sates would produce that year, a vast improvement in speed, range, and load over any of of the 2200 planes America had produced in 1939"
{Added 12/18/98}
Here comes this wave. Look at all this whiteness and all those bubbles. I said to
myself, "I've been taught at school that to be able to design a model -- because a
bubble is a sphere -- you have to use pi, and the number, pi, 3.14159265, on and on
goes the number." We find it cannot be resolved because it is a transcendental
irrational. So I said, "When nature makes one of those bubbles, how many places
did she have to carry out pi before she discovered you can't resolve it? And at
what point does nature decide to make a fake bubble?" I said, "I don't think nature
is turning out any fake bubbles, I think nature's not using pi." This made me
start looking for ways in which nature did contrive all mensurations, all her
spontaneous associations, without using such numbers.
Buckminster Fuller (An Autobiographical Monologue / Scenario): Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder, 1980
{Added 12/18/98}
Physics has found no solids! So to keep on teaching our children the word solid immediately is to drive home a way of thinking that is going to be neither reliable nor useful.
There are no surfaces, there are no solids, there are no straight lines, there are no planes.
Buckminster Fuller (An Autobiographical Monologue / Scenario) Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder, 1980
{Added 12/21/98}
There comes a time, however, when we discover other ways of doing the same task more economically -- as, for instance, when we discover that a 200-ton transoceanic jet airplane -- considered on an annual round-trip-frequency basis -- can outperform the passenger-carrying capability of the 85,000-ton Queen Mary.
Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller, 1981.
{Added 01/07/99}
I am not a thing -- a noun. I am not flesh. At eighty-five, I have taken in over a thousand tons of air, food, and water, which temporarily became my flesh and which progressively disassociated from me. You and I seem to be verbs -- evolutionary processes. Are we not integral functions of the Universe?
Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller, 1981.
{Added 01/07/99}
1053.832 Radiation outcasts. Radiation does not broadcast; broadcast is a planar statement; there are no planes. Out is inherently omnidivergent. Radiation omnicasts but does not and cannot *in*cast; it can only go-in-to-go-out. *In* is gravity.
1053.833 If radiation "goes through" a system and comes out on the other side, it does so because (1) there was no frequency interference -- it just occurred
between the system's occurrence frequencies -- or (2) there was tangential interference and deflection thereby of the of angle of travel, wherefore it did not go
through; it went by.
Synergetics by Buckminster Fuller, 1975.
{Added 01/07/99}
It is a nontrivial matter that we are almost always unaware of trends in our changes of state. There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you can get a frog to
sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there is no moment marked to be the
moment at which the frog should jump, he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing
pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, 1979.
{Added 01/08/99}
Human sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i.e. into changes) in order
to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain constant for more than a few seconds become perceptible only by scanning.
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, 1979.
{Added 01/08/99}
Ross Ashby long ago pointed out that no system (neither computer nor organism) can produce anything new unless the system contains some source of the
random. In the computer, this will be a random-number generator which will ensure that the "seeking," trial-and-error moves of the machine will ultimately cover
all the possibilities of the set to be explored.
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, 1979.
{Added 01/08/99}
From the perspective of soul, however, we see each opposing either/or as a conjoined both/and. We can be here only because we are not there; in this way the "here" and "there" belong together. "That comes from this, and this comes from that--which means that that and this give birth to one another. Life rises from death and death from life." (Chuang-tsu) If God exists beyond all the heavens, then God must be hidden in what is closest and most familiar to us. "When there is no more separation between "this and that, it is called the still-point of Tao. At the still-point in the center of the circle one can see the infinite in all things." I can be separated from you only because at a deeper level we are joined in something inseparable. I cannot be alone alone.
The still center, the soul, does not oppose anything. Not opposing anything, it does nothing. As
soul, we do not act; we are. As ego, we cope with the world, change it, arrange it, try to improve
it. We cope with ourselves, too, becoming our own projects, struggling to be who and where we are
not. When we become aware of the still-point in a person, of a deed that has no doer, we are aware
of soul; we are in the presence of presence.
[pp. 11-12 quote]
By midday it became apparent that the teacher had lost direction. Moreover, no provision had been made for food. There was increasing grumbling but he continued walking, sometimes through underbrush and sometimes across faces of crumbling rock.
When they reached the summit in the late afternoon, they found other wanderers already there who had strolled up a well-worn path. The disciples complained to the teacher.
He said only, "These others have climbed a different mountain."
[p. 33 quote]
Indeed, the grander the vision, the more extensive--and the more surprising--our preparation has been.
Through the whole course of our ordinary life, veils are dropping away but as long as we are looking from
the perspective of ego we never notice.
[p. 83 quote]
--RIG VEDA, X:129
[p. 89 quote] [from p. 23, A. L. Basham, "The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism, 1989]
--An Anonymous Sufi
[p. 125 quote] [from Kenneth Cragg, "Wisdom of The Sufis", 1976, p. 48]
My God was more like the sky over the sound: gray, vast, cold, full of veiled threat. You had to be a sharp thinker for this one and you had to work at it to get close. Getting close required dedication, sacrifice, and vigilance. For Bob's it was enough just to be there for morning worship, according to the Book of Common Prayer. Whether you come late, doze a little, even let your mind wander, it's all the same.
I wanted a God I could experience in some amazing way. Bob's faith overlapped so completely with his life that God was more like a companion than, well, like God. Such an experience of God seemed to me too unexceptional, too ordinary, reassuring but boring. I was always looking for a revelation, a sign, an appearance in the void so unexpected it threw off all your thinking. There was something lovely in the idea of a God who just puts an arm across your shoulders, but still, I wanted to be carried up, swept away.
There was an irony here I missed completely. If the God implicit in Bob's faith was an affable aristocrat, there was at least an openness to every sort of experience. No one in his variety of Christianity was privileged by the quality of their private relation to the Divine. My idea of the experience of God, on the other hand, led to religious elitism. In wanting a special revelation of my own, I wanted also to be special among the citizens of faith. The certainty I longed for would, I thought, give my voice a discernible authority--a direct route to spiritual arrogance.
I was impatient with Bob's lack of theological earnestness. My Presbyterian conviction that in time
everything would be explained, even if current explanations were still incomplete, seemed to amuse him.
[pp. 129-130 quote]
Spiritual arrogance is hardly unique to Christianity. I imagine I could just as easily have argued that this perspiring and unhappy citizen needed nothing so much as the Buddhist dharma, or the five pillars of Islam, or the ritual instructions of the Yajur Veda, or the wisdom of the Torah.
Mystics frequently warn us against seeing the whole world from a perspective unique to our own tradition.
Ibn Arabi, a master of Sufi gnosticism, observed that if we remembered that "the water takes its color
from the vessel containing it," we would not interfere with the beliefs of others "but would perceive God
in every form of belief." But how do we get at the clear water? How especially can we presume to find God
everywhere without arriving at an even higher arrogance?
[pp. 133-134 quote]
[inner quote from Reynold A. Nicholson, "The Mystics of Islam", 1975, p. 88.]
So the obvious fact that when we are talking we are not silent yields to the more complicated fact that when we are not talking we are still not silent. How then do we go about the task of shutting down the inner voices that are trying to get our attention?
It is possible to get ourselves to stop talking by talking to ourselves, but only with virtuosic effort. We would need to develop an inner discipline by which we are always ready to spring out with a mental "Stop!" each time a word enters the edge of consciousness. This, however, would be less the practice of silence than the practice of shouting ourselves down. The result is something closer to mental wordlessness than to genuine silence. It is still the art of silencing , not the art of silence.
We won't make any progress in reaching a deeper level of silence until we abandon the struggle to silence ourselves and begin to listen to the many voices that insist on speaking within us. To do this we must become a listener who has nothing to say. Before we can become such a listener we must first know whose voices they are. In one sense, of course, they are all our own. There are no other speakers actually residing in us. In another sense, however, none of these voices is ours. They originate in our parents and children, in friends, lovers, teachers, in our critics and models, heroes and heroines. "Stand chin-to-chin with each of life's challenges and slug it out," my father says in one of his characteristic lectures. Dead thirty years, he is standing right at my shoulder. "It's better to lose than not to fight at all," he adds and gives me a gentle shove. "Will you miss me?" Alice asked a few days before she died, and continues to ask over and over again. Though the speakers are absent there is an urging, an insistent energy in their voices. These words don't just whip through our interiority like leaves in a storm. They require a response. "You know, I'm not really a slugger," I try to tell my father. "Yes, Alice," I say each time she asks. "Yes."
There is a paradox here. These words are spoken by others. We could not possibly have invented the words or the speakers. And yet, because no one is actually speaking them in us, they are also our own. When we step back to be a listener who has nothing to say, we see ourselves not just noisy with words but deep in conversation with scores of others. That we can have this conversation completely within ourselves shows how far we can isolate our interiority from others. None of the conversants need ever know we are talking with them. On the other hand, because every voice within us is someone's voice, we know this isolation can never be complete.
All language is therefore shared language. Even the most intimate and hidden conversation with ourselves is in words we have learned from speaking with others. In fact, we don't know what we are saying to ourselves unless we know what these words would mean if we spoke them to another. It is a curious fact that we cannot make up a private language to use only within ourselves. We might devise a secret code with an array of sounds and signs indecipherable to others, but if we couldn't translate them into language someone else could understand we couldn't make sense of them either.
For this reason, unless we have listeners other than ourselves, we cannot speak at all. I can't say anything to you unless you are waiting to receive my words. But I won't know I have said anything until you respond with your own speech. Then, of course, you won't speak unless my words have behind them a waiting silence of my own. Silence precedes our discourse with each other and makes it possible, but it must be a shared silence. Before each of us can have a voice of our own, we must enter a silence we can enter only together. It is a silence without walls.
By stepping back to be the listener who has nothing to say we discover that just as there is no language that is exclusively our own, there is no silence that is not a shared silence.
Because our speaking with each other implies a shared silence, because it is a silence that language cannot exhaust, the mysticism of language does not reside in what we say but in the very existence of language itself. Every spoken word is a threshold into our own inwardness and at the same time into oneness with others.
The soul has nothing to say. Its essential silence makes voices possible but it has no voice of its own. Therefore, from the perspective of soul, it is the ongoing, renewable, changeable nature of language, its continuing life, that is most important. Because the meanings of words arise in the way speakers respond to each other, there is a constant evolution of the meaning of any given word over the course of its use. The meaningfulness of our speech has much more to do with our ability to keep our discourse with each other open than it has to do with pinning down the meanings of words and expressions. We know our discourse is meaningful not by what we have said but by what has yet to be said. Soul draws our speech forward in the direction of the unspeakable. Only thus can it remain speech.
Ego, always the earnest dualist in us, is eager to maintain boundaries between speaker and listener. It wants
to direct the flow of words, knowing in advance where our conversation with others is headed. A builder of
walls, the ego longs for control over the meaning of words. But doing so, it walls itself in and though it
may increase the volume of words it says less and less.
[pp 160-164]
The story came after Gerry as well. Even if it started with her mother, it had a persistent energy her mother
could not have given it. It awoke a listener in Gerry's childhood that would not go back to sleep in her
adulthood. But it awoke a listener in me as well. Why would a tale so contrary to fact and seemingly silly
persist in seizing our attention unless there were a listener in us awake to something we could not yet notice?
[p 171]
The faithfulness of stories to fact is often the way we evaluate them. "Is that story true?" "Did that really happen?" But stories seem to have a life of their own that allows them to race on without so much as a glance at the factual.
Because of their inherent liveliness, stories command a sharper attention than facts, however appropriate facts
may be to the matter under discussion. The way an audience is visibly awakened by a narrative example during an
otherwise precisely factual lecture shows that stories touch us closer to a listener's center than accurate
descriptions of objective states of affairs. Gerry would not have grabbed my Milwaukee Braves cap and slid over
to her corner of the front seat to lecture on the mechanics of her conception and delivery, nor if she had would I
have remembered. The mythic story of her birth was abruptly invalidated by a few physiological details but it
obviously had far too much vitality to be buried by the truth.
[pp 171-172]