Chapter 3: Scientific Proof of the
Existence of God Will Not Be Announced by the White
House
Radical Politics for
Ordinary Men and Women
ADI DA SAMRAJ: We have renounced our
real and true politics. We have renounced responsibility for
our own lives, and we no longer determine them. We do not
assume freedom of movement, association, and commitment, but
we assume instead that we have to listen to every little
bureaucrat, intellectual, commentator, or revolutionary who
wants to control or prevent our intimate politics and
society. And this assumption reflects and results from our
frightened renunciation of the Life-Principle and the
exuberant vitality of bodily existence.
Because individuals are afraid of
their own vitality, afraid to be polarized to it whole
bodily and to enjoy it intelligently and responsibly, we
have the present-day world, which is a product of at least
3,000 years of patriarchal, anti-sexual, anti-Life
indoctrination. The result is a society of morons and
slaves. Many people in this present-day world are no less
slaves than the poor beasts who built the pyramids. For the
most part, we are an unconscious mass, controlled by
shrewder people.
In the most ancient days, men and
women were oriented toward delight, toward vital life. They
were positively, but not obsessively, polarized to the
Life-Principle. But ever since the advent of the modern
other-worldly religions, men have assumed that vital life is
supposed to be manipulated, suppressed, and even eliminated.
People are deeply troubled about their vitality. The whole
of modern society is built around the manipulative
suppression of Life. Even the State is in the business.
Everything has become very humorless. You are supposed to
work. That is the asceticism of the common man and woman.
You are supposed to be a mere salt-of-the-earth worker, and
you are not to be fundamentally and ecstatically involved in
delight. You are not expected or permitted to be conscious.
Consciousness is not valued. You are supposed to work and
buy junk food and television sets, and you are not to be
aware of anything fundamentally curious that might cause you
to become erratic and profound.
Some anthropologists say that Mans
uniqueness is that he makes tools. But that is only a
secondary and debatable uniqueness. His fundamental
uniqueness is that he interiorizes the problem of survival.
The sense of existence itself as a problem, as a dilemma, is
inherent in the human condition. And, through the tool of
desire, Man constantly creates new solutions. He seeks a
condition of release that exceeds the limits of both mind
and body. Thus, he invents an interior or mystical process,
through which he can step out of both mind and body into
another world. But he also does other things. By virtue of
having a mind, he is able to enter into creative
relationship to the functional processes in himself and in
the world. So he creates sciences and technologies as
practical tools for dealing with the material conditions of
existence. But both of these possibilities, both mystical
and technological, are extensions of the ordinary game of
problem-solving.
Until the common individual begins
to grasp some basic understanding of his ultimate Condition,
he is exploitable by individuals who arbitrarily assume a
creative power and authority beyond his own. So the usual
man or woman, who works in a factory or an office and
listens to the News faithfully, is constantly exploited by
all kinds of shrewd people who are really in charge of his
or her political, social, and intimate life.
For the usual person, politics is
merely a matter of listening to the News every night. Our
politics is either a childish or an adolescent reaction to
the fact of being controlled by the State. One individual
plays the “system,” and the other is a revolutionary. The
child buys the “system” and wants it to work, and the
adolescent is a perpetual revolutionary. Both types are
merely dealing with the Parent Figure in ordinary
ways.
If you stop listening to and
believing in the News, and if you simply observe what is
really going on, you can get depressed and feel that your
life is not under your control. But that is really a very
minimal insight. Obviously, everybody is controlled. The
typical response is to react by joining a revolution,
getting drunk, kicking a couple of bad politicians out of
office, having a war, getting “high” on drugs or religious
and mystical illusions, becoming an anti-communist, or
becoming a communist. But reaction is obviously not the way
to transform politics. What is needed is to establish a
completely different principle of human culture and
politics, one that is not based on reaction to all the bad
Newsbecause there is only bad News in the ordinary,
unenlightened, chaotic world. Instead of waiting for action
from sources out in the beyond somewheregovernment
sources, media sources, Divine sources, or whatever it is
that you wait for all the timebecome involved yourself
in intimate community with other human beings. In a
responsible, mutually dependent, and intimate relationship
with those people, create and protect the basics of a truly
human culture and daily society.
The only reason the State can
exploit you is that you are in vital
shock, or self-dividing
recoil from the Life-Principle, and you believe that you
need a number of things you cannot get without playing for
or against the “system.” But if you are already alive,
already full of humor, already full of the Living God, you
need not be concerned about any of that. You can and must
create your own politicsin intimate cooperative
association with your fellow human beings.
The existence of the big “system”
does not make any ultimate positive difference in the daily
life of the individual. You can and must live a humorous,
responsible life, regardless of the “system.” Of course, it
can be done a little easier if the “system” is relatively
loose and benign, as it still is in America. You would have
to be more inventive to do it in an absolutist society, or
during a war in a bombed-out town, but it could still be
done.
The true change we must create is
not principally in the system itself (in the “Parent”) but
in the ordinary associations between human beings. Common
people must simply live in an entirely different way. They
must understand themselves, externally and internally, and
they must adapt to a totally new way of life, in which they
are each personally responsible for the character of daily
existence, and in which they simply live together, without a
Parent anymore.
A truly rational politics cannot be
enacted merely by investing everything in a worldwide system
of Parentlike bureaucracies. The abstract system creates
childish dependencies and illusory solutions, and it
discourages the general possibility of genuine personal
responsibility or involvement. The true politics of the
individual is in relation to what is intimate to him. Truly
human politics is in the sphere of relationships experienced
on a daily basis, where the individuals voice and experience
can be heard and dramatically felt. That, fundamentally, is
politics. All the rest is only the vulgar News of the
world-machine.
A politics based on truly human or
intimate relationships is not likely to take place on a
large scale in a present-day city, although that is a
possibility. But present-day cities are merely a random
collection of subhuman emergencies. People crowd together in
modern cities for all kinds of conflicting and subhuman
reasons. These are not genuine cities in any fully human
sense. A true city would be a large-scale community, an
essentially autonomous, cooperative, and intimate order of
mutually dependent people who are devoted to the higher
evolutionary culture of Man. But we do not have that kind of
consciousness in the cities of today. Today a city is just a
collection of disturbed and fascinated people, not a
conscious, working association of truly human beings.
Without a community of responsible relationships and higher
cultural agreements, there can be no valid form of politics.
True politics is the higher function of the personal
relationships between individuals living in free cooperation
with one another.
The true community is not just
another utopian commune, in which everybody tries to be
perfect or perfectly fulfilledas if such were
possible. Higher human and spiritual understanding is the
principle of life in true community. Communities are rightly
established when human beings understand the functional
design of Man as a totality and as a single or simultaneous
whole, and when the problem-solving, creative capacities of
human beings are rightly measured in terms of their ultimate
importance. Human beings must understand and be responsible
for their liabilities and their tendencies to live life as
an inherent or irreducible dilemma and as a perpetual search
for self-glorifying fulfillment of loveless
inclinations.
In such a community, every one knows
what every one else has the tendency to become (when
irresponsible) and the possibility to become (when
responsible). And all serve one another at the level of that
understanding. They all also know the functional character
and capacity of each other, and they amuse and enjoy and
serve and employ one another at every appropriate level. But
responsibility for functional life must always be assumed
and demanded in a truly human community. When it is not,
that failure of responsibility will weaken the community and
thus enable (or even oblige) other, shrewder men and women
to exploit and oppress the members of the community and make
them slaves again.
So if men and women will enter into
true community, into intimate cooperative and higher
cultural relationship with one another, they will no longer
be exploitable by any Life-negating Parent source in the
social and political realm. The negatively dominant
bureaucracy of the Parent State becomes obsolete only
through non-use. And, once its negative and Parentlike
powers become obsolete through non-use, the State will again
be obliged to become the simple instrument of the
responsible agreements of the people. If the people do not
assume childish dependence on the State, then the State in
which they live makes little ultimate difference. And if the
people truly become collectively responsible for the
mechanisms of the State, then individual freedom will never
really be threatened.
Conventional politics has always
been associated with an ideal of one or another sort. In the
last hundred years, the ideal has switched from a humanistic
to an economic one, but all merely idealistic systems tend
to depend on temporary, emergency solutions to basic
problems. This is because conventional idealism is an
abstraction, a basis for a politics of manipulation of
people by the State, but not for an intimate politics of
practical responsibility on the part of the people for both
themselves and the State. The tactics of abstract State
politics always relate to a more or less irresponsible and
controlled populace, and, therefore, the State tends to be
fixed in a view of human life as a dilemma that continuously
requires new emergency reactions to solve the constant
crisis of new emergency problems. As a result, we get an
insane conglomeration of temporary solutions and a
bureaucratic State that is oppressive, rigid, immense, and
intolerable.
The fundamentals of life must be
pre-solved at the local level, at the regional level where
the community exists. Within the community, every member
should be guaranteed access to the basic necessities of life
(provided each individual functions responsibly and
cooperatively within the community). Basic solutions to
human needs do not generally require resort to any of the
resources of the State, but they should be managed locally
in ones own community, and in natural cooperation with other
communities. (In other words, first establish community and
the planned solutions to fundamental needs, and, on that
basis, see what kind of agreements are useful in cooperation
with other communities and with large-scale cooperative
agencies.)
Politics is a human adventure, and
our inherent obligation involves the realization of our
humanity as a discipline. We do not really have the option
to renounce our humanity or the Life that sustains us.
Rather, we must assume the burden and the delight of human
relationships. We must assume all the structures of Man
(both lower and higher) as real conditions of existence. And
we must become functionally responsible to the
Life-Principle in every area of our experience. To the
degree that all of this is done, it obliges us to be
committed to existence in the dimensions of time and space,
but only then are we also perfectly free to carry on the
creative evolutionary and ecstatically self-transcending
process of our own lives.
If we do not assume responsibility
for our own lives, we deserve all the dreadful results that
come down the road every day. The News is our ordinary
destiny, our minimal inheritance. Everybody tends to sit
like cattle at the feet of the daily News, expecting it will
all eventually evolve into some superior politics or fate.
But truly human politics or destiny cannot go on
unconsciously. Truly human life occurs where consciousness
enters the domain of existence. There is no human politics,
then, without conscious responsibility. You cannot sit like
mice in front of the TV, dutifully listening to the official
News every night, and rightly expect or require that
somebody in Washington is going to create some super-program
or announce some Super-Truth that will liberate you from
your lowly estate. You must take responsibility for
yourself. It is not by reforming the State in any way, but
by consciously stepping apart from your childish dependence
on it, that you carry on radical and truly human politics.
You must provide your own requirements, in personal and
local cooperation with others. You must enter into intimate
community with others. You must cooperatively share your
functions, your resources, and your vitality with other
human beings That is the only true and liberating politics
for human beings.
The usual mans life is built on the
idea that the law of life is survival, and that survival is
the significance, meaning, and goal of existence, whereas in
Truth, the fundamental process of Man, and even the very
Realm of Nature, is one of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the Law.
The usual life is not built upon the self-transcending
principle of sacrifice, but on the self-fulfilling principle
of survival, or the aggressive self-glorification of the
individualized, separate, and separative entity. This is the
common illusion, and this game of surviving as a separate,
self-contained, and separative “someone” is what makes human
existence the overwhelming chaos of troubles that it has now
become for everyone. But the fact is that all specific
“somethings” must ultimately be sacrificed, and human
existence itself must become a sacrificial affair, in which
nothing is maintained for its own sake. As soon as the
individual realizes that the Law of Life is loving sacrifice
to the Life-Principle, and not survival independent of the
Life-Principle, he becomes free. He becomes free of guilt,
fear, his entire ritual of obsessive activity, all the
assumed dilemmas of subhuman culture and politics, and all
the Parent-child games of the usual life in this
world.
Scientific
Proof – Table of Contents
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