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