*
THE TEST OF POSITION
Every complete cycle of individual experience begins in an assertion of selfhood: "I am I" (phase 1). Through the use of the energies of nature which, by biological, social and spiritual birthright, fall within its field of operation (phase 2), then through the associative processes of thought (phase 3), the "I" that was in the beginning only "I" a rhythm, a quality of being becomes a person, a concrete organized whole (phase 4). Having experienced the great "test of stability" and chosen a type of foundation in surface-extension, in earth-rootedness, or in the realization of center, victorious over gravitation the individual person seeks to express outwardly in a characteristic manner the energies of his personality (phase 5).
There are correct and incorrect ways of using the power rising from a concrete organism. They lead to increasing proficiency in action, or to pain and waste (phase 6). Through self-discipline and suffering man learns the lessons of objectivity and respect; failing to learn, his sense of individual isolation or frustration turns into physical and psychological invalidism, rebelliousness or rancor.
No individual can experience completeness and fruitfulness of being while alone. To be is to enter into relationship (phase 7). Relationship lived in a spirit of mutuality produces great fruitions (phase 8). As the constantly arising responsibilities for the management of the harvest of partnership and love are shared by all the participants in the relationship, understanding is born in illumined minds; physically useful joint activities take on meaning and value (phase 9). They become integrated within the field of a culture, a religion, a society of significantly interdependent personalities wise in the ways of relationships of relationships which "make sense" because they are consistently and intelligently referred to a harmonic whole-in-the-making (phase 10).
Human society is forever in the making. Even where a particular society or culture is outwardly disintegrating, as a plant in the fall, "seeds" are being matured and sown in the very midst of decay. Social living implies participation in a constant process of integration or disintegration. The participation of the individual man or woman in the social process may be positive or negative. It may build or maintain, transform or destroy values. It may mean, for the individual, joy and success in the discharge of the responsibilities born of relationships or quasi-slavery to an alien and unwholesome rhythm of work, from which the individual gains no value save the bare fact of existence in relative comfort and to which he brings no creative vision or dynamic intensity.
The individual's contribution to social processes whether in the household or in the factory, in the fields or at sea establishes his place and function in society. The character of the relationship between the individual "I" and this factor of place-and-function is one of the four basic constituents of every human personality a "cardinal" factor, one which determines (together with the other three) the total and fourfold "approach to life" of any particular person.
This fourfold approach is symbolized most significantly by the four directions of the space marked by the daily motion of the sun by the east (or dawn- point), the noon-point, the west (or sunset-point), the "midnight sun". But as the individuality of man develops in counterpoint, or contrast, to the flow of the life-energies of nature, the order is reversed. Man is "born" an individual at the symbolic east, builds the foundations of his concrete personality at the nadir (or midnight-point), experiences relationship in mutuality at the sunset-point, then finds his place, and fulfills his function in the larger organism of society at the noon or zenith-point.
As a particular person lives in a particular locality and in terms of the particular characteristics of his race, class, family, religion, cultural-economic and spiritual level, his "place" is thereby determined and, if he accepts the social responsibilities associated with this place, his "function" also. In some societies the place-function factor is almost entirely predetermined by birth and inheritance. In the more modern democratic countries every individual may choose, at least theoretically, his place and function within the economy of his society.
Actually racial, economic and educational discrimination limits greatly the field of opportunity for many minority-groups almost everywhere. In many instances the work is in waiting for the man, who must take it, whether he likes it or not, in order to exist or subsist, and to fulfill the responsibilities accruing from the personal relationships which he has entered deliberately, or which have been imposed upon him by circumstances beyond his control.
Any person who functions actively according to his place in society has a "position". In this word, position, we find combined many social and psychological elements which make it most adequate to characterize the tenth of the basic tests which individual existence on earth presents to every active person in any kind of social grouping. Position implies the factor of place; but more than this it refers to the fact that every man in any "position" should assume in full the responsibilities of this position and may wield, to however small a degree, influence and authority of a sort. Position, socially speaking, is place with reference to an operative and organized whole. It includes functional activity and, whenever the function is successfully filled, prestige.
Any society in which "position" gives prestige to an individual even if he does not live up actively and successfully to its responsibilities is to some extent an unhealthy or spiritually degenerate society. A man's position in society should always be the fruition of his individual selfhood; it should be the proof and consecration of his achievement as an individual. The "proof of works" is demanded by the spirit of any person seeking to experience the fullness of individual living. It should likewise be required by society, which, only after the proof is given, has right to bestow upon a man prestige and authority. This bestowal is what is meant by "con-secration": the Whole endowing an individual participating in its life with authority and delegated power, by entrusting him with an "office". The union of the right person with the significant office is the consummation of all human existence, at whatever level of social or spiritual being this union becomes effective.
The test of position is therefore the crowning test of a man's life-experience. The attitude of an individual toward a position is the factor by which he will be judged socially and spiritually. By it he will stand or fall as an individual person. And "position" means here any kind of effective participation in the life of society and humanity in terms of the "organic" requirements of the collectivity of which the individual is knowingly a component part, and to which he feels, with the whole of himself, that he "belongs".
No position is less noble than any other. The street-sweeper keeping a city clean, the housewife fulfilling family and home duties, the mine-worker, the clerk or politician, the artist and the religious reformer leading their followers to a new path of social-ethical and spiritual-creative transformation all these persons occupy "offices" and perform functional tasks in their community. The manner
in which they perform these works determines not only their social, but also their spiritual status as individuals.The quality of the performance, in turn, is determined by the character of the progressive approach which the workers have taken to this culmination this "zenith" of personal living; by the manner in which they have gradually prepared themselves, and have been prepared by their education, for this crucial test of "performance". No person can put into an actual performance more than what he has put into the process of preparing himself for it.
In the broadest sense, a person fulfills his office according to: 1) what he has realized himself essentially to be as an individual 2) what he has made himself actually as a concrete personality 3) what he has created out of human relationship. He finds himself compelled by the very pressure of his own previous attitudes to meet the tests of power and authority according to whether this power and authority have come to him as the result of relationships made fruitful in intelligence and understanding, or whether he has sought relentlessly to acquire them by cornering the energy born of relationship in order to feed his ambition.
Understanding and ambition are the two roads to "position"; and each is based on one type of approach to human relationship and to the use of the fruits of human relationship a positive or a negative approach. In turn, any man meets the problems of human relationship according to the way in which he has faced his own self and has built himself as a particular personality. The whole of the
personal life is consummated in the use one makes of "social power" power, not generated by the individual as a single organism, but instead by the interdependence and cooperation (conscious or unconscious) of a group of individuals. Will this power of position or office be considered as a trust, or as a booty? It is for every individual to choose. In most instances the choice is conditioned by his or her particular culture and tradition, by a particular type of education and by the opportunities society has allowed him or her to have.The tragedy of our individualistic type of so-called democracy is that the entire trend of society, subtly or brutally, urges the individual to consider whatever power or authority he acquires in the fulfilling of his social position as strictly and without moral reservations "his own". This power and authority are presented as if they were for him alone to use, as he pleases and with no reference to the welfare of society as a whole. Yet power and authority of this kind are actually generated by the individual in so far as he is a participant in the life of his entire community and not in his capacity as a single individual person. They do not constitute a "private", but instead a "public" factor.
For instance, real estate profits caused by a neighborhood boom, wealth due to the fact that someone invented a new chemical method of treating some mineral ore, deposits of which one owns, and even more all stock market gains, are products of collective activity. Wherever the individual acquires power because of position, this power should be considered as a trust. The power of the policeman, of the judge, of the army general and of all public officials is also and even more specifically to be considered a trust. It is power of office, power born of social function in terms of relatedness; and all participants in the relationships involved in the production of this power should theoretically share in it, indirectly if not directly.
It is true that all members of a community do share in the advantages and comforts insured by communal living. Society gives to every one of its component individuals a participating interest in the benefits of civilization and cultured behavior; it takes also in the form of taxes a portion of all gains which the individual makes as a social person. Yet, the underlying individualistic attitude of most human beings stamps so deeply with the quality of greed whatever gain an individual makes out of his work as a member of society that the social-cultural heritage the hidden collaboration of all men to the social achievements of any one manare taken for granted or ignored. The rugged individualist rapes nature and society, enslaves the weak and the congenitally oppressed, in order to nurture his ambition; he uses what he can get out of the collective life of his people to swell his egoism, or he wastes it to tickle his bored fancy and his jagged nerves.
In the process, all sense of personal consecration to a task is lost; the essence of individual selfhood deteriorates along with the decay of all natural things and the entropy of all energies. The spiritual value of "position" is denied. For, in position, individual selfhood and relationship should become integrated in the act of self-dedication and social consecration. If any relationship and its fruits
are made to feed the ego of a person, then, to this extent, the person cannot reach a spiritual status. Conversely, if the individual selfhood of a man is made the slave of social production at all costs, the society which makes such a demand upon the individual except in the case of a defensive war can never, however powerful it may become externally, give birth to a spirit-realizing and spirit-emanating civilization.Selfhood and relationship are to be integrated in consecrated works; they can be integrated in nothing else. Whenever one factor uses the other to its exclusive advantage human values are perverted; "Man" suffers a perpetual abortion. Each time an individual usurps the power invested in his office and function be it even that of a nurse or a factory foreman in order to expand his ego and his wealth at the expense of the social activity which it is his responsibility to perform, Man suffers. Each time a society through its central nucleus of power and authority, the Government makes individuals subservient or slave to its craving for collective expansion and greed for power, Man is brutalized.
There is never any question, spiritually speaking, of the supremacy of individual persons over society, or of society over individuals. A strict individualism is, ultimately, as much a destroyer of spiritual values, as a strict collectivism. The rugged individualism of days of frontier expansion, historically useful as it may appear, is as opposed to the total fulfillment of Man as is a totalitarian collectivism imbued with the vitality of creative goals. There can be, in the last analysis, no truly spiritual value except out of the harmonization of the two polarities.
This means that the individual must learn self-dedication; and his society must "consecrate" every individual in his function. The individual dedicates his self to his position or office; society gives to position or office a sacred character by dedicating it to the creative energy of the individual fulfilling his responsibilities. In this factor of "position" individual and society meet. The man and the office
become one and both, sacred. For the man to consider the power and authority of the office as his own, for him to use as his emotions or ego moves him this is the greatest of all crimes. But as great is the crime of a society which enslaves the man to the office, so that society and the controlling mechanisms of the state may wax bigger and more powerful.Our modern world is today disrupted and brutalized by the wholesale occurrence of both types of crime. World Wars are the symptoms, not the causes of the deteriorization of Man. Individuals starve and die in torture; nations crumble, while bureaucracies wax tyrannical. Why? They have failed to understand that individual selfhood and group-relationship are the two pillars of civilization, the two supporting limbs of Man. They have failed to respect the sacredness of both the office and the individual person who officiates.
As this occurs, all performances of work become senseless and uncreative, because the individual and society do not unite in them, polarizing the descent of the Holy Spirit of uncreativity. Individuals become mechanized into automatons; communities turn into graveyards for the creative spirit. Civilization becomes the "Shadow" of Man, a nightmare filled with the catabolic activities of men that are destroyers in mind and helpless neurotics in their emotional lives. Such is, indeed our modern Western civilization!
Yet, behind and beyond the Shadow stands the Illumined Personage. The Crucifixion in our solid world of bodies and egos, must always be the shadow of the Transfiguration. As Jesus is transfigured into the Christ, he hears the tidings of his death from the mouths of those who have preceded him and represent the past Moses and Elijah, the "Law and the Prophets", fixity of rule and passivity to the divine Voice. Jesus is "christed", as every man may be, in spiritual creativeness. He is not only "illumined" but light-bestowing. He who has "stood under" and thus understood all that is human can now become a sun. And to become a sun is to have a star become you.
To be a sun is to give light to a group of dark bodies gravitating, in desire for light, radiant core of one's giving. To be a star is to "belong" to the "Companionship of the Sky" - to a constellation of spiritual Intelligences and "Sons of God". Every zenith is a potential noon-point; but before the coincidence is perfect, the individual must be poised and grounded in his own equator: a profound symbol indeed! The star of the true zenith becomes the "position" of the noonday sun only at the equator. As he radiates the "solar" power of his selfhood through his social performance, (his "office") the self-dedicated individual fulfills his office in society only as he is balanced in equatorial splendor, as North and South are equally active in his fulfilled and "global" personality.
This is the state of human plenitude; and toward it humanity, having seen itself commingling in death and the devastations of war, may be slowly - oh ! so slowly! - steering its course, however distant the ultimate goal. Yet even plentitude may cast a shadow, the densest of all! Fullness of materiality means maximum of weight and opacity, and total emptiness of spirit. It may be named success, yet be the death of all that is real and creative in man. To many, alas, nothing fails like success! There is blindness in all noon-day suns, murderous heat in all equators.
Spiritual fullness dwells only where the stars join in the translucent wholeness of the sky, symbol of Deity. He who can experience the midnight sun at noon; he whose zenith star at midnight can be like a sun illumining all men - this man, indeed, is an incarnate god. He is the universal spirit incorporated in an office. In this incorporation, and in it alone, the individual reaches fulfillment of the spirit, by the spirit, and for all men.
