TURNING WALLS INTO DOORWAYS1
ELISE BOULDING
I cannot remember a time when I did not suffer from periods of recurring horror about the state of the world around me, and fear that walls were closing in on me. World War I shadowed my childhood, and I feared that war would recur. Neither can I remember a time when I did not have a “safe place” to which to go to regain my sense of the goodness of the world: a special tree in the backyard, a special corner in my room. As a child, I used to fantasy that if war came again I would find my way to Norway and be secure in a mountain hytte. The process of centering down in my secure place was also an inward quieting which always left me fresh, ready to step out into the world, finding doorways everywhere.
In my childhood, the sense of threat and the sense of security alternated. In adulthood, I gradually became aware of the double tracks of social happenings in our century. There was the peace track moving through the League of Nations and the United Nations. It continued in my adult years in discoveries about human development, interpersonal interdependency, group dynamics and conflict resolution. Then there was the war track, beginning with World War I and steadily widening from the time of the Hiroshima explosion onward. It absorbed more and more precious social space as the world became more heavily armed and battlefields more automated.
Could one endure living with such a double awareness? In the sixties, as our five children were growing up, I was shuttling back and forth between the experiences of horror – visits to Auschwitz, to Hiroshima, confronting the day that nuclear testing resumed after the suspension failed – and my inward retreats into quietness, prayer, and a renewing of strength. The tensions were severe. In the seventies came a gradual discovery, punctuated with sudden bursts of insight, that there was a third track. Unbroken through the centuries, this track held in balance those powerful intellectual drives which had produced the age of technology and a militarized planet, and the spiritual intuitions which revealed the heart of creation. The balancing of the spiritual and the intellectual through ceaseless discernment was the third track. I was a scholar by now, no longer primarily a homemaker. Learning to use intellect and spirit synchronically had become a terribly urgent task. If I couldn’t succeed, I felt I would become an agent of evil by staying in academia. I did find a way of making the two work together, though the process has to be attended to and renewed continuously. Writing The Underside of History in the mid-seventies and facilitating workshops in imaging a world without weapons in the eighties have been two expressions of that synchronous effort.
Weekly Meeting for Worship, and daily family worship in the days when that was our regular practice, were an important part of working this out. By chance I also found help from a source surprising to my Quaker self. Going on retreat to a Benedictine monastery, I suddenly discovered the wonderful spiritual rhythms of monastic life, the rhythms of the hours of office, the celebration of the seasons of the year and the seasons of the heart. My new awareness that one lived out a number of different rhythms with different time spans simultaneously provided the basis for a new sense of spiritual and temporal synchronicity. I came to experience my life as a symphony of cycles from the heartbeat to the lifespan, with the stages of family life weaving through it.
The discovery through reading and through experiencing the monastic hours of office of ascesis, or spiritual exercises,2 as developed down through the centuries, was of very great help. For many, this becomes an experience of eclectic borrowing from many religious traditions. While I read in other traditions and found many commonalities in underlying conceptions, my practices stayed within Christianity. For me, this was “home.” This was what I could grow with.
Meister Eckhart has been more important than any other teacher in my inward growth. From him I have learned how to “empty out,” how to let God be God in me. The emptying out can have its terrifying aspects, if one confronts the black holes where God is not. Staying with it, one rediscovers where God is. From Eckhart I have also learned about intentionality, that “the seat of love is in the will.” Intending implies analysis, and so once again intellect and spirit must work in harness. Loving while intending involves putting the mind in the heart, as the hesychasts teach. It also involves walking the razor’s edge between the I-it and the I-Thou, which Martin Buber has described. Identifying with the fulness of the planet, experiencing all creation with a new smell, I learned from George Fox. Over time I developed my own exercises of using the body as a metaphor for the planet to experience the personal-planetary linkage in a direct way. Reaching out to the Other as stranger, but not as enemy, I learned from Buber’s teachings on dialogue. Reaching out to oneness with God – the unitive experience – was something that all teachers pointed to, and yet when the time came I had to find my own way there. There are no maps through the “Cloud of Unknowing.”
A difficult task for which there are few teachers is that of reworking the deep structures of the mind which bear cultural overlays of God as Father, God as Mighty in Battle from ancient tribal experience. Knowing God as mother and nurturer is one thing intellectually, but much harder spiritually because of the deep structures. I am still working on that.
The daily ascesis varies a lot from one period of my life to another, and particularly varies according to whether I am at Dartmouth meeting classes, on the road conferencing and speaking, at home in Boulder, or at my hermitage. While the phrase, “keeping spiritually fit” sounds offensive even as I write it, there is no question but that there has to be a daily practice of some kind in order to stay grounded in God. Waking into prayer and going to sleep in prayer helps frame the day. Lectia divina, the monastic practice of reading the bible or devotional literature with the heart, mind and body (and yes, moving the lips) helps orchestrate the rhythms of one’s being. There is no limit to the kinds of prayer one can pray in a day. The centering prayer, the lifting prayer, the listening prayer, are among the many inner turnings toward God one can make. The ways of tuning in are highly individual; we each find our own. Devices to help the tuning are many. I love to start the morning with “Oh God, open my lips that my mouth may declare your praise.” During the day there are spiritual “hums” which, like Winnie the Pooh, I make up as I go along. The Jesus prayer or a variant of it, repeated at the back of my mind in situations of great and continuous pressure when it seems almost impossible to meet all the demands others are placing on me, keeps me on an even keel.
Daily ascesis cannot substitute for times of solitude, which in my own life I think of as “hermitage time.” There are mini-solitudes, when one has an hour, a day, a week alone. And then there are the Great Solitudes, which require months of stillness. These are the times when one can approach such tasks as working on the deep structures of the mind. This cannot be done in the midst of other tasks, as daily ascesis can. My first Great Solitude came in 1974, when with my husband’s support I took a year’s leave from the University and spent it in a small one-room hermitage which had been built in the woods behind the family cabin on our mountain acreage. Because I have written about that in the Pendle Hill pamphlet, Born Remembering, I will not speak of it here except to say that now, ten years later, what keeps me going through heavier work pressures than I can easily manage is knowledge that my next Great Solitude is coming up in the fall of 1985. The knowledge of the spiritual space that is waiting for me is already doing a healing work in me, in advance.
One thing I will say about the Great Solitude is that it is a time of stripping. One goes into that solitude heavily baggaged, and comes out traveling light. It is however in no way a time of disconnecting with the world. It is a time of reconnecting with the life-affirming qualities of human society. One digs deeper in the groups with which one works. We need each other’s solitude.
As I write, the old warnings are sounding in my mind as they did in 1973, the year before my hermitage year, not to anticipate, not to think or say too much. It must be a time of openness to happenings, one can be neither described nor programmed in advance. At the right time, doors will open back into the world. I want to share here what I know now in all its partialness. The balancing of mind and spirit goes on, sometimes precariously, sometimes joyfully. Doing futures imaging has been one wonderful balancer.
Societies and individuals move toward the futures they see as possible and desirable. The envisioned future itself acts as a powerful magnet, directing our behavior toward the realization of the vision. This is the basic message of the book on The Image of the Future by the Dutch sociologist, Fred Polak, which I translated from the Dutch in the 1950s. Polak wrote his macrohistorical survey of how past societies have been empowered by their images of the future in order to arouse people from postwar apathy and despair. He pointedout to his fellow-Europeans that if they didn’t start mentally picturing a better future, there would be no future, only a miserable extension of the war-gutted present. It gradually dawned on me, after years of working for an ever-receding goal of disarmament, that no one – not scholars, not activists, certainly not public leaders – could picture a disarmed world. They therefore could not work for one, no matter how much they feared the arms race. In fact, the arms race was inextricably entwined with the images of economic development which had initially aroused them from their postwar apathy. People had indeed imaged, but imaged in a dangerously limited near-term manner. They had not done the kind of visioning for which Polak was calling.
It was clear to me from my reading of history that people of all traditions had in the past generated images of the drastically other and better Zion, the peaceable kingdom, the Elysian Fields, the place where deserts bloomed. Yet “utopian” is a bad word in our time. Our education fosters a pseudo-rationality. Imaging is done passively in front of TV screens, which leave little to the imagination. Several generations of children have had daydreaming bred out of them. Our literacy is confined to numbers and words. There is no image literacy.
How are we to repair image illiteracy? How can we recover the capacity for utopian thinking? How can we bring about the abolition of war? Warren Ziegler3 was willing to work with me in applying a Polakian technique he had developed for helping groups do problem solving by imaging a future in which the problem they were struggling with had actually been solved. The result: workshops in imaging a world without weapons.
There are two basic components to this type of imaging. The first is intentionality. We must allow ourselves not only to wish for but to intend the good. I am speaking of the kind of intentionality of which William Law wrote in his Serious Call to the Devout and Holy Life. He created something of a spiritual revolution in eighteenth century England by pointing out that most people who identified themselves as Christians had no intention of becoming Christian in the spiritual sense. They weren’t “serious.” Our intentions about the future must be serious, so the first exercise in the imaging workshop is to make a list of things we want to see happen in the world by 2016, thirty years into the future. We choose 30 years because it is far enough into the future so something can have happened, and near enough so that many of us will live into that time. Participants must make their own lists. The items on it become their intentions.
The second component of imaging involves unlocking the total store of imagery in our mental warehouses. Everything we have ever experienced from conception – every sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, every thought and inward impulse, is stored within us. Nothing has been lost. This is the prima materia for the work of imaging how things will be in 2016. You cannot draw on it with your conscious mind, but when you allow yourself to go into a fantasying mode, it floats up. To help participants get into that fantasying mode, the second exercise is to step into a childhood memory. Participants are asked to pick a happy one. I often go back to age nine and climb an apple tree in our yard. It is essential to use all one’s inward senses in experiencing the scene; see the colors, feel the textures, smell the smells, hear the sounds, note the expressions on peoples’ faces. The more questions asked, the more images one will see. It is all there. After a couple of minutes of remembering, each participant turns to a neighbor and describes where he or she has been, then listens to where the neighbor has been. Sharing the experience helps to clarify the memory.
It is this type of imaging you do when you image the year 2016. You will see a world without weapons around you with the same vividness, as fragments from your stored experiences recombined in a kind of movie reel inside your head. Now you won’t see that kind of world if you don’t fantasize 2016 with the intention of seeing it. Your intentionality instructs your unconscious. The only role your intellect plays at this stage is to instruct your intentions; it is not to construct the world itself. That would interfere with the work of fantasy.
This kind of imaging is related to, although not the same as, what Quakers call “standing in the light.” This light illumines the good and gives us power to move toward it. However there are dark times; for fears and horrors also are stored in the unconscious. This is both because of our memory storehouse and because of the structures of the mind itself, including archetypal structures. There is nothing in the act of imaging per se that evokes visions of a good world. We can imagine evil as well as good, as we all know. That is why our intentions are so important. Entering into the fantasy mode with our intentions clarified and well honed is in essence a religious experience. By an act of will we are moving toward something which in a sense God is holding out to us. Yet we are in no way prophesying or predicting or compelling the future by this kind of imaging, any more than we are compelling the future when we pray. The enactment of the future depends on what we do, how we individually and collectively respond to what we envision. Further, because our images will vary, the future will look different to each of us. Whose future will be played out? Asking this question reminds us that conflicts and differences are at the very core of our humanness. Learning to work together across differences will if anything be even more important in 2016 than it is in the present, if we are to manage without weapons.
After workshop participants have honed their intentions, practiced imaging by stepping into a childhood memory, they are ready to step into 2016. Each has his or her own way of becoming relaxed and comfortable so the body does not interfere with imaging. Stepping out of the present, each will find a long hedge stretching as far as eye can see in either direction. It is a thick hedge. We cannot see through it. On the other side lies 2016. Each of us will find a way through the hedge. Some will find a space to squeeze through the branches, others may find a gate, or even a path. Those who are athletically inclined may even jump the hedge! When one is on the other side, he or she must step well into the new land and look around. If one sees nothing it may be necessary to walk in whatever direction appears promising. Some may be offered a lift by a passing resident of 2016. Our instructions are to use whatever device we can think of to get where we can see something.
There are always a few who have trouble actually seeing anything on the other side of the hedge. Those who do find their way can help others who are still not “there” with suggestions. It is all right to ask questions as one explores this world. How are folks managing conflict if there are no weapons? What kinds of occupations do people have? What kind of family life? What are children doing, the elderly? How does governance take place? Do people play? Do they pray? It is important to remember that you are watching what is going on in order to report it. Participants are the observers. They must not be content with generalizations like “nobody is hungry,” “everybody shares with everybody else.” What indicates that no one is hungry, if that is the thought that comes to mind? What is seen that indicates sharing? It is like a movie inside your head.
Once again participants will share with their neighbors. If telling clarifies a childhood memory, it is even more true of our memory of the future. Neighbors can ask questions of each other, so each can see as clearly as possible what the other has seen.
We now begin to work together, first in groups of three, and later in groups of five or more, to construct a more coherent world out of the image fragments. After all, each has seen only a few things, been only in a tiny corner of that future world. Yet image fragments are clues about the larger society. What are the implications of what has been seen for the world itself? Here the intellect comes into its own, in partnership with the imaging spirit. What can be inferred about decision-making, governance, state of the environment, cities, etc. from what each of us in our working group has seen?
At this point we begin to draw pictures, or schematic diagrams, or maps, showing “how things are.” We look at each other’s representations of the future, and start constructing the world out of the varied ingredients offered by each participant. Some will appear mutually contradictory. Since we know that the world of today is full of contradictions, it would seem that this phenomenon continues in the future! On the other hand, many themes will also be congruent. Generally workshop participants agree that there is less strain and more smiling in 2016. I will say no more about what is found in the workshop groups because that might start affecting our images. Each must begin with his or her own inward fantasying. Our personal image fragments must have their part in the effort to first imagine and then rationally construct the world we envision humanity inhabiting in 2016.
There are two more parts to this process. After participants have worked together on “world construction,” whether for an hour or a day, it is important to remember how we got to 2016. This again is done in a fantasying mode. Standing in the world of 2016, we look back over the events that brought us there. What happened last year? What happened in 2010? In 2000? In 1990? Finally we are back in the present, and have reconstructed history from the future to the present. Participants must work rationally forward, making up events that make 2016 plausible. Doing so would not allow fantasy a chance to make its input. The whole point of this exercise is to allow fantasy to dream up happenings of which our rational mind would not have thought. Impossible to write history from the future, you say? Not at all. We are constructing history using clues from our imaged 2016. This is the way historians construct history, only they use clues from the past. Most of what the historian does is to fill in the empty spaces. This is precisely what we have been doing.
Now we come to the last exercise. Participants have been in 2016, and are happy with what they have seen. They have remembered events that got them there – some catastrophes, some slow unfoldings, some extraordinarily creative social inventions. Now they must map out the spaces in the present, considering carefully the different settings in which they spend time each week, each month. Knowing what we know about 2016, remembering some of the events that got us there, the question becomes what will each of us choose to do now in the settings in which we regularly move, to help bring about that future? We have been standing in the light. Now it is time to walk in it.
Up to now I have said very little about the dark side of the unconscious. I have dealt with the forces of evil by emphasizing the intending and willing of the good. Things are not that simple. I must not over-simplify the realities of the inward struggle. Appropriately enough at the 1984 Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, a wonderfully illuminating dream came to me on the last night of the conference.
The dream was of a wedding. The wedding dress started to be of ivory to match my daughter’s skin. Then it was to be a dress of many colors, and many beautiful pieces of cloth were brought. The wedding had a bride and groom, but it was also somehow simultaneously a confirmation, a bar and bat mitzvah, a taking of convent vows, and a marriage of two apocalyptic figures, one dark, one shining bright. The groom, who was dark, was to give the wedding sermon. I typed a draft of the sermon on onion skin paper and gave it to him. He didn’t look at it. I said, “You’d better look;” I wanted him to use the ideas but mingle them with his own. He said no, he would just read it aloud. Then a bridesmaid started making changes, crossing out lines and adding phrases with a big blue pencil. “He won’t be able to read it!” I said. Then he took it, and now he was both bridegroom and bride. I somehow knew he was going to use the manuscript but not read from it. Then he disappeared. I asked everywhere, “Have you seen him?” Yes he was here, yes he was there – a photographer helped to look. Then it was time to go to the church, and we went in faith because there was no sign of the bride/ bridegroom. There was a parking space just in front of the church; we parked and went in. As we came in, I knew the kairos was at hand. The bride/bridegroom was there.
I woke up knowing I had witnessed the wedding of the two faces of the apocalypse, the “last things.” What we did not fully explore during the 1984 Conference weekend was the grim fact that our age is convinced that the forces of darkness will overcome the forces of light, and that we will be destroyed. At the same time, we have allowed ourselves to become the forces of darkness, and so it is we who destroy ourselves in an acting out of a perverted armageddon. The forces of light, the other face of the apocalypse, are hidden in the Holy Spirit. The eruption of that hidden Holy Spirit has occurred again and again in unlikely times in human history. Joachim de Fiore in the thirteenth century saw beyond a corrupt and violent Rome to a post-bureaucratic post-hierarchial age, an age of the Holy Spirit, which would succeed the oppressive ages of conquest and domination that had prevailed for so long.
There has been an unbroken line of succession from the chiliasts of Joachim’s time through the anabaptist tradition to our own times. That tradition has been a tradition of children of the light, all equal, all sharing, eschewing violence, making no false distinctions by gender or age, using the Bible as a guidebook to the peaceable kingdom, accepting an inward discipline of lifelong spiritual development, and committed to the reconstruction of the existing social order. The industrial revolution almost swamped that vision, but not quite. In trying to recover it, we have to face the reality that the god of most periods of human history, and particularly our own, is a battle god, a mighty warrior. The language of the Bible and of much devotional literature is couched in warrior language. We must set ourselves to the painful task of looking at the warrior face of God, which our collective unconscious has revealed through many centuries, and reworking our deepest understandings until we see the face of love, the other side of conflict and pain. That I think is what the wedding of my dream was about. This is no easy Aquarian-Age transformation. It will take an incredible intellectual, emotional, and spiritual effort, and requires the undoing of many habits of mind and spirit. As Meister Eckhart says, the seat of love is in the will. God’s gifts to us are light, love and will. Using them rightly, we can indeed move toward the Zion we share through visioning.
1. This article is based on lectures given at The Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology held at Haverford College, May 1984.
2. Athletics seems too hearty a word, somehow, yet athletics are involved.
3. Warren Ziegler, Future Invention Associates, 2026 Hudson St., Denver, CO .
ELISE BOULDING, Quaker mystic and sociologist, is a member of Boulder Friends Meeting. She has led innumerable discussion groups, seminars and workshops, taught in Japanese, English and American universities. Recently she has been chairperson of the Dartmouth Department of Sociology. Her article reflects her interest as futurist, peace activist, community network facilitator and consultant to international organizations.