{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

[Opening remarks missing]

... and you hear this in church -- of course, many of you have -- that we must die with Christ in order to rise with Him; it doesn't mean anything to you. You think that's some abstract matter for the beyond somewhere, on the Isles of the Blessed. It's very practical, gentlemen. No girl can leave her parents' home if she isn't engaged in a love with another man -- with a man. Then she can. And so can you, gentlemen. When you know where you are going, you can give up what you have. But the people who have nothing to come to, like the Americans of today -- have no future, so they cling to what they have: the standard of living, for example. And that's what you do, gentlemen. You think, first one thing goes, and then the next begins. But my life hasn't been this way, gentlemen. First, you leap across a torrent or a brook, and then you build a bridge and connect with the past. But first you must take a jump into the future. And since you don't do this, gentlemen, you are just lived. You are the most -- the most --hundred -- out of 155 Americans of this country, as you well know, 154 millions are lived by business, by prosperity, or depression. And you accept that. You are lived, gentlemen. You don't live, because you do not anticipate the unimportance of the economic cycle. Then you would lead a life which is independent of it, in your heart, and you would have some reserves to live in a different manner. But you live instead on the installment plan, gentlemen, and that is hanging onto the old eon even longer than it deserves. Anybody who lives on the installment plan mortgages his future. And that's recommended here. And I haven't heard a minister preach against it in the church. They don't know that what they should preach about. They should preach about your relation to the changes which God has set above you, and that's what I've tried to tell you.

And here, therefore, cut out, gentlemen, cut out on line 5, on page 13, after "through." Cut out the words, "the end of one eon first end." This makes it seven words, isn't it? They go out. Please, take a pencil or a fountain pen and cross it out, so you cannot even read it. As long as this will stare at you, you will not understand the sentence, because there it stands, this very unnatural sentence, that we have to live through the -- always through the beginning of the new eon first, before we ever will say farewell to the old eons, because we are so afraid, you see. Nobody wants to leave his home if -- before he hasn't rented the next one. You see. You don't move before you haven't rented the new apartment. Isn't that true? But nobody wants to know this, gentlemen. You all are slaves to your own physicists' abstraction. You -- I have never seen anybody in your generation so perfectly incapable of making an experience of admitting how you really live. You think you live quite differently from how you live. You don't

look into yourself, ever. You don't watch your own step. But you believe in physics. They tell you that time is -- consists in such a way that here's the past, and here's the present, here's the future, so that's how you live. And you say, "This is Step One, and then the past ends. And then Step Two, and then the present ends; and then in Step Three does the future comes," and of course, it never comes. Nobody has ever lived this way, gentlemen. So I tell you, the typist stands for all of you, and I only make so much fuss about this misprint, gentlemen, because it's your misreading. You cannot read my paper, because you have this glasses before your eyes, of the factory worker, who says, "Hour one, Hour two, Hour three, then the pay envelope after eight hours, and then I go home."

And that's what you think is life. Gentlemen, everybody knows that the wageearner in a factory has no life. That's foreign. That's not -- it means nothing in his life, as we say, you see. Anything that must -- shall mean something in your life must be something that's predicated, because you already live in the future, and you create for this future. This in a factory you cannot do. And that's why the factory work doesn't mean anything in a worker's life. But you judge time just the same, all wrong, because you think your time is ever composed in this strange, erratic way: first, the past; then the present; and then the future. Anybody who believes this, gentlemen, is the heresy of his own dogma, because everyone who is happy, lives the other way around. If I -- most of you are here in college in order to prepare themselves for a better life than otherwise. So you, in anticipation of this future, and even if it is only that you want to make a bigger income, you are here. Isn't that true? That the future has only allowed you to go here to college with a good conscience. But there it is, page 13, and three cheers for the typist who discovered you. Who has no copy? Pardon me?

(I have one -- I --. Sir, would you -- I've got the beginning of the new eon first. You just reversed --?)

I cut out seven words.

(Yes, sir, but we didn't -- you didn't add any, after that. After "the beginning of the new eon first.")

No, no, no, no. You see, I was right in the first place. And she was wrong in the second.

Now, my friend Mike Gish has been good enough to put on these five cycles; and allow me, Mr. Metzger, to plunge right ahead. Where is he? So we won't read your report at this moment, you see. Because I'm very glad to have { } and I want to exploit them to the full, I shall never be able to put them on again.

You recall that man is found in five processes of change, and we listed them just as one, two, three, four, five. And they were: mechanical. They were, second -- what was the second?

(Organic.)

The third was --?

[unintelligible]

Operative, we can call it. In Greek, it would energetic, you see. Energy is -- means, "by work," you see. The difference between organic and work is just energy. And so, "operative" is the Latin term. Greek would be "energetic." The fourth is passionate. And the fifth was by sacrifice.

Now we have to look into this, gentlemen. All religions are built around this -- these five items. That man dreads change, must produce change, must impose change. He must obey God, because God is the power who makes us change. See? Because we can, of course, say that the two words, "He commandeth," you see, and he asks us to command, can be translated also in, "He demands change," because any command makes us do something we didn't do before, you see. And when we give commands, we change the world, too. So the widest world for all this is, of course, that God makes us change ourselves and the world.

Now you can already see as far as the plumbers go and the Atomic Energy Commission, they only change the material world, and they have to build therefore, on the fall, on gravity. So the -- what is produced by a mechanics is fall, gravity, the exploitation of it. You can make water run down and on this is based -- are based practically all power transforming processes. You make something fall down; and that gives you energy-heat and whatever it is, light. Gentlemen, organic processes delay the fall. If you take the pendulum of a clock, or you take your heartbeat, finally, the heart will stop to beat. But as long as it does beat, this rhythm delays death, delays the fall. All rhythm, gentlemen, delays the fall. I will only take here the negative attitude, gentlemen, what it does. It delays the fall. Rhythm does. That's why anything that lives must live rhythmically, because otherwise the pendulum, you see, would just stop, and the gravity would win out. Rhythm is the simplest way of delaying fall, gentlemen. When you operate, when you build a wall of a house, you do not delay the fall, but you dam it up. You prevent it. You put on the brakes. You dam it off. So, gentlemen, you stop the fall. That's what all work does, because all work tries to build, energetically, resistance against what would otherwise happen by nature. Work is always an anti-natural. By nature, the thing would crumble. By your work, you stop the fall. I want to make it as simple as possible, and just start with Newton. Fall is

that which you -- even you have to admit as the form of death, which is there. You don't want to be spoken to about death, so I hope to speak to you about fall, because that things fall to the ground you will admit. Even you would fall -- I put you on the church spire and push you off, you have to fall down.

Now, former generations preferred to face the religious issue by the question of death. You prefer it in terms of physics. All right. We can get just as far. If you are passionate, gentlemen, you defy all the gravity. A lover, and anybody who is passionate can swing -- can overcome hurdles and obstacles. He can swing himself over fences, which no impassionate man can. Passion, therefore, gentlemen, overcomes gravity. It defies gravity, and it can soar with the wings of the dawn. But gentlemen, what?

(Do you mean by "gravity" that the -- )

I mean gravity! I mean this. [Object drops to floor.] Exactly this. What's the question? I mean by gravity that something falls to the ground and that you are today at this moment sitting on your fannies. That's gravity. And that's all I can hope for.

Gentlemen, man in the sacrificial mood, man who can add something that has never happened before, can reverse gravity. He doesn't defy it. But since Christianity -- the sinners, the fallen men are the saints. They are the asset. The modern man, gentlemen, has inherited the great discovery that our liabilities must become our assets. I've always preached for the last 30 years that unemploy -- the unemployed are the greatest asset of a nation. And as long as you do not understand this, you will never treat unemployment right. You think they are liability. That's gravity. That's fall, destruction, disintegration. That people perish. But gentlemen, with no -- every grandmother being a secretary and every aunt being a nurse, you have no reserves except the unemployed for the decencies of humanity. The families are combed out. Every young daughter, instead of sitting at home and being a lubricating element to the frictions of life is a friction in her own person. She also comes home tired. How can she then do anything? So gentlemen, we live in a society without oil. We produce all this oil in the world, but we have no human lubrication, gentlemen. Of course, our industrial apparatus is over-stuffed, far too energetic. So the ener -- unemployed are our only hope for keeping elastic.

Well, that's -- leads you too far. You don't understand that. But I want to throw out, gentlemen, that anybody in any time who says that something which you think is a liability might become an asset is always thought of as a fool. So, any religious man, gentlemen, is a fool in his own time, because he has a firm belief that something that God has created cannot be bad. Only we haven't yet

discovered how it can serve as something good. We haven't yet discovered it. That's all. And therefore, gentlemen, you have this great honor to live in a time where again the people say that you know everything that is liability. You call your -- you see, as you don't speak of death, but only of gravity. And then I'm asked, "What is gravity?" So that you don't even speak of gravity. I don't know what you speak. So you also do not wish to speak of sinners. But if I -- perhaps the bankers have taught you that you may speak of liabilities, of debts. Although even this we are abolishing today and thinking debts are something in itself wonderful. Gentlemen, a debt in itself is not an asset. It's a liability. If you however use the debt to -- for buying up -- building up conservation in this country, it might become an asset, might it not? But you have first to discover how to use it. In itself, it isn't.

So gentlemen, as I say "gravity" for death, so I say "liability" for sin. The word "sin" doesn't mean anything, but it meant in the old language of antiquity simply that drags us down. That's all what sin is. And of course you are such wonderful people that nothing drags you down, because you are already down. And you don't want to get up. Certainly not in the morning.

I'm really rather -- pardon me for being rather bitter at this moment with you, because I feel that even the very basic element, which makes man reverent, has gone out of your system. You don't want to hear this.

The ancients, gentlemen, who felt surrounded by these five cycles of constant inexorable change, which they all called altogether "death," and which involved everybody in some form any moment -- the people felt that if they could master these five elohim, these five great powers, which the Jews call "elohim," the partner -- parts in which God, Jahweh, appears; or which the Greeks gave a special divine name, or the Aztecs. But if they could swing in the rhythm, and the life, and the change of these five different movements -- the mechanical movement of the universe; the organic, vegetative, of chemistry; the operative, you see, of purposive action; the passionate one of affectionate association; and the creative one, in which new associations could be created, and a new beginning could be made, and the worthless could be integrated into the universe again -- that is, you could have the swing of these five cycles -- that you would then become like God. And the desire of those people was, of course, not to be underestimated. They wanted to be deified, gentlemen. Religion is an attempt to make men share the divine life and to become divine.

That's far from you. You say, "I'm just a human being," gentlemen. But that's not good enough for man. Man was not created to be a human being. He unfortunately was created to become deified.

So, let's look into this, how it was done, gentlemen. It's still in our language very clearly. As you know, we count the days of the week by the gods of the Greeks. And these Greek gods all signify not nonsense, gentlemen, and not nothingness. But they just signify these cycles. I give you the Roman, Latin names for these gods, because they are still in our weekdays. And you know, you speak of Wednesday. You speak of Thursday. You speak of Friday. You speak of Saturday. And you speak of Sunday. If you go to the Latin -- Italian and French language, you can see these gods more clearly. Wednesday is in French, what? Wie?

(Mercredi.)

Mercredi. That's Mercoledi. Merkur's Day. So we would have for the vegetative, Mercury, which is not a bad expression. Mercury -- you know the element mercury, the quicksilver. That's mercury -- is one of the elements from which man learned all processes chemistry. So the god Hermes, or Mercury, is the planet and the god under whose influence you live in the second sphere of your time -- of your change experience, of your experience of boiling over -- being chemically, physiologically, you see, undergoing what is called today with the most general, fashionable term -- how is it called, our -- all our chemical changes in our body?

(Metabolism?)

Yes. Let's put it here. Mercury stands for metabolism.

Now I began in the middle of this whole story. I should have started with Tuesday. But again, we have to go to French to see clearly who the god Zio -- Tiw is, the old Anglo-Saxon god. Tiw is the god of war. And in French and in Italian, it means therefore --?

(I think it's Mardi.)

Mardi. Martedi, which is which god?

(Mars.)

Mars. And he is the god of -- ?

(War.)

War. Of sheer force. Of sheer gravity. Of mere energy. Very meaningful, gentlemen. And if you come under the influence of Mars, it just goes by num-

bers. Quantity. Ten thousand outnumber 5,000; so the 5,000 will have to surrender.

Now, we come to the third sphere. The sphere of work, of planning. I already gave you a cue to that, when we spoke of Athene, as the daughter who sprang from the head of Zeus, her father, as the purposive goddess of industry and the arts in the city, of the Greeks. Her father, Jupiter, is the other planet after whom Jeudi, Giovedi is called, or what we call Dona, Thursday. In Thursday, you have the same god, and he would be the god of the enlightenment, the god of purpose, the god of the will, who can plan and reason, and who is rational. Your god. The god of modern enlightenment of the last 200 years is the god Jupiter, the god of the clear enlightenment, the light that is connected with plan and purpose, and intent, and deliberation, and what you call Reason, with a capital R.

Gentlemen, the next step, I don't have to tell you, you can find it out yourself. What's in French, the word for Friday?

(Vendredi.)

Wie?

(Vendredi?)

And who is she?

[unintelligible]

That's of course Venus. That's the girl of the passions, the god of love -- the goddess of love. And then come -- we come to the god of catastrophe. And who is he? Saturnus. Saturnus. The god of calamity, of mischief, of the end of the times, of what we call "catastrophe." Saturnus is the god of catastrophe, the wicked god. And so, you see the pagan week. Built up, there are two more days -- sun and moon -- but they are no real planets. And so the real Babylonian week was only five days of the planets. The ancient system of the gods and of your life with the gods was Mars, or let me say Aries, in Greek -- Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, and Kronos. Perhaps you take this as a parallel, so that you can have an idea how eternal these gods are. Don't get stuck with the Latin or the Germanic name of these gods.

That we live under these five influences, gentlemen, that is the common procession of the whole human race. You only have forgotten it. You think you are not under the influence of any gods. You are totally godless, because the only

debate you have is the asking, "Is there a God?" So you don't -- deny that you ever experienced any, so you can never have been in love, certainly; and never been up against just mechanical obstacles, for your existence. You have never to escape from prison, or from a concentration camp. You have never to measure up against mere quantity. But all these powers, gentlemen, for the normal being who hasn't gone to college or to high school and who hasn't been fed all the nonsense, this sugar-coating around life -- but knows that life consists of the constant threat of death -- and your and my escape from death by breathing, by sleeping, by eating, by jumping, by running, by learning, by speaking -- since you do not believe that at this moment, we are fighting death of this dead community in which we live, and that's why I teach you. Since you think that's just a show, you do not understand, gentlemen, that today nobody can believe in the great one God, who doesn't believe in the gods. Gentlemen, this is your great handicap. You cannot experience God all at once. But you think that if you -- in the abstract, as a concept -- debate God, that He will be good enough to stoop to conquer you. He will not. He has to be worshiped in His acts, and not to be worshiped as your idea. God is not your idea. Isn't that obvious? If it is your mind who thinks up God, then we would not talk about Him. But it is your whole human being that experiences divine powers who threaten you, who annihilate you, who transform you. Then it is necessary to ask, "Is perhaps there one God; are there many gods?"

That's the only question which I allow you today, if you want to come to life, gentlemen. That's the only decision you have to make. Are there many gods -- like my friend, the Catholic, you remember, who went to Fordham, and had as his conscious god the business cycle and economic reasons, you see. And for his family love, he had his unknown love of Aphrodite, of Venus, you see. And for his abstract convictions, he had Thomas Aquinas, and a rational system of belief. Remember? Now this man, you see, has -- is dead, because he has no chance -- at least only one chance in a thousand -- ever to integrate his three beliefs into one. He has three separate beliefs. So he's just funny. Most people want to be funny, obviously. They never talk about their whole belief, but they quote one belief for Sunday, and they live another belief downtown and the third they -- belief they live in their suburbs in Framingham, Mass., or Scarsdale. So there's neither life in Scarsdale, nor life downtown. There's nowhere.

Gentlemen, nourish your creed by asking yourself what overwhelms you and what threatens you and what you want to run away from. Then you will experience where God is. But not by abstract reasoning. Is -- is the -- are the Christians right, or the Jews right, or the Muslim right -- these are no questions for decent human being. You'll never know that. I don't know it certainly. Only I -- as I live, I more and more am convinced that all the { } people of all times have believed as I am compelled to believe. This I discover as I go on. And I'm -- there are many

truths still waiting for me I haven't yet discovered, but I have no doubt that one day I will.

So gentlemen, this is a great story. The five Greek and Roman gods, which -- by the way, recur -- as I told you, in other religions, mean to tell us that we are ringed in by five constant inexorable streams. We may try to form an eddy in the stream and hold back, but nothing can be done. There is in every moment pressure of gravity on us to dislodge us, you see. And we go downhill, and we dissolve, as the law of gravity and thermodynamics tells us. We are losing heat. We are losing energy. We are losing out. Then we have the rhythm of life. We must breathe. We must boil. We must burn. Then we have the power to do something about it. And I've given you already this list. I only want to remind you, this is the full aspect of this inexorable change. And now you see the change shifts from the outside, the most outer part of us -- for example, our body -- which falls by gravity down the stairs, if we don't once look out, you see. It changes over to a change of the epoch or the era in which we live. That is, gentlemen, this mysterious process of the Greek, Latin, and as we shall see, Jewish and Christian gods is exactly the same. The first change which a man realizes is a change in the space continuum. You are moved, or something is moved, like this, you see, pushed forward in space. It's a measurable change of space. Let us call this the space continuum.

The second action, gentlemen, which you -- we all have to realize is that there is a space of time during which the fall is delayed by rhythm. Again, take the pendulum or take your heartbeat. Any rhythm delays the fall, we said, which means that as long as this rhythm, or as long as your heart beats, you do not fall. You do not become a corpse. Therefore, gentlemen, we have a second expression. A space of time, which is very different from this, because if I move this just here in space, the time element is not considered. And you don't realize it, and you are not afraid to lose time. I mean, if you move a chair, nobody considers the element of time that is lost in it, really.

The third stage, gentlemen, in the operation -- we have, as you well know, a third expression. We call this a working hour or working span. We do not even use the word "span" here already. Perhaps I can still call it an "hour," simply. Our clocks are mechanically dividing the time into segments. They segment time and we count the hours. And so we -- I would say all energy is not counted by movement in space, but by the working time that it takes, because that has to be paid for. That's -- we speak of kilowatt-hours in electricity. That's quite a good example about energy, you see, treated by the hour. Your meter man comes every month and takes -- and tells how many kilowatt-hours, you see, have you used.

In the life of the affections, gentlemen, we speak of the span of life. "Span" comes from this strange word which the Anglo-Saxons dropped in 1650, when Milton replaced Shakespeare. As you know, the word "span" does -- has not been allowed to form a noun in your language. From 1650 to 1950, it was repressed. The Anglo-Saxons are a space culture, through Newton. Newton had such a tremendous vogue in England that he threw out the word "span." In South Africa, they still have the word "span" and "outspan." And in German, you still have the word "Spannung," which is the polarity between two -- the negative and the, you see, positive pole in electricity, and which you have to call with the very poor word, "tension." And I remember still very well when I came to this country 20 years ago -- or more than 20 years ago, as a matter of fact -- the word "tension" did not exist. I ran around in Harvard and asked people, "How should I translate `Spannung'?" And they had nothing to offer. The word "tension" is as short as -- -lived as this. You already know what tension is, don't you? And even people tell you that you are full of tension, you see. I wish you were full of attention.

But however this may be, the word "tension" is a fashionable new term in England, because it means the resumption of cultural relations with Germany. The Germans in the Reformation, and Shakespeare -- who was a German poet, because he lived in the German century -- have this idea of "span" of time, of rhythmical, not only, but passionate time. A marriage, gentlemen, fills a span of life. You can't count a marriage by hours. You can't forget that it is for a period of life, as you can by movement -- moving a chair. The whole rhythm, the whole biography of a couple that is married is in the anniversaries, is it not? The 10th anniversary, and the 25th anniversary, and the birth of the child, and then perhaps the sickness or the death of one partner of the marriage -- that's the span which determines the meaning of every event inside this span of time. And if you do not know which year of a marriage this event takes place, you cannot place it in the hearts of these people, because it means a lot what comes first, and what comes second, and what comes third. That is, gentlemen, time there, in the passionate stage, begins to determine space. And because there is a 25th anniversary, the people go on a journey, as they did on their honeymoon. And so they change space. They -- or they build a new house. Or they move to -- to Florida. Whatever these people do, the time moment of their marriage will determine their apparition, their appearance in space.

Wherever we have corporation and association, gentlemen, space is obedient to time. Wherever you have mechanics, time is subordinate to space.

That's why you do not understand industry. You think that industry consists of the existing factories of the United States of America, which is absolute nonsense. These are just all heaps of steel and rubble. Bricks. They are worth nothing. The movement of industry already at this moment has spoken the death

warrant over 20 industry -- factories who produce something that is obsolete. For example, they haven't yet taken up plastics. They still haven't heard of plastics, so they still try to go on. But industry is already, you see, in its timely progress, in its process through time, dictating to a new investor who builds a factory out of plastics. And out do these 20 factories go. And you have no way of -- by looking at all the factories that exist today -- to predict which is dead and which is alive. Half of them are dying, and the other half coming to life. And this you can never know by space, because you can never know by any map of the factories in America. Only if you are in the swing of things, if you know -- Ja, thank you very much -- if you know what is coming next. And this you can only know by your passionate belief in what is coming next, by participating in the progress of technology or science or whatever it is. And therefore, you as laymen, with all your economics studies, gentlemen, you don't know what industry is. Industry is the potential of building new factories in space. That's industry. But it is not the sum out of the heap of statistics, saying that there are 2,000 factories. That's not industry. However, you are so cock-eyed, that you look only at the world through the eyes of the dead physicist, who only knows of things in space. You do not participate in this growth of industry, unless you have your fortune invested in it, or perhaps your father takes you into his business. Then you would learn this, at least in your little corner. With regard to the product of your father's business, that -- business -- the good will of the business consists only in his potential market, only in that which will not -- robbed or taken away from him by a better product of a different kind. Only because he is ahead of the others, in a race, is he, you see, able to hold onto this factory in Pittsburgh. But it is the time element of his produce which allows him to have a foothold on this earth in space, and to pay the rent for the building.

Now gentlemen, that's the religious conversion, or the religious upsurge, which I cannot help demanding from you: Religion is the reversal of what you call the normal relations of space and time. To you, time is the fourth dimension of space. To the believer in God, space is the element of death that threatens the path of the gods. Space is the murderer of time. And space has to be defied. For the religious man, gentlemen, time has three dimensions and space has one, gravity. For you, who are physicists, space has three dimensions and time has one. So we cannot understand each other.

And therefore, gentlemen, since this misunderstanding is total, I have put a second concentric -- five concentric circles here before you to show you the ineluctable decision which you have to make. Every human being has to make this decision, and -- which you do not want to make. And which the most people -- parlor, parlor thinkers -- from parlor Communist to parlor Christian, you see -- most people live a parlor existence. That is, it costs nothing to hear their convictions as uttered in their living rooms. It's all parlor convictions. And you don't

know what they really believe, before you have seen them in action.

So you must never believe any man what he says in his parlor or in anybody else's parlor. What he is really going to do has very -- mostly nothing to do with his formulated, articulated, and even registered convictions. This is your way of looking at the thing, gentlemen. You say it is easiest to understand mechanic physics. That's the ABC of time. And so you put this nearest to your heart, here, where I put Mars. Then you say, "Let's study chemistry." That's not quite as scientific, but nearly so. Then let's study psychology. That's on the mind, isn't it? And that's already fairly much of a science. But then comes the affections and the passions. And then we get to this great science, sociology. And then -- that's very uncertain, already, like all the social sciences -- and then, it's no science whatsoever, no knowledge whatsoever. That's theology. That's above our heads -- that's obsolete anyway, and that's medieval.

So you believe, gentlemen, that Mars is the first planet. And the first god, because he -- directs the gods of gravity. In those you believe, in space. Then you believe in spaces of time. That is, you can space time processes by waves, by rhythms, because you must admit that the universe is not just space, but there are strangely enough waves to be found in it. They are rhythmical. This far you will also go. Here is just space. And here are waves, or what I call "rhythm." Call it waves. Then you have here psychology. That's dealing with this strange mind of an undergraduate. And then, sociology, that deals with masks as your { } in his { } coarseness, calls it. These are the loving and hating men. We call them masses, which just shows you that the farther away you get from space, the more helpless these modern -- your -- you people get. There's no God in this, in the masses. It's just godless. Or you have to be Communist, to believe that God is in the masses. And theology, we know nothing about that. That's just out of the window, or that's just for the lady.

Now, gentlemen, this is your treatment of these five great rings -- pardon me?

(Where does art fit in there, Sir?)

What?

(Does art fit in here, any place -- art?)

There is no art in this country. Why should I talk about it? I didn't hear that Beethoven lived in America. In this sequence, of the scientific, positivistic age, there is no place for art. This only exists, this stupidity, since 1859, since Darwin published his book on the origin of the species, my dear man.

There was -- is then a common god for these two beliefs which you have. It is called evolution. You have taken Marx and Hermes-Mercury together and you call him "evolution." He can mix and he can expedite. And he can extend. And he can contract. And that you call "evolution." That's your god. It is really true. Gentlemen, you must think in this scheme, in which you have grown up in your high school days, sir, there is no place for art as a normal { }. Art is just something that, so to speak, happens, you see. But it's inexplicable. It -- it's -- doesn't follow from these five gods which are really believed in. That is, there are not five gods. The real god is physics. The second is chemistry. Imagine, that Mr. Einstein has a window in the Riverside Church -- for -- for inventing the atom bomb. Quite something. Chemistry, psychology, sociology. These are the real gods. Theology is really denied in this scheme. I mean, it's nonsense to talk about it. There is no God. That's the assumption, of course, of this scale.

Now gentlemen, in my experience, I have always lived the other way around. My experience has always been that the great riddle of my existence is the creating of a new time, of a new period. I have been living through this. But -- when I grew up, gentlemen, that was what was called the fin de siŠcle, the end of time, the end of the times. And it was 1900. And when the war broke out in 1914, I had a friend -- a very, a real genius -- by the way, a great artist, my dear man. He was a great musician. And he had been very dissolute in a way. Completely remote from practice. He came from a very rich house and, as I said, was a kind of a genius. He had gone from Berlin to Heidelberg. And he had not found a niche in this world of Europe, which was very much like your world at this moment. Very similar. Berlin was very much like Chicago. And so this man went to war. And he said, "I go to war as a bride goes to her bedchamber." And he fell -- was killed on the fifth day of the war and he got what he deserved -- what he wanted. Because it was for him the dawn of a new era. The beginning of finally shaking off all of this nonsensical life which he had had to tolerate, and to lead, and which you lead. And this meaninglessness had preyed on him. And there were hundreds and thousands and millions, I may say, in Europe, who felt that the war put an end to much sham and fiction, to much what was just dead and deserved to be murdered, killed, thrown out of the window.

And so gentlemen, this is my first experience. That I -- we waited for a change, then we got and underwent the change. I lost many of my best and intimate friends. I lost my country finally. I lost my fortune. I lost my profession. And so I know something of what it means to change in time. And the whole merit of my belief has been that there is for man always this great challenge to sacrifice -- to cut his losses in time and to accept the change, and thereby make an asset out of a liability. That's all we can do. But death is upon us. Now in my case, in the case of my generation, it's the death of a whole civilization. But that's death just the same.

So, therefore, you must understand, gentlemen, that my order of things has always been the other way around. I've always understood God's ways with men, and I've never understood physics. I'm a very poor mathematician. I have taught physics in this college during the war years, but I'm happy to say that we didn't lose the war, just the same. I hope I have not mistaught anybody. But I tried to do my best, but I certainly am not a physicist.

So gentlemen, to me the theses of physics are utterly questionable. I don't believe in them for a minute. What they say -- what the geologist tells me about the periods of the earth's crust, I hold for a great hoax. I don't believe in any of these dates of 500 millions of years. I think that's all absolute nonsense. We know nothing about this. We have no right -- but this is their religion. So whenever you have religion, you get infinity, and so -- since they believed in stones and in death and in physics, they have made up these tremendous figures which overawe you. And in a book by Mr. John Dewey, which I quote in my Christian Future -- has anybody the copy? I can show you what happens when a man doesn't begin with God, but with space.

When Mr. -- when the -- Hitler came into being, it hadn't been foreseen by the Enlightenment that any such monster could raise his ugly head. And so they were very angry. They had deprecated war. They said it would never be necessary again. And there was something they couldn't help feeling, that perhaps it would be good to go to war against Hitler. But where was the place for this in their vocabulary?

So gentlemen, Mr. -- poor Mr. Dewey was suddenly faced by a quality of life which he certainly had not thought possible. And so Mr. Dewey tried to interpret the new era or the decisive point against Hitler, in this wonderful sentence. Page 45. Has anybody a copy? Read it, please.

[unintelligible]

Who he is. So, page 45.

( ... John Dewey feels deeply that his method is something new. When Hitler began to threaten his world, Dewey exclaimed at the end of his book, Liberalism and Social Action, "Social intelligence has found itself after millions of years of errancy as a method and it will not be lost forever, in the darkness of night." This strangely quantitative oratory of the "millions of years" -- common with the pharaohs of Egypt -- is the only pompousness which he will allow. Unfortunately the sentence is void of any meaning.)

Now, if I could show you this, gentlemen, you would perhaps wake up from your pragmatic slumber. The sentence, "Social intelligence has found itself after millions of years of errancy as a method, and will not be lost again," is utter nonsense. It is absolute nonsense. A new quality has nothing to do with the length of time in which it does not exist. The -- if there is social intelligence, which can be very much doubted, but if there -- let us admit that Mr. Dewey is speaking of -- of something that exists as of this moment, obviously the whole period of the animals and the plants, in which it didn't exist, have absolutely nothing to do with its existence. I mean, this -- a quality cannot depend on the length of time that has elapsed, you see, before it came into existence. It's just something new. Something utterly new. But that was his only comfort. He said, well, it has taken a thousand million years to have social intelligence, Mr. Hitler will not be able to wipe it out. Gentlemen, do you know how you defend something precious? By fearing that it can be wiped out. That's the only way by which you can preserve it. A baby has to be defended by the lioness -- and any mother is a lioness when her cub is in danger -- because she knows the baby can be wiped out and has never existed before. Her baby hasn't existed and it hasn't been found in the millions of years of errancy. It has found in nine months of affectionate married life. And therefore it has now to be defended! And what he wanted -- to beat the drum against Hitler, you see, in this sentence, is weakening his whole case. If it has come about in millions of years of errancy, we don't have to worry, because then it will just stay for another millions of years, of another errancy, you see. Nobody can do anything about millions of years, anyway. So why should we go to war against Hitler if this is -- if social intelligence is a product of million of years? But in fact, a poem, gentlemen, is a miracle. And a baby is a miracle that these two people should ever love each other. And a miracle has to be defended against the physicist, against Mr. Hitler. Therefore, because it's so utterly new, and unique, and single -- you have to go to war, for defending the liberties of the Declaration of Independence, because they have not come about in millions of years, but just like that, overnight. Without any space moment, gentlemen, at one moment in time. And regardless where they have happened. It doesn't matter whether Jefferson was in Monticello, and from Virginia, or whether he came from Philadelphia and from the statehouse there. The great thing was the miracle at that moment on July 4th. But if it is an errancy of millions of years, where are we with the Declaration of Independence? Then it was probably a germ, that die -- that was cast on Mars and then flew down through space, through the stratosphere and landed somewhere on a mountain in New England, huh? Millions of years. And this is by the most reasonable philosopher of America, gentlemen. He's crazy. I would put such a man in a lunatic asylum. But they do it the other way. They put me in the lunatic asylum.

So we are as at war, gentlemen. And there must be war between the people who say that space makes time, which Mr. Dewey in this phrase actually does

say. His millions of years are nothing, but relating the creative processes somewhere into the infinite space of the planets and the stars, and saying that at certain times, they came all out of the Empire State Building, the social intelligence. It's unbelievable. I am in much better company, gentlemen. I know that God first created the stars. And then He created the earth. And then He created vegetation. And, I'm in perfect harmony with all geologists and all scientists. And then He created the animals. And then He created man. And now it's up to me to understand what He wants me to create. And He wants my sacrifices so that He can keep His creation going. And that has very little to do with millions of years, gentlemen. It just happens at this moment, here. And even in this classroom, I have even -- took -- respect you as creatures of God, have I not? And you can ask that I do the very best for you. But that's now, not because of an errancy of social intelligence of millions of years, gentlemen. It happens right here under your noses, gentlemen. And this is what you and I know first. Gentlemen, that we speak to each other, and that we have to speak and listen to each other, we know it is the only thing. You have to listen to me, whether I -- I -- you are sick, or whether I have a colic. That is, our physical well-being doesn't matter, at all. The truth has just to come out just the same, whether I am handicapped and have only one leg and one arm, I still will go on talking.

So what has Number 1, what has Number 2, what has Number 3, what Number 4 to do with my decision to teach? And your decision to learn? That's your divine destination at this moment. And then you say it is better to learn with a man you like. And then you are tempted to go to a man who is just -- whose apple you can polish and who then is just affectionate with you. And you don't care for the truth, for the divine. And then you can even say it is better to go to a drill master and have high marks, because he puts -- grinds you up -- all up, you see, and you can buy the high marks and it's just work. And neither passion nor truth is involved. So gentlemen, we go down the line. To me, the world of physics is at the outskirts of the universe. That's the most remote, abstract. I can't live by this, and I can put up with many things, with poor air, poor heating, poor illumination. I have a study. It's good enough for me. I don't recommend it to anybody else. But what of it? It's just physics.

And how about chemistry? I mean, a man may have TB or a man may have only one arm, but he still is a full-fledged human being. His metabolism may be very poor. That's on the outskirts. Hermes is not a great god. And Jupiter, for heaven's sake. Yes, I must plan my work to a certain extent, and so I did plan, with Jupiter's help, these five concentric circles for you. That's Jupiter's work here. And I organize my work, in other words. And organization is, or planning is will, and is reason. And I do not certainly despise it, gentlemen. But if I hadn't a passion for association, I wouldn't be in this college, gentlemen. And if I had not a relation to the fates and the destiny of the human race, I have no right to

talk to you. I would have no right.

So gentlemen, this is the starting point of all I know. And yours, too. You know that you exist, because you are called by somebody who loves you to live. And in his name -- this name, this person conjures you up by everything that is good and right. Your mother thinks that if you call -- she calls you by your name, you will not lie to her, isn't that true? And on this relation, everything else hinges. This is your first experience of life, gentlemen, that somebody has loved you. And on -- by this, you have to go.

And, I'll give you a secret, gentlemen. There's a great battle on between these two schools, of course, in every realm. Politics, education. And the worst part of this educational process is that the pagans -- who today pose as sociologists and psychologists and psychoanalysts -- that the pagans who start with physics and end nowhere with sociology, with masses, you see, they also tell you that, of course, you must know where you are going, and therefore, you must educate people on certain principles. Gentlemen, my experience with my parents is -- and I hope it is your experience, too -- that from love of us, the -- parents renounce all prejudice and all ready-made images. They allow you to grow. God is He who allows you to free yourself, to emancipate yourself from any certain image. That's why you are created in His image, whom nobody can see. Now, modern education, which wants to have everybody six feet four, and so many vitamins, and so many muscles, and so many normal pounds, and this is the waistline of the beauty of America -- they all have an image of their own, as they try to mold you after this image. But wherever a man has real faith, and real love for his fellow man, he allows this man to develop a faith which he has not foreseen, which is quite unpredicted.

And therefore, gentlemen, the real meeting of the spirit in human relations, which I think comes first before you can learn anything else, is you must trust your nurse, your mother, your father, your teacher that he renounces all right to mold you in his image, isn't that right? You will not trust the man who says, "I mold you in my image." Then he would be a dictator. He would be a slavemaster, you see. He would be a maker, a manipulator. And that is the difference, gentlemen, between God -- the god of all times, who creates you out of nothing, and the manipulator, the so-called, in Greek, { }, the manufacturer, the artisan, you see, who molds you out of clay. The Bible, as you know, has this very great way out, in which it says that "Man is molded out of clay, but God blew him in His living breath." And thereby, we participate in His freedom.

What I'm trying to say to you, gentlemen, has -- of great practical significance, if you could only see it. The sequence in which you list your experience determines your life. What you know, to know first will color everything else. First

things come first. But what are first things? Is it really first thing that you weigh 150 pounds? That would be if physics rules the world. Or is it really important that economics rules the world? Gentlemen, you know very well that they don't rule you. You would despise you if they would. But why can't you see that in any one moment these two great powers of life and death are lying in ambush against you? The powers of death are the modern natural sciences. They are the very good for dead things, but as soon as you say that you can learn for your life anything from them, they are poisonous, because they appeal to an experience which you do only make three times removed from your real life. What you really know of your own life, gentlemen, is much nearer home. And everybody, every one of you has experienced the good life, long before he is expected -- has slid on the ice and fallen down. And then been comforted by somebody who picked him up. And funny enough, anybody who falls on the ice, or is trapped in the desert, or is bankrupt, or is sick -- he thinks there is already somebody who is going to help him. You are all crying for help. How can you -- if the experience of being helped is not long previous to all your falls? And -- you haven't heard of a man who is -- doesn't -- when something happens to him looking for somebody who can comfort him or help him. Isn't that funny? Obviously he has experienced that this is there, long before he then begins to cry and say, "Oh, it hurts," you see. He thinks it is normal that it doesn't hurt.

That's your first experience, gentlemen, that life doesn't hurt, but is very blessed. The bliss of life is with you, gentlemen. But you fall from it, and the more you study in these modern institutions, of mental prison -- really, it is -- you -- the more you abstract from your real experience, and go to the most remote experience, and you begin to talk of the remote laws of physics. Gentlemen, physics is for those poor people, the physicists, who are only able to dabble with things who cannot talk back. But you and I, gentlemen, in our highest moments, live in a living universe in which all the voices of the universe talk. Everything has a voice. And you have. So whether you live in a universe in which physics comes last, and is of very doubtful value, or whether this is the order that will decide the Third World War. Gentlemen, if physics is a questionable entertainment of the mind, then you don't have to throw the atom bomb. If physics comes first, then there is no way out. The hydrogen bomb must have its way. Because it's there. In physics, this is funny. You see, everything that is in the physical world, one day it will be used. Who can say that the physics -- the atom bomb will not be thrown? Not these physicists.

[tape interruption]

I had a friend, a young friend, a Dartmouth student, who said he wanted to be a doctor. I thought it was a very good idea. He was very nice, and intelligent; and he finally came to the conclusion he couldn't do it. You know why he

couldn't become a doctor? He said, "I have -- am accustomed to take my physical exercise in my shower every morning from 6 to 7. And if I may -- am a doctor, I may be called to patient at that time. And then my -- all my routines would go broke."

Now that's a dead, dead man, isn't he? Before he even starts to live, who makes his second circle -- the vegetative, the organic circle, you see -- the law for his operating, you see, and his working, and his loving, affectionate circles. But these people exist in this country. I mean, all you ladies who live by vitamins, you see, and so on. And by diets, and so. It's a great temptation to -- this way out into the organic, the metabolism cycle. It hasn't to be physics, you see. You can only -- also take refuge to the god of Mercury, you see. And to the god of Hermes and go to the doctors. And then you have always a migraine and the decisive moment when your husband wants to take you to the theater, because your vegetative apparatus gives you the right to withdraw, you see, from the cycle, because the affections do not rule you, but your -- the selfishness of your organisms.

Can you see these connections, gentlemen? Any one of these circles can take over. In Germany, the men all have their womenfolk tell you on the street even that they are overworked. They work till after midnight, and oh! It's incredible the reams of work the poor husband has to make. That is, they boast with Cycle Number 3, you see. Nothing to boast about. It's shame over the man who works too much. That's just as bad as overeating. But in this country, as you know, some people do this, too. They boast of working. In England, it is impossible. In England, they boast of going hunting. I mean, no Englishman will ever tell you that he is overworked. They work as hard as you and I. Perhaps even harder. But they won't mention it. That's one of their rituals. They live in a ritual of society, of the -- Group Number 4. So their recourse is always to -- "I have to meet an appointment," or "I have a dinner party," or "I have a tea," you see. Or something. That they will always have as a subterfuge, if they don't want to meet you, you see. But a German will say he has to work. And probably an American, too. Wouldn't you say?

So, gentlemen, we all -- all the nations, and all we -- individual has a way of hiding, beating about the bush -- these are bushes behind which we hide. But the great question is, "What's in the heart of the thing?" gentlemen. Do you meet with the event of your being created, or do you meet with the event of your being un- -- discre- -- how do you say? -- undone, by physics? One is, do you describe your fall, your gravity, your resistance, your tiredness, your laziness -- as the main item in life? That you are full of weight, and dross, you see, and feces, and that you have to die. Is this the first thing? That you're already dead, so to speak? Or is the first thing that, despite everything, you are called forth to

create life?

Now I do feel that, by and large, you have a completely schizophrenic situation inside yourself. Your heart knows perfectly well on which side it lives. And you act as free men. But you think as slaves. Something has been put into your mind that forbids you ever to admit your own scale of values. What -- why that is so, I've studied this question. I can only hope it is -- the reason is a very religious one. It is possible, that in order to preserve our hearts, the consciousness is blurred, and that we put any nonsense in it, so that it -- our self-consciousness might not awake and destroy our goodness. I hope that's the case with you. And in this case, of course, I would be very poorly off, because I don't have this schizophrenia. So I'm all for your schizophrenia if you move really in this way, that the heart and the calamity of the times come first, and that you do volunteer for Korea and do not dodge the draft, and that the physics matter very little with you. And then perhaps, all what you have in your mind is not very important, gentlemen.

But I thought, on the other hand, it is very dangerous. What you have in your mind is perhaps not dangerous, but you will be on a board of education, and you will be trustees. And you will vote, which perhaps is the most unimportant of these things. But you will probably have all kind of honorary trusts thrown on you -- president of a fraternity. Gentlemen, as long as you have to speak to others, and you make speeches, which sell these people this wrong order of things, you contribute to the destruction of the universe. And you must contribute in a certain way to the predomination of the hydrogen bomb and the atom bomb. Because physics then will come first, in everybody's estimation.

Thank you.