So we get all mixed up when we talk about the Generation Gap.
We’ve got five of them and if you talk about the revolution of
consciousness III – that is only part of the picture. And here it
depends upon what part of the society you’re looking at, which
revolution you are dealing with.
Question:
How do you relate this to the present administration?
Dr.
Graves:
Nearly all people I find interested are in consciousness, and
please don’t misunderstand me here because some of you might be, are
people who have lost their way from an E-R to an F-S transition. Now
this gets a little tough. My students just play hell with me when I
brought this up . . . oh, they got so angry with me. But you go back
to the data . . . and you are going to find something interesting. You
are going to find that the F-S system is as authoritarian as hell.
Now, if you don’t think the F-S system is authoritarian you
should attend the American Association for Humanistic Psychology
meetings. I’m just the ornery kind of person who just had to test
this sort of thing out. I didn’t come this year because I didn’t
feel as ornery as last year when I tested it at
Miami
. I went to this
meeting of so-called free souls coming in for this kind of deeper
experience and that kind of deeper experience. They came into a room
like this
room . . . just a floor with shoes over here. Nasty little creature
that I am, I walk in and take a look at it and go out to get a chair.
I bring it back in and sit down. “You don’t want to sit on that
chair”, they said. I told them, “I wouldn’t have brought it in
here if I didn’t want to.” They said, “You don’t want to be
different?” I said, “I don’t care.” They said, “Take off
your shoes and be like the rest of us.” Again, I said, “I don’t
care to.” They replied, “What are your doing here?” They push
you and push and push you. A week ago I was down this way. A gentlemen
and I walked out of the afternoon meeting. I was loaded down with
heavy suitcases and he was too. We were staying at the top of a hill.
We turned to get the car and drive up here and they said to us, “We
don’t ride this distance because everyone here walks.” Well, we
don’t want to walk. You must do what everyone else does or you upset
them. This person in the F-S system appears to be an extreme. It’s a
free system on the surface but when it comes to the person who
is the non-conformist that is the place where you go beyond belief. It
is extremely hard to take. So a great deal of that revolution is of
this kind. When I told my students who were operating in this system
that they were almost as authoritarian as their highly authoritarian,
parents they were pretty unhappy.
Question:
In this story about sin, in my childhood, I had contact with
religious people. Even then and especially later . . . there was so
much difference in the people who shared identical beliefs, people who
literally believe God is watching every sparrow, ever deer, is there
every moment. And one must be a good person who can – in a childlike
position – be
a good boy to get the reward and go to heaven and another person who
is in a quite different orientation – which I would think of in
terms of integrity, communion or something up toward the H-U level and
yet . . . they share identical beliefs.
Dr.
Graves: Identical
beliefs in God? No, they don’t. Many people believe in God. My
question is: What’s God?
Let’s take the E-R and the D-Q? Many people believe in the concept
of justice but God was the original cause. In some E-R thinking God
laid down the laws of the universe and now he has left it to man to
find out what they are, to learn from them and use them. He just
started it. He just pushed the button.
With
the D-Q, God laid it down and he controls the button and he pushes the
button all day. Now, this is a tremendous difference in the belief as
to what God is. What is God in the C-P system. God is a conquering
name, an all powerful being who is able to take this world in hand and
twist it and make it do what he wants it to do. A person in the C-P
system, if you remember back in your liberal arts education, a person
in the C-P system conceives of becoming a God as in mythology. He
wants to become one. He wants to get into the position of being able to control. So he can hear the belief in
God, but the question is how does he believe about God? Not, does he
believe or not believe but . . . how does he believe?