Celebrating Moreno's Genius

[Edward Schreiber]

Hi all,
I know for myself I have to place myself into a very particular frame  
of mind,
or state of mind, to fully understand and grasp reading Moreno.  WSS  
takes me
a long time.  Each line is pregnant with many thoughts.  I have to be  
centered in
a particular way to fully take in what he is saying.

Here are some of my favorites from some of his writings:

"The only sure way of finding out the basic structure of human  
society is by training to change it. The discovery that human society  
has an actual, dynamic, central structure underlying and determining  
all its peripheral and formal groupings may one day be considered as  
the cornerstone of all social science. This central structure - once  
it has been identified - is either found or is discernible in very  
form of human society, from the most primitive to the most civilized;  
it is the genesis of every type of society. In addition, it exerts a  
determining influence upon every sphere in which the factor of human  
interrelations is an active agent - in economics, biology, social  
pathology, politics, government and similar spheres of social action."

Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society
JL Moreno

For me this statement has been a driving force in my attempted  
understanding of what Moreno was and is all
about.  Zerka has helped me to understand him by asking her many  
questions - but also by telling her what I am
thinking all this means and what to do with the method moving  
forward.  For myself, the more and more I understand
books and teachers like Eckhart Tolle, the more clear and precise my  
understanding seems to become.

Here's an example:

In "The Power of NOW" Tolle writes, "When you become conscious of  
Being, what is really happening is that Being becomes conscious of  
itself.  When Being becomes conscious of itself - that's presence.   
Since Being, consciousness, and life are synonymous, we could say  
that presence means consciousness becoming conscious of itself, or  
life attaining
self-consciousness. But don't get attached to the words, and don't  
make an effort to understand this. There is nothing you need to  
understand before you become present."

What this means to me is that he is noting the essence of the  
encounter and the essence of the canon of creativity.  In the  
encounter, the activation of the "I-and-Thou" dilemma, we find  
ourselves becoming another, and in that experience, we have the  
moment of capacity to know the essence of life beyond self.  This is  
the curative factor really in the work we are doing:  we are  
inducting - an experience of the essence of life beyond self - that  
is self - to know itself experientially.

What a great thing to do!  This is what Tolle means I feel when he  
writes:  "presence means consciousness becoming conscious of  
itself..".  This is the case because our method has to it instruments  
to transcend the self, the small contracted sense of self, to expand  
in experience to what is beyond the self - Life - and to re-invoke  
that life within our being  It's done with precision - stabilization  
- and induction in action.  I like to think of this as tools of a  
Modern Day Mystery School that operates parallel to the method or  
behind it.  The method activates formulas of the mystery school is  
how I am seeing and feeling about it now.  Sorry to sound out here,  
but that's how I see it.  And I have some worthy references in this  
perspective.

That means that to address the whole of humanity we have to make the  
method more available somehow and formulas, if they exist, that carry  
the codes of the method, so to speak, would be one good way to teach  
it forward.

To the first quote about human society, well, there is the notion we  
are at the 11th hour of humanity's history on this planet.  There's a  
movie that came out some years ago called something like:  The 11th  
Hour.  It was an environmental movie, a movie about the environment  
to which we are all connected.  The dropping off of a part of the Ice  
Shelf from Antarctica a few weeks ago inches us close to the question  
"Who Shall Survive?".   This is not to sound an alarm (that was  
already done by Al Gore) but more to note the larger structures  
Moreno saw in human civilization, this central, underlying  
structure.  It appears to be:  the sociodynamic effect on a global  
scale and the curative:  the social and organic unity of humanity.   
This social and organic unity is the inner knowing and presence of  
the Godhead within each of us. What is mind blowing about our method  
is that is induces the emergence, and in groups with sociometry when  
done with a sociatric point of mind.

Thanks,

Ed