What Is Your Ultimate Concern?

What Is Your Ultimate Concern?

"All our concerns are finite. In the short span of our lives many of them have already disappeared and new ones have emerged which also will disappear. Many great concerns of the past have vanished and more will come to an end, sooner or later. The melancholy law of transitoriness governs even our most passionate concerns. The anxiety of the end dwells in the happiness they give. Both the things about which we are concerned and we ourselves come to an end. There will be a moment – and perhaps it is not far away – when we shall no longer be concerned about any of these concerns, when their finitude will be revealed in the experience of our own finitude – of our own end.

"But we maintain our preliminary concerns as if they were ultimate. And they keep us in their grasp if we try to free ourselves from them. Every concern is tyrannical and wants our whole heart and our whole mind and our whole strength. Every concern tries to become our ultimate concern, our god. The concern about our work often succeeds in becoming our god, as does the concern about another human being, or about pleasure. The concern about science has succeeded in becoming the god of a whole era in history, the concern about money has become an even more important god, and the concern about the nation the most important god of all. But these concerns are finite, they conflict with each other, they burden our consciences because we cannot do justice to all of them.

"The one thing needed – this is the first and in some sense the last answer I can give – is to be concerned ultimately, unconditionally, infinitely."
~ Paul Tillich

> What is your ultimate concern?

Meeting Guidelines

The meetings serve as forums for discussing issues related to self-inquiry and self-definition. This is a tricky proposition – using the mind to understand the mind. To expedite the process, a facilitator directs the discussion.

Typical meeting formats are round-robin style, where participants have an equal amount of time to air their views. The object of this airing is to help each person clarify contradictions, tracing them back to prides and fears that cloud our mental processes. One of the ways of doing this is a friendly mode of challenging, or confrontation, not of the person but of his or her assumptions, beliefs, values and ethics. The facilitator is not to be confronted, as this disrupts the flow of the meeting.

A successful interchange relies on the cooperation of all participants and their willingness to "play the game." No one should preach or be subject to preaching. As much as is humanly possible we should try to:

Listen actively, without interrupting, maintaining a felt connection with the speaker. Keep the focus on each participant in turn, avoiding the temptation to shift the attention to ourselves – either out of a desire to rescue the person from tension or a desire to be the center of attention ourselves. When such a shift occurs, the facilitator or other participant should point it out. Try to understand the speaker's point of view and challenge him to question his own thinking, not argue with him or try to sell our views.