Morenowithaudio

Dr. J.L. Moreno is a psychiatrist and sociologist internationally known as a founder and creator of a number of crucial disciplines in human relations. Group Psychotherapy, group dynamics, psychodrama and sociometry. His Books on the subject have been translated into 20 languages. Although he is widely known as a scientist and therapist his greatest contribution, which is the fountainhead of all his ideas is expounded in his first book: “The Words of the Father”. Dr. Moreno, do you believe that the idea of God is still valid in our times? “Yes, I do. It was more than fifty years ago, before the outbreak of the First World War, that I had three Dialogues About God, God the Creator, God the Lover, and God the Scientist. I sent out an invitation to an encounter with all men. "Come to me and meet me," I said, "rejoice! I have good news for you! The riddle of our world is solved?' As long as I remember, I had before me two alternatives. I asked myself: "Who is this me? A name? A bit of nothing, vanishing like a rainbow in the sky, never to return? Or is this me the most real thing there is, the Creator of the world, the first and the final being, the all-inclusive thing? In other words, am I nothing, or am I God?" The confrontation with these two alternatives was the dilemma which ran like a red line throughout my life. I suspect that every man is troubled by the same dilemma. Everyone has to find out for himself whether these alternatives are also meaningful to him. Every man is involved in this dilemma, whether he admits it or not. We all suffer from doubt and fear that we are passing fancies, without any consequence, and we are annoyed and angry because of it. I began to dig deeper into my own mind, into my own world. I began to try to find meaning in an existence which appears meaningless in itself. If there is nothing else in life except a dreamlike passing into nothing, at least we can protest against an unreasonable fate, an unpardonable sin, a mistake of the cosmos to have thrown us out here, into the desert of this planet, perceiving, feeling, thinking, without any chance or hope to become something which really matters. My quest, therefore, was: "Am I, this perishable thing, a hopeless existence, or am I at the center of all creation, of the entire cosmos?" I began to wonder whether I do not have, besides the responsibility for myself and for my own care, also a responsibility for all the people around me, my mother and father, my sister and brother, my friends, all the people in town and beyond it, a responsibility for everything which happens in the nations, in far-reaching continents, among all the people on earth, their wars and revolutions and miseries—is that not my responsibility? Is not the whole universe my responsibility? Responsibility cannot stop anywhere except in the all inclusiveness of all things which stir and spread life. If there is responsibility it must be for more than mere existence. It must be for a bigger role! How can I assume it unless I have a function in creating this universe, unless I am a partner in its creation? I must have been there in the beginning, billions of years ago. And I will be there billions of years hence. "I created myself, therefore, I exist." I began to think of the Gods which our forefathers have produced, the concepts they have evolved. I began to think, of course, living in Western civilization, of the God of the Hebrews, a great Godhead, the God who is outside me, far distant in space, unreachable and unknown, a mystery. It was in which the Hebrews lived; it fulfilled a great function then, for them. People were then frightened and dependent upon an enormous Supreme Creator whom they could trust and who guided their lives and who gave their life a meaning. It was a God whom they never saw, it was something like a He-God, He, the God, a God who was outside their world but of whom they felt that he is the greatest help in their lives. And then I began to realize that there were other forms of Godheads which in the course of centuries and millennia men brought about, always when there was a great crisis in the development of the world. And then came Christ and he made that mysterious, invisible, distant God very close, very personal. He was brought to visibility in the form of a personal appearance of God. He was the Thou-God, the God who is near, not as much the God of power and enormous wisdom and intelligence but the God of love and sweetness and closeness. And that was the God which Christ brought into this world.