I filled my house with the latest antiques. An echo of my own mental voice coming back to me. I hated it. It struck me, sharp and had, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! Human beings seem to be receptive only to sound waves that vibrate at the frequency rate of from 20 to 20,000 cycles per second. Another way of putting it is that a message is picked up, which is simply light reflected off him an into your eyes. Humans are in the process of developing a new consciousness which, in spite of their apparent spiritual and moral captivity, can eventually lift the human race above and beyond the fear, ignorance, and isolation which beset it today. It is to this nascent consciousness, to this concept of mortals born out of a Universe perceived through a fresh vision of reality, that the mysterious character of the holy produces an ambiguity in mortal’s ways of experiencing it. The holy can appear as creative and destructive (referring again t the fascinating character of the nationalistic idolatry), and the terrifying and consuming element can be destructive and creative. This ambiguity, of which we still find traces in the Old Testament, is reflected in the ritual or quasi-ritual activities of religions and quasi religions (sacrifices of others or one’s bodily or mental self) which are strongly ambiguous. One can call this ambiguity divine-demonic, whereby the divine is characterized by the victory of the creative over the destructive possibility of the holy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

 In this situation, which is most profoundly understood in the prophetic religion of the Old Testament, a fight has been waged against the demonic destructive element in the holy. And this fight was so successful that the concept of the holy was changed. Holiness becomes justice and truth. It is creative and destructive. The true sacrifice is obedience to the law. This is the line of thought which finally led to the identification of holiness with mortal perfection. However, when this point is reached, holiness loses it meaning as the separated, the transcending, the fascinating and terrifying, the entirely other. All this is gone, and the holy has become the morally good and the logically true. It has ceased to be the holy in the genuine sense of the word. Summing up this development, one could say that the holy originally lies below the alternative of the good and the evil; that it is both divine and demonic; that with the reduction of the demonic possibility the holy itself becomes transformed in its meaning; that it becomes rational and identical with the true and the good; and that its genuine meaning must be rediscovered. These dynamics of the holy confirm what was said about the dynamics of faith. We have distinguished between true and idolatrous faith. The holy which is demonic, or ultimately destructive, is identical with the content of idolatrous faith. Idolatrous faith is still faith. The holy which is demonic is still holy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

This is the point where the ambiguous character of religion is most visible and the dangers of faith are most obvious: the danger of faith is idolatry and the ambiguity of the holy is its demonic possibility. Our ultimate concern can destroy us as it can heal us. However, we never can be without it. Mortals have entered a new era of evolutionary history, one in which rapid change is a dominant consequence. One is contending with a fundamental change, since one has intervened in the evolutionary process. One must now better appreciate this fact and then develop the wisdom to direct the process toward one’s fulfillment rather than toward their destruction of humanity. As one learned to apply one’s understanding of the physical World for practical purposes, one is, in reality, extending one’s innate capacity and augmenting one’s ability and one’s need to communicate as well as one’s ability to think and create. And as a result one is substituting a goal-directed evolutionary process in one’s struggle against environmental hardship for the slow, but effective, biological evolution which produced modern mortals through mutation and natural selection. By intelligent intervention in the evolutionary process mortals have greatly accelerated and greatly expanded the range of one’s possibilities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

 However, one has not changed the basic fact that it remains a trial and error process, with the danger of taking paths that lead to sterility of mind and heart, moral apathy and intellectual inertia; and even producing social dinosaurs unfit to live in an evolving World. Only those spiritual and intellectual leaders of our epoch who have a paternity in this extension of mortal’s horizons are invited to participate in the Series: those who are aware of the truth beyond the divisiveness among mortals there exists a primordial unitive power since we are all bound together by a common humanity more fundamental than any unity of dogma; those who recognize that the centrifugal force which has scattered and atomized humankind must be replaced by an integrating structure and process capable of bestowing meaning and purpose on existence; those who realize that science itself, when not inhibited by the limitations of its own methodology, when chastened and humbled, commits mortals to an indeterminate range of yet undreamed consequences that may flow from it. Virtually all of our disciplines have relied on conceptions which are now incompatible with the Cartesian axiom, and with the static World view once derived from it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

 For underlying the new ideas, including those of modern physics, is a unifying order, but it is not causality; it is purpose, and not the purpose of the Universe and of mortals, but the purpose in the Universe and in mortals. In other words, we seem to inhabit a World of dynamic process and structure. Therefore we need a calculus of potentiality rather than one of probability, a dialectic of polarity, one in which unity and diversity are redefined as simultaneous and necessary poles of the same essence. As we know, totalitarian solutions quite obviously leads only to increased insanity and dehumanization; it increases mortal’s alienation, their automatization, and completes the process of making mortals a servant to the idol of production. The only constructive solution is to possess the aims and implement a fundamental reorganization of our economic and social system in the directing of freeing mortals from being used as a means for purpose outside of oneself, of creating a social order in which human solidarity, reason and productiveness are furthered rather than hobbled. Mortals, their emotional and intellectual powers, are the aim and goal of culture. However, when we have a good deal of regimentation and bureaucratization, it does not increase human freedom nor independence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Many people would like to see greater security, greater prosperity in the system so one not need be afraid that the new bureaucracy will not be dangerous. People want a new society of solidarity and faith, in which the individual has found oneself and has emerged from the alienation of the anxiety that is present in society. However, many people are satisfied with the practical activities at hand; still others, have lost faith in a renewal of society. This is why some leaders find it important to give the impression that everything is all right with the World, if we could only protect our citizens from the threat of a lack of security and taxation without representation; they act like disappointed lovers who have lost all faith in love. Yet it is quite beyond doubt that the problems of social transformation are not as difficult to solve—theoretically and practically—as the technical problems our chemists and physicists have solved. And it can also not be doubted that we are more in need of a human renaissance than we are in need of new sports stadiums and electric cars. Another important reason for the feeling of loneliness and dysfunction arises from the fact that our society lays such a great emphasis on being socially accepted. It is our chief way of allaying anxiety, and our chief mark of prestige. Thus we always have to prove we are a social success by being forever sought after and by never being alone. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Without my work in natural science, I should never have known human beings as they really are. In no other activity can one come so close to direct perception and clear thought, or realize so fully the errors of the senses, the mistakes of the intellect, the weaknesses and greatnesses of human character. Of all the electromagnetic energy in the Universe, our eyes are only sensitive to those light waves or particles having frequencies of between 400 nanometers (millimicrons) and about 780 nanometers. The phenomenon of subliminal perception involved perceptions of light energy that occur too rapidly to be seen, but which are recorded in the visual cortex. So people are constantly picking up on energy, light, and vibrations that they are not even aware of. That is why it is important to make sure you feel okay inside when you go out in public. It will decrease the chance of attracting negative reactions from others, and it is also a way to make sure that you are in control of your own energy. If one is well-liked, that is, socially successful—so the idea goes—one will rarely be alone; not to be liked is to have lost out in the race. In the days of the gyroscope mortals and earlier, the chief criterion of prestige was financial success: now the belief is that if one is well-liked, financial success and prestige will follow. “Be well-liked, Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman advises his children, “and you will never want.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

The reverse side of modern mortal’s loneliness is one’s great fear of being alone. In our culture it is permissible to say you are lonely, for that is a way of admitting that it is not good to be alone. In our culture it is permissible to say you are lonely, for that is a way of admitting that it is not good to be alone. The melancholy romantic songs present this sentiment, with the appropriate nostalgia: Me and my shadow, not a soul to tell our troubles to. Just me and my shadow, all alone and feeling blue. And it is permissible to want to be alone temporarily to get away from it all. However, if one mentioned at a party that one liked to be alone, not for a rest or an escape, but for its own joys, people would think that something was vaguely wrong with that person—that some pariah aura of untouchability or sickness hovered round him or her. If a person is alone very much of the time, people tend to think of that individual as a failure, for it is inconceivable to them that one would choose to be alone. However, as Beyonce says, “I am known to walk alone, and I am alone for a reason,” in her song Upgrade. So people need to be alone for safety reasons, to protect themselves from others who are trying to exploit them and take advantage of them, until they can find someone or people they can trust. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

However, for most people, this fear of being alone lies behind the great need of people in our society to get invited places, or if they invite someone else, to have the other accept. The pressure to keep dated up goes way beyond such realistic motives as the pleasure and warmth people get in each other’s company, the enrichment of feelings, ideas and experiences, or the sheer pleasure of relaxation. Actually, such motives have very little to do with the compulsion to get invited. Many of the more sophisticated persons are well aware of these points, and would like to be able to say “No”; but they very much want the chance to go, and to turn down invitations in the usual round of social life means sooner or later one will not get invited. The cold fear that protrudes its icy head from subterranean levels is that one would then be shut out entirely, left on the outside. To be sure, in al ages people have been afraid of loneliness and have tried to escape it. People make great efforts to divert themselves, and the purpose of the bulk of these diversions are to enable people to avoid thoughts of themselves. One does everything possible by way of diversion and the Janizary music of loud-voices enterprises to keep lonely thoughts away, just as in the forest of America they keep away wild beasts by torches, by yells, by the sound of cymbals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, the difference in our day is that the difference in our day is that the fear of loneliness is much more extensive, and the defenses against it—diversions, social rounds, and being liked—are more rigid and compulsive. Let us paint an impressionistic picture of a somewhat extreme though not otherwise unusual example of the fear of loneliness in our society as seen in the social activities at summer colony on the seashore, where people are vacationing and therefore do not have their work available for the time being as escape and support. It is of crucial importance for these people to keep up the continual merry-go-round of cocktail parties, despite the fact that they meet the same people every day at the parties, drink the same cocktails, and talk of the same subjects or lack of subjects. What is important is not what is said, but that some talk be continually going on. Silence is the great crime, for silence is lonely and frightening. One should not feel much, nor put much meaning into what one says: what you say seems to have more effect if you do not try to understand. One has the strange impression that these people are all afraid of something—what is it? It is as if the yatata were a primitive tribal ceremony, a witch dance calculated to appease some god. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

There is a god, or rather a demon, they are trying to appease: it is the specter of loneliness which hovers outside like the fog drifting in the sea. One will have to meet this specter’s leering terror for the first half-hour one is awake in the morning anyway, so let one do everything possible to keep it away now. Figuratively speaking, it is the specter of death they are trying to appease—death as the symbol of ultimate separation, aloneness, isolation from other human beings. Admittedly, the above illustration is extreme. In the day-to-day experience of most of us, the fear of being alone may not crop up in intense form very often. We generally have methods of keeping lonely thoughts away, and our anxiety may appear only in occasional dreams of fright which we try to forget as soon as possible in the morning. However, these differences in intensity of the fear of loneliness, and the relative success of our defenses against it, do not change the central issue. Our fear of loneliness may not be shown by anxiety as such, but by subtle thoughts which pop up to remind us, when we discover we were not invited to so-and-so’s party, that someone else likes us even if the person in question does not, or to tell us that we were successful or popular in such-and-such other time in the past. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Often this reassuring process is so automatic that we are not aware of it in itself, but only of the ensuing comfort to our self-esteem. If we as citizens of the middle 21^st century look honestly into ourselves, that is, look below our customary pretenses, do we not find this fear of isolation as an almost constant companion, despite its many masquerades? The fear of being alone derives much of its terror from our anxiety lest we lose our awareness of ourselves. If people contemplate being alone for longish periods of time, without anyone to talk to our any radio to eject noise into the air, they generally are afraid that they would be at loose ends, would lose the boundaries for themselves, would have nothing to bump up against, nothing by which to orient themselves. It is interesting that they sometimes say that if they were alone for long they would not be able to work or play in order to get tired; and so they would not be able to sleep. And then, they would lose the distinction between wakefulness and sleep, just as they lose the distinction between the subjective self and the objective World around them. “And never could a people more blessed than were they, and more prospered by the hand of the Lord. And they were in a land that was choice above all lands, for the Lord has spoken,” Ether 10.28. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Every human being gets much of one’s sense of one’s own reality out of what others say to him or her and think about him or her. However, many modern people have gone so far in their dependence on others for their feeling of reality that they are afraid that without it they would lose the sense of their own existence. They feel they would be dispersed, like water flowing every which way on sand. Many people are like visually impaired feeling their way along in life only by means of touching a succession of other people. In its extreme form, this fear of losing one’s orientation is the fear of psychosis. When persons actually are on the brink of psychosis, they have an urgent need to seek out some contact with other human beings. This is sound, for such relating gives them a bridge to reality. However, the point we are discussing here has a different origin. Modern Western mortals, trained through four centuries of emphasis on rationality, uniformity, and mechanics, has consistently endeavored, with unfortunate success, to repress the aspects of oneself which do not fit these uniform and mechanical standards. It is not too much to say that modern mortals, sensing one’s own inner hollowness, is afraid that if one should not have one’s regular associates around one, should not have the talisman of one’s daily program and one’s routine of work, if one should forget what time it is, that one would feel, though in an inarticulate way, some threat like that which one experiences on the brink of psychosis? #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

When one’s customary ways of orienting oneself are threatened, and one is without other selves around one, one is thrown back on inner resources and inner strength, and this is what modern mortals have neglected to develop. Hence loneliness is a real, not imaginary, threat to many of them. Social acceptance, being liked has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay. A person is surrounded with comfortable warmth; one is merged in the group. One is reabsorbed—as though, in the extreme psychoanalytic symbol, one were to go back into the womb. One temporarily loses one’s loneliness; but it is at the price of giving up one’s existence as an identity in one’s own right. And one renounces the one thing which would get one constructively over the loneliness in the long run, namely the developing of one’s own inner resources, strength and sense of direction, and using this as a basis for meaningful relations with others. The stuffed mortals are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they lean together; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love. However, every person, experiencing as one does one’s own solitariness and aloneness, longs for union with another. They yearn to participate in a relationship greater than oneself. Normally, one strives to overcome one’s aloneness through some form of love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

In love, there is a required self-assertion, a capacity to stand on one’s own feet, an affirmation of one’s self in order to have the power to put one’s self into the relationship. One must have something to give and be able to give. The danger, of course, is that one will over assert oneself—which is the source of the experience shown in the notion of being taken over by a demon. However, this negative side is not to be escaped by giving up self-assertion. For if one is unable to assert oneself, one is unable to participate in a genuine relationship. A dynamic dialectical relationship—I am tempted to call it a balance, but it is not a balance—is a continuous give-and-take in which one asserts oneself, finds an answer in the other, backs up but does not give up, shifts the participation to a new form, and finds the way that is adequate for the wholeness of the other. This is the constructive use of the soul. It is an assertion of one’s own individuality in relation to another person. It always skates on the edge of exploitation of the partner; but without it, there is no vital relationship. In its right proportion, the soul has the urge to reach out toward others, to increase life, to create, to civilize; it is the joy and rapture, or the simple security of knowing that we matter, that we can affect others, can form them, can exert power which is demonstrably significant. It is a way of making certain that we are valued. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15