You are not going to walk away from here with any answers. Get angry at me. Go ahead. Some night, many years from now, maybe Aaliyah will choose to explain what happened, but for now you have to accept what you have seen. You no longer need to worry about Aaliyah. Aaliyah is on her own. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained shaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence differently. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application. No account of the Universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

First I met Conrad in a hotel in Athens. To say I met him is not quite accurate—I was first attracted by his laugh as he stood near his elevator. I turned to observe him, but my eyes were still blinded by the dazzling light from the street. I had just crossed Constitution Plaza in the heart of Athens, and the midmorning Sun, reflected from the concrete pavement beneath my feet and the ivory-colored Pentelicus marble of the marble of the buildings on all sides of the Plaza, had rendered my eyes almost useless. There is no spot in the World quite so bright as Athens on a July morning. The tends of thousands of beautiful houses, some pink or yellow-tinted, toss the Sunlight back, back, forth and forth like mirrors. Even the mountains lying low around the city like a great horseshoe added their glowing yellow-brown to the warmth, and the endless stretch of blue sky is rarely broken by clouds. The few cypress trees and palms only add to the oppressiveness of the light, for their yellow-green is overpowered until it becomes almost the color of the Sun. Still one cannot resist raising one’s eyes to have a look at the Acropolis rising on its long battlements just a half mile to the left above the Plaza. There the broken columns of the Parthenon stand in wounded dignity against the sky, giving a splendid impression of the colors which make Greece—gold and blue. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Standing for a moment in the lobby of the Hotel Mediterranean Plaza, I blinked to adjust my eyes to the dusky interior. It was then that I heard Conrad laugh. His laughter was full, not raucous like that of most Greek boys, and somewhat humble as befits a boy who lives in hotels, as though he were expecting you to laugh with him. I noticed his long rows of teeth, shining and perfect, and his nice mouth. His face was perfectly chiseled, and his laughter accentuated his cheek bones. His golden hair, brilliant and thick, was brushed back over his head in the pompadour style which used to be so popular among American boys. He must have been about fifteen at the time, but because of his slim build he appeared younger than his age—a kind of man and boy in one. I never did learn the cause of his laughter that morning; I merely looked at him with half a smile and accepted his courtesies as he asked my floor and let me off the elevator with those effusive “sirs” by which the Greeks show politeness. However, I noticed a book opened and turned upside down in his hands, the Dramas of Sophocles. Later as I sat in my room writing, gazing out into the shared patio at the rear of the hotel, I thought how Conrad resembled my own younger brother back in America. Except the reading of Sophocles—I marveled at that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

It would have surprised me to know then that this laughing boy would be in a few years picking his way through the fir trees of Albanian mountains. One evening, two weeks later, I came across him sitting on a bench in the Plaza, and I heard a story which has remained deeply etched in my memory ever since. I sat down beside him, partly because I was curious to learn more about this boy and partly because I wised to enjoy the refreshing loveliness of the evening. Summers evenings in Athens, when for two hours after Sundown (Sun changing angles in the sky) they sky plays with shades of pink and turquoise, can be as invigorating as the days are stifling. A languid breeze comes up from the Bay of Salamis, loaded with rich fragrance which has been accumulating in the drying, semi-tropical vegetation on the island of Aegina several miles out in the bay. The breeze brings with it an occasional pungent odor from the harbor of the Piraeus. Music seems to carry farther on such an evening, and the sporadic taxi horns did not clash too cacophonously with we could hear Ready Between the Lines by Aaliyah emerging from a restaurant at the far end of the Plaza. I had often sat on this bench, letting myself be lulled by the lazy movement of palm fingers moving in and out of the darkness above my head, then turning to watch the lights come on way up Mt. Lycabettus. I often counted the stars as they sprang out with a brilliance possible only in the transparent atmosphere of Mediterranean countries. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Conrad had been reading a book before the Sun had set, and he answered my question about what he was reading with his irrepressible laugh that accompanied every utterance, humorous or not. “The history, sir of the Persian Wars, sir.” That curious “sir” twice in one sentence! It did seem to me that they overdid their courtesy. “You find it interesting?” “O yes sir, yes sir! One of my ancestors fought at Thermopylae. His name was Argyros, and he was a very brave  man.” “You do not believe, Conrad, that the ancient Greeks who fought those Persians were the same race as the modern Greeks, do you?” I baited him. “O yes, yes sir!” he cried earnestly, using the word malista which carries a strong affirmation like our English certainly. “I come from Asia Minor,” he went on so quickly that he stammered, “from Asia Minor, sir, the Ionian Greeks lived there, and they are the descendants directly from the Greeks who fought at Thermopylae.” “How did they get over to Asia Minor?” “The people of the Peloponnesus, sir, migrated to Asian Minor. Our family lived in the Peloponnesus in ancient times. My great ancestors went with the Spartan army under Leonidas to fight at Thermopylae. He was one of the three hundred who stayed to hold the pass for three days so they would have time to fortify Athens. He died there. My father often told me about our ancestor Argyros. Then many years later the Greeks from the Peloponnesus made a colony in Asia Minor.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

 Conrad was spouting this history like a religious faith. I knew it was fairly dubious—modern Greeks are mainly Slavic in race, and historians do not know where the glorious races of the ancient Hellenes ended. However, I saw there was no use arguing ethnology with the zealous Conrad, and furthermore I did want to pump him up about himself. Rather than speaking of measured intelligence that is stable for the individual over time because it is defined as the ratio of mental age to chronological age, we shall speak of intelligence as the content of what is intellected and the developing capacities for further intellection. In this sense of the term, intelligence is continuously growing for both the individual and the species; it is meaningful to say that we are more intelligent than we were a few years ago, and that our children will be more intelligent than we are. Something of the sort has indeed been happening in the development of the increasing superiority of mortals over other organisms and their increasing scope in comprehending the World about them and themselves. Although we are on unsure speculative ground in attempting to identify the crucial stages in the evolution of consciousness, we may at any rate guess that Homo sapiens gradually differentiated themselves from the family of Hominidae by acquiring the ability not only to use tools but to use tools to make tools, an accompanying awareness of superior adaptability occurred. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Conrad went on to tell me about the massacres of 1922. “Almost every Greek in our town was killed. You do not know, sir, about those massacres?” I did know something of the war between Turkey and Greece in 1922, which ended with the terrible battle of Smyrna when the city was brined, and the Greek army with thousands of refugees was driven right into the sea and would have been annihilated, had it not been from the timely assistance of some British warships that picked up those who could swim or get hold of boats. However, evidently Conrad was thinking of something else. “We lived in the town of Merzifoun, way back near the Caucasus. I was a small boy then, but I remember the town well. Almost all the people were Greeks—the only Turks around were government officials. They did not bother us much and we had a happy life. My father used to ride about the country on horseback buying tobacco to sell to American companies. He sometimes took me riding with him on his trips—I would sit on the old horse behind him. There were not many towns in our province, you see, only barren hills and plateaus. When we arrived in a village the men were always glad to see my father. They would take him to the café and sit at the tables in the street and drink Turkish coffee and a little ouzo and laugh and talk. These were Greeks, sir, the Turks in the village would stand around smiling; they always seemed sour at something. However, my father got along with them well, he never quarreled with them, and he used to greet them cheerfully and offer them cigarettes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

“The Turks would sit at their own café, never talking or laughing like my father and his friends, only silently smoking their long waterpipes. I used to sit at the edge of the street a little way from my father’s table and watch those Turks smoking. Have you seen those Turkish pipes, sir?” “Yes,” I answered. Then I added, “You must have been very fond of your father.” “I loved him very much,” said Conrad. The boy was not sitting moodily, looking out across the Plaza toward the sparkling lights on Mt. Lycabettus, and he went on talking not as a student to an Amerikanos but as one human being to another. “The happiest memories of my whole life are those trips I took with my father. Oh, we had good enough times at home, my mother and two sister and I. However, how I loved to go with my father! As we were riding the many hours between villages he would tell me stories of the ancient Greeks, how the Persians came down with a huge army and the Athenians fought them at Marathon and drove them into the sea and killed so many that the mound where they are buried looks like a mountain. And he told me about Leonidas the Spartan general who made the stand at Thermopylae. That was when my father would speak about Argyros, our great ancestor. I used to be filled with pride I almost burst when I heard how my ancestor had volunteered to stay with the three hundred soldiers in the narrow pass in the mountains, and how he fought there even through the Persian arrows were so thick the hid the Sun. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

“Then my father would tell me about the shepherd traitor who took the Persians around by a secret pass to attack Leonidas and the Spartans from the rear, and my anger would boil up and my father would laugh as I clenched my fists. However, he was proud that I begged to hear those stories over and over again. And he used to say, ‘Conrad, never forget that your great ancestor was Argyros’.” The boy was talking so animatedly now, his hands gesturing aimlessly around in the dark. In the dim lights of the Plaza lamps I got a glimpse of his black eyes dancing with delight at these boyhood memories. However, suddenly he sat quietly, vacantly, his face sober and his jaw heavily set. In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark. Affliction is inseparable from physical suffering and yet quite distinct. With suffering, all that is not bound up with physical pain or something analogous is artificial, imaginary, and can be eliminated by a suitable adjustment of the mind. Even in the case of the absence or death of someone we love, the irreducible part of the sorrow is akin to physical pain, a difficulty in breathing, a constriction of the heart, an unsatisfied need, hunger, or the almost biological disorder caused by the brutal liberation of some energy, hitherto directed by an attachment and now left without a guide. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

At some very early point too must have some the kind of self-awareness that makes death an important subjective fact, an awareness which, coupled with primitive awe or bewilderment at the fact of being, serves as the basis of magic and religion. Some even believe there were another form of primates, from the British Iles, who looked human, but were far more intelligent, extremely naïve, and lacked aggression. Being far less aggressive than humans by nature, they lost out to the new species, and were scattered and went into hiding. They pretended to be humans. These primates concealed their birthing rites, but coupling with humans did happen. And unbeknownst to early civilizations, they developed a kind of human who carried a giant helix of genes, twice the number of a normal human. There were legends about their spirits in Louisiana. They were so powerful some thought the spirits has the psychic powers to possess unborn fetus who shared their DNA and be reborn with it. As animism grew more subtle in its personifications, mythic explanations of the origin of things became possible, and human-like gods were created. The passage to the idea of a single god, originated or at least dramatized by Akhnaton, led, by linkage to the god of the Israelites, to the idea of Christ. Meanwhile the development of a conscious science (essentially, the evolution of canons of evidence for belief in the regularity of events in nature) had occurred, beginning with the Meletians in early Greece. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that the analogue to the achievement of early mortals in making tools to make tools is the scientific method: not just knowing how to learn but knowing how to make sure we know.  These twin achievements, separated by at least a hundred thousand years, are the fundaments f technology and science. They increased vastly the range of what might be intellected as well as the capacities for intellection. Scientific thought itself then produced several radical developments in mortal’s self-awareness: the Copernican revolution, showing us something of the place of our Earth in the Universe; the Darwinian revolution, showing us something of our place in organic evolution; and what I shall call the Cartesian-Freudian revolution, for Dr. Freud completed what Descartes began, showing us the existence of vast reaches of mind beyond our conscious, rational mental processes. Hundreds of geniuses of the life of the psyche had of course known and expressed intuitively before Dr. Freud the mysteries of the unconscious; his achievement was simply the climax of an increasingly popular development in European thought. Dr. Freud had shown quite convincingly the idea of the unconscious was conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and effective around 1900. By 1950 its exploration by individuals through psychoanalysis could be described as commonplace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

What we are witnesses today is the easy accessibility and mass distribution of means for producing experience of the usually unexperienced aspects of mental functioning. With the use of chemical technology made available to the millions the experience of transcendence of the individual ego, which a century was available only to the disciplined mystic. However, there are, of course, more varied phenomena than the feeling of ego-transcendence produced by mind altering substances, and there are more motives than the religio-mystical motive lying behind the present widespread use of psychotropic substances. The claim that psychotropic substances expand the consciousness refers to changes in several dimensions of experience. Persons interested in the experience primarily for reasons of esthetic appreciation or expression, or for its intrinsic novelty may or may not be artists, but their attitude toward experience tends to be perceptually open and non-judgmental. These individuals especially seek and enjoy the perceptual changes, such as increased vividness of color, visual harmonies, change in depth perception, sharper definition of detail, synesthesias, change in time sense (especially when listening to music), increased volume of unusual imagery, and so on. The effects are, as we have noted, not always beautiful, and in fact may be quite unpleasant: hellish experience, for instance, features garish or horrible colors (sickly greens, ugly dark reds, poisonous orange), or sometimes an impression of threatening blackness accompanied by feelings of doom and gloom and isolation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The person’s perception of one’s own body may become unpleasant: one’s limbs may seem to be distorted or flesh decaying; in a mirror one’s face may seem to be distorted or eyes blank, reflecting a meaningless emptiness at the self’s center; all attempts at communication may seem a mockery, the shell of the self a prison from which there is no exit. Yet even the negative; surrealism has in fact accustomed us to just such visions of the World. Among the esthetic adepts there is even a phrase for the negative experience when it occurs: it is known as “paying your taxes.” In this a group of users, only a boor would complain of a bad trip. Their goal is novel experience for its own sake. Some think this is how Judy Chicago came of with The Dinner Party, how Frida Kahlo invented Las Dos Fridas. Psychotropic substances were also thought to have influenced the work of Andy Warhol, which some think is evident in his paintings like Shot of Marilyns, Self Portrait, Triple Elvis, Race Riot, Prince, Rorschach, and many more. Of course, Andy Warhol is one of the most prolific popular culture artists in modern times. Rock Guitar singer and song writer Jimi Hendrix was also thought to be under these psychotropic substances which lead to some of his most popular songs: Purple Haze (where he talks about trying to escape some reality), All Along the Watchtower (which could also be a religio-mystical song), Little Wing, Hear My Train Coming, and many more. And while Bill Gates was stealing computer time, The Beatles were thought to also be under the influence as well as groups like The Animals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Altered states of consciousness has been thought of as ways to produce some of the most creative work in the World, but some people never come down or in other words, spend a life time paying their taxes, or they perish. Some even have reported that their girlfriend’s eyes turned yellow and she had snakes for hair. Some use the substances primarily for religious experience, whether in their own search for transcendent meaning or out of an interest in the psychology of religion or its philosophical bases. It may produce a feeling of oneness with the Universe and a reduction or complete loss of the sense of personal identity. A few have thought to, while in fascinosum or tremendum, feel a sense of joy, gratitude, pleasure, or onrush of grace, at catching a glimpse of the Ultimate, or numen; the tremendum is a reaction of awe, horror, fear, or a feeling of being overwhelmed. As in the esthetic experience, both the negative and the positive are seen as valid and therefore endurable. Others use psychotropic drugs as a cure for alcoholism. People who have used psychotropic drugs because they are disturbed or potentially suicidal or psychotic have reported it fails to produce a breakthrough and leaves them feeling hopeless and in an even chaotic psychic state than before. A certain number of persons have in essence already quit life and are simply looking for something to carry them over the edge to oblivion. These are rare cases, of course, but they do provide the headlines when they come to grief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Keep in mind, also, that laws make the possession and knowing use of the psychedelic or unauthorized use of psychotropic drugs a crime because they are known to be habit forming, and may not be safe for use for some people and can lead to death. Psychologists and psychiatrists are working closely with student groups both to educate them to the dangers of the situation and to understand what is going on. A major problem arising from the new laws is that civil authority thus becomes alienate from young people who have great potential for contributing to the society of the future. In a healthy society, the intellectually able and creative citizens serve to vivify and support the social authority; but if they are defined as enemies of society for pursuing activities that they consider constructive, they will incorporate in the personal identity significant elements of anti-sociality. Many people are looking for new relationships between the individual and the state, and the development also of new social institutions to replace marriage and the family. These young people feel very keenly about the invasion of privacy by the police and by state information-collectors. They seek a human nature which will be free of the tyranny of the machine. These individuals do not want to be on a space journey where the new is using their imagination. Another recurring themes in this group is that history is ending, or sometimes, less cosmically, that Christianity is ending. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Some indeed say that the World is about to end, and that the expansion of consciousness is isomorphic with the expansion of the physical Universe; that both will fall back to the center simultaneously and instantaneously, and will vanish in a trice. Still others see the World as ending in a nuclear explosion. Whatever the vision, the World as we know it now, for example, modern society, is seen as fleeting, perishable, not viable. And it does no good to ask what rearrangement of things as they are is being proposed by these youth; nothing is being proposed, and they see it as the nature of the case that nothing can be proposed. You can ask a person to imagine pink elephants or rhinoceroses with horses’ heads or skyscrapers that walk and talk, but you cannot ask him or her to imagine an unknown primary color. There is a new time coming, and we will know what it is when it happens. Pour us your poison that it may renew our strength. Fire burns our brains. Now let us leap—Heaven or Hell, what matter?—into the deep, at the bottom of the Unknown to find the new. The motive for this sort of exploration of the potentialities of the mind is an extraordinarily powerful one. It is in essence highly idealistic and moral, regardless of its associations with behaviors that much of society many consider immoral. Indeed, it may even arise in part because of the basic human need to feel worthwhile through knowing that one is behaving responsibly and in a way that makes sense to others. Be a person on whom nothing is lost. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

A new mortality must be created—realization of depth or heights of the self for which no words exist. Express the value of sensitive and unforgetting attention. The great act of attention is all-inclusive; the more of life that is remembered and brought to bear upon the present movement in living expression, the more fully conscious a person is declared to be. As you might expect, this dimension is rather difficult to define. I can only appeal from my introspection to your introspection in offering it for consideration. What I mean here is something akin to Plato’s idea of the musical unconscious, or as he also called it, the spiritual unconscious. Be the magic power of this immense midnight at the crossroads of your senses, be the purport of their strange meeting. The sensitivity to the breadth of consciousness of others, includes animals and nature. This also involves a recognition of the game character of social interaction and personal relationship: at a low level, an awareness of the games people play, including oneself of course, and at a high level an appreciation of mythic enactment in human affairs, the extent to which the roles that are possible to us because of our evolutionary history find expression in any given time-stretch in out lives. I would not be willing to say consciousness has been expanded or extended unless it could be shown to be so when the person is in his or her normal state, free of drug effect. In brief, my view is that the intact ego, in which all the capacities of mind are used to the fullest, is the best vehicle we have for bring ourselves into valid and discriminating relationship with the protean forms of reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The evolutionary task, in the individual and in the species, is to create an ego that itself capable of including the states of consciousness now called paranormal. The states the psychedelic and psychotropic drugs produce should not themselves be confused with expanded consciousness. That comes later, if it comes at all, when and if the experience of unusual realities is brought into the ego and the ego itself is thereby enlarged in scope.  A corollary of this is that the ego already possessed of considerable scope is more likely to be able to use such an experience further to grow and enlarge itself, just as it is the stronger ego that can use psychotherapy more effectively. A sorrow that is not centered around an irreducible core of such a nature is mere romanticism or literature. Humiliation is also a violent condition of the whole corporal being, which longs to surge up under the outrage but is forces, by impotence or fear, to hold itself in check. On the other hand pain that is only physical is a very unimportant matter and leaves no trace in the soul. Toothache is an example. An hour or two of violent pain caused by a decayed tooth is nothing once it is over. It is another matter if the physical suffering is very prolonged or frequent, but in such a case we are dealing with something quite different from an attack of pain; it is often an affliction. “God shall consecrate thine affliction for thy gain,” reports 2 Nephi 2.2. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18