The power to communicate varies. To listen to the thoughts of others is often to be heard oneself. Moral strength is needed by the quester. This path requires something more than a search for righteousness or peace. It requires the aspirant to make oneself more sensitive to the sorrows and struggles of humankind, ignorance-born and karmically earned thought they may be, to imbue oneself with a wise, prudent, and balanced compassion. One must advance from an outwardly-compulsively goodness to an inwardly-natural goodness. Such away of life, with if chained desires, holy communion, and sensitive compassion, gives any mortal a higher stature. It is easy to fall into a gloomy pessimism and say that the spiritual life is not for one, that one is unfit to practice its arduous exercises and that one has better abandon what is manifestly only for those blessed with luck or genius. Yet one would be wrong to assume that because the path is not easy one is mistake in aspiring to it. Because it is not just a matter of daydreaming, nor passing from one thrilling inner experience to another, because hard work and unflagging perseverance are demanded from one, there is still no need to despair. An interesting question confronts us here. Are freedom of doing and freedom of being contradictory? Why is it that some people achieve essential freedom only when everything in the existential World becomes unfree? #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

It seems to have been the experience of the survivors of the concentration camps that only once their freedom was taken away that they learned to really be free. Solzhenitsyn testifies that this was true in his years in the Russian work camps—when all freedom of doing was taken away, he felt himself pushed back to the level of essential freedom. It was, moreover, the experience of freedom marchers who were thrown into prison, as shown by the several books that subsequently came out by the marchers. Saint Paul states that in bondage the Christian is freed, a sentence that seems hopelessly paradoxical at first but takes on meaning the more one thinks about it. One will need much courage for the Quest because one will be confronted by two powerful enemies. One is oneself, the other is society. Within oneself an individual will have to do battle against the great desires. Within society one will have to contend against great traditions. If only one possess faith in oneself, one can successfully overcome the magnitude of one’s tasks, courage in one’s vision, and the resolve to shape one’ life for its higher welfare. However, do we get to essential freedom only when our everyday existence is interrupted? For as long as most human beings can settle for bread and comfort, they will do so, the Grans Inquisitor argues. However, when bread and comfort are no longer available, as people then—and only then—pushed to their essential depths of experience? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

If we answer yes to these questions, we deny the popular idea that human beings move up through a hierarchy of needs from the biological to the psychological to the spiritual. It would mean, rather, that people evolve by conflict and struggle, and there is no simple and placid evolution from lower needs to higher ones. When lower needs are not met, they are forced into higher needs. Fasting as a way of reaching religious truth is one example of this. Calamity theory is another example. It says in effect that in calamity, in hardship, many people are forced to look inward and to take the necessary leaps to higher levels, as we have noted above. Is confinement, including the simple fact of having time to think, one aspect of what is necessary for the experience of essential freedom? John Lilly thinks confinement is essential in experiments in isolation tanks: the person floats in complete darkness in a tank in which one is weightless and without any stimuli from the outside World. Then apparently radical and often highly beneficial things happen to some people in their sense of freedom of being. When human beings can no longer escape—when they can no longer run about, go to this movie or that, surrender to their TV addiction, or fill their time with diversions—when these escape avenues are no longer open to them, they must listen to themselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

However, here we arrive at a fascinating question: Is not our destiny itself our concentration camp? Is not the destiny that impinges upon us that which forces us to see our bondage? Does not the engaging of our destiny—which is the design of our life—hedge us about with the confinement, the sobriety, indeed, often the cruelty, which forces us to look beyond the limits of day-to-day action? Is not the inescapable fact of death, whether we are young or mature, the concentration camp of us all? Is not the fact that life is a joy and a bondage at the same time enough to drive us to consider the deeper aspect of being? This is the greatness of life and our quiet desperation in the same instant. The struggle of CORE to help African American people turn the wonderful proclamation of freedom put on paper by President Abraham Lincoln into real and actual freedom. Out of the battles he and his followers went through and the violence they had to endure, James Farmer declares: “In the very act of working for the impersonal cause of racial freedom, a mortal experiences, almost like grace, a large measure of private freedom. Or call it a new comprehension of one’s own identity, an intuition of the expanding boundaries of oneself.” This radical source of freedom is the freedom of being.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

Whoever comes to this quest is unlikely to stay long with its pursuit unless one comes with considerable devotion and correct evaluation of its spiritual importance. James Farmer describes one incident in which he and his followers endured the brutality of the police, and “the men and women who stood between me and the lynch mob gradually, during the course of those two violent says, made the decision to act instead of being acted upon.” If the impulse to embark on this quest is to be something more than an unstable fancy, a calm perception of its stubborn difficulties and a most especially frank recognition of its self-refusing demands, is needed. That mortal is mistaken who comes to the quest expecting its rewards without its pains, its peace without its emotional crucifixions, its strength without its bodily mortifications. The quest is unattractive to sinners and unnecessary to saints. It is for those who are not wholly indifferent to Worldly desires nor yet too strongly attached to them. The quest is to be neither an emotional fancy nor an intellectual whim; it has to become something steady, deep-rooted, and strong-sapped in a mortal’s life. One will possess an irrefragable faith in the power of truth, holding that even if it were crushed and obliterated today time will cause it to rise again tomorrow and give it a fresh voice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Recently I spent three months in Germany and what I saw was people who were heavy with burdens, too heavy to be carried away by sorrows too deep to be forgotten. And what their faces expressed, their words confirmed: Tales of horror, stories of pain and despair, anxieties dwelling in their blood, confusions and self-contradictions disturbing their minds. And if you look deeper into them you find guilt-feeling, sometimes expressed, mostly repressed for it hides itself under passionate denials of guilt, under self-excuse and accusations of others, under a mixture of hostility and humility, of self-pity and self-hate. However, within this nation, I found people who were healthy, not because the infirmary was not written in their faces also. But something else was in them, a healing power, making them whole in spite of their disruption, making them serene in spite of their sorrow, making them examples for all of us, examples of what could and should happen to us. To us? But are we not a healthy nation? That certainly is what you believe when you return from Germany and Europe to this country! The faces of most people are shaped by smiles and not by tears. There is benevolence towards each other and even towards enemies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

People here are willing to admit their shortcomings such as discrimination, exploitation, destructive competition. They are used to acting spontaneously and not under compulsions imposed on them by tyrants or conquerors, or what is even more difficult, imposed on them by newspapers, radios and public opinion polls, these tyrants of modern democracy. A healthy nation! However, we read that in this nation almost 40 percent of all those young men and women who are rejected by the Armed Services are unacceptable because of mental disturbances and maladjustments. And we hear that of all illnesses mental illness is by far the most widespread in this country. What does this mean? It is a symptom of serious danger for our health. There may be something in the structure of our institutions which produces illnesses in more and more people. It may, for instance, be that the unlimited, ruthless competition which deprives everybody of a feeling of security, makes many in our healthy nation sick; not only those who are unsuccessful in competition, but also those who are most successful. And so something surprising occurs: We have fought victoriously against many forms of bodily sickness. We have discovered drugs with an almost miraculous power. The average length of our lives has been stretched beyond any former expectation. However, many in our nation cannot stand this health. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

Some people in our nation want sickness as a refuge into which they can escape from the harshness of an insecure life. And since the medical care has made it more difficult to escape into bodily illness, they choose mental illness. However, does not everybody dislike sickness, the pain, the discomfort and the danger connected with it? Of course, we dislike our sickness with some parts of our souls; but we like it with some other parts, mostly unconsciously, sometimes even consciously. However, nobody can be healed especially of mental disorders and diseases who does not want it with one’s whole heart. And this is why they have become almost an epidemic in this country. People are fleeing into a situation where others must take care of them, where they exercise power through weakness or where they create an imaginary World in which it is nice to live as long as real life does not touch them. Do not underestimate this temptation. The basic insecurity of human existence and the driving anxiety connected with it are felt everywhere and by everyone. It is human heritage and it is increased immensely by our present World, even in this country full of heal and vigor. As in ours, so in the period of Jesus much talk was going on of sickness and healing. Jewish people and Greeks wrote about it. People felt that they lived in a sick period; they called it “this World-period” and they described it in a way which is very similar to the way in which we describe today. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

People saw not only bodily infirmity of all of us, the innumerable bodily diseases in the masses of the people, they also saw the destructive powers possessing the minds of many. They called the mentally ill the possessed or the demoniacs and they tried to expel the evil spirits. They also knew that nations can be sick and that the diseases of social classes infect every individual in it. They looked even beyond the boundary lines of humankind into the nature and spoke in visionary ecstasy about this Earth becoming old and sick just as we did when we were under the first shock of the atomic power of self-destruction. Out of this knowledge of a sick period the question of a new period, a reality of healthy and wholeness was asked. Salvation and a Savior were expected. However, salvation is healing. And the Savior is the healer. Therefore, Jesus answers the anxious question of the Baptist about whether he is the Savior, by pointing to his healing power. This is what Christ says: “If I am able to heal the hearing impaired and the visually impaired, if I am able to liberate the mentally sick, then a new reality has come upon you!” There are many healing stories in the Gospels, a stumbling block for scholars and preachers and teachers, because they take them as miracle stories of the past instead of taking them as healing stories of the present. For this they are. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

These stories show that the human situation, the relation between bodily and mental disease, between sickness and guilt, between the desire of being healed and the fear of being healed. It is astonishing how many of our profoundest modern insights into human nature are anticipated in these stories: They know that becoming healthy means becoming whole, reunited, in one’s bodily and psychic functions. They know that the mentally sick are afraid of the process of healing, because it throws them out of the limited but safe house of their neurotic self-seclusion, they know that the process of mental healing is a difficult and painful one, accompanied by convulsion of body and soul. They tell of the relation of guilt and disease, of the way in which unsolved conflicts of our conscience drive us to those cleavages of body and soul which we call sickness. We are told how Jesus, knowing this, pronounces to the mobile impaired first the forgiveness of one’s sins and then one’s regained health. The mortal lived in an inner struggle with oneself, with one’s feelings of guilt. Out of this conflict one’s illness had grown; and now when Jesus forgives one, one feels reconciled with oneself and the World; one becomes whole and healthy. There is little in our recent psychology of depth that surpasses these insights in truth and depth. These stories also describe the attitude which makes healing possible. They call it faith. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

Faith here, of course, does not mean the belief in assertion for which there is no evidence. It is never meant that in genuine religion, and it never should be abused in this sense. However, faith means being grasped b a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us. Surrender to this power is faith. The people whom Jesus could heal and can heal are those who did and do this self-surrender to the healing power in him. They surrendered their persons, split, contradicting themselves, disgusted and despairing about themselves, hateful of themselves and therefore hostile towards everybody else; afraid of life, burdened with guilt feelings, accusing and excusing themselves, fleeing from others into loneliness. Feeling from themselves to others, trying finally to escape from the threats of existence into the painful and deceptive safety of mental and bodily disease. As such beings they surrendered to Jesus and this surrender is what we call faith. However, he did not keep them, as a god helper should never do. He gave them back to themselves, as new creatures, healed and whole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

 And when Jesus returned to Heaven he left a group of people who, in site of much anxiety and discord and weakness and guilt, had the certitude that they were healed, and that the healing power amongst them was great enough to conquer individuals and nations all over the World.  If we are grasped by the new reality which has appeared in Christ, we belong to these people. We have the Savior’s healing power ourselves. Those who are willing to take themselves in hand, ready to trample on their lower natures, are alone fit for this quest. They are few. The others, who come to it for its sensational, dramatic, physical, and occult possibilities, hover around the entrance, but never get on the path itself. The quest is neither for outright saints nor for outright sinners. It is for those who are conscious of having terrestrial passions and human weaknesses, but who are struggling against them and striving for self-mastery. Just as sickness creates appreciation of the vale of good health, so life’s anxieties create appreciation of inner peace. However, this peace cannot be had without a measure of self-control and self-reform, which calls for use of the will. In life with nature, the relation vibrates in the dark and remains below language. The creatures stir across from us, but they are unable to come to us, and our language sticks with them. Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12