I told you. It is just a dream. However, if you want a name, let me call it the gateway of life and death. I will bring you with me through this gateway. And why? Because I am a coward. And I love you too much to let you go. I promise you nothing. How can I? I have told you what lies ahead. See how everything creates its opposite! War continues in the midst of peace. Want is born from abundance. In one and the same laboratory, the same people search for what will kill and what will cure, cultivating both good and evil. Freedom is fraught with paradoxes because of its unique character. Before there could be any freedom to walk on the streets or to raise cattle in frontier towns, for example, law and order were necessary. If freedom is to exist at all, a certain degree of security is essential, yet security is the opposite of freedom. The purpose of government is to preserve sufficient security so that each mortal may live without fear of one’s neighbor. Have to, paradoxically, is strangely freeing.  The word paradox is used to describe the relationship between two opposing things, which even through they are posited against each other and seem to destroy each other cannot exist without each other. God and the devil, good and evil, life and death, beauty and unattractiveness—all these opposites appear to be at odds with each other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

However, the paradox is that the very confrontation with the one breathes vitality into the other.  When we are aware of death, life is more alive, more zestful; and only because there is life death has significance. God needs the devil. When we see it in opposition to destiny, freedom comes alive, and destiny is significant only when it is in opposition to freedom. The opposites fructify each other: each gives dynamism, power, to the other. The emotions elicited in us by a paradox are surprise and amazement. The assertion that God cannot exist without the devil catches short those who believe life is a one-way ticket to paradise. That male and female need the differences between each other gives pause to those who dabble in simplistic hopes for a future brave new androgyny. People do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of bow and the lyre. This is illustrated by the bow and cord; one can shoot with the bow because of the tension set up by the string pulling against it. Or the frame of the lyre and its strings. Each of these opposites is useful to us by virtue of the tension set up between the two forces. The paradox we confront here is that between freedom and destiny. It can be stated in many ways. One is that freedom gets it vitality, its authenticity, from its juxtaposition with destiny. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

And destiny, such as in death, is important to us because it perpetually threatens our freedom; the Grim Reaper stands at any given moment in our freedom is, new possibilities beckon us in our dreams, in our aspirations, in our hopes and actions, and the possibility pushes us to acknowledge, encounter, confront, engage, or rebel against our destiny. The paradox is fundamental in psychotherapy, a point not realized by most therapists. Louis de Pointe du Lac, for example, when we came to terms with the paradoxes of his life, only then did he attain his personal freedom. The chief one was his love-hate relation with his mother. However, there were other derivative paradoxes such as his dependency-love relation with Lestat de Lioncourt. The major experiences such as birth, death, love, anxiety, guilt are not problems to be solved, but paradoxes to be confronted and acknowledged. Thus in therapy we should talk of solving problems only as a way of making the paradoxes of life stand out more clearly. Attention to the paradox….My contribution is to ask for a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and not for it to be resolved. By flight to a split-off intellectual functioning it is possible to resolve the paradox, but the price of this is the loss of the value of the paradox itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Just as the acceptance of normal anxiety is necessary if we are to be able to free ourselves of neurotic anxiety, so the acceptance of the normal paradoxes of life—love-hate, life-death—is necessary is we are to achieve freedom from the compulsive and neurotic aspects of our problems. The confusion with regard to freedom in our day is that we have conceived of freedom as a bow with no string to hold it in tension or a lyre with no frame to give it tautness and hence produce music. We were created free, the American Declaration of Independence tells us, and hence we assume there are no limits. Freedom thus has lost its viability; it has vanished like the flame going out in our fireplace when we need it most. When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him or her, then one is no thing among things nor does one consist of things. He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the World grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, one is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but one; but everything else lives in his or her light. Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines—one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity—so it with the human being to whom I say You. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

I can abstract from one the color of one’s hair or the color of one’s speech or the color of one’s graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately one is no longer You. And even as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, the sacrifice not in space but space in the sacrifice—and whoever reverses the relation annuls the reality—I do not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometime and Somewhere. I can place one there and have to do this again and again, but immediately one becomes a He or a She, an It, and no longer remains my You. As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cowers at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals. The human being to who, I say You I do not experience. However, I stand in relation to one, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I experience one again. Experience is remoteness from You. The relation can obtain even if the human being to whom I say You does not hear it in one’s experience. For You is more than It knows. You does more, and more happens to it, than It knows. No deception reaches this far: here is the cradle of actual life. This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through one. Not a figment of one’s soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

What is required is a deed that a mortal does with one’s whole being: if one commits it and speaks with one’s being the basic word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being. The deed involves a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the alter of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness of such a confrontation demands this. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits oneself may not hold back part of oneself; and the work does not permit me, as a tree or mortal might, to seek relaxation in It-World; it is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me. The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced World. Not as a ting among the internal things, not as a figment of the imagination, but as what is presented. Tested for its objectivity, the form is not there at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Forming is discovery. As I actualize, I uncover. I lead the form across—into the World of It. The created work is a thin among things and can be experienced and described as an aggregate of qualities. However, the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again. What, then does one experience of the You? Nothing at all. For one does not experience it. What, then, does one know of the You? Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars. The You encounter me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. However, that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed. The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions and this with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions. The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I required a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter. “The Lord healeth the broken in hear, and bindeth up their wounds—Bless the Lord, O my soul…who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction,” reports Psalm 147.3; 103.2,3, 4. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

How do we paint Jesus the Christ? It does not matter whether he is painted in lines and colors, as the great Christian painters in all periods have done or whether we paint him in sermons, as the Christian preachers have done Sunday after Sunday, or whether we paint him in learned books, in Biblical or systematic theology, or whether we paint him in our hearts, in devotion, imagination and love. In each case we must answer the question: How do we paint Jesus Christ? The stories in the Gospel of Matthew contribute to the answer; they add a color, and expression, a trait of great intensity, they paint him as the healer: It is astonishing that this color, this vivid expression of his nature, this powerful trait of his character, has more and more been lost in our time. The grayish colors of a moral teacher, the tense expression of a social reformer, the soft traits of a suffering servant have prevailed, at least amongst our painters and theologians and life-of-Jesus novelists; perhaps not so much in the hearts of the people who need somebody to heal them. The gospels, certainly, are not responsible for this disappearance of power in the picture of Jesus. They abound in stories of healing; but we are responsible, ministers, laymen, theologians, who forgot that “Savior” means “healers,” he who makes whole and sane what is broken and insane, in body and mind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The woman who encountered Jesus was made whole, the demoniac who met him was liberated from his mental cleavage. Those who are disrupted, split, disintegrated, are healed by him. And because this is so, because this power has appeared on Earth, the Kingdom of God has come upon us; this is the answer Jesus gives to the Pharisees when they discuss his power of healing the mentally possessed; this is the answer he gives to the Baptist to overcome his doubts; this is the order he gives to his disciples when he sends them to the towns of Israel. “And as ye go, preach, saying, the kingdom of God is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” That is why they shall do and for this he gives them authority and power; for in him is the kingdom of Go has appeared, and its nature is salvation, healing of that which is ill, making whole what is broken. All we still able to experience this power? I do not speak of theological inhibitions about the acceptance of such a picture of Christ. They do not weigh very heavily. Of course we were worried about miracle stories for many decades; today we know what the New Testament always knew—that miracles are signs pointing to the presence of a divine power in nature and history, and that they are in no way negations of natural laws. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Of course, we were and we are worried about the abuse of religious healing for commercial and other selfish purposes or about its distortion into magic and superstition. However, when the right use is lacking and superstitions arise, the abuses occur because faith has become weak. All these are not serious problems; good theology and good practice can solve them. However, the serious problem is, as always, the problem of our own existence. Are we healed, have we received healing forces, here and there from the power of the picture of Jesus the Savior? Are we grasped by this power? Is it strong enough to overcome our neurotic trends, the rebellion of unconscious strivings, the split in our conscious being, the diseases which disintegrate our minds and destroy our bodies at the same time? Have we overcome in moments of grace the torturing anxiety in the depth of our hearts, the restlessness which never ceases moving and whipping us, the unordered desires and the hidden repressions which return as poisonous hate, the hostility against ourselves and others, against life itself, the hidden will to death? Have we experienced now an then in the moments of grace that we are made whole, that destructive spirits have left us, that psychic compulsions are dissolved, that tyrannical mechanisms in our soul are replaced by freedom; that despair, this most dangerous of all splits, this real sickness unto death, is healed and we are saved from self-destruction? Has this happened to us under the power of the picture of Jesus as the Savior? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

This is the real problem, the true Christological problem (theologically speaking), the question of life and death (humanly speaking), for every Christian and of Christendom of today. Do we go to the physicians lone, or to the psychotherapists alone or to the counsellors alone in order to be healed? Sometimes, of course, we should go to the, but do we also go to or—more precisely—do we also receive the healing power in the picture of Jesus the Christ who is called the Savior? This is the question before us, and this question is answered by those who can tell us that they have experienced his healing power, that the New Being has grasped their bodies and their soul, that they have become whole and same again, that salvation has come upon them. Not always, of course, but in those moments which are moments of grace and in which they are anticipated the perfect wholeness, the wholeness of God being in all. Can we join this answer? To believe that this quest is only for religious people, or for impractical dreamers, and not for reasonable people or for mortals active in the World is to believe something that is untrue. The laity, the masses, are entitled to be told that a higher truth exists, that they can come to it when they can cope with it, tat it is up to them to equip themselves with needed qualifications. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Just because most people appear to have superficial interests and are not yet ready for the deeper thoughts of philosophy does not necessarily mean that they are not making spiritual progress. One the contrary, they may be doing very well on their own particular levels of development. It will simply be necessary for them to incarnate many more times before they are capable of understanding the more advanced truths. Aspirants come from the low, the middle, and the high strata of life—with most probably from middle. No age is unsuited to be the study and practice of philosophy. No one is too young to begin it, nor too late. Although the middle-age and elderly, being more experiences, are more receptive to the ideas of emotional control and personal detachment, philosophy is not necessarily a subject fit only for those in their Sunset years. Mortals who are seized by ambition, who want money, prestige, honours, power, will not welcome the idea of detachment, and they are right. For they are not yet ready for it: they need to gain the fruits of their desires, to experience the strivings and accomplishments from which the truth about them can be deduced. Only after the lessons have been learned can they be in a position to reflect properly and impartially upon this idea and appreciate its worth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

One who is afraid to touch this study because one is afraid of spoiling one’s Worldly career is unfit for it. Nevertheless, it is an error to believe that those who shed such a fear are called upon to forget their tasks or shirk their responsibilities and duties in this World. They are not. If they become indoctrinated with the ideas here taught, they can succeed in their tasks and duties; they need not fail. Those who live in a private realm of far-fetched phantasies which are caricatures of the real facts, as well as those who betray all the signs of neuroticism, hysteria, or psychopathy, often talk overmuch about the quest but do not seem able to apply its most elementary injunctions. To encourage them to follow it is only still further to build up their ridiculous egoism and bolster their fool’s paradise. For them the quest is unachievable until they become different persons. The unequal balance of the whole psyche is a characteristic of those seekers who impatiently shun the philosophic discipline. Hence we find that emotional neuroticism, intellectual disorder, volitional weakness, and egotistical excess are strongly marked in a number of people who take a fussy, shrieking interest in mysticism. They seek ardently for teachers but not for truth, for personalities rather than principles. They surrender themselves eagerly to visible organization but not to the invisible God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

It does not occur to them that the absence of proper qualifications unfits them for personal discipleship under competent master. For anyone to express even a hint of this unfitness is to arouse their anger, provoke their hostility, and stiffen their conceit. And if one goes out to suggest, in however kindly and constructive a manner, that their energies would be more profitably directed towards self-improvement than towards running after incompetent teachers and absurd sects, one is rewarded by abuse and vilification. Neither a dry pedantic intellectualism nor a sloppy excitable emotionalism is desirable in the seeker after truth. It is not for irresponsible persons, those of feeble will or hysterical nerves. It is wrong to look upon this quest as one for semi-lunatics, emotionally disturbed persons, or gullible, brainless miracle-hunters. It is not a place for the deposit of sickness, troubles, and deficiencies. Such things must be taken elsewhere for repair. All too many people take to this quest who are not really ready for it, who need to become human beings before seeking the more massive achievement of becoming superhuman ones, who ought to attain personal decency, balance, discipline, practicality, and calmness before losing themselves in the theoretical flights of spirituality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Truth is discoverable but not by everyone. It is not discoverable by criminals who break every ethical law, by lazy who will not pause and look within each day, by the cynics who sneer at the quality of reverence, by those who do not value it enough to cultivate their true intelligence. Does everyone have the right to know this truth? Yes and no. Yes—because all mortals must do so in the end as a part of the fulfilment of life’s purpose. No—when they are as yet uninterested in it and unable or unwilling to receive it. If our thought is to be straight and fearless we ought to fling all prejudices overboard at the very start of our voyage. The prejudiced mortal with one’s prejudices confirmed not contradicted. One is not really looking for truth. Before the quest can ever begin, prejudices must be removed. This is a psychological operation which the mortal cannot preform upon oneself, expect in part, without a great effort. The fool cannot follow this Quest. One may try to but one will be sent back to learn some wisdom through Earthly lessons and through Earthly difficulties brought on by one’s foolishness. Flighty temperaments, which seek the latest novelty rather than the first truth, are unfit for philosophy. The very name “Quest” implies movement, travelling, journey; those who remain stationary cannot be said to be on the “Quest.” By this I do not mean those who find themselves stagnating against their will, but those who make no effort inwardly to advance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The truth is sometimes so spiky and so uncomfortable that people hide from it. Entry on the quest is a sign that enough courage has been gathered to face it. Those who assert that they are questers but who are too much in love with their own fancies are incapable of facing the realities being those fancies. To this extent their quest is a bogus one, although not usually a consciously bogus one. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them! No factory can manufacture divine peace for us, nor can any workshop turn out the inspirations which bestow heroism on a mortal. We may wander the whole length of Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, China and find no shop which can sell us a packet of starry truths that might comfort and console. The morning post will bring a hundred letters in the office mail, but it will not bring one word or hint that shall conduct us nearer the higher aims. “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as children, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved,” reports Romans 8.20-24. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16