And there it was again, the most seductive beauty I have ever beheld. And I am yours, my love. You are my only true companion, my finest instrument. You know this, do you not? We have looked at the powers which rule the World and over which the faith in providence must triumph. What is faith? It is certainly not the belief that everything will turn out well in the end. It is not the belief that everything follows a preconceived plan, whether we call the planner God or Nature or Fate. Lift is not a machine well-constructed by its builder and running on according to the forces and laws of its own machinery. Life, personal and historical, is a creative and destructive process in which freedom and destiny are mixed with each other in everything and in ever moment. These tensions, ambiguities and conflicts makes life what it is. They create the fascination and the horror of life. They drive us to the question of a courage which can accept life without being conquered by it, and this is the question of providence. However, let us now drop the word providence with all its false connotations and look at what it really means. It means the courage to accept life in the power of that which is more than life. This is the love of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The love of God certainly is above the angelic-demonic figure of love which we spoke. This love is the ultimate power of union, the ultimate victory over separation. Being united with it enables us to stand above life in the midst of life. It enables us to accept the double-faced rulers of life, their fascination and their anxiety, their glory and their horror. It gives us the certainty that no moment is possible in which we can be prevented from reaching the fulfillment towards which all life is striving. This is the courage to accept life in the power of that in which life is rooted and overcome. Forget your person tragedy. We are all cursed from the start and especially have to hurt like hell before we can write seriously. However, when you get the damned hurt use it—do not cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist. It is only in the face of death that mortal’s self is born. Our awareness of death is the most vivid and compelling example of destiny. I say awareness of death rather than simply death, for everything in nature dies in its own time. However, human beings know that they die. They have a word for death, they anticipate it, they experience their death in imagination. This experience of imagining one’s own death is seen in such diverse events as seeing a dead cat in the road, or crossing a trafficked street, or buckling a seat belt, or taking a breath of fresh air. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Mortals are only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, but one is a thinking reed. There is no need for the entire Universe to arm itself in order to annihilate one: a vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill a mortal. However, were the Universe to crush one, mortals would yet be more noble than that which slays one because one knows that one dies, and the advantage that the Universe has over one; of this Universe knows nothing. Thus all our dignity is possessed in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, not by space and time, which we cannot fill. Let us strive, then, to think well—therein is possessed the principle of mortality. This awareness of death is the source of zest for life and of our impulse to create not only works of art, but civilizations as well. Not only is human anxiety universally associated with the ultimate death, but awareness of death also brings benefits. One of these is the freedom to speak the truth: the more aware we are of death, the more vividly we experience the fact that it is not only beneath our dignity to tell a lie but useless as well. Rome will not burn a second time, so why fiddle during this burning? We can then say with Omar, “The bird of Time has but a little way to flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

The mortals of wisdom throughout history have understood the value for life in our awareness of death. To philosophize is to prepare for death. No mortal enjoys the true taste of life but one who is willing and ready to quit it. A young man who was studying to be a psychotherapist and who was at this time my patient told me how intensely anxious he had been for several days prior to reporting on a case before a group of older practicing therapists, where he anticipated being attacked. Driving to the meeting, the thought suddenly occurred to him, “We will all be dead some day—why not forget this neurotic anxiety and do the best I can?” Strange to say, this gave him a sudden, temporary relief from his anxiety. Another client told me about his having gone to a therapist several years earlier also with the problem of being so anxious he felt he could not stand it when his work required him to travel around the country. The other therapist had remarked, “You can always put a revolver in your suitcase and shoot yourself.” This also gave the man a considerable relief from his anxiety. Both of these persons experienced, with this reference to death, a relief from the feelings of being trapped. When they realized, if they had to, they could get out of victim’s role, the anxiety lost its power. The possibility of suicide has saved many lives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

And if you ask how is this possible it is because nor anything else in all creation. The powers of this World are creatures as we are. They are no more than we, they are limited. We are untied with that which is not creature and whose creative ground no creature can destroy; even if they can destroy our lives, we know they cannot destroy the meaning of our lives. And this gives us the certainty that no creature can destroy the meaning of life universal, in nature as well as history, of which we are a part, even though history and the whole Universe should destroy themselves tomorrow. No creature can keep us from this ultimate courage. None? Perhaps one—ourselves. Against all the powers and principalities, including life and death, the courage to maintain the unity with God stand firm. However, when guilt separates us from the love of God, it falls. Then we cannot face death, because the sting of death is sin; we cannot face life because guilt drives life into tragic self-destruction; we cannot face love because love is corrupted by greed; and we cannot face power because it is corrupted by cruelty. We shy away from the past because it is polluted by guilt, and we shy away from the future because it may bring the fruits of past guilt, and we cannot rest in the present because it accuses us and expels us. We cannot stand the height because we are afraid of falling, and we cannot stand the depth because we feel responsible for our fall. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The rulers of the World cannot achieve what an uneasy conscience can achieve—the undermining of our courage to accept life. Therefore, not even your guilty conscience can separate you from the love of God. For the love of God means that God accepts one who knows that one is unacceptable. This is the meaning of “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” One is the victor over the rulers of the World because one is the victor over our hearts. One’s image gives us the certainty that even our hearts, our self-accusation, our despair about ourselves cannot separate us from the love of God, the ultimate unity, the source and ground of the courage to accept life. The prenatal life of the child is pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity; and the life horizon of the developing being appears uniquely inscribed, and yet also not inscribed, in that of the being that carries it; for the womb in which it dwells is not solely that of the human mother. This association is so cosmic that it seems like the imperfect deciphering of a primeval inscription when we are told in the language of an Egyptian legend that in his mother’s womb mortals know the Universe and forgets it at birth due to childhood amnesia, which is an amazing phenomenon. And as the secret image of a wish, this association remains to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

However, this longing ought not to be taken for a craving to go back, as those suppose who consider the spirit, which they confound with their own intellect, a parasite of nature. For the spirit is nature’s blossom, albeit exposed to many aliments. What this longing aims for is the cosmic association of the being that has burst into spirit with its true You. Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother—the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal World. From this it detaches itself to enter a personal life, and it is only in dark hours when we slip out of this again (as happens even to the healthy, night after night) that we are close to her again. However, this detachment is not sudden and catastrophic like that from the bodily mother. The human child is granted some time to exchange the natural association with the World that is slipping away for a spiritual association—a relationship. From the glowing darkness of the chaos one has stepped into the cool and light creation without immediately possessing it: one has to get it up, as it were, and make it a reality for oneself; one gains one’s World by seeing, listening, feeling, forming. It is in encounter that the creation reveals its formhood; it does not pour itself into sense that are waiting but deigns to meet those that are reaching out. What is to surround the finished human beings as an object, has to be acquired and wooed strenuously by one while one is still developing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

No thing is a component of experience or reveals itself except through the reciprocal force of confrontation. Like primitives, the child lives between sleep and sleep (and a large part of waking is still sleep), in the lightning and counter-lightning of encounter. The innateness of the longing for relation is apparent even in the earliest and dimmest stage. Before any particulars can be perceived, dull glances push into the unclear space toward the indefinite; and at times when there is obviously no desire for nourishment, soft projections of the hands reach, aimlessly to all appearances, into the empty air toward the indefinite. Let anyone call this animalic: that does not help our comprehension. For precisely these glances will eventually, after many trials, come to rest upon a red wallpaper arabesque and not leave it until the souls of red has opened up to them. Precisely this motion will gain its sensuous form and definiteness in contact with a shaggy toy bear and eventually apprehend lovingly and unforgettably a complete body: in both cases not experience of an object but coming to grips with a living, active being that confronts us, if only in our imagination. (But this imagination is by no means a form of panpsychism; it is the drive to turn everything into a You, the drive to pan-relation—and where it does not find a living, active being that confronts it but only an image or symbol of that, it supplies the living activity from its own fullness.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Little inarticulate sounds still ring out senselessly and persistently into nothing; but one day they will have turned imperceptibly into a conversation—with what? Perhaps with a bubbling tea kettle, but into a conversation. Many a motion that is called a reflex is a sturdy trowel for the person building up one’s World. It is not as if a child first saw an object and then entered into some relationship with that. Rather, the longing for relation is primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles; and the relation to that, which is a wordless anticipation of saying You, comes second. However, the genesis of the thing is a late product that develops out of the split of the primal encounter, out of the separation of the associated partners—as does the genesis of the I. In the beginning is the relation—as the category of being, as readiness, as a form that reaches out to be filled, as a model of the soul; the a priori of the relation; the innate You. In the relationship through which we live, the innate You is realized in the You we encounter: that this, comprehended as a being we confront and accepted as exclusive, can finally be addressed with the basic word, has its ground in the a priori of relation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

In the drive for contact (originally, a drive for tactile contact, then also for optical contact with another being) the innate You comes to the fore quite soon, and it becomes ever clearer that the drive aims at reciprocity, at tenderness. However, it also determines the inventive drive which emerges later (the drive to produce things synthetically or, where that is not possible, analytically—through taking or tearing apart), and thus the product is personified and a conversation begins. The development of the child’s soul is connected indissolubly with one’s craving for You, with the fulfillments and disappointments of this craving, with the play of his experiments and his tragic seriousness when one feels at a total loss. Any real understanding of these phenomena is compromised by all attempts to reduce them to narrower spheres and can be promoted only when in contemplating and discussing them we recall their cosmic—metacosmic origin. We must remember the reach beyond that indifferentiated, not yet formed primal World has emerged completely, but not yet the bodily, the actualized being that has to evolve from it gradually through entering into relationships. One must have suffered to the point of being weary of living, or one must be old and infirm, or one must have reflected very honestly and deeply to believe that it is better to be without the predominance of the personal consciousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

And to be willing to work for this end must seem mad to young eager vital men and women enjoying their lives. The time will come when, under the pressure of the mysterious inner self, this quest will become the most important enterprise of one’s life. Why are they seeking the truth? Because they have at last become sensitive enough to respond to the existence of the diviner self within them, the God in which only truth exists. The fact of its existence has pressed them subconsciously from within and finally provoked them into feeling a need to become aware of, and co-operative with, the God. There is an inner prompting which comes into the hearts of some mortals, not of all mortals, which bids them believe in the existence of God. Although they do not know clearly what they are doing when they accept it, they feel that it is then, and will lead later to, something tremendously important. The work is going on inside of them. The decision to embark of this Quest may ripen for a long time in one’s unconscious mind before it is openly and slowly made, it may explode impulsively in a wholly unpremeditated way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

One has entered upon the quest for no other reason than one has been inwardly and strongly commanded to enter it. The long hard search for the soul asks too much endurance of self-discipline from its pursuers ever to be more than it has been in the past—an undertaking for the few driven by an inner urge. Hence it is not so much a voluntary undertaking as an involuntary one. The questers cannot help themselves. It is not that they necessarily have the strength to endure as that they have no choice except to endure. The urge to follow the spiritual Quest, the impulse to find the higher consciousness, comes from the God. Whatever be the pull of their interests in their lives, a time comes in the reincarnation when the divine self asserts itself in their consciousness. There is something within us which will not let us rest in what we are, which urges us to think of still higher possibilities. This is the paradox that when you take the first steps on this Quest, it is grace which impels you to do so. Yet you think and act as if you have never been granted the divine gift. There comes a time when the unfulfilled possibilities of a mortal begin to haunt one, when one’s innermost conscience protests against the wastage of this reincarnation. All this work on the Quest is directed towards discovering oneself, one’s best self, and to bringing it influence into whatever it is that one does or thinks. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

One ought not to enter into it for the sake of ego enhancement—that is for the Worldlings—but for the sake of something that transcends the ego. With the coming of middle age a mortal begins to appraise one’s life course, work, fortunes, and in the end—oneself. Quite often the results are not very satisfactory, perhaps even disappointing. Too intelligent to accept the narrow short-sighted view of life, too idealistic to accept a merely animal satisfaction of desires, one needs guidance. This is what the quest is for. One feels that one must enter irrevocably on the quest for moral self-perfection, however unattainable it may seem. For one does so in obedience to the inner voice of a conscience the ordinary mortal does not hear. And one’s feeling is a right one. The destination may be only a glorious dream but the direction is a serious actuality. One may come to see the grave contradiction between one’s ideals and one’s actions, one’s mental World and one’s actual World, and the sight may disgust one. Out of this chagrin, the desire to renounce a senseless existence and withdraw altogether from it may take hold of one. So long as mortals feel the need of inner support and mental direction, of moral uplift and emotional consolation, so long will they continue to study, to follow, and to practice philosophy—that is, to enter upon the quest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13