You make life when you play. You create something from nothing. You make something good happen. And that is blessed to me. I have lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing. Actors and musicians—they are saints to me. You do not understand. I am speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I am speaking of those who will not accept a useless life, just because there were born into it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things. There is blessedness in that. There is sanctity. There is goodness in that. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine. Events will take their course, it is no good our being angry at them; one is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account. How can we wisely turn them to the best account? What powers do we have to guide and influence the direction of our destiny? How does one both shape one’s destiny and live as an expression of it? This day we fashion destiny, which is our web of fate we spin. It has been years and years since I had walked in the witches’ place. The moon was bright enough to see the charred stakes in their grim circle and the ground in which nothing ever grew even one hundred years after burning. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The new saplings of the forest kept their distance. And so the wind struck the clearing, and above, clinging to the rocky slope, the village hovered in darkness. A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I had felt as a child when I had heard those awful words “roasted alive,” when I had imagined the suffering. What one individual has done another can aspire to; the destiny that one mortal has challenged and finally mastered another has it in one’s power to confront courageously also. In its externals each person’s destiny is their own; seen from within it is the destiny of mortals made manifest in one individual. One does not fulfill our destiny for us, but one shows us how we in our turn may fulfill it. Destiny sets limits for us physically, psychologically, culturally, and equips us with certain talents. However, we do not simply ask: How do we act within those limits or how do we develop those talents? We ask the more crucial question: Does the confronting of these limits itself yield us constructive values? Can one, in other words, turn misfortune into fortune and keep fortune fortunate, turn handicaps into assets and keep assets from becoming handicaps? Is something taught us by the very process of confronting hardship that yields greater benefits than we gave up in our hardships and greater gifts than we lost? There come to mind hosts of examples of persons who have been burdened with a cruel destiny and have turned it to a constructive use. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

I thought of my mother in the castle high up the mountain, and the sadness numbed me until I could not bear it, and Nicki started playing again, telling me to dance and to forget everything. Yes, that is what it could make you do, I wanted to say. Is that sin? How can it be evil? I went after him as he danced in a circle. The notes seemed to be flying up and out of the violin as if they were made of gold. I could almost see them flashing. I danced round and round him now and he sawed away into a deeper and more frenzied music. I spread the wings of the fur-lined cape and threw back my head to look at the Moon. The music rose all around me like smoke, and the witches’ place was no more. There was only the sky above arching down to the mountains. We were closer for all this in the days that followed. What possibilities does our capacity to be active give us in molding our destiny? Which trends in our destiny do we choose to identify with, and which others do we avoid? Do we cringe before our destiny, feeling sorry for ourselves, crying out: If only we could have been such and such? #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

If we feel sorry for ourselves, so we shall go down like cowards or, more likely, robots—mechanical human beings who the Universe erases. Or do we confront destiny directly, using it as a stimulus to call forth our best efforts, our greatest sensitivity, our sharpest creative vision? If so, we then are men and women for whom the future cries. We can see the vicissitudes of finding and losing, searching for but fleeing from, our personal destiny in noting how other historical figures have dealt with their destiny. From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security…Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among mortals, but alone with God. I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people—aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. However much a mortal searches Heaven and Earth, the present and the future, for one’s higher destiny, one remains the victim of a perennial vacillation, of an external influence which perpetually troubles one. For the first time I have found myself and am happily in harmony with myself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Many look so hard for their destiny, their destiny is so little apparent to some, because in looking for it one has already made up one’s mind to flee from it. To be continually preoccupied with one’s destiny is also a way of escaping living it out. A sense of abandon is necessary, a sense of throwing oneself into one’s calling. Some people spend most of their days depressed, a psychological state that can be a symptom of a lack of harmony between oneself and one’s way of life, a state opposite to the way God wants us to live. In depression one feels on the rack, one struggles against meaninglessness, against the burden of it not being worthwhile to get up in the morning. There are people who greet every morning with bitter weeping, as if this is where they belong. Are these people in the service of their vocation, or rather, a perpetual deserter from their inner destiny? It is the geniuses, the persons of abundant talents, who have the greatest difficulty in seeking and living out their destiny because their gifts continually present them with so many different possibilities. Hence geniuses are more often depressed and anxious than the rest of us, and more often joyful and ecstatic. Life, especially for creative people, is generally anything but simple and harmonious. It is especially hard for those with a multiplicity of gifts, which troubles and disorients the vocation, or at least the mortal who is its axis. It may well be, the destiny of some people may not rest in an unambiguous vocation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The conflict many of us face when we want to do something for a career, but cannot due to limitations that are out of our control, this is conflict of destinies and shows us that the point where one’s individual inclinations collide head-on with the necessities of life is where we see revealed the deeper density of ourselves. William James, for example, struggled with bad health, poor eyesight amounting at times to blindness, disabilities of his back, and his profound and recurrent psychological depress. However, William James managed to surmount his depression by his belief in freedom. The focus of his depression had been a conflict around the question of whether his actions were caused by prior influences such as childhood conditioning, or did he have some margin of personal freedom of action? He could not prove the latter, and none of his friends could send him proof. No one can prove in positivistic terms the qualities of life such as courage, love, beauty, or freedom. Thus began the important work of William James on will and belief, illustrated by the title of one of his collections of essays, The Will to Believe. “The first act of freedom is to choose it,” he wrote. Anyone who has done psychotherapy knows that this would give the person a point outside the depression from which to view it and would provide some rising above the malady. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

This  is the demonstration of the relation of belief to destiny. Does belief—or faith, as some may put it—change the track of destiny? There are many wise persons in this history of the Western World who would answer “yes” to that. They would hold that the state of mind of the beholder influences what one perceives in life, that our minds not only conform to reality but reality also conforms to our mind. Thus, our state of mind influences the reality we experienced around us. Karl Pribram’s recent experiments on the neurology of the brain and its relation to the World would support this, as would Gregory Bateson’s concept that values are constituted in part our beliefs. Out of his problems and his perpetually difficult destiny William James developed a remarkable sense of personal freedom. He was amazingly flexible and board-minded: he was the living example of freedom from cant and constriction. He not only wrote the classical volume on academic psychology, but books on religion, will, mysticism, and education as well. He insisted everlastingly that in human life there are options, however much destiny may limit these options. However, without God, people feel life is meaningless and will just go on and on and on. And that they will not any longer be witnesses to it. They believe that they will not have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in their minds. They feel they will just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

One should guard against being unconsciously insincere, against protesting one’s love of the divine when it is really a mask for love of oneself. Beware lest you call desire of the World search for God. However, more often one’s quest is inspired by mixed motives. On one hand, one is interested in the personal benefits one hopes to get from it. On the other hand, one is also interested in learning the impersonal truth about life. To the young neophyte the quest, with its mysterious traditions and magical promises, is an enchanting and glamorous enterprise. People of rank, fortune, influence, or power may become complacent, satisfied with what they are or have or where they are. However, this is a condition which cannot last. Why? Because the higher purpose of life, embodied in the World-Idea, is also present and will make appropriate change or exert appropriate pressure at the destined time. There is always a number of enquirers who interest themselves in the teaching to a certain extent and then drop it altogether. Why? Because they are not primarily seeking God for his love, but only the hidden powers or personal success of something else, or sometimes, these things only and God as a means of obtaining them. Many comes to this quest in the beginning because of some personal desire. This personal satisfaction is their primary goal. It may be that later, with growth, harmony with God becomes less important to them. A few in the end will come to see that nothing short of pure devotion to God for their own sake is their proper goal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Some churches very early forgot the word of our Gospel that Christ is the truth; and claimed that their doctrines about Christ are the truth. However, these doctrines, no matter how necessary and good they were, proved to be not the truth that liberates. Soon they became tools of suppression, of servitude under authorities; they become means to prevent the honest search for truth—weapons to split the souls of people between loyalty to the Church and sincerity to truth. And in this way they gave deadly weapons to those who attacked the Church and its doctrines in the name of truth. Not everybody feels this conflict. There are masses of people who feel safe under doctrinal laws. They are safe, but it is the safety of one who has not yet found one’s spiritual freedom, who has not yet found one’s true self. It is the dignity and the danger of Protestantism that it exposes its adherents to the insecurity of asking the question of truth for themselves and that it throws them into the freedom and responsibility of personal decisions, of the right to choose between the ways of the sceptics, and those who are orthodox, of the indifferent masses, and Christ who is the truth that liberates. For this is the greatness of Protestantism: that it points beyond the teachings of Jesus and beyond the doctrines of the Church to the being of Christ whose being is the truth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

This quest for truth has different attraction for different people. Some find that it replaces the very ordinariness of their lives by exotic, unusual, even dramatic ideas or experiences. Some draw near because of its promise of help sorely needed to cover up their weaknesses. Others need its intellectual concepts to support their withdrawal from orthodoxy. Still others are delighted to get its help in the reinterpretation of orthodoxy, and in its reasonable replies to reasonable questions. If the philosophical code attracts some by its moral nobility, it attracts others through their personal necessity. It should not be thought that all those who read some literature, or attend such lectures, or even join such movements, are seeking more than a simple glimpse. Perhaps most are ordinary people who are satisfied with having a credo to support their lives which enlarges their traditional religion or belief. How do they reach the truth? By doing it, is the answer of the Fourth Gospel. This does not mean being obedient to the commandments, accepting them and fulfilling them. Doing the truth means living out the reality which is Christ who is the truth, making Christ’s being the being of ourselves and of our World. And again, we ask, “How can this happen?” “By remaining in Him” is the answer of the Fourth Gospel, by participating in his being. “Aide in me and I in you,” he says. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

The truth which liberates is the truth in which we participate, which is a part of us and we a part of it. True discipleship is participation. If the real, the ultimate, the divine reality which is Christ’s being becomes our being we are in the truth that matters. And a third time we ask, “How can this happen?” There is an answer to this question in our Gospel which may deeply shock us: “Every one who is the truth hears my voice.” Being “of the truth” means, coming from the true, the ultimate reality, being determined in one’s being by the divine ground of all being, by that reality which is present in the Christ. If we have part in it, we recognize it wherever is appears; we recognize it as it appears in its fullness in the Christ. However, some may ask in despair: “If we have no part in it, if we are not of the truth, are we then forever excluded from it? Must we accept a life without truth, a life in error and meaninglessness? Who tells me that I am of the truth, that I have a chance to reach it?” Nobody can tell you; but there is one criterion: If you seriously ask the question, “Am I of the truth?’ you are of the truth. If you do not ask it seriously, you do not really want, and you do not deserve, and you cannot get, an answer! One who asks seriously the question of the truth that liberates, is already on one’s way to liberation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

One may still be in the bondage of strict doctrines of self-assurance but one has begun to be free from it. One may still be in the bondage of cynical despair, but one has already started to emerge from it. One may still be in the bondage of unconcern about the truth that matters, but one’s unconcern is already shaken. These all are of the truth and on their road to the truth. One this road one will meet the liberating truth in many forms except in one form: you never will meet it in the form of propositions which you can learn or write down and take home. However, you may encounter it in one sentence of a boo or of a conversation or of a lecture, or even of a sermon. This sentence is not the truth, but it may open you up for the truth and it may liberate you from the bondage to opinions and prejudices and conventions. Suddenly, true reality appears like the brightness of lightening in a formerly dark place. Or, slowly, true reality appears like a landscape when the fog becomes thinner and thinner and finally disappears. New darknesses, new fog will fall upon you; but you have experienced, at least once, the truth and the freedom given by the truth. Or you may be grasped by the truth in an encounter with a piece of nature—its beauty and its transitoriness; or in an encounter with a human being in friendship and estrangement, in love, in difference and hate; or in an encounter with yourself in a sudden insight into the hidden strivings of your soul, in disgust and even hatred of yourself, in reconciliation with and acceptance of yourself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

In these encounters you may meet the true reality—the truth which liberates from illusion and false authorities, from enslaving anxieties, desires, and hostilities, from a wrong self-rejection and a wrong self-affirmation. And it may even happen that you are grasped by the picture and power of Christ who is truth. There is no law that this must happen. Many at all times and in all places have encountered the true reality which is in Christ without know his name—as Christ himself said. They were of the truth and they recognized the truth, although they had never seen Christ who is the truth. And those who has seen Christ, the Christians in all generations, have no guarantee that they participate in the truth which he is. Maybe they were not of the truth. Those, however, who are of the truth and who have encountered Christ who is the truth have one precious thing beyond the others: They have the point from which to judge all truth they encounter anywhere. They look at a life which never lost the communion with the divine ground of all life, and they look at a life which never lost union of love with all beings. The truth which liberates is the power of love, for God is love. The father of the lie binds us to himself by binding us to ourselves—or to that in us which is not our true self. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

All sorts of people come to this quest for truth—the truth-seekers, the hallucinated, the ambitious and the meek, the highly intuitive and the utter imbecilic, the joyous and the embittered failures, the really intelligent and the merely curious-but few stay on it. Most are caught soon or late on the detours, the sidetracks, and the return-tracks. If many come to this Quest because they are discontented with living or even despairing of it, some come because they feel the joy of living or even exalt in it. There are a few, however, who come because they seek truth or reality. There are those today as never before whose deep but unconscious spiritual loneliness remains unsatisfied by workaday life. Some people seek truth because of the hunger for the truth for its own sake, or because of the sense of incompleteness of a merely materialistic existence. Love liberates from the father of the lie because it liberates us from our false self to our true self—to that self which is grounded in true reality. Therefore, distrust every claim for truth where you do not see truth untied with love; and be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you and has started to make you free from yourselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14