I have no special circle of friends who think the way I do, no rights, no wrongs, no desired ends. There was no doubt in my mind, at least at this moment, that he was from the devil, that God and the devil existed, that beyond the isolation I had known only hours ago lay this vast realm of dark beings and hideous meanings and I had been swallowed into it somehow. It occurred to me quite clearly I was being punished for my life, and yet that seemed absurd. Millions believed as I believed the World over. Why the hell was this happening to me? And a grim possibility started irresistibly to take shape, that the World was no more meaningful than before, and this was but another horror. “In God’s name, get away!” I shouted. I had to believe in God now. I had to. That was absolutely the only hope. I went to make the Sign of the Cross. For one moment he started at me, his eyes wide with range. And then he remained still. He watched me make the Sign of the Cross. He listened to me call upon God again and again. He only smiled, making his face a perfect mask of comedy from the proscenium arch. This reveals a World with no structure of human relations and no moral structure—no rights, no wrongs, no purposes. It is a celebration of isolation and emptiness. No wonder I am driven inside myself, taking refuge in an essentially narcissistic relation with myself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The purest form of love, the warmest kind of love, the most exciting love is knowing that these feelings are not mine for another, but mine for me. However, this solipsism, a powerful illustration of the me decade, leads to my anxiety, which at this point is a sign of residual health. I am just beginning to see how scary it is to live first for myself. Nonetheless, self-discipline can seem like self mutiny when the growing degree of resentment and anger possesses one and one can sense that in one’s alienation and isolation, one has somehow missed the boat. There is no genuine freedom at all in a family that has been broken up by the fact that one has experienced death by suicide. The main problem in the “if I am me’ syndrome, and the reason it so quickly goes bankrupt in the search for personal freedom, is that it omits other people; it fails to enrich our humanity. It does not confront destiny as embodied in the community. If we all subscribe to the doctrine, “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this World to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this World to live up to mine. You are you and I am I; if by chance we find each other, it is beautiful. If not, it cannot be helped,” this yields the courage—or arrogance, if one wishes to call it that—of one against the World. True, it may be a necessary phase of individuation at certain times in one’s history—and I think the past decade has been some a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

However, the me against the World attitude is a cop-out, it is a way to avoid or neglect problems, responsibilities, or commitments as a permanent way of life. The I detached from a Thu disintegrates. Narcissism is self-hate disguised as self-love. It is probably the cruelest and most insidious form of self-deception, because it destroys the healing power of loving relationships. We must now transcend the seduction of the mirror, and replace the ego’s image with a moral and political vision which restores our morale and enriches our humanity. The “I am me” always sooner or later comes to grief because it tries to escape confronting the destiny that limits every expression of freedom. Nothing keeps you bound except your Me—until you break its chains, its handcuffs, and are free. It our birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord is a first step on the long and tortuous path, fraught with endless difficulties and emblazoned with many joys, becoming autonomous. Obviously, we never fully reach our goals. However, until we become aware that individuation occurs in our confronting, accepting, or engaging in various ways our destiny as social creatures, we shall never even start on the right track. If there are no limits in a human relationship, no place in the other where one cannot go, there is then no gratifying relationship from which we can learn. The concept of the unconscious used to provide this, but now, when everyone wears one’s dreams on one’s sleeve, it no longer does. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Complete self-transparency, not withstanding its value as an ideal aim, is impossible and even undesirable. To keep the secret self-that sanctum sanctorum—is as important as the transparency. The new narcissism brought with it a distrust of reality, as though we could never be sure anything was real, and we grasped desperately at what was inside ourselves in the hope of finding an anchor. The beneficial side f this uncertainty about reality is shown in the Christian story of the person asking: Am I a mortal looking at the World, or am I a child of God dreaming I am on the quest for truth? The negative side is shown when reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by the cameras. There comes to mind the scene from Apocalypse Now, where the marine at night is desperately shooting at random not knowing where the enemies’ shells are coming from, not knowing where his commander is or even who he is or whether he even has a commander. It is a Kafkaesque story that we are playing out, except that it is not played out now on a calm scene: it is played with atom bomb, germ warfare, biological weapons, fake news, and the possibility of annihilated cities and the dreaded prospect of darkness at noon. It is the uncertainty about the reality of oneself that threatens us. The self becomes increasingly insignificant in our World of technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

The emphasis on living now, with no ability to get solace or renewal from the past of future, the inability to commit oneself because one is not sure there is a self, the pervasive sense of purposelessness and vague despondency always threatening to become severe depression—these are all symptoms crying out that something has gone radically wrong with the self in relation to this World. The new narcissism and the me decade are symptoms of what has gone wrong with the reality of oneself. We seem to have to question every relationship, and the answers continue to be ambivalent. Confronted mostly by hipster, this unreality of the self has led to a fear of psychosis on a scale broader than ever before. For their elders all these compulsive-obsessional symptoms—the rigidity, the hollowness, the lack of affect—were protections against psychosis. However, many are turning to strong opioids and street drugs to shock to one’s consciousness that produces makes it clear that a similar shock was possible for the whole of society. More and more the question is being asked whether society as a whole is psychotic, and the pause after the question is a sign that the answer could be yes as well as no. The widespread passion to be me with the assumption that then I will be free turns into becoming a candidate for a mental hospital. The inmates in mental hospitals are there because they cannot be themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

As one man puts it in the hospital, “Here we are ourselves with a vengeance; ourselves and nothing whatever but ourselves. We go full steam through life under the pressure of self. Each one shuts oneself up in the cask of self. Sink to the bottom by self-fermentation, seals oneself in with the bung of self, and seasons in the well of self, no one here weeps for the woes of others. No one here listens to anyone else’s ideas.” There can be no sense of the self without a sense of the destiny of that self. How we respond to the facts of illness, disaster, good fortune, success, renewed life, death ad infinitum is crucial; and the pattern of such response is the self relating to destiny. For when all is said and done, the sense of self consists in the relationship between the person’s freedom and his or her destiny. So we must conclude that the lack of sense of reality of the self is due to the fact that we have omitted destiny. We secretly tend to believe that advertisements that tell us that we are unlimited, the sky is the limit, we will be 100-percent winners, we make our own destiny, and so on. And it is this that robs us of the sense of reality—and of adventure also—in our encountering the vicissitudes of human existence. It is certain that the “if I am me, I will be free” is a mistaken path, for it lacks the sense of destiny that gives freedom to reality. Instead of freedom, this path leads to isolation and estrangement. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Spirit in its human manifestation is mortal’s response to one’s person. Mortals speak in many languages—tongues of language, of art, of action—but the spirit is one; it is response to the individual that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of a mortal and then become sound in one’s throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in mortals but mortals stand in language and speak out of it—so it is with all words, all spirits. Spirit is not in the I but between I and society. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. When one is able to respond to the individual that means mortals live in the spirit. When one enters into this relation with one’s whole being, one is able to do that. It is solely by virtue of one’s power to relate that mortals are able to live in the spirit. However, it is here that the fate of the relational events rears up most powerful. The more powerful the response, the more powerfully it ties down the individual and as by a spell binds it into an object. Only silence toward the individual, the silence of all languages, the taciturn waiting in the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word leaves the individual free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

All response binds the individual into the rational World. That is the melancholy of mortals, and that is one’s greatness. For thus knowledge, this works, thus imagine and example come into being among the living. However, whatever has thus been changed into It and frozen into a thing among things is still endowed with the meaning and the destiny to change back ever again. When it bestowed itself upon mortals and begot the response in one–ever again—that was the intention in that hour of the spirit—the object shall catch fire and become present, returning to the element from which it issued, to beheld and lived by mortals as present. The fulfillment of this meaning and this destiny is frustrated by the mortal who has become reconciled to the It-World as something that is to be experienced and used and who holds down what is tied into it instead of freeing it, who observes it instead of heeding it, and instead of receiving it utilizes it. Knowledge: as one beholds what confronts one, its being is disclosed to the knower. What one beheld as present one will have to comprehend as an object, compare with objects, assign a place in order of objects, and describe and analyze objectively; only as an individual can it be absorbed into the store of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

However, in the act of beholding it was no thing among things, no event among events; it was presented exclusively. It is not in the law that is afterward derived from the appearance but in the appearance itself that the being communicates itself. That we think the universal is merely an unreeling of skeinlike event that was beheld in the particular, in a confrontation. And now it is locked into the Individual-form of conceptual knowledge. Whoever unlock it and beholds it again as present, fulfills the meaning of that act of knowledge as something that is actual and active between mortals. However, knowledge can also be pursued by stating: “so that is how it is constituted; that is were it belongs.” What has become in It is then taken as an It, experienced and sued as an It, employed along with other tings for the project of conquering the World. “One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, the chief priests and the scribes with the elders came up and said to him, ‘Tell us by what authority you do these things, or what it is that gave you this authority.’ He answered them, ‘I also will ask you a question; now tell me, Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from mortals?’ And they discussed it with one another, saying, ‘If we say, from Heaven, he will say, from mortals, and all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know whence it was. And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things,” reports Luke 20.1-8. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

The story we have read was very important to the early Christians who preserved it for us. If we look at it superficially, no reason seems to exist for such a high valuation: the Jewish leaders tried to trap Jesus by a shrewd question, and Jesus trapped them by an even shrewder question. It is a pleasant anecdote. However, it is more than this? Indeed, it is infinitely more. It does something surprising: it answers the fundamental question of prophetic religion by not answering t. AN answer to the question of authority is refused by Jesus, but the way in which Christ refuses the answer is the answer. Let us imagine that Christ had answered the question of the religious leaders about his authority by asking them about the source of their authority! They could have replied easily and convincingly. The chief persists could have said, “The source of our authority is our consecration accord to a tradition which goes back without interruption to Moses and Aaron. The sacred tradition of which we are a link from the past to the future gives us our authority.” And the scribes could have answered, “The source of our authority is our knowledge—beyond that of anybody else—of the Scriptures. We have studied them day and night since our early childhood, as a student of the Word of God must do. Because we are experts in interpreting the Holy Scriptures, we have authority.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

And they all together would have said to Jesus, “But who are you, who are not consecrated and not studied in the Scriptures, and without the wisdom of age and the experience of practice? Which is the source of your authority? You have not only taught and preached, you have also acted as a radical, without our approval. You have driven out the temple of all who sold and bought, you have overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seat of those who sold pigeons. And you know yourself that they are necessary for the preservation of sacrifices! By what authority have you turned against the religion as it has been given to us by Moses and by all generations since his time?” I awoke in the middle of the night to discover the room was filled with bright light. I could see all the furniture. A marvelous peace pervaded me. I said to myself, “God is that you?” and instinctively, I knew that it was. After a while I got up when the experience was fading to check its extraordinary nature and confirmed that none of the electric lamps were switched on. Since then thirteen years have passed. I have a loving husband and loving children, enough money for the basic things of life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

However, for some time life was not meaningful and I felt empty. I looked at my friends, so willing to accept this hollow life, but I could not. It became intolerable. Five years ago, I was shown the spiritual quest of truth and this has since become my mainstay. Was there a connection between the vision of Light and the subsequent restlessness until one turned to the quest? That there is such a line, is confirmed by many other instances scattered around the World. Every mortal who catches such a glimpse of one’s diviner possibilities will be haunted forever after by them until one tries to catch up in actual thought and life with them. The endeavour to do so brings one sooner or later to the Quest for God. In the moment of first meeting with one’s Higher Self, the quest is laid open to one in reality. One has to see the opportunity and to take the first steps by an act of intuition and a venture of faith. There will be many more succeeding steps if one is to continue the quest and most probably a number of missteps, but it all begins with this initial recognition and reaction. One who meets for the first time the challenge in an adept’s eyes, meets one’s fate, did one know it. For one is at once presented subconsciously with a choice between two courses: the one leading to a higher kind of life aim, the other continuing on normal lines. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

When the truth explodes suddenly like a NASA rocket blasting off beneath the traditions or beliefs or habits which held one captive in untruth, the light may dazzle and bewilder one or it may set one free from them in a way and with a speed which could not have existed ordinarily. It is this faith that there is a World-Idea and that we much adjust our lives to its or suffer unnecessarily which makes one out from the herd. It is the desire to do for oneself what Life wishes one to do, to realize one’s higher potentials, that puts one on this Quest. It is this feeling that one is not in one’s true place that pushes a mortal into this search for a teaching or a teacher. Mortals whose lives have been so endangered and whose minds so troubled will either turn for relief to gross sensuality or search for wholeness in new spirituality. The sickness of the World wants something much more than a mere philosophy of the lecture-room to cure it; no bottles of verbal drugs can prove potent in the present desperation. Not all mortals understand just at what time, what date, their quest of God will start. This may be because it did not happen all at once. “Wings stir the sunlit dust of the cathedral in which the Past is buried to its chin in marble,” reports Stan Rice from “Poem on Crawling int Bed: Bitterness” Body of work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13