I pulled the bank notes out of my pocket and put them in his unsteady hand. I spilled gold coins onto the payment. The actors darted forward fearfully to gather them up. I scanned the crowd around for the source of this strange distraction, what was it, not Nicolas in the door of the deserted theater, watching me with a broken soul. No, something else both familiar and unfamiliar, having to do with the dark. This conception of the pause gives us a whole new World. It is in the pause that people learn to listen to silence. We can hear an infinite number of sounds that we normally never hear at all—the unending hum and buzz of insects in a quiet Summer field, a breeze blowing lightly through the golden hay, a thrush singing in the low bushes beyond the meadow. And we suddenly realize that this is something—the World of silence is populated by a myriad of creatures and myriad of sounds. In childhood, we were taught to sit still and enjoy the silence. We were taught to use our organs to smell, to look when apparently there was nothing to see, and to listen intently when all seemingly was quiet. We learned that silences as well as sounds are significant in the forest, and we learned how to listen to the silences. Deeply felt silences might be said to be the core of our religion. During these times, the nature within ourselves found unity with the nature of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

In Japan, free time and space—what we call pauses—are perceived as ma, the valid interval or meaningful pause. Such perception is basic to all experience and specifically to what constitutes creativity and freedom. This perception persists in spite of the adoption of Western culture and science. Even in 1958, Misako Miyamoto wrote of the No plays, “The audience watches the play and catches the feeling through not only the action and words but also the intervals of the period of pauses. There is a free creation in each person’s mind; and the audience relates to this situation with free thinking.” Of silent intervals in speech, she says, “Especially in the pauses in a tone of voice, I can feel the person’s unique personality and one’s joy, sorrow or other complicated feelings.” On listening to a robin in early Spring, “It sand with pauses, I could have time to think about the bird in the silent moment between one voice and others. The pauses produced the effect of the relation between the bird and me. Lest these examples seduce us into assuming that this valuing of the pause is chiefly in Eastern esoteric cultures, let me point out that the phenomenon is just as clear, though not as frequent, in our own modern culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

John Cage, a composer noted for his originality, gave a concert in New York which consisted of his coming out on the stage, sitting down at the keyboard for a period of time, and not playing one note. His sim, as he explained to a less-than-pleased audience, was to give them an opportunity to listen to the silence. Hos recorded music shows precisely this—many pauses are interspersed with heterogeneous notes. John Cage sharpens our awareness, makes our sense keener, and renders us alive to ourselves and our surroundings. Listening is our most neglected sense. The very best essence of jazz is in the space between notes, called the afterbeat. The leader of a band in which I once played used to sing out “um-BAH,” the “Bah”—or the note coming always between the beats. This syncopation is a basis of jazz. Duke Ellington, for example, keeps the audience tantalized, on edge, expectant—we have to dance to work out the emotion building up within us. On an immediate level this expectancy has a similarity to the exquisite levels of feeling before climax. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Hence, some musicians, can simulate the process of pleasures of the flesh in the tantalizing beat of their song. In the ever-changing jazz group at Preservation Hall in New Orleans, this infinite variety, with each person improvising, produces each time a piece of music never before played and never to be played again. This is freedom par excellence. There seems to be no pause in technology. Or when there is, it is called a depression and is denied and feared. However, pure science is a different matter. We find Alert Einstein remarking that “the intervals between the events are more significant than the events themselves.” The significance of the pause is that the rigid chain of cause and effect is broken. The pause momentarily suspends the billiard-ball system of Pavlov. In the person’s life response no longer blindly follows stimulus. There intervenes between the two our human imaginings, reflections, considerations, ponderings. Pause is the prerequisite for wonder. When we do not pause, when we are perpetually hurrying from one appointment to another, from one planned activity to another, we sacrifice the richness of wonder. And we lose communication with our destiny. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

When they learn about it for the first time, too many persons will have nothing to do with the Quest. This is not because they find it impossible to believe some of the ideas on which it is based, such as the idea of reincarnation. Nor is it because the metaphysical side is too abstruse for them to go through the needed labour of troubling their minds with it. No—it is because the ideal set up for the questers is, they claim, completely outside their horizon and quite unreachable by most, if not nearly all of them. Its peak seems so austere, the climb up it so demanding of the bravery that a mortal could ever possess, that few even venture to approach it. They hear of saints who seem to achieve the impossible—a happiness which eludes their fellow denizens of this planet and a self-control which puts human desire and passion easily underfoot. What these spiritual superpeople can do, in temptation-free Himalayan heights of European monastic retreats, they see no prospect of ever doing in their noisy busy cities. It is not possible, they think, to live on such a high Godlike plane in a World where meanness and violence are everyday patterns. This is a plausible view but it is not the only one. It is impossible only if they think so. When it is already lost in the mind, no victory can ever be won. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Even if it were offered to them, those persons who are satisfied with substitutes for the Truth could not appreciate or recognize it. Those who seek neither moral elevation nor spiritual teaching do not thereby show their indifference to thought about life. They show only that they are smugly satisfied with the little they thought they have managed to do. Those who are content with a life of nothing more than sitting down to meals, going out to make money, and coming back to enjoy pleasures of the flesh—that is, wit a solely materialistic life—find nothing in such inspired messages and get noting from such mystical teachings. There is no large idea in their petty lives. It will not engage the interest of the spiritually indolent. So long as we keep ourselves focused wholly in the physical World of thoughts such as these may be read but will not reach our minds. The mortals who see no need for a higher concept of one’s nature than the merely physical one will see no need for a higher goal than feeding, clothing, sheltering, and amusing one’s body. In letting the senses, the passion, the intellect, and the ego take sole charge of one’s life, one quite naturally sees only mere emptiness beyond. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

One doubts and refutes the intuitive-spiritual and denies and rejects the spiritual. The Infinite is nothing to one so long as one prefers to remain shut in within the sense bound outlook. This is why one dismisses spiritual experience, religious feeling, and philosophic insight as mere hallucinations. However, all the opposition takes place only in one’s conscious mind for there is unavoidable recognition on one’s subconscious mind. One wants to escape from oneself, however, and fears the ordeal of facing oneself. These words will make no appeal to the materialistic mentality which still regards all spiritual experience as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when I first embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than a decade ago. People neglect the real because they believe they already have it (in sense-experience of the World outside) and for the same reason they do not seek truth. The unfortunate who have been unable to manage their affairs or to recover from the blows of destiny may turn to religion for comfort: they seldom turn to philosophy. For this fails to confront their emotions: it appears is only to those who are learning that emotions need to be checked or balanced or controlled by reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The mass of people do not want, and may even fear, the spiritual and intellectual freedom to search for truth. They are more comfortable inside the gregarious protection of ready-made group tradition. It is not only that so many people are not capable of comprehending the truth but also that a large number of them do not want to comprehend it. The truth hurts their ego, contradicts their desires, and denies their expectations. Mortal’s communal life cannot dispense any more than one oneself with the It-World—over which the presence of the You floats like the spirit over the face of the waters. Mortal’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it. There is no evil drive until the drive detaches itself from our being; the drive that is wedded to and determined by our being is the plasma of communal life, while the detached drive spells its disintegration. The economy as the house of the will to profit and the states as the house of the will to power participate in life as long as they participate in the spirit. If they abjure the spirit, they abjure life. To be sure, life takes its time about settling the score, and for quite a while one may still think that one sees a form move where for a long time a mere mechanism has been whirring. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Introducing some sort of immediacy at this point is surely futile. Loosening the framework of the economy or the state cannot make up for the fact that neither stands any longer under the supremacy of the You-saying spirit, and stirring up the periphery cannot replace the living relationship to the center. The structures of communal human life derive their life from the fullness of the relational force that permeates their members, and they derive their embodies form from the saturation of this force by the spirit. The states person of business person who serves the spirit is no dilettante. One knows well that one cannot simply confront the people with whom one has to deal as so many carriers of the You, without undoing one’s own work. Nevertheless one ventures to do this, not simply but up to the limit suggested to one by the spirit; and the spirit does suggest a limit to one, and the venture that would have exploded a served structure succeeds where the presence of the You floats above. One does not become a babbling enthusiast; one serves the truth, which, though supra-rational, does not disown reason but holds her in lap. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

What one does in communal life is no different from what is done in personal life by a mortal who knows that one cannot actualize the You in some pure fashion but who nevertheless bears witness of it daily to the It, defining the limit every day anew, according to the right and measure of that day—discovering the limit anew. Neither work nor possessions can be redeemed on their own but only by starting from the spirit. It is only from the presence of the spirit that significance and joy can slow into all work, and reverence and the strength to sacrifice into all possessions, not to the brim but quantum satis—and that is worked and possessed, though it reminds attached to the It-World, can nevertheless be transfigured to the point where it confronts us and represents the You. There is no back-behind-it; there is, even at the moment of the most profound need—indeed, only then—a previously unsuspected beyond-it. Whether it is the state that regulates the economy or the economy that directs the state is unimportant as long as both are unchanged. Whether the institutions of the state become freer and those of the economy juster, that is important, but not for the question concerning actual life that is being posed here; for they cannot become free and just on their own. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

You-saying, responding spirit—remains alive and actual; whether what remains of it in communal human life continues to be subjected to the state and the economy or whether it becomes independently active; whether what abides of it in individual human life incorporates itself again in communal life. However, that certainly cannot be accomplished by dividing communal life into independent realms that also include the life of the spirit. That would merely mean that the regions immersed in the It-World would be abandoned forever to this despotism, while the spirit would lose all actuality. For the spirit in itself can never act independently upon life; that it can do only in the World—with its force which penetrates and transforms the It-World. The spirit is truly at home with itself when it can confront the World that is opened up to it, give itself to the World, and redeem it and, through the World, also itself. However, the spirituality that represents the spirit nowadays is so scattered, weakened, degenerate, and full of contradictions that it could not possibly do this until it had first returned to the essence of the spirit: being able to say You. Most people are contented with their chains or even strongly attached them—such is the awesome power of desires, passions, infatuation, and especially egoisms. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

And when we defend our Christian faith, they point to the fact that the World has not become better since the days of Hosea and Jeremiah, and that the prophetic visions of doom are more realistic today than they were in those days. It is hard to answer this; but we must answer it for not only the Christians, but for humanity, or friends, and our children, and something in ourselves asks these questions. It is hard to answer them. What, for instance, can we answer when our children ask us about the child in the Manger while in some parts of the World all children from two years old and under have died and are dying, not by an order of Herod, but by ever-increasing cruelty of ear and its result in Christian era and by the decrease of the power of imagination of the Christian people. Or, what can we answers the Jews when the remnants of the Jewish people, returning from death-camps, worse than anything in Babylon, cannot find a resting place anywhere on the surface of the Earth, and certainly not amongst the great Christian nations? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Or, what can we answer Christians and non-Christians who have realized that the fruit of centuries of Christian technical and social civilization is the imminent threat of a complete and universal self-destruction of humanity? When we look at the unhealed and unsaved state of our lives after the message of healing and salvation has been heard at every Christmas for almost two thousand years, what answer can we give to ourselves? Should we say that the World, of course, is unsaved but that there are men and women in all generations who are saved from the World? However, this is not the message of Christmas. All those in Christmas legend who expect the Christ and receive the divine are looking out for the salvation of Israel and of the Gentiles and for the World. For all of them, and for Jesus himself, and for the apostles, the kingdom of God, the universal salvation is at hand. However, if this was the expectation, has it not been utterly refuted by reality? Many people fear the quest because they fear that, if they get involved in it too seriously, they might have to repress some inclination in their nature or renounce some habit in their way of living. So they take from it only what appeals to them, and discard the rest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13