If one would give birth to a dancing star, I tell you one must harbor chaos. I hide nothing from you, not my ignorance, not my fear, not the simple terror that if I try I might fail. I do not even know if it is mine to give more then once, or what is the price of giving it, but I will risk this for you, and we will discover it together, whatever the mystery and the terror, just as I have discovered alone all else. Most of us are so preoccupied with the noise, the uproar, the cacophony of the modern World that we have no energy left for constructive living. We long to pause, to absorb into our day-to-day existence, some calmness, some inner order in which we can call our soul our own, in which we take time to experience some beauty, to know and enjoy our friends, and to let whatever creative impulses or visions we have be heard, listened to, have their moment. This pressing need coincides with influx of Christian influence, especially among the young people in this country, shown by the wide sale of books on religion, and the endless listening to preachers. There can be no doubt of the depth and urgency of the hunger for some psychoreligious center of life. However, it often happens that aspirants put off the sacrifice of time which prayers and meditation call for because, they complain, they are too busy with this or that. Eternal anxiety is the lot of the free mortal. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Thus they never make any start at all and the years slip uselessly by. In most cases this involves no penalty other than the spiritual stagnation to which it leads, but in some cases where a higher destiny has been reserved for the individual or where a mission has to be accomplished, the result is far different. Everything and everyone that such a person uses as an excuse for keeping away from the practice of meditation, the exercise of devotion, and the communion of prayer may be removed from one’s external life by the higher self. Thus, through loss and suffering, one will be forced to obey the inward call. Human beings are given more than one chance to redeem themselves. Such is the mercy of the higher power. Prayer is a way, available for most of us without a radical changing of our vocation, by which we can put meaningful content into the pause. No matter what form or stripe this prayer may take—yoga of the physical or mental variety—all have in common the aim of providing channels to deeper levels of experience by means of the pause. When I, for example, am overburdened with fatigue or gloom or the distress of problems and the sleeplessness that goes with these things, I may pause temporarily to withdraw myself from the ego-self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

I cannot withdraw myself from the ego-self by the head-on force of thinking. However, it can be done, sometimes with the help of a prayer, or through relaxation, or pausing and letting be. I seek to move into the psyche-self, in which I see tings sub specie aeternitatis, in which I no longer feel the pain described above—the ego-self that feels the pains described above—the ego-self that feels them is temporarily transcended. The fatigue, the distress, the gloom all seem to vanish. They psyche-self, freed from the groveling kind of pain, freed from the narcissism, freed from ego-centered misery, can be a channel to awareness of infinite possibilities. Time-backed and Earth-bound as one is, it is not surprising that one often tries to evade the Quest, to ignore it in various ways such as always keeping bust truing to fulfill increasing ambition, cultivating skepticism disguised as practicality, or demanding instant and demonstrable proofs. However, most often one deflects the thoughts of it or changes the conversation abruptly.  If pursued by oneself or others, the very idea makes one nervous. One is uneasy at the thought of higher laws to be obeyed. One is fearful of what one will be asked to do and of the discipline to be practiced. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

It is sadly human to want to digress from the straight path of the Quest at times. This happens to many and a proportion of them yields to the desire. Invariable, however, the passing years bring them back to either the leaving point or the starting point. Experience always points up the lesson that the initial urge faith conviction or reasoning which put them on the path was a wise and necessary one. When they learn at first hand with sorrow, loss, or frustration, the picture of life grows a little clearer to them, what the teachers offered free without such unpleasant consequences. One can understand how in the modern World, left to itself, untouched and unthawed by the emergence of any individual, should become alienated and turn into an incubus; but how does it happen at, as you say, the I of mortal is deactualized? Whether it lives in relation or outside it, the I remains assured of itself in its self-consciousness, which is a strong thread of gold on which the changing states are strung. Whether I say, “I see you,” or “I see the tree,” seeing may not be equally actual in both cases, but the I is equally actual in both. Prayer is, par excellence, a concentration of the void, the pause, the no thing. It is a freeing of the self from the clutter of life, giving one a pleasantly dizzy and mildly ecstatic experience. This dizziness is an attractive state that one likes to come back to, at least in memory, in moments throughout the day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

In this sense meditation is a relief and a freedom from our buying and selling, our technological culture. Prayer seems magical and curative because it opens one’s vision and being to a New World, a brightly colored World, conducive to calmness and peacefulness. In general it seems to be a less intense form of the World than the mystics describe, but in quality the same, a World which has within it sweetness, overflowing love, beauty now all about it. This is the common denominator of many diverse methods of prayer. They seem to have in common: stopping the machinery, the noise, the pressure, the haste, the compulsive driveness, and a higher level of consciousness, what was called oceanic. One experiences being absorbed into the Universe and the Universe being temporarily absorbed into one’s self. Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons. One is the spiritual form of natural differentiation, the other that of natural association. The purpose of setting oneself apart is to experience and use, and the purpose of that is living—which means dying one human life long. The purpose of relation is the relation itself—touching the soul. For as soon as we touch the soul, we are touched by a breath of eternal life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Whoever stands in relation, participates in an actuality; that is, in a being hat is neither merely a part of one nor merely outside oneself. All actuality is an activity in which I participate without being able to appropriate it. Where there is no participation, there is no actuality. Where there is self-appropriation, there is no actuality. The more directly the soul is touched, the more perfect is the participation. The I is actual through its participation in actuality. The more perfect the participation is, the more actual the I becomes. However, the I that steps out of the event of the relation into detachment and the self-consciousness accompanying that, does not lose its actuality. Participation remains in it as a living potentiality. To use words that originally refer to the highest relation but may also be applied to all others: the seed remains in one. This is the realm of subjectivity in which the I apprehends simultaneously its association and its detachment. Genuine subjectivity can be understood only dynamically, as the vibration of the I in its lonely truth. This is also the pace where the desire for ever higher and more unconditional relation and for perfect participation in being arises and keeps rising. In subjectivity the spiritual substance of the person matures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

The person becomes conscious of oneself as participating in being, as being-with, and thus as a being. The ego becomes conscious of oneself as being this way and not that. The person says, “I am”; the ego says, “That is how I am.” “Knowing thyself” means to the person: know yourself as being. To the ego it means: knows your being-that-way. By setting oneself apart from others, the ego moves away from being. This does not mean that the person give up one’s being-that-way, one’s being is different; only, this is not the decisive perspective but merely the necessary and meaningful form of being. The ego, on the other hand, wallows in one’s being-that-way—a fiction that one has devised for oneself. For at bottom self-knowledge usually means to one the fabrication of an effective apparition of the self that has the power to deceive one every more thoroughly; and through the contemplation and veneration of this apparition one seeks the semblance of knowledge of one’s own being-that-way, while actual knowledge of it would lead one to self-destruction—or rebirth. The person beholds one’s self; the ego occupies oneself with one’s My: my manner, my race, my works, my genius. The ego does not participate in any actuality nor does one gain any. One sets oneself apart from everything else and tries to possess as much as possible by means of experience and use. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

This is one’s dynamics: setting oneself apart and taking possession—and the object is always It, tat which is not actual. One knows oneself as a subject, but this subject can appropriate as much as it wants to, it will never gain any substance: it remains like a point, functional, that which experiences, that which uses, nothing more. All of its extensive and multifarious being-that-way, all of its eager individuality cannot help it to gain any substance. There are two kinds of human beings, but there are two poles of humanity. No human being is pure person, and none is pure ego; none is entirely actual, none entirely lacking in actuality. Each lives in a twofold I. However, some mortals are so person-oriented that one may call them persons, whiles are so ego-oriented that one may call them egos. Between these and those true history takes place. The more a human being, the more humanity is dominated buy the ego, the more does the I fall prey to inactuality. In such ages the person in the human being and in humanity comes to lead a subterranean, hidden, as it were invalid existence—until it is summoned. There is always the danger that some people will be too separate from the reality of most people’s experience. Let us keep in mind that prayer occurs, often silently, in all gradations, from a chance insight on a crowded elevator to the conscious cultivation of the sense of peace to regular discipline of meditating for short periods several times a day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

There are also dangers in becoming isolated from the World of social action by praying too much, and it can be a detriment to one’s own creativity, which means we should not only pray, but take corrective actions to help assist our prayers. We never wholly leave the ego-self behind, and we still live in the real World with its rationality and irrationality, and with our responsibility toward this World. However, it is precisely in this ever-present World that prayer can give meaning to our pauses. All forms of prayer seek to change the character of the self, a change that involves a new relationship with the void. Many people will be familiar with at least the beginning stages of the void by their practice of meditation. I speak of the holy void because holy, coming from the root whole, refers to the mystical experience of grasping the wholeness of the Universe in one’s prayer. The feeling of the World as bounded whole is the spirituality of God. The holy void is the pause appearing in imaginary spatial form. This is one reason the mystics are so often shepherds since they look out continuously on the endless desert. One has this experience of the void in looking steadily out over the sea, an experience rightly termed oceanic since it gives one feeling of infinity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Being in the desert or at the ocean where our vision can seemingly go on for ever can give us acute anxiety, since the eyes have no boundaries with which to orient us; or it can give us a sense of profundity, of eternity, or of infinity, all of which are pleasurable. This is why floating in a stimulus-free tank, where we are insulted from every sound and every glimmer of light can bring either intense anxiety or a transcendent, holy experience. In the void the experience of nothingness occurs, and in this one’s spiritual inspirations are called forth and one’s deepest thoughts are made manifest. In the experience of nothingness, we find ourselves cleansed of the chatter and the clatter of a World which is too much with us. If a mortal is born with spiritual capacity but refuses to use it, and even deliberately shuts it away, a day will come wen it will thrust itself up into one’s conscious self for acceptance and use. If one continue to deny it, the capacity will then operate against one, until one’s sanity becomes questionable or one’s fortunes become adverse. No mortal can afford to fail to heed the summons to the Quest. If one does, it is at one’s own peril and one will then fail in everything else, for this is an imperative call coming from the highest part of one’s being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

In is not by accident the people love to believe in myths in searching for ways things can be said and done, for Greek mythic language is one of the ways such truths can be made manifest. In the holy void the nothingness that we experience gives our deeper thoughts room to make themselves manifest, and the otherwise silent inner voice can be heard. This is the equivalent of the listening to the silence we referred to earlier. One method of prayer consists of continuously clearing the mind of all content until God—or being, as some would prefer—can speak to us out of the void. The nothingness then becomes a something; a something that comes, the Christians would say, from the depths of our soul. The void is the dimension of eternity. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who life in the present. Our human hope is these experiences of timelessness—such as when we see something breathtakingly beautiful or hear a piece of music that seems to raise us into that seems to raise us into eternity—is to hang on to the experience of forever. Those who have been personally confronted by an illuminated mortal with the Quest of the God and reject it to continue their quest of the ego instead, are destined to suffer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

On hearing a Symphony of Ruben de Ronde called Save Me I thought the of the sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease! Reject me not into the World again. And again in God’s World: O World, I cannot hold thee close enough! Lord, I do fear. Thou has made the World too beautiful this years; my soul is all but out of me—let fall. No burning leaf: prithee, let no bird call. The warning which Light on the Path gives to disciples, but if thou look not for one, if thou pass one by, then there is no safeguard for thee. Thy brain will reel, thy heart grow uncertain, and in the dust of the battlefield thy sight and senses will fail, and thou wilt not know thy friends from thy enemies—this warning is apposite here and should be taken deeply to heart. Necessity will with time force this comprehension on them. Prophets and teachers will disclose this truth to them but if they do not listen then hard experience must disclose it. The void may seem to be contact with pure being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, awareness that there is a beckoning path to pure being even though none of us gets very far on it. The concentration on the spaces between words, the intervals, the pauses in life—these yield the touch of ecstasy. However, the moment formulation in words occurs, the no thing becomes a something. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Obviously, one listens with care to any message that may be formulated in moments like these, and one need not worry too much about its origin. It may be interpreted as coming from one’s deeper self, or from the various autosuggestions that occur, or from contact with the being of the Universe. The last may be experiences as a glimpse of Go—assuming that God is conceived as the ground of being and meaning in the Universe. At this point I feel, as I gotten have, what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. How long can a mortal withstand this silent call of the God within one? –as long as one’s hopes and desires can find some measure of satisfaction, as long as frustration does not crush them, or until destiny itself overrides one’s indifference and compels one to heed it. The Call of the Quest once heard may be lost for a while, even a long while, but it will return. The need of truth is an irrepressible one but it may take a long time to come through in all its force and clarity. One is left free to save or destroy oneself, to accept the truth or turn one’s face away from it. “Learn wisdom in thy youth; yes, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yes, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.35,36. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13