I blinked my eyes. I felt weary suddenly; it was almost a feeling of despair. And I thought confusedly, This is ridiculous, I never despair! Others do that, not me. I go on fighting no matter what happens. Always. Sometimes we find the specter of anxiety forcing its way into the picture time and time again. When a person is most vulnerable to anxiety, that is the moment of pause. It is the tremulous moment when we balance possible decisions, when we look forward with wonder and awe or with dread or fear of failure. The pause is the moment when we open ourselves, and the opening is our vulnerability to anxiety. When we spoke about listening to the silence, we noted that many people flee from silence because of the anxiety of the anxiety the silence brings. They perpetually seek the company of some noise or the television or radio even to the extent of carrying blaring portable sets with them on the streets or in the erstwhile peace of the parks. John Lilly found in his experiments in which people floated in his stimulus-free tank that silence, with its complete freedom, brings to many people more anxiety than they can bear. Who knows what devil may emerge out of the complete silence? Where are our familiar boundaries? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The members of John Cage’s audience at his famous concert of silence were required to absorb their own anxiety. There was no music to do it for them. People shrink from the quiet desperation that confronts them in periods of complete silence, fearing they will lose all ways of orienting themselves. In our technological society, we are moving toward periods of greater and greater leisure—in earlier retirement, for example—and superficially we welcome this prospective leisure. However, we find within ourselves a curious gnawing fear of something missing. What will we do with all this unfilled free time, this unplanned, unscheduled empty space? Does it not hang before us—O paradox of paradoxes! –like a great threat, the threat of emptiness, rather than the great boon we were seeking? Will our capacities, lying fallow, evaporate? Will we lose our abilities? Will we be blotted out in sleep for over a century like Lestat de Lioncourt? If there is nobody knowing at the door, will we lose our consciousness? Secretly, man of us interpret freedom as becoming nothing. And will we, in our now unhampered possibility, become simply no thing? This is a real and immediate source of anxiety, covered up and unadmitted though it generally is. Formless freedom, unstructured freedom without the limits of destiny, leaves human beings inert. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

At such times the pause takes over People do not know what to do, and they cry out for someone or something to organize them. Hence, organized play and planned leisure—which are really contradictions in terms. Thrown on their own resources, people may find themselves bankrupt since they have long gotten into the habit of ignoring their pauses. Let us consider again the illustration of a speaker receiving promptings and directions from the audience. Suppose, in one’s millisecond pauses, no such prompting comes. In anxiety over this possibility, some speakers choose to write out their lectures word for word, and then they can fall back on the printed page regardless of the promptings or lack thereof from the audience. However, in reading one’s speech the speaker has surrendered one’s opportunity for freedom, for the discovery of new ideas, for the adventure of exploring new frontiers, for the heady thrill of uncertainty. Thus, one chooses security over freedom, as the Grand Inquisitor so passionately adjured. However, such a choice exacts a serious price in self-consciousness, tension, and the loss of freedom. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Sometimes the anxiety that accompanies freedom is intermixed and confused with excitement. Once, while waiting (which is a form of pausing) at an airport for a person whom I knew only slightly and who was going to be my guest at my country farm for three days, I felt the excitement that always comes wit the anticipation of meeting a new person. However, this excitement merged back and forth into the anxiety that came as I asked myself in fantasy: What will two people do cooped up in an twelve room farm house for long? Will the intimacy become boring or scary? So I jotted down the following notes: When does excitement—for example, the constructive side of anxiety, which keeps life from being boring, keeps us spontaneous, stimulated, and alive—lead into destructive anxiety, which shuts out spontaneity, paralyzes, and blocks our freedom? Excitement, the risking of which is pleasurable, gives us the spirit of the chase, keeps us growing. This has a clear survival value. It remains excitement so long as I feel I can cope; I can retain a sense of some autonomy. When I cannot do this, it becomes destructive. Thus as long as we can experience “I can” and “I will,” we remain open, we experience our freedom, we preserve the power to experience new possibilities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Does this anxiety always occur in the exercise of freedom? The answer to that depends on how one views life. If we follow Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, who conceive of life as a continuous dialectical tension between being and nonbeing, each of us engaged in every breath in preserving our own being against the threat of nonbeing, then we must answer “Yes.” In any case I prefer to keep the question on the level of consciousness. This would mean starting that while there is always some accompaniment of dizziness with freedom, we, as human beings, may not be aware of it since we have different points where we block it off, where we repress the dizziness temporarily or deny it altogether. All people are trying to find God, to feel his love and sense his peace. Those who are in flight from Worldly things do s consciously; those who are in pursuit of them do so unconsciously. Life compels no one to enter upon this conscious Quest, although it is leading everyone upon the conscious Quest. Even among the students of this teaching, not all are following the Quest, many are merely seeking for an intellectual understanding; their interest has been attracted and their curiosity aroused, but they have not felt called upon to go any farther. This may be due to inner weakness or to outer difficulties or both. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Such men and women do not have to pledge themselves to any moral tasks or mystical experiences. Nevertheless, their studies and reflections upon the teaching will not be without a certain value and will place them on an altogether different level from the unawakended herd which is bereft of such an interest. However, I a mortal’s mission requires one to know only one’s association with one’s cause and no real relation to any soul, no present encounter with God, so that everything around one becomes It and subservient to one’s cause? What about the saying of Napoleon, “I was never truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.” Was not that legitimate? Is this phenomenon of experiencing and using no person? Indeed, this master of the age evidently did not now the dimension of the soul. The matter has been put well: all being was for him valore. Gently, he compared the followers who denied one after his fall with Peter; but there was nobody whom one could have denied, for there was nobody whom he could have denied, for there was nobody whom he recognized as a being. He was the demonic spirit for the millions and did not respond; to the soul he responded be calling it an It, he responded fictitiously on the personal level—responding only in his own sphere, that of one’s cause, and only with his deeds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

This is the elementary historical barrier at which the basic word of association loses its reality, the character of reciprocity: the demonic spirit for whom nobody can become true soul. In addition to the person and the ego, to the free and the arbitrary mortal—not between them—occurs in fateful eminence in fateful times: ardently, everything flames toward one while one oneself stands in a cold fire; a thousand relations reach out toward one but none issues from one. One participates in no actuality, but others participate immeasurably in one as in an actuality. To be sure, one views the beings around one as so many machines capable of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the cause. However, that is also how one views oneself (only one can never cease experimenting to determine one’s own capacities, and yet never experiences their limits). One treats oneself, too, as an It. This the individual is saying one is not vitally empathic, not full. Much less does it feign these qualities (like the they are the foundation of the I of the modern ego). One does not even speak of oneself, one merely speaks on one’s own behalf. The I spoken and written by one is the required subject of the sentences that convey one’s statements and orders—no more and no less. It lacks subjectivity; neither does it have a self-consciousness that is preoccupied with being-that-way; and least of all does it have any delusions about its own appearance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

I am the clock that exists and does not know itself: thus one oneself formulated one’s fatefulness, the actuality of this phenomenon and the inactuality of the soul, after one had been separated from one’s cause; for it was only then that one could, and had to, think and speak of oneself and recollect one’s soul which appeared only then. What appears is not mere subject; neither does it reach subjectivity: the magic spell broken, but unredeemed, it finds expression in the terrible word, as legitimate as it is illegitimate: The Universe contemplates Us! The end it sinks back into mystery. Who after such a step and such a fall, would dare to claim that this mortal understood one’s tremendous, monstrous mission—or that one misunderstood it? What is certain that the age for which the demonic mortal who lives without a present has become master and model will misunderstand one. It fails to see that what holds sway here is destiny and accomplishment, not the lust for and delight in power. It goes into ecstasies over the commanding brow and has no inkling of the signs inscribed upon this forehead like digits upon the face of a clock. One tries studiously to imitate the way one looked at others, without any understanding of one’s need and necessitation, and one mistakes the objectivity severity of this I for fermenting self-awareness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The word “I” remains the shibboleth of humanity. Napoleon spoke it without the power to relate, but he did speak it as the I of an accomplishment. Those who exert themselves to copy this, merely betray the hopelessness of their own self-contradiction. What is that: self-contradiction? When mortals do not test a priori of relation in the World, working out and actualizing the innate soul in what one encounters, it turns inside. Then it unfolds through the unnatural, impossible object, the I—which is to say that it unfolds where there is no room for it to unfold. Thus the confrontation within the self comes int being and this cannot be relation, presence, the current of reciprocity, but only self-contradiction. Some mortals may try to interpret this as a relation, perhaps one that is religious, in order to extricate themselves from the horror of their Doppelganger: they are bound to keep rediscovering the deception of any such interpretation. Here is the edge of life. What is unfulfilled as here escaped into the mad delusion of some fulfillment; now it gropes around in the labyrinth and get lost ever more profoundly. When mortals are overcome by the horror of the alienation between I and World, at times, it occurs to one that something might be done. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Imagine that at some dreadful midnight you lie there, tormented by a waking dream: the bulwarks have crumbled and the abysses scream, and you realize in the midst of this agony that life is still there and I must merely get through it—but how? How? Thus feels mortals in the hours when one collects oneself: overcome by horror, pondering, without direction. And yet one may know the right direction, deep down in the unloved knowledge of the depths—the direction of return that leads through sacrifice. However, he rejects this knowledge; what is mystical cannot endure the artificial midnight Sun. One summons thought in which one places, quite rightly, much confidence: thought is supposed to fix everything. After all, it is the lofty art of thought that it can paint a reliable and practically credible picture of the World. Thus mortals say to one’s thought: “Look at the dreadful shape that lies over there with those cruel eyes—is she not the one which with whom I played long ago? Do you remember how she used to laugh at me with these eyes and how good they were then? And now look at my wretched soul—I will admit it to you: it is empty, and whatever I put into myself, experience as well as use, does not penetrate to this cavern. Will not you fix things between her and me so that she relents and I get well again?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

And thought, ever obliging and skillful, paints with its accustomed speed a series—nay, two series of pictures on the right and the left wall. Here is (or rather: happens, for the World pictures of thought are reliable motion pictures) the Universe. From the whirl of the stars emerges the small Earth, from the teeming on Earth emerges small mortals, and now history carries one forth through the ages, to preserve in rebuilding the anthills of the cultures that crumble under its steps. Beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” On the other wall happens the soul. A female figure spins the orbits of all stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and creatures and World but feeling and representations or even living experiences and states of the soul. And beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” Henceforth, when mortals are for once overcome by the horror of alienation and the World fills one with anxiety, one looks up (right or left, as the case may be) and see a picture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Then one sees that the soul is contained in the World, and that there is really no I, and this the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down; or one sees that the World is contained in the I, and that there really is no World, and thus the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down. And when mortals are overcome again by the horror of alienation and the I fills one with anxiety, one looks up and sees a picture; and whichever one sees, it does not matter, either the empty I is stuffed full of World or it is submerged in the flood of the World, and one calms down. However, the moment will come, and it is near, when mortals overcome by horror, looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And one is seized by a deeper horror. Shall we say that all humans are traveling on this quest of God but most humans do so unconsciously and unwillingly? For then the person technically called a quester simply differs from other persons by one’s awareness of the journey, the demands in makes upon one, and one’s willingness to co-operate in satisfying demands. Mortals unconsciously seeks one’s freedom and enlightenment, as one consciously seeks one’s welfare and happiness. However, there is a faceless sinister, sarcastic, evil presence that one can sense sometimes. It plants thoughts and puts on demonic plays to cause worry and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Saviour. Cries and howls continue. A new anthem of curses upon those who break the sacred laws, blasphemed, provoke the wrath of God and Stand. They are pulling on the gates and lower windows. They are doing stupid things like throwing rocks at the wall. It I because God is hidden in all creatures that all creatures are searching all the time for God. This remains just as true even though in their ignorance they usually mistake the object of their search and believe that it is something else. Only on the quest does this search attain self-consciousness. The uninformed mortal is blind to the work of spiritual evolution which goes on within one and consequently thwarts and obstructs it unwittingly. The informed mortal sees the work and co-operates with it consciously. The blessing of feasting upon the words of Christ are powerful and life changing. The words of Christ will profoundly touch hearts and open the eyes of those who do not see him. “Ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all mortals, animals and other living and non-living beings. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting up the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.20. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13