Natural enough was not it, that one of his own should take him away from this place where mortals would sooner or later have approached him, driven him stumbling away. He gave no resistance to me. In a moment he was standing on his own feet. And then he walked drowsily beside me, my arm about his shoulder, bolstering him and steadying him until we were moving away from the Palais Royal, towards the rue St.-Honore. Let us single out one aspect of that revolution, acupuncture, as represented by Dr. Harold Bailen, a doctor of Western cardiology who later became an acupuncturist. His shift to acupuncture occurred because of his growing conviction that the model of Western medicine was at best incomplete and at worst simply wrong. The sickness itself is not the enemy. Rather the wrong way of life is. Western medicine, being disease-oriented, blocks off the symptom with which patients come to the doctor, whereas Eastern medicine, with a tradition of thousands of years behind it, asks: What is the symptom trying to tell us? The symptom is the right-brain language—in its pain, ache, often remarks to patients, “Is not it marvelous that your body is so bright that it can speak to you in that language?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

In contrast to the left brain, from which language, logic, and rationality largely spring, the right-brain is the side that communicates in fantasies, dreams, intuition—and symptoms. The symptom is a red warning light. Right-brain language cannot be attacked from a purely rational, left-brain point of view. Acupuncture enhances communication between the right and left brain, states Dr. Bailen. It synthesizes this information, something like an altered state of consciousness. The aim of acupuncture is to stimulate, through the use of the needles, the energy circuits of the body so the body will be energized to cure itself. These circuits, called meridians, are not synonymous with the neural pathways of the body. The most accepted theory these days is that acupuncture activates endorphins, a morphinelike hormonal substance in the body. Dr. Rene Dubos, who is not an acupuncturist, describes this well: “Acupuncture can trigger the release of pituitary endorphin which, somehow, gains access to the cells of the spinal cord and can thus exert an opiate-like effect on the perception of pain. It is not too far-fetched to assume that, as in the case of other hormones, mental attitudes can affect the secretion of endorphin and thereby the patient’s perception of disease.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Dr. Dubos goes on to say that endorphin acts not only on the mechanisms of pain itself, but also inhibits the emotional response to pain and, therefore, to suffering. Hence, the demonstrated anti-pain effect of acupuncture as used by a number of dentists in their work. Acupuncture requires that the person being treated not simply be a “patient,” but that one’s body and one’s consciousness—meaning one’s whole self—be an integral part of the treatment. It is not simply done to a patient, but requires the patient’s awareness of one’s freedom and responsibility at every point. If the patient gets this message loudly and clearly, Dr. Bailen states, one is confronted with a choice point. This may take the form of a question to himself: “Oh, my God. Do I want to get rid of this?” Occasionally patient (generally arthritics) become better, get the insight, and then stop the treatment with the conclusion “It is easier for me to bear the pain than to make the change.” They had become so rigid, so bound by habit, and had gotten so much secondary gain, such as being taken care of, out of the ailment that they chose not to change their way of life. This is a conscious, responsible choice. The person is no longer in one’s victim role. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

This very much like the goal of psychotherapy, in my judgment. The purpose of psychotherapy is not to cure the clients in the conventional sense, but to help them become aware of what they are doing and to get them out of the victim role. Its purpose is to help the disturbed one get to the stage where one is free to choose one’s own way of life, as far as that is realistically possible, and to accept one’s situation in life, as far as that is unavoidable. To illustrate the choice point, I will cite an experience of Rollo May. The problem—or the symptom—with which he went to Dr. Bailen for treatment was tachycardia, which he had had since he was four years old. Though it had not handicapped him seriously as an adolescent, during the last years it had gotten severe enough to cause fainting and even more dangerous symptoms. He has been put on Inderal, one of the drugs which controls the beat of the heart. When he began he was on six Inderal (each one 10 milligrams) a day. This, indeed, did control his heartbeat, butt at the price of shutting off his brain. He felt like a zombie. The following are notes he made at the time of his acupuncture. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

This past Monday I felt very good after the acupuncture treatment, and my mood continued to be excellent on the morning of Tuesday. I was already down to one Inderal a day after several months of treatment. I decided then to cut the Inderal out entirely. However, by noon, when I was feeling high because of the possibility of curing the tachycardia entirely, I began to get a strange feeling of deep and pervasive loneliness. I paced back and forth in my office trying to figure out what this might be. There was no particular reason why I should be lonely. However, I continued to feel as though I were in a foreign land where I could not speak the language, in a World in which I was lost and unable to communicate with anyone. I has also the strange feeling that I had lost myself; I had only half an identity. In the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me that this loneliness had come out of my fantasy that the tachycardia could be cured entirely and I would be free of it. Yes! an important part of how I had experienced my identity in the past would be gone. I had grown accustomed to this image, this myth of myself, that I was this man with this particular ailment, namely tachycardia. The ailment seemed to be my friend; it has stood by me faithfully when I was under too much stress and needed some withdrawal from the active World. Like the prisoners of the River in Sacramento, California, I had become friends with my very chains. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

That night I dreamed that I was dying. My friends were gathered together and I was going around the circle saying good-bye to them. I was crying in the dream and felt that I was saying good-bye to this World. The following night I dreamt that I was having a brain operation and part of my hair had been cut away in order for the surgeons to get the part of my skull that was going to be cut out. The chief surgeon was tall, thin man [Dr. Bailen is tall and thin]. I ran out of the operating room. When I woke up the next morning [Wednesday] my tachycardia has returned in full force; my heart was pounding at the rate of 150 a minute. The tachycardia continued to trouble me all morning. I was glad to get to Dr. Bailen’s office that afternoon; for I knew that the dreams and behavior had been a very clear, if strident, cry that I was not yet ready to give up this ailment. The loneliness, and the first dream, were saying that to give up my symptom of tachycardia would be tantamount to dying, and also surrendering the identity by which I had known myself and survived since I was a child of four. The second dream makes an even more explicit cry about parting from the tachycardia: “Not yet!” it was shouting. Dr. Bailen laughingly agreed with my interpretation that I would need another month or so before making the drastic change completely. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

The hanging on to illnesses, or the difficulty in asserting one’s freedom and responsibility toward illness, has been well known through history and literature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarks about the tendency of human beings “to run to meet their chains thinking they secure their freedom.” Even in the Declaration of Independence our forefathers recognized this truth: “All experience hat shown that humankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Thomas Mann shows in one of his stories how we make a way of life out of our own or others’ sickness. In “Tobias Mindernickel,” he pictures the dog as overly independent, a longer and not very friendly toward its master. In an accident the dog breaks its two front legs. The man then puts it in bed beside him nurses it through the illness. Finally, wen the dog recovers and is able to run around as used to be its wont, the man no longer has the animal to care for nor the animal’s friendliness and dependency upon him. He is beside himself. Unable to stand his present isolation, the man takes a hammer and breaks the dog’s legs all over again. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The moral of this story is applicable to the multitude of relationship in our World in which marriages, friendships, dependencies of various are kept together essentially by the need to be care for on the part of one member and the need to take care of on the part of the other. On the healthy side this is the comradeship we experience in comforting each other as we embrace cold and lonely destinies we cannot change. On the unhealthy side, it is the self-limitations built into the World by persons who have suffered illnesses are loathe to give up their dependency when the possibility of freedom does open up again. One must remember that one has set one’s feet upon a path, and one has begun to move on that path. One must continue to do so. One must not desert the Quest under any circumstances. He must go on until the goal is reached. It is impossible in life to avoid at some period or other difficulties, trials, handicaps, obstacles, temptations, and so on. They must come, but that is no reason why anyone should give up the Quest. One should stick to the Quest for truth in spite of all that is happenings to one. If one gets a sense of failure—and one may get it—or a sense of intense depression, one may think that the Quest is too difficult and its rewards remote, and one may be tempted to give it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

One must understand what is happening. One should understand that one is expressing a mood, a mood of depression and a sense of failure. However, one should remember that it is just a mood; it will pass away. And so one can say to oneself: “Very well, I will not occupy myself with thoughts of the Quest for the present. I can feel no enthusiasm for it.” Very well, but one must not give up the Quest. One should realize that one is doing it for the present, that tomorrow or next week or next month or even next year one will take it up and continue, that one is not giving it up, that one is just laying low, so to speak, for a while, but keeping in the back of one’s mind that one is sticking to the Quest, even though for a while one has to give up conscious effort. If one feels that one has failed, if one feels that one has sinned, even these are no reasons why one should give up the Quest for God. One may fall a thousand times. That does not justify one’s giving up the Quest. One must pick oneself up and try for the thousand-and-first time. There is no steady, smooth progression to he goal. It is not an easy path. One walks, and there is no possibility of moving towards the goal without meeting with hindrances and rebuffs. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

And one has to learn to be patient and to be tolerant with oneself, not to withdraw because one meets with those rebuffs or because one becomes dissatisfied with oneself. One must not give up. One can wait, and then one can continue, even if one falls, still one can say one is destined to succeed the thousand-and-first times, it may be that one is destined to succeed the thousand-and-first time. So one must try, because one never knows which of one’s efforts is going to be a successful one; and if one persists, there will come a time when this a time when this effort will and must succeed. It is as though the gods like to play with one for a while to try one’s patience and endurance, just to see how keenly one wants this attainment. If one gives up at the first few hindrances or rebuffs, it means that one is not so very keen after all; but if one can endure and keep on, and keep om, and still keep on, no matter what happens, well then, the gods say, here is someone who really wants truth, so we must give it to one. That is the attitude which one must develop. It does not matter how troubled one is personally or how dark circumstances are: they will change because they must change. The wheel of destiny is turning all the time. So one must not let circumstances or one’s own inner moods deter one from continuing on the path. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

As a matter of fact, once one has begun on the right-hand path, there is no turning back. One has accepted the responsibility, and one will have to go on with it—and if one tried to turn back, what happens is that one meets with nothing but suffering and disappointment in order to force one to return to the path. So, it is really serious undertaking to enter upon this path, because one has to continue, and the gods will give one no rest if one runs away from it once one has really set one’s foot on it. If one allows other people to influence one to abandon a worthy endeavour, one must blame only oneself, only one’s own weakness, not them. If, too, one allows obstructive circumstances to influence one in the same way, one is again to blame. This fault is harder to see and to admit than the first one. However, the Quest cannot be played with, nor undertaken only for one’s easier and more comfortable hours. It is a master to whom one has been indentured for lifelong obedience. It is a duty from which one must let nothing swerve one. If the quest becomes too arduous one can always take a holiday. It would be foolish, in the end futile, to give up altogether. Hope is the instinctive turning of the flower to the Sun. It bestows inspiring strength on the weak and gallant endurance on the sorrowful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Hope is a way up from flinty tracts to the level plateau where the worst troubles vanish. And those of us who have planted our feet on the grander path that shall lead one day to ultimate wisdom, have to go on—whether it be through sorrow or joy, weakness or strength, World-turmoil or World-peace. For us there is not turning back. Once one has solemnly made this momentous decision and has reverently dedicated oneself to the quest, one has to remain loyal to it under all the experiences of pleasure and pain, temptation and tribulation which will henceforth be brought to bear upon one. To desert the quest at any point will only delay one’s movement and increase one’s suffering, for one will find in the end that no other ways is open to one except the way of repentance and return. One is indeed free who, unpossessed by one’s own possessions, unswayed by one’s own family, undeflected by one’s own desires, remains ever loyal to the quest. Once one has started on this quest in earnest, one will never be able to leave it again. One may try to do so for a time and to escape its claims but in the end one will fail. For some power which one cannot control will eventually and often abruptly emerge in the midst of one’s mental or emotional life and control one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

This quest is an irreversible journey. Once you have really started on it there is no turning back. You may believe that you have given it up in despair or turned away from it for a Worldier existence, but you are only fooling yourself. For one day either a deep repressed hunger will suddenly reassert itself or else a cataclysmic turn of events will drive you back to seek this last and enduring refuge of mortal. Where is the truth to be found in all this bewildering array of doctrines, creeds, claims, systems, and beliefs? That is the reaction of many young aspirants toward a life higher than the materialistic one offered by society today. Theirs is the choice: the responsibility cannot be evaded. There may be long mental struggle or easy swift emotional acceptance but the consequences belong to them. Though all these things they learn, develop, discover, and find their way in the end. “Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with one. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which one hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when one shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen,” reports Moroni 7.47-48. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13