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Without Pain We Would Become a Nation of Zombies—Some Critics Believe We Have Already Arrived at that State!

Amazing how the mind works kind of like a puzzle and as it grows, as your neurons produce more synapses which have dendrites. My guidance is what you need. You have only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance. We need to understand the function of illness and health in a culture. The disease itself is not the ultimate enemy. It may actually be a blessing in disguise in that it forces the person, as tuberculosis did to me, to take stock of his life and to reform his style of work and play. Having a disease in one way of resolving a conflict situation. Disease is a method of thinking one’s World so that, with lessened responsibilities and concerns, the person has a better chance of coping successfully. Health, on the contrary, is a freeing of the organism to realize its capacities. I believe that people utilize disease in the same way older generations used the devil—as an object on which to project their hated experiences in order to avoid having to take responsibility for them. However, beyond giving a temporary sense of freedom from guilt feeling, these delusions do not help. Health and disease are part and parcel of our continuous process throughout life of making ourselves adequate to our World and our World adequate to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Nor is pain the ultimate enemy. Americans are probably the most pain-conscious people on the face of the Earth. For years we have had it drummed into us—in print, on radio, over television, in everyday conversation—that any hint of pain is to be banished as though it were the ultimate evil. Leprosy is such a dreaded disease because of the fact that the affected person has lost the sense of pain and has no signal to tell one how and when to take care of the infected parts. We consume in this country a fabulous number of tranquilizers in the process of blocking out pain. Has this been the danger all along, the trigger of our fear? Even as we recognize it, we are yielding, and it seems the great lessons of our life have all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear is one again breaking the shell around us so that something else can spring to life. The interplay of pain and pleasure, and the dependence of one on the other–never, never in all our existence, not mortal or immortal, have we been threatened with an intimacy quite like this. Many of us, for example, want to know why beauty exists, why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, the why do they retain for us such a symbolic power. What is the lantern by which we see the Devil’s Road, by what lantern have many traveled it? What have people learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do we know about other humans and how they came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing. How strange would appear to be this thing that mortals call pleasure! And how curiously is it related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a mortal, and yet if you seek one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up. Pain is a sensitizer in life. In running away from pain we lose our vitality, our capacity genuinely to feel and even to love. I am not saying that pain is a good thing in itself. I am saying that pain and the relief from pain paradoxically go together. They are the bow and the string of Heraclitus. Without pain we would become a nation of zombies. Some critics believe we already have arrived at that state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

There is a common illusion that medical technology is wiping out one disease after another—such original lethal scourges as tuberculosis, which supposedly claimed the life 2nd President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, William Wirt Winchester, in 1880. That is why in memory of her husband, Mrs. Sarah Winchester donated over $1,00,000.00 ($25,053,725.49 adjusted for inflation) to the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still proudly exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. Infantile paralysis along with tuberculosis being among the recent examples—that we need only to wait, hoping we live long enough until medicine vanquishes all diseases. However, this illusion rests on a serious misunderstanding of the functions of illness and health in any human society. However, physicians must resist the idea that technology will some day abolish disease because as long as humans feel threatened and helpless, they will seek the sanctuary that illness provides. And as the population grows and we cure more diseases, other symptoms will pop up to cure the disease that overpopulation is causing the planet to suffer from. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch the people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Not only do physicians need to resist this illusion, but even more do play people, to whom the idea that medical technology will ultimately save them is the most powerful rationalization for evading their own responsibility for their health. For human beings live—it is their destiny to do so—delicately balanced between health and illness, and this balance is what is important. There is no doubt that we, as a race, are getting healthier. However, will I be misunderstood when I affirm that the possibilities of illness get proportionately greater at the same time? Certainly, there is just as much consulting with doctors as there was one hundred years ago. What seems to be occurring is the shift in the kinds of illness from infectious diseases—which attack the person from the outside—to internal diseases like heart attacks, hypertension, and strokes—which are intimately related to anxiety and stress. The latter are the greatest killers of our day. Illness and health are complexly balanced in each of us, and taking responsibility, so far as we can, gives us some possibility of restoring the balance when it goes awry. It is not by accident that so many of our greatest persons have struggled with diseases all their lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Noting the large number of important creative human beings who have had tuberculosis, a physician some years ago wrote a book entitled Tuberculosis and Genius in which he argued that the tubercular bacilli must eject some serum into the blood to produce the genius. This explanation seems to me absurd. It makes much more sense to hold that they way of life of the genius—intensive work, unquenchable enthusiasm, the fire in the brain—puts too much of a strain on the balance, and hence the individual becomes ill as a necessary way of withdrawing into oneself for a times. The struggle between health and illness is part of the source of creativity. Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all suffered severe illness and met in constructively. George Pickering, who suffered from his own osteoarthritic hips as an ally, which he puts to bed when they get painful; and in bed he cannot attend committee meetings or see patients or entertain visitors. However, these the ideal conditions for creative work: freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life. #RandolpHarris 6 of 13

Sometimes when in pain or under the weather, one way to treat it I by becoming aware that you are involved in a fight and to pray for a cure. For ten minutes each day, focusing on your body being healed. That is a way to be conscious of and handle the consciousness of your illness or pain without letting it overcome you. One will be better, but in order to contrive with one’s body, to impose one’s wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will. It is important to devote as much as one can into regulating one’s World, in building the being who you are, and in embellishing one’s life. What am I? Is such an ancient and perennial question only because it has to be answered by each individual for oneself. If one finds the true answer, one will find also that one cannot really transfer it to another person but only its idea, its mental shadow. That too may be valuable to others, but it is not the same. Surely the human race has by this time, by this late century in history found the truth? Why, then, does the mortal who wants it have to make one’s own personal search all over again? It is because one must know it for oneself within oneself. You yourself are your own guru. Be that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

One who seeks the truth about these matters will discover that it is contrary to current opinion, and therefore one will have to discover it by oneself and for oneself. One should verify the truth not by reference to book or bible but by reference to one’s own private experience. There is no room in this school for those who are ready to dispose of life’s problems with secondhand judgment. The need of individual thinking is vital here. Humanity will not be saved in groups or by organizations. It will be saved individual by individual. Being true to oneself brings happiness. Being indifferent to the criticisms of those who misunderstand brings freedom from anxiety on their account. Walking the streets in a spirit of independences, enables us to walk as a billionaire! If they will, let others sacrifice themselves to snobbery; let us be free. Only when the feet rest can we bring the mind to rest—unless we are Attained Ones! We can be devout and dignified but we need not therefore be dull. I do not deny that the drift of several movements which are in the World’s eye today, is toward this idea of greater spirituality. However, whereas they are confined in their search by attachment to a set creed, or a particular philosophy, or even some one person, we propose to pursue an absolutely independent quest—one limited in its width by no qualifications or conditions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

There are not concrete threats against life and well-being, there is not a depressing guilt feeling or a despair about ourselves. There is not a disintegrating doubt or an intolerable emptiness. There is not an extreme situation. Does this mean that there is no desire to ask for a word from the Lord? Are the situations which are not extreme situations, deprived of a word out of the dimension of the eternal? Is God silent if the foundations of our existence are not shaken? A hard question, and answered in many different ways! How would we answer? I shall never forget the word of a wise old man who said to my grandfather when I was still a child, “I need somebody who I can than when a great joy is given to me.” Can we share this experience? Do we remember such moments in which the eternal made itself felt to us through the abundance or greatness or beauty of the temporal? I believe that none of us is completely without such experiences. However, did we not say that a word from the Lord is the eternal cutting into the temporal does not mean negating it. This can mean, and this is does mean whenever we are driven into an ultimate situation. There are in everybody’s life such situations, and they are frequent in mortal’s tragic history. However, the eternal can also cut into the temporal by affirming it, by elevating a piece of it out of the ordinary context of temporal things and events, making it translucent for the Divine glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Without such moments, life would be poor and sad; there would be on creations in which the greatness of life is expressed. However, they exist, and the eternal shines through them; they can become a word from the Lord to us. However, still some of you are thinking: All this may be as you say, but it remains strange to us. Neither in ultimate situations nor in moments of a great elevation has the eternal cut into our temporal existence. We never got a word from the Lord. Maybe you did not hear it. However, certainly it was spoken to you. For there is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The problem of mortals is not that God does not speak to one: God does speak to everyone who has a human countenance. For this is what makes one a human. One who is not able to perceive something ultimate, something infinitely significant, is not a mortal. Mortals are human because one is able to receive a word from the dimension of the eternal. The question is not that humankind has not received any word from the Lord; the question is that it has been received and resisted and distorted. This is the predicament of all of us. Human existence is never without that which breaks vertically into it. Mortals are never without a manifestation of that which is ultimately serious and infinitely meaningful. One is never without a word from the Lord and one never ceases resisting and distorting it, both when one has to hear it and when one has to say it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, should be aware of this: We resist and distort the word from the Lord not only when we hear it, but also when we say it. When we ask why our message of the Word of God is rejected, we often find that one does not reject that for which we stand, but the way in which we stand for it. Many of those who reject the Word of God reject it because the way we say it is utterly meaningless to them. They know the dimension of the eternal, but they cannot accept our names for it. If we cling to their words, we may doubt whether they have received a word from the Lord. If we meet them as persons, we know they have. There is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The Christian Church believes that this word has a central content, and that is has the name Jesus the Christ. Therefore, the Church call not his words but his Being the Word of God. The Church believes that in his Being, the eternal has broken into the temporal in a way which once for all gives us a word, nay, the word from the Lord. It believes that whatever word from the Lord has been said in all history and in every individual life, is implied in this Word, which is not words but reality, a new reality, the reality of the eternal in the temporal, conquering the resistance and the distortions of the temporal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

So we have not a, but the word from the Lord? As Christians we can boast that we have it? Can we really? Did we not receive the message through mortals, and are not we who heard it mortals? And does that not mean that the message, while it went through the mouths of those who said it and through the ears of us who heard it, lost is power to cut into our World and our soul? It is supposed that God will enter the being that ha been freed of I-hood or that at that point one merges into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all selfishness ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that there is no truth in selfishness at all because in truth there is no duality. The first believes in the unification, the second in the identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I and You: for the first this comes to be, perhaps in ecstasy, while for the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the thinking subject beholds its self. Both annul relationship—the first, as it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the soul, which then becomes a united being; the second, as it were statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as the only being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The doctrine of dependence considers the I-supporter of the World-arch of pure relation as so weak and insignificant that one’s ability to support the arch ceases to be credible, while the one doctrine of immersion does away altogether with the arch in its perfection and the other one treats it as a chimera that has to be overcome. The doctrines of immersion invoke the greater epigrams of identification—one of them above all the Johannine “I and the Father are one,” and the other one the doctrine of Sandilya: “The All-embracing is my self in the inner heart.” The paths of these two epigrams are diametrically opposed. The former (after a long subterranean course) had its source in the myth-sized life of a person and then unfolds in a doctrine. The second emerges in a doctrines and culminates (provisionally) in the myth-sized life of a person. On these paths the character of each epigram is changed. The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that has become flesh but once, takes us to Eckhart’s Christ whom God begets eternally in the human soul. The formula of the coronation of the self in the Upanishads—“That is the actual, it is the self, and you are” takes us far more quickly to the Buddhistic formula of deposition: “A self and what pertains to the self are not to be found in truth and actuality.” Beginning and end of both paths have to be considered separately. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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