I looked through the bars to the stars overhead, and it seemed to me I was dying in the most absurd and foolish way, among people I did not admire and customs I would have abolished. And yet the seeming sanctity of it all infected me. It caused me to dramatize and to dream and to give in, to see myself at the center of something that possessed its own exalted beauty. Carefully, they shaved all the hair from my chin and upper lip. They trimmed my finger nails. They brushed my hair and put on me the same white robes. And then shielding me on all sides with white veils they passed me out of the house and into a white canopied wagon. As a young man, I held innocence in high esteem. I disliked power, both in theory and practice, and abhorred violence. I came down with tuberculosis in my early thirties, a times when there was still no medication for the disease. For a year and a half I did not know whether I would live or die. As best I could, I tried to do what my doctors instructed me to do. This meant, as I then interpreted it, accepting the program of rest and giving my healing over to others. I could only lie in bed, tracing with my eye patterns of light on the ceiling of my room, waiting for the monthly X-ray which would tell whether the cavity in my lung had enlarged or decreased. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

However, I found, to my moral and intellectual dismay, that the bacilli were taking advantage of my very innocence. This innocence had transformed my helplessness into passivity, which constituted an open invitation to the bacilli to do violence to my body. I saw, too, that the reason I had contracted tuberculosis in the first place was my hopelessness and sense of defeatism. My then present lack of self-affirmation and self-assertion, conveniently rationalized by the innocence, could only lead in one direction. I could see in the apparently innocent patients around me in the sanatorium that passively accepting their powerlessness in face of the disease meant dying. I was becoming ever more desperate. I should have done anything to escape. However, some twenty Druids surrounded the cart and beyond them was a legion of warriors. And the crowd itself went so far back into the trees that I could see no end to it. Darkness was falling quickly, and everywhere torches were being lighted. I could feel the roar of excited voices. The screamed of the condemned grew every more piercing and beseeching. I sat still and tried to deliver my mind from panic. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

If I could not escape, then I would meet these strange ceremonies with some degree of calm, and when it came clear what a sham they were, I would with dignity and righteousness pronounce my judgments loud enough for others to hear them. That would be my last act—the act of the god—and it must be done with authority, or else it would do nothing in the scheme of things. Not until I developed some fight, some sense of personal responsibility for the fact that it was I who had the tuberculous, an assertion of my own will to live, did I make lasting progress. I learned to listen to my body with an inner concentration like prayer, to get guidance as to when to exercise and when to rest. I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate. This truth, though experiences by me in my getting well, was not very useful since I could never formulate it. I was later forced to think about it at length, however, when I found my patients in psychoanalysis describing similar experiences. Practically all of them had come for help because they felt they were powerless. They had no effective bridge to the significant people in their lives; they could only remain passive while others (like t.b. bacilli in my analogy did violence to them). #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

This bridge to significant others was never directly confronted by Dr. Freud. Sullivan pointed to it, but had never elaborated on the nature of this bridge. It is, in fact, power. However, it is power analogous to the healing power by which one overcomes tuberculosis, not analogous to the military power of a general on the battlefield or the economic power of the head of a corporation. It was as if my soul would be locked in my body forever. Like it had no chance in natural death to pass into another body or another lifetime. I had, then, to confront my own relationship to power. No longer could I conceal behind my own innocence my envy of those who had power. This, I found, only follows the general procedure in our culture: power is widely coveted and rarely admitted. Generally, those who have power repress their awareness of this fact. And it is the dispossessed in our society, represented by such movements as women’s power and black power, who, wen they are able, force a direct confrontation with the issue. When we join this confrontation, as we obviously must, we find ourselves immediately up against the issue of violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Can violence also have something to do with innocence—or, as I ask, does innocence invite its own murder? This leads us to difficult, if fascinating, questions. We can only agree that Jacob Bronowski’s words (in The Face of Violence) are true: Violence is here, in the World of the sane, and violence is a symptom. I hear it in the headlong weeping of men who have failed. I see it in the terrible dreams of boys whose adolescence repeats all history. As these weeping men and dreaming adolescents, however, become able to actualize their power, they are able, to some extent, to turn their violence to constructive use and their dreams and visions to the social and their own good. I hope to suggest ways not around the problems of power and violence, but through them. To understand power and the sources of violence, we must ask more profound questions than are customary. We must probe the problem of what it means to be a human being. Modern mortals, alienated from nature, from their gods, and from society, in an increasingly mechanized, atomized and depersonalized World, too often are unable to achieve an identity and a relatedness to others. What are the circumstances that have led to this predicament and what are the chances for alleviating it? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Ours is a self-conscious age. Perhaps never before in history have mortals been so much a problem themselves. Rocketing through space and on the point of conquering the Heavens, one is fast losing touch with one’s own World. Growing numbers of writers describe people in various ways as “alienated.” What forces have made them so? The past few hundred years have seen major scientific and technological revolutions in half the World, while the other half still plows the Earth with dull sticks. Unparalleled economic growth has occurred side by side with the profoundest human misery; and struggles for freedom and enlightenment side by side with continuing social injustice. Our own age allegedly produced Nazi concentration camps, media cults who are hell bent on confusing people and lying and dividing they nation as they try to take over the government, two catastrophic World wars, and a dream of one World; a nuclear arms race that may put an end to civilization as we know it, and the promise of atoms for peace. There is an independence which gives a mortal special strength for it allows one to possess complete purity of motive. It does not come easily for one has to stay clear of all attempts to organize the truth, of all orthodoxies, groups, factions, parties, and sects which claimed to be united with it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

One may align oneself with no groups. Therefore, one can take up no defined position, no particular program. Is one then a neutral? No and yes. Is one an individualist? Yes and no. Confronted with such mighty opposites—with apocalyptic visions of mass annihilation on the one hand, and on the other with dreams of progress and a vastly better life for increasing numbers of people—no wonder Western mortals feel deeply troubled as they face the immense gulf between one’s finest achievements of hand and brain, and one’s own sorry ineptitude at coping with them; between one’s truly awe-inspiring accomplishments and the utter failure of one’s imagination to accomplishment and the utter failure of one’s imagination to encompass them and give them meaning. Powerless in the face of modern mechanical and social forces, we have reached a point in history where knowledge and tools intended originally to serve mortal now threaten to destroy them. What kind of society is it that loses control over its own tools and creations? Is it one in which the sense of community has become seriously, if not fatally, weakened? The development of nuclear weapons required the splitting of the atom. Is the society that uses such weapons itself split and its members atomized? #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

If so, this splitting process did not take place suddenly, and not just a series of wars and upheavals have brought on the crisis. Indeed, ever since the great technological and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century, with their shattering impact on a rigid social order and their promise of individual freedom, one of the most disturbing phenomena of Western culture has been mortal’s sense of estrangement from the World one one’s self had made or inherited—in a word, mortal’s alienation from oneself and from others. Our present age of pessimism, despair and uncertainty succeeds a quite different earlier period of optimism, hope and certainty—a period when mortals believed in oneself and the work of one’s hands, had faith in the powers of reason and science, trusted their gods, and conceived one’s own capacity for growth as endless and one’s widening horizons limitless. Bold in one’s desires for freedom, equality, social justice and fraternity, one imaged that ignorance alone stood in the way of these desires. However, tumult and violence have unseated these traditional beliefs and values. Knowledge has spread, but it had not abolished war, or fear; nor has it made all mortals family. Instead, mortals find themselves more isolated, anxious and uneasy than ever. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Only this total independence of all cults, creeds, groups, and organizations can enable one to find the facts as they are, rather than imaginary pictures of the facts. It is to be found in the privacy of your own mind: no cult, group, or church will provide it. Philosophy stresses the need of development’s being individual. Students of other teachings may grow in groups, but not students of philosophy. It is not an essential part of the outer conditions of one’s life that one should subscribe to any particular institution or organization, but if one is led to do so that will be acceptable also if it is an honourable one. Mind in its ultimate condition is free and infinite. We, as humans, are at the very beginning of its discovery. Let us not set up false steps to our journey or ignorantly put up fences to block our view. Let us avoid the illinformed littleness of sectarianism, the common eagerness to huddle under a label. For several reasons one is not a joiner. Most sects have only partial and limited views, most mix some error with their truth, and develop ugly strict and rigid tyrannies. Furthermore, their adherents, believing that they alone possess the truth, generally exclude all others from the warmer temperatures of their goodwill—if they do not only dislike them. However, fined; one wants to express this freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

However, is not solitude, too, a portal? Does it not happen sometimes in the stillest lonesomeness that we unexpectedly behold? Cannot intercourse with oneself change mysteriously into intercourse with mystery? Indeed, is not only one that is no longer attached to any being worthy of confronting being? Come, lonesome one to the lonesome. God does what God has always done; he divides the evil from the good. God brings down blessings upon those who worship him. God draws the faithful into harmony with all the cycles of the Universe, with the cycles of the Moon, as I have told you. God fructifies the land. All things that are good proceeds from God. We belong to the tribes of Heaven. You do not understand. Our God was not defeated by your idols and those who tell their frivolous and lascivious stories. Our God is as beautiful as if the Moon itself has fashioned him with her light, and God speaks with a voice that is as pure as the light, and he guides us in that great oneness with all things that is the only cessation of despair and loneliness. However, God was stricken with terrible calamity, and all through certain parts of the World it seems faith in God has perished completely. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

To seek pleasure for the sake of pleasure is to avoid reality, the reality of other beings and the reality of ourselves. However, only the fulfillment of what we really are can give us joy. Joy is nothing else than the awareness of our being fulfilled in out true being, in our personal center. And only if we unite ourselves with what others really are is this fulfillment is possible. It is reality that gives joy, and reality alone. The Bible speaks so often of joy because it is the most realistic of all books. Rejoice! That means: Penetrate from what seems to be real to that which is really real. Mere pleasure, in yourselves and in all other beings, remains in the realm of illusion about reality. Joy is born out of union with reality itself. One of the roots of the desire for pleasure is the feeling of emptiness and the pain of boredom following from it. Emptiness is the lack of relatedness to things and persons and meanings; it is even the lack of being related to oneself. Therefore we try to escape from ourselves and the loneliness of ourselves, but we do not reach the others and their World in a genuine relation. There are two kinds of lonesomeness, depending on what it turns away from. If lonesomeness means detaching oneself from experiencing and using things, then this is always required to achieve any act of relation, not only the supreme one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, if lonesomeness means the absence of relation: if other beings have forsaken us after we have spoken the true You to them, we will be accepted by God; but not if we ourselves have forsaken other beings. Only one that is full of covetousness to use them is attached to some of them; one that lives in the strength of the presence can only be associated with them. The latter, however—one alone is ready for God. For God alone counters God’s actuality with a human actuality. And again there are two kinds of lonesomeness, depending on what it turns to. If lonesomeness is the place of purification which even the associate needs before one enters the holy of holies, but which one also needs in the midst of one’s trials, between one’s unavoidable failures and one’s ascent to prove oneself—that is how we are constituted. However, if it is the castle of separation where mortals conduct a dialogue with oneself, not in order to test oneself and master oneself for what awaits one but in one’s enjoyment of the configuration of one’s own soul—that is the spirit’s lapse into mere spirituality. And this becomes truly abysmal when self-deception reaches the point where one thinks that one has God within and speaks to him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

However, as surely as God embraces us and dwells in us, we never have him within. And we speak to him only when all spec has ceased within. The orthodox way of looking at these questions will no longer serve. A new way is needed. Only if we reorient our thinking and free it from the strict and rigid doctrines of established institutions will the right answers will be found. One is not a joiner because of several reasons: one of them is that joiners are too often too one-sided in approach, too limited in outlook, too exclusive to let truth in when it happens to appear in a sect different from one’s own. Another reason is that too frequently there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search. Mortal’s search for truth cannot be properly carried on unless one has full freedom in it. Where is the religious or religio-mystical institution which is willing to grant that to one? Is there a single one which lets one start out without being hampered by authoritarian doctrines that are strict and rigid, taboos, limitations, and traditions which it would impose upon one? “And when he had said these words, behold, the Lord showed oneself unto one, and said: Because thou knowest these tings ye are redeemed from the fall; therefore ye are brought back into my presence; therefore I show myself unto you,” reports Ether 3.13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

And for no apparent reason, I was possessed of a strange idea about life, a strange concern that amounted almost to a pleasant obsession. I remember that it came on me this night because it seemed somehow related to what happened after. However, it was not related. I had had the idea before. That it came to me in these last free ours as a Roman citizen was no more than coincidence. The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather there was on Earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness. And I thought of it in practical terms that excited me and soothed me simultaneously. There was an awareness somewhere of all things I had seen in my travels, and awareness of what it had been like in Massilia six centuries ago when the first Greek trader came, an awareness of what it had been like in Egypt when Cheops built the pyramids. Somebody knew what the light had been like in the late afternoon in the day that Troy fell to the Greeks, and someone or something knew what the less affluent said to each other in their little farmhouse outside Athens right before the Spartans brought down the walls. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

My idea of who or what it was, was vague. However, I was comforted by the notion that nothing spiritual—and knowing it was spiritual—was lost to us. That there was this continuous knowing. A modern philosopher supposed that every mortal believes of necessity either in God or in idols—which is to say, some finite good, such as one’s nation, one’s art, power, knowledge, the acquisition of money, the ever repeated triumph with women—some good that has become an absolute value for one, taking its place between one and God; and if only one proves to a mortal the conditionality of this good, thus smashing the idol, then the diverted religious act would all by itself return to its proper object. This view presupposes that mortal’s relation to the finite good that one idolizes is essentially the same as one’s relationship to God, as if only the object were different: only in that case could the mere substitution of the proper object for the wrong one save the mortal who has gone wrong. However, a mortal’s relation to the particular something that arrogates the supreme throne of one’s life’s value, pushing eternity aside, is always directed toward the experience and use of an It, a thing, an object or enjoyment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

There are a thousand dark wonders which I cannot commit to paper for only this kind of relation can bar the view to God, by interposing the impenetrable It-World; the relationship that says You always opens it up again. Whoever is dominated by the idol whom one wants to acquire, have, and hold, possessed by one’s desire to possess, can find a way to God only by returning, which involves a change not only of the goal but also the kind of movement. One can heal the possessed only by awakening and educating one to association, not by directing one’s possession toward God. If a mortal remains in the state of possession, what does it mean that one no longer invokes the name of a demon or of a being that is for one distorted demonically, but that of God? It means that one blasphemes. It is a blasphemy when a mortal whose idol has fallen down being the alter desires to offer to God the unholy sacrifice that is piled up on the desecrated alter. When a man loves a woman so that her life is present in one’s own, the You of her eyes allows one to gaze into a ray of the eternal You. However, if a mortal lusts after the ever repeated triumph—you want to dangle before one’s lust a phantom of the eternal? If one serves a people in a fire kindled by immeasurable fate—if one is willing to devote oneself to it, one means God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

However, if the nation is for one an idol to which one desires to subjugate everything because in its image one extols one’s own—do you fancy that you only have to spoil the nation for one and one will then see the truth? And what is it supposed to mean that a mortal treats money, which is un-being incarnate, as if it were God? What does the voluptuous delight of rapacity and hoarding have in common with the joy over the presence of that which is present? Can mammon’s slave say You to money? And what could God be to one if one does not know how to say You? One cannot serve two masters—not even one after the other; one must first learn to serve differently. Whoever has been converted by substitution, now has a phantom that one calls God. God, however, the eternal presence, cannot be had. Woe unto the possessed who fancy that they possess God! Lectures, societies, and group-movements are of limited value: they can never replace nor achieve what is gained by one’s own individual efforts made in the right way. The seeker after the truth will not find one’s way easy to travel. One may find that an institution, an authority, or an organization is suffocating one mentally or oppressing one emotionally. This may be the hour when one must claim one’s freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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