I went into my chamber and in the incandescent light rising from the sea, I unlocked the violin case and I looked at the Stradivarius violin. Of course I did not know how to play it, but we are powerful mimics. We have superior concentration and superior skills. And I had seen Nicki do it so often. I tightened the bow now and subbed the horsehair with the little piece of resin, as I had seen him do. Now I took it out of its case and I carried it through the house. It made a sound, did it not, that no one had ever heard in the ancient World, a sound so human and so powerfully affecting that people thought the violin the work of the devil and accused its finest players of being possessed. That is what a $16,000,000.00 violin sounds like. It is a 1715 ex-Bazzini – De Vito violin, made by Antonio Stradivari. This 304-year-old instrument can speak and tell something to all the people, not only people who understand the music, but all people. The light of the lamps danced in a thousand tiny specks of gold in the murals. I looked down at the violin and tried to remember my idea, and I ran my fingers along the wood and wondered what this thing looked like to them. In a hushed voice I explained what it was, that I wanted them to hear it, that I did not really know how to pay it but that I was going to try. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

I was not speaking loud enough to hear myself, but surely they could it if they chose to listen. And I lifted the violin to my shoulder, braced it under my chin, and lifted the bow. I closed my eyes and I remembered music, Nicki’s music, the way that his body had moved with it and his fingers came down with the pressure of hammers and he let the message travel to his fingers from his soul. I plunged into it, the music suddenly wailing upwards and ripping down again as my fingers danced. It was a song, all right, I could make a song. The tones were pure and rich as they echoed off the close walls with a resounding volume, an incredible chemistry occurred creating the wailing beseeching voice that only the violin can make. I think every violin has its own soul, and the soul has been imprinted by a previous performer. So I definitely feel the soul of Nicki on this violin. If the violin is not played for a few months, it goes to sleep. I went on madly with it, rocking back, back, fourth, and fourth, forgetting Nicki, forgetting everything but the feel of my fingers stabbing at the soundboard and the realization that I was making this perfect sound that has mystified experts for centuries, and it plummeted and climbed and overflowed ever louder and louder as I bore down upon it with the frantic sawing of the bow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Violins mimic aspects of the human voice, I was singing with it, I was humming and then singing loudly, and all harmonic tones corresponded to resonances in the vocal tract, and the gold of the little room was a blur. This Stradivari violin has a brightness and brilliance, and suddenly it seemed my own voice became louder, inexplicably louder, wit a pure high note which I knew that I myself could not possibly sing. Yet it was there, this beautiful note, steady and unchanging and growing even louder until it was hurting my ears. I played harder, more frantically, and I heard my own gasps coming, and I knew suddenly that I was not the one making this strange high note! It was a tone that rivaled the most perfect female voice. Without out stopping the music, without giving in to the pain that was splitting my head, I looked forward and I saw Akasha had risen and her eyes were very wide and she appeared to be singing, her voice was lively and sweet, and she was moving off the steps of the tabernacle toward me with her arms outstretched and the note pierced my eardrum, and a modern instrument could not compare to the magic of this sound. The moment healed my wounded body and soul. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Sheer will has shaped my experience more than any other human characteristic. God still exists and damnation and salvation have established the boundaries of a small and hopeless World, allowing one to see over the jungle of dark singing treetops at the distant silver curve of the river and the low Heavens where the stars burned through the pearl gray clouds. I was weeping at the sheer sight of it, at the feel of the damp wind against my face. As some may know, the follower of a labelled cause, movement, or part tends to become unfair to competing causes, exaggerating their weak points but minimizing or even shutting one’s eyes to those of one’s own. One who refuses to attach oneself but remains independence is more likely to judge without prejudice and after a genuine investigation of both sides. The advantages of being in a position of intellectual and social, religious and personal independence are several. If it is luckily found, the chance of finding truth and, of expressing it, is surely large. Still, drug addiction is another possible effect of powerlessness. The conviction of powerlessness is especially profound with young people, and this is also where drug addiction is most prevalent. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Their addiction is a form of violence, first of all, in that the individual violates one’s own mind—which, indeed, is the purpose of the drug; and there follows later all the petty crime and greater crime that drug addicts get into. The basis of addiction is a lot of weakness and a blocked anger. The weakness takes the form of I cannot meet the demands of my family; I cannot get a job; I am impotent in pleasures of the flesh; I am a no person. The anger takes the form of the addict’s revenge upon one’s family and the World for forcing one into this painful position of powerlessness. Impotence in pleasures of the flesh is present before taking the drugs; a large majority of addicts report that they had suffered from premature or quick climaxes or had great difficultly in standing at attention at all. Their fear is that they were not man enough to satisfy a woman. The heroin wipes away all this discomfort of perpetually feeling weak. It anesthetizes the person, partly through chemical and partly through psychological means, and gives complete relief in place of the original profound and continuous pain. No more inferiority, no more worry about being a failure in the working World, no more fear of being a coward in battle, no more disappointing one’s parents—all these oppressive feelings evaporate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

A typical case of an affluent drug addict is roughly as follows: he grows up in the lace curtain suburbs, where the scents are so strong you smell the raw green leaves as well as the pink and yellow blossoms. His father works at a white shoe firm, comes from a long line of feudal lords who licked their fingers and threw the bones over their shoulders to the dogs as they dined, and his mother quells her own anxiety by feeding him (the “Eat, baby, eat. It is proof you love me” syndrome). His father is successful financially but otherwise could be stronger; he has two Cadillacs but can only throw his weight around the house by boisterous swearing or some other way of expressing his frustration. The son is enlists and goes to Vietnam. On his way back, he throws his medals into the Pacific as a symbol of freedom. Back home he gets a position as a Criminal Investigator with in the Office of Investigation at the United States Post Office, leading complex federal criminal, civil and administrative investigations. Feeling increasingly social, he meets some new friends in the music scene and they convince him to take a shot of heroin. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Finding it gives him great comfort and that is all his friends do on their spare time, he soon also finds he has to pick up this habit to fit in, as it gives them a purpose in life. His friends start also stealing money from him for the drug. His employers find out and dismiss him from his job, telling him to come back when he is clean. Throughout the whole sorry account, he gets a divorce, his wife gets custody of his daughter and keeps the custom house in the hills, and there emerges most clearly the young man’s powerlessness and loss of purpose. The origin of this sense of powerlessness is generally the young person’s lack of a relationship with a strong father. (Sometimes it is attributable to his relationship with the mother, but not as often.) Having no male figure with whom he can identify, he has no direction, no structure which the father is supposed to bring in from the outside World, no set of values by which to direct oneself or against which to rebel. In less affluent household, this lack of a strong father is taken for granted. Sometimes less affluent people have more realistic reasons for taking heroin—their problems are externalized, and hence drug addiction does not represent such a serious illness as it does for the affluent. The affluent drug addict seems not to have the oedipal motive of striving to surpass his father, which can give a constructive dynamic for development; but the son will take revenge upon the father by means of the addiction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Heroin addiction gives a way of life to the young person. Having suffered under perpetual purposelessness, one’s structure now consists of how to escape the police, how to get the money one needs, where to get one’s next fix—all these give one a new web of energy in place of one’s previous structureless World. The treatment method comes out of this situation of powerlessness. In the home of a good church, a great deal of power is let loose in sessions and Bible study, power that is directed toward the demand for absolute authenticity. These groups are encouraged to be as direct as possible with each other (without being rude or physical violence) in insisting on honesty. The phrase dope fiend is used, for example, because there is no euphemism in it; they insist on not covering up the cold truth in how they handle their affairs. However, when we spend so much time describing the attacking serpent that we fail to see the source of healing, we are no different than a dope fiend. We do not have to focus on the serpents or the pain of their venomous bites or their fear of death in order to be healed. We simply have to look to the source of healing: our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Obviously this gives a structure that cannot be evaded; the strong substitute father comes out in our faith in Christ. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

We know from the scriptures and the teachings of latter-day prophets that genuine repentance requires feeling sincere remorse. However, focusing too much on the negative can lead to fear, loss of hope, and diminishing self-worth—in the words of Nephi, we begin to “droop in sin” (2 Nephi 4.28). Those who struggle with sin sometimes lie and rationalize in an attempt to minimize the consequences of their behavior. However, somewhere inside themselves, they are aware of that they have done and know they are accountable for it. They know they are in spiritual bondage. Almost everyone I have met struggling with addiction suffers from a terrible sense of shame and a belief that he or she is broken, defective, and beyond the love and grace of God. However, this belief, in my experience, is far from the truth. Usually I find that those who struggle with addictions are warriors with tenacity, courage, and a strong desire to be clean. They win far more battles than they lose as they march toward recovery. This seems to boil down to a rediscovery of one’s power and how to use it. The notorious permissiveness that was so completely followed in the Clinton and Obama era is out, and what is in is what gives personal power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

This may be hard for some to comprehend—if people are so strong, why is overcoming addiction so difficult? Addiction is often misunderstood, and some believe that if a person would simply choose to recover or work harder at stopping, he or she would be able to. However, the nature of addiction—and all sin, for that matter—is such that we cannot heal ourselves from it. The children of Israel could not heal themselves from the bites of the fiery serpents, and we cannot simply wish or even work addiction away. We must find our hope of healing in Christ. On the anvil on which the treatment is hammered out, all things are used that will recover some sense of power in the addict, which is necessary for one’s cure. The addict’s anger and one’s energy are connected; the angrier one can becomes—which means direct, not expressed in revenge or in other indirect ways—the more likely one is to get cured. The addict is a person of much energy, but it has been blunted by one’s drugs. When one comes off drugs, one is apt to have a good deal of anger; it is on this angry energy that one’s rehabilitation depends. However, it is the social side of power that is stressed. The desired emphasis seems to Dr. Alfred Adler’s concept of social interest; we all have one basic desire and goal: to belong and to feel significant. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Consider the experience of those who struggle with addiction and how it brings heavy burdens of secrets and pain. Repentance may involve an emotional and physical process. Both repentance and recovery may take time. Even though a person may have some initial success, further emotional healing may be necessary to completely repent and recover. It takes faith, hope, love, support, time, and prayer to heal from the patterns of self-deception. In its panorama of disorder and change, history offers plentiful evidence that mortals in times past also felt no small uncertainty about themselves and their identities, suffered no little anguish of gloom, despair and feelings of detachment. Great and small people are saying they wish they had never been born. No public office stands open where it should, and the masses are like river hogs, eating whatever is insight, without think about their Saviour. Artists have ceases to ply their art. The few slay the many. One who yesterday was indigent I now wealthy, and the sometime rich overwhelm one with adulation. Impudence is rife. Oh that man cease to be, that women should no longer conceive and give birth. Then, at length, the World would find peace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

There was a similar moral collapse in Greece during the Peloponnesian war. As for medieval Europe, Huizinga reminds us that the Middle Ages were essentially violent in character: wars, class struggles, hysterical crowd behavior, vice and crime (on an unparalleled scale, particularly in university towns), plagues, scarcity, superstition, the conviction that the World was coming to an end—such was the “black” background of medieval life. The unattached person during the Middle Ages was one either condemned to exile or domed to death: if alive, one immediately sought to attach oneself, at least to a band of robbers. To exist, one had to belong to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no security expect in association, and no freedom that did not recognize the obligations of a corporate life. One lived and died in the style of one’s class and corporation. People had known a kind of psychological security; they took for granted all the actual insecurity of life in a vale of tears. If one has to analyse problems for oneself and has no one else to do it for one, the endeavour may help one to learn discrimination and good judgement. It is better to make one’s own decisions independently. This is not the case, however, if one feels too incapable of thinking out an issue, or too illiformed about it, or too vacillating to make up one’s mind on its pros and cons. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

If one’s understanding of this teaching delivers one from excessive dependence on another mortal or on external methods, it will clear one’s path and help one’s self-reliance. However, if it outruns itself and makes one cocksure, proud, arrogant, and irreverent towards one’s Saviour, then it has degenerated into misunderstanding. This will block one’s path. Joy is more than pleasure; and it is more than happiness. Happiness is a state of mind which lasts for a longer and shorter time and is dependent on many conditions, external and internal. In the ancient view it is a gift of the gods which they give and take away again. In the American Constitution, “the pursuit of happiness” is a basic human right. In economic theory the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of people is the purpose of human action. In the fairy tale, “they live happily ever after.” Happiness can stand a large amount of pain and lack of pleasure. However, happiness cannot stand the lack of joy. For joy is the expression of our essential and central fulfillment. No peripheral fulfillments and no favorable conditions can be substituted for the central fulfillment. Even in an unhappy state a great joy can transform unhappiness into happiness. What, then is you? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Let us first ask what is its opposite. It is sorrow. Sorrow is the feeling that we are deprived of our central fulfillment, by being deprived of something that belongs to us and is necessary to our fulfillment. We may be deprived of relatives and friends nearest to us, of a creative work and a supporting community which gave us a meaning of life, of our home, of honor, of love, of bodily or mental health, of unity of our person, of a good conscience. All this brings sorrow in manifold forms, the sorrow of sadness, the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of depression, the sorrow of self-accusation. However, it is precisely this kind of situation in which Jesus tells his disciples that his joy shall be with them and that their joy shall be full. Sorrow can be the Sorrow of the World which ends in death of final despair, and it can be Divine sorrow which leads to transformation and joy. For joy has something within itself which is beyond joy and sorrow. This something is called blessedness. Blessedness is the eternal element in joy, that which makes it possible for joy to include in itself the sorrow out of which it arises, and which it takes into itself. In the Beatitudes, Jesus calls the less affluent, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst, those who have been persecuted blessed. And he says unto them: “Rejoice and be glad!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Joy within sorrow is possible to those who are blessed, to those in whom joy has the dimension of the eternal. By its very nature the eternal You cannot become an It; because by its very nature it cannot be placed within measure and limit, not even within the measure of the immeasurable and the limit of the unlimited; because by its very nature it cannot be grasped as a sum of qualities, not even as an infinite sum of qualities that have been raised to transcendence; because it is not to be found either in or outside the World; because it cannot be experienced; because it cannot be thought; because we transgress against it, against that which has being, if we say: “I believe that he is”—even “he” is still a metaphor, while “you” is not. And yet we reduce the eternal You ever again to an It, to something, turning God into a thing, in accordance with our nature. Not capriciously. The history of God as a thing, the way of the God-thing through religion and its marginal forms, through its illuminations and eclipses, the times when it heightened and when it destroyed life, the way from the living God and back to him again, the metamorphoses of the present, of embedment in forms, of objectification, of conceptualization, dissolution, and renewal are one way, the way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Here we must once more reply to those who attack Christianity because they believe that it destroys the joy of life. In the view of the Beatitudes they say that Christianity undercut the joy of life by pointing to and preparing for another life. They even challenge the blessedness in the promised life as a refined form of seeking for pleasure in the future life. Again we must confess that in many Christians, joy in the way is postponed till after death, and that there are Biblical words which seem to support this answer. Nevertheless, it is wrong. Jesus will give his joy to his disciples now. They shall get it after he has left them, which means in this life. And Paul asks the Philippians to have joy now. This cannot be otherwise, for blessedness is the expression of God’s eternal fulfillment. Blessed are those who participate in this fulfillment here and now. Certainly eternal fulfillment must be seen not only as eternal which is present, but also as eternal which is future. However, if it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all. This joy which has in itself the depth of blessedness is asked for and promised in the Bible. It preserves in itself its opposite, sorrow. This blessed joy provides the foundation for happiness and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Blessed joy which is promised in the Bible for this lifetime on Earth presents in all levels of mortal’s striving for fulfillment. It consecrates and directs them. It does not diminish or weaken them. It does not take away the risks and dangers of the joy of life. It makes the joy of life possible in pleasure and pain, in happiness and unhappiness, in ecstasy and sorrow. Where there is joy, there is fulfillment. And were there is fulfillment, there is joy. In fulfillment and joy the inner aim of life, the meaning of creation, and the end of salvation, are attained. The asserted knowledge and the posited action of the religions—whence do they come? The presence and strength of revelation (for all of them necessarily invoke some sort of revelation, whether verbal, natural, or psychic—there are, strictly speaking, only revealed religions), the presence and strength that mortals received through revelation—how do they become a content? The explanation has two levels. The exoteric, psychic level is known when a mortal is considered by oneself, apart from history. The esoteric, factual one, the primal phenomenon of religion, when we afterward place one in history again. Both belong together. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Mortals desires to have God; one desires to have God continually in space and time. One is loath to be satisfied with the inexpressible confirmation of the meaning; one wants to see it spread out as something that one can take out handle again and again—a continuum unbroken in space and times that insures life for one at every point and moment. A mortal can achieve one’s independence by grades without rebellion but one is seldom so wise as to do so. More often, one lacks patience, takes the more foolish violent way, and attains one’s freedom at a cost, to oneself and to others, that could have been much less for the same result by evolutionary ways. The passionate contempt for organized authority, or its complete rejection, may be only a cover for weakness: the inability to undergo a course of discipline, much less undertake it for oneself. The danger of walking alone is also the danger of identifying one’s own private judgments, impulses, desires, and thoughts as intuitions from the higher self. However, independence of mind as its own perils, for it may lead to stubbornness in error, to arrogance in behaviour, and to fanaticism in attitude. One who depends upon one’s own personal intellect and personal strength alone, deprives oneself of the protection which God could give one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The endeavor after independence can achieve only a partial success, never a total one. We find that we are tied to other people. Life’s rhythm of pure relation, the alternation of actuality and a latency in which only our strength to relate and hence also the presence, but not the primal presence, wanes, does not suffice mortal’s thirst for continuity. One thirsts, thirst, pain as clear as light for something spread out in time, for duration. Thus God becomes an object of faith. Originally, faith fills the temporal gaps between the acts of relation; gradually, it becomes a substitute for these acts. The ever new movement of being through concentration and going forth is supplanted by coming to rest in an It in which one has faith. The trust-in-spite-of-all of the fighter who knows the remoteness and nearness of God is transformed ever more completely into the profiteer’s assurance that nothing can happen to one because one has faith that there is One who would not permit anything to happen to one. The life-structure of the pure relation, the lonesomeness of the I before the You, the law that mortals, however one may include the World in one’s encounter, can still go forth only as a person to encounter God—all this also does not satisfy mortal’s thirst for continuity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The magic of faith leaves something stronger than memory of the circuit of the blood of Christ through us. One thirsts for something spread out in space, for the representation in which the community of the faithful is united with God. Thus God becomes a cult object. The cult, too, originally supplements the acts of relation, by fitting the living prayer, the immediate You-saying into a spatial context of great plastic and power and connecting it with the life of the senses. And the cult, too, gradually becomes a substitute, as the personal prayer is no longer support but rather pushed aside by communal prayer; and as the essential deed simply does not permit any rules, it is supplanted by devotions that follow rules. We can fully trust in a loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help us become the person he knows we can become. Our Father in Heaven has given us not only one but two physical eyes. We can see adequately with only one eye, but the second eye provides us with another perspective. When both perspectives are put together in our brains, they produce a three-dimensional image of our surrounding. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. We have a loving Father in Heaven, and we all agreed to come to this Earth as part of a divine plan. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20