The reason people do not believe you sometimes, it not because you are a liar, but because of their ego. They feel they are superior to you, and therefore you could not be having experiences that are more advanced than theirs. However, they would likely believe the same experiences if someone else were to have them without question. To the householder taking on a family life is a joy; to the monk it is an encumbrance. Neither person is wrong. It is all in the point of view. Each has inherited one’s own attitude from one’s former selves. One is not abandon the householder’s life unless the divine command tells one to do so. They are not necessarily strong and heroic who stay in the World and disdain flight from it. It may be that pleasures and possession keep them there. Equally, those who has nothing wroth renouncing—the poor, the unlucky, the disappointed, and the frail—make so sacrifice in passing the cloister’s shelter, the monastery’s peace. There are those who flee the World, its futile tumults and doings; they do well. However, we who hold to philosophy may flee or stay, just as we choose. For we can make of it a pathway to the Ever-Peaceful. Closely related to, indeed part of, the consumption process is the way modern mortals use their leisure time, if they have any. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The qualification is overlooked by many writers commenting in contemporary leisure behavior who assume that there have been gains in leisure for all working people. We have an extremely uneven distribution of leisure. The average person’s gain in leisure with economic growth has been exaggerated. Estimates of annual and life-time leisure suggest that the skilled urban worker may have gained the position of their thirteenth century counterpart. Upper strata have, in fact, lost out. Even through their work lives are shorter and vacations longer, these people work many steady hours week after week—sometimes reaching a truly startling total. Many who do have leisure, on the other hand, are forced into it because they are marginal to the economy; and if they could, they would give up their leisure for work. The shorter work-week, instead of increasing opportunities for leisure, has simply encouraged growing numbers of men and women to take on second jobs. Most critical evaluations of leisure and its uses apply more to a beckoning future (when, presumably, all of us will have joined the leisure class) than to the present. Nevertheless, work has declined as a central activity, even if more mortals still work hard; a big split has taken place between work and leisure. Instead of being closely integrated with work, as in the past, the pursuit of leisure has become a desperate escape from work which is increasingly meaningless. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Small wonder that the idols of leisure have replaced the idols of work for so many. However, leisure itself has become meaningless, a packaged mass activity, its values provided by the entertainment industry. And although mortals are trained for work, they are not trained to spend leisure creatively. If some achieve freedom for an hour or a day, many of them find only a great emptiness. Escaping from work, they escape also from themselves. The alienating influences of the modern work force extend far beyond the individual worker; they touch with equal force upon one’s family and one’s community. Of the many effects of the corporate World on the family, perhaps the most important is the breakdown of the extended kinship group which, as we saw, had been the primary productive and social unit in the pre-industrial age. As the old crafts declined, and labor became increasingly divided and specialized, the economic and social base of the large family was destroyed. Lost were the customs and skills that had been passed on from one generation to another. Gone were the close bond between young and old, and especially the respect that youth had previously given to age. Into the new World class cities poured millions who had been cut off from their traditional family roots. These are the most visible consequences for the family in the corporate World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

However, considerably less is known about the more subtle psychological effects of globalization and corporate influence. There are many long-range and hidden influences which may not appear until generations later. It must be remembered that most of the long-industrialized countries of the West are still heavily burdened by the as yet uncompensated disservices of the earlier stages of their economic growth. Viewed in terms of the long-drawn cycle of family life, the violent industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century, the poverty, the unemployment, the social indiscipline, the authoritarianism of people and the cruelties to children, are by no means as remote today in their consequences as some economists and historians would have us believe. Thus the cult of human relations in industry and office to which we referred earlier ignores the fact the morale is not just a function of working conditions; but also of life outside the workplace. Yet what society expects of men and women outside the factory or office is considerably different from what is demanded inside. For example, while “stability” is heavily valued in family life, industrial conditions in the Western World has been marked by unemployment the displacement of old skills, the increasing mechanization of rationalization of work and especially by changes—often loss—of status and self-respect. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

There is fundamental conflict between the values or norms of expected behavior in the workplace and those norms which prevail in the wider society and which are expected to influence the worker or employee in one’s role as a husband and father or wife and mother. In these roles, society tends increasingly to expect one not to submit to life as it happens but to consciously control one’s affairs, to think about their children’s tomorrow, to rationally and not blindly influence their behavior, and to accord to one’s spouse a greater measure of tolerance, respect, and understanding than many partners have given their spouses in the past. However, if workers cannot achieve stability or self-respect on the job, or have little conception of their place in the scheme of things, how can they perform satisfactorily as husbands and fathers or as wives and mothers? The answer is they cannot. With changes in family function, especially the decline of large kinship group as an operating unit, have come significant changes in structure. Perhaps most important, work is now increasingly separated from family life; parents disappear during the day, leaving the children to grow up chiefly with their peers and the television. Related to this break is the enormous suburban trend, distinguished by what sociologist call the nuclear family, that is, the small core unit of two parents and their children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

High divorce rates in countries such as the United States are only the most dramatic evidence of the many serious strains to which the new family is exposed. Most affected by the breakdown of the extended family or kinship group, however, are the aged. That breakdown has been accompanied by a tremendous increase in life expectancy. Just 200 years ago, the average person lived to be 40.5, now people are living to be 80.0 years old. Also, early retirement is causing issues. In North America and Western Europe a growing number of the aged finds itself increasingly cut off from meaningful purists. And sometimes I wonder if these people are happy living so long, only to be parked in a nursing home with other aged people, waiting for whatever is to come next. A recent American survey shows that the overwhelming majority of our citizens oppose the idea of having older persons live with their children. As these trends continue—the prolongation of life, early retirement, breakdown of the extended family—the aged become outcasts in a society like ours that places such emphasis on youth and its energies. Separate housing, even separate cities—this is the lot of our elderly citizens. In their twilight World there is only fleeting contact with the community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

No one can doubt that a new electronic technology is fast revolutionizing our economic and communication systems. Religious practices are also involved in profound change. One age is dead and the other not yet born—ours, which includes both youth and age, is in limbo. To what extent, we must finally ask, is technology used as the scapegoat from our present situation and, therefore, an escape from responsibility? Like, some people only participate in protests and demonstrations, not because they care about the cause, but be they want to voice their anger and destroy things. One young man admitted that during a protest, when one guy shouted: Let’s get the computer!” The young man, who was a student at the time, remarked “All my life I’ve wanted to smash a computer.” Now, on my college tours, when I tell that story, the students unfailingly burst into laughter, and it is the kind of laughter that indicates that some unconscious urge in them has been released, but this behavior also explains why it is so easy to yoke people into attacking people who have never done anything to them, they have never met, and know nothing about. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

So anyway, why this animosity, this spirit of revenge, against technology? For one thing, young people are entirely aware of the disastrous effects of technology—as, for instance, in the galloping pollution of air, Earth, and water. They see that technological progress seems in so many instance to lead straight into disaster; that the proliferation of techniques and machines, far from threatening only certain classes with unemployment, menaces the very existence of whole nations and conceivably of all humankind. This is surely true. However, a serious citing of it would also lead to the opposite statement, that technology has far-reaching values for nations and conceivable all humankind. Why, then, the refusal on the part of young adults to accept, or at least see, the latter? I believe that this refusal us used to protect their own consciousness. Technology consist of a complex system of tools that ought to extend human consciousness. A simple example of this may be illustrated by a chimpanzee fastening two sticks together to pull into his cage a banana that he cannot reach with one stick. However, in our day—so the younger generation feels—technology does just the opposite: it shrinks, dries up, depersonalizes human existence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Young people have discovered in their own bitter experience how the juggernaut of technology overrides them without paying the slightest attention to their protests. They find themselves crying, both silently and aloud: “Stop the machinery!” It is interesting that this metaphor from Charles Reich is identical with that of Mario Savio back in the first rebellion in 1964 in Berkeley: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop…” There are various ways of accomplishing this arresting of the machinery: prayer and movements back to nature. However, most important of all, there has arisen a new understanding of the value of subjectivity, to redress our gross overemphasis upon objectivity. Dedicated to the machine makes us tend to act in a machine-like manner. Whoever does one’s business in the manner of a machine develops a machine heart. Whoever has a machine heart in one’s chest loses one’s simplicity. Whoever loses one’s simplicity becomes uncertain in the impulses of one’s spirit. Uncertainty in the impulses of the spirit is something that is incompatible with truth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

On the one side is the spirit that has already entered the World and now can be perceived in it by means of our senses; on the other, the spirit has not yet entered the World, but is ready to do so and now becomes present to us. This distinction is founded on the fact that I can show you the spiritual forms that have already entered the World, but not the others. The spiritual forms that are at hand in our common World, no less than a thing or natural being, I can point out to you as something actually or potentially accessible to you. If I am asked here, too, in the case of this borderland, where one is supposed to find mutuality, I can only point indirectly to certain scarcely describable events in human life where spirit was encountered; and if this indirect procedure proves inadequate, nothing remains to me in the end but an appeal to the testimony of your own mysteries, which may be buried under debris but are presumably still accessible to you. If, in the power and passion of such an ultimate concern, we can look at our finite concerns. Everything seems the same and yet everything is changed. We are still concerned about all these things but differently—the anxiety is gone! It still exists and tries to return. However, its power is broken; it cannot destroy us any more. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

One who is grasped by the one thing that is needed has the many things under one’s feet. They concern one but not ultimately, and when one loses them one thing one needs and that cannot be taken from one. They will hear a voice, perhaps none too clearly at first, that is identical with the voice that speaks to them through other genuine sayings of the same master. Now they will not ne able any longer to do what they did as long as they treated the saying as an object: they will not be able to separate out content and rhythm; they receive nothing but the indivisible wholeness of something spoken. However, here we are still dealing with a person and the manifestation of a person in one’s words. What I have in mind, however, is not limited to the continued presence of some personal existence in words. Hence I must supplement this account by pointing to an example in which there is no longer anything personal. What has to be achieved was what I was able to achieve: to confront and endure this spiritual form there that has passed through the mind and hand of man and become incarnate. Does the concept of mutuality disappear here? It merely merges into the darkness behind it—or it changes into a concrete state of affairs, coldly rejecting concepthood, but bright and reliable. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

From here we may also look across into that other realm where that which is not at hand belongs, the contact with spiritual beings, the genesis of word and form. Jesus’ use of the metaphor, the Son and the Father, was intended to point out that mortals, in one’s inner self, were born of, and is still in relation to, the Higher power, God. The innermost being of mortals and the cosmos is ever at rest, and single. The incarnate being of both is ever in movement, and dual. The inner is the Real, Changeless; the other is the Appearance, and subject to the play of two opposed but interpenetrating active forces. Because it is the quintessence of consciousness and intelligence, I call the first Mind. It is without shape, infinite and untouchable by mortals, but because it is, universes are able to appear, expand, disintegrate, and reincarnate. This activity is directly due to the agency of the first entity to appear, which I call the World-Mind. From the latter flows ceaselessly the energy which is at the heart of every atom, the life-force which is at the heart of every mortal. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

World-Mind and Mind are for us the twin sides—a crude but simple, understandable metaphor—of God. The human being draws breath, exists, and thinks with awareness only because of this relationship. If one declares oneself an atheist, sees oneself only as an animal, rejects any divine basis to one’s mind, one testifies thereby to a failure on one’s own part: one has failed to seek and find, or because of prejudice—that is, of prejudgment—has sought wrongly. Jesus gave two helps in this matter: seek the kingdom of Heaven first, and seek it within. It is open to anyone to test this truth that one is related to God. However, if one does not bring certain qualities into the work, such as patience and humility, the going may be too hard, the result disappointing. Something of that Mind is in us, as a parent has left some legacy in the child, but at the same time we are also in that Mind. Gospel of John, chapter 17, verse 21: “As thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee.” An ever-active Mind within an ever-still Mind—that is the real truth, not only about God but also about mortals. The World-Mind reproduces something of itself in each individual entity we call the soul, or Overself. The soul in mortals, the Overself, is linked with, or rooted in, the soul in the Universe, the World-Mind. The Infinite Mind is centered within its finite expression, the human ego. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Spirit become word, spirit become form—whoever has been touched by the spirit and did not close oneself off knows to some extent of the fundamental fact: neither germinates and grows in the human World without having been sown; both issue from encounters with the other. Encounters not with Platonic Ideas (of which I have no direct knowledge whatever and which I am incapable of understanding as having any being) but with the spirit that blows around us and inspires us. Again I am reminded of the strange confession of Nietzsche who circumscribed the process of inspiration by saying that one accepts without asking who gives. That may be so—one does not ask, but one gives thanks. Those who know the spirit’s breath commit a transgression if they wish to gain power over the spirit or to determine its nature. However, they are also unfaithful if they ascribe this gift to themselves. Sometimes it seems the devil is rampant. The entire city of Sacramento seems to be under the influence of the devil. It is like nothing will save this city but an exorcism, prayer, and fasting. Because we have all—yes! sinners as well as saints—come forth from the divine substance in our bodies and from the divine mind in our entities, there is something God-like in each of us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14