How many people do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their live to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: cars made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, people attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the individual; everything except the person is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immorality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening some people rise and realize what they have feared perhaps for decades, that they simply want no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to one has been swept off the face of the Earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except their children. Otherwise they will have ceased long ago to speak of themselves or of anything. They will vanish. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

I sat back impressed by the obvious truth of it, and yet at the same time, everything in me revolted against that prospect. I became aware of the depth of my hope and my terror; how very different those feelings were from the alienation that he described, how very different from that awful wasting despair. There was something outrageous and repulsive in that despair suddenly. I could not accept it. The alienated being, unable to achieve oneself or reach others, uneasily asks, “Who am I?” What this means in a society like ours is we need tremendous faith, for we have to rely upon the infinite life-power to sustain us henceforth. In taking the vow of obedience, one shows forth one’s great humility, for one confesses that one is unable to guide one’s own life and thought wisely, but will take our guidance henceforth from those who stand nearest to God. As a result, some people take a vow of celibacy, which makes a magnificent gesture of defiance to one’s own lower nature, against which one will henceforth fight and to which one will not willingly succumb. For many, the psychological effects of capitalism do not allow one to experience oneself as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside one’s self, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Under capitalism, much like any other economic system, alienation can become the fate not only of the workers but of managers (or bureaucrats) and owners or capitalists themselves. That is because we are not focused on spirituality, but our focus, primarily, is on money, which is an abstraction living beings use to acquire things we consume, and we are similarly alienated from each other. The relationship of beings to their fellows is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other. Ultimately, therefore, beings are alienated from themselves since their aim is to sell themselves. However, things have no self and beings who have become things can have no self. The idea of being’s making a thing of themselves is the marketing orientation. This is closely linked with one’s sacrifice of all that is distinctive about themselves to win approval of the group. As a result, there is some spontaneous self which one is prevented from achieving. This leads to some people becoming neurotics, as they are unable to achieve a sense of self, and as a consequence accept a paper identity of personality as a substitute. However, this substitute offers little comfort. The central issue of the effects of capitalism on personality is the phenomenon of alienation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences one’s self as an alien. One has become, one might say, estranged from oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s acts and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with one’s own being as one is out of touch with any other person. One, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the sense and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the World outside productively. The older meaning in which alienation was used was to denote an insane person; aliene in French, alienado in Spanish are older words for the psychotic, the thoroughly and absolutely alienated person. (“Alienist,” in English, is still used for the doctor who cares for the insane.) In the last century the word alienation was used by Hegel and Marx, referring not to a state of insanity, but to a less drastic form of self-estrangement, which permits the person to act reasonably in practical matters, yet which constitutes one of the most severe socially patterned defects. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

In Marx’s system alienation is called that condition of a being where one’s own act become to one an alien power, standing over and against one, instead of being ruled by one. However, while the use of the word “alienation” in this general sense is a recent one, the concept is a much older one; it is the same to which the prophets of the Old Testament referred as idolatry. It will help us to a better understanding of “alienation” if we begin by considering the meaning of “idolatry.” The prophets of monotheism did not denounce heathen religious as idolatrous primarily because they worshiped several gods instead of one. The essential difference between monotheism and polytheism is not one of number of gods, but is possessed in the fact of self-alienation. Beings spend their energy, their artistic capacities on building an idol, and then one worships this idol, which is nothing but the result of one’s own human effort. One’s life forces have flown into a thing, and this thing, having become an idol, is not experienced as a result of one’s own productive effort, but as something apart from one’s own being, over and against one, which one worships and to which one submits. As the prophet Hosea says (XIV, 8): “Assur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, you are our gods; for the fatherless finds love.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Idolatrous beings bow down to the work of their own hands. The idol represents one’s own life-forces in an alienated form. However, human experience is characterized by freedom (will, creativity, expressiveness) and by limitation (natural and social restraints, vulnerability, and death). The dread of either freedom or limitation promotes extreme or dysfunctional counterreactions to that dread. These counterreactions often manifest themselves in either fanatical overreaching (if the dread centers on one’s limits) or banal timidity (if the dread centers on one’s freedom). The confrontation with or integration of the polarities promotes psychophysiological resilience. The philosopher is not to be advertised by outward signs. Yet if one feels a personal vocation to follow these customs, one is also free to do so. It is simply that there is no necessity in the general sense. There is a halfway stage in the disintegration of words. This is obscenity. It gets power from the using of words to do violence to our unconscious expectations, to destroy our mooring posts, and to undercut the forms of relationship we are used to. The words threaten us with the insecurity of formlessness. Obscenity expresses what has previously been prohibited, reveals what previously was not revealed. Thus it insists on and gets our attention. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Obscenity is the process of attacking what has been sacred and occurs when the word is losing its holy character. It is often factually true that words have already lost all roots to their meaning and have become nothing but empty forms. The same is true in modern art. By showing blood and gore and using sensational colors that carry these impressions, many painters are crying out: “You must look, you must pay attention, you must see in a new way.” This can, indeed, teach us, shocked as we are, not just to look but to see. The breakdown in language has become very clear to many. Nobody really communicates with words anymore. Words have lost their emotional impact, intimacy, ability to shock and make love. However, there is one word Americans have not destroyed. One word which has maintained its emotional power and purity. As you have guessed already, that word is God. It has kept its purity only because it is a force we all call on in our time of need. People who do not believe in God also call on him in situation of extreme distress. The word God does have emotional power. It is connected with tenderness and gentleness, but can also be aggressive and vengeful. An act of God is usually used to describe a disaster beings are not directly responsible for. A miracle is often used to describe when God makes the impossible possible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

However, a word becomes aggressive as a stage in its deterioration: it loses its original meaning, takes on the aggressive for in obscenity, and then may pass into oblivion, as when a person is upset and says, “God damn!” And that is one reason we are not supposed to take the Lord’s name in vein, we must never let the creator of the Universe pass into oblivion, or else we may cease to exist. When it is used to incite people’s aggressive emotions, language can be as violent as physical force. About 230,000 people recently attended a peaceful, graceful demonstration in Hong Kong, China to protest a bill that would allow Hong Kong people to be extradited to mainland China for criminal prosecution. People want the extradition bill terminated because legislation would mean there is no longer any difference between Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong was guaranteed autonomy until 2047. Because there is so much at stake, tensions did flare up and police had to disperse hundreds. Some are only concerned with getting the word out and are totally oblivious to the fact that if you keep chanting, people will get mad, and this rage will have nothing to do with the extradition bill. It will be because words people use in anger to get their points across. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Obscenity is a form of psychic violence and can be used with great effect, a weapon that can excite people to lethal physical violence.  Once should know this when using language. It is a mark of our time that each side in a disagreement uses violent language. This amounts to using violence to defeat violence—which never words, whether it is done by police and administration or by young people themselves. In the stories of the crucifixion the agony and the death of Jesus are connected with a group of events in nature: Darkness covers the land; the curtain of the temple is torn in two; the Earth is shaken and the bodies of saints rise out of their graves. Nature, with trembling, participates in the decisive event of history. The Sun veils its head; the temple makes the gesture of mourning; the foundations of the Earth are moved; the tombs are opened. Nature is in an uproar because of something is happening which concerns the Universe. Since the time of the evangelists, wherever the story of Golgotha has been told as the turning event in the World-drama of salvation, the role of nature played in this drama has also been told. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Painters of the crucifixion have used all their artistic power to express the darkness over the land in almost unnatural color. I remember my own earliest impression of Good Friday—the feeling of the mystery of the divine suffering, first of all, through the compassion of nature. And so did the centurion, the first pagan who witnessed for the Crucified. Filled with awe, with numinous dread, he understood in a naive-profound way that something more had happened than the death of a holy and innocent man. We should not ask whether clouds or a dust storm darkened the Sun on a special day of a special year, whether an Earthquake happened in Palestine just at that hour, whether the curtain before the holy of holies in the temple at Jerusalem had to be repaired or whether the raised bodies of the saints died again. However, we should ask whether we are able to feel with the evangelists and the painters, with the children and the Roman soldiers, that the event at Golgotha is one which concerns the Universe, including all nature and all history. With this question in our mind let us look at the signs reported by our evangelist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The Sun veiled its face because of the depth of evil and shame which it saw under the Cross. However, the Sun also veiled its face because its power over the World had ceased once and forever in these hours of its darkness. The great shining and burning God of everything that lives on Earth, the Sun who was praised and feared and adored by innumerable human beings during thousands and thousands of years, had been deprived of its divine power when one human being in ultimate agony maintained his unity wit that which is greater than the Sun. Since those hours of darkness it is manifest that not the Sun, but a suffering and struggling soul which cannot be broken by all the powers of the Universe is the image of the Highest, and that the Sun can only be praised in the way of St. Francis, who called it our brother, but not our god. The curtain of the temple was torn in two. The temple tore its gown as the mourners did because Christ, to whom the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple—and with it, all temple on Earth—also complained of its own destiny. The curtain which made the temple a holy place, separated from other places, lost is separating power. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

One who was expelled as blaspheming the temple, had cleft the curtain and opened the temple for everybody, for every moment. This curtain cannot be mended any more, although there are priests and ministers and pious people who try to mend it. They will not succeed because Christ, for whom every place was a sacred place, a place where God is present, has been brought on the Cross in the name of the holy place. When the curtain of the temple was torn in two, God judged religion and rejected temples. After this moment temples and churches can only means places of concentration on the holy which is the ground and the meaning of every place. And like the temple, the Earth was judged at Golgotha. Trembling and shaking the Earth participated in the agony of the man on the Cross and in the despair of all those who had seen in him the beginning of the new eon. Trembling and shaking the Earth proved that it is not the motherly ground on which we can safely build our houses and cities, our cultures and religious systems. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Trembling and shaking the Earth pointed to another ground on which the Earth itself rests: the self-surrendering love on which all Earthly powers and values concentrate their hostility and which they cannot conquer. Since the hour when Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last and the rocks were split, the Earth ceased to be the foundation of what we build on her. Only insofar as it has a deeper ground, can it stand; only insofar as it is rooted in the same foundation in which the Cross is rooted, can it last. And the Earth not only ceases to be the solid ground of life; she also ceases to be the lasting cave of death. Resurrection is not something added to the death of him who is the Christ; but it is implied in his death, as the story of the resurrection before the resurrection indicates. No longer is the Universe subjected to the law of death out of birth. It is subjected to a higher law, to the law of life out of death by the death of Christ who represented eternal life. When one man in whom God was present without limited committed his spirit into this Father’s hands, the tombs were opened and bodies were raised. Since this moment the Universe is no longer what it was; nature has received another meaning; history is transformed and you and I are no more, and should not be any more, what we were before. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Living beings are not God. Yet one can approach God so intimately, be suffused by his presence so completely, that the first mystics to call this state union with God may be excused. The telepathic closeness which sometimes exists between two separated lovers, relatives, or friends is a slight hint of the telepathic closeness which exists between the harmonized human ego and its divine soul. In my alleged claim that every human being can develop the divinity within oneself, I do not mean that we humble mortals can ever rise to the stature of the Almighty, and I completely concur with the warning against beings attempting to join partners with God. I mean only that we have within us something that is lined with and related to God: it is our higher self, the discovery of and union with which represents the limit of our possible attainment. If it is wiser and humbler to leave some mystery at the bottom of all our intellectual understanding of life than to indulge in self-deceiving finality about it, then it is no less wiser and humbler to acknowledge the ultimate mystery at the heart of all our immediate mystical experience of life. The mystic’s claim to know God when one knows only the deepest part of one’s own self, is one’s particular kind of vanity. Whatever terminous and transcendental consciousness one may discover there, something ever remains beyond it lost in utter inscrutability. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

The World-Mind is impenetrable by human power. This agnostic conclusion does not, however, touch the validity of the mystic’s more legitimate claim, that the human soul is knowable and that an unshakeable union with it is attainable. The mystic may indeed feel the very stuff of God in one’s rapture but this does not supply one with the whole content of God’s knowledge. If therefore one claims not only to be one with God but also to be one with God’s entire consciousness, it is sheer presumption. The mystical union with God can never be a union of nature and substances, can never achieve a complete identity of the atom with the Infinite. What is possible of achievement is, to speak in terms of spatial symbolism which is the only satisfactory way of treating such a transcendental subject, to unite with a single point within the immeasurable infinite of God. We should learn to discern the truth not only through our rational minds but also through the very still and small voice of the Spirit. We can trust in our loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help be become the person he knows we can become. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

In addition to our rational minds, another dimension to gaining knowledge can give us guidance and understanding. It is the still and soft voice of his Holy Spirit speaking to our hearts and also to our minds. We have been given two sources of information, through our physical and spiritual capacities. When these two perspectives are then combined in our souls, one complete picture shows the reality of things as they truly are. We will find our Father’s voice in many places. We will find it when we pray, study the scriptures, attend church, engage in faithful discussion, or go to the temple. However, answers are sometimes slow to come. Still, if you have made the wrong decision, God will not let you proceed too far without a warning impression. Much grotesque misconception exists among the mystics about this claim to have untied with God, however. Not having passed through the metaphysical discipline and consequently having only a confused notion of what God is, they do not comprehend how exaggerated their claim is. For if they were really untied with God, they should have the power of God too. They would be able to set up as creators of entire Universes, of Suns, Stars, and cosmic systems. This feat is plainly beyond them. Let us hear no more of such babble and let them confine their strivings to realizable aims. God’s gift to his sorrowing creatures is a joy worthy of their destiny. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16