But, finally, when I put the papers aside and sat thinking these things over, the strangeness of it did not matter. What mattered was that I was more utterly alone in the World than I had ever been in all my life. That Claudia was gone beyond reprieve. And I had less reason to live than I had ever had, and less desire. Armand showed no concern at my facing him, and as soon as our eyes met I wished the World were not one black empty ruin of ashes and death. I wished it were fresh and beautiful, and that we were both living and had love to give each other. I wanted to lay down my soul, to find some transcendent pleasure that would obliterate pain and make me utterly forget even myself. Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not denigrate it. I simply forgot it. The almost perfect symmetrical balance of the Claude Monet 1874, The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil—how out of the dense growth of the near bank, a train emerges, as we witness nature in the process of giving way to the forces of civilization. With eternal nature being pitted against the contemporary moment expressing how this painting captures the dawn of a new World, a World of opposition and contradiction. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

As I stood on the sidewalk before the doors of the hotel waiting for the carriage that would take me to meet Armand, I saw the people who walked there—the restless boulevard crowd of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, the hawkers of papers, the carriers of luggage, the drivers of carriages—all these in a new light. Yet, the magnificent paintings of the Louvre still were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone. Without love, all the beauty in the World is reduced to ashes. The principle of monotheism is that beings are infinite, that there is no partial quality in one which can be hypostatized into the whole. God, in the monotheistic concept, is unrecognizable and indefinable; God is not a thing. If beings are created in the likeness of God, one is created as the bearer of infinite qualities. In idolatry beings bows down and submits to the projection of one partial quality in oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center from which living acts of love and reason radiate. One becomes a thing, his neighbor becomes a thing, just as his gods are things. The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, sliver and gold, but I would rather have Jesus than silver and gold—work of being’s hands are inferior to my Lord. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

So many people have mouths but they speak now; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; nether is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like them; so is everyone that trusts in them. “And thus they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness, contrary to the laws of their country and also the laws of God. And whosoever of those who belonged to their band should reveal unto the World of their wickedness and their abominations, reports Helaman 6.23-24. Monotheistic religions themselves have, to a large extent regressed into idolatry. Beings projects their power of love and of reason unto God; one does not feel them any more as one’s own powers, and then one prays to God to give one back some of what one, men and women, have projected unto God. In early Protestantism and Calvinism, the required religious attitude is that beings should feel oneself empty and impoverished and put one’s trust in the grace of God, that is, into the hope that God may return to one part of one’s own qualities, who one has put into God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry in this sense. What is frequently called love is often noting but this idolatrous phenomenon of alienation; only that not God or an idol, but another person is worshipped in the way. The loving person in this type of submissive relationship, projects all his or her love, strength, thought, into the other person, and experiences the loved person as a superior being, finding satisfaction in complete submission and worship. This does not only mean that one fails to experience the loved person as a human being in his or her reality, but that one does not experience one’s self in one’s full reality, as the bearer of productive human powers. Just as in the case of religious idolatry, one has projected all one’s richness into the other person, and experiences this richness not any more as something which is one’s, but as something alien from oneself, deposited in somebody else, with which one can get in touch only by submission to, or submergence in, the other person. The same phenomenon exists in the worshipping submission to a political leader, or to that state. The leader and the state actually are what they are by the consent of the governed. However, they become idols when the individual projects all one’s powers into them and worships them, hoping to regain some of one’s powers by submission and worship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

In Rousseau’s theory of the state, as in contemporary totalitarianism, the individual is supposed to abdicate one’s own rights and to project them unto the state as the only arbiter, which is the kind of behavior we are seeing from the mayor and governor of California in particular at this time. And that is the reason career politicians like Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., who served as the 34t and 39^th Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and from 2011 to 2019 are dangerous because they can basically set up a dictatorships and then pass that same kind of authority on to their successor to the point the people and their votes do not matter because the state has all the power and virtually goes unchallenged. He was also mayor of Oakland, California from 1999-2007, so Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. was able to deeply embed his roots of corruption in California. Furthermore, it did not help the people that Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown Sr. also served as the 32^nd Governor of California from 1959 to 1967. This allowed the Brown’s to run California as if were their family business. For instance, the twin tunnel project to ship water from the Sacramento River to Southern California was actually Pat Brown’s idea, which stated when he was in office and was supposed to take sixty years, and this was a project Jerry Brown also tried to implement. However, environmentalist believe that this $104 billion project would destroy the environment and be too expensive. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

In fascism, which we are seeing a resurgence of with the democrats having a super majority in California and with them being in bed with a low of judges, is a type of Stalinism that leads absolutely to the alienation of individuals who worship the state at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is knowns as: state, class, collective, or what else. Under Jerry Brown and his father Pat Brown an Ethnic cleansing started in San Francisco, California in 1967 and the population of Black went from about 100,000 to 40,000. The Browns red tagged many of the Victorian homes and businesses owned by Blacks and tore them down to put up project-based housing high rises and to expand the freeway. This displaced a lot of Black Americans and lead to the loss of a lot of Black wealth (millions of dollars per household) from the appreciated equity of the property. The ethnic cleansing inspired the 2019 film The Last Black man in San Francisco. Therefore, we can speak of idolatry or alienation not only in relationship to other people, but also in relationship to oneself, when the person is subject to irrational passions. The person who is mainly motivated by one’s lust for power, does not experience oneself any more in the richness and limitlessness of a human being, but one becomes a salve to one partial striving in one, which is projected into external aims, by which one is possessed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The person who is given to the exclusive pursuit of one’s passion for money is possessed by one’s striving for it; money is the idol which one worships and the projection of one isolated power in oneself, one’s greed for it. In this sense, the neurotic person is an alienated person. One’s actions are not one’s own; while one is under the illusion of doing what one wants, one is driven by forces which are separated from one’s self, which work behind one’s back; one is a stranger to oneself, just as one’s fellow beings are a stranger to the individual. One experiences the other and one’s self not as what they really are, but distorted by the unconscious forces which operate in them. The insane person is the absolutely alienated person; one has completely lost oneself as the center of one’s own experience; one has lost the sense of self. What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the love of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalization or irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not experience themselves as the active bearer of one’s own power and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalizations of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not have experience one’s self as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon. Suffice it to say that it seems alienation differs from culture to culture, both in the specific spheres which are alienated, and in the thoroughness and completeness of the process. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of a being to one’s work, to the things one consumes, to the state, to one’s fellow beings, and to oneself. Beings have created a World of things created by beings as it never existed before. They have constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine they built. Yet this whole creation of theirs stands over and above them. One does not feel oneself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which one’s hands have built. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which one unleashes, the more powerless one feels oneself as a human being. One confronts oneself with one’s own forces embodied in things one has created, alienated from oneself. One is owned by one’s creation, and has lost ownership of oneself. One has built a golden calf, and says “these are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt.” However, this is a trap cunningly invented by Satan for your downfall and the body as a tomb dug for your divine soul. Holiness is not necessarily limited to hermits and spiritual teachers; it may also belong to householders. Whether it be the Long or the Short Path, both may be pracitsed in the daily routine of life. The problem is to take advantage of outside help and yet leave the student individually free. Its solution is simple. One can get this help through books written by seers, sages, and philosophers. Those who can only advance by hanging on to a teacher make only a pseudo-advance and one day their house of cards will come tumbling about their ears. However, it is equally true that those who can only progress by dispensing with a teacher, progress father into the morass of ignorance. One alone who can take a teacher’s guidance in a free spirit; who comprehends that while the teacher points out a path, it is for one to strive, toil, and adventure forth; such a being will derive much from one’s discipleship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

When one finds that one can go no farther by oneself, the time has come to look within for more grace or to look without for more guidance. One needs the one to get away from one’s own selfishness or the other to get away from one’s own darkness. There is sometimes conflict between submission to authority and obedience to conscience. The importance of language in an evolving culture is that it provides symbolic forms by means of which we can reveal ourselves and by means of which others stand revealed to us. Communication is a way of understanding each other; if there are no such ways, each of us becomes like the man who, in a dream, find oneself wandering in a foreign country where one can understand nothing of what is being said around one nor feel anything from the person next to one. One’s isolation is great, indeed. During the week end of the Moon landing, a TV reporter interviewed members of the crowd in Central Park just after the landing. One answer to his question of what they were waiting for was: “To see the extravehicular activity.” Now this phrase “extra vehicular activity” gives one pause. Its main word consists of six syllables and is highly technical; it tells, like many technical phrases, what the astronauts are not going to do (extravehicular) rather than what they are going to do. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

The word “activity” may mean any act under the Sun—swimming, flying, crawling, diving, and so forth. There is no poetry in the sentence, no meaning that is not technical, nothing personal. We finally discover the polysyllabic phrase means “to walk on the Moon.” However, that is a poetic phrase. No word of over one syllable, coming straight out of our own lives (from the age of eight months when we learned to walk), a phrase associated with all the romance of the Moon. It is actually more truthful than its scientific parallel in the sense that it reveals not an abstraction but an act that will be done by human beings like you and me. The more technical we become without a parallel development in the meaningfulness of personal communication, the more alienated we also become. Communication is then replaced by communique. The breakdown of communication is a spiritual one. Words get their communicative power from the fact that they participate in symbols. Through drawing meanings together into a Gestalt, a symbol gets a numinous quality which points toward a reality greater than itself. The symbol gives the word its power to carry across to one some meaning from the emotions of another. Symbolic breakdown is, therefore, spiritual tragedy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The symbol always implies more than it states; it is essentially connotative. Thus, words, in so far as they are symbolic, point to more than they specifically can say; what counts is the afterglow, the ripples of meaning that appear like a stone being dropped in a lake, the connotative rather than the denotative aspects of the words. It is a Gestalt similar to that which the poet uses. A form emerges out of the very speaking of words—which is why people tend to become more poetic when they report something under stress. It also must be remembered that in the days before the art of writing was widely used almost all the earliest texts were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone. This entailed wonderful fears of memory which we must admire but it also entailed the possibility of conscious or unconscious alteration of the texts themselves, against which we must guard ourselves. Whether it happened or not, however, one thing was psychologically unavoidable. This was the interpretation of passages, phrases, or single words according to the unconscious complexes governing the minds and controlling the character of those who preserved and passed down the texts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The inevitable consequence is that words which bore one meaning when they were uttered by the original author came bit by bit to receive a modified or altogether different meaning when they had passed through the mouths and pens of scribes and priests. Many fail to perceive that the real battlefield of human life is internal and not external; some who cannot comprehend the unity of Spirit and matter; beings, in short, who had yet to realize that they were virtuous or sinful primarily as their thoughts were virtuous and sinful—these are set up today as the arbiters of how we twenty-first century beings shall live in a World whose circumstances and systems are beyond their own narrow imaginations. The quest indeed has been turned into something impossibly remote from us, something only to be talked about at tea-tables because we cannot implement it. Such a situation is unacceptable to the philosophic student. Better ostracism, abuse, slander, and misunderstanding than this. All this, of course, is exactly contrary to what we have been taught. We are taught that the more specific and limited a word is, the more accurately we talk. More accurately, yes, but not more truthfully. For we tend, with this point of view, to make our language more and more technical, impersonal, objective, until we are talking in purely scientific terms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

This is one legitimate way of communicating, and certainly the way that thrives in a technological age. However, it ends up with computor language; and what I really want to know about my friend as he walks besides me is in the country is as absent as though we were in two vacuum tubes. Beings are not God. There is a fundamental error in making the unity with God to be a unity of nature and not of Grace. The Godly being is untied to God, not however in virtue of one’s essences but by a process of re-creation and regeneration. The mystic who talks vaguely of being one with God must surely know that the experience has not put one in personal management of the Universe. If the mystic really attains a complete identity with the World-Mind, then all the latter’s evolutionary and dissolutionary powers and especially its all-pervading all-knowing character would become the common property of both. However, even the most fully mystic has no such powers and no such character. The frontiers between God and beings cannot be obliterated although the affinity between them can be established. If a being really appreciated one’s own finite littleness and the higher power’s sublime infinity, one would never have the impertinence to claim the attainment of “union with God.” All such talk is irresponsible babble, the careless use of words without semantic awareness of what is being said. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

No human mind can capture the One Life-Power in all its magnitude, and its understanding of itself and its Universe. All it can do is to act as a mirror, in the deepest recesses of its own being, and in its own humble way, of the attributes which it confers on the Absolute from its own limited human point of view. The rest is silence. Although God is inaccessible to beings, beings are not inaccessible to God. The quest for meaning (and moorings) in a seemingly fathomless World can be found in the earliest forms of literature. The Assyrian-Babylonian text Gilgamesh (3000 B.C.), for example, alludes to a futile search for immortality in an absurd, capricious cosmos. A related Babylonian work, called the Poem of Creation, dramatizes a titanic struggle between the forces of chaos (exemplified by the primordial goddess Tiamat) and the forces of order (represented by the upstart deity Marduk). These legends caused me to go over a plan in my mind, a plan on which I was willing to gamble my life with the powerful freedom of a being who truly does not care for that life, who has the extraordinary strength of being willing to die. “Bless be the name of our God; let us sing to his praise, yes, let us give thanks to his holy name, for he doth work righteousness forever,” Alma 26.8. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15