His eyes moved gently to engage mine. However, he said nothing. The pain of his face was terrible. It was softened and desperate with pain and on the verge of some terrible explicit emotion he would not be able to control. He was in fear of that emotion. I was not. He was feeling my pain with that great spellbinding power of his which surpassed mine. I was not feeling his pain. It did not matter to me. Lestat, forever 20, is like a client at middle age—beset by dilemmas. On the one hand, he fears the freedom polarity of his nature—his potential for lust, greed, and power mongering; on the other hand, he dreads the limitation polarity—his entrapment by ignorance, despair, and death. With my help, he is able to re-experience these agitations, see what they are about, and emerge from the anew. What does this newness mean? It means decreased fear, increased appreciation of complexity, and increased appreciation of the choice within complexity. “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed,” reports Dr. Sigmund Freud. I wondered, if I shut my eyes, would this realm of tiny things consume the rooms around me, and would I, like Gulliver, awake to discover myself bound hand and foot, an unwelcomed giant? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Therapists belong to a strange profession. It is partly religion. Since the time of Paracelsus in the Renaissance the physician—and afterward the psychiatrist and psychological therapist—has taken on the mantle of the priest. We cannot deny that we who are therapist deal with people’s moral and spiritual questions and that we fill the role of father-confessor or mother-confessor as part of our armamentarium, as shown in Dr. Freud’s position behind and unseen by the person confessing. It makes beings responsible for their own lives while duly honouring the helps and influences outside one. One must rely on the force of one’s aspiration and devotion, work and discipline instead of leaning on guru or avatar or turning primarily to dry academic scholarship and depending on book learning for final judgments. The master is not rejected but then one is not given the place of God. I deeply admire the genius and humbly respect the attainment of each guru, but do not feel that it is proper to let one, or any other person I so far know, have a controlling influence over me. Therapy is also partly science. Dr. Freud’s contribution was to make therapy to some extent objective, and thus to make it teachable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

When it is hard to form a correct judgment by oneself, the wisdom of consulting another person becomes obvious. However, if one consults the wrong person, one gets wrong advice. One’s conviction that one knows what is right does not make it necessarily so. One is unable to escape from the need of judging the other’s advice. So in the end one has to practise some degree of self-reliance. If one refuses to seek and cling to the human personality of any Master, but resolves to keep all the strength of one’s devotion for the divine impersonal Self back of one’s own, that will not bar one’s further progress. It, to, is a way whereby the goal can be successfully reached. However, it is a harder way. Be a disciple if you must but do not be a sectarian disciple. Keep away from such narrow alleys. Therapy is partly—an inseparable part—friendship. This friendship, of course, is likely to be more contentious than the familiar camaraderie of social relationships. Therapist best assist their patients by evoking their resistances. Even those in the general public who have not entered therapy know this beneficial struggle from published case studies and from popular films like An Unmarried Woman and Ordinary People and Home Again. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Both an inspired church and a qualified master have their place but it is only a limited one. Beyond those limits, nothing outside of one’s divine soul can really help the spiritual seeker. For its grace alone saves an enlightens one. The religious being who depends on a church for one’s salvation thereby delays its. The mystical aspirant who depends on a master for one’s self-realization also delays it. One will have to learn to rely less and less upon other people for one’s spiritual and Worldly advancement, more and more upon one’s inner self. Human beings need some new mixture of professions. Throe physic to the dogs. I will have none of it. For psychic—no matter how many forms of Valium or Librium we invent—will not basically confront the rooted sorrow or raze out the written troubles of the brain. Ah love, let us be true to one another…the World, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams so various, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. Now, in the age of information, humanity feels itself bereft of faith for their dying culture. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

A loss of this magnitude leaves people en masses without any reliable structure; each one of us feels like a passenger on a yacht, loose upon the ocean, having no compass or sense of direction, with a storm coming up. It is any wonder, then, that psychology, the discipline which tells us about ourselves, and psychotherapy, which is able to cast some light on how we should live, burgeoned in our century? It is well to seek and accept guidance. When you become to concentrated on a single source of guidance, the error and exaggeration creep in. The real tragedy for many people is that they have not take themselves seriously because no one else has. The hope for these beings is that now they are asserting that they really are human, and are demanding the right to human dignity without the ability to respect and cherish their own humanity in spite of pervasive rejection. Whatever else may be said about procreation, it is a special demonstration of one’s power, an extension of one’s self, a production of a new member of one’s kind, a new being. Many women only experience confidence when they have a baby. However, there is also in men the experience that their manhood is affirmed. The sense of pride of paternity is a cliché, but should not for that reason be derogated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Some people have no active belief that they deserve to be helped, but seem to accept their problems fatalistically, each hardship being taken as another expression of inevitable doom. Therapists judge some patients unanalyzable because it is their belief that one does not have enough motivation and cannot generate enough inner conflict about their problems to engage in the long-term process of working them through. These individuals may not repress their problems, but to others are not convinced that they are willing to do anything at all about them. However, the label untreatable refers not to a state of the patient but to the limitations of an individual psychotherapist’s methods. It is important that a psychotherapist try to find the special kind of treatment that will unlock the door to the problems of this particular being. It is not your function in life to please everybody, to be passive, nor to accept whatever form of victimization life might bring you. Beneath the surface, it may be that some are profoundly helpless, apathetic, and chronically depressed. However, such diagnostic statements do not help us much since anyone who is being victimized would be similarly depressed. We have to see more of the inner dynamics of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

However, it seems like in this age of information, we are so willing to write everything off as a mental problem, without understanding anything about the individual or the situation they are enduring. It is hard for a person to be happy and not complain when they are being abused and labeling a person like that insane, without understanding the problem could be dangerous. It may not be that an abused person needs medication, it could be that they need to be relocated or maybe law enforcement is needed to remove the threat these individuals are facing. Putting someone on medication unnecessarily could be dangerous when there is something else going on in their life that needs to be correct. Not all problems are the fault of the person enduring them. Sometimes there is something wrong in their home or community that needs to be addressed. Still, one is perfectly entitled to clear one’s own pathway to the Spirit for oneself, and without the help of any contemporary, any neighbour, or any leader who lived in the past centuries. However, will this independence and this isolation be a gain or loss? The answer must always be an individual one: it cannot always be one or the other alone. It depends on what sort of a being one is, what sort of teaching and what sort of teacher one has access to. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

However, parallel with this practice of self-reliance and this assumption of self-responsibility we may receive the help of a more advance person if it is available to us. It should of course be received only if it leaves our freedom untouched and only if it is a competent. Thus we do not take advantage of such help to sink into lazy forgetfulness of work that must be done upon and by ourselves. There is room in life for the element of revelation equally as for that of realization. Guidance or instruction from another person is not to be rejected merely because it is external, but only if it emanated from a dubious source. If an aspirant is going to ignore all the signposts, one will wander around for a very long time before one gets started on the right road. Not knowing where to find the right path, one may easily enter by mistake on the wrong path. Indeed, one may take several false steps before one reaches surety or, more often, some right ones mixed up with some wrong steps. And not having the strength for the true ideals, one may slip many a time. Thus one’s quest may need harder efforts and take a longer course than the quest of a competently guided disciple. In the first place, we acquire things with money; we are accustomed to this and take it for granted. However, actually, this is a most peculiar way of acquiring things. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Money represents labor and effort in an abstract form; not necessarily my labor and effort, since I can have acquired it by inheritance, by fraud, by luck, or any number of ways. However, even if I have acquired it by my effort (forgetting for the moment that my effort might not have brought me the money were it not for the fact that I employed beings), I have acquired it in a specific way, by a specific kind of effort, corresponding to my skills and capacities, while, in spending, the money is transformed into an abstract form of labor and can be exchanged against anything else. Provided I am in the possession of money, no effort or interest of mine is necessary to acquire something. If I have the money, I can acquire an exquisite painting, even though I may not have any appreciation for art; I can buy the best phonograph, even thought I have no musical taste; I can buy a library, although I use it only for the purpose of ostentation. I can buy an education, even though I have no use for it expect as an additional social aspect. I can even destroy the painting or the books I bought, and aside from a loss of money, I suffer no damage. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Mere possession of money gives me the right to acquire and to do with my acquisition whatever I like. The human way of acquiring would be to make an effort qualitatively commensurate with what I acquire. The acquisition of bread and clothing would depend on no other premise than that of being alive; the acquisition of books and paintings, on my effort to understand them and my ability to use them. How this principle could be applied practically is not the point to be discussed here. What matters is that the way we acquire things is separated from the way in which we use them. The alienating function of money in the process of acquisition and consumption has been beautifully described. Money transforms the real human and natural powers into merely abstract ideas, and hence imperfections, and on the other hand it transforms the real imperfections and imaginings, the powers which only exist in the imagination of the individual into real powers. It transforms loyalty into vice, vice into virtue, the slave into the master, the master into the slave, ignorance into reason, and reason into ignorance. One who can buy valour is valiant although one be cowardly. “For the love of money, people will steal from their mother. For the love of money, people will rob their own brother. Money changes people sometimes. Don’t let money fool. Don’t let money change you,” reports The O’Jays (For the Love of Money). #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Assume beings as beings, and their relation to the World as a being, and you can exchange love only for love, confidence only for confidence, and so forth. If one wishes to enjoy art, one must be an artistically trained person; if one wished to have influence on other people, you must be a person who has a really stimulating and furthering influence on other people. Every one of your relationships to beings and to nature must be a definite expression of your real, individual life corresponding to the object of your will. If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. It is quite inevitable for the mystic, overwhelmed by this tremendous experience to say “I am God!” However, once one has entered philosophy and passed through semantic discipline and cross-examined one’s of words in thinking and speech, one will know that their term “God” is too extravagant to use in such an unqualified way. For if one means by that the World-Mind, then one lacks its powers and knowledge. There is a type of mysticism calling for criticism. It is uncritically pantheistic and it is the conception of God in living form. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

In every being, there is a divine soul and we can know and recognize it. However, it is impossible for us to know God. We can discover that God exists and that the Soul exists but not go farther. The mystic who claims to have achieved absolute identity with God is either speaking quite loosely or taking something to be God which is not. What the mystic does attain is the feeling of being possessed by the Overself. Just as there is such a things as demoniac obsession, so there is such a thing as divine possession. However, this does not entitle one to proclaim oneself God. This claim could not arise if the word God had been subjected to semantic analysis, so that one knew what one was talking about. Few individuals are properly qualified to form a correct conception of the successful mystic’s experience. If in the joy of one’s ecstasy one chooses to call it the union with God, one does so because preconceived beliefs leads one to expect such a union. However, when scientifically examined from inside no less than from outside—which means that the examiner can thoroughly know what one is talking about and appraise it at its truth worthy only if one has been both a practising mystic and, above all, an initiated philosopher oneself—it will be found that the ecstasy mingles personal and emotional reaction to the awareness of the divine presence with the presence of itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The neurotic person who lives among us, with the conflicts actually moves one, with one’s anxieties, one’s sufferings and the many difficulties one has in one’s relations with others as well as with oneself. We should not be concerned with any particular type or types of neuroses, but focus on the character structure which recurs in nearly all neurotic persons of our times in one or another form. Emphasis is put on the actually existing conflicts and the neurotic’s attempts to solve them, on one’s actually existing anxieties and the defenses one had built up against them. This emphasis on the actual situation does not mean that we discard the idea that essentially neuroses develop out of early childhood experiences. However, we differ from many psychoanalytic writers inasmuch as we do not consider it justified to focus our attention on childhood in a sort of one-sided fascination and to consider later reactions essentially as repetitions of earlier ones. I want to show that the relation between childhood experiences and later conflicts is much more intricate than is assumed by those psychoanalysts who proclaim a simple cause and effect relationship. Though experiences in childhood provide determining conditions for neuroses they are nevertheless not the only case of later difficulties. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13