We took a walk among the tall trees. The freedom, immensity, and longevity of the trees was contrasted with our foreboding about the unmanageability of death. Their height and depth, beauty and sensuality are gateways to the cosmic; they are dimensions that petrify as well as compel. After all, what is our entire World to the stars above? What do they think of our tiny planet, I wondered, full of mad juxtaposition, happenstance, and endless struggle, and the deep crazed civilizations sprawled upon the face of it, and held together not by will or faith or communal ambition but by some dreamy capacity of the World’s millions to be oblivious to life’s tragedies and again and again sink into happiness, just as the passengers of that little ship sank into it—as if happiness were as natural to all beings as hunger or sleepiness or love of warmth and fear of the cold. Examine the part played by mechanical routine and mechanical apparatus in one’s day, from the alarm-clock that wakes one to the radio program that put one to sleep. Instead of adding to one’s burden by recapitulating it, think about how the modern machine civilization is a temporal regularity. From the moment of waking, the rhythm of the day is punctuated by the clock. Irrespective of strain or fatigue, despite reluctance or apathy, the household rises close to its set hour. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Tardiness in rising is penalized by extra haste in eating breakfast or in walking to catch the train: in the long run, it may even mean the loss of a job or of advancement in business. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, occur at regular hours and are of definitely limited duration: a million people perform these functions within a very narrow band of time, and only minor provisions are made for those who would have food outside this regular schedule. As the scale of industrial organization grows, the punctuality and regularity of the mechanical regime tend to increase with it: the time-clock enters automatically to regulate the entrance and exit of the worker, while an irregular worker-tempted by the trout in spring streams or ducks on salt meadows—finds that these impulses are as unfavorably treated as habitual drunkenness: if he would retain them, he must remain attached to the less routinized provinces of agriculture. The refractory tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysm of diligence have indeed been tamed. Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and interrelating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own. The schoolteacher, the lawyer, even the doctor with one’s schedule of operations conform their functions to a timetable almost as rigorous as that of the locomotive engineer. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

In the case of childbirth, patience rather than instrumentation is one of the chief requirements for a successful normal delivery and one of the major safeguards against infection in a difficult one. Here the mechanical interference of the obstetrician, eager to resume one’s rounds, has apparently been largely responsible for the current discreditable record of American physicians, utilizing the most sanitary hospital equipment, in comparison with midwives who do not attempt brusquely to hasten the process of nature. While regularity in certain physical functions, like eating and eliminating, may in fact assist in maintaining health, in other matters, like play, pleasures of the flesh, and other forms of recreation the strength of the impulse itself is pulsating rather than evenly recurrent: here habits fostered by the clock or the calendar may lead to dullness and decay. Hence the existence of a machine civilization, completely timed and scheduled and regulated, does not necessarily guarantee maximum efficiency in any sense. Time-keeping established a useful point of reference, and is invaluable for co-ordinating diverse groups and functions which lack any other common frame of acidity. In the practice of an individual’s vocation such regularity may greatly assist concentration and economize. However, to make it arbitrarily rule over human functions is to reduce existence itself to mere time-serving and to spread the shades of the prison house over too large area of conduct. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The regularity that produces apathy and atrophy—that acedia which was the bane of monastic existence, as it is likewise of the army—is as wasteful as the irregularity that produces disorder and confusion. To utilize the accidental, the unpredictable, the fitful is as necessary, even in terms of economy, as to utilize the regular: activities which exclude the operations of chance impulses forfeit some of the advantages of regularity. In short: mechanical time is not an absolute. And a population trained to keep to a mechanical time routine at whatever sacrifice to health, convenience, and organic felicity may well suffer from the strain of that discipline and find life impossible without the most strenuous compensations. The fact that pleasures of the flesh in a modern city is limited, for workers in all grades and departments, to the fatigued hours of the day may add to the efficiency of the working life only by a too-heavy sacrifice in personal and organic relations. Not the least of the blessings promised by the shortening of working hours is the opportunity to carry into bodily play the vigor that has hitherto been exhausted in the service of machines. Next to mechanical regularity, one notes the fact that a good part of the mechanical elements in the day are attempts to counteract the effects of lengthening time and space distances. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The refrigeration of eggs, for example, is an effort to space their distribution more uniformly than the hen herself is capable of doing: the pasteurization of the milk is an attempt to counteract the effect of the time consumed in completing the chain between the cow and the remote consumer. The accompanying pieces of mechanical apparatus do nothing to improve the product itself: refrigeration merely halts the process of decomposition while pasteurization actually robs the mile of some of its value as nutriment. Where it is possible to distribute the population closer to the rural centers where milk and butter and green vegetables are grown, the elaborate mechanical apparatus for counteracting time and space distances may to a large degree be diminished. One might multiply such examples from many departments; they point to a fact about the machine that has not been generally recognized by those quaint apologists for machine-capitalism who look upon every extra expenditure of horsepower and every fresh piece of mechanical apparatus as an automatic net gain in efficiency. I wonder whether the typewriter, the Internet, digital phones, electronic mail, the telephone, social media, and the automobile, though creditable technological achievements have wasted more effort and substance than they have saved, whether they are not to be credited with an appreciable economic loss, because they have increased the pace and the volume of correspondence and communication and travel out of all proportion to the real need. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour reach one’s destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled one to save time had one remained in one’s original situation now—by driving one to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain. One further effect of our closer time co-ordination and our instantaneous communication must be noted here: broken time and broken attention. The difficulties of transport and communication before 1850 automatically acted as a selective screen, which permitted no more stimuli to reach a person than one could handle: a certain urgency was necessary before one received a call from a long distance or was compelled to make a journey oneself: this condition of slow physical locomotion kept intercourse down to a human scale, and under definite control. Nowadays this screen has vanished: the remote is as close as the near; the ephemeral is as emphatic as the durable. While the tempo of the say has been quickened by instantaneous communication the rhythm of the day has been broken: the radio, the telephone, the daily newspaper clamor for attention, and amid the host of stimuli to which people are subjected, it becomes more and more difficult to absorb and cope with it as a whole. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The common being is as subject to these interruptions as the scholar or the being of affairs, and even the weekly period of cessation from familiar tasks and contemplative reverie, which was one of the great contributions of Western religion to the discipline of the personal life, has become an ever remoter possibility. These mechanical assistance to efficiency and cooperation and intelligence have been mercilessly exploited, through commercial and political pressure: but so far—since unregulated and undisciplined—they have been obstacles to the very ends they affect to further. We have multiplied the mechanical demands without multiplying in any degree our human capacities for registering and reacting intelligently to them. With the successive demands of the outside World so frequent and so imperative, without any respect to their real importance, the inner World becomes progressively meager and formless: instead of active selection there is passive absorption ending in the state happily described as addled subjectivity. This could produce anxiety. An element in anxiety is its apparent irrationality. To allow any irrational factors to control them is for some persons more intolerable than for others. It is particularly hard to endure for those who secretly feel in danger of being swamped by irrational contrasting forces within themselves, and who have automatically trained themselves to exercise a strict intellectual control. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Thus they will not consciously tolerate any irrational elements. Besides containing individual motivations this latter reaction involves a cultural factor, inasmuch as our culture places great stress on rational thinking and behavior and regard irrationality, or what may appear as such, as inferior. To a certain extent connected wit this is the last element in anxiety: by its very irrationality anxiety presents an implicit admonition that something within us is out of gear, and therefore it is a challenge to overhaul something within ourselves. Not that we consciously take it as a challenge; but implicitly it is one, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. None of us likes such a challenge; it may be said that we are opposed to nothing so much as to the realization that we must change some attitude of our own. The more hopelessly, however, a person feels trapped in the intricate network of one’s fear an defense mechanism, and the more one has to cling to one’s delusion that one is right and perfect in everything, the more one instinctively rejects any—even if it is only indirect or implicit—insinuation of something wrong in oneself and any need to change. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

In our culture there are four main ways of escaping anxiety: rationalize it; deny it; narcotize it; avoid thoughts, feelings, impulses and situations which might arouse it. One method—rationalization—is the best explanation for evasion of responsibility. It consists in turning anxiety into a rational fear. If the psychic value of such a shift is disregarded we might imagine that not much is changed by it. The over-solicitous mother is in fact just as concerned about her children, regardless of whether she admits to having anxiety or whether she interprets her anxiety as a justified fear. One can any number of times, however, make the experiment of telling such a mother that her reaction is not a rational fear but an anxiety, implying that it is disproportionate to the existing danger and involves personal factors. In response she will refute this insinuation and will put all her energy into proving you entirely wrong. Did Stephanie not catch this infectious disease in the nursery? Did Mike not break his leg climbing trees? Has not a man tried not recently to lure children by promising them candy in Midtown Sacramento? Is her own behavior not entirely dictated by affection and duty? Whenever we meet such a vigorous irrational attitudes we may be sure that the attitude defended has important functions for the individual. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Instead of feeling a helpless pray to her emotions, such a mother feels she can actively do something about the situation. Instead of recognizing a weakness she can feel proud of her high standards. Instead of admitting that irrational elements pervade her attitude she feels entirely rational and justified. Instead of seeing and accepting a challenge to change something within herself she can go on shifting the responsibility to the outside World and thereby escape facing her own motivations. Of course she has to pay the price for these momentary advantages by never getting rid of her worries. Particularly do the children have to pay the price. However, she does not realize that, and in the last analysis she does not want to realize it, because deep down she clings to the delusion that she can change nothing within herself and yet manage to have all the benefits that would ensure from a change. The same principle holds true for all tendencies to believe that anxiety is a rational fear, whatever its content may be: fear of childbirth, of low-income housing, of diseases, of errors in diet, or your retirement check being stolen, of catastrophes, of impoverishment. We will discuss the other aspects of anxiety in future sessions. Nonetheless, sometimes anxiety is a story about our most instructive liberation because thy take our cray condition (within the boundless) seriously. Anxiety harkens to that “something more” that sustains even as it alarms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is whether life is or is not worth living. When I consider the short duration of my life, I am terrified and wonder that I am here rather than there now rather than then. This is an attempt to understand the fundamental conditions of human existence to propose response-able, that is, thoughtful, deeply searching responses to those conditions. Sometimes we attract the same types of people in our lives and want desperately to escape from them and that represents a total giving over to their infinitude axis. With increasing degrees of identification and mergence, one will discover the chaos that buttresses that link. One may discover that a thorough surrender has no linguistic or cultural context within which to orient oneself, no consoling appeals, but is an absurd harrowing spin. By desperately trying to make someone into person you find fascinating, one will discover that this is a totally different being, and it will eventually drag one into cynicism and despair. When one overcomes dazzlement, the price is despair. The way to resolve the situation is for the part to realize that one has gone too far and that the limited World of flaws and foibles must be addressed. The former person may have loved you. The latter person may have inspired you, but overwhelmed you. This means it is time to search anew. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The implication is that one is caught between the banal (limited), and the fanatical (transcendent). The problem is that neither of these experiences was very fulfilling. The banal is oppressive and the fanatical is disorienting. Indeed, both are reactions to one another. The banal is a defense against the intensity of the fanatical, and the fanatical, is a defense against the devitalization of the banal. When a person has to beg and plead for you to move on and leave that alone, that is very sad. That means they feel your presence is intolerable, overpowering, and dangerous. It seals off the deeper wisdom of human history. In ancient Greek civilization, there is the myth of Prometheus, a Titan living on Mount Olympus, who saw that human beings were without fire. His stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind is taken henceforth by the Greeks as the beginning of civilization, not only in cooking and in the weaving of textiles, but in philosophy, science, drama, an in culture itself. However, the important point is that Zeus was outraged. He decreed that Prometheus be punished by being bound to Mount Caucasus, where a vulture was to come each morning and eat away his liver which would grow again at night. This element in the legend, incidentally, is a vivid symbol of the creative process. How we treat others is how we will be treated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The two schools of thought, one of which says that spiritual attainment depends on self-effort and the other that it depends wholly upon the Grace of God, do not really clash, if their claims are correctly and impartially understood. When a being begins one’s spiritual quest, it is solely by one’s own strivings that one makes one’s initial progress. The time comes, however, when this process seems to stop and when one seems to stagnate. One has to come to the end of a stage which was really a preparatory one. The stagnation indicates that the path of self-effort is no longer sufficient and that one must now enter upon the path of reliance upon Grace. This is because in the earlier stage, the Ego was the agent for all one’s spiritual activities, whilst it provided the motives which impelled one into these activities. However, the Ego can never be really sincere in desiring its own destruction, nor can it ever draw from its own resources the power to rise above itself. So it must reach this point where it ceases self-effort and surrenders itself to the higher power which may be variously named God or the Higher Self, and relies on that power for further progress. However, because the aspirant is living in a human form, the higher power can reach one best through finding a living outlet which is also in a human form. So it bestows grace upon one partly as a reward and partly as a consequence of one’s own preparatory efforts by leading one to such an outlet, which is none other than a Master or Guide in the flesh. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

No being is wholly saved by own’s own effort alone. If one fails to make effort, nor can any Master save one. Thus, if introduced at the proper stage, the claims of both schools are correct. There is little place today as ever for the spiritual individualist, the being who can betray oneself and deny truth for the sake of peaceably steeling down in one of society’s organized groups or established institutions. The climate is hostile to one. One must remain a lone thinker, self-exiled, paying a price but getting one’s money’s worth. The independent mind which does not wish to commit itself to any creed or group or cult must accept its loneliness as the price of its independence. Nutrient power is perhaps best illustrated by the normal parents care for his or her children. It is a form of power not only because the child, in one’s younger years, needs our effort and attention, but all our lives we get pleasure out of exerting ourselves from time to time for the sake of the other. Obviously a good deal of this kind of power is necessary and valuable in relations with friends and loves ones. It is the power that is given by one’s care for the other; we wish one well. At its best, teaching is a good example. Statesmanship, again, at its best, also shows element of nutrient power. This is expressed in the projection of the political leader of parental images (the czar as “Little Father”; the “father image” given to the American president). #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Nutrient power comes out of a concern for the welfare of the group for which the statesman carries responsibility. It is the constructive aspect of political and diplomatic power. Such a person will claim no essential superiority over other beings; on the contrary, one will plainly admit that they, too, may attain the same state of inspiration which one possess. President Trump confessed, repeatedly, “I am only a human being like unto yourselves. However, revelations are made to me and I want to eliminate poverty and make America better than it has ever been.” An utterly honest appraisal of what enlightenment and liberation really are both in experience and idea is still needed. Is it given to any human being to express one’s higher self constantly and without interruption of one’s ego? There is a sphere about which the most confused ideas exist or else it has been entirely misunderstood. Enlightenment is both a bestowal by grace and achievement by self. Enlightening, philosophically found, is both an experience and an understanding. It is a state attained by very few and only after a great struggle. Awareness is not enough to describe full enlightenment. Knowingness includes it but goes farter and is hence a better term. There is in one now a translucency of mind which gives all things, all persons, all events, a deeper diviner significance. Life henceforth has a wonderful and beautiful meaning. “Yea, Lord, I know that thou speakest the truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie,” reports Ether 3.12. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15