Glimpses have been had more often than most people believe but enlightenment that is continuous and always present is rare. To have the intermittent experience of the inner self is one thing, but to have the continuous experience of it is quite another. I was still in a pure mortal state of shock as we entered the large marble-tiled lobby. In a haze, I saw the sumptuous furnishings, the immense vases of flowers, and the smartly dressed tourists drifting past. Patiently, the tall brown-haired man who has been my former self guided me to the elevator, and we went up in swooshing silence to a high floor. I was unable to tear my eyes off him, yet my heart was throbbing from what had only just taken place. In the translation of technical improvements into social processes, the machine has undergone a perversion: instead of being utilizes as an instrument of life, it has tended to become an absolute. Power and social control, once exercised chiefly by military groups who had conquered and seized the land, have gone since the seventeenth century to those who have organized and controlled and owned the machine. The machine has been valued because—it increased the employment of machines. An such employment was the source of profits, power, and wealth to the new ruling classes, benefits which hitherto gone to traders or to those who monopolized the land. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Jungles and tropical islands were invaded during the nineteenth century for the purpose of making new converts to the machine: explorers like Stanley endured incredible tortures and hardships in order to bring the benefits of the machine to inaccessible regions tapped by the Congo: insulated countries like Japan were entered forcibly at the point of the gun in order to make way for the trader: natives in Africa and the Americas  were saddled with false debts or malicious taxes in order to give them an incentive to work and to consumer in the machine fashion—and thus to supply an outlet for the goods of American and Europe, or to ensure the regular gathering of runner and lac. The injunction to use machines was so imperative, from the standpoint of those who owned them and whose means and place in society depended upon them, that it placed upon the worker a special burden, the duty to consume machine-products, while it paced upon the manufacturer and the engineer the duty of inventing products weak enough and shoddy enough—like the safety razor blade or the common run of American woolens—to lend themselves to rapid replacement. The great heresy to the machine was to believe in an institution or a habit of action or a system of ideas that would lessen this service to the machines: for under capitalist direction the aim of mechanism is not to save labor but to eliminate all labor expect that which can be channeled at a profit through the factory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

At the beginning, the machine was an attempt to substitute quantity for value in the calculus of life. Between the conception of the machine and its utilization a necessary psychological and social process was skipped: the stage of evolution. Thus a steams turbine may contribute thousands of horsepower, and the speedboat may achieve speed: but these facts, which perhaps satisfy the engineer, do not necessarily integrate them in society. Railroads may be quicker than canalboats, and a gas lamps may be brighter than a candle: but it is only in terms of human purpose and in relation to a human and social scheme of values that speed or brightness have any meaning. If one wishes to absorb the scenery, the slow motion of a canalboat may  be preferable to the fast motion of a BMW motor car; and if one wishes to appreciate the mysterious darkness and the strange forms of a natural cave, it is better to penetrate it with uncertain step, with the assistance of a torch or a lantern than to descend into it by means of an elevator, as in the famous caves of Virginia, and to have the mystery entirely erased by a grand display of electric lights—a commercialized perversion that puts the whole spectacle upon the low dramatic level of a cockney amusement park. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Because the process of social evaluation was largely absent among the people who developed the machine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the machine raced like an engine without a governor, tending to overheat its own bearings and lower its efficiency without any compensatory gain. This left the process of evaluation to groups who remained outside the machine milieu, and who unfortunately often lacked the knowledge and the understanding that would have made their criticisms more pertinent. The important thing to bear in mind is that the failure to evaluate the machine and to integrate it in society as a whole was not due simply to defects in distributing incomes, to errors of management, to the greed and narrow-mindedness of the industrial leaders: it was also due to a weakness of the entire philosophy upon which the new techniques and inventions were grounded. The leaders and enterprises of the period believed that they had avoided the necessity for introducing values, except those which were automatically recorded in profits and prices. They believed that the problem of justly distributing goods could be sidetracked by creating an abundance of them: that the problem of applying one’s energies wisely could be cancelled out simply by multiplying them: in short, that most of the difficulties that has hitherto vexed humankind has a mathematical or mechanical—that is a quantitative—solution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The belief that values could be dispensed with constituted the new system of values. Values, divorced from the current processes of life, remained the concern of those who reacted against the machine. Meanwhile, the current processes justified themselves solely in terms of quantity production and cash results. When the machine as a whole overspeeded and purchasing power failed to keep pace with dishonest overcapitalization and exorbitant profits—then the whole machine went suddenly into reverse, stripped its gears, and came to a standstill: a humiliating failure, a dire social loss. One is confronted, then, by the fact that the machine is ambivalent. It is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression. It has economized human energy and it has misdirected it. It has created a wide framework of order and it has produced muddle and chaos. It has nobly served human purposes and it has distorted and denied them. The authentic innocence of the nonviolent person is the source of one’s power. The genuine rather than pseudo quality of the innocence, at least in the examples I have given, is attested by the facts, first, that the nonviolence does not involve any blocking off of awareness. Second, it does not involve the renouncing of responsibility. Third, its purpose is not to gain something for the individual oneself but for one’s community. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Nonviolent power acts as a goad to rulers’ ethics, a living rebuke to the smugness of their establishment. Members of the ruling class cannot turn blindly away from the nonviolent one, for one is obviously suffering and, by this, dramatizing the issue. When it is authentic, nonviolence has a religious dimension, since by its very nature it transcends the human forms of power. It seems to be the fact, however, that for every authentic form of nonviolent power there are dozens of unauthentic attempts to claim the role. These different kinds of power are obviously all present in the same person at different times. Many a business person who exercises manipulative or competitive power at work takes on nutrient power when one comes home to one’s family. The question—and it is a moral one—is the proportion of each kind of power in the total spectrum of the personality. No one can escape experiencing, in desire and in action, all the different types of power, and only self-righteous rigidity leads one to claim that one is immune from any of them. The goal for human development is to learn to use these different kinds of power in ways adequate to the given situation. When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. However, that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. #RanolphHarris 6 of 14

Artist are fear for they are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent. They love to emerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form outside of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always pus on to newer Worlds. Thus are they the creators of the uncreated conscience of the race. This requires an intensity of emotion, a heightened vitality—for is not the vital forever in opposition to death? We could call this intensity by many different names: I choose to call it rage. This rage is necessary to ignite the poet’s passion, to call forth one’s abilities, to bring together in ecstasy one’s flamelike insights, that one may surpass oneself in one’s poems. The rage is against injustice, of which there is certainly plenty in our society. However, ultimately it is rage against the prototype of all injustice—death. Do not just bless us, cruse us with your fierce tears. Some of us have to confront death and in some way accept it. However, we also have to express the eternally insurgent spirit—and as a result this will create a piercing elegance in your life. This rage has nothing at all to do with rational concepts of death, in which we stand outside the experience of death and make objective, statistical comments about it. That always has to do with someone else’s death, not our own. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

We all know that each generation, whether of leaves or grass or human beings or any living things, must die in order for a new generation be born. I am speaking of death in a different sense. A child has a dog, and the dog dies. The child’s grief is mixed with deep anger. If someone tries to explain death in the objective, evolutionary way to one—everything dies, and dogs die sooner than most beings—one may well strike out against the explainer. The child probably knows all that anyway. Ones real sense of loss and betrayal comes from the fact that one’s love for one’s dog and the dog’s devotion to one are now gone. It is the personal, subjective experience of death of which I am speaking. As we grow older we learn how to understand each other better. Hopefully, we learn also to love more authentically. Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age. However, at the highest point in the development of that wisdom, we will be blotted out. No longer will we see the trees turning scarlet in the autumn. No longer will we see the grass pushing up so tenderly in the Spring. Each of us will become only a memory that will grow fainter every year. This is the most difficult truth. What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are vulnerable, none is safe. And whence is courage. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

So one who strongly feels, behaves. The very bird, grown taller as one sings, steels one from straight up Though one is captive, one mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy. This is mortality, this is eternity. Thus mortality is at last brought into antiphony with its opposite, eternity. Existence is infinite, not to be defined; and though it seems but a bit of wood in your hand, to crave as you please, it is not to be played with and laid down. Abide at the center of your being for the more you leave it, the less you learn. We have a responsibility to some profound searching of the soul, and the integration of self-World relationships, be they soothing or contrary. The neurotic may make a conscious decision to overcome one’s anxiety. A girl, for example, who was tormented by anxiety, particularly concerning burglars, consciously decided to disregard the anxiety, to sleep alone in the attic, to walk alone in the empty house. The first dream she brought to analysis revealed several variations of this attitude. It contained several situations which in fact were frightening, but which each time she faced with bravery. In one of them she heard footsteps in the garden at night, stepped out on the balcony and called “Who’s there?’ She succeeded in losing her fear of burglars, but nothing was changed in the factors provoking her anxiety, other consequences of the still-existing anxiety remained. She continued to be withdrawn and timid, she felt unwanted and could not settle down to any constructive work. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Very often there is no such conscious decision in neurotics. Frequently the process goes on automatically. The difference from the normal, however, does not lie in the degree of consciousness of the decision, but in the result attained. All that a neurotic can attain by pulling oneself together is to lose a special manifestation of anxiety, as the girl lost her fear concerning burglars. I do not mean to undervaluate such a result. It may have a practical value and may also have a psychic value in strengthening self-esteem. However, since such results are usually over-estimated it is necessary to point out the negative side. (Dr. Freud has always stressed this point in emphasizing that the disappearance of symptoms is not a sufficient indication of a cure.) Not only does the essential dynamics of the personality remain unchanged, but when the neurotic loses a conspicuous manifestation of one’s existing disturbances one loses at the same time a vital stimulus to tackle them. The process of ruthlessly marching over an anxiety plays a great role in many neuroses and is not always recognized for what it is. The aggressiveness, for instance, which many neurotics display in certain situations is often taken as a direct expression of an actual hostility, while it may be primarily such a reckless marching over an existing timidity, under the pressure of feeling attacked. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

While some hostility is usually present, the neurotic may greatly overdo the aggression one really feels, one’s anxiety provoking one to overcome one’s timidity. If this is overlooked there is danger of mistaking recklessness for veritable aggression. For many people the relating of rebellion to religion will be a hard truth. It brings with it the final paradox. In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents. Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been the same person.  Sōkrátēs was a rebel, and he was sentenced to drink hemlock. Jesus was a rebel, and she was crucified. Lestat was a rebel and he was killed by his own daughter. Joan of Arc was a rebel, and she was burned at the stake. Queen Akasha was a rebel and she was decapitated. Yet each of these figures and hundred like them, though ostracized by their contemporaries, were recognized and worshiped by the following ages as having made the most significant creative contributions in ethics and religion to civilization. Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insight into divinity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The teachings that led to the saints who rebelled deaths raised the ethical and spiritual levels of their societies. They were aware that Zeus, the jealous god of Mount Olympus, would no longer do. Hence Lestat stands for a religion of compassion. They rebelled against Yahweh, the primitive tribal god of the Hebrews who gloried in the deaths of thousands of Philistines. In place of him came the new visions of Amos and Isiah and Jeremiah of the god of love and justice. Their rebellion was motivated by new insights into the meaning of godliness. They rebelled against God in the name of the God beyond God. The continuous emergences of the God beyond God is the ark of creative courage in the religious sphere. Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy n the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new World. This is creative courage, however, minor or fortuitous our creations may be. We can then say, Welcome, O life! We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of the race. The higher the peak one climbs, the lonelier the trail becomes. There is a paradox here for the loneliness exists outside the body, not inside the heart, and the more it grows outside the less it is felt inside. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

The quest is to be walked alone. Yet although this means that one must have a solitary and creedless path if the Word is to be said, the Touch is to come, the Glimpse is to be seen, or the Feeling of the presence is to enter awareness, the gracious revelation is the sacred compensation. Because of the soul’s own infinitude, its expressions in art and culture, its manifestations in society and industry, will always be infinitely varied. If we find the contrary to exist among us today, it is because we have lost the soul’s inspiration and forfeited our spiritual birthright. The monotonous uniformity of our cities, the uncreative sameness of our society, the mass-produced opinions of our culture, and the standardized products of our immobilized mentalities reveal one thing glaringly—our cramping inner poverty. The being who possesses a spark of individuality must today disregard the rule of conformity and go one’s own way in appalling starving loneliness amid this lack of creativeness, this dearth of aspiration. In the end one must inwardly walk alone—as must everyone ese however beloved—since God allows no one to escape this price. Emotional union with the Overself is insufficient, fugitive ecstasies are not the final accomplishment. Better than both is the unshakeable serenity of the being. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

As one climbs toward the ideal one find oneself drawing farther and farther away from one’s fellows who herd on the plains below. That which draws one to itself, also isolates one from others. One may wander through the low haunts of life, seeking the smiling figures of Fortune and Love. One may go, too, into the higher abodes of better people. In both places one finds illusion and frustration. So it comes about that one ceases one’s wandering and sits silently by a lone hearth. One knows then what one has always dimly suspected.  A true soul will disdain to be moved expect by what natively commands it, though it should go sad and solitary in search of its master a thousand years. I wish you the best deliverance in that contest to which every soul must go alone. If one is really to attain Truth, one will have to learn how to stand solidly by oneself, how to live within oneself, and how to be satisfied with one’s inner purpose as one’s only companion. “And there will I bless thee and thy seed, and raise up unto me of thy seed, and of the seed of thy brother, and they who shall go with thee, a great nation. And there shall be none greater than the nation which I will raise up unto me of thy see, upon all the face of the Earth. And thus I will do unto thee because this long time ye have cried unto me,” reports Ether 1.43. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14