My song was the only sad note in Heaven, and yet the sadness was transfigured immediately into harmony, into a form of psalm or canticle, into hymn of praise and wonder and gratitude. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet. We raise our heads over the face of the Earth, smiling into the Sun, and declare life is good. Once we realize that we need prosperity, we also realize that anything that works against continued prosperity is bad. Disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is alive, and death cuts prosperity off coldly. Beings transcend death not only by continuing to feed their appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for one’s life, some kind of larger scheme into which one fits: one may believe one ha fulfilled God’s purpose, or done one’s duty to one’s ancestors or family, or achieved something which has enriched humankind. This is how beings assure the expansive meaning of one’s life in the face of real limitations of the body; the immortal self can take very spiritual forms, and spirituality is not a simple reflex of hunger and fear. It is an expression of the will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because one has lived, has emerged on it, and has worked, suffered, and transcended. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

If not for ourselves, then at least in the larder scheme of things, we want to know that our lives have somehow mattered, that is has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some way. Culture itself is sacred, since it is the religion that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Culture is in this sense supernatural, and all systematizations of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise beings above nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the Universe more than merely physical things count. If we seek to avoid evil and assure our eternal prosperity, we are living a fantasy for which there is no scientific evidence so far. Id the fantasy is a harmless one, that would be all right. Since beings must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of beings. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

At the gateway that leads from the Middle Ages into the modern World stands Science (which later became the spirit of the Enlightenment), Protestantism, and Capitalism. At first glance, the Spirit of Protestantism would seem to have very little to do with the of the New Science, since in matters religious Protestantism placed all the weight of its emphasis upon the irrational datum of faith, as against the imposing rational structures of medieval theology, and there is Luther’s famous curse upon “the whore, Reason.” In secular matters, however—and particularly in its relation toward nature—Protestantism fitted in very well with the New Science. By stripping away the wealth of images and symbols from medieval Christianity, Protestantism unveiled nature as a realm of objects hostile to the spirit and to be conquered by puritan zeal and industry. Thus Protestantism, like science, helped carry forward that immense project of modern beings: the despiritualization of nature, the emptying of it all the symbolic images projected upon it by the human psyche. With Protestantism beings that long modern struggle, which reaches its culmination in the twentieth century, to strip humans naked. To be sure, in all of the aim was progress, and Protestantism did succeed in raising the religious consciousness to a higher level of individual sincerity, soul searching, and strenuous inwardness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The object of ritual is to secure full life and to escape from evil. One can read anthropology for years—even the very best anthropology—without ever really understanding what beings are trying to do in society. There are so many fact, so many strange customs, and the give a picture so complex and overflowing that there does not seem to be a center anywhere, and so we cannot get any conceptual grip on the phenomenon. However, the Universal human ambition is the achievement of prosperity—the good life. To satisfy this craving, only beings could create that most powerful concept which has mad them heroic and brought them utter tragedy—the invention and practice of ritual, which is first and foremost a technique for promoting the good life and averting evil. Let us not rush over these words: ritual is a technique for giving life. The thing is momentous: throughout vast ages of prehistory of humankind imagined that it could control life! We scoff at the idea because we do not believe life can be controlled by charms, spells, and magic. However, just that we do not believe in the efficacy of the technique is no reason for overlooking the momentous place that ritual has had in the life of humankind.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Human beings were impoverished in order to come face to face with their God and the severe and inexplicable demands of their faith; but in the process they were stripped of all the mediating rites and strict and rigid doctrines that could make this confrontation less dangerous to their psychic balance. The fact is that primitive beings imagined they could transfer life from one thing to another, that one could, for example, take the spirit-power that resided in the scalp of an enemy and, by proper dancing and chanties, transfer that life from its former owner to the new one. Or, in the famous totemic increase ceremonies of the Australian aborigines, primitive beings imagined that by going through the motions of imitating animal birther that could increase the number of kangaroos, emus, grubs in the World. The technique was so precise that the aborigine could even prescribe the color of the kangaroos—brown, say, rather than gray. Or again, the aim of the technique could be general and vast, and make the renovation of the whole Universe, the Sun, and all the Earth. Or finally, ritual could generate not only bears or yams, or the life of the whole Universe, but the individual soul as well. This is the meaning of the rites of passage rituals which took place at birth puberty, marriage, and death: by means of symbolically dying and being reborn via ritual the individual was elevated to new states of being. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Life was not a curve as we see it, where birth is zero and death a return from zero. For primitive beings birth was zero, but very often death was considered the final promotion of the soul to a state of superhuman power and indefinite durability. Protestantism achieved a heightening of the religious consciousness, but at the same time served this consciousness from the deep unconscious life of our total human nature. In this respect, its historical thrust runs parallel to that of the New Science and capitalism, since science was making the mythical and symbolic picture of nature disappear before the success of its own rational explanations, and capitalism was opening up the whole World as a field of operations for rationally planned enterprise. Faith, for Protestantism, is nevertheless the irrational and numinous center of religion; Luther was saturated with the feeling of St. Paul that beings for themselves can do noting and only God working in us can bring salvation. Here the inflation of human consciousness is radically denied, and the conscious mind is recognized as the mere instrument and plaything of a much greater unconscious force. Faith is an abyss that engulfs the rational nature of beings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

 The Protestant doctrine of original sin is in all its severity a kind of compensatory recognition of those depths below the level of consciousness where the earnest soul demand to interrogate itself—expect that those depths are cast into the outer darkness of depravity. So long as faith retained its intensity, however, the irrational elements of human nature were accorded recognition and a central place in the total human economy. However, as the modern World moves onward, it becomes more and more secularized in every department of life; faith consequently becomes attenuated, and Protestant beings begins to look more and more like a gaunt skeleton, a sculpture by Giacometti. A secular civilization leaves one more starkly naked then the iconoclasm of the Reformation has ever dreamed. The more severely one struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness. In the middle of the nineteenth century, was the reckoning point of the whole Protestant Reformation that began three centuries earlier: faith is seen as the uncompromising and desperate wager it is, if one takes it in all its Protestant strictness; and one cannot say, “Stupefy yourself, take holy water, receive the sacraments, and in the end all shall be well”—for Protestant beings have forsworn the sacraments and natural symbols of the soul as the snares and pomp of the devil.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Our contemporaries are so excused or merely passed over as the personal outpourings of a very melancholy temperament; yet they are the truthful record of what the Protestant soul must experience on the brink of the great Void. Protestant beings are the beginning of the New World’s fateful encounters with Nothingness—an encounter that was long overdue and is perhaps only now in the twenty first century reaching its culmination. Life could not continue without throwing the past into the past, liberating the present from its burden. Without this power life would be without a future; it would be enslaved by the past. Nothing new could happen; and even the old could not be, for what is now old was once something new, that might or might not have come into existence. Life, without pushing the past into the past, would be altogether impossible. However, life has this power, as we are able to observe in the growth of every plant and every animal. The earlier stages in the development of a living being are left behind in order to provide space for the future, for a new life. However, not everything of the past is pushed into the past; something of the past remains alive in the present, so that there is ground from which to grow into the future. Every growth displays its conquered past, sometimes in the form of scars. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Life uses its past and battles against it at the same time, in order to thrust forward towards its own renewal. In this pattern, beings are untied with all beings. It is the universal character of life, whether living beings are aware of it or not. Only humans can be fully aware of it. One saves the past by remembering it, and one pushed it back by forgetting it. This is the way that every child grows, both physically and in spirit. One preserves and one leaves behind. One remembers and one forgets. In healthy development, the balance between the two enables one to advance towards the new. However, if too much is preserved, and too little forgotten, the way is barred: the past, with its infantile forces and memories, overpowers the future. We know that some of this occurs in the recesses of the inner life of all of us. We discover remnants of infancy that were never pushed into the past, where they belong. They constrict our freedom and narrow our path into the future. They may even produce a distortion of growth. Think of the preservation of infantile habits in our action and language: our adolescent with withdrawal and aggression; the early images of ourselves and our World, far removed from reality; unfounded anxieties and foolish desires; a yet unshaken dependence on childhood authorities—father or mother; and our unquestioned prejudices that have no connection with our present stage of growth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

There were occasions in the past when we lacked the strength to leave behind what belonged to the past; we forgot what belonged to oblivion. We forgot to forget, and now we may find it too late. There have been nations that were unable to throw anything of their heritage into the past, and thus cut themselves off from new growth, until the weight of their past crushed their present and brought them to extinction. And sometimes we might ask if the Christian church, as well as foreign religions, have not carried with it too much of its past, and left behind too little. Forgetting is probably more difficult for a religious tradition than any other human heritage. However, God is not only the beginning from which we came He is also the end to which we go. God is the creator of the new as well as the ancient of days. To all creatures God has given presence; and presence, although it rests on the past, drives into the future. Therefore, all life has received the gift of forgetting. A church that does not accept this gift denies its own creatureliness, and falls into the temptation of every church, which is to make itself God. Of course, no church or nation or person should ever forget its own identity. We are not asked to forget our name, the symbol of our inner self. And certainly, no church is required to forget its foundation. However, if it is unable to leave behind much of what was built on this foundation, it will lose its future. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

However, all life, including beings, not only leaves behind. It also preserves. It not only forgets. It also remembers. And the inability to remember is just as destructive as the inability to forget. An aged tree demonstrates that the live forces of its original seed that determined its final form still exists. An animal would perish if it forgot the adjustments to life it learned from its first hour. The same is true of the human infant; and it is true of all one’s later growth in body and mind. Remembrance of the past preserves the identity of a human being with oneself. Without it, one oneself would be left behind by oneself. This applies equally to all social groups. A formless rushing ahead, indiscriminate severing of the roots of the past, results in emptiness, a lack of presence, and thus, also, a lack of future. There are churches that, in their desire to forget, have lost the memory of their origins. There are nations that have cut themselves off from their traditions. Perhaps one of the most conspicuous examples is our own nation, which has used a whole ocean as the drug of forgetfulness with respects to the sources of the civilization to which it belongs—Jerusalem and Athens. I do not speak of the scholarly knowledge of the past, of which there is no lack, but rather of the pushing forward of this nation into a future in which the creative forces of the past no longer exist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

More than any other, our nation possesses the great power of forgetting. However, this power is not balanced equally with the power of remembering, a fact that might become our undoing, spiritually and even politically. For if we lose our identity, we are lost. Detached knowledge brings detached action. A drug addict can be stopped from using drugs, but one remains an addict. An abuser can be removed from society, medicated, or educated; but one’s attitude will remain the same. A depressive can be adjusted, but one’s depths will remain tormented. Unless therapy can reach clients experientially, it cannot promote holistic change. It can promote behavioral and intellectual change, to be sure; but it cannot awaken clients to the affect, sensations, and intentions that underlie that change and that will urge it persistently forward. We are entirely our bodies, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body. The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a way and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little reason, which we call spirit—a little instrument and toy of our great reason. What the sense feels, what the spirit knows, never has its end in itself. However, sense and spirit would persuade one that they are the end of all things: that is how vain most are. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Instruments and toys are sense and spirit: behind them still lies the self. The self also seeks with the eyes of the senses; it also listens with the ears of the spirit. Always the self listens and seeks: it compares, overpowers, conquers, destroys. It controls, and it is in control of the ego too. Behind your thoughts and feelings, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—whose name is self. In your body one dwells; one is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom? Your self laughs at your ego and at its bold leaps. “What are these leaps and flights of thought to me?” it says to itself. “A detour to my end. I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.” The self says to the ego, “Feel pain here!” Then the ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more—and that is why it is made to think. The self says to the ego, “Feel pleasure here!” Then the ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again—and that is why it is made to think. I want to speak to the despisers of the body. It is their respect that begets their contempt. What is it that created respect and contempt and worth and will? The creative self created respect and contempt; it created pleasure and pain. The creative body created the spirit as a hand for its will. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even in your folly and contempt, you despisers of body, you serve your self. I say unto you: your self itself wants to die and turns away from life. It is no longer capable of what it would do above all else: to create beyond itself. That is what it would do above all else, that is its fervent wish. However, now it is too late for it to do this: so your self wants to go under, O despisers of the body. Your self wants to go under, and that is why you have become despisers of the body! For you are no longer able to create beyond yourselves. And that is why you are angry with life and the Earth. An unconscious envy speaks out of the squint-eyed glance of your contempt. I shall not go your way, O despisers of the body! You are no bridge to the Overself. It is unfortunate and regrettable, but all history bears out the fact that among religious believers and mystical followers, organizations sooner or later leads to exploitation. It is more likely to happen, of course, after the prophet, teacher, guru has passed away, but in a number of recent cases it was by no means absent even during one’s lifetime. There is no hint in Jesus’ words that he wanted beings to form themselves into an organized religion, to appoint a hierarchy, to create a liturgy. Was he himself not in protest against the Hebrew version of these things? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Did Jesus not suffer from its tyranny, and in the end die by it? Why should he want to set up a new institution, which would inevitably end in the same way? As a spiritual organization grows in numbers, it grows also in the potentialities of internal dissension. The history of most organizations confirms this. The service of an organization or a group association is that it may be able to point out the way to those who are just starting to travel the path. This disservice begins when it seeks to keep its own power over one and misguides one and misinterprets the truth under the sway of such selfish infatuation. The struggle between a high original purpose and low personal ambition goes on within the organization. Any organized sect which claims a monopoly on salvation, by that very act disproves its claim. For in the end we are saved by Grace alone, which comes from or through the Overself within us, whereas the sect is a humanmade thing outside us.  It is not necessary for those who follow philosophy to enroll members or hold group meetings. They need collect no dues and seek no converts. Once this stage is attained, neither the knowledge of reality nor the feeling of serenity will ever leave one again. One has found them not for a few hours but forever. Therefore the being who perceives this naturally, perceives the ultimate reality everywhere. One does not need to meditate or to go into a trance to find it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

One’s whole nature has come completely to rest in the Overself. The disciple is aware of the Overself at some times but not at other times. The adept, however, always has this awareness in an unbroken flow. Inner strength, divine joy, deep understanding, and unspeakable tranquility will pervade one always and not be limited to the hours of solitary mediation. This is so because the Overself whence these things come is always with all beings. Only, they know it not, whereas one has awakened to its abiding presence. At this stage one’s mind never loses its magnificent poise but remains always fixed on its own deepest level. When this has been fully achieved without fluctuations or breaks, when the mind is always established in this lofty state, it is characterized by a beautiful peace. One sits, poised in this great Mind. Because there is something of God in me as the Overself, Godlike qualities and capacities are in me. I am essentially wise, powerful, loving; but to the extent that I identify myself with the little ego, I obscure these grand qualities. I have the power to work creatively on my environment as well as on the body in which I am housed, just as the World-mind, the Creative Spirit, works on the Universe. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command the Earth shall be rolled together as a scroll? Therefore, repent ye, and humble yourselves before him,” reports Mormon 5.23-24. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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