Your Master knew these things. He knew. But he was of a pagan time, obdurate and angry, and fusing ever the grace of God. In you, he saw God’s grace, because your soul is pure. You are young and tender and open like the moonflower to take the light of night. You hate of now, but you will come to see the dance today is degenerated survival of an ancient group language, a language which was meant to be a medium of solidarity, of self-expression and release. In our times it is an empty form at best, when it does not serve other ulterior ends. One feels little doubt that the regular patron of the dance hall is bored. Large numbers admit without hesitation that they are bored, but say that as nothing else in the way of amusement is to be found easily, they come to the dance hall. The taxi dance hall represents a logical and therefore not unexpected stage in the history of the dance. Here commercialization is complete and the beginnings of production are apparent. The very forms of dance practiced in the taxi dance halls appears that the form of dance is rhythmic, overtly seductive, and an expressive pastime for thousands of solitary men and a spurious source of income for hundreds of woman, many of whom get cash tips for this work. “I know I may come off quiet, I may come off shy, but I feel like talking, feel like dancing when I see this guy. What’s practical is logical, what the heck, who care? All I know is I’m so happy when you’re dancing there,” (Lyrics from I’m a Slave 4 U by Britney Spears). #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

It is significant to note that the more regular patron is seldom a member of a gang. The institution serves chiefly the distraught, the individualized and the egocentric. There is a little conversation. The patron may sit for hours beside others of his gender while conversing with them. The women, likewise, when not dancing stand for long periods beside each other while talking. At best these recreations are harmless play-forms of the parlor game type or they are ceremonious, socialite show in both of which the dance is merely an optional activity of individuals and not a communal ritual of all those present. Furthermore, on these occasions, the competitive features of social life dominate over the cooperative communal ones: physical attractiveness, wealthy and rank, achievements of many kinds and so on are assessed, compared and approval or rejection registered often through the very media of dance etiquette. The history of the choral dance shows a continuous decline which runs parallel with the long-drawn-out process of desocialization. The choral dance is not merely a symptom of group integration but also a uniquely ancient sustainer of biosocial group life. The decline of the choral dance is a cause and an indication of social development. The choral dance, communal dances, demand a compact social order: they require an association in the dance which is something more than the current execution of a series of figures and moments. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The breaking up of rural communities by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of individualism stopped the choral dances and surrendered the floor, or the village green, to Shmoney Dance, Wobble, Twerkin’, Harlem Shake, and many others. Some are saying the suppression of the Choral dance has given birth to a new culture to go along with the new music. Critics are saying this is a manifestation of the declining culture, but that is heavily laden with value judgments. On the other had we should stress that the perpetuation and further growth of desocializing culture involves the inevitability of its own eventual destruction. Desocialization is decay which affects the entire social-cultural life of human communities; this decay has been speed up during the last few centuries and contemporary culture is pregnant with catastrophe. The thesis here expounded comprises a claim that this process of desocialization is simultaneous with the process of cultural development; in other words, it seems to be suggested that whilst there is culture there will always be frustrations imposed on being’s biosocial needs. Hence it should be reaffirmed that this prognosis was suggested only if the cultures of chance and of misrepresentation continue. It is necessary to state that culture is not incompatible with a biosocially balanced life provided it comprises an awareness of biological sociality and the institutions through which this awareness can be expressed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Taking the whole era of cultures as a phase of human’s phylogenetic history we may say, in the light of the foregoing, that desocialization is, in the first place, a phylogenetic process. We selected the choral dance for the purpose of illustrating this phylogenetic development. Naturally, the choral dance was by no means the only medium of biosocial contact in pre-cultural human society. Yet it was chosen because it is the only known non-economic social form which, having existed preculturally, continues throughout the historically charted centuries. Even if its evidence is not decisive, it is at least the most suggestive indicator of phylogenetic changes in the realm of the social. Recent developments in affective and physiological neuroscience research are beginning to reveal observable interconnections between the body and the functioning of the mind. The brain is the organ that orchestrates our interactions with the World around us. It is responsible for taking in massive amounts of simultaneous sensory information, sorting out and interpreting what we are experiencing based on past associations, and then coordinating our response. This dynamic interchange between body and brain is ongoing, even in stillness, and the functioning of the mind is communicated and experienced through the body. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Dance/movement therapy actively engages the brain through the body with interventions that impact both physical and psychological functioning. Dance/movement therapy is at the frontier of current trends in psychotherapy, which is just beginning to grasp the significance of the body’s role in the perceptual process. Dance/movement therapy interventions that emphasize proprioception and encourage internal focus on body and sensory awareness may have beneficial effects on the neurophysiological regulation systems. Body awareness approaches initiate a down-regulation of the nervous system, engaging the vagus nerve (the vagus nerve is one of the cranial nerves that connect the brain to the body). Body awareness activities help to create a subjectively beneficial experience in the body, helping the patient to feel relaxed, held, and safe. These interventions provide a foundation for patients to gauge their own experiences and manage their levels of arousal through self-regulation of their own bodies. Over time, through tracking emotion evoked in the moment, the patient/mover can learn to sense feelings and feel safe in the process using integrative body-based approaches. This provides an essential foundation for developing an increased capacity to tolerate more complex emotional states. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Philosophic discipline relates at every point to the act for living. For once insight has been unfolded, as in body awareness, the philosopher is continuously aware of the oneness of the stuff of the World existence—which includes one’s own existence, too. How does the illuminate react to one’s own karma? After knowledge of the self has been awakened, one who has this higher consciousness permanently will see and experience the outer World like other beings, but one will understand the relation between what one sees and the Real World which is behind it. In the same way, anyone can understand the relation between one’s body and its shadows; but whereas unenlightened beings see the shadow alone, the enlightened one sees both. As beings grow in true understanding, one moves from mere existence to authentic essence. When the wall between one’s little ego and the infinite Being collapses, one is said to have joined one’s soul with God. This disclosure that the whole Universe exists in the mind comes with Reality’s revelation. This is the spiritual climax of one’s life, this dramatic moment when consciousness comes to recognize and understand itself. One will be conscious that inwardly one has been born utterly and unmistakably anew, that not only has the old self passed away but also the belief in the existence and reality of self has passed with it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

What does it give to the dignity of being? It provides a rare link with the Absolute, an answer to What am I? and a touch of the Untouch. It is the gift of an inner security, the blessing of a peace which comes to stay. The Overself will overshadow one. It will take possession of one’s body. There will be a mystical union of its mind with one’s body. The ego will become entirely subordinate to it. Whoever attains this inner liberation rarely finds it reflected in the outer World of human societies. Only by going to the lonely places of nature, to forests and fields, deserted shores and unbuilt-on hills can one match the freedom felt. If one ventures into an ashram—however reputed—the sense of entering a cage is produces. It could be that this is partly caused by the mental pressures of its authorities or inmates, by the smug if unexpressed exclusiveness. If one enters a church, one is at ease only if one is the only worshipper; otherwise sectarian pressure comes to awareness. From the time that this great shift of consciousness has taken place, the event itself as well as its tremendous effects ought to be wrapped in secrecy and revealed only under authentic higher guidance. If one has become enlightened, a discerning eye may note the fact by one’s body and one’s actions, by one’s silences and one’s utterances. However, an ignorant eye may note nothing at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The effects of enlightenment include: an imperturbably detachment from outer possessions, rank, honours, and persons; and overwhelming certainty about truth; a carefree, Heavenly peace above all disturbances and vicissitudes; an acceptance of the general rightness of the universal situation, with each entity and each event playing its role; and impeccable sincerity which says what it means, means what it says. One cannot dwell in that magical state without transforming one’s experience in the World so that in some way or other it serves God’s purpose, thus turning even outer defeats to inner victory. I know history, I read it as others read their Bibles, and I will not be satisfied until I have unearthed all stories that are written and knowable, and cracked the codes of all cultures that have left me any tantalizing evidence that I might pry loose from Earth or stone or papyrus or clay. Christ is a personality, a human, a presence that I felt I knew. And He was the Lord God Father Almighty and He was the maker of the Universe and the whole World. And He was the Saviour or the Redeemer for sins inscribed on my soul before I was born. He was the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and he was the Theologian expounding from the Holy Mount. Christ was also my brother, and the symbol of all brothers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Christ is the Lord, and that is why His core is simply love. Many fail to grasp the complexity of what Christ is. People who call themselves Christians—parents, teachers, preachers—tell us that we should be “good” and obey the will of God. For many of them the will of God is not very different from the will of those socially correct people whose conventions they ask us to accept. If we only willed such goodness, they say, we could achieve it, and would be rewarded in time and eternity—but first of all, in time. One can thank God that such preaching has become more and more suspect, for it does not strike at the real human situation. How can any institution, whether it be the family or the government or the church, be better character than the persons who comprise it, and certainly those who rule or lead it? To expect a Spiritual Master to repeat oneself in the institution, organization, or order which gathers around one, is to expect what history tells us never happens. Shelley, Michelangelo, and Phidias did not found organization to produce further Shelleys, Michelangelos, and Phidias. New persons must arise to express their own inspirations. Why then found strangling institutions at all, why gather followers together into exclusive sects, why create still more monasteries and lamaseries, why make leader worship a substitute for Spirit-and-truth worship? #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Attachment to the group surrounding a master sheds a kind of prestige on them, and gives each one a borrowed light or strength, which may be real or false. No association of spiritually minded persons can as such rise higher than the Personality who has inspired it, and in whose superior power and knowledge it has rested its roots. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one being. Europe and America, for instance, are dotted with groups working along routes of mental and semi-spiritual development, but in every such group you will find that it draws its real life from it Founder or from its Head. The point in development reached by the Head marks the limitation to which one can bring one’s followers, and one can take them no further. In earlier centuries, the illumined being left one’s spiritual legacy in the hearts and minds of those who had felt one’s power, or been guided by one’s light, or known one’s peace. The institutions and organziations were usually the creation of disciples who lived later. However, today there may be a legacy of printed books, recorded tapes, televised film. The foundation of every effort to better human life is not an organized movement but the being who inspires it. The eyes of many serious people in our time have been opened to an awareness of their predicament as beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

If in the end we have to walk this Earth on our own feet, why not begin to do so now? When we could cultivate our strength, why continue to cultivate our weakness? Where there is no attempt at self-improvement there is inevitable deterioration. Nature does not let us stand still. We have to be careful not to be driven by some power to act against our good will. For who amongst us is not full of good will? However, perhaps is we come to know ourselves better, we may begin to suspect that some of this good will is not so good after all, and that we are driven by forces of which we might not even be aware of. It is not necessary to described those who embody good will and work towards just the opposite on a level hidden beneath their goodness. Psychologist and others have done this so fully that it needs no repetition. Despite what critics have to say of our time, one of the great things to have come out of it is the difficulty of anyone’s being able to hide permanently from oneself and from others the motives for one’s actions. Whatever we may think about the methods employed to reach this insight, the insight itself is infinitely precious. It has also become difficult for a being who works with dedication and success at one’s business or profession to feel assured about the goodness of what one is doing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

One cannot from oneself that one’s commitment to one’s work may also be a way of escaping genuine human commitments and, above all, a way of escaping oneself. And it has become difficult for a mother who loves her children passionately to be sure that she feels only love for them. She can no longer conceal from herself that her anxiety concerning their well-being may be an expression of her will to dominate them or a form of guilt for a heavily veiled hostility that desires to get rid of them. And we cannot applaud every act of moral self-restraint, knowing that it cause may be cowardice preventing a revolution against inherited, though already questioned, rules of behavior. Nor can we praise every act of daring non-conformism, knowing that its reason may be the inability of an individual to resist the persuasive irresponsibility of a group of nonconformists. In these and countless other cases, we experience a power that dwells in us and directs our will against itself. The name of this power is sin. Nothing is more precarious today than the mention of this word among Christians, as well as among non-Christians, for in everyone there is a tremendous resistance to it. It is a word that has fallen into disrepute. To some of us it sounds almost ridiculous and is apt to provoke laughter rather than serious consideration. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

To others, who take the word sin more seriously, it implies an attack on their human dignity. And again, to others—those who have suffered from it—it means the threatening countenance of the disciplinarian, who forbids them to do what they would like and demands of them what they hate. Therefore, even Christian teachers, including myself shy away from the use of the word sin. We know how many distorted images it can produce. We try to avoid it, or to substitute another word for it. However, it has a strange quality. It always returns. We cannot escape it. It is as insistent as it is ugly. And so it would be more honest—and this I say to myself—to face sin and ask what it really is. The application of these ideals is hard, but let no one deceive oneself into thinking that their nonapplication is much easier. Those who live without such life-purposes are subject to troubles that could have been avoided and to afflictions of their own making. It is easy to drift, as so many others do, through a life of self-indulgence. It is hard to try continually to practice a life of self-control. Yet the deferred penalties of the first course are painful, the consequent rewards of the second course are satisfying. The gaining of such flashes has been accidental. It should stimulate us to know that is we want to make it deliberate, there is a detailed technique, ready at hand for the purposes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Intellectuals who know how and why these flashes come have formulated the technique for the benefit of those who want to elevate themselves. From the first day that one began to tread this path, one automatically assumed the responsibility of growth. Henceforth there had to be continuity of effort, an ever-extending line of self-improvement. The prize will not be sent to you. You win it. No one except the being oneself can develop the needed qualities and practise them. Similar operations can be perceived at the level of societies. Societies that stress protectionism and moral strictness, for example, can be correlated with a pervasive dread of life. The subtler problems of overspecialization, social malaise, and complacency are also relevant there. Conversely, societies that indulge in national and cultural chauvinism or, to a lesser extent, myriad forms of hero worship can be associated with a global revulsion for death. At the same time that we fear separation and attachment, however, we also desire them to some degree. By the same token, most of us seek a modicum of dependency, safety, and order in our lives. The question becomes one of negotiating between these desires and fears. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

We must find some kind of balance within which to live. In our quest for vital experience, we must honor both our capacity for greatness and our (cosmic) eagerness. It is important to be here and now, and allow the actual conditions of life to flow. Address your (separation/attachment) concerns more focally, and mobilize your resources for growth. If one wishes to enter the portal of philosophy one will most likely begin with others, with what philosophers have thought and taught; but in the end one must make a second beginning—with one’s self. One will have to have to reexamine one’s own psyche, one’s own personality, but from a detached position, standing far to one side. One will have to decide each hour of each day how to apply the truth, gathered from books and teachers, to the events, duties, occasion, and thoughts of that day. Effort at self-improvement and self-development, consciously and deliberately made, is an indispensable requirement. All talk of dispensing with it because one has surrendered to a master is self-deceiving. All avoideance of its is self-disappointing in the end. One cannot shift the burden of responsibility from off one’s shoulders so easily as that. It remains inalienably one’s own by virtue of one’s membership in the human race. One must begin to cease living at second hand, to help one’s self, to try one’s own powers, or one will never grow. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Only as a matter of fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions, but there are some options between opinions in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant of our choice. I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and lend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps of passion you have indeed had to admit as necessary,–we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take no further passional step. Well, of course, I agree as far as the fact will allow. Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all. The responsibility for one’s spiritual development is possessed squarely upon one’s own shoulders. In trying to evade it, either by getting a master to carry it or by making a Short Path leap into enlightenment, one indulges in an illusion. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a judge’s duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time over: the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and got out of the way. The truth cannot be had by muttering a mantram ad infinitum although that may yield a curious kind of transient relief from thoughts which case one another. Nor may it be had by paying one week’s income to a guru. If a being is determined to succeed in this enterprise and optimistically believes that one will succeed, one’s efforts will increase and be strengthened, chances will be taken from which one would otherwise shrink; and even if one falls short of one’s hopes, the going is likely to be farther. This is the surest way to disable oneself, this burdening of one’s mind with the fear of failure and the thoughts of one’s failings. The greatest error of a being is to think that one is weak by nature. One can and must conquer. This is the ideal, but to translate it into the actual, to asset it in the midst and against the opposition of a grossly materialistic environment, calls for firmness and determination. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Let one not be satisfied with the amount of true knowledge one has got, nor with the quality of personal character which one has developed. Let one press forward to the more and better. In our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of sceptical balance is therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What difference, indeed, does it makes to most of us whether we have or have not a theory of the Rontgen rays, whether we believe or not in mind stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious states? In makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us. On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing reasons pro et contra with an indifferent hand. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advance than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the same. See for example the sagacity which Spencer and Weismann now display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the being who has no interest whatever in its results: one is the warranted incapable, the absolute fool. The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always one whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest one become deceived. Science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as that would be stolen in defiance of her duty to humankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than technical rules. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas; and however indifferent to all but the bare rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the concrete players who furnish one the materials to judge of are usually, each one of them, in love with some pet live hypothesis of one’s own. Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal. Yet, are there not somewhere forced options in our speculative questions, and can we (as beings who may be interested at least as much in absolutely gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery) always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have arrived? It seems a priori improbable that the truth should be so nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the great boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, if they did, we should view them with scientific suspicion. “These are they that are redeemed of the Lord; yea, these are they that are taken out, that are delivered from that endless night of darkness; and thus they stand or fall; for behold, they are their own judges, whether to do good or evil,” reports Alma 4.7. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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