It is an old spell; it binds you to come to me, it binds the spirits who listen to me to drive you towards me. It binds them to fill your dreams and your waking hours with thoughts of me. As the spell builds in power it presses out all other considerations, and finally there is one obsession, that you come to me, and nothing else will do. I have commanded the spirits drench your soul, your mind, your hear with a heat for me, to inflict upon your nights and days a relentless and torturous longing for me; to invade your dreams with the images of me; to let there be nothing that you eat or drink that will solace you as you think of me, until you return to me, until you stand in my presence, until I can use every power at my command on you as we speak together. I will not for a moment let you be quiet; not for a moment will you be able to turn away. May you be as a slave to me, many you be the faithful servant of my designs, may you have no power to refuse what I have confided to you, I will make you strong when you are weak, give you words when you cannot speak. When heart aches weighs you down, I will be the one to show you how to live again, my great and faithful spirits. May you fulfill that destiny which I choose of my own accord. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The yearning for diversion whereof a little more than a little is by much too much, because no displaced craving can be satisfied by catering to it in its displaced form. Only when it becomes possible to experience the desire in its true form and to dispense with the internalized processes that balked and displaced it does actual gratification become possible. Diversion at most, through weariness and fatigue, can numb and distract anxiety. For instance, in many popular movies the tear ducts are massaged and thrills are produced by mechanized assaults on the center of sense. (However, in the 2001 film Romeo Must Die, starring Aaliyah and Jet Li, Aaliyah thought of sad memories to make herself cry when it was called for in the script.) We are diverted temporarily and in the end perhaps drained—but not gratified. Direct manipulation of sensations can produce increases and discharges of tension, as the touch of one’s own hand in personal pleasures of the flesh, but it is a substitute. It does not involve reality but counterfeits it, much like social media does. Sensations directly stimulated and discharged without being intensified and completed through feelings sifted and acknowledged by the intellect are debasing because the do not involve the whole individual in one’s relation to reality. When one becomes inured to bypassing reality and individuality in favor of meaningless excitement, ultimate gratification becomes impossible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Once fundamental impulses are thwarted beyond retrieving, once they are so deeply repressed that no awareness is left of their aims, once the desire for a meaningful life has been lost as well as the capacity to create it, only a void remains. Life fades into tedium when the barrier between impulses and aims so high that neither penetrates into consciousness and no sublimation whatever takes place. Diversion, however frantic, can overwhelm temporarily but not ultimately relieve the boredom which oozes from non-fulfillment. Though the bored person hungers for things to happen to one, the disheartening fact is that when they do one empties them of the very meaning one unconsciously yearns for by using them as distractions. In popular culture even the second coming would become just another barren thrill to be watched on television till Milton Berie comes on. No distraction can cure boredom, just as the company so unceasingly pursued cannot stave off loneliness. The bored person is lonely for oneself, not, as one thinks, for others. One misses the individuality, the capacity for experience from which one is debarred. No distraction can restore it. Hence one goes unrelieved and insatiable. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The popular demand for inside stories, for vicarious sharing of the private life—even someone else’s—of those who are dimly aware of having none whatever, or a least no life that holds their interest. The attempts to allay boredom are assiduous as they are unavailing. Countless books pretend to teach by general rules and devices what cannot be learned by devices and rules. Individual personalities cannot be mass produced (with happiness thrown in or your money back). Nevertheless, the messages of much popular culture is “you, too, can be happy if you only buy this BMW 4 series, and a Cresleigh Home, then purchase a new dress from Draper James, and bake a Betty Crocker Butterscotch Pudding Layer Cake, and try that TRESemme Smooth and Silky hair tonic; you will be thrilled, you will have adventure, romance, popularity—you will no longer be lonely and left out if you follow this formula. And success, happiness or at least freedom from anxiety is also the burden of popular religion, as unchristian in these its aims as it is in its means. From Dale Carnegie to Norman Vincent Peale to Harry and Bonaro Overstreet only the vocabulary changes. The principle remains the same. The formula is well illustrated in the following. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Warm Smile is an Attribute of Charm
For this, train the upper lip by the method:
- Stretch the upper lip down over the teeth. Say “Mo-o-o-o.”
- Hold the lip between the teeth and smile.
- Purse the lips, pull them downward and grin.
- Let the lower jaw fall and try to touch your nose with your upper lip.
Months of daily practice are necessary to eliminate strain from the new way of smiling, but it, too, can become as natural as all beguiling smiles must be. One will be surrounded by an Overself-conscious atmosphere even in the midst of social functions. One’s inward repose will be no less evident there than in solitude. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Whatever the formula, nothing can be more tiresome than the tireless, cheerless pursuit of pleasures. When they are empty, days go slowly; one cannot tell one from the other. And yet the years go by fast. When time is endlessly killed, one lives in an endless present until time ends without ever having passed, leaving a person who never lived to exclaim, “I wasted time and now doth time waste me.” To the Christian, despair is a sin not because there is anything to be hoped for in this life, but because to despair is to lack faith in redemption from it—in the life everlasting. As for the pleasure of this life, they are not worth pursuing. Though they fade not of themselves yet to us they fade. We are hungry and we eat. Eat we not till that fades and we are as weary of our fulness as we were of our fasting. We are weary and we rest. Rest we not till that fades and we are as weary of our rest as ever we were of our weariness? Our bodies and minds themselves fade as do their pleasures. The insults of time are spared to none of us. Such is the human predicament. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Dr. Freud pointed to the additional burdens that civilization imposes on human beings. They, too, are inevitable, for civilizations, despite its cost, eases the total burden we bear. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The mass of beings lead lives of quiet desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called games and amusements of humankind. Despair, we find, is no longer quiet. Popular culture tries to exorcise it with much clanging and banging. Perhaps it takes more noise to drone it out. Perhaps we are less willing to face it. However, whether wrapped in popular culture, we are less happy than our quieter ancestors, or the natives of Bali, must remain an open question despite all romanticizing. (Nor do we have a feasible alternative to popular culture. Besides, a proposal for the mass of beings would be unlikely to affect the substance of popular culture. And counsel to individuals must be individual.) There have been periods happier and others more desperate than ours. However, we do not know which. And even an assertion of today’s bliss with yesterday’s. The happiness felt in disparate groups, in disparate periods and places cannot be measured and compared. Our contention is simply that by distracting from the human predicament and blocking individuation and experience, popular culture impoverishes life without leading to contentment. However, whether the mass of beings felt better or worse without the mass production techniques of which popular culture is an ineluctable part, we shall never know. Of happiness and of despair, we have no measure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Mercedes had been a tomboy in her youth and had early developed a great ambition as shown in the phrase which she used, “Either Caesar or nothing.” In her late teens there becomes evident her perpetual and all-encompassing dilemmas which trapped her like vices; she vacillated from despair to joy, from anger to docility, but most of all from gorging food to starving herself. Mercedes had a long illness which we would term in our day severe anorexia nervosa. However, her doctor was not interested here in the technique of treatment but was concerned with trying to understand her. Mercedes fascinates him by seeming to be in love with death. In her teens Mercedes implores Amel to kids her to death. She writes, “Death is the greatest happiness in life, if not the only one. If he makes me wait much longer, the great friend, death, then I shall set out to seek him.” She writes time and again that she would like to die “as the bird dies which bursts its throat in supreme joy.” Her talent as a writer is shown in her extensive poetry, diaries, and prose about her fascinating with immortality and vampirism. Mercedes reminds me of Anne Rice. Her fascination with vampires and immortality made me wonder: Are there some persons who can fulfill their existence only by taking their own lives? #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
However, where the existence can exist only be relinquishing life, there the existence is a tragic existence. I know her and I know magic. Mercedes was able to use blood to cast spells. Do you not see, this woman not only believes in magic, she understands it. Perhaps a million mortal magicians have lived and died during the past millennia, but how many of them were the genuine article? She knows what she is doing! Your blood was in the weave of her own garment. She has cast a spell on you that I do not know how to break! To live in the face of death, however, means to die unto death, or to die one’s own death. Every passing away, every dying, whether self-chosen death or not, is still an autonomous act of life. This leads us to ask, “Is life worth living?” Some reply, “It depends on the liver.” In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know now what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find. With many beings the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whiteman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling:–“To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand! To be this incredible God I am! O amazement of things, even the least particle! O spirituality of things! I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting; I too throb to the brain and beauty of the Earth and of all the growths of the Earth. I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continues—glory continues. I praise with electric voice, for I do not see one imperfection in the Universe, and I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell:–“How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself! I rose with the Sun, and I was happy; I went to walk, and I was happy; I saw ‘Maman,’ and I was happy; I left her, and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere. It was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.” If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. However, we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them a standing refutation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In what is called ‘circular insanity,’ phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call “the concoction of the humors.” In the words of the newspaper joke, “it depends on the liver.” Rousseau’s ill-balanced constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. Some beings seem launched upon the World even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman’s was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his,–the exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, James Thomason, in that pathetic book. The City of Dreadful Night, which I think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply because beings are afraid to quote its words,–they are so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined cathedral at night. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The sermon is too long to quote, but ends thus:– “O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief; a few short years must bring us all relief: Can we not bear these years of laboring breath? However, if you would not this poor life fulfil, Lo, you are freed to end it when you will, without the fear of waking after death. The organ-like vibrations of his voice thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away; the yearning of the tones which bade rejoice was sad and tender as a requiem lay: our shadowy congregation rested still, as brooding on that End it when you will. Our shadowy congregation rested still, as musing on that message we had heard, and brooding on the End it when you will, perchance awaiting yet some other word; when keen as lightning through a muffled sky sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:–the man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth; we have no personal life beyond the grave; there is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth: Can I find here the comfort which I crave? In all eternity I had one chance, one few years term of gracious human life,–the splendors of the intellect’s advance, the sweetness of the home with babes and wife; the social pleasures with their genial wit; the fascination of the Worlds art; the glories of the Worlds of Nature lit by large imagination’s glowing heart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
“The rapture of mere being, full of health; the careless childhood and the ardent youth; the strenuous manhood winning various wealthy, the reverend age serene with life’s long truth: all the subline prerogatives of Man; the storied memories of the times of old, the patient tracking of the World’s great plan through sequences and changes myriadfold. This chance was never offered me before; for me the infinite past is blank and dumb; this chance recurreth never, nevermore; blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth, a mockery, a delusion; and my breath of noble human life upon this Earth so racks me that I sigh for senseless death. My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, my noonday passes in a nightmare dream, I worse than lose the years which are my all: What can console me for the loss supreme? Speak not of comfort where no comfort is, speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? Our life’s a cheat, our death a black abyss: Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair. This vehement voice came from the northern aisle, rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close; and none gave answer for a certain while, for words must shrink from these most wordless woes; at last the pulpit speaker simply said, with humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,– #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
“My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus: This life holds nothing good for us, but it ends soon and nevermore can be; and we knew nothing of it ere our birth, and shall know nothing when consigned to Earth: I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.” When Louis committed suicide in the novel Merrick by Anne Rice by going into the Sun, when he was resurrected he said he saw “Nothing.” He bowed his head, but then he looked up helplessly. “Nothing. I saw nothing and I felt that there was nothing. I felt it-empty, colorless, timeless. Nothing. That I had ever lived in any shape seemed unreal.” His eyes were shut tight, and he brought up his hand to hide his face from us. He was weeping. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.” “It ends soon, and never more can be,” “Lo, you are free to end it when you will,”—these versus flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson’s pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the World is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain of delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare,–and army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the British army, follows the Sun round the World and never terminates. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must ponder these things also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity,–nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case. “If suddenly,” says Mr. Ruskin, “in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,–would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-being,–by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate the merriment from the misery.” Our relation to the Overself is one of direct awareness of its presence—not as a separate being but as one’s own essence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Intimate communion and personal converse with the higher self remain delightful fact. The Beloved ever companions one and never deserts one. One can never again be lonely. There is a feeling of living in a self other than the ego, although that also is present but subdued and submissive. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that her full measure of mortal life had not been enjoyed. I wanted to tell her that destiny had marked her for great things, perhaps, and I had broken that destiny had with my careless selfishness, with an ego that could not be restrained. The awareness will be with one at all times, a part of all one’s actions and feelings. It will indeed be the essence of every experience and enable one to pass through it more happily. One has no fixed abode, no permanent address, for like the wind one comes and goes from nowhere to anywhere. Destiny or service may keep one’s body in one place for a time, or for a lifetime, but it will not keep one. For the person who has come to this understanding, who continually feels that IT IS, who is ever in remembrance of It, rituals, ceremonies, mantras, and prayers are not only unnecessary but are a waste of time. The mind emptied of all the activity of ordinary thoughts and filled with the beauty of this presence is a divinely sustained mind. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The owl, which sees clearly at midnight, is an old and good symbol of the sage whose mind is ever at rest in, and lighted by, the Infinite Mind. “And the did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their afflictions. And now the Lord was slow to hear their cry because of their iniquities; nevertheless the Lord did hear their cries, and began to soften the hearts of the Lamanites that they began to ease their burdens; yet the Lord did not see fit to deliver them out of bondage,” reports Mosiah 21.14-15. Because this Mind is common to all beings, it is an inevitable and inescapable consequence of awakening to its existence that the initiate rises above a merely personal outlook and maintains a sympathetic attitude towards all beings. At this level, one is beyond bothering to listen to the discordant sounds of competing sects and cults: one is uninterested in the claims made for different teachings. One has only one concern: direct communion with the God within one as a felt, grace-giving Presence. Henceforth one is able to return one’s consciousness and retract one’s attention from the ego—and this, not only at will, but throughout one’s lifetime. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Randolph Harris II International 