But I lived the lie. I lived it out of anger. This is what I am trying to tell you. I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love. Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I did not know. We can trace the transformation of the small and more intimate public of early democratic experience into mass society as we now know it, with far fewer people expressing opinions than receiving them, and with far fewer opportunities for meaningful activity. The elite who control the media of communication are increasingly able to manipulate tastes and opinions, since those at the receiving end cannot answer back. At the top, therefore, power is ever more concentrated, wile at the bottom, in the mass, the individual is powerless to influence events and institutions. Is this an exaggerated picture? No. A large proportion of the electorate feels politically powerless because it believes that the community is controlled by a small group of powerful and selfish individuals who use public office for personal gain. People respond to this situation in various ways, often feelings of apathy about politics, which in turn leads to withdrawal from political activity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Other citizens, equally alienated, express their anxieties by identifying themselves with a charismatic leader who they expect will save them. The motives and mechanisms of this process is called caesaristic identification—that is, powerful psychological attachment of masses to a leader—arises in time of crisis when the situation of masses is objectively endangered, when the masses are incapable of understanding the historical process, and when the anxiety activated by the danger becomes neurotic persecutory (aggressive) anxiety through manipulation. Such movements often seize upon conspirational theory of history. Just as the masses hope for their deliverance from distress through absolute oneness with a person, so they ascribe their distress to certain persons, who have brought this distress into the World through conspirators. We have seen numerous examples, notably the theory of Communist conspiracy, now such a potent force in American politics with the derangement of the democratic party. The result is not merely a break with the rules of the game (for instance, a dictatorship replacing a democracy) but, if the mass movement is to retain power, a perpetuation or institutionalization of the anxieties which helped to create it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Again, the cure is still another form of alienation. However, not only anxiety or fear motivates people to accept radical solutions and break with the past. In the standard image of power and decision, no force is held to be as important as The Great American Public. More than merely another check and balance, this public is thought to be the seat of all legitimate power. In official life as in popular folklore, it is held to be the very balance wheel of democratic power. In the end, all liberal theorists rest their notions of the power system upon the political role of this public; all official decisions, as well as private decisions of consequence, are justified as in the public’s welfare; all formal proclamations are in its name. Let us therefore consider the classic public of democratic theory in the generous spirit in which Rousseau once cried,” Opinion, Queen of the World, is not subject to the power of kings; they are themselves its first slaves.” The most important feature of the public of opinion, which the rise of the democratic middle class initiates, is the free ebb and flow of discussion. The possibilities of answering back, of organizing autonomous organs of public opinion, of realizing opinion in action, are held to be established by democratic institutions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The opinion that results from pubic discussion is understood to be a resolution that is then carried out by public action; it is, in one version, the general will of the people, which the legislative organ enacts into law, thus lending to it legal force. Congress, or Parliament, as an institution, crows all the scattered publics; it is the archetype for each of the little circles of face-to-face citizens discussing their public business. This eighteenth-century idea of the public of public opinion parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy. Here is the market composed of freely competing entrepreneurs; there is the public composed of discussion circles of opinion peers. As price is the result of anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals, so public opinion is the result of each being’s having thought things out for oneself and contributing one’s voice to the great chorus. To be sure, some might have more influence on the state of opinion than others, but no one group monopolizes the discussion, or by itself determines the opinions that prevail. Innumerable discussion circles are knit together by mobile people who carry opinions from one to another, and struggle for the power of larger command. The public is thus organized into associations and parties, each representing a set of viewpoints, each trying to acquire a place in the Congress, where the discussion continues. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Out of the little circles of people talking with one another, the larger forces of social movements and political parties develop; and the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted. Thus autonomy of these discussions is an important element in the idea of public opinion as a democratic legitimation. The opinions formed are actively realized within the prevailing institutions of power; all authoritative agents are made or broken by the prevailing opinions of these publics. And, in so far as the public is frustrated in realizing its demands, its members may go beyond criticism of specific policies; they may question the very legitimations of legal authority. That is one meaning of the Jefferson’s comment on the need for an occasional revolution. The public, so conceived, is the loom of classic, eighteenth-century democracy; discussion is at once the threads and the shuttle trying the discussion circles together. It lies at the root of the conception of authority by discussion, and it is based upon the hope that truth and justice will somehow come out of society as a great apparatus of free discussion. The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

One viewpoint wins out. Then the people act out this view, or their representatives are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do. Such are the images of the public of classic democracy which are still used as the working justifications of power in American society. However, now we must recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works. The issues that now shape being’s fate are neither raised nor decided by the public at large. The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal, an assertion of a legitimation masquerading—as legitimations are now apt to do—as fact. For now the public of public opinion is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was. These doubts are asserted absolutely in the statement that the classic community of publics is being transformed into a society of masses. This transformation, in fact, is one of the keys to the social and psychological meaning of modern life in America. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed, with John Locke, that the individual conscience was the ultimate seat of judgment and hence the final court of appeal. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

However, this principle was challenged—as E. H. Carr has put it—When Rousseau “for the first time thought in terms of the sovereignty of the whole people, and faced the issue of mass democracy. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that among the individuals who composed it there was a natural and peaceful harmony of interests. However, this essentially conservative doctrine gave way to the Utilitarian doctrine that such a harmony of interests had first to be created by reform before it could work, and later to the Marxian doctrine of class struggle, which surely was then, and certainly is now, closer to reality than any assumed harmony of interest. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that before public action would be taken, there would be rational discussion between individuals which would determine the action, and that, accordingly, the public opinion that resulted would be the infallible voice of reason. However, this has been challenged not only by the assumed need for experts to decide delicate and intricate issues, but by the discovery—as by Dr. Freud—of the irrationality of the being in the street, and by the discovery—as by Marx—of the socially conditioned nature of what was once assumed to be autonomous reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that after determining what is true and right and just, the public would act accordingly or see that its representatives did so. In the long run, public opinion will not only be right, but public opinion will prevail. This assumption has been upset by the great gap now existing between the underlying population and those who make decisions in its name, decisions of enormous consequences which the public often does not even know are being made until well after the fact. Given these assumptions, it is not difficult to understand the articulate optimism of many nineteenth-century thinkers, for the theory of public is, in many way, a projection upon the community at large of the intellectual’s ideal of supremacy of intellect. The evolution of the intellect determines the main course of social evolution. If looking about them, nineteenth-century thinkers still saw irrationality and ignorance and apathy, all that was merely an intellectual lag, to which the spread of education would soon put an end. How much the cogency of the classic view of the public rested upon a restriction of this public to the carefully educated is revealed by the fact that by 1859 even John Stuart Mill was writing of “the tyranny of the majority,” and both Tocqueville and Burckhardt anticipated the view popularized in the recent past by such political moralists as Ortega y Gasset. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

In a word, the transformation of public into mass—and all that this implies—has been at once one of the major trends of modern societies and one of the major factors in the collapse of that liberal optimism which determined so much of the intellectual mood of the nineteenth century. Why is it that on the path we seem to meet students and aspirants only, not real teachers or genuine adepts? Why is it that so few ever seem to realize their spiritual selves? The answer is that the way is long and the game is hard, that the animal self is too strong and the human ego too foolish, and that the struggle against our innate bestiality and ignorance is too long-drawn and to beset with failures. This is what observation tells us. It may be saddening but by being realistic we at least know what to expect, what is the nature of the path we are undertaking, and what a tremendous patience we must bring to it. One has come to a clear knowledge of what the Quest means and what it will demand of one. The Quest of the divine soul has become one’s pole star. It was natural for one to feel repelled at first by the idea of overcoming the ego but now one sees its desirability. This will not mean giving it up in practical life however; for while one is in the flesh the ideal is to find a proper balance between egoism and altruism because one needs both. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

However, because the individual’s egoism is apt to be too big already and one’s altruism too small, religious teachers have usually deliberately over-emphasized subduing the ego. That is the moral side. On the philosophical side it is simply a matter of finding the Overself and letting it rule the ego thenceforth. Thus the ego is not killed but put back in its lower place. However, first one has to become conscious of the Overself, one has to feel it as a living presence, and one has to do this throughout the day and night, awake or asleep. That is the goal. It is not really as hard as it sounds. For the divine self is always there within one, it is never absent from one, not even for a second. It is the unfailing witness of all one’s efforts and aspirations. When one has tried hard enough and long enough it will suddenly shed all its grace on one. It is not wrong to aspire toward happiness but, on the contrary, our human duty. Those who, in the name of Spirituality, would turn life into a gloomy affair are entitled to their opinion but they cannot justly be called philosophers. Every being will be forced to realize one’s own sacredness in the end: then only will one’s search for happiness find fulfilment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

I often wonder where some beings have gotten their notions about reality, and it dawned on me they get them from the bits and pieces of electric dreams that they watch on the giant screen that have been provided for them. Fictions of all kinds—what they World calls News, and all this has inundated them. The media has let loosed the flood. Anger is too painful for me. Anger is too pathetic. I cannot bear it. I cannot act upon it. Anger is weak. Anger is as weak as fear. Can any of us endure fear? Not at all. However, there is something inside of many people that is heated and strong. There is something brutal and hurt inside of some of us, and we refuse the cup of anger, choosing silence rather than angry words. The Quest follows a double line of development: mind-stilling plus mind-stimulating, each in its proper place. And the ultimate goal is to discover that there is but one reality, of which all are but a part, that the separateness of the personal ego is but superficial, and that Truth is evidenced by the consciousness of unity. The first fruit of such discover is necessarily the dedication of life to the service of all creatures, to incessant service for universal welfare. Hence, in this light, the being who has withdrawn into cave or forest is on a lower plane—good for one as a phase of one’s personal development but useless to those who must live truth, the truth of unity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

To forget self but to remember Overself—it is as simple as that, and also as hard as that. Not to find the Energy of the Spirit but the Spirit itself is the ultimate goal. Not its powers or effects or qualities or attributes but the actuality of pure being. The aspirant is not to stop short with any of these but to push on. One has to seek for the mysterious essence of oneself, which is something one touches at rare, blessed, and unforgettable moments. It allures because it is also the Perfect, ever sought but never found in the World outside. It is not the knowing of the Overself that one is to get so much a the knowing that is the Overself. One comes at last to full consciousness of one’s inner being, one’s soul—in the correct sense of a word that is not often understood and which is used by people without knowing what they really mean. If the distant goal of this quest is the discover of true being, this does not exclude and ought not to exclude the fullest growth of the human being, the widest realization of one’s best capacities, making patent what is latent. It is a prime purpose of the Quest to create a true individuality where, at present, there is only a pseudo one. For those who are at the mercy of their automatic responses of attraction or repulsion by environment, whose minds are molded by external influences and education suggestions, are not individual in any real sense. “Heal the sick; cast out the demons,” reports Matthew 10.8. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Members of the outgoing class! Friends! The first difficulty you will experience when Jesus sends you ahead of him and gives you the power of healing is that many people will tell you that they do not need to be healed. And if you come to them with the claim that you will cast out the demons that rule their lives they will laugh at you and assure you that you are possessed by a demon—just as they said to Jesus. Therefore, the first task of a minister to make beings aware of their predicament. Many of those who have gone out from our seminary to various congregations and communities have despaired over this task. And they have either given up the ministry altogether, or they minister only to those who consider themselves healthy. They have forgotten that their task is to heal those who are sick, which includes those who are not aware that they are sick. There is no easy way to make them aware of their predicament. Finally, they come into my house, looking about themselves as though they were among miracles when all that I possess are the simple furnishings of a rich man. They gaze hungrily at the bronze oil lamps that fill the marble-floored rooms with brilliant light, and the couches and chairs they hesitate to touch. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

I cannot tell you how often this has happened me over the centuries, that some wandering being, bereft of all human attachment, has come into my house to marvel at simple things. I always tell them to sit down, there is nothing here that cannot be cleaned or thrown away. I insist that my guest be comfortable. God, certainly, has His ways of doing so. He shakes the complacency of those who consider themselves healthy by hurling them, both externally and internally, into darkness and despair. He reveals to them what they are by splitting the foundations of their self-assurance. He reveals their blindness towards themselves. This we cannot achieve, not even for ourselves. However, we can be open to the moment when it happens to us. And if it happens, we can become tools of the power that may heal others. To try this is the first task of the minister, and perhaps the hardest of them all. However, you are not the only ones who are used as tools. Everyone is potentially a tool of healing for anyone else. And it often happens that healing power works outside the church and the ministry. The fact that Jesus gave the disciples responsibility for healing and casting out demons does not constitute a special prerogative on the part of the minister. Every Christian receives this charge, and each of us should take it seriously in our relation to one another. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Everyone should accept one’s priestly responsibility for everyone else.  One may be most intensely occupied with one’s Worldly affairs, but one will remained fixed in the holy presence. The minister has no magic power to heal. Even his administration of the liturgy and sacraments does not give one this power. However, in one’s special vocation, one stands for the universal power given to the church to heal and to cast out demons. The illuminate stands n the centre of the World-movement, oneself unmoving and unmoved. The liberated person is liberated from all intellectual doctrines that are rigid and strict which may not be helpful, freed from perplexities, and questionings—whether they concern the present past or future, whether they relate to oneself personally or to the Universe abstractly. For all these can interest only a limited egoistic consciousness. At least one has not only a peace of mind—a philosophic attitude toward the events of one’s personal life—but also peace in the mind, a freedom from the struggle against baser impulses and ignoble tendencies. The momentous results of this inner change will naturally reflect themselves in one’s outer life as a general nonattachment to the World. And because one has become free even of intellectual possessions, one is able to enter with full sympathy into the views and ideas of every other person—although this does not prevent one’s deeper wisdom from calmly noting at the same time the defects and errors of those views and ideas. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

To oneself the practical value of this attainment is its conferment of freedom, but to humanity the practical value is one’s resulting dedication to service. The sense of strain which accompanies present-day living vanishes. The pace of being relaxed in thought and feeling, nerve and muscle, replaces it. One becomes a focus where persons, utterly incompatible and totally diverse otherwise, are able to meet. “For they saw and beheld with great sorrow that the people of the church began to be lifted up in the pride of their eyes, and to set their hearts upon riches and upon the vain things of the World, that they began to be scornful, one towards another, and they began to persecute those that did not believe according to their own will and pleasures,” reports Alma 4.8. The sense of a divine presence will be with one, the conviction of its supreme reality will grip one, and the feeling of an indestructible serenity will suffuse one. The Master necessarily lives in an inner World of one’s own, immeasurably remote from some of those environments in which one is plunged. Nevertheless, one possesses the power to recall oneself freely and instantly from one to the other, and in either direction. It is one sign of this attainment that one becomes less critical of other persons. Yet this does not mean tat one understands them less accurately. A fulfillment such as this must bring joy to the heart and peace to the mind. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

One may remain human in several ways—but not too human. Penetrated by the feeling of a divine presence as one daily is, one’s life becomes a truly inspired one. One’s first reliance will be on the soul. One’s last reliance will be on the soul. One’s life silently becomes a witness to the fact of the Overself’s continuous presents. The lotus, that lovely Asian flower, is much used as a symbol of the goal we have to gain. It grows in mud but is not even spotted by it. It rests on water but is never stained by it. Its colour is pure white in striking contrast to the dirty surroundings which are its home. So the disciple’s inner life must be undefiled, unstained, and pure even though one’s outer life is perforce carried on under the most materialistic surroundings or among the most sensual people. That which few beings value and few beings find is nevertheless the most worthwhile thing for which to search. What is it? It is what once found cannot be lost, once seen must be loved, and once felt awakens all that is best in a being. Inexplicable and incomprehensible though the fact must be to the human intellect, the One infinite Mind never loses its own character even though it is seemingly incarnated into the myriad forms of an evolving Universe, never loses itself in them. It is a wisdom expressed through the World-Idea, but not confined to it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17