In the nights that followed I could not resist visiting Rome, though Avicus and Mael both advised me not to do it. They feared that I did not know how long I had slept, but I knew. Almost a hundred years had passed. I found the grand buildings of Imperial glory fallen to ruin, overrun with animals, and being used as quarries for those who came to take the stone. Huge statues had been toppled over and lay in the weeds. My old street was unrecognizable. And the population had dwindled to no more than a few thousand. At the heat of our violence, in act or in feeling, lies the wish to show ourselves beings with a will. However, the complexity of society makes the being lose heart. Nothing one does any longer seems a skill to be proud of in a World where someone else always hits the headlines. This is a plausible picture, in despair of which beings cheerfully join any private army which will offer them the ambivalent identity of a uniform: the right to salute and be saluted. One of the reasons we have made so little progress in our mitigating of violence is that we have determinedly overlooked the elements in it that are attractive, alluring, and fascinating. Our minds tend to castrate the topic in the very act of understanding it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

When a congress member delivers a tirade against violence, one seems to forget entirely that as a child he or she ran after fire engines, he or she was fascinated by pictures of bullfights, enjoyed Westerns, and one also shared the strange combination of allure and horror which leads people to crowd around accidents. We deny with our minds the secret love of violence, which is present in all of us in some form, at the same time as we perform violent acts with our bodies. By repressing the awareness of the fact of violence, we can thus secretly give ourselves over to the enjoyment of it. If we were to admit the reality of this secret love, this seems to be a necessary human defense against the deeper emotional implications we would have to face. At the outset of every war, for example, we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the diamonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome psychological and spiritual questions that war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves. I shall lump these alluring and fascinating elements together under the term “ecstasy.” The word may seem strange, partly because in common parlance it is pegged at a high level of intensity: we go into ecstasy over a new Cresleigh home, a new BMW 4 series, or we become ecstatic upon winning a million dollars in the lottery. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

However, the historical meaning of the word ecstasy leaves the question of intensity of emotion entirely open. Coming from the Greek ekotaois, ecstasy means etymologically to stand out of one’s self. The experience that takes one beyond one’s self, beyond conventional ego boundaries, and gives one a new and enlarged awareness of the self—such as Hindu or Buddhist meditation—is legitimately called ecstatic, although its intensity may not be quantitatively great. Aesthetic experiences or moments in love are commonly spoken as ecstatic. The experience of being worth, of knowing that other people change because of your influence, also gives you the feeling of being beyond yourself—in other words, a kind of ecstasy of low intensity. Hence I have used, for these experiences of lesser intensity, the phrase “sense of significance.” That violence is often associated wit ecstatic experiences is seen in our using the same phrases for both. We say a person is beside one’s self with rage; one is possessed by power. There also occurs a self-transcendence in violence which is like the self-transcendence in ecstatic experiences. The total absorption, furthermore, that is present in violence is also present in ecstasy. In our day of anti-intellectualism, when there is a reaction against all things sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, the absorption of the self in violence is especially attractive. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In what ways does violence yield for us this experience of ecstasy, this sense of significance? When a lightrail train was stopped in Sacramento, police tried to arrest those who had jumped on [the train]. As they moved to grab people, suspects split in all directions—only three or four were caught. They ran, yipping and whooping, away from the tracks and through the streets, like a bunch of crazy expletives. They considered themselves victorious warriors. They were ecstatic. They had stopped the lightrail train. They stopped the war machine dead in its tracks. Whatever one’s impression, this is surely an experience of the ecstasy of violence. A less dramatic example, but one containing some of the ingredients of ecstasy in their embryonic form, comes from my own experience in graduate school. Several young African Americans in California had been accused of sexual assault and had been lynched by a mod without a semblance of a trial. A clergyman in New York had, in a sermon, commended the lynching. As a result a group of us decided to picket the church the following Sunday morning. The incident would not be worth relating expect for the fact of the excitement, even joy, that went hand in hand with our anxiety on this occasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Painting the signs the night before, organizing the march, feeling the solidarity with the others—comrades who would walk beside me in this cause, the rightness of which we had no doubt—all of these activities has an element of ecstasy. I recall walking home late at night after these preparations and finding, when I was alone, that questions and doubts came into my mind as to the effectiveness of our proposes course. However, no! My comrades and I had decided, and I must not let them down. We expected some opposition in the form of mounted police (which actually occurred); we hoped it would not be too violent but great enough to make an impression on the news media. We also secretly hoped for opposition because that would give an added cohesion to our group and would even add to our ecstasy. An extreme emphasis on individual responsibility can become an egocentric manipulation of others, a compulsion that defeats genuine mortality and yields only a counterfeit sense of significance. Most Americans are oppressed by the sense of individual responsibility, not only for general humanitarian reasons but for reasons specific to our own nation. An American receives very little assistance from one’s culture in carrying this responsibility. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Americans have no sacraments like penance, no rituals like confession (except in psychoanalysis for the few) to help free them from the burden of the past. The whole weight rests on the shoulders of the individual, and we have already seen that one feels powerless. Perhaps this accounts for the moralistic and picayune forms that responsibility tends to take: in the past it centered on not smoking and not drinking, and now it centers on not stepping on insects and not throwing away anything made of plastic. In any case a person cannot carry the burden of responsibility for one’s own moral salvation without a corresponding depth of culture to give one structure. Otherwise one will end up feeling isolated, lonely, and separated from others. This emerging sense of ecstasy in a successful rebellion accounts for some importance changes in the character of the rebellion itself. The typical rebellion normally begins with  highly moral aims—the students at Berkeley, for example, proclaimed their opposition to the unhuman facelessness of the modern factory-university. However, with the state of ecstasy which accompanies the initial success, the psychological character and meaning of the rebellion change. A new elan is added. For many, the goal of the rebellion now becomes the ecstasy itself rather then the original conditions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The rebellion has become the high point in the lives of many of the rebels, and they seem dimly aware that they will never have that much sense of significance again. This often leads to an elaboration and multiplying of the original conditions that the administration, be it of a university or a prison, is asked to meet. The rebels are saying, in this action, that the conditions originally set are no longer the main reason for rebellion. Hence, at Brandeis, the university president remained in his office during the week of the African American sit-in to negotiate with the rebels, and each day the African Americans sent over a different bargaining committee with different conditions. It is as though they were saying by this action: “Can you not see that this rebellion means much more to us than the specific conditions?” This also accounts for the curious presentation of the condition of amnesty, which obviously cannot be granted without complete capitulation on the part of the administration. I interpret this as saying: “All along what we wanted was this experience of ecstasy, this sense of our own significance.” The ecstasy may reach such a pitch that it approaches Malcolm X’s concept of “revolutionary suicide.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The value of the group contrasted with the individual must also be mentioned. The group is constituted around issues that are, to the participant, of life-and-death importance. The question about any group is: What is its psychic center—to what is it devoted? The deep need of a being not to feel lost and lonely in the World has, of course, been previously satisfied by the concept of a God who has created this World and is concerned with each and every creature. When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of humans feel wit it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory. However, for many of those whom God was dethroned, the need for a godlike figure did not disappear. Some proclaimed a new God, Evolution, and worshipped Darwin as one’s profit. For many, Darwin had revealed the ultimate truth regarding the origin of all beings; all human phenomena which might be approached and explained by economic, religious, ethical, or political consideration were to be understood from the point of view of evolution. This quasi-religious attitude toward Darwinism becomes apparent when the term “the great constructors,” is used referring to selection and mutation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The methods and aims of the great constructors are used very much in the way a Christian might speak of God’s acts. When the singular for of the great constructor is used, one is coming even closer to the analogy with God. We know that in the evolution of vertebrates, the bond of personal love and friendship was the epoch-making invention created by the great constructors when it became necessary for two or more individuals of an aggressive species to live peacefully together and to work for a common end. We know that human society is built on the foundation of this bound, but we have to recognize the fact that the bond has become too limited to encompass all that it should: it prevents aggression only between those who know each other and are friends, while obviously it is all active hostility between all beings of all nations or ideologies that must be stopped. The obvious conclusion is that love and friendship should embrace all humanity, that we should love all our human brothers and sister and cousins indiscriminately. This commandment is not new. Our reason is quite able to understand its necessity as our feeling is able to appreciate its beauty, but nevertheless, made as we are, we are unable to obey it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We can feel the full, warm emotion of friendship and love for individuals, and the utmost exertion of willpower cannot alter this fact. However, the great constructors can, and I believe they will. I believe in the power of human reason, as I believe in the power of natural selection. I believe that reason can and will exert a selection pressure in the right direction. I believe that this, in the not too distant future, will endow our descendants with the faculty of fulfilling the greatest and most beautiful of all commandments. The great constructors will win out, where God and beings have failed. The commandment of brotherly love has to remain ineffective, but the great constructors will give it life. This ends in a true confession of faith: I believe, I believe, I believe…reason is one of the strengths human beings have which alone will save them from confusion and decay. Genuinely the need for self-knowledge, by uncovering one’s unconscious strivings, is necessary. We can overcome the loss of God by turning to reason—and feel painfully weak. However, we must not turn to new idols. Many people who worship Satan speak of how the Devil is their Ruler and how through serving him, they serve Christ. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Why have these assertions, that were so central at the time the gospel was first preached, lost their significance in our own periods? The reason, I believe is possessed in the words “healing” and “casting out demons,” that have been misunderstood as miracle-healing, based on magic power and magic self-suggestions. There is no doubt that such phenomena occur. They happen here, and everywhere else in the World. They happen and are used in the midst of Christianity. However, the church was right when it felt that this was not the task of the church and its ministers. It is an abuse of the name of the Christ to use it as a magic formula. Nevertheless, the words of our test remain valid. They belong to the message of the Christ, and they tell us about something that belongs to the Christ as the Christ—the power to conquer the demonic forces that control our lives, mind and body. And I believe that, of all the different ways to communicate the message of Christ to others, this way will prove to be the most adequate for the people of our time. It is something they can understand. For in every country of the World, including our own, there is an awareness of the power of evil as has not existed for centuries. If we look at our period as a whole, we will realize that not only special groups fall under the judgment of Jesus’ ironic words—“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

In spite of the many who resist this insight, we know that we are sick, that we are not whole. The central message for our contemporaries, including ourselves, the message awaited by many both within and outside our congregations is the good news of the healing power that is in the World and whose expression is the Christ. The task of healing demands of you insight into the nature of life and the human situation. People often ask, in passionate despair, if sickness is one of the things to be healed by divine order, why the divine order of things includes sickness? This very natural question, which, for many of us, is the stumbling block of our faith, points to the riddle of evil in the World of God. You will have to deal with this question more often than with any other. And you must not avoid the question by retiring being the term “mystery.” Of course, there is mystery—divine mystery—and, in contrast to it, the mystery of evil. However, it belongs to the insights demanded of you that you put the mystery in its right pace, and explain what can and must be explained. Evil in the divine order is not only mystery; it is also revelation. It reveals the greatness and danger of life. One who can become sick is greater than one who cannot, than that which is bound to remain what it is, unable to be split in itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Memory is desperate to leave us. Memory knows that we cannot endure its company. Memory would reduce us to fools. Ah, listen to old mortals when they have nothing but memories of childhood. How they go on mistaking those persons around them for persons long dead, and no one listens. How often I have wondered at their long uninterrupted conversations with ghost in empty rooms. I think it is very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from the beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force. Christianity, at one time, was considered a great mystery, a little cult, which had begun in Jerusalem of all place, and grew to such tremendous size. However, when some first heard Christians preaching, they thought there was no chance that this religion could gain ground because it placed far too much responsibility upon the new members to avoid all contact with the revered gods of Greece and Rome, and many thought the sect would soon die out. However, no such thing happened, and Rome in the three hundreds was thronged with Christians. For their apparently magical ceremonies, they met in the catacombs and also in private homes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

One who alone is fee is able to surrender to the demonic forces that turn one’s freedom into bondage. The gift of freedom implies the danger of servitude; and the abundance of life implies the danger of sickness. Human’s life is abundant life, infinitely complex, inexhaustivle in its possibilities, even in the vitally poorest human beings. Being’s life is most open to disease. For in being’s life more than in any other being, there are divergent trends that must continuously be kept in unity. Health is not the lack of divergent trends in our bodily or mental or spiritual life, but the power to keep them united. And healing is the act of reuniting them after the disruption of their unity. “Heal the sick” means—help them to regain their lost unity without depriving them of their abundance, without throwing them into a poverty of life perhaps by their own consent. For there is a sick desire to escape sickness by cutting off what can produce sickness. I have known people who are sick only because of their fear of sickness. Sometimes it may be necessary to reduce the richness of life, and to establish a poorer life on a smaller basis. However, this in itself is not health. It is the most widespread mental disease. It can be transformed into health only if what is lost on a lower level is regained on a higher level, perhaps on the highest level—that of our infinite concern, our life with God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Many are satisfied if they can attain just a glimpse of the Overself. However, a few are not. They seek permanent abidance in the Overself, and that in the greatest possible degree. However, the main object of the quest is, after all, not these secondary betterments in bodily health, nerve, character, self-control—welcome as they are—but the discovery of truth and the living within the presence of the divine. There is no such thing as an ever-receding goal on the Ultimate Path because there are not ten or twenty ultimate truths. There is only a single, final truth. This is the objective on this path and once one knows it one has attained the goal. We must reflect in the mind and act the true being of beings. If one thinks the goal of all tis endeavour is merely to become frozen into passivity which never expresses itself and a contentment which never sees the miseries, the disasters, or the tragedies of life, they are mistaken. One seeks to fulfil a steady purpose which remains and is not an emotional froth which abates and later vanishes. There is a wide confusion in religio-mystic circles as to what a sage is really like, what a spiritually enlightened master really experiences, what both say and do when living in the World of ordinary people, how they behave and appear. On these points truth is inextricably bound up with superstition, fact with exaggeration, and wisdom with sentimentality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

There is also a wide confusion of the Real with its attributes and aspects, that is to say, with human reactions, interpretations, and experiences of IT. The conventional picture of what a being attuned to God is like needs to be revised. It is not the invisible imprimatur of any pontifical canonization that really makes a being one of God’s saints but the invisible imprimatur of one’s Overself. There is no higher point in human existence. Without direct experience of the inner nature of things, without personal revelation from the Overself, the only kind of knowledge beings can possess is obtained by the use of logical thinking assisted by memory. The cosmogony of a sage is truly scientific, for it is exactly descriptive of what really exists whereas the other kind of knowledge is merely argumentative. Philosophy uses the attained being not as a god for groveling worship and blind obedience, but as an ideal for effectual admiration and reverent analysis. To worship one as a god, to put him beyond all possible criticism, will only confuse our thought about him and obstruct our understanding of one. “And now it came to pass that Alma, having seen the afflictions of the humble followers of God, and the persecutions which were heaped upon them by the remainder of one’s people, and seeing all their inequality, began to be very sorrowful; nevertheless the Spirit of the Lord did not fail him,” reports Alma 4.15. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16