People easily forget that they are locked in coevolution with the life-forms that sustain their thought. In particular, they often neglect the evolution of their soul as a vital aspect of their own survival. When life seems not worth living, ten minutes in prayer proves otherwise. The soul is that venerable place where beings preserve the history of their experience, their tentative experiments, their discoveries, and their plans. In the soul may be found the recipes for daily living—the prescriptions for the mind and the heart. Listening one evening to Bach’s “Passion according to St. Matthew,” I was struck by the text and music of the line, “Then all the disciples forsook hi and fled.” It anticipated the words of Jesus on the Cross, “My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?” One who is forsaken by all beings feels forsaken by God. And, indeed, all being left him, and those who were nearest him fled farthest from him. Ordinarily, we are not aware of this fact. We are used to imagining the crucifixion in terms of those beautiful pictures where, along with his mother and other women, at least one disciple is present. The reality was different. They all fled, and some women dared to watch from afar. Only an unimaginable loneliness remained during the hours His life and work were broken. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

How shall we think about these disciples? Our first reaction is probably the questions—how could they forsake him Whom they had called the Messiah, the Christ, the bringer of the new age, whom they had followed after leaving behind everything for his sake? However, this time, when I heard the words and tones of the music, I admired the disciples! For it is they whom we owe the words of our text. They did not hide their flight; they simply stated it in one short sentence, a statement that judges them for all time. The gospel stores contain many judgments against the disciples. We read that they misunderstood Jesus continuously, as did his mother and brothers, and that day by day, their misunderstandings intensified his suffering. We read that some of the most important among them demanded a place of exceptional glory and power in the World to come. We read that Jesus reproached them because their zeal made them fanatical against those who did not follow Him. And we read that Jesus had to call Peter “Satan,” because Peter tried to dissuade him from going to Jerusalem to his death, and that Peter denied his discipleship in the hour of trial. These reports are astonishing. They show what Jesus did to the disciples. He taught them to accept judgement, and not to present themselves in a favorable light. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Without the acceptance of such judgement, they could not have been his disciples. And if the disciples had suppressed the truth about their own profound weakness, our gospels would not be what they are. The glory of the Christ and the misery of his followers would not be so clearly manifest. And yet even in the same records, human’s desire to cover up one’s own unattractiveness makes itself felt. Later traditions in the gospels try to smooth the hard and hurting edges of the original picture. Apparently, it was unbearable to established congregations that all the disciples fled, that none of them witnessed the crucifixion and the death of the master. They could not accept the fact that only far away in Galilee was their flight arrested by the appearance of him who they deserted in his hour of agony and despair. So, it was stated that Jesus himself had told them to go to Galilee; their flight was not a rea real flight. And still later, it was said that they did not flee at all, but remained in Jerusalem. From earliest times, the church could not stand this judgment against itself, its past and its present. It has tried to conceal what the disciples openly admitted—that we all forsook him and fled. However, this is the truth about all beings, including the followers of Jesus today. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The flight from God begins in the moment we feel His presence. This feeling is at work in the dark, half-conscious regions of our being, unrecognized, but effective; in the restlessness of the child’s asking and seeking; of the adolescent’s doubts and despairs; of the adult’s desires and struggles. God is present, but not as God; He is present as the unknown force in us that makes us restless. However, in some moments He appears as God. The unknown force in us that caused our restlessness becomes manifest as the God in Whose hands we are, Who is our ultimate threat and our ultimate refuge. In such moments it is as though we were arrested in our hidden flight. However, it is not an arrest by brute force, but one that has the character of a question. And we remain free to continue our flight. This is what happened to the disciples: they were powerfully arrested when Jesus first called them, but they remained free to flee again. And they did when the moment of trial arrived. And so it is with the church and all its members. They are arrested in their hidden flight and brought into the conscious presence of God. However, they remain free to flee again, not only as individual beings, but also as bearers of the church, carrying the church itself on the road to Galilee, separating it as far away as possible from the point where the eternal breaks into the temporal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Beings flee from God even in the church, the place where we are supposed to be arrested by the presence of God. Even there we are in flight from him. If the ultimate cuts into life of a being, one tried to take cover in the preliminary. One runs for a safe place, fleeing from the attack of that which strike one with unconditional seriousness. And there are many places that look safe to us as Galilee looked to the feeling disciples. Perhaps the most effective refuge in our time from the threatening presence of God is the work we are doing. This was not always so. The attitude of ancient beings towards work is well summed up in the curse God pronounced over Adam—“In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,” and in the words of the 90^th Psalm concerning the short years of our life—“yet their span is but toil and trouble.” Later, physical labor with its toil and its drudgery was left to the slaves and serfs or uneducated classes. And it was distinguished from creative work that was based on leisure time, and hence, the privilege of the few. Medieval Christianity considered work a discipline, especially in monastic life. However, in our period of history, work has become the dominating destiny of all beings, if not in reality, at least by demand. It is everything—discipline, production, creation. The difference between labor and work is gone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

 The fact that it stands under a curse in the Biblical view is forgotten. Work has become a religion itself, the religion of modern industrial society. And it has all of us in its grip. Even if we were able to escape the punishment of starvation for not working, something within us would not permit an escape from the bondage to work. For most of us it is both a necessity and a compulsion. And as such, it has become the favored way of the flight from God. And nothing seems to be safer than this way. From it we get the satisfaction of having fulfilled our duty. We are praised by others and by ourselves for “work well done!” We provide support for our family or care for its members. We overcome daily the dangers of leisure, boredom and disorder. We acquire a good conscience out of it and, as a cynical philosopher said, at the end of it, a good sleep. And if we do the kind of work that is called creative, an even higher satisfaction results—the joy of bringing something new into being. Should somebody protest that this is not his or her way of fleeing from God, we might ask one: Have you not sometimes drawn a balance sheet of your whole being, and upon honestly discovering many points on the negative side, then not balanced the sheet by your work on the other? #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The pharisee of today would boast before God not so much of one’s obedience to the law and of one’s religious exercises as of one’s hard work and one’s disciplined, successful life. And one would also find sinners with whom one could compare oneself favorably. Can these competing tendencies, the extroverting and the introverting, be brought together in a single life? Philosophy not only answers that they can, but also that they mist be integrated if the spiritual life is to reach its fullest bloom. It wisely mingles the two ideals without despoiling either. Here, it not only co-operates with human nature but also imitates the rhythmic pattern of Nature. It is in harmony with the way the Universe goes. It is not enough to develop any one of these parts of our being alone. It is a much more stupendous task to develop al three at the same time. Yet this is what philosophy asks for. Work completely done, the body effectively used, the mind capably directed—such a roundly developed personality is the ideal. If the whole truth is to be discovered, the whole being must be brought to its quest. If this is done, philosophy will be lived as well as known, felt a well as understood, experienced as well as intuited. Beings as a whole must enter on the Quest and then the complete organism will benefit when truth is found. If isolated functions alone enter on it then they alone will benefit by the truth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

So long as one is an incomplete person, so long will one never be able to find more than an incomplete truth. It is not just one part of being which is to follow the quest but all parts of one. The whole truth can come only to the whole being. Other experiences and other goals demand the strength and activity of only a part of one’s being from one but this search for a higher life demands one’s all. One follows the quest somewhat hesitantly, discontinuously and cautiously, wary lest it demands more from one than one is prepared to give. There is no objection: one my set one’s own pace but in the end, of course, one must come into this quest with all of oneself. Why should one not be a human being as well as an enlightened soul? Why should one not bring all of one’s nature to this co-operative venture that is Life? The quest may become one’s central interest but this is no excuse for one to become unbalanced or disequilibriated. If one comes to the quest with one’s whole being, turning every side of it to the quest’s light and discipline, one may confidently expect the full insight, the full transformation and not a partial, incomplete result. The first reward is truth realized in every part of one’s being, the lower self becoming the instrument of the Soul. The second reward is peace, intense satisfying and joyous. A keen and constant longing after the Soul’s consciousness, a willingness to surrender all to it inwardly, are however necessary prerequisites. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Let us have faith that right makes right; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. The acceptance of these ideas can only benefit, and not harm, humanity. God does not want us to do extraordinary things; he wants us to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another. The real World as it is given objectively at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. The real World order—it is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible, We break it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we began to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and out of an infinite number of these we call certain one essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but only for our purpose, the other relations being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to conceive simply and to foresee. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodeling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends. When the being of affairs, the artist, or the being of science fails, one is not rebutted. One tried again. One says the impressions of sense must give way, must be reduced to the desiderated form. They are all postulate in the interest of their volitional nature a harmony between the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And the reflex doctrine of the mine’s structure, though all theology should as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor itself at least obeyed in form the mind’s most necessary law. Now, if he did not exist, what kind of a being would God be? The word “God” has come to mean many things in the history of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the “Idee” which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and presented as the only fitting object of our reverence. Of course, if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more definite the this. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

We must not call any object of loyalty a “God” without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be one of God’s functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of his own believes that the object of one’s loyalty has those other attributes, negative or positive, as the case may be. Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their amounts and mutual relations, the World has been delivered over to disputes. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself, the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection with our free-will, the proportion of one’s mercy to one’s justice, and the amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical relation to the phenomenal World, whether causal, substantial, ideal, or what not—are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these essential features, the care poles of the subject, that our business exclusively is possessed. The acceptance of these ideas can only benefit, and not harm, humanity. If one will consciously put oneself into line with this higher purpose of human living, one will not only become a better and wiser being but also a happier one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The pursuit of Truth is full of certainty. It rewards its own, even in apparent defeat. Out of the Quest will come a yearning for what is the best in life and the highest in Truth. This experience of feeling is really the discovery of unknown elements of self. The phenomenon is the fact that in our daily lives there are a thousand and one reasons for not letting ourselves experience our attitudes fully, reasons from our past and from the present, reasons that reside within the social situation. It seems too dangerous, too potentially damaging, to experience them freely and fully. Just as pain might make a person realize that there is something wrong with one’s body, so neurotic symptoms could draw attention to psychological problems of which the individual was unaware. Introverts are caught up in their inner Worlds; while extraverts lose themselves in the press of events. Because of the achievements of one’s culture, there is an especial tendency toward intellectual hubris; and overvaluation of thinking which could alienate a being from one’s emotional roots. Neurotic symptoms, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious are often expressions of the “other side” trying to asset itself. There is, therefore, within every individual, a striving toward unity in which divisions would be replaced by consistency, opposites equally balanced, consciousness in reciprocal relation with the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Personalities are manifested by definiteness, wholeness and ripeness. In the safety and freedom of a therapeutic relationship, one can they can be experienced fully, clear to the limit of what they are. They can be and are experienced in a fashion that I like to think of as “pure culture,” so that for the moment the person is one’s fear, or one is one’s anger, or one is one’s tenderness, or whatever. In the first half of life, a person is, and should be, concerned with emancipating oneself from parents and with establishing oneself in the World as spouse, parent and effective contributor. In the modern World, especially, a certain one-sidedness might be needed to fulfill these conventional demands; but, once a person had done so, then one should look inwards. This is the journey toward the wholeness the process of individuation. Sometimes fear kind of seeps through, and people feel they need something to hold on to. Much like a student feels he or she wishes the World would let one have one’s thesis or one’s Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) because they kind of need that little World. In adult life, we experience a feeling of being all the way to the limit. Being nothing but a pleading little child, supplicating, begging, dependent. At that moment one is nothing but one’s pleadingness, all the way through. Alchemists sought not only to make gold, but to perfect everything in its own nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Moreover, alchemists linked change in matter with change in beings, so that alchemical “work” aimed at perfecting matter was, at the same time, a psychological process aimed at perfecting humans. Some of the alchemists undoubtedly thought of their work as a meditative development of the inner personality. Here we find parallels between the series of changes described by the alchemists and the process of individuation which is taking place within people who reach their limit and are trying to move beyond. Only the being who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality. By paying attention to the voice within, the individual achieves a new synthesis between conscious and unconscious, a sense of calm acceptance and detachment, and a realization of the meaning of life. If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor alone with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self. The new centre expressed itself in quaternity symbols and circular structures which are called mandalas. Mandalas symbolize an integrating factor. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

In cases where consciousness is confused, mandalas may appear as compensator attempts at self-healing by imposing an ordered structure. The self, of which the mandala is a symbol, is the archetype of unity and totality. This archetype is the underlying reality manifesting itself in the various systems of monotheism. The self, therefore, is God within; and the individual, in seeking self-relations and unity, becomes the means through which God seeks his goal. By fulfilling one’s own highest potential, the individual is no only realizing the meaning of life, but also fulfilling God’s will. People will feel it is such a wondrous thing to have these new things come out of them. It will amaze them so much each time, and then again there will be that same feeling, kind of feeling scared that one has so much of this that one has been keeping back something. Then one will realize that this has bubbled through, and that for the moment one is one’s dependency in a way which astonished him or her. It is not only dependency that is experienced in this all-out kind of fashion. It may be hurt, or sorrow, or jealousy, or destructive anger, or deep desire, or confidence and pride, or sensitive tenderness, or outgoing love. It may be anything of the emotions of which beings are capable. What I have gradually learned from experiences such as this, is that the individual in such a moment, is coming to be what one is. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Only exception individuals reach the peeks of individual development. Individuation means parting company with the crowd; and this is first accentuates loneliness, and may seem alarming. Most human beings are content to remain safely with the majority, conforming to the conventions and beliefs shared by members of their family, church or political party. However, exceptional individuals are impelled by their inner nature to seek their own path; and, although human psyches, like human bodies, share a basic structure, the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. When a person has, throughout therapy, experienced in this fashion all the emotions which organismically arise in one, and has experienced them in knowing and open manner, then one has experienced oneself, in al the richness that exists within oneself. One has become what one is. Childhood discover is of the vital importance of remaining in touch with the inner World and is one factor accounting for it as an emphasis on healing and the growth of personality as essentially an inner process, concentrating upon the individual’s relation with the various aspects of one’s own psyche, rather than upon one’s relationships with other human beings. Individuals can neither be happy nor healthy unless they acknowledge their dependence upon God than that of the ego. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

When we think about what it means to become one’s self, it is a most perplexing question. Often times during the reflective process, various facades by which one has been living have somehow crumpled and collapsed, bring a feeling of confusion, but also a feeling of relief. It may seem as if all the energy that goes into holding the arbitrary pattern together is quite unnecessary—a waste. One might think that one has to make the pattern one’s self; but there are so many pieces, and it is so hard to see where they fit. Sometimes one may put them in the wrong place, and the more pieces mis-fitted, the more effort it takes to hold them in place, until at last you are so tired that even that awful confusion is better than holding on any longer. Then one will discover that left to themselves the jumbled pieces fall quite naturally into their own places, and a living pattern emerges without any effort at all one one’s part. Your job is just to discover it, and in the course of that, you will find yourself and your own place. One must even let their own experience tell one its meaning; the minute one tells it what it means, one is at war with one’s self. To be yourself means to find the pattern, the underlying order, which exists in the ceaselessly changing flow of one’s experience. Rather than trying to hold one’s experience into the form of a mask, or to make it be a form or structure that it is not, being one’s self means to discover the unity and harmony which exists in one’s own actual feelings and reactions. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Being one’s self means that the real self is something which is comfortably in one’s experiences, not something imposed upon it. It seems that as we learn to self-actualize that gradually, painfully, the individual explores what is behind the masks one presents to the World, and even behind the masks which one has been deceiving oneself. Deeply and often vividly one experiences the various elements of oneself which have been hidden within. Thus, to an increasing degree one becomes oneself—not a façade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, nor a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process—in short, one becomes a person. We should be ruled by affirmation of individuality. A being who understands and comes to terms with the different aspects of one’s inner being is enabled to live life more completely. It is possible to look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference which, though mutually exclusive, are nevertheless complementary. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you set for yourself. There are no limits except the limits you place on your imagination. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable and then, when we summon the will, they seem become inevitable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the daily small differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee. O Lord God, Who didst bow the Heavens, and come down for the salvation of humankind, look upon Thy servants and Thine inheritance. For to Thee, the awful and benignant Judge, Thy servants have bowed the head and stooped the neck, looking for no help of humans, but waiting for Thy pardon and salvation. Guard them at all times, and this evening, and in the ensuing night, from every foe, from every adverse working of the devil, from idle thoughts and wicked imaginations. “And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land,” reports Mosiah 29.30. O Lord our God, refresh us with quiet sleep, when we are wearied with the day’s labour; that being assisted with the help which our weakness needs, we may be devoted to Thee both in body and mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “And I command you to do these things in the fear of the Lord; and I command you to do these things, and that ye have no king; that if these people commit sins and iniquities they shall be answered upon their own heads” reports Mosiah 29.30. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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