No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than the soul. I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something; and what I can do, that I ought to do; and what I ought to do, by the grace of God I shall do. The soul implies an act of faith. The brain is cool, but the soul is magic. Where else can the spirit of generations stir your imagination? So many people talk about the soul setting them on their magical paths, it is almost a groaner, but we know it is true. Wander through the depths of your being, and you can feel the dreams, the unique Worlds bubbling within your heart. The magic enters you as if it is cosmic. The brain may make you feel clever, lucky and driven to express yourself—but rarely is it as inspired to dream and create as is your soul. Some people see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream things that never were and say, “Why not?” In the pursuit of happiness, half the World is on the wrong scent. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. Happiness is really found in giving and in serving others. The soul is informed, illuminated, radiated by a fierce and beautiful love of God. A love so overwhelming that it engulfs community after community and makes the culture of our time distinctive, individual, creative and truly of the spirit of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

There is another way to flee from God—the way that promises to lead us into the abundance of life, a promise that is kept to a certain extent. It is not necessarily the way of the prodigal son in the parable of Jesus. It can be the acceptance of the fullness of life, opened to us by a searching mind and the driving power of love towards the greatness and beauty of creation. Such longing for life does not need to close our eyes to the tragedy within greatness, to the darkness within light, to the pain within pleasure, to the ugliness within beauty. More men and women should dare to experience the abundance of life. However, this also can be way of fleeing from God, like labor and work. In the ecstasy of living, the limits of the abundance of life are forgotten. I do not speak of the shallow methods of having a good time, of the desire for fun and entertainment. This is, in most cases, the other side of the flight from God under the cover of labor and work, called recreation; it is justified by everybody as a means for working more effectively. However, I speak of the ecstasy of living that includes participation in the highest and lowest of life in one and the same experience. This demands courage and passion, but it also can be a flight from God. And whoever lives in this way should not be judged morally, but should be made aware of one’s restlessness, and one’s fear of encountering God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The being who is under the bondage of work should not boast of being superior to others. However, neither should one boast to those who are in the bondage of work. There are many in our time who have experienced the limits both ways, for whom successful work has become as meaningless as plunging into the abundance of life. I am speaking of the skeptics and cynics, of those in anxiety and despair, of those who for a moment in their lives have been stopped in their flight from God and then continued it—though in a new form, in the form of consciously questioning or denying Him. Their attitude is intensely described and analyzed in our period by literature and the arts. And somehow they are justified. If they are serious skeptics, their seriousness, and the suffering following it, justifies them. If they are in despair, the hell of their serious despair makes them symbols through which we can better understand our own situation. However, they are also in flight from God. God has struck them; but they do not recognize Him. Their need to deny God in thought and attitude show that they have been arrested in their flight for a moment. If they were satisfied with the success of work or with the abundance of life, they would not have become “accusers of being.” They accuse being, because they flee from the power that gives being to every being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

This cannot be said of the last group of those who are in flight from God. They do not flee away from the Cross as did the disciples. They flee toward it. They watch it and witness to it; they are edified by it. They are better than the disciples! However, as they really? If the Cross becomes a tenet of our religious heritage, of parental and denominational tradition, does it remain the Cross of Christ, the decisive point where the eternal cuts into the temporal? But perhaps it is not paternal tradition that keeps us near the Cross. Perhaps it is a sudden emotional experience, a conversion under the impact of a powerful preacher or evangelist that has brought us, for the first time, face to face with the Cross! Even then, in the height of our emotion, we should ask ourselves—is not our bow to the Cross the safest form of our flight from God? But whatever the way of our flight from God, we can be arrested. And if this happens, somethings cuts into the regular process of our life. It is a difficult but also great experience! One may be thrown out of work and think now that the meaning of life is gone. One may feel suddenly the emptiness of what seemed to be an abundant life. One may become aware that one’s cynicism is not serious despair but hidden arrogance. One may see in the midst of a devotional act that one has exchanged God for one’s religious feelings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

All this is as painful as being wounded by a knife. However, it is also great, because it opens up in us a new dimension of life. God has arrested us and something new takes hold of us. This new reality that appears in us does not remove the old realities, but transforms them by giving them a new dimension. We still work; and work remains hard and full of anxiety and, as before, takes the largest part of our day! But it does not give us the meaning of our life. The strength or the opportunity to work may be taken from us, but not the meaning of our life. We realize that work cannot provide it and that work cannot take it from us. For the meaning of work itself has become something else. In working we help to make real that infinite possibilities that are possessed hidden in life. We cooperate with life’s self-creating powers, in the smallest or the greatest form of work. Through us, as workers, something of the inexhaustible depth of life becomes manifest. This is what one may feel, at least in some moments, if one is arrested by God. Work points beyond itself. And because it does so, it becomes blessed, and we become blessed through it. For blessedness means fulfillment in the ultimate dimension of our being. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

And if someone is arrested by experiencing the profound emptiness of the abundant life, the abundance itself is not taken from one; it may still give great moments of ecstasy and joy. However, it does not give one the meaning of one’s life. The external opportunities or the inner readiness to experience the ecstasies of life may vanish, but not the meaning of one’s life. One realizes that abundance cannot give it, and that want cannot take it away. For the abundance of life becomes something new for one who is arrested by God. It becomes a manifestation of the creative love that reunites what it separates, that gives and takes, that elevates us above ourselves and shows us that we are finite and must receive everything, that makes us love life and penetrate everything that is to its eternal ground. And if someone is arrested by God and made aware of the lack of serious of one’s doubt and one’s despair, the doubt is not taken away from one, and the despair does not cease to be a threat. However, one’s doubt does not have to lead to despair. It does not have to deprive one of meaning of one’s life. Doubt cannot give it to one, as one secretly believed in one’s cynical arrogance; and doubt cannot take it from one, as one felt in one’s despair. For doubt becomes something else for one who is arrested by God. It becomes a means of penetrating the depth of one’s being and into the depth of all being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Doubt ceases to be intellectual play or a method of research. It becomes a courageous undercutting of all the untested assumptions on which our lives are built. They break down one after the other, and we come deeper and nearer to the ground of our life. And then it happens that those who live in serious doubt about themselves and their World discover that dimension that leads to the ultimate by which they had been arrested. And they realize that hidden in the seriousness of their doubt was the truth. And if someone is arrested by God and made aware of the ambiguous character of one’s religion life, religion is not taken away from one. However, now one realizes that even this cannot give one the meaning of one’s life. If one loses religion, one does not have to lose the meaning of one’s life. Whoever is arrested by God stands beyond religion and non-religion. And if one holds fast to one’s religion, it becomes something else to one. It becomes a channel, not a law, another way in which the presence of the ultimate has arrested one, not the only way. Since one has reached freedom from religion, one also has reached freedom for religion. One is blessed in it and one is blessed outside of it. One has been opened to the ultimate dimension of being. Therefore, do not flee! Let yourself be arrested and be blessed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that God be conceived as the deepest power in the Universe; and, second, he must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition of our disposition toward those things, the things themselves being al good and righteous things. However, extrinsically considered, so to speak, God’s personality is to be regarded, like any other personality, as something possessed outside of my own and other than me, and whose existence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then, which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which recognizes us—such is the definition which I think nobody will be inclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth the other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination; various the ways of conceiving it what mode the recognition, the hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; some are the most sustained efforts of human’s intellect has ever made to keep still living on that subtile edge of things were speech and thought expire. However, with all these differences, the essence remains unchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality may differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at least in this—that both have purposes for which they care, and each can heart the other’s call. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

One is not grieved when past or present history brings to one’s notice the fact that human nature is less than perfect, nor is one disillusioned when one one’s self is made to suffer personally from this imperfection. One knows beings as they are, as well as what they will one day become, and has an accepting attitude toward their frailties. Nothing that any of them may do can embitter one, or weaken one’s confidence in the higher laws, or deter one from abiding the higher principles, or blur one’s insight to the ultimate greatness of every human being. Without pretension or affection, neither seeking to draw attention nor seek to impress others, one is truly humble in one’s greatness. Anyone who has this awakened consciousness at all times will be radiant at all times. One will make the best of things and things will be for best with one. Peace is perpetually within one. It is not the humility of an inferiority-complexed person but of a being who communes with God. It is not the equanimity of stupid empty-mindedness but of one who feels deep spiritual peace. It is not the dignity of self-conceit but of profound respect for the God within one. A being finds one’s greatest fulfilment of life, one’s greatest joy and happiness, in spirit, so that in reducing lower things one misses nothing at all, for one has outgrown them. This was the belief, feeling, and practice of one being who become a veritable sage—Plotinus! #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

So much intuition, like dream, get lost in the passage to verbal expression or even mental formulation. In early years, questions pepped one’s mind. Now they have ceased to do so. Not only because one does not want to disturb the peace one now enjoys; nor because one’s intellect has decayed; but because one knows that behind it all is Mystery: that one being cannot play the role of omniscient God, that one may well leave to God the endless questions that arises. A peace pervades one, gathered from deep thought and, much more, from the stillness which transcends all thought. The peace fills one with amiability, like warm Sunshine, and makes ill will impossible. The sensitive benefit, momentarily or permanently, by the contact, although they may not feel the peace till afterwards; the insensitive, well!—they may shrug their shoulders in wonder at what others see and find in one. One’s varied experience of human being makes one familiar with the heights and depths of the human nature, it saintly possibilities and its sinful actualities. This knowledge does not make one more cynical, only more patient. One’s patience is the outcome of one’s understanding, one’s acceptance the outcome of one’s knowledge. The cosmic plan of evolution through birth and after birth illuminates many situations for one. One neither hopes for the best nor fears the worst, for one lives in perfect serenity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of connection with the reflect-action theory of mind. Any mind, constructed on the triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and finally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage of definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing object. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our reactions are firm and certain enough—often instinctive. I see the desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk. However, the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a whole—the Universe. And then the object that confronts us, that knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided upon and actively met, is just this whole Universe itself and its essence. The Universe which shall completely satisfy the mind must obey conditions of the mind’s own imposing, and must at least let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a rational Universe or not. When this truth is at last seen, that Heaven is not a place in space but a condition of being, and that therefore it can to a certain extent be realized even before death, a feeling of joy and a sense of adventure are felt. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The joy arises because we are no longer restricted by time, and the adventuresomeness arises because a vista of the quest’s possibilities opens up. A serenity which never leaves one and an integrity which always stamps one, are only two of the fruits of matured philosophic discipline. One whose resort is solely the personal ego is constantly subject to its limitations and narrowness and, consequently, is afflicted with strains and anxieties. One who lets it go and opens oneself up, whose resort is to one’s God, finds it infinite and boundless and, consequently, is filled with inward peace. The quest often begins with a great sadness but always ends with a great happiness. Its course may flow through both dark and bright moods at times, but its terminus will be unbelievably serene. The Quest for God gives one the chance to achieve inner peace and find inner happiness; it does not give peace and happiness. If this does not seem to justify its labours and disciplines, remember that ordinary beings lack even this chance. Therefore, it is that, grey with wandering from one’s ancient goal, the aspirant turns tired feet across the threshold of immortal thought and dwells for a soft white hour upon the couch of unutterable peace. It forms the middle segment of the mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulse dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of mentality finds its rhythmic pause. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have pointed out—the function of defining the direction which our activity, immediate or remote, shall take. The words one has heard with one’s mortal ears have proved only of momentary worth to one, but the words one hears when one turns away from the World and listens with the inner ear will walk by one’s side until the end of Time. When one has brought the host of conflicting emotions to rest, when one has trained the thoughts to obedience, when one has fought and beaten the ego itself, one comes to a state of peace. To enter into the presence of a high inspiration, feel its ennoblement, and understand its message, beings a deeply satisfying joy. The being who fails to find joy in one’s Quest has not understood the Quest. There is no need for aspirants to engage in the cult of morbid suffering. There is no reason why they should not be happy. If the Quest is to bring them nearer to their essential self, it will also bring them nearer to its happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

When a being feels the presence of a diviner self within one’s heart, when one believes that its power protects and provides for one, when one views past errors and future troubles alike with perfect equanimity, one has a better capacity to enjoy life and a truer expression happiness than those who delight only in ephemeral pleasures and sense satisfactions. For it will endure into times of adversity and last through hours of calamity, where the other will crumble and vanish. Wisdom may or may not come with the years of mature age: it is more likely to come with the labours in self-rule and the deepenings of study, concentration, and reflection, with the humbling religious veneration of the higher Power. It is, they say, its own reward but it a bringer of gifts, of which inner peace is the most prominent and a kindly smile the most permanent. One who has won wisdom as the reward of one’s quest wins virtue as its natural accompaniment too. The person who has diligently applied oneself to the primary task of self-improvement, and who has accompanied one’s efforts with honest and rigid self-analysis, will discover that many questions which formerly baffled one has been solved by the workings of one’s own intuition. Nobody can earnestly work through a course in the higher philosophy without finding oneself a better and wiser being at the end than one was at the beginning. And this result will come to one almost unconsciously, little by little, though the creative power of right thinking. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

I imagine that one of you are asking, “But what kind of person does one become? It is not enough to say that one drops the facades. What kind of person is possessed underneath?” Since one of the most obvious facts is that each individual tends to become a separate and distinct and unique person, the answer is not easy. However, I would like to point out some of the characteristic trends which I see. No one person would fully exemplify these characteristics, no one person fully achieves the description I will give, but I do see certain generalization which can be drawn, based upon living a therapeutic relationship with others. First of all, I would say that in this process the individual becomes more open to one’s experience. This is a phrase which has come to have a great deal of meaning to me. It is the opposite of defensiveness. Psychological research has shown that if the evidence of our senses runs contrary to our picture of self, then that evidence is distorted. In other words, we cannot see all that our senses report, but only the things which fit the picture we have. Now in a safe relationship of the sort I have described, this defensiveness or rigidity, tends to be replaced by an increasing openness to experience. One’s judgments turn out to be misjudgments, and one’s caution to be indecision. Often this may be so, alas! #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, this kind of wisdom which comes with failure of defeat; it embodies the hindsight which, too late to be of possible use except in the future, is the consequence after the event. How precious then would be the acquirement of two values to which the Quest may lead a being—calmness and intuition. Here on the quest, it is not only possible for one to meet the profoundest thoughts of the human mind but also its highest experiences. One whom finds God, loses the burdens, the miseries, and the fears of the ego. How does the quest remove one’s fears? By providing one sooner or later with firm assurance that God’s gracious power is not only illuminative but also protective. Slowly, a one strives onward with this inner work, one’s faults and frailties will fall away and this ever-shining better self hidden behind them will begin to be revealed. The individual become more openly aware of one’s own feelings and attitudes as they exist in one at an organic level, in the way I tried to describe. One also becomes more aware of reality as it exists outside of oneself, instead of perceiving it in preconceived categories. One sees that not all trees are evergreens, not all men are stern fathers, not all women are rejecting, not all failure experiences prove that one is no good, and the like. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

One is able to take in the evidence in a new situation, as it is, rather than distorting it to fit a pattern which one already holds. As you might expect, this increasing ability to be open to experience makes one far more realistic in dealing with new people, new situations, new problems. It means that one’s beliefs are not rigid, that one can accept ambiguity. One can receive much conflicting evidence without forcing closure upon the situation. This openness of awareness to what exists at this moment in oneself and in the situation is, I believe, an important element in the description of the person who emerges from therapy. Even if this quest ends in total failure (which it cannot do) the ideals and ideas it involves will have left some impress on one’s character, for they are faint reverberations of whispers from one’s higher being. The aspirant is not unreasonable in asking that some reward, if not an adequate reward, should become visible in time for al one’s struggles. If one is told to acquire the virtue of patience, one is not told to acquire the quality of hopelessness. There are signs and tokens, experiences and glimpses to hearten one on the way. One’s prayers tend to make one sensitive and one’s studies sympathetic; the two qualities combine well so that others notice how kindly one is in personal relations. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. Our souls have the most effective search engines yet invented—the spirit of God. “Therefore let your light so shine before this people, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in Heaven,” reports 3 Nephi 12.16. Be present, O Lord, to our prayers, and protect us by day and night; that in all successive changes of time we may ever be strengthened by Thine unchangeableness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, at evening, and morning, and nonday, we humbly beseech Thy Majesty, that Thou wouldst drive from our hearts the darkness of sins, and make us to come to the true Light, which is Christ; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Thine is the day, O Lord, and Thine is the night: grant that the Sun of righteousness may abide in our hearts, to drive away the darkness of wicked thoughts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We give Thee thanks, Lord, Who hast preserved us through the day. We give Thee thanks, Who wilt preserve us through the night. Bring us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, in safety to the morning hours; that Thou mayest receive our praise at all times; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who by making the evening to succeed the day hast bestowed the gift of repose on human weakness; grant, we beseech Thee, that while we enjoy these timely blessings, we may acknowledge God from Whom they come. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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