Exaggerate Nothing for All Good Lies in Right Measure!

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. Even the best-intentioned people have been horrified by probabilism, but, when brought face to face with the realities of life, many of them have fund their horror evaporating or their laughter dying on their lips. The doctor too must weigh and ponder, not whether a thing is for or against the Church but whether it is for or against life and health. On paper the moral code looks clear and neat enough; but the same document written on the “living tables of the heart” is often a sorry tatter, particularly in the mouths of those who talk the loudest. We are told on every side that evil is evil and that there can be no hesitation in condemning it, but that does not prevent evil from being the most problematical thing in the individual’s life and the one which demands the deepest reflection. What above all deserves our keenest attention is the question “Exactly who is the doer?” For the answer to this question ultimately decides the value of the deed. It is true that society attaches greater importance at first to what is done, because it is immediately obvious; but in the long run the right deed in the hands of the wrong human will also have a disastrous effect. No one who is far-sighted will allow oneself to be hoodwinked by the right deed of the wrong human, any more than by the wrong deed of the right human. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25

Hence the psychotherapist must fix one’s eye on not what is done but on how it is done, because therein is decided the whole character of the doer. Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good. The encounter with the dark half of the personality, or “shadow,” comes about of its own accord in any moderately thorough treatment. This problem is as important that of sin in the Church. The open conflict is unavoidable and painful. I have often been asked, “And what do you do about it?” I do nothing; there is nothing I can do expect wait, with a certain trust in God, until, out of a conflict borne with patience and fortitude, there emerges the solution destined—although I cannot foresee it—for that particular person. Not that I am passive or inactive meanwhile: I help the patient to understand all the things that the unconscious produces during the conflict. The reader may believe me that these are no ordinary products. On the contrary, they are among the most significant things that have ever engaged my attention. Nor is the patient inactive; one must do the right thing, and do it with all one’s might, in order to prevent the pressure of evil from becoming too powerful in one. “The Lord will judge his people. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” reports Hebrews 10.30-31. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25

One needs justification by faith, for justification by fait alone has remained an empty sound for one as for so many others. “By faith we understand that the Universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what is visible,” reports Hebrews 11.3. Faith can sometimes be a substitute for a lack of experience. In these cases what is needed is real work. Christ espoused the sinner and did not condemn one. The true follower of Christ will do the same, and, since one should do unto others as one would do unto oneself, one will always take the part of the sinner who is oneself. And as little as we would accuse Christ of fraternizing with evil, so little should we reproach ourselves that to love the sinner who is oneself is to make a pact with the devil. Love makes a human better, hate makes one worse—even when that human is oneself. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ However, I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons (and daughters) of you Father in Heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers (or sisters), what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” reports Matthew 5.43-48. The danger in this point f view is the same as in the imitation of Christ; but the Pharisee in us will never allow oneself to be caught talking to publicans and harlots. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25

I must emphasize of course that psychology invented neither. Christianity nor the imitation of Christ. I wish everybody could be free from the burden of their sins by the Church. However, one to whom she cannot render this service must bend very low in the imitation of Christ in order to take the burden of one’s cross upon one. The ancients could get along with the Greek wisdom of the ages: Exaggerate nothing, all good lies in right measure. However, what an abyss still separates us from reason! Apar from the moral difficulty there is another danger which is not inconsiderable and may lead to complications, particularly with individuals who are pathologically inclined. This is the fact that the contents of the persona unconscious (id est, the shadow) are indistinguishably merged with the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious and drag the latter with them when the shadow is brought into consciousness. This may exert an uncanny influence on the conscious mind; for activated archetypes have a disagreeable effect even—or I should perhaps say, particularly—on the most cold-blooded rationalist. One is afraid that the lowest form of conviction, namely superstition, is, as one thinks, forcing itself on one. However, superstition in the truest sense only appears in such people if they are pathological, not if they can keep their balance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25

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It then takes the form of the fear of “going mad”—for everything that the modern mind cannot define it regards as insane. It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears. The psychological elucidation of these images, which cannot be passed over in silence of blindly ignored, leads logically into the depths of religious phenomenology. The history of religion in its widest sense (including therefore mythology, folklore, and primitive psychology) is a treasure-horse of archetypal forms from which the doctor can draw helpful parallels and enlightening comparisons for the purpose of calming and clarifying a consciousness that is all at sea. It is absolutely necessary to supply these fantastic images that rise up so strange and threatening before the mind’s eye with some kind of context so as to make them more intelligible. Experience has shown that the best way to do this is by means of comparative mythological material. There is a lot of connection between individual dream symbolism and medieval alchemy. That is not, as one might suppose, a prerogative of the case in questions, but a general fact which only struck me some ten years ago when first I began to come to grips with the ideas and symbolism of alchemy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25

More often than not it is precisely the more intelligent and cultured patients who, finding a retuning to the Church impossible, and come up against archetypal material and thus set the doctor problems which can no longer be mastered by a narrowly personalistic psychology. Nor is a mere knowledge of the psychic structure of a neurosis by any means sufficient; for once the process has reached the sphere of the collective unconscious we are dealing with healthy material, id est, wit the universal basis of the individually varied psyche. Our understanding of these deeper layers of the psyche is helped not only by a knowledge of primitive psychology and mythology, but to an even greater extent by some familiarity with the history of our modern consciousness and the stages immediately preceding it. One the one hand it is a child of the Church; on the other, of science, in whose beginnings very much lies hid that the Church was unable to accept—that is to say, remnants of the classical spirit and the classical feeling for nature which could not be exterminated and eventually found refuge in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages. As the “spiritus metallorum” and the astrological components of destiny the old gods of the planets lasted out many a Christian century. Whereas in the Church the increasing differentiation of ritual and dogma alienated consciousness from its natural roots in the unconscious, alchemy and astrology were ceaselessly engaged in preserving the bridge to nature, id est, to the unconscious psyche, from decay. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25

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Astrology led the conscious mind back again and again to the knowledge of Heimarmene, that is, the dependence of character and destiny on certain moments in time; and alchemy afforded numerous “hooks” for the projection of those archetypes which could not be fitted smoothly into the Christian process. It is true that alchemy always stood on the verge of heresy and that certain decrees leave no doubt as to the Church’s attitude towards it, but on the other hand it was effectively protected by the obscurity of its symbolism, which could always be explained as harmless allegory. For many alchemists the allegorical aspect undoubtedly occupied the foreground to such an extent that they were firmly convinced that their sole concern was with chemical substances. However, there were always a few for whom laboratory work was primarily a matter of symbols and their psychic effect. As the texts shows, they were quite conscious of this, to the point of condemning the naïve goldmakers as liars, frauds, and dupes. Their own standpoint they proclaimed with propositions like “Aurum nostrum non est aurun vulgi.” Although their labours over the retort were a serious effort to elicit the secrets of chemical transformation, it was at the same time—and often in overwhelming degree—the reflection of a parallel psychic process which could be projected all the more easily into the unknown chemistry of matter since that process is an unconscious phenomenon of nature, just like the mysterious alteration of substances. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25

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What the symbolism of alchemy expresses is the whole problem of the evolution of personality described above, the so-called individuation process. Whereas the Church’s great buttress is the imitation of Christ, the alchemist, without wanting it, easily fell victim, in the loneliness and obscure problems of one’s work, to the promptings and unconscious assumptions of one’s own mind, since, unlike the Christians, one had no clear and unmistakable models on which to reply. The authors one studied provided one with symbols whose meaning one thought one understood in one’s own way; but in reality they touched and stimulated one’s unconscious. Ironical towards themselves, the alchemists coined the phrase “obscurum per obscurius.” However, with this method of explaining the obscure by more obscure they only sank themselves deeper in the very process from which the Church was struggling to redeem them. While the dogmas of the Church offered analogies to the alchemical process, these analogies, in strict contrast to alchemy, had become detached from the World of nature through their connection with the historical figure of the Redeemer. The alchemical four in one, the philosophical gold, the lapis angularis, the aqua divina, became, in the Church, the four-armed cross on which the Only-Begotten had sacrificed himself once in history and at the same time for all eternity. The alchemists ran counter to the Church in preferring to seek through knowledge rather than to find through faith, though as medieval people they never thought of themselves as anything but good Christians. Paracelsus is a classic example in this respect. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25

However, in reality they were in much the same position as modern humans, who prefer immediate personal experience to belief in traditional ideas, or rather has it forced upon one. Dogma is not arbitrarily invented nor is it a unique miracle, although it is often described as miraculous with the obvious intent of lifting it out of its natural context. The central ideas of Christianity are rooted in Gnostic philosophy, which, in accordance with psychological laws, simply had to grow up at a time when the classical religions had become obsolete. It was founded on the perception of symbols thrown up by the unconscious individuation process which always sets in when the collective dominants of human life fall into decay. At such a time there is bound to be a considerable number of individuals who are possessed by archetypes of a numinous nature that force their way to the surface in order to form new dominants. This state of possession shows itself almost without exception in the fact that the possessed identity themselves with the archetypal contents of their unconscious, and, because they do not realize that the role which is being thrust upon them is the effect of new contents still to be understood, they exemplify these concretely in their own lives, thus becoming prophets and reformers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25

In so far as the archetypal content of the Christian drama was about to give satisfying expression to the uneasy and clamorous unconscious of the many, the consensus omnium raised this drama to a universally binding truth—not of course by an act of judgment, but by the irrational fact of possession, which is far more effective. Thus Jesus became the tutelary image or amulet against the archetypal powers that threatened to possess everyone. The glad tidings announced: “It has happened, but it will not happen to you inasmuch as you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God!” Yet it could and it can and it will happen to everyone in whom the Christian dominant has decayed. For this reason there have always been people who, not satisfied with the dominants of conscious life, set forth—under cover and by devious paths, to their destruction or salvation—to seek direct experience of the eternal roots, and following the lure of the restless unconscious psyche, find themselves in the wilderness where, like Jesus, they come up against the son of darkness. Thus an old alchemist—and he a cleric!—prays: “Horridas nostrae mentis purge tenebras, accende lumen sensibus!” (Purge the horrible darkness of our mind, light a light for our senses!) The author of this sentence must have been undergoing the experience of the nigredo, the first stage of the work, which was felt as “melancholia” in alchemy and corresponds to the encounter with the shadow in psychology. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25

When, therefore, modern psychotherapy once more meets with the activated archetypes of the collective unconscious, it is merely the repetition of a phenomenon that has often been observed in moments of great religious crisis, although it can also occur in individuals for whom the ruling ideas have lost their meaning. An example of this is the descensus ad inferos depicted in Prince Lestat, which, consciously or unconsciously, is an opus alchymicum. The problem of opposites called up by the shadow plays a great—indeed, the decisive—role in alchemy, since it leads in the ultimate phase of the work to the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the hierosgamos or “chymical wedding.” Here the supreme opposites, male and female (as in the Chinses yang and yin), are melted into a unity purified of all oppositions and therefore incorruptible. The prerequisite for this, of course, is that the Artifex should not identify oneself with the figures in the work but should leave them in their objective, impersonal state. So long as the alchemist was working in one’s laboratory one was in a favourable position, psychologically speaking, for one had no opportunity to identify oneself with the archetypes as they appeared, since they were all projected immediately into the chemical substances. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25

The disadvantage of this situation was that the alchemist was forced to represent the incorruptible substance as a chemical product—an impossible undertaking which led to the downfall of alchemy, its place in the laboratory being taken by chemistry. However, the psychic part of the work did not disappear. It captured new interpreters, as we can see from the example of Prince Lestat, and also from the signal connection between our modern psychology of the unconscious alchemical symbolism. From our own childhood we remember that before our elders thought us capable of “understanding” anything, we already had spiritual experience as pure and as momentous as any we have undergone since, though not, of course, as rich in factual context. From Christianity itself we learn that there is a level—in the long run the only level of importance—on which the learned and the adult have no advantage at all over the simple and the child. I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronized. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, saggy-bearded, slow-spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25

We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. However, sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods—that they could cease directing their lives to their Creator and taking all their delights as uncovenanted mercies, as “accidents” (in the logical sense) which arose in the course of a life directed not to those delights but to the adoration of God. As a young man wants a regular allowance from his father which he can count on as his own, within which he makes his own plans (and rightly, for his father is after all a fellow creature), so they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to plan for pleasure and for security, to have a medium from which, no doubt, they would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time, attention, and love, but which, nevertheless, was theirs not His. They wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” However, that means to live a life, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the Universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” However, there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. We have no idea in what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory, impossible wish found expression. For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence. This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall. For the difficulty about the first sin is that it must be very heinous, or its consequences would no be so terrible, and yet it must be something which a being free from the temptations of fallen humans could conceivably have committed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25

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The turning from God to self fulfills both conditions. It is a sin possible even to Paradisal man, because the mere existence of a self—the mere fact that we call it “me”—includes, from the first, the danger of self-idolatry. Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to myself. This is, if you like, the “weak spot” in the very nature of creation, the risk which God apparently thinks work taking. However, the sin was very heinous, because the self which Paradisal man had to surrender contained no natural recalcitrancy to being surrendered. His data, so to speak, were a psychophysical organism wholly subject to the will and a will wholly disposed, though not compelled, to turn to God. The self-surrender which he practiced before the Fall meant no struggle but only the delicious overcoming of an infinitesimal self-adherence which delighted to be overcome—of which we see a dim analogy in the rapturous mutual self-surrenders of lovers even now. He had, therefore, no temptation (in our sense) to choose the self—no passion or inclination obstinately inclining that way—nothing but the bare fact that the self was himself. Up to that moment the human spirit had been in full control of the human organism. When it has ceased to obey God, it doubtless expected that it would retain this control. However, its authority over the organism was a delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God’s delegate. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25

Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being, it had cut itself off from the source of power. For when we say of created things that A rules B this must mean that God rules B through A. I doubt whether it would have been intrinsically possible for God to continue to rule the organism through the human spirit when the human spirit was in revolt against Him. At any rate He did not. He began to rule the organism in a more external way, not by the laws of spirit, but by those of nature. To disobey your proper law (id est, the law God makes for being such as you) means to find yourself obeying one of God’s lower laws: exempli gratia, if, when walking on a slippery pavement, you neglect the law of Prudence, you suddenly find yourself obeying the law of gravitation. Thus the organs, no longer governed by man’s will, fell under the control of ordinary biochemical laws and stuffed whatever the inter-workings of those laws might bring about in the way of pain, senility, and death. And desires began to come up into the mind of humans, and as one’s reason chose, but just as the biochemical and environmental facts happened to cause them. And the mind itself fell under the psychological laws of association and the like which God had made to rule the psychology of the higher anthropoids. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25

And the will, caught in the tidal wave of mere nature, had no resource but to force back some of the new thoughts and desires by main strength, and these uneasy rebels became the subconscious as we now know it. The process was not, I conceive, comparable to mere deterioration as it may now occur in a human individual; it was a loss of status as a species. What man lost by the Fall was his original specific nature. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The total organism which had been taken up into his spiritual life was allowed to fall back int the merely natural condition from which, at one’s making, it had been raised—just as far earlier in the story of creation, God had raised vegetable life to become the vehicle of animality, and chemical process to be the vehicle of vegetation, and physical process to be the vehicle of chemical. Thus human spirit from being the master of human nature became a mere lodger in its own house, or even a prisoner; rational consciousness became what it now is—a fitful spotlight resting on a small part of the cerebral motions. However, this limitation of the spirit’s powers was a lesser evil than the corruption of the spirit itself. It has turned from God and become its own idol, so that though it could still turn back to God, it could do so only by painful effort, and its inclination was self-ward. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25

Hence pride and ambition, the desire to be lovely in its own eyes and to depress and humiliate all rivals, envy, and restless search for more, and still more, security, were now the attitudes that came easiest to it. It was not only a weak king over its own nature, but a bad one: it sent down into the psychophysical organism desires far worse than the organism sent up into it. This condition was transmitted by heredity to all later generations, for it was not simply what biologists call an acquired variation; it was the emergence of a new kind of man—a new species, never made by God, had sinned itself into existence. The change which man had underdone was not parallel to the development of a new habit; it was a radical alteration of one’s constitution, a disturbance of the relation between one’s component parts, and an internal perversion of one of them. God might have arrested this process by miracle: but this—to speak in somewhat irreverent metaphor—would have been to decline the problem which God has set Himself when He created the World, the problem of expressing His goodness through the total drama of a World containing free agents, in spite of, and by means of, their rebellion against Him. If we talk too much of God planning and creating the World process for good and of that good being frustrated by the free will of the creatures, the symbol of a drama, a symphony, or a dance, is here useful to correct a certain absurdity which may arise. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25

This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else—more ridiculously still—that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realized. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula. The World is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God’s own assumptions of the suffering nature which evil produces. The doctrine of the free Fall asserts that the evil which thus makes the fuel or raw material for the second and more complex kind of good is not God’s contribution but man’s. This does not mean that if man had remained innocent God could not than have contrived an equally splendid symphonic whole—supposing that we insist on asking such questions. However, it must always be remembered that when we talk of what might have happened, of contingencies outside the whole actuality, we do not really know what we are talking about. There are no times or paces outside the existing Universe in which all this “could happen” or “could have happened.” I think the most significant way of stating the real freedom of man is to say that if there are other rational species than man, existing in some other part of the actual Universe, then it is not necessary to suppose that they also have fallen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25

Our present condition, then, is explained by the fact that we are members of a spoiled species. I do not mean that our sufferings are a punishment for being what we cannot now help being nor that we are morally responsible for the rebellion of a remote ancestor. If, none the less, I call our present condition one of original Sin, and not merely one of original misfortune, that is because our actual religious experience does not allow us to regard it in any other way. Theoretically, I suppose, we might say “Yes: we behave like vermin, but then that is because we are vermin. And that, at any rate, is not our fault.” However, the fact that we are vermin, so far from being felt as an excuse, is a greater shame and grief to us than any of the particular acts which it leads us to commit. The situation is not nearly so hard to understand as some people make it out. It arises among human beings whenever a very badly brought up boy is introduced into a decent family. They rightly remind themselves that it is “not his own fault” that he is a bully, a coward, a tale-bearer and a lair. But none the less, however it came there, his present character is detestable. They not only hate it, but ought to hate it. They cannot love him for what he is, they can only try to turn him into what he is not. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25

In the meantime, though the body is most unfortunate in having been so brought up, you cannot quite call his character a “misfortune” as if he were one thing and his character another. It is he—he himself—who bullies and sneaks and like doing it. And if he begins to mend he will inevitably feel shame and guilt at what he is just beginning to cease to be. The fact that we can die “in” Adam and live “in” Christ seems to imply that humans, as they really are, differs a good deal from humans as our categories of thought and our three-dimensional imaginations represent them; that the separateness—modified only by casual relations—which we discern between individuals, is balanced, in absolute reality, by some kind of “inter-inanimation” of which we have no conception at all. It may be that the acts and sufferings of great archetypal individuals such as Adam and Christ are ours, not by legal fiction, metaphor, or causality, but in some much deeper fashion. There is no question, of course, of individuals melting down into a kind of spiritual continuum such as Pantheistic systems believe in; that is excluded by the whole of our faith. However, there may be a tension between individuality and some other principle. We believe that the Holy Spirit can be really present and operative in the human spirit, but we do not, like Pantheists, take no mean that we are “parts” or “modifications” or “appearances” of God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25

We may have to suppose, in the long run, that something of the same kind is true, in its appropriate degree, even of created spirits, that each, though distinct, is really present in all, or in some, others—just as we may have to admit “action at a distance” into our conception of matter. Everyone will have noticed how the Old Testament seems at times to ignore our conception of the individual. When God promises Jacob that “He will go down with him into Egypt and will also surely bring him up again,” this is fulfilled either by the burial of Jacob’s body in Palestine or by the exodus of Jacob’s descendants from Egypt. It is quite right to connect this notion with the social structure of early communities in which the individual is constantly overlooked in favour of the tribe or family: but we ought to express this connection by two propositions of equal importance—firstly that their social experience blinded the ancients to some truths which we perceive, and secondly that it made them sensible of some truths to which we are blind. If they had always been felt to be so artificial as we now feel them to be, legal fiction, adoption, and transference or imputation of merit and guilt, could never have played the part they did play in theology. I have thought it right to allow this one glance at what is for me an impenetrable curtain. Clearly it would be futile to attempt to solve the problem of pain by producing another problem. Humans, as a species, spoiled themselves, and good, to us in our present state, must mean primarily remedial or corrective good. What part pain actually plays in such remedy or correction must be considered. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25

The Real stands alone. It is without any kind of support, and needs none. It is without any kind of dependence or dependent relationship. The emptiness of space is a symbol. The Universe spread out in that space is also a symbol. Both speak of the Real that is in them, but each in a different way. Yes, within every localized point, every timed instant, That which Is proclaims Itself as the unique Fact outside relationship and beyond change. All one needs to take one through intricate problems of metaphysics is this single masterly conception: Mind alone is. In the last summation, there is only a single infinite thing, but it expresses itself brokenly through infinitely varied forms. Philosophy defines God as pure Mind from the human standpoint and perfect Reality from the cosmic one. The time has indeed come for us to rise to meditate upon the supreme Mind. It is the source of all appearances, the explanation of all existences. It is the only reality, the only thing which is, was, and shall be unalterably the same. Mind itself is ineffable and indestructible. We never see it as it is in itself but only the things which are its passing phases. The ultimate reality is one and the same, no matter what it is called; to the Chinese mystic it is TAO, that is, the Significance; to the Christian mystic it is GOD; to the Chinese philosopher it is T’AI CHI, that is, The Great Extreme; to the Hindu philosopher it is TAT, that is Absolute existence. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25

The pure Mind has its own independent, everlasting, invisible, and infinite existence, while all Worldly things and creatures are but fragmentary and fleeting expressions of IT on a lower sphere altogether. It lies deeply concealed as their innermost substance, and persists through their changes of form. Before the personal ego came into being, Being was. “Before Abraha was I am,” announced Jesus. Before thoughts, Thought! In its timelessness, Mind is the One without a Second; “it its timed manifestation it is all things.” The REAL is always where: we live in it. Mind is primary being. It is mysteriously as still as it is self-active. Absolute mind is the actuality of human life and the plentitude of universal existence. Apart from Mind they could not even come into existence, and separated from it they could not continue to exist. Their truth and being are in It. However, it would be utterly wrong to imagine the Absolute as the sum total of all finite beings and individual beings. The absolute is not the integral of all its visible aspects. It is the unlimited, the boundless void within which millions of Universes may appear and disappear ceaselessly and unendingly but yet leave It unaffected. The latter do not exhaust even one millionth of its being. The Great Mind—invisible and untouchable; the host of little minds visible and pseudoconscious; the words incessantly poured out until the Silence descends. The Great Mind again! Yet it was always there but humans looked elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25

With every thought we break the divine stillness. Yet behind all thoughts is Mind. Behind all things that give rise to thoughts is Mind. The One Infinite Life-Power is the ultimate of all things and all consciousness. There is no thing and no mind beyond it. Within and without the Universe there is only a single absolute power, a single uncreate essence, a single primary reality. The ultimate metaphysical principle of Mind behind all this ordered activity is the same as the ultimate religious principle worshipped as God. This is the mysterious element which hides as the unknown quantity—the algebraic x—of the Universe. That which is at the heart of all existence—the World’s and yours—must be real, if anything can be. The World may be an illusion, your ego a fiction, but the ultimate essence cannot be either. Reality must be here or nowhere. Mind is the essence in humans and the power in the Universe. It is always there, the only reality in a mind-made World. It is in here, and out there, the fundament upon which all Universes are structured, the substance of which they are composed, yet it is nowhere to be seen microscopically or measures geometrically. When all else is extinct it remains, indestructible and unique. There is a principle of life which is conscious in its own unique way, which is the essential being of all entities and the essential reality behind all substances. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25

The Infinite Being is there and will be there whether Universes exist or not. The essence of all these finite forms is an infinite one. No one can see the Real yet everyone may see the things which come from it. Although it is itself untouchable, whatever we touch enshrines its presence. There is but One God, One Life, One infinite Power, one all-knowing Mind. Each human individualizes it but does not multiply it. One brings it to a point, God, but does not alter its unity or change its character. Lord of travelers, please unite this land. We share one road, with many branches: guide us along it to find each other’s homes. And when we find them, please clear our sight so that we might see that we all live in the same neighbourhood, that none of us lives apart. To the blessed God they offer sweet melody, to the Sovereign, the living and ever enduring God, they utter hymns and make their praises heard; for He alone works mighty deeds and makes all that is new. He is triumphant in battle, sowing righteousness and bringing forth victory. He creates healing, for He is the Lord of wonders and is revered in praises. In His goodness He renews continually each day the work of creatin, as it is said in the Psalm: “Gibe thanks to Him who makes great lights, for His loving kindness endures forever.’ O cause a new light to shine upon Zion, and may we all be worthy to delight in its splendor. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Creator of the Heavenly lights. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25