If that is the Sole Object of You Gaze, then You are Easily Deceived!

Sometimes it takes a lot of courage just to play the hand you got dealt. We offer knowledge, learn to ask. Happy is the one who understand that to love Jesus is to ignore oneself. You have tot leave behind your self, whom you love dearly, for Someone who loves your wholly and wishes you to love Him completely. The love of one creature for another is a frail structure; the love of Jesus is a permanent abode. Clinging for dear life to a created thing is fatalistic. Clinging to Jesus is futuristic. Love Him and keep Him as your friend. When everyone else leaves you high and dry, He will not. Nor will He allow you to perish at the Final Bar. The moral? Whether you like it or not, sooner or later you and all your old crowd will have to come to a parting of the ways. In life and in death you should keep yourself in the presence of Jesus. Commit yourself to Him always. Why? When all else fails, He alone will be left to help you, and what is more, He will not allow your Earthly friends to trample on the friendship. What He plans to do is furnish your heart and leave behind a fairly comfortable chair for Himself. If you have pretty well cleaned out your heart of all the creaturely trash, then according to John (15.4), Jesus will make His move. You will find whatever affection you have placed in Humankind moribund; but that is never the case with Jesus. The moral? As the Evangelist Matthew put it (11.7), do not confide in or rely upon the waverly reed. As the Prophet Isaiah so aptly put in (40.6), “All flesh is grass, all glory is flower”; their season, as we surely know, is always cut short. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Yes, you look at the external person every day, but if that is the sole object of your gaze, then you are easily deceived. Seek your solace and profit in others, and you will find it a losing proposition. Seek Jesus in everything, and you will find Him there. If, however, you seek only yourself in human affairs, then that is what you will find, and what a risk that is to your eternal welfare! The moral? Ignoring Jesus does more to harm Humanity than all the tornados and volcanos and hurricanos in the history of the World. The Principle at the same moment that it explains the Rules supersedes them. If the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God, opaque by the very fulness of His blinding actuality, then He might do things. He might work miracles. However, would He? Many people of sincere piety feel that He would not. They think it unworthy of Him. It is petty and capricious tyrants who break their own laws: good and wise kings obey them. Only an incompetent workman will produce work which needs to be interfered with. And people who think in this way are not satisfied by the assurance given them that miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of Nature. that may be undeniable. However, I will still be felt (and justly) that miracles interrupt the orderly march of events, the steady development of Nature according to her own inherent genius or character. That regular march seems to such critics as I have in mind more impressive than any miracle. Looking up (like Lucifer in Meredith’s sonnet) at the night sky, they feel it almost impious to suppose that God should sometimes unsay what He has once said with such magnificence. This feeling springs from deep and noble sources in the mind and must always be treated with respect. Yet it is, I believe, founded on an error. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

May be an image of furniture and kitchen

When schoolboys begin to be taught to make Latin verses at school, they are very properly forbidden to have what is technically called “a spondee in the fifth foot.” It is a good rule for boys because the normal hexameter does not have a spondee there: if boys were allowed to use this abnormal form, they would be constantly doing it for convenience and might never get the typical music for the hexameter into their heads at all. However, when the boys come to read Virgil they find that Virgil does the very thing they have been forbidden to do—not very often, but not so very rarely either. In the same way, young people who have just learned how to write English rhyming verse, may be shocked at finding “bad” rhymes (id est, half-rhymes) in the great poets. Even in carpentry or car-driving or surgery there are, I expect, “licenses”—abnormal ways of doing things—which the master will use himself both safely and judiciously but which one would think it unwise to teach one’s pupils. Now one often finds that the beginner, who has just mastered the strict formal rules, is over-punctilious and pedantic about them. And the mere critic, who is never going to begin oneself, may be more pedantic still. The classical critics were shocked at the “irregularity” or “licenses” of Shakespeare. A stupid schoolboy might think that the abnormal hexameters in Virgil, or the half-rhymes in English poets, were due to incompetence. In reality, of course, every one of them is there for a purpose and breaks the superficial regularity of the metre in obedience to a higher and subtler law: just as the irregularities in The Winter’s Tale do not impair, but embody and perfect, the inward unity of its spirit. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

In other words, there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity. A supreme workman will never break by one note or one syllable or one stroke of the brush the living and inward law of the work one is producing. However, one will break without scruple any number of those superficial regularities and orthodoxies which little, unimaginative critics mistake for its laws. The extent to which one can distinguish a just “license” from a mere botch or failure of unity depends on the extent to which one has grasped the real and inward significance of the work as a whole. If we had grasped as a whole the innermost spirit of that “work which God worketh from the beginning to the end,” and of which Nature is only a part and perhaps a small part, we should be in a position to decide whether miraculous interruptions of Nature’s history were mere improprieties unworthy of the Great Workman or expressions of the truest and deepest unity in His total work. In fact, of course, we are in so such position. The gap between God’s mind and ours must on any view, be incalculably greater than the gap between Shakespeare’s mind and that of the most peddling critics of the old French school. For who can suppose that God’s external act, seen from within, would be that same complexity of mathematical relations which Nature, scientifically studied, reveals? It is like thinking that a poet builds up one’s line out of those metrical feet into which we can analyse it, or that living speech takes grammar as its starting point. However, the best illustration of all is Bergson’s. Let us suppose a race of people whose peculiar mental limitation compels them to regard a painting as something made up of little coloured dots which have been put together like a mosaic. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Studying the brushwork of a great painting, through their magnifying glasses, they discover more and more complicated relations between the dots, and sort these relations out, with great toil, into certain regularities. Their labour will not be in vain. These regularities will in fact “work”; they will cover most of the facts. However, if they go on to conclude that any departure from them would be unworthy of the painter, and an arbitrary breaking of one’s own rules, they will be far astray. For the regularities they have observed never were the rule the painter was following. What they painfully reconstruct from a million dots, arranged in an agonizing complexity, one really produced with a single lightning-quick turn of the wrist, one’s eye meanwhile taking in the canvas as a whole and one mind obeying laws of composition which the observers, counting-their dots, have not yet come within sight of, and perhaps never will. I do not say that the normalities of Nature are unreal. The living fountain of divine energy, solidified for purposes of this spatio-temporal Nature into bodies moving in space and time, and thence, by our abstract thought, turned into mathematical formulae, does in fact, for us, commonly fall into such and such patterns. In finding out those patterns we are therefore gaining real, and often useful, knowledge. However, to think that a disturbance of them would constitute a breach of the living rules and organic unity whereby God, from His own point of view, work, is a mistake. If miracles do occur, then we may be sure that not to have wrought them would be the real inconsistency. How a miracle can be no inconsistency, will be clear to those who have read Miss Dorothy Sayers’ indispensable book, The Mind of the Maker. Miss Sayers’ thesis is based on the analogy between God’s relation to the World, on the one hand, and an author’s relation to one’s book on the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

May be an image of furniture and living room

If you are writing a story, miracles or abnormal events may be bad art, or they may not. If, for example, you are writing an ordinary realistic novel and have got your characters into a hopeless muddle, it would be quite intolerable if you suddenly cut the knot and secured a happy ending by having a fortune left to the hero from an unexpected quarter. On the other hand, there is nothing against taking as your subject from the outset the adventures of a human who inherits an unexpected fortune. If it is what you are really writing about,the unusual event is perfectly permissible: if you simply drag it in by the heels to get yourself out of a hole, it is an artistic crime. The ghost story is a legitimate form of art; but you must not bring a ghost into an ordinary novel to get over a difficulty in the plot. Now there is no doubt that a great deal of the modern objection to miracles is based on the suspicious that they are marvels of the wrong sort; that a story of a certain kind (Nature) is arbitrarily interfered with, to get the characters out of a difficulty, by events that do not really belong to that kind of story. Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control. The reader may set one’s mind at rest. If I thought miracles were like that, I should not believe in them. If they have occurred, they have occurred because they are the very thing this universal story is about. They are not exceptions (however rarely they occur) nor irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Death and Resurrection are what the story is about; and had we but eyes to see it, this had been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables. If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worthy pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what they story was really about?—that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? And it is certain you were right? It is easy to make mistakes in such matters. A friend of mine wrote a play in which the main idea was that the hero had a pathological horror of trees and a mania for cutting them down. However, naturally other things came in as well; there was some sort of love story mixed up with it. And the trees killed the man in the end. When my friend had written it, he sent it to an older man to criticize It came back with the comment, “Not bad. But I’s cut out those bits of padding about the trees.” To be sure, God might be expected to make a better story than my friend. However, it is a very long story, with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers. Some people, as they become more aware of “objects”—aspects of the environment which they cannot control—turn more strongly to their own powers to care for themselves. Ever after, their trusts and sense of well-being rests on the assurance that they can cope; other people and things are regarded with distanced interest, and perhaps wariness mistrust. With this kind of start, I think I would be more likely to continue to experience the World in terms of the dichotomy of self versus not-self. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

May be an image of furniture and bedroom

I would avoid situations which threaten to bring me too close to others and so make me lose my individuality; I would tend to be on the defensive towards the intrusive impinging World of others, on whom I would not wish to be dependent. By contrast, people relating in a more ocnophil way are more inclined toward situations which recreate something of the primitive oneness they love, and tend to put their trust in close relationships with other people. How might this difference affect the development of splits in the personality, and particularly the relation of the coping regions with other self-regions? This is a fascinating theme for speculation, for it allows us to consider how the structure of a person might be reflected in the structure of one’s relationships. He loss of merged oneness, the experience of separateness, and the discovery of the other may be felt as a terror and an impingement, or as a matter of indifference, or as brining convenient new resources. If I were a spacebat, I would be considering how to get others to serve my purposes. Spacebats believe all they need are the proper tools and cultivate the ego so they are independent. The more determined my spacebat element, the stronger my attitudes of wariness, manipulation, competition, and exploitation towards other people—the greater also my incentive to develop the skills (including ego-functioning skills) which facilitate my separateness and independence. My vulnerable side would have to be hidden. There would have to be quite a split, which would deepen if circumstances made it expedient. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

By contrast, if I were a homebody, I would react to the onset of individuation by clinging to objects of dependence and to others all the more. With this element strong in my personality I would tend to mistrust my own abilities and powers, gladly depending on those who care for me. I have an incentive to show others my needy and vulnerable side, for they may perhaps be disarmed by this and co-operate in caring for the disarmingly vulnerable self. Here are incentives to develop those skills which facilitate dependence. Generally preferring co-operation to individual enterprise and initiative, my experience will tend to be in terms of “us” and to avoid the harsher opposition of “I” to “them.” In generally I would have much more nurturing mutual relationships with others. I would care about others and not see them primarily as objects to be negotiated (through in my own way I may draw on them as resources to be made use of). I cannot easily cut myself off: I am not “schizoid.” When others are unkind, I cannot easily dismiss them from my mind and drop the friendship: I will be hurt, angry, depressed. When others are distressed, I feel it. I can “identify.” I feel about other people more as though they were part of me. More people matter to me, have significance and meaning for me as extensions of my own self. This ready capacity to feel identified with others acts as an integrating principle of a particular kind. Structurally it creates connections on my map, between my self mapped there, and other people mapped there. To organize much of (what more splitting people might regard as) the World others, into close association with my self, makes for a more tightly integrated personality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

More of others is mapped with my self in important self-regions, regions where fulfillment and gratification and being loved and being welcomed—and being unfulfilled and deprived and unloved and rejected—are mapped. There is thus an intertwining of self and others; as regards well-being or as regards distress. At the other extreme, to the extent that others are liable to be experienced as impinging rather than supplying good things, such mapping will not occur. The other will be mainly mapped as “not me” and far from “me.” The great difference, after all, between self-imagery in general and object-imagery in general, is that the self has a biological unity to star with. My body (and whatever self is connected with my body) is the common factor in all my experience, the place where I experience all events. The World of others is manifold and stays so, the more particularly if the manifold objects’ most remarkable characteristic is that it is “not-me but other.” The more I experience the World of others painfully as “not-me impinging on me,” the less I will identify with it. We may be looking here at the roots of a very early and major difference between personality-structures, parallel with differences in our needs for others. At one extreme we can imagine a tightly-integrated, highly-organized and interconnected set of regions forming the personality with self and others strongly connected. At another extreme we can envisage a more “schizoid” structure, altogether more loosely organized. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

What is strange is that the experience which comes with the Overself visitation assumes any one of a wide range of feelings, from the most delicate to the most overwhelming. With time and growth it may become well settled, or—though rarely—its light may shine from the beginning. There are even other possibilities. It is safer to keep out the preconceptions and the expectations, safer too if the ties of books and bibles are left outside for a while. That is, accept the freedom of utter surrender to the Overself, of dissolving in it and letting the wind blow where it listeth. The Overself’s summons is immediate, so the response must be immediate too. A king ignored will not wait around. The experience is capturable not by the self’s grasping hand but by its loving surrender. This is the paradox. It mut be something which possesses one, not something which one possesses. These glorious moments must be appraised for what they are, and not received with just casual enjoyment. They are gifts from Heaven. Anti–technique: If one regards it egoistically as a new “experience,” then it will have to share the transient character of all experience and come to an inevitable end. If, however, one has been taught and trained by metaphysical reflection to regard it impersonally as a realization of something which was always there, which always was and shall be, and if one is morally ready for it—if, in short, one recognizes it as the experience of one’s own self to which one did not attend before—then it may not lapse. As one receives an influx of light from the Overself, the Glimpse is experienced. However, only to the degree that one has previously prepared, molded, and purified oneself will one experience it correctly, completely, and safely. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

The Glimpse is either the result of a certain sensitivity to intuitive feelings and ideas, or else brings one to it. The ego’s imagination soon gets to work recreating its past or extending its desires for the future, whenever a glimpse of spiritual calm suspends those memories and desires for a time. It is this restless picture-making faculty, among others, which is used so actively by the ego to keep us out of the kingdom by wrenching us out of the eternal into the temporal. We must beware its operations, or renounce its results, if we would keep this calm a little longer. The less one lets anything disturb the full impact of this experience, the deeper will be the impression it makes. The glimpse requires a complete concentration. Meet these first moments of the Glimpse’s onset with instant acceptance and warm love. Then you cannot fail o enter the experience itself. When this glorious feeling comes over one, whether at gentle pace or with a lively rush, one should accept the gift straightaway. One may sit or stand there, where it caught one, mesmerized by the glimpse, permeated by its tranquility. When the personal “me” stops the endless struggle for a while and remains quiet, inactive, and passive, the impersonal “I Who Am” arises and, little by little, gently suffuses it with new life and heals it with great love. When the feel of this unusual and ethereal presence suffuses the heart, the first duty is to drop all attention elsewhere and respond to it. This response is not only to be immediate, unhesitating, and unquestioning; it must also be warm, loving, grateful, and joyous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Once one catches that feeling of happy stillness, one should not le oneself leave it on any excuse whatever—for thoughts will invade one and try to drag one away. One should refuse to disturb one’s tranquillity even for thoughts about the nature, working, and effects of the stillness itself! One objective alone should be with one, and that is to become absorbed more and more deeply in this happy state, until every idea, concept, decision, or impulse is dissolved in it. Any other objective will only invite loss of the Glimpse. If it comes without preliminary mediation, then it will probably come unexpectedly and suddenly. Therefore a certain amount of either knowledge or experience is required to recognize the authentic signs of its onset and to detect the precious opportunity which offers itself. When one feels is presence, one must first identify its real character, and be passive to facilitate its onset. We join with the Earth and with each other to bring new life to the land, to restore the waters, to refresh the air. We join with the Earth and with each other to renew the forests, to care for the plants, to protect the creatures. We join with the Earth and with each other to celebrate the seas, to rejoice in the sunlight, to sing the song of the stars. We join with the Earth and with each other to recreate the human community, to promote justice and peace, to remember our children. We join with the Earth and with each other, we join today as many and diverse expressions of one loving mystery: for the healing of the Earth and the renewal of all life. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Remember the Messiah of the house of David, Thy servant, and Jerusalem, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and well being, lovingkindness, life and peace on this say of the rest of our lives. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13