When they understand, when they can forgive not only God for this big mess, but themselves for their own failures, their own horrible angry reactions, their own spite and meanness, when they love everyone totally in complete forgiveness, then they will be worthy of Heaven. Hell would have to be where they see the consequences of their actions, but with a full merciful comprehension of how little they themselves knew. To know what has hurt others, to realize that you did not know, that nobody gave you the knowledge, yet still you have the power. And to forgive that, and forgive your victims, and forgive God and forgive yourself. That will terminate your anger, your outrage. It is a place where you learn to understand what you have done to another being…where you come to realize the suffering you have inflicted on others! At the same time, the individual gains freedom of movement, far beyond the first jealous delimitation. The individual also gains a specific individuality to which the division of labor in the enlarged group gives both occasion and necessity. The state and Christianity, guilds and political parties, and innumerable other groups have developed according to this formula, however much, of course, the special conditions and forces of the respective groups have modified the general scheme. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
This scheme seems to me distinctly recognizable also in the evolution of individuality within urban life. The small-town life in Antiquity and in the Middles Ages set barriers against movement and relations of the individual toward the outside, and it set up barriers against individual independence and differentiation within the individual self. These barriers were such that under them modern beings could not have breathed. Even today a metropolitan being who is placed in a small town feels a restriction similar, at least, in kind. The smaller the circle which forms our milieu is, and the more restricted those relations to others are which dissolve the boundaries of the individual, the more anxiously the circle guards the achievements, the conduct of life, and the outlook of the individual, and the more readily a quantitative and qualitative specialization would break up the framework of the whole little circle. The ancient polis in this respect seems to have had the very character of a small town. The constant threat to its existence at the hands of enemies from near and afar effected strict coherence in political and military respects, a supervision of the citizen by the citizen, a jealousy of the whole against the individual whose particular life was suppressed to such a degree that one could compensate only by acting as a despot in one’s own household. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The tremendous agitation and excitement, the unique colorfulness of Athenian life, can perhaps be understood in terms of the fact that a people of incomparably individualized personalities struggled against the constant inner and outer pressure of a deindividualizing small town. This produced a tense atmosphere in which the weaker individuals were suppressed and those of the stronger natures were incited to prove themselves in the most passionate manner. This is precisely why it was that there blossomed in Athens what must be called, without defining it exactly, the general human character in the intellectual development of our species. For we maintain factual as well as historical validity for the following connection: the most extensive and the most general contents and forms of life are most intimately connected with the most individual ones. They have a preparatory stage in common, that is, they find their enemy in narrow formations and groupings the maintenance of which places both of them into a state of defense against expanse and generality lying without and the freely moving individuality within. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Just as in the feudal age, the free being was the one who stood under the law of the land, that is, under the law of the largest social orbit, and the unfree being was the one who derived one’s right merely from the narrow circle of a feudal association and was excluded from the larger social orbit—so today metropolitan beings are free in a spiritualized and refined sense, in contrast to the pettiness and prejudices which hem in the small-town being. For the reciprocal reserve and indifference and the intellectual life conditions of large circles are never felt more strongly by the individual in their impact upon one’s independence than in the thickest crowd of the big city. This is because the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance only the more visible. It is obviously only the verse of this freedom if, under certain circumstances, one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd. For here as elsewhere it is by no means necessary that the freedom of a being be reflected in one’s emotional life as comfort. It is not only the immediate size of the area and the number of persons which, because of the universal historical correlation between the enlargement of the circle and the personal inner and outer freedom, has made the metropolis the locale of freedom. It is rather in transcending this visible expanse that any given city becomes the seat of cosmopolitanism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The horizon of the city expands in a manner comparable to the way in which wealth develops; a certain amount of property increases in a quasi-automatical way in ever more rapid progression. As soon as a certain limit has been passed, the economic, personal, and intellectual relations of the citizenry, the sphere of intellectual predominance of the city over its hinterland, grow as in geometrical progression. Every gain in dynamic extension becomes a step, not for an equal, but for a new and larger extension. From every thread spinning out of the city, ever new threads grow as if by themselves, just as within the city the unearned increment of ground rent, through the mere increase in communication, brings the owner automatically increasing profits. At this point, the qualitative aspect of life is transformed directly into qualitative traits of character. The sphere of life of the small town is, in the main, self-contained and autarchic. For it is the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves into a far-flung national or international area. Weimar is not an example to the contrary, since its significance was hinged upon individual personalities and died with them; whereas the metropolis is indeed characterized by its essential independence even from the most eminent individual personalities. This is the counterpart to the independence, and it is the price the individual pays for the independence, which one enjoys in the metropolis. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
The most significant characteristic of the metropolis is this functional extension beyond its physical boundaries. And this efficacy reacts in turn and gives weight, importance, and responsibility to metropolitan life. Beings do not end with the limits of their body or the area comprising their immediate activity. Rather is the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from one temporally and spatially. In the same way, a city consists of its total effects which extend beyond its immediate confines. Only this range is the city’s actual extent in which its existence is expressed. This fact makes it obvious that individual freedom, the logical and historical complement of such extension, is not to be understood only in the negative sense of mere freedom of mobility and elimination of prejudices and petty philistinism. The essential point is that the particularity and incomparability, which ultimately every human being possesses, be somehow expressed in the working-out of a way of life. That we follow the laws of our own nature—and this after all is freedom—becomes obvious and convincing to ourselves and to others only if the expressions of this nature differ from the expressions of others. Only our unmistakability proves that our way of life has not been superimposed by others. However, when self-affirmation no longer works, the individual gathers his or her powers together to pit against opposition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
A curious aspect of self-assertion is that human beings often seek out opposition in order to practice assertion. This, again, indicates that self-assertion is not pathological but a constructive expression of the power to be. One can observe this relatively early in children, in the second to fourth years. They will the limits, see how far they have to go to invite the opposition of parents, cross the parents for the sake of crossing them, say “no” for the sake of saying “no.” When the environment has introduced the moral issue—for instance, a four-year-old’s assertion is bad because it is in opposition to one’s mother’s demands—the child may concern himself with the question of “good” and “bad” in ways quite different from what the mother expects. Thus, Leo, four, was overheard speaking loudly to himself and asking, “Is he a good boy? Or is he a bad boy?” To which followed a cheerful declaration brought forth with glee, “Yes, good boy is Leo.” In seeking out of opposition, the child will often refuse to do something he is told, standing in the middle of the floor with just a suggestion of a smile on his face as though he somehow knows that this is all a game anyway. The sensible parent accepts this behavior not as a reason for increasing the guilt feeling of the child nor as a pretext for giving in—which would only mean that the child has to try harder to find some other issues in which to get bona fide opposition. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
For what the child wants is to try out his psychological muscles. It is a normal and necessary aspect of growing—a will to self-assertion is practiced by the child. Folklore is full of references to the child going out to learn to shiver and to shake, as the German nursery rhyme puts it. Unless there is an actual encounter or the potentiality for an actual encounter, an individual’s power of being remains hidden. The power to be becomes evident in the continual struggles of being against nonbeing, nonbeing is all aspects that negate and destroy being. These include conformism, which destroys uniqueness and originality; hostility, which shrinks courage, generosity, and capacity to understand the other; destructiveness; and, eventually, death itself. We have being to the extent that we can absorb nonbeing into ourselves. A life process is the more powerful, the more non-being it can include in its self-affirmation, without being destroyed by it. The aim is not to overlook or repress expressions of nonbeing, but to confront them directly, accept them as necessity, endeavor to absorb them—all of which reduces their destructive power. Out of this struggle comes creativity. Being is manifested only in the process of actualizing its power; otherwise how could we even be aware of it, let alone know its ramification? Power become actualized in those situations in which opposition is overcome. I estimate the power of a will according to how much resistance, pain, and torture it endures and knows to transform to its own advantage. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of spiritual and physical tortures. Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and freedom which is not the basis for our pride. Remember, God said, “This is the only World. And you know the World. Maybe Sheol awaits you. You have seen the World and Heaven but you have not seen Hell. Throughout my Creation, there are creatures whose spawn numbers in the thousands, of which only a tiny portion survive—fishes of the sea, turtles of the sea, winged insects of the air. A hundred, a million even, of one species may be born under the arc of one day’s Sun, with only a handful to survive and reproduce. Do not you know this? You do not think the beauty of Creation reveals my light to Humankind? You do not think these souls, which your yourself have brought here, have not developed out of a perception of the glory of all that has been made?” Life consists of self-overcoming. All living creatures, far from tending to preserve their existence, strive to enhance themselves, to grow, and to generate more life. In doing this they risk their existence. Life is that which must ever overcome itself. Indeed, you call it will to generation or drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this is one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
This is why power cannot, strictly speaking, be given to another, for then the recipient still owes it to the giver. It must in some sense be assumed, taken, asserted. For unless it can be held against opposition, it is not power and will never be experiences as real on the part of the recipient. Therefore, it is absurd to think of artists simply as painting nature, as though they were only anachronistic photographers of trees and lakes and mountains. For them, nature is a medium, a language by which they reveal their World. What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relations to their World; thus in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history. If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols. This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, unconscious levels of the culture is destroyed. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and one’s World. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Nowhere was this encounter demonstrated more vividly than in the famous seventy-fifth anniversary exhibit of Picasso’s work, presented in New York in 1957. Broader in temperament than Mondrian, Picasso is a spokesman for his time par excellence. Even in his early works around 1900, his vast talent was already visible. And in the stark, realistic paintings of peasants and poor people in the first decade of this century, his passionate relationship to human suffering was shown. You can then see the spiritual temper of each succeeding decade in his work. In the early 1920s, for example, we find Picasso painting classical Greek figures, particularly bathers by the sea. An aura of escapism hovers about these pictures in the exhibit. Was not the 1920s, the decade after the first World War, in reality a period of escapism in the Western World? Toward the end of the twenties and in the early thirties, these bathers by the sea become pieces of metal, mechanical, gray-blue curving steel. Beautiful indeed, but impersonal, unhuman. And here one was gripped in the exhibit with an ominous foreboding—the prediction of the beginning of the time when people were to become impersonal, objectivized, numbers. It was the ominous prediction of the beginning of the man, the robot. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Then in 1937 comes the great painting Guernica, with figures torn apart, split from each other, all in stark white, gray, and black. It was Picasso’s pained outrage against the inhumanity of the bombing of the helpless Spanish town of Guernica by fascist planes in the Spanish revolution; but it is much more than that. It is the most vivid portrayal imaginable of the atomistic, split-up, fragmentized state of contemporary human beings, and implies the conformism, emptiness, and despair that were to go along with this. Then in the late thirties and forties, Picasso’s portraits become more and more machinelike—people turned literally into metal. Faces become distorted. It is as though persons, individuals, do not exist any more; their places are taken by hideous witches. Pictures now are not named, but numbered. The bright colors the artist used in his earlier periods and which were so delightful are now largely gone. In these rooms as the exhibit one feels as though darkness has settled upon the Earth at noon. As in the novel of Kafka, one gets a stark and gripping feeling of the modern individual’s loss of humanity. The first time I saw this exhibit, I was so overcome with the foreboding pictures of human beings losing their faces, their individuality, their humanity, and the prediction of the robot to come, that I could look no longer and had to hurry out of the room and onto the street again. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
To be sure, all the way through Picassos preserves his own sanity by playing with paintings and sculptures of animals and his own children. However, it is clear that the main stream is a portrayal of our modern condition, which has been psychologically portrayed by Riesman, Mumford, Tillich, and others. The whole is an unforgettable portrait of modern man and woman in the process of losing their person and their humanity. In these sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the World on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. Creativity, to rephrase our definition, is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her World. In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil Lestat goes out in search of adventures for the sake of learning what it is to fear or be in dread. We will let that adventurer go his way without troubling ourselves to learn whether in the course of it he encountered the dreadful. On the other hand I would say that learning to know dread is an adventure which every being has to affront if one would not go to perdition either by not having known dread or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be in dread has learned the most important thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
During childhood, it is an undisputed fact that we are particularly prone to react with anxiety, and there are good and understandable reasons, possessed in the child’s comparative helplessness against adverse influences. In fact in character neuroses it is invariably found that the formation of anxiety started in early childhood, or at least that the foundation of what I have called basic anxiety was laid in the time. Besides this, however, Dr. Freud believes that the anxiety in adult neuroses is still bound up with the conditions which originally provoked it. This means, for instance, that an adult man would be just as much harasshed by fear of castration, though in modified forms, as he had been as a boy. No doubt there are rare cases in which an infantile anxiety reaction may with appropriate provocations re-emerge in later life in unchanged form. An employee frequently changed position because certain employers provoked wrath and anxiety within him. The psychoanalysis showed that only those superiors having a certain kind of beard infuriated him. The patient’s reaction proved to be an exact repetition of a reaction he had toward his father at three years of age, when the latter attacked his mother in a menacing way. However, as w rule what we find is, in a phrase, not repetition but development. In cases in which the analysis allows us a pretty complete understanding of how a neurosis has developed we may find an uninterrupted chain of reactions from early anxiety to adult peculiarities. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Therefore the later anxiety will contain, among, elements conditioned by specific conflicts existing in childhood. However, the anxiety as a whole is not an infantile reaction. To consider it as such would be to confuse two different things, to mistake for an infantile attitude an attitude merely generated in childhood. With at least as much justification as calling anxiety an infantile reaction one might call it a precocious grown-up attitude in a child. The constant application of prayer to the activity of knowledge, to behaviour, thought, and feeling, eventually bring about a continuous awareness. It can accompany daily activity without interfering with it. It is a settled calm, and complete inner quiet. Here are no distinguishing marks that an outside observer can use to identify an enlightened individual because illumination represents consciousness itself rather than its transitory states. It is the lightning flash and considered to be the most desirable goal. Enlightenment is experiences as a pleasure. Because this consciousness is experienced as pleasure, and it is a permanent consciousness, the experiencer does not need to go into prayer. This is despite the outward appearance of a person who places oneself in the posture of prayer in order to achieve something. When you are engaged in outward activity it is not the same as when you are in a trance. This is true for both the beginner and the adept. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, our language has wisely sensed the two sides of a being’s being along. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament. In the twenty-fifth Psalm we read—“Turn thou to me and be gracious; for I am lonely and afflicted.” The psalmist feels the pain of loneliness. We do not know the character of his particular loneliness, but we know the many faces that loneliness can have. We have all experienced some of them. Most widespread is our loneliness after those who helped us to forget that we are alone have left us, either through separation or death. I refer not only to those nearest to us, but also to those human beings who give us the feeling of communion, groups with which we have worked, with which we have had social constant, with which we have had spiritual communications. For many people such loneliness becomes a permanent state and a continuous source of profound melancholy. The sighing of innumerable lonely people, all around us and over the World, fills the ears that are opened by love. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Their devotion to the guru, the cult, or the group is, in terms of real spiritual progress, both a help and a hinderance. As a sign, and insofar as it is a measure, of aspiration to rise toward a superior state of being, it is a help. However, as another bar added to the cage in which they live, shutting out all those who are not co-followers or co-members, it increases partisanship and widens prejudice. To bind oneself to a sectarian group and to its ideas is to form another attachment for the ego. Group emotion is worked up until it becomes a substitute for personal inspiration. Either through ignorance of or inability to practise prayer, or both, the group members are happy to share, and are satisfied with, a common experience on the shallowest level. However, nothing will replace individual work at self-development leading to deeper experience and higher knowledge. When too much is made of an organization or institution and too little of the idea behind it, the leaders become tyrannical and the followers fanatical. That is, their character is corrupted. “Yea, I know that I am nothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things; yea, behold, many mighty miracles we have wrought in this land, for which we will praise in his name forever,” reports Alma 26.12. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Oh, how innocent he sounded, how it came from his heart, ancient and childlike, a heart so preternaturally strong that it has taken hundreds of years to render it safe to beat in the company of mortal hearts. Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzieme. They are person who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of services. At the same time, the concentration of individuals and their struggles for customers compel the individual to specialize in a function from which one cannot be readily displaced by another. It is decisive that city life has transformed the struggle with nature for livelihood into an inter-human struggle for gain, which here is not granted by nature but by other beings. For specialization does not flow only from the competition for gain but also from the underlying fact that the seller must always seek to call forth new and differentiated needs of the lured customer. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
All right. Picture this. The population of the World has swelled to billions, and cities have risen though not in very many places, and mostly in that very valley where I had descended and left my marks on the walls of caves. Humankind hand wandered north and south as far as it could on the planet; settlements and towns and forts existed in various stages of development. Human’s wild imaginings of immortality and reunion wit the dead have everywhere given rise to religion. In the Nile Valley, a civilization of astonishing stability has developed, while war is waged all the time in the land we call the Holy Land. Billions of souls are now sputtered with enduring life, and they are of various creeds and yearnings for eternal life, which has brought them to this place with great ferocity. Mad expectations have pitched countless one into confusion. Others have grown so strong they exert a sort of rulership amongst the others. And some have learned some have learned that they can possess, or influence, or harm or love, as they case may be, to get others to do what they wish. The World is also populated by spirit! And some, have no memory anymore at all of being human, have become what men and women will for eternity call demons, prowling about, eager to possess, wreak havoc, or make mischief, as their development allow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
And as we Angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point…souls and nothing but souls…we realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on Earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process. And just as with Angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to Hudegrees of spiritual illumination, which accounts both for the varying outlooks to be found among the mystics and for the different kinds of Glimpse among aspirants. All illumination and all Glimpses free the soul from its negative qualities and base nature, but in the latter case only temporarily. One is able, as a result, to see into one’s higher nature. In the first degree, it is as if a window covered with dirt were cleaned enough to reveal a beautiful garden. One can symbolically look down and see flowers of the World enjoy the petal and the center colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated one may be unsure that our spectrum is even involved. I mean, it is as if out spectrum of color is not the limit! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Angels are individual, that is the key. We Who Fell are no single species, unless being the brightest, the most clever, and the most comprehending makes us a species, which I do not think it does. When God sent us down to Earth to Watch, specifically to observe all Humankind, we were curious about the dead as the living—this wreath of souls we could see and hear, gathered about the Word, and which we called Sheol immediately because it seemed to us that the realm of these weeping souls was the realm of pure gloom. “Sheol” means gloom. A gathering of Angels decided to go with me, to draw as close as possible to Matter in order to pull together for ourselves our entire knowledge, to better comprehend, as God had asked us to do. We discovered that some beings more sensitive, often more gifted. They want their lives to have some meaning, some fulfillment. They want the feel of living for some worthwhile end. However, often there is something wrong with the seeking. They too suffer from the intrusive ego. Their seeking lacks adequate sincerity. This need of success is greater for them than the need of the thing that is sought. If, for example, they pursue some art, the art itself counts less then the renown of the artist. They would be great artists, great writers, opera singers, pathfinders. They would aim high, but the mark is higher than their reach. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
