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The World-Idea is Forever Realizing itself in the Actual, a Process which is Ceaseless and Infinite, without Known Beginning or Known End!

October 14, 2019 11:50 pm

A little country community in the valley, with a dozen or more subdivisions, most names long ago effaced, and the whole surrounded by a small iron fence and four immense oak trees, the kind weighed down by their dipping branches, and the sky the perfect color of lilacs, and the heat of the Summer sweet and caressing and—you bet I have got on my black velvet frock coat (close-up: tapered at the waist, brass buttons) and my motorcycle boots, and a brand-new linen shirt loaded with lace at cuffs and throat (pity the poor slob who snickers at me on account of that!), and I have not cut my shoulder-length blonde mane tonight, which I sometimes do for a variety, and I have chucked my violet glasses because who cares that my eyes attract attention, and my skin is still dramatically tanned from my years-ago suicide attempts in the raw Sun of the Gobi Desert, and I am thinking—what about the informants themselves? Did they too think themselves superior? Just as people were less ready to label themselves “unfriendly” than they were others, so they were less ready to admit they themselves felt superior. Not many showed their mind so clearly as Mrs. Abbott who said, “As soon as they get down here they get big ideas, and yet they are never used to it. They are nothing really.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Or as Mr. Haddon: “Some people are inclined to think they are better than some other people in the East End of London, but they are not. I have met them and mixed with them and I find that they are actually lower than others—they have not the ability to be sociable. That is why it is. So they put themselves a bit above others so as to give a let-out to feelings.” Yet we formed the strong impression that most of the critics of the “big-heads” did at least in part share the attitude they complained of. One key to this attitude, as we have said, is the house. When they compare it with the gloomy tenement or decaying cottage, is it any wonder that they should feel they have moved up in the World? “When people moved out here it was a big change for them,” said Mr. Adams. “In Bethnal Green the people were coped up in two rooms or something like that, and when they get here they think they have bettered themselves—and so they have bettered themselves. And they try to raise their standard of living.” A house is one bearer of status in any society—it most certainly is in a country where a semi-detached suburban house with a garden has become the signal mark of the middle class. When the migrants compare the new with the old, it is any wonder that they should for a time feel “big-headed”? #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

In their mind’s eye the people with whom they compare themselves may be less their fellow-residents at Greenleigh with their identical houses than their old neighbors of Bethnal Green, and, compared to them, they are in this one way undeniably superior. Mr. Berry, a milkman, was one of several who connected the “snobbishness” with the possession of a new house. “I deliver milk all over the estate so I think I know practically everybody on this estate. And I can tell you that when they move down here—I suppose it is just that they have got a new house—they just think they are a cut above everybody else.” Mrs. Allen, although rather more tentative, was of the same mind. “I do not like it, the atmosphere. People are not the same; I do not know if they get big-headed because they have got a house. Out here you just get a good morning.” The women most appreciate their new workshop and nursery. The man’s status is the status of his job; the woman’s status of her home. Since she has moved up most in the World, she is only being realistic to recognize it. “When I was in London I had a six-bedroom house on my own, but you get a few of them who some from, say, a two bedroom. Then they get a house. Well, they have worked hard—you must admit they have worked hard—they have got themselves a nice home, television and that. So you find this type of person temporarily gets a bit to thinking that they are somebody. You do find it with some people, and I think you find it more amongst the women than amongst the men.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The house when the builders leave it is only a shell, unless you get one of those fully furnished model homes by Cresleigh. But anyway, the house when people move into it really comes to life. They bestow an authority upon it, even vest it with a kind of personality; up to a point it then decrees what they shall do within its walls. The house is also a challenge, demanding that their style of life shall accord with the standard it sets. When they make a first cup of coffee after the removal van has driven away and look around their mansion, they are conscious not only of all they have got which they never had before but also of all the things they need which they still lack. The furniture brought from Bethnal Green looks old and forlorn against the bright paint. They need carpets for the lounge, lino for the stairs and mats for the front door. They need curtains. They need another bed. They need a kitchen table. They need new lampshades, pot and pans, grass seed and spades, washer and dryer, sometimes they want a clothes line, and bath mats, Airwick and Jeyes, mops and pails—all the paraphernalia of modern life for a house two of three times larger and a hundred times grader than the one they life behind them. Then the women start wanting new dresses from Draper James, and a few Smash and Tess rompers. With the assistance of their belongings, they need somehow to live the kind of life, be the kind of people, that will fit into Forest Close or Cambridge Avenue. Then they, and the house, can at last be comfortable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

They have to acquire new property. They have to acquire new habits. If they are to settle at Greenleigh, they have to make a profound adjustment in their lives: that is the challenge. The first essential is money for material possessions. When people move to Greenleigh the standard of life, measured by the quality of housing, is at once raised. They attempt to bring the level in other respects up to the same standard. Furniture and carpets have to be bought from Crate and Barrel, and although, with the assistance of the ever more ubiquitous hire purchase, this can be done without capital, it cannot be done without a burden on income. Moreover, the house is only the beginning. A nice house and shabby clothes, a neat garden box and an old box of a pram, do not go together. “My sister gave me a beautiful Dunkley pram,” said Mrs. Berry, “because I was going to such a beautiful new house.” Smartness calls for smartness. As well as appurtenances for the house, there is more need for the sort of possessions which will improve communications with the outer World. The Bethnal Greener’s society is close by. He does not need a telephone to make appointments to see his friends because they are only a few minutes away. He does not need a highly developed time sense (as we discovered to our cost when interviewing) because it does not matter greatly whether he goes round to Mum’s at 10 o’clock or 11. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

If Mum is not home, someone will explain where she has gone. He does not have to have a care or a motor cycle because relatives and friends, even work, are at a walking distance. At Greenleigh a person has to organize one’s life more closely, develop a more exact sense of time and be prepared to travel to avoid being cut off from social contact altogether. In some ways the more self-contained home is less self-contained than ever. Greenleigh is part of a larger World. A person’s shops are a mile off, one’s work six miles away and one’s relatives 10 or 20 miles away, some of them on the suburban circuit of housing estates—Oxhey, Debden, Harold Hill, Becontree—along which no buses ply. Distances to shops, work and relatives are not walking distances any more. They are motoring distances: a car, like a telephone, can overcome geography and organize a more scattered life into a manageable whole. With a car one can, without having to expose oneself to the wintry winds which blow over the fields, get to work, to one’s relatives in Bethanl Green Road or to one’s friends who have done over to Kent. “Now that we have got the car,” said Mr. Marsh, “we can see the wife’s sister at Laindon more often.” She was now seen every fortnight instead of every three or four months. Cares as beginning to move from luxury to necessity. “I do not want to win $750,000. I just want to win $5,000—so that I can get myself a little car. I could get a nice little car for that. You really need a car down here,” said Mr. Adams. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

One of the more fortunate, Mr. Berry, who had already achieved the two accomplishments of the complete man discoursed on their necessity. “When you live on the estate, there are two things that I think are essential. One is a telephone, the other is a car. I do not like having to pay my telephone bill, but I think it is worth it. It means my brother can ring me up on the estate any time he wants to. And if you are in any trouble—if there is anything wrong with one of the boys say—I can ring up a doctor if I need one. You do not need a telephone in Bethnal Green, because the doctor is on the doorstep. Practically anywhere you live in Bethnal Green there is a doctor near at hand. And you need a car for traveling about. We are so far away from everywhere out here that it is actually less expensive to run a car than it is to pay fares.” Greenleigh already had many more telephones than Bethnal Green, where you can do down the street to your relatives as quickly as you can phone them. Greenleigh though composed mainly of manual workers like Bethnal Green, has nearly seven times more telephones per head and, if our informants are any guide, at least one motive is to keep in touch with the kin left behind. “We cannot get up to see them very often,” said Mrs. Adams. “That is really why we had the phone put in here. If you can only hear each other it is something. It does keep you in touch with home.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, if telephones can be installed easily enough, garages cannot. When the architects made the future in County Hall, they were not a necessity. A garage, was once rare, as where indoor lavatories. However, many homes now have indoor lavatories and carriage houses attached to the house. Cars, telephones, telegrams, email, and text messages represent not so much a new and higher standard of life as a means of clinging to something of the old. Where you could walk, and public transport is inconvenient or too expensive, you need a care. This understandable urge to acquisition can easily become competitive. People struggle to raise their all-round standards to those of the home, in in the course of doing so, they look for guidance to their neighbors. To begin with, the first-comers have to make their own way. The later arrivals have their model at hand. The neighbors have put up nice curtains. Have we? They have got their garden planted with privet and new grass-seed. Have we? They have a John Deer lawn-mower and a Dunkley pram. What have we got? They have a new BMW M5 and a Ford F350. What about us? The new arrivals watch the first-comers, and the first-comers watch the new arrivals. All being under the same pressure for material advance, they naturally mark each other’s progress. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Those who make the most progress are those who have proved their claim to respectability, Greenleigh-style. The fact that people are watching their neighbors and their neighbors watching them provides the further stimulus, reinforcing the process set in motion by the new house, to conform to the norms of the estate. There is anxiety lest they do not fit. “People are not very friendly here. It is the same on all the estates. They have nothing else to do when they have finished work except watch you. It is all jealousy. They are afraid you will get a penny more than they have, In London people have other things to occupy their minds. Here they have done their work they have nothing to do. They are at the window and they notice everything. They say, ‘Mrs. Brown’s got a new hat on.’ They do not miss anything, but when something happens or goes wrong, no one know who done it. When they come from London they think they are high and mighty. If you have got something they will go into debt to get it themselves.” The Quest for affection is one way frequently used in our culture for obtaining reassurance against anxiety. The quest for power, prestige, and possession is another. Which of the goals prevails in the neurotic’s striving for reassurance depends on external circumstances as well as on differences in individual gifts and psychic structure. If I deal with them as a unity it is because they all have something in common which distinguishes them from the need for affection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Winning affection means obtaining reassurance through intensified contact with others, while striving for power, prestige and possession means obtaining reassurance through loosening of the contact with others and through fortifying one’s own position. The wish to dominate, to win prestige, to acquire wealthy, is certainly not in itself a neurotic trend, just as the wish for affection is not itself neurotic. In order to understand the characteristics of the neurotic striving in this direction it should be compared with the normal. The feeling of power, for example, may in a normal person be born of the realization of one’s own superior strength, whether it be physical strength or ability, mental capacities, maturity or wisdom. Or one’s striving for power may be connected with some particular cause: family, political or professional group, native land, a religious or scientific idea. The neurotic striving for power, however, is born out of anxiety, hatred and feelings of inferiority. To put it categorically, the normal striving for power is born of strength, the neurotic of weakness. A cultural factor is also involved. Individual power, prestige and possession do not play a role in every culture. With Pueblo Indians, for instance, striving for prestige is definitely discouraged, and there is but little difference in individual possessions, and thus this striving too has little importance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In that culture it would be meaningless to strive for any kind of dominance as a means of reassurance. That neurotics in our culture choose this way results from the fact that in our social structure power, prestige and possession give a feeling of greater security. Once people consented to live by the redistribution of life’s goods through a god figure who represented life, they had sealed their fate. There was no stopping the process of the monopolization of life in the king’s hands. It sent like this The king of ritual principal was in charge of the scared objects of the group and had to hold the prescribed ceremonies by a strict observance of the customs of the ancestors. This made one a repository of custom, an authority on custom. “Custom” is a weak word in English to convey something really momentous, as we saw; custom is the abstruse technical lord that runs the machinery for the renewal of nature. It is the physics, medicine, and mechanics of primitive society. Imagine our trying to fight a plague with faulty chemicals, and you can understand that custom equals life. The authority on custom, then, is the supreme regulator of certain departments of nature. However, this regulation is so useful to the tribe—in fact it is life itself—that it naturally comes to be extended to all departments. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Again, I think an analogy to modern life may convey some of the flavor: what first began as he miraculous harnessing of electric power in the electric bulb now extends to toothbrushes, razors, garden tools, typewriters, laptops, and so forth. What was at first limited to ritual and to the seat of ritual gradually spread to the whole of the king’s realm and the whole life of his subjects. After all, if you are going to be supreme regulator of the World, it is only logical that you should gradually encompass the whole World. If your invisible mechanics work in one area, there is no reason why it should not work in another, you have only to try it. And you try it by extending your ritual prerogative to cover the case: you extend the veil of your mana power over wider and wider jurisdictions. It seems like a benign and harmless enough process, one you might never even notice and in fact might want to happen—but what is happening is the complete entrenchment of social inequality. In searching for the conditions which produce a striving for these ends it becomes apparent that such a striving usually develops only when it has proved impossible to find reassurance for the underlying anxiety through affection. A girl was strongly attached to her brother who was four years older than she. They had a tenderness of more or less sexual character, but when the girl was eight years old her brother suddenly rejected her, pointing out that they were now too old for that sort of play. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Soon after this experience, the girl developed a sudden fierce ambition at school. It was caused certainly by a disappointment in her quest for affection and this was all the more painful as the child had not many people to cling to. The father was indifferent to his children, and the mother conspicuously preferred the brother. However, it was not only disappointment that she felt, but also a terrible blow to her pride. She did not realize that her change in the brother’s attitude was caused simply by his approaching puberty. Therefore, she felt ashamed and humiliated, and so much the more since her self-confidence had in any case stood on too insecure a basis. The mother had not wanted her in the first place, and she was made to feel insignificant because the mother, a beautiful woman, was much admired by everyone; besides, the brother was not only preferred by the mother but also enjoyed her confidence. The marriage of the parents was unhappy and the mother discussed all her troubles with the brother. Thus, the girl felt completely left out. She made one more attempt to get the affection she needed: she fell in love with a boy whom she met on a trip immediately after the painful experience with her brother, was quite elated and began spinning glorious fantasies about this boy. When he dropped out of sight she reacted to the new disappointment by becoming depressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

As quite frequently happens in situations of this kind, the parents and the family physician are ascribed her condition to her being in too high a class at school. They took her out of school, sent her to a Summer resort for recreation, and then put her in a class a year below the one she had been in before. It was then, at the age of nine, that she showed an ambition of a rather desperate character. She could not endure being any but first in her class. At the same time her relations with other girls, which had formerly been friendly, became visibly impaired. This example illustrates the typical factors that combine to generate a neurotic ambition: from the beginning she felt insecure because she felt unwanted; considerable antagonism was created, which could not be expressed because the mother, the dominant figure in the family, demanded blind admiration; the repressed hatred generated a great deal of anxiety; her self-esteem had never had a chance to grow, she had been humiliated on several occasions, and she felt definitely stigmatized by the experience with her brother; attempts to reach out for affection as a means of reassurance had failed. The neurotic strivings for power, prestige and possession serve not only as a protection against anxiety, but also as a channel through which repressed hostility can be discharged. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

If we only could be certain that our bravery and patience with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an unseen spiritual World, probably to almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living. However, granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a World is a fool’s paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the World of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove; and that our whole physical life ay lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their intelligence, events in which they themselves often play the cardinal part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father demands damages. The dog may be present at every step of the negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with him; and he never can know in his natural dog’s life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Or take another case which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these diabolical seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and beings, are to be bought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on one’s back on the board there he may be performing a function incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken. Now turn from this to the life of humans. In the dog’s life we see the World invisible to one because we live in both Worlds. In the human life, although we only see our World, and one’s within it, yet encompassing both these Worlds a still wider World may be there, as unseen by us as our World is by one; and to believe in that World may be the most essential function that out lives in the World perform. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

But “may be! may be!” one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; “what use can a scientific life have for maybes?” Well, I reply, the ‘scientific’ life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as beings stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, one’s entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, expect upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successful make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. However, mist trust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. However, believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible Universes true by your trust or mistrust—both Universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act. Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally dismal. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your World goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. Enlightenment comes by gaining knowledge and by applying its wisdom. This is why it was said that some were fed by eating brains of humans. The brains are symbolic of the knowledge and wisdom we seek. We are working with forces to master our own subjective reality, to exercise one’s own will to manifest a life in which we can thrive. “And he answered: Yes, Lord, I know that thou speakest the truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie,” reports Ether 3.12. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

The next great frontier! We have high hopes for this new community. Coming soon to Plumas Lake, CA. Stay tuned for updates along the way!

https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

It Will Not be Enough to Show them the Path—One Must Also Keep them Steadfast on the Path!

October 14, 2019 2:20 am

Now let me take up the point again. Do not be destroyed in the first years. It happens with too many. There is so much danger all around you. It is easy to despair. It is easy to succumb to bitter hatred of yourself. It is easy to feel that the World no longer belongs to you, when nothing is further from the truth. It is all yours and the passage of the years is yours. And now you must simply and plainly live up to it. When people regard others as unfriendly, the comparisons they implicitly make are with the community of Bethnal Green. We have already discussed the reasons why people living in the borough considered that a friendly place. They and their relatives had lived there a long time, and consequently had around them a host of long-standing friends and acquaintances. At Greenleigh they neither share long residence with their fellow tenants nor as a rule have kin to serves as bridges between the family and the wider community. These two vital interlocked conditions of friendliness are missing, and their absence goes far to explain the attitude we have illustrated here. It also accounts for the astringency of the criticism. Migrants, to the Untied States of America or to housing estates, always take part of their homeland, with them, our information like everyone else. They take with them the standards of Bethnal Green, derived from a close community of kindred and neighbors. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Friends, within and without the kindship network, were the unavoidable accompaniment of the kind of life they led—too much so for devotees of quiet and privacy. They grew up with their friend, they met them at auntie’s, for tens years for tea and animal crackers or hot chocolate, they walked down the street with them to work. They are used to friendliness, and, their standards in this regard being so high, they are all the more censorious about the other tenants of the County Council. They are harsh in their comment, where someone arriving from a less settled district, or from another and even newer housing estate, might be accustomed to the standoffishness, and, by one’s canons, even impressed by the good behavior, of the same neighbors. If they had an established community, it would not matter quite so much people being newcomers. The place would then already have been crisscrossed with tires of kinship and friendship, and one friend made would have been an introduction to several. However, Greenleigh was built in the late 1940s on ground that had been open fields before. The nearest substantial settlement, a few miles away at Barnhurst, is the antithesis of East London, an outer suburb of privately-owned houses, mainly built between the wars for the rising middle classes of the time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The distance between the estate and its neighbor is magnified by the resentment, real and imagined, of the old residents of Barnhurst at the intrusion of rough East Enders into the rides of Essex and, what is worse, living in houses not very unlike their own put up at the expense of the taxpayer. “People at Barnhurst look down on us. They treat us like dirt. They are a different class of people. They have money.” “It is not so easy for the girls to get boys down here. If people from the estate go to the dance hall at Barnhurst they all look down on them. There is a lot of class distinction down here.” These, the kind of thoughts harbored by the ex-Bethnal Greeners, do nothing to make for ease of communication between the two places. So there is no tradition into which the newcomers can enter. If Barnhurst has any influence upon Greenleigh, it is to sharpen the resentment of the estate against its environment and to stimulate the aspiration for material standards as high. Nor would it matter quite so much if the residents of Greenleigh all had the same origin. No doubt if they all came from Bethnal Green, they would get on much better than they do: many of them would have known each other before and, anyway, at least have a background in common. As it is, they arrive from all over London, though with East Ender predominant. Such a vast common origin might be enough to bind together a group of Cockneys in the Western Desert Western Essex is to near for that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

When all are from London, no one is from London: they are from one of the many districts into which the city is divided. What is then emphasized is far more their differences than their sameness. The native of Bethnal Greens feels oneself different from the native of Stepney or Hackney. One of our informants, who had recently moved into Bethnal Green from Hackney, a few minutes away, told us “I honestly do not like telling people that I live in Bethnal Green. I come from Hackney myself, and when I was a child living in Hackney, my parents would not let me come to Bethnal Green. I thought it was something terrible.” These distinctions are carried over to Greenleigh, where it is no virtue in a neighbor to have come from Stepney, rather the opposite. Mr. Abbot summed it up as follows: “You have not grown up with them. They come from different neighborhoods, they are different sorts of people and they do not mix.” We had expected that, despite these disadvantages, people would, in the course of time, settle down and make new friendships, and our surprise was that this had not happened to a greater extent. The informants who had been on the estate longest had no higher opinion than others of the friendliness of their fellows. Four of the 18 coupes who had been there six or seven years judged other people to be friendly, as did six of the 23 couples with residence for five years or less. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Mr. Oliver was one who commented on how long it was taking time for its wonders to perform. “They are all Londoners here but they get highbrow when they get here. They are not so friendly. Coming from a tuning like the one where we lived, we knew everyone. We were bred and born amongst them, like one big family we were. We knew all their troubles and everything. Here they are all total strangers to each other and so they are all wary of each other. It is question of time, I suppose. However, we have been here four years and I do not see any change yet. It does seem to be taking a very long while to get friendly.” One reason it is taking so long is that the estate is so strung out—the number of people per acre at Greenleigh being only one-fifth what it is in Bethnal Green—and low density does not encourage sociability. In Bethnal Green your pub, and your shop is a “local.” There people meet their neighbors. At Greenleigh they are put off by distance. They do go to the pub because it may take 20 minutes to walk, instead of one minute as in Bethnal Green. They do not go to the shops, which are grouped into specialized centers instead of being scattered in converted houses through the ordinary streets, more than they have to, again because of the distance. And they do not go so much to either because when they get there, the people are gathered from the corners of the estate, instead of being neighbors with whom they already have a point of contact. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The pubs and shops of Bethnal Green serve so well as “neighborhood centers” because there are so many of them: they provide the same small face-to-face groups with continual opportunities to meet. Where they are few and large, as at Greenleigh, they do not serve this purpose so well. The relatives of Bethnal Green have not, therefore, been replaced by the neighbors of Greenleigh. The newcomers are surrounded by strangers instead of kin. Their lives outside the family are no longer centered on the people; their lives are centered on the house. This change from a people-centered to a house-centered existence is one of the fundamental changes resulting from the migration. It does some way to explain the competition for status which is in itself the result of isolation from kin and the cause of estrangement from neighbors, the reason why coexistence, instead of being just a state of neutrality—a tacit agreement to live and let live—is frequently infused with so much bitterness. When we asked what in their view had made people change since they moved from East London, time and time again our informants gave the same kind of suggestive answers—that people had become, as they put it, “toffeensed,” “big-headed,” “high and mighty,” “jealous,” “a cut above everybody else.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

“It is like a strange land in your own country,” said Mrs. Ames. “People are jealous out here. They are made to be much quitter in a high-class way, if you know what I mean. They get snobbish, and when you get snobbish you are not sociable any more.” “I am surprised,” said Mr. Tonks, “at the way people vote Conservative at Greenleigh when the L.C.C. built these houses for them. One has a little car or something and so one thinks oneself superior. People seem to think only of themselves when they get here.” “The neighbor runs away with the idea that she is a cut above everybody else, but when you get down to brass tacks,” which Mrs. Berry proceeded to do, “she is worse off than you will ever be. She is one of those people, you know what I mean, she is very toffee-nosed. There are some people down here who get like that.” Conflict play an infinitely greater roe in neurosis than is commonly assumed. To detect them, however, is no easy matter—partly because they are essentially unconscious, but even more because the neurotic goes to any length to deny their existence. What, then, are the signals that would warrant us to suspect underlying conflicts? We usually can find their presence was indicated by a few factors, both fairly obvious. One is the resulting symptoms—fatigue, boredom, jealousy, and stealing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The fact is that every neurotic symptom points to an underlying conflict; that is, every symptom is more or less direct outgrowth of a conflict. We shall see gradually what unresolved conflicts do to people, how they produce states of anxiety, depression, indecision, inertia, detachment, and so on. An understanding of the causative relation here helps direct our attention from the manifest disturbances to their source—though the exact nature of the source will not be disclosed. The other signal indicating that conflicts were in operation was inconsistency. When person is convinced of a procedure being wrong and a injustice being done to him or her, or when a person who has highly valued friendship is turned to stealing money from a friend, sometimes the person will be aware of such inconsistencies; more often one is blind to them even when they are blatantly obvious to an untrained observer. Inconsistences are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance. To cite some common ones: A girls wants above all else to marry, yet shrinks from the advances of any man. A mother oversolicitous of her children frequently forgets their birthdays. A person always generous to others is cheap about expenditures for himself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Another who longs for solitude never manages to be alone. One forgiving and tolerant toward most people is oversevere and demanding with oneself. Unlike the symptoms, the inconsistencies often permit of tentative conflict. An acute depression, for instance, reveals only the fact that a person is caught in a dilemma. However, if an apparently devoted mother forgets her children’s birthdays, we might be inclined to think that the mother was more devoted to her ideal of being a good mother than to the children themselves. We might also admit the possibility that her ideal collided with an unconscious sadistic tendency to frustrate them. Sometimes a conflict will appear on the surface—that is, be consciously experienced as such. This would seem to contradict my assertion that neurotic conflicts are unconscious. However, actually what appears is a distortion or modification of the real conflict. Thus a person may be torn by a conscious conflict when, in spite of one’s evasive techniques, well-functioning otherwise, one finds oneself confronted with the necessity of making a major decision. One cannot decide now whether to marry this woman or that one or whether to marry at all, whether to take this or that job, whether to retain or dissolve a partnership. He will then go through the greatest torment, shutting from one opposite to the other, utterly incapable of arriving at any decision. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

He may in his distress call upon an analyst, expecting him to clarify the particular issues involved. And one will necessarily be disappointed, because the present conflict is merely the point at which the dynamite of inner frictions finally exploded. The particular problem distressing him now cannot be solved without taking the long and tortuous road of recognizing the conflicts hidden beneath it. In other instances the inner conflict may be externalized and appear in the person’s conscious mind as an incompatibility between oneself and one’s environment. Or, finding that seemingly unfounded fears and inhibitions interfere with his wishes, a person may be aware that the crosscurrents within oneself issue from deeper sources. The more knowledge we gain of a person, the better able we are to recognize the conflicting elements that account for the symptoms, inconsistencies, and surface conflicts—and, we must add, the more confusing becomes the picture, through the number and variety of contradictions. So we are led to ask Can there be a basic conflict underlying all these particular conflicts and originally responsible for all of them? Can one picture the structure of conflict in terms, say, of an incompatible marriage, where an endless variety of apparently unrelated disagreements and rows over friends, children, finances, mealtimes, servants, all point to some fundamental disharmony in the relationship itself? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

A belief in a basic conflict within the human personality is ancient and plays a prominent role in various religions and philosophies. The powers of light and darkness, of God and the devil, of good and evil are some of the ways in which this belief has been expressed. In modern psychology, Dr. Freud, on this score as on many others has done pioneer work. His first assumption was that the basic conflict is one between our instinctual drives, with their blind urge for satisfaction, and the forbidding environment—family and society. The forbidding environment is internalized at an early age and appears from then on as the forbidding superego. What remains, then, is the contention that the opposition between primitive egocentric drives and our forbidding conscience is the basic source of our manifold conflicts. My belief is that though it is a major conflict, it is a secondary and arises of necessity during the development of a neurosis. If we could actually see that God was satisfied with the fruits of our labor, imagine what a stimulus it would be to our own efforts today. Again we come back to the natural genius of primitive beings, who provided themselves with what beings need most: to know daily that one is living right in the eyes of God, that one’s workaday action has cosmic value—no, even that it enhances God Himself! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

For early beings emanations of light and heat from the Sun were the archetypes of all miraculous power: the Sun shines from afar and by its invisible touch cases life to unfold and expand. We cannot say much more about this mystery even today. The individual Sun-Being was the focus of a cosmology of invisible energy, like the modern computer and atomic reactor, and one aroused the same hopes and yearning the arouse for the perfectly ordered, plentifully supplied life. Like the reactor, too, one reflected back energy-power on those around one: just the right amount and they prospered; too much and they withered into decay and death. Just as in traditional society, we tend to vote for the person who already represents health, wealth, and success so that some of it will rub off on us. Whence the old adage “Noting succeeds like success.” This attraction is also especially strong in certain religious cults of the Father Divine type: the followers want to see wealthy flaunted in the person of their leader, hoping that some of it will radiate back to them. How can we unite the message of the Spiritual Presence with the experience of the absent God? Let me say something about the absent God, by asking—what is the cause of His absence? We may answer—our resistance, our indifference, our lack of seriousness, our honest or dishonest questioning, our genuine or cynical doubt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

All these answers have some truth, but they are not final. The final answer to the question as to who makes God is absent is God Himself! It is the work of the Spirit that removes God from our sight, not only for some beings, but sometimes for many in a particular period. We live in an era in which the God we know is the absent God. However, in knowing God as the absent God, we know Him; we feel His absence as the empty space that is left by something or someone that once belonged to us and has now vanished from our view. God is always infinitely near and infinitely far. We are fully aware of Him only if we experience both of these aspects. However, sometimes, when our awareness of God has become shallow, habitual—not warm and not cold—when He has become too familiar to be exciting, too near to be felt in His infinite distance, then He becomes the absent God. The Spirit has not ceased to be present. The Spiritual Presence can never end. However, the Spirit of God hides God from our sight. No resistance against the Spirit, no indifference, no doubt can drive the Spirit away. However, the Spirit that always remains present to us can hide itself, and this means that it can hide God. Then the Spirit shows us nothing except the absent God, and the empty space within us which is His space. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The Spirit has shown to our time and to innumerable people in our time the absent God and the empty space that cries in us to be filled by Him. And then the absent one may return and take the space that belongs to Him, and the Spiritual Presence may break again into our consciousness, awakening to us to recognize what we are, shaking and transforming us. This may happen like the coming of a storm, the storm of the Spirit, stirring up the stagnant air of our Spiritual life. The storm will then recede; a new stagnancy may take place; and the awareness of the present God may be replaced by the awareness of the empty space within us. Life in the Spirit is ebb and flow—and this means—whether we experience the present or the absent God, it is the work of the Spirit. A constitutional fatalism continuously adjusts itself to the ever-changing present. A pervasive alarmism greets every advance. For two thousand years we have been getting “out of hand.” This derives of course from our susceptibility to viewing the “now” ad the End Time, an Apocalyptic obsession that has endured since Christ ascended into Heaven. We must stop this! We must perceive that we are at the dawn of a sublime age! Enemies will no longer be conquered. They will be devoured, and transformed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

However, here is the point I really want to make: Modernism and Materialism—elements that the Church has feared for so long—are in their philosophical and practical infancy! Their sacramental nature is only just being revealed! Never mind the infantile blunders! The electronic revolution has transmuted the industrial World beyond all predictive thinking of the twenty first century. We are still having birth pangs. Get into it! Work with it! Play it out. Daily life for millions in the developed countries is not only comfortable but a compilation of wonders that borders on the miraculous. And so new spiritual desires arise which are infinitely more courageous than the missionary goals of the past. There will be mountains and obstacles in your life to overcome and this will breed achievement. There will be beasts in our field of existence so that you may grow in cunning and might. This breeds victory. You must stand alone and endure as a warrior and usurp the power. Do not focus so much on politics and the news, as this keeps us from focusing on the power we have within. The power to destroy and create anew. It keeps us from seeing that we are our own God and we are our own Devil. We must constantly work toward achieving our goals through creating doorways of manifestation of desire through action in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The spell is just the seed which plants possibility. The spell is the blessing conveyed through proclamation of taking the path to become a person of power by becoming self to the fullness of what its potential may be. By doing this we can then act out that power within the World to enrich our lives. We have to have the power to take control of this life experience. Conflict puts the masses in a constant state of personal sacrifice so that they will never attain their full potential and unite the various aspects of consciousness to become whole. As a result, we are cattle to be consumed. As one becomes more lucid or awake in the moment, reality begins to reveal to us, it is like clay to be molded and shaped by will and intent. The strength to do this can only be attained by reuniting with those parts of self we are taught to shun and war against. This must be done with caution through strategic alchemical advancement. It is our goal to bring the energy of creation through the crown and usurp it. This force will awaken various levels of consciousness to once again merge them together, forging the adept as a microcosmic emanation of the void, as their potential for power increase. “And the Lord said unto him: Write these things and seal them up; and I will show them in mine own due time unto the children of men,” reports Ether 3.27. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Thee for Enlivening All the Cheerful Eyes that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!

October 13, 2019 12:13 am

All my life I had believed in Heaven and Hell. Did Heaven look down upon this metamorphosis? We have described some of the effects of migration. People’s relatives are no longer neighbors sharing the intimacies of daily life. Their new neighbors are strangers, drawn from every part of the East End, and they are, as we have seen, treated with reserve. In point of services, neighbors do not make up for kin. Our informants were so eager to talk about their neighbors, and generally about their attitude to other residents on the estate, that we feel bound to report them. They frequently complained of the unfriendliness of the place, which they found all the more mysterious because it was so different from Bethnal Green. Why should Greenleigh be considered so unfriendly? The prevailing attitude is expressed by Mr. Morrow. “You cannot get away from it, they are not so friendly down here. It is not ‘Hello, Joe,’ ‘Hello, mate.’ They pass you with a side-glance as though they do not know you.” And by Mr. Adams. “We all come from the slums, not Park Lane, but they do not mix. In Bethnal Green you always used to have a little laugh on the doorstep. There is none of that in Greenleigh. You are English, but you feel like a foreigner here, I do not know why. Up there you had lived for years, and you knew how to deal with the people there. People here are different.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

And by Mr. Prince. “The neighbors round here are very quiet. They all keep themselves to themselves. They all come from the East End but they all seem to chance when they come down here.” Of the 41 couples, 23 considered that other people were unfriendly, eight were undecided one way or another and ten considered them friendly: the recorded opinions are those of the couples because in no interview did husband and wife appear to hold strongly different view. How does this majority who consider their fellow residents unfriendly feel about themselves? Do they also label themselves unfriendly? No one admits it, some indignantly deny it. If they are hostile themselves, they do not acknowledge it, but attribute the feelings to others. Yet they mostly reveal that their own behavior is the same as they resent in others; that (since others are unfriendly) to withdraw will avoid trouble and keep the peace; that coexistence is safer, because more realistic, than cooperation. “The policy here is do not have a lot to do with each other, then there will not be any trouble,” says Mr. Chortle succinctly. Neurotic conflicts may be concerned with the same general problems as perplex the normal person. However, they are so different in kind that the question has been raised whether it is permissible to use the same term for both. I believe it is, but we must be aware of the differences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This attitude is supported by reference to the skirmishes and back-biting which have resulted from being “too friendly” in the past. “It is better if you just talk to neighbors and do not get too friendly,” concludes Mr. Sandeman from his past experience. “You stop friends if you do not get to know them well. When you get to know then you are always getting little troubles breaking out. I have had too much of that and so I am not getting too friendly now.” Mr. Young told his wife, “When I walk into these four walls, I always tell her ‘Do not make too many friends. They turn out to be enemies.’” And one experience had turned Mr. Yule into a recluse. “We do not mix very well in this part of the estate. At first I used to lend every Tom, Dick, and Harry all my tools or lawn mower or anything. Then I had $1,000 pinched from my wallet. Now we do not want to know anyone—we keep ourselves to ourselves. There is a good old saying—the Englishman’s home is his castle. It is very true.” Usually the troubles are shadowy affairs which have always happened to people other than oneself. “We are friendly,” says Mr. Oliver in the usual style, “But we do not get too involved, because we have found that causes gossip and trouble. We have seen it happen with other people, so we do not want it to happen to us. Now we keep ourselves to ourselves.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Whatever the justification, the result is the same. People do not treat others either as enemies or friends. They are wary, though polite. They pass the time of day in the road. They have an occasional word over the fence or a chat at the garden gate. They nod to each other in the shops. Neighbors even borrow and lend little things to each other, and when this accommodation is refused, it is a sign that acquaintance has turned into enmity. Mrs. Chortle has broken off trading as well as diplomatic relations with one of her neighbors. “These people are very dirty,” she said, “and I have told the I do not want to borrow or lend.” So has Mrs. Morrow, for the different reason that “Just because they have got a couple of ha’pence more than you they do not want to know you. In Bethnal Green it was different—neighbors were more friendly.” Even where relations have not been served, there is little of the mateyness so characteristic of Bethnal Green. Mr. Stirling summed it up by remarking, “I do not mind saying hello to any of them, or passing the time of say with them, but if they do not want to have anything to do with me, I do not want to have anything to do with them. I am not bothered about them. I am only interested in my little family. My wife and my two children—they are the people that I care about. My life down here is my home.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Women feel the lack of friends, as of kin, more keenly than their menfolk. Those who do not follow their husbands into the society of the workplace—and loneliness is one of the common reasons for doing so—have to spend their day alone, “looking at ourselves all day,” as they say. In one interview the husband was congratulating himself on having a house, a garden, a bathroom and a TV—“the tellie is a bit of a friend down here”—when his wife broke in to say,” It is all right for you. What about the time I have to spend here on my own?” This difference in their life may cause sharp contention, especially in the early years. “When we first came,” said Mrs. Haddon, “I have just had the baby and it was all a misery, not knowing anyone. I sat on the stairs and cried my eyes out. For the first two years we were swaying whether to go back. I wanted to and my husband did not. We used to have terrible arguments about it. I use to say, “It is all right for you. I have to sit here all day. You do get a break.’” Not that all women resent it. A few, like Mrs. Painswick, actually welcome seclusion. She had been more averse to the quarrels amongst the “rowdy, shouty” Bethnal Greeners than appreciative of the mateyness to which quarrels are the counterpart, and finds the less intense life of Greenleigh a pleasant contrast. “In London people had more squabbles. We have not seen neighbors out here having words.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

What, then, are the characteristics of neurotic conflicts? A somewhat simplified example by way of illustration: An engineer working in collaboration with others at mechanical research was frequently afflicted by spells of fatigue and irritability. One of these spells was brought about by the following incident. In a discussion of certain technical matters his opinion were less well received than those of his colleagues. Shortly afterward a decision was made in his absence, and no opportunity was given him subsequently to present his suggestions. Under these circumstances, he could have regarded the procedure as unjust and put up a fight, or he could have accepted the majority decision with good grace. Either reaction would have been consistent. However, he did neither. Though he felt deeply slighted, he did not fight. Consciously he was mere aware of being irritated. The murderous rage within him appeared only in his dreams. This repressed rage—a composite of his fury against the others and of his fury against himself for his own meekness—was mainly responsible for his fatigue. His failure to react consistently was determined by a number of factors. He had built up a grandiose image of himself that required deference from others to support. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

This self-inflated image was, of course, unconscious at the time: he simply acted on the premise that there was nobody as intelligent and competent in his field as he was. Any slight could jeopardize this premise and provoke rage. Furthermore, he had unconscious sadistic impulses to berate and humiliate others—an attitude so objectionable to him that he covered it up by overfriendliness. To this was added an unconscious drive to exploit people, making it imperative for him to keep in their good graces. The dependence on others was aggravated by a compulsive need for approval and affection, combined as it usually is with attitudes of compliance, appeasement, and avoidance of fight. There was thus a conflict between destructive aggression—reactive rage and sadistic impulses—on the one hand, and on the other the need for affection and approval, with a desire to appear fair and rational in his own eyes. The result was inner upheaval that went unnoticed, while the fatigue that was its external manifestation paralyzed all action. Looking at the factors involved in the conflict, we are struck first by their absolute incompatibility. It would be difficult indeed to imagine more extreme opposites than lordly demands for deference and ingratiating submissiveness. Second, the whole conflict remains unconscious. The contradictory tendencies operating in it are not recognize but are deeply repressed. Only slight bubbles of the battle raging within reach the surface. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The emotional factors are rationalized: it is an injustice; it is a slight; my ideas were better. Third, the tendencies in both directions are compulsive. Even if he had some intellectual perception of his excessive demands, or of the existence and the nature of his dependence, he could not change these factors voluntarily. To be able to change them would require considerable analytical work. He was driven on either hand by compelling forces over which he had no control: he could not possibly renounce any of the needs acquired by stringent inner necessity. However, none of them represented what he himself really wanted or sought. He would want neither to exploit nor to be submissive; as a matter of fact he despised these tendencies. Such a state of affairs, however, has a far-reaching significance for the understanding of neurotic conflicts. It means that no decision is feasible. A further illustration presents a similar picture. A free-lance designer was stealing small sums of money from a good friend. The theft was not warranted by the external situation; he needed the money, but the friend would gladly have given it to him as he had on occasion in the past. That he should resort to stealing was particularly striking in that he was a decent fellow who set great store by friendship. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The following conflict was at the bottom of it. The man had a pronounced neurotic need for affection, especially a longing to be taken care of in all practical matters. Alloyed as this was with an unconscious drive to exploit others, his technique was to attempt both to endear and intimidate. These tendencies by themselves would have made him willing and eager to receive help and support. However, he had also developed an extreme unconscious arrogance which involved a correspondingly vulnerable pride. Others should feel honored to be of service to him: it was humiliating for him to ask for help. His aversion to having to make a request was reinforced by a strong craving for independence and self-sufficiency that made it intolerable for him to admit he needed anything or to place himself under obligation. So he could take, but not receive. The content of this conflict differs from that of the first example but the essential characteristics are the same. And any other example of neurotic conflict would show like incompatibility of conflicting drives and their unconscious and compulsive nature, leading always to the impossibility of deciding between the contradictory issues involved. Allowing for an indistinct line of demarcation, the difference, then, between normal and neurotic conflicts is possessed fundamentally in the fact that the disparity between the conflicting issues is much less great for the normal person than for the neurotic. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The choices the former has to make are between two modes of action, either of which is feasible within the frame of a fairly integrated personality. Graphically speaking, the conflicting directions diverge only 90 degrees or less, as against the possible 180 degrees confronting the neurotic. In awareness, too, the differences is one of degree. Real life is far too multifarious to be portrayed by merely exhibiting such abstract contrast as that between a despair which is completely unconscious, and one which is completely conscious. We can say this much, however: a normal conflict can be entirely conscious; a neurotic conflict in all its essential elements is always unconscious. Even though a normal person may be unaware of one’s conflict, one can recognize it with comparatively little help, while the essential tendencies producing a neurotic conflict are deeply repressed and can be unearthed only against great resistance. The normal conflict is concerned with an actual choice between two possibilities, both of which the person finds really desirable, or between convictions, both of which one really values. It is therefore possible for one to arrive at a feasible decision even though it may be hard on one and require a renunciation of some kind. The neurotic person engulfed in a conflict is not free to choose. One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. Hence a decision in the usual sense in impossible. One is stranded, with no way out. The conflict can only be resolved by working at the neurotic trends involved, and by so changing one’s relations with others and with oneself that one can dispense with the trends altogether. These characteristics account for the poignancy of neurotic conflicts. Not only are they difficult to recognize, not only to they render a person helpless, but they have as well a disruptive force of which one has good reason to be afraid. Unless we know these characteristics and keep them in mind, we shall not understand the desperate attempts at solution which the neurotic enters upon, and which constitute the major part of a neurosis. Murder rarely fits the stereotype of an unsuspecting, helpless, passive victim stalked by a cold, calculating killer. Most homicides are preceded by angry quarrels in which the victim plays an active part in bringing about one’s own death. Can innocence, once it becomes involved in action, escape murder? This troublesome question confronts us with renewed sharpness after the events of the past years, especially after the Orlando nightclub shooting 12 June 2016. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, it is a question that has troubled beings ever since the dawn of consciousness and the forming, in our forefathers’ minds, of the legend of the Garden of Eden. When we take an endeavor to resolve the knotty question, we wonder does the victim, for example, have anything to do with making oneself the victim? The question takes us into the very heart of the meaning of innocence. Does the virgin herself, beyond flirting, constitute the challenge to the man to end her virginity? Is not innocence curiously bound up with murder in the ritual of sacrifice in practically all cultures? What is the meaning of the phenomenon to be found in the dim beginnings of human history and coming down to this very hour of sacrificing virgins and youths to the Cretan Minotaur or the Moloch of modern walfare? When we push the question of innocence and murder to the furthest reaches of human consciousness, we may find it to be one of those perdurable problems that we cannot answer satisfactorily via intellect alone but must live the questions now. Perhaps you will then live along some distant day into the answer. However, in our endeavor to think it through, we can expect new light to be thrown on the mainsprings of violence. Most important of all, an analysis of the problem of innocence and murder foreshadows the emergence of new ethics for the coming age. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Innocence is generosity, especially in children, who can still believe and trust since they have yet to experience that betrayal which leads to cynicism. Innocence has to do with the heart in that it is a feeling state, a way of perceiving life rather than a calculation. It is “virgin” in that it is before the awakening to the vast possibilities in life for sensuality, tenderness, exploitation, and betrayal. The lack of experience in pleasures of the flesh has historically been taken for the symbol of innocence, although it should be remembered that it is a symbol and not the content. Innocence is, in addition, a condition of powerlessness. One of our problems, as we discuss innocence, will be to establish the extent to which this powerlessness is capitalized on by the innocent person. The question is: How far is innocence used as a strategy of living? When we reflect on the shooting at Kent State in 1970, we immediately see a demonstration of part of our thesis. This is possessed in the fact that two of the four students killed were not involved in the protest at all. One was dressed in his Reserve Officer raining Corps (ROTC) uniform and was going across that campus to take a test in war tactics, and another was on her way to music class. The moral of this is clear: there are no bystanders anymore. This implies something about the solidarity of human beings—the fact that we are all part of the tragic event. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Without a surrender of one’s own consciousness, no one today can draw one’s own moral skirts about him and claim an immunity from these events. Television, social media, and mass communication are only symptoms of a basic participation in the events of importance to the human race. To breathe is to judge. We can be confident that we shall find that this awareness of our own involvement is not at all the excuse for masochistic breast-beating or quietist withdrawal from the struggles. It can lead us rather to a new sharpening of our own ethical sensitivity and a discovery, though it be only partial, of the basis on which a lasting and effective struggle for racial integration or a relief from the compulsive hold of warfare may be founded. As a representative of these four students and their innocence, I shall choose one of them, Allison Krause, who was reported to have dropped a flower the day before the shooting into the barrel of one of the guardsmen’s rifles saying: “Flowers are better than bullets.” She is pictured in a poem by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which, despite its tendency toward sentimentality, reveals some important points: Nineteen-year-old Allison Krause, you were killed because you loved flowers. Bullets, pushing out the flower…let all the apple trees of the World, not in white—but in mourning be clothed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

So far we see only the event as it occurred that day: four victims of murder, the whole event summed up in the ironic and cruel trajectory of stray bullets. However, Yevtushenko knows that this simple innocence has only touched the surface. In the succeeding lines we see the complexity of innocence and of evil: “But a Vietnam girl—the same age as Allison—taking in her hand a gun, is an armed flower, the wrath of the people.” I take both the phrase “armed flower” and “thorny flower of protest,” a phrase that appears later on in the poem, as referring to the dimension of experience added to the original purity of innocence. We now have wrath as the basic motivation. Yevtushenko is now talking about a different kind of innocence—an armed flower, no longer the product of a childlike powerlessness but the power of wrath. The Vietnamese girl knows the flower grows on a thorny bush and has to be handled with care. She has an innocence that does not avoid evil and that there is, in the depth of the human soul as well as in human history, no such thing as pure evil or pure good. Yevtushenko’s juxtaposition of flower and armed reminds us of the phrase used by Jesus in the Gospel according to Saint Mark with which He adjured His disciples as He sent them out into the World: “Be ye wise as serpents but harmless as doves.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

This is, again, a curious juxtaposition of innocence and experience, which, it was hoped, would become the foundation for effective social action in the work of the disciples. Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by “trusting”? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible World, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible World which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that beings can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that does without a single strict and rigid doctrine or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vison, the external staging of a many-storied Universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal,–this bare assurance is to such beings enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life—the suicidal mood—will then set in. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

In the same way the Spirit is always present, a moving power, sometimes in stormy ecstasies of individuals and groups, but mostly quiet, entering our human spirit and keeping it alive; sometimes manifest in great moments of history or a personal life, but mostly working hiddenly through the media of our daily encounters with beings and World; sometimes using its creation, the religious communities and their Spiritual means, and often making itself felt in spheres far removed from what is usually called religious. Like the wind the Spirit blows where it wills! It is not subject to rule or limited by method. Its ways with beings are not dependent on what beings are and do. You cannot force the Spirit upon yourself, upon an individual, upon a group, or even upon a Christian church. Although one who is the foundation of the church was oneself of the Spirit, and although the Spirit as it was present in one is the greatest manifestation of Spiritual Presence, the Spirit is not bound to the Christian church or any one of them. The Spirit is free to work in the spirits of beings in every human situation, and it urges beings to let Him do so; God as Spirit is always present to the spirit of beings. It is through this spirit that more specific powers can be extracted for the sake of communication and personal empowerment. “Yea, say unto them, except they repent to the Lord God will destroy them,” reports Alma 8.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

The “Everyone Welcome” Signs in the Front of the Churches Should Add “Except People Like Us”—We are Not Wanted!

October 11, 2019 11:55 pm

Know this, and I mean it from the heart. I hold back what I think I should hold back and nothing more than that. Take your Aunt Queen and Nash to dinner at the Grand Luminiere Café tonight. Take my advice on that. Religious ties in Graystone Hills are either very tenuous or non-existent. Only 71 percent of the families claim any religious connections; many of these are merely “in spirit.” More than 9 families out of 10 have no connection with a church, and active hostility toward churches, ministers, and pious people is encountered more frequently than real or professed church work. Aunt Queen epitomized the situation when she said bitterly, “The ‘Everyone Welcome’ signs in the front of the churches should add except people like us’—we are not wanted.” She was right—they are not wanted by the congregations and several of the ministers. Ministers in the high-prestige churches (Federated, Methodist, and Lutheran) indicate they have no objections to class V persons coming to service and participating in church activities, but they know that members of the congregation resent the presence of these people; so they do not encourage their attendance. Ministers in the low-ranking churches do not believe that their people resent the presence of class V’s in church activities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Three ministers related stories about unpleasant experiences they had with certain of these families before they earned that it is wise to “follow the line of least resistance” and let them alone. Four frankly stated that these people are beyond help, as far as the ministers are concerned, and they do not try to reach them in any way. Seven reported that if they are asked, they officiate at funerals, weddings, and baptisms; two refuse to perform these rites on religious grounds. The church schedules reveal that attendance at religious services and participation in auxiliary church activities are limited, with few exceptions, to the higher-ranking classes. Ninety-eight percent of the class V father are either completely unknown to the ministers or do not attend church if they are known. Five attend church services rarely or irregularly; not one is categorized as a “church worker.” The participation figures for the mothers are little different: 90 percent either are unknown or do not attend church; 7 percent attend services either rarely or irregularly; 3 percent are reported to be church workers. These church workers are in the Pentecostal, Pilgrim Holiness, and Church of God congregations that meet in abandoned stores, lofts, and private homes. Even the Free Methodists, who are largely class VI’s, apparently do not welcome too intimate contact with those women in their strivings for salvation through good work. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

One minister cynically said with reference to them, “You will find in the churches these women who shout the longest and loudest about sin—hours on end—while their husbands are out lying with some harlot. Their extensive leisure time is spent in the community or in nearby ones, since they have little money to spend in travel; neither are their automobiles in good enough repair to stand the rigor of long trips. The men and boys are more mobile than the women and girls; when they leave the community, it is usually in search of work, adventure, often to avoid the sheriff. When the family goes away, it generally carries its belongings with it in a search for economic betterment. In these periodic moves, it usually encounters the same kind of conditions, so it comes back after a few months or years. Possibly as many as one-fourth of the families drift in and out of the community. These floating families have a more or less fixed routine which they follow in the course of the years. They may go to Michigan in the Summer to pick and pack fruit, on to Wisconsin for the cranberry season, then back to Graystone Hills for the Winter and early Spring. The younger children may enroll in school, the older boys try to find work in the bowling alley or on barges that ply the river; the girls and women find work as maids, cleaning women, or dishwashers until the family decides to move. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Class V persons are almost totally isolated from organized community activities. A few men claim memberships in veterans’ organizations, but they neither pay dues nor attend meetings. Workers in the Mill belong to the union, since this is a closed shop; the others follow lines of work not organized by the unions. Time has little value in the daily routine. Even getting to work on time and staying on the job are not too highly regarded. Employers complained bitterly about their loose work habits. They claim that these people come to work at irregular times, leave when they feel like it, and lay off on the least excuse. Since they do not participate in the organized community affairs, hours off the job are spent they way the person chooses without too much interference from neighbors. Leisure is expanded in loafing around the neighborhood, in downtown district, along the river, and at home. Their social life consist of informal visits between neighbors, gossip, petty gambling, visits to the less expensive theaters, going to town, drinking in the home or public taverns, with now and again a fist fight. The family is so loosely organized that members usually go their own way in search of amusement or pleasure. The cliques are severely age- and sex-graded; men associate with men and women with women, except in their ubiquitous play involving pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Organized dinners and parties where guests are invited to the home on a Saturday night are unknown. Festive gatherings take place on Sunday when many branches of the family unite for a brief spell on merrymaking. The low-ranking taverns are filled on Saturday nights with class V’s of all ages who gather there for their big social night. Small children are kept up until after midnight in the hot, smoke-filled, poorly lighted, noisy “poor man’s night club.” Young couples wander in and out; often preliminary passes are made in preparation for a later seduction. Almost every Saturday night the police are called to some low-ranking tavern to break up a fight between half-drunk customers. The police, sheriff, prosecuting attorney, and judge know these families from frequent contact through the years, whereas the ministers and school officials may be only slightly acquainted with them. Between 2010 and 2017, 8 percent of the mothers and 46 percent of the fathers had been convicted once or more in the local courts. Public drinking, disorderly conduct, family neglect, and sex offenses were the charges against the women; they averaged 1.5 convictions each. The men were more or less chronic offenders who were convicted of habitual public drunkenness, 49 percent ; miscellaneous offenses, 30 percent; offenses against property, 12 percent; sex and family neglect, 9 percent. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

They averaged 4.1 convictions each in eight years covered by reliable court records. Their misdeeds are prominently written up in the newspaper. If they do not reach they paper, they are known by some persons in the higher classes who delight in telling about them to their acquaintances. However, it is not neurotic to have conflicts. At one time or another our wishes, our interests, our convictions are bound to collide with those around us. And just as such clashes between ourselves and our environment are a commonplace, so, too, conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life. An animal’s actions are largely determined by instinct. Its mating, its care for its young, its search for food, its defenses against danger are more or less prescribed and beyond individual decision. In contrast, it is the prerogative as well as the burden of human beings to be able to exert choice, to have to make decisions. We may have to decide between desires that lead in opposite directions. We may, for instance, want to be alone but also want to be with a friend; we may want to study medicine but also to study music. Or there may be a conflict between wishes and obligations: we may wish to be with a lover when someone in trouble needs our care. We may be divided between desires to be in accord with others and a conviction that would entail expressing an opinion antagonistic to them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

We may be in conflict, finally, between two sets of values, as occurs when we believe in taking on a hazardous job in wartime but believe also in our duty to our family. The kind, scope, and intensity of such conflicts are largely determined by the civilization in which we live. If the civilization is stable and tradition bound, the variety of choices presenting themselves are limited and the range of possible individual conflicts narrow. Even then they are not lacking. One loyalty may interfere with another; personal desires may stand against obligations to the group. However, if the civilization is in a stage of rapid transition, where highly contradictory values and divergent ways of living exist side by side, the choices the individual has to make are manifold and difficult. One can conform to the expectations of the community or be a dissenting individualist, be gregarious or live as a recluse, worship success or despise it, have faith in strict discipline for children or allow them to grow up without much interference; one can believe in a different moral standard for men and women or hold that same should apply for both, regard relations in pleasures of the flesh as an expression of human intimacy or divorce them from ties of affection; one can foster racial discrimination or take the stand that human values are independent of color of skin or the shape of noses—and so on and so forth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

There is so doubt that choices like these have to be made very often by people living in our civilization, and one would therefore expect conflicts along these lines to be quite common. However, the striking fact is that most people are not aware of them, and consequently do not resolve them by any clear decision. More often than not they drift and let themselves be swayed by accident. They do not know where they stand; they make compromises being aware of doing so; they are involved in contradictions without knowing it. I am referring here to normal persons, meaning neither average nor ideal but merely non-neurotic. There must, then, be preconditions for recognizing contradictory issues and for making decisions on that basis. These preconditions are fourfold. We must be aware of what our wishes are, or even more, of what our feelings are. Do we really like a person or do we only think we like one because we are supposed to? If a parent dies, are we really sad, or do we only go through the motions? Do we really wish to become a lawyer or a doctor or does it merely strike us as a respectable and profitable career? Do we really want our children to be happy and independent or do we only give lip service to the idea? Most of us would find it difficult to answer such simple questions: that is, we do not know what we really feel or want. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Since conflicts often have to do with convictions, beliefs, or moral values, their recognition would presuppose that we have developed our own set of values. Beliefs that are merely taken over and are not a part of us hardly have sufficient strength to lead to conflicts or to serve as a guiding principle in making decisions. When subjected to new influences, such beliefs will easily be abandoned for others. If we simply have adopted values cherished in our environment, conflicts which in our best interest should arise do not arise. If, for instance, a son has never questioned the wisdom of a narrow-minded father, there will be little conflict when the father wants him to enter a profession other than the one he himself prefers. A married man who falls in love with another woman is actually engaged in a conflict; but when he has failed to establish his own convictions about the meaning of marriage he will simply drift along the path of least resistance instead of facing the conflict and making a decision one way or the others. Even if we recognize a conflict as such, we must be willing and able to renounce one of the two contradictory issues. However, the capacity for clear and conscious renunciation is rare, because our feelings and beliefs are middle, and perhaps because in the last analysis most people are not secure and happy enough to renounce anything. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Finally, to make a decision presupposed the willingness and capacity to assume responsibility for it. This would include the risk of making a wrong decision and the willingness to bear the consequences without blaming others for them. It would involve feeling, “This is my choice, my doing,” and presupposed more inner strength and independence than most people apparently have nowadays. To explain the phenomenon of indiscriminate relations with both genders on the basis of a given bisexuality is to my mind a misconstruction. There are in these cases no indications of a genuine leaning toward the same gender. The seemingly homosexual trends disappear as soon as a sound self-assertion has taken the place of anxiety, just as indiscrimination in reference to the opposite gender also disappears. What has been said of bisexual attitudes can also throw some light on the problem of homosexuality. In fact there are many intermediate stages between the described “bisexual” type and a definitely homosexual type. In the history of the latter there are definite factors which account for the fact that one excludes a person of the opposite gender as a sexual partner. Of course, the problem of homosexuality is much too intricate to allow an understanding from one point of view alone. Suffice it to say here that I have not yet seen a homosexual person in whom the factors mentioned in the bisexual group were not also present. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

In the last few years it has been pointed out by several psychoanalytical writers that sexual desires may be reinforced because sexual excitement and satisfaction serve as an outlet for anxiety and for pent-up psychic tensions. This mechanistic explanation may be valid. I believe, however, that there are also psychic processes which lead from anxiety to increased sexual needs, and that it is possible to recognize these processes. This belief is founded both on psychoanalytic observation and on a study of the history of such patients in conjunction with their character traits outside the sexual sphere. Patients of the type may become passionately infatuated with the analyst at the beginning, impetuously demanding some return of love. Or they may maintain a considerate aloofness during analysis, transferring their need for sexual closeness to some person outside who, as evidenced by the fact that one resembles the analyst or by the fact that the two are identified in dreams, is made to serve as a substitute. Or finally, such persons’ need to establish a sexual contact with the analyst may appear exclusively in dreams or in sexual excitement during the interview. The patients are often utterly amazed by these unmistakable signs of sexual desire, because they neither feel attracted by the analyst nor are in any way fond of him or her. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

In fact, sexual attraction emanating from the analysts plays no perceptible role, nor in the sexual temperament of such patients more impetuous or uncontrollable than that of others, nor is their anxiety greater or less than that other patients. What characterizes them is a deep disbelief in any kind of genuine affection. They are thoroughly convinced that the analyst is interested in them only for ulterior motives, if at all, that in one’s secret heart one despises them, and that probably one will do them more harm than good. Because of neurotic hypersensitivity reactions of spite, anger and suspicion occur in every psychoanalysis, but in these patients of particularly strong sexual needs these reactions form a permanent and rigid attitude. They make it seem that there is an invisible but impenetrable wall between analysts and patient. When confronted with a difficult problem of their own their first impulse is to give up, to break off the psychoanalysis. The picture they present is analysis is an exact replica of what they have been doing all their life. The difference is only that before the analysis they were able to escape the knowledge of how thin and intricate their personal relations actually were, the fact that they easily became involved sexually helped to confuse the situation and to lead them to believe that their readiness to establish sexual contacts meant that they were having good human relationships in general. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Caught at so many of us are in the strangling grip of conflicts—however unacknowledged—our inclination is to look with envy and admiration on people whose lives seem to flow along smoothly without being disturbed by any of this turbulence. The admiration may be warranted. These may be the strong ones who have established their own hierarchy of values, or who have acquired a measure of serenity because in the course of years of conflicts and the need for decision have lost their uprooting power. However, the outward appearance may be deceptive. More often, due to apathy, conformity, or opportunism, the people we envy are incapable of truly facing conflict or truly trying to resolve it on the basis of their own convictions, and consequently have merely drifted or been swayed by immediate advantage. To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset. The more we face our own conflicts and seek out our own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength we will gain. Only when we are willing to bear the brunt can we approximate the ideal of being the captain of our ship. A spurious tranquility rooted in inner dullness is anything but enviable. It is bound to make us weak and an easy prey to any kind of influence. When conflicts center about the primary issues of life, it is all the more difficult to face them and resolve them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

However, provided we are sufficiently alive, there is no reason why in principle we should not be able to do so. Education could do much to help us to live with greater awareness of ourselves and to develop our own convictions. A realization of the significance of the factors involved in choice would give us ideals to strive for, and in that a direction for our lives. When a person is neurotic, the difficulties always inherent in recognizing and resolving a conflict are immeasurably increased. Neurosis, it must be said, is always a matter of degree—and when I speak of “a neurotic” I invariable mean “a person to the extent that one is neurotic.” For one awareness of feelings and desires is at a low ebb. Often the only feeling experienced consciously and clearly are reactions of fear and anger to blows dealt to vulnerable spots. And even these may be repressed. Such authentic ideals as do exist are so pervaded by compulsive standards that they are deprived of their power to give direction. Under the sway of these compulsive tendencies the faculty to renounce is rendered impotent, and the capacity to assume responsibility for oneself all but lost. The attitudes I have mentioned are so regularly found together that whenever a patient at the start of a psychoanalysis begins revealing sex desires, fantasies or dreams concerning the analyst I am prepared to find particularly deep disturbances in one’s personal relations. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

It is in accord with all observations on this score that the gender of the analyst is comparatively irrelevant. Patients who have worked successively with a man and a woman analyst may have identically the same curve of reaction toward both. In these cases it may therefore be a grave mistake to take at their face value homosexual wishes expressed in dreams or otherwise. Thus in general, just as “all is not gold that glitters,” so also “all is not sexuality that looks like it.” A great part of what appears as sexuality has in reality very little to do with it, but is an expression of the desire for reassurance. If this is not taken into consideration one is bound to overestimate the role of sexuality. The individual whose sexual needs are enhanced under the unrecognized stress of anxiety is inclined naively to ascribe the intensity of one’s sexual needs to one’s innate temperament, or to the fact that one is free from conventional taboos. In doing so one commits the same error as those who overestimate their need for sleep, imagining that their constitutions require ten hours of sleep or more, while actually their enhanced need for sleep may be determined by a variety of pent-up emotions; sleep may serve them as a means of withdrawing from all conflicts. The same applies to compulsive eating or drinking. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Eating, drinking, sleep, sexuality, all constitute vital needs; their intensity varies not only with the individual’s constitution, but with many other conditions, such as climate, absence or presence of other conditions, such as climate, absence or presence of other satisfactions, absence or presence of external stimulations, degree of strenuous work, existing physical conditions. However, also all of the needs may be increased by unconscious factors. The connection between sexuality and the need for affection throws light on the problem of sexual abstinence. How well sexual abstinence can be endured varies with the culture and the individual. In the individual it may depend on several psychic and physical factors. It is easy to understand, however, that an individual who needs sexuality as an outlet for the sake of allaying anxiety will be particularly incapable of enduring any abstinence, even of short duration. These considerations lead to certain reflections on the role that sexuality plays in our culture. We tend to look with a certain pride and satisfaction on our liberal attitude toward sexuality. Certainly there has been a change for the better since the Victorian age. We have greater freedom in sexual relations and a greater capacity for satisfaction. The latter point is particularly true for women; frigidity is no longer considered a normal condition in women, but is generally recognized as a deficiency. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

In spite of the change, however, the improvement is not quite so far-reaching as we might think, because a great deal of sexual activity today is more an outlet for psychic tensions than a genuine sexual drive, and is therefore to be regarded more as a sedative than as genuine sexual enjoyment or happiness. The cultural situation is reflected also in psychoanalytical concepts. It is one of the great achievements of Dr. Freud that he contributed so much to giving sexuality its due importance. In detail, however, many phenomena are accepted as sexual which are really the expression of complex neurotic need for affection. For example, sexual desires concerning the analyst are usually interpreted as repetitions of sexual fixation on father or mother, but often they are not genuine sexual wishes at all, but a reaching out for some reassuring contact to allay anxiety. Therefore, some doctors may have overplayed the Oedipus complex. The patient, to be sure, often relates associates or dreams—expressing for affection or shelter. Even if the desires concerning the analyst were understood as a direct repetition of similar desires toward the father or mother, this would be no proof that the infantile tie to the parents was itself a genuine sexual tie. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

There is plenty of evidence that adult neuroses all the features of the Oedipus complex, may have existed in childhood, but this is less frequently the case than Dr. Freud assumes. However, the Oedipus complex is brought about by the child clinging to one parent for the sake of reassurance. Yet, it ignores the female counterpart. We call women who may be attracted to their father’s girls with “daddy issues.” But what is the term for girls who seem to have an attraction to their mothers and express excessive demands for unconditional love, jealous, possessiveness, hatred because of rejection, which are characteristic of the neurotic need for affection. This is also a neurotic formation. Do not fall into the trap of expressing disgust with these people, or exhibiting spite or hatred. Allow them to have their space to act out. Your life will become more blessed, and your blessings will be grounded. The increasing intensity of your spiritual experience will make the experiences more real increasing faith in self while your physical reality will see more malleable through your soul work. This is a major part of this infernal science of becoming. It helps to enforce the process of unifying the dense physical self with the potential unlimited possibility. Instead of being fearful you should see your visions for prosperity as opportunities to destroy imposed fate through prayer. Remembering this at all times…the life experience is nothing but a series of opportunities to exercise power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Having faith in God keeps the powerful forces of protection active. This is a much needed insurance policy when walking a path such as this. It will help to absorb and consume any malign energies that may seek your destruction as your personal power develops through alchemical transmutation. The oppositional forces then become fuel for ascent. This will create indirect doorways for others to awaken from spiritual sedation. Keep in mind that the realms of hell are sentient and subjective in that they are based on the personal fears of each individual. What really differs is the fact that by applying these principles our consciousness begins to assimilate obvious yet severely neglected fundamental spiritual truths. We need to come to understand that when creating changes within self for the sake of empowerment our external reality also begins to shift reflecting that internal empowerment. Wen working toward creating external shifts within our external reality our spirit is also empowered by simply exercising our own divine power. There is no difference in the end. Either way the end result is empowerment through an increase in efficiency of the life experience through the manifestation of desired change. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Wealth and poverty are of the same energy. The only difference is how the specific energy is being applied. Understand that whenever a light is shined a shadow is cast. To perceive unlimited possibility, you must become the eye between the reflector and reflected. Therefore, it is not just about removing the illusion of external divinity but rather usurping and taking back that power as your own birthright. In essence this ritual is designed to destroy the concept of external divinity altogether so that one becomes the center of creation and destruction within their own subjectivity reality. Remember that self-discipline is an avenue which makes your desire and intent law! If it is your desire to do something and you do not do it, then you weaken the potency of your will and intent. This will further ensnare you with limitation and program yourself for failure. Wait until you are ready to commit. This is a working of devoting your intent toward peering deep within self and pulling divine power into these deepest depths. Throughout this time frame you must act accordingly within the World. Strive to become something greater by setting goals and achieve. This rite by itself, as simple as it is, may make you or break you. “May the Lord our God, who has redeemed us and made us free, keep you continually in his presence; yea, and may he favor this people, even that ye may have success,” reports Alma 58.41. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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It is Well to Seek Guidance—The Error and Exaggeration Creep in When One Becomes too Concentrated on a Single Source of Guidance!

October 11, 2019 12:03 am

More full of visions than a high romance? Light hoverer around our happy pillows! It was about nine a.m. when I called Stirling, and, unable to contain myself, spilled out all of the story of recent events, as I invited him to dinner to discuss them in greater detail. Perhaps I wanted him to know this was a loaded invitation. I thought it only fair. He surprised me. He insisted that we meet for lunch. He asked if it would not be too inconvenient if we gathered at twelve noon. All population elements are represented in the community, but three families out of five (58 percent) trace their ancestry to “American stock” that came to Graystone Hills before the Civil War. In spite of popular belief, “the Irish element” has contributed less than 9 percent to the ranks of class V. The Poles are found here twice as frequently, and the Germans and Norwegians only one-third as frequently as we may expect if change factors alone are operating. The concentration of “American stock” is overlooked by people in Graystone Hills who commonly use a European ancestral background as a symbolic label. This is understandable in the case of the Poles; they were imported as strikebreakers, and they have not outlived this experience of their ethnic background. Authority and individuality need not contend with one another in a being’s mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Many of these “American” families have lived in Graystone Hills as long as its “leading families”; however, length of residence is their only similarity to leading families, for through the generations they have achieved notorious histories. Unfortunately, the unsavory reputation of an ancestor is remembered and often used as an explanation for present delinquency. It is interesting to note that the doctrine of “blood” which explains the rise to eminence of class I is used on the same way to justify the derogation of class V. And, significantly, present behavior of class V gives the people who hold such an explanation is unwarranted, but people in Graystone Hills are not sociologists! Often such remarks as the following are made about these families or some member of them, “Blood will out”; “You cannot expect anything else from such people”; “His great-grandfather was hanged for killing a neighbor in cold blood!” Class V families are excluded from the two leading residential areas. They are found in the others, with large concentrations north of the tracks and below the canal. Below the canal and the Mill Addition are populated mainly by “Americans.” Down by the Mill is “Irish Heaven,” whereas the section north of the tracks is divided into the Norwegian and Poles areas. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

A low, flat, swamp-like sub-area within this section, Bluffs, is almost exclusively Polish. The higher ground north of the tracks, populated mainly by Norwegians with a slight intermingling of Irish and Germans, is known as “Ixnay.” Below the canal is referred to by many names, all symbolic of its undesirability: down by the garbage dump; where the river rats live; behind the tannery; the bush apes’ home; squatters’ paradise; where you will find the God-damned yellow hammers; the tannery flats; and along the tow-path. The dilapidated, box-like homes contain crude pieces of badly abused furniture, usually acquired secondhand. A combination wood and coal stove, or kerosene burner, is used both for cooking and heating. An unpainted table and a few chairs held together with baling wire, together with an ancient sideboard—with shelves above to hold the assorted dishes, and drawers below for pots, pans, and groceries—furnish the combined kitchen and dining room. There may be some well-worn linoleum or strips of roofing on the floor. The “front room” generally serves a dual purpose, living room by say and bedroom by night. Here too the floor is often covered with linoleum or roofing strips, seldom with a woven rug. Two or three overly used chairs in various stages of disrepair share the room with a sagging sofa that leads a double life as he routine of day alternates with that of night. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

If an additional bed is needed, an iron one may stand in a corner or along one wall. A simple mirror that shows signs of age, perhaps abuse, shares the wall with a few cheap prints of pictures cut from magazines that show how undressed a woman may be without being nude. Now and again a colored print of a saint and a motion picture star will be pasted or nailed beside a siren. An improvised wardrobe made by driving a row of nails in the wall generally occupies one corner. A table, a radio, and some means of lighting the room complete its furnishings. Old iron beds that sag in the middle, made with blankets, and comforts in the absence of sheets, a chest of drawers, a chair or two, and a mirror that looks out on the stringy curtains and the bare floor complete the furnishings of tiny bedrooms. Musical instruments, magazines, and newspapers other than The Bugle seldom find their way into these homes. Less than 1 percent have telephones. Privacy in the homes is almost non-existent; parents, children, “in-laws” and their children, and parts of broken family may live in two or three rooms. There is little differentiation in the use of rooms—kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom functions may be combined from necessity into a single use area. Bath and toilet facilities are found in approximately one home in seven. City water is piped near or into 77 percent of the homes within the city limits, except those below the canal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Water for these homes is either carried from the town pump, also located in this area, or from the river. Outside the town, wells, springs, and creeks are used for a water supply. Some 4 percent of the homes were equipped with furnace heat; the rest were heated with wood- or coal-burning stoves. The family residence is rented in four cases out of five (81 percent). The few that are owned have either been inherited or built along the canal and in the tannery flats by their present owners. A few Poles have bought homes in Rolling Hills from the English and Scotch who formerly inhabited this area. Although it is popularly believed that these people buy cars rather than homes, only 57 percent own cars, the great majority (83 percent) being more than 7 years old. The family pattern is unique. The husband-wife relationship is more or les an unstable one, even though the marriage is sanctioned either by law or understandings between the partners. Disagreements leading to quarrels and vicious fights, followed by desertion by either the man or the woman, possibly divorce, are not unusual. The evidence indicates that few compulsive factors, such as neighborhood solidarity, religious teachings, or ethical considerations, operate to maintain a stable material relationship. On the contrary, the class culture has established a family pattern were serial monogamy is the rule. Legal marriages are restricted within narrow limits to class equals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, exploitative liaisons of pleasures of the flesh between males from the higher classes frequently occur wit teenage girls, but they are illegal and rarely result in marriage. Marriage occurs in the middle teens for the girls and late teens or early twenties for the boys. Doctors, nurses, and public officials who know these families best estimate that from one-fifth to one-fourth of all births are illegitimate. Irrespective of the degree of error in this estimate, 78 percent of the mothers gave birth to their first child before they were 20 years of age. Another trait that marks the family complex is the large number of children. The mean is 5.6 per mother, the range, 1 to 13. There is little prenatal or postnatal care of either mother or child. The child is generally delivered at home, usually by a local doctor, the county nurse, or a midwife, but in the late 1990’s some expectant mothers entered the local hospital. Hospital deliveries, however, are a recent innovation and not widely diffused. Death, desertion, separation, or divorce has broken more than half the families (56 percent). The burden of child care, as well as support, falls on the mother more often than on the father when the family is broken. The mother-child relation is the strongest and most enduring family tie. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Formal education experience is limited in large part to the elementary school. Two parents out of three (67 percent) quit school before the eighth grade was reached; the third completed it. Seven fathers and six mothers out of 230 have completed a year or more of high school; only one father and four mothers have graduated. None has attended any type of school after leaving the public school system. Psychologically speaking, there are an infinite number of situations in which people live at subhuman levels, and they find that some violence is life-giving. The overly shy person; the suspicious one who cannot let oneself make relationships; the one unable to love deeply or to give to another; the coward who insulates oneself from experiences that would enrich one—the list becomes endless. These are all individuals in whom some admixtures of violence may help to correct a deficiency. However, it requires a burst of effort that goes beyond rationality, a risking of one’s self, a committing of all, to give the person a sense of fulfillment. When a woman who has been docile all her life finally loses her temper and breaks out in a tirade, we find ourselves smiling and silently cheering; at least she is no longer apathetic. A friend of mine told me recently that his two sons had come home from college and had stepped into a situation where there was a lot of tension because of the illness of two relatives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

After a coupe of days one of the sons had torn up his iPhone 11 Pro Max in rage, and the other son had crashed his Bentley Flying Spur V8 S into a wall. My friend remarked: “It was a good violence.” A bust of anger seems to clear up the psychological relationship, making for greater honesty. Hence most people feel better after having gotten angry. However, I think he was rationalizing because the items were insured and no one physically got hurt. We have sad that violence united the self on a level below the human one. Now it so happens that many people (in fact most people) do live this way—that is without consciousness in any degree and without personal dignity. Many people spend their lives as only partially formed human beings, and millions living on a substandard in affluent countries. For these people, violence may raise the level of psychological and spiritual existence. Just as it unites the self that has attained consciousness on a level below the human one, it may raise undeveloped persons to a human level. This may take the form of political rebellions, which cause groups to break out of their apathy and succeed in wrenching social reforms from the dominant party. There are few, if any, instances where a dominant group has given up its power willingly and freely; power has a way of burrowing in to stay. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

You do not have to be a semibeast to be accepted. One must live their life with dignity, and develop their potential consciousness, and future freedom. There are people who have suffered centuries of exploitation and have endured the apathy this causes; and to become psychologically and spiritually alive, some forgiveness is necessary. Do not allow colonial powers to take an active role in setting natives against each other because, as a result, they are only consolidating their own interests. Violence is not the only way to throw off the yoke of the colonial powers, education is the most important factor, and education will help to elevate the community and produce unity in the family. Although underdeveloped nations, after being exploited for so long, have turned to violence, this is not the path to integrity, self-esteem, nor awareness of their own powers. The most important thing is for us to have human dignity, the birth and growth of consciousness, integrity of relationships. There have been people who have resisted exploitation by going to school during the day and driving taxis at night. The dignity of humanity will spring from their brains and incorporate their total organism and their collective unconscious, which is an expression of their organism. We are climbing toward a new order, toward new forms, and these are part of the new nationality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The old order and old forms will be destroyed in the process, but no sane person would argue that the forms of colonial society, which exploit people are part of humanity. Justice is a perspective that has been conceived as realistic. We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their brains, fill them will ideas, change them and make them into human beings. The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women. We ought first to give back their dignity to all people. We should not be sticking needles in dolls or pounding on pillows, but should wipe out the rea evils of social and economic oppression. This concept has helped to clarify many neurotic problems which hitherto were beyond the reach of our understanding and hence of our therapy. It also puts two of the neurotic trends which had preciously resisted integration into their proper setting. The need for perfection now appears as an endeavor to measure up to this idealized image; the craving for admiration can be seen as the patient’s need to have outside affirmation that one really is one’s idealized image. And the farther the image is removed from reality the more insatiable this latter would logically be. Of all the attempts at solution the idealized image is probably the most important by reason of its far-reaching effect on the whole personality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, in turn it generates a new inner rift, and hence calls for further patchwork. The next attempt at a solution seeks primarily to do away with this rift, though it helps as well to spirit away all other conflicts. Through what I call externalization, inner processes are experience as going on outside the self. If the idealized image means taking a step away from the actual self, externalization represents a still more radical divorce. It again creates new conflicts, or rather greatly augments the original conflict—that between the self and the outside World. I have called these attempts a solution, partly because they seem to operate regularly in all neuroses—though in varying degree—and partly because they bring about incisive changes in the personality. However, they are by no means the only ones. Others of less general significance include such strategies as arbitrary rightness, whose main function is to quell all inner doubts; rigid self-control, which holds together a torn individual by sheer will power; and cynicism, which, in disparaging all values, eliminates conflicts in regard to ideals. Sometimes being rich is not the answer to your problems, it can actually be a curse. Rich people have all their needs and wants met and it gives them nothing to strive for. This can leave them empty inside, to the point they do not realize how beautiful or talented they are. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

For a wealthy person, if he or she is empty inside a new dress or suit looks like just another pile of rags. They have to develop their spirituality and sometimes it is more difficult for them to do because they have more responsibilities to handle. Being less affluent, you get more joy for just putting food on the table and you see how thankful your kids are, who may have been starving all week. Buying new tires for your car might be a blessing because you know now you can get back and forth to work without hydroplaning with your kids in the back seat. Also, being less affluent allows you to dream more and it may motivate you to think about that house you are trying to purchase so you and your kids can live in a lace curtain suburb where you will no longer be preyed on. Meanwhile the consequences of all these unresolved conflicts have gradually become clearer to me. I see the manifold fears that are generated, the waste of energy, the inevitable impairment of moral integrity, the deep hopelessness that has resulted for the affluent and less affluent from feeling inextricably entangled. It was only after I had grasped the significance of neurotic hopelessness that the meaning of sadistic tends finally came into view. These, I now understand, represent an attempt at restitution through the vicarious living, entered upon by a person who despairs of ever being oneself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

And the all-consuming passion which can so often be observed in sadistic pursuits grew out of such a person’s insatiable need for vindictive triumph. It becomes clear to me then that the need for destructive exploitation is in fact no separate neurotic trend but only a never-failing expression of that more comprehensive whole which for the lack of a better term we call sadism. Thus a theory of neurosis evolves, whose dynamic center is basic conflict between the attitudes of moving toward, moving again, and moving away from people. Because of one’s fear of being split apart on the one hand and the necessity to function as a unity on the other, the neurotic makes desperate attempts at solution. While one can succeed this way in creating a kind of artificial equilibrium, new conflicts are constantly generated and further remedies are continually required to blot them out. Every step in this struggle for unity makes the neurotic more hostile, more helpless, more fearful, more alienated from oneself and others, with the result that the conflicts become more acute and their real resolution less and less attainable. One finally becomes hopeless and may try to find a kind of restitution in sadistic pursuits, which in turn have the effect of increasing one’s hopelessness and creating new conflict. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

This, then, is a fairly dismal picture of neurotic development and its resulting character structure. Why do I nonetheless call my theory a constructive one? In the first place it does away with the unrealistic optimism that maintains we can cure neuroses by absurdly simple means. However, in involves no equally unrealistic pessimism. I call it constructive because it allows us for the first time to tackle and resolve neurotic hopelessness. I call it constructive most of all because in spite of its recognition of the severity of neurotic entanglements, it permits not only a tempering of the underlying conflicts but their actual resolution, and so enables us to work toward a real integration of personality. Neurotic conflicts cannot be resolved by rational decision. The neurotic’s attempts at solution ae not only futile but harmful. However, these conflicts can be resolved by changing the conditions within the personality that brought them into being. Every piece of analytical work well done changes these conditions in that it makes a person less helpless, less fearful, less hostile, and less alienated from oneself and others. Dr. Freud’s pessimism as regards neuroses and their treatment arouse from the depths of his disbelief in human goodness and human growth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Being, Dr. Freud postulated, are doomed to suffer or to destroy. The instincts which drive one can only be controlled or at best sublimated. My own belief is that beings have the capacity as well as the desire to develop one’s potentialities and become a decent being, and that these deteriorate if one’s relationship to others and hence oneself is, and continues to be, disturbed. I believe that a being can change and g on changing as long as one lives. And this belief has grown with deeper understanding. We cannot allow the media or any other puppet show to direct an attack on our very freedom of thought, forcing all minds to think towards the same objective of enslavement which below the surface drives the collective race of humankind into a state of oppression. After all, who is anyone to tell us what to think? Who is anyone to say what thoughts are good? Thoughts stem from our ability to seek knowledge and live according to that knowledge as wise men and women and children and other living beings. They are expressions of our individual spirit of consciousness which has been torn to pieces. When we choose to develop our thought process by actually thinking instead of accumulating supposed facts we are empowered to create lives which are fulfilled according to how we want to shape them in correlation with our own true divine will and level of self-discipline. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Maybe making money outside of the system of slave labor is your goal. If that is the case, then focus on your talents and contemplate ways of making cash by using those talents to produce prosperity. Your perception of the enslaved will become more apparent and you will essentially stop being able to understand their contentment with such mundane aspirations. Do not fall into the trap of expressing disgust with these people, or exhibiting spite or hatred. They serve as important examples of what not to be. Remember that they are not the target of your spite and hatred. It is the systematic construct of imposed limitation we despise. Not the people who are enslaved by the system. The veil between Worlds will begin to tear from top to bottom and your spiritual and corporal experiences will begin to merge. Your life will become more blessed, and your blessings more grounded. The increasing intensity of your spiritual experiences will make the experiences more malleable through our soul work. This is a major part of this infernal science of becoming. It helps to enforce the process of unifying the dense physical self with the potential of unlimited possibility. Instead of being fearful you should see these visions as opportunities to destroy imposed fate through spirituality. Remember this at all times…the life experience is nothing but a series of opportunities to exercise power. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Absorb and consume any malign energies that may see your destruction as your personal power develops through alchemical transmutation. The oppositional forces then become fuel for ascent. A miracle will awake and when it does, it will mercilessly encroach upon all enemies which seek to interrupt your ascent with malicious intent. These blessings are extensions of self and the collective being conscious of humankind. These numbers of these blessings is infinite and when they are stirred, legions upon legions will begin to attack the enemy. Destruction of tyrants and liberation of the spirit is our goal. Keep this in mind, as then through application of this work our children may live in a better World of love and peace beyond the slavery of those so called gods who seek and worship adoration as if they were entities of greater power. We are isolated emanations of the void and so we are the Gods of Gods. We created them to serve us. Respect this current for what it is. It is a weapon meant to destroy the God of slaves from the inside out as well as the slave drivers who exalt him and/or her. It is meant to destroy the entire system and usher in something else. “They should come forth even unto the land of promise, which was choice above all other lands, which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people,” reports Ether 2.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Closer to the Hearts Desire–Be Still My Soul, Be Still; the Arms You Bear are Strong!

October 10, 2019 12:50 am

They brought me into the house. It was bright and magnificent. They showed me the sunny double parlor with its craved archway and shining floors and they took me through the handsome dining room with its murals of the Winchester Mansion. People in Graystone Hills, in general, are inconsistent in the way they talk and act with reference to the idea of classes. If they are asked bluntly, “Do you believe there are ‘classes’ in the community?” they are very likely to say, “No.” Yet, they will tell you the Hiltons are “a leading family here,” or the “Hearsts are like the Hiltons, and Rothschild, and Winchesters. These families are different from the rest of us; they are exclusive. I guess you would call them our aristocracy.” During the course of the conversation, the same speaker will say that there are several different “types of families” in the community and, justifying one’s judgment by describing the “way they live,” place them in different categories. The democratic tradition that there are no classes in American society is the reason for this type of behavior. Therefore, the people in Graystone Hills deny the existence of class directly but act as if classes exist. However, many beings in Graystone Hills openly say that there are three classes in the community—“upper,” “middle,” and “less affluent”—but when they are requested to name persons in, let us say the “less affluent class” they generally divide the class into the “good” lower class people and the “worthless, ne’er-do-wells.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The same kind of break appears in the “middle class.” Separation of the “middle class” into “upper middle” and “lower middle” is quite conventional. Even though people in Graystone Hills are inconsistent in their designations of a particular class, the systematic analysis of selected cultural traits associated with each of the five classes, based upon data collected from the 535 families of the adolescents, supplemented by interviews and observations, reveal that the possession of a constellation of differentially evaluated social symbols—functional, pecuniary, religious, educational, reputational, power, lineage, proper associates, memberships in associations—are relied up by Graystone Hills to “hang people on the peg they belong on,” to determine “their place in the community” or “their standing in life.” Class V occupies the lowest-ranking stations in the prestige structure. It is looked upon as the scum of the city by the higher classes. It is believed generally that nothing beyond charity can be done for these people, and only a minimum of that is justified since they show little or no inclination to help themselves. It is the opinion of the upper classes that: “They have no respect for themselves. They enjoy their shacks and huts along the river or across the tracks and love their dirty, smoky, low-class dives and taverns. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

“Whole families—children, in-laws, mistresses, and all—live in one shack. This is the crime class that produces the delinquency and sexual promiscuity that fills the paper. Their interests lie in pleasures of the flesh and its perversion. The girls are always with child; the families are huge; incestual relations occur frequently. They are not inspired by education, and only a few are able to make any attainments along this line. They are loud in their speech, vulgar in their actions, sloppy in their dress, and indifferent toward their plight. Their vocabulary develops as profanity is learned. If they work, the work at very menial jobs. Their life experiences are purely physical, and even these are on a low plane. They have no interests in health and medical care. Then men are too lazy to work or do odd jobs around town. They support the Democratic party because of the relief obtained during the depression. This groups lives for a Saturday of drinking or fighting. They are of low character and breed and have a criminal record for a pedigree.” Class V persons, passive and fatalistic, realize that they are “on the bottom” and believe that they can do nothing to improve their position. They desire money, possessions, education, and favorable prestige, but they do not know how these are achieved. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

When a class V persons attempts to improve one’s position, one is discriminated against by the higher classes, and by many members of one’s own class who think one is trying to “put on airs.” One woman with considerable insight into her class position summarized it thus: “Survival for us depends on staying on good terms with the rich people and the law. Whenever I think about myself and the kids, I am reminded what my father used to say, ‘We are the ones who are told what to do, when and how’ around here. This town takes us for granted. Most people think the people down here [the tannery flats] are too ignorant to do anything and do not care; I guess they are right.” To generalize a little more, class V persons give the impression of being resigned to a life of frustration and defeat in a community that despises them for their disregard of morals, lack of “success” goals, and dire poverty. Family support comes from many sources. The father is the chief breadwinner in three families out of five, but his earnings are meager. Ninety-two percent are unskilled and semi-skilled laborers or machine operators. Not one is a farm owner, and only 8 are farm tenants; 2 are notions salesmen; and 8 operate very small businesses, such as hauling coal from local mines, ash and trash hauling, repair and sales of old cars. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Fifty-five percent of the mothers in class V “work out” part time or full time as waitresses, dishwashers, cooks, washwomen, janitresses, cleaning women, and unskilled domestic workers. Many younger women and girls work on the production line of a local manufacturer who is reputed to give them preference in his shops because they can be hired for lower wages than class IV workers. Income from wages provides them with enough money to obtain the most meager necessities of life; however, in many cases it is inadequate even for his, and they rely upon private charity and public relief. Annual family income ranges from $15,365 to high of $24,934. The modal income fell in the $18,572 to $18,958 bracket. (Whereas the median income in Rocklin, California is $84,121 and the median income in Oak Park, California is $121,721). Income varies from year to year, depending upon your work conditions and wages. Between 2017 and 2019, the private earnings of 53 percent of these families were supplemented by township relief during at least one-fourth of each year. This figure does not take into consideration federal subsidies, such as Works Progress Administration (WPA) and National Youth Administration (NYA), which prevailed in that period; neither does it include private charity in the form of “outfitting the children” with clothes. Gifts of partially worn-out clothing, linens, bedding, old furniture, dishes, and food are a regular part of the private relief and indirect wage system supported by the two highest classes and to some extent by class III. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

These gifts are given informally to persons who preform domestic service for donors. Begging by class V’s is frowned upon strongly; consequently, needy families do not solicit things in an overt manner, but any class V persons knows how to make his or her wants known to an employer in a humble, discreet manner that generally brings the desired results. Semipublic charity is dispensed through sewing circles, guilds, and clubs that make clothing for infants. The ever-popular rummage sale, one of which is held almost every Saturday by some “middle-class” organization, may be viewed as another form of charity to the lower classes. Many class V women regularly buy their family’s best clothes from these sales. As one class II woman said, “This year, Mrs. Gordon Sweitzer [class I] will have a striking dress, next year you will see it on Mrs. Luke Jenkins [class IV] in the Baptist choir, and three years from now Pearl Soper [class V] will be trying to catch some loafer’s eye with it.” Bank credit is non-existent, and even the small-loan broker has learned through experience to be careful with class V: “Before I loan one of them a cent, I investigate carefully and make sure they own what they put up for security. There is not a person in that class who has not been in here one time of another for a loan. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

“If they have a job and can give me good evidence they can pay back a loan, I will give them from $100 to $250 at first. If they pay it back, just as they agree to, I will let them have a little more next time. Eighty percent of the loans I have written off were made to the class represented by the names you have there. [A group of class V’s we were checking for loans.] Exactly one-half of the class V families studied have procured small personal loans, none over $500; this is the limit the broker will loan to persons he or she does not believe to be “good risks.” Repeated loans to the class V’s are discouraged; the mean is eight loans per family for those who manage to obtain them. On the other hand, the broker encourages class IV’s to borrow time after time, since one considers them “good risks.” The uncertain nature of their employment results in long periods of idleness, you often see them sitting on the front porch or on a bench as if they are waiting for a ride or a bus that never comes; also illness, real or imagined, may result in a voluntary layoff for a few days that, to persons in the higher classes, appears to be laziness. Whatever conditioning factors, these people are far more irregular in their employment than the class IV’s. They will leave a job casually, often without notice, and for flimsy reasons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Even then the class V’s are placed in the simplest menial jobs. The work history of a father or mother is generally known to employers, and one acts in the light of it when a son or daughter of one of these families asks one for employment. Therefore, prepare your journey and its integration with your soul. Know that the only comfort you will find is that which you have the strength to create and perceive yourself. This work will pour outward from within. Take record of the journey and examine it closely for it is the mirror reflecting the knowledge of your true self, along with all of its power and glory. It is very easy to cause self-destruction along the journey for there are many noses which seek to hang you. Even if you are in a place of eternal darkness, understand that you have a light within which cannot be dimmed. A light which is unlike any light perceived by those of lower consciousness. This light is the power of your own spirit, developed by your own intellect, spoken words, and chosen deeds within the realm of limitation. What we see as finite never is. Nothing is finite for the same exact reason nothing is infinite. Infinite existence would mean stasis and lack of consciousness, never moving forward in thought or maturity and never growing to expand in influence and in the responsibility of action. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The only difference between us and those of the more mundane nature is that we choose to consciously guide the process and flux of the chaos of darkness eternal. At this point we see the inadequacy of the concept commonly used in psychoanalytic circles to explain creativity—regression in the service of the ego. In my own endeavors to understand creative people in psychoanalysis and to understand the creative act in general, I find this theory unsatisfactory. This is not only because of its negative character, but chiefly because it proposes a partial solution that diverts us from the center of the creative act and therefore away from any full understanding of creativity. In supporting the theory of regression in the service of ego, creativity often seems to be a regressive phenomenon, and does bring out archaic, infantile, unconscious psychic contents in the artist. The rest—or regression—only serves to release the person from his or her intense efforts and the accompanying inhibitions, so that the creative impulse can have free rein to express itself. When the archaic elements in a poem or a picture or a film have genuine power to move others, and when they have a universality of meaning—that is, when they are genuine symbols—it is because some encounter is occurring on a more basic comprehensive level. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Eventually the Lord of Darkness will perish because this is the will of the Lord of Darkness. They are as weapons to be put away after the turmoil of war. When the greater work is complete and humanity, they will perish and he like human vessels will be liberated, and humanity will then be able to come to terms with their own power by taking responsibility for the nature of their existence. Civil disobedience does not serve our potential to thrive. Therefore, you will find yourself viewing news reports and the lies being told to you by the media, but instead of consuming it without question, you will directly perceive the agenda that hides behind them. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the World. What tremendous power this is. It is a new revelation, with beauty and how we will learn to resolve this terrible situation in which we modern human beings find ourselves. The reason some people have such power is that they come from a place of intensity of consciousness that includes archaic elements because they are part of them, as they are of every person, and will emerge in any intensely ware moment. However, the symbol has its power precisely from the fact that it is an encounter that also includes the most dedicated and passionate intellectual effort. It is important for us to be receptive, but by no stretch of the imagination passive. We cannot wait until the cry gathers of itself in one’s own throat. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Obviously, creative insights of all sorts come to us in moments of relaxation. They come not haphazardly, however, but come only in those areas in which we are intensively committed and on which we concentrate in our waking, conscious experience. It may be, as we have said, that the insights can break through only in moments of relaxation; but to say this is to describe how they come rather than to explain their genesis. Choose the moments in which you are capable of your highest, most intense consciousness. Bless be the Lord God of our father, which hath put such a thing as this in the king’s heart, to beautify the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem. What must be understood here is that the principle of the dual nature of good and evil cease to exist altogether when the forces are applied in their proper context. All possible actions serve a great purpose under the right circumstances and within the proper context and so there are no absolutes such as good and evil. The nature of symbols and myths do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads, unconscious longings, and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. However, they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

In other words it is the occult. It is human power and potential that is the crux of that which is hidden. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative. It is progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence. Most will say that language was designed for the sole purpose of expressing the religious doctrine. The power of sound is what created the Universe according to the basis of most religions, and the priests knew the secrets of this power—power that syncs accumulated vibrational intentions of good speech. Language was used to worship energy accumulated (which is why people make “high energy” music like), controlled, and manipulated to shift the vibrational frequency of the environment. Languages are simply an ancient method of brain entertainment. This might seem outright foolish, however, this is a stone age application of the concepts used within the science of binaural beats and isochoric tones that are used today. We know that by the manipulation of sound frequencies, through measuring brainwaves our state of mind, including how receptive we are to ideas. Ideas can be planted directly into the mind as displayed through the craft of science of hypnotism which also depends upon the manipulation of brainswaves and this is why sirens like Aaliyah, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Emma Hewitt and Beyonce are so popular, their soft and seductive voices can put the audience in a state of trance. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Humankind is an emanation of raw, unadulterated and primal divine power that has been reduced to impotence because we are programmed to believe we must search for this power outside of self. This makes the power impotent because it is analogous to taking the fuel out of a care before starting the engine. We are programmed to believe in, and therefore sustain and fuel the limitation of our power to evolve and become something great. We are sovereign entities with unimaginable power and potential who have been enslaved by spiritual shackles. Seemingly casual words are vibrational emanations of our own dormant divine power. They vibrate according to our own individual level of personal will. Today our words lack power because they are used so frivolously without purpose or intent other than to take part in rather random conversations. It is not that conversation is bad. In fact, effectively relating to others is an important part of our life experience if the goal is to reunite with our eternal soul. This heightened consciousness, which we have identified as a characteristic of the encounter, the state in which the dichotomy between subjective experience and objective reality is overcome and symbols which reveal new meaning are born, is historically termed ecstasy. Like passion, ecstasy is a quality of emotion (or, more accurately, a quality of relationship one side of which is emotional) rather than a quantity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Ecstasy is a temporary transcending of the subject-object dichotomy. It is interesting that is psychology we dodge that problem, Maslow’s work on the peak experience being a notable exception. Or, when we do speak of ecstasy we are implicitly pejorative or assume that it is neurotic. The experience of the encounter also brings with it anxiety. I need not remind you of the fear and trembling of artists and creative people in their moments of creative encounter. If not approached in the correct way, prayers, hymns, and devotions will create a very spiritually destructive atmosphere, and chance one’s vibration in a very destructive way if the chaos is not harnessed according to will with proper understanding of the principle of evil speech. Do not hide the agenda to simple mask the intent and power to enslave humankind behind the guise of an imposed definition of what is to be considered good by the herd. The subconscious mind can cause chaos within one’s reality by inverting these concepts due to predispositions and symbolic mental associations. I am impressed by Frank Barron’s studies of creative persons in art and science, for he shows them directly confronting their anxiety. Barron designated his “creative persons” as those who were recognized by their peers as having made distinguished contributions to their field. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Frank Barron showed them as well as a control group of “normal” people a series of Rorschachlike cards, some of which had orderly, systematic designs on them and others disorderly, unsymmetrical, and chaotic designs. The “normal” people selected the orderly, symmetrical cards as the designs they liked the most—they liked their Universe to be “in shape.” However, the creative persons selected the chaotic, disorderly cards—they found these more challenging and interesting. They could be like God in the Book of Genesis, creating order out of chaos. They chose the “broken” Universe; they got joy out of encountering it and forming it into order. They could accept the anxiety and use it in molding their disorderly Universe “closer to the heart’s desire.” According to the theory proposed here, anxiety is understandably a concomitant of the shaking of the self-World relationship that occurs in the encounter. Our sense of identity is threatened; the World is not as we experienced it before, and since self and World are always correlated, we no longer are what we were before. The anxiety we feel is temporary rootlessness, disorientation; it is the anxiety of nothingness. When these sonic spells are inverted you must keep in mind that it does not have to usher in sickness or anything of that sort, though it can be used that way to wield powers of baneful intent toward enemies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Instead, understand that it is rather your right as a human being to seek out and develop good healthy through your actions and choices within the World. This is simple cause and effect which is at the root of the Universe. The obtainment of this logic then leads to empowerment to manifest change within your reality. Creative people, as I seem them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the terms used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean. I am impelled by chaos to seek order, to struggle with it until I can find a deeper, underlying form. I am then struggling wit the meaninglessness and silence of the World until I can force it to mean, until I can make the silence answer and the non-being be. I can these use this peace for its authentic purpose—namely a deep relaxation of mind and body. Take your time with it, put forth effort to master it. You will find your own individual rhythm and hook into deep currents of power running through the deepest depths of self. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Channel your mental faculties to recite or memorize the words of power—such as love, joy, friendship, success, accomplish, blessing, advanced, balanced, beneficial, developed efficient, enhanced, innovated, excelled, promoted, refined, recovered, sustained, skilled, secured, saved, taught, trained. valued, validated, and so forth. It will eventually produce great power in the atmosphere of the temple area. These harmonic vibrations will break up the supposed natural order and so you must focus your intent to rebuild the reality you wish. Once your field of energy has been erased you may impose beauty upon the slate. The average human has an estimated 70,000 thoughts per day. Do you know how many of those thoughts are swayed by external forces? What if you were in control of each one of those thoughts? What would your reality be like at that point? To seek control of those thoughts is the premise and purpose of enlightenment. Learn to observe, question, and deconstruct your reality to come to your own personal conclusions. In the way you will start to engage higher spiritual consciousness. “Yea, we have reason to praise him forever, for his is the Most High God, and has loosed our brethren from the chains of hell. Yes, they were encircled about with everlasting darkness and destruction; but behold, he has brought them into his everlasting light, yea, into everlasting salvation; and they are encircled about with the matchless bounty of his love; yea, and we have been instruments in his hands of doing this great and marvelous work,” reports Alma 26.14-15. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Gain of Infinity is Never Attained Except through Despair!

October 8, 2019 11:11 pm

The late afternoon was Heavenly. To be that in love, to know that frenzy of the heart—even know, young as I still am, I look back on it as something that was part of the innocence of childhood. That it could come again, I do not even dream of, that I should ever know such a consuming happiness is impossible. Work, popular culture, politics, science—all contribute to the alienation of modern beings. However, they tell us little about being’s community life or their isolation from each other because of social status, age, or race. Poverty is only one of many isolating factors. Improvement in social status may also lead to alienation. There were two families transplanted to a new suburban development from the East End of London (an area corresponding socially to the lower East Side of Manhattan). These people left the intimacy and solidarity of a slum with its close ties for a chiller life in new surroundings. How keenly East Enders feel the difference is made abundantly clear. Now their lives are no longer focused on people but on their houses and possessions, on the struggle for status. Frequently there was considerable bitterness. However, for the he East End families soon after the move to the suburbs, warmer relations did develop later on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

However, if people are united chiefly by competition for social status, can this ever take the place of family-centered community life? “Neighbors do not make up for kin.” The suburban environment has been made familiar to us in numerous American studies, such as The Lonely Crown, Crestwood Heights, The Exurbanites, and The Organization Man. What is interesting is that the expanding metropolis loosens the ties of kin and neighborhood in the very process of building new communities. In breaking up the traditional family-centered life, modern society deal harshly with those who are most vulnerable, particularly the aged. Among the aged, there is a distinction to be drawn between social isolation and loneliness. In the first state the aged person has few social contacts; in the second one feels cut off, especially if one has lost a loved one. The isolation of the aged is grim enough; but when the aged are also bereaved, the result is not just loneliness but often a rapid decline of faculties and even of the will to live. To sustain the aged our society has found no substitute for the same. The isolation of the nuclear family from its roots is just one of the ways in which beings become separated from each other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

To be a poor being is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. Less affluent people want to be treated like human beings. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable. However, the neurotic need for affection often take the form of a sexual infatuation or an insatiable hunger for gratifications of pleasures of the flesh. In view of this fact we have to raise the question whether the whole phenomenon of the neurotic need for affection is prompted by dissatisfaction in pleasures of the flesh, whether all this longing for affection, for contact, for appreciation, for support is motivated not so much by a need for reassurance as by dissatisfied libido. Dr. Freud would be inclined to look at it that way. He has seen that many neurotic persons are anxious to attach themselves to others and prone to cling to them; and he has described this attitude as resulting from dissatisfied libido. This concept, however, is based on certain premises. It presupposes that all those manifestations which are not pleasures of the flesh in themselves, such as the wish to get advice, approval or support, are expressed of pleasures of the needs that have been attenuated or sublimated. Furthermore, it presupposed that tenderness is an inhibited or sublimated express of drives in pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Such presuppositions are unsubstantiated. The connections between feelings of affection, expressions of tenderness and sexuality are not so close as we sometimes assume. Anthropologist and historians tell us that individual love is a product of cultural development. Pleasures of the flesh have a closer affiliation with cruelty than with tenderness, although some do not find this so convincing. From observations made in our culture we know, however, that pleasures of the flesh can exist without affection or tenderness, and that affection or tenderness can exist without pleasures of the flesh. There is no evidence, for instance, that the tenderness between mother and child is sexual in nature. All that we can observe—and that as a result of Dr. Freud’s discovery—is that elements of pleasures of the flesh may be present. We can observe many connections between tenderness and pleasures of the flesh: tenderness may be for forerunner of pleasures of the flesh feelings; one may have desires for pleasures of the flesh while being aware only of tender feelings; desires for pleasures of the flesh may stimulate or pass into tender feelings. While such transitions between tenderness and pleasures of the flesh definitely indicate a close relation between them, it is nevertheless seems better to be more cautious and to assume the existence of two different categories of feelings, which may coincide, pass into each other or substitute for each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Moreover, if we accept Dr. Freud’s assumptions that dissatisfied libido is the driving force for seeking affection, it would scarcely be understandable why we find the same craving for affection, with all the complications described—possessiveness, unconditional love, not feeling wanted, and so forth—in persons whose sexual life from the physical point of view is entirely satisfactory. As there is no doubt, however, that such cases do exist, the conclusion is inevitable that dissatisfied libido does not account for the phenomenon in these cases, but that the reasons for it are possessed outside the sphere of pleasures of the flesh. Cases like these, with definite disturbances in the emotional sphere coexisting with a capacity for full satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh, have always been a puzzle to some analysts, but the fact that they do not fit into the libido theory does not keep them from existing. Finally, if the neurotic need for affection were nothing but a sexual phenomenon, we should be at a loss to understand the various problems involved, such as possessiveness, unconditional love, feeling of being rejected. It is true that these various problems have been recognized and described in detail: jealousy, for example, is traced back to sibling rivalry or the Oedipus complex; unconditional love is traced back to oral eroticism; possessiveness is explained as anal-eroticism, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, it has not been realized that in reality the whole range of attitudes and reactions described belong together, that they are the constituent parts of one total structure. Without recognizing anxiety as the dynamic force behind the need for affection, we cannot understand the precise condition under which the need is enhanced or diminished. By way of Dr. Freud’s ingenious method of free association it is possible, in the process of analysis, to observe accurately the relation between anxiety and the need for affection, particularly by paying attention to the fluctuations in the patient’s need for affection. After a period of co-operative constructive work a patient may suddenly change one’s behavior and make demands on the analyst’s time or crave one’s friendship or admire one blindly, or become exceedingly jealous, possessive, sensitive to being “only a patient.” Simultaneously there is an increase in anxiety, showing either in dreams or in feeling rushed or in physical symptoms such as diarrhea or frequent urge to urinate. The patient does not recognize that there is anxiety or that one’s enhanced clinging to the analyst is conditioned by one’s anxiety. If the analyst recognizes the connection and presents it to the patient, both will discover together that before the sudden infatuation problems were touched upon which stirred up anxiety in the patient; one may, for example, felt an interpretation by the analyst as an unfair accusation or as a humiliation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

The sequence of reactions appears to be like this: a problem comes up, discussion of which provokes an intense hostility against the analyst; the patient starts to hate the analyst, to dream that one id dying; one represses one’s hostile impulses immediately, becomes frightened and out of a need for reassurance one clings to the analyst; when these reactions have been worked through, hostility, anxiety and with them the increased need for affection recede into the background. An enhanced need for affection so regularly appears as the result of anxiety that one may safely take it as an alarm signal indicating that some anxiety has come close to the surface and calls for reassurance. The process described is not at all limited to the process of analysis. Identically the same reactions occur in personal relationships. In marriage, for example, a husband may compulsively cling to his wife, be jealous and possessive, idealize and admire her, though deep down one hates and fears her. If one realize that the term gives only a rough description and says nothing about the dynamics of the process, it is justifiable to speak of an exaggerated devotion superimposed on a hidden hatred as an “overcompensation.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

If for all the reasons presented we refuse to accept an etiology of pleasures of the flesh and the need for affection, then the question arises whether it is only incidentally that the neurotic need for affection is sometimes coupled with, or appears altogether as, a desire for pleasures of the flesh, or whether there are certain conditions under which the need for affection is felt and expressed in sexual ways. To some extent an expression of pleasures of the flesh and the need for affection depends on whether or not the external circumstances favor it. To some extent it depends on differences in culture, in vitality and in sexual temperament. And finally it depends on whether the person’s life involving pleasures of the flesh is satisfactory, for if it is not, one is more likely to react in a sexual manner than those who have a satisfactory life in pleasures of the flesh. Though all of factors are self-evident, and have a definite influence on the person’s reaction, they do not sufficiently account for basic individual differences. In a given number of persons showing a neurotic need for affection these reactions vary from individual to individual. Thus we find some whose contacts with others assume immediately, almost compulsively, a sexual coloring of greater or lesser intensity, whereas in others the excitability in pleasures of the flesh or the activities in pleasures of the flesh keep within the range of normal feeling and behavior. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Belonging to the former group are men and women who slide from one relation in pleasures of the flesh into another. When having no relations or when seeing no immediate chance of having one, a more intimate know of their reactions shows that they feel insecure, unprotected, and are quite erratic. Belonging to the same group, yet having more inhibitions, are men and women who factually have very few relations, but who create an erotic atmosphere between themselves and other persons whether or not they feel particularly attracted by them. Finally, a third group of persons belongs here who are still more inhibited in the pleasures of the flesh, yet wo are easily excited by pleasures of the flesh and compulsively see a potential partner for pleasures of the flesh in any man or woman. In this last sub-group compulsory masturbation may—not necessarily must—take the place of relations in pleasures of the flesh. There are great variation in this group as to the degree of physical satisfaction attained. Wat the group has in common, apart from the compulsory nature of the needs for pleasures of the flesh, is a definite lack of discrimination in the choices of partners. They have the same characteristics that we have already discussed in our general consideration of persons with a neurotic need for affection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

In addition one is struck by the discrepancy between their readiness to have relations in pleasures of the flesh, factual or imaginary, and the profound disturbance in their emotional relations to others, a disturbance in their emotional relations to others, a disturbance which is more thorough than in the average person haunted by a basic anxiety. It is not only that these persons cannot believe in affection, but that they actually become deeply perturbed—or, in the case of men, impotent—if love is offered them. They may be aware of their own defensive attitude, or they may be inclined to blame their partners. In the latter case they are convinced that they never met a young lady or man who was lovable. Relations in pleasures of the flesh mean to them not only the release of specific tensions involving the flesh, but also the only way of getting human contact. If a person has developed the conviction that for one obtaining affection is practically out of the question, then physical contact may serve as a substitute for emotional relationships. In that case, if not the only, pleasures of the flesh is the main bridge leading to contact with others, and therefore acquires an inordinate importance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

In some persons the lack of discrimination shows itself in regard to the potential partner one is seeking to have pleasures of the flesh with; they will actively seek relations with both genders, or will passively yield to demands in pleasures of the flesh, regardless of whether they are made from a person of the opposite or the same gender. The first type does not interest us here, because though with them too pleasures of the flesh is put into the service of establishing human contact, otherwise difficult to obtain, the precipitating motive is not so much a need for affection as striving to conquer, or more accurately, to subdue others. This striving may be so imperative that the gender distinctions become comparatively unimportant. Men and women both have to be subdued, in pleasures of the flesh, or otherwise. However, those in the second group, who are prone to yield to advances in pleasures of the flesh from either gender, are driven by an unending need for affection, especially by a fear of losing another person through refusing a pleasures of the flesh request, or through daring to defend themselves against any request made upon them, whether just or unjust. They do not want to lose the other person, because the contact with one is so bitterly needed. Tarqin, in Anne Rice’s novel Blackwood Farm is bisexual and deeply attached to a male and wants to marry a female named Mona. However, he bisexuality is possible due to the fact that he is eighteen, and was told from a young age that he was “queer,” and do to the fact that he was seduced by men and women in his teenage years. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Whatever the starting point and however tortuous the road, we must finally arrive at a disturbance of personality as the source of psychic illness. The same can be said of this as of almost any other psychological discovery: it is really a rediscovery. Poets and philosophers of all times have known that it is never the serene, well-balanced person who falls victim to psychic disorders, but the one turn by inner conflicts. In modern terms, every neurosis, no matter what the symptomatic picture, is a character of neurosis. Hence our endeavor in theory and therapy must be directed toward a better understanding of the neurotic character. We must think about the role of cultural factors, their influence on our ideas of what constitutes masculinity or femininity. I have observed that the attitudes and the neuroses of persons in this country differ in many ways from those I have noted in European countries, and that only the difference in civilizations could account for this. Therefore, neuroses are brought about by cultural factors—which more specifically means that neuroses are generated by disturbances in human relationships. Compulsive drives are specifically neurotic; they are born of feelings of isolation, helplessness, fear and hostility, and represent ways of coping with the World despite these feelings; they aim primarily not at satisfaction but at safety; their compulsive character is due to the anxiety lurking being them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Two of these drives—neurotic cravings for affection and for power—stand out at first in clear relief. It has a lot to two with the macrocosm formed by many microcosms interacting upon one another. In the nucleus of each microcosm is a neurotic trend. This theory of neurosis has a practical application. If psychoanalysis did not primarily involve relating our present difficulties to our past experiences but depended rather upon understanding the interplay of forces in our existing personality, then recognizing and changing ourselves with littler or even no expert help is entirely feasible. In the face of widespread need for psychotherapy and a scarcity of available assistance, self-analysis seems to offer the hope of filling a vital need. The neurotic need for affection, compulsive modesty, and the need for a partner belong together. However, what many fail to see is that together they represent a basic attitude toward others and the self, and a particular philosophy of life. These trends are the nuclei of what I have now dawn together as a moving toward people. I see, too, that a compulsive craving for power and prestige and neurotic ambition have something in common. They constitute roughly the factors involved in what I call moving against people. However, the need for admiration and the perfectionist drives, though they have all the earmarks of neurotic trends and influence the neurotic relations with others, see, primarily to concern one’s relations with oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Also, the need for exploitation seems to be less basic than either the need for affection or for power; it appears less comprehensive than these, as if it was not a separate entity but has been taken out of some larger whole. Neurotic trends not only reinforce each other, but also create conflict. Nevertheless, conflicts remain a side issues. The conflicts operate between contradictory sets of neurotic trends, and though they originally concern contradictory attitudes towards others, in time they encompass contradictory attitudes toward the self, contradictory qualities and contradictory sets of values. Many people are forcibly blind toward the obvious contradictions within themselves. When they are pointed out, people usually come elusive and seem to lost interest. After repeated experiences of this kind I realized that the elusiveness expresses a profound aversion to tackling these contradictions. Finally, panic reaction in response to a sudden recognition of a conflict shows me I am working with dynamite. People have a good reason to shy away from these conflicts: they dread their power to tear them to pieces. There is also an amazing amount of energy and intelligence that is invested in more or less desperate efforts to solve the conflicts or, more precisely, to deny their existence and create an artificial harmony. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

There are four major attempts at a solution in about the order in which these conflicts are presented. The initial attempt is to eclipse part of the conflict and raise its opposite to predominance. The second is to move away from people. The function of neurotic detachment now appears in a new light. Detachment is part of the basic conflict—that is, one of the original conflicting attitudes towards others; but is also represents an attempt at solution, since maintaining an emotional distance between the self and others set the conflict out of operation. The third attempt is very different in kind. Instead of moving away from others, the neurotic moves away from oneself. One whole actual self becomes somewhat unreal to one and one created in its place an idealized image of oneself in which the conflicting parts were so transfigured that they no longer appeared as conflicts but as various aspects of a rich personality. The existentialist’s study of the authentic person and of authentic living helps to throw this general phoniness, this living by illusions and by fear into a harsh, clear light which reveals it clearly as sickness, even [though] widely shared. Nonetheless, the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening. Most people experience both tragedy and joy in varying proportions. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Gain of infinity is never attained except through despair. The commitment to willingly move forward must be made without fear. If it is not, and one is found fearful the floodgates of self-destruction are opened and the abysmal waters rush forth to claim their prize. This happens because the spirits encountered seek to destroy humankind. They are indifferent toward the outcome of our physical lives. This issue remains in the fact that many claim to seek power yet when it is received they become scared of the concept of limitless possibility. They are forced to see that the greatest of all evils dwells in their own heart and mind, superseding the limitless power of ancient dark Gods. They are forced to see that they are their own God and, therefore, they are their own Devil, and the illusory paths of salvation are consumed by the flams of that truth. All human beings differ in some respects and in mind as well as in body. Each is unique. Each needs to find one’s own individual path. For in each aspirant there exists a certain direction, tendency, capacity, attribute, or gift along which line the possibility of one’s spiritual development can open up more quickly, freely, and easily than along any other. It is on this line that one should concentrate more effort and so take advantage of what Nature has given one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

However, to detect and recognize what is one’s best potentiality requires exploration and search, not only by one’s ordinary faculties but also and especially by one’s more sensitive and intuitive ones. It will not be found all at once but only after much grouping around and feeling one’s way. Time is needed because this hidden possibility does not exist at the surface level. The Earth which surrounds this gem obscures its whereabouts. If one is in a hurry and insists on a premature discovery instead of keeping up the search, one will identify the wrong stone. Once having found it let one stay with it as often and as long as one can. There is a way suited to the particular individuality of each separate person, which will bring out all one’s spiritual possibilities as no other way could. The purpose of all paths being to bring the traveler to the same single destination—union with God—any path which either fulfills this purpose or partially helps to do so, it acceptable. “Therefore, let us glory, yea, we will glory in the Lord; yea, we will rejoice, for our joy is full; yea, we will praise our God forever. Behold, who can glory too much in the Lord? Yea, who can say too much of his great power, and of his mercy, and of his long-suffering towards the children of beings? Behold, I say unto you, I cannot say the smallest part which I feel,” reports Alma 26.16 #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

These Enemies Inevitably Leave in their Destructive Wake Tears of Sorrow, the Pain of Conflict, and the Shattered Hopes of what Could Have Been!

October 7, 2019 10:16 pm

That is wrong. The man who hurt me was angry. Did you see the bad things he did to me? It does not matter what the think. I love you. I am loyal to you. They cannot part us. It is impossible. However, you cannot be angry. You cannot be violent. If you are angry and violent, I cannot love you. I do want you to protect me. Protect the house. Protect all those I love. Never once in my brawl with the stranger had I felt this kind of fear. You want me to be afraid? I cannot love you and be afraid of you. If I am afraid, I will come to hate you. Did you see how I hated the stranger? Make a choice. Shocking as this may sound, the murder of an individual is a relatively human action—not because the effect of an individual murder is quantitatively smaller than that of a mass murder or a total extermination (for the deaths cannot really be added; the very plural form of the noun “death” is absurd, for each individual murderer still can react to one’s crime in a human way. It is possible to mourn one victim of murder, not a million victims. One can repent one murder, not a million murdered. In other words, imaginative, and moral capacity are congruent or at least commensurable with one’s capacity for action. And this congruence, this condition in which the being is more or less equal to oneself, is no doubt the basic prerequisite of that which is called humanity. It is the congruence that is absent today. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Consequently, modern unmorality does not primarily consist in being’s failure to conform to a specific more-than-human image of beings; perhaps not even in one’s failure to meet the requirements of a just society; but rather in one’s half-guilty and half-innocent failure to conform to oneself, that is to say, in the fact that one’s capacity for action has outgrown one’s emotional, imaginative, and moral capacities. We have good reason to think that our fear is by far too small: it should paralyze us or keep us in a continual state of alarm. It does not because we are physically unequal to the danger confronting us, because we are incapable of producing a fear commensurate with it, let alone of constantly maintaining it in the midst of our still seemingly normal everyday life. Just like our reason, our psyche is limited in the Kantian sense: our emotions have only a limited capacity and elasticity. We have scruples about murdering one being; and no scruples at all about bombing a city out of existence. A city full of dead people remains a mere word to us. All this should be investigated by a Critique of Pure Feeling, not for the purpose of reaching a moral verdict, but in order to determine the boundaries of our emotional capacity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

What disturbs us today is not the fact that we are not omnipotent and omniscient, but the reverse, namely, the fact that our imaginative and emotional capacities are too small as measured against our knowledge and power, that imaginatively and emotionally we are so to speak smaller than ourselves. Each of us moderns is an inverted Lestat: whereas Lestat had infinite anticipations and boundless feelings, and suffered because his knowledge and feelings were unequal to these feelings, we know more and produce greater things than we can imagine or feel. As a rule, then, we are incapable of producing fear; only occasionally does it happen that we attempt to produce it, or that we are overwhelmed and stunned by a tidal wave of anguish. However, what stuns or panics us at such moments is the realization not of the danger threatening us, but of the futility of our attempts to produce an adequate response to it. Having experiences this failure we usually relax and return shamefaced, irritated, or perhaps even relieved, to the human dimensions of our psychic life commensurable with our everyday surroundings. Such a return, however pleasant it may be subjectively, is of course sheer suicide from the objective point of view. For there is nothing and there can be nothing that increases the danger more than our failure to realize it intellectually and emotionally, and our resigned acceptance of this failure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

In fact, the helplessness with which contemporary humankind reacts—or rather fails to react—to the existence of the superbomb bespeaks a lack of freedom the like of which has never before existed in history—and surely history cannot be said to have been poor in varieties of unfreedom. We have indeed reached the freezing point of human freedom. The Stoic, robbed of the autonomy of action, was certainly unfree; but how free the Stoic still was, since one could think and feel as one pleased! Later there was the even more impoverished type of being, who could think only wat others had thought of one, who indeed could not feel anything expect what one was supposed to feel; but how free even this type of being was, since one still could speak, think, and feel what one was supposed to speak, think, and feel! Truly unfree, divested of all dignity, definitively the most deprived of beings are those confronted with situations and things which they cannot cope by definition, to which they are unequal linguistically, intellectually, and emotionally—ourselves. If all is not to be lost we must first and foremost develop our moral imagination: this is the crucial task facing us. We must strive to increase the capacity and elasticity of our intellectual and emotional faculties, to match the incalculable increase of our productive and destructive power. Only where these two aspects of being’s nature are properly balanced can there be responsibility, and moral action and counter-action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Whether we can achieve such a balance, is an open question. Our emotional capacity may turn out to be limited a priori; perhaps it cannot be extended at will and ad infinitum. If this were so, and if we were to resign ourselves to such a state of affairs, we would have to give up all hope. However, the moralist cannot do so in any case; even if one believed in the theoretical impossibility of transcending those limits, one would still have to demand that they be transcended in practice. Academic discussions are pointless here: the question can be decided only by an actual attempt, or, more accurately, by repeated attempts, for instance, spiritual exercises. It is immaterial whether such exercises aim at a merely quantitative extension of our ordinary imagination and emotional performance, or at a sensational, “impossible” transcending of our proportio humana, whose boundaries are supposedly fixed one and for all. The philosophical significance of such exercises can be worried about later. What matters at present is only that an attempt at violent self-transformation be made, and that it be successful. For we cannot continue as we are. In our emotional responses we remain at the rudimentary stage of small artisans: we are barely able to repent an individual murder; where as in our capacity for killing, for producing corpses, we have already entered the proud stage of industrial mass production. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Indeed, the performances of our heart—our inhibitions, fears, worries, regrets—are in inverse ratio to the dimensions of our deeds, for instance, the former grow smaller as the latter increase. This gulf between our emotional capacity and our destructive powers, aside from representing a physical threat to our lives, makes us the most divided, the most disproportionate, the most inhuman beings that ever existed. As against this modern cleavage, all older spiritual conflicts, for instance, the conflict between mind and body or duty and inclination, were relatively harmless. However, violently the struggle may have raged within us, it remained human; the contending principles were attuned to each other, they were in actual contact, neither of them lost sight of the other, and each of them was essentially human. At least on the battlefield of the contending principles beings preserved their existence unchallenged: beings were still there. Not so today. Even this minimum of being’s identity with oneself is gone. For the horror of being’s present condition consists precisely in this, that the conflicting forces within one are no longer inter-related: they are so far removed from each other, each has become so completely independent, that they no longer even come to grips. They can no longer confront each other in battle, the conflict can no longer be fought out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

In short, beings as producers, and beings as a being capable of emotions, have lost sight of each other. Reality now seems attributable only to each of the specialized fragments designated by an “as.” What made us shudder ten years ago—the fact that one and the same being could be guard in an extermination camp and good father or mother and husband or wife, that as the former one could be so radically different from oneself as the latter, and that the two parts one played or the two fragments one was did not in the least stand in each other’s way because they no longer knew each other—this horrifying example of guilelessness in horror has not remained an isolated phenomenon. Each of us, like this schizophrenic in the trust sense of the term, is split into two separate beings; each of us is like a worm artificially or spontaneously divided into two halves, which are unconcerned with each other and move in different directions. True, the split has not been entirely consummated; despite everything the two halves of our being are still connected by the thinnest of threads, and the producer half, by far the stronger, drags the emotional half behind it. The unity is not organic, it is that of two different beings meaninglessly grown together. However, the existence of this minimal connection is no comfort. On the contrary, the fact that we are split in two, and that there is no internal principle integrating these halves, defines the misery and disgrace of our condition. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Violence is a uniting of the self in actions. Violence is creating the self. It is an organizing of one’s powers to prove one’s power, to establish the worth of the self. It is a risking all, a committing all, an asserting all. However, it united the different elements in the self, omitting rationality. This is why I have said above that the uniting of the self is done on a level that bypasses reason. Whatever its motive or its consequences may be within the violent person, its result is generally destructive to the others in the situation. The physical element which bulks so large in violence is a symbol of the totality of one’s involvement. When violence erupts I can no longer sit idly on the sidelines. Movement seizes my body, which I am called upon to risk as an expression of my total commitment. No desire or time to think is left once the violence breaks out; we are in a nonrational World. This can be subrational, as it generally is in the riots in the transient communities; or it can be superrational, as it assumedly was with Joan of Arc. Reason no longer has even a pretense of command. In the movie If, the conventional dullness of life at a British boys’ boarding school is portrayed with stark realism. The burden of routine, the loneliness, the artificial moralistic rules soon developed int sadism and homosexuality. In the face of the severe beatings they receive, the boys begin to form a bond of camaraderie. Then the leading boys discover a cache of machine guns and ammunition under the cathedral. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The movie ends with a surrealistic scene in which the boys take their guns to a position on top of the church and mow down guests, dressed in all their British pomp, who have come to commencement exercises. The movie is a presentation of the steps of violence from separation to loneliness to camaraderie to sadism to violence. The availability of guns has a curious and macabre relation to violence. This form of technology not only vastly increases the range and effectiveness of violence but also has a strong effect—generally dulling—on the conscious of those who use them. One day when I was on a farm in a fairly remote section of New Hampshire, I noticed under an apple tree a stray dog which seemed to be diseased. Having been alone for some time, during which time one’s imagination often comes up with weird ideas, I decided the dog had rabies. Although I could not get to it in the tangle of branches, our own dog, to which our whole family was deeply attached, could and did. She went sniffing around the “rabid” one, and, being a show, she would not come back to me no matter how much I called. I went in the house and got the Luger pistol that my son used on the farm for target practice, inserted a clip in it, and came out to shoot the rabid dog. Now the point of this story is that my having in my hand a pistol with which to shoot some living thing changed me into an entirely differ person psychologically. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

I could deal out death to anyone since I was possessed by this instrument of death; I had become an irrational man of hostility. The gun had me rather than my having it: I had become its instrument. Seized with dislike for this person I had become, I took the gun back to the house and put it away; and the incident was resolved in a quite different way. We understand only vaguely the effect that technology can have on the conscious of a person, but it is clear that the possession of guns can radically change personality. Glenn Gray remarks that, as an officer in the army, he did not feel dressed when he went out without his pistil strapped to his belt; not being in the army, I felt myself to be a misdirected robot, without conscious control over my actions, when I had my finger on the trigger with the intent to kill. An extreme form of such an effect on personality can be seen in the career of Charles Fairweather, the teenager who went on a rampage in Nebraska and murdered eleven people before he was caught. “I love guns,” he had said as a boy. “They give me a feeling of power like nothing else.” His story follows along common lines: as a queer-looking child with bowlegs and thick glasses he was mocked regularly when he first went to school. He developed early in life the symbolic interpretation of the World as a place of mockery, and his cry for recognition became that much the stronger for never having any answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Charles Fairweather then discovered that he could get recognition by letting loose his temper and flailing away at the school bullies in fights, which he managed to win by the sheer vehemence of his violence. His father described him as “always one of the quiet ones,” illustrative again that the docile appearing person may be precisely the violent-prone one. Despite his poor eyesight, he became a remarkable marksman with a gun. Upon getting out of high school Charles managed to find a girl friend and a job as assistant on a garbage truck. When the scant recognition that these afforded him was wiped away—he lost his job and his girl friend’s mother threw him out—he got three guns and shot his girl friend’s mother and stepfather, living for several says in their house with their bodies wrapped up in paper and stowed in the chicken yard. Forcing the girl to go with him, he then went on the path of violence made familiar by Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. The important element in this bloody store is his early symbolic interpretation that the World is a place of derision. His ultimate violence achieved a double response: it answered his cry for recognition and it also mocked the World in revenge. (Again, we see the macabre logic in such outburst of violence.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

From his complete lack of feeling when he was later questioned about the persons he had murdered, we cannot conclude that Charles was always so unfeeling, so typically schizoid. It is obvious that the person on a binge of violence must become unfeeling and detached, like a soldier mowing down the enemy with a machine gun, or else he could never do what he feels he has to do. We are haunted above all by his childhood obligato: “I love guns. They give me a feeling of power.” The symbol of the gun as a phallus and its relation to pleasures of the flesh is well known. Both are long and slim, both eject a substance that can radically change the person into whom it is directed. Hence the gun has become, especially with simple people, a symbol par excellence of masculine power. The line delivered by Mae West on greeting her boy friend remains the classic expression of this: “Is that gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” However, the cultural aspects of guns is also convincing, as Stanley Kunitz remarks. We hunted with guns to eat; we hunted with guns to live in our pioneer period, from which we in America are removed only by a little over a century and a half. In all these ways the gun was valuable, a laudable symbol of power; and handling it well was also laudable. Many a person feels when he or she possesses a gun that one has a power that was unfairly taken away from one. And what a power it is! #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

With a gun, people who have had their power taken away feel they can now make this big explosion and hurl that projectile to kill things much larger than themselves. Consciousness is surrendered willingly. In the film Patton, the general’s running out and emptying his pistol into the air at German airplanes bombing his Algerian base is childish gesture, an anachronistic hang-over from a boy playing with guns; but it is nevertheless a convincing expression of violence. In a World where peace is such a universal quest, we sometimes wonder why violence walks our streets, accounts of murder and senseless killings fill the columns of our newspapers, and family quarrels and disputes mar the sanctity of the home and smother the tranquility of so many lives. Perhaps we stray from the path which leads to peace and find it necessary to pause, to ponder, and to reflect on the teachings of the Prince of Peace and determine to incorporate them in our thoughts and actions and to live a higher law, walk a more elevated road, and be a better disciple of Christ. The ravages of hunger in Somalia, the brutality of hate in Bosnia, and the ethnic struggles especially in the United States of America and across the globe remind us that the peace we seek will not come without effort and determination. Anger, hatred, and contention are foes not easily subdued. These enemies inevitably leave in their destructive wake tears of sorrow, the pain of conflict, and the shattered hopes of what could have been. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Their sphere of influence is not restricted to the battlefields of war but can be observed altogether too frequently in the home, around the hearth, and within the heart. So soon do many forget and so late do they remember the counsel of the Lord: “There shall be no disputations among you, for verily, verily I say unto you, he hath the spirit of content is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another. Behold, this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of beings with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.” We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our World know the blessing of peace. World peace, though a lofty goal, is but an outgrowth of the personal peace each individual seeks. I speak not of the peace promoted by beings, but peace as promised by God. I speak of peace in our homes, peace in our hearts, even peace in our lives. Peace after the way of beings is perishable. Peace after the manner of God will prevail. We are reminded that anger does not solve anything. It builds nothing, but it can destroy everything. The consequences of conflict are so devastating that we years for guidance—even a way to insure our success as we seek the path to peace. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

When we now hear the word “Spirit,” we are somehow prepared for it: the power in us, but not of us, qualifying us for the service of a new state of things is what Spirit means. This may sound strange to many both inside and outside the churches for whom they term Holy Spirit is the strangest of the strange terms that appear among Christian symbols. Rarely a subject of preaching, it is also neglected in religious teachings. Its festival, Pentecost, has almost disappeared in the popular consciousness of this country. Some groups that claim spiritual experiences of a particular character are considered unhealthy, and often rightly so. Liturgically, the use of the term “Holy Ghost” produces an impression of great remoteness from our way of speaking and thinking. However, spiritual experience is a reality for everyone, as actual as the experience of being loved or the breathing of air. Therefore, we should not shy away from the word “Spirit.” We should become fully aware of the Spiritual Presence, around us and in us, even though we realize how limited our experience of “god present to our spirit” may be. For this is what Divine Spirit means: God present to our spirit. Spirit is not a mysterious substance; it is not a part of God. It is God Himself; but not God as the creative Ground of all things and not God directing history and manifesting Himself in its central event, but God as present in communities and personalities, grasping them, inspiring them, and transforming them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

For Spirit its first all power, the power that drives the human spirit above itself towards what it cannot attain by itself, the love that is greater than all other gifts, the truth in which the depth of being opens itself to us, the holy that is the manifestation of the presence of the ultimate. You may say again—“I do not know this power. I have never had such an experience. I am not religious or, at least, not Christian and certainly not a bearer of the Spirit. What I hear from you sounds like ecstasy; and I want to stay sober. It sounds like mystery, and I try to illuminate what is dark. It sounds like self-sacrifice and I want to fulfill my human possibilities.” To this I answer—Certainly, the Spiritual power can thrust some people into an ecstasy that most of us have never experienced. It can drive some toward a kind of self-sacrifice of which most of us are not capable. It can inspire some to insights into the depth of being that remain unapproachable to most of us. However, this does not justify our denial that the Spirit is also working in us. Without doubt, wherever it works, there is an element, possibly very small, of self-surrender, and an element, however weak, of ecstasy, and an element, perhaps fleeting, of awareness of the mystery of existence. Yet these small effects of the Spiritual power are enough to prove its presence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, there are other conscious and noticeable manifestations of the Spiritual Presence. Let me enumerate some of them, while you ask yourselves whether and to what degree they are of your own experience. The Spirit can work in you with a soft but insistent voice, telling you that your life is empty and meaningless, but that there are changes of a new life waiting before the door of your inner self to fill its void and to conquer its dullness. The Spirit can work in you, awakening the desire to strive towards the sublime against the profanity of the average day. The Spirit can give you the courage that says “yes” to life in spite of the destructiveness you have experiences around you and within you. The Spirit can reveal to you that you have hurt somebody deeply, but it also can give you the right word that reunites one with you. The Spirit can make you love, with the divine love, someone you profoundly dislike or in whom you have no interest. The Spirit can conquer your sloth towards what you know is the aim of your life, and it can transform your moods of aggression and depression into stability and serenity. The Spirit can liberate you from hidden enmity against those whom you love and from open vengefulness against those why whom you feel violated. The Spirit can give you the strength to throw off false anxieties and to take upon yourself the anxiety which belongs to life itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The Spirit can awaken you to sudden insight into the way you must take your World, and it can open your eyes to a view of it that makes everything new. The Spirit can give you joy in the midst of ordinary routine as well as in the depth of sorrow. The Spirit can create warmth in the coldness you feel within you and round you, and it can give you wisdom and strength where your human love towards a loved one has failed. Just when you felt totally rejected, and when you rejected yourself totally, the Spirit can throw you into a hell of despair about yourself and then give you the certainty that life has accepted you. The Spirit can give you the power of prayer, that nobody has except through the Spiritual Presence. For every prayer—with or without words—that reaches its aim, namely the reunion with the divine Ground of our being, is a work of the Spirit speaking in us and through us. Prayer is the Spiritual longing of a finite being to return to its origin. These are works of the Spirit, signs of the Spiritual Presence with us and in us. In view of these manifestations, who can asset that one is without Spirit? Who can say that one is in no way a bearer of the Spirit? One may be in a small way. However, is there anybody among us who could say more than that about oneself? One can compare the Spiritual Presence with the air we breathe, surrounding us, nearest to us, and working life within us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

This comparison has a deep justification: in most languages, the word “spirit” means breath or wind. Sometimes the wind becomes storm, grand and devastating. Mostly it is moving air, always present, not always noticed. “Many will say to me in that day: Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name have cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then I profess unto them: I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity,” reports 3 Nephi 14.22-23. Jesus opened up the Mysteries to the mass of the Western continent and gave to the many what had hitherto been given only to the chosen few. The presence of God, the journey from anticipation to realization is a long one. One this Quest the curiosity to know what lies ahead can never be satisfied with perfect correctness because it must necessarily differ with different individuals. Changes of circumstances which bring uncertainty of the future will not frighten one. They will interest one. One will seek to discover if they point the way to an incoming of new forces of experience necessary for one’s further development. “I try to put it in the past, hold on to myself and don’t look back. I don’t wanna dream about all the things that never were. Maybe I can live without when I’m out from under. I don’t wanna feel the pain, what good will it do me now, I’ll get it all figure out when I’m out from under,” (Out from Under By Britney Spears). #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

The Real Stands Alone—It is Without Any Kind of Support, and Needs None!

October 7, 2019 1:09 am

Do you not see, I have to do this! I have no choice. If I do not insist that you talk to these psychiatrists, we will stand accused of gross negligence. Think of it. We have to get this of the way and get back to life the way we want it to be. If there is anything that modern beings regard as infinite, it is no longer God; nor is it nature, let alone morality or culture; it is one’s own power. Creatio ex nihilo, which was once the marl of omnipotence, has been supplanted by its opposite, potestas annihilationis or reductio as nihil; and this power to destroy, to reduce to nothingness is possessed in our own hands. The Promethan dream of omnipotence has at long last come true, though in an unexpected form. Since we are in a position to inflict absolute destruction on each other, we have apocalyptic powers. It is we who are the infinite. To say this is easy, but the fact is so tremendous that all historically recorded developments, including epochal changes, seem trifling in comparison: all history is now reduced to prehistory. For we are not merely a new historical generation of beings; indeed, we are no longer what until today humans have been called “human beings.” Although we are unchanged anatomically, our completely changed relation to the cosmos and to ourselves has transformed us into a new species—beings that differ from the previous type of beings no less than Nietzsche’s superman differed from humans. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

In other words—and this is not meant as a mere metaphor—we are Titans, at least as long as we are omnipotent without making definitive use of this omnipotence of ours. In fact, during the short period of our supremacy the gulf separating us Titans from the humans of yesterday has become so wide that the latter are beginning to seem alien to us. This is reflected, to take a salient example, in our attitude toward Lestat, the hero in whom the last generations of our forefathers saw the embodiment of their deepest yearnings. Lestat strives desperately to be a Titan; his torment is caused by his inability to transcend his humanity. We, who are no longer finite, cannot even share this torment in our imagination. The infinite longing for the infinite, which Lestat symbolizes, and which for almost a thousand years was the source of human’s greatest sufferings and greatest achievements, has become so completely a thing of the past that it is difficult for us to visualize it; at bottom we only know that it has once existed. What our parents, the last humans regarded as the most important thing is meaningless to us, their sons, the first Titans; the very concepts by means of which they articulated their history have become obsolete. For instance, the antithesis between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac principle: The former denoted the happy harmony of the finite; the latter, the intoxication found in exploding the boundaries of the finite. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Since we are no longer finite, since we have the explosion behind us, the antithesis has become unreal. The infinite longing some of us still experience is a nostalgia for finitude, the good old finitude of the past; in other words, some of us long to be rid of our Titanism, and to be humans again, humans like those of the golden age of yesterday. Needless to say this longing is as romantic and utopian as was that of the Luddites; and like all longings of this kind, it weakens those who indulge in it, while it strengthens the self-assurance of those who are sufficiently unimaginative and unscrupulous to put to actual use the omnipotence they possess. However, the starving working people who early in the nineteenth century rose against the machines could hardly have suspected that a day would come when their longing for the past would assume truly mythological dimensions—when beings could be appropriately descried as Titan who strives desperately to recover one’s humanity. Curiously enough, omnipotence has become truly dangerous only after we have got hold of it. Before then, all manifestations of omnipotence has become truly dangerous only after we have got hold it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Before then, all manifestations of omnipotence, whether regarded as natural or supernatural (this distinction, too, has become unimportant), have been relatively benign: in each instance the threat was partial, only particular things were destroyed—merely people, cities, empires, or cultures—but we were always spared, it “we” denotes humankind. No wonder that no one actually considered the possibility of a total peril, expect for a few scientific philosopher who toyed with the idea of a cosmic catastrophe (such as the extinction of the Sun), and for a minority of Christians who took eschatology seriously and expected the World to end at any moment. With one stroke all this has changed. There is little hope that we, cosmic parvenus, usurpers of the apocalypse, will be as merciful as the forces responsible for the former cataclysms were out of compassion or indifference, or by accident. Rather, there is no hope at all: the actual masters of the infinite are no more imaginatively or emotionally equal to this possession of theirs than their prospective victims, for instance, ourselves; and they are incapable, and indeed must remain incapable, of looking upon their contraption as anything but a means to further finite interest, including the most limited party interests. Because we are the first beings with the power to unleash a World cataclysm, we are also the first to live continually under its threat. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Because we are the first Titans, we are also the first dwarfs or pygmies, or whatever we may call beings such as ourselves who are mortal not only as individual, but also as a group, and who are granted survival only until further orders. We have just emerged from a period in which for Europeans natural death was an unnatural or at least an exceptional occurrence. A being who died of old age aroused envy: one was looked upon as one who could afford the luxury of a peaceful and individual death, as a kind of slacker who managed to escape from the general fate of extermination, or even as a sort f secret agent in the service of cosmic foreign powers though which one had been able to obtain such a special favor. Occasionally natural death was viewed in a different light—as evidence of being’s freedom and sovereignty, as a twin brother or Stoic suicide—but even the natural death was felt to be unnatural and exceptional. During the war, being killed was thus the most common form of dying: the model for our finitude was Abel, not Adam. In the extermination camps natural death was completely eliminated. There the lethal machines operated wit absolute efficiency, leaving no uneconomical residues of life. There the venerable proposition, All humans are mortal, had already become an understatement. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The fact that all human are mortal being more serious than we realize—if this proposition had been inscribed on the entrance gates to the gas chambers, instead of the usual misleading, “Shower Baths,” or “Conventional Housing,” it would have aroused jeers; and in this jeering laughter the voices of the victims would have joined an infernal unison with the voices of their guards. For the truth contained in the old proposition was now more adequately expressed in an new proposition—“All men and women are exterminable.” Whatever changes have taken place in the World during the ten years since the end of the war, they have not affected the validity of the new proposition: the truth it expressed is confirmed by the general threat hanging over us. Its implications have even become more sinister: for what is exterminable today is not “merely” all beings, but humankind a whole. This change inaugurates a new historical epoch, if the term “epoch” may be applied to the short time intervals in question. Accordingly, all history can be divided into three chapters, with the following captions: All human beings are mortal, All human beings are exterminable, and Humankind as a whole is exterminable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Under the present dispensation, human mortality has acquired an entirely new meaning—it is only today that its ultimate horror is brought home to us. To be sure, even previously no one was exempt from mortality; but everyone regarded oneself as mortal within a larger whole, the human World; and while no one ever explicitly ascribed immortality to the latter, the threat of its mortality stared no one in the face either. Only because there was such a “space” within which one died, could there arise that peculiar aspiration to give the lie to one’s mortality through the acquisition of fame. Admittedly the attempt has never been very successful; immortality among mortals has never been a safe metaphysical investment. The famous beings were always like those ship passengers of the Arabian Nights, who enjoyed the highest reputation abroad, but whose reputation enjoyed no reputation, because the very existence of the ship was totally unknow on land. Still, as compared with what we have today, fame was something. For today our fear of death is extended to all of humankind; and if humankind were to perish leaving no memory in any being, engulfing all existence in darkness, no empire will have existed, no idea, no struggle, no love, no pain, no hope, no comfort, no sacrifice—everything will have been in vain, and there would be only what which has been, and nothing else. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Even to us, who are still living in the existing World, the past, that which merely was, seems dead; but the end of humankind would destroy even this death and force it, as it were, to die a second time, so that the past will not even have been the past—for how would that which merely had differ from that which had never been? Nor would the future be spared: it would be dead even before being born. Ecclesiastic’s disconsolate, “There is nothing new under the Sun,” would be succeeded by the even more disconsolate, “Nothing ever was,” which no one would record and which for that reason would never be challenged. Let us assume that the bomb has been exploded. To call this “an action” is inappropriate. The chain of events leading up to the explosion is composed of so many links, the process has involved so many different agencies, so many intermediate steps and partial actions, none of which is the crucial one, that in the end no one can be regarded as the agent. Everyone has a good conscience, because no one conscience was required at any point. Bad conscience has once and for all been transferred to moral machines, electronic oracles: those cybernetic contraptions, which are the quintessence of science, and hence of progress and of morality, have assumed all responsibility, while beings self-righteously washes their hands. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Since all these machines can do is to evaluate profits and losses, they implicitly makes the loss finite, and hence justifiable, although it is precisely this evaluation that destroys us, the evaluated ones, even before we are actually destroyed. Because responsibility has been displaced on to an object, which is regarded as “objective,” it has become a mere response; the Ought is merely the correct chess move, and the Ought Not, the wrong chess move. The cybernetic machines are interested only in determining the means that can be advantageously used in a situation defined by the factors a, b, c….n. Nothing else matters: after all, the continued existence of our World cannot be regarded as one of the factors. The question of the rightness of the goal to be achieved by the mechanically calculated means is forgotten by the operators of the machine or their employers, for instance, by those who bow to its judgment the moment it begins to calculate. To mistrust the solutions provided by the machine, for instance, to question the responses that have taken the place of responsibility, would be to question the very principle of our mechanized existence. No one would venture to create such a precedent. Even where robots are not resorted to, the monstrous undertaking is immensely facilitated by the fact that it is not carried out by individual, but by a complex and vastly ramified organization. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

If the organization of an undertaking is “all right,” and if the machines function smoothly, the performance too seems “all right” and smooth. Each participant, each intermediary, performs or has insight into only the job assigned to one; and certainly each works conscientiously. The specialized worker is not conscious of the fact that conscientious efforts of a number of specialists can add up to the most monstrous lack of conscience; just as in any other industrial enterprise one has no insight into the process as a whole. In so far as conscientia derives from scire, for instance, conscience from knowledge, such a failure to become conscious certainly points to a lack of conscience. However, this does not mean that any of the participants acts against one’s conscience, or has no conscience—such immoral possibilities are still comfortingly human, they still presuppose beings that might have a conscience. Rather, the crucial point here is that such possibilities are excluded in advance. We are here beyond both morality and immortality. To blame the participants for their lack of conscience would be as meaningless as to ascribe courage or cowardice to one’s hand. Just as a mere hand cannot be cowardly, so a mere participant cannot have conscience. The division of labor prevents one so completely from having clear insight into the productive process, that the lack of conscience we must ascribe to one is no longer an individual moral deficiency. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

And yet it may result in the death of all humankind. The action of unleashing the bomb is not merely irresponsible in the ordinary sense of the term: irresponsibility still falls within the realm of the morally discussible, while here we are confronted with something for which no one can even be held accountable. The consequences of this action are so great that the agent cannot possibly grasp them before, during, or after one’s action. Moreover, in this case there can be no goal, no positive value that can even approximately equal the magnitude of the means used to achieve it. This incommensurability of cause of effect or means and end is not in the least likely to prevent the action; on the contrary, it facilitates the action. To murder an individual is far more difficult than to throw a bomb that kills countless individuals; and we would be willing to shake hands with the perpetrator of the second rather than of the first crimes. Offenses that transcend our imagination by virtue of their monstrosity are committed more readily, for the inhibitions normally present when the consequences of a projected action are more or less calculable are no longer operative. The Biblical “They know not what they do” here assumes a new, unexpectedly terrifying meaning: the very monstrousness of the deed makes possible a new, truly infernal innocence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The situation is not entirely unfamiliar. The mass extermination under Hilter could be carried our precisely because they were monstrous—because they absolutely transcended the moral imagination of the agents, and because the moral emotions that normally precede, accompany, or follow actions could not arise int his case. However, can one speak here of “agents”? The beings who carry out such actions are always co-agents: they are either half-active and half-passive cogs in a vast mechanism, or they serve merely to touch off an effect that has been prepared in advance to the extent of 99 percent. The categories of coagent and touching off are unknown in traditional ethics. This is not to be interpreted as a justification of the German crimes. The concept of collective guilt was morally indispensable: something had to be done to prevent these crimes from being quickly forgotten. However, the concept proved inadequate because the crime in question transcended the ordinary dimensions of an immoral act; because a situation in which all perpetrators are merely co-perpetrators, and all non-perpetrator are indirectly perpetrators, requires entirely new concepts; and above all because the number of dead was too great for any kind of reaction. Just as being can produce acoustic vibrations unperceivable by the human ear, so they can perform actions that lie outside the realm of moral apperception. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

The saying of Jesus cannot authenticated by anyone as being historically true. However, every illumined being can authenticate them as being mystically true. Those who can understand the mystery of what is called by theologians (not by philosophers) the Incarnation, will understand also that the crucifixion of Jesus did not last a mere sic hours. It lasted for a whole thirty-three years. His sufferings were primarily mental, not physical. They were caused, not by the nails driven into his flesh at the end of his life, but by the evil thoughts and materialistic emotions impinging on his mind from his environment during the whole course of his life. Nonetheless, without either a Long or Short Path previous history of a being may still find oneself in the higher consciousness. This shows that Grace alone is a sufficient cause. Second, aside from the feeling of disgust with the World through failure to pass one’s school examinations, the only preparation which some undergo are falling involuntarily and profoundly into a trance state for three days. Here, these beings are pulled in away from the sense and outer awareness by a strong force. This shows that depth of inner penetration of the mind’s layers and length of period that contact is held with the Overself are the two important governors of the result attained. Go as deep as you can; stay there as long as you can; this seems to be silent message of the experience. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Sokrates was an awakener of beings. He tried to stir their minds by questions, and their conscience by revealing fresh points of view. This being who came among them to tell of a deeper kind of life that would give them unearthly peace, who sought to bless them by removing an ancient curse from their history, was rejected, yet Jesus had to do what he did, to say what he said. Human beings must learn to put the Worldly existences into the proper proportions. As one is also a human being, one should be able to reduce one’s own egoism and tranquillize one’s own desires and recast one’ sense of values until the great peace comes over one and one is enlightened. “Gather together whatsoever force ye can upon your march hither, and we will go speedily against those dissenters, in the strength of our God accord to the faith which is in us,” reports Alma 61. 17. After a certain day when she underwent an experience wherein God seemed to take out her heart and carry it away, Saint Catherine of Siena remained peaceful and contended for the rest of her life. She could not describe that inner experience but said that in it she had tasted a sweetness which made Earthly pleasures seem like mud and even spiritual pleasures seem far inferior. The miracles of Christ were an expression of special power manifested by Him in virtue of His special mission to humanity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

A Relationship Must Have a Solid Foundation on which it Can be Built—It Must Have Love, Affinity, and Trust!

October 5, 2019 12:53 am

It seemed at times that the men singing the Christmas carols made me cry. I expected the women to sing, it seemed natural, but for the men to join in, men of all ages, and to do it with such stout hearts, that seemed especially reassuring and wonderful. I cried every year. It was that and the purity of the soprano who sang ‘O Holy Night,’ and ‘What is This?’ Of course I joined in the singing myself. Nonetheless, it made me ponder on a third dimension which science has added to modern war. It has created war nerves and the war of nerves. I am not thinking about the technical conditions for a war of nerves: the camera person and the radio and the massed display strength. I am thinking of the climate in which this stage lightening flickers and is made to seem real. The last eighty years have given us a frightening show of these mental states. There is a division in the mind of each of us, that has become plain, between the being and the brute; and the rift can be opened, the being submerged, with a cynical simplicity, with the meanest tools of envy and frustration, which in my boyhood would have been thought inconceivable in a civilized society. I shall come back to this cleavage in our minds, for it is much more than an item in a list of war crimes. However, it is an item. It helps create the conditions for disaster. And I think that science has contributed to it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Science; the fact that most people are impressed by it but ignorant and helpless—all this seems to me to have contributed to the division in our minds. And scientists cannot escape the responsibility for this. They have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god. They have failed to make themselves comfortable in the talk of people in the street; no one taught them the knack, of course, but they were not keen to learn. And now they find the distance which they enjoyed has turned to distrust, and the awe has turned to fear; and people who are by no means fools really believe that we should be better off without science. These are the indictments which scientists cannot escape. Of course, they are often badly phrased, so that scientists can side-step them with generalities about the common responsibility, and who voted the credits for atomic research anyway; which are perfectly just, but not at all relevant. That is not the heart of the matter; and the people in queues and pubs are humbly groping for the heart. They are not good at saying things and they do not give model answers to interviewers. However, when we say “We have forgotten what is right,” what is in their minds is perfectly true. Science and society are out of joint. Science has given to no one in particular a power which no one in particular knows how to use. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Why do not scientists invent something sensible? Wives say it every time they stub their toe on the waste bin, and husbands say it whenever a fuse blows. Why is it the business of no one in particular to stop fitting science for death and to begin fitting it into our lives? We will agree that warlike science is no more than a by-product of a warlike society. Science has merely provided the means, for good or for bad; and society has seized it for bad. However, what are we going to do about it? The first thing to do, it seems to me, is to treat this as a scientific question: by which I mean as a practical and sensible questions, which deserves a factual approach and a reasoned answer. Now that I have apologized on behalf of scientists, and this on a scale which some of them will certainly think too ample, let us cut out what usually happens to the argument at this point, the rush of recriminations. The scientists are conscious of their mistakes; and I do not want to discuss the mistakes of non-scientists—although they have made a great many—except those which we all must begin to make good. I have said that a scientific answer must be practical as well as sensible. This really rules out at once the panaceas which also tend to run the argument into a blind alley at this stage; the panaceas which say summarily “Get rid of them.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Naturally, it does not seem to me to be sensible to get rid of scientists; but in any case, it plainly is not practical. And whatever we do with our own scientists, it very plainly is not practical to get rid of the scientists of rival nations; because if there existed the conditions for agreement among nations on this far-reaching scheme, then the conditions for war would already have disappeared. If there existed the conditions for international agreement, say to suspend all scientific research, or to abandon warlike research, or in any other way to forgo science as an instrument of nationalism—if such agreement could be reached, then they would already have disappeared. So, however we might sigh for Samuel Butler’s panacea in Erewhon, simply to give up al machines, there is no point in talking about it. I believe it would be a disaster for humankind the coming of the Dark Ages. However, there is no point in arguing this. It just is not practical, nationally or internationally. There are no panaceas at all; and we had better face that. There is nothing that we can do overnight, in a week or a month, which can straighten by a laying on of hands the ancient distortion of society. Do not let us fancy that any one of us out of the blue will concoct that stirring letter to The Times which will change the black mood of history—and the instruction to diplomats. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Putting scientist in the Cabinet will not do that, and women in the War Office (Department of Defense) will not, now will bishops in the Privy Council. There are no panaceas. We are the heirs to a tradition which has left science and society out of step. The being in the street is right: we have never learned to handle such things. Nothing will do but that we learn. However, learning is not done in a year. Our ultimate survival is in our own hands. Our survival while we are learning is a much chancier thing. We had better be realistic about that. Meanwhile we had better settle down to work for our ultimate survival; and we had better start now. We have seen that the diagnosis has turned out to be not very difficult. Science and our social habits are out of step. And the cure is no deeper either. We must learn to match them. And there is no way of learning this unless we learn to understand both. Of the two, of course, the one which is strange is science. I have already blamed the scientists for that. One has been the preacher of our age, timid, thwarted, anxious to be asked to help; and with a secret ambition to play the Grey Eminence. Through years of childhood poverty one dreamed of this. Scientific skill was a blue door beckoning to one, which would open into the society of dignitaries of the state. However, the private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does. The difficulties only of language. To grow familiar with the large ideas of science calls for patience and an effort of attention; and I hope I have shown that it repays them. For nearly three hundred years, these ideas have been applied to technical needs; and they have made our World anew, triumphantly, from top to toe. Our shoes are tanned and stitched, our clothes are spun and dyed and woven, we are lighted and carried and doctored by means which were unknow to neat Mr. Pope at Twickenham in 1740. We may not think that is much to put against the eighty thousand dead in Hiroshima, Japan, or we may. We may not think it recompenses us for the absence of any Mr. Pope from Twickenham today; we may even hold it responsible. It is certainly not a spiritual achievement. However, it has not yet tried to be. It has applied its ideas monotonously to shoe-leather and bicycle bells. And it has made a superb job of them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Compare its record in its own field with that of any other ideas of the same age: Burke’s ideas of the imagination, or Bentham’s on government, or Adam Smith on political economy. If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created something, then certainly it is the ideas of science. We may think that all that science has created is comfort; and it certainly has done that—the very word “comfortable” in the modern sense dates from the Industrial Revolution. However, we always stopped to think what science has done not to our mode of living but to our life? We talk about research for death, the treat of war and the number of civilians who get killed. However, have we always weighed this against the increase in out own life span? Let us do a small sum. The number of people killed in Great Britain in six years of war by German bomb, flying bombs, and V2’s was sixty thousand. They were an average lot of people, which means that on an average they lost half their expectation of life. Quite an easy long division shows that the effect of this in our population of fifty million people shorten the average span of life by less than one tenth of one percent. This is considerably less than a fortnight. Put this on the side. And on the credit side, we know that in the last hundred and sixty years the average span of life in California has increased by forty years. That is this the price of science, take it or leave it—a fortnight for forty years. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

And these forty years have been created by applying to daily life, to clothing and bedding, to hygiene and infection, to birth and death, the simple ideas of science—the fundamental ideas I have been talking about: order, cause, and chance. If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created life, it is the ideas of science. We have not neglected these ideas altogether in our social organization. However, it is a point I have made several times, we have got hopelessly behind with them. The idea of order is now old enough to have reached at least our filing cabinets. The idea of cause and effect has entered our habits, until it has become the new a priori in the making of administrative plans. The difficulty is to dislodge it, now that it is hardening into a scholastic formula. For the idea which has given a new vigor to science in our generation is larger than the machinery of cause and effect. It stipulates no special mechanism between the present and the future. It is content to predict the future, without insisting that the computation must follow the steps of causal law. I have called this idea of chance, because its method is statistical, and because it recognizes that every prediction carries with its own measurable uncertainty. A good prediction is one which defines its area of uncertainty; a bad prediction ignores it. And at the bottom this is no more than the return to the essentially empirical, the experimental nature of science. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Science is a great many things, and I have called them a great many names; but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we think. When we have faced our Worldly problems, it needs more courage than we have ever found. This is how society has lost touch with science: because it has hesitated to judge itself by the same impersonal code of what works and what does not. We have clung to Adam Smith and Burke, or have agitated for Plato or Aquinas, through wars and famine, through rising and falling birth-rates, and through libraries of learned argument. And in the end, our eyes have always wandered from the birth-rate to the argument: from the birth-rate to what we have wanted to believe. Here is the crux of what I have been saying. Here is our ultimate hope of saving ourselves from extinction. We must learn to understand that the content of all knowledge is empirical; that its test is whether it works; and we must learn to act on that understanding in the World as well as in the laboratory. This message of science: our ideas must be realistic, flexible, unbigoted—they must be human, they must create their own authority. If any idea have a claim to be called creative, because they have liberated that creative impulse, it is the ideas of science. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

This is not only a material code. On the contrary, my hope is that it may heal the spiritual cleft which two wars have uncovered. I have seen in my lifetime an abyss open in the human mind: a gulf between the endeavor to be human, and the relish in being brute. The scientist has indeed had a hand in this, and every other specialist too, with one’s prim detachment and one’s oracular airs. However, of course, the large strain which has opened this fault is social. We have made beings live in two halves, a Sunday half and a workday half. We have ordered them to love their neighbor and to turn the other cheek, in a society which has constantly compelled them to shoulder their neighbor aside and to turn their backs. So we have created a savage sense of failure which, as we know now to our cost, can be tapped with an ease which is frightening; and which can thrust up, with explosive force, a symbol to repeat to an unhappy people its most degrading dream. Can science heal that neurotic flaw in us? If science cannot, then nothing can. Let us stop pretending. There is no cure in high moral precepts. We have preached them too long to beings who are forced to live how they can: that makes the strain which they have not been able to bear. We need an ethic which is moral and which works. It is often said that science has destroyed our values and put nothing in their place. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

What has really happened of course is that science has sown in harsh relief the division between our values and our World. We have not begun to let science get into our heads; where then was it supposed to create these values? We have used it as a machine without will, the conjured spirit to the chores. I believe that science can create values: and will create them precisely as literature does, by looking into the human personality; by discovering what divides it and what cements it. That is how great writer have explored human beings, and this whether they themselves as being have been driven by the anguish of Akasha in Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned or by the sympathy of Marius in Anne Rice’s Blood and Gold. The insight of science is not different from that of the arts. Science will create values, I believe, and discover virtues, when it looks into being; when it explores what makes one human and not an animal, and what makes one’s societies human and not animal packs. I believe that we can reach this unity in our culture. The nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science. Rembrandt was the contemporary of Huygens and Spinoza. At that very time, Isaac Newton walked with Dryden and Christopher Wren. We know that our is a remarkable age of science with the new 5 G internet. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Science is for us to use to broaden and liberate culture. These are the marks of science: that it is open for all to hear, and all are free to speak their minds in it. They are marks of the World at its best, and the human spirit at its most challenging. One distinguishing characteristic of the encounter is the degree of intensity, or what I would call passion. I am not referring here to the quantity of emotion. I mean a quality of commitment, which may be present in little experiences—such as a brief glance out the window at a tree—that do not necessarily involve any great quantity of emotion. However, these temporally brief experiences may have a considerable significance for the sensitive person, here viewed as the person with the capacity for passion. Students these days have a great deal of talent, but they lack passion and commitment. Interestingly enough, my men students get married early for reasons of security and become dependent on their wives, and often it is only through their wives that I, as their teacher, can draw out their talent. The fact that talent is plentiful but passion is lacking seems to me to be a fundamental facet of the problem of creativity in many fields today, and our ways of approaching creativity by evading the encounter have played directly into this trend. We worship technique—talent—as a way of evading the anxiety of the direct encounter. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

When passion has been obliterated in favor of learning, the present writer can easily foresee one’s fate in an age, in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the boon can easily be perused during an afternoon nap. Agnostic positivism—this doctrine tells us, we have no right to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the Universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interest. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is in accessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen World contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be one’s wisest cue. However, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologist tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involved conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. #RandolpHarris 13 of 19

If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire as if it were still warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as I believed there were no deed. And so if I must not believe that the World is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, that most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer folly of strict and rigid doctrines to say that our inner interest can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden World may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner interest have proved prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematic harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies are possessed hidden between all the cogs, sprockets, and interstices of the crude natural World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not know: we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes the with Dr. Darwin’s accidental variations. However, the inner need of believing that this World of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of may generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible Universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible Universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic “thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence” is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind. If the study of the uniqueness of the individual does not fit into what we know of science, then so much the worse for that conception of science. It, too, will have to endure re-creation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Phenomenology has a history in American psychological thinking, but on the whole I think it has languished. The European phenomenologists with their excruciatingly careful and laborious demonstrations, can reteach us that the best way of understanding another human being, or at least a way necessary for some purposes, is to get into one’s Weltanschauung and to be able to see one’s World through another’s eyes. Of course such conclusion is rough on any positivistic philosophy of science. The existentialist stress on the ultimate aloneness of the individual is a useful reminder for us, not only to work out further the concepts of decisions, or responsibility, of choice, of self-creation, or autonomy, or identity itself. It also makes more problematic and more fascinating the mystery of communication between alone-ness via, for example, intuition and empathy, love and altruism, identification with others, and homonymy in general. We take these for granted. If we regarded them as miracles to be explained, it would be better. Another preoccupation of existentialist writers can be phrased very simply, I think. It is the dimension of seriousness and profundity of living (or perhaps the tragic sense of life) contrasted with the shallow and superficial life, which is a kind of diminished living, a defense against the ultimate problem of life. This is not just a literary concept. It has a real operational meaning, for instance, in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

I (and others) have been increasingly impressed with the fact that tragedy can sometimes be therapeutic, and that therapy often seems to work best when people are driven into it by pain. It is when the shallow life does not work that it is questioned and that there occurs a call to fundamentals. Shallowness in psychology does not work either as the existentialists are demonstrating very clearly. He existentialists along with many other groups are helping to teach us about the limits of verbal, analytic, conceptual rationality. They are part of the current call back to raw experience as prior to any concepts or abstractions. This amounts to what I believe to be justified critique of the whole way of thinking in the Western World in the 21st century, including orthodox positivistic science and philosophy, both of which badly need re-examination. Possibly most important of all the changes to be wrought by the phenomenologists and existentialists is an overdue revolution in the theory of science. I should not say “wrought by” but rather “helped along by,” because there are many other forces helping to destroy official philosophy of science or scientism. It is not only the Cartesian split between subject and object that needs to be overcome. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

There are other radical changes made necessary by the inclusion of the psyche and of raw experience in reality, and such a change will affect not only the science of psychology but all other sciences as well, for example, parsimony, simplicity, precision, orderliness, logic, elegance, definition, and so forth, are all the realm of abstraction rather than of experience. I close with the stimulus that has most powerfully affected me in the existentialist literature, namely, the problem of future time in psychology. Not that this, like all the other problems or pushes I have mentioned up to this point, was totally unfamiliar to me nor, I imagine, to any serious student of the theory of personality. We should be sensitized to the necessity of grappling with and systematizing the dynamic role of the future in the presently existing personality, for example, growth and becoming and possibly necessarily point toward the future; so do the concepts of potentiality and hoping, and of wishing and imagining; reduction to the concrete is a loss of future; threat and apprehension point to the future (no future = no neurosis); self-actualization is meaningless without reference to a currently active future; life can be a gestalt in time, and so forth and so on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

And yet the basic and central importance of this problem of the existentialists has something to teach us. I think it fair to say that no theory of psychology will ever be complete which does not centrally incorporate the concept that beings have a future within one, dynamically active at this present moment. In this sense the future can be treated as a-historical sense. Also we must realize that only the future is in principle unknown and unknowable, which means that all habits, defenses and coping mechanisms are doubtful and ambiguous since they are based on past experience. Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, only the one who can face novelty with confidence without fear. I am convinced that much of what we now call psychology is the study of tricks we used to avoid the anxiety of absolute novelty by making believe the future will be like the past. “Remember to learn wisdom in thy youth; yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goes let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.35-36. Sometimes the literal form of expressions tends to be taken as the whole of the truth and the inner reality is missed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

Randolph Harris II International Institute