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All Along What We Wanted Was this Experience of Ecstasy, this Sense of Our Own Significance!

September 11, 2019 1:17 am

In the nights that followed I could not resist visiting Rome, though Avicus and Mael both advised me not to do it. They feared that I did not know how long I had slept, but I knew. Almost a hundred years had passed. I found the grand buildings of Imperial glory fallen to ruin, overrun with animals, and being used as quarries for those who came to take the stone. Huge statues had been toppled over and lay in the weeds. My old street was unrecognizable. And the population had dwindled to no more than a few thousand. At the heat of our violence, in act or in feeling, lies the wish to show ourselves beings with a will. However, the complexity of society makes the being lose heart. Nothing one does any longer seems a skill to be proud of in a World where someone else always hits the headlines. This is a plausible picture, in despair of which beings cheerfully join any private army which will offer them the ambivalent identity of a uniform: the right to salute and be saluted. One of the reasons we have made so little progress in our mitigating of violence is that we have determinedly overlooked the elements in it that are attractive, alluring, and fascinating. Our minds tend to castrate the topic in the very act of understanding it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

When a congress member delivers a tirade against violence, one seems to forget entirely that as a child he or she ran after fire engines, he or she was fascinated by pictures of bullfights, enjoyed Westerns, and one also shared the strange combination of allure and horror which leads people to crowd around accidents. We deny with our minds the secret love of violence, which is present in all of us in some form, at the same time as we perform violent acts with our bodies. By repressing the awareness of the fact of violence, we can thus secretly give ourselves over to the enjoyment of it. If we were to admit the reality of this secret love, this seems to be a necessary human defense against the deeper emotional implications we would have to face. At the outset of every war, for example, we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the diamonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome psychological and spiritual questions that war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves. I shall lump these alluring and fascinating elements together under the term “ecstasy.” The word may seem strange, partly because in common parlance it is pegged at a high level of intensity: we go into ecstasy over a new Cresleigh home, a new BMW 4 series, or we become ecstatic upon winning a million dollars in the lottery. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

However, the historical meaning of the word ecstasy leaves the question of intensity of emotion entirely open. Coming from the Greek ekotaois, ecstasy means etymologically to stand out of one’s self. The experience that takes one beyond one’s self, beyond conventional ego boundaries, and gives one a new and enlarged awareness of the self—such as Hindu or Buddhist meditation—is legitimately called ecstatic, although its intensity may not be quantitatively great. Aesthetic experiences or moments in love are commonly spoken as ecstatic. The experience of being worth, of knowing that other people change because of your influence, also gives you the feeling of being beyond yourself—in other words, a kind of ecstasy of low intensity. Hence I have used, for these experiences of lesser intensity, the phrase “sense of significance.” That violence is often associated wit ecstatic experiences is seen in our using the same phrases for both. We say a person is beside one’s self with rage; one is possessed by power. There also occurs a self-transcendence in violence which is like the self-transcendence in ecstatic experiences. The total absorption, furthermore, that is present in violence is also present in ecstasy. In our day of anti-intellectualism, when there is a reaction against all things sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, the absorption of the self in violence is especially attractive. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In what ways does violence yield for us this experience of ecstasy, this sense of significance? When a lightrail train was stopped in Sacramento, police tried to arrest those who had jumped on [the train]. As they moved to grab people, suspects split in all directions—only three or four were caught. They ran, yipping and whooping, away from the tracks and through the streets, like a bunch of crazy expletives. They considered themselves victorious warriors. They were ecstatic. They had stopped the lightrail train. They stopped the war machine dead in its tracks. Whatever one’s impression, this is surely an experience of the ecstasy of violence. A less dramatic example, but one containing some of the ingredients of ecstasy in their embryonic form, comes from my own experience in graduate school. Several young African Americans in California had been accused of sexual assault and had been lynched by a mod without a semblance of a trial. A clergyman in New York had, in a sermon, commended the lynching. As a result a group of us decided to picket the church the following Sunday morning. The incident would not be worth relating expect for the fact of the excitement, even joy, that went hand in hand with our anxiety on this occasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Painting the signs the night before, organizing the march, feeling the solidarity with the others—comrades who would walk beside me in this cause, the rightness of which we had no doubt—all of these activities has an element of ecstasy. I recall walking home late at night after these preparations and finding, when I was alone, that questions and doubts came into my mind as to the effectiveness of our proposes course. However, no! My comrades and I had decided, and I must not let them down. We expected some opposition in the form of mounted police (which actually occurred); we hoped it would not be too violent but great enough to make an impression on the news media. We also secretly hoped for opposition because that would give an added cohesion to our group and would even add to our ecstasy. An extreme emphasis on individual responsibility can become an egocentric manipulation of others, a compulsion that defeats genuine mortality and yields only a counterfeit sense of significance. Most Americans are oppressed by the sense of individual responsibility, not only for general humanitarian reasons but for reasons specific to our own nation. An American receives very little assistance from one’s culture in carrying this responsibility. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Americans have no sacraments like penance, no rituals like confession (except in psychoanalysis for the few) to help free them from the burden of the past. The whole weight rests on the shoulders of the individual, and we have already seen that one feels powerless. Perhaps this accounts for the moralistic and picayune forms that responsibility tends to take: in the past it centered on not smoking and not drinking, and now it centers on not stepping on insects and not throwing away anything made of plastic. In any case a person cannot carry the burden of responsibility for one’s own moral salvation without a corresponding depth of culture to give one structure. Otherwise one will end up feeling isolated, lonely, and separated from others. This emerging sense of ecstasy in a successful rebellion accounts for some importance changes in the character of the rebellion itself. The typical rebellion normally begins with highly moral aims—the students at Berkeley, for example, proclaimed their opposition to the unhuman facelessness of the modern factory-university. However, with the state of ecstasy which accompanies the initial success, the psychological character and meaning of the rebellion change. A new elan is added. For many, the goal of the rebellion now becomes the ecstasy itself rather then the original conditions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The rebellion has become the high point in the lives of many of the rebels, and they seem dimly aware that they will never have that much sense of significance again. This often leads to an elaboration and multiplying of the original conditions that the administration, be it of a university or a prison, is asked to meet. The rebels are saying, in this action, that the conditions originally set are no longer the main reason for rebellion. Hence, at Brandeis, the university president remained in his office during the week of the African American sit-in to negotiate with the rebels, and each day the African Americans sent over a different bargaining committee with different conditions. It is as though they were saying by this action: “Can you not see that this rebellion means much more to us than the specific conditions?” This also accounts for the curious presentation of the condition of amnesty, which obviously cannot be granted without complete capitulation on the part of the administration. I interpret this as saying: “All along what we wanted was this experience of ecstasy, this sense of our own significance.” The ecstasy may reach such a pitch that it approaches Malcolm X’s concept of “revolutionary suicide.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The value of the group contrasted with the individual must also be mentioned. The group is constituted around issues that are, to the participant, of life-and-death importance. The question about any group is: What is its psychic center—to what is it devoted? The deep need of a being not to feel lost and lonely in the World has, of course, been previously satisfied by the concept of a God who has created this World and is concerned with each and every creature. When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of humans feel wit it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory. However, for many of those whom God was dethroned, the need for a godlike figure did not disappear. Some proclaimed a new God, Evolution, and worshipped Darwin as one’s profit. For many, Darwin had revealed the ultimate truth regarding the origin of all beings; all human phenomena which might be approached and explained by economic, religious, ethical, or political consideration were to be understood from the point of view of evolution. This quasi-religious attitude toward Darwinism becomes apparent when the term “the great constructors,” is used referring to selection and mutation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The methods and aims of the great constructors are used very much in the way a Christian might speak of God’s acts. When the singular for of the great constructor is used, one is coming even closer to the analogy with God. We know that in the evolution of vertebrates, the bond of personal love and friendship was the epoch-making invention created by the great constructors when it became necessary for two or more individuals of an aggressive species to live peacefully together and to work for a common end. We know that human society is built on the foundation of this bound, but we have to recognize the fact that the bond has become too limited to encompass all that it should: it prevents aggression only between those who know each other and are friends, while obviously it is all active hostility between all beings of all nations or ideologies that must be stopped. The obvious conclusion is that love and friendship should embrace all humanity, that we should love all our human brothers and sister and cousins indiscriminately. This commandment is not new. Our reason is quite able to understand its necessity as our feeling is able to appreciate its beauty, but nevertheless, made as we are, we are unable to obey it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We can feel the full, warm emotion of friendship and love for individuals, and the utmost exertion of willpower cannot alter this fact. However, the great constructors can, and I believe they will. I believe in the power of human reason, as I believe in the power of natural selection. I believe that reason can and will exert a selection pressure in the right direction. I believe that this, in the not too distant future, will endow our descendants with the faculty of fulfilling the greatest and most beautiful of all commandments. The great constructors will win out, where God and beings have failed. The commandment of brotherly love has to remain ineffective, but the great constructors will give it life. This ends in a true confession of faith: I believe, I believe, I believe…reason is one of the strengths human beings have which alone will save them from confusion and decay. Genuinely the need for self-knowledge, by uncovering one’s unconscious strivings, is necessary. We can overcome the loss of God by turning to reason—and feel painfully weak. However, we must not turn to new idols. Many people who worship Satan speak of how the Devil is their Ruler and how through serving him, they serve Christ. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Why have these assertions, that were so central at the time the gospel was first preached, lost their significance in our own periods? The reason, I believe is possessed in the words “healing” and “casting out demons,” that have been misunderstood as miracle-healing, based on magic power and magic self-suggestions. There is no doubt that such phenomena occur. They happen here, and everywhere else in the World. They happen and are used in the midst of Christianity. However, the church was right when it felt that this was not the task of the church and its ministers. It is an abuse of the name of the Christ to use it as a magic formula. Nevertheless, the words of our test remain valid. They belong to the message of the Christ, and they tell us about something that belongs to the Christ as the Christ—the power to conquer the demonic forces that control our lives, mind and body. And I believe that, of all the different ways to communicate the message of Christ to others, this way will prove to be the most adequate for the people of our time. It is something they can understand. For in every country of the World, including our own, there is an awareness of the power of evil as has not existed for centuries. If we look at our period as a whole, we will realize that not only special groups fall under the judgment of Jesus’ ironic words—“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

In spite of the many who resist this insight, we know that we are sick, that we are not whole. The central message for our contemporaries, including ourselves, the message awaited by many both within and outside our congregations is the good news of the healing power that is in the World and whose expression is the Christ. The task of healing demands of you insight into the nature of life and the human situation. People often ask, in passionate despair, if sickness is one of the things to be healed by divine order, why the divine order of things includes sickness? This very natural question, which, for many of us, is the stumbling block of our faith, points to the riddle of evil in the World of God. You will have to deal with this question more often than with any other. And you must not avoid the question by retiring being the term “mystery.” Of course, there is mystery—divine mystery—and, in contrast to it, the mystery of evil. However, it belongs to the insights demanded of you that you put the mystery in its right pace, and explain what can and must be explained. Evil in the divine order is not only mystery; it is also revelation. It reveals the greatness and danger of life. One who can become sick is greater than one who cannot, than that which is bound to remain what it is, unable to be split in itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Memory is desperate to leave us. Memory knows that we cannot endure its company. Memory would reduce us to fools. Ah, listen to old mortals when they have nothing but memories of childhood. How they go on mistaking those persons around them for persons long dead, and no one listens. How often I have wondered at their long uninterrupted conversations with ghost in empty rooms. I think it is very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from the beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force. Christianity, at one time, was considered a great mystery, a little cult, which had begun in Jerusalem of all place, and grew to such tremendous size. However, when some first heard Christians preaching, they thought there was no chance that this religion could gain ground because it placed far too much responsibility upon the new members to avoid all contact with the revered gods of Greece and Rome, and many thought the sect would soon die out. However, no such thing happened, and Rome in the three hundreds was thronged with Christians. For their apparently magical ceremonies, they met in the catacombs and also in private homes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

One who alone is fee is able to surrender to the demonic forces that turn one’s freedom into bondage. The gift of freedom implies the danger of servitude; and the abundance of life implies the danger of sickness. Human’s life is abundant life, infinitely complex, inexhaustivle in its possibilities, even in the vitally poorest human beings. Being’s life is most open to disease. For in being’s life more than in any other being, there are divergent trends that must continuously be kept in unity. Health is not the lack of divergent trends in our bodily or mental or spiritual life, but the power to keep them united. And healing is the act of reuniting them after the disruption of their unity. “Heal the sick” means—help them to regain their lost unity without depriving them of their abundance, without throwing them into a poverty of life perhaps by their own consent. For there is a sick desire to escape sickness by cutting off what can produce sickness. I have known people who are sick only because of their fear of sickness. Sometimes it may be necessary to reduce the richness of life, and to establish a poorer life on a smaller basis. However, this in itself is not health. It is the most widespread mental disease. It can be transformed into health only if what is lost on a lower level is regained on a higher level, perhaps on the highest level—that of our infinite concern, our life with God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Many are satisfied if they can attain just a glimpse of the Overself. However, a few are not. They seek permanent abidance in the Overself, and that in the greatest possible degree. However, the main object of the quest is, after all, not these secondary betterments in bodily health, nerve, character, self-control—welcome as they are—but the discovery of truth and the living within the presence of the divine. There is no such thing as an ever-receding goal on the Ultimate Path because there are not ten or twenty ultimate truths. There is only a single, final truth. This is the objective on this path and once one knows it one has attained the goal. We must reflect in the mind and act the true being of beings. If one thinks the goal of all tis endeavour is merely to become frozen into passivity which never expresses itself and a contentment which never sees the miseries, the disasters, or the tragedies of life, they are mistaken. One seeks to fulfil a steady purpose which remains and is not an emotional froth which abates and later vanishes. There is a wide confusion in religio-mystic circles as to what a sage is really like, what a spiritually enlightened master really experiences, what both say and do when living in the World of ordinary people, how they behave and appear. On these points truth is inextricably bound up with superstition, fact with exaggeration, and wisdom with sentimentality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

There is also a wide confusion of the Real with its attributes and aspects, that is to say, with human reactions, interpretations, and experiences of IT. The conventional picture of what a being attuned to God is like needs to be revised. It is not the invisible imprimatur of any pontifical canonization that really makes a being one of God’s saints but the invisible imprimatur of one’s Overself. There is no higher point in human existence. Without direct experience of the inner nature of things, without personal revelation from the Overself, the only kind of knowledge beings can possess is obtained by the use of logical thinking assisted by memory. The cosmogony of a sage is truly scientific, for it is exactly descriptive of what really exists whereas the other kind of knowledge is merely argumentative. Philosophy uses the attained being not as a god for groveling worship and blind obedience, but as an ideal for effectual admiration and reverent analysis. To worship one as a god, to put him beyond all possible criticism, will only confuse our thought about him and obstruct our understanding of one. “And now it came to pass that Alma, having seen the afflictions of the humble followers of God, and the persecutions which were heaped upon them by the remainder of one’s people, and seeing all their inequality, began to be very sorrowful; nevertheless the Spirit of the Lord did not fail him,” reports Alma 4.15. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

One Seeks to Fulfill a Steady Purpose which Remains and is Not an Emotional Froth which Abates and Later Vanishes

September 10, 2019 2:09 am

Ah, what a spectacle! Amid dozens of little candle stubs and Earthen lamps full of burning fat, there stood a propped some twenty or more ikons, some very old and darkened in their gold frames, and some radiant, as though only yesterday they had come alive through the power of God. We now consider some dilemmas which arise from the relation of the unconscious to techniques and machines. No discussion of creativity and the unconscious in our society can possible avoid these difficult and important problems. We live in a World that has become mechanized to an amazingly high degree. Irrational unconscious phenomena are always a threat to this mechanization. Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line. Mechanization requires uniformity, predictability, and orderliness; and the very fact that unconscious phenomena are original and irrational is already an inevitable threat to the bourgeois order and uniformity. This is one reason people in our modern Western civilization have been afraid of unconscious and irrational experience. For the potentialities that surge up in them from deeper mental wells simply do not fit the technology which has become so essential for our World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

What people today do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious World. This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or techniques or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then tools become a defense mechanisms—specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness that we call the unconscious. Our mechanisms and technology then make us uncertain in the impulses of the spirit. Western civilization since the Renaissance has centrally emphasized techniques and mechanics. Thus it is understandable that the creative impulses of ourselves and our forefathers, again since the Renaissance, should have been channeled into the making of technical things—creativity directed toward the advance and application of science. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Such channeling of creativity into technical pursuits is appropriate on one level but serves as a psychological defense on a deeper level. This means that technology will be clung to, believed in, and depended on far beyond its legitimate sphere, since it also serves as a defense against our fears of irrational phenomena. Thus the very success of technological creativity—and that its success is magnificent does not need to be heralded by me—is a threat to its own existence. For if we are not open to the unconscious, irrational, and transrational aspects of creativity, then our science and technology have helped to block us off from what I shall call creativity of the spirit. By this I mean creativity that has noting to do with technical use; I mean creativity in art, poetry, music, and other areas that exist for our delight and the deepening and enlarging of meaning in our lives rather than for making money or for increasing technical power. To the extent that we lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific creativity. Scientists themselves, particularly the physicists, have told us that the creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the free, pure sense. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In modern physics it is very clear that the discoveries that later become utilized for our technological gains are generally made in the first place because a physicist lets his imagination go and discovers something simply for the joy of discovery. However, this always runs the risk of radically upsetting our previously nicely worked-out theories, as it did when Einstein introduced his theory of relativity, and Heisenberg introduced his principle of indeterminacy. My point here is more than the conventional distinction between pure and applied science. The creativity of the spirit does and must threaten the structure and presuppositions of our rational, orderly society and way of life. Unconscious, irrational urges are bound by their very nature to be a threat to our rationality, and the anxiety we experience thereupon is inescapable. I am proposing that the creativity coming from the preconscious and unconscious is not only important for art and poetry and music; but is essential in the long run also for our science. To shrink from the anxiety this entails, and block off the threatening new insights and forms this engenders, is not only to render our society banal and progressively more empty, but also to cut off as well the headwaters in the rough and rocky mountains of the stream that later becomes the river of creativity in our science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

The new physicists and mathematicians, for fairly obvious reasons, have been furthest ahead in realizing this interrelation between unconscious, irrational illumination and scientific discovery. Let me now give an illustration of the problem we face. In the several times I have been on television, I have been struck by two different feelings. One was wonder at the fact that my words, spoken in the studio, could be delivered instantaneously into the living rooms of two million people. The other was that whenever I got an original idea, whenever in these programs I began to struggle with some unformed, new concept, whenever I had an original thought that might cross some frontier of the discussion, at that point I was cut off. I have no resentment against emcees who do this; they know their business, and they realize that if what goes on in the program does not fit in the World of listeners all the way from Georgia to Wyoming, the viewers will get up, go to the kitchen, get a can of beer, come back, and switch on a Western. When you have the potentialities for tremendous mass communication, you inevitably tend to communicate on the level of the two-million people who are listening. What you say must have some place in their World, must at least be partly known to them. Inevitably, then, originality, the breaking of frontiers, the radical newness of ideas and images are at best dubious and at worst totally unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Mass communication—wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued—presents us with a serious danger, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in al the cities of the country. This very fact throws considerable weight on the side of regularity and uniformity and against originality and freer creativity. By the middle of the 19^th century: individualism had begun to be replaced by collective forms of economic and political life; harmony of interests by inharmonious struggle of classes and organized pressures; rational discussions undermined by expert decisions on complicated issues, by recognition of the interested bias of argument by vested positions; and by the discovery of the effectiveness of irrational appeal to the citizen. Moreover, certain structural changes of modern society, which we shall presently consider, had begun to cut off the public from the power of active decision. The transformation of public into mass is of particular concern to us, for it provides an important clue to the meaning of the power elite. If that elite is truly responsible to, or even exists in connection with, a community of publics, it carries a very different meaning than if such a public is being transformed into a society of masses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The United States of America today is not altogether a mass society, and it has never been altogether a community of publics. These phrases are names for extreme types; they point to certain features of reality, but they are themselves constructions; social reality is always some sort of mixture of the two. Yet we cannot readily understand just how much of which is mixed into our situation if we do not first understand, in terms of explicit dimensions, the clear-cut and extreme types: If we are to grasp the differences between public and mass, at least four dimensions must be attended to. There is first, the ratio of the givers of opinion to the receivers, which is the simplest way to state the social meaning of the formal media of mass communication. More than anything else, it is the shift in this ratio which is central to the problems of the public and of public opinion in latter-day phases of democracy. At one extreme on the scale of communication, two people talk personally with each other; at the opposite extreme, one spokes person talks impersonally through a network of communications to millions of listeners and viewers. In between these extremes there are assemblages and political rallies, parliamentary sessions, law-court debates, small discussion circles dominated by one being, open discussion circles with talk moving freely back and forth among fifty people, and so on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The second dimension to which we must pay attention is the possibility of answering back an opinion without internal or external reprisals being taken. Technical conditions of the means of communication, in imposing a lower ratio of speakers to listeners, may obviate the possibility of freely answering back. Informal rules, resting upon conventional sanction and upon the informal structure of opinion leadership, may govern who can speak, when, and for how long. Such rules may or may not be in congruence with formal rules and with institutional sanctions which govern the process of communication. In the extreme case, we may conceive of an absolute monopoly of communication to pacified media groups whose members cannot answer back even in private. At the opposite extreme, the condition may allow and the rules may uphold the wide and symmetrical formations of opinion. We must also consider the relation of the formation of opinion to its realization in social action, the ease with which opinion is effective in the shaping of decisions of powerful consequences. This opportunity for people to act out their opinions collectively is of course limited by their positions in the structure of power. This structure may be such as to limit decisively this capacity, or it may allow or invite such action. It may confine social action to local areas or it may enlarge the area of opportunity; it may make action intermittent or more or less continuous. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

There is, finally, the degree to which institutional authority, with its sanctions and controls, penetrates the public. Here the problem is the degree to which the public has genuine autonomy from instituted authority. Atone extreme, no agent of formal authority moves among the autonomous public. At the opposite extreme, the public is terrorized into uniformity by the infiltration of information and the universalization of suspicion. One thinks of the late Nazi street-and-block system, the eighteenth-century Japanese Kumi, the Soviet cell structure. In the extreme, the formal ebb and flow of influence by discussion which is thus killed off. By combining these several points, we can construct little models or diagrams of several types of societies. Since the problem of public opinion as we know it is set by the eclipse of the classic bourgeois public, we are here concerned with only two types: public and mass. In a public, as we may understand the term, virtually as many people express opinions as receive them. Public communications are so organized that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion formed by such discussion readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against—if necessary—the prevailing system of authority. And authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When these conditions prevail, we have the working model of a community of publics, and this model fits closely the several assumptions of classical democratic theory. At the opposite extreme, in a mass, far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media. The communications that prevail are so organized that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect. The realization of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organize and control the channels of such action. The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion. The public and the mass maybe most readily distinguished by their dominant modes of communication: in a community of publics, discussion is the ascendant means of communication, and the mass media, if they exist, simply enlarge and animate discussion, linking one primary public with the discussion of another. In a mass society, the dominant type of communication is the formal media, and the publics become mere media markets: all those exposed to the contents of given mass media. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

When we look upon the public from almost any angle of vision that we might answer, we realize that we have moved a considerable distance along the road to the mass society. At the end of that road there is totalitarianism, as in Nazi Germany or in Communist China. We are not yet at the end. In the Untied States of America today, media markets are not entirely ascendant over primary publics. However, surely we can see that many aspects of the public life of our times are more the features of a mass society than of a community. What is happening might again be stated in terms of the historical parallel between the economic market and the public of public opinion. In brief, there is a movement from widely scattered little powers to concentrated powers and the attempt at monopoly control from powerful centers, which being partially hidden, are centers of manipulation as well as of authority. The small shop serving the neighborhood is replaced by the anonymity of the national corporation: mass advertisement replaces the personal influence of opinion between merchant and customer. The political leader hooks up one’s speech to a national network and speaks, with appropriate personal touches, to a million people he never saw and never will see. Entire brackets of professions and industries are in the opinion business, impersonally manipulating the public for hire. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The craving for affection may be restricted to certain groups of persons, perhaps to one with which there are interests in common, such as a political or religious group; or it may be restricted to one of the genders. If the need for reassurance is restricted to the opposite gender the condition may superficially appear to be normal, and will usually be defended as normal by the person concerned. There are women, for example, who, if they do not have men around them, feel miserable and anxious; they will start an affair, break it off after short time, again feel miserable and anxious, start another affair, and so on. That this is no genuine longing for relationship with men is shown by the fact that the relationships are conflicting and unsatisfactory. Rather, these women choose indiscriminately any man; they want only to have one near them, and are not found of any of them. And as a rule they do not even find physical satisfaction. In reality, of course, the entire picture is more complicated; I am highlighting only that art which is played in it by anxiety and the need for affection. One may find similar pattern in men; they will have a compulsion to be liked by any woman and will feel uneasy in the company of other men. If the need for affection is concentrated on the same gender, this may be one of the determining factors in latent or manifest homosexuality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

If the way to the opposite gender is barred by too much anxiety, the need for affection may be directed toward the same gender. Needless to say, this anxiety need not be manifest, but may be concealed by a feeling of disgust or disinterest concerning the opposite gender. Since getting affection is of vital importance it follows that the neurotic will pay any price for it, mostly without realizing that one is doing so. The most common ways in which the price is paid are an attitude of compliance and an emotional dependence. The complying attitude may take the form of not daring to disagree with or to criticize the other person, of showing nothing but devotion, admiration and docility. If persons of this type do allow themselves to make critical or derogatory remarks they feel anxiety, even though their remarks may be harmless. The complying attitude can go so far that the neurotic will extinguish not only aggressive impulses but all tendencies toward self-assertion, will let oneself be abused and will make any sacrifice, no matter how detrimental this may be. One’s self-abnegation may appears as, for example, a wish to have bipolar disorder because the person whose affection one desires is interested in research in bipolar disorder, implying that having this illness might perhaps win the other’s interest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Closely akin to the attitude of compliance, and interwoven with it, is the emotional dependence which results from the neurotic’s need to cling to someone who holds out the promise of protection. This dependence not only may cause endless suffering but may even be wholly destructive. There are relationships, for example, in which a person becomes helplessly dependent on another, even through one is fully aware that the relationship is untenable. If one does not get a kind work or smile, one feels as if the World would go to pieces, one may even have an attack of anxiety at the time one expects a telephone call, and feel utterly desolate if the other is prevented from seeing one. However, one is unable to break away. In the primary public the competition of opinions goes on between people holding views in the service of their interests and their reasoning. However, in the mass society of media markets, competition, if any, goes on between the manipulators with their mass media on the one hand, and the people receiving their propaganda on the other. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that there should arise a conception of public opinion as a mere reaction—we cannot say response—to the content of the mass media. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

In this view, the public is merely the collectivity of individuals each rather passively exposed to the mass media and rather helplessly opened up to the suggestion and manipulations that flow from these media. The fact of manipulation from centralized points of control constitutes, as it were, an expropriation of the old multitude of little opinion producers and consumers operating in a free and balanced market. Usually the structure of an emotional dependence is more complicated. In relationships in which one person becomes dependent on the other there is invariably a great deal of resentment. The dependent person resents being enslaved; one resents having to comply, but continues to do so out of fear of losing support from and individual or the masses. Not knowing that it is one’s own anxiety which creates the situation, one will easily assume that one’s subjugation has been brought about by the other’s imposing on one. Resentment growing on such a basis has to be repressed, because the affection of the other is bitterly needed, and this repression in turn generates new anxiety, with a subsequent need for reassurance and hence a reinforced impulse to cling to the other. Thus in certain neurotic persons emotional dependence produces a very realistic and even justified fear that their life is being ruined. When the fear is very great they may seek to protect themselves against this dependence by not attaching themselves to anyone. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The thirst for perfection is certainly present within us. This thirst is a pointer to its eventual slaking. However, there is no necessary implication that this will be attained whilst we are in the flesh and on a level of existence where everything is doomed to decay and death. The perfection we seek and the immortality we hope for are more likely to be mental rather than physical achievements. For all mystics are at least agreed that there is such a level of untainted, purely spiritual being. The fundamental task of beings is first to free themselves of animalist and egotist tyrannies, and second, to evolve into awareness of one’s spiritual self. The goal is to free oneself from the meshes and fetters, to being all the forces of one’s being under mastery. The aim is to emancipate oneself from Earthly bondage, to redeem oneself from animal enslavement. One’s quest can come to an end only when the unveiled Truth is seen, not in momentary glimpses, but for the rest of one’s lifetime without a break. We have to bring this awareness of the Overself as a permanent and perpetual feature into active life. It is perpetual abidance in the divine that is to be sought. “Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. Every tree that bringeth not fort good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them,” reports 3 Nephi 14.17-20. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

It is Not Wrong to Aspire Toward Happiness but, on the Contrary, Our Human Duty!

September 8, 2019 11:21 pm

But I lived the lie. I lived it out of anger. This is what I am trying to tell you. I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love. Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I did not know. We can trace the transformation of the small and more intimate public of early democratic experience into mass society as we now know it, with far fewer people expressing opinions than receiving them, and with far fewer opportunities for meaningful activity. The elite who control the media of communication are increasingly able to manipulate tastes and opinions, since those at the receiving end cannot answer back. At the top, therefore, power is ever more concentrated, wile at the bottom, in the mass, the individual is powerless to influence events and institutions. Is this an exaggerated picture? No. A large proportion of the electorate feels politically powerless because it believes that the community is controlled by a small group of powerful and selfish individuals who use public office for personal gain. People respond to this situation in various ways, often feelings of apathy about politics, which in turn leads to withdrawal from political activity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Other citizens, equally alienated, express their anxieties by identifying themselves with a charismatic leader who they expect will save them. The motives and mechanisms of this process is called caesaristic identification—that is, powerful psychological attachment of masses to a leader—arises in time of crisis when the situation of masses is objectively endangered, when the masses are incapable of understanding the historical process, and when the anxiety activated by the danger becomes neurotic persecutory (aggressive) anxiety through manipulation. Such movements often seize upon conspirational theory of history. Just as the masses hope for their deliverance from distress through absolute oneness with a person, so they ascribe their distress to certain persons, who have brought this distress into the World through conspirators. We have seen numerous examples, notably the theory of Communist conspiracy, now such a potent force in American politics with the derangement of the democratic party. The result is not merely a break with the rules of the game (for instance, a dictatorship replacing a democracy) but, if the mass movement is to retain power, a perpetuation or institutionalization of the anxieties which helped to create it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Again, the cure is still another form of alienation. However, not only anxiety or fear motivates people to accept radical solutions and break with the past. In the standard image of power and decision, no force is held to be as important as The Great American Public. More than merely another check and balance, this public is thought to be the seat of all legitimate power. In official life as in popular folklore, it is held to be the very balance wheel of democratic power. In the end, all liberal theorists rest their notions of the power system upon the political role of this public; all official decisions, as well as private decisions of consequence, are justified as in the public’s welfare; all formal proclamations are in its name. Let us therefore consider the classic public of democratic theory in the generous spirit in which Rousseau once cried,” Opinion, Queen of the World, is not subject to the power of kings; they are themselves its first slaves.” The most important feature of the public of opinion, which the rise of the democratic middle class initiates, is the free ebb and flow of discussion. The possibilities of answering back, of organizing autonomous organs of public opinion, of realizing opinion in action, are held to be established by democratic institutions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The opinion that results from pubic discussion is understood to be a resolution that is then carried out by public action; it is, in one version, the general will of the people, which the legislative organ enacts into law, thus lending to it legal force. Congress, or Parliament, as an institution, crows all the scattered publics; it is the archetype for each of the little circles of face-to-face citizens discussing their public business. This eighteenth-century idea of the public of public opinion parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy. Here is the market composed of freely competing entrepreneurs; there is the public composed of discussion circles of opinion peers. As price is the result of anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals, so public opinion is the result of each being’s having thought things out for oneself and contributing one’s voice to the great chorus. To be sure, some might have more influence on the state of opinion than others, but no one group monopolizes the discussion, or by itself determines the opinions that prevail. Innumerable discussion circles are knit together by mobile people who carry opinions from one to another, and struggle for the power of larger command. The public is thus organized into associations and parties, each representing a set of viewpoints, each trying to acquire a place in the Congress, where the discussion continues. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Out of the little circles of people talking with one another, the larger forces of social movements and political parties develop; and the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted. Thus autonomy of these discussions is an important element in the idea of public opinion as a democratic legitimation. The opinions formed are actively realized within the prevailing institutions of power; all authoritative agents are made or broken by the prevailing opinions of these publics. And, in so far as the public is frustrated in realizing its demands, its members may go beyond criticism of specific policies; they may question the very legitimations of legal authority. That is one meaning of the Jefferson’s comment on the need for an occasional revolution. The public, so conceived, is the loom of classic, eighteenth-century democracy; discussion is at once the threads and the shuttle trying the discussion circles together. It lies at the root of the conception of authority by discussion, and it is based upon the hope that truth and justice will somehow come out of society as a great apparatus of free discussion. The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

One viewpoint wins out. Then the people act out this view, or their representatives are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do. Such are the images of the public of classic democracy which are still used as the working justifications of power in American society. However, now we must recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works. The issues that now shape being’s fate are neither raised nor decided by the public at large. The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal, an assertion of a legitimation masquerading—as legitimations are now apt to do—as fact. For now the public of public opinion is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was. These doubts are asserted absolutely in the statement that the classic community of publics is being transformed into a society of masses. This transformation, in fact, is one of the keys to the social and psychological meaning of modern life in America. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed, with John Locke, that the individual conscience was the ultimate seat of judgment and hence the final court of appeal. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

However, this principle was challenged—as E. H. Carr has put it—When Rousseau “for the first time thought in terms of the sovereignty of the whole people, and faced the issue of mass democracy. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that among the individuals who composed it there was a natural and peaceful harmony of interests. However, this essentially conservative doctrine gave way to the Utilitarian doctrine that such a harmony of interests had first to be created by reform before it could work, and later to the Marxian doctrine of class struggle, which surely was then, and certainly is now, closer to reality than any assumed harmony of interest. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that before public action would be taken, there would be rational discussion between individuals which would determine the action, and that, accordingly, the public opinion that resulted would be the infallible voice of reason. However, this has been challenged not only by the assumed need for experts to decide delicate and intricate issues, but by the discovery—as by Dr. Freud—of the irrationality of the being in the street, and by the discovery—as by Marx—of the socially conditioned nature of what was once assumed to be autonomous reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that after determining what is true and right and just, the public would act accordingly or see that its representatives did so. In the long run, public opinion will not only be right, but public opinion will prevail. This assumption has been upset by the great gap now existing between the underlying population and those who make decisions in its name, decisions of enormous consequences which the public often does not even know are being made until well after the fact. Given these assumptions, it is not difficult to understand the articulate optimism of many nineteenth-century thinkers, for the theory of public is, in many way, a projection upon the community at large of the intellectual’s ideal of supremacy of intellect. The evolution of the intellect determines the main course of social evolution. If looking about them, nineteenth-century thinkers still saw irrationality and ignorance and apathy, all that was merely an intellectual lag, to which the spread of education would soon put an end. How much the cogency of the classic view of the public rested upon a restriction of this public to the carefully educated is revealed by the fact that by 1859 even John Stuart Mill was writing of “the tyranny of the majority,” and both Tocqueville and Burckhardt anticipated the view popularized in the recent past by such political moralists as Ortega y Gasset. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

In a word, the transformation of public into mass—and all that this implies—has been at once one of the major trends of modern societies and one of the major factors in the collapse of that liberal optimism which determined so much of the intellectual mood of the nineteenth century. Why is it that on the path we seem to meet students and aspirants only, not real teachers or genuine adepts? Why is it that so few ever seem to realize their spiritual selves? The answer is that the way is long and the game is hard, that the animal self is too strong and the human ego too foolish, and that the struggle against our innate bestiality and ignorance is too long-drawn and to beset with failures. This is what observation tells us. It may be saddening but by being realistic we at least know what to expect, what is the nature of the path we are undertaking, and what a tremendous patience we must bring to it. One has come to a clear knowledge of what the Quest means and what it will demand of one. The Quest of the divine soul has become one’s pole star. It was natural for one to feel repelled at first by the idea of overcoming the ego but now one sees its desirability. This will not mean giving it up in practical life however; for while one is in the flesh the ideal is to find a proper balance between egoism and altruism because one needs both. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

However, because the individual’s egoism is apt to be too big already and one’s altruism too small, religious teachers have usually deliberately over-emphasized subduing the ego. That is the moral side. On the philosophical side it is simply a matter of finding the Overself and letting it rule the ego thenceforth. Thus the ego is not killed but put back in its lower place. However, first one has to become conscious of the Overself, one has to feel it as a living presence, and one has to do this throughout the day and night, awake or asleep. That is the goal. It is not really as hard as it sounds. For the divine self is always there within one, it is never absent from one, not even for a second. It is the unfailing witness of all one’s efforts and aspirations. When one has tried hard enough and long enough it will suddenly shed all its grace on one. It is not wrong to aspire toward happiness but, on the contrary, our human duty. Those who, in the name of Spirituality, would turn life into a gloomy affair are entitled to their opinion but they cannot justly be called philosophers. Every being will be forced to realize one’s own sacredness in the end: then only will one’s search for happiness find fulfilment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

I often wonder where some beings have gotten their notions about reality, and it dawned on me they get them from the bits and pieces of electric dreams that they watch on the giant screen that have been provided for them. Fictions of all kinds—what they World calls News, and all this has inundated them. The media has let loosed the flood. Anger is too painful for me. Anger is too pathetic. I cannot bear it. I cannot act upon it. Anger is weak. Anger is as weak as fear. Can any of us endure fear? Not at all. However, there is something inside of many people that is heated and strong. There is something brutal and hurt inside of some of us, and we refuse the cup of anger, choosing silence rather than angry words. The Quest follows a double line of development: mind-stilling plus mind-stimulating, each in its proper place. And the ultimate goal is to discover that there is but one reality, of which all are but a part, that the separateness of the personal ego is but superficial, and that Truth is evidenced by the consciousness of unity. The first fruit of such discover is necessarily the dedication of life to the service of all creatures, to incessant service for universal welfare. Hence, in this light, the being who has withdrawn into cave or forest is on a lower plane—good for one as a phase of one’s personal development but useless to those who must live truth, the truth of unity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

To forget self but to remember Overself—it is as simple as that, and also as hard as that. Not to find the Energy of the Spirit but the Spirit itself is the ultimate goal. Not its powers or effects or qualities or attributes but the actuality of pure being. The aspirant is not to stop short with any of these but to push on. One has to seek for the mysterious essence of oneself, which is something one touches at rare, blessed, and unforgettable moments. It allures because it is also the Perfect, ever sought but never found in the World outside. It is not the knowing of the Overself that one is to get so much a the knowing that is the Overself. One comes at last to full consciousness of one’s inner being, one’s soul—in the correct sense of a word that is not often understood and which is used by people without knowing what they really mean. If the distant goal of this quest is the discover of true being, this does not exclude and ought not to exclude the fullest growth of the human being, the widest realization of one’s best capacities, making patent what is latent. It is a prime purpose of the Quest to create a true individuality where, at present, there is only a pseudo one. For those who are at the mercy of their automatic responses of attraction or repulsion by environment, whose minds are molded by external influences and education suggestions, are not individual in any real sense. “Heal the sick; cast out the demons,” reports Matthew 10.8. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Members of the outgoing class! Friends! The first difficulty you will experience when Jesus sends you ahead of him and gives you the power of healing is that many people will tell you that they do not need to be healed. And if you come to them with the claim that you will cast out the demons that rule their lives they will laugh at you and assure you that you are possessed by a demon—just as they said to Jesus. Therefore, the first task of a minister to make beings aware of their predicament. Many of those who have gone out from our seminary to various congregations and communities have despaired over this task. And they have either given up the ministry altogether, or they minister only to those who consider themselves healthy. They have forgotten that their task is to heal those who are sick, which includes those who are not aware that they are sick. There is no easy way to make them aware of their predicament. Finally, they come into my house, looking about themselves as though they were among miracles when all that I possess are the simple furnishings of a rich man. They gaze hungrily at the bronze oil lamps that fill the marble-floored rooms with brilliant light, and the couches and chairs they hesitate to touch. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

I cannot tell you how often this has happened me over the centuries, that some wandering being, bereft of all human attachment, has come into my house to marvel at simple things. I always tell them to sit down, there is nothing here that cannot be cleaned or thrown away. I insist that my guest be comfortable. God, certainly, has His ways of doing so. He shakes the complacency of those who consider themselves healthy by hurling them, both externally and internally, into darkness and despair. He reveals to them what they are by splitting the foundations of their self-assurance. He reveals their blindness towards themselves. This we cannot achieve, not even for ourselves. However, we can be open to the moment when it happens to us. And if it happens, we can become tools of the power that may heal others. To try this is the first task of the minister, and perhaps the hardest of them all. However, you are not the only ones who are used as tools. Everyone is potentially a tool of healing for anyone else. And it often happens that healing power works outside the church and the ministry. The fact that Jesus gave the disciples responsibility for healing and casting out demons does not constitute a special prerogative on the part of the minister. Every Christian receives this charge, and each of us should take it seriously in our relation to one another. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Everyone should accept one’s priestly responsibility for everyone else. One may be most intensely occupied with one’s Worldly affairs, but one will remained fixed in the holy presence. The minister has no magic power to heal. Even his administration of the liturgy and sacraments does not give one this power. However, in one’s special vocation, one stands for the universal power given to the church to heal and to cast out demons. The illuminate stands n the centre of the World-movement, oneself unmoving and unmoved. The liberated person is liberated from all intellectual doctrines that are rigid and strict which may not be helpful, freed from perplexities, and questionings—whether they concern the present past or future, whether they relate to oneself personally or to the Universe abstractly. For all these can interest only a limited egoistic consciousness. At least one has not only a peace of mind—a philosophic attitude toward the events of one’s personal life—but also peace in the mind, a freedom from the struggle against baser impulses and ignoble tendencies. The momentous results of this inner change will naturally reflect themselves in one’s outer life as a general nonattachment to the World. And because one has become free even of intellectual possessions, one is able to enter with full sympathy into the views and ideas of every other person—although this does not prevent one’s deeper wisdom from calmly noting at the same time the defects and errors of those views and ideas. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

To oneself the practical value of this attainment is its conferment of freedom, but to humanity the practical value is one’s resulting dedication to service. The sense of strain which accompanies present-day living vanishes. The pace of being relaxed in thought and feeling, nerve and muscle, replaces it. One becomes a focus where persons, utterly incompatible and totally diverse otherwise, are able to meet. “For they saw and beheld with great sorrow that the people of the church began to be lifted up in the pride of their eyes, and to set their hearts upon riches and upon the vain things of the World, that they began to be scornful, one towards another, and they began to persecute those that did not believe according to their own will and pleasures,” reports Alma 4.8. The sense of a divine presence will be with one, the conviction of its supreme reality will grip one, and the feeling of an indestructible serenity will suffuse one. The Master necessarily lives in an inner World of one’s own, immeasurably remote from some of those environments in which one is plunged. Nevertheless, one possesses the power to recall oneself freely and instantly from one to the other, and in either direction. It is one sign of this attainment that one becomes less critical of other persons. Yet this does not mean tat one understands them less accurately. A fulfillment such as this must bring joy to the heart and peace to the mind. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

One may remain human in several ways—but not too human. Penetrated by the feeling of a divine presence as one daily is, one’s life becomes a truly inspired one. One’s first reliance will be on the soul. One’s last reliance will be on the soul. One’s life silently becomes a witness to the fact of the Overself’s continuous presents. The lotus, that lovely Asian flower, is much used as a symbol of the goal we have to gain. It grows in mud but is not even spotted by it. It rests on water but is never stained by it. Its colour is pure white in striking contrast to the dirty surroundings which are its home. So the disciple’s inner life must be undefiled, unstained, and pure even though one’s outer life is perforce carried on under the most materialistic surroundings or among the most sensual people. That which few beings value and few beings find is nevertheless the most worthwhile thing for which to search. What is it? It is what once found cannot be lost, once seen must be loved, and once felt awakens all that is best in a being. Inexplicable and incomprehensible though the fact must be to the human intellect, the One infinite Mind never loses its own character even though it is seemingly incarnated into the myriad forms of an evolving Universe, never loses itself in them. It is a wisdom expressed through the World-Idea, but not confined to it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Individual Personalities Mass Produced with Happiness Thrown in or Your Money Back!

September 6, 2019 10:19 pm

It is an old spell; it binds you to come to me, it binds the spirits who listen to me to drive you towards me. It binds them to fill your dreams and your waking hours with thoughts of me. As the spell builds in power it presses out all other considerations, and finally there is one obsession, that you come to me, and nothing else will do. I have commanded the spirits drench your soul, your mind, your hear with a heat for me, to inflict upon your nights and days a relentless and torturous longing for me; to invade your dreams with the images of me; to let there be nothing that you eat or drink that will solace you as you think of me, until you return to me, until you stand in my presence, until I can use every power at my command on you as we speak together. I will not for a moment let you be quiet; not for a moment will you be able to turn away. May you be as a slave to me, many you be the faithful servant of my designs, may you have no power to refuse what I have confided to you, I will make you strong when you are weak, give you words when you cannot speak. When heart aches weighs you down, I will be the one to show you how to live again, my great and faithful spirits. May you fulfill that destiny which I choose of my own accord. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The yearning for diversion whereof a little more than a little is by much too much, because no displaced craving can be satisfied by catering to it in its displaced form. Only when it becomes possible to experience the desire in its true form and to dispense with the internalized processes that balked and displaced it does actual gratification become possible. Diversion at most, through weariness and fatigue, can numb and distract anxiety. For instance, in many popular movies the tear ducts are massaged and thrills are produced by mechanized assaults on the center of sense. (However, in the 2001 film Romeo Must Die, starring Aaliyah and Jet Li, Aaliyah thought of sad memories to make herself cry when it was called for in the script.) We are diverted temporarily and in the end perhaps drained—but not gratified. Direct manipulation of sensations can produce increases and discharges of tension, as the touch of one’s own hand in personal pleasures of the flesh, but it is a substitute. It does not involve reality but counterfeits it, much like social media does. Sensations directly stimulated and discharged without being intensified and completed through feelings sifted and acknowledged by the intellect are debasing because the do not involve the whole individual in one’s relation to reality. When one becomes inured to bypassing reality and individuality in favor of meaningless excitement, ultimate gratification becomes impossible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Once fundamental impulses are thwarted beyond retrieving, once they are so deeply repressed that no awareness is left of their aims, once the desire for a meaningful life has been lost as well as the capacity to create it, only a void remains. Life fades into tedium when the barrier between impulses and aims so high that neither penetrates into consciousness and no sublimation whatever takes place. Diversion, however frantic, can overwhelm temporarily but not ultimately relieve the boredom which oozes from non-fulfillment. Though the bored person hungers for things to happen to one, the disheartening fact is that when they do one empties them of the very meaning one unconsciously yearns for by using them as distractions. In popular culture even the second coming would become just another barren thrill to be watched on television till Milton Berie comes on. No distraction can cure boredom, just as the company so unceasingly pursued cannot stave off loneliness. The bored person is lonely for oneself, not, as one thinks, for others. One misses the individuality, the capacity for experience from which one is debarred. No distraction can restore it. Hence one goes unrelieved and insatiable. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The popular demand for inside stories, for vicarious sharing of the private life—even someone else’s—of those who are dimly aware of having none whatever, or a least no life that holds their interest. The attempts to allay boredom are assiduous as they are unavailing. Countless books pretend to teach by general rules and devices what cannot be learned by devices and rules. Individual personalities cannot be mass produced (with happiness thrown in or your money back). Nevertheless, the messages of much popular culture is “you, too, can be happy if you only buy this BMW 4 series, and a Cresleigh Home, then purchase a new dress from Draper James, and bake a Betty Crocker Butterscotch Pudding Layer Cake, and try that TRESemme Smooth and Silky hair tonic; you will be thrilled, you will have adventure, romance, popularity—you will no longer be lonely and left out if you follow this formula. And success, happiness or at least freedom from anxiety is also the burden of popular religion, as unchristian in these its aims as it is in its means. From Dale Carnegie to Norman Vincent Peale to Harry and Bonaro Overstreet only the vocabulary changes. The principle remains the same. The formula is well illustrated in the following. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Warm Smile is an Attribute of Charm
For this, train the upper lip by the method:

Stretch the upper lip down over the teeth. Say “Mo-o-o-o.”
Hold the lip between the teeth and smile.
Purse the lips, pull them downward and grin.
Let the lower jaw fall and try to touch your nose with your upper lip.

Months of daily practice are necessary to eliminate strain from the new way of smiling, but it, too, can become as natural as all beguiling smiles must be. One will be surrounded by an Overself-conscious atmosphere even in the midst of social functions. One’s inward repose will be no less evident there than in solitude. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Whatever the formula, nothing can be more tiresome than the tireless, cheerless pursuit of pleasures. When they are empty, days go slowly; one cannot tell one from the other. And yet the years go by fast. When time is endlessly killed, one lives in an endless present until time ends without ever having passed, leaving a person who never lived to exclaim, “I wasted time and now doth time waste me.” To the Christian, despair is a sin not because there is anything to be hoped for in this life, but because to despair is to lack faith in redemption from it—in the life everlasting. As for the pleasure of this life, they are not worth pursuing. Though they fade not of themselves yet to us they fade. We are hungry and we eat. Eat we not till that fades and we are as weary of our fulness as we were of our fasting. We are weary and we rest. Rest we not till that fades and we are as weary of our rest as ever we were of our weariness? Our bodies and minds themselves fade as do their pleasures. The insults of time are spared to none of us. Such is the human predicament. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Dr. Freud pointed to the additional burdens that civilization imposes on human beings. They, too, are inevitable, for civilizations, despite its cost, eases the total burden we bear. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The mass of beings lead lives of quiet desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called games and amusements of humankind. Despair, we find, is no longer quiet. Popular culture tries to exorcise it with much clanging and banging. Perhaps it takes more noise to drone it out. Perhaps we are less willing to face it. However, whether wrapped in popular culture, we are less happy than our quieter ancestors, or the natives of Bali, must remain an open question despite all romanticizing. (Nor do we have a feasible alternative to popular culture. Besides, a proposal for the mass of beings would be unlikely to affect the substance of popular culture. And counsel to individuals must be individual.) There have been periods happier and others more desperate than ours. However, we do not know which. And even an assertion of today’s bliss with yesterday’s. The happiness felt in disparate groups, in disparate periods and places cannot be measured and compared. Our contention is simply that by distracting from the human predicament and blocking individuation and experience, popular culture impoverishes life without leading to contentment. However, whether the mass of beings felt better or worse without the mass production techniques of which popular culture is an ineluctable part, we shall never know. Of happiness and of despair, we have no measure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Mercedes had been a tomboy in her youth and had early developed a great ambition as shown in the phrase which she used, “Either Caesar or nothing.” In her late teens there becomes evident her perpetual and all-encompassing dilemmas which trapped her like vices; she vacillated from despair to joy, from anger to docility, but most of all from gorging food to starving herself. Mercedes had a long illness which we would term in our day severe anorexia nervosa. However, her doctor was not interested here in the technique of treatment but was concerned with trying to understand her. Mercedes fascinates him by seeming to be in love with death. In her teens Mercedes implores Amel to kids her to death. She writes, “Death is the greatest happiness in life, if not the only one. If he makes me wait much longer, the great friend, death, then I shall set out to seek him.” She writes time and again that she would like to die “as the bird dies which bursts its throat in supreme joy.” Her talent as a writer is shown in her extensive poetry, diaries, and prose about her fascinating with immortality and vampirism. Mercedes reminds me of Anne Rice. Her fascination with vampires and immortality made me wonder: Are there some persons who can fulfill their existence only by taking their own lives? #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

However, where the existence can exist only be relinquishing life, there the existence is a tragic existence. I know her and I know magic. Mercedes was able to use blood to cast spells. Do you not see, this woman not only believes in magic, she understands it. Perhaps a million mortal magicians have lived and died during the past millennia, but how many of them were the genuine article? She knows what she is doing! Your blood was in the weave of her own garment. She has cast a spell on you that I do not know how to break! To live in the face of death, however, means to die unto death, or to die one’s own death. Every passing away, every dying, whether self-chosen death or not, is still an autonomous act of life. This leads us to ask, “Is life worth living?” Some reply, “It depends on the liver.” In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know now what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find. With many beings the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whiteman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling:–“To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand! To be this incredible God I am! O amazement of things, even the least particle! O spirituality of things! I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting; I too throb to the brain and beauty of the Earth and of all the growths of the Earth. I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continues—glory continues. I praise with electric voice, for I do not see one imperfection in the Universe, and I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell:–“How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself! I rose with the Sun, and I was happy; I went to walk, and I was happy; I saw ‘Maman,’ and I was happy; I left her, and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere. It was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.” If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. However, we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them a standing refutation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

In what is called ‘circular insanity,’ phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call “the concoction of the humors.” In the words of the newspaper joke, “it depends on the liver.” Rousseau’s ill-balanced constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. Some beings seem launched upon the World even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman’s was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his,–the exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, James Thomason, in that pathetic book. The City of Dreadful Night, which I think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply because beings are afraid to quote its words,–they are so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined cathedral at night. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The sermon is too long to quote, but ends thus:– “O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief; a few short years must bring us all relief: Can we not bear these years of laboring breath? However, if you would not this poor life fulfil, Lo, you are freed to end it when you will, without the fear of waking after death. The organ-like vibrations of his voice thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away; the yearning of the tones which bade rejoice was sad and tender as a requiem lay: our shadowy congregation rested still, as brooding on that End it when you will. Our shadowy congregation rested still, as musing on that message we had heard, and brooding on the End it when you will, perchance awaiting yet some other word; when keen as lightning through a muffled sky sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:–the man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth; we have no personal life beyond the grave; there is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth: Can I find here the comfort which I crave? In all eternity I had one chance, one few years term of gracious human life,–the splendors of the intellect’s advance, the sweetness of the home with babes and wife; the social pleasures with their genial wit; the fascination of the Worlds art; the glories of the Worlds of Nature lit by large imagination’s glowing heart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

“The rapture of mere being, full of health; the careless childhood and the ardent youth; the strenuous manhood winning various wealthy, the reverend age serene with life’s long truth: all the subline prerogatives of Man; the storied memories of the times of old, the patient tracking of the World’s great plan through sequences and changes myriadfold. This chance was never offered me before; for me the infinite past is blank and dumb; this chance recurreth never, nevermore; blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth, a mockery, a delusion; and my breath of noble human life upon this Earth so racks me that I sigh for senseless death. My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, my noonday passes in a nightmare dream, I worse than lose the years which are my all: What can console me for the loss supreme? Speak not of comfort where no comfort is, speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? Our life’s a cheat, our death a black abyss: Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair. This vehement voice came from the northern aisle, rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close; and none gave answer for a certain while, for words must shrink from these most wordless woes; at last the pulpit speaker simply said, with humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,– #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

“My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus: This life holds nothing good for us, but it ends soon and nevermore can be; and we knew nothing of it ere our birth, and shall know nothing when consigned to Earth: I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.” When Louis committed suicide in the novel Merrick by Anne Rice by going into the Sun, when he was resurrected he said he saw “Nothing.” He bowed his head, but then he looked up helplessly. “Nothing. I saw nothing and I felt that there was nothing. I felt it-empty, colorless, timeless. Nothing. That I had ever lived in any shape seemed unreal.” His eyes were shut tight, and he brought up his hand to hide his face from us. He was weeping. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.” “It ends soon, and never more can be,” “Lo, you are free to end it when you will,”—these versus flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson’s pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the World is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain of delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare,–and army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the British army, follows the Sun round the World and never terminates. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must ponder these things also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity,–nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case. “If suddenly,” says Mr. Ruskin, “in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,–would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-being,–by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate the merriment from the misery.” Our relation to the Overself is one of direct awareness of its presence—not as a separate being but as one’s own essence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Intimate communion and personal converse with the higher self remain delightful fact. The Beloved ever companions one and never deserts one. One can never again be lonely. There is a feeling of living in a self other than the ego, although that also is present but subdued and submissive. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that her full measure of mortal life had not been enjoyed. I wanted to tell her that destiny had marked her for great things, perhaps, and I had broken that destiny had with my careless selfishness, with an ego that could not be restrained. The awareness will be with one at all times, a part of all one’s actions and feelings. It will indeed be the essence of every experience and enable one to pass through it more happily. One has no fixed abode, no permanent address, for like the wind one comes and goes from nowhere to anywhere. Destiny or service may keep one’s body in one place for a time, or for a lifetime, but it will not keep one. For the person who has come to this understanding, who continually feels that IT IS, who is ever in remembrance of It, rituals, ceremonies, mantras, and prayers are not only unnecessary but are a waste of time. The mind emptied of all the activity of ordinary thoughts and filled with the beauty of this presence is a divinely sustained mind. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The owl, which sees clearly at midnight, is an old and good symbol of the sage whose mind is ever at rest in, and lighted by, the Infinite Mind. “And the did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their afflictions. And now the Lord was slow to hear their cry because of their iniquities; nevertheless the Lord did hear their cries, and began to soften the hearts of the Lamanites that they began to ease their burdens; yet the Lord did not see fit to deliver them out of bondage,” reports Mosiah 21.14-15. Because this Mind is common to all beings, it is an inevitable and inescapable consequence of awakening to its existence that the initiate rises above a merely personal outlook and maintains a sympathetic attitude towards all beings. At this level, one is beyond bothering to listen to the discordant sounds of competing sects and cults: one is uninterested in the claims made for different teachings. One has only one concern: direct communion with the God within one as a felt, grace-giving Presence. Henceforth one is able to return one’s consciousness and retract one’s attention from the ego—and this, not only at will, but throughout one’s lifetime. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Illuminate Stands in the Centre of the World-Movement and Remains Fixed in the Holy Presence!

September 5, 2019 10:35 pm

Come on, let us pack up the suitcase and go down to the kitchen. Tell your people not to open all those boxes, just to move them to where they will be safe. I will make you some good coffee. I make the best coffee. I make better coffee than Reese Witherspoon or her mother Mrs. Betty. While immensely augmenting our comforts, our conveniences and our leisure, and disproportionately raisin the real income of the less affluent, industry has also impoverished life. Mass production and consumption, mobility, the homogenization of taste and finally of society were among the costs of higher productivity. They de-individualized life and drained each of our ends of meaning as we achieved it. Pursuit thus became boundless. The increased leisure time would hang heavy on our hands, were it not for the mass media and social media which help us burn it away like coal on the grill during Summer time. They inexorably exclude art anything of significance when it cannot be reduced to mass entertainment, but they divert us from the passage of the time they keep us from filling. They also tend to draw into the mass market talents and works that might otherwise produce new visions and they abstract much of the capacity to experience art or life directly and deeply. What they do, however, is what people demand. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

We scrutinized the causes, the effects and the general characteristics of popular culture and found them unavoidable in a mass-production economy. However, we have hardly touched on the contents of popular culture. Some work on this subject has been done and much remains. Limitations of scope also restricted us from stressing the many material advantages of industrialism. We do not intend to deny them. Finally, prophecy too is beyond our means. True, extrapolation of present trends makes a dismal picture. However, there is comfort in the fact that no extrapolation has ever predicted the future correctly. Elements can be forecast, but only prophets can do more (and they are unreliable, or hard to interpret). History has always had surprises up its sleeves—if it changed its ways, it would be most surprising. Our ignorance here leaves the rosy as well as the grim possibilities open for the future. However, this des not allow us to avert our gaze from the present and from the outlook it affords. Neither is cheerful. The gist of any culture is an ethos which gives meaning to the lives of those who dwell in it. If this be the purport of popular culture, it is foiled. We have suggested how it comes to grief in various aspects. What makes popular culture as a whole so disconcerting is best set forth now by exploring the relationship among diversion, art and boredom. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The gist of any culture is an ethos which gives meaning to the lives of those who dwell in it. If this be the purport of popular culture, it is foiled. We have suggested how it comes to grief in various aspects. What makes popular culture as a whole so disconcerting is best set forth now by exploring the relationship among diversion, art and boredom. Dr. Freud thought of art as a diversion, an illusion in contrast to reality, a substitute gratification like a dream. In this he fully shared what was and still is the popular view of art. It is a correct view—of popular art, of pseudo-art produced to meet the demand for diversion. However, it is a mistaken, reductive definition of art. Dr. Freud finds the dreamwork attempting to hide or disguise the dreamer’s true wishes and fears so that they may not alarm one’s consciousness. The substitute gratification produced by the dreamwork, mainly by displacements, helps the dreamer continue sleeping. However, one major function of art is precisely to undo this dreamwork, to see through disguises, to reveal to our consciousness the true nature of our wishes and fears. The dreamwork covers, to protect sleep. Art discovers and attempts to awaken the sleeper. Whereas dreamwork tries to assist repression, the work of art intensifies and depends perception and experience of the World and of the self. It attempts to pluck the heart of the mystery, to show where the actions is possessed in its true nature. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Though dreams and art both may disregard literal reality, they do so to answer opposite needs. The dream may ignore reality to keep the sleeper’s eyes closed. Art transcends immediate reality to encompass wider views, penetrate into deeper experience and lead to a fuller confrontation of being’s predicament. The dreamwork even tries to cover upsetting basic impulses with harmless immediate reality. Art, in contrast, ignores the immediate only to uncover the essential. Artistic revelation need not be concerned with outer or with social reality. It may be purely aesthetic. However, if it is art, it can never be an illusion. Far from distracting from reality, art is a form of reality which strips life of the fortuitous to lay bare its essentials and permit us to experience them. In popular culture, however, art is all that Dr. Freud said art is, and no more. Like the dreamwork, popular culture distorts human experience to draw substitute gratifications or reassurances from it. Like the dreamwork, it presents an illusion in contrast to reality. For this reason, popular art falls short of satisfaction. And all of popular culture leaves one vaguely discontented because, like popular art, it is only a substitute gratification; like a dream, it distracts from life and from real gratification. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Substitute gratifications are uneconomic, as Dr. Freud often stressed. They do not in the end gratify as much, and they cost more psychologically than the real gratifications which they shut out. This is why sublimation and realistic control are to be preferred to substitution and repression. That is why reality is to be preferred to illusion, full experience to symptomatic displacements and defense mechanisms. Yet substitute gratifications, habitually resorted to, incapacitate the individual for real ones. In part they cause or strengthen internalized hindrances to real and gratifying experience; in part they are longed for because internal barriers have already blocked real gratification of the original impulses. Though the specific role it plays varies with the influence of other formative factors in the life of each individual, popular culture must be counted among the baffling variety of causes and effects of defense mechanisms and repressions. It may do much damage, or do none at all, or be the only relief possible, however deficient. Yet, whenever popular plays a major role in life significant repressions have taken (or are taking) place. Popular culture supplants those gratifications, which are no longer sough because of the repression of the original impulses. However, it is a substitute and spurious. It founders and cannot succeed because neither desire nor gratification are true. “Nought’s had, all’s spent/ where desire is got without content.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

It may seem paradoxical to describe popular culture in terms of repression. Far from repressed, it strikes one as uninhibited. Yet the seeming paradox disappears if we assume that the uproarious din, the raucous noise and the shouting are attempts to drown the shriek of unused capacities, of repressed individuality, as it is bent into futility. Repression bars impulses from awareness without satisfying them. This damming up always generates a feeling of futility and apathy or, in defense against it, an agitated need for action. The former may be called listless, the later restless boredom. They may alternate and they may enter consciousness only through anxiety and a sense of meaninglessness, fatigue and nonfulfillment. Sometimes there is such a general numbing of the eagerness too often turned aside that only a dull feeling of dreariness and emptiness remains. More often, there is an insatiable longing for things to happen. The external World is to supply these events to fill the emptiness. Yet the bored person cannot designate what would satisfy a craving as ceaseless as it is vague. It is not satisfied by any event supplied. There are characteristics of the experience that are supposed to follow: there should be a suddenness of illumination; the insight may occur, and to some extent must occur, against what one has clung to consciously in one’s theories; there should be a vividness of the incident and the whole scene that surrounds it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

For art to satisfying a craving there should also be expressed brevity and conciseness of insight, along with the experience of immediate certainty. Continuing with the practical conditions which one cites as necessary for this experience are hard work on the topic prior to the breakthrough may occur (that could be in thought or visualization or interpretation), and keep in mind that the necessity of alternating work and relaxation, with the insight often coming at the moment of the break between the two, or at least within the break. This last point is particularly interesting. It is probably something everyone has learned: if they alternate the classroom with the beach, professors will lecture with more inspiration; when they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing, authors will write better. However, certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved. I propose that in our day this alteration of the market place and mountain requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be able to retire from a World that is too much with us, that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in its. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is a characteristic of our time that many people are afraid of solitude: to be alone is a sign one is a social failure, for no one would be alone if he or she could help it. It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly difficult to let insights from unconscious depths break through. Of course, when an individual is afraid of the irrational—that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience—one tries to keep busiest, trues to keep most noise going on about one. The avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant agitated diversion is what we likened to the settlers in the early says of America who used to beat on pots and pans at night to make enough din to keep the wolves away. Obviously if we are to experience insight from our unconscious, we need to be able to give ourselves to solitude. What determines why a given idea comes through from the unconscious? Why this particular insight and not one of a dozen others? Is it because a particular insight is the is the answer which is empirically most accurate? No. Is It because it is the insight which will pragmatically work best? Again, no. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The useful combinations [that come through from the unconscious] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know, but of which the profane are so unaware as often to be tempted to smile at it. Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are also without effect upon the esthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful. They will be capable of touching this special sensibility of the geometer of which I have just spoken, and which, one aroused, will call our attention to them, and thus give them occasion to become conscious. This is why the mathematicians and physicists talk about the elegance of a theory. The utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches one’s sensibilities—these are significant factors determining why a given idea emerges. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights reveals the same phenomenon—that insights emerge not chiefly because they are rationally true or even helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes an incomplete Gestalt. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

When this breakthrough of a creative insight into consciousness occurs, we have the subjective conviction that the form should be this way and no other way. It is characteristic of the creative experience that it strikes us as true—with immediate certainty. And we think, nothing else could have been true in that situation, and we wonder why we were so stupid as not to have seen it earlier. The reason, of course, is that we were not psychologically ready to see it. We could not yet intend the new truth or creative form in art or scientific theory. We were not yet open on the level of intentionality. However, the truth itself is simply there. This reminds us of what the Zen Buddhists keep saying—that at these moments is reflected and revealed a reality of the Universe that does not depend merely on our own subjectivity, but is as though we only had our eyes closed and suddenly we open them and there it is, as simple as can be. The new reality has a kind of immutable, eternal quality. The experience that “this is the way reality is and is not it is strange we did not see it sooner” may have a religious quality with artists. This is why many artists feel that something holy is going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious revelation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

There are ways that can help society avoid the tragic effects of the aggressive instinct; indeed, in the nuclear age one is almost forced to look for possibilities for peace in order to make one’s theory of the innate destructiveness of beings acceptable. I do not mind admitting that I think I have something to teach humankind that may help it to change for the better. This conviction is not as presumptuous as it might seem. The most important precept is to know thy self. We must deepen our insight into the causal concatenations governing our own behavior—it is the laws of evolution. As one element in this knowledge to which we must give special emphasis is the objective, ethological investigation of all the possibilities of discharging aggression in its primal form on substitute objects. The psychoanalytic study of so-called sublimation also helps as it is a mature type defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse. There is also another method which will helps us live more productive lives and that is the promotion of personal acquaintance and, if possible, friendship between individual members of different ideologies or nations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The fourth and perhaps the most important measure to be taken immediately is the intelligent and responsible channeling of militant enthusiasm—that is, to help the younger generation to find genuine cases that are worth serving in the modern World. Self-knowledge means that one becomes conscious of what is unconscious; this is a most difficult process, because it encounters the energy of resistance by which the unconscious is defended against the attempt to make it conscious. Self-knowledge is not an intellectual process alone, but simultaneously an affective process. It is not only knowledge by the brain, but also knowledge by the heart. Knowing oneself means gaining increasing insight, intellectually and affectively, in heretofore secret parts of one’s psyche. It is a process which may take years for a sick person who wants to be cured of one’s symptoms and a lifetime for a person who seriously wants to be oneself. Its effect is one of increased energy because energy is freed from the task of upholding repressions; thus the more beings are in touch with one’s inner reality, the more one is awake and free. Knowing thyself also involves theoretical knowledge of the facts of evolution, and specifically of the instinctive nature of aggression. If somebody who knows the laws of gravity finds oneself in deep water and cannot swim, one’s knowledge will not prevent one from drowning; reading prescriptions does not make one well. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Even air lines advertise international travel as serving the cause of peace; unfortunately this concept of the aggression-lowing function of personal acquaintance does not happen to be true. There is ample evidence for this. The British and the Germans were very well acquainted with each other before 1914, yet their mutual hatred when the war broke out was ferocious. There is even more telling proof. It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides. Does the fact of mutual intimate knowledge diminish the intensity of hate among members of a family? Acquaintance and friendship cannot be expected to lower aggression because they represent a superficial knowledge about another person, a knowledge of an object which I look at from the outside. This is quite different from the penetrating, empathic knowledge in which I understand the other’s experiences by mobilizing those within myself which, if not the same, are similar to one’s own knowledge. Knowledge of this kind requires that most repressions within oneself are lowered in intensity to a point where there is little resistance to becoming aware of the new aspects of one’s unconsciousness. The attainment of a nonjudgmental understanding can lower aggressiveness or do away with it altogether; it depends on the degree to which a person has overcome one’s own insecurity, greed and narcissism, and not on the amount of information one has about others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

It is an interesting question why civil wars are in fact much fiercer and why they elicit much more destructive impulses than international wars. It seems plausible that the reason is possessed in that usually, at least as far as modern international wars are concerned, they do not aim at the destruction of extinction of the enemy. Their aim is a limited one: to force the opponent to accept conditions for peace which are damaging, but by no means a threat to the existence of the population of the defeated country. (Nothing could illustrate this better than that Germany, the country who conceded in two World Wars, became most prosperous after each concession than before.) Exceptions to this rule are wars which aim at the physical extinction or enslavement of the total enemy population, like some of the wars—although by no means all—which the Romans conducted. In civil war the two opponents have the aim, if not to destroy each other physically, to destroy each other economically, socially, and politically. If this hypothesis is correct, it would mean that the degree of destructiveness is by and large dependent on the severity of the threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Channeling of militant enthusiasm is essential to life; one of my special recommendations is athletics. However, the fact is that competitive sports stimulate a great deal of aggression. How intense this is was highlight recently when the deep feelings aroused by an international soccer match led to a small war in Latin America. If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression. What often produces aggression in sports is the competitive character of the event, cultivated in a social climate of competition and increased by an overall commercialization, in which not pride of achievement but money and publicity have become the most attractive goals. Many thoughtful observers of the unfortunate Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro, 2016, have recognized that instead of furthering goodwill and pace, they furthered competitive aggressiveness and nationalistic pride. However, supposing that being a patriot of my home country (which I am), I felt an unmitigated hostility against another county (which I emphatically do not), I still could not wish whole-heartedly for its destruction if I realized that there were people living in it who, like myself, were enthusiastic workers in the field of inductive natural science, or revered Charles Darwin and were enthusiastically propagating the truth of his discoveries. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Or still others in these other who shared my appreciation of Michelangelo’s art, or my enthusiasm for Goethe’s Faust, or for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, or the beauty of a rambling Victorian mansion, a coral reef, a love for a BMW, or for wildlife preservation or a number of minor enthusiasm I could name, then we would more than likely be able to see eye to eye and respect each other, and I could not wish for their destruction just because they are in another geographical location. I should find it quite impossible to hate, unreservedly, any enemy, if one shared only one of my identifications with cultural and ethical values. My denial of the wish for destruction of a whole country by the word “wholeheartedly,” and by qualifying hate by “unreservedly.” However, what is a “half-hearted” wish for destruction, or a “reserved” hate? More important, my condition for not wanting the destruction of another country is that there are people who share my particular tastes and enthusiasm (those who revere Darwin seem to qualify only if they also enthusiastically propagate his discoveries): it is not enough that they are human beings. In other words, the total destruction of an enemy is undesirable only if and because one is similar to my own culture, and even more specifically, to my own interests and values. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The character of these statements is not changed by my demand for a humanistic education, for instance, an education offering an optimum of common ideals with which an individual can identify. This was the kind of education current in German high schools before the first World War, but the majority of the teachers of this humanism were probably more war-minded than the average German. Only a very different and radical humanism, one in which the primary identification is with life and with humankind, can have an influence against war. How often have I heard, in talk or writing, that the philosophic requirements are set too high and are beyond average human compliance. My answer is that time and patience and work keep on pushing back the measure of what is possible to a being, that grace may fitfully bless one if one sustains effort and aspiration or recognizes opportunity and inspiration, and that these requirements are not set for immediate attainment but as an ultimate goal to be striven for little by little and to give correct direction to one’s life. “Hope on and old on,” I told Britney Spears at an outwardly dark moment in her life. She did!—and later found herself, her own peace, and became in turn through her performances and music a help to many fellow Christians. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The achievements of such personal self-sufficiency, of such detachment from the World of agitations and desires, is, one will say, something entirely superhuman preternatural. “Why ask frail mortals to look at such unclimbable peaks, such unattainable summits?” Philosophy answers, “Yes, the peaks are high, the summits do cause us to strain our necks upward. However, it is wrong to say that they are unclimbable. There is a way of climbing them, little by little, under competent guidance, and that way is called the Quest. True, it involves certain disciplines, but then, what is there in life worth getting which can be got without paying some price in self-discipline for it? The aim of these disciplines is to secure s better-controlled mind, a more virtuous life, and a more reverent fundamental mood. The sage is a being who lives in constant truth-remembrance. One has realized the existence of the Overself, one knows that one partakes of Its life, immortal and infinite. One has made the pilgrimage to essential being and returned again to walk amongst beings, to speak their language, and to bear witness, by one’s life amongst them, to Truth. “And I would that ye should behold that the more part of them are in the path of their duty, and they do walk circumspectly before God, and they do observe to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments according to the law of Moses,” reports Helaman 15.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

In Loving Memory of Sarah Winchester 22 April 1839 – 5 September 1922

The Masters Rarely Emerge from their Obscurity to Positions of Influence and Prominence but their Disciples May and Occasionally Do!

September 5, 2019 12:58 am

The World is now yours. You must look at the larger movements of history. The state of the World will begin in time to oppress you, and you will find, as all immortals do, that you cannot simply shut your heart on it, especially not you. The study of painting will lead you to the study of humans, and the study of humans will lead you to the state of the World of humans. With the invention of the mass media, a mass market for culture became possible. The economies yielded by the mass production of automobiles became available in the mass production of entertainment. Producers of popular culture supply this new mass market. Popular culture does not grow within a group. It is manufactured by one group—in Hollywood or New York—for sale to an anonymous mass market. The product must meet an average of tastes and it loses in spontaneity and individuality what it gains in accessibility and inexpensiveness. The creators of popular culture are not a sovereign group of unacknowledged legislators. They work for Hooper ratings to give people what they want. Above all, they sales people; they sell entertainment, they use the television to tell you a vision, and the produce with sales in mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The creators of high culture are no longer insulated from the demands of the mass market by an educated elite, as they still were during the nineteenth century (and there are no stable, isolated communities in which folk culture could grow). The creators of popular culture do not have personal relationships with patrons whom they can lead as a being may lead in a conversation. A personal tutor is much more dependent on a few persons than television lecturer. However, one’s influence on one’s pupil is also much greater than the influence of anyone television lecturer on any one pupil. Today’s movie producer, singer, or writer is less dependent on the taste of an individual customer, or village, or court, than was the artist of yore; but one does depend far more on the average of tastes, and one can influence it far less. He need not cater to any individual taste—not even one’s own. One caters to an impersonal market. One is not involved in a conversation. One is like a speaker addressing a mass meeting and attempting to curry its favor. All mass media in the end alienate people from personal experience and, though appearing to offset it, intensify their moral isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

One may turn to the mass media when lonely or bored. However, mass media, once they become a habit, impair the capacity for meaningful experience. Though more diffuse and not as gripping, the habit feeds on itself, establishing a vicious circle as addictions do. The mass media do not physically replace individual activities and contacts—excursions, travel, parties and so forth. However, they impinge on all. The portable radio and digital phone (with its social media) is taken everywhere—from under the sea to space—and everywhere it isolates the bearer from one’s surroundings, from other people, and from oneself. Most people escape being by themselves at any time by voluntarily tuning in on something or somebody. Anyway, it is nearly beyond the power of individuals to escape broadcast or a social media posting. Music, social media, and public announcements are piped into restaurants, bars, shops, cafes, and lobbies, into public means of transportation, and even taxis. You can turn off your radio or mobile phone but not your neighbor’s nor can you silence his or her portable or the set at the restaurant. #RandolpHarris 3 of 13

Fortunately, most persons do not seem to miss privacy, the cost of which is even more beyond the average income than the cost of individuality. People are never quite in one place or group without at the same time, singly or collectively, gravitating somewhere else, abstracted, if not transported by the mass media. The incessant announcements, arpeggios, croonings, sobs, bellows, brayings and jingles draw to some faraway Word at large and by weakening community with immediate surroundings make people lonely even when in a crowd and crowded even when alone. And social media has made it possible for people to conjure up the perfect life, summon a new relationship with photo engineering software, and they can even invoke the perfect family, car, house, and pets. We have already stressed that mass media must offer homogenized fare to meet an average of tastes. Further, whatever the quality of the offerings, the very fact that one after the other is absorbed continuously, indiscriminately and casually, trivializes all. Even the most profound of experiences, articulated too often on the same level, is reduced to a cliché. The impact of each of the offerings of mass media is thus weakened by the next one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

However, the impact of the stream of all mass-media offerings is cumulative and strong. It lessens people’s capacity to experience life itself. Sometimes it is argued that the audience confuses actuality with mass-media fiction and reacts to the characters and situations that appear in soap operas or comic strips or tabloids as if they were real. For instance, wedding presents are sent to fictional couples. One fictional couple even got a brand-new BMW for an engagement gift just because she got engaged to a man with a good German name. It seems more likely, however, that the audience prefers to invest fiction with reality—as a person might prefer to dream—without actually confusing it with reality. After all, even the kids know that Reese Witherspoon is an Oscar Award winning actor and the adults know that “Big Little Lies” is fiction. Both, however, may attempt to live the fiction because they prefer it to their own lives. This is also why some people cyberstalk celebrities and act as if social media postings are truthful and happening in real time. They are so desperate to insert themselves into someone else’s life and feel special and important. The significant effect is not the (quite limited) investment of fiction with reality, but the de-realization of life lived in largely fictitious terms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Art can deepen the perception of reality. However, popular culture veils it, diverts from it, and becomes an obstacle to experiencing it. It is not so much an escape from life but an invasion of life, first, and ultimately evasion altogether. Parents, well knowing that mass media can absorb energy, often lighten the strain that the attempts of their children to reach for activity and direct experiences would impose; they allow some energy to be absorbed by the vicarious experience of the televisions screen. Before television, the cradle was rocked, or poppy juice given, to inhibit the initiative and motility of small children. Television, unlike these physical sedatives, tranquillizes by means of substitute gratifications. Manufactured activities and plots are offered to still the child’s hunger for experiencing life. They effectively neutralize initiative and channel imaginations. However, the early introduction of de-individualized characters and situations and early homogenization of tastes on a diet of meaningless activity hardly foster development. Perhaps poppy juice, offering no models in which to cast the imagination, was better. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

The homogenizing effect of comic books or television, the fact that they neither express nor appeal to individuality, seems far more injurious to the child’s mind and character than the violence they feature, though it is the latter that is often blamed for juvenile delinquency. The blame is misplaced. Violence is not new to life or fiction. It waxed large in ancient fables, fairy tales, and in tragedies from Sophocles to Dynasty. Mom always knew that “her boy could not have thought of it,” that the other boys must have seduced him. The belief that viewing or reading about violence persuades children to engage in it is Mom’s ancient conviction disguised as psychiatry. Violence on television may actually allow kids to vicariously release their aggression. Children are quite spontaneously blood thirsty as vampires and need bot direct and fantasy outlets for violence. What is wrong with the violence of the mass media is not that it is violence, but that it is not art—that it is meaningless violence which thrills but does not gratify. The violence of the desire for life and meaning is displaced and appears as a desire for meaningless violence. However, the violence which is ceaselessly supplied cannot ultimately gratify it because it does not meet the repressed desire. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

We have hinted that the gratifications offered by popular culture are spurious and unsatisfactory. Most of us wish to be liked, gratefully enjoy the feeling that we are liked, and feel resentment if we are not. For a child the feeling of being wanted is, as we have said, of vital importance for one’s harmonious development. However, what are the particular characteristics of a need for affection that can be considered neurotic? It is my opinion that in arbitrarily calling this need infantile one not only wrongs children but forgets that the essential factors constituting the neurotic need for affection have nothing whatever to do with infantilism. The infantile and the neurotic needs have in common only one element—their helplessness—though this too has a different basis in the two cases. Apart from this, the neurotic needs grow under quite different preconditions. These are, to repeat: anxiety, feeling unlovable, inability to believe in any affection, and hostility against all others. The first characteristic, then, that strikes us in the neurotic need for affection is its compulsiveness. Whenever a person is driven by strong anxiety the result is necessarily a loss of spontaneity and flexibility. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

In simple terms this means that to a neurotic the gaining of affection is not a luxury, nor primarily a source of additional strength or pleasure, but a vital necessity. The difference is one between “I wish to be, and enjoy being, loved,” and “I must be loved at any cost”; or the difference between someone who eats because one has a good appetite, can enjoy one’s food and be discriminating about it, and another person who is near starvation, must take any food indiscriminately, pay any price for it. This attitude necessarily leads to an over-evaluation of the factual significance of being liked. It is, in reality, not so terribly important that people in general should like us. It may, in fact, be important only that certain persons like us—those whom we care for, those with whom we have to live or work, or those on whom it is expedient to make a good impression. Apart from such individual it is fairly irrelevant whether we are liked. (However, such a statement may meet with disagreement in America, where a cultural factor enters into the picture in so far as being popular has become one of the competitive aims, and has thereby gained a significance which it does not have in other countries.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Neurotic persons, however, feel and behave as if their existence, happiness and security depended on being liked. Their desires may be attached to everyone without discrimination, from the hairdresser or the strangers they meet at a party to their colleagues and friends, or to all women, or to all men. Thus a greeting, a telephone call or an invitation, if more friendly or less, may change their mood and their entire outlook upon life. I should mention one problem in this connection: the incapacity to be alone, varying from a slight uneasiness and restlessness to a definite terror of solitude. I speak not of persons who are dull anyway, and easily bored by their own company, but of persons who are intelligent and resourceful and who could otherwise enjoy a number of things by themselves. Frequently, for example, one sees individuals who can work only if someone is around, and are uneasy and unhappy if they have to work alone. There may be other factors in this need for company, but the general picture is one of a vague anxiety, a need for affection or, more accurately, a need for some human contact. These persons have the feeling of drifting forlornly in the Universe, and any human contact is a relief to them. One can sometimes observe, as in an experiment, how the incapacity to be alone parallels the increase of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Some patients are capable of being alone as long as they feel sheltered behind the protective walls with which they have surrounded themselves. However, as soon as their protective devices are effectively tackled by analysis, and some anxiety is stirred up, they suddenly find themselves unable to stand being alone any longer. This is one of the transitional impairments in a patient’s condition which are unavoidable during the process of analysis. The neurotic need for affection may be focused on a single person—husband, wife, physician, friends, shift manager at a café. If this is the case the devotion, interest, friendliness and presence of that person will acquire inordinate importance. This importance has a paradoxical character, however. On the one hand, the neurotic seeks the other’s interest and presence, fears to be disliked and feels neglected if the other is not around; and on the other hand, one is not at all happy when one is with one’s idol. If one ever becomes conscious of this contradiction one is usually perplexed about it. However, on the basis of what I have said it is evident that the wish for the presence of the other person is the expression not of genuine fondness, but only of a need for the reassurance supplied by the fact that the other is available. (Of course a genuine fondness and a need for reassuring affection may go together, but they do not necessarily coincide.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

However, during the process of enlightenment, although one holds to the apex of all human points of view to which philosophy brings one, one keeps open the doors of one’s mind to all sincere writers, to all good people, and to all lower points of view. To one every day is a school say and every meeting with other persons a class lesson, since everyone has something to teach—even if it is only what not to do, how not to think or to behave. When the ego willingly reties from all its Worldly concerns or intellectual preoccupations to the sanctuary of the heart to be alone with the Overself, it becomes not only wiser but more powerful. At moments when the divine influx blissfully invades a being, it will not be out of one’s ordinary self that one will speak or act, but out of one’s higher self. It is natural as well as inevitable that one who has entered into the larger life of the Overself should show forth some of its higher powers. Such an individual’s thoughts are informed by a subtler force, invested with diviner element, pointed by a sharper concentration, and sustained by a superior will than are those of the average person. They are in consequence exceedingly powerful, creative, and effective. That which the sage bears in one’s heart is for all beings. If few are willing to receive it, the fault does not lie with one. One rejects none, is prejudiced against none. It is the others who reject one, who are prejudiced against one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Outwardly one appears to act as intensely or as vigorously as other beings. However, inwardly one will really be at rest in the Overself, which will lead one like a child into performing necessary actions. One’s mind is still, even though one’s body is busy. And because of this leading, one’s actions will be right and even inspired ones, one’s personal will will be expressive of a higher one. So wherever the illuminate goes, one immovable centered in truth. One may retire to the green quietudes of the countryside. One may meet in one’s wanderings with violence and accident or with flattery and fortune. Yet always and alike, one remains self-composed, calm, and king or queen-like in one’s mental grandeur. At long last, when the union of self with Overself is total and complete, some part of one’s consciousness will remain unmoving in infinity, unending in eternity. There, in that sacred glory, one will be preoccupied with one’s divine identity, held to it by irresistible magnetism, gladly, lovingly. “And it came to pass that the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: Behold, thou shalt not suffer these things which ye have seen and heard to go forth unto the World, until the time cometh that I shall glorify my name in the flesh; wherefore, ye shall treasure up the things which ye have seen and heard, and show it to no man or woman,” reports Ether 3.21. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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Whilst there are Parts of Our Nature which Remain Still Undeveloped, We are Not Complete Beings!

September 2, 2019 1:34 am

I felt very sophisticated on account of this education. However, I had no warmth from it, not lasting warmth, and it seemed my loneliness was worse than guilt, worse than the feeling of being damned. Indeed it seemed to replace that old feeling. I feared it, being utterly along. As I sat there looking up at the tiny margin of black Heaven, at the few stars that drifted over the roofs of the houses, I sensed how utterly terrible it would be to lose both my Master and my guilt simultaneously, to be cast out where nothing bothered to love me or damn me, to be lost and tumbling through the World with only those humans for companions, those boys and girls, the English lord with his dagger, even my beloved Bianca. Anxiety is generated by a repressed hostility and it in turn again generates hostility, in other words, anxiety and hostility are inextricably interwoven, one is able to recognize the self-deception in the neurotic’s thinking and the reasons for one’s failures. Without knowing it the neurotic person is in the dilemma of being incapable of loving and yet being in great need of love from others. We stumble here over one of those questions that seem so simple and are nevertheless so difficult to answer: what is love, or what do we mean by it in our culture? #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

One may sometimes hear an offhand definition of love as the capacity to give and take affection. Although this contains some truth, it is much too sweeping to be helpful in clarifying the difficulties with which we are concerned. Most of us can be affectionate at times, but it is a quality that may go with a thorough incapacity for love. The important consideration is the attitude from which affection radiates: is it an expression of a basic beneficial attitude toward others, or is it, for example, born of a fear that one will lose the other, or of a wish to get the other person under one’s thumb? In other words, we cannot take any manifest attitudes as criteria. Although it is very difficult to say what is love, we can say definitely what is not love, or what elements are alien to it. One may be thoroughly fond of a person, and yet at times between such circumscribed reactions of wrath or withdrawal and the attitude of a neurotic, who is constantly on guard against others, feels that any interest they take in third persons is a neglect of oneself, and interprets any demand as an imposition or any criticism as a humiliation. This is not love. So, too, it is not incompatible with love to offer constructive criticism of certain qualities or attitudes, in order, if possible, to help correct them; but it is not love to make, as the neurotic often does, an intolerant demand for perfection, a demand which implies a hostile “woe unto you if you are not perfect!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

We also consider it incompatible with our idea of love when we find a person using another only as a means for some purpose, that is, only or mainly because one fulfills certain needs. This is clearly the situation when the other person is wanted only for gratification of pleasures of the flesh, or in marriage, only for prestige. However, here too this issue is very easily blurred, especially if the needs concerned are of a psychic nature. A person may deceive oneself into believing that one loves another even if, for example, the other is needed only for the blind admiration that one gives. In such cases, however, the other person is likely to be dropped suddenly or even may be turned against, as soon as one begins to be critical, thereby failing in the function of admiration, for which one was loved. In discussing the contrast between what is and what is not love we must be watchful, however, not to lean over backward. Though love is incompatible with use of the loved one for some gratification, this does not mean that love must be completely and exclusively altruistic and sacrificing. Nor does that feeling alone deserve the name of love which does not demand anything for the self. Person who express any such convictions betray their own unwillingness to give affection rather than a thoroughly worked out conviction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Of course we want something from the person we are fond of—we want gratification, loyalty, help; we may even want a sacrifice, if necessary. (Jesus Christ is the most renewed blood sacrifice.) And it is in general an indication of mental health to be able to express such wishes or even fight for them. The difference between love and the neurotic need for affection is possessed in the fact that in love the feeling of affection is primary, whereas in the cases of the neurotic the primary feeling is the need for reassurance, and the illusion of love is only secondary. Of course there are still all sorts of intermediate conditions. If a person needs another’s affection for the sake of reassurance against anxiety, the issue will usually be completely blurred in one’s conscious mind, because in general one does not know that one is fully of anxiety and that one therefore reaches out desperately for any kind of affection for the sake of reassurance. All that one feels is that here is a person who one likes or trusts, or with whom one feels infatuated. However, what one feels as spontaneous love may be nothing but a response of gratitude for some kindness shown one or a response of hope or affection aroused by some person or situation. The person who explicitly or implicitly arouses in one expectations of this kind will automatically be invested with importance, and one’s feeling will manifest itself in the illusion of love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Such expectations may be aroused by the simple fact that one is treated kindly by a person who is powerful and influential, or by one who merely gives the impression of standing more securely on one’s feet. They may be aroused by erotic or advances in pleasures of the flesh, although these may have nothing to do with love. They may feed on existing ties of some sort, which implicitly contain a promise of help or emotional support: family, friends, physician. Many such relations are carried on under the camouflage of love, that is, under a subjective conviction of attachment, when actually the love is only the person’s clinging to others to satisfy one’s own needs. That this is no reliable feeling of genuine affection is revealed in the ready revulsion that appears when any wishes are not fulfilled. One of the factors essential to our idea of love—reliability and steadiness of feeling—is absent in these cases. A final characteristic of the incapacity for love has already been implied, but I wish to give it special emphasis: disregard of the other’s personality, peculiarities, limitations, needs, wishes, development. This disregard is in part a result of the anxiety which prompts the neurotic to cling to the other person. One who is drowning and clings to a swimmer does not usually consider the other’s willingness or capacity to carry one along. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

The disregard is also partly an expression of the basic hostility toward people, the most common contents of which are contempt and envy. It may be covered up by desperate efforts to be considerate, or even sacrificing, but usually these efforts cannot prevent the emerging of certain unwonted reactions. A wife may be subjectively convinced, for example, of her deep devotion to her husband, and yet be resentful, complaining or depressed when the husband devoted his time to his work, his interests or his friends. An over-protective mother may be convinced that she does everything for the sake of the child’s needs for independent development. The neurotic person whose protective device is a drive for affection is hardly ever aware of one’s incapacity for love. Most such persons will mistake their need of others for a disposition toward love, whether for individuals or for humankind in general. There is a pressing reason for maintaining and defending such an illusion. Giving it up would mean uncovering the dilemma of feeling at once basically hostile toward people and nevertheless wanting their affection. One cannot despise a person, distrust one, wish to destroy one’s happiness or independence, and at the same time crave one’s affection, help or support. In order to achieve both ends, which in reality are incompatible, one has to keep the hostile disposition strictly removed from awareness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The illusion of love, in other words, while it is the result of an understandable confusion between genuine fondness and need, has the definite function of making the pursuit of affection possible. There is still another basic difficulty which the neurotic encounters in satisfying one’s hunger for affection. Though one may succeed, at least temporarily, in getting the affection one wants, one is unable really to accept it. One should expect one to welcome any affection offered to one, as eagerly as a thirsty person takes to water. In fact, that does happen, but only temporarily. Every physician knows the effect of kindness and consideration. All physical and psychic troubles may suddenly vanish, even though nothing is being done but giving the patient hospital care and having one thoroughly examined. A situation neurosis, even through it be a severe one, may disappear altogether when the person feels loved. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a famous example of this kind. Even in character neuroses such attention, whether it is love, interest or medical care, may be sufficient to release anxiety and thereby improve the condition. Any kind of affection may give one a superficial reassurance, or even a feeling of happiness, but deep down it either meets with disbelief or stirs up distrust and fear. One does not believe in it, because one is firmly convinced that no one can possibly love one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

And this feeling of being unlovable is often a conscious conviction, unshakable by any factual experiences to the contrary. It can, indeed, be taken so much for granted that it never consciously bothers the person, but even when it is inarticulate it is just as unshakable a conviction as if it had always been conscious. Also, it can be concealed by a “do not care” attitude, usually dictated by pride, and then it is likely to create difficulty in digging it out. The conviction of being unlovable is closely akin to the incapacity for love; it is, in fact, a conscious reflection of that incapacity. A person who can be genuinely found of others will have no doubts that other can be fond of one. If the anxiety is really deep, any affection offered meets with distrust, and it will immediately be assumed that it is offered from ulterior motives. In psychoanalysis, for example, such patients feel that the analyst wants to help them only for the sake of one’s own ambition, or that one makes appreciative or encouraging remarks only for therapeutical reasons. One patient of mine considered it a beneficial humiliation that I offered to see her during the weekend, at a time when she was emotionally upset. Affection shown demonstratively is easily felt as a taunt. If an attractive young lady openly shows affection toward a neurotic man he may take it as teasing, or even as a deliberate provocation, since it is beyond his imagination that the girl might be truly fond of him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Affection ordered to such a person not only may meet with distrust but may arouse absolute anxiety. It is as if giving in to an affection meant being caught in a spider’s web, or as if believing in an affection meant being taken off one’s guard while living among cannibals. A neurotic person may have a feeling of terror when one approaches the realization that some genuine fondness is being offered to one. Furthermore, evidence of affection may arouse a fear of dependency. Emotional dependency, as we shall see shortly, is a real danger for anyone who cannot live without the affection of others, and anything faintly resembling it may evoke a desperate struggle against it. Such a person must at all cost avoid any kind of absolute emotional response of one’s own, because such a response immediately conjures up the danger of dependency. In order to avoid this one must blindfold oneself against the awareness that others are kind or helpful, somehow managing to discard every evidence of affection and insisting, in one’s own feelings, that the others are unkind, uninterested or even malevolent. The situation created in this way is similar to that of a person who is starving for food yet does not dare to take any for fear that it might be poisoned. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

In short, then, for a person who is driven by one’s basic anxiety and consequently, as a means of protection, reaches out for affection, the chances of getting this so much desired affection are anything but favorable. The very situation that creates the need interferes with its gratification. Unconscious ideas of the patient are more often than not the conscious theories of therapist. In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing. However, now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Religious differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says somethings are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things. First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the Universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. Perfection is eternal, and that is a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The second affirmation of religion is that if we believe her first affirmation to be true, even now we are better off. Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true. (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset. If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the saving remnant’ alone). So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issues by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that was if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we absolutely chose to disbelieve. It is as if a being should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,–that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his take as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach scepticism to us as a duty until sufficient evidence for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in the presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist’s command to imitate one’s kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side,–that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the World religiously might be prophetic and right. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the Universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The Universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the Universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn,–so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing that Universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required. I therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what kinds of truth might materially be. I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. However, sad experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from radically saying with me, in abstracto, that we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is lived enough to temp our will. I suspect, however, this if this is so, it is because you have got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious hypothesis which for you is dead. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The freedom to believe what we will you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, “Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true.” I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to one who has them to consider. When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete beings, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true—till doomsdays, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough,–this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in no waiting for its releasing word. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of ideal fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed we may wait if we will,–I hope you do not think that I am denying that,–but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the others, nor should we brandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have the spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things. What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the World? These are questions with which all mist deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them. In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If a being chooses to turn one’s back altogether on God and the future, no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that one is mistake. If a being thinks otherwise and acts as one thinks, I do not see that anyone can prove that one is mistaken. Each must act as one thinks best; and if one is wrong, so much the worse for one. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? Be strong and of good courage. Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. One has chosen a path to which one has been led both by instinct and by experience. As one tries to follow it, one will meet with all kinds of difficulties but one should not turn back. Because the interrelation of outward karma to inner character is so close, one should understand that these difficulties are linked up with one’s inner state, and that one begins to solve them by removing the imperfection of that inner state. One must understand that, although this goal is not easy to obtain, one must refuse to give up hope. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The path is right by itself, and in allying oneself with it, one is allying oneself with what is, after all, the greatest force in the World. One will know that this is the day of one’s spiritual rebirth, that struggle is to be replaced henceforth by serenity, that self-reproach is to yield to self-assurance, and that life in appearance is transformed into life in reality. At last one has emerged from confusion and floundering and bewilderment. At last one is able to experience the blessed satisfaction, the joyous serenity of an integrated attitude wholly based on the highest truth. The capacities which have been incubating slowly and explosively during all the years of one’s quest will erupt suddenly into consciousness at the same moment that the higher self takes possession of one. What was formerly an occasional glimpse will not become a permanent sight. The intermittent intuition of a guardian presence will now become the constantly established experience of it. The divine presence has now become to one an immediate and intimate one. Its reality and vitality are no longer matters for argument or dispute, but matters of settled experience. I am a being; and beings are created after the image of God, and I am called by his Holy Spirit to teach these things unto this people, that they may be brought to a knowledge of that which is just and true; and a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God,” reports Alma 18.34-35. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Modern Beings Seem Mad in their Obsession to Control Nature by Technology

August 31, 2019 1:46 am

Pay attention. You will always know when the morning is coming, if you pay attention. Do you feel it? Do you hear the birds? There are in all parts of the World those birds who sing right before dawn. One motive for delinquency—a way of getting out of line—is, possibly, a preference for occasional prison terms to imprisonment by routine. Crime, by its ultimate irrationality, may protest against the subordination of individual spontaneity to social efficiency. Three further reactions to anonymity may be noted: (1) The prestige of histrionics has risen. We long to impersonate, to get a name—better a pseudonym than to remain nameless; better a borrowed character than none; better to impersonate than never to feel like person. The wish to be oneself does not occur, for the only self known is empty and must be filled from the outside. (2) The attempt to become “interesting” (no doubt unconsciously to become interested) by buying a ready-made individuality, through “sending for,” “enrolling in,” or “reading up on” something, or “going places.” (3) Impersonal and abstract things and utilitarian relationships are cozily “personalized” as though to offset the depersonalization of individual life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

De-individualization, however, should not be viewed as a grim, deliberate, or coercive process. It is induced gradually by economic rewards and not experienced as de-individualization at all, though the symptoms are demonstrable. Most of the people who are nourished with homogenized pap never has solid food on which to cut their teeth. They feel vaguely restless and dissatisfied, but do not know what they are pining for and could not masticate or digest it if they had it. The cooks are kept busy ransacking all the recipes the World has ever known to prepare new dishes. However, the texture is always the same, always mushy, for the materials are always strained, blended, beaten, heated, and cooled until it is. Let us briefly tour the institutional kitchens where “recreation” is cooked up—movies, radio, television. Mass media cannot afford to step on anyone’s toes, and this implies a number of restrictions which, though less significant than the positive prescriptions, are not negligible. We can forebear rehearsing tiresome minutiae—forbidden words, topics, situations, actions; but the countless dangerous associations mass media must avoid deserve some scrutiny. No religious, racial, occupational, national, economic, political, and so forth, group can be offended. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Hence: Can an evil man be Mormon? Left-handed? Pipesmoking? Can he perish in an airplane accident? Can a villain have any qualities shared with non-villains and a hero have disapproved traits? In short, can either be human? The playwright or script writer may not mean to say that Mormons are evil or all evil men left-handed, or all pipesmokers; one may not intend to advocate bigamy or to suggest that airplane are dangerous or that we ought to be atheists. Anne Rice did not intend Tales of the Body Thief to be anti-Vampire, any more than Shakespeare intended Othello as a tract against handkerchiefs (in favor of Kleenex?). No matter. There is a danger that the play will be so understood. In Shylock and Fagin, Shakespeare and Dickens created individuals, experiences, and ideas and, unlike copy writers or propagandists, did not intend them as instruction on how to act and think. Yet the groups that press restrictions on mass media are wrong. For the audience tends to react as though such instruction had been received. The audience of mass media always expects to be sold goods, stereotypes, and recipes for living—a new vitamin for that tired, listless feeling, or a new line for romance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

And the audience is usually right: the same actress who just implored a soap-opera husband not to leave her and the kids turns and implores one and all in identically sincere and personal tones to buy insurance and perfume. The small boy’s heroes admonish him to get mommy to buy this or that (and even if the heroes did not, someone will sell Davy Crockett caps to the small boy). In many breakfast and news shows, advertising recommendations are deliberately mixed with “actual” expressions of opinion. Even non-professionals—society leaders, well-known novelists, successful and “average” common beings-ringingly declare their profound personal convictions on brands of soap, or beer, or God: “This I believe.” The line dividing views and characters presented as fiction and as “real” becomes hazy and the audience necessarily muddled about separating advertisements, pleas, and recipes from art. In such a context, the audience cannot receive art as individual experience and perspective on experience. Art becomes irrelevant. It is not perceived in its own terms, but first reduced to, then accepted or rejected as, a series of rules and opinions on what to expect or do. The idea that something must be sold is held by the media managers as fervently as it is held by the audience. It transcends the commercial motives which begot it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Thus public or educational stations, which do not accept commercial advertising, spend nearly as much time on (non-commercial) attempts to sell something as do commercial ones. They sell themselves or their program, or next week’s offering—anything at all, as long as something is sold: “please listen again tomorrow,” “please send for our booklet,” “please do this or do not do that”—the listener must always be hectored, sold on or wheedled into something. How, then, could the audience see that a character such as Shylock simply is? A character in the audience’s experience always exists for a purpose; a character is invented to sell something, a point of view, or a product, or oneself. It is never an end in itself. Hence the audience always asks, Should be buy his or her line?, and it is nearly impossible to present something without suggesting by implication that it be bought. Art, like love, can be experiences only as a personal, continuous, cumulative relationship. Else art becomes entertainment—dull entertainment often—just as love is reduced to pleasures of the flesh or prestige. Not that art should not be entertaining; but it is no more deliberately aimed at entertainment than love is. Art (and love) must be felt; they cannot be manufactured by someone to suit the tastes of someone else. Yet mass-media fare is prepared for consumers devoted to amusement, not, as art (and love) must be, devoted to the work (or person) itself. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

The circumstances which permit the expected in the audience of mass media. That audience is dispersed and heterogeneous, and though it listens often, it does so incidentally and intermittently and poised to leave if not immediately enthralled and kept amused. Such an audience is captured by loud, broad, and easy charms, by advertising posters, by copywriter’s prose. And the conditions and conditioning of the audience demand a mad mixture of important and trivial matters, atom bombs, hit tunes, symphonies, B.O., sob stories, hotcha girls, round tables, and jokes. It jells into one thing: diversion. Hence what art is presented is received as entertainment or propaganda. Shylock would be understood as an anti-Semitic stereotype. The mass media may as well fit their offerings to the audience which they address and, knowing the limitations of that audience, they would be irresponsible to disregard the kind of understanding and misunderstand their offerings will meet. They must omit, therefore, all human experiences likely to be misunderstood—all experience and expression, the meaning of which is not obvious and approved. Which is to say that the mass media cannot touch the experiences that are, philosophy and literature deal with: relevant and significant human experience presented in relevant and significant form. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

For if it is such, it is new, doubtful, difficult, perhaps offensive, at any rate easily misunderstood. Art is not concerned with making the obvious and approved more obvious and approved; it is precisely after this point that art begins and the mass media stop. There is a small debate being aired in certain circles of anthropology today about the many ways in which primitive life was superior to our own. I do not want to go int the pros and cons of it and the many subtle and valid arguments produced on both sides. However, if we agree to the old anthropological tenet about the psychic unity of humankind—that is, the beings everywhere, no matter how exotic a particular culture, is basically standard Homo sapiens, interchangeable in their nature and motives with any other human being–it does help us to understand the primitive World. This is what the whole movement to rehabilitate the primitive has been about: to show that one is basically no different from ourselves and certainly not inferior mentally or emotionally. Well, having agreed that the primitive is no worse than we are, it might be in order to add that one is no better. Otherwise, as we shall see, we cannot really understand what happened in history, unless we try to make out that a different animal developed, nor can we understand the problems of modern society, unless we pretend that modern beings are a wholly degenerate type of Homo sapiens. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

What I am saying is that if modern beings seem mad in their obsession to control nature by technology, primitive beings were no less obsessed by their own mystical technics of sacrifice. After all, one of the things we have learned from the modern study of mental illness is that to make the body the referent of the whole cosmos is a technique of madness. It is true that by institutionalizing macrocosmization, primitive beings made it a normal way of referring oneself to transcendent events. However, this kind of normality is itself unreal, it blows beings up to an abnormal size, and so we are right to consider it self-defeating, a departure from the truth of the human condition. If the primitive was not less intelligent, one was equally not less intent on self-perpetuation. When we step off into history, we seem to see a type of being who is more driven—but this is only because one started off already obsessed with control and with a hunger for immortality. It is true that primitive beings were kinder to nature, that one did not cause the kind of destructiveness we are causing and, in fact, did not seem capable of our kind of casual disregard for the bounty of the natural World. It would take a lot of study and compilation of comparative data to bear these impressions out, but I think that if primitive beings were kinder to nature, it was not because one was innately different in one’s emotional sensitivity nor more altruistic toward other living forms than we are. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

I think, rather, that it was because one’s technics of manipulation were less destructive in the past. One needed a tree, the spirit of an animal or plant, the sacrifice of one animal species. A we shall see, we grind up astronomically larger quantities of life, but it is in the same spirit and for the same basic reasons. If we talk about a certain primitive quality of reverence for lice, we must be very careful. The primitives’ attitude toward animals considered sacred was sometimes more cruel than our own is. They did not hesitate to sacrifice those whom they considered their benefactors or their gods, or even hesitate to kill their chiefs and kinds. The main value was whether this brought life to the community and whether the ritual demanded it. Beings have always casually sacrificed life for more life. Probably more to the point, beings have always treated with consideration and respect those parts of the natural World over which one has had no control. As soon as one was sure of one’s powers, one’s respect for the mystery of what one faced diminished. As the superiority and mastery over the rest of the living World became more and more apparent one seems to have become more and more anxious to disclaim relationships with animals, especially when worship because associated with respect. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

There is no objection to an animal’s being the object of a cult when this does not imply respect but is merely a procedure for causing the animal to multiply. It is a very different thing when ritual becomes worship; beings are loath to abase themselves before an animal. This is attributed to the growing conceit of human beings. However, we could just as well see it as a result of natural narcissism. Each organism preens itself on the specialness of the life that throbs within it, and is ready to subordinate all others to its own continuation. Beings are always conceited; one only began to show one’s destructive side to the rest of nature when the ritual technology of the spiritual production of animals was superseded by other technologies. The unfolding of history is precisely the saga of the succession of new and different ideologies of organismic self-perpetuation—and the new injustices and heightened destructiveness of historical beings. However, there is no love without aggression. As opposed to ordinary aggression, it is directed toward one individual, just as love is, and probably hate presupposes the presence of love: one can really hate only where one has loved and, even if one denies it, still does. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

That love is sometimes transformed into hate has often been said, even though it is more correct to say that it is not love which suffers this transformation, but the wounded narcissism of the loving person, this is to say, the non-love which causes hate. To claim one hates only where one has loved, however, turn the element of truth in the statement into plain absurdity. Does the oppressed hate the oppressor, does the mother of the child hate its murderer, does the tortured hate the torturer because they one loved him or still do? Primitive forms of petty individual aggression owes its motivating force to phylogenetically evolved behavior patterns. There cannot be the slightest doubt that human militant enthusiasm evolved out of a communal defense response of our prehuman ancestors. It is the enthusiasm shared by the group in defense against a common enemy. Every being of normally strong emotions knows, from one’s own experience, the subjective phenomena that go hand in hand with the response of militant enthusiasm. A shiver runs down the back and, as more exact observation shows, along the outside of both arms. One soars elated, above all the ties of everyday life, one is ready to abandon all for the call of what, in the moment of this specific emotion, seems to be a sacred duty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

All obstacles in its path become unimportant; the instinctive inhibitions against hurting or killing one’s fellows lose unfortunately much of their power. Rational considerations, criticism, and all reasonable arguments against the behavior dictated by militant enthusiasm are silenced by an amazing reversal of all values making them appear not only untenable but base and dishonorable. Beings may enjoy the feeling of absolute righteousness even while they commit atrocities. Conceptual thought and moral responsibility are at their lowest ebb. As a Ukrainian proverb says: “When the banner is unfurled, all reason is in the trumpet.” There is a reasonable hope that our moral responsibility may gain control over the primeval drive, but our only hope of its ever doing so rests on the humble recognition of the fact that militant enthusiasm is an instinctive response with a phylogenetically determined releasing mechanism and that the only point at which intelligent and responsible supervision can get control is the conditioning of the response to an object which proves to be a genuine value under the scrutiny of the categorical questions. No doubt many beings do enjoy the feeling of absolute righteousness even while they commit atrocities—or rather, to put it in more adequate psychological terms, many enjoy committing atrocities without any more inhibitions and without experiencing a sense of guilt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

However, it is an untenable scientific procedure to claim, without even trying to muster evidence for it, that this is a universal human reaction, or that it is human nature to commit atrocities during war, and to base this claim on an alleged instinct based on the questionable analogy with fishes and birds. The fact is that when hate is aroused against in the group, individuals and groups differ tremendously in their tendency to commit atrocities. In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy. Similarly, the Germans reported few atrocities committed by their enemies, for the simple reason that there were so few. Even during the second World War, in spite of the increasing brutalization of humankind, atrocities were generally restricted to special formations of the Nazis. In general, regular troops on both sides did not commit war crimes on the scale which would be expected. However, as far as atrocities are concerned, the behavior of sadistic or bloodthirsty character type often display a militant enthusiasm, it is a nationalistic and emotionally somewhat primitive reaction. To assert that a readiness to commit atrocities once the flag has been unfurled is an instinctively given part of human nature and is the classic defense against the accusation of violating the principles of the Geneva Convention. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

We do not mean to defense atrocities, and our approach in dealing with them must never block the understanding of the character systems in which they are rooted, and the individual and social conditions that cause their development. However, without military enthusiasm (this true autonomous instinct) neither art, nor science, nor indeed any of the great endeavors of humanity would have come into being. How can this be when the first condition for the manifestation of this instinct is that a social unit with which the subject identifies must appear to be threatened by some danger from outside? Is there any evidence that art and science flower only when there is an outside threat? We can explain this as the love of neighbor, expressed in the willingness to risk one’s life for one, as a matter of course if one is your best friend and has saved yours a number of times: you do it without even thinking. Instance of such decent behavior in tight spots easily occur, provided they are of a kind that occurred often enough in the paleolithic period to produce phylogenetically adapted social norms to deal with the situation. Such a view of love of neighbor is mixture of instinctivism and utilitarianism. You save your friend because he or she has saved your life a number of times; what is one did it only once, or not at all? Besides, you only do it because it happened often enough in the paleolithic period. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Furthermore, there is a difference in the satisfaction attained—in general terms the difference between pleasures and reassurance. Strivings for satisfaction and security present a basic principle regulating life. The distinction, however, is less sharp than appears at first sight. The satisfaction of instinctual drives such as hunger and pleasures of the flesh is desire, but if physical tension has been pent up the satisfaction attained is very similar to that attained in relief from anxiety. In both cases there is relief from an unbearable tension. As to intensity, pleasure and reassurance may be equally strong. A satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh, though different in kind, may be equally as strong as the feelings of a person who is suddenly relieved from an intense anxiety; and, generally speaking, the strivings for reassurance not only may be as strong as instinctual drives, but may yield an equally strong satisfaction. The strivings for reassurance contain also other secondary sources of satisfaction. For example, the feeling of being loved or appreciated, of having success or influence, may be highly satisfactory, quite apart from the gain in security. Furthermore, as we shall see presently, the various approaches to reassurance allow quite a discharge of pent-up hostility and thus afford another kind of relief from tensions. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The craving for affection is so frequent in neuroses, and so easily recognizable by the trained observer, that it may be considered one of the surest indicators for an existing anxiety and its approximate intensity. In fact if one feels fundamentally helpless toward a World which is invariably menacing and hostile, then the search for affection would appear to be the most logical and direct way of reaching out for any kind of benevolence, help or appreciation. If the psychic conditions of the neurotic person were what they frequently appear to oneself to be, it ought to be easy for one to gain affection. If I may verbalize what one often sense only dimly, one’s impression are something like this: what one wants is so little, only the people should be kind to one, should give one advice, should appreciate that one is less affluent, harmless, lonely soul, anxious to please, anxious not to hurt anyone’s feelings. That is all one sees or feels. One does not recognize how much one’s sensitivities, one’s latent hostilities, one’s exacting demands interfere with one’s own relationships; nor is one able to judge the impression one makes on other or their reaction to one. Consequently one is at a loss to understand why one’s friendships, marriages, love affairs, professional relations are so often dissatisfactory. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

One tends to conclude that all of this dysfunction is the fault of others, that they are inconsiderate, disloyal, abusive, or that for some unfathomable reason one lack the gift of being popular. This one keeps chasing the phantom of love. One day the mysterious event called by Jesus being born again will occur. There will be a serene displacement of the lower self by the higher one. It will come in the secrecy of disciple’s heart and it will come with an overwhelming power which the intellect, the ego, and the animal in one may resist, but resist in vain. One is brought to this experience by the Overself as soon as one is oneself able to penetrate to the deeper regions of one’s heart. Only when the disciple has given up all the Earthly attractions and wishes, expectations and desires that previously sustained one, only when one has had the courage to pluck them out by the roots and throw them aside forever, only then does one find the mysterious unearthly compensation for all this terrible sacrifice. For one is anointed with the sacred oil of a new and higher life. Henceforth one is truly saved, redeemed, illumined. The lower self has died only to give birth to a divine successor. “And blessed are all they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled with the Holy Ghost. And blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. And blessed are all the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” reports 3 Nephi 12.6-8. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

However Scarce the World May Make this Sense—In Awe One Feels Profoundly the Immense!

August 30, 2019 12:17 am

You simply do not know the flesh. The concept is too complex for you. What do you think taught your souls your souls in Sheol their perfection? Was it not suffering? Yes, they enter perhaps twisted and burnt if they have failed to see beyond suffering on Earth, and some may disappear. But in Sheol, over the centuries of suffering and longing, others are purged and purified. Since we generally think of aggression as being destructive, I shall not need to illustrate this beyond a brief personal example. I was engaged to speak at a conference of the junior executives of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. This conference was part of a six-week training session held on the campus of a New England college and, I assumed, an expression of the humanistic interest of AT&T. I had spoken at such conferences before with gratifying results. However, I found, to my surprise and some bewilderment, that my talk was confronted with strange, invisible barriers. I have always been convinced of the truth of Walt Whiteman’s statement that the “audience makes the speech.” This audience seemed alert and fresh bur, try as I would, I just could not communicate my main ideas. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

At a recess I discovered that, for this part of their training, these young executives (being judged for possible promotion to the few top positions in the corporation) were being trained to be “aggressive,” and that AT&T has retained a couple of professors from college to grade the men and women on how efficiently they could shoot holes in the arguments presented. What I was really facing was not an audience that wanted to learn or even a group present for the pleasures of intellectual stimulation. Its aim was entirely different; the audience was listening not to what I said, but for the errors, the weaknesses in the argument. This was, in short, a sophisticated form of listening geared toward putting down the speaker. The aggression had a weighty competitive reward, namely promotion to high office. This is an example of noncommunication. Such an attitude will successfully inhibit any speaker; you cannot bring forth your ideas unless you feel that they will at least be heard. This does not mean that they will be agreed with; but it does mean that they will be listened to for their own intrinsic merit. If I had known about the purpose of this audience at the outset I could have simply changed the whole theme of my talk to aggression and its purposes and effect; then we would at least have been communicating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Many are wondering, as we speak about communication, how is the mass market formed on which popular culture is sold and perpetuated? In the first place, individual taste has become uneconomic for the purchaser and for the seller, and this effectively stunts its growth. People are prepared accordingly throughout the educational process. Group acceptance, shared taste, takes the place of authority and of individual moral and aesthetic judgment and standards. However, people often move from group to group. Any tastes therefore that cannot be sloughed off—an individual taste, not easily divided from the person in whom it dwells—becomes an obstacle to adaptation. Success is hindered by a discriminating personal taste which expresses or continues an individual personality, and success is fostered by an unselective appetite. Numerous precautions are taken, beginning in nursery school (itself hardly an individualizing institution) to avoid elaboration of personal discernment and to instill fear of separation from the group. Group acceptance is stressed through formal and informal popularity contests, teamwork, and polling. Education altogether stresses group instruction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

For instance, the size of one’s classes and the class average, not the qualities of individual pupils, are often considered the measure of the teacher. The student oneself is so much treated as part of a group that, except in higher education (which is only partly immune), one may be automatically promoted with one’s group regardless of individual achievement or variation. Finally, the surviving individual talent is instructed not to cultivate, but to share, itself. The writer gives a writing course, the scholar lectures and writes popularizations, the beauty models of appears on TV, and the singer deserts the concert hall for the juke box. The aggregate effect of advertising is to bring about wide sharing of tastes. The actual social function of advertising is not to mold tastes in any particular way, nor to debase it. This goes for manufacturers, publishers and movie-makers too. They are quite content to produce and advertise what people want—be it T.S. Eliot or Edgar Guest, Kierkegaard or Norman Vincent Peale, “September Morn” or mobiles. It does not matter what people want to buy as long as they want to buy enough of the same thing to make mas production possible. Advertising helps to unify tastes, to de-individualize it and thus to make mass production possible. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

There is no evidence to support conspiracy theories which hold that wicked capitalists, through advertising and mass media, deliberately (or stupidly) debauch the originally good, natural tastes of the masses. Mass production—capitalist or socialist—demands unified taste; efficiency (or profitableness) is dependent only on its being shared by sizeable groups. Can one say anything about mass tastes beyond saying that they are widely shared? Are they homogenized on the lowest common denominator? There seem to be no good reasons to assume that the lowest tastes are most widespread. One may say something of the sort about some crowds untied temporarily by crude common appetites at the expense of reason, restraint and refinement. However, why consider consumers a crowd? Even the fare offered by the entertainment media is usually consumed by people separately or in very small groups. (Except for movies, but moviegoers are isolated from each other though they are together.) Producers have no interest in lowering tastes or in catering to low rather than high taste. They seek to provide for a modal average of tastes which through advertising they try to make as congruent with the mean average as possible. Neither average can be identical with the lowest common denominator. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Yet in one sense consumers are treated as a crowd: their individual tastes are not catered to. The mass-produced article need not aim low, but it must aim at an average of tastes. In satisfying all (or at least many) individual tastes in some respects, it violates each in other respect. For there are—so far—no average persons having average tastes. Averages are but statistical composites. A mass-produced article, while reflecting nearly everybody’s tastes to some extent, is unlikely to embody anybody’s taste fully. This is one source of the sense of violation which is rationalized vaguely in theories about deliberate debasement of taste. The sense of violation springs from the same thwarting of individuality that makes prostitution (or promiscuity) psychologically offensive. The cost of inexpensive and easy availability, of mass production, is wide appeal; and the cost of wide appeal is de-individualization of the relationship between those who cater and those who are catered to; and of the relationship of both to the object of the transaction. By using each other indiscriminately as impersonal instruments (the seller for profit, the buyer for sensation—or, in promiscuity, both parties for sensation and relief of anxiety) the man or woman of the night and his or her client sacrifice to seemingly more urgent demands the self which, in order to grow, needs continuity, discrimination and completeness in relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Though profit and sensation can be achieved by depersonalization, the satisfaction ultimately sought cannot be, for the very part of personality in which it is felt—the individual self—is stunted and atrophied, at least if de-individualization continues long enough and is comprehensive. Ultimately, the sense of violation too is numbered. Now, the depersonalizing effects of the mass production of some things—say, electric clocks—may be minor as far as consumers are concerned and more than offset by the advantages of affordability. The same cannot be said for mass entertainment or education. And though some individuals may, society cannot have one without the other. The effects of mass production on people as producers and consumers are likely to be cumulative. Besides, even goods that seem purely utilitarian include elements of non-utilitarian, of aesthetic and psychic (for instance, prestige) appeal. Indeed, less than half of consumer expenditure goes for the satisfaction of simple biological needs. (More, perhaps, in the lowest income groups, and much less still in the higher ones.) One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. Whatever helps consciousness come nearer to high moods is a useful spiritual path to someone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Distinctions of this kind are necessarily hazy, but if cigarettes, newspapers, television, drinks, shaving lotion or lipstick, the prestige location of one’s Cresleigh Home, the fashionableness of one’s clothing, and so forth, are taken to satisfy nonbiological needs—and we can do without them biologically—then we are motivated by psychic needs in spending most of our money. This, of course, is not in itself objectionable—except that the processes by which many of these needs now arise and are stilled bring to mind the processes by which bread is now mass produced. In milling and baking, bread is deprived of any taste whatever and of all vitamins. Some of the vitamins are then added again (taste is provided by advertising). Quite similarly with all mass-produced articles. They can no more express the individual tastes of producers than that of consumers. They become impersonal objects, however pseudo-personalized. Producers and consumers go through the mass production mill to come out homogenized and de-characterized—only it does not seem possible to reinject the individualities which have been ground out, the way the vitamins are added to enrich bread. The human relations industry tried to do just that and it doubtlessly supplies a demand and can be helpful, just as chemical sedatives or stimulants can be. However, it seems unlikely that any assembly line—including manned by human relations counselors—can give more than the illusion of individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

To produce more, people work under de-individualizing conditions and are rewarded by high income and leisure. Thus they can and do consume more. However, as consumers, they must once more rid themselves of individual tastes. The benefits of mass production are reaped only by matching de-individualizing work with equally de-individualizing consumption. The more discontinuous income earning and spending become physically, the more continuous they seem to become psychologically. Failure to repress individual personality in or after working hours is costly; in the end the production of standardized things by persons demands also the production of standardized persons. This intellectual preparation and emotional purification is a task that strains being’s faculties to the extreme. Nobody therefore need expect it to be other than a lifetime’s task. Few even succeed in finishing it in a single lifetime—a whole series is required in most cases. Nature has taken a very long time to bring beings to one’s present state, so she is in no hurry to complete their development in any particular reincarnation. Yet such is the mystery of grace, that this is always a grand possibility, always the sublime X-factor in every case. However, the individual aspirant cannot afford to gamble with this chance, which, after all, is a rare one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

One must rely on one’s personal efforts, on one’s own strivings, more than anything else, to being one nearer to the desired goal. In a material sense, this assembly-line shaping, packaging and distributing of persons, of life, occurs already. Most people perch unsteadily in mass-produced, impermanent dwellings throughout their lives. They are born in hospitals, fed in cafeterias, married in churches or castles or mansions or rose gardens. After terminal care they perish in hospitals, are shelved briefly in funeral homes, and are finally incinerated or put in the ground. On each of these occasions—how many others?—efficiency and economy are obtained and individuality and continuity stripped off. If one lives and dies discontinuously and promiscuously in anonymous surroundings, it becomes hard to identify with anything even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything even one’s own individuality. The rhythm of individual life loses autonomy, spontaneity, and distinction when it is tired into a stream of traffic and carried along according to the speed of the road, as we are, in going to work, or play, or in doing anything. Traffic lights signal when to stop and go, and much as we seem to be driving we are driven. To stop spontaneously, to exclaim, Verweile doch Du bist so schoen (Stay, for you are beautiful), may not lose the modern Faust his soul—but it will cause a traffic jam. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The egoism which falsifies our true sense of being and the materialism which distorts our true sense of reality are maladies which can hardly be cured by our own efforts. Only by calling, in trust and love, on a higher power, whether it be embodied in another man or in ourself, can their mesmeric spell ultimately be broken. Yet it is our own efforts which first must initiate the cure. Turning inward upon oneself might be retiring to a fool’s paradise or into a real one. To make progress inwardly is ultimately all that matters, everything else passes except the fruit of our spiritual efforts. Mysticism is the theory and practice of a technique whereby a being seeks to establish direct personal contact with spiritual being. The ideal here may not set at becoming a sinless saint but at becoming an enlightened and balanced human being. The ultimate point to be attained is fully humanity. One alone who has developed on all sides in this way is fully human. It is one sign of the sage who lives in perfect detachment that one does not miss an enjoyable experience which has passed away, and another sign that one is not afraid of this passing while one is enjoying it. What happened in all those earlier years is now veiled history to the enlightened being; what happens now, in the Eternal Now, is the important significant matter. Thus one’s mind is free from old burdens and errors. Yet, if needed, dead events can be resuscitated by intense concentration. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The background of one’s mind is far away from everyday consciousness as if invisible, but it can spring instantly forward if needed. There is no split between higher and lower mind: they are in harmony but the kind of activity is different. It would not be correct to say that one’s consciousness splits itself into two. The proficient can mentally turn inside from the busyness of one’s environment and within a few moments find the divine presence there. One part of one can enter frequently into cerebral thinking but another part can drop out of this into celestial experience. Our work remains active in the foreground of consciousness, while our wisdom remains in the background as its inspirer. One moves in the World of bodily senses and their surrounding objects without losing the Presence, being held by it rather than holding on to it. Primitive society was organized for a certain kind of production of life, a ritual technique of manufacture of the things of the World that used the dimension of the invisible. Beings used their ingenuity to fill one’s stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of one’s organism; this is only logical and natural. However, this stomach-centered characteristic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

One reason is that beings were never content to just stop at food: they wanted more in life in the widest sense of the term—exactly what we would expect an organism to want if it could somehow contrive to be self-conscious about life and death and the need to continue experiencing. Food is only one part of that quest; being quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify for immortality. In this way the simple food quest was transmuted into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity. All of being’s higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power. All morality is fundamentally a matter of power, of the power of organisms to continue existing by reaching for a superhuman purity. It is all right for a being to talk about spiritual aims; what one really means is aims for merits that qualify one for eternity. This too, of course, is the logical development of organismic ambitions. Thus the sacrificial lamb is no longer the young of an ewe slaughtered at the Paschal Feast as the embodiment of some god in order to promote the life of the crops, but a symbol expressing a sum of innocence, purity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, redemption and divinity. Doubtless many will be scandalized at any attempt to derive the cure of souls for the cravings of the stomach. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even so the rising generation may find cause not for anger, but for wonder, in the rapidity with which beings, so late emerged from the brute, has proceeded from the conquest of matter to that of the spirit. No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual emotions that beings are capable of. As a creature one is most attuned to the living miracle of the cosmos and responds to that miracle with a fineness and a nobility that are in themselves wondrous; the whole thing is surely part of a divine mystery. However, the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as some would seem to make it out. The earning of spiritual points is the initial impetus of the search for purity, however much some few noble souls might transmute that in an unselfish direction. For most beings faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organism stomach project. Many people what is going on in the mind that ideas they were pondering should break through at a sudden moment. Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me, incontestable, and traces of it can be found in other cases where it is less evident. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness. The appearance of the illumination is not due to the relief from fatigue—for instance, simply taking a rest. It is more probably that this rest has been filled out wit unconscious work and that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself to the geometer or someone seriously considering the solution to a problem. Only the revelation, instead of coming during a walk or a journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form. When it comes to the conditions of unconscious work, it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never happen expect after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing. The aspirant’s decision to aim for the highest Goal is the governing factor: if one sticks to this decision, one is bound to succeed sooner or later. The question now arises: What is this Goal? It is the fulfilment of the Real Purpose of life, as apart from the lower purposes of earning a livelihood, rearing a family, and so forth. The aspirant will become fully Self-conscious—as aware of the divine Overself as one now is of one’s Earthly body. And this achievement will be perpetual, not just a matter of occasional glimpse or fleeting intuitions. Even though the Quest has become more difficult under modern conditions, it has not become impossible. The timeworn means t this end must simply be brought up to date. What are the means? They are thought, feeling, will, and intuition used in a special way. This constitutes the fourfold path, or Quest. “And now, behold, my joy is great, even unto fulness, because of you, and also this generation; yea, and even the Father rejoiceth, and also the holy Angels, because of you and this generation; for none of them are lost,” reports 3 Nephi 30. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

These Little Treasures—Your Family, Your Heritage, Your Cresleigh Homes Matter to Us Because they Matter to You!

August 29, 2019 12:46 am

God willed it. God willed that all edifices should crumble, all texts be stolen or burnt, all eyewitnesses to mystery be destroyed. Think on it. Think. Time has plowed under all those words written in the hand of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Paul. Where is there one parchment scroll left which bears the signature of Aristotle? And Plato, would that we have one scrap he threw into the fire when feverishly working? It is the way of God, the way of His creation. Even what is writ in stone is washed away by time, and cities lie beneath the fire and ash of roaring mountains. I meant to say the Earth eats all. Modern beings have long since abandoned the ritual renewal theory of nature, and reality for us is simply refusing to acknowledge that evil and death are constantly with us. With medical science we want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our consciousness. We are shocked by the vulgarity of symbols of death and the devil and pleasures of the flesh in primitive ruins. However, if your theory is to control by representation and imitation, then you have to include all sides of life, not only the side that makes you comfortable or that seems purest. There are two words which sum up very nicely what the primitive was up to with their social representation of nature: “microcosmization” and “macrocosmization.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Although microcosmization and macrocosmization sound technically forbidding, they express quite simple complementary maneuvers. In macrocomization beings simply takes oneself or parts of oneself and blows them up to cosmic importance. Thus the popular ancient pastime of entrail reading or liver reading: it was thought that the fate of the individual, or a whole army or a country, could be discerned in the liver, which was conceived as a small-scale cosmos. The ancient Hindus, among others, looked at every part of a being as having a correspondence in the macrocosm: the head corresponded to the Sky, the Eye to the Sun, the breath to the Wind, the legs to the Earth, and so on. With the Universe reflected in one’s very body, the Hindu thus thought one’s life has the order of the cosmos. Microcosmization of the Heavens is merely a reverse, complementary movement. Beings humanizes the cosmos by projecting all imaginable Earthly things onto the Heavens, in this way again intertwining one’s own destiny with the immortal stars. So, for example, animals were projected onto the sky, star formations were given animal shapes, and the zodiac was conceived. By being’s transferring animals to Heaven all human concerns took on a timelessness and a superhuman validity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

The immortal stars came to preside over human destiny, and the fragile and ephemeral animal called human blew oneself up to superhuman size by making oneself the center of things. Campsites and buildings were all laid out according to some kind of astronomical plan which intertwined human space with the immortal spheres. The place where the tribe lived was conceived as the navel of the Universe where all creative powers poured forth. By means of micro- and macrocosmization beings humanized the Heavens and spiritualized the Earth and so melted sky and Earth together in an inextricable unity. By opposing culture to nature in these ways, beings allotted to oneself a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled one to transcend one’s animal condition and assume a special status in nature. No longer was one an animal who died and vanished from the Earth; one was a creator of life who could also give eternal life to oneself by means of communal rituals of cosmic regeneration. The central problem of primitive beings was overcoming death. They were trying to become immortal beings, but the stars are immortal because they live longer, much longer than humans, yet they are not eternal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Eternal beings, such as God and his Angels and eternal places like Heaven never cease. Whereas immortality can come to an end, but things that are eternal cannot be destroyed. And so we have come full circle in our overview of the primitive World. We started with the statement that primitive beings used the dual organization to affirm one’s organismic self-feeling, and one of their principal means was the setting up of society in the form of organized rivalry. Now we can conclude that one in fact set up the whole cosmos in a way that allows one to expand symbolically and to enjoy the highest organismic creature all the way up to the stars. The Egyptians hoped that when they died they would ascend to Heaven and become stars and thus enjoy eternal significance in the scheme of things. This is already a comedown from what primitive social groupings enjoyed: the daily living of divine significance, the constant meddling into the realm of cosmic power. Primitive society was organized for contests and games, but these were not games as we now think of them. They were games as children play them: they actually aimed to control nature, to make things come out as they wanted them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Ritual contest between moieties were a play of life against death, forces of light against forces of darkness. One side tried to thwart the ritual activities of the other and defeat it. However, of course the aide of life always contrived to win because by this victory primitive beings kept nature going in the grooves one needed and wanted. If death and disease were overtaking a people, then a ritually enacted reversal of death by a triumph of the life faction would, hopefully, set things right again. At the center of the primitive technics of nature stand the act of sacrifice, which reveals the essence of the whole science of ritual; in a way we might see it as the atomic physics of the primitive World view. The sacrificer goes through the motions of performing in miniature the kind of arrangement of nature that one wants. One may use water, clay, and fire to represent the sea, Earth, and Sun, and one proceeds to set up the creation of the World. If one does things exactly as prescribed, as the gods did them in the beginning of time, then one gets control over the Earth and creation. One can put vigor into animals, like into females, and even arrange the order of society into castes, and in the Hindu ritual. In the Hindu ritual and in coronation rituals, this is the point at which the contest came in. In order to control nature, beings must drive away evil—sickness and death. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

And so one must overcome demons and hostile forces. If one makes a slip in the ritual, it gives power to the demons. That is why Mormons say no premarital pleasures of the flesh, no pornography, no cursing, no drinking alcohol, no smoking, no using drugs, no nightclubs, no sinning. The ritual triumph is thus the winning of a contest with evil. When kings were to be crowned they had to prove their merit by winning out against the forces of evil; dice and chess probably had their origin as the way of deciding whether the kind really could outwit and defeat the forces of darkness. People in the New World did not understand this kind of technics and so many ridiculed it. Archaic beings believed that they could put vigor into the World by means of a ceremony, that they could create an island, an abundance of creatures, keep the Sun on its course, and so forth. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to many in the New World because they look only at the surface of it and do not see the logic behind it, the forces that were really at work according to the primitive’s understanding of them. The key idea underlying the whole thing is that as the sacrifice manipulates the altar and the victim, one becomes identified with them—not with them as things, but with the essences behind them, their invisible connection to the World of the gods and spirits, to the very insides of nature. And this too is logical. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The primitive beings had a conceptualization of the insides of nature just as we do in our atomic theory. One saw that things were animated by invisible forces, that the Sun’s heat worked at a distance and pervaded the things of the Earth, that seeds germinated out of the invisible as did children, and so forth. All one wanted to do, with the technique of sacrifice, was to take possession of these invisible forces and use them for the benefit of the community. Even though North Korea currently may be building a submarine capable of launching nuclear missiles, primitive beings had no need for missile launchers and atomic reactors; sacrificial altars mounds served one’s purposes well. In a word, the act of sacrifice established a footing in the invisible dimension of reality; this permitted the sacrificer to build a divine body, a mystical, essential self that had superhuman powers. And perhaps this was possible of our ancestors, some thought Veronica’s Veil could not have been created by human hands. People believed in Faustian Body Switching. Perhaps this idea of primitive beings having superhuman powers is why Victorian houses were so creative and ornate, they were thought to have spiritual powers and represent a spiritual nexus. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

However, if in modern times we think this is so foreign to our own traditional ways of thinking, we should look closely at the Christian communion. “We have our beliefs and our traditions. It is common to be bad, to be greedy, to be corrupt and self-seeking. It is a rare thing to love. We love. Again, I had enjoyed our sense of purpose, our commitment—that we were the inviolate Talamasca, that we cared for the outcast, that we harbored the sorcerer and the seer, that we had saved witches from the stake and reached out even to the wandering spirits, yes, even to the shades whom others fear. We had done it for well over a thousand years. But these little treasures—your family, your heritage, they matter to us because they matter to you. And they will always be yours,” reports David Talbot in the novel Merrick by Anne Rice. By performing the prescribed rites the communicant unites oneself with Christ—the sacrifice—who is God, and in this way the worshiper accrues to oneself a mystical body or soul which has immortal life. Everything depends on the prescribed ritual, which puts one in possession of the power of eternity by union with the sacrifice. And in this universal Mind wherein one now dwells, one can find no mortal to be called one’s enemy, no being to be hated or despised. One is friendly to all beings, not as a deliberately cultivated attitude but as a natural compulsion one may not resist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

When this consciousness of the Overself is attained and maintained, one’s mind becomes perfectly equable and one’s moral character perfectly unblemished. The tremendous tension of effort which makes the quest, with all the evanescent elations and despairs which it involves, comes at last to a welcome end. One’s submission to the divine will is henceforth spontaneous and innate; it is no longer the end product of a painful struggle. One is no longer able to will for oneself for the simple reason that some other entity has begun to will for one. Egoism in the human sense, sensualism in the animal sense, have both been eliminated from one’s heart. Selflessness of purpose is said to follow attainment of this high spiritual status. On this point there is some misrepresentation so that beginners get half-false, half-true notions. It does not mean that, as against other beings, an enlightened person must surrender one’s possessions, one’s position, or one’s service to them. One has one’s own rights still and does not automatically have to abandon them. A being may attain this union with the Overself and yet produce no great work of art, no inspired piece of literature as a result. This is because the union does not bestow technical gifts. It bestows inspiration but not the aesthetic talent which produces a painting a painting or the intellectual talent which produces a book. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Henceforth one is to work knowingly and lovingly with the power behind one’s life. Henceforth one functions as the human instrument of a superhuman power. One result then comes, that what one does by instinct and what one does by choice are henceforth one and the same. These finer qualities will no longer appear only in momentary impulses. They will possess one’s whole character. One of the foremost features of enlightenment is the clarity it gives to the mind, the lucidity of understanding and luminosity which surrounds all problems. One who understands the Truth at long last, does so only because one becomes the Truth. All that one knows will be intensely lived, for one knows it with one’s whole being. One has come to the end of this quest. One’s discovery of truth has released the power of truth and conferred the peace of truth. The pieces of life’s mosaic are at last fitted neatly into place. One has attained complete understanding. The intellectual faculties will not be extinguished by this radiant exaltation, but their work will henceforth be passively receptive of intuitive direction. Freed from obsession with the past as well as anticipation of the future, one will regard each day as unique and live through it as if one were here for the first time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Changes in the functioning of a being’s mind could bring about such complete changes in one’s sense of time that one could veritably find oneself imbued with the sense of eternity. This continuous flux of time which to us seems to go on forever, to them is but an illusion produced by the succession of our thoughts. For them, there is only the Eternal Now, never-ending. The realized being does not look back constantly for memories of the past and does not consider them worth recapitulating, for they belong to the ego and they are blotted out with the blotting out of the ego’s tyranny. The only exception would be where one has to draw upon them to instruct others to help them profit intellectually, spiritually and emotionally by one’s experiences. Only what the mind gives one now is alive and real for one. One is not afraid to be outside the current of one’s time. This is because inwardly one is inside the Timeless. In recent years there has been a growing awareness on the part of some psychiatrists and psychologist that serious gaps exist in our way of understanding human beings. These gaps may well seem most compelling to psychotherapist, confronted as they are in clinic and consulting room with the sheer reality of persons in crisis whose anxiety will not be quieted by theoretical formulas. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

However, the lacunae likewise present seemingly unsurmountable difficulties in scientific research. Thus many psychiatrists and psychologist in Europe and others in this country have been asking themselves disquieting questions, and others are aware of gnawing doubts which arise from the same half-suppressed and unasked questions. Can we be sure, one such question goes, that we are seeing the patient as one really is, knowing one in one’s own reality: or are we seeing merely a projection of our own theories about one? Every psychotherapist, to be sure, has one’s knowledge of patterns and mechanisms of behavior and has at one’s fingertips the system of concepts developed by one’s particular school. If we are to observe scientifically, such conceptual system is entirely necessary. However, the crucial question is always the bridge between the system and the patient—how can we be certain that our system, admirable and beautifully wrought as it may be in principle, has anything whatever to do with this specific Mr. Lestat de Lioncourt, a living, immediate reality sitting opposite us in the consulting room? May not just this particular person require another system, another quite different frame of reference? And does not this patient, or any person for that matter, evade our investigations, slip through our scientific fingers like sea foam, precisely to the extent that we rely on the logical consistency of our own system? #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Another such gnawing question is: How can we know whether we are seeing the patient in one’s real World, the World in which one lives and moves and has one’s being, and which is for one unique, concrete, and different from our general theories of culture? In all probability we have never participated in one’s World and do not know it directly. Yet, if we are to have any chance of knowing the patient, we must know it and to some extent must be able to exist in it. Such questions were the motivations of psychiatrists and psychologists in Europe, who later comprised the Daseinsanalyse, or existential-analytic, movement. The “existential research orientation in psychiatry, writes Ludwig Binswanger, its chief spokesman, “arose from dissatisfaction with the prevailing efforts t gain scientific understanding in psychiatry. Psychology and psychotherapy as sciences are admittedly concerned with beings, but not at all primarily with mentally ill beings, but with beings as such. The new understanding of beings, which we owe to Heidegger’s analysis of existence, has its basis in the new conception that beings are no longer understood in terms of some theory—but it a mechanistic, a biologic or a psychological one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If you are looking for truth, it is not enough to look only at your own country’s, your own religion’s statement of it, nor just this century’s. One need also to look elsewhere, to heed the wiser voices of other centuries and to feel free to move from the Old World to the New World or into B.C. as well as A.D. However, above all these things you must look into the mystery of your own consciousness. Uncover its layer after layer until you meet the Overself. All this is included in the Quest. Nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus ask his followers to enter into a church but he does ask them, by implication, to enter within themselves. To the extent to that they stop looking outside themselves for the help and support and guidance they correctly feel they need, they will start looking inside and doing the needful inner work to come into conscious awareness of the power waiting there, the divine Overself. They themselves are inlets to it, never disconnected from it. Why did Jesus warn beings not to look for the Christ-self in the deserts or the mountain caves? It was for the same reasons that he constantly told them to look for in within themselves, and that he counselled them to be in the World but not of it. Do not expect to find more truth and meaning in the World outside than you can find inside yourself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Although the Infinite Spirit exists everywhere and anywhere, the paradox is that It cannot be found in that way before It has first been found in one’s own heart. Yet it is also true that to find It in its fullness in the self inside, we have to understand the nature of the World outside. One must start by believing that concealed somewhere within one’s mind there is the intuition of truth. The only being you need for this great work is yourself. Stop looking outside and look within, for there is not only the material to work upon but also the God within to guide you. We must find in our own inner resources the way to the blessed life. The people of the World drinks and dances; the mystics thinks and trances. Many beings cannot find the higher truth because they insist on looking for it where it is not. They will not look within, hence they get someone else’s idea of the truth. The other person may be correct but since this is to be known only by being it, the discovery must be made inside themselves. One cannot know anyone else so well as oneself. When we can know only oneself so deeply and truly, why then try to know so many people so superficially? The goal can be reached by using the resources in one’s own soul. One should create from within oneself and by one’s own efforts the strength, the wisdom, and the inspiration one need. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The student must remember that success does not only come to one, it also comes from one. The plan of the road to achievement and the driving power to propel one along it must be found within oneself. Usually, it is by one’s own efforts alone—but not excluding the possibility of Grace, however—that one develops the needed objectivity with which to correctly study oneself and cultivate awareness. The truth will be given us: we shall not be left to starve for it. However, it will be given according to our capacity to receive it. There can be no doubt that in our culture the ways one protects one’s self against anxiety may play a decisive part in the lives of many persons. There are those whose foremost striving is to be loved or approved of, and who go to any length to have this wish gratified; those whose behavior is characterized by a tendency to comply, to give in and take no step of self-assertion; those whose striving is dominated by the wish for success or power or possession; and those whose tendency is to shut themselves off from people and to be independent of them. The question may be raised, however, whether I am right in declaring that these strivings represent a protection against some basic anxiety Are they not an expression of drives within the normal range of given human possibilities? #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

The mistake in arguing this way is putting the question in the alternative form. In reality the two points of view are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive. The wish for love, the tendency to comply, the striving for influence or success, and the tendency to withdraw are present in all of us in various combinations, without being in the least indicative of a neurosis. Moreover, one or another of these tendencies may be a predominate attitude in certain cultures, a fact which would suggest again the possibility of their being normal potentialities in humankind. Attitudes of affection, of mothering care and compliance with the wishes of others are predominant in the Arapesh culture, as described by Margaret Mead; striving for prestige in a rather brutal form is a recognized pattern among the Kwakiutl, as Ruth Benedict has pointed out; the tendency to withdraw from the World is a dominant trend in the Buddhist religion. My concept is intended not to deny the normal character of these drives, but to maintain that all of them may be put to the service of affording reassurance against some anxiety, and furthermore, that by acquiring this protective function they change their qualities, becoming something entirely different. I can explain this difference best by an analogy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

We may climb a tree because we wish to test our strength and skill and see the view from the top, or we may climb it because we are pursued by a wild animal. In both cases we climb the true, but the motives for our climbing are different. In the first case we do it for the sake of pleasure, in the other case we are driven by fear and have to do it out of a need for safety. In the first case we are free to climb or not, in the other we are compelled to climb by a stringent necessity. In the first case we can look for the tree which is best suited to our purpose, in the other case we have no choice but must take the first tree within reach, and it need not necessarily be a tree; it may be a flag pole, or a house if only it serve the purpose of protection. The difference in driving forces also results in a difference in feeling and behavior. If we are impelled by a direct wish for satisfaction or any kind of our attitude will have a quality of spontaneity and discrimination. If we are driven by anxiety, however, our feeling and acting will be compulsory and indiscriminate. There are intermediate stages, to be sure. In instinctual drives, like hunger and pleasures of the flesh, which are greatly determined by physiological tensions resulting from privation, the physical tension may be piled up to such an extent that satisfaction is sought with a degree of compulsion and indiscriminateness which is otherwise characteristic of drives determined by anxiety. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Some people, even medical doctors assumes that observations about themselves and acquaintances are applicable to all beings. However, analogies drawn from the behavior of others or animals to another individual, scientifically speaking, such analogies prove nothing; they are suggestive and pleasing to other beings, not factual. They sometimes go together with a high degree of anthropomorphizing that some professionals indulge in. Precisely because the give the pleasant illusion to a person that one understands what another is feeling they become very popular. Who would not like to possess King Solomon’s ring? Analogous behavior can be observed in human beings. In the good old days when there was still a Hapsburg monarchy and there were still domestic servants, I used to observe the following, regularly predictable behavior in my widowed aunt. She never kept a maid longer than eight to ten months. She was always delighted with a new servant, praised her to the skies, and swore that she had at last found the right one. In the course of the next few months her judgment cooled, she found faults, then bigger ones, and toward the end of the stated period she discovered hateful qualities in the poor girl, who was finally discharged without a reference after a violent quarrel. After this explosion the antiquated lady was once more prepared to find a perfect Angel in her nest employee. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

It is not my intention to poke fun at my long-deceased and devoted aunt. I was able, or rather obliged, to observe exactly the same phenomenon in serious, self-controlled beings, myself included, once when I was a prisoner of war. So-called polar disease, also known as expedition choler, attacks small groups of men who are completely dependent on one another and are thus prevented from quarreling with strangers or people outside their own circle of friends. From this it will be clear that the damming up of aggression will be more dangerous, the better the members of the group know, understand, and like each other. In such a situations, as I know from personal experience, all aggression and intra-specific fight behavior undergo an extreme lowering of their threshold values. Subjectively this is expression by the fact that one reacts to small mannerisms of one’s best friends—such as the way in which they clear their throats or sneeze—in a way that would normally be adequate only if one had been hit by a drunkard. However, the personal experiences with my aunt, fellow prisoners-of-war, and myself do not necessarily say anything about the universality of such reactions. There are more complex psychological interpretations one might five for my aunt’s behavior, instead of the hydraulic one which claims that her aggression potential rose every eight to ten months to such a degree that it has to explode. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

From a psychoanalytic standpoint, one would assume that my aunt was very narcissistic, exploitative woman; she demanded that a servant should be completely devoted to her, have no interests of her own, and gladly accept the role of a creature who is happy to serve her. She approached each new servant with the phantasy that she is the one who will fulfill her expectations. After a short honeymoon during which my aunt’s phantasy is till sufficiently effective to blind her to the fact that the servant is not right—and perhaps also helped by the fact that the servant in the beginning makes every effort to please her new employer—my aunt wakes up to the recognition that the servant is not willing to live up to the role for which she has been cast. Such a process of awakening lasts, of course, some times until it is final. At this point my aunt experiences intense disappointment and rage, as nay narcissistic exploitative person does when frustrated. Not being away that the cause for this rage is possessed in her impossible demands as if she Those Who Must Be Kept (in total peace and quiet), she rationalizes her disappointment by accusing the servant. Since she cannot give up her desires, she fires the servant and hopes that a new one will be right. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

The same mechanism repeats itself until my aunt expresses what type of servant she truly wants or cannot get anymore servants. Such a development is by no means found only in the relations of employers and servants. Often the history of marriage conflicts is identical; however, since it is easier to fire a servant than to divorce, the outcome is often that of a lifelong battle in which each partner tries to punish the other for ever-accumulating wrongs. The problem that confronts us here is that of a specific human character, namely the narcissistic-exploitative character, and not that of an accumulated instinctive energy. Ideally, we learn the wisdom of life best, easiest, and most from teachers, from instruction by those who know the Way in its beginning and end. Actually, we have to learn it by ourselves, by our own experiences, by self-expression, all necessary and valuable, suffering as well as joy. Only when all of the mind—unconsciously evolved through the mineral, plant, animal, and lower human kingdoms—enters on the quest, does it consciously enter upon the development of its own consciousness. “And may the Lord bless you, and keep your garments spotless, that ye may at last be brought to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the holy prophets who have been ever since the World began, having your garments spotless even as their garments are spotless, in the kingdom of Heaven to go no more out,” reports Alma 7.25. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

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