Randolph Harris II International Institute

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True, Nature Does Have Rhythm in its Day and Night; it Does Have Balance and Harmony, Summer and Winter!

November 8, 2019 2:30 am

ImageDo not tell me you are the People of Purpose when your purpose is to do just what they sent you to do! For the love of your souls, find yourself a finer purpose! Just as I did. In any case, the African Americans came to the Bowery and the sociologists fund them in good shape when they got there, regardless of how he felt about it. When the defense boom came many of the African Americans left but some stayed on, seeing in life on the Bowery what the Irish and the Swedes and Poles saw, seeing in it what the seaman and those without homes saw—an end to fight back, a resting place, a refutation of the old hymn, “There is no hiding place down here.” The Bowery offered a hiding place so secret that the fugitive could not be found even by himself. The Jew is a rarity and a curio on the Bowery. On either side of the street are districts primarily Jewish. Until Puerto Ricans came in to share the East Side tenements with them, this was an area where Jewish life filled the air and flavored the stores and the streets. However, the peddlers, sweatshop workers, teachers, and rabbis looked upon the Bowery as beyond the pale. Some Jews made Bowery history. Monk Eastman and his gang of thus, almost all Jewish, were sponsored by Tim Sullivan who counted on them to deliver votes and loot from their side just as the Irish and Italians did. Jews also appeared in the Bowery theaters as producers, actors, directors, and impresarios. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

ImageThey were part of the Bowery’s history but not fully a part of the Bowery until the depression. Then some of them drifted down to the breadlines and the psychologists found them in a bay way. These were the shattered, declassed ones. They cropped up with skills that were unusual on the Bowery. They were bookkeepers, teachers, musicians, tailors, and sales people; but temperamentally they were shot. After the war Jews ran to about two percent of the Bowery population. Dr. Levinson has said that most of them have deteriorated much further than the average non-Jewish Bowery resident. Alcohol itself, said the Doctor, is outside the Jews’ “cultural patter,” and presumably those Jews who take to it suffer a cirrhosis not only of the liver but of the psyche. Perhaps it is only those disturbed Jews who end up on the Bowery or else their fate disturbs them ore than it does the others. In any case, Dr. Levinson says, Jews on the Bowery are more likely to be psychopathic or mentally defective. Even rare than a Jewish Bowery Man is a Chinese. Chinatown abuts the Bowery, and Chinese stores spill out of the tight narrow streets of their quarter onto the Street, but no Chinese panhandler works there. Patrolman Leo O’Hea, who has walked the beat along the Bowery for a quarter of a century, says the blotter is clean of Chinese names. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

ImageThere are no Chinese vagrants. The patrolman has no very fancy scientific notions of “why,” but he knows that when a Chinese boy breaks a window all that an officer need do is to tell his brother or his cousin or his uncle and the matter is take care of. The boy is likely to apologize. In time the Chinese may become so Americanized that the family will lose the antique function of mutual responsibility, of collective conscience. Until then, however, there are not likely to be Chinese flophouses. The only times when any police action was needed were the days of the tong wars—a kind of bloody commercial rivalry—and during the period when the exclusion laws were so rigid that no Chinese man could hope to marry a Chinese young lady in New York. In those days, women of the evening from the Bowery would then come down to Chinatown to pay the “house calls” of their profession, and now and then the police would feel obliged to intervene. The Bowery is above all American. More than three quarters of its regular derelict population are a mixture of races and native-born, often tracing a native American lineage far back into their country to stand in front of the Salvation Army Building on an afternoon—cheerfully facing nothingness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

ImageDr. Levinson and his colleagues had these native-born Americans examine the telltale ink blots of the Rorschach test, and from their fancied images they pieced together this view of the personality type (which I have presumed to annotate): “The homeless man has had a very poor psychosexual history, as a result of which he has developed a fear of either accepting or sharing affection,” says Dr. Levison. (There is a musician who used to play with the Philadelphia Symphony. One day he came home and found a stranger in his wife’s bed. He turned around, walked out, and buried his poor psychosexual history on the Bowery.) The Doctor continues: “At some time, the mother figure had brought about a good deal of ambivalence and anxiety. To love meant to be hurt, to be rejected to be deserted.” (A seaman, now permanently beached on the Bowery, says that he never had a home. He grew up in an orphanage. Sure, he had girls, but “you know the kind you meet on a waterfront…Oh a nice girl would be something else again.” So he never got married. He would not make anybody a good husband, he says.) “He now denies to himself his need for affection and tends to respond to the demands of the World of reality by repression. By withdrawing into passivity…Since he replaces activity by passivity, he atones for his guilt.” (“I didn’t commit no crime, see,” says Thomas Finn. “What I did, I did only to myself, right?”) #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Image“He is able to accept life and to continue existing on the Bowery because being there is a solution to his problems. His life on the Bowery is an acting out of his conflicts, an ‘undoing’ and assuaging of guilt, and is a replacement of his phallicism by castration.” (An old man says that he finds it hard to stay at the Muni—the Municipal Lodging House—because of the “queens.” Disgusting, he says. The queens are young men who swing their hips and gather courts around them in secluded spots. Courtiers and courtesans vie for the queen’s affections, and the old Bowery hands shrink to the wall in horror.) Dr. Levinson concludes: “It is hypothesized that being homeless has only exacerbated latent personality trends and that living on the Bowery is the solution of the emotional problems of these men and the natural outcome of the dynamics involved.” Psychologist agree that the Bowery Men need a place where an effortless going to hell is the accepted way of life. They need a place where no one requires anything of them, where no one ever says: “You can do better.” The institution the Bowery Men need is one where everyone agrees: “Mac, you can’t do better.” They need the sweet delights of hopelessness, and anyone who seeks to energize them with hope betrays them, for he calls their spirit into action; calls them again to try again to lose; calls them again to compare themselves with other men, to assert their worth—when all that they want is for the World to leave them alone, worthless and careless, beyond redemption or competition. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

ImageWhere else could these men find such an institution? Where could they find a home in which all the talents and learning of psychologist are bent to give them the certainty they need that they have lost themselves? It is probably as difficult for a social worker or a missionary to let a man despair as it is for a doctor to oblige a patient with euthanasia. For that reason the Bowery Men have made their own community on the street. Sociologists describe this institution—creation by the men themselves, tailor-made for them and for no others—as a subculture. Professor H. Warren Dunham, of Wayne University, gives the psychologist short shrift. It is all very well, he says in effect, to diagnose individuals as suffering from dependency needs (“Inadequate personality” and so on), but the stubborn fact remains that a lot of men not on the Bowery fit that picture just as well. Society, says Dr. Dunham, keeps producing “inadequately socialized types,” and the skid rows are there to receive them. The World, after all, is full of opportunities for failure. A boy can flunk an exam or catch the look of scorn in a girl’s eye. A man can lose a job, or possibly hold a job too long whole his friends rise, perhaps stepping smilingly upon his neck as they go up. A businessman can lose his money and suddenly realize that he has nothing else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

ImageAnd the World is scornful of failures. People persecute failures even by feeling sorry for them. Even when stretching out a helping hand, successful men make it clear that it is more blessed to give than to receive—though the receiver plainly stands in greater need of blessing. Those who no longer aspire, who do not wish to rise on anybody’s shoulders, who do not wish to sell more, make more, show more, even give more than others—these are among the “inadequately socialized” who have built the modern Bowery. There they need struggle no longer against the critics, the status-seekers and the status-makers who pigeonhole people. The Bowery, it would seem, is a grotesque limbo beyond good and evil, where there is no first or last, no past or future—a death wherein one may have the delights and torments of being a spectator at one’s own funeral. In the quiet attitudes of the men in flops—the old ones often sit for hours with hands crossed in their laps—it is easy to read a prayerful solemnity. In the prim detached way in which pleasures of the flesh is regarded there is something monastic. These men use the usual four-letter words, but this is mere ritual and no more. Such words are expletives and no longer serve to recall the warmth of the fires below. There is an air of finality on the Street. Each man things it is all over. He used to live some other way. There used to be another self. It is all gone now, as if he had taken holy orders, changed his name, and put on his rags as a sign. What they are a sign of is, of course, the crucial difference between the Bowery Man’s retreat and that of a monk. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

ImageLearnedly, Dr. Levinson terms it “ego-devaluating, not a religious retreat.” Still it is a retreat, an escape into tranquility. And here one is brought up short by the obvious bond linking the unshaved bum sprawled flat on his face in the street with the businessman, the advertising executive, the cocktail drinking wife, the harried suburbanite—the whole organization, brief-cased, golf-and-bridge, scotch-and-soda set. All understand that the major objective of life is tranquility freedom from tension, and an end to worry. The parents who send their children joyfully off to life adjustment courses do so with the notion that they will have fewer conflicts, fewer tensions. Life will be smoother. However, if life is not smoother and the ideal is still tranquility; if one is not fully adjusted to life and the objective is still to avoid tension; if the tranquilizers are too expensive on in the end fail to secure the all-important inner peace—then it may be a consolation to us all to know that there is a Bowery, a place where life is thoroughly anesthetized. It is our brothers who have pioneered there. It is not a state of dreamy futility but one of intense usefulness. There is some confusion about the kind of life an enlightened being will live. It is popularly believed that one sits in one’s cave or one’s hunt sunk continually in meditation. The idea that one can be active in the World is not often accepted, especially by the masses who have not been properly instructed in these matters and who do not know differences between religion and mysticism and between mysticism and philosophy. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

ImageThe truth is that the enlightened being may not practise meditation; but one has no dependence upon it, because one’s enlightenment being fully established will not be increased by further meditation. Whenever one does meditate, it is either for the purpose of withdrawing from the World totally for short periods, at intervals, either for one’s own satisfaction or to recuperate one’s energies, or to benefit others by telepathy. When it is said “for one’s own satisfaction,” what is meant is that meditation in seclusion may have become a way of life in one’s previous incarnation. This generates a karmic tendency which reappears in this life and the satisfaction of this tendency pleases one, but it is not absolutely essential for one. One can dispense with it when needful to do so, whereas the unenlightened being is too often at the mercy of one’s tendencies and propensities. There is no classification into matter and spirit for the Sage. There is only one life for one. If a being can find reality only in trance, if one says that the objective World is unreal, one is not a Sage. The being who becomes immobilized by one’s inheritance of asceticism and escapism will also become indifferent to the sorrows of a humankind whom one regards as materialistic. The seeker of truth is self-disciplined to live in the World with one’s heart and thought molded after one’s own fashion, and will not turn in contempt or helplessness from the so-called materialistic but, on the contrary, will find their ignorance the motive for one’s incessant service of enlightenment to them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

ImageThe stultified stony apathy of the first is shamed by the courageous acceptance of life as a whole of the second. The saint is satisfied to attain freedom from one’s lower self but the Master does not stop there. One seeks also to carry enlightenment to others, remove their misery, and save them from the illusion in which they are involved. One’s attainments in the mental, ethical, and philosophic spheres must take concrete shape in the disinterested service of humanity, or one is no illuminate. Truth seekers certainly wish that all others might attain to their own inner peace. However, because one has not oneself realized this higher unity (which is all-embracing) one does not feel that one bears any personal responsibility for their uplift. One the contrary while the ascetic, under the illusion that Worldly life is a snare set by Satan, sits smugly in one’s retreat, the illuminate knows that all life is divinely born, never relaxes one’s efforts for the enlightenment of humankind. Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to dream dreams and see visions, to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s changes that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

ImageIn creative endeavors the imagination operates in juxtaposition with form. When these endeavors are successful, it is because imagination infuses form with its own vitality. The question is: How far can we let our imagination loose? Can we give it rein? Dare to think the unthinkable? Dare to conceive of, and move among, new visions? At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes communication possible in a shared World? Will we lose the boundaries that enable us to orient ourselves to what we call reality? This, again, is the problem of form or, stated differently, the awareness of limits. Psychologically speaking, this is experienced by many people as psychosis. Hence some psychotics walk close to the wall in hospitals. They keep oriented to the edges, always preserving their location in the external environment. Having no localization inwardly, they find it especially important to retain whatever outward localization is available. As director of a large mental hospital in Germany which received many brain-injured soldiers during the war, Dr. Kurt Goldstein found that these patients suffered radical limitation of their capacities for imagination. He observed that they had to keep their closets in rigid array, shoes always placed in just this position, shirts hung in just that place. Whenever a closet was upset, the patient became panicky. He could not orient himself to the new arrangement, could not imagine a new form that would bring order to the chaos. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

ImageThe patient was then thrown into what Dr. Goldstein called the “catastrophic situation.” Or when asked to write his name on a sheet of paper, the brain-injured person would write the name in some corner close to the boundaries. He could not tolerate the possibility of becoming lost in the open spaces. His capacities for abstract thought, for transcending the immediate facts in terms of the possible—what I call, in this context, imagination—were severely curtailed. He felt powerless to change the environment to make it adequate to his needs. Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to shift forms, these patients found their World radically truncated. Any limitless existence was experiences by them as being highly dangerous. Not brain-injured, you and I nevertheless can experience a similar anxiety in the reverse situation—that is, in the creative act. The boundaries of our World shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order. As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic situation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

ImageThe artists are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncrasies. For if we can listen seriously to them, we will be better prepared for them. There is a curiously sharp sense of joy—or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy—that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation. Let us say you have been puzzling about it for days when suddenly you get the insight that unlocks the door—you see how to write that line, what combination of colors is needed in your picture, how to form that theme you may be writing for a class, or you hit upon the theory to fit your new facts. I have often wondered about this special sense of joy; it so often seems out of proportion to what actually has happened. I may have worked at my desk morning after morning trying to find a way to express some important idea. When my insight suddenly breaks through—which may happen when I am chopping wood in the afternoon—I experience a strange lightness in my step as though a great load were taken off my shoulders, a sense of joy on a deeper level that continues without any relation whatever to the mundane tasks that I may be performing at the time. It cannot be just that the problem at hand has been answered—that generally brings only a sense of relief. What is the course of this curious pleasure? #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

ImageI propose that it is the experience of this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to-be. If only for that moment, we participate in the myth of creation. Order comes out of disorder, form out of chaos, as it did in the creation of the Universe. The sense of joy comes from our participation, no matter how slight, in being as such. The paradox is that at the moment we also experience more vividly our own limitations. We discover the amor fati that Nietzsche write about—the love of one’s fate. No wonder it gives a sense of ecstasy! Most people are surprises to learn that the rebel operates with built-in restraints. Indeed, that is one’s chief distinction from the revolutionary who, concerned as one is with political change, experiences only outer restraints. However, the rebel, who is concerned with people’s attitudes and motives, has inner limits. One is restrained by the boundaries inherent in the order one proposes. In describing these limits, I shall speak in ideal terms to clarify my point. The first is the universality of the rebel’s vision. One’s ideal of life, which gives birth to one’s rebellion in the first place, applies not just to oneself but to others as well; and these others must include one’s enemies. To pursue the metaphor I employed earlier, if the slave kills the master he or she has no choice but to usurp the master’s throne and be killed oneself; and we have round after round of meaningless bloodshed, like the sultans’ murders in the seraglio. The excitement of the ego trip is secondary to the rebel; one is concerned chiefly with one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

ImageIn this vision of the World are present the restraints upon one’s actions. Sokrates is restrained from making a secret deal with Sparta not by the Athenians, who condemned him to death, but by the requirements of one’s own personally chosen ethics. Jesus could not take up the sword without betraying his own vision of the World. The rebel scorns as a motive personal revenge (actually the nursing of feelings of rejection, of one’s own hurt pride—authentic enough but not the basis for a genuine rebellion). One does not have the right to demand revenge, and furthermore there is no time to do so. The essential characteristic of the rebel is one’s capacity to transcend one’s own particular hurt pride in identification with one’s people and with one’s universal ideal. Another limit is the rebel’s compassion. As we noted in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the compassion of the rebel is one of the things that makes one a rebel in the first place. One identifies with people who suffer and feels a passionate desire to do something about this suffering. This arises from one’s sensitivity and empathy for other people which inform one’s vision. True, the revel is sometimes so absorbed in the universal application of one’s ideal that one neglects one’s own family. Well, like us all, one remains a human being of good and bad traits. One’s capacity for empathy makes one more compassionate of peoples—if not always for the members of one’s family—and enables one to form one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

ImageThe limits also come from the fact that the rebel’s mind meets other minds. The others’ views of reality restrain and sharpen one’s; and in encounter between them, they work out something of greater value for both. This is why dialogue is so important for the rebel. Dialogue includes all the tangling of emotions, temperament, and diverse goals which occurs in any real interchange. The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all one’s adversaries is the last thing on Earth one wishes: their extermination would deprive one and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies—being human—also have and could share with one. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of beings. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with out enemies, we are the poorer. We would lose not only our enemies’ good ideas, but the restraints they give us as well. The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the World. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out the mass of meaningless data in the World an order and form. Born as we are out of chaos, why can we never establish contact with it? No sooner do we look at it than order, pattern, shape is born under our eyes. This is not only true of the novelist, but of the painter, the engineer, and the intellectual as well—indeed, true of us all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

ImageThe forming of the World begins with the simple act of perception, which arranges things in a Gestalt that has meaning for us. We institute the order. It is a product of the human mind’s continual search for meaning in a World in which meaning does not exist apart from our minds. True, nature does have rhythm it its day and night; it does have balance and harmony, Summer and Winter; without our patterns, the functions are blind and meaninglessly repetitive. However, no sooner does the human mind look at this chaos than order is born. Out of the meeting of the human mind and the chaos of nature some meaning is established by which we can orient ourselves. The rebel is one who can grasp this meaning with a clarity that reaches beyond that of the masses of people. An act of rebellion of [the rebel’s] part seems like a demand clarity and unity. The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order. Those who hold political power may not trust the rebel’s vision and may hang on to their power to oppose it. However, in this new vision, this very pattern and order, there are present the restraining factors on the rebel oneself. When one writes a sonnet or any other kind of poetry, the chosen form exercises a restraint upon the poet just as the banks restrain the river. Otherwise creativity flows off absurdly in every direction and the river is lost in the sand. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

ImageThere are even limits to such a personal aim as self-actualization. The human potential movement has fallen heir to the form of innocence prevalent in America, namely that we grow toward greater and greater moral perfection. Trying to be good all the time will make one not into an ethical giant but into a prig. We should grow, rather, toward greater sensitivity to both evil and good. The moral life is dialectic between good and evil. Especially in the understanding of violence is it necessary to be aware of the good and evil in each of us. Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of beings, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. However, our task is not to unleash them on the World; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps us always erect in the savage formless movement of history. The fact that good and evil are present in all of us prohibits anyone from moral arrogance. No one can insist on one’s own moral supremacy. It is out of this sense of restrain that the possibility of forgiveness arises. “Ask in sincerity of heart that God would forgive you,” reports Moroni 6.8. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18Image

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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

ImageIn 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

ImageWhen 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

ImageHowever, 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

ImageIn 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

ImagePainting 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

ImageAmericans 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

ImageThe 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

ImageThe 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

ImageThe 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

ImageWe 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

ImageWhy 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

ImageIn 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

ImageMemory 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

ImageOne 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

ImageMany 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

ImageThere 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 16Image

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

August 29, 2019 12:46 am

ImageGod 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

ImageAlthough 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

ImageThe 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

ImageEternal 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

ImageRitual 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

ImageAnd 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

ImageThe 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

ImageHowever, 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

ImageWhen 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

ImageHenceforth 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

ImageChanges 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

ImageHowever, 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

ImageAnother 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

ImageIf 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

ImageAlthough 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

ImageThe 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

ImageThe 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

ImageWe 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

ImageSome 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

ImageIt 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

ImageFrom 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

ImageThe 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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Many People Remember a Time When the Desire to Solve the Riddles of the Universe and to Find Truth was the Driving Force in their Lives

August 21, 2019 1:44 am

ImageI cannot live without this beauty. I cannot endure without it. Oh, God, you have shown me Hell and it lies behind me, surely in the land where I was born. If Christ is the Lord, if Christ is the Lord, then what a beautiful miracle it is, this Christian mystery—that the Lord himself should come to Earth and clothe himself in flesh the better to know us and to comprehend us. Oh, what God, ever made in the image of Man by His fancy, was ever better than one who would become flesh? However, absolute unity, in spire of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff. “Ever not quite.” After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite fact as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the various points of view which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the World; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains a bare externality and datum to the other. The negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished. Something—call it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will—is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be the greatest of philosophers. #RandolphHaris 1 of 14

ImageReason is but one item in the mystery of the Universe; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. Real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real more life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt either to overcome or to reinterpret in monistic form. The Last Days! Christianity is a religion based on the notion that we are living in the Last Days! It is a religion fueled by the ability of beings to forget all the blunders of the past, and get dressed once more for the Last Days. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for the immortal life. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nice cases out of every thousand f us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case or credulity is criticized by some one else. Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,–what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

ImageWe want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. Why do few scientists even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits. However, if this very being had been shown something which as a scientist one might do with telepathy, one might not only have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough. This very law which the logicians would impose upon us—if I may give the name of the logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature here—is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can find no use. Still, there is a truth, and it is the destiny of our minds to attain it, we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make it. The faith that truth exits, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

ImageWe may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutions in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One may hold on to the first being possible without the second; hence the empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees of strict and rigid doctrines in their lives. What one ha to do in the World as a human being is henceforth to be done not really by one’s ordinary personal self but by the Presence which, shapeless and silent though it be, is the vital living essence of what connect one with God. If this seems to deprive one of the attributes which make a being a being, I can reply only that we are here back with the Sphinx. Yes, the enigma is great; but the realized understanding and experience is immeasurably greater in its blessedness. One’s life becomes a lengthened awareness of this Presence. One is never lovely because one is never encased in the belittling thought that this narrow personal self-consciousness is the totality of one’s “I.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

ImageOne lives every moment in the awareness of one’s higher self. Yet this does not oppose nor interfere with the awareness of one’s lower one. Everything one then does is done by the ordinary personal self alone, out of and in harmony with the Overself, or one’s higher individuality. In thus working together, the divine presence supports the ego’s presence, but the ego is put in its place and kept in harmony with the higher individuality. If this is what people mean by killing out the ego (which is really killing our its tyranny), there could be no objection to the statement. However, to asset that it is not functioning at all is silly. If the claim of complete merger is valid, if the individual self really disappears in the attainment of Divine Consciousness, of whom then was this same self away in the experience of attainment? No—it is only the lower personal self that is transcended; the higher spiritual individuality is not. One day a learned colleague called me up and cried angrily, “There is a saying in the New Testament which I consider to be one of the most immoral and unjust statements ever made!” And he began to quote our text—“To him who has will more be given,” his anger increasing as he continued, “and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” I believe that most of us cannot but feel equally offended. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

ImageAnd we cannot easily excuse the passage by suggesting what this colleague suggested—that the words may be due to a misunderstanding on the part of the disciples. No, they appear at least four times in the gospels with great emphasis. And furthermore, it is clear that the writers of the gospels feel exactly as we do. For them, the statement is a stumbling block, and they tried to interpret it in different ways. Probably none of the explanations satisfied them fully, for this particular saying of Jesus confronts us immediately with the greatest and perhaps most painful riddle of life—the inequality of all beings. We certainly cannot hope to solve it. Neither the Bible nor any of the great religions and philosophies was able to do so. However, this we can do: we can explore the breadth and dept of the riddle of inequality; and we can try to find a way to live with it, unsolved as it may remain. When we consider the words, “to him who has will more be given,” we ask ourselves—what do we have? And we may discover that much has been given us in terms of external goods, of friends, of intellectual gifts, and even of a comparatively high morality on which to base our actions. So we can expect that even more will accrue to us, while, at the same time, those who are lacking in all these attributes will lose the little they already have. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

ImageEven further, according to Jesus’ parable, the one poor talent they possess shall be handed over to those who have five or ten talents. We shall be richer because they will be poorer. And cry out as we may against such an injustice, we cannot deny that life abounds in it. We cannot deny it, but we might well ask—do we really have what we believe we have, so that it cannot be taken from us? It is a question full of anxiety, intensified by Luke’s version of our text: “From one who has not, even what one thinks that one has will be taken away.” Perhaps our having of those many things is not the kind of having that can be increased. Perhaps the having of a few things on the part of the poor is the kind of having that makes them grow. Jesus confirms this thought it the parable of the talents. The talents that are used, at the risk of their being lost, are the talents that we really have. Those that we try to preserve, without risking their use for growth, are those that we do not really have, and that will therefore be taken from us. They begin to disappear, until suddenly we feel that we have lost them, perhaps forever. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

ImageThe greatest empiricist among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christian on such insufficient evidence, insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way. They believe so completely in an anti-Christian order of the Universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start. However, as pragmatism explains, the criteria for the validity of knowledge are the consequences that are produced by the (given) knowledge. This approach provides useful implications for understanding human beings (for instance, thoughts or behaviors that give people pleasure or help them meet basic needs). The consequences, of course, as that our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. More that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as a life process validates not only sense perception, but also affectional, intuitive, imaginal, and spiritual states of experience. It purports that usefulness need not be confined to discrete, overt, or measurable behaviors, but may encompass any experience that a person finds subjectively or objectively for help. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

ImageFor example, it has been found by experts such as William James that so-called mystical experiences are useful for people. A sense of the divine gives beings a powerful ally for their own ideals. Spiritual life is more richly satisfying tan that of the conventional (logical-positivist) perspective. In the memory of all of us, there are many things that we seemed to have, but that we really did not have, and that were therefore taken away from us. Some of them were lost because of the tragic limitations of life. They had to be sacrificed so that other things might grow. We are all given youthful innocence, but innocence cannot be used and increased. The growth of our lives is made possible only by the sacrifice of the original gift of innocence. Sometimes, nevertheless, a melancholy longing arises in us for a purity that has been taken from us. We were all given youthful enthusiasm for many things and goals. However, all this enthusiasm also cannot be used and increased. Most of the objects of our early enthusiasm must be sacrificed for a few, and those few approached soberly. No maturity is possible without this sacrifice. Yet often a deep yearning for the lost possibilities and that enthusiasm takes hold of us. Innocence and youthful enthusiasm: we had them, and we did not have them. Life itself demanded that they be taken from us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

ImageHowever, there are other things that we had and that were taken from us because we were guilty of taking them too much for granted. Some of us were deeply sensitive to the wonder of life as it is revealed in nature. Slowly, under the pressure of work and social life and the lure of cheap pleasures, we lost the wonder of our earlier years—the intense joy and sense of the mystery of life in the freshness of the young day or the glory of the dying afternoon, the splendor of the mountains and the infinite of the sea, or in the perfection of the movements of a young animal or of a flower breaking through the soil. We try perhaps to evoke such feelings again, but we find ourselves empty and do not succeed. We had that sensitivity and we did not have it, and it was taken from us. Others of us have has the same experiences with respect to music, poetry, great literature and the drama. We desired to devour all of these; we lived in them, and through them created for ourselves a life beyond our daily life. We had this experience and we did not have it. We did not allow it to grow. Our love for it was not strong enough, and so it was taken from us. Many people remember a time when the desire to solve the riddles of the Universe and to find truth was the driving force in their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

ImageThese beings could not rest satisfied with the littleness that see nothing beyond its own greed and desire. One was haunted by higher ideals than the ordinary; one wanted to be finer, cleaner, better and nobler human material than the common one. They entered college and the university not in order to gain access to the upper middle classes or the preconditions for social and economic success, but because they felt driven by their thirst for knowledge. They had something to which, seemingly, more could be added. However, their desire was not strong enough. They failed to nurture it, and so it was taken from them. Expediency and indifference towards truth took the place of genuine academic interest. Because their love for the truth was let go, they sometimes feel sick at heart; they realize that what they have lost may never be returned to them. We all know that any deep relationship to another human being requires watchfulness and nourishment; otherwise, it is taken from us. And we cannot recapture it. This is a form having and not having that is the root of innumerable human tragedies. We are all familiar with them. An outward organization may be useful to those who are still on the religious and mystical levels but for the purpose of philosophic advancement it is unnecessary. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

ImagePublic societies are mere babels of strict and rigid opinions and lead in the end to confusion. The correct history of many spiritual organizations is not an edifying one. No formal association or institution is of any real worth here. Every student must work hard on and for oneself. Outside of that one may catch inspiration and receive help from an expert guide. The few who are able to walk together with one on this path will come along with time; the others would only be a drag. However, if one wants to join wit other really interested persons in studying the books together in an informal way, with no external bond, one may try it.  And there is the most fundamental kind of having and not having—our having and losing God. Perhaps in our youth and innocence, and even beyond it, our experience of God was rich. We may remember the moments in which we felt God’s presence intensely. We may remember our praying with an overflowing heart, our encounter with the holy in words and music and holy places. We communicated with God; but this communication was taken from us, because we had it and did not have it. We failed to let it grow, and therefore, it slowly disappeared, leaving only an empty space. We became unconcerned, cynical and indifferent, not because we doubted our religious traditions—such doubt belongs to a life rich in God—but because we turned away from what once concerned us infinitely. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

ImageSuch thoughts mark the first step in approaching the riddle of inequality. Those who have, receive more if they really have what they have, if they use it and cause it to grow. And those who have not, lose what they seem to have, because they really do not have it. The seeker after Reality will be suspicious of professional spirituality, although the seeker after religion will be attracted by it. It is not necessary to advertise inner attainment. One who would be a true philosopher must turn to the only source of true philosophy—the front within oneself. That is, one must turn inward, not outward to a group. Institutions tend to deaden inspirations. Of all things Truth is the freest. So, if a being is to find it in all its genuineness, and not in its distortions, caricatures, or fragmentation, not in any substitute for it, then one must preserve one’s own freedom to search for it. However, this is just what one cannot do so easily if one joins a sect. As I see it, the history of humankind divides into two great periods: the first one existed from time immemorial until roughly the Renaissance or Enlightenment, and it was characterized by the ritualist view of nature. The second period began with the efflorescence of the modern machine age and the domination of the scientific method and World view. In both periods beings wanted to control life and death, but in the first period they had to rely on a nonmachine technology to do it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

ImagePrimitive ritual manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the Universe, but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it. We control it up to a point—the point at which we seem to be destroying it. Besides, our belief in the efficacy of the machines control of nature has in itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are supposed to work, and to work infallibly, since we have to put all our trust in them. And so when they fail to work our whole World view begins to crumble—just as the primitives’’ World view did when they found their rituals were not working in the face of New World culture and weaponry. I am thinking of how anxious we are to find the exact cause of an airplane crash, or how eager we are to attribute the crash to human error and not machine failure. Or even more, how certain authorities hush up their air crashes: how can machines fail in machine paradise? The fact is that beings in the New World did not know what was going on because they were faced with a technics so alien to their ways of thought probably explains our long puzzlement over the organization of primitive society. “Awake, and hear the words which I shall tell thee; for behold, I am come to declare unto you the glad tidings of great joy. For the Lord hath heard thy prayers, and hath judged of thy righteousness, and hath sent me to declare unto thee that thou mayest rejoice; and that thou mayest declare unto thy people, that they may also be filled with joy,” reports Mosiah 3.3-4. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14Image

 

How Long is it Since You were Really Bothered? About Something Important, About Something Real?

August 14, 2019 10:32 pm

EAmXu_dUEAAqkLvCans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

ImageWhat manner of men and women need thirty feet of steel and four hundred horsepower to take them, singly, to their small destinations? Who demand that what they eat is wrapped so that forests are cut down to make the paper that is thrown away, and what they smoke and chew is sealed so that the sealers can be tossed in gutters and caught in twigs and grass? What kind of beings can afford to make the streets of their towns and cities hideous with neon at night, and their roadways hideous with signs by day, wasting beauty; who spill their trash into ravines and make smoking mountains of refuse for the town’s rats? What manner of beings choke off the life in rivers, streams and lakes with the waste of their produce making poison of water? Who is as rich as that? Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one lane, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of beings and the stigma of their improvidence. Who is so rich that ne can squander forever the wealth of Earth and water for the trivial needs of vanity or the compulsive demands of greed; or so prosperous in land that one can sacrifice nature for unnatural desires? The Earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

ImageAnd when we are long dead, what will we leave behind us? Temples? Amphora? Sunken treasure? Or mountains of twisted, rusted steel, canyons of plastic containers, and a million miles of sores garlanded, not with the lovely wrack of the sea, but with the cans and bottles and light-bulbs and boxes of people who conserved their convenience at the expanse of their heritage, and whose ephemeral prosperity was built on waste. As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power; might will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no being is angry any more at wrongdoing or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, God will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress them. Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude. We have a natural desire for solitude because we are beings. We want to feel what we are—namely, alone—not in pain and horror, but with joy and courage. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

ImageThere are many ways in which solitude can be sought and experienced. And if it is true that religion is what a being does with one’s solitariness, each way can be called religious. One of these ways is the desire towards the silence of nature. We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea. This solitude we can have, but only for a brief time. For we realize that the voice of nature cannot ultimately answer the questions in our minds. Our solitude in nature can easily become loneliness, and so we return to the World of being. Solitude can also be found in the reading of poetry, in listening to music, in looking at pictures, and in sincere thoughtfulness. We are alone, perhaps in the midst of multitudes, but we are not lonely. Solitude protects us without isolating us. However, life calls us back to its empty talk and the unavoidable demands of daily routine. It calls us back to its loneliness and the cover that it, in turn, spreads over our loneliness. Without a doubt, this last describes not only a being’s general predicament, but also, and emphatically, our time. Todays, more intensely than in preceding periods, beings are so lonely that they cannot bear solitude so they take to social media to build a fantasy life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

ImageThe epidemic of this fantasy life that people present on social media to cure their loneliness has become so pervasive that they even gather in groups in public to act out their roles they cast themselves in in the real World. It is as if life, for many people has become so lonely, that they feel the need to collect their fake friends and act out scenes in real life. People have become so lonely that they conjure up marriages, relationships, vacation and lifestyles all with the click of a button. Some do it for profit, others do it to make themselves feel better. However, the bottom line is they are trying to make an impression for an individual or a wide audience. People try desperately to become a part of the crowd. Everything in our World supports them. They are able to cyberstalk people, to figure out where they might be and what they might be think, and with the technology to track a cellphone or with the cameras all over the place, which are supposed to add to our security, people can then make a cameo in a person’s life and impersonate someone the individual know or act out a fantasy for a brief moment. It is a symptom of our disease that teachers and parents and the managers of public communication do everything possible to deprive us of the external conditions for solitude, the simplest assistant to privacy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

ImageEven our houses, instead of protecting the solitude of each member of the family or group, are constructed to exclude privacy almost completely with Alxea the virtual assistant, Roomba, and other devices spying on us, while pretending to make life easier. People can also access digital information and figure out where you go and be there waiting on you. Can you imagine how annoying that is? You wake up in the morning wonder what story is your mother going to tell you today? What scene are people in the community going to be acting out? What stupid question is someone going to ask? And who is going to become the fakest person in the World on social media, while all you are looking for is some solitude and something real, but people are all selling their souls because they want to look cool and feel special. The same holds true f the forms of communal life, the school, college, office and factory. An unceasing pressure attempts to destroy even our desire for solitude. However, sometimes God thrusts us out of the crowd into a solitude we did not desire, but which nonetheless takes hold of us. The prophet Jeremiah says—“I sit alone, because thy hand was upon me.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

ImageGod times lays hands upon us. He wants to ask the question of justice that many bring us suffering and death, and that can grow in us only in solitude. He wants us to break through the ordinary ways of beings that may bring disrepute and hatred upon us, a breakthrough that can happen only in solitude. God wants us to penetrate to the boundaries of our being, where the mystery of life appears, and it can only appear in moments of solitude. There may be some among you who long to become creative in some realm of life. However, you cannot become or remain creative without solitude. One hour of conscious solitude will enrich your creativity far more than hours of trying to learn the creative process. What happens in our solitude? Listen to Mark’s words about Jesus’ solitude in the desert—“And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, and the Angels ministered to him.” He is alone, facing the whole Earth and Sky, the wild beasts around him and within him, he himself the battlefield for divine and demonic forces. So, first, this is what happens in our solitude: we meet ourselves, not as ourselves, but as the battlefield for creation and destruction, for God and the demons. Solitude is not easy. Who can bear it? It was not easy even for Jesus. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

ImageWe read—“He went up into the hills to pray.” When evening came, he was alone.” When evening comes, loneliness becomes more lonely. We feel this when a day, or a period, or all the days of our life come to an end. Jesus went up to pray. Is this the way to transform loneliness into solitude and to bear solitude? It is not a simple question to answer. Most prayers do not have this much power. Most prayers make God a partner in a conversation; we use God to escape the only true way to solitude. Such prayers flow easily from the mouths of both ministers and laymen. However, they are not born out of a solitary encounter of God with beings. They are certainly not the kind of prayer for which Jesus went up into the hills. Better that we remain silent and allow our soul, that is always longing for solitude, to sign without words to God. This we can do, even in a crowded day and a crowded room, even under the most difficult external conditions. This can give us moments of solitude that no one can take from us. In these moments of solitude something is done to us. The center of our being, the innermost self that is the ground of our aloneness, is elevated to the divine center and taken into it. Therein can we rest without losing ourselves. Now perhaps we can answer a question you may have already asked—how can communion grow out of solitude? #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

ImageWe have seen that we can never reach the innermost center of another being. We are always alone, each for one’s self. However, we can reach it in a movement that rises first to God and then returns from God to the other self. In this way being’s aloneness is not removed, but taken into the community with that in which the centers of all beings rest, and so into community with all of them. Even love is reborn in solitude. For only in solitude are those who are alone able to reach those from whom they are separated. Only the presence of the eternal can break through the walls that isolate the temporal from the temporal. One hour of solitude may bring us closer to those we live than many hours of communication. We can take them with us to the hills of eternity. And perhaps when we ask—what is the innermost nature of solitude? we should answer—the presence of the eternal upon the crowded roads of the temporal. It is the experience of being alone but not lonely, in view of the eternal presence that shines through the face of the Christ, and that includes everybody and everything from which we are separated. In the poverty of solitude all riches are present. Let us dare to have solitude—to face the eternal, to find others, to see ourselves.  #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

ImageObservation shows beyond any doubt that if they feel the deprivations to be just, fair, necessary or purposeful, children, as well as adults, can accept a great many deprivations. A child does not mind education for cleanliness, for example, if the parents do not put an undue stress on it and do not coerce the child with subtle or gross cruelty. Nor does a child mind an occasional punishment, provides it feels certain in general of being loved and provided it feels the punishment to be fair and not done with the intention of hurting it or humiliating it. The questions of whether frustration as such incites to hostility is difficult to judge, because in surroundings which impose many deprivations on a child plenty of others provocative factors are usually present. What matters is the spirit in which frustrations are imposed rather than the frustrations themselves. The reasons I stress this point is that the emphasis often placed on the danger of frustration as such has led many parents to carry the idea still farther than did Dr. Freud himself and to shrink from any interference with the child lest one might be harmed by it. Jealousy can certainly be a source of formidable hatred in children as well as in adults. There is no doubt about the role that jealousy between siblings and jealousy of one or the other parent may play in neurotic children, or about the lasting influence this attitude may have for later life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

ImageOne who is educated by dread is educated by possibility, and only the being who is educated by possibility is educated in accordance with one’s infinity. Possibility is therefore the heaviest of all categories. One often hears, it is true, the opposite affirmed, that possibility is so light but reality is so heavy. However, from whom does one hear such talk? From a lot of miserable beings who never have known what possibility is, and who, since reality showed them that they were not fit for anything and never would be, mendaciously bedizened a possibility which was so beautiful, so enchanting; and the only foundation of this possibility was a little youthful tomfoolery of which they might rather have been ashamed. Therefore by this possibility which is said to be light one commonly understands the possibility of luck, food fortune and so forth. However, this is not possibility, it is a mendacious invention which human depravity falsely embellishes in order to have reason to complain of life, of providence, and as a pretext for being self-important. No, in possibility everything is possible, and one who truly was brought up by possibility has comprehended the dreadful as well as the smiling. When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that one can demand of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every being, and has learned the profitable lesion that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, one will then interpret reality differently. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

ImageOne will then extol reality, and even when it rests upon one heavily one will remember that after all it is far, far lighter than the possibility was. Only thus can possibility educate; for finiteness and the finite relationships in which the individual is assigned a place, whether it be small and commonplace or World-historical, educate only finitely, and one can always talk them around, always get a little more out of them, always Shaffer, always escape a little from them, always keep a little apart, always prevent oneself from learning absolutely from them; and if one is to learn absolutely, the individual must in turn have the possibility in oneself and oneself fashion that from which one is to learn, even though the next instant it does not recognize that it was fashioned by one, but absolutely takes the power from one. However, in order that the individual may this absolutely and infinitely be educated by possibility, one must be honest towards possibility and must have faith. By faith I mean the inward certainty which anticipates infinity. When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will then disclose all finitudes and idealize them in the form of infinity in the individual who is overwhelmed by dread, until in turn one is victorious by the anticipation o faith. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

ImageEveryone uses from time to time such expressions as, “a thought pops up,” an idea comes “from the blue” or “dawns” or “comes though out of a dream,” or “it suddenly hit me.” These are various ways of describing a common experience: the breakthrough of idea from some depth below the level of awareness. I shall call this realm “the unconscious: as a catchall for the subconscious, preconscious, and other dimensions below awareness. When I use the phrase “the unconscious,” I, of course, mean it as shorthand. There is no such thing as “the unconscious”; it is, rather, unconscious dimensions (or aspects or sources) of experience. I define this unconscious as the potentialities for awareness or action which the individual cannot or will not actualize. These potentialities are the source of what can be called “free creativity.” The exploration of unconscious phenomena has a fascinating relationship to creativity. What are the nature and characteristics of the creativity that has its source in these unconscious depths of personality? When a body is still and ego-mind is at rest, there is peace, sometimes even ecstasy. However, when both are active I am not, when there is neither questing nor non-questing, there is unchanging stability. That is realization. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

ImageWhen the sense of this presence is a continuous one, when the knowledge of the mentalness of this World-experience is an abiding one, and when the calm which comes as a result is an unshakeable one, it may be said that one is established in the Truth and in the Real. One does not have to enter into formal prayer to find one’s soul. It is an ever-present reality for one, not merely an intellectual conception or emotional belief. If one has no need to sit down specially for an arranged period of prayer, it is only because one has successfully gone through several stages of the practice. In the World you will find only two kinds of people—the unconscious and the conscious. The first kind know only their own little egos and their own large desires. The second kind know continually that they are in the presence of the Overself, and enjoy it great peace. The consciousness of Consciousness never deserts one. It remains somewhere on the outer periphery of the mind all the time and expands to its fullness at special times—that is, when withdrawn from all activity for a few minutes. One lives inwardly silent thought—free awareness of whatever is presented to one, whether it be the body in which one must live or the environment in which one finds oneself. One enjoys a supernal calm, being indeed free while living. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14Image

Of Happiness and Despair, We Have No Measure for After the Angel Had Spoken to Us, He Departed!

August 8, 2019 11:25 pm

85All right. Picture this. The population of the World has swelled to billions, and cities have risen though not in very many places, and mostly in that very valley where I had descended and left my marks on the walls of caves. Humankind hand wandered north and south as far as it could on the planet; settlements and towns and forts existed in various stages of development. Human’s wild imaginings of immortality and reunion wit the dead have everywhere given rise to religion. In the Nile Valley, a civilization of astonishing stability has developed, while war is waged all the time in the land we call the Holy Land. Billions of souls are now sputtered with enduring life, and they are of various creeds and yearnings for eternal life, which has brought them to this place with great ferocity. Mad expectations have pitched countless one into confusion. Others have grown so strong they exert a sort of rulership amongst the others. And some have learned some have learned that they can possess, or influence, or harm or love, as they case may be, to get others to do what they wish. The World is also populated by spirit! And some, have no memory anymore at all of being human, have become what men and women will for eternity call demons, prowling about, eager to possess, wreak havoc, or make mischief, as their development allow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

ImageAs we can see, humans are alienated because of the conditions in which they work and play. Industrial societies, in the Age of Information, produce certain cultural values. What are those values? What effect o they have on being’s striving for self-achievement?  The urban culture is a money culture, that is, money stamps its character. Monetary interests lend urban society its essentially impersonal character and make beings a mere cog in a giant machine. To survive as an individual in this calculating World, beings must use their heads more than their hearts. The result is a blasé attitude in which nerves and feelings are blunted. If the individual does survive, it is only at the most terrible cost. Most, however, are overwhelmed by the splendor and pressures of the metropolis. When the system of private property produces a surplus of wealth, the possession of wealth becomes the primary means of achieving social status. In time mere wealth becomes an end in itself. It becomes conspicuous waste. Conspicuous because being’s wealth, if it is to secure them the esteem of their peers, must be seen; wasteful, because material but not human ends are served. As material values have gained pre-eminence, spiritual values have declined in direst proportion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

ImageThe central fact of modern history is unquestionably the decline of religion as a ruling force in being’s lives. While one may argue with this claim, there can be no disputing the decline. In losing religion, beings lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; one was set free to deal with this World in all its brute objectivity. However, beings are bound to feel homeless in such a World, which no longer answered the need of one’s spirit. Just how anomie is related to the decline of religion and stimulation of material desire, faith is thought to be no longer a sustaining power and anarchy rules in the economy, any serious breakdown in that economy will have dire results for its victims. Lacking moral stability, they take their own lives. And the lack of spirituality and family values could also be why we are seeing a sharp spike in violence. The spike in violence is probably also due to the fact you have politicians like Jerry Brown and Darrell Steinberg vowing to “fight Trump,” which may also insight violence and also because White men in particular are being demonized by the media just for having pride in their culture, and this is making many people live in fear, have anxiety and feel ashamed of who they are, even though they have done nothing wrong. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

ImageAfter the industrial revolution men and women continued to sing and dance, but rarely in cohesive groups. (In the latest dance craze, the “twist,” which was made popular by Chubby Checker in the 1960s, bodies never touched. You can see how much culture, just like religion has changed.) The decline of the of group dancing is a paradigm of what is called desocialization or decay. The perpetuation and further growth of desocializing culture involves the inevitability of its own eventual destruction. There are other monsters on Earth, existing twixt the visible and the invisible; but the great thrust of the World was and always has been the fate of its billions of Humankind. Is this pessimistic outlook justified? In place of earlier and cohering beliefs and activities, we now have mass culture. Of happiness and of despair, we have no measure for culture adds to the estrangement of beings. All mass media in the end alienates people from personal experience and, though appearing to offset it, intensify their mortal isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves. The processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from the outside. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

ImageThough the steps by which anxiety develops are simple in principle, in practice it is usually difficult to understand the conditions of anxiety. One of the complicating factors is that the repressed hostile impulses are frequently projected not on the person factually concerned but on something else. In one of Dr. Freud’s case histories, for example, the little Hans did not develop an anxiety concerning his parents but an anxiety concerning white horses. An otherwise very sensible patient of mine, after a repression of hostility toward her husband, suddenly developed an anxiety concerning reptiles in the tiled swimming pool. It seems that nothing from germs to thunderstorms is too remote for an anxiety to be attached to it. The reasons for this tendency to detach the anxiety from the person concerned are quite obvious. If the anxiety factually concerns a parent, husband, friend or one in similar close relationship the assumption of hostility is felt to be incompatible with an existing tie of authority, love or appreciation. The maxim in these cases is he denial of hostility all around. By repressing one’s own hostility the person denies that there is any hostility on one’s part, and by projecting one’s repressed hostility to thunderstorms one denies any hostility on the other’s part. Many illusions of happy marriage rest on an ostrich policy of this kind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

ImageThat a repression of hostility leads with inexorable logic to the generation of anxiety does not mean that anxiety must become manifest every time the process takes place. Anxiety may be removed instantaneously by one of the protective devices we have discussed or shall discuss later. A person in such a situation may protect oneself by such means, for example, as developing an enhanced need for sleep or taking to drink. There are infinite variations in the forms of anxiety which may ensue from the process of repressing hostility. For instance, though things, or objects, have a radically different existence than do conscious human beings, we so often treat the two in the same way. Increasingly, society identifies people’s roles with their overall beings; factory managers, for example, perceive their workers as mechanical parts; consumers equate producers with things (for instance, clerk-things, waiter-things, doctor-things); and even governments, such as the American Democratic Party, views its citizens as moldable tools of the state. Yet our authentic existence is completely contrary to these frozen interpretations of our lives: it is a “no-thing.” At every instant, that is, we are completely free to disengage from who we were that instant before, not in the sense of changing our material reality or the circumstances within which are thrust, but in the sense of adopting attitudes toward these facticities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

ImageTo live authentically, then, one must be prepared, at each instant, to negate one’s identities of the past, to create new identities (or attitudes), and to affirm the nothingness that one is. How workable is this demanding vision of being? It is highly workable because we live it whether we want to acknowledge the point or not. We are condemned to be free. It is extremely difficult to achieve such a liberated state. For unlike experiencing a fullness of Being, it would be like a constant state of disorientation, or nausea—a void that we would be perpetually responsible for filling. It would also be a disconnected state, completely immune to subconscious (for example, cultural, historical, or personal) influences. However, do we really have to acknowledge total freedom to adopt attitudes toward a given situation in order to be considered authentic; or are there mitigating circumstances, pre- or unreflected-upon meanings, that color and limit our attitudinal range? Inherent in power-to-be is the need to affirm one’s own being. This, the second level in our spectrum, is the quiet, undramatic form of self-belief. It arises from an original feeling of worth imparted to the infant through the love of a parent or parents in the early months, and it shows itself later on in life as a sense of dignity. The word dignity, coming from the Latin dignus, “worthy,” means a “feeling of intrinsic worth,” an essential for every mentally healthy human being. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

ImageMany things many happen to this initial longing to be valued. Sometimes people believe things like, “I am worth something, but nobody in the World knows it.” Or they may feel, “I am not worth anything, and I am not supposed to be except when others can use me for pleasures of the flesh.” Or some may believe, “I am not worthy anything, but allied with God I am worth everything in the World.” The error many persons make is that of bypassing self-affirmation and jumping straight from powerlessness into aggression and violence. When one has always been powerless, the heady feeling one gets when one first realizes one is does have power seems to be intoxicating. It is as though one had to summon up adrenalin in order to experience the fact that one has power to be, and once the adrenalin is present, one moves on the strength of it into aggressive behavior. Hence persons in therapy often go through periods of being what their friends and family call excessively aggressive just after they realize their own power to be. This aggression or violence can burn like bonfire, but is generally no more than a temporary exercise. If self-affirmation, as a step in a person’s development, is omitted or given the staying capacity and depth to one’s power to be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

ImageMany in our culture tend to deny self-affirmation on moral grounds. They have been taught that this urge is selfish or egocentric in the pejorative sense, and that the way to love others is hate yourself. This is one of the most thoroughly anachronistic aspects of our deteriorated puritanism; our attitudes toward others parallel our attitudes toward ourselves and a basic love for ourselves is necessary if we are to love others, has now been proved beyond any doubt. The Biblical precept means what it says: Love your neighbor not as you hate yourself but as you love yourself. Therapeutically, it often helps to cast the patient’s behavior into perspective by reminding one, “You would not treat another person as badly as you treat yourself.” Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. However, it is not to be thought of merely as a “letting go”; it involves the total person, with the subconscious and unconscious acting in unity wit the conscious. It is not, thus, irrational; it is, rather, suprarational. It brings intellectual, volitional, and emotional functions into play all together. What I am saying may sound strange in the light of our traditional academic psychology. It should sound strange. Our traditional academic psychology has been founded on the dichotomy between subject and object which has been the central character of Western thought for the past four centuries. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

ImageThis dichotomy between subject and object is the cancer of all psychology and psychiatry up to now. It is not avoided by behaviorism or operationalism, which would define experience only in objective terms. Nor is it avoided by isolating the creative experience as a purely subjective phenomenon. Most psychological and other modern schools of thought still assume this split without being aware of it. We have tended to set reason over against emotions, and have assumed, as an outgrowth of this dichotomy, that we could observe something most accurately if our emotions were not involved—that is to say, we would be least biased if we had no emotional stake at all in the matter at hand. I think this is an egregious error. There are now data in Rorschach responses, for example, that indicate that people can more accurately observe precisely when they are emotionally involved—that is, reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when one’s emotions are engaged. Indeed, we cannot really see an object unless we have some emotional involvement with it. It may well be that reason works best in the state of ecstasy. What manner of encounter releases the vitality? What particular relation to landscape or inner vision or idea heightens the consciousness, brings forth the intensity? #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

ImageBy asking these questions, the teacher soon finds that one is faced by a new problem: the temperamental incompatibilities of the students. They cannot study together without coming into disagreement and they cannot work together without coming into conflict. They take offense too easily and do not realize that the teacher has duties toward many other students besides themselves. They cannot even discover that the teacher has sent more letters of given more interviews to another student without becoming jealous of the latter. Thus the personal factor cannot be eliminated from any group. In the end, the teacher finds that one has to be advise each student not to concern oneself about the others. So the teacher concludes that one can get better results by dealing with each individual separately than in a group. Those who serve the interests of their institution, those who mold its policy and become its instrument, will have to choose between such activity and the Ideal. To overact against the misuse of power of the deficiencies of an institution is to commit a fresh error. Whilst beings are imperfect and whilst power makes them drunk, the real issue is why the inhibitions are there in the first place? We cannot entrust the government of any religious institution, any religious organization, or any human life to a single being. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

ImageThe organization of church, group, or society along the usual lines is too often motivated by a mixture of urges—some creditable but others not. If there is the desire to spread what is believed to be true, there may also be the desire to occupy a prominent leading position in the organization, the ambition to dominate others. People try to escape their responsibility in this matter by handing it over to an official Church, or Spiritual Guide, or referring to Scripture. However, they fail to see that in the end it is they themselves who judge between doctrines, decide upon beliefs, choose spiritual paths, request ceremonies and accept observances, and finally personally pronounce the words: this is Truth! To accept belief is unconsciously or consciously to pass a judgment, one’s own judgment, on that belief. The illuminate is conscious of both the ultimate unity and the immediate multiplicity of the World. This is a paradox. However, one’s permanent resting place while one is dealing with others is at the junction-point of duality and unity so that one is ready at any moment to absorb one’s attention in either phase. The understanding that everything is illusive is not the final one. It is an essential stage but only a stage. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

ImageUltimately you will understand that the form and separateness of a thing are illusory, but the thing-in-itself is not. That out of which those forms appear is not different from them, hence Reality is one and the same in all things. This is the paradox of life and a sharp mind is needed to perceive it. However, to bring beginners out of their Earthly attachments, we have to teach first the illusoriness of the World, and then raise them to a higher level of understanding and show that the World is not apart from the Real. That Thou Art unifies everything in essence. However, this final realization cannot be got by stilling the mind, only by awakening it into full vigour again after the spiritual peace has been attained and then letting its activity cease of its own accord when thought merges voluntarily into insight. When that is done, you know the limitations of both soul and enquiry of mind as successive stages. Whoever realizes this truth does not divorce from matter, but realize non-difference from it. Hence we call this highest path the soul’s unity. However, to reach it one has to pass through the revelations of evolution and gain wisdom and knowledge. Christian Science caught glimpses of the higher truth but some get their facts and fancies confused together. Many admire the human heart, loving others as it does, mate with mate, and family with family, they imagine Heaven. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

ImageBeings have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kin will be restored to them and to each other, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity because their love demands it. They have conceived of these ideas as they conceive of fleshly children! And their souls are greats. They reach out beyond the love of self and the service of self in the name of Love. Love goes back and forth between Earth and Heaven eternally. Being know the Lord is here, and they want to know everything about God. And about themselves. They know and they want to know. God’s essence is Goodness, and he will not suffer these souls to cry in gloom and ignorance. God will not suffer the ingenious Humankind to continue without an inkling of the Divine. Souls of the dead have given human much inspiration, and encouragement, and those souls are out of Nature, as many have beheld it, and growing stronger by the day. In this high state one’s own mind is consciously connected with the divine Mind. The result can scarcely be understood by the uninitiated. “And it came to pass that after this manner of language did I persuade my brethren, that they might be faithful in keeping the commandments of God. And after the Angel had spoken unto us, he departed,” reports 1 Nephi 3.21 and 3.30. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14Image

Ah Love, Let Us be True to One Another of the Heart has its Reasons which Reasons Knows Not!

August 2, 2019 10:26 pm

ImageI think I sold my soul for a place like this. Look, you are alive, whatever you are, but you are not human. You can make a miracle, can you not? I love art, of course. Beauty. However, I got mixed up in my head when I was seventeen that I was going to start a new religion, a cult—free love, give to the less affluent, rise one’s hand against no one, you know, a sort of Amish community. There were these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it; but a medieval codex, no; I was an altar boy when I was very little, went to Mass every day for years with my mother, know liturgical Latin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books as devotional and rare. These books were not like the others books. They were psalms that never appeared in any Bible. I figured that much out, simply by comparing them to other Latin reprints of the same period that I got out of the library. This was some sort of original work. If one joins a monastic order one will usually have to take a vow to practise certain restraints and renunciations. To a lesser degree this also occurs with joining certain groups and circles in the World outside such orders. The value of the vow is that it sets up a standard to be followed, a course to be travelled, and a goal to be reached. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageOne may fall from the standard, deviate from the course, and fail to approach the goal, but their existence of sacred standards and goals may help one come closer to the object of the vow than one might otherwise have come. On the other hand, the layman who is not interested in vows but simply resolves to improve oneself lacks their stimulus. There is nothing but the inner force of one’s own ideal to keep one from abandoning the self-imposed rigours of one’s discipline. One depends on the power which one will have to summon up from somewhere within oneself. The weakness of binding oneself to the new regime which one has imposed on one’s own life that it can easily be shirked at any time, that if one yields to the inclination to do so, the restraints upon it will be weaker and fewer. Whatever church, organization, or cult to which one commits oneself, one should always make for oneself at least the reservation that one should retain the freedom to leave and go elsewhere or to cease seeking among outer organizations and to search within. However, there is a place and a need for the cohesion of a group, for the sustained teamwork of an organization, and for the discipline imposed on individuals by a church. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageAny institution dedicated to training for the life of the Spirit will always keep out the Spirit. It cannot be found through any formal performance nor through any organized group work. And all that training can do is to open a way wherethrough, if It is already coming or will come, it may pass. I made my life rich enough that I stopped caring about changing the World if ever I really thought of it; I made a life you see, you know, a World unto itself. However, others are able to open their soul in a sophisticated way to…to something. There is something else, something about our dilemma, that you cannot invent theologies, but for them to work they have to come from some deeper place inside a person—a totality of human experience. Illumination is not a result which follows moral purification and emotional discipline. These things are necessary but only preparatory. It is a result which follows conscious attempts to seek the Real and discard the illusory. This discrimination will show itself in the kind of values that are attached to the World, in the thinking reflections that are made about the World, and in the deliberate rejection of ego that takes place during meditation. It begins with either the intellect as enquiry, or the feelings as World-weariness, but is passes gradually into the whole life of the individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

ImageIt the enlightenment is to be continuous and the self-conquest completed, the technique which is to achieve them must be a sufficiently adequate one. To become established in the Reality is to give up seeking all those transient and temporary experiences which come by pursuing particular techniques, whether they be techniques of yoga or techniques of taking supplement, and take to philosophy. We must carefully qualify by such words as “intermittent,” “partial,” and “temporary,” the attainments to which exercises lead. This is because the full and permanent attainment cannot emerge out of meditation alone. It is a fruit of the threefold planting of meditation and reflection and action combined. Hence although the foregoing exercises will bring the student considerably nearer it, it must not be thought that any mystical exercise of itself can confer ultimate enlightenment. The path to this exalted result must traverse all fields to spiritual enlightenment. We need to know the truth, the wisdom-knowledge, but it is not enough. We need to have the living mystic experience, the vital feeling of what I am, but it is not enough. For we need to synthesize the two in a full actual intuitive realization, conferred by the Overself. This is Grace. This is to emerge finally—born again! #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

ImageGood people work here. Since joining the company I have not heard one person raise one’s voice to another in anger, and rarely even in irritation. Apparently when you remove fear from a being’s life you also remove one’s stinger. Since there is no severe competition within our shop, we are serene. We do compete mildly perhaps, by trying to achieve good marks in the hope that our department head will recommend a promotion or an increase to the Salary Committee. Cutting out the other beings and using tricks to make one look bad is hardly ever done. At higher levels, now and then, executive empires will bump into each other and there will be skirmishes along the border. However, these are for the most part carried on without bullying and table pounding, and the worst that can happen to the loser is that one will be moved sideways into a smaller empire. It would be wrong to say that our employees are not lively. They have fun and love, and go on camping trips, go skinning, and operate power boats, have yacht parties, and read things and go to the movies, and ride motorcycles like anybody else. In the office they know what to do (usually after consolation) in almost any circumstance. What a great many of them have lost, it seems to me, is temperament, in the sense of mettle. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageWe speak of a mettlesome horse. Well, these are not mettlesome people. When the ego is threatened—because at our company we do not threat people’s egos, they lack, perhaps, the capacity to be mean and ornery. Rather the ego tends to atrophy through disuse. Another curious thing is our talent for being extremely friendly without saying anything to each other. I remember a conversation that went on something like this: “Sully! Where did you come from? I have not seen you in—I guess it has been about a year and a half.” “Just about that, Jillian. A year and a half at least.” “What are you up to, for goodness’ sake?” “I have been in Canada, and now I am back in the states.” “Always on the move!” “Well, I guess I am. I just thought I would come down and have a chat with you before leaving.” “It is great that you did. How is your family?” “Fine, Jill, how is yours?” “They are fine, too. We just all had a family reunion and it was lovely.” “The years go by, do they not?” “They sure do.” “Well…” “Well…” Well, I guess I had better be moving along.” “It has been wonderful talking to you, Sully. Look, before you get on the plane, why do you not come down for another talk?” “I will, young lady. You can count on it.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageAlso common among our employees is a genuine and lively interest in the career of upper-level executives whom they may never have laid eyes on. As the gentlemen move from one station to another, their progress is followed with exclamations and inside comments. “Hmm…Armin has moved to Purchasing! I thought so.” “Look at Welsh—he has taken over the top spot in Patagonia. Anybody can tell that they are setting him up for a vice-presidency.” Who cared about Armin and Welsh? At one point, I did. I had to prepare a press release about them, and update—add two more lines to—their official biographies. The role of the corporation’s top directors in our cosmos is an interesting one. In out company, members of the board are not remote figures from outside who drop in to attend meetings now and then. They are on the job every day. They recognize us, nod, and often say hello. I have found these august gentlemen to be amiable and even shy in the presence of their subordinates, but their appearance one the scene is the occasion of total respect, body and soul, such as I have never witnessed outside the army. They are not feared either. They conduct themselves in a friendly, most democratic manner. It is not awe they inspire but, so far as I can see, pure admiration. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageI was once talking to a young man in the employee-relations department when his eyes, gazing over my shoulder, suddenly lit up with joy. I turned, expecting to see our pretty receptionist, but it was a director passing by and giving us a wave of his hand. This unity and harmony are important for everyone who does not know how to control one’s inmost self would feign control one’s neighbor’s will according to one’s own conceit. For the living person, power is not a theory but an ever-present reality which one must confront, use, enjoy, and struggle with a hundred times a day. Every person is born a bundle of potentialities. Very few of these have become formed into actual powers at birth; one cannot yet walk or talk or make a flying machine. However, one can cry and this cry is the potentiality that develops into the complex system of communication in language. No one can doubt the delight the normal infant gets at the maturing of these potentialities into powers as one is able to talk, to crawl, to walk, to run. All of us who have watched children running in the park, skipping and jumping as randomly as puppies, can appreciate the pleasure of sheer movement, of exercising muscles that demand to be used. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageThe potentiality to explore, to see the World as a person of one’s age can, will increasingly become an actual power as one’s neuromuscular structure develops. Everyone who has observed one’s own development with wonder will be aware that there is both nature and nurture in every step of this actualization of one’s potentialities. However, these potentialities also being anxiety. Potentiality becomes actuality, but the intervening variable is anxiety. The potentiality for pleasures of the flesh, which takes a decisive leap ahead at puberty, brings excitement and joy but also the anxiety associated with new relationships and new responsibilities. Power pushes toward its fulfillment. It is neither good nor evil, ethically speaking; it only is. However, it is not neutral. It requires in some way its own expression, although the forms of the expression vary greatly. There is an inescapable conflict between a being’s individual powers and the culture to which he or she belongs; and there is bound to be a struggle of these powers against the culture that seeks to hold the individual within its bounds. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImageThis constant struggle has a dialectical nature—as one pole changes, the other does too. Anxiety connected with an activity will spoil the pleasure that it would otherwise hold. This is not true for minor anxieties; on the contrary, they may produce an added zest. Riding a roller-coaster with some apprehension may make it more thrilling, whereas doing it with strong anxiety will make it a torture. A strong anxiety connected with pleasures of the flesh will render them thoroughly unenjoyable, and if one is not aware of the anxiety one will have the feeling that pleasures of the flesh do not mean anything. That maybe confusing because I have said that a feeling of dislike may be used as a means of avoiding an anxiety, and now I am saying that the dislike may be a consequence of the anxiety. Actually, both statements are true. Dislike may be the means of avoiding and the consequence of having anxiety. This is one small example of the difficulty in understanding psychic phenomena. They are intricate and involved, and unless we make up our minds that we must consider innumerable, interwoven interactions we shall make no progress in psychological knowledge. The purpose of discussing how we may defend ourselves against anxiety is not to give an exhaustive picture of all possible defenses. In fact we shall soon learn more radical ways of preventing anxiety from arising. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

ImageMy main concern now is to substantiate the statement that one may have more anxiety than one is aware of, or may have anxiety without being aware of it at all, and also to show some of the more common points where it may be looked for. Thus, in short, anxiety may be hidden behind feelings of physical discomfort, such as heart-pounding and fatigue; it may be concealed by a number of fears that seem rational or warranted; it may be the hidden force driving us to drink or to submerge ourselves in all sorts of distractions. We shall often find it as the cause of inability to do or enjoy certain things, and we shall always discover it as the promoting factor behind inhibitions. For reasons we shall discuss later, our culture generates a great deal of anxiety in the individuals living in it. Hence practically everyone has built up one or another of the defenses I have mentioned. The more neurotic a person is, the more is one’s personality pervade and determined by such defenses, and the greater the number of things one is unable to do or does not consider doing, although according to one’s vitality, mental capacities or educational background one would be justified in expecting one to do them. The more sever the neurosis, the more inhibitions are present, both subtle and gross. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

ImageThere are three contemporary dilemmas: (1) the failure of institutional authority, (2) the rising ride of nihilism, and (3) the struggle for psychospiritual balance, or integration. When people declare that God is dead, they do not mean all gods or every God to come; they meant the gods, both secular and religious, that no longer bred inspiration and hope, but only disillusionment and decay. This denotes the corrupt gods that catered to some greedy elite; churches financed by cocaine king; the repressive gods that stifled pleasures of the flesh, creative play, and emotional expressiveness; the technocratic gods that sapped the populace of meaningful and stimulating work; and the scientistic gods that deny the legitimacy of nonrational phenomena. This forecast the breakdown of institutional authority. We can also foresee a gaping chasm left in the wake of this breakdown—a chasm which could lead to nihilism. When people no longer have traditions to steer them or gods to inspire them, what happens? Many of them flounder; they become reckless, anarchistic beast, or they form reactionary, xenophobic enclaves. These extremes strike a note of familiarity in our own unstable era, an era bereft of traditions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageThis World view can be characterized as a primordial clash of counraries—on the one hand, repression, order, or an Apollonian consciousness and on the other hand, indulgence, abandon, or Dionysian awareness. Wherever one is sacrificed the other suffers, because neither can operate in isolation. How can we cope with these warring (individual and collective) tendencies? By confronting them, by acknowledging both our limits and our possibilities, our need for order and discipline, as well as spontaneity and abandon. In so doing, we foster dynamic, realistic lives. This is what is meant by passionate people who master their passions, or those who self-overcome. Sometimes it is okay to surround ourselves with limited horizons, as long as we do not retire from life but put ourselves in the midst of it; do not be fainthearted but take as much as possible upon yourself, over yourself, and into yourself. What we want is totality; fight for the extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will. Discipline yourself to wholeness, create yourself. A human being who is strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward oneself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom is a being of tolerance, not weakness but of strength. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

ImageSuch a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed in the whole. In the case of abstract painters, for example, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. The paint, the canvas, and the other materials then become a secondary part of this encounter; they are the language of it, the media, as we rightly put it. Or scientists confront their experiment, their laboratory task, in a similar situation of encounter. The encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort—that is, will power. A healthy child’s play, for example, also has the essential features of encounter, and we know it is one of the important prototypes of adult creativity. The essential point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the degree of intensity. Let prayer stay as a beautiful, peace-bestowing, and calming exercise. If it does, it need not limit you to getting stuck with “Experience” as a final attainment. It is a felt experience, but one which must be accompanied by the knowledge that the entire Universe is a form of knowledge. The two together complete the prayerful experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

ImageThus one learns to understand that one must advance beyond ordinary situations to this goal of Being, to become established in it, in this stillness, ever-present and ever-proven. So do as you wish in this matter, do not deprive yourself of the occasional or even regular practice of prayer, should you be inclined toward it, so long as you comprehend that though it has its very important place in the Quest, it is not essential to attainment of the ultimate goal itself. Love is the primary attribute and motive for the spiritual purposes we were changed to undertake by our beloved God. A marvelous work is about to come forth. This revelation establishes that those who desire to serve God qualify for such faith, hope, charity and love, with a focus on the glory of God. Charity, which is the pure love of Christ, includes God’s eternal love for all his children. We are blessed with great love for our fellow beings and environment, for we are called to carry the gospel to the World to win souls unto Christ. When we gain a vision of love, the Lord’s work will be accomplished. We need to align our hearts with love and move away from feelings of mere responsibility or guilt. Loving performing ordinances for ancestors will strengthen and protect our youth and family in a World that is becoming increasingly evil. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

ImageWhen we work in righteousness, our decisions are Heaven blessed. Most of us need time to fit and equip ourselves for the glorious moment of insight, but a few receive it in a day. It must be remembered that it does not actually happen in time but out of it, in the great Stillness. The being does not know about the absolute final truth a second before—and then it is all there. How soon it can settle down in one will also vary with different persons—it is a few hours in one case but three years in another. Those who seek the will of the Lord as individuals and for their families must strive for righteousness, meekness, kindness, and love. Humility and love are the hallmark of those who see the Lord’s will, especially for their families. Perfecting ourselves, qualifying ourselves for the blessings of covenants, and preparing to meet God are individual responsibilities. We need to be self-reliant and anxiously engaged in making our homes a refuge from the storms that surround us and a sanctuary of faith. When there is love at home, there is beauty all around. Whether enlightenment is reached by steps as an outcome of practice unremittingly done, or that it comes suddenly all at once, it must be a concept-free phenomenon, a set of doctrines and covenants that are understanding, and possess a recognition of what always was, is, and will be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16Image

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No Victory Can Ever Be Won When it is Already Lost in the Mind–The Intervals Between the Events Are More Significant than the Events Themselves!

May 24, 2019 10:13 pm

I pulled the bank notes out of my pocket and put them in his unsteady hand. I spilled gold coins onto the payment. The actors darted forward fearfully to gather them up. I scanned the crowd around for the source of this strange distraction, what was it, not Nicolas in the door of the deserted theater, watching me with a broken soul. No, something else both familiar and unfamiliar, having to do with the dark. This conception of the pause gives us a whole new World. It is in the pause that people learn to listen to silence. We can hear an infinite number of sounds that we normally never hear at all—the unending hum and buzz of insects in a quiet Summer field, a breeze blowing lightly through the golden hay, a thrush singing in the low bushes beyond the meadow. And we suddenly realize that this is something—the World of silence is populated by a myriad of creatures and myriad of sounds. In childhood, we were taught to sit still and enjoy the silence. We were taught to use our organs to smell, to look when apparently there was nothing to see, and to listen intently when all seemingly was quiet. We learned that silences as well as sounds are significant in the forest, and we learned how to listen to the silences. Deeply felt silences might be said to be the core of our religion. During these times, the nature within ourselves found unity with the nature of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

In Japan, free time and space—what we call pauses—are perceived as ma, the valid interval or meaningful pause. Such perception is basic to all experience and specifically to what constitutes creativity and freedom. This perception persists in spite of the adoption of Western culture and science. Even in 1958, Misako Miyamoto wrote of the No plays, “The audience watches the play and catches the feeling through not only the action and words but also the intervals of the period of pauses. There is a free creation in each person’s mind; and the audience relates to this situation with free thinking.” Of silent intervals in speech, she says, “Especially in the pauses in a tone of voice, I can feel the person’s unique personality and one’s joy, sorrow or other complicated feelings.” On listening to a robin in early Spring, “It sand with pauses, I could have time to think about the bird in the silent moment between one voice and others. The pauses produced the effect of the relation between the bird and me. Lest these examples seduce us into assuming that this valuing of the pause is chiefly in Eastern esoteric cultures, let me point out that the phenomenon is just as clear, though not as frequent, in our own modern culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

John Cage, a composer noted for his originality, gave a concert in New York which consisted of his coming out on the stage, sitting down at the keyboard for a period of time, and not playing one note. His sim, as he explained to a less-than-pleased audience, was to give them an opportunity to listen to the silence. Hos recorded music shows precisely this—many pauses are interspersed with heterogeneous notes. John Cage sharpens our awareness, makes our sense keener, and renders us alive to ourselves and our surroundings. Listening is our most neglected sense. The very best essence of jazz is in the space between notes, called the afterbeat. The leader of a band in which I once played used to sing out “um-BAH,” the “Bah”—or the note coming always between the beats. This syncopation is a basis of jazz. Duke Ellington, for example, keeps the audience tantalized, on edge, expectant—we have to dance to work out the emotion building up within us. On an immediate level this expectancy has a similarity to the exquisite levels of feeling before climax. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Hence, some musicians, can simulate the process of pleasures of the flesh in the tantalizing beat of their song. In the ever-changing jazz group at Preservation Hall in New Orleans, this infinite variety, with each person improvising, produces each time a piece of music never before played and never to be played again. This is freedom par excellence. There seems to be no pause in technology. Or when there is, it is called a depression and is denied and feared. However, pure science is a different matter. We find Alert Einstein remarking that “the intervals between the events are more significant than the events themselves.” The significance of the pause is that the rigid chain of cause and effect is broken. The pause momentarily suspends the billiard-ball system of Pavlov. In the person’s life response no longer blindly follows stimulus. There intervenes between the two our human imaginings, reflections, considerations, ponderings. Pause is the prerequisite for wonder. When we do not pause, when we are perpetually hurrying from one appointment to another, from one planned activity to another, we sacrifice the richness of wonder. And we lose communication with our destiny. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

When they learn about it for the first time, too many persons will have nothing to do with the Quest. This is not because they find it impossible to believe some of the ideas on which it is based, such as the idea of reincarnation. Nor is it because the metaphysical side is too abstruse for them to go through the needed labour of troubling their minds with it. No—it is because the ideal set up for the questers is, they claim, completely outside their horizon and quite unreachable by most, if not nearly all of them. Its peak seems so austere, the climb up it so demanding of the bravery that a mortal could ever possess, that few even venture to approach it. They hear of saints who seem to achieve the impossible—a happiness which eludes their fellow denizens of this planet and a self-control which puts human desire and passion easily underfoot. What these spiritual superpeople can do, in temptation-free Himalayan heights of European monastic retreats, they see no prospect of ever doing in their noisy busy cities. It is not possible, they think, to live on such a high Godlike plane in a World where meanness and violence are everyday patterns. This is a plausible view but it is not the only one. It is impossible only if they think so. When it is already lost in the mind, no victory can ever be won. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Even if it were offered to them, those persons who are satisfied with substitutes for the Truth could not appreciate or recognize it. Those who seek neither moral elevation nor spiritual teaching do not thereby show their indifference to thought about life. They show only that they are smugly satisfied with the little they thought they have managed to do. Those who are content with a life of nothing more than sitting down to meals, going out to make money, and coming back to enjoy pleasures of the flesh—that is, wit a solely materialistic life—find nothing in such inspired messages and get noting from such mystical teachings. There is no large idea in their petty lives. It will not engage the interest of the spiritually indolent. So long as we keep ourselves focused wholly in the physical World of thoughts such as these may be read but will not reach our minds. The mortals who see no need for a higher concept of one’s nature than the merely physical one will see no need for a higher goal than feeding, clothing, sheltering, and amusing one’s body. In letting the senses, the passion, the intellect, and the ego take sole charge of one’s life, one quite naturally sees only mere emptiness beyond. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

One doubts and refutes the intuitive-spiritual and denies and rejects the spiritual. The Infinite is nothing to one so long as one prefers to remain shut in within the sense bound outlook. This is why one dismisses spiritual experience, religious feeling, and philosophic insight as mere hallucinations. However, all the opposition takes place only in one’s conscious mind for there is unavoidable recognition on one’s subconscious mind. One wants to escape from oneself, however, and fears the ordeal of facing oneself. These words will make no appeal to the materialistic mentality which still regards all spiritual experience as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when I first embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than a decade ago. People neglect the real because they believe they already have it (in sense-experience of the World outside) and for the same reason they do not seek truth. The unfortunate who have been unable to manage their affairs or to recover from the blows of destiny may turn to religion for comfort: they seldom turn to philosophy. For this fails to confront their emotions: it appears is only to those who are learning that emotions need to be checked or balanced or controlled by reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The mass of people do not want, and may even fear, the spiritual and intellectual freedom to search for truth. They are more comfortable inside the gregarious protection of ready-made group tradition. It is not only that so many people are not capable of comprehending the truth but also that a large number of them do not want to comprehend it. The truth hurts their ego, contradicts their desires, and denies their expectations. Mortal’s communal life cannot dispense any more than one oneself with the It-World—over which the presence of the You floats like the spirit over the face of the waters. Mortal’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it. There is no evil drive until the drive detaches itself from our being; the drive that is wedded to and determined by our being is the plasma of communal life, while the detached drive spells its disintegration. The economy as the house of the will to profit and the states as the house of the will to power participate in life as long as they participate in the spirit. If they abjure the spirit, they abjure life. To be sure, life takes its time about settling the score, and for quite a while one may still think that one sees a form move where for a long time a mere mechanism has been whirring. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Introducing some sort of immediacy at this point is surely futile. Loosening the framework of the economy or the state cannot make up for the fact that neither stands any longer under the supremacy of the You-saying spirit, and stirring up the periphery cannot replace the living relationship to the center. The structures of communal human life derive their life from the fullness of the relational force that permeates their members, and they derive their embodies form from the saturation of this force by the spirit. The states person of business person who serves the spirit is no dilettante. One knows well that one cannot simply confront the people with whom one has to deal as so many carriers of the You, without undoing one’s own work. Nevertheless one ventures to do this, not simply but up to the limit suggested to one by the spirit; and the spirit does suggest a limit to one, and the venture that would have exploded a served structure succeeds where the presence of the You floats above. One does not become a babbling enthusiast; one serves the truth, which, though supra-rational, does not disown reason but holds her in lap. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

What one does in communal life is no different from what is done in personal life by a mortal who knows that one cannot actualize the You in some pure fashion but who nevertheless bears witness of it daily to the It, defining the limit every day anew, according to the right and measure of that day—discovering the limit anew. Neither work nor possessions can be redeemed on their own but only by starting from the spirit. It is only from the presence of the spirit that significance and joy can slow into all work, and reverence and the strength to sacrifice into all possessions, not to the brim but quantum satis—and that is worked and possessed, though it reminds attached to the It-World, can nevertheless be transfigured to the point where it confronts us and represents the You. There is no back-behind-it; there is, even at the moment of the most profound need—indeed, only then—a previously unsuspected beyond-it. Whether it is the state that regulates the economy or the economy that directs the state is unimportant as long as both are unchanged. Whether the institutions of the state become freer and those of the economy juster, that is important, but not for the question concerning actual life that is being posed here; for they cannot become free and just on their own. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

You-saying, responding spirit—remains alive and actual; whether what remains of it in communal human life continues to be subjected to the state and the economy or whether it becomes independently active; whether what abides of it in individual human life incorporates itself again in communal life. However, that certainly cannot be accomplished by dividing communal life into independent realms that also include the life of the spirit. That would merely mean that the regions immersed in the It-World would be abandoned forever to this despotism, while the spirit would lose all actuality. For the spirit in itself can never act independently upon life; that it can do only in the World—with its force which penetrates and transforms the It-World. The spirit is truly at home with itself when it can confront the World that is opened up to it, give itself to the World, and redeem it and, through the World, also itself. However, the spirituality that represents the spirit nowadays is so scattered, weakened, degenerate, and full of contradictions that it could not possibly do this until it had first returned to the essence of the spirit: being able to say You. Most people are contented with their chains or even strongly attached them—such is the awesome power of desires, passions, infatuation, and especially egoisms. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

And when we defend our Christian faith, they point to the fact that the World has not become better since the days of Hosea and Jeremiah, and that the prophetic visions of doom are more realistic today than they were in those days. It is hard to answer this; but we must answer it for not only the Christians, but for humanity, or friends, and our children, and something in ourselves asks these questions. It is hard to answer them. What, for instance, can we answer when our children ask us about the child in the Manger while in some parts of the World all children from two years old and under have died and are dying, not by an order of Herod, but by ever-increasing cruelty of ear and its result in Christian era and by the decrease of the power of imagination of the Christian people. Or, what can we answers the Jews when the remnants of the Jewish people, returning from death-camps, worse than anything in Babylon, cannot find a resting place anywhere on the surface of the Earth, and certainly not amongst the great Christian nations? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Or, what can we answer Christians and non-Christians who have realized that the fruit of centuries of Christian technical and social civilization is the imminent threat of a complete and universal self-destruction of humanity? When we look at the unhealed and unsaved state of our lives after the message of healing and salvation has been heard at every Christmas for almost two thousand years, what answer can we give to ourselves? Should we say that the World, of course, is unsaved but that there are men and women in all generations who are saved from the World? However, this is not the message of Christmas. All those in Christmas legend who expect the Christ and receive the divine are looking out for the salvation of Israel and of the Gentiles and for the World. For all of them, and for Jesus himself, and for the apostles, the kingdom of God, the universal salvation is at hand. However, if this was the expectation, has it not been utterly refuted by reality? Many people fear the quest because they fear that, if they get involved in it too seriously, they might have to repress some inclination in their nature or renounce some habit in their way of living. So they take from it only what appeals to them, and discard the rest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Time and Growth are Needed Before a Mortal Can Sign that Absolute Commitment of Mind and Life for Which it Asks!

May 23, 2019 9:00 pm

I think he handled the notes much differently from other violinist. And the pauses between the notes—ah, there is where the artistry is possessed! Nicolas bore down on the strings, and I could almost see him against my eyelids, swaying back and forth, his head bowed against the violin as if he meant to pass into the music, and then all sense of him vanished and there was only the sound. The long vibrant notes, and the chilling glissandos, and the violin singing in its own tongue to make every other form of speech seem false. Yet as the song deepened, it became the very essence of despair as if its beauty were a horrid coincidence, grotesquely without a particle of truth. The goal of music and fasting is inner unity. This means hearing but not with the ear; hearing, but not with the understanding; it is hearing with the spirit of God, with your whole being. The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. However, the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence, it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitations and from preoccupations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Was this what Nicolas believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it has nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair was not beautiful, and beauty was then a horrid irony? I did not know the answer, but the sound went beyond him as it always had. It grew larger than the despair. It fell effortlessly into a slow melody, like water seeking its own downward mountain path. It grew richer and darker still and there seemed something undisciplined and chastening in it, and heartbreaking and vast. I lay on my back on the roof now with my eyes on the stars. Pinpoints of light mortals could not have seen. Phantom clouds. And the raw, piercing sound of the violin coming slowly with exquisite tension to a close. We define freedom as the capacity to pause in the midst of stimuli from all directions, and in this pause to throw our weight toward this response rather than that one. The crucial term, and in some ways the most interesting, is that little word pause. It may seem strange that this word is the important one rather than terms like liberty, independence, spontaneity. And it seems especially strange that a word merely signifying a lack of something, an absence, a hiatus, a vacancy, should carry so much weight. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

In America especially, the word pause refers to a gap, a space yet unfilled, a nothing—or, better yet, a no thing. I was in some silent understanding of the language the violin spoke to me. Beauty was not the treachery some imagine it to be, rather it is an uncharted land where one can make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signpost of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the Earth had been eons before mortals had one single coherent thought in their hears or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of gold plates. Beauty was a Savage Garden. Good and evil, those are concepts mortals have made. And better, really, than the Savage Garden. However, maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

The word pause, like the word freedom, seems essentially to signify what something is not rather than what it is. We have seen that freedom is defined almost universally by what it is not—or, in a sentence definition, “Freedom is when you are anchored to nobody or nothing.” Similarly, the past is a time when no thing is happening. Can the word pause give us an answer not only as to why freedom is a negative word, but is also loved as the most affirmative term in our language? This conception of nothingness as somethinhness enabled the philosophers to perceive the integrity of non-being, to name the free space and give us zero. Freedom is experienced in our World in an infinite number of pauses, which turn out not to be negative but to be the most affirmative condition possible. The ultimate paradox is that negation becomes affirmation. Thus, freedom remains the most loved word, the word that thrills us most readily, the condition most desired because it calls forth continuous, unrealized possibilities. And it is so with the pause. The no thing turns out to bespeak a reality that is most clearly something. It is paradoxical that in our lives empty can be full, negative can be affirmative, the void can be where most happens. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

There is something in the Christian message which is opposed to established authority. There is something in the Christian experience which revolts against subjection to even the greatest and holiest experiences of the past. And this something is indicated in the question of Jesus, “Was the baptism of John from God or mortals?” and in his refusal to give an answer! That which makes an answer impossible is the nature of an authority which is derived from God and not mortals. The place where God gives authority to a mortal cannot be circumscribed. It cannot be legally defined. It cannot be put into the fences of doctrines and rituals. It is here, and you do not know where it comes from. You cannot derive it. You must be grasped by it. You must participate in its power. This is the reason why the question of authority never can get an ultimate answer. Certainly there are many preliminary answers. There is no day in our lives in which we do not give, silently or openly, answers to the questions of authority, saying mostly “yes” and sometimes “no.” However, an ultimate answer we cannot give. We only point to a reality, as Jesus does. And this is what our religious leaders could and should do—the churches, and the ministers, and the theologians, and every Christian who acts as a priest to other Christians. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

They all can raise their fingers as Jesus did to John, and as John did to Jesus. We all can point passionately, but not as established authorities, to the Crucified—as does the Baptist, in the tremendous picture by the antiquated painter Matthias Grunewald. There his whole being is in the finger with which he points to the Cross. This is the greatest symbol of which I know for the true authority of the Church and the Bible. They should not point to themselves but to the reality which breaks again and again through the established forms of their authority and through the hardened forms of our personal experiences. And once more we ask: “What does it mean that the question of authority cannot get ultimate answer?” It would sound like a blasphemy if I said, “Because God cannot give an answer.” It would sound not blasphemous but conventional if I said, “Because God is Spirit.” Yet both sentences mean the same. God who is Spirit cannot give an ultimate answer to the question of authority. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

The churches, their leaders and members, often ignore the infinite significance of the words “God is Spirit.” However, the sharp eyes of the enemy see what these words mean. Nietzsche calls the mortal who first said that God is Spirit the first one of those who have killed God. His profound insight into the human soul made it certain to him that a God who is not circumscribed on a definite place, who does not answer definitively the question of authority, cannot be accepted by most human beings. If he were right, we either had to agree with him that there is no God left, or we had to return to a God who tells us a definite answer to the question of authority, and subjects us by Divine order to an established religious authority as the Earthly representative of one’s own Heavenly authority as the Earthly representative of one’s own Heavenly authority. However, this God is not the God who is Spirit. Actually, such a God is the Heavenly image of the Earthly authorities which use him for the consecration of their own power. This God is not the God of whom Jesus speaks in our story. The God who cannot answer the question of ultimate authority because he is Spirit does not remove the preliminary authorities with whom we live our daily lives. God does not deprive us of the protection of those who have more wisdom and power than we have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

God does not isolate us from the community to which we belong and which is a part of ourselves. However, he dines ultimate significance to all these preliminary authorities, to all those who claim to be images of his authority and who distort God’s authority into the oppressive power of a Heavenly tyrant. The God who does not answer the questions of ultimate authority transforms the preliminary authorities into media and tools of himself—of the God who is Spirit. Parental authority in Heaven, but it is the earliest tool through which the Spiritual qualities of order and self-control and love are mediated to us. Therefore, the parents must be and remain subjects of honor, but not of unconditional authority. Even God whom we call the Father in Heaven cannot answer the ultimate questions of authority. How could the parents? The authority of wisdom and knowledge on Earth is not the consecrated image of the authority of Heavenly omniscience, but it is the tool through which the Spiritual qualities of humility and knowledge and wisdom are mediated to us. Therefore, the wise ones should be honored but not accepted as unconditional authorities. The authorities in community and society, in nation and state, are not consecrated images of Heavenly power and justice, but they are tools through which the Spiritual qualities of mutuality, understanding, righteousness, and courage can be mediated to us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Therefore, the social authorities should be accepted as guarantees of the external order but not as those which determine the meaning of our lives. The authority of the Church is not consecrated Earthly image of the Heavenly Ruler of the Church, but it is a medium through which the Spiritual substance of our lives is preserved and protected and reborn. Even the authority of Jesus the Christ is not the consecrated image of the mortal who rules as a dictator, but it is the authority of one who is emptied oneself of all authority; it is the authority of the mortal on the Cross. If you say that God is Spirit and that he is manifest on the cross, it is one and the same thing. And you who are fighting against authorities and you who are searching for authorities, listen to the story in which Jesus fights against them and establishes an authority which cannot be established! Here is an answer, namely, that no answer can be given except the one that, beyond all preliminary authorities, you must keep yourselves open to the power of one who is ground and the negation of everything which is authority on Earth and in Heaven! #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

It is easy to understand why so many persons have little faith in such teachings, but it is hard to understand why so few persons take the trouble to investigate them. Most people are too shallow—for which they are not to be blamed, since living itself is a fatiguing job—to be able to mine successfully for Reality, or for Truth, which is the knowledge of reality. It is hard for the moderns to appreciate that are years, when measured against Jesus’ teaching, are often spent in futile activities, hard to understand with the spiritual that they merely exist and do not really live. They bow too quickly before the mystery of life and being, resign further search and enquiry, make no more effort to develop and use their mental and intuitive faculties. Faith and patience are deserted too soon. Quite a number seek understanding of life’s meaning, but few seek a true understanding. Most want a partisan or prejudiced one, an endorsement of inherited ideas or personal satisfactions. Too many are married for life to their personal views: they are not seekers of Truth and are not really willing to learn the New and the True. It is a wrong and yet common notion to believe that one is not in a position to start out on the Quest. The business person pleads one’s business cares, the sinner one’s sins, the antiquated mortal one’s age, and the young person one’s youth as an excuse for failing to make any beginning at all. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

However, is it not the communal life of modern mortals bound to be submerged in the It-World? Consider the two chambers of this life, the economy and the state: are they even thinkable in their present dimensions and ramifications, expect on the basis of a superior renunciation of all immediacy—and even an inexorably resolute repudiation of any alien authority that does not itself have its source in this area? And if the I that experiences and uses holds sway here—in the economy, the I uses opinions and aspirations—is it not precisely to this absolute dominion that we owe the extensive and firm structure of the great objective fabrics in these two spheres? Does not the form-giving greatness of leading state people and business people depend on their way of seeing the human beings with whom they have to deal not as carriers of an inexperienceable You but rather as centers of service and aspirations tat have to be calculated and employed according to their specific capacities? If they refused to add up He + He + He to get an It, and tried instead to determine the sum of You and You and You, which can never be anything else than you, would not their World come crashing down upon them? If not an exchange of form-giving mastery for a puttering dilettantism, and of lucid, powerful reason for murky enthusiasm, what would this come to? #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

And when we turn our eyes from the leaders to the led and consider the fashion of modern work and possession, do we not find that modern developments have expunged almost every trace of a life in which human beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships? It would be absurd to try to reverse this development; and if one could bring off this absurdity, the tremendous precision instrument of this absurdity, the tremendous precision instrument of this civilization would be destroyed at the same time, although this alone makes life possible for the tremendously increased numbers of humanity. Speaker, you speak too late. However, a moment ago you might have believed your own speech; now this is no longer possible. For an instant ago you saw no less than I that the state is no longer led: the strokers still pile up coal, but the leaders merely seem to rule the racing engines. And in this instant while you speak, you can hear as well as I how the machinery of the economy is beginning to hum in an unwonted manner; the overseers give you a superior smile, but death lurks in their hearts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

They tell you they have adjusted the apparatus to modern conditions; but you notice the henceforth they can only adjust themselves to the apparatus, as long as that permits it. Their spokesperson instruct you that the economy is taking over the heritage of the state; you know that there is nothing to be inherited but the despotism of the proliferating It under which the I, more and more impotent, is still dreaming that it is in command. Only seldom during a lifetime, and that very briefly, will mortals give a thought to these larger features of their existence—to its unreality, to its unreality, to its changeability, and to its mortality. Some people do not succeed n making the self-disciplinary grade which the quest of philosophy calls for. This is because they are more easily distracted from the quest by their personal feelings than they should be. People who live unaware of why they are here consequently live unconcerned with what seem like mere abstractions lacking any utility at all. They could not face truth for they would be embarrassed by the Goddess’s unshrinking gaze. I learned from each thing that I touched. And there were moments when all the color and texture became too lustrous, too overpowering. I wept inwardly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

The Purest Form of Love, the Warmest, the Most Exciting Love is Not Mine for Another, But Mine for Me!

May 20, 2019 12:09 am

I climbed to my feet. I felt myself light and powerful, and strangely numbed, and I went to the dead fire, and walked through the burnt timers. It was time now to examine the inner room. Most of us remember the myth of Narcissus as the story of a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own image in a pool and pined away because he never could possess it. However, the actual myth is a great deal richer. It begins with Tiresias, the aged prophet, predicting to the river nymph who was Narcissus’ mother, provided he never knows himself, her son would live to a ripe old age. This catches us up short. What is the meaning of not knowing oneself? True, the dynamics of narcissism always have as their fulcrum the problem of self-knowledge. However, could Tiresias be saying if Narcissus avoids the absorption of self-love, the very thing we later call narcissism, that he will live long? Or can he be referring to the literal translation of know thyself, from the Greek know that you are only a man, accept your human limits, which Narcissus obviously refused to do? The second character in the myth, also forgotten by most of us, is Echo, a lovely mountain nymph who falls hopelessly in love with Narcissus and follows him over hill and dale as he hunts for stage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Intending to call his hunting companions, Narcissus cries, “Let us come together here!” Echo responds in the same words and rushes out to embrace Narcissus. However, he shakes her off roughly and runs away crying out, “I will die before you ever lie with me!” Echo then pines away, leaving behind only her melodious voice. Disdaining her supine resignation, the gods condemn her to wander forever in the mountain glens and valleys, where we hear her voice today. However, in her need for revenge, she calls upon the gods to punish Narcissus by making him also the victim of unrequited love. It is only then that he falls in love with his own reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful young man who confronted him, but presently he recognized himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened. Echo, although she has not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed ‘Alas! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in his chest, and also the final ‘Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!” as he expired. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Narcissus’ tragic flaw, in the eyes of the gods, is that he could never love anyone else, never love in the sense of giving himself in union with another person. There is no fertility in Narcissus’ love, and none in narcissism—no genuine coupling, no cross-fertilization, no interpersonal relationship. This threatens to be a tragic flaw in our present-day “I am me” effort to escape the paradox: we cannot love without committing ourselves to another person. In grasping for freedom from entanglement with other persons, we come to grief over our failure of compassion and commitment—indeed, the failure to love authentically. However, there is another important insight in this story that will help us understand present-day neo-narcissism and that, to my knowledge, has not yet been mentioned in the literature. It is that narcissism has its origin in revenge and retaliation. Echo’s plea, answered by Aphrodite, is a gesture of revenge. And this is also true in our contemporary neo-narcissism: there is in it a strong motive of anger and revenge. This is shown in the above series of verses. “I have no right, no wrongs” can be translated into the cry “The culture has let us down.” What we learned as children turns out to be phony; our parents seemed unable by dint of their confusion to show us any alternative moral guideposts or teach us wisdom; and what we were taught often turns out to be undesirable anyway and promotes conterrebellion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

It is out of revenge upon those in the culture who betrayed her that the writers of the verses withdraws into herself and comforts herself with a lonely self-love: “The purest form of love, the warmest, the most exciting love is not mine for another, but mine for me.” In our society we have called this self-love. The phrase self love came into general currency after Erich Fromm’s essay “Selfishness and Self-Love.” Dr. Fromm condemned the fist and elevated the second. He did not see the important differences between self-love and love of another. There is a tragic flaw in this self-love, a seductive error that carries over into the masses of self-help books and spreads the havoc that arises from neo-narcissism. What is called love for others and self-love are two different things. Love for another person is the urge toward the uniting of two separate entities who invigorate each other, revivify each other, and contribute their differences to each other, and combine their different genes in a new and unique being—toward which the pleasures of the flesh is a powerful motivation. The essence, then, is the combining of two different beings. Nature’s obvious purpose in this, in contrast to incest, is the increase of possibilities. The insemination, the combination of two different sets of genes, result in the creation of new forms and original patterns. All of this Narcissus could not or would not do. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

The well-worn, strict doctrine that if you hate yourself, you cannot love others is true. However, the converse of that—that is you love yourself, you will automatically love others—is not true. Narcissus, in his rejection of Echo, dramatically demonstrates this. Many persons use self-love, then, ought really to be termed self-caring, which includes self-esteem, self-respect, and self-affirmation. This would save from the confusion of self-caring and love for others, as it is shown so vividly in the myth of Narcissus. To be free to love other persons requires self-affirmation and, paradoxically, the assertion of oneself. At the same time it requires tenderness, affirmation of the other, relaxing of competition as must as possible, self-abnegation at times in the interests of the loved one, and the age-old virtues of mercy and forgiveness toward each other. Destiny is the other person in the act of loving. The dialectical poles of self-caring and love for the other fructify and strengthen each other. Fortunately, this paradox can neither be escaped nor solved, but must be lived with. There are others, however, who are not satisfied with such ignorance and such indifference, who want certain and assured knowledge of the spirit, by penetrating the secrets of their own being. And it is the promise of the satisfaction of this want which attracts them to the quest for God’s truth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from mortals? Many cannot answer this. If one says that it was from mortals, they would have hurt the popular feelings and perhaps even a feeling within themselves, that John was a prophet. However, if they had said that he was from God, they would have established an authority beyond the threefold authority which they could claim for themselves. And this they did not want. They, who were called authorities, demanded that all authority be vested in them. Therefore, they did not accept John as a prophet, nor Jesus as the Christ. Do not minimize the seriousness of this conflict. It was not simply a conflict between good and evil, between faith and unbelief. The conflict was much more profound and much more tragic than this! Let us imagine that we ourselves were in the place of those who asked Jesus about the source of his authority. Let us imagine ourselves as the guardians of a great religious tradition, or as the unquestionable experts in a sphere of decisive importance for human existence, or as people who have learned through a long experience to deal with matters of highest value. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

And let us also assume that we had no function as legally established authorities and that somebody came and spoke about the same things in quite a different language and acted in the field of our authority in quite a radical way; how would be react? And if the people who saw and heard this man said of him what they said about Jesus, that he teaches as one who has authority and not as we the established authorities, how would we react? Would we not think: He confuses the masses, he spreads dangerous doctrines, he undermines well-proved laws and institutions, he introduces strange modes of life and thought, he disrupts sacred ties, he destroys traditions from which generations of mortals have received discipline and strength and hope? It is our duty to resist him and if possible to remove him! For the sake of our people we must defend our consecrated and tested authority against this mortal who cannot show the source of the authority he claims. Could we be blamed for such a reaction? And if not, can we blame the authorities in Jerusalem for their reaction to Jesus? We think of the Reformation. This was a moment in the history of the Church in which the question of authority was once more in the center of events. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Luther, and consequently the whole Protestant World, broke away from the Roman Church and from 1500 years of Christian tradition when no agreement about the authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone had arisen who spoke and acted with an authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone has arisen who spoke and acted with an authority the sources of which could not be determined by legal means. And here also we must ask, “Are the Catholic authorities who rejected him in the name of their established authority to be blamed for it?” However, if we do not blame them, we can ask them, “Why do you blame the Jewish authorities who did exactly the same as you did when the people said of the Reformers that they spoke with authority and not like the priests and monks?” Is the same thing so different if it is done by the Jewish high priest and if it is done by the Roman high priest? And one may ask the present-day Protestant authorities in Europe and in this country, “Are you certain that the insistence on your authority, on your tradition, and your experience does not suppress the kind of authority which Jesus has in mind?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

And now we ask, “What does authority mean?” What does it mean for a mortal as a mortal? What does it mean for our period and for each of us?” First of all, it means that we are finite and in need of what the word “authority” really says: to be started and increased. It means that we are born, that we were infants and children, that we were completely dependent on those who gave us life and home and guidance and contents for soul and mind. We were not able to decide for ourselves for many years, and that made us dependent on authority and made authority a benefit for us. We accepted this authority without resistance, even if we rebelled on special occasions. And this authority became the basis for all other authorities. It gave strength to the authority of the older brother or sister, of the more mature friend or teacher, of the official, of the ruler, of the minister. And through them we have been introduced into the institutions and traditions in society, state and Church. Authority permeates, guides, shapes our lives. The acceptance of authority is the acceptance of what is given by those who have more than we. And our subjection to them and to what they stand for enables us to live in history, as our subjection to the laws of nature enables us to live in nature. And from the authority of the law is derived the authority of those who represent and administer it and who, for this reason, are called the authorities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Our daily life would be impossible without traditions of behavior and customs and the authority of those who have received them and surrendered them to us. Mortal’s control of nature would be impossible without the tradition of knowledge and skill into which every new generation is introduced and which gives authority to those who are able to introduce us. Mortal’s intellectual life—the language one uses, the songs one sings, the music one plays, the houses one builds, the pictures one paints, the symbols one creates—one has received through the authority of those who have participated in it before one. Mortal’s religious life—the faith one hold, the cult one loves, the stories and legends one has heard, the commandments one tried to obey, the texts one knows by heart—all this is not created by one; one takes it from those who represent to one religious authority. And if one revolts against the authorities which have shaped one, one does it with the tools one has received from them. The language of the revolutionary is formed by those against whom one revolts. The protest of the reformer uses the tradition against which one protests. There, no absolute revolution is possible. If it is attempted, it fails immediately; and is a revolution succeeds, its leaders soon have to use forms and ideas created by the authorities of the past. This is true of the rebellion of the adolescent against the family authority as well as of the rebellion of new social groups against the authority of the established power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

When we speak of human finitude, we usually think of mortal’s transitorines in time, of birth and death, of the vicissitudes which threaten one in every moment. However, we are not only finite in that we are temporal, we are also finite in that we are historical and that means subject to authority, even if we rebel against it. We are thrown into existence, not only bodily, but also mentally. In no respect are we by ourselves, in no moment can we be by ourselves. One who tries to be without authority tries to be like God, who alone is by himself. And like everyone who tries to be like God, one is thrown down to self-destruction, be it a single human being, be it a nation, be it a period of history like our own. Art, to: as one beholds what confronts one, the form discloses itself to the artist. One conjures it into an image. The image does not stand in a World of gods but in this great World of mortals. Of course, it is there even when no human eye afflicts it; but it sleeps. The Chinese poet relates that mortals do not want to hear the song that one was playing on one’s flute of jade; then one played it to the gods, and they inclined their ears; and ever since mortals, too, have listened to the song—and thus one went from the gods to those with whom the image cannot dispense. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

As in a dream it looks for the encounter with mortal in order that one may undo the spell and embrace the form for a timeless moment. And there one comes and experiences what there is to be experienced: that is how it is made, or this is what is expresses, or its qualities are such and such, and on top of all that perhaps also it might rate. Not that scientific and aesthetic understand is not necessary—but it should do its work faithfully and immerse itself and disappear in that truth of the relation which surpasses understanding and embraces what is understandable. And also: that which towers above the spirit of knowledge and the spirit of art because here evanescent, corporeal mortals need not banish oneself into the enduring matter but outlasts it and rises, oneself an image, on the starry sky of the spirit, as the music of one’s living speech roars around one—pure action, the act that is not arbitrary. Here the Independent World appeared to mortals out of a deeper mystery, addressed one out of the dark, and one responded with one’s life. Here the word has become life, and this life, whether it fulfilled the law or broke the law—both are required on occasion lest the spirit die on Earth—is teaching. Thus it stands before posterity in order to teach it, not what is and not what ought to be, but how one lives in the spirit, in the countenance of the Independent World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

And that means: it stands ready to become an Independent World at any time, opening up to the spirit of God; no, it does not stand ready, it always comes toward them and touches them. However they, having become uneager and inept for such living intercourse that opens up a World, are well informed; they have imprisoned the person in history, and one’s speech in a library; they have codified the fulfillment of the breach, it does not matter which; nor are they stingy with reverence and even adoration, adequately mixed with some psychology, as is only proper for modern mortals. O lonely countenance, starlike in the dark; O living finger upon an insensitive forehead; O steps whose each is fading away! It is a tradition in spiritual circles of God that anyone who has ever felt the truth power or beauty of the Gospel, however briefly, will not be able to escape being drawn to its practical consequence, the Quest, one day, however long deferred it may be. A mind which is no longer satisfied with shallow consolations will naturally turn to mystical experience or metaphysical study for deeper ones. All that has happened before one’s entry upon the quest has really been converging toward it. It is as inevitable that some mortals should come to the Quest because of their sorrows and difficulties as that other mortal should abandon it temporarily for the same reasons. God offers the surest path to the mind’s peace and the heart’s satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

 

 

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