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I Roamed with My Mortal Attendants through a Paradise of Material Wealth, Claiming Everything that I Wanted!
He watches. Sometimes he lets himself be seen. However, when he discovers what is really going on here, only God knows what he will do. Of the countless empirical studies which bear this out, I will cite an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was reported in the daily press under the caption “Nice Patients Die Faster.” This was a study of how two groups of women dealt with terminal breast cancer. “Feisty, combative women survived longer than trusting, complacent women” was the conclusion. The women who survived longest were, as a group, more anxious, depressed, hostile, and alienated about their illness tan those who succumbed faster. The feisty women seemed to maintain a combative posture rather than being hopeless victims. “They were going down fighting!” wrote Dr. Derogatis, the psychologist who made the study. “The women who survived longer had mechanisms of externalizing their conflicts, fears and angers about the disease. They were more demanding of physicians, less satisfied with treatment and were rated as less well adjusted. By contrast, the other woman—who died sooners—felt less anxious and more optimistic towards their doctors, and rated themselves as more content on a self-evaluation. I believed they has divested themselves of the responsibility of fighting the disease.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Now breast cancer does indeed seem to be a blow of fate. Yet the women who could assert their freedom and take responsibility for the illness—and this for fighting it—have a better chance of living. I do not wish my emphasis on responsibility to be confused with that of expressed sequence tag (a unique stretch of DNA within a coding region of a gene that is useful for identifying full-length genes and serves as a landmark of mapping). Is the unborn baby the cause of its brain defect because of its mother’s malnutrition? To hold that we are responsible for everything that happens to us is to show to what absurdities when we have no understanding of our destiny. Our freedom—and, therefore, our sense of responsibility—exists only as we acknowledge and engage our destiny. Norman Cousin’s book Anatomy of an Illness excellently describes his own encounter with a vital problem of health. Cousins was pronounced incurably ill of a rare disease of the collagen tissues which he had developed in Russia. Possessing a remarkably strong will to live, he asked himself the question: “If negative emotions produce negative chemical changes in the body would not the beneficial emotions produce beneficial chemical changes? It is possible that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence, and the will to live have therapeutic value?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Norman Cousins tells us how, when the specialists pronounced him doomed, he summoned his own concern with the problem and his will to health. He moved out of the inhospitable hospital and into a hospitable hotel and began a new regimen, in consultation with his own physician. Cousins went on a program consisting of large quantities of vitamin C and equally large amounts of health-giving laughter. His story is the documentation of how one individual asserted his limited freedom and his responsibility for confronting his destiny, cruel and unfair as that destiny was. When asked by a friend whether he had not been terribly discouraged, Cousins answered that he was, “especially at the start when I expected my doctor to fix my body as though it were an automobile engine that needed mechanical repair, like cleaning out the carburetor, or reconnecting the fuel pump.” When one discusses the need for the individual to take responsibility for one’s own health, the tendency of listeners is to interpret the discussion as an attack on modern medicine. An address of Roll May’s called, “Personal Freedom and Caring,” before the convention of the American Occupational Therapy Association was reported in a newspaper under the caption “Caring Physicians Rob Patients of Their Freedom, Responsibility.” This was, if anything, directly opposite to the meaning of his address. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Rollo May was not attacking medicine as such. None of us can escape marveling at and valuing the tremendous progress of modern medicine in the development of medical technology and the new drugs. Among his friends who are advocates of holistic medicine, his task is to caution against viewing the medical profession as the enemy. “Talk of enemies does not sit well,” Norman Cousins says, “in a movement in which spiritual factors are no less vital than practical ones.” In does no good furthermore, to refuse on principle to take a prescribed drug because one wants to preserve one’s freedom, nor to refuse to go to a doctor when such is indicated. We cannot withdraw from the contemporary World, hermitlike, to contemplate our own navels. Furthermore, such revolt smacks too much of the Luddites, eighteenth-century workers who, realizing the threat to their livelihood in the industrial revolution, armed themselves with crowbars and pickaxes and attached the machines. This rebellion does no good beyond the self-righteous feelings it gives the rebels themselves. In a given illness I believe one’s responsibility to oneself is to get the best medical advice available. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
However, they very progress of modern medicine makes our emphasis here all the more necessary, since this progress increases the mystification and authoritarianism that people have thrust upon the medical profession the medical profession has assumed all too readily. When I lived in a large metropolis, I found myself, when I needed medical service, phoning my own physician to find out which specialist I should go to. The “laying on of hands,” which has classically been central in the healing profession, has now become all too often the laying on of techniques. Since assuming the role of priest, as doctors began to do as early as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, the tendency has been for people to see in the physician the god who has power over life and death. However, as long as physicians are made god on people’s conscious level, they will also be made the devil on an unconscious level. The rash of malpractice suits in the last fifty years shows the disillusionment and rage that people feel as this belief in the devil begins to surface. When I told my present physician of my intention to work also with an acupuncturist on the problem of tachycardia, he well remarked, “Western medicine is on the verge of a great revolution.” He did not mean in the sense of new discoveries in techniques. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The doctor meant, rather, a revolutionary change in the philosophical and ethical basis of medicine, a change in the cultural context in which doctors operate. This revolution is seen most dramatically in the incursion of Eastern insights into Western medical treatment. The complete acceptance of philosophy involves a complete reordering of a mortal’s life. One’s conduct will be motivated by new purpose which will themselves be the result of one’s new values. One will stop acting impulsively and start acting rationally. However, in actual practice we find that the acceptance of philosophy is never so complete as this. The individual will bring it into a part of life but not into the whole of their lives. It is only gradually absorbed and the ideals which are sought to be realized are only gradually set up. Those whom embark on the quest must pay for their journey with personal self-denial and unceasing self-struggle. Knowledge of the higher laws, consciousness of the higher self, bring special obligations. To apply them carries new responsibilities to live according to them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
There will be murmurings, complaints, and disheartenment; there may even be short or long lapses; but one will understand sooner or later that one will have to go through with this quest till the very end. Something that is certainly not one’s ordinary self drives one to do so. Indeed, one power of choice or freedom of will have become irrelevant to this particular matter. Is there any word from the Lord? This is a question asked by mortals in all periods of history. It has been asked by kings in moments of danger. They asked it of priests and prophets. It has been asked by people in all ages and places in times of unrest. They asked it of extraordinary men and women, often of those considered to be abnormal, of ecstatics and hysterics. It has been asked by individuals in moments of great personal decisions. They asked it of holy Scriptures which should give a special word to them, from saints and inner voices. What about ourselves? Have we never asked for a word from the Lord? Many, certainly, will answer with a definite “No.” They will tell us that they always decided for themselves, using their own reasonable judgment, based on experience, knowledge, and intelligence. Perhaps they impress us. Perhaps we are ashamed to confess that sometimes we have asked for a word from the Lord. However, let us wait with out answer until we have found out what these words mean. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
We should not be misled by the phrase, “word from the Lord.” It sounds as if we turned to a Heavenly authority after all others, including the authority of reason, have failed. It sounds as if we asked the Lord of providence to give us for a moment a glimpse into what he plans for us, individually and in history. However, such a favor is not granted. The answers given by seers, ecstatics, books and inner voices are mostly ambiguous, open to different interpretations, so that we would have to ask for a second Divine word to interpret the first, and so on indefinitely. Or, these answers are clear and agree with the best wisdom we can have without them. Therefore, I repeat: Let us not be misled by the phrase “word from the Lord.” It is not an oracle-word telling us what to do or to expect. Then what is it? It is the voice from another dimension than that in which we ordinarily live. It cuts into the dimension of things and events which we call our World. It does not help us to manage things within this dimension more successfully than before. It does not add to our knowledge of the factors which influence a situation, it does not remove the responsibility for our decisions. It does something else. It elevates the situation in which we have to decide, into the light of a new dimension, the dimension of that which is ultimately important and infinitely significant and for which we use the word “Divine.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
So it was in the case of the king Zedekiah and of the false prophets with whom Jeremiah had to fight. The king came to Jeremiah in a hopeless situation, in a situation into which he had brought himself and his people through guilt and error and disregard of the warnings of the prophet. He was supported in his wrong decisions by nationalistic politicians who called themselves prophets without having received a word from God. They did not interpret the situation of Judah in the midst of threatening empires in its seriousness. They lacked the realism which is the quality of true prophetism. They were not able to look beyond political chances and military calculations. And so disaster attempts to get a consoling or helping word from the prophet. However, he did not get it. Out of his prison Jeremiah tells him the only thing he did not want to hear: You shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon! God will not say you! And the king felt: So it is! He did not slay the prophet of doom, as present-day dictators or nationalistic mobs would do. On the contrary, he helped him out of his miserable prison. However, he did not do anything to change the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It was too late for this politically and psychologically, and the threat of the prophet, the word he has received from the Lord for Zedekiah, became a terrible reality. Yet it was spoken in vain. It has been remembered ever since, not as an interesting historical report but as an event in which the eternal gives ultimate meaning to an historical catastrophe. The many words from the Lord which are recorded in the Old Testament have the same quality. They are not promises of an omnipotent ruler replacing political or military strength. They are not advices of a Heavenly counselor, replacing intelligent human counsel. However, they are manifestations of something ultimate breaking into our existence with all its preliminary concerns and insights. They do not add something to our situation, but they add a dimension to the dimension in which we ordinarily live. The word from the Lord is the word which speaks out of the depth of our situation. It is, one could say, the deepest meaning of the situation, of every situation which comes to us in such words. It is also the depth of our own situation that speaks to us when we receive a word from the Lord. Let us imagine an hour in which we have to make an important decision, but it the choice of a vocation, be it the choice of a mate for life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
We know most of the factors. Nevertheless, we cannot decide. The anxiety of the possible consequences in each of them. We ask friends, counsellors; we seek for counsel in ourselves. However, the anxiety of having to decide increases. And a longing grows in our souls, a longing for something that liberates us from the anxiety of the possible and gives us the courage toward the real. It is the question of our text: Is there a word from the Lord? And perhaps an answer has been received. However, it was not an oracle-word pointing to the right vocation to choose, or the right man or woman to join with. It was a voice out of the depth of our situation, elevating our concrete problems into an ultimate perspective. In doing so, it probably has devaluated some factors determining our decision and has stressed others. Or it has left the balance of possibilities unchanged, but has given us the courage to make a decision with all the risks of a decision, including error, failure, guilt. The word from the Lord, the voice out of the depth of our situations, ends the anxiety of the possible and gives the courage to affirm the real with its many questionable elements. Some of you may say: If this is what “word from the Lord” means, how can it help me in moments of decision? However, would you really want me to tell you where to turn for an oracle which would liberate you from the burden of decision? #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Certainly, that which is weak in you would like it. However, that which is strong in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in relation to God mortals are always wrong. Your wrong may turn out to be right. If in the presence of the eternal you risk defeat, through your very defeat a word from the Lord has come to you. One aspect of the perfect love is our Heavenly Father’s involvement in the details of our lives, even when we may not be aware of it or understand it. We seek the Father’s divine guidance and help through heartfelt, earnest prayer. When we honor our covenants and strive to be more like our Savior, we are entitled to a constant stream of divine guidance through the influence and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The scriptures teach us, “For your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him, and God “knoweth all things, for all things are present before God’s eyes.” The prophet Mormon is an example of this. He did not live to see the results of his work. Yet he understood that the Lord was carefully leading him along. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
When he felt inspired to include the small plates of Nephi with this record, Mormon wrote: “And I do this for a wise purpose; for thus is whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me. And now, I do not know all things; but the Lord knoweth all things which are to come; wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to his will.” Although Mormon did not know of the future loss of the 116 manuscript pages, the Lord did and prepared a way to overcome that obstacle long before it occurred. The Father is aware of us, knows our needs, and will help us perfectly. Sometimes that help is given in the very moment or at least soon after we ask for divine help. Sometimes our most earnest and worthy desires are not answered in the way we hope, but we find that God has greater blessings in store. And sometimes our righteous desires are not granted in this life. Sometimes God has a greater blessing prepared for us than we initially anticipated. And sometimes our righteous petitions to God will not be granted in this life. Faith also includes trust in God’s timing. We have the assurance that his own way and in his own time, Heavenly Father will bless us and resolve all of our concerns, injustices, and disappointments. “And thus the Lord did pour out his blessings upon this land, which was choice above all other lands,” Ether 9.20. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I roamed with my mortal attendants through a paradise of material wealth, claiming everything that I wanted. Couches and chairs, china and sliver plate, drapery and statuary—all things were mine for the taking. And in my mind I transformed the castle where I had grown up as more and more good were carried out to be crated and shipped south immediately. To little kids I sent toys of which they had never dreamed—tiny ships with real sails, dollhouses of unbelievable craft and perfection. I learned form each object I touched. And there were moments when all the color and texture became too lustrous, too overpowering. I wept inwardly. After all, where did I spend my time now? At the grandest theaters in Paris. I had the finest seats for the ballet and the opera, for the dramas of Moliere, Corneille, and Racine—it was in tragedy that two of the three great dramatist of seventeenth-century France excelled. I was hanging about before the footlights gazing up at the great actors and actresses. I had suits made in every color of the rainbow, jewels on my fingers, hairstyles of the latest fashion, shoes with diamond buckles as well as gold souls. And I had eternity to be drunk on the poetry I was hearing, drunk on the singing and the sweep of the dancer’s arms, drunk on the organ throbbing in the great cavern of the Winchester Mansion and drunk on the chimes that counted out the hours to me, drunk on the snow falling soundlessly on the gardens of the estate. And each night I was becoming less wary among mortals, more at ease with them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Oh Brave New World that Has Such Robots in it?
Hell’s Bell ringing, my secret music. However, another sound was coming to me. I knew it as I went up the stairs. And I marveled at its power to reach me. It was like a song arching over an immense distance, low and sweet. Once years ago, I had heard a young farm boy singing as he walked along the high road out of Cresleigh Rocklin Trials to the north. He had not known anyone was listening. He had thought himself alone in the open country, and his voice had a private power and purity that gave it unearthly beauty. Never mind the words of his song. This was the voice that was calling to me now. The lone voice, rising over the miles that separated us to gather all sounds into itself. Hubris in psychology is the refusal to acknowledge destiny. Some believe that psychology has no limits at all. There are a number of people who are crying to be told that freedom is an illusion and they need worry about it no longer. Some capitalize with a vengeance on the widespread feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, which are the underlying anxiety of our time; and these individuals insure others that personal responsibility is demode and that they do not need to trouble their consciousness—if they have any left—about it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Many in behavioral sciences believe that we must develop a technology of behavior, but that our belief in freedom and human dignity stands in the way. It is thought that this new technology will not solve our problems, however unit is replaces traditional prescientific views, and these are strongly entrenched. Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous mortal of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for one’s conduct and given credit for one’s achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment. We would be the last to argue that the environment does not influence—to a considerable extent—the development of the person. Indeed, I would argue that the environment has an even more varied effect than most experts admit: anyone in psychoanalysis knows that the environment is important even on unconscious levels and in dreams. Any viewpoint that leaves out the environment—like the extreme forms of the human-potential movement, where it is argued that only the inner potentials are significant—is equally wrong. However, there are other points related to responsibility and freedom that concern us here. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When people attack the traditional belief that a mortal can be held responsible for what one does, a scientific analysis shifts the credits as well as the blame to the environment. When we place all the blame for human behavior on the environment and try to design better environments as the only remedy to solve society’s problems, we forget that we also have methods to design better mortals. Now we would all agree that ideally all citizens should strive and it is their responsibility to correct the flaws in the environment, say, of school children, the less affluent, and those with special needs. Indeed, there are times we should proceed to the design of better environments by outright uniting and standing against the cruel and unfair laws in our society. However, what, pray tell, is the environment composed of except other human beings like you and me? And how can an environment be responsible? True, when a society is formed, there develops a group force which makes for conformism; to keep people in line is one of the functions of the group, as we have said. However, if we surrender our individual responsibility, what leverage, what power, do we have against the force of the group? #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Some people believe that the environment is some holy form made in Heaven and superimposed by some god or demigod upon us mortals. Completely absent is the wisdom that we have met the enemy and it is us. Autonomous mortals possess miraculous powers. A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous mortals and turns the control one has been said to exert over to the environment. One is henceforth to be controlled by the World around one, and in large part by other mortals. However, we know that wise use of agency keeps our choices open and improves our ability to choose correctly. True freedom comes from choosing disobedience. While we are free to choose our course of action, we are not free to choose the consequences. Whether for good or bad, consequences follow as a natural result of the choices we make. “Verily I say, mortals should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.27. When we use the term moral agency, we are appropriately emphasizing the accountability that is an essential part of the divine gift of agency. We are moral beings and agents unto ourselves, freed to choose but also responsible for our choices. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Again, what kind of psychoengineering is this which turns the control over to the environment, holds that the World around us does the controlling, and this consist largely of other mortals? This seems to me to lack the logic that we have a right to expect of engineers of behavior. It sounds like the following lines from Goethe “For each, incompetent to rule one’s own internal self, is all too fain to sway one’s neighbor’s will, even as one’s haughty mind inclines.” When it comes to psychoengineering, there is a fundamental confusion of values in the system: toward whose values is the environment going to be changed? Who are the other people who will do the controlling? The problem is that either alternative—to blame the environment for everything or to locate everything within oneself as the human-potential movement used to do—is wrong. Both deny freedom. However, human beings have another possibility: they can choose when and whether they are to be acted upon or are to do the acting. When I fly in a plane, I let myself be acted upon. I nap a little; I look out the window and daydream. The pilot entirely controls the success or failure of my flight. When I get off the plane, however, to make a speech at a college or university, I choose the opposite alternative. I seek to persuade the audience; I want to get my viewpoint across. I am now assumedly the controller, I am on a deeper level of freedom—the freedom of being. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One of the saddest things about psychology today is that so many of its better minds are forced to cope with the cant, error and falsehood generated by the discipline itself. The problem is that so many people are on the edge of panic these days and yearn for some rationalization for dumping their responsibility someplace outside themselves. Since it promises a way out and reinforces their desire to escape from a World that so baffles them, such a simplistic gospel of the environment being in control of human behavior greatly appeals to many. The gospel is especially seductive to those against sin: they oppose the things that ought to be opposed, such as aversive control and destructive punishment. Thus, people dump their environment the very responsibility that would be needed if they are effectively to influence their environment. What about the high-school student who finds looming up before one problems that one cannot possibly solve in the political and economic World, who is struggling with drugs and alcoholism and all the conflicts that occur in adolescence? Then one hears that one has no responsibility, that the environment will take over, that an impersonal science of engineering should take the blame and the credit. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
In a situation where someone is unaware of their personal responsibility not to sin and their free will, when they are mislead to believe that the environment is in control of their and they are not morally at fault for anything they do, how is one going to experience oneself and one’s life? One does not need to blame psychologist for the problems of juvenile delinquency like drugs, crimes, violence. No single mortal can be expected to answer for the exigencies of history, to state the obvious. However, if they are continually told that they are powerless and all in influence is exercised by the environment, young people are scarcely going to take responsibility for their actions or lives. It is surprising, then, that they resign from life, become the uncommitted, go to such films as A Clockwork Orange, mumbling the while a paraphrase from Shakespeare: Oh brave new World that has such robots in it? When people talk about cultural technology, they also talk about the greater happiness of humankind as the goal of one’s engineering. If one can turn stones into a delicious meal, humankind will run after thee like a flock, grateful and obedient, though forever trembling, lest thou withdraw thy hand and deny them the delicious cuisine, and they are left with nothing to consume. When there is no crime, there is no sin. Therefore when we shift environment to the environment, people do not need incarceration, but rather treatment, rehabilitation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
If we recognize obedience as a cardinal virtue (prudence, the ability to discern the appropriate course of action to be taken in a given situation at the appropriate time), mortals seeks not so much of God as the miraculous, and comes forth with one’s triumvirate, miracle, mystery and authority. Psychology likewise presents that miracle and authority and the concepts of science, as they are believed to be rational and clear. However, in psychology, people seem to be unaware that scientific concepts are the most miraculous and mysterious of all concepts of our age. We cannot regard freedom as the central enemy, as that is an expression of fear of freedom, which will cause people to flee from freedom and to rationalize and justify that flight and turn control of their lives over to the government. Freedom is not an illusion. Much of our actions seem to be freely chosen and performed, but one could easily demonstrate that all our behavior is the result of previous conditioning. Some people believe that behaviorism already has control of 80 percent of all the Psychology Departments in the country and will soon have control of all of them. And many in psychology are taught to join with the ideas of behaviorist or they will be buried and forgotten. However, many people still believe that if we put our mind to it, there is nothing we cannot do. So this demonstrates the people still understand that they have free will. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The people who argue freedom is an illusion usually have already given up their own freedom in their very strict and rigid doctrines, but may they are doing this to get people to surrender control of their lives to the government, which would make it easier to control the World. People become more helpless the more they doubt their own truth and get closer to the point of collapse. This is a flight from destiny and an escape from the dizziness of anxiety in freedom. Behaviorism tends to dominate when we are faced with vast social problems such as nuclear fission, concentration camps, the aftermath of World War and the agonizing endurance of a recession, when inflation and unemployment occur simultaneously, when there is an energy crisis, and so on endlessly. When society is facing a distraught age, behaviorism offers a simple gospel, promising escape from responsibility, from confusion, and especially from such difficult problems as freedom. Certainty is in the saddle, even though it is a false certainty. In such behaviorism there is no sense of the freedom of uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
This alone can explain why there is such a great segment of our population who not only succumbs to behaviorist viewpoints, especially the democratic part because they rely on more government resources and advocate removing right as they do not want to be held responsible for their behavior by pushing for things like gun control, soda tax. I believe that this flight from destiny includes a frank refusal to let oneself see any of the aspects of life—such as responsibility, limits in science, and so on—that require us to understand our destiny. A vicious circle gets started in any strict and rigid doctrines. The person’s security is bolstered by the strict and rigid doctrines, and the strict and rigid doctrines are, in turn, reinforced by the security. True anxiety can be avoided by such strict and rigid doctrines, but there are clear penalties. The person reinforces the stockade around oneself and one’s ideas; one blocks out the anxiety by cutting off one’s possibility and one’s maneuverability. The anxiety is escaped, but the person is a prisoner in one’s own stockade. This, by definition, is the loss of freedom. And the constant expansion that characterizes freedom is blocked. If we were to peel off the defensive cover of the strict and rigid doctrines, we would almost always find a trembling person imprisoned with the walls one one’s self has created. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Whether scientist or religious, the person who adheres to strict and rigid doctrines is one who fear secretly that one must crystallize one’s beliefs or they will evaporate. One is afraid that any pause would be thrown into panic. One fear that one’s truth will disappear unless one puts a firm stockage around it. Some truths we embody and do not know, which covers a great deal of experience, and it totally ignore by people who are not willing to expand their consciousness. One knows everything has, has an answer for everything; no question can make one ponder. Such persons are boring to others precisely because there is no freedom in what they are saying or standing for. In extreme forms and in clinical terms such a person becomes the compulsive-obsessional. All this has great bearing upon freedom. Freedom is the capacity to increase our theories, to look about ourselves to find more possibilities. Freedom means that we can see many different forms of truth, some from the West and others from the East, some from our technology and others from intuition. They very existence of theories and our dependence upon them are on the side of freedom. Then we achieve the mark of the mature intelligence, and we can hold in the mind two opposing thoughts without undermining either one of them. So the inescapable uncertainty of human life is accepted as our destiny from which we do not flee. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The shadows cast upon the wall in Plato’s legend of the cave are one degree removed from reality. However, if we know they are shadows, we are saved from the shackles of strict and rigid doctrines. And knowing we live in a cave can also turn our imaginations loose in new freedom. This confrontation with destiny releases us to experience a sea change in the realm of possibility. We can find new forms, new ways of relating to each other, new styles of life. The soul senses of the mortal who is in one’s relationship to society experiences the disappointment of the change into freedom, and aspires beyond conditions and barriers to reach the eternal soul. When we seek something in truth, there is God-seeking because we go where we can find him. However, even if we gain all the wisdom of solitude and the power of concentration, if we leave our life’s way, we will miss God. It is rather as if a mortal went out of one’s way and merely wised that it might be the way; one’s aspiration find expression in the strength of one’s wish. Every encounter is a way station that grants one a view of fulfillment; in each one thus fails to share, and yet also does share, in the one because one is ready. Ready, not seeking, one goes one’s way; this gives one the serenity toward all things and the touch that helps them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, once one has found, one’s heart does not turn away from them although one now encounters everything in the one. One blesses all the cells that have sheltered one as well as all those where he will still put up. For this finding is not an end of the way but only its eternal center. It is a finding without seeking; a discovery of what is most original and the origin. The soul sense that cannot be satiated until in finds the infinite soul sensed its presence from the beginning; this presence merely had to become wholly actual for it out of the actuality of the consecrated life of the World. It is not as if God could be inferred from anything—say, from nature as its cause, or from history as its helmsman, or perhaps from the subject as the self that thinks itself through it. It is not as if something else were given and this were then deduced from it. This is what confronts us immediately and first and always, and legitimately it can only be addressed, not asserted. The essential element in our relation to God has been sought in a feeling that has been called a feeling of dependence or, more recently, in attempt to be more precise, creature-feeling. While the insistence on this element and its definition are right, the one-sided emphasis on this fact lead to a misunderstanding of the character of the perfect relationship. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
But do You Not See, the Color of Wine in a Crystal Glass can be Spiritual!
Ah, yes, immortal, but you have not begun to understand it. It is no more than a word. Study the fate of your maker. Why did Magnus go into the flames? It is an age-old truth among us, and you have not guessed it. Live among mortals, and the passing years will drive you to madness. To see others grow old and die, to see kingdoms rise and fall, to lose all you understand and cherish—who can endure it? It will drive you to idiot raving and despair. Your own immortal kind is your protection, your salvation. The ancient ways, do you see, which never changed! The authentic prophet experiences the anxiety that comes with one’s freedom to see into the future, to see beyond the usual limits in which other people see. Tus, Tiresias cries out to Oedipus: “How terrible it is to know…where no good comes from knowing! My say, in any sort, I will not say, lest I display my sorrow. I will not bring remorse upon myself and upon you. Why do you search these matters?” we recall also that the prophetess Cassandra, in ancient Mycenae, hated her role as medium and hated to prophesy. One way to distinguish between the authentic prophet or saint from the fanatic or charlatan is this: the authentic prophet feels anxiety about one’s role and the charlatan does not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Like the prophets in the Old Testament, the authentic ones do not want to be prophets: they do their best to decline the role. If they could because of the dizziness and dread such great freedom entails, they would escape. Jonah even fled from Nineveh and has to be brought back by a whale to give his prophecies. The common ways of denying the anxiety of freedom include, in our society, alcohol and drugs. When Peer Gynt, in Ibsen’s play, hears the passing people talking and laughing at him as he hides behind the bushes, he comforts himself: “If only I had a dram of something strong, or could go unnoticed. If only they did not know me. A drink would be best. Then the laughter does not bite.” When one has recourse to a dram of Scotch, true, it does not bite so much; this is the dominant way of escaping anxiety in our culture. Harry Stack Sullivan once remarked that liquor was a necessity in a technological civilization like ours to relax people after a compulsive-obsessional day in the office. Whatever truth there may be in that statement, probably made by Sullivan with tongue in cheek, it is obvious that alcohol drunk to avoid anxiety may ease the mind and dull the sensitivities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
However, the drinking to escape anxiety puts one on a treadmill: the next day, when the anxiety increases, the drinking must increase also, and so on, until Alcoholics Anonymous has a new member. Overuse of alcohol erodes our freedom to imagine, to reflect, to discover some possibility that would have helped us cope with anxiety in the first place. During the recent year there were over 50 million prescriptions written in the United States for Valium. In addition there are Librium, Equanil, Miltown, Alprazolam, Clonazepam, Lorazepam, Temazepam, Triazolam, and a long list of similar drugs whose main purpose is to block off feelings of anxiety and consequent depression. These drugs obviously have their constructive uses, especially with people whose anxiety rises to paralyzing heights and who cannot then communicate fruitfully with others or a therapist. In this limited sense the tranquilizing drugs may temporarily promote freedom. They can relieve the anxiety long enough so that the person can then see some real possibilities in one’s life. However, used as a crutch, the drugs, like alcohol, can be a way of blocking off freedom and possibility, a way of becoming an unfeeling robot, avoiding the sensitivity necessary to be open to possibilities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
When people are abusing a substance, personal freedom thus evaporates. One gives up the sharp play of imagination; one surrenders the inspiration that comes from the interplay of exhilaration and sadness, ecstasy and grief, joy and woe. The human being then approximates the non-sentient computer which simply recites its pre-programmed responses. However, in a fairly wide experience, we have found that most people who are interested in this subject are still very far from having achieved the mystical goal, and that not one in a hundred has been successful in travelling the mystical path to its end. Of the many who have started on this quest in modern times, few have reached the goal, most have gone astray. Of those who have stood on the temple’s threshold, only a very small fraction were able to make their way inside. This is a significant fact that requires explanation. Few people have either the interest or the wisdom to carry these thoughts through persistently to the true conclusions. Mortals who live enclosed within their own little egos naturally feel no call either to pursue truth or to practice service. And such are the majority. Therefore, it is said that philosophy’s quest is only for the few. Not all mortals are disposed to look for truth, rather only a minority. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Prophets and teachers, sages and saints have come among us in all times to speak of that inner life and inner reality which they have found. However, only those who cared to listen have profited by these revelations, communications, and counsels, and still fewer have profited by being willing to follow the path of discipleship. Because the Higher Power (God) is present in the whole World, it is present in everyone too. Because few seek the awareness of It, fewer still find it. Those who are seeking persona help are immeasurably more numerous than those who are seeking the impersonal Truth. Those who seek philosophic achievement are today, as always, necessarily few since it belittles the ego and incites aspirants to overcome or crush it. Many who are willing, or who are able, to put themselves under the quest’s discipline are few. The unwilling find it irksome, the unable impossible. Those only who come to it with a passionate devotion and an eagerness to advance, can muster up enough power to submit to the discipline and practice. However, they are a small group: the others are a large one. Most mortals are happy enough with the flesh, satisfied enough to live in the body alone or the body and intellect together. Few want God, most are not even ready for him and would be blinded by his light. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Not many are willing to submit themselves to the performance of exercises, for most modern people and almost all city people feel they have enough to do already. Although salvation is open to all, it is not free to all. The price must be paid. Few are willing to pay. Therefore few actually claim salvation, let alone receive it. Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal soul. Every single soul is a glimpse of that. Through every single soul the basic word addresses the eternal soul. The mediatorship of the soul of all beings accounts for the fullness of our relationships to them—and for the lack of fulfillment. The innate soul is actualized each time without ever being perfected. It attains perfection solely in the immediate relationship to the soul that in accordance with its nature cannot become an inanimate object. Mortals have addressed their eternal soul by many names. When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You: the first myths were hymns of praise. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Mortals felt impelled more and more to think of and to talk about their eternal soul. However, no matter the names they give it, all names of God remain hallowed—because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him. Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God’s nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all mortals who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means the soul, addresses, no matter what is in one’s delusion, the true soul of one’s life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom one stands in a relationship that includes all others. However, whoever abhors the name and fancies that one is Godless—when one addresses with one’s whole devoted being the soul of one’s life that cannot be restricted by any other, one addresses God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
When we walk our way and encounter a mortal who comes toward us, walking one’s way, we know our way only and not the other person’s; for one comes to life for us only in the encounter. The Biblical saying, “Many are called” does not refer to the general scheme of evolution, but only to the few who seek to quicken it by taking the Quest. And few of these succeed in achieving quick realization although many attempt to do so. This is because the path is subtler, harder, and more hidden than other paths; because the adverse elements bestir themselves to mislead aspirants and take them off on sidetracks where they eventually get lost; and because it is next to impossible to find correct guidance, since many are directed to the wrong teachers by emotion, desire, egoism, and wrong preconceptions. The way for humanity is long and dark, but the few who want to shorten it may do so. Only one mortal here and there among thousands take to philosophy. Yet in some ways the World is better prepared to understand it now than in earlier times. Few people breathe the clear, keen air of truth; most prefer the impure air of prejudice and illusion. The high goals with which, a an impressionable an idealistic age, youth started adult life, have not remained. Many have settled for less. However, not all did so. A minority has refound its way, the better way. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Only a few sufficiently appreciate its teachings and fewer still put them into practice. Of the perfect relational process we know in the manner of having lived through it our going forth, our way. The other part merely happens to us, we do not know it. It happens to us in the encounter. However, if we speak f it as something beyond the encounter, we try to life more than we can. Our concern, our care must be not for the other side but for our own, not for grace but for will. Grace concerns us insofar as we proceed toward it and await its presence; it is not our object. The soul confronts me. However, I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationships is at once being chosen and choosing, passive and active. For an action of the whole being does away with all partial actions and thus also with all sensations of action (which depend entirely on the limited nature of actions)—and hence it comes to resemble passivity. This is the activity of the human being who has become whole: it has been called not-doing, for noting particular, nothing partial is at work in a mortal and thus nothing of one intrudes into the World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It is the whole human being, closed in its wholeness, at rest in its wholeness, that is active here, as the human being has become an active whole. When one has achieved steadfastness in this state, one is able to venture forth toward the supreme encounter. To this end one does not have to strip away the World of the senses as a World of appearance. There is no World of appearances, there is only the World—which, to be sure, appear twofold to us in accordance with our twofold attitude. Only the spell of separation needs to be broken. Nor is there any need to go beyond sense experience; any experience, no matter how spiritual, could only yield us a partial being. Nor need we turn a World of ideas and values—that cannot become present for us. All this is not needed. Can one say what is needed? Not by way of a prescription. All the prescriptions that have been excogitated and invented in the ages of the human spirit, all the preparations, exercises, and mediations that have been suggested have nothing to do with the primally simple fact of encounter. All advantages for knowledge or power that may owe to one or another exercise do not approach that of which we are speaking here. All this has it place in the unenlightened World and does not take us one step—does not take the decisive step—out of it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Going forth is unteachable in the sense of prescriptions. It can only be indicated—by drawing a circle that excludes everything else. Then the one thing needful becomes visible: the total acceptance of the present. To be sure, this acceptance involves a heavier risk and a more fundamental return, the further mortals have lost their way in separation. What has to be given up is not the Soul, as most mystics supposed, nor the will: the soul is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes our union with God. What has to be given up is not the soul nor the will, but that false drive for self-affirmation which impels mortals to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous World of relation into the having of things. Every actual relationship to another being in the World is exclusive. It is the being freed and steps forth to confront us in its uniqueness. It fills the firmament—not as if there were nothing else, but everything else lives in its light. As long as the presence of the relationship endures, this World-wideness cannot be infringed. However, as soon as the soul becomes focused on the material World, the World-wideness of the relationship appears as an injustice against the World, and its exclusiveness as an exclusion of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
In the relation to God, unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one. For those who enter into the absolute relationship, nothing particular retains any importance—neither things nor beings, neither Earth nor Heaven—but everything is included in the relationship. For entering into the pure relationship does not involve ignoring everything but seeing everything in the soul, not renouncing the World but placing it upon its proper ground. Looking away from the World is not help toward God; staring at the World is no help either; but whoever beholds the World in one stands in God’s presence. “World here, God there”—that is the material World talking; and “God in the World”—that, too, is the soul talking in the material World, leaving nothing behind, to comprehend all—all the World—in comprehending the comprehensive being, giving the World its due and truth, to have nothing besides God but to grasp everything in one, that is the perfect relationship. If one does not remain in the World, one does not find God; if one leaves the World, one does not find God. Whoever goes forth to one’s soul with one’s whole being and carries to it all the being of the World, finds one whom one cannot seek. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Of course, God is the wholly other; but one is also the wholly same: the wholly present. Of course, one is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overwhelms; but one is also the mystery of the obvious that is closer to me than my soul. When you fathom the life of things and of conditionality, you reach the indissoluble; when you dispute the life of things and of conditionality, you wind up before the nothing; when you consecrate life you encounter the living God. If one is to reach to its farther bounds, the Quest will make demands upon individuals. It will call for strength to steel oneself against unwanted passions; it will call for reason to judge persons, situations, and circumstances; and it will call for aspiration to go one better than one’s best. “Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God. Behold, I came into the World not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, little children are whole for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefore the curse of Adam is taken from them in me, that it hath no power over them; and the law of circumcision is done away in me. And after this manner did the Holy Ghost manifest the word of God unto me,” reports Moroni 8.8-9. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13 
My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Universe Contemplates Us—In the End it Sinks Back into Mystery!
I blinked my eyes. I felt weary suddenly; it was almost a feeling of despair. And I thought confusedly, This is ridiculous, I never despair! Others do that, not me. I go on fighting no matter what happens. Always. Sometimes we find the specter of anxiety forcing its way into the picture time and time again. When a person is most vulnerable to anxiety, that is the moment of pause. It is the tremulous moment when we balance possible decisions, when we look forward with wonder and awe or with dread or fear of failure. The pause is the moment when we open ourselves, and the opening is our vulnerability to anxiety. When we spoke about listening to the silence, we noted that many people flee from silence because of the anxiety of the anxiety the silence brings. They perpetually seek the company of some noise or the television or radio even to the extent of carrying blaring portable sets with them on the streets or in the erstwhile peace of the parks. John Lilly found in his experiments in which people floated in his stimulus-free tank that silence, with its complete freedom, brings to many people more anxiety than they can bear. Who knows what devil may emerge out of the complete silence? Where are our familiar boundaries? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The members of John Cage’s audience at his famous concert of silence were required to absorb their own anxiety. There was no music to do it for them. People shrink from the quiet desperation that confronts them in periods of complete silence, fearing they will lose all ways of orienting themselves. In our technological society, we are moving toward periods of greater and greater leisure—in earlier retirement, for example—and superficially we welcome this prospective leisure. However, we find within ourselves a curious gnawing fear of something missing. What will we do with all this unfilled free time, this unplanned, unscheduled empty space? Does it not hang before us—O paradox of paradoxes! –like a great threat, the threat of emptiness, rather than the great boon we were seeking? Will our capacities, lying fallow, evaporate? Will we lose our abilities? Will we be blotted out in sleep for over a century like Lestat de Lioncourt? If there is nobody knowing at the door, will we lose our consciousness? Secretly, man of us interpret freedom as becoming nothing. And will we, in our now unhampered possibility, become simply no thing? This is a real and immediate source of anxiety, covered up and unadmitted though it generally is. Formless freedom, unstructured freedom without the limits of destiny, leaves human beings inert. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
At such times the pause takes over People do not know what to do, and they cry out for someone or something to organize them. Hence, organized play and planned leisure—which are really contradictions in terms. Thrown on their own resources, people may find themselves bankrupt since they have long gotten into the habit of ignoring their pauses. Let us consider again the illustration of a speaker receiving promptings and directions from the audience. Suppose, in one’s millisecond pauses, no such prompting comes. In anxiety over this possibility, some speakers choose to write out their lectures word for word, and then they can fall back on the printed page regardless of the promptings or lack thereof from the audience. However, in reading one’s speech the speaker has surrendered one’s opportunity for freedom, for the discovery of new ideas, for the adventure of exploring new frontiers, for the heady thrill of uncertainty. Thus, one chooses security over freedom, as the Grand Inquisitor so passionately adjured. However, such a choice exacts a serious price in self-consciousness, tension, and the loss of freedom. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Sometimes the anxiety that accompanies freedom is intermixed and confused with excitement. Once, while waiting (which is a form of pausing) at an airport for a person whom I knew only slightly and who was going to be my guest at my country farm for three days, I felt the excitement that always comes wit the anticipation of meeting a new person. However, this excitement merged back and forth into the anxiety that came as I asked myself in fantasy: What will two people do cooped up in an twelve room farm house for long? Will the intimacy become boring or scary? So I jotted down the following notes: When does excitement—for example, the constructive side of anxiety, which keeps life from being boring, keeps us spontaneous, stimulated, and alive—lead into destructive anxiety, which shuts out spontaneity, paralyzes, and blocks our freedom? Excitement, the risking of which is pleasurable, gives us the spirit of the chase, keeps us growing. This has a clear survival value. It remains excitement so long as I feel I can cope; I can retain a sense of some autonomy. When I cannot do this, it becomes destructive. Thus as long as we can experience “I can” and “I will,” we remain open, we experience our freedom, we preserve the power to experience new possibilities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Does this anxiety always occur in the exercise of freedom? The answer to that depends on how one views life. If we follow Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, who conceive of life as a continuous dialectical tension between being and nonbeing, each of us engaged in every breath in preserving our own being against the threat of nonbeing, then we must answer “Yes.” In any case I prefer to keep the question on the level of consciousness. This would mean starting that while there is always some accompaniment of dizziness with freedom, we, as human beings, may not be aware of it since we have different points where we block it off, where we repress the dizziness temporarily or deny it altogether. All people are trying to find God, to feel his love and sense his peace. Those who are in flight from Worldly things do s consciously; those who are in pursuit of them do so unconsciously. Life compels no one to enter upon this conscious Quest, although it is leading everyone upon the conscious Quest. Even among the students of this teaching, not all are following the Quest, many are merely seeking for an intellectual understanding; their interest has been attracted and their curiosity aroused, but they have not felt called upon to go any farther. This may be due to inner weakness or to outer difficulties or both. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Such men and women do not have to pledge themselves to any moral tasks or mystical experiences. Nevertheless, their studies and reflections upon the teaching will not be without a certain value and will place them on an altogether different level from the unawakended herd which is bereft of such an interest. However, I a mortal’s mission requires one to know only one’s association with one’s cause and no real relation to any soul, no present encounter with God, so that everything around one becomes It and subservient to one’s cause? What about the saying of Napoleon, “I was never truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.” Was not that legitimate? Is this phenomenon of experiencing and using no person? Indeed, this master of the age evidently did not now the dimension of the soul. The matter has been put well: all being was for him valore. Gently, he compared the followers who denied one after his fall with Peter; but there was nobody whom one could have denied, for there was nobody whom he could have denied, for there was nobody whom he recognized as a being. He was the demonic spirit for the millions and did not respond; to the soul he responded be calling it an It, he responded fictitiously on the personal level—responding only in his own sphere, that of one’s cause, and only with his deeds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
This is the elementary historical barrier at which the basic word of association loses its reality, the character of reciprocity: the demonic spirit for whom nobody can become true soul. In addition to the person and the ego, to the free and the arbitrary mortal—not between them—occurs in fateful eminence in fateful times: ardently, everything flames toward one while one oneself stands in a cold fire; a thousand relations reach out toward one but none issues from one. One participates in no actuality, but others participate immeasurably in one as in an actuality. To be sure, one views the beings around one as so many machines capable of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the cause. However, that is also how one views oneself (only one can never cease experimenting to determine one’s own capacities, and yet never experiences their limits). One treats oneself, too, as an It. This the individual is saying one is not vitally empathic, not full. Much less does it feign these qualities (like the they are the foundation of the I of the modern ego). One does not even speak of oneself, one merely speaks on one’s own behalf. The I spoken and written by one is the required subject of the sentences that convey one’s statements and orders—no more and no less. It lacks subjectivity; neither does it have a self-consciousness that is preoccupied with being-that-way; and least of all does it have any delusions about its own appearance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
I am the clock that exists and does not know itself: thus one oneself formulated one’s fatefulness, the actuality of this phenomenon and the inactuality of the soul, after one had been separated from one’s cause; for it was only then that one could, and had to, think and speak of oneself and recollect one’s soul which appeared only then. What appears is not mere subject; neither does it reach subjectivity: the magic spell broken, but unredeemed, it finds expression in the terrible word, as legitimate as it is illegitimate: The Universe contemplates Us! The end it sinks back into mystery. Who after such a step and such a fall, would dare to claim that this mortal understood one’s tremendous, monstrous mission—or that one misunderstood it? What is certain that the age for which the demonic mortal who lives without a present has become master and model will misunderstand one. It fails to see that what holds sway here is destiny and accomplishment, not the lust for and delight in power. It goes into ecstasies over the commanding brow and has no inkling of the signs inscribed upon this forehead like digits upon the face of a clock. One tries studiously to imitate the way one looked at others, without any understanding of one’s need and necessitation, and one mistakes the objectivity severity of this I for fermenting self-awareness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The word “I” remains the shibboleth of humanity. Napoleon spoke it without the power to relate, but he did speak it as the I of an accomplishment. Those who exert themselves to copy this, merely betray the hopelessness of their own self-contradiction. What is that: self-contradiction? When mortals do not test a priori of relation in the World, working out and actualizing the innate soul in what one encounters, it turns inside. Then it unfolds through the unnatural, impossible object, the I—which is to say that it unfolds where there is no room for it to unfold. Thus the confrontation within the self comes int being and this cannot be relation, presence, the current of reciprocity, but only self-contradiction. Some mortals may try to interpret this as a relation, perhaps one that is religious, in order to extricate themselves from the horror of their Doppelganger: they are bound to keep rediscovering the deception of any such interpretation. Here is the edge of life. What is unfulfilled as here escaped into the mad delusion of some fulfillment; now it gropes around in the labyrinth and get lost ever more profoundly. When mortals are overcome by the horror of the alienation between I and World, at times, it occurs to one that something might be done. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Imagine that at some dreadful midnight you lie there, tormented by a waking dream: the bulwarks have crumbled and the abysses scream, and you realize in the midst of this agony that life is still there and I must merely get through it—but how? How? Thus feels mortals in the hours when one collects oneself: overcome by horror, pondering, without direction. And yet one may know the right direction, deep down in the unloved knowledge of the depths—the direction of return that leads through sacrifice. However, he rejects this knowledge; what is mystical cannot endure the artificial midnight Sun. One summons thought in which one places, quite rightly, much confidence: thought is supposed to fix everything. After all, it is the lofty art of thought that it can paint a reliable and practically credible picture of the World. Thus mortals say to one’s thought: “Look at the dreadful shape that lies over there with those cruel eyes—is she not the one which with whom I played long ago? Do you remember how she used to laugh at me with these eyes and how good they were then? And now look at my wretched soul—I will admit it to you: it is empty, and whatever I put into myself, experience as well as use, does not penetrate to this cavern. Will not you fix things between her and me so that she relents and I get well again?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And thought, ever obliging and skillful, paints with its accustomed speed a series—nay, two series of pictures on the right and the left wall. Here is (or rather: happens, for the World pictures of thought are reliable motion pictures) the Universe. From the whirl of the stars emerges the small Earth, from the teeming on Earth emerges small mortals, and now history carries one forth through the ages, to preserve in rebuilding the anthills of the cultures that crumble under its steps. Beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” On the other wall happens the soul. A female figure spins the orbits of all stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and creatures and World but feeling and representations or even living experiences and states of the soul. And beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” Henceforth, when mortals are for once overcome by the horror of alienation and the World fills one with anxiety, one looks up (right or left, as the case may be) and see a picture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Then one sees that the soul is contained in the World, and that there is really no I, and this the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down; or one sees that the World is contained in the I, and that there really is no World, and thus the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down. And when mortals are overcome again by the horror of alienation and the I fills one with anxiety, one looks up and sees a picture; and whichever one sees, it does not matter, either the empty I is stuffed full of World or it is submerged in the flood of the World, and one calms down. However, the moment will come, and it is near, when mortals overcome by horror, looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And one is seized by a deeper horror. Shall we say that all humans are traveling on this quest of God but most humans do so unconsciously and unwillingly? For then the person technically called a quester simply differs from other persons by one’s awareness of the journey, the demands in makes upon one, and one’s willingness to co-operate in satisfying demands. Mortals unconsciously seeks one’s freedom and enlightenment, as one consciously seeks one’s welfare and happiness. However, there is a faceless sinister, sarcastic, evil presence that one can sense sometimes. It plants thoughts and puts on demonic plays to cause worry and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Saviour. Cries and howls continue. A new anthem of curses upon those who break the sacred laws, blasphemed, provoke the wrath of God and Stand. They are pulling on the gates and lower windows. They are doing stupid things like throwing rocks at the wall. It I because God is hidden in all creatures that all creatures are searching all the time for God. This remains just as true even though in their ignorance they usually mistake the object of their search and believe that it is something else. Only on the quest does this search attain self-consciousness. The uninformed mortal is blind to the work of spiritual evolution which goes on within one and consequently thwarts and obstructs it unwittingly. The informed mortal sees the work and co-operates with it consciously. The blessing of feasting upon the words of Christ are powerful and life changing. The words of Christ will profoundly touch hearts and open the eyes of those who do not see him. “Ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all mortals, animals and other living and non-living beings. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting up the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.20. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Nobody Does it Without Carrying Scars in One’s Soul One’s Whole Life
I was enchanted by the World of rock music—the way the singers could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels of devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I do not think the World of ages past has ever seen. Also there was something vampiric about rock music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who do not believe in the supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a single note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music. The World just did not have it in any form before. Since personal freedom is a venture down paths we have never traversed before, we can never know ahead of time how the venture will turn out. We leap into the future. Where will we land? With freedom one experiences a dizziness, a feeling of giddiness, a sense of vertigo, giddiness, dread—are expressions of the anxiety that accompanies freedom like its shadow. Sometimes a patient in therapy will wryly smile and say, “When I am mad at you, I think I was better off when I was neurotic—then I could go along in only one groove.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I say “wryly” because if he really believed this, he would not be in therapy in the first place since the purpose of therapy is precisely to take one out of the rigid grooves, the narrow, compulsive trends, which are blocks to freedom. This gives the person a sense of release. However, it is a freedom that brings anxiety. Anxiety is potentially present whenever we are free; freedom is oriented toward anxiety and anxiety toward freedom. Anxiety is the reality of freedom as a potentiality before this freedom has materialized. For freedom is possibility, and who is to forecast what the end result of any possibility may be? Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor saw this clearly: “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a mortal and a human in society than freedom. Mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” Freedom is a burden because it brings anxiety in its wake; and the Grand Inquisitor sought to shield people from the paralyzing aspects of anxiety by robbing them of its positive aspects—chiefly, freedom. Requiring the surrender of their freedom, he removed the stimulus to invent new forms, new styles, new ideas—in short, new possibilities. Now, as he insisted, men and women are “vile, weak creatures,” “slaves by nature,” “base creatures.” He is surely logical: if you take away freedom, you make people into the base, weak, vile salves the Grand Inquisitor describes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
It is helpful to keep in mind that anxiety, like dizziness, can be both constructive and destructive. The constructive aspect is stimulating and gives one energy and zest; anxiety is a teacher that, since we carry it inwardly, can never be avoided. Anxiety illuminates experiences that we would otherwise run away from. Civilization is the result of anxiety in that cavemen were forced to invent thinking in order to cope with the saber-toothed tiger and the bison and other animals, which were stronger in tooth and nail and would have exterminated the human race. The anxiety that comes with excessive freedom can also be destructive in that it can paralyze us, isolate us, send us into panic; and when repressed, it may lead to cardiac ailments and other psychosomatic illnesses. These two aspects of anxiety are parallel to constructive and destructive stress. If one lives with any sense of adventure, every person must bear constructive stress; but destructive stress is the excessive tension we see on the modern assembly lines which can tear the human being to pieces. This is why personal freedom is fascinating and the most prized of all human conditions. However, because it is inseparable from anxiety, it is dangerous and understandably dreaded at the same time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The longer I live and the more I observe in the lives of others, the more numerous becomes the illustrations of higher laws—the factuality of righteousness and the universality of the Quest. This is only as it should be for both are parts of the World-Idea. Thought and action are reflected back by choices and what the consequences of our choices are. They can lead to corruption, or to eternal life. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live,” reports Deuteronomy 30.19. Everything in life goes exactly according to what is written in God’s Word. There are no exceptions. This is the law that affects everyone, whether a believe or a non-believer. You will reap what you sow. All corruption that is in the World comes from lusts. Let no one make the mistake of separating out the quest from everyday life. It is Life itself! Questers are not a special group, a labeled species, which one does or does not join, but are all humanity. This is not merely a matter for a small elite interested in spiritual self-help. It is a serious truth important to every mortal everywhere. The inability to measure up to these ideals does not carry a stigma. All mortals at this level come to Earth with their imperfections. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
All mortals seek for truth either consciously and deliberately or unconsciously and blindly, but they can seek only according to their capacity and ability, circumstances and preparedness. It is not a question whether questers are happier than non-questers—for that is an individual personal matter: the division itself is an artificial one. The ascent to Consciousness is for all mortals, not for a few only. Humankind is so near to God and yet so far away from God! Every fresh day is a fresh call from God to mortals. “Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. And when his friends heard it, they went out to seize him; for they said, ‘He is beside himself,’” reports Mark 3.19-21. It is there in all, whether it be latent or patent, this impulse in each mortal to improve and better oneself into a person of worth. Ultimately it develops, in this body or a later one, into the aspiration to transcend oneself. The divine soul dwells in every mortal. Therefore, if only one will apply the faculties one possesses, every mortal may find it. “And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.’ And he answered, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother,’” reports Mark 3.31-35. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
For most of those who go away to a university to study, it is not the first time that they leave the home of their parents. However, for all of them it is an important step on their own independent way of life. Every step on this road brings them farther away from the place from which they came, the family into which they were born. The first moves towards independence occur very early in life—as exemplified in the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple. And none of these moves is without pain and tragic guilt—as indicated in the anxiety of the parents of Jesus and the reproaches they made to him. However, only after Jesus has begun his public activities the depth of the gap between him and his family becomes fully manifest. In the story which we have just read and which is recorded by the three Gospels, Jesus uses the family relations as symbols for a relation of a higher order for the community of those who do the will of God. Something unconditional breaks into the conditional relations of the natural family and creates a community which is as intimate and as strong as the family relations, and at the same time infinitely superior to it. The depth of this gap is emphasized in the attempt of one’s family to seize him and to bring him home because of his extraordinary behavior which makes them believe he is out of his mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And the gap is strongly expressed in Christ’s saying that one who loves father and mother more then him cannot be his disciple, words even sharpened in Luke’s version, where everyone is rejected by one who does not hate father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—and one’s own life. All these words cut with divine power through the natural relation between the members of the family whenever these relations claim to be ultimates. They cut through the bondage of age-old traditions and conventions and their unconditional claims; they cut through the consecration of the family and ties by sacramental or other laws which make them equal to the ties between those who belong to the new reality in the Christ. The family is no ultimate! The family relations are not unconditional relations. The consecration of the family is not a consecration for the final aim of mortal’s existence. We can imagine the revolutionary character of such sayings in face of the religions and cultures of humankind. We can hardly measure their disturbing character in face of what has happened century after century within the so-called Christian nations—with the support of the Christian churches who could not stand the radical nature of the Christian message in this as in other respects. However, in spite of its radicalism, the Christian message does not request this dissolution of the family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The Christian message affirms the family and limits its significance. Each mortal must someday take this quest. This is as certain as the Sun’s rising, for it is not said on high authority that we can live by bread alone? The work of the opening up to one’s inner being, and to its best, not worst, side is both the duty and the destiny for every mortal. One may evade the first and retain the second for a time but cannot do so for all time. What the quester does of one’s own free choice today, the generality of mortals will be obliged to do tomorrow. The hour of awakening must come to every mortal, even if it has to come at the hour of deathl and when it does it will be with utter amazement and stupefaction at best, or else with all the force of an explosive shock. For one is a member of the human species, not the animal one, and shares its destiny. Jesus takes up the prophecy of Micah, that in the last days “brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and the children will rise against parents and have them put to death.” It belongs to periods in which the demonic powers get hold of the World, that the family community is turned into its opposite. However, when Jesus uses this prophecy, he adds, “And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.” The same words which point to the demonic disruption of the family are used to describe its inescapable divine disruption. This is the profound ambiguity of the Biblical teaching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Now let us look into our own situation. We cannot cut the ties with our family without being guilty. However, the question is: Is it willfulness which demonically disrupts the family communion, or is it the step toward independence and one’s own understanding of the will of God which divinely liberates us from the bondage to our family? We never know the answer with certainty. We must risk tragic guilt in becoming free from father and mother and brothers and sisters. And we know today better than many generations before us what that means, how infinitely difficult it is and that nobody does it without carrying scars in one’s soul one’s whole life. For it is not only the real father or mother or brother or sister from whom we must become free in order to come into our own. It is something much more refined, the image of them, which from our earliest childhood has impregnated our souls. The real father, the real mother may let us go free, although this is by no means the rule in Christian families. However, even if they have the wisdom to do it, their images can prevent us from doing what the will of God is in a concrete situation, namely, to do acts in which love, power, and justice are united. Their image may prevent us from love by subjection to law. It may prevent us from having power by weakening our personal center. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Their image may also prevent us from exercising justice by blinding us to a concrete situation and its demands. And the same thing happens with the images of brothers and sisters. Although it is easier to become free from them in an external sense, they may hiddenly produce decisions which determine for the worse whole periods of our lives. However, do not mistake me! Opposition and revolt are not yet freedom. They are unavoidable stages on the way to freedom. However, if they are not overcome as much as the early dependence must be overcome, they create another servitude. How can this happen? Certainly, in pathological cases, psychotherapy is needed, as Jesus himself acted as a healer, bodily and mentally. However, more is necessary, namely, the dependence on that which gives ultimate independence, the image of that which makes it possible to hate and to love every life, including our own. No human problem and certainly not the family problem can be solved on a finite level. This is true although we know that even the image of God can be distorted by the images of father and mother, so that its saving power is almost lost. This is the danger of all religion and a serious limit for our religious work. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, it is not a limit for God, who again and again break through the images we have made of him, and who has shown in Christ that he is not only father and mother to us, but also child, and that therefore in hum the inescapable conflicts of every family are overcome. The Father who is also child is more than a father as he is more than a child. Therefore we can pray to the Father in Heaven without transferring our hostility against the father image to him. Because God has become child, it is possible for us to say the Our Father. How dissonant the ego sounds! When it issues from tragic lips, tense with come self-contradiction that they try to old back, it can move us to great pity. When it issues from chaotic lips that savagely, heedlessly, unconsciously represents contradiction, it can make us shudder. When the slips are vain and smooth, it sounds embarrassing or disgusting. Those who pronounce the name of God, wallowing in the soul, uncover the shame of the World spirit that has been debased to mere spirituality. The Quest cannot be evaded. In the end all must come to it; otherwise they will be pulled or pushed along it however unwilling or reluctant they may be. More and more people are moving, albeit at a slow pace and with suspicious minds, into mystical teaching—but they are moving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Nature is trying to teach mortals to equilibrate themselves. The sooner they learn this lesion, the better for their happiness and success. How beautiful and legitimate the vivid and empathic God sounds! Prayer is our infinite conversation, and the air of conversation is present on all its ways, even before our judges, even in the final hour on Earth. In prayer we actually go out in faith and toward God. Thus, we stand together with the holy Trinity in actuality and are never severed from it. Even solitude cannot spell forsakenness, and when the human World falls silent for one, one his one’s soul say You. How beautiful and legitimate the full armor of God is. It is the pure intercourse with nature. Nature yields to it and speaks ceaselessly with it; she reveals her mysteries to it and yet does not betray her mystery. The soul believers in her and says to the rose: “So it is You”—and at once shares the same actuality with the rose. Hence, when it returns to itself, the spirit of actuality stays with it; the vision of the Sun clings to the blessed eye that recalls its own likeness to the Sun, and the friendship of the elements accompanies mortals into the calm of dying and rebirth. Thus, accepting God as adequate, true, and pure resounds through the ages. And to anticipate and choose an image from the realm of unconditional relation: how powerful, even overpowering, is our Saviour, and how legitimate to the point of being a matter of course! #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
For it is the unconditional relation in which mortals call the soul of the Holy Ghost has become unconditional for one. If detachment ever touches one, it is surpassed by association, and it is from this that one speaks to others. In vain we seek to reduce our spirituality to something that derives its power from itself, nor can we limit our soul to anything that dwells outside us. Both would once again deactualize the actual, the present relations. Everyone can seek God and then become righteous; everyone can say Father and then becomes son or daughter: actuality abides. The multitudes who people our planet will eventually travel the same course that the philosophic aspirant now travels. However, they will do it slowly through the lapse of numerous centuries; they will move lightly, imperceptibly, and without the intense pressures one puts upon oneself. Mortal are made in God’s image in the sense that one latently possesses certain Godlike qualities. However, these have to be developed by evolution which can be meticulous, through the path of normal experience, or swift through Quest. “Never be weary of good works, but be meek and humble in heart; for such shall find rest to their souls,” Alma 37.34. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
If We Take Eternity to Mean Not Infinite Temporal Duration but Timelessness, then Eternal Life Belongs to those Who Live in the Present!
If one would give birth to a dancing star, I tell you one must harbor chaos. I hide nothing from you, not my ignorance, not my fear, not the simple terror that if I try I might fail. I do not even know if it is mine to give more then once, or what is the price of giving it, but I will risk this for you, and we will discover it together, whatever the mystery and the terror, just as I have discovered alone all else. Most of us are so preoccupied with the noise, the uproar, the cacophony of the modern World that we have no energy left for constructive living. We long to pause, to absorb into our day-to-day existence, some calmness, some inner order in which we can call our soul our own, in which we take time to experience some beauty, to know and enjoy our friends, and to let whatever creative impulses or visions we have be heard, listened to, have their moment. This pressing need coincides with influx of Christian influence, especially among the young people in this country, shown by the wide sale of books on religion, and the endless listening to preachers. There can be no doubt of the depth and urgency of the hunger for some psychoreligious center of life. However, it often happens that aspirants put off the sacrifice of time which prayers and meditation call for because, they complain, they are too busy with this or that. Eternal anxiety is the lot of the free mortal. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Thus they never make any start at all and the years slip uselessly by. In most cases this involves no penalty other than the spiritual stagnation to which it leads, but in some cases where a higher destiny has been reserved for the individual or where a mission has to be accomplished, the result is far different. Everything and everyone that such a person uses as an excuse for keeping away from the practice of meditation, the exercise of devotion, and the communion of prayer may be removed from one’s external life by the higher self. Thus, through loss and suffering, one will be forced to obey the inward call. Human beings are given more than one chance to redeem themselves. Such is the mercy of the higher power. Prayer is a way, available for most of us without a radical changing of our vocation, by which we can put meaningful content into the pause. No matter what form or stripe this prayer may take—yoga of the physical or mental variety—all have in common the aim of providing channels to deeper levels of experience by means of the pause. When I, for example, am overburdened with fatigue or gloom or the distress of problems and the sleeplessness that goes with these things, I may pause temporarily to withdraw myself from the ego-self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
I cannot withdraw myself from the ego-self by the head-on force of thinking. However, it can be done, sometimes with the help of a prayer, or through relaxation, or pausing and letting be. I seek to move into the psyche-self, in which I see tings sub specie aeternitatis, in which I no longer feel the pain described above—the ego-self that feels the pains described above—the ego-self that feels them is temporarily transcended. The fatigue, the distress, the gloom all seem to vanish. They psyche-self, freed from the groveling kind of pain, freed from the narcissism, freed from ego-centered misery, can be a channel to awareness of infinite possibilities. Time-backed and Earth-bound as one is, it is not surprising that one often tries to evade the Quest, to ignore it in various ways such as always keeping bust truing to fulfill increasing ambition, cultivating skepticism disguised as practicality, or demanding instant and demonstrable proofs. However, most often one deflects the thoughts of it or changes the conversation abruptly. If pursued by oneself or others, the very idea makes one nervous. One is uneasy at the thought of higher laws to be obeyed. One is fearful of what one will be asked to do and of the discipline to be practiced. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is sadly human to want to digress from the straight path of the Quest at times. This happens to many and a proportion of them yields to the desire. Invariable, however, the passing years bring them back to either the leaving point or the starting point. Experience always points up the lesson that the initial urge faith conviction or reasoning which put them on the path was a wise and necessary one. When they learn at first hand with sorrow, loss, or frustration, the picture of life grows a little clearer to them, what the teachers offered free without such unpleasant consequences. One can understand how in the modern World, left to itself, untouched and unthawed by the emergence of any individual, should become alienated and turn into an incubus; but how does it happen at, as you say, the I of mortal is deactualized? Whether it lives in relation or outside it, the I remains assured of itself in its self-consciousness, which is a strong thread of gold on which the changing states are strung. Whether I say, “I see you,” or “I see the tree,” seeing may not be equally actual in both cases, but the I is equally actual in both. Prayer is, par excellence, a concentration of the void, the pause, the no thing. It is a freeing of the self from the clutter of life, giving one a pleasantly dizzy and mildly ecstatic experience. This dizziness is an attractive state that one likes to come back to, at least in memory, in moments throughout the day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
In this sense meditation is a relief and a freedom from our buying and selling, our technological culture. Prayer seems magical and curative because it opens one’s vision and being to a New World, a brightly colored World, conducive to calmness and peacefulness. In general it seems to be a less intense form of the World than the mystics describe, but in quality the same, a World which has within it sweetness, overflowing love, beauty now all about it. This is the common denominator of many diverse methods of prayer. They seem to have in common: stopping the machinery, the noise, the pressure, the haste, the compulsive driveness, and a higher level of consciousness, what was called oceanic. One experiences being absorbed into the Universe and the Universe being temporarily absorbed into one’s self. Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons. One is the spiritual form of natural differentiation, the other that of natural association. The purpose of setting oneself apart is to experience and use, and the purpose of that is living—which means dying one human life long. The purpose of relation is the relation itself—touching the soul. For as soon as we touch the soul, we are touched by a breath of eternal life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Whoever stands in relation, participates in an actuality; that is, in a being hat is neither merely a part of one nor merely outside oneself. All actuality is an activity in which I participate without being able to appropriate it. Where there is no participation, there is no actuality. Where there is self-appropriation, there is no actuality. The more directly the soul is touched, the more perfect is the participation. The I is actual through its participation in actuality. The more perfect the participation is, the more actual the I becomes. However, the I that steps out of the event of the relation into detachment and the self-consciousness accompanying that, does not lose its actuality. Participation remains in it as a living potentiality. To use words that originally refer to the highest relation but may also be applied to all others: the seed remains in one. This is the realm of subjectivity in which the I apprehends simultaneously its association and its detachment. Genuine subjectivity can be understood only dynamically, as the vibration of the I in its lonely truth. This is also the pace where the desire for ever higher and more unconditional relation and for perfect participation in being arises and keeps rising. In subjectivity the spiritual substance of the person matures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The person becomes conscious of oneself as participating in being, as being-with, and thus as a being. The ego becomes conscious of oneself as being this way and not that. The person says, “I am”; the ego says, “That is how I am.” “Knowing thyself” means to the person: know yourself as being. To the ego it means: knows your being-that-way. By setting oneself apart from others, the ego moves away from being. This does not mean that the person give up one’s being-that-way, one’s being is different; only, this is not the decisive perspective but merely the necessary and meaningful form of being. The ego, on the other hand, wallows in one’s being-that-way—a fiction that one has devised for oneself. For at bottom self-knowledge usually means to one the fabrication of an effective apparition of the self that has the power to deceive one every more thoroughly; and through the contemplation and veneration of this apparition one seeks the semblance of knowledge of one’s own being-that-way, while actual knowledge of it would lead one to self-destruction—or rebirth. The person beholds one’s self; the ego occupies oneself with one’s My: my manner, my race, my works, my genius. The ego does not participate in any actuality nor does one gain any. One sets oneself apart from everything else and tries to possess as much as possible by means of experience and use. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
This is one’s dynamics: setting oneself apart and taking possession—and the object is always It, tat which is not actual. One knows oneself as a subject, but this subject can appropriate as much as it wants to, it will never gain any substance: it remains like a point, functional, that which experiences, that which uses, nothing more. All of its extensive and multifarious being-that-way, all of its eager individuality cannot help it to gain any substance. There are two kinds of human beings, but there are two poles of humanity. No human being is pure person, and none is pure ego; none is entirely actual, none entirely lacking in actuality. Each lives in a twofold I. However, some mortals are so person-oriented that one may call them persons, whiles are so ego-oriented that one may call them egos. Between these and those true history takes place. The more a human being, the more humanity is dominated buy the ego, the more does the I fall prey to inactuality. In such ages the person in the human being and in humanity comes to lead a subterranean, hidden, as it were invalid existence—until it is summoned. There is always the danger that some people will be too separate from the reality of most people’s experience. Let us keep in mind that prayer occurs, often silently, in all gradations, from a chance insight on a crowded elevator to the conscious cultivation of the sense of peace to regular discipline of meditating for short periods several times a day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
There are also dangers in becoming isolated from the World of social action by praying too much, and it can be a detriment to one’s own creativity, which means we should not only pray, but take corrective actions to help assist our prayers. We never wholly leave the ego-self behind, and we still live in the real World with its rationality and irrationality, and with our responsibility toward this World. However, it is precisely in this ever-present World that prayer can give meaning to our pauses. All forms of prayer seek to change the character of the self, a change that involves a new relationship with the void. Many people will be familiar with at least the beginning stages of the void by their practice of meditation. I speak of the holy void because holy, coming from the root whole, refers to the mystical experience of grasping the wholeness of the Universe in one’s prayer. The feeling of the World as bounded whole is the spirituality of God. The holy void is the pause appearing in imaginary spatial form. This is one reason the mystics are so often shepherds since they look out continuously on the endless desert. One has this experience of the void in looking steadily out over the sea, an experience rightly termed oceanic since it gives one feeling of infinity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Being in the desert or at the ocean where our vision can seemingly go on for ever can give us acute anxiety, since the eyes have no boundaries with which to orient us; or it can give us a sense of profundity, of eternity, or of infinity, all of which are pleasurable. This is why floating in a stimulus-free tank, where we are insulted from every sound and every glimmer of light can bring either intense anxiety or a transcendent, holy experience. In the void the experience of nothingness occurs, and in this one’s spiritual inspirations are called forth and one’s deepest thoughts are made manifest. In the experience of nothingness, we find ourselves cleansed of the chatter and the clatter of a World which is too much with us. If a mortal is born with spiritual capacity but refuses to use it, and even deliberately shuts it away, a day will come wen it will thrust itself up into one’s conscious self for acceptance and use. If one continue to deny it, the capacity will then operate against one, until one’s sanity becomes questionable or one’s fortunes become adverse. No mortal can afford to fail to heed the summons to the Quest. If one does, it is at one’s own peril and one will then fail in everything else, for this is an imperative call coming from the highest part of one’s being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
In is not by accident the people love to believe in myths in searching for ways things can be said and done, for Greek mythic language is one of the ways such truths can be made manifest. In the holy void the nothingness that we experience gives our deeper thoughts room to make themselves manifest, and the otherwise silent inner voice can be heard. This is the equivalent of the listening to the silence we referred to earlier. One method of prayer consists of continuously clearing the mind of all content until God—or being, as some would prefer—can speak to us out of the void. The nothingness then becomes a something; a something that comes, the Christians would say, from the depths of our soul. The void is the dimension of eternity. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who life in the present. Our human hope is these experiences of timelessness—such as when we see something breathtakingly beautiful or hear a piece of music that seems to raise us into that seems to raise us into eternity—is to hang on to the experience of forever. Those who have been personally confronted by an illuminated mortal with the Quest of the God and reject it to continue their quest of the ego instead, are destined to suffer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
On hearing a Symphony of Ruben de Ronde called Save Me I thought the of the sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease! Reject me not into the World again. And again in God’s World: O World, I cannot hold thee close enough! Lord, I do fear. Thou has made the World too beautiful this years; my soul is all but out of me—let fall. No burning leaf: prithee, let no bird call. The warning which Light on the Path gives to disciples, but if thou look not for one, if thou pass one by, then there is no safeguard for thee. Thy brain will reel, thy heart grow uncertain, and in the dust of the battlefield thy sight and senses will fail, and thou wilt not know thy friends from thy enemies—this warning is apposite here and should be taken deeply to heart. Necessity will with time force this comprehension on them. Prophets and teachers will disclose this truth to them but if they do not listen then hard experience must disclose it. The void may seem to be contact with pure being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, awareness that there is a beckoning path to pure being even though none of us gets very far on it. The concentration on the spaces between words, the intervals, the pauses in life—these yield the touch of ecstasy. However, the moment formulation in words occurs, the no thing becomes a something. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Obviously, one listens with care to any message that may be formulated in moments like these, and one need not worry too much about its origin. It may be interpreted as coming from one’s deeper self, or from the various autosuggestions that occur, or from contact with the being of the Universe. The last may be experiences as a glimpse of Go—assuming that God is conceived as the ground of being and meaning in the Universe. At this point I feel, as I gotten have, what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. How long can a mortal withstand this silent call of the God within one? –as long as one’s hopes and desires can find some measure of satisfaction, as long as frustration does not crush them, or until destiny itself overrides one’s indifference and compels one to heed it. The Call of the Quest once heard may be lost for a while, even a long while, but it will return. The need of truth is an irrepressible one but it may take a long time to come through in all its force and clarity. One is left free to save or destroy oneself, to accept the truth or turn one’s face away from it. “Learn wisdom in thy youth; yes, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yes, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.35,36. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Human Beings are Given More than One Chance to Redeem themselves for Such is the Mercy of the Higher Power!
If you follow your conscience, you do what you want. However, it was simpler than that. I wanted you to have the wealth I gave you. I wanted you…to be happy. I lighted the torch on the wall, and went out for a moment to breathe the fresh air. Then leaving gates and doors unlocked behind me, and went up stairs to watch the twilight melt from the sky. An hour must have passed. The azure light faded, the stars rose. A friend responded to my question as to how he was with these words: “I have got a cold, I did not sleep much last night, everything is going wrong.” My friend went on: “The people who argue that the psyche and the ego are identical are wrong. My ego is in bad shape; my psyche is fine.” All through history human beings have wrestled with the fact that each of us experiences two aspects of selfhood which are never fully separated from each other. One of these aspects is the ego-self. This has the functions Dr. Freud rightly assigned to it: beleaguered monarch thought it is, it keeps, as best it can, some harmony in the different sections of its kingdom. It judges the demands of reality, balances preconscious ideas, and sifts out unacceptable unconscious impulses so that the person can live with some unity. The ego-self is related to the instincts and bodily well-being. A number (though not all) of the concerns about wounded prestige, suffering slights, I would assign to this ego-self. The ego-self’s question is some form of “Do I get what I want?” Hence, its associated with the term egocentricity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The other aspect is the psyche-self, which seeks to see life steadily and its it whole. The psyche-self is concerned with the context of freedom. The heightened consciousness of which we speak from time to time is a function of the psyche-self. It is the aspect that scans the various possibilities of the self; it is the locus of what we call essential freedom. When Christopher Burney, during the five years in solitary confinement in Germany in World War II, set himself to review everything he had been taught in school in order to keep from going psychotic, he was using not the ego-self, but the source of purpose that transcends the ego, which is the psyche-self. The ego-self is correlated with freedom of doing, the psyche-self with freedom of being. When it is pointed out again and again that freedom depends on how the self relates itself to itself at every moment, one is speaking of the psyche-self in relation to the ego. The self relating to itself was the aspect of selfhood that Dr. Freud never understood. About his therapeutic practice we find Dr. Freud writing, “analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other.” This refers to freedom, but it omits the function most concerned with this freedom—namely, the self relating to itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is a curious phenomenon in human selfhood that I have noticed in my clients and in myself that I call the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot is the device on passenger planes to which the pilot can shift the directing of the plane when, on a long flight, he or she needs to rest. A client, for example, will be intensely anxious about a confrontation one must have with some other person or about a difficult phone call one mast make. Finally, one gets one’s courage up and goes ahead to do these anxiety-laden acts. One is surprised to discover that they turn out much better than one anticipated. There seems to be some unexpected assistance, some power that one did not know one possessed. From a Freudian point of view, it would be asserted that the help of which one was not aware comes from the client’s preconscious; and in Jungianism, it would probably be interpreted as a voice from the unconscious. I call such assistance a function of the psyche-self. The implication is that we, whether we are patients in therapy or not, can rightfully trust ourselves on those deeper dimensions which I have called the psyche-self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
In the welter of self-distrust in which we generally find ourselves these days (covered up as it is by neonarcisscism, techniques of assertiveness, and advice to stand up for yourself), we can bank on more power, more capacity than mist of us give ourselves credit for. This upsurging of strength and energy which we did not know we has is an example of the working of destiny through the psyche-self. However, it is required at the same time that we confront our despair and our anxiety rather than suppressing them; otherwise the despair and anxiety will take over in the moment when we need their opposites. The automatic pilot is partially an influence from Eastern mysticism, particularly Zen Buddhism and its offshorts. It is the phenomena of letting go and letting be. The awareness of the duality of selfhood enables us to correct a radical misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism and other Eastern psychoreligions with regard to transcending the self. There is a passion among some groups in America to lose oneself, to escape from oneself, to get free of oneself. It is significant that this passion came along with, or followed closely, the age of narcissism and the preoccupation with self-sentiments. The “me” decade followed hard upon the Zen decade. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
These two phases, me decade and Zen decade, sound contradictory—and they are on paper. However, their proximity shows that they had in common the same longing to escape from oneself. People in search of a drug would ask a friend, “Do you have any uppers?” or if the answer was no, “Do you have any downers?” It did not matter whether the result one got was elation or depression. At least one got free of oneself. The rushing after Zen and the narcissism was thus often to be found in the same person. There was no distinction between the constructive self-concern of a person and the self-concern of one who leaps after one gimmick one weekend and after another gimmick the next weekend. This leaping often leads not only to temporary elation, but to eventual confusion and despair. The loss of the self, I believe is a misnomer. The misunderstanding of the Zen Buddhist goal of freedom from the self actually leads to a more subtle kind of narcissism. One’s own pushiness, one’s demands, one’s egocentricity may still be present; only the person now rationalizes them in terms of nonselfullness. We cannot help noting the exemplars of Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation and other forms of psychoreligion are not without any self; the idea is abused. They are relieved of one phase of the self—namely, what I have called the ego-self. However, they seek to discover in the psyche-self a new clarity, a freshness, a sense of immediacy and of eternity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The self we transcend in Zen Buddhism and meditation is the ego-self. The ecstasy we experience is the freedom from the concerns of the ego-self, a process of dumping rubbish of the self, followed by the pre-eminent presence, however temporary, of the psyche-self. One gains power over an incubus by addressing it by its real name. Similarly, the It-World that but now seemed to dwarf mortal’s small strength with its uncanny power has to yield to anyone who recognizes its true nature: the particularization and alienation of that out of whose abundance, welling up close by, every Earthly You emerges to confront us—that which appeared to us at times as great and terrible as the mother goodness, but nevertheless always motherly. However, how can we muster the strength to address the incubus by one’s right name as long as a ghost lurks inside us—that I that has been robbed of its actuality? How can the buried power to relate be resurrected in a being in which a vigorous ghost appears hourly to stamp down the debris under which this power lies? How is a being to collect itself as long as the mania of one’s detached I-hood chases it ceaselessly around an empty circle? If caprice is one’s dwelling place, how is anyone to behold one’s freedom? #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom. However, freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the nightmare of the World, get along with each other, living next door and avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eye, madly, and the confession erupts from both that they are unredeemed. How much intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least conceal this occurrence! Free is the mortal that wills without caprice. One believes in the actual, which is to say: one believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. One believes in destiny and also that is needs one. It does not lead one, it waits for one. One must proceed toward it without knowing where it waits for one. One must go forth with one’s whole being: that one knows. It will not turn out the way one’s resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come only if one resolves to do that which one can will. One must sacrifice one’s little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to one’s great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Now one no longer interferes, nor does one merely allow things to happen. One listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the World, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to be actualized by one—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. One believes, I said; but this implies: he encounters. The capricious mortal does not believe and encounter. One does not know association; one only knows the feverish World out there and one’s feverish desire to use it. We only have to give use an ancient, classical name, and it walks among the gods. When you say You, he means: You, my ability to use! And what one calls one’s destiny is merely an embellishment of and a sanction for one’s ability to use. In truth one has no destiny but is merely determined by things and drives, feels autocratic, and is capricious. One has no great will and tires to pass off caprice in its place. For sacrifice one lacks all capacity, however much one may talk of it, and you may recognize it by noting that one never becomes concrete. One constantly interferes, in order “to let it happen.” How, one says to you, could one fail to assist destiny? How could one not employ all feasible means required for such an end? That is how one see those who are free; one cannot seem them differently. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the free mortal does not have an end here and then fetch the means from there; one has only one thing: always only one’s resolve to proceed toward one’s destiny. Having made this resolve, one will renew it at every fork in the road; and one would sooner believe that one was not really alive than one would believe that the resolve of the great will was insufficient and required the support of means. One believes; one encounters. However, the unbelieving marrow of the capricious mortal cannot perceive anything but unbelief and caprice, positing ends and devising means. One’s World is devoid of sacrifice and grace, encounter and present, but shot through with ends and means: it could not be different and its name is doom. For all one’s autocratic bearing, one is inextricably entangled in unreality; and one becomes aware of this whenever one recollects one’s own condition. Therefore one takes pains to use the best parts of one’s mind to prevent or at least obscure such recollection of one’s falling off, of the deactualized and the actual I, were permitted to reach down to the roots that mortals calls despair and from which self-destruction and rebirth grow, this would be the beginning of the return. “Jesus Christ was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him,” reports II Corinthians 1.19,20. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A change in his traveling plans and the angry reaction of the Corinthian Christians to this change is used by Paul for profound and far-reaching assertions about Jesus “the Christ”: “In hi it is always Yes, he is not Yes and No.” This reminds us by contrast of the words of a great Protestant mystic who has said that in Yes and No all things consist, and of philosophers and theologians who are convinced that truth can only be expressed through No and Yes, and above all of Paul’s own central doctrines that God justifies the sinner, that he says “yes” to one whom he says a radical ‘”no” at the same time. And does not Paul in this second letter to Corinthians formulate the Yes and No in a most paradoxical way: “Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live, having nothing yet possessing every.” This certainly is Yes and No. However, in the Christ, he says, there is not Yes and No. Really not? Do we not come from Good Friday to Easter, which point to the deepest No and the highest Yes—that of the death and life of Christ? Yes and No: This certainly is the law of all life, but not Yes alone and not No alone. Yes alone is the advice of a self-deceiving confidence which soon will be shaken by the No of the three gray figures: emptiness, guilt, death. No alone is the advice of a self-deceiving despair whose hidden Yes to itself is manifest in its self-seclusion and its resistance against the Yes of love and communion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And further, Yes and No is the law of truth. Not Yes alone and not No alone! Yes alone is the arrogance which claims that its limited truth is the ultimate truth, but which reveals by its fanatical self-affirmation how many hidden No’s are present in its ground. No alone is the resignation which denies any ultimate truth but which shows by its self-complacent irony against the biting power of every word of truth how strong the Yes to itself is that underlies its ever-repeated No. Truth as well as life unite Yes and No, and only the courage which accepts the infinite tension between Yes and No can have abundant life and ultimate truth. How is such a courage possible? It is possible because there is a Yes above the Yes and No of life and of truth. However, it is a Yes which is not ours. If it were ours, even our greatest, our most universal and most courageous Yes, it would be contrasted by another No. This is the reason why no theology and no philosophy, not even a theology or philosophy of “Yes and No” is ultimate truth. In the moment in which it is expressed, it is contradicted by another philosophy and another theology. Not even the message of Yes and No, be it said by Kierkegaard or by Luther or by Paul, can escape its No. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
There is only one reality where there is not Yes and No but only Yes: Jesus as the Christ. First he also stands under the No, as completely as a being can stand; this is the meaning of the Cross. Everything of Christ which is only the expression of a finite life or a finite truth stands with all life and all truth under the No. Therefore, we are not asked to accept Christ as the unquestionable teacher or as the always fitting example, but we are told that in Christ all promises of God have become real, and that in Christ a life and truth which is beyond Yes and No has become manifest. This is the meaning of Resurrection. The No of death is conquered and the Yes of life is transcended by that which has appeared in Christ. A life which is not balanced by death, a truth which is not balanced by error is visible in Christ’s being. Christ shows the final Yes without another No. This is the Easter message; this is the Christian message altogether. And this is the ground of a courage which can stand the infinite tension between Yes and No in everything finite, even in everything religious and in everything Christian. Paul points to the fact that Christian say Amen through Christ. One cannot say Amen to anything expect the reality which is the Christ. Amen is the formula of confirmation, the expression of ultimate certitude. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is no ultimate certitude expect the life which has conquered its death and the truth which as conquered its death and the truth which has conquered its error, the Yes which is beyond Yes and No. Paul points to that which gives us such a certainty: It is not an historical report, but it is the participation in Christ, in whom we are established, as he says who has given us the guarantee of his Spirit in our hearts. We can stand the Yes and No of life and truth because we participate in the Yes beyond Yes and No, because we are in it, as it is in us. We are participants of Christ’s resurrection; therefore, we can say the ultimate Yes, the Amen beyond our Yes and our No. How many people thing and say that when their material fortunes improve, or their family problems are solved, or their living place is changed they will be able to give time and effort to the spiritual quest, but until then they must wait! However, in actual fact this seldom happens. For when the improvement, solution, or change does take place, new matters call for their attention or new attachments are formed for the ego, and so the spiritual effort gets postponed again. Those who believe that it is better to wait for more propitious circumstances before they begin the Quest, deceive themselves into an unavailing and lugubrious pessimism. Neither tomorrow nor the next year will be any better. Procrastination my be perilous. Later may be too late. Beware of being drawn into that vast cemetery wherein mortals bury their half-born aspiration and paralysed hopes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Many Business People Love Monday as it is an Escape from Having Nothing Planned, Nothing Scheduled!
We heard the presence very sharply after that, as we explored the churches, then again it was gone. We climbed belfries to survey our kingdom, and afterwards huddled in crowded coffeehouses for a little while merely to feel and smell the mortals around us, to exchange secret glances, to laugh softly, tete-a-tete. That form of the pause which we call leisure is also, curiously enough, both desired and feared. Unbonded leisure can turn people’s lives into chaos, which those people can then blame on excessive freedom. Persons who despair about such problems as delinquency, truancy, alcoholism, drugs, often point to too much leisure as the villain of piece. These people believe that the devil indeed has work for idle hands. The word leisure can be read as freedom or pausing. This is why American leisure has to be filled with named games, organized recreation, labelled hobbies, planned activities. And this is why the have to is often paradoxically freeing. Observing the sharp dilemma people are thrown into by leisure time, we ask: What is this apparent fear of leisure? In America we have traditionally associated freedom, especially in the form of leisure, with space. There was always some new, unexplored space to go to. Land was free. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
However, we cannot enter the private dwellings of mortals now to search for the clothes we need, even if we can hear a house is empty, we cannot move swiftly through the streets, with our eyes on the windows of the darkened mansions, and steal one of the rings off a sleeping woman’s hands. Therefore, America the free is not this is not true in a literal sense nearly as much as it used to be, the concept is still very much a part of our American Legend, American Dream, and Americana. Unfortunately, the Native Americas were never considered as owning the space or land. Freedom of the land was recognized as the fundamental freedom, from which other freedom was derived. We expressed our freedom of the body by moving to a new space. So we remained extroverts, concerned with our muscle. Hence, the great outcry, and near panic, with gasoline shortage. People interpreted it as having their freedom to travel, to move, taken away from them, thus enslaving them. In Europe, on the contrary, all spaces has been exploded for a long time, and is now apportioned out and owned by somebody. So the Europeans’ emphasis has been on time. Europeans cultivated the introvert side, turned inward, free in their imaginations and thought to travel all over the World. Freedom meant freedom of the mind in contrast to the body. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
However, in American this leaves us with a problem. We no longer can simply pack up and move to another house, typically farther west. When our freedom essentially means what we do with our leisure, freedom then turns out to be a vacuum. There is no being in it; it is a “no thing.” This becomes clear in psychoanalysis. There is something called “Sunday neuroses,” the anxiety that subtly eats away at business people on Sunday when nothing is planned, nothing scheduled. These business people are filled with anxiety and stoically endure the passage of time until Monday morning when they can go back to work and again become occupied. (What a graphic phrase, “become occupied,” implying that something outside ourselves takes over and occupies us!) Does this version of freedom, with it dependence on the pre-planned and its main emphasis on the capacity of the self, engender creativity, originality, spontaneity? My own opinion is that it does not; that indefiniteness and randomness, the recognition of the pauses are all essential to creativity. I enthusiastically agree. If the person is to be open to one’s creative impulses, randomness, the recognition of the pauses, and the confronting of leisure rather than destroying it by excessive planning are essential. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The pause is the essence of creativity, let alone of originality and spontaneity. One cannot avail oneself of the richness of precociousness or unconsciousness unless one can let oneself periodically relax, be relieved of tension. It is then that the person lets the silences speak. There is value to the analyst when a patient misses an hour. If the analyst is the creative type, this empty hour is of the essence. Therefore, it is true that unstructured freedom is difficult for most people to confront for long periods. However, there are happy mediums, and the use of leisure falls in that category. The constructive limits to our freedom are given by what we are committed to and by the myths we live by. Then there can be meaning to leisure. We can use it for random thinking, reverie, or for simply wandering around a new city for a time. Yes, the time may be wasted. However, who is to say that this wasted time may not bring us our most important ideas or new experiences, new visions, that are invaluable? The letting be and letting happen may turn out to be the most significant thing one can do. The sickness of our age is unlike that of any other and yet belongs with the sicknesses of all. The history of cultures is not a stadium of eons in which one runner after another must cover the same circle of death, cheerfully and unconsciously. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
A nameless path leads through their ascensions and declines. It is not a path of progress and development. It is a descent through the spirals of the spiritual underworld but could also be called an ascent to the innermost, subtlest, most intricate turn that knows no Beyond and even less any Backward but only the unheard of return—the breakthrough. Shall we have to follow this path all the way to the end, to the test of the final darkness? However, where there is danger what saves grows, too. The biologistic and the historiosophical orientations of this age, which made so much their differences, have combined to produce a faith in doom that is more obdurate and anxious than any such faith has ever been. It is no longer the power of karma nor the power of the stars that rules mortal’s lot ineluctably; many different forces claim this dominion, but upon closer examination it appears that most of our contemporaries believe in a medley of forces, as the late Romans believed in a medley of gods. The nature of these claims facilitates such a faith. Whether it is the law of life—a universal struggle in which everybody must either join the fight or renounce life—or the psychological law according to which innate drives constitute the entire human soul; or the social law of an inevitable social process that is merely accompanied by will and consciousness; or the cultural law of an unalterably uniform genesis and decline of historical forms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Or, whatever variation there may be: the point is always that mortals are yoked into an inescapable process that one cannot resist, though one may be deluded enough to try. From the compulsion of the stars the ancient mysteries offered liberation; from the compulsion of karma, the Christian sacrifice, accompanied by insight. Both were preparations for salvation. However, the medley idol does not tolerate any faith in liberation. It is considered foolish to imagine any freedom; one is supposed to have nothing but he choice between resolute and hopelessly rebellious slavery. Although all these laws are frequently associated with long discussions of teleological development and organic evolution, all of them are based on the obsession with some running down, which involves unlimited causality. The strict and rigid doctrines of a gradual running down represents mortal’s abdication in the face of the proliferating It-World. Here the name of fate is misused: fate is no bell that has been jammed down over mortals; nobody encounters it, except those who started out from freedom. However, the strict and rigid doctrines of some running down leaves no room for freedom or for its most real revelation whose tranquil strength changes the countenance of the Earth: returning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The strict and rigid doctrines do not know the human being who overcomes the Universal struggle by returning; who tears the web of drives, by returning; who rises above the spell of one’s class by returning; who by returning stirs up, rejuvenates, and changes the secure historical forms. The strict and rigid doctrines of running down offers you only one choice as you face its game: to observe the rules or drop out. However, one that returns knocks over the mortals on the board. The strict and rigid doctrines will at most permit you to carry out conditionality with your life and to remain free in your soul. However, that one returns considers this freedom the most ignominious slavery. Nothing can doom mortals but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return. The belief in doom is a delusion from the start. The scheme of running down is appropriate only for ordering that which is nothing-but-having-become, the severed World-event, objecthood as history. The presence of the You, that which is born of association, is not accessible to this approach, which does not know the actuality of spirit; and this scheme is not valid for spirit. Divination based on objecthood is valid only for those who do not know presentness. Whoever is overpowered by the It-World must consider the strict and rigid moral doctrines of an ineluctable running down as a truth that creates a clearing in the jungle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
In truth, these strict and rigid doctrines only leads one deeper into slavery of the It-World. However, the World of the You is not locked up. Whoever proceeds toward it, concentrating one’s whole being, with one’s power to relate resurrected, behold one’s freedom. And to gain freedom from the belief is unfreedom is to gain freedom. And Jesus cried out and said, “One who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And one who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the World, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge one; for I did not come to judge the World but to say the World. One who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be one’s judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me,” reports John 12.44-50. “He who believes in me, believes not in me but in one who sent me.” These words follow a bitter complaint of the evangelist about the unbelief and half-belief of the people and their leaders. The words are introduced by the phrase: “Jesus cried out . . .” He is making an almost desperate effort to be understood. And what Jesus cries out is that the believing in him means not believing in him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The argument of the unbelievers was—and is in all periods—that it is impossible to believe in Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus declares: “This argument is valid. If people are asked to believe in me, they should not do so. However, they are not asked any such thing! They are asked to believe in one who has sent me, who is greater than I and with whom I am one. I have spoken on my own authority,” Jesus continues. “If I did so, the unbelievers would be right.” There are many authorities in past and present. Why accept one and not another? Why accept any authority? As Jesus the man Jesus is neither an authority nor an object of faith. None of his superior qualities—neither his religious life, nor his moral perfection, nor his profound insights—make him an object of faith or the ultimate authority. On this basis, Jesus say, he does not judge anyone. If he did, he would be a tyrant who imposes himself and his greatness on others, thus destroying instead of saving them. What about our preaching? When we use the name of Jesus, do we not often try to force upon those to whom we are speaking and upon ourselves something great besides God? Do we always make it clear that believing in Christ does not mean believing in him? If not, are we not working for destruction more than for salvation? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It seems that the Christian painters knew more about this than we often do. They did not present a picture of Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus of Nazareth. They painted him as the infant of Bethlehem who contains the whole Universe, though lying now in Mary’s lap. Through Christ’s infantile traits shines the power of the Lord of the World. Or they painted Christ as the visible bearer of the divine majesty in those great mosaics where every piece of his grown is transparent for the infinite depth he represents and expresses. Or they painted him as the Crucified who does not suffer as an individua man, but as he who stands for both the suffering Universe and the divine love which participates in its suffering. Or they painted him as the bringer of the new aeon who controls the powers of nature, the souls of mortals, the demonic forces of disease, insanity, and death. However, they did not give Christ individual traits, did not make him a representative of a psychological type or of a sociological group. Look at the pictures of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo gave a special character to every prophet, to every sibyl. However, when he painted Jesus as the ultimate judge, only an irresistible divine-human power appears. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When in our time Jesus became an object of biographical and psychological essays and was portrayed as a fanatic and neurotic, or as a pious sufferer, or as a social benefactor, or as a moral example, or as a religious teacher, or as a mass leader—he ceased to be the one in whom we can believe, for he ceased to be the one in whom we do not believe, if we believe in him. He was no longer Jesu who is the Christ. We cannot pray to anyone except to God. If Jesus is someone besides God, we cannot and should not pray to him. Many Christians, many among us, cannot find a way of joining honestly with those who pray to Jesus Christ. Something in us is reluctant, something which is genuine and valid, the fear of becoming idolatrous, the fear of being split in our ultimate loyalty, the fear of looking at two faces instead of at the one divine face. However, one who sees him see the Father. There are no two faces. In the face of Jesus the Christ, God makes his face to shine upon us. For nothing is left in the face of Jesus the Christ which is only Jesus of Nazareth, which is the only face of one individual besides others. Everything in his countenance is transparent to him who has sent him. Therefore, and therefore alone, can we sing at Christmas-time: “O come, let us adore him.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The word mystic is not the perfect one to convey my meaning, but it is at least the handiest one. It as been so ill-used that spouters of the errant nonsense have taken shelter under its roof whilst oracles of the loftiest wisdom have not hesitated to call themselves by this name. The partisan approach to this name has caused it to become either an abusive or else an adulatory word rather than a precise description. Whereas some use it in contempt, others use in it praise! Again, how many are scared by its very sound! When they hear the word mysticism uttered, there are even persons who feel a shiver run down their back! It has been stated that they who do not feel in possession of enough strength or desire to tread the ultimate path need not do so, and that if they remember and sometimes read about it even this will yield good fruit in time. We have been asked to be more explicit on this point. We deeply sympathize with all those who do not feel inclined to tackle the mental austerities involved in the ultimate path. If, however, they will just dip into its intellectual study from time to time, a little here this week and a little there next week, without even making their reading continuous and connected, there will slowly take shape in their minds an outline of some of the main tenets of this teaching. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
And however vague this outline may be it will be immeasurably better than the blank ignorance which covers the rest of humankind like a shroud. These new ideas will assume the characteristics of seeds, which under the water of the student’s own aspiration and the Sunshine of visible and invisible forces, will grow gradually into fruitful understandings and deeds. For the karmic consequences of such interest will be one day birth into a family where every opportunity for advancement will be found. At least it has aroused them to awareness that there is such a thing: they have later the chance to think about it, still later to try it, and perhaps in the end to appreciate it. The ideal may appeal, coming as it does from God, but the ego will put up obstacles, resistances, to its realization. The images of the Ideal formed in the early years of adulthood may get broken or smudged or even lost. The clamour from outside—by which I do not mean heard noise alone—is so insistent that the summons from inside is seldom heard or, if heard at all, is taken to be a summons to culture, art, poetry, and music perhaps or to intellect and its development. This dream of eventual illumination will haunt the background of one’s own mind as a hope to be fulfilled in some far-off future life. One is too aware of one’s own weakness to bring it into the foreground. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Wide Unclasp the Tables of Their Thoughts—These Same Thoughts, People, this Little World
It was time to go out, time to test my powers. After all there had not been a case of witchcraft in a hundred years, the last that I knew f being the trial of La Voisin, a fortune-teller, bunt alive in the time of Louis the Sun King. All the houses, built by Cresleigh Homes in Rocklin, California, looked like dollhouses to me in their completeness. They reminded me of baby Winchester Mansions. Perfect collections of toys with their dainty little wooden chairs and polished mantelpieces, mended curtains and well-scrubbed floors. I saw all this as one who had never been a part of life, gazing lovingly at the simplest details. A starched white apron on its hook, worn boots on the hearth, a pitcher beside a bed. And the people . . . oh, the people were marvels. I was reflecting on my time at the Winchester Mansion, after the passing of Mrs. Winchester in 1922, we opened one of the safes, and I was flabbergasted by what I saw there. The safe was crammed with gems and gold and silver. There were countless jeweled rings, diamond necklaces, ropes of pearls, plate and coins and hundreds upon hundreds of miscellaneous valuables. I ran my fingers lightly over the heap and then held up handfuls of it, gasping as the light ignited the red rubies, the green of the emeralds. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I saw refractions of color of which I have never dreamed, and wealth beyond any calculation. It was the fabled Caribbean pirates’ chest, the proverbial king’s ransom. And it was mine now. More slowly I examined it. Scattered throughout were personal and perishable articles. Satin mask rotting away from their trimming of gold, lace handkerchiefs and bits of cloth to which were fixed pins and brooches. Here was a strip of leather harness hung with gold bells, a moldering bit of lace slipped through a ring, snuffboxes by the dozen, lockets on velvet ribbon. Had Mrs. Winchester been collecting this all her life? I lifted up a jewel-encrusted sword, far too heavy for these times, and a worn slipper saved perhaps for its rhinestone buckle. There were other objects scattered about in this treasure. Rosaries made up gorgeous gems, and they still had their crucifixes! I touched the small sacred images. Perplexity is leavened by extravagant Victorian beauty scattered along each crooked path of exploration in this 160-room catacomb. Regularly each night Mrs. Winchester dined in lonely splendor, table set with a $774,387.88 solid-gold dinner service. And each night she counted every piece as it was put away in one of the mansion’s six huge safes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
I think I was on the verge of deceiving her, of creating some strong emanation of contentment with all the powers I had. I would tell mortal lies with immortal skills. I would start talking and talking and testing my every word to make it perfect. However, something happened in the silence. I do not think I stood still more than a moment, but something changed inside of me. An awesome shift took place. In one instant I saw a vast and terrifying possibility, and in that same instant, without question, I made up my mind. It had no words to it or scheme or plan. And I would have denied it had anyone questioned me at that moment. I would have said, “No, never farthest from my thoughts. What do you think I am, what sort of monster” . . . And yet the choice had been made. I understood something absolute. The relation between creativity and pause is as close as it is startling. Not only does one get one’s original ideas in the pause—Albert Einstein got his while shaving. Henri Poincare, French Mathematician, got his while walking by the sea; others get theirs in dreams at night—but the capacity to pause is woven all through the creative production itself. The pause is an active, nimble, often intense state, as when an Olympic diver, Jennifer Abel or Tom Daley, pauses at the end of the diving board until that precise hundredth of a second when every muscle is tensed in harmony. And at that instant one dives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The creative person stands in a state of openness, heightened sensitivity, incubating the creative idea, with a sharpened readiness to grasp the creative impulse when it is born. The phrase “inviting the Muses,” which is a part of the occupation in the pause, is an active yearning, an imploring, the authenticity of which is demonstrated by the hours of hard work the creative person puts in before and after the insight. While writing this essay, I went to the nearby coast one Sunday hoping to do a sketch. Afterward, I wrote some notes about the experience: I walk about on the shore in a mood of readiness, openness, asking myself, Where is the scene that grasps me? This red cliff with that water behind it or that boulder with the other rocks in front of the ocean? I continue looking until I have the special feeling that a particular scene seizes me. I see it; and though I do not think of this consciously, I see it in a way that no one has ever seen it before. I think only: “This I like, this turns me on.” When I start painting: The colors flow into each other . . . my muscles react . . . I make this line going off in the direction, another great rock on the paper . . . the colors form almost as though they had their own plan in mind . . . the World is born anew in the painting. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Not only did no one ever see this scene before as I do now [everyone sees every scene differently] but I find a new picture coming to birth, new to me as well as others, in the flowing of the colors into each other, new in that the combination makes a different effect from what I have expected. We see how important are such terms as “readiness,” “openness.” In these active pauses, we see the work of destiny born in the unpredictable flowing of colors. Hence so much of creativity seems accidental. However, the artist, whether one be scientific inventor or painter or writer or what not, is the one who can most often put oneself in readiness for the “accident.” True, the picture comes out differently from what one expects. However, knowing one can never predict for the “lucky accident.” This means that “accident” is not the right term: rather, a myriad of different possibilities exist, and out of these one is born. Our capacity to appreciate is already a kind of creativity which shows the activity in the pause. Our appreciative listening to Mozart, Aaliyah, Bach, our concerned reading of Aeschylus, is our creative contribution. The listening and the seeing are what is important; hence, Frederick Franck in his book on Zen painting entitled it, very rightly, The Zen of Seeing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Indeed, it takes listeners, actual or imaginary and partakes of the creative act by virtue of the fact that writing poetry or prose or music dramas would not be possible without a real or imagined audience, whether an author writes for people of one’s own century (like most of us) or for later centuries (like Soren Kierkegaard). The presence of the pause is very clear in Henri Matisse’s paintings in his use of space—which is a synonym for pause. Ben Shahn tells, in his description of creativity, of one day taking his daughter out to his studio with him to make a mock-up book out of one color, rejected it, pondered another, put it aside, and so on for half an hour. When they came back into the house, the little girl asked her mother, “Why can’t Daddy make up his mind?” Ben Shahn goes on to explain that the artist is the one who has the courage to pause, to be suspended for a certain duration in midair. And even though in our technological culture such doubts may appear on the surface to imply weakness, this pausing is really a sign of an inner richness of discriminatory powers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
There is a phrase among artists, “negative space,” which stands for space not noticed by the usual viewer. On a Rorschach record, “negative space” is the white area surrounding the black or colored. Many people who take the Rorschach never notice or remark on the white spaced—it is simply “surrounding.” Those who do, who see many white spaced may be adjudged “stubborn” on the test because they are preoccupied with the opposite to what most people point out. This is an interesting commentary on the conformist tendencies in our culture to see artist and musicians as a bit strange and to see the pause as an anomaly. I want to make clear that the common misconception that the creative person is passive is just that—a misconception. The creative person is receptive. I agree entirely with Archibald MacLeish when he quotes a Chinses poet, “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being. We knock upon silence for an answering music.” Archibald MacLeish continues, “The ‘Being’ which the poem is to contain derives from ‘Non-being,’ not from the poet. And the ‘music’ which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the silence; comes in answer to our knock.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The creative act has always been a paradox, and it probably will always be one. Practically everybody trying to explain it, especially the psychoanalysts who propose that creativity is “regression in the service of the ego,” find they crash upon the rocks of their inability to distinguish between passivity and receptivity. The creative persons are the latter; they are certainly not the former. We do not know from what combination in the brain cells and synapses the creative ideas spring. However, we do know that creativity requires freedom, and the pause is the way to give that creative combination the chance to work. Pausing is wondering, and wonder is first cousin to creativity. Poetry for me is the space between the words. A poet is a poet when he or she can create that tension between words—a tension created by spaces—that lift the reader would add, of intense or mild ecstasy—standing mentally outside oneself. These new experiences of splendor or wonder or just plain insight have their start in the poem, but they leap out into the reader’s conception of his own private World. Creativity comes not only out of our moments or hours or weeks of effort; it requires—and this is essential—the moments or hours or weeks of pause between the effort. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The pause is that situation in which symbols are formed. The intensity of handling all the stimuli that come at us requires the symbol. How are we to assess these stimuli, how are we to judge them, to weight them—all of which must be done before one can throw one’s strength toward this response rather than that one, to employ our simplest paradigm of freedom? The term symbol comes from two Greek words, sym meaning “with” and bollen meaning “to throw.” The symbol is, thus, that which throws or brings together these antimonies into one image, one form. The vitality of the situation is preserved for as long as the symbol continues to exist. We surely cannot handle all these stimuli by computer; we cannot add and subtract and in other mathematical ways try to fashion them into a decision. In a technological problem one can do this. However, when one tries to turn human decisions—such as whom shall I marry—over to the machine and tried to abstract oneself out of the picture, one becomes more and more mechanical, less and less personal and human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Lo and behold, the warmth has gone out of the situation, the vitality lost, the personal characteristics fled, and the person talking to you experiences you as less and less a person and more and more a machine. This is similar to talking with brain-injured patients in a mental hospital: they understand all the words you use, but cannot go behind the words to understand you as the person speaking. A human being is normal communication speaks in symbols, and if these are not grasped—and they are not by the brain-injured—the person is not understood. Al vital words carry some residue of their origin as symbols. In a human problem, the pattern is all-important and personal likes and dislikes are crucial. The response, to which you throw your weight, will not be only a conclusion, but will also be a commitment with its own power. Many factors need to be taken into consideration, some of which are only partially conscious. In such personal questions there is no decision which is right, but only approximately so. We have to keep the different factors all alive, like a juggler with a dozen balls in the air; we cannot avoid some factors without doing damage to the totality. What ideally happens is that these stimuli begin to fit into a pattern, a whole, a totality, a form that preserves the kernel and the value of each one. This is the symbol. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Take, for example, the apparently simply stimuli that arise around the concept of patriotism. There is the call of one’s homeland; the fact that our forefathers fought in 1776 to construct this nation; the feeling of comradeship with people who speak the same language; and a million and one other facts and memories acting as stimuli. You hit upon a banner, and you call it a flag. The flag does not leave out any of the above meanings; it expresses the multitude of meanings in a compact, dynamic symbol. The elements that are forged and united into symbol in this pause which we have made the center of freedom come from many sources. They are from past and present, individual and group, consciousness and unconsciousness, and they are both rational and irrational. All of these antimonies are brought together in the pattern which is the symbol. The symbol keeps them alive and vital. Every great culture that embraces more then one people when a response is made to a You, an essential act of the spirit. Reinforced by the energy of subsequent generations that points in the same direction, this creates a distinctive conception of the cosmos in the spirit; only this does a human cosmos become possible again and again; only now can a mortal again and again build houses of worship and human houses in a distinctive conception of space and from a confident soul—and full vibrant time with new hymns and songs and give the human community itself a form. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, only as long as one possesses this essential act in one’s own life, acting and suffering, only as long as oneself enters into the relation is one free and thus creative. When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-World which is broken only intermittently by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits. From that point on, common causality, which hitherto was never able to disturb the spiritual conception of the cosmos, grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. Wise, masterful fate which, as long as it was attuned to the abundance of meaning in the cosmos, held sway over all causality, has become transformed into demonic absurdity and has collapsed into causality. The same karma that appeared to earlier generations as a beneficial dispensation-for our deeds in this life raise us into higher sphere in the next—now is seen as tyranny for the deeds of a former life of which we are unconscious have imprisoned us in a dungeon from which we cannot escape in this life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Where the meaningful law of Heaven is used to arch, with the spindle of necessity hanging from its bright vault, the meaningless, tyrannical power of the planets now holds sway. It used to be merely a matter of entering Dike, the Heavenly path that aimed t be ours, too, and one could live with a free heart in the total measure of destiny. Now we feel, whatever we do, the compulsion of heimarmene, a stranger to spirit who bends every neck with the burden of the dead mass of the World. The craving for redemption grows by leaps and bounds and remains unsatisfied in the end, in spite of all kinds of experiments, until it is finally assuaged by one who teaches mortals how to escape from the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God. Such accomplishments issue from a new encounter that becomes substantial, a new response of one human being to one’s You, an event that comes to determine fate. The repercussions of such a central essential act may include the supersession of one culture by another that is devoted to this ray, but it is also possible for a culture to be thus renewed. The yearning for spiritual light wells up in the heart spontaneously. It is a natural one. However, desires, egoism, and materialism cover it for so long a time that it seems unreal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 