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Blessed are the Eyes Which See the things that We See–We Can Exercise Our Freedom Even Against Destiny!
I was too anxious and miserable to play with them! I was too dazed. I shouted the old questions, “Who are you, speak to me!” The glass panes rattled in the nearby windows. Mortals stirred in their little chambers. There was no cemetery here. “Answer me, you pack of cowards. Speak if you have a voice or once and for all get away from me!” And then I knew, though how I knew, I cannot tell you, that they could hear me and they could answer me, if they chose. And I knew that what I had always heard was the irrepressible evidence of their proximity and their intensity, which they could not disguise. However, their thoughts they could cloak and they had. I mean, they had intellect, and they had words. I let out a long low breath. I was stung by their silence, but I was stung a thousand times more by what had just happened, and as I had done so many times in the past, I turned my back on them. The length of time of the pause is, in principle, irrelevant. When we look at what actually happens in people’s experience, we note that some pauses can be infinitesimally small. When I am giving a lecture, for example, I select one word rather than another in a pause that lasts for only a millisecond. In this pause a number of possible terms flash before my mind’s eye. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If I want to say the noise of loud, I may consider in this fraction of a second such words as deafening, startling, or overwhelming. Out of these I select one. All this happens so rapidly—strictly speaking, on the preconscious level—that I am aware of it only when I stop to think about it afterward. Note in this last sentence I say “stop to think.: This habitual phrase is another proof of the importance of pause. There is a necessity of stopping to think—in other words, pausing is essential to the process of reflection. However, something else, even more interesting, occurs in those small, multitudinous pauses as one speaks. This is the time when I “listen” to the audience, when the audience influences me, when I “hear” its reaction and ask silently, What connotations are they taking from my words? For any experienced lecturer the blank spaces that constitute the pauses between the words and sentences is the time of openness to the audience. At such times I find myself noting: There someone seems puzzled; here someone listens by tipping his head to one side so as not to miss any word; there in the back row—what every speaker dreads to see—is someone nodding in sleep. Every experienced speaker than I know is greatly helped by the cultivation of one’s awareness of facial expressions and other subtle aspects of unspoken communication from the audience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Walt Whitman once remarked that “the audience writes the poetry,” and in an even clearer sense the audience gives the lecture. Hence, a lecture delivered from the same notes, sat once to a social club and then again to graduate students at a large university, will often seem to be two entirely different speeches. The pause for milliseconds while one speaks is the locus of the speaker’s freedom. The speaker may mold one’s speech this way or that, one may tell a joke to relax the audience, or—in a thrilling moment of which there cannot be too many in a lecturer’s career—one may even be aware of a brand-new idea coming to one from Heaven knows where in the audience. Cassandra, we are told in Aeschylus’ drama, foretold the doom of Mycenae. A prophetess, she was sensitive to communications on many different levels of which the average person is unaware. This sensitivity caused her much pain, and if she could have, she would gladly have given up her role. She was doomed, or destined to listen on these different levels; she could not escape hearing the messages coming in her pauses. Quite apart from the roles of prophetess or mystic—which we see also in Tiresias and Jeremiah and Isaiah—it would seem that multitudes of us have such capacities, but we train ourselves (a process abetted by much contemporary education) to suppress this sensitivity to the pauses. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
And we may suppress the sensitivity to the pause in the hope of avoiding the pain. The difference between the charlatan and the genuine prophet may well be the sense of pain the latter experiences in one’s prophecies. The pause may be longer, for instance, wen one is answering questions after a lecture. In response to a question, I may silently hem and haw for a moment while different possible answers flash through my mind. At that time I do not usually think of Soren Kiekegaard’s proclamation “Freedom is possibility,” but that is what I am living out in those moments of pause. The thrilling thing is that at such a time a new answer that I have never thought of may suddenly emerge. It is often said that intellectually creative people—like John Dewey, for example—are a strain to listen to and are not good public speakers, because the time they pause to consider different possibilities requires a capacity to wait that most people find tedious. One’s freedom may involve still larger pauses. When one is making important decisions like buying a house, “Let me sleep on it” is a not infrequent remark. These are the situation in which a longer interval between stimuli is desired; there may be many different houses available, or one can decide not to buy at all. The decision then requires complex consideration, pondering, setting up the possibilities for choice, and playing “as if” games with oneself to assess various factors like view and design and so on. Freedom consists of these possibilities. The pauses are the exercise of one’s freedom to choose among them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We recall that Jesus Christ, following his own inner guidance, went off into his separate wilderness to engage in his quest. If the records are to be believed, he paused for forty days. These were assumedly times of intense concentration, times of considering possibilities, of listening to whatever voices were available on deeper levels within themselves, voices from nature, voices from what we now term archetypal experiences, voices from what Jesus called God, and I would call Being. These assumedly were periods in which they experienced their visions and integrated themselves around their message. However, students tell me that they have professors who pause permanently. These teachers make a career our of pausing. The pause is then not a preparation for action but an excuse for never acting at all. It has been remarked that the academic profession is the only one in which you can make your living by questioning things. How much it is still true in academia that persons substitute talking for decision or rationalize lack of commitment by calling it “judicious pausing” I do not know. Nevertheless this is a tendency that confronts us all: to use pausing as a substitute for committed action. In our action-oriented life in America this misuse of pausing is a not infrequently found neurotic reaction. However, this dilemma is not overcome by acting blindly, without consciousness and without reason. When it is necessary to act if one’s freedom is to be actualized at all, to be free obviously requires the courage to act. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A person may ponder for months and years or all life long, never finding satisfactory answers. This occurs particularly with the question of death. When he stated his concerns with what might happen beyond death, Hamlet spoke for many of us. “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, it must give us pause.” However, in our personal freedom can be actualized regardless of whether we find satisfactory answers or not, or even if there are no answers at all. We can exercise our freedom even against destiny. Indeed, in the long run to “know that he dies,” as Blaise Pascal said, is the most essential and triumphant experience of freedom possible for a human being. In the It-World causality holds unlimited sway. Every event that is either perceivable by the senses and physical or discovered or found in introspection and psychological is considered to be of necessity caused and a cause. Those events which may be regarded as purposive form no exception insofar as they also belong in the continuum of the It-World: this continuum tolerates a teleology, but only as a reversal that is worked into one part of causality without diminishing its complete continuity. The unlimited sway of causality in the It-World, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the mortal who is not confined to the It-World but free to step out of it again and again into the World of relation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Here I and You confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by any causality; here mortals finds guaranteed the freedom of one’s being and of being. Only those who know relation and who know of the presence of the You have the capacity for decision. Whoever makes a decision is free because one has stepped before the countenance. The fiery matter of all my capacity to will surging intractably, everything possible for me revolving primevally, intertwined and seemingly inseparable, the alluring glances of potentialities flaring up from every corner, the Universe as a temptation, and I, born in an instant, both hands into the fire, deep into it, where the one that intends me is hidden, my deed, seized: now! And immediately the menace of the abyss is subdued: no longer a coreless multiplicity at ply in the iridescent equality of its claims; but only two are left alongside each other, the other and the one, delusion and task. However, now the actualization commences within me. Having decided cannot mean that the one is done while the other remains lying there, an extinguished mass, filling my soul, layer upon layer, with its dross. Only one that funnels all the force of the other into the doing of the one, absorbing into the actualization of what was chosen the undermined passion of what was not chosen, only one that serves God with the evil impulse, decides—and decides what happens. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Once one has understood this, one also knows that precisely this deserves to be called righteous: that which is set right, toward which a mortal directs oneself and for which one decides; and if there were a devil he would not be the one who decided against God but one that in all eternity did not decide. The mortal to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality. One knows that one’s mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and one senses the meaning of this. It suffices one that again and again one may set foot on the threshold of the sanctuary in which one could never tarry. Indeed, having to leave it again and again is for on an intimate part of the meaning and destiny of this life. There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is kindled in one again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land the spark has to prove itself. What is here called necessity cannot frighten it; for there one recognized true necessity: fate. Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by one that actualizes freedom. That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me. However, this, too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance also reveals that mystery to me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
One that forgets all being caused as one decides from the depths, one that puts aside possessions and cloak and steps bare before the countenance—this free human being encounters fate as the counter-image of one’s freedom. It is not one’s limit but one completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light—looks like grace itself. No, the mortal who returns into the It-World, carrying the spark, does not feel oppressed by causal necessity. And in healthy ages, confidence flows to all the people from the mortals of the spirit; to all of them, even the most obtuse, the encounter, the presence has happened somehow, if only in the dimension of nature, impulse, and twilight; all them have somewhere felt the You; and now the spirit interprets this guarantee to them. However, in sick ages it happens that the It-World, no longer irrigated and fertilized by living currents of the You-World, severed and stagnant, becomes a gigantic swamp phantom and overpowers mortals. As one accommodates oneself to a World of objects that no longer achieve any presence for one, one succumbs to it. Then common causality grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The freezing temperature of those snowy peaks of thought frightens away some who might otherwise venture on the Quest. It is the ego which is so frightened, knowing that its own end would come with the end of the journey into this elevated region. A mortal may stay at one’s present level or try to rise in character to a better one than one was born with. It ideals and values do not stir one, if one is ruled by undisciplined animal appetites, these truths will not appeal to one. Even if one is qualified to receive truth one may not be in the mood to do so, that is, one is not ready and willing to meet the cost. One’s interest or one’s desire or one’s emotions at that particular time as elsewhere possessed. When they learn the price—disciplining and reducing the fattened ego—that will have to be paid for this higher consciousness, they are more hesitant to embark on the Quest. Mortals who are uninterested in affairs other than their own personal ones, in matters other than their own work and pleasure, position and fortune, mortals who are preoccupied with the trivial round of external, selfish activities only, will naturally regard the study of philosophy as a waste of time, the practice of meditation as a form of indolence, and the endeavour after self-improvement as a needless trouble. No higher yearings enter their hearts, no reverent feelings touch them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Because of their unwillingness either to look within or to think more deeply for any higher purpose or obligation that they might have, people live largely in delusion and deception, especially self-deception. “Why am I here on Earth?” is a question for which they can only find one answer: to satisfy their own material desires. This question is as old as the Christian message itself and the answer is equally old, as our text indicate. Jesus takes his disciples aside and speaks privately to them when he praises them because they see what they are seeing. The presence of the Messiah is a mystery; it cannot be said to everybody, and it cannot be seen by everybody, but only by those like Simeon who are driven by the Spirit. There is something surprising, unexpected about the appearance of salvation, something which contradicts pious opinions and intellectual demands. The mystery of salvation is the mystery of a child. So it was anticipated by Isaiah, by the ecstatic vision of the sibyl and by the poetic vision of Virgil, by the doctrines of mysteries and the rites of those who celebrated the birth of a child. A child is real and not yet real, it is in history and not yet historical. Its nature is visible and invisible, it is here and not yet here. And just this is the character of salvation. Salvation has the nature of a child. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
As Christendom remembers every year, in the most impressive of its festivals, the child Jesus, so salvation, however visible it may be, remains always also invisible. One who wants a salvation which is only visible cannot see the divine child in the Manger as one cannot see the divinity of the Man on the Cross and the paradoxical ways of all divine acting. Salvation is a child and when it grows up it is crucified. Only one who can see power under weakness, the whole under the fragment, victory under defeat, glory under suffering, innocence under guilt, sanctity under sin, life under death can say: Mine eyes have seen thy salvation. It is hard to say this in our days. However, it always has been hard and always will be hard. It was and is and will be a mystery, the mystery of a child. And however deep the World might fall, even into utter self-destruction, as long as there are mortal they will experience this mystery and say: “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that we see.” Not everyone is prepared by temperament, or past history, to seek the higher truth, much less has the time and will for it. Not everyone among the seekers is ready to make the sacrifices that a conscientious re-adjustment of character and behavior wants from one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
I believe in a high power behind the Universe. I call it God. I believe this same higher power is behind mortals. Call it the soul, if you like to. Such beliefs do not appeal to the cocktail-soaked cynics and sophisticates of our era. Such teachings are ignored or rejected as being of interest only to dreamers, idlers, or misfits. There is some truth in this criticism, some basis for this attitude. Plain normal people who have to make a living, who are body with the World’s work, politics, and economics, who have personal and family problems most of the time, find all this to be unrealistic out of touch with things as they are, humanity as it is and has been. So long as the objects of their existence remain small and circumscribed, selfish and materialistic, so long will the meaning of their existence be denied them. It is not that they are contemptuous of truth but that they are indifferent to it. The opinions of most people about mysticism are either totally or partially worthless. This is because they are not informed either by accurate or by sufficient knowledge of the subject. They know next to nothing of its true history, nature, and results. Lack of concern for higher values reveals mortal’s frailty or malice. To the diseased mentality, mysticism is an attempt to cripple progress by weakening intellect and inhibiting needed action. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
No Victory Can Ever Be Won When it is Already Lost in the Mind–The Intervals Between the Events Are More Significant than the Events Themselves!
I pulled the bank notes out of my pocket and put them in his unsteady hand. I spilled gold coins onto the payment. The actors darted forward fearfully to gather them up. I scanned the crowd around for the source of this strange distraction, what was it, not Nicolas in the door of the deserted theater, watching me with a broken soul. No, something else both familiar and unfamiliar, having to do with the dark. This conception of the pause gives us a whole new World. It is in the pause that people learn to listen to silence. We can hear an infinite number of sounds that we normally never hear at all—the unending hum and buzz of insects in a quiet Summer field, a breeze blowing lightly through the golden hay, a thrush singing in the low bushes beyond the meadow. And we suddenly realize that this is something—the World of silence is populated by a myriad of creatures and myriad of sounds. In childhood, we were taught to sit still and enjoy the silence. We were taught to use our organs to smell, to look when apparently there was nothing to see, and to listen intently when all seemingly was quiet. We learned that silences as well as sounds are significant in the forest, and we learned how to listen to the silences. Deeply felt silences might be said to be the core of our religion. During these times, the nature within ourselves found unity with the nature of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
In Japan, free time and space—what we call pauses—are perceived as ma, the valid interval or meaningful pause. Such perception is basic to all experience and specifically to what constitutes creativity and freedom. This perception persists in spite of the adoption of Western culture and science. Even in 1958, Misako Miyamoto wrote of the No plays, “The audience watches the play and catches the feeling through not only the action and words but also the intervals of the period of pauses. There is a free creation in each person’s mind; and the audience relates to this situation with free thinking.” Of silent intervals in speech, she says, “Especially in the pauses in a tone of voice, I can feel the person’s unique personality and one’s joy, sorrow or other complicated feelings.” On listening to a robin in early Spring, “It sand with pauses, I could have time to think about the bird in the silent moment between one voice and others. The pauses produced the effect of the relation between the bird and me. Lest these examples seduce us into assuming that this valuing of the pause is chiefly in Eastern esoteric cultures, let me point out that the phenomenon is just as clear, though not as frequent, in our own modern culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
John Cage, a composer noted for his originality, gave a concert in New York which consisted of his coming out on the stage, sitting down at the keyboard for a period of time, and not playing one note. His sim, as he explained to a less-than-pleased audience, was to give them an opportunity to listen to the silence. Hos recorded music shows precisely this—many pauses are interspersed with heterogeneous notes. John Cage sharpens our awareness, makes our sense keener, and renders us alive to ourselves and our surroundings. Listening is our most neglected sense. The very best essence of jazz is in the space between notes, called the afterbeat. The leader of a band in which I once played used to sing out “um-BAH,” the “Bah”—or the note coming always between the beats. This syncopation is a basis of jazz. Duke Ellington, for example, keeps the audience tantalized, on edge, expectant—we have to dance to work out the emotion building up within us. On an immediate level this expectancy has a similarity to the exquisite levels of feeling before climax. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Hence, some musicians, can simulate the process of pleasures of the flesh in the tantalizing beat of their song. In the ever-changing jazz group at Preservation Hall in New Orleans, this infinite variety, with each person improvising, produces each time a piece of music never before played and never to be played again. This is freedom par excellence. There seems to be no pause in technology. Or when there is, it is called a depression and is denied and feared. However, pure science is a different matter. We find Alert Einstein remarking that “the intervals between the events are more significant than the events themselves.” The significance of the pause is that the rigid chain of cause and effect is broken. The pause momentarily suspends the billiard-ball system of Pavlov. In the person’s life response no longer blindly follows stimulus. There intervenes between the two our human imaginings, reflections, considerations, ponderings. Pause is the prerequisite for wonder. When we do not pause, when we are perpetually hurrying from one appointment to another, from one planned activity to another, we sacrifice the richness of wonder. And we lose communication with our destiny. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When they learn about it for the first time, too many persons will have nothing to do with the Quest. This is not because they find it impossible to believe some of the ideas on which it is based, such as the idea of reincarnation. Nor is it because the metaphysical side is too abstruse for them to go through the needed labour of troubling their minds with it. No—it is because the ideal set up for the questers is, they claim, completely outside their horizon and quite unreachable by most, if not nearly all of them. Its peak seems so austere, the climb up it so demanding of the bravery that a mortal could ever possess, that few even venture to approach it. They hear of saints who seem to achieve the impossible—a happiness which eludes their fellow denizens of this planet and a self-control which puts human desire and passion easily underfoot. What these spiritual superpeople can do, in temptation-free Himalayan heights of European monastic retreats, they see no prospect of ever doing in their noisy busy cities. It is not possible, they think, to live on such a high Godlike plane in a World where meanness and violence are everyday patterns. This is a plausible view but it is not the only one. It is impossible only if they think so. When it is already lost in the mind, no victory can ever be won. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Even if it were offered to them, those persons who are satisfied with substitutes for the Truth could not appreciate or recognize it. Those who seek neither moral elevation nor spiritual teaching do not thereby show their indifference to thought about life. They show only that they are smugly satisfied with the little they thought they have managed to do. Those who are content with a life of nothing more than sitting down to meals, going out to make money, and coming back to enjoy pleasures of the flesh—that is, wit a solely materialistic life—find nothing in such inspired messages and get noting from such mystical teachings. There is no large idea in their petty lives. It will not engage the interest of the spiritually indolent. So long as we keep ourselves focused wholly in the physical World of thoughts such as these may be read but will not reach our minds. The mortals who see no need for a higher concept of one’s nature than the merely physical one will see no need for a higher goal than feeding, clothing, sheltering, and amusing one’s body. In letting the senses, the passion, the intellect, and the ego take sole charge of one’s life, one quite naturally sees only mere emptiness beyond. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
One doubts and refutes the intuitive-spiritual and denies and rejects the spiritual. The Infinite is nothing to one so long as one prefers to remain shut in within the sense bound outlook. This is why one dismisses spiritual experience, religious feeling, and philosophic insight as mere hallucinations. However, all the opposition takes place only in one’s conscious mind for there is unavoidable recognition on one’s subconscious mind. One wants to escape from oneself, however, and fears the ordeal of facing oneself. These words will make no appeal to the materialistic mentality which still regards all spiritual experience as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when I first embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than a decade ago. People neglect the real because they believe they already have it (in sense-experience of the World outside) and for the same reason they do not seek truth. The unfortunate who have been unable to manage their affairs or to recover from the blows of destiny may turn to religion for comfort: they seldom turn to philosophy. For this fails to confront their emotions: it appears is only to those who are learning that emotions need to be checked or balanced or controlled by reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The mass of people do not want, and may even fear, the spiritual and intellectual freedom to search for truth. They are more comfortable inside the gregarious protection of ready-made group tradition. It is not only that so many people are not capable of comprehending the truth but also that a large number of them do not want to comprehend it. The truth hurts their ego, contradicts their desires, and denies their expectations. Mortal’s communal life cannot dispense any more than one oneself with the It-World—over which the presence of the You floats like the spirit over the face of the waters. Mortal’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it. There is no evil drive until the drive detaches itself from our being; the drive that is wedded to and determined by our being is the plasma of communal life, while the detached drive spells its disintegration. The economy as the house of the will to profit and the states as the house of the will to power participate in life as long as they participate in the spirit. If they abjure the spirit, they abjure life. To be sure, life takes its time about settling the score, and for quite a while one may still think that one sees a form move where for a long time a mere mechanism has been whirring. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Introducing some sort of immediacy at this point is surely futile. Loosening the framework of the economy or the state cannot make up for the fact that neither stands any longer under the supremacy of the You-saying spirit, and stirring up the periphery cannot replace the living relationship to the center. The structures of communal human life derive their life from the fullness of the relational force that permeates their members, and they derive their embodies form from the saturation of this force by the spirit. The states person of business person who serves the spirit is no dilettante. One knows well that one cannot simply confront the people with whom one has to deal as so many carriers of the You, without undoing one’s own work. Nevertheless one ventures to do this, not simply but up to the limit suggested to one by the spirit; and the spirit does suggest a limit to one, and the venture that would have exploded a served structure succeeds where the presence of the You floats above. One does not become a babbling enthusiast; one serves the truth, which, though supra-rational, does not disown reason but holds her in lap. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
What one does in communal life is no different from what is done in personal life by a mortal who knows that one cannot actualize the You in some pure fashion but who nevertheless bears witness of it daily to the It, defining the limit every day anew, according to the right and measure of that day—discovering the limit anew. Neither work nor possessions can be redeemed on their own but only by starting from the spirit. It is only from the presence of the spirit that significance and joy can slow into all work, and reverence and the strength to sacrifice into all possessions, not to the brim but quantum satis—and that is worked and possessed, though it reminds attached to the It-World, can nevertheless be transfigured to the point where it confronts us and represents the You. There is no back-behind-it; there is, even at the moment of the most profound need—indeed, only then—a previously unsuspected beyond-it. Whether it is the state that regulates the economy or the economy that directs the state is unimportant as long as both are unchanged. Whether the institutions of the state become freer and those of the economy juster, that is important, but not for the question concerning actual life that is being posed here; for they cannot become free and just on their own. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
You-saying, responding spirit—remains alive and actual; whether what remains of it in communal human life continues to be subjected to the state and the economy or whether it becomes independently active; whether what abides of it in individual human life incorporates itself again in communal life. However, that certainly cannot be accomplished by dividing communal life into independent realms that also include the life of the spirit. That would merely mean that the regions immersed in the It-World would be abandoned forever to this despotism, while the spirit would lose all actuality. For the spirit in itself can never act independently upon life; that it can do only in the World—with its force which penetrates and transforms the It-World. The spirit is truly at home with itself when it can confront the World that is opened up to it, give itself to the World, and redeem it and, through the World, also itself. However, the spirituality that represents the spirit nowadays is so scattered, weakened, degenerate, and full of contradictions that it could not possibly do this until it had first returned to the essence of the spirit: being able to say You. Most people are contented with their chains or even strongly attached them—such is the awesome power of desires, passions, infatuation, and especially egoisms. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
And when we defend our Christian faith, they point to the fact that the World has not become better since the days of Hosea and Jeremiah, and that the prophetic visions of doom are more realistic today than they were in those days. It is hard to answer this; but we must answer it for not only the Christians, but for humanity, or friends, and our children, and something in ourselves asks these questions. It is hard to answer them. What, for instance, can we answer when our children ask us about the child in the Manger while in some parts of the World all children from two years old and under have died and are dying, not by an order of Herod, but by ever-increasing cruelty of ear and its result in Christian era and by the decrease of the power of imagination of the Christian people. Or, what can we answers the Jews when the remnants of the Jewish people, returning from death-camps, worse than anything in Babylon, cannot find a resting place anywhere on the surface of the Earth, and certainly not amongst the great Christian nations? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Or, what can we answer Christians and non-Christians who have realized that the fruit of centuries of Christian technical and social civilization is the imminent threat of a complete and universal self-destruction of humanity? When we look at the unhealed and unsaved state of our lives after the message of healing and salvation has been heard at every Christmas for almost two thousand years, what answer can we give to ourselves? Should we say that the World, of course, is unsaved but that there are men and women in all generations who are saved from the World? However, this is not the message of Christmas. All those in Christmas legend who expect the Christ and receive the divine are looking out for the salvation of Israel and of the Gentiles and for the World. For all of them, and for Jesus himself, and for the apostles, the kingdom of God, the universal salvation is at hand. However, if this was the expectation, has it not been utterly refuted by reality? Many people fear the quest because they fear that, if they get involved in it too seriously, they might have to repress some inclination in their nature or renounce some habit in their way of living. So they take from it only what appeals to them, and discard the rest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Time and Growth are Needed Before a Mortal Can Sign that Absolute Commitment of Mind and Life for Which it Asks!
I think he handled the notes much differently from other violinist. And the pauses between the notes—ah, there is where the artistry is possessed! Nicolas bore down on the strings, and I could almost see him against my eyelids, swaying back and forth, his head bowed against the violin as if he meant to pass into the music, and then all sense of him vanished and there was only the sound. The long vibrant notes, and the chilling glissandos, and the violin singing in its own tongue to make every other form of speech seem false. Yet as the song deepened, it became the very essence of despair as if its beauty were a horrid coincidence, grotesquely without a particle of truth. The goal of music and fasting is inner unity. This means hearing but not with the ear; hearing, but not with the understanding; it is hearing with the spirit of God, with your whole being. The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. However, the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence, it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitations and from preoccupations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Was this what Nicolas believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it has nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair was not beautiful, and beauty was then a horrid irony? I did not know the answer, but the sound went beyond him as it always had. It grew larger than the despair. It fell effortlessly into a slow melody, like water seeking its own downward mountain path. It grew richer and darker still and there seemed something undisciplined and chastening in it, and heartbreaking and vast. I lay on my back on the roof now with my eyes on the stars. Pinpoints of light mortals could not have seen. Phantom clouds. And the raw, piercing sound of the violin coming slowly with exquisite tension to a close. We define freedom as the capacity to pause in the midst of stimuli from all directions, and in this pause to throw our weight toward this response rather than that one. The crucial term, and in some ways the most interesting, is that little word pause. It may seem strange that this word is the important one rather than terms like liberty, independence, spontaneity. And it seems especially strange that a word merely signifying a lack of something, an absence, a hiatus, a vacancy, should carry so much weight. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
In America especially, the word pause refers to a gap, a space yet unfilled, a nothing—or, better yet, a no thing. I was in some silent understanding of the language the violin spoke to me. Beauty was not the treachery some imagine it to be, rather it is an uncharted land where one can make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signpost of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the Earth had been eons before mortals had one single coherent thought in their hears or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of gold plates. Beauty was a Savage Garden. Good and evil, those are concepts mortals have made. And better, really, than the Savage Garden. However, maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The word pause, like the word freedom, seems essentially to signify what something is not rather than what it is. We have seen that freedom is defined almost universally by what it is not—or, in a sentence definition, “Freedom is when you are anchored to nobody or nothing.” Similarly, the past is a time when no thing is happening. Can the word pause give us an answer not only as to why freedom is a negative word, but is also loved as the most affirmative term in our language? This conception of nothingness as somethinhness enabled the philosophers to perceive the integrity of non-being, to name the free space and give us zero. Freedom is experienced in our World in an infinite number of pauses, which turn out not to be negative but to be the most affirmative condition possible. The ultimate paradox is that negation becomes affirmation. Thus, freedom remains the most loved word, the word that thrills us most readily, the condition most desired because it calls forth continuous, unrealized possibilities. And it is so with the pause. The no thing turns out to bespeak a reality that is most clearly something. It is paradoxical that in our lives empty can be full, negative can be affirmative, the void can be where most happens. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
There is something in the Christian message which is opposed to established authority. There is something in the Christian experience which revolts against subjection to even the greatest and holiest experiences of the past. And this something is indicated in the question of Jesus, “Was the baptism of John from God or mortals?” and in his refusal to give an answer! That which makes an answer impossible is the nature of an authority which is derived from God and not mortals. The place where God gives authority to a mortal cannot be circumscribed. It cannot be legally defined. It cannot be put into the fences of doctrines and rituals. It is here, and you do not know where it comes from. You cannot derive it. You must be grasped by it. You must participate in its power. This is the reason why the question of authority never can get an ultimate answer. Certainly there are many preliminary answers. There is no day in our lives in which we do not give, silently or openly, answers to the questions of authority, saying mostly “yes” and sometimes “no.” However, an ultimate answer we cannot give. We only point to a reality, as Jesus does. And this is what our religious leaders could and should do—the churches, and the ministers, and the theologians, and every Christian who acts as a priest to other Christians. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
They all can raise their fingers as Jesus did to John, and as John did to Jesus. We all can point passionately, but not as established authorities, to the Crucified—as does the Baptist, in the tremendous picture by the antiquated painter Matthias Grunewald. There his whole being is in the finger with which he points to the Cross. This is the greatest symbol of which I know for the true authority of the Church and the Bible. They should not point to themselves but to the reality which breaks again and again through the established forms of their authority and through the hardened forms of our personal experiences. And once more we ask: “What does it mean that the question of authority cannot get ultimate answer?” It would sound like a blasphemy if I said, “Because God cannot give an answer.” It would sound not blasphemous but conventional if I said, “Because God is Spirit.” Yet both sentences mean the same. God who is Spirit cannot give an ultimate answer to the question of authority. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The churches, their leaders and members, often ignore the infinite significance of the words “God is Spirit.” However, the sharp eyes of the enemy see what these words mean. Nietzsche calls the mortal who first said that God is Spirit the first one of those who have killed God. His profound insight into the human soul made it certain to him that a God who is not circumscribed on a definite place, who does not answer definitively the question of authority, cannot be accepted by most human beings. If he were right, we either had to agree with him that there is no God left, or we had to return to a God who tells us a definite answer to the question of authority, and subjects us by Divine order to an established religious authority as the Earthly representative of one’s own Heavenly authority as the Earthly representative of one’s own Heavenly authority. However, this God is not the God who is Spirit. Actually, such a God is the Heavenly image of the Earthly authorities which use him for the consecration of their own power. This God is not the God of whom Jesus speaks in our story. The God who cannot answer the question of ultimate authority because he is Spirit does not remove the preliminary authorities with whom we live our daily lives. God does not deprive us of the protection of those who have more wisdom and power than we have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
God does not isolate us from the community to which we belong and which is a part of ourselves. However, he dines ultimate significance to all these preliminary authorities, to all those who claim to be images of his authority and who distort God’s authority into the oppressive power of a Heavenly tyrant. The God who does not answer the questions of ultimate authority transforms the preliminary authorities into media and tools of himself—of the God who is Spirit. Parental authority in Heaven, but it is the earliest tool through which the Spiritual qualities of order and self-control and love are mediated to us. Therefore, the parents must be and remain subjects of honor, but not of unconditional authority. Even God whom we call the Father in Heaven cannot answer the ultimate questions of authority. How could the parents? The authority of wisdom and knowledge on Earth is not the consecrated image of the authority of Heavenly omniscience, but it is the tool through which the Spiritual qualities of humility and knowledge and wisdom are mediated to us. Therefore, the wise ones should be honored but not accepted as unconditional authorities. The authorities in community and society, in nation and state, are not consecrated images of Heavenly power and justice, but they are tools through which the Spiritual qualities of mutuality, understanding, righteousness, and courage can be mediated to us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Therefore, the social authorities should be accepted as guarantees of the external order but not as those which determine the meaning of our lives. The authority of the Church is not consecrated Earthly image of the Heavenly Ruler of the Church, but it is a medium through which the Spiritual substance of our lives is preserved and protected and reborn. Even the authority of Jesus the Christ is not the consecrated image of the mortal who rules as a dictator, but it is the authority of one who is emptied oneself of all authority; it is the authority of the mortal on the Cross. If you say that God is Spirit and that he is manifest on the cross, it is one and the same thing. And you who are fighting against authorities and you who are searching for authorities, listen to the story in which Jesus fights against them and establishes an authority which cannot be established! Here is an answer, namely, that no answer can be given except the one that, beyond all preliminary authorities, you must keep yourselves open to the power of one who is ground and the negation of everything which is authority on Earth and in Heaven! #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It is easy to understand why so many persons have little faith in such teachings, but it is hard to understand why so few persons take the trouble to investigate them. Most people are too shallow—for which they are not to be blamed, since living itself is a fatiguing job—to be able to mine successfully for Reality, or for Truth, which is the knowledge of reality. It is hard for the moderns to appreciate that are years, when measured against Jesus’ teaching, are often spent in futile activities, hard to understand with the spiritual that they merely exist and do not really live. They bow too quickly before the mystery of life and being, resign further search and enquiry, make no more effort to develop and use their mental and intuitive faculties. Faith and patience are deserted too soon. Quite a number seek understanding of life’s meaning, but few seek a true understanding. Most want a partisan or prejudiced one, an endorsement of inherited ideas or personal satisfactions. Too many are married for life to their personal views: they are not seekers of Truth and are not really willing to learn the New and the True. It is a wrong and yet common notion to believe that one is not in a position to start out on the Quest. The business person pleads one’s business cares, the sinner one’s sins, the antiquated mortal one’s age, and the young person one’s youth as an excuse for failing to make any beginning at all. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, is it not the communal life of modern mortals bound to be submerged in the It-World? Consider the two chambers of this life, the economy and the state: are they even thinkable in their present dimensions and ramifications, expect on the basis of a superior renunciation of all immediacy—and even an inexorably resolute repudiation of any alien authority that does not itself have its source in this area? And if the I that experiences and uses holds sway here—in the economy, the I uses opinions and aspirations—is it not precisely to this absolute dominion that we owe the extensive and firm structure of the great objective fabrics in these two spheres? Does not the form-giving greatness of leading state people and business people depend on their way of seeing the human beings with whom they have to deal not as carriers of an inexperienceable You but rather as centers of service and aspirations tat have to be calculated and employed according to their specific capacities? If they refused to add up He + He + He to get an It, and tried instead to determine the sum of You and You and You, which can never be anything else than you, would not their World come crashing down upon them? If not an exchange of form-giving mastery for a puttering dilettantism, and of lucid, powerful reason for murky enthusiasm, what would this come to? #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
And when we turn our eyes from the leaders to the led and consider the fashion of modern work and possession, do we not find that modern developments have expunged almost every trace of a life in which human beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships? It would be absurd to try to reverse this development; and if one could bring off this absurdity, the tremendous precision instrument of this absurdity, the tremendous precision instrument of this civilization would be destroyed at the same time, although this alone makes life possible for the tremendously increased numbers of humanity. Speaker, you speak too late. However, a moment ago you might have believed your own speech; now this is no longer possible. For an instant ago you saw no less than I that the state is no longer led: the strokers still pile up coal, but the leaders merely seem to rule the racing engines. And in this instant while you speak, you can hear as well as I how the machinery of the economy is beginning to hum in an unwonted manner; the overseers give you a superior smile, but death lurks in their hearts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
They tell you they have adjusted the apparatus to modern conditions; but you notice the henceforth they can only adjust themselves to the apparatus, as long as that permits it. Their spokesperson instruct you that the economy is taking over the heritage of the state; you know that there is nothing to be inherited but the despotism of the proliferating It under which the I, more and more impotent, is still dreaming that it is in command. Only seldom during a lifetime, and that very briefly, will mortals give a thought to these larger features of their existence—to its unreality, to its unreality, to its changeability, and to its mortality. Some people do not succeed n making the self-disciplinary grade which the quest of philosophy calls for. This is because they are more easily distracted from the quest by their personal feelings than they should be. People who live unaware of why they are here consequently live unconcerned with what seem like mere abstractions lacking any utility at all. They could not face truth for they would be embarrassed by the Goddess’s unshrinking gaze. I learned from each thing that I touched. And there were moments when all the color and texture became too lustrous, too overpowering. I wept inwardly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
And Sometimes the Pain and Ache and Even Agony of Miscarried Love is Almost More than We Can Bear!
The stone moved out easily enough, as I had seen before, and it had a hook on the inside of it by which I could pull it closed behind me. However, to get into the narrow dark passage I had to lie on my belly. And when I dropped down on my knees and peered into it, I could see no visible light at the end. I did not like the look of it. I knew that if I had been a mortal still, nothing could have induced me to crawl into a passage like this. It would be too much to expect the mass of people to take to this quest in its fullness. They are unable to make more than an elementary effort to confine the lower nature within the requires limits. Most people are like sleep-walkers, caught up in their own illusions. Their belief that they are awake is the biggest of these illusions. The poor are overpowered by their grinding poverty, the rich by their fortune; both find neither the time nor taste for spiritual enquiry. Easily stupefied by sensuality, thoroughly bewitched by constant repetition of the same pleasure, they shrug aside the disturbing thoughts and visible reminders of life’s transitoriness and the body’s infirmity. So, why is it so hard for people to see that if one really cares about some other person, there will be some attachment, some normal jealousy and one will be vulnerable to pain; and that the aim with jealousy is not to exorcise it entirely, but to realize it is a problem only when it reaches neurotic proportions? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The awareness of normal jealousy is the one corrective to the growth of neurotic jealousy, the dreary picture of which we have seen in these vignettes. It times in which there were difficulties standing in the way of pleasures of the flesh, such as perhaps during the decline of the ancient civilization, love became worthless and life empty, and strong reaction-formations were required to restore indispensable affective values…the ascetic current in Christianity created physical values for love which pagan antiquity was never able to confer on it. The decline of the ancient civilizations, when love became worthless and life empty, is related to the disintegration of our mores and culture. Too many people focus on pleasures of the flesh as an antidote against anxiety; the neurological pathway that carries the sexual stimulation cuts off that pathway which transmits anxiety. In our own concern with the innumerable problems in our society that we cannot solve, it is understandable that we turn to our preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh. However, we should avoid making principles out of our own abnormal state. The books and TV shows are alike in that they reflect and act upon the moral vacuousness that has become so commonplace as to be nearly normative in recent writings about pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Is not this moral vacuity one explanation for the fact that, while we never has more talks and workshops and public-school teachings on pleasures of the flesh, contraception, terminating pregnancies, and complication with unprotected and even protected sex, the rate of venereal disease, teenage pregnancies and abortions are rising dramatically? Pleasures of the flesh and intimacy that goes with it are so basic a part of human existence that one cannot separate them from one’s values. To treat pleasures of the flesh and values as totally divorced from each other is not only to block the development of one’s freedom, but also to make the cultural problem of pleasures of the flesh simply insoluble. Moral concern in pleasures of the flesh hinges on the acceptance of one’s responsibility for the other as well as for oneself. Other people do matter; and the celebration of this gives pleasures of the flesh its ecstasy, its meaning, and its capacity to shake us to our depths. When made into the be-all and end-all of pleasures of the flesh, without a committed relationship, at the legal age, and without intimacy—it is an expression of narcissism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Narcissism is not beautiful. It is actually a personality disorder in which a person has an inflated sense of self-importance. There are fewer than 200,000 cases diagnosed per year, so it is rare. Treatment can help, but this condition cannot be cured. It requires a medical diagnosis, but lab test or imaging not required. Chronic narcissism can last for years and be lifelong. Narcissism is a refusal to love, a running from the beautiful Echo as Narcissus did in the myth. Pleasures of the flesh as solitary stimuli, carried on in the absence of sharing, without intimacy, is an overpowering concern with one’s own stimuli, a peering endlessly at oneself, as Narcissus peered into the pool. As a way of life, pleasures of the flesh without intimacy is motivated by resentment and vengeance, like Echo’s myth. Narcissus allegedly self-destructs by stabbing himself, but we self-destruct by a long, drawn-out amputation of vital parts of ourselves. Our contemporaries seem not to be vengeful because some specific person will not love them now (as was the case with Echo), but they seem to carry a vengeance from infancy, an experience of not having been loved, that they have never come to terms with. They have never accepted, as one must accept, their destiny, with all its cruel and its beneficent strains. Nor have the accepted the fate that no one ever gets enough love. This yearning for love makes us human. Having accepted that aspect of destiny, perhaps then we can join the human race. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
What the proponents of the ideal of pleasures of the flesh without intimacy as the way to genuine freedom have grossly overlooked is that freedom in the pleasures of the flesh is like freedom in every other realm of life: one is free only as one recognizes one’s limits—for instance, one’s destiny. The structure, the design, of the pleasures of the flesh function in life needs to be seen steadily and whole. In human relations responsibility comes out of ever-present loneliness and our inescapable need for others, which is dramatically true in pleasures of the flesh; and without this sense of responsibility there is no authentic freedom. Our freedom is pleasures of the flesh then grows in proportion to the parallel growth of our sensitivity to the needs, desires, wishes of the other. These needs, desires, and wishes of the other are the givens. The fact that pleasures of the flesh are stimuli can blossom into authentic intimacy and into love is one of the mysteries of life which can give us a lasting solace and joy. As in all aspects of confronting destiny, there is a risk. If you have feelings, you are bound to be vulnerable and hurt. And sometimes the pain and ache and even agony of miscarried love is almost more than we can bear. However, accepting this risk is the price of freedom, and especially the freedom to love authentically. Who wishes to trade these for existence as a zombie? #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Standing under the basic word of separation which keeps apart I and It, one has divided one’s life with one’s fellow mortals into two neatly defined districts: institutions and feelings. It-district and I-district. Institutions are what is out there where for all kinds of purposes one spends time, where one works, negotiates, influences, undertakes, competes, organizes, administers, officiates, preaches; the halfway orderly and on the whole coherent structure where, with the manifold participation of humans heads and human limbs, the round of affairs runs its course. Feelings are what is in here where one lives and recovers from the institutions. Here the spectrum of emotions swings before the interested eye; here one enjoys one’s inclination and one’s hatred, pleasure and, if it is not too bad, pain. Here one is at home and relaxes in one’s rocking chair. Institutions comprise a complicated forum; feelings, a boudoir that at least provides a good deal of diversity. This separation, to be sure, is continually engendered, as our supportive feelings break into the most objective institutions; but with a little good will it can always be restored. A dependable separation is most difficult in the areas of our so-called personal life. In marriage, for example, it is not always so simple to attain; but time works wonders. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
In the areas of so-called public life it is eminently successful: consider, for example, how in the age of political parties, but also of groups and movements that claim to be above parties, Heaven-storming congresses alternate flawlessly with the day-to-day operations that crawl along on the ground, whether mechanized and evenly or organically and slovenly. However, the severed It of institutions is a golem, and the served I of feelings is a fluttering soul-bird. Neither knows that human being; one only the instance and the other only the object. Neither knows person or community. Neither knows the present: these, however modern, know only the rigid past, that which is finished, while those, however persistent, know only the fleeting moment, that which is not yet. Neither has access to actual life. Institutions yield no public life; feelings, no personal life. That institutions yield no public life is felt by more and more human beings, to their sorrow; this is the source of the distress and search of our age. That feelings yield no personal life has been recognized by few so far; for they seem to be the home of what is most personal. And once one has learnt, like a modern mortal, to become greatly preoccupied with one’s own feelings, even despair over their unreality will not easily open one’s eyes; after all, such despair is also a feeling and quite interesting. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Those who suffer because institutions yield no public life have thought of a remedy: feelings are to loosen up or thaw or explode the institutions, as I they could be renewed by feelings, by introducing the freedom of feelings. When the automatized state yokes together totally uncongenial citizens without creating or promoting any fellowship, it is supposed to be replaced by a loving community. And this loving community is supposed to come into being when people come together, prompted by free, exuberant feelings, and want to live together. However, this is not how things are. True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required, too), but rather no two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another. The second event has its source in the first but is not immediately given with it. A living reciprocal relationship includes feelings but is not derived from them. A community is built upon a living, reciprocal relationship, but the builder is the living, active center. Even institutions of so-called personal life cannot be reformed by a free feeling (although this is also required). #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Marriage can never be renewed expect by that which is always the source of all true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another. It is of this that the You that is I for neither of them builds a marriage. This is the metaphysical and metaphysical fact of love which is merely accompanied by feelings of love. Whoever wishes to renew a marriage on another basis is not essentially different from those who want to abolish it: both declare that they no longer know the fact. Indeed, take the much-discussed eroticism of our age and subtract everything that is really egocentric—in other words, every relationship in which one is not at all present to the other, but each uses the other only for self-enjoyment—what would remain? True public and true personal life are two forms of association. For them to originate and endure, feelings are required as a changing content, and institutions are required as a constant form; but even the combination of both still does not create human life which is created only by a third element: the central presence of the You, or rather, to speak more truthfully, the central You that is received in the present. The basic word I-It does not come from evil—anymore than matter comes from evil. It comes from evil—like matter that presumes to be that which has being. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
When mortals let it have its way, the relentlessly growing It-World grows over one like weeds, one’ own I loses its actuality, until the incubus over one and the phantom inside one exchange the whispered confession of their need for redemptions. In our story, Jesus as well as His foes acknowledge authority. They struggle about valid authority, not about authority as such. And this is what we find everywhere in the Bible and the life of the Church. Paul fights with the original disciples, including Peter, about the foundations of apostolic authority. The bishops fight with the princes about ultimate source of political authority. The reformers fight with the hierarches about the interpretation of the Bible. The theologians fight with the scientists about the criteria of ultimate truth. None of the struggling groups denies authority, but each of them denies the authority of the other group. However, if the authority is split in itself, which authority decides? Is not split authority the end of authority? Was not the split produced by the Reformation the end of the authority of the Church? Is not the split about the interpretation of the Bible the end of the Biblical authority? Is not the split between theologians and scientists the end of intellectual authority? Was not the split between the gods of polytheism the end of their divine authority? #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Is not the split in one’s conscience the end of the authority of one’s conscience? If one has to choose between different authorities, not they but oneself is ultimate authority for oneself, and this means: there is no authority for one. This, however, creates the dreadful alternative of our historical period. If there is no authority, we must decide ourselves, each for oneself. As finite beings we must act as if we were infinite, and since this is impossible, we are driven into complete insecurity, anxiety and despair. Or, unable to stand the oneliness of deciding for ourselves, we suppress the fact that there is a split authority. We subject ourselves to a definite authority and close our eyes against all other claims. The desire of most people to do this is very well known to those in power. They use the unwillingness of human beings to decide for themselves in order to preserve their power and to increase it. This is true of religious as well as of political powers. On this ground of human weakness the systems of authority are built in past and present. “By what authority” do you do this? Jesus is asked And Christ answering but by pointing to the acting and speaking of John. Here, Christ tells the leaders of his nation, you see the rise of an authority without ritual or legal foundation. However, you deny the possibility of it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
So you deny both the Baptist and myself. You deny the possibility of an authority guaranteed by its inner power. You have forgotten that the only test of the prophets was the power of what they had to say. Listen to what the people say about us, namely, that we speak with authority and not as you, who are called the authorities. That is what Christ tells them. What would Christ say to us? He would not have to fight about his authority with the chief priests and the scribes and the elders of our day. In our time they all acknowledged Christ. He would have to ask quite a different question of them. He would have to ask: “What is the nature of my authority for you? It is like that of John the Baptist, or is it like that of the authorities who tried to remove me? Have you made the words of those who have witnessed to me, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the popes, the reformers, the creeds, into ultimate authorities? Have you done this in my name? And is so, do you not abuse my name? For whenever my name is remembered, my fight with those who were in authority is also remembered.” After the work done to gain livelihood or fulfil ambition, there is usually a surplus of time and strength, as part of which could and should be devoted to satisfying higher needs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is hardly a mortal whose life is so intense that it does not leave one a little time for spiritual recall from this Worldly existence. Yet the common attitude everywhere is to look no farther than, and be content with, work and pleasure, family, friends, and possessions. It feels no urge to seek the spiritual and, as it erroneously thinks, the intangible side of life. It makes no effort to organize its day so as to find the time and energy for serious thought, study, prayer, and meditation. It feels no need of searching for truth or getting an instructor. People who find their own company boring, their own resources empty, their own higher aims non-existent, must needs flee from it to some form of escape, such as the cinema, the radio, the theatre, or television. Here they are not confronted by the uncomfortable problem of themselves, by aimless meaningless drifting “I.” Humanity ordinarily shirks this enquiry into truth partly because of its difficulty, partly because of its apparent personal unprofitability, and partly because of its loneliness. There are those—and they are many—who do not want such a quest: its disciplines frighten them away or its studies bore them or its isolation makes too daring a demand on their gregariousness. “Some things lighten nightfall and make a Rembrandt of a grief. But mostly the swiftness of time is a joke; on us. The flame—moth is unable to laugh. What luck. They myth are dead,” reports Stan Rice “Poem on Crawling into Bed: Bitterness” Body of Work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Age of No Mystery—It is So Nice to be in Love for I am Tired of Doing it for My Complexion!
And yet my grief was not entirely gone from me. It lingered like an idea, and the idea had a pure truth to it. I believe that this masking of dating without something to strive for, is an expression of narcissism, that it is also a rationalization for fear of intimacy and closeness in interpersonal relations, and that is arises from the alienation in our culture and adds to this alienation. Intimacy is the sharing between two people not only of their dreams, visions, goals, aspiration, values and religion, but also their personal space and thoughts. Intimacy is sensation blooming into emotion. Love is a state of being. That relation is intimate which is enriched by sharing our nature, in which one longs to hear the other’s fantasies, dreams, and experiences and reciprocated by sharing one’s own. Having lived for three years in a country in which the carnival season was built into the yearly calendar, I can testify to the great relief and pleasure in attending champagne parties that went on all night long and that ended only when the Sun was rising. For most people the carnival season is a time to dream dreams that my never come into reality. A patient from Germany, shy man among whose problems was a fear of intimacy, told how he had gone regularly to the masked balls in Berlin after the way, always hoping to meet some mysterious great love. However, of course, he never found anybody. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Dating without intimacy is sometimes helpful for adolescents, when deal with their peer group, for they are still navigating their way into the mysterious World and do not want to get trapped. Yet another use is for the divorcees in healing the wounds of separation, abandonment, and rejection. Dating without intimacy is said by some therapists to be a stage in getting emotionally free from the estranged spouse and launching oneself into the stream of life again. Other therapists add that a period of friendships can be a way of avoiding marrying on the rebound or getting too deeply involved with a partner before one has lived through the inevitable mourning period of the previous abandonment. Now we note that each of these is clearly a freedom from. Serial dating is supposedly free from tension; masked balls are freedom from the perpetual burden of too much consciousness; adolescents dating their peers is a freedom from bewilderment; divorcees’ dating is a freedom from the pain of wounded self-esteem. If dating without intimacy cannot enhance freedom of being itself, at least it can prepare the ground for later enhancement. Reading about these truths has a revelatory effect upon certain minds but only a boring or irritating effect upon others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Why might learning about the truth be boring or irritating? It is because the first have been brought by the experience or reflection to a sufficiently sensitive and intuitive condition to appreciate the worth of what they are reading, whereas the second, comprising for the most part an extroverted public, will naturally be impatient with such mystical ideas and contemptuous of their heretical expounder. Indeed, some of these writings must seem as incomprehensible to a Western ear as the babblings of a man just awakening from the chloroformed state. The masses would show no interest for they possess insufficient mental equipment to understand it. How can large principles find a resting place in such little persons? The incomprehensions of the undeveloped minds and unrefined hearts puts up a barrier between them and philosophy. To ignore it is first to bewilder and then to frustrate them. It is not fair to ask them to accept and believe in teachings which seems to be contradicted by all their experiences and by all the experience of the society around them. How can we demand that they violate their own thinking and their own feeling by doing so? #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
They are not necessarily more materialistic. It is simply that they have not begun to think about life, to question its meaning and ask for its purpose. The call to a higher kind of life may sound absurd to the lower kind of mind. It is often said in the criticism that its doctrines are unreasonable and its techniques impracticable. It is a subject which the arrogant intellectuals of our time, being unable to cope with it, find irritating or bewildering. The seeming failure to get these truths accepted more widely, still more to get them practiced, is no failure at all. Mortals are what they are as a result of what they were in the past. It is easier for most persons to lay down their distressing burdens at the door of faith in formal religion than turn to the quest which explains the very presence of these burdens and prescribes the technique to remove them. Too many people who are ordinarily supposed to be good people with some religious side to their character, hide behind their duties and responsibilities to avoid the Quest for truth of God. They find in these two things sufficient excuse to disregard the larger questions of life. They keep themselves busy supporting themselves and their family or keeping up a position in the World of activity, following an occupation, or maintaining a business. In this way they are able to ignore any self-questioning about why they are here on Earth at all or what will happen to them after death or whether these practical duties and responsibilities are that is required from them by the God they profess to believe in. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, when dating without intimacy is made into one’s overall way of life a la Playboy or Playgirl a very different thing occurs. This is a compartmentalization of the self, an amputation of the important parts of one’s being. In one’s fascination with the mystery in masked balls or dating without intimacy, one wakes up, in our twenty-first century “age of no mystery,” to find oneself with the mechanical counterpart to the masks, the love machines, literally or in the form simply of feelingless people. It is so nice to be in love. I am tired of doing it for my complexion. Sometimes relations or serial dating, without a real connection, is boring. Many people have an aim to learn to be in relationships without sensation or without emotion. The strange thing is that these same clients sometimes come for therapy on the advice of their partner. A young woman in her first session stated that she wanted a monogamous relationship with her partner and she was entirely happy with her partner and did not want to see other people, but her partner persuaded her that something was wrong if she could not date other men. And this is what she, at his urging, had come to learn to do. One woman tells of a quarrel she has with her spouse in which he expressed his irritation that she confined herself to a monogamous relationship with him. She found herself crying out, “If I want to be faithful to you, what bloody business is it of yours?” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In such men we see the fear of intimacy, often stimulated by their general fear of women. They may be afraid that too much responsibility will be dumped on them by the woman, afraid of enchainment to the woman’s emotions, afraid of being encroached upon by the woman’s needs. Obviously, women have similar fears of men: fear that they will be enveloped by the man, fear that they will not be able to express themselves, that they will lose their autonomy—fears made all the stronger by the cultural emphasis, at least until recently, on the woman’s role as subordinate to men. The fears are understandable. Being in a committed relationship requires momentous acts of trust and intimacy. And for tens of thousands of years before the last few decades, this has meant the man’s leaving his pearl with her with the possibility of her carrying a fetus for none months and then having another mouth to feed and child to take responsibility for. What arrogance makes us think we can change that cultural inheritance of tens of thousands of years’ duration in a couple of decades? All the World complains nowadays of a press of trivial duties and engagements which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of; but undoubtedly, if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, they would now at once fulfill their superior engagement and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. They would never be caught saying that they had no time for this when the dullest man knows that this is all that he has time for. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
There are now so many activities calling for one’s interest and energies that modern mortals thinks one has no time to devote to finding one’s soul. So one does not seek it: and so one remains unhappy. The joining of two people in a loving relationship is, psychologically and physiologically, the most intimate of all relationships to which the human being is heir. It is a uniting of the most sensitive parts of ourselves, our soul, mind, heart, finances, secrets, identity, and emotions with an intimacy greater than is possible than with anyone else. A loving relationship is the ultimate way we become part of each other; the throb of the other’s heart and pulse are then felt as our own. It is not the fear of intimacy I am questioning—there is no wonder we yearn for freedom from intimacy in carnivals and occasional flings. However, I am questioning the rationalization of this fear into a principle that ends up amputating the self. Another rationalization is the idea that, since dating is at times recreation, it is noting but recreation; and one does not get intimate with one’s partner in tennis or bridge. This ignores not only the meaning of love, but the power of the soul. No wonder true love in our society is being steadily replaced by pornography. However, in these days, pleasures of the flesh without intimacy in the extreme, leads ultimately to one’s own death. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The discomfort of being confronted by the fundamental questions which we must at some time, early or late, ask of life can be evaded—as all too many persons do evade it—by deliberately turning to more activity, or reinforced narcissism. Some reject the whole system for such reasons as “I do not want to become a saint,” or “I have to earn my livelihood.” This is an unwise attitude. Their minds are mostly occupied by personal matters, both petty and large, leaving little or no space in them for thoughts about life in general. How then can there be interest in the quest for truth? They dismiss the teachings in a few seconds under the erroneous belief that it is expounder is just another cultist. It is easy to fall into such gross misconceptions since they know nothing about it, or about the ancient tradition behind it. The fact is that, in the ordinary consciousness, many people are not interested in the question of truth, nor in the discovery of what seems without personal benefits of a Worldly kind; they are certainly not willing to practice various controls of thoughts, emotion, speech, and passion. Considering these factors, it will not come as a surprise when I state that, on the basis of my psychotherapeutic experiences, the people who can best function in a system of dating without intimacy are those who have little capacity for feeling in the first place. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
It is the persons who are compulsive and mechanical in their reactions, untrammeled by emotions, the persons who cannot experience intimacy anyway—in short the ones who operate like nonsentiment motors—that can most easily carry on a pattern of dating without intimacy. One of the saddest things about our culture is that this nonloving, compulsive—obsessional type seems to be the fruit of the widespread mechanistic training in our schools and life, the type our culture cultivates. The danger is that these detached persons who are afraid of intimacy will move toward a robotlike existence, heralded by the drying up of their emotions not only on personal levels, but on all levels, supported by the motto “my love don’t cost a thing.” Little wonder, then, that in the story which cites what the women of different nationalities say after dating, the American woman is portrayed saying “What is your name, darling?” I have noticed that in detached relationships with women, some male patients, not uncommonly intellectuals, are very competent with having modern relationships. They not only exemplify serial dating, but they also think and live without intimacy; and their yearnings, hopes, fears have been so strait-jacketed as to be almost extinct. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Then in therapy they begin to make process. Suddenly they find themselves impotent. This troubles them greatly, and they often cannot understand why I regard it as a gain that they have become aware of some sensibilities within themselves and can no longer direct their pleasures of the flesh on command as one would a computer. They are beginning to distinguish the times when they really want to have an intimate, monogamous relationship and the times they do not. This impotence is the beginning of a genuine experiences of pleasures of the flesh with intimacy. Now their adult life ideally can be built on a new foundation of relationship; now they can be monogamous partners, instead of serial dating. In contrast, the new narcissist is permissive about promiscuity, but this has given those types of individuals no true peace. What happens is that a premium is placed upon not feeling. Susan Stern, in describing how she gravitated toward the Weathermen, confesses an “inability to feel anything. I grew more frozen inside, more animated outside.” Some women who encourage their male partners to explore with other woman admit they would be hurt only if they felt too much, for instance, developed some intimacy with the other woman along with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Enlightenment has suffered miscomprehension in its own land by its own people and many are unfamiliar or unable to cope with righteous intuitive perceptions. The pleasures of the flesh without intimacy trend in our culture goes hand in hand with the loss of the capacity to feel. His is a trend I saw developing in patients in therapy as early as the 1950s. Speaking of some new moments in our culture, our of a pervasive dissatisfaction with the quality of personal relations, many are taught not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependence on others, live out loud, and to live for the moment—the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place. Our society has made deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marrieds increasingly difficult to achieve. Some of the new therapies dignify this combat as assertiveness and fighting fair in love and marriage. Others celebrate impermanent attachments under such formulas as open marriage and open-ended commitments. Thus they intensify the disease they pretend to cure. Too many quacks, incompetents, fanatics, charlatans, tools, or lunatics have brought reproach and opprobrium on them. Only a small handful of persons employ them deliberately to express the lofty, the admirable, and the honorable meanings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Few are willing to undergo the philosophical discipline because few are willing to disturb their personal comfort or disrupt their personal ease for the sake of a visionary ideal. The eagerness to improve oneself, the willingness to cultivate noble qualities are uncommon. If some joyfully recognize the truth as soon as they meet with it, others shudderingly turn away from it. The materialistically minded persons are too sceptical to take up this training and re-education of the mind; the self-indulgent ones are too lazily unwilling to disturb their comfort with it and come out of the groove in which they have sunk; while the narcissistic are too uninterested in merely long-range, far-off, and tangible benefits to se any value in it. Many people, especially in the working and the petty bourgeious classes, find their felicity at the beer and bacon table or the television, in idle chatter or in the particular successes of ambition. The notion that anyone could find it by means of nothing that can be measured in materialistic terms would seem foolish to them, while the Quest of God would seem the highest point of all foolishness. They accept the futility of materialism because they have never known the vitality of transcendentalism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
This is not the atmosphere in which those minds are satisfied with the shackles of strict doctrines or the pretensions of mere opinion can thrive: hence few glances at philosophy are often enough to keep them away. Most people devalue themselves, although they do not know it. A part of them is divine, but it is ignored and neglected. The improvement of the ability to experience and use generally involves a decease in mortal’s power to relate. The mortal who sample the spirit as if it were spirits—what is one to do with the beings that live around one? “Tempting to place in coherent collage the bee, the mountain range, the shadow of my hoof—tempting to join them, enlaced by logical vast and shining molecular thought-thread thru all Substances—Tempting to say I see in all I see the place where the needle began in the tapestry—but ah, it all looks whole and part—long live the eyeball and the lucid heart,” reports Stan Rice from “Four Days in Another City” Some Lamb (1975). First problem with us today is that we have not enough faith in God; the second is that we have become too soft and will not submit our lives to God. Amusements, sports, gossip, even pleasures of the flesh protect the thoughtless masses from having to confront the higher challenges of life, from having to let into the minds basic questions. It allows them to escape all through the length of their incarnation from the one thing they were put here on Earth to face. In short, they hide from the Quest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Purest Form of Love, the Warmest, the Most Exciting Love is Not Mine for Another, But Mine for Me!
I climbed to my feet. I felt myself light and powerful, and strangely numbed, and I went to the dead fire, and walked through the burnt timers. It was time now to examine the inner room. Most of us remember the myth of Narcissus as the story of a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own image in a pool and pined away because he never could possess it. However, the actual myth is a great deal richer. It begins with Tiresias, the aged prophet, predicting to the river nymph who was Narcissus’ mother, provided he never knows himself, her son would live to a ripe old age. This catches us up short. What is the meaning of not knowing oneself? True, the dynamics of narcissism always have as their fulcrum the problem of self-knowledge. However, could Tiresias be saying if Narcissus avoids the absorption of self-love, the very thing we later call narcissism, that he will live long? Or can he be referring to the literal translation of know thyself, from the Greek know that you are only a man, accept your human limits, which Narcissus obviously refused to do? The second character in the myth, also forgotten by most of us, is Echo, a lovely mountain nymph who falls hopelessly in love with Narcissus and follows him over hill and dale as he hunts for stage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Intending to call his hunting companions, Narcissus cries, “Let us come together here!” Echo responds in the same words and rushes out to embrace Narcissus. However, he shakes her off roughly and runs away crying out, “I will die before you ever lie with me!” Echo then pines away, leaving behind only her melodious voice. Disdaining her supine resignation, the gods condemn her to wander forever in the mountain glens and valleys, where we hear her voice today. However, in her need for revenge, she calls upon the gods to punish Narcissus by making him also the victim of unrequited love. It is only then that he falls in love with his own reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful young man who confronted him, but presently he recognized himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened. Echo, although she has not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed ‘Alas! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in his chest, and also the final ‘Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!” as he expired. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Narcissus’ tragic flaw, in the eyes of the gods, is that he could never love anyone else, never love in the sense of giving himself in union with another person. There is no fertility in Narcissus’ love, and none in narcissism—no genuine coupling, no cross-fertilization, no interpersonal relationship. This threatens to be a tragic flaw in our present-day “I am me” effort to escape the paradox: we cannot love without committing ourselves to another person. In grasping for freedom from entanglement with other persons, we come to grief over our failure of compassion and commitment—indeed, the failure to love authentically. However, there is another important insight in this story that will help us understand present-day neo-narcissism and that, to my knowledge, has not yet been mentioned in the literature. It is that narcissism has its origin in revenge and retaliation. Echo’s plea, answered by Aphrodite, is a gesture of revenge. And this is also true in our contemporary neo-narcissism: there is in it a strong motive of anger and revenge. This is shown in the above series of verses. “I have no right, no wrongs” can be translated into the cry “The culture has let us down.” What we learned as children turns out to be phony; our parents seemed unable by dint of their confusion to show us any alternative moral guideposts or teach us wisdom; and what we were taught often turns out to be undesirable anyway and promotes conterrebellion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is out of revenge upon those in the culture who betrayed her that the writers of the verses withdraws into herself and comforts herself with a lonely self-love: “The purest form of love, the warmest, the most exciting love is not mine for another, but mine for me.” In our society we have called this self-love. The phrase self love came into general currency after Erich Fromm’s essay “Selfishness and Self-Love.” Dr. Fromm condemned the fist and elevated the second. He did not see the important differences between self-love and love of another. There is a tragic flaw in this self-love, a seductive error that carries over into the masses of self-help books and spreads the havoc that arises from neo-narcissism. What is called love for others and self-love are two different things. Love for another person is the urge toward the uniting of two separate entities who invigorate each other, revivify each other, and contribute their differences to each other, and combine their different genes in a new and unique being—toward which the pleasures of the flesh is a powerful motivation. The essence, then, is the combining of two different beings. Nature’s obvious purpose in this, in contrast to incest, is the increase of possibilities. The insemination, the combination of two different sets of genes, result in the creation of new forms and original patterns. All of this Narcissus could not or would not do. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The well-worn, strict doctrine that if you hate yourself, you cannot love others is true. However, the converse of that—that is you love yourself, you will automatically love others—is not true. Narcissus, in his rejection of Echo, dramatically demonstrates this. Many persons use self-love, then, ought really to be termed self-caring, which includes self-esteem, self-respect, and self-affirmation. This would save from the confusion of self-caring and love for others, as it is shown so vividly in the myth of Narcissus. To be free to love other persons requires self-affirmation and, paradoxically, the assertion of oneself. At the same time it requires tenderness, affirmation of the other, relaxing of competition as must as possible, self-abnegation at times in the interests of the loved one, and the age-old virtues of mercy and forgiveness toward each other. Destiny is the other person in the act of loving. The dialectical poles of self-caring and love for the other fructify and strengthen each other. Fortunately, this paradox can neither be escaped nor solved, but must be lived with. There are others, however, who are not satisfied with such ignorance and such indifference, who want certain and assured knowledge of the spirit, by penetrating the secrets of their own being. And it is the promise of the satisfaction of this want which attracts them to the quest for God’s truth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from mortals? Many cannot answer this. If one says that it was from mortals, they would have hurt the popular feelings and perhaps even a feeling within themselves, that John was a prophet. However, if they had said that he was from God, they would have established an authority beyond the threefold authority which they could claim for themselves. And this they did not want. They, who were called authorities, demanded that all authority be vested in them. Therefore, they did not accept John as a prophet, nor Jesus as the Christ. Do not minimize the seriousness of this conflict. It was not simply a conflict between good and evil, between faith and unbelief. The conflict was much more profound and much more tragic than this! Let us imagine that we ourselves were in the place of those who asked Jesus about the source of his authority. Let us imagine ourselves as the guardians of a great religious tradition, or as the unquestionable experts in a sphere of decisive importance for human existence, or as people who have learned through a long experience to deal with matters of highest value. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And let us also assume that we had no function as legally established authorities and that somebody came and spoke about the same things in quite a different language and acted in the field of our authority in quite a radical way; how would be react? And if the people who saw and heard this man said of him what they said about Jesus, that he teaches as one who has authority and not as we the established authorities, how would we react? Would we not think: He confuses the masses, he spreads dangerous doctrines, he undermines well-proved laws and institutions, he introduces strange modes of life and thought, he disrupts sacred ties, he destroys traditions from which generations of mortals have received discipline and strength and hope? It is our duty to resist him and if possible to remove him! For the sake of our people we must defend our consecrated and tested authority against this mortal who cannot show the source of the authority he claims. Could we be blamed for such a reaction? And if not, can we blame the authorities in Jerusalem for their reaction to Jesus? We think of the Reformation. This was a moment in the history of the Church in which the question of authority was once more in the center of events. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Luther, and consequently the whole Protestant World, broke away from the Roman Church and from 1500 years of Christian tradition when no agreement about the authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone had arisen who spoke and acted with an authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone has arisen who spoke and acted with an authority the sources of which could not be determined by legal means. And here also we must ask, “Are the Catholic authorities who rejected him in the name of their established authority to be blamed for it?” However, if we do not blame them, we can ask them, “Why do you blame the Jewish authorities who did exactly the same as you did when the people said of the Reformers that they spoke with authority and not like the priests and monks?” Is the same thing so different if it is done by the Jewish high priest and if it is done by the Roman high priest? And one may ask the present-day Protestant authorities in Europe and in this country, “Are you certain that the insistence on your authority, on your tradition, and your experience does not suppress the kind of authority which Jesus has in mind?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
And now we ask, “What does authority mean?” What does it mean for a mortal as a mortal? What does it mean for our period and for each of us?” First of all, it means that we are finite and in need of what the word “authority” really says: to be started and increased. It means that we are born, that we were infants and children, that we were completely dependent on those who gave us life and home and guidance and contents for soul and mind. We were not able to decide for ourselves for many years, and that made us dependent on authority and made authority a benefit for us. We accepted this authority without resistance, even if we rebelled on special occasions. And this authority became the basis for all other authorities. It gave strength to the authority of the older brother or sister, of the more mature friend or teacher, of the official, of the ruler, of the minister. And through them we have been introduced into the institutions and traditions in society, state and Church. Authority permeates, guides, shapes our lives. The acceptance of authority is the acceptance of what is given by those who have more than we. And our subjection to them and to what they stand for enables us to live in history, as our subjection to the laws of nature enables us to live in nature. And from the authority of the law is derived the authority of those who represent and administer it and who, for this reason, are called the authorities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Our daily life would be impossible without traditions of behavior and customs and the authority of those who have received them and surrendered them to us. Mortal’s control of nature would be impossible without the tradition of knowledge and skill into which every new generation is introduced and which gives authority to those who are able to introduce us. Mortal’s intellectual life—the language one uses, the songs one sings, the music one plays, the houses one builds, the pictures one paints, the symbols one creates—one has received through the authority of those who have participated in it before one. Mortal’s religious life—the faith one hold, the cult one loves, the stories and legends one has heard, the commandments one tried to obey, the texts one knows by heart—all this is not created by one; one takes it from those who represent to one religious authority. And if one revolts against the authorities which have shaped one, one does it with the tools one has received from them. The language of the revolutionary is formed by those against whom one revolts. The protest of the reformer uses the tradition against which one protests. There, no absolute revolution is possible. If it is attempted, it fails immediately; and is a revolution succeeds, its leaders soon have to use forms and ideas created by the authorities of the past. This is true of the rebellion of the adolescent against the family authority as well as of the rebellion of new social groups against the authority of the established power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When we speak of human finitude, we usually think of mortal’s transitorines in time, of birth and death, of the vicissitudes which threaten one in every moment. However, we are not only finite in that we are temporal, we are also finite in that we are historical and that means subject to authority, even if we rebel against it. We are thrown into existence, not only bodily, but also mentally. In no respect are we by ourselves, in no moment can we be by ourselves. One who tries to be without authority tries to be like God, who alone is by himself. And like everyone who tries to be like God, one is thrown down to self-destruction, be it a single human being, be it a nation, be it a period of history like our own. Art, to: as one beholds what confronts one, the form discloses itself to the artist. One conjures it into an image. The image does not stand in a World of gods but in this great World of mortals. Of course, it is there even when no human eye afflicts it; but it sleeps. The Chinese poet relates that mortals do not want to hear the song that one was playing on one’s flute of jade; then one played it to the gods, and they inclined their ears; and ever since mortals, too, have listened to the song—and thus one went from the gods to those with whom the image cannot dispense. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
As in a dream it looks for the encounter with mortal in order that one may undo the spell and embrace the form for a timeless moment. And there one comes and experiences what there is to be experienced: that is how it is made, or this is what is expresses, or its qualities are such and such, and on top of all that perhaps also it might rate. Not that scientific and aesthetic understand is not necessary—but it should do its work faithfully and immerse itself and disappear in that truth of the relation which surpasses understanding and embraces what is understandable. And also: that which towers above the spirit of knowledge and the spirit of art because here evanescent, corporeal mortals need not banish oneself into the enduring matter but outlasts it and rises, oneself an image, on the starry sky of the spirit, as the music of one’s living speech roars around one—pure action, the act that is not arbitrary. Here the Independent World appeared to mortals out of a deeper mystery, addressed one out of the dark, and one responded with one’s life. Here the word has become life, and this life, whether it fulfilled the law or broke the law—both are required on occasion lest the spirit die on Earth—is teaching. Thus it stands before posterity in order to teach it, not what is and not what ought to be, but how one lives in the spirit, in the countenance of the Independent World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
And that means: it stands ready to become an Independent World at any time, opening up to the spirit of God; no, it does not stand ready, it always comes toward them and touches them. However they, having become uneager and inept for such living intercourse that opens up a World, are well informed; they have imprisoned the person in history, and one’s speech in a library; they have codified the fulfillment of the breach, it does not matter which; nor are they stingy with reverence and even adoration, adequately mixed with some psychology, as is only proper for modern mortals. O lonely countenance, starlike in the dark; O living finger upon an insensitive forehead; O steps whose each is fading away! It is a tradition in spiritual circles of God that anyone who has ever felt the truth power or beauty of the Gospel, however briefly, will not be able to escape being drawn to its practical consequence, the Quest, one day, however long deferred it may be. A mind which is no longer satisfied with shallow consolations will naturally turn to mystical experience or metaphysical study for deeper ones. All that has happened before one’s entry upon the quest has really been converging toward it. It is as inevitable that some mortals should come to the Quest because of their sorrows and difficulties as that other mortal should abandon it temporarily for the same reasons. God offers the surest path to the mind’s peace and the heart’s satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Purest form of Love, the Warmest Kind of Love, the Most Exciting Love is Knowing that these Feelings Are Not Mine for Another, but Mine for Me!
I have no special circle of friends who think the way I do, no rights, no wrongs, no desired ends. There was no doubt in my mind, at least at this moment, that he was from the devil, that God and the devil existed, that beyond the isolation I had known only hours ago lay this vast realm of dark beings and hideous meanings and I had been swallowed into it somehow. It occurred to me quite clearly I was being punished for my life, and yet that seemed absurd. Millions believed as I believed the World over. Why the hell was this happening to me? And a grim possibility started irresistibly to take shape, that the World was no more meaningful than before, and this was but another horror. “In God’s name, get away!” I shouted. I had to believe in God now. I had to. That was absolutely the only hope. I went to make the Sign of the Cross. For one moment he started at me, his eyes wide with range. And then he remained still. He watched me make the Sign of the Cross. He listened to me call upon God again and again. He only smiled, making his face a perfect mask of comedy from the proscenium arch. This reveals a World with no structure of human relations and no moral structure—no rights, no wrongs, no purposes. It is a celebration of isolation and emptiness. No wonder I am driven inside myself, taking refuge in an essentially narcissistic relation with myself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The purest form of love, the warmest kind of love, the most exciting love is knowing that these feelings are not mine for another, but mine for me. However, this solipsism, a powerful illustration of the me decade, leads to my anxiety, which at this point is a sign of residual health. I am just beginning to see how scary it is to live first for myself. Nonetheless, self-discipline can seem like self mutiny when the growing degree of resentment and anger possesses one and one can sense that in one’s alienation and isolation, one has somehow missed the boat. There is no genuine freedom at all in a family that has been broken up by the fact that one has experienced death by suicide. The main problem in the “if I am me’ syndrome, and the reason it so quickly goes bankrupt in the search for personal freedom, is that it omits other people; it fails to enrich our humanity. It does not confront destiny as embodied in the community. If we all subscribe to the doctrine, “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this World to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this World to live up to mine. You are you and I am I; if by chance we find each other, it is beautiful. If not, it cannot be helped,” this yields the courage—or arrogance, if one wishes to call it that—of one against the World. True, it may be a necessary phase of individuation at certain times in one’s history—and I think the past decade has been some a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
However, the me against the World attitude is a cop-out, it is a way to avoid or neglect problems, responsibilities, or commitments as a permanent way of life. The I detached from a Thu disintegrates. Narcissism is self-hate disguised as self-love. It is probably the cruelest and most insidious form of self-deception, because it destroys the healing power of loving relationships. We must now transcend the seduction of the mirror, and replace the ego’s image with a moral and political vision which restores our morale and enriches our humanity. The “I am me” always sooner or later comes to grief because it tries to escape confronting the destiny that limits every expression of freedom. Nothing keeps you bound except your Me—until you break its chains, its handcuffs, and are free. It our birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord is a first step on the long and tortuous path, fraught with endless difficulties and emblazoned with many joys, becoming autonomous. Obviously, we never fully reach our goals. However, until we become aware that individuation occurs in our confronting, accepting, or engaging in various ways our destiny as social creatures, we shall never even start on the right track. If there are no limits in a human relationship, no place in the other where one cannot go, there is then no gratifying relationship from which we can learn. The concept of the unconscious used to provide this, but now, when everyone wears one’s dreams on one’s sleeve, it no longer does. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Complete self-transparency, not withstanding its value as an ideal aim, is impossible and even undesirable. To keep the secret self-that sanctum sanctorum—is as important as the transparency. The new narcissism brought with it a distrust of reality, as though we could never be sure anything was real, and we grasped desperately at what was inside ourselves in the hope of finding an anchor. The beneficial side f this uncertainty about reality is shown in the Christian story of the person asking: Am I a mortal looking at the World, or am I a child of God dreaming I am on the quest for truth? The negative side is shown when reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by the cameras. There comes to mind the scene from Apocalypse Now, where the marine at night is desperately shooting at random not knowing where the enemies’ shells are coming from, not knowing where his commander is or even who he is or whether he even has a commander. It is a Kafkaesque story that we are playing out, except that it is not played out now on a calm scene: it is played with atom bomb, germ warfare, biological weapons, fake news, and the possibility of annihilated cities and the dreaded prospect of darkness at noon. It is the uncertainty about the reality of oneself that threatens us. The self becomes increasingly insignificant in our World of technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The emphasis on living now, with no ability to get solace or renewal from the past of future, the inability to commit oneself because one is not sure there is a self, the pervasive sense of purposelessness and vague despondency always threatening to become severe depression—these are all symptoms crying out that something has gone radically wrong with the self in relation to this World. The new narcissism and the me decade are symptoms of what has gone wrong with the reality of oneself. We seem to have to question every relationship, and the answers continue to be ambivalent. Confronted mostly by hipster, this unreality of the self has led to a fear of psychosis on a scale broader than ever before. For their elders all these compulsive-obsessional symptoms—the rigidity, the hollowness, the lack of affect—were protections against psychosis. However, many are turning to strong opioids and street drugs to shock to one’s consciousness that produces makes it clear that a similar shock was possible for the whole of society. More and more the question is being asked whether society as a whole is psychotic, and the pause after the question is a sign that the answer could be yes as well as no. The widespread passion to be me with the assumption that then I will be free turns into becoming a candidate for a mental hospital. The inmates in mental hospitals are there because they cannot be themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
As one man puts it in the hospital, “Here we are ourselves with a vengeance; ourselves and nothing whatever but ourselves. We go full steam through life under the pressure of self. Each one shuts oneself up in the cask of self. Sink to the bottom by self-fermentation, seals oneself in with the bung of self, and seasons in the well of self, no one here weeps for the woes of others. No one here listens to anyone else’s ideas.” There can be no sense of the self without a sense of the destiny of that self. How we respond to the facts of illness, disaster, good fortune, success, renewed life, death ad infinitum is crucial; and the pattern of such response is the self relating to destiny. For when all is said and done, the sense of self consists in the relationship between the person’s freedom and his or her destiny. So we must conclude that the lack of sense of reality of the self is due to the fact that we have omitted destiny. We secretly tend to believe that advertisements that tell us that we are unlimited, the sky is the limit, we will be 100-percent winners, we make our own destiny, and so on. And it is this that robs us of the sense of reality—and of adventure also—in our encountering the vicissitudes of human existence. It is certain that the “if I am me, I will be free” is a mistaken path, for it lacks the sense of destiny that gives freedom to reality. Instead of freedom, this path leads to isolation and estrangement. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Spirit in its human manifestation is mortal’s response to one’s person. Mortals speak in many languages—tongues of language, of art, of action—but the spirit is one; it is response to the individual that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of a mortal and then become sound in one’s throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in mortals but mortals stand in language and speak out of it—so it is with all words, all spirits. Spirit is not in the I but between I and society. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. When one is able to respond to the individual that means mortals live in the spirit. When one enters into this relation with one’s whole being, one is able to do that. It is solely by virtue of one’s power to relate that mortals are able to live in the spirit. However, it is here that the fate of the relational events rears up most powerful. The more powerful the response, the more powerfully it ties down the individual and as by a spell binds it into an object. Only silence toward the individual, the silence of all languages, the taciturn waiting in the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word leaves the individual free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
All response binds the individual into the rational World. That is the melancholy of mortals, and that is one’s greatness. For thus knowledge, this works, thus imagine and example come into being among the living. However, whatever has thus been changed into It and frozen into a thing among things is still endowed with the meaning and the destiny to change back ever again. When it bestowed itself upon mortals and begot the response in one–ever again—that was the intention in that hour of the spirit—the object shall catch fire and become present, returning to the element from which it issued, to beheld and lived by mortals as present. The fulfillment of this meaning and this destiny is frustrated by the mortal who has become reconciled to the It-World as something that is to be experienced and used and who holds down what is tied into it instead of freeing it, who observes it instead of heeding it, and instead of receiving it utilizes it. Knowledge: as one beholds what confronts one, its being is disclosed to the knower. What one beheld as present one will have to comprehend as an object, compare with objects, assign a place in order of objects, and describe and analyze objectively; only as an individual can it be absorbed into the store of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, in the act of beholding it was no thing among things, no event among events; it was presented exclusively. It is not in the law that is afterward derived from the appearance but in the appearance itself that the being communicates itself. That we think the universal is merely an unreeling of skeinlike event that was beheld in the particular, in a confrontation. And now it is locked into the Individual-form of conceptual knowledge. Whoever unlock it and beholds it again as present, fulfills the meaning of that act of knowledge as something that is actual and active between mortals. However, knowledge can also be pursued by stating: “so that is how it is constituted; that is were it belongs.” What has become in It is then taken as an It, experienced and sued as an It, employed along with other tings for the project of conquering the World. “One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, the chief priests and the scribes with the elders came up and said to him, ‘Tell us by what authority you do these things, or what it is that gave you this authority.’ He answered them, ‘I also will ask you a question; now tell me, Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from mortals?’ And they discussed it with one another, saying, ‘If we say, from Heaven, he will say, from mortals, and all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know whence it was. And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things,” reports Luke 20.1-8. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The story we have read was very important to the early Christians who preserved it for us. If we look at it superficially, no reason seems to exist for such a high valuation: the Jewish leaders tried to trap Jesus by a shrewd question, and Jesus trapped them by an even shrewder question. It is a pleasant anecdote. However, it is more than this? Indeed, it is infinitely more. It does something surprising: it answers the fundamental question of prophetic religion by not answering t. AN answer to the question of authority is refused by Jesus, but the way in which Christ refuses the answer is the answer. Let us imagine that Christ had answered the question of the religious leaders about his authority by asking them about the source of their authority! They could have replied easily and convincingly. The chief persists could have said, “The source of our authority is our consecration accord to a tradition which goes back without interruption to Moses and Aaron. The sacred tradition of which we are a link from the past to the future gives us our authority.” And the scribes could have answered, “The source of our authority is our knowledge—beyond that of anybody else—of the Scriptures. We have studied them day and night since our early childhood, as a student of the Word of God must do. Because we are experts in interpreting the Holy Scriptures, we have authority.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And they all together would have said to Jesus, “But who are you, who are not consecrated and not studied in the Scriptures, and without the wisdom of age and the experience of practice? Which is the source of your authority? You have not only taught and preached, you have also acted as a radical, without our approval. You have driven out the temple of all who sold and bought, you have overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seat of those who sold pigeons. And you know yourself that they are necessary for the preservation of sacrifices! By what authority have you turned against the religion as it has been given to us by Moses and by all generations since his time?” I awoke in the middle of the night to discover the room was filled with bright light. I could see all the furniture. A marvelous peace pervaded me. I said to myself, “God is that you?” and instinctively, I knew that it was. After a while I got up when the experience was fading to check its extraordinary nature and confirmed that none of the electric lamps were switched on. Since then thirteen years have passed. I have a loving husband and loving children, enough money for the basic things of life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, for some time life was not meaningful and I felt empty. I looked at my friends, so willing to accept this hollow life, but I could not. It became intolerable. Five years ago, I was shown the spiritual quest of truth and this has since become my mainstay. Was there a connection between the vision of Light and the subsequent restlessness until one turned to the quest? That there is such a line, is confirmed by many other instances scattered around the World. Every mortal who catches such a glimpse of one’s diviner possibilities will be haunted forever after by them until one tries to catch up in actual thought and life with them. The endeavour to do so brings one sooner or later to the Quest for God. In the moment of first meeting with one’s Higher Self, the quest is laid open to one in reality. One has to see the opportunity and to take the first steps by an act of intuition and a venture of faith. There will be many more succeeding steps if one is to continue the quest and most probably a number of missteps, but it all begins with this initial recognition and reaction. One who meets for the first time the challenge in an adept’s eyes, meets one’s fate, did one know it. For one is at once presented subconsciously with a choice between two courses: the one leading to a higher kind of life aim, the other continuing on normal lines. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
When the truth explodes suddenly like a NASA rocket blasting off beneath the traditions or beliefs or habits which held one captive in untruth, the light may dazzle and bewilder one or it may set one free from them in a way and with a speed which could not have existed ordinarily. It is this faith that there is a World-Idea and that we much adjust our lives to its or suffer unnecessarily which makes one out from the herd. It is the desire to do for oneself what Life wishes one to do, to realize one’s higher potentials, that puts one on this Quest. It is this feeling that one is not in one’s true place that pushes a mortal into this search for a teaching or a teacher. Mortals whose lives have been so endangered and whose minds so troubled will either turn for relief to gross sensuality or search for wholeness in new spirituality. The sickness of the World wants something much more than a mere philosophy of the lecture-room to cure it; no bottles of verbal drugs can prove potent in the present desperation. Not all mortals understand just at what time, what date, their quest of God will start. This may be because it did not happen all at once. “Wings stir the sunlit dust of the cathedral in which the Past is buried to its chin in marble,” reports Stan Rice from “Poem on Crawling int Bed: Bitterness” Body of work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Against Heavens Hand or Will, Argue Not Nor Bate a Lot of Heart or Hope, Still Bear Up and Steer Right Onward!
Investigators of the paranormal—we watch and we are always here. I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I could not believe the sound I was hearing. He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. I have never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it has all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote. Nicolas de Lenfent had been educated all his life to be a little imitation aristocrat. Well, during his first term studying law in Paris, at Pantheon-Assas University, he fell madly in love with the violin, of all things. Seems he heard an Italian virtuoso, one of those geniuses from Padua who is so great that mortals say he has sold his soul to the devil. Well, Nicolas dropped everything at once to take lessons from Wolfgang Mozart. He sold his books—the 17th century Institutio Theologiae Elencticae by Francisco Turrettione, the 16th century Tractatulus Hypocratis Medicorum Optimi de Aspectibus Plantrum Verus Lubam by Pietro d’Abano. He did nothing but play and play until he failed his examinations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nicolas wanted to be a musician. Can you imagine? And his father was beside himself. He even smashed the instrument, and you know what an expensive instrument the Molitor Stradivarius is, and you know what a piece of expensive merchandise means to the good draper. Nicolas promptly ran away to Clermont and sold his rare silver and tortoiseshell verge pocket watch to buy another. He is impossible all right, and the worst part of it is that he plays rather well. On Sunday when I went to mass, he was playing upstairs in his bedroom over the shop. Everyone could hear him, and his father was threatening to break his hands. I gave a little grasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that. Of course, people said he will never be anything. He is too old. That when you are already twenty, you cannot take up the violin. But what do they know? He plays magically in his own way. And maybe he can sell his soul to the devil. Engaging destiny is seen most brilliantly in poets, partly because of their genius with words, but mainly because they live in and write with the awareness of deeper dimensions of consciousness than the rest of us. Whether or not we call these depths subconscious, unconscious, or collective unconscious, they still are arrived at only by intensity of feeling and vision, an ecstasy or a rage that cuts through superficial existence and reveals the profound forms of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
We should expect poets to have a great deal to communicate about destiny and about their own struggles to confront it. And we are not disappointed. I have always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reasons. Many people do not much believe in God and never have. Of course, when they do to mass they say they do. However, it is a duty for them. Real religion long ago died out for many people, especially when Madalyn Murry O’Hair came along and founded American Atheists and challenged mandatory prayer and Bible reading in public schools, but of course she and her sons ended up stealing money from the foundation and absconded. And as fate would have it, David Roland Waters, a convicted felon and former employee of American Atheists was convicted of murdering Madalyn O’Hair, her second son Jon Garth Murray, and her adopted daughter Robin Murry O’Hair (daughter of her son William J. Murray and his high school girlfriend Susan). Now we have all these shootings in the schools since people are removing God from the country founded in his name, as religion has died out in the families of thousands of aristocrats. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Once I remember crying over witches. We were little boys and the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the charred ground. That was a horrid, horrid place. I remember screaming and being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead and saying, “Wake up.” However, I had not thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it—the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burst alive. When my mother came to get us, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales. The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our village, that they had been innocent. Victims of superstition. There were no real witches. No wonder I had screamed and screamed. However, my mother told a different story, that the witches has been in league with the devil, that they had lighted the crops, and in the guise of wolves killed the sheep and the children. Still, if no one is ever brunt in the name of God, the World would be better. The good father even said that they had burnt a good number of werewolves in those times, too. They were a regular menace. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Nevertheless, the poet’s way is the opposite to the opaque, placid life. In authentic poetry we find a confrontation which does not involve repression nor covering up nor sacrifice of passion in order to avoid despair, nor any of the other ways most of us use to avoid direct acknowledgment of our destiny. The art of the poets teases out our awareness of our fate; the energy that does into the making of the poem adds to our passion; and by means of the music poets combine with words, the poem takes on a power to express the dignity of our state as human beings. All pains in the immortal spirit must endure, all weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, find their sole speech in that victorious brow. This is an expression for all of us to understand the passions and griefs experienced in engaging our own destinies. The joy and ecstasy from this level is where freedom takes off. All possibilities open up—thou art freed. When we consider how our light is spent, half our days in this dark World and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide could lodge us useless, not to express our freedom is a cruel fate. For many people their failure to see life and its precious capacity is what eats away their souls. However, religious faith is what helps us to accept our destiny, it keeps us from being cynical and sarcastic. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Against Heavens hand or will, one must not argue, nor bate a lot of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer right onward. This thought might lead one through the Worlds vain mask content, through the veil, have we no better guide. This is not a resignation. Resignation usually drains away one’s power and productivity. However, we are still passionate in our defense of freedom. Give us the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties. Help us to save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. It is important to have such passionate devotion to the cause one believes in and speak not of resignation, passivity, docility, or loss of energy. Tragic experience can be formed by art into a thing of beauty. This outer power in politics as well as inner power of poetry indicates that we have kept very much alive our dialectical relation to our own destiny and thus our experience of authentic freedom. The World is twofold for mortals in accordance with our twofold attitude. Modern society only recognizes one of these modes, the mode of experience, through which mortals treats the World (including their fellow people), as an object to be analyzed and utilized. Most mortals ignore the second mode, the mode of encounter, through which mortals enter into a relation with the World, engaging as active participants rather than as objective observer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is only by opening ourselves up to this second mode of engaging in the World that we can escape the ills of the modern human condition. Or mortals encounter being and becoming as what confronts one—always only one being and everything only as a being. What is there reveals itself to one in the occurrence, and what occurs there happens to one as being. Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically. Measure and comparisons have fled. It is up to us how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for us. The encounters do not order themselves to become a World, but each if for us a sign of the World order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees our association wit the World. The World that appears to us in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to us, and we cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for everything in it permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when we cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if one tries to make it surveryable, one loses it. It comes—comes to fetch us—and if it does not reach us or encounter us it vanishes, but it comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside us, it touches our ground; and id we say “soul of my soul” we have not said too much. However, one must beware of trying to transpose it into our soul—that way one destroy it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is your present; you have a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it—you must do that again and again—and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimation of eternity. The It-World hangs together in space and time. The You-World does not hang together in space and time. The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course. The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation. These are the two basic privileges of the It-World. They induce mortals to consider the It-World as in which one has to live and also can live comfortably—and that even offers us all sorts of stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
In this firm and wholesome chronicle the You-moments appears as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes, loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny, altogether indispensable. Since one must after all return into the World, why not stay in it in the first place? Why not call to order that which confronts us and send it home into objectivity? And when one cannot get around to saying You, perhaps to one’s father, wife, companion—why not say You and mean It? After all, producing the sound “You” with one’s vocal cords does not by any means entail speaking the uncanny basic word. Even whispering an amorous You with one’s soul is hardly dangerous as long as in all seriousness one means nothing but experiencing and using. One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. However, in pure past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged. One only has to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn. And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. However, whoever lives only with that is not human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? When we have fears that we may cease to be, before the pen has gleaned one’s teeming brain—keep in mind the chief expression of possibility, the freedom to create, may be taken from one. When one beholds, upon the night’s starred face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that one may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when one feel, fair creature of an hour, that one shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the faery power of unreflecting love;–then on the shore of the wide World one stands alone, and thinks till love and fame to nothingness do sink. The words will began to pour out of one as they had out of a poet, and soon one will be talking about things they had felt in their hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words will seem to be essential words they way good friends do on those rare occasions. And friends will come to describe their longings and dissatisfactions, and say things to each other with exuberance. Once night, when the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I had never done before—of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I could not see the towers of my father’s house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Into this Universe, and why not knowing nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; and out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. Up from the Earth’s centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; and many knots unraveled by the road; but not the master-knot of human fate. The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it. We must attack the false wishes of illusions that we all tend to carry—the hope that somehow we shall escape, through our special piety or our self-pity, the common fate of humankind. We simply do not know the ultimate answers. However, despite this fate and the injustices that it implies, we must seize what freedom we can and push on. The mystery will remain a mystery, our destiny cannot be unraveled by reason or by wit. We must pit fortitude against fatalism. Confront fate without becoming fatalistic. As a boy eight centuries ago, studied Sufism and science and as an adult become known as Persia’s outstanding astronomer, who wrote an authoritative text on algebra, who revised the astronomical tables, who persuaded the sultan to reform the calendar, and who in other ways worked diligently in the sultan’s government. Hardly a hedonistic loafer! #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Because something deep down in the subconscious knows that the ego is destructible, sooner or later, in one incarnation or another, a longing arises for what which is indestructible. From this moment one begins, however feebly, to crease indulging the desires, the wishes, of one’s ego, and to replace the by something new and higher. This is the beginning of the Quest, and it may take a religious, a spiritual, or a philosophic form, according to one’s maturity. Many seem to believe their entry into the quest for God will set their life in order and solve their problems forever. This is, of course, mere wishful thinking. It is not their entry but their completion of the quest that could ever do these things for them. The embracing of one’s fate so directly and so clearly—as well as so blithely and courageously—reduced the negative effect of the piddling worries about destiny, and sets one free inwardly for actualizing one’s freedom outwardly. Like Queen Akasha, those persons who often seem the most capable of accepting the inevitable are also the most productive and the most capable of pleasure and joy. We see in these poets that the acceptance of human destiny is the way to put one’s feet on solid ground. We then are not the ready prey of hobgoblins—we are no longer fighting battles against figments of our imagination; no boogeyman or woman is lurking in the closet. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We are freed from the hundred and one imaginary bonds; we are loosed from the need to beg others to take care of us. Having confronted the worst, we are released to open up to the possibilities of life. Those of us who dare to face the question of truth may listen to what the Fourth Gospel says about it. The Fourth Gospel speaks a true reality—that reality which does not deceive us if we accept it and live with it. If Jesus says, “I am the truth,” he indicates that in Christ the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present, unveiled, undistorted, Christ’s infinite depth, in his unapproachable mystery. Jesus is not the truth because his teachings are true his teachings are. However, Christ’s teachings are true because they express his words. And he is more than any word said about him. The truth which makes us free is neither the teaching of Jesus nor the teaching about Jesus. They point to the truth, but are not a law of truth. Nor are the doctrines about him the truth that liberates. I say this to you as somebody who all his life has worked for a true expression of the truth which is the Christ. However, the more one works, the more one realizes that our expressions, including everything we have learned from our professors and from the teaching of the Church in all generations, is not the truth that makes us free. “The dead do not share. Though they reach towards us from the grave (I swear they do) they do not band their hearts to you They hand their heads, the part that stares,” Stan Rice from “Their Share” Body of Work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Why Are they Seeking the Truth–No Mortals Enjoys the True Taste of Life But One Who is Willing and Ready to Quit it!
And there it was again, the most seductive beauty I have ever beheld. And I am yours, my love. You are my only true companion, my finest instrument. You know this, do you not? We have looked at the powers which rule the World and over which the faith in providence must triumph. What is faith? It is certainly not the belief that everything will turn out well in the end. It is not the belief that everything follows a preconceived plan, whether we call the planner God or Nature or Fate. Lift is not a machine well-constructed by its builder and running on according to the forces and laws of its own machinery. Life, personal and historical, is a creative and destructive process in which freedom and destiny are mixed with each other in everything and in ever moment. These tensions, ambiguities and conflicts makes life what it is. They create the fascination and the horror of life. They drive us to the question of a courage which can accept life without being conquered by it, and this is the question of providence. However, let us now drop the word providence with all its false connotations and look at what it really means. It means the courage to accept life in the power of that which is more than life. This is the love of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The love of God certainly is above the angelic-demonic figure of love which we spoke. This love is the ultimate power of union, the ultimate victory over separation. Being united with it enables us to stand above life in the midst of life. It enables us to accept the double-faced rulers of life, their fascination and their anxiety, their glory and their horror. It gives us the certainty that no moment is possible in which we can be prevented from reaching the fulfillment towards which all life is striving. This is the courage to accept life in the power of that in which life is rooted and overcome. Forget your person tragedy. We are all cursed from the start and especially have to hurt like hell before we can write seriously. However, when you get the damned hurt use it—do not cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist. It is only in the face of death that mortal’s self is born. Our awareness of death is the most vivid and compelling example of destiny. I say awareness of death rather than simply death, for everything in nature dies in its own time. However, human beings know that they die. They have a word for death, they anticipate it, they experience their death in imagination. This experience of imagining one’s own death is seen in such diverse events as seeing a dead cat in the road, or crossing a trafficked street, or buckling a seat belt, or taking a breath of fresh air. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Mortals are only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, but one is a thinking reed. There is no need for the entire Universe to arm itself in order to annihilate one: a vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill a mortal. However, were the Universe to crush one, mortals would yet be more noble than that which slays one because one knows that one dies, and the advantage that the Universe has over one; of this Universe knows nothing. Thus all our dignity is possessed in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, not by space and time, which we cannot fill. Let us strive, then, to think well—therein is possessed the principle of mortality. This awareness of death is the source of zest for life and of our impulse to create not only works of art, but civilizations as well. Not only is human anxiety universally associated with the ultimate death, but awareness of death also brings benefits. One of these is the freedom to speak the truth: the more aware we are of death, the more vividly we experience the fact that it is not only beneath our dignity to tell a lie but useless as well. Rome will not burn a second time, so why fiddle during this burning? We can then say with Omar, “The bird of Time has but a little way to flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The mortals of wisdom throughout history have understood the value for life in our awareness of death. To philosophize is to prepare for death. No mortal enjoys the true taste of life but one who is willing and ready to quit it. A young man who was studying to be a psychotherapist and who was at this time my patient told me how intensely anxious he had been for several days prior to reporting on a case before a group of older practicing therapists, where he anticipated being attacked. Driving to the meeting, the thought suddenly occurred to him, “We will all be dead some day—why not forget this neurotic anxiety and do the best I can?” Strange to say, this gave him a sudden, temporary relief from his anxiety. Another client told me about his having gone to a therapist several years earlier also with the problem of being so anxious he felt he could not stand it when his work required him to travel around the country. The other therapist had remarked, “You can always put a revolver in your suitcase and shoot yourself.” This also gave the man a considerable relief from his anxiety. Both of these persons experienced, with this reference to death, a relief from the feelings of being trapped. When they realized, if they had to, they could get out of victim’s role, the anxiety lost its power. The possibility of suicide has saved many lives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
And if you ask how is this possible it is because nor anything else in all creation. The powers of this World are creatures as we are. They are no more than we, they are limited. We are untied with that which is not creature and whose creative ground no creature can destroy; even if they can destroy our lives, we know they cannot destroy the meaning of our lives. And this gives us the certainty that no creature can destroy the meaning of life universal, in nature as well as history, of which we are a part, even though history and the whole Universe should destroy themselves tomorrow. No creature can keep us from this ultimate courage. None? Perhaps one—ourselves. Against all the powers and principalities, including life and death, the courage to maintain the unity with God stand firm. However, when guilt separates us from the love of God, it falls. Then we cannot face death, because the sting of death is sin; we cannot face life because guilt drives life into tragic self-destruction; we cannot face love because love is corrupted by greed; and we cannot face power because it is corrupted by cruelty. We shy away from the past because it is polluted by guilt, and we shy away from the future because it may bring the fruits of past guilt, and we cannot rest in the present because it accuses us and expels us. We cannot stand the height because we are afraid of falling, and we cannot stand the depth because we feel responsible for our fall. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The rulers of the World cannot achieve what an uneasy conscience can achieve—the undermining of our courage to accept life. Therefore, not even your guilty conscience can separate you from the love of God. For the love of God means that God accepts one who knows that one is unacceptable. This is the meaning of “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” One is the victor over the rulers of the World because one is the victor over our hearts. One’s image gives us the certainty that even our hearts, our self-accusation, our despair about ourselves cannot separate us from the love of God, the ultimate unity, the source and ground of the courage to accept life. The prenatal life of the child is pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity; and the life horizon of the developing being appears uniquely inscribed, and yet also not inscribed, in that of the being that carries it; for the womb in which it dwells is not solely that of the human mother. This association is so cosmic that it seems like the imperfect deciphering of a primeval inscription when we are told in the language of an Egyptian legend that in his mother’s womb mortals know the Universe and forgets it at birth due to childhood amnesia, which is an amazing phenomenon. And as the secret image of a wish, this association remains to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, this longing ought not to be taken for a craving to go back, as those suppose who consider the spirit, which they confound with their own intellect, a parasite of nature. For the spirit is nature’s blossom, albeit exposed to many aliments. What this longing aims for is the cosmic association of the being that has burst into spirit with its true You. Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother—the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal World. From this it detaches itself to enter a personal life, and it is only in dark hours when we slip out of this again (as happens even to the healthy, night after night) that we are close to her again. However, this detachment is not sudden and catastrophic like that from the bodily mother. The human child is granted some time to exchange the natural association with the World that is slipping away for a spiritual association—a relationship. From the glowing darkness of the chaos one has stepped into the cool and light creation without immediately possessing it: one has to get it up, as it were, and make it a reality for oneself; one gains one’s World by seeing, listening, feeling, forming. It is in encounter that the creation reveals its formhood; it does not pour itself into sense that are waiting but deigns to meet those that are reaching out. What is to surround the finished human beings as an object, has to be acquired and wooed strenuously by one while one is still developing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
No thing is a component of experience or reveals itself except through the reciprocal force of confrontation. Like primitives, the child lives between sleep and sleep (and a large part of waking is still sleep), in the lightning and counter-lightning of encounter. The innateness of the longing for relation is apparent even in the earliest and dimmest stage. Before any particulars can be perceived, dull glances push into the unclear space toward the indefinite; and at times when there is obviously no desire for nourishment, soft projections of the hands reach, aimlessly to all appearances, into the empty air toward the indefinite. Let anyone call this animalic: that does not help our comprehension. For precisely these glances will eventually, after many trials, come to rest upon a red wallpaper arabesque and not leave it until the souls of red has opened up to them. Precisely this motion will gain its sensuous form and definiteness in contact with a shaggy toy bear and eventually apprehend lovingly and unforgettably a complete body: in both cases not experience of an object but coming to grips with a living, active being that confronts us, if only in our imagination. (But this imagination is by no means a form of panpsychism; it is the drive to turn everything into a You, the drive to pan-relation—and where it does not find a living, active being that confronts it but only an image or symbol of that, it supplies the living activity from its own fullness.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Little inarticulate sounds still ring out senselessly and persistently into nothing; but one day they will have turned imperceptibly into a conversation—with what? Perhaps with a bubbling tea kettle, but into a conversation. Many a motion that is called a reflex is a sturdy trowel for the person building up one’s World. It is not as if a child first saw an object and then entered into some relationship with that. Rather, the longing for relation is primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles; and the relation to that, which is a wordless anticipation of saying You, comes second. However, the genesis of the thing is a late product that develops out of the split of the primal encounter, out of the separation of the associated partners—as does the genesis of the I. In the beginning is the relation—as the category of being, as readiness, as a form that reaches out to be filled, as a model of the soul; the a priori of the relation; the innate You. In the relationship through which we live, the innate You is realized in the You we encounter: that this, comprehended as a being we confront and accepted as exclusive, can finally be addressed with the basic word, has its ground in the a priori of relation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
In the drive for contact (originally, a drive for tactile contact, then also for optical contact with another being) the innate You comes to the fore quite soon, and it becomes ever clearer that the drive aims at reciprocity, at tenderness. However, it also determines the inventive drive which emerges later (the drive to produce things synthetically or, where that is not possible, analytically—through taking or tearing apart), and thus the product is personified and a conversation begins. The development of the child’s soul is connected indissolubly with one’s craving for You, with the fulfillments and disappointments of this craving, with the play of his experiments and his tragic seriousness when one feels at a total loss. Any real understanding of these phenomena is compromised by all attempts to reduce them to narrower spheres and can be promoted only when in contemplating and discussing them we recall their cosmic—metacosmic origin. We must remember the reach beyond that indifferentiated, not yet formed primal World has emerged completely, but not yet the bodily, the actualized being that has to evolve from it gradually through entering into relationships. One must have suffered to the point of being weary of living, or one must be old and infirm, or one must have reflected very honestly and deeply to believe that it is better to be without the predominance of the personal consciousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And to be willing to work for this end must seem mad to young eager vital men and women enjoying their lives. The time will come when, under the pressure of the mysterious inner self, this quest will become the most important enterprise of one’s life. Why are they seeking the truth? Because they have at last become sensitive enough to respond to the existence of the diviner self within them, the God in which only truth exists. The fact of its existence has pressed them subconsciously from within and finally provoked them into feeling a need to become aware of, and co-operative with, the God. There is an inner prompting which comes into the hearts of some mortals, not of all mortals, which bids them believe in the existence of God. Although they do not know clearly what they are doing when they accept it, they feel that it is then, and will lead later to, something tremendously important. The work is going on inside of them. The decision to embark of this Quest may ripen for a long time in one’s unconscious mind before it is openly and slowly made, it may explode impulsively in a wholly unpremeditated way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
One has entered upon the quest for no other reason than one has been inwardly and strongly commanded to enter it. The long hard search for the soul asks too much endurance of self-discipline from its pursuers ever to be more than it has been in the past—an undertaking for the few driven by an inner urge. Hence it is not so much a voluntary undertaking as an involuntary one. The questers cannot help themselves. It is not that they necessarily have the strength to endure as that they have no choice except to endure. The urge to follow the spiritual Quest, the impulse to find the higher consciousness, comes from the God. Whatever be the pull of their interests in their lives, a time comes in the reincarnation when the divine self asserts itself in their consciousness. There is something within us which will not let us rest in what we are, which urges us to think of still higher possibilities. This is the paradox that when you take the first steps on this Quest, it is grace which impels you to do so. Yet you think and act as if you have never been granted the divine gift. There comes a time when the unfulfilled possibilities of a mortal begin to haunt one, when one’s innermost conscience protests against the wastage of this reincarnation. All this work on the Quest is directed towards discovering oneself, one’s best self, and to bringing it influence into whatever it is that one does or thinks. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
One ought not to enter into it for the sake of ego enhancement—that is for the Worldlings—but for the sake of something that transcends the ego. With the coming of middle age a mortal begins to appraise one’s life course, work, fortunes, and in the end—oneself. Quite often the results are not very satisfactory, perhaps even disappointing. Too intelligent to accept the narrow short-sighted view of life, too idealistic to accept a merely animal satisfaction of desires, one needs guidance. This is what the quest is for. One feels that one must enter irrevocably on the quest for moral self-perfection, however unattainable it may seem. For one does so in obedience to the inner voice of a conscience the ordinary mortal does not hear. And one’s feeling is a right one. The destination may be only a glorious dream but the direction is a serious actuality. One may come to see the grave contradiction between one’s ideals and one’s actions, one’s mental World and one’s actual World, and the sight may disgust one. Out of this chagrin, the desire to renounce a senseless existence and withdraw altogether from it may take hold of one. So long as mortals feel the need of inner support and mental direction, of moral uplift and emotional consolation, so long will they continue to study, to follow, and to practice philosophy—that is, to enter upon the quest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
How Can Mortals Accuse the Gods! For they Say Evils Come from Us—However, they themselves, by Reason of their Sins, Have Sufferings Beyond those Destined for them!
That was permission, was it not? Or cosmic indifference, I am not sure which. I would have said nothing about the book to anyone; I had only brooded on it in those long painful hours when I could not really think, except in terms of chapters: an ordering; a road map through the mystery; a chronicle of seduction and pain. They are still asking me those questions now. Even Gabrielle, who in the main never bothers with questions, never says much of anything. They want to know when I am going to recover, when I am going to talk about what happened, when I am going to stop writing through the night. As for the Great Family, well, it was not likely that any of them would think it more than a fiction, with a touch here and there of truth; that is, if they ever happened to pick up the book. Are we responsible for our destiny? If we dare to answer that by saying “Partly so,” we then face another question just as difficult. That is: If destiny is a given, a vital design that gives us talents and limits and that we cannot revoke, how can responsibility have any meaning? The ancient Greeks faced this problem, together with the moral implications of destiny, when the ethical consciousness of the Greek civilization was being formed. During this period, around 1000 B.C., Homer relates the following fascinating incident from the Trojan War. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The combined Greek forces were encamped around the walls for Troy. Agamemnon, the general in chief of the Greek armies, had stolen Achilles’ mistress from the Achilles’ tent. When Achilles returned and discovered this, his rage knew no bounds. He was not only a man of fiery temper, but also the best fighter in the Greek army. There hung in the balance the portentous question: Would the whole Greek expedition be destroyed by the enmity between these two men? As these two heroes confront each other, Agamemnon says: “Not I…was the cause of this act, but Zeus and the furies who walk in darkness: they it was who…put wild ate [madness] in my understanding, on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles’ prize from him. So what could I do? Deity will always have its way.” In other words destiny—Zeus and his wild ate—will brook no denial. Is Agamemnon saying, “I was brainwashed; not I but my unconscious did it”? It may seem so, but he is not. He is preparing the way to assume his own responsibility. He then goes on: “But since I was blinded by ate, and Zeus took away my understanding, I am willing to make peace and give abundant compensation.” Ah! Since destiny did these things to me, I will give compensation. Cooling down, Achilles answers: “Let the son of Atreus [Agamemnon] go his way…For Zeus the counselor took away his understanding.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
The Greeks are saying here that a person is responsible even though the gods work inwardly, even though they take away one’s understanding. That is, one is destined, but one is responsible for what this destiny makes one do. Although Agamemnon is driven by destiny, which work through powers in his unconscious mind, he is nevertheless responsible. And responsibility is inseparable from freedom. Freedom and responsibility on one side, and ate and destiny on the other—these operate simultaneously in this dialectical and intimately human paradox. Julian Jaynes reminds us of another incident from Homer and the Trojan War. Hector finds himself confronting Achilles in the heat of battle Hector does not want to fight Achilles at that moment, so he backs away. His withdrawing is not determined by cowardice, for instance, he is not forced by Achilles’ sword to back up. Instead, the goddess puts her shield around Hector in the form of a could under which he could back out of the battle without any loss of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The furies who walk in darkness and the goddess surrounding Hector with a could are superb synonyms for destiny. Indeed, the gods and goddesses were personifications of destiny; they set the ultimate limits on human actions opened up possibilities for human beings. Anyone who opposed them outright was brought to ruin by such means as a bolt of lightning—what we moderns call an act of God, carrying of this ancient belief—from the hand of Zeus. This sense of responsibility is partly the impingement of culture upon us. If we are to live with any harmony in community, we have to have responsibility. Those who pursue this quest do so because they too want to be happy. Do not imagine that only the Wordly pleasure-seekers, the hard money-hunters, the romantic love-dreamers, or the ambitious fame-followers are in this respect, in a different category. It is only their method and result that are different. All without exception want the feeling of undisturbed happiness, but only the questers know that it can be found only in the experience of spiritual self-fulfillment. Fame, fortune, love, or pleasure may contribute towards the outer setting of a happy person’s life but what of that person oneself? Who has not heard or known of mortals sitting in misery amid all their riches or power, of death forcing a well-mated could to bid each other farewell? When we see it, we must love the highest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Culture can help us mitigate or meliorate destiny: through culture we can learn to build architectural marvels as well are Cresleigh Homes to keep out the snow and the Winter cold and other elements. Through culture we barter our services for food so that we do not starve. However, culture cannot overturn destiny, cannot erase it. We can collectively cover our eyes to the results of our actions, blind ourselves to the full import of our cruelty and our responsibility for that cruelty as the Mayor of Sacramento does to housing crisis. However, this requires a numbing our of sensitivity and will sooner or later take its toll in neurotic symptoms. What lures a person to this quest? It may be that the ideas by which, and with which, one has lived for a long time have proved insufficient, false, or feeble. It may be that bereavement, calamity, or suffering have brought one to cherish peace. It may be nothing else than the simple need for higher quality of living. It may even be that one comes to this quest, as some undoubtedly do, because one seeks a special benefit—healing, relief, amendment of fortune, perhaps. However, in that case one must remain on it because one seeks God, alone. Lastly let it be noted that if for some reason the first step on this quest is the final step down a long road of increasing desperation, for most it ought to be the first step up a garden path of increasing joy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
For Homer the acknowledging of destiny was by no means a wallowing in guilt, but an acceptance of personal responsibility. Homer has the gods proclaim in the Odyssey: “O alas, how now do mortals accuse the gods! For they say evils comes from us [the gods]. However, they themselves, by reason of their sins, have sufferings beyond those destined for them.” Some come to the quest for spirituality through the joy enkindled by great music, inspired writing, or majestic landscape, or through response to beauty; but others—and they are more—come through being wrecked or crushed, threatened with destruction, left hopeless, forlorn, and helpless. They reach the end of their strength, or discover the falseness and futility of their wisdom. One may come to the need or, as well as the illumination by, the God through two very different paths: through joy and sweetness or through suffering and sadness. In these Homeric tales the early Greeks were learning—an arduous task in civilization requiring hundreds and hundreds of years—that freedom and destiny require each other, that they are in dialectical relation with each other. Agamemnon knows that he must assume his responsibility by compensating Achilles for what he believes the god– for instance, destiny—made him do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the Old World it is the general belief that a mortal turns toward this spiritual quest to fulfill their destiny for either two reasons. If one is young, it is because one has an inborn genius for it. If one is somewhat older, it is because one is dissatisfied with life, disappointed in it, or bereaved by its calamities. However, the philosophical view, while including these reasons, goes father and wider. For it sees that some, notably those who are aesthetically sensitive and those who are martially fulfilled, are indeed satisfied with their existing form of life. Only, they sense the greater possibilities open to a human being and wish to expand it to realize them more completely. The Greeks found, furthermore, that their belief in destiny, expressed in the gods and goddesses, energized and strengthened them individually. The typical Greek citizens, as anyone who reads Herodotus or Thucydides knows, were amazingly self-reliant and autonomous. We look at their activities and realize that it is not true that belief in destiny tends to make one passive and inert. The opposite is true—namely, that belief in unlimited freedom, as the flower children demonstrated, tends to paralyze one. For unlimited freedom is like a river with no banks; the water is not controlled in its follow and hence spills out in every direction and is lost in the sands. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Hence the seeming paradox that the deterministic movements, like Calvinism with its predestination, and Marxism with its economic determinism of history, have such great power. One would think that since people are the result of their predestination or their economic status, not much change is possible. However, the Marxists and Calvinists work energetically to change people and often with great success. In other words, their belief in their particular form of destiny give them power. Therefore, it would be too wide-sweeping a generalization to assert that all entrants on the quest come out of disgust with the Worldly life. This may be true for some, for several reasons, but it is not so true for Westerners. For among the latter there are those whose approach to life is through art—through sensitivity to beauty and joy—or through science—through the pursuit of truth about the Universe. Such persons are not unhappy, not alienated from Earthy affairs, but they know that a deeper basis to their present satisfaction is required. It is not only those who have exhausted all their limited means of attaining happiness who turn away and come to this quest: there are others whose capacity for enjoyment still remains, but having had the experience of a single glimpse or understood the pointers given by inspired are, they are attracted toward living on a higher plane. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
However, where some turn away from the World for negative reasons because of their misery and disappointment, others come to the quest for beneficial reasons; they have sensed or suspected, felt, or been told of, a higher plane of existence: they respond to a divine call. One is not sacrificing so much that is dear to the World for the sake of an empty abstraction, nor trampling on inborn egotism for the sake of a cold intellectual conception. One is doing this for somethings that has become a warm living presence in this life—for the God. After going through innumerable smaller decisions, once in a while a person arrives at a point where one’s freedom and destiny seems united. This was true of Martin Luther, wo, when he nailed his ninety-nine theses on the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg, declared, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Such acts are the fruition of years of minor decisions culminating in the crucial decision in which one’s freedom and destiny merge. Deeper than all other desires is this need to gain consciousness of the God. Only it is unable to express itself directly at first, so it expresses itself in the only ways we permit it to—first the physical, then the emotional and intellectual quest of happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
By encountering destiny directly, the Greeks had their own ways also of mitigating it. The clever individual, like Ulysses, could know which gods to set against other gods in his sacrifices. The Greeks could guarantee an auspicious wind with which to sail from Aulis to Troy by sacrificing Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon. This cruel act, incidentally, clinched Agamemnon’s destiny—one would later be murdered by his wife for his part in the bloody heritage of Mycenae. Therefore, the impulse which puts a person’s feet on the spiritual path, is not always an explicable one. It is sometimes hard to say why one obeys it, wen it will hinger the ego’s natural cravings at the very start and lead to an unnatural self-effacement at the very end. All one knows is that something him one bids one begin the journey and keeps one on it despite its hurts to one’s pride, one’s passion, and one’s ego. Disenchanted with celebrities and disillusioned with the World, the will be more inclined to turn in the end towards the divinity within themselves, to trust its first faint leadings on Jesus’ assurance that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you!” Such independence is outwardly a lonely path, but with patience it will prove not less satisfying. Why should anyone be willing to put oneself aside, one’s inclinations and desires, unless one is bidden to do so by a power stronger than one’s own will? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In Aeschylus’ drama, when Agamemnon came back from Troy, he marched in as the proud conqueror, one who could scarcely restrain one’s boasting that one had accomplished the laying low of Troy. The chorus hastens to warn one not to commit hubris, the sin of overweening pride, which makes the gods jealous and incites their revenge. It is parallel to our modern, weaker form of the same wisdom “Pride goeth before a fall.” However, Agamemnon, with one’s bluster, does commit hubris, and this leads directly to his death. Hubris is the refusal to accept one’s destiny. It is the person’s belief that one performed great acts all by oneself. It is the tendency to usurp the power of the gods. It is also the denial of how much one is always dependent upon one’s fellow mortals and one’s society. Destiny itself is the course of our talents and assists the victors in these great projects like Trojan War, and when we lose sight of this—as we do when we commit hubris—evil consequences ensure. Others are attracted to these spiritual teachings through an impulse of feeling unsupported by the understanding of reason. It is safe to say that such persons are being led by their souls into this attraction. Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at and confer on one some responsibility to do it? I choose to answer yes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Responsibility is no longer simply tied to past causes—for instance, what one did. It must be geared also to present freedom—for example, what I can do. The freedom to act confers on me the responsibility to act. In tis sense freedom and responsibility are united. Responsibility is more than a moral teaching, more than another rule of the ethical life. It is part of the underlying ontological structure of life. This means, obviously, that there is a host of things that we are responsible for that we will never be able to discharge. However, it is better to carry unfulfilled responsibility than to act on some pretense of pure conscience. Such is the interdependence of people in the collective nature of the human community that we need to assume responsibility for a multitude of things. Obviously, I am not saying that we develop neurotic consciences—there may be many reasons for not doing the given thing. For example, my friend brings up his child wrongly, and I had better not act on my hunch that I know how and he does not. However, the freedom inherent in a friendship does confer on me the responsibility to be open to talk with him about it and to share whatever insights I have. Thus, I am not suggesting we be busybodies. I am suggesting we be sensitive, compassionate, and aware of the complex interdependence of our humanity community. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Those who conceive of this quest as escapism are neither right nor wrong. They are right when it is embarked upon because of a neurotic refusal to do for and to oneself with effort what is hoped God or gurus will be able to do without it. They are wrong when it is embarked upon because of an evaluation of life that is made above its distorting battle or out of a compulsive, involuntary, and inner attraction toward the Ideal. Only when thought and experience have run deep enough and wide enough are the ego’s emotional and fleshly hungers likely to yield to spiritual hunger. One can no more help being on the spiritual quest than one can help being on this Earth. The hunger to know the inner mysteries of life, and the aspirations to experience the Soul’s peace and love will not leave one alone. They are part of one, as hands or feet are parts of one. When ripened by experience, it is natural and inevitable that mortals should yearn to be untied with their divine Source. Through widely different kinds of external experience, the ego seeks but never finds enduring happiness. Discovering in the end that it is on a wrong road, it turns to internal experience. Then or melancholy lot took shape in primal history? Indeed, it developed—insofar as mortal’s conscious life developed in primal history. However, in conscious life cosmic being recurs as human becoming. Spirit appears in time as a product, even a byproduct, of nature, and yet it is spirit than envelops nature timelessly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The opposition of the two basic words as many names in the ages and Worlds; but in its names truth it inheres in the creation. Then you believe after all in some paradise in the primal age of humanity? Even if it was a hell—and the age to which we can go back in historical thought was certainly full of wrath and dread and torment and cruelty—unreal it was not. Primal mortal’s experiences of encounter were scarcely a matter of tame delight; but even violence against a being one really confronts is better than ghostly solicitude from faceless digits! From the former a path leads to God, from the latter only to nothingness. Let us close this enumeration with the pair of most threatening power—death and life. These two belong to each other. In every life death is always present; it works in body and soul from the moment of conception the moment of dissolution. It is present at the beginning of our lives just as much as at their end. At the moment of our birth we begin to die, and we continue to do so daily, throughout our lives. Growth is death, because it undermines the conditions of life even while it is increasing life. However, not to grow is immediate death. All of us stand between the fascination of life and the anxiety of death, and sometimes between the anxiety of life and the fascination of death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Death and life are the greatest, the all-embracing powers, which try to separate us from the love of God. Even if we could fully understand the life of the primitive, it would be no more than a metaphor for that of the truly primal mortal. Hence the primitive affords us only brief glimpses into the temporal sequence of the two basic words. More complete information we receive from the child. Here it becomes unmistakably clear ow the spiritual reality of the basic words emerges from a natural reality: that of the basic word I-You from a natural association, that of the basic word I-It from a natural discreteness. One’s own higher self will direct the properly equipped seeker’s steps towards philosophy. One may go reluctantly, fighting against its ideas secretly or openly for months and years. However, in the end one will have to yield to what will become quite plainly a divine leading. One’s intellect will have to obey this irresistible intuition. If a mortal is born with innate tendencies for this quest, nothing will keep one from it and one will surely come to it in the course of time. One may come because one is so satisfied with life that one believes in God’s goodness. One may come because one is so disappointed in life that one disbelieves in God’s goodness. However, by whatever the road, one will come to it because the urge will be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International Institute 