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There is an Abyss which No Human Can Cross, a Mystery which Remains Utterly Impenetrable to One—This is Transcendent Godhead!

September 24, 2019 12:56 am

No, this is something you will never do, I thought. You will not take someone so vital out of the World. You will not disturb the destiny of one who has given others so much to love and enjoy. We have to establish the logical connection between alienation and anxiety. This is extremely difficult because the discussion of the problem of anxiety has by no means reached the clarity which would make it possible for an outsider—like myself to adopt an unambiguous position toward the various opinions. Nevertheless it seems to me that the differences in the conception of the origin of anxiety do not have a decisive significance for my analysis, although they are, of course, highly relevant in other contexts. Dr. Freud himself had originally derived anxiety from the repression of libidinous impulses, and thus has seen it as an automatic transformation of instinctual energy. This view he later modified. Others claim, on the other hand, that there is a single inborn faculty for being afraid. Dr. Rank, in his famous work, derives anxiety from the trauma of birth. And a number of analysts have tried, more or less successfully, to combine the various theories in many ways. The following propositions seem to me more or less acceptable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

One must distinguish between true anxiety (Realangst) and neurotic anxiety. The difference is of considerable consequence especially for the understanding of the political importance of anxiety. The first—true anxiety—thus appears as a reaction to concrete danger situations; the second—neurotic anxiety—is produced by the ego, in order to avoid in advance even the remotest threat of danger. True anxiety is thus produced through the threat of an external object; neurotic anxiety, which may have a real basis, on the other hand is produced from within, through the ego. Since anxiety is produced by the ego, the seat of anxiety is in the ego, not in the id—the structure of instincts. However, from the analysis of the problem of psychological alienation it follows necessarily that anxiety, feelings of guilt, and the need for self-punishment are responses to internal threats to basic instinctual demands so that anxiety exists as a permanent condition. The external dangers which threaten a being meet the inner anxiety and are thus frequently experienced as even more dangerous than they really are. At the same time, these same external dangers intensify the inner anxiety. The painful tension which is evoked by the combination of inner anxiety and external danger can express itself in either two forms: in depressive or in persecutory anxiety. The differentiation is important because it helps us to evaluate the political function of anxiety more correctly. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

In the history of the individual there are certain typical dangers which produce anxiety. For the child, the withdrawal of love is of decisive importance. On this point there seems to be no doubt among psychologists. From the numerous phobias we may learn a great deal about the relation between anxiety and the renunciation of instinctual gratification. For inhibitions are a functional restraint of the ego; the ego renounces many activities in order to avoid a conflict with the id and the conscience. We know that the phobic symptoms are a substitute for gratifications of the instincts that have been denied or are unattainable. In other words, the ego creates anxiety through repression. If I have correctly reproduced the most important results of analytical theory concerning the origin of anxiety, several important consequences for the analysis of political behavior seem to follow immediately. Anxiety can play very different roles in the life of beings; that is, the activation of a state of anxiety through a danger can have a beneficial as well as destructive effect. We may perhaps distinguish three different consequences: Anxiety can play a warning role, a kind of mentor role, for beings. Affective anxiety may allow a presentiment of external dangers. Thus, anxiety also contains a protective function for it permits beings to take precaution in order to ward off the danger. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Anxiety can have a destructive effect, especially when the neurotic element is strongly present; that is, it can make being incapable of collecting themselves either to escape the danger or to fight against it; it can paralyze beings and degenerate into panicky anxiety. Finally, anxiety can have a cathartic effect; beings can be strengthened inwardly when one has successfully avoided a danger or when one has prevailed against it. One may perhaps even say (although I cannot prove this) that the being who has conquered anxiety in coming to terms with a danger, may be more capable of making decisions in freedom than the one who never had to seriously wrestle with danger. This may be an important qualification of the proposition that anxiety can make free decision impossible. Our analysis of the relation of alienation to anxiety does not yet permit us to understand the political significance of these phenomena, because it is still in the realm of individual psychology. How does it happen that masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and masses is successful, and what view of history do the beings have who accept leaders? #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, the question concerning the essence of identification of masses and a leader stands in the center of group-psychological analysis. Without it the problem of the integration or collectivization of the individual in a mass cannot be understood. I assume that the history of the theories of group psychology is familiar. The extraordinary difficulty in the comprehension of group-psychological phenomena is possessed first of all in our own prejudices; for the experiences of the last decades have instilled in us all more or less strong prejudices against the masses, and we associate with masses the epithet mob, a group of beings who are capable of every atrocity. In fact the science group psychology began with this aristocratic prejudice in the work of the Italian, Scipio Sighele; and Le Bon’s famous book is completely in this tradition. His these are familiar. Beings in the mass descends; one is, as it were, hypnotized by the leader (operateur) and in this condition is capable of committing acts which one would never commit as an individual. As the slave of the unconscious—for instance, for Le Bon, regressive—sentiments, beings in the mass are degraded into a barbarian: “Isolated, one may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, one is a barbarian—that is a creature acting by instinct. One possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Critics of Le Bon, among them Dr. Freud, have pointed out that his theory, which rests on Sighele and Tarde, is inadequate in two aspects: the answer to the question, What hold the masses together? is inadequate, for the existence of a radical soul is unproved. In addition, in Le Bon the decisive problem—the role of the leader—hypnotist—remains unclarified. As is frequently true in social-psychological studies, the descriptions of psychological states are adequate, the theoretical analyses, the answers to “Why?,” are inadequate. From the outset, Dr. Freud sees the problem in the way which we have put it, namely, as that of the identification of masses with a leader—an identification which becomes of decisive significance particularly in an anxiety situation. And he sees in the libido the cement which holds leader and masses together, whereby, as is known, the concept of libido is to be taken in a very broad sense, to include the instinctual activities which in relations between the genders force their way toward the union in pleasures of the flesh, as well as those which in other circumstances are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longings for proximity, and self-sacrifice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The cement which holds the mass together bonds them to the leader is thus a sum of instincts that are inhibited in their aims. In this manner, I believe, the logical connection between alienation and mass behavior has been established. Since the identification of masses with the leader is an alienation of the individual member, identification always constitutes a regression, and a twofold one. On the one hand, the history of a being is the history of one’s emergency from the primal horde and of one’s progressive individualization; thus the identification with a leader in a mass is a kind of a historical regression. This identification is also a substitute for a libidinal object bond, thus a psychological regression, a damaging of the ego, perhaps even the loss of the ego. However, this judgment is valid only for the libido-charged, for instance, affective, identification of an individual in a mass with a leader; and not as a matter of course (and perhaps not all) for that of lovers and of small groups. Non-affective identification too, cannot be simply considered as regressive. For identification with organizations (church, army) is not always libidinally charged. MacDougall’s emphasis on the significance of organization must therefore be taken seriously. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

It is thus necessary to make distinctions. There are non-affective identifications, in which coercion or common material interest play an essential role, either in bureaucratic-hierarchic, or in cooperative form. It seems to me to be incorrect, above all for recent history, to see in the identification of the soldier with the army, for instance, in the loyalty to an organization, an actual identification of the soldier with the commander-in-chief. Surely these are example of this: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Wallenstien, Napoleon. However, the commander-in-chief of the twenty first century is much more the technician of war than the leader of beings, and the libidinal bond of the soldier is, if I may coin the phrase, essentially cooperative, namely, with the smallest groups of comrades with whom one shares dangers. Thus I would like to establish two fundamental types of identification: a libido-charged (affective) and a libido-free (non-affective); and maintain generally (as it follows from MacDougall’s psychology) that non-affective identification with organization is less regressive than the affective identification with a leader. Non-affective loyalty is transferable; personal loyalty, on the other hand, is not. The former always contains strong rationalist elements, elements of calculability between organizations and individual, and thus prevents the total extinction of the ego. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

However, I believe that one must also distinguish two types within affective identification. One may call them cooperative and caesaristic. It is conceivable (and it has probably happened in short periods in history) that many equals identify themselves cooperatively with one another in such a manner that their egos are merged in the collective ego. However, this cooperative form is rare, limited to short periods or in any case operative only for small groups. The decisive affective identification is that of masses with leaders. It is—as I have said—the most regressive form, for it is built upon a nearly total ego-shrinkage. It is the form which is od decisive significance for us. We call it caesaristic identiciation. Caesaristic identification may play a role in history when the situation of masses is objectively endangered, when the masses are incapable of understanding the historical process, and when the anxiety activated by the danger become neurotic persecutory (aggressive) anxiety through manipulation. From this follows, first of all, that not every situation dangerous to masses must lead to a caesartic movement; it allows, further, that not every mass movement is based on anxiety, and thus not every mass movement need be caesaristic. Thus it is a question of determining the historical conditions in which a regressive movement under a Caesar tried to win political power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, before we describe these historical situations, I may perhaps point to a clue which will frequently permit us an early diagnosis of the regressive character of such a mass movement. This clue is the view of history which the masses and the leaders employ. It may be called the conspiracy theory of history, a theory of history characterized by false concreteness. The connection between Caesarism and this view of history is quite evident. Just as the masses hope for their deliverance from distress into the World through a conspiracy. The historical process is personified in this manner. Hated, resentment, dread created by great upheavals, are concentrated on certain persons who are denounced as devilish conspirators. Nothing would be more incorrect than to characterize the enemies as scapegoats (as often happens in the literature), for they appear as genuine enemies who one must extirpate and not as substitutes whom one only needs to send into the wilderness. It is a false concreteness and therefore an especially dangerous view of history. Indeed, the danger consists in the fact that this view of history is never completely false, but always contains a kernel of truth and, indeed, must contain it, if it is to have a convincing effect. The truer it is one might say, the less regressive the movement; the falser, the more regressive. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

It is my thesis that whatever affective (for instance, caesaristic) leader-identifications occur in politics, masses and leaders have this view of history: that the distress which has befallen the masses has been brought about exclusively by a conspiracy of certain persons or groups against the people. With this view of history, true anxiety, which had been produced by war, want, hunger, anarchy, is to be transformed into neurotic anxiety and is to be overcome by means of identification with the leader-demagogue through total ego-renunciation, to the advantage of the leader and one’s clique, whose true interests do not necessarily have to correspond to those of the masses. Of course, I cannot provide conclusive proof, but I believe that by pointing to certain historical events I can make clear the connection between this view of history and Caesarism. What being will set out on a task which one can never hope to accomplish? It is too much to expect the average seeker to become a President Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr. We portray the nature of this quest not because we hold such vain expectation but because we believe in the value of right direction and in the creative power of the Ideal. The general direction of one’s thoughts and deeds—rather than those thoughts and deeds themselves—as well as the ideal one mist habitually contemplates, is what is most important and most significant in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

One first need is to choose a general goal, not necessarily an exact point but enough to orient oneself, to give one a direction. An ideal helps to hold a being back from one’s weaknesses, a standard gives one indirectly a kind of support as well as, directly, guidance. Let us not pretend to the Perfect or the hope of its attainment. However, we can have the Ideal and follow it. It is a truth which one must bring to life by one’s own personal experience. If there were no possibility of finding one’s way from this body-prisoned, time-encased condition, then no one would ever have become self-realized, and all preaching of religion and teaching of philosophy would have been futile. However, we know from history and biography that such achievement has been experienced in all parts of the World and in all centuries, so that no should give up hope. Are the quest’s goals worth what one has to pay for them? It is even worth embarking on if one remembers how few seem to reach those goals? Time alone can show one that no price is too high and that right direction is itself sufficient reward. The ultimate goal is for us to live from the Overself not from the ego. When Glenn gray went back to Europe in 1955 to interview his comrades-in-arms and his friends in the resistance of fifteen years ago, a French woman living in her comfortable bourgeois home with her husband and son, confessed earnestly: “My life is so unutterably boring nowadays! Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have no felt before or since.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Relating to the experience of listening to a German comrade-in-arms, Gray continues: Overweight, and with an expensive cigar in his mouth, he spoke of our earlier days together at the close of the way when he was shivering and hungry and harried with anxieties about keeping his wife and children from too great wants. “Sometimes I think that those were happier times for us than these.” And there was something like despair in his eyes. Neither one of these people was longing for the old day in sentimental nostalgia; they were confessing their disillusionment with a sterile present. Peace exposed a void in them that war’s excitement has enabled them to keep covered up. This void is that from which the ecstasy of violence is an escape. Some of the sterility is due to the inescapable conditions of civilized existence that remove much of the risk and challenge from life—risk and challenge that seem to be more important for many, if not most, people, than out much touted affluence. Violence puts the risk and challenge back, whatever we may think about its destructiveness; and no longer is life empty. We are going to have upheavals of violence for as long as experiences of significance are denied people. Everyone has a need for some sense of significance; and if we cannot make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary. Thinking which is fact-grounded, experience-based, and correct; living which is wise, balanced, and good; prayer which goes deeper and deeper—these are some of our basic needs. Peace of mind can be enjoyed in this World: there is no need to wait for passage to the next one. Different terms can be used to label this unique attainment. It is insight, awakening, enlightenment. It is Being, Truth, Consciousness. It is Discrimination between the Seer and the Seen. It is awareness of That Which Is. It is the Practice of the Presence of God. It is the Discovery of Timelessness. All these words tell us something but they all fall short and do not tell us enough. In fact they are only hints for farther they cannot go: it is not on their level at all since it is the Touch of the Untouchable. However, nevermind; just pay with such ideas if you care too. Ruminate and move among them. Out your heart as well as head into the game. Who knows one day what may happen? Perhaps if you become still enough you too may know—as the Bible suggests. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

That life will reach some higher end and thus justify all the fret and toil is more than a comforting belief: it is also an offering of the highest Reason, the revelation of highest experience. A surgeon we know once wrote us that the goals seemed so distant, the way so long, the labour so arduous, that he felt inclined to abandon the quest altogether as something beyond ordinary human reach. Our reply to him was that because a position could not be capture in its entirety that was no reason for hesitating to make a start to capture some of it. ”And it came to pass that there was not one soul, except it were little children, who had entered the covenant (with God to keep his commandments) and had taken upon them the name of Christ,” reports Mosiah 6.2. It is a blessed historic fact that divine life and light came to the World through living beings. However, not what is more important is that it shall come to us today. Great historic prophets, sages, and teachers were not the first discoverers of this secret consciousness, nor will they be the last. Such a circle, with its esoteric doctrines and exclusive membership, cannot be understood properly by those who stand outside it and who therefore do not know its informing spirit. This is the wordless and pictureless discovery that insight reveals and intelligence confirms. This is the beautiful source of all life and unfailing sustainer of all beings. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

The Miracles of Genius Breed Doubt as Well as Faith so that We Feel Uplifted from the World!

September 23, 2019 12:56 am

At first reality appears mere sensuous indulgence, a kind of poetic luxury—ripe strawberries, almond blossoms, and white-shouldered nymphs still more or less imaginary. However, we must bid these joys farewell for a nobler life, a more heroic kind of story, involving the agonies, the strife of human hearts. One becomes a lonely voyager across a perilous sea—it is an inescapable part of every being’s soul-making. Through feeling and suffering in a thousand diverse ways, the merely intelligent or sentient being is fortified and altered, and the spirit becomes aware of its own nature and part in the World, and thus achieves an identity or soul. If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had time I would have made myself remembered. The life of self-creation, of soul-making, is not complete. I have no identity because I have not made up my mind about everything. To show beauty in the face of death, with eternal lids apart with planetary eyes, in the age-long suffering of humankind grants one passage to part the veils, a face—a scene which strangely evokes the terror of this boy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

When I awake, I lay quiet for an hour, weak and keenly in pain, I had been sleeping like a fallen angel on the red taffeta. So bad was the pain, in fact, that sleep seem preferable to wakefulness, and I dreamt of things long ago, times when Meghan and I had been together and when it had not seemed possible that we would ever part. What finally jarred me from my uneasy slumber was the sounds of Aaliyah screaming. Over and over in terror she screamed. I rose, somewhat stronger than the night before, and then once I was certain that I had my gloves and mask in place, I crouched beside her body and called out to her. At first she could not hear me, so loud were her frantic screams. However, at last, she grew quiet in her desperation. And there it was, an open face of Heaven, returning home at evening with an ear catching the notes of “Rock the Boat,”—and eye watching the sailing cloudlet’s bright career. We mourned that day so soon as it was glided by evening with the passage of an angel’s tear that falls through the clear ether silently. I gazed awhile, and felt as light, and free as though the fanning wing of Mercury had played upon my heels: I was light-hearted, and many pleasures to my vision started. “And behold, the Holy Spirit of God did come down from Heaven, and did enter into their hearts, and they were filled as if with the fire, and they could speak forth marvelous words,” reports Helaman 5.45. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The air was cooling, and so very still, and caught from the early sobbing of the morn with solemn sound—“Aaliyah,” I said, “You will be remembered for making pleasing music, and not wild uproar.” She replied, “It is my soul’s pleasure; and it must be almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.” What then has the Christian message to say about human’s predicament in this World? The eighth Psalm, written hundreds of years before the beginning of the Christian era, raises the same question with full clarity and great beauty. It points, on the one hand, to the infinite smallness of beings as compared to the Universe of Heavens and stars, and, on the other hand, to the astonishing greatness of beings, one’s glory and honor, one’s power over all created things, and one’s likeness to God Himself. Such thoughts are not frequently in the Bible. However, when we come across them, they sound as though they had been written today. Ever since the opening of the Universe by modern science, and the reduction of the great Earth to a small planet in an ocean of Heavenly bodies, beings have felt real vertigo in relation to infinite space. One has felt as though one had been pushed out of the center of the Universe into an insignificant corner in it, and has asked anxiously—what about the high destiny claimed by beings in past ages? #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

What about the idea that the divine image is impressed in one’s nature? What about one’s history that Christianity always considered to be the point at which salvation for all beings took place? What about the Christ, who in the New Testament, is called the Lord of the Universe? What about the end of history, described in Biblical language as a cosmic catastrophe, in which the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars are perhaps soon to fall down upon the Earth? What remains, in our present view of reality, of the importance of the Earth and the glory of beings? Further, since it seems possible that other beings exist on other Heavenly bodies, in whom the divine image is also manifest, and of whom God is mindful, and also whom He has crowned with glory and honor, what is the meaning of the Christian view of human history and its center, the appearance of the Christ? These questions are not merely theoretical. They are crucial to every being’s understanding of one’s self as a being placed upon this star, in an unimaginably vast Universe of stars. And they are disturbing not only to people who feel grasped by the Christian message, but also to those who reject it but who share with Christianity a belief in the meaning of history and the ultimate significance of human life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Again, the eighth Psalm spears as though it had been conceived today—“Thou hast made him little less than God; thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands.” It gives, as an example, being’s dominion over the animals; but only since modern technology subjected all the spheres of nature to being’s control has the phrase “little less than God” revealed its full meaning. The conquest of time and space has loosened the ties that kept beings in bondage to one’s finitude. What was once imagined as a prerogative of the gods has become a reality of daily life, accessible to human technical power. No wonder that we of today feel with the psalmist that beings are little less than God, and that some of us feel even equal with God, and further that others would not hesitate to state publicly that humankind, as a collective mind, has replaced God. We therefore have to deal with an astonishing fact: the same events that pushed beings from their place in the center of the World, and reduced one to insignificance, also elevated one to a God-like position both on Earth and beyond! It there an answer to this contradiction? Listen to the psalmist: one foes not say that humans have dominion over all things or that beings are little less than God; he says—“Thou hast given one dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast made one a little less than God.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

This means that neither being’s smallness nor one’s greatness emanates from oneself, but that there is something above this contrast. Being, together with all things, comes from God Who has put all things under being’s feet. Beings are rooted in the same Ground in which the Universe with all its galaxies is rooted. It is this Ground that gives greatness to everything, however small it may be, to atoms as well as planets and animals; and it is this that makes all things small, however great—the Stars as well as beings. It gives significance to the apparently insignificant. It gives significance to each individual being, and to humankind as a whole. This answer quiets our anxiety about our smallness, and it quells the pride of our greatness. It is not a Biblical answer only, nor Christian only, nor only religious. Its truth is felt by all of us, as we become conscious of our predicament—namely, that we are not of ourselves, that our presence upon the Earth is not of our own doing. We are brought into existence and formed by the same power that bears up the Universe and the Earth and everything upon it, a power compared to which we are infinitely small, but also one which, because we are conscious of it, makes us great among creatures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Primitives were frank about power, and in a spiritual cosmology power is relatively undisguised: it comes from the pool of ancestors and spirits. In our society power resides in technology, and we live and use the artifacts of technology so effortlessly and thoughtlessly that it almost seems we are not beholden to power—until, as said earlier, something goes wrong with an airplane, a generator, a telephone line. Then you see our religious anxiety come out. Power is the life pulse that sustains beings in every epoch, and unless the student understands power figures and power sources one can understand nothing vital about social history. The history of man’s fall into stratified society can be traced around the figures of one’s heroes, to whom one is beholden for the power one wants most—to persevere as an organism, to continue experiencing. Again we pick up the thread from the very beginning of our argument and see how intricately it is interwoven in being’s career on this planet. If primitive being was not in bondage to the authority of living persons, one at least had some heroes somewhere, and these—as said—were the spirit powers, usually of the departed dead, the ancestors. The idea seems very strange to most of us today, but for the primitive it was often the dead who has the most power. In life the individual goes through ritualistic passages to states of higher power and greater importance as a helper of life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

For many primitives death is the final promotion to the highest power of all, the passage into the invisible World from their new abode. This, however, is not universal among primitives by any means. Some tribes fear the dead for only a little while immediately after death, and then they are thought to become weak. Some tribes fear especially those spirits who represent unfinished and unfulfilled life, spirits of persons who died prematurely and would be envious of the living, and so on. The dead are feared because they cannot be controlled as well as when they are alive. Many people have argued that primitives do not fear death as much as we do; but we know that this equanimity is due to the fact that the primitive was usually securely immersed in one’s particular cultural ideology, which was in essence an ideology of life, of how to continue on and to triumph over death. It is easy to see the significance of power for the human animal; it is really the basic category of one’s existence, as the organism’s whole World is structed in terms of power. No wonder that that Thomas Hobbes could say that man was characterized by “a general inclination, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

One of the first things a child has to learn is how much power one has and how much exits in others and in the World. Only if one learns this can one be sure of surviving; one has to learn very minutely what powers one can count on to facilitate one’s life and what powers one has to fear and avoid in order to protect it. So power becomes the basic category of being for which one has, so to speak, a natural respect: if you are wrong about power, you do not get a chance to be right about anything else; and the things that happen when the organism loses its powers are a decrease of vitality and death. Little wonder, then, that primitive beings had a right away to conceptualize and live according to hierarchies of power and give them one’s most intense respect. Anthropology discovered that the basic categories of primitive thought are the ideas of mana and taboo, which we can translate simply as power and danger or watch out (because of power). The study of life, people, and the World, then, broke down into an alertness for distributions of power. The more mana you could find to tap, the more taboo you could avoid, the better. However, power is an invisible mystery. It erupts out of nature in storms, volcanoes, meteors, in springtime and newborn babies; and it returns into nature as ashes, winter, and death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The only way we know is it there is to see it in action. And so the idea of mana, or special power erupting from the realm of the invisible and the supernatural, can only by spotted in the usual, the surpassing, the excellent, that which transcends what is necessary or expected. From the very beginning, the child experiences the awesomeness of life and one’s problems of survival and well-being in other people; and so persons comes to be the most intimate place where one looks to be delighted by the specialness of mysterious life, or where one fears to be overwhelmed by powers that one cannot understand or cope with. It is natural, then, that the most immediate place to look for the eruptions of special power is in the activities and qualities of persons; and so, as we saw, eminence in hunting, extra skill and strength, and special fearlessness in warfare right away marked those who were thought to have an extra charge of power or mana. They earned respect and special privileges and had to be handled gently because they were both an asset and a danger: in their very persons they were an open fount between two Worlds, the visible and invisible, and power passed through them as through an electric circuit. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naively and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wig could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a “Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.” However, those times are past; and we of the twenty first century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character one can be an adequate expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifferences,–a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral Universe. To such a harlot we own no allegiance; with one as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealing with one several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of the prudence in coming to terms with such of one particular features as will help us to our private ends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

If there be a divine Spirit of the Universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to beings. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this World, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other World. I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated mind. In fact, if I am to express my personal unreservedly, I should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate relations with the Universe is the act of rebellion against the idea that such a God exists. Such a rebellion essentially, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it! And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base fear away from me forever. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No has said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;” to which my whole Me now made answer: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” From that hour I began to be a man. Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be my miserable self than He, than He who formed such creatures to his own disgrace. The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou from whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! Abhorred, malignant and implacable! I vow that not for all Thy power furled and unfurled, for all the temples to Thy glory built, would I assume the ignominious guilt of having made such beings in such a World. There is no democratic equality here. If such a being speaks, others are entitled only to whisper! There never yet has been a time, however thinned out their ranks may be, when those who know have faded out from this World—and there never will be such a time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

For it is an inexorable duty laid upon them to hand down to us from the light to posterity. And thus a chain of teacher and taught has been flung down to us from the dimmest epochs of antiquity right into this noisy, muddled twenty first century of ours. Through such illumined beings there has been constant expression of truth, and through this individual expression it has been able to survive socially. Those who are out of centre, eccentric and different from others because they are unbalanced mentally and uncontrolled emotionally, will not heed what conventional society demands from them. However, there exists a second group of persons who are likewise different and heedless of conventions, although often in other ways. This group is what it is by reason of its being a pioneer one which has advanced farther along the road of evolution than the herd behind. From it are drawn the great reformers and their followers, those who stand firmly by moral principle and factual truth. It is they who try to lift up society and put right its abuses and cruelties, its wrongs and superstitions. They are daring champions who do not stop to count the cost of their service but, enduring ridicule, persecution, or even crucifixion, go ahead unfalteringly where others draw back. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Whoever will take the trouble to search for them, as I once did, may find that several records have been left behind for posterity by beings who successfully penetrated to the inside of Truth and made themselves at home there. The lands in which they lived were wide apart and included continents all over the globe. For such beings Truth was not a theory but a living experience. There has not yet manifested itself one outstanding personality who merges the simple mystic in the wise sage, who speaks the mind of truth for our time, and who is willing to enlighten or lead us without reference to local or traditional beliefs. Such a being will certainly be heard; one may even be heeded. If the fullest degree of perfection seems so far off as to depress one, the first degree is often so near that it should cheer one. Few imagine their capacity extends to such a lofty attainment and so few seek it. Most of those who engage on this quest have a modest desire—to get somewhere along the way where they have more control over their mind and life than their unsatisfactory present condition affords. If one knew at the beginning that it was so far and so long, and so troubled a journey, would one have embarked on a quest at all? That depends on the nature of the being oneself, on the nature of one’s impelling motive, and on the strength behind it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The attitude of greediness, with all its variations and subsequent inhibitions, is called an oral attitude and as such has been well described in analytical literature. While the theoretical preconceptions underlying this terminology have been valuable, in so far as they have permitted the integration of hitherto isolated trends into syndromes, the preconception that all these trends originate in oral sensations and wishes is dubitable. It is based on the valid observation that greediness frequently finds its expression in demands for food and in manners of eating, as well as in dreams, which may express the same tendencies in a more primitive way, as for example in cannibalistic dreams. These phenomena do not prove, however, that we have here to do with originally and essentially oral desires. It seems therefore a more tenable assumption that as a rule eating is merely the most accessible means of satisfying the feeling of greediness, whatever its source, just as in dreams eating is the most concrete and primitive symbol for expressing insatiable desires. The assumption that the oral desires or attitudes are libidinal in character also needs substantiation. There is no doubt that an attitude of greediness may appear in the sphere of pleasures of the flesh, in actual instability of pleasures of the flesh as well as in dreams that identify pleasures of the flesh with swallowing or biting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

However, it appears just as well in acquisitiveness concerning money or clothes, or in the pursuit of ambition and prestige. All that can be said in favor of the libidinal assumption is that the passionate intensity of greediness is similar to that of drives in the pleasures of the flesh. Unless one assumes, however, that every passionate drive is libidinal, it still remains necessary to prove that greediness as such is a pleasure of the flesh—pregenital—drive. The problem of greediness is complex and still unsolved. Like compulsiveness it is definitely promoted by anxiety. The fact that greediness is conditioned by anxiety may be fairly evident, as is frequently the case, for example, in excessive masturbation or excessive eating. The connection between the two may also be shown by the fact that greediness may diminish or vanish as soon as the person feels reassured in some way: feeling loved, having a success, doing constructive work. A feeling of being loved, for instance, may suddenly reduce the strength of a compulsive wish to buy. A girl who had been looking forward to each meal with undisguised greediness forgot hunger and mealtime altogether as soon as she started designing dresses, an occupation which she greatly enjoyed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

On the other hand, greediness may appear or become reinforced as soon as hostility or anxiety is heightened; a person may feel compelled to go shopping before a dreaded performance, or compelled to eat greedily after feeling rejected. There are many persons, however, who have anxiety and yet do not develop greediness, a fact which indicates that there are still some special factors involved. Of these factors all that can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that greedy persons distrust their capacity to create anything of their own, and thus have to rely on the outside World for the fulfillment of the needs; but they believe that no one is willing to grant them anything. Those neurotic persons who are insatiable in their need for affection usually show the same greediness in reference to material things, such as sacrifices of time or money, factual advice in concrete situations, factual help in difficulties, presents, information, and gratifications of pleasures of the flesh. In some cases these desires definitely reveal a wish for proofs of affection; in others, however, that explanation is not convincing. In the latter case one has the impression that the neurotic person merely wants to get something, affection or no affection, and that a craving for affection, if present at all, is only a camouflage for the extortion of certain tangible favors or profits. “Peace, peace by unto you, because of your faith in my Well Beloved, who was from the foundation of the World,” Helaman 5.47. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Great Mystery Remains Where it Always Has Been—Untouched by Being’s Feelings and Undefined by One’s Thoughts!

September 19, 2019 2:12 am

And once again, I saw a clear image of the boy lying on a stone floor. And I heard the boy’s prayers: “Deliver me.” And I saw the Face of Christ in gleaming egg tempera. I saw the jewels set into the halo. I saw the egg and pigment mixing. “Deliver me.” “Can’t you understand me?” I asked. “I told you what I wanted. I want that boy, the one who won’t do wat you try to force him to do.” Heaven had cast down upon this stone floor an abandoned angel, of auburn curls and perfectly formed limbs, of fair and mysterious face. I reached down to take him by the arms and I lifted him, and I looked into his half-opened eyes. His soft reddish hair was loose and tangled. His flesh was pale and the bones of his face only faintly sharpened by his Slavic blood. “Amadeo,” I said, the name springing to my lips as though the angels willed it, the very angels whom he resembled in his purity and in his seeming innocence, starved as he was. It is perhaps an irony of history that one of the very first and most influential tracts of modern revolutionaries, a tract that gave the antistatists their clarion call to end the abuses of expropriation and inequality, itself rests on the personal, psychological reasons for the very first step in the origin of inequality. Social imbalances occur because of differences in personal merit and the recognition of that merit by others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Social inequality was relatively absent on primitive levels because property was comparatively absent. In the most egalitarian primitive societies, those whose economy is based on hunting and gathering, there is no distinction of rank, little or no authority of one individual over another. Possessions are simple and there is no real difference in wealth; property is distributed equally. Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence, and influence always stems from personal qualities: extra skill in hunting and warfare, in dealing with spirits in the invisible World, or simply physical strength and endurance. Being a senior citizen can often have an influence. If a person has outlived others, especially when so many die prematurely, one is often thought to have special powers. Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit. The scalps of the slain enemies and teeth, feathers, and other ornaments were often loaded with magical power and served as protection. If a being wore a large number of trophies and badges showing how much power one had and how great were one’s exploits, one became a great mana figure who literally struck terror into the heats of one’s enemies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Today, many people use the media and their political authority to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies, or the general public. The conspiratorial theory is particularly appealing to individuals who have feelings of powerlessness and normlessness because it accounts for the absence of power and the lowering of values in a simple and easily understood fashion. The individual who projects sees one’s self as powerless because sinister forces have successfully conspired to destroy the traditional political rules in such a way that one is excluded from exercising one’s rights. This kind of thinking frequently occurs when political and social antagonisms are sharp. Certain audiences are especially susceptible to it—particularly, those who have obtained a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to the centers of power that they feel deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power. In primitive culture, the elaborate decorations of the warrior and hunter were not aimed to make one beautiful, but to show off one’s skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. This gave one automatic social distinction; by wearing the tokens of one’s achievements, the visible memories of one’s bravery and excellence, one could flaunt one’s superiority in the eyes of everyone who could not make similar displays. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The Sioux could announce by certain decorations on one’s moccasins how many horses one had captured, enemies killed, whether the warrior oneself had been wounded, and so forth; similar things were conveyed by the feathers one wore and the color they were dyed. Among other tribes, war exploits entitled the warrior to mark oneself with certain scarifications and tattoos. Each warrior was literally a walking record of one’s military campaigns: the “fruit salad” on the chest of today’s military beings is a direct descendant of those public announcement of “see who I am because of where I have been and what I have done; look how accomplished I am as a death dealer and death defier.” It is of course less concrete and living than actual facial and shoulder scars or the carrying of scalps which included the forehead and eyes. However, it gives the right to the same kind of proud strutting and social honor and the typical question that the primitive warrior asks: “Who are you that you should talk? Where are your tattoo marks? Whom have you killed that you should speak to me?” These people, then, are honored and respected or feared, and this is what gives them influence and power. Not only that, it also gives them actual benefits and privileges. Remember that as children we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neighborhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing that grown men want most—wives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

They got these wives more easily than did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was common property of the tribe. And so on. I do not intend to even try to sum up the theoretical details from the vast literature on the growth of hereditary privilege and private accumulation. Besides, there is little agreement on how exactly class society came into existence. There is general agreement on what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is shrouded in mystery. Many different factors contributed, and it is impossible to pull them apart and give them their proper weight. Also, the process would not have been uniform or unilinear—the same for all societies in all areas. If we add psychological factors to materialist ones, we must also now add ecological and demographic factors such as population density and scarcity of resources. I do not want to pop my head into the argument among authorities lest it get neatly sliced off. So I would like to sidestep the argument while still remaining focused on what is essential, which, I think must be possessed in human nature and motives. Another mechanism for deal with feelings of political alienation is identification with a charismatic leader. This is the attempt of an individual to feel powerful by incorporating within one’s self the attitudes, beliefs, and actions held by a leader whom one perceives as powerful. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Charismatic refers to an extraordinary quality of a person regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed. In taking over the attributes of a charismatic leader, the individual may enter into activity one would otherwise abhor. German bourgeoisie who identified with Hitler approved of and too part in behavior their consciences would otherwise not allow them to do. Rational activism is behavior based on logical reasoning and an undistorted perception of political realities. Withdrawal may be a rational response in some situations and an irrational, affective response in other circumstances. The mechanisms of projection resulting in conspiratorial thinking and identification with a charismatic leader are irrational, affective responses. They are also regressive, in that they are more characteristic of a child’s than of an adult’s handline of a problem. When feelings of political alienation are widespread, individuals will adopt one or more of the mechanisms we have described to handle the frustration and anxiety associated with them. The political behavior or each individual will be affected by the particular mechanism or mechanisms one selects. The most sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing; it just happened, gradually and ineluctably. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The vital question, then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it was allowed to happen, what there was in human nature that went along so willingly with the process. The answers to this question seems to me remarkably straightforward. I have said that primitive beings recognized differences in talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat granted them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. Exploits in the danger of hunting and war were especially crucial. Why? Because in these activities certain individuals could single themselves out as adept at defying death; the tokens and trophies that they displayed were indications of immortality power or durability power, which is the same thing. If you identified with these persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history: one is the one who gambles with one’s very life and successfully defies death, and beings follow one and eventually worship one’s memory because one embodies the triumph over what they fear most, extinction and death. One becomes the focus of the peculiarly human passion play of the victory over death. We can now see how fanciful the idea is that in the state of nature humans are free and only becomes unfree later on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Humans never were free and cannot be free from one’s own nature. One carries within one the bondage that one needs in order to continue to live. Some do not understand human nature in the round, they are not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison. This insight is the fruit of the outcome of modern psychoanalysis. It penetrates to the heart of the human condition and to the principal dynamic of the emergence of historical inequality. We have to say that primitive religion starts the first class distinction. That is, the individual gives over the aegis of one’s own life and death to the spirit World; one is already a second-class citizen. The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings. Once things started off on this footing, it was only natural that class distinction should continue to develop from this first impetus: those individuals who embodied supernatural powers, or could somehow plug into them or otherwise use them when the occasion demanded, came to have the same ability to dominate others that was associated with the spirits themselves. The anthropologist Robert Lowie was a specialist on those most egalitarian of all primitives peoples, the Plains Indian tribes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Even these fiercely independent Indians, he tells us, gave up their equalitarian attitudes of everyday life on raiding parties. A Crow Indian would organize a raid only when prompted by one’s supernatural guardian spirit, and so all those who followed one deferred to one and to one’s spirit. Again, the overlordship of the invisible World as embodied in certain human personages made temporary slaves of their fellows. I suggest that the awe which surrounded the protégé of supernatural powers formed the psychological basis for more complex political developments. The very same beings who flout the pretensions of a fellow-brave grovel before a darling of the gods, render him implicit and obedience and respect. We have described the forms of political alienation and the mechanisms by which they may be expressed. When political alienation is widespread, it may be a major factor in determining the outcome of an election. The astute politician is aware of this; consequently one’s strategy takes these factors into account. The election we have analyzed took place in a community where feelings of political alienation, frustration, and disillusionment with the political process are widespread. When this situation exists, the voting behavior of the electorate is less predictable than otherwise, since a decision is likely to arise from negative rather than from beneficial convictions and may change on the basis of minor issues, fleeting incidents, or gut reactions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

The analysis of the statements of the individuals we interviewed shows that they hold an image of the political structure which is similar to that developed by modern political science. They perceive the hierarchical arrangements of power and influence, and they relate various power groupings to each other. They are aware of the uses and abuses of political office; and they know that their role is not one that the grammar-school version of democratic theory taught them. They have, however, greatly exaggerated their lack of power and, perhaps, the extent of corruption. The election, after all, resulted in the downfall of the group associated with one candidate and the elevation to power of another group which probably did not believe it had a serious chance of winning. All the money that was given to the group which lost the election and all the promises that may have been made to the contributors have been to no avail, for the personnel now in power are different. The antagonisms built up during the campaign may mean that the outs are really out of City Hall in the near future. The election upset was to a large extent a response to feelings of political alienation. Senator Powers followed the time-honored rules of campaigning. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

One spent large amounts of money on advertising which portrayed one as a devoted public servant and friend of the people, shook as many hands as possible, attended numerous house parties, recounted one’s experience, contributed to charities of all faiths, was photographed with prominent religious leaders, attacked one’s opponent, and emphasized the support of the municipal, state, and national politicians; but although one may have 54 percent more votes the primary, an individual can still fail to win. This has shaken politicians’ faith in the traditional vote-getting techniques. Although there can be many more reasons why some lost elections, it is clear that one of the most important was the fact that one presented one’s self as a powerful professional politician—a serious mistake in a community where a considerable amount of political alienation exists. The alienated are not absolutely disposed toward those whom they identify as powerful. Under these circumstances, the candidate must reevaluate antiquated methods, reformulate one’s strategy, and experiment with new techniques. A number of countervailing strategies are available to one. The candidate may create a strong sense of identity with the electorate by presenting one’s self as the underrepresented in a struggle against a power elite. Whether one does this or not, one certainly should not emphasize a background of power to the massive support of other political figures who may also be associated with the powerful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Since an elaborate campaign is viewed as collusion with the powerful, the candidate must avoid the appearance of an opulent campaign. Of course, a candidate may appeal to regressive mechanisms of projection and identification with a charismatic leader. For instance, President Trump successfully appealed to those who tend to think in conspiratorial terms (a form of projection) via his slogan, “Stop power politics, elect a hands-free president, Make American Great Again,” and such techniques as his essay contest on a definition of “power politics.” The electorate, however, did not view Trump as a charismatic leader. He came off more like a saucy demon and holds for like a dictator with a mannish voice, which makes people fear and respect him. As a result the nation feels safe that they are being lead by someone who is not soft nor afraid to hold his ground and the economy is booming. The professional politicians may court popular esteem by throwing the support of the organization behind a clean amateur; that is, some well-know citizen who has not had contact with the politicians and therefore does not share their stigma. The stigma which is attached to the politician by the alienated is not likely to rub off on such an individual, at least during the beginning of the campaign. The difficulty with procedure, from the point of view of the organization, is that such a candidate may be unreliable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Therefore, it is important to grow slowly into the discovery and realization of what one really is deep, deep, inside. Coming to know it is hard enough but impregnating the moment-to-moment daily life with this knowledge is harder still. The aspirant of today may be the adept of tomorrow, but the course is interminably long, the goal reached only through innumerable experiences and efforts. After the optimists have had their say and the Advaitins have preached, the hard fact will be echoed back by experience: the goal is set so far, one’s powers so limited, that one has to call on the quality of patience and make it one’s own. So far as history tells us, full enlightenment cannot be got in the span of a single lifetimes, except among the notable few. Yet history has too many undiscovered secrets, and enlightenment is too subtle a matter to correct judgment upon. The attainment of realization of the Overself is extremely rare, and the aspirant should not expect to do so in one limited lifetime. However, since its Grace is unpredictable, no one can say that it is impossible in a particular case. If the recent scientific computation of the Earth’s age as four thousand million years be correct, we get some idea how long it take to make a human. How much longer then to make a superhuman? That which is cheaply bought is often lightly esteemed. We shall rate Truth more highly when we pay a high price for it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even a lifetime is not too long a period to devote toward gaining such a great objective. What we give must be commensurate with what we want to receive. Moreover the effort required, being worthy in itself and necessary to attain the full development of adulthood, is its own reward whether there is any other or nor. Why then should anyone relax one’s efforts or fall into despair because one has been able to make only little or limited progress toward the goal? The illumination is possible for all beings because they are incarnate in human and not animal forms. However, all beings are not willing to pay its price in mental control and emotional subjugation. If the reader finds such a task too fatiguing one should remember that the reward is nothing less than enlightenment. How few are those who have realized their aspiration to merge into the higher self. How rare an event is. It is obvious from the rarity of its historic realization that this ideal was always too ice-mantled a peak of perfection to be climbable by most beings. Nevertheless we gain nothing by ignoring it, and it is at least well to know towards what goal humankind is so slowly and so unconsciously moving. This truth may seem unsympathetic to natural human feelings, far too impersonal. It is not for the multitude who demand from religions satisfaction of desires, consolation and comfort, answer to prayers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Thee adepts seems so immeasurably aloof from us, their attainments so superhuman, that we may well ask of what use to most beings is the offering of such a quest. One feels intuitively that there is, or ought to be, some elusive element, principle, purpose, or Deity behind all life and all Nature—but is it possible for a human being to become acquainted with IT? Such a goal may be unappealing to many, held by their attachments as they are; but it is fascinating and alluring to a few old souls, much experiences after a long series of Earthly lives, whose values have been altered, whose glamours and illusions have been eliminated. They feel like wanderers returning home. The goal set up by this teaching may seem too foolish and perhaps even too fatuous for persons who pride themselves on their reasonability and practicality. This judgement may be the result of a slight acquaintance with the subject; it could not be the result of a full and satisfactory knowledge of it. The outside observer will not be able to see what is happening to one, and to that extent will not be able to share in it. However, if the latter is associated with one in some way and is at all sensitive, one will be able secretly to affect the subconscious mind of the observer. The name “Rishee” was bestowed in ancient, as well as modern, Indian on the being who had reached the peak of spiritual knowledge; literally it means “seer.” What is it that one sees? One is a see-er of reality, and though illusion. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

People form quaint and queer notions of what constitutes an illuminate. They would divest one of all human attributes, makes one a being who never even sneezes or yawns! In one the high power manifests itself and through one it follows for the inspiring of others. If people tell that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. Jesus said that they way to eternal life is straight and narrow. One could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standard is set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist its attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. “And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them,” reports Ether 11.8. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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The First Great Truth is that a Supreme Mind Minds the Universe!

September 18, 2019 12:29 am

Once again I marveled at the pure resistance of Christianity, that it seemed to feed upon disaster as it had fed upon persecution, and as it prospered during interludes of peace. I also marveled at the resilience of the old Patricians, who as I said, did not withdraw from public life, but strove to inculcate the old values as best they could. Everywhere one saw barbarians with mustaches, wearing crude trousers, their hair greasy and unkempt. Many were Arian Christians, holding different ceremonies from their “orthodox” Catholic brothers and sisters. In municipal politics another source of meaninglessness is likely to be present in the nature of the city government. In theory, and to a large extent in practice, there are no issues in a controversial sense. Indeed, in the usual textbook version, a city government is a “bundle of services.” In practice the political choices available to the administrators of a city government are severely circumscribed by economic realities and by state law. There exist only a small number of ways in which revenue can be raised and these are generally exploited to their fullest. At the same time the services which the city must maintain the standards of a going social system. Therefore the minimal facilities which a city must provide to maintain its viability tend to be not much less than the maximal facilities it can available funds. The municipal public official necessarily operates within a narrow range of alternate programs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Municipal elections therefore tend to center around the inefficiency or dishonesty of the administration, not its program. Consequently, the “honesty” of the candidate is often the variable about which most information is demanded by voters who wish to make a “meaningful” decision. However, information concerning the honesty of the candidate is difficult to secure because corrupt and dishonest activities are carefully hidden from the public. It is precisely the absence of information of this problem which brings about feelings of meaninglessness. Under these circumstances an individual who feels alienated in the “meaningless” sense will tend either not to vote, to believe one’s vote makes no difference, or to make one’s decision in terms of what one believes are inadequate standards. Since relevant factors are absent, many voting decisions are based on “gut reactions”—intuitive emotional responses to the candidate’s physical appearance, voice, and personality. “Don’t like his looks,” “tough,” “ugly looking,” “smug—looks crooked,” “something about his eyes.” Feelings of political meaninglessness give rise to a low sense of confidence among many voters that their voting decision was correct: that their candidate would be a better mayor. When relevant facts are not available, voters cannot predict the future course of political action with any sense of certainty. This also contributes to feelings of powerlessness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Feelings of political alienation may also be experiences in the sense of the lowering of an individual’s political ethics. This occurs when standards of political behavior are violated in order to achieve some goal. This is likely to occur when the political structure prevents the attainment of political objectives through institutionally prescribed means. An example of this would be an individual who believes that paying off a public official is illegitimate, yet does so. The fact that the individual may be reluctant to bribe a public official does not alter the fact that one is lowering one’s standards of political ethics. When individuals believe that corrupt practices are the only ways to achieve political goals and when they feel that corruption is widespread, there will be a greater tendency to resort to it. If the corruption becomes the generally accepted method of dealing with public officials, the stigma attached to it tend to disappear and the political community becomes normless, for instance, anomic. Political estrangement refers to the inability of an individual to find direct satisfactions in political activity itself, that is, gratification from fulfilling one’s obligations as a responsible citizen. Both politically active and politically inactive individuals may be politically estranged. If their activity is motivated by goals of personal monetary gain rather than a sense of their obligation as citizens, political activists are estranged. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Individuals who do have a sense of community responsibility are like to find other community activities, such as support of a symphony orchestra, charities, or clubs, a more rewarding way of fulfilling this obligation than being politically active. This is political estrangement. Four aspects of political alienation—powerlessness, meaninglessness, the lowering of norms, and estrangement—have been distinguished. The extent to which a particular individual is affected by any one of these forms can be related to such variables as social class, age, and religion. Separation of population according to income tends to include separation according to education and occupation as well. Data on income were obtained in this survey and will be used as a gross measure of social-class difference. The majority of the Sacramento electorate, who are elementary or high-school graduates, employed in blue-collar or white-collar jobs, and in the lower-income group, might be expected to feel alienated primarily in the sense of powerlessness. It is this group which is in fact furthest removed from the seats of political power. They have relatively little contact with the city as compared to home owners and business men and women, and when they do have contact, they lack the economic means to participate in the “business” of politics. Steinberg’s major campaign appeal was directed to those who feel powerless. His campaign slogan was “Fight Trump,” and he presented himself as leading the battle against President Trump. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Johnson’s prolific use of political endorsements did not hinder the image Steinberg was creating. The data collected in our survey shows that the lower-income groups switched from Johnson to Steinberg in larger proportions than did the middle- or upper-income groups. This implies that feelings of powerlessness were greater in the lower-income groups. In contrast to the lower-income groups, the upper-income groups, who have more economic power, might be expected to experience political alienation in the forms of meaninglessness, lowering of norms, and estrangement more than in the form of powerlessness. Upper-income groups have more education, which tends to develop more rigorous standards of clarity of information on which to base decisions. The data show that this group had greater interest in political programs and expressed fewer “gut reactions” than did lower-income groups. With higher standards of clarity there are likely to be stronger feelings of political meaninglessness. The upper-income groups include business men and women and property owners who necessarily have more contact with the city because they may require licenses of various kinds, tax abatements, and building inspection certificates. Since they have economic power, they are in a position to purchase special political consideration. Those who do this will experience political alienation in the form of lowering of political norms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Upper-income groups include some individual with a sense of community responsibility. Because of the disjunction of their political values and the political structure, they are likely to be active in nonpolitical civic activities such as charities or service organizations. Age is another variable related to political alienation. Senior citizens, who have lived in Sacramento for many years and have observed the political structure over a long time, might be expected to show greater feelings of alienation. This age group had the largest proportion of individuals who thought that the being they supported would be no better than one’s opponent. Having observed more elections, they seem to feel more strongly that the effect of their vote makes little difference in the long run. Religion is another sociocultural variable to be considered. Since Sacramento is a strongly Catholic, Christian and Mormon city, it might be expected that Protestants and Jewish people, having less political power, would have stronger feelings of political alienation. In support of this are the facts that a smaller percentage of Protestants and Jewish people voted than did Catholics, Christians, and Mormons and that a greater portion voted for Steinberg, whose campaign was largely an appeal to the political alienated. Feelings of political alienation may be expressed through rational activism, withdrawal, projection, or identification with a charismatic leader. These are conscious or unconscious mechanisms by which an individual may handle the uncomfortable feelings of political alienation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Some forms of alienation lead to specific mechanisms, for example, feelings of estrangement inevitably lead to withdrawal because gratification is found only in nonpolitical activity. Other forms may result in one or more of several mechanisms, for example, feelings of powerlessness may lead to political activism or to projection and identification with a charismatic leader. Rational activism is political action based on a realistic evaluation of the political situation, the object of which is to promote a political structure consonant with political values. The frustration arising from political alienation can be a spur to rational activism; feelings of powerlessness can lead to increased political activity. Feelings of meaninglessness can lead to demands for more information rather than withdrawal or “blind” voting. And guilt, resulting from normlessness, can result in activity directed toward raising political standards. Mature individuals, who re those able to tolerate frustration and to act on their beliefs, are those most likely to handle their feelings of political alienation through rational activism. This activity may occur within existing political institutions or it may be directed toward the creation of a new set of political institutions. When individuals believe that their activity has a reasonable chance of bringing about a change, rational activism is more likely to be the response to feelings of political alienation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed, sacred obligations which appear as objective realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion. Political withdrawal is the removal of an individual’s interest and activity from politics. This may occur as a result of a conscious rational decision based on a realistic estimate of the political situation or as an affective, unconscious response. In the latter case the anger and resentment of political alienation may be internalized within the individual rather than expressed outwardly. When the individual feels that any political effort on one’s part has little chance of producing an effect, this mechanism is more likely to occur. Although an individual may have withdrawn from political interests, one is not likely to escape entirely from politics. Municipal problems of education, traffic, housing, and taxes may affect one personally, or one may note the recurrent exposure of corruption in newspapers. Consequently, additional mechanisms of expression of political alienation are likely to be used. There may be projection, identification with a charismatic leader, or rational activism. Feelings of anger and resentment which arise from political alienation may be projected on to some other individual or group. This group is seen as participating in a hostile conspiracy. Political leaders may use this mechanism because it establishes a sense of identity between them and the voters to whom they are appealing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

The origin of inequality among beings! This was the question that excited thinkers of the eighteenth century as they combed the globe trying to find humanity in an uncorrupted state. From the early voyages and early anthropology they already saw that primitive society was fairly egalitarian, that compared to the civilized World of that time primitives lived what seemed an unspoiled, undriven sort of life, and one that took very little toll on the World around them. It was the same kind of World that Levi-Strauss set out to find in the Amazon a couple of centuries later and for which he wrote the same kind of epitaph as the earlier observers had: A World on the Wane. Nobody was very happy with the way history and civilization had turned out, and many thinkers of that time supposed that if the first steps in the process of the oppression of beings by beings could be pinpointed, then the decay of civilization might be arrested and even reversed. They believed that if a being could be shown how one got into one’s deplorable condition, one would make every intelligent, scientific effort to get out of it. They supposed too that there was nothing naturally evil in being’s nature that would prevent one from being able to build a new social World, once one understood the reasons for the mess one was in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The great Rousseau, with his uncanny intuition of what was significant, began it all with his famous “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men” (1755). In that essay he reasoned out how man had gradually fallen from his primitive state of innocence into the conflicts of classes and states. The whole story of the influence of Rousseau’s ideas is well known and I am not going to repeat it here. All I want to do is to remind the reader that Rousseau failed to bring about what he hoped for, and so too did the whole tradition which followed him; and I want to sum up why it failed. The Marxist tradition seized on Rousseau’s work because it was exactly what the Marxists needed: the accusation that the state acted tyrannically to hold beings in bondage, deprived them of the fruits of their labors, and distributed these fruits mostly among the elite. They attempted to remind society of a being’s concern for one’s fellows before the exploitation began and said that once a being understood that one had the right to enjoy the fruits of meaningful labor, one would rise up and break the shackles which enslaved one. This was the message of the great Manifesto, the authority for the massive revolutions of this century. However, the great disillusionment of our time is that none of this has led to the liberation of beings. Masses of people are still being treated like masses instead of persons, still being sent off like puppets to war, and still slaving all day for purposes they did not fashion or control. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

In a word, the great revolutions of our time, directed against the state as a structure of domination, have not led to the disappearance of the state, and so they have not led to human equality and freedom. What went wrong? Obviously something with the plans on the original drawing board; Rousseau’s answer to the question posed by the Academy of Dijon was not compete or was beside the mark. We have had to conclude that the question of the origin of inequality among beings was not answered by the Marxist tradition. This great historical realization is what prompted the work of the leading school of sociology of our time—the Frankfurt school—a work dedicated to going beyond Marx to a new synthesis: a merger of the materialist and psychological levels of explanation, “the union of Marx and Freud.” If it is not only power and coercion that enslaved beings, then there must be something in one’s nature that contributes to one’s downfall; since this is so, the state is not human’s first and only enemy, but one one’s self harbors an “enemy within.” We are here at one of the ultimate crossroads in social theory….If the cause of the trouble were force, to “expropriate the expropriators” would be enough. However, if force did not establish the domination of the master, then perhaps the slave is somehow in love with one’s own chains…a deeper psychological malady. The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into one’s head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe one, was the true founder of society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

In other words, primitive equality was ended by private property, which led to the differential personal ownership of wealth. However, the point is the person did not take the land by force, but rather because of something in the minds of those around one. In Rousseau’s theory of inequality, wealth is at the last stage and personal qualities at the first stage: it is personal qualities that give rise to distinctions of rank and power, and wealth is the last to which they are reduced in the end. Personal qualities are the only ones which could attract consideration: The one who sang and danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered and that was the first step toward inequality. Our sacred boos and traditions tell us of one God who made Heaven and Earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good. Yet, on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of Heaven and Earth refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

This is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar unheimlichkeit, or poisonousness, likes expressly in in our holding two things together which cannot possibly agree,–in our clinging, on the one hand, to the demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the other, to the belief that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit’s adequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradiction between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us, and wit which we ought to have some communion, and the character of such a spirit as revealed by the visible World’s course, that this particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle reside. Carlyle expressed the result in that chapter of his immortal ‘Sartor Resartus’ entitled ‘The Everlasting No.’ “I lived, writes poor Teufelsdrockh, “in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured.” This is the first state of speculative melancholy. No brute can have this sort of melancholy; no being who is irreligious can becomes it prey. It is not the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the mere necessary outcome of animal experience. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Teufelsdrockh himself could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this World’s experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally unlimited trust and affection toward them. If he might meet them piecemeal, with no suspicion of any whole expressing itself in them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air vocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of ‘I don’t care,’ is for this World’s ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. However, no! something deep down in Teufelsdrockh and in the rest of us tells us that there is a Spirit in things to which we own allegiance, and for whose sake we must keep up the serious mood. And so the inner fever and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature are at the present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look. The Art of Self-Revelation is no tea-table philosophy, shaped and polished to beguile the tedium of the idle. Not many have attempted this path and fewer have completed it. For few find going easy. The fleshly World with its snares waits for us all, and the escape is only for the starred ones. “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength,” reports Nehemiah 8.10. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

And then to Lose Him, to Lose this Young One with Whom I Felt Such Utter Communion—Ah, that was Such Rich Pain!

September 14, 2019 12:13 am

This is what I believe happened. I brought the inventions of the modern World to her as offerings. At first it was the machines that played music, and then came those which would show moving pictures. At last, I brought the most powerful of all, the television that would play constantly. I set it in her shrine as though it were a sacrifice. In all modern societies, the autonomous associations standing between the various classes and the state tend to lose the effectiveness as vehicles of reasoned opinion and instruments for the rational exertion of political will. Such associations can be deliberately broken up and thus turned into passive instruments of rule, or they can more slowly wither away from lack of use in the face of centralized means of power. However, whether they are destroyed in a week, or wither away in a generation, such associations are replaced in virtually every sphere of life by centralized organizations, and it is such organizations with all their new means of power that can take charge of the terrorized—or as the case may be—merely intimidated, society of masses. The institutional trends that make for a society of masses are to a considerable extent a matter of impersonal drift, but the remnants of the public are also exposed to more personal and intentional forces. Rather like the music of the violin, I think, just as deeply colored, such terrible pain. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

With the broadening of the base of politics within the context of a folk-lore of democratic decision-making, and with the increased means of mass persuasion that are available, the public of public opinion has become the object of intensive efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate. In political, military, economic realms, power becomes, in varying degrees, uneasy before the suspected opinions of masses, and, accordingly, opinion-making becomes an accepted technique of power-holding and power-getting. The minority electorate of the propertied and the educated I replaced by the total suffrage—and intensive campaigns for the vote. The small eighteenth-century professional army is replaced by the mass army of conscripts—and by the problems of nationalist morale. The small shop is replaced by the mass-production industry—and the national advertisement. As the scale of institutions has become larger and more centralized, so has the range and intensity of the opinionmakers’ efforts. The means of opinion-making, in fact, have paralleled in range and efficiency the other institutions of greater scale that cradle the modern society of masses. Accordingly, in addition to their enlarged and centralized means of administration, exploitation, and violence, the modern elite have had placed within their grasp historically unique instruments of psychic management and manipulation, which include universal compulsory education as well as the media of mass communication. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Early observers believed that the increase in the range and volume of the formal means of communication would enlarge and animate the primary public. In such optimistic of animating the primary public—written before radio and television and movies—the formal media are understood as simply multiplying the scope and pace of personal discussion. Enlarge indefinitely the competition of ideas, and whatever has owed its persistence merely to lack of comparisons is likely to go, for that which is really congenial to the choosing mind will be all the more cherished and increased. There is a reason to be excited by the break-up of the conventional consensus of the local community, as the new means of communication are furthering the conversational dynamic of classic democracy, and with it the growth of rational and free individuality. No one really knows all the functions of the mass media for in their entirety these functions are probably so pervasive and so subtle that they cannot be caught by the means of social research now available. However, we do no have reason to believe that these media have helped less to enlarge and animate the discussions of primary publics than to transform them into a set of media markets in mass-like society. I do not refer merely to the higher ratio of deliverers of opinion to receivers and to the decreased chance to answer back; nor do I refer merely to the violent banalization and stereotyping of our very sense organs in terms of which these media now compete for attention. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

I have in mind a sort of psychological illiteracy that is facilitated by the media, and that is expressed in several ways: Very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the World have found out first-hand. Most of the pictures in our hears we have gained from these media—even to the point where we often do not really believe what we see before us until we read about in in the paper or hear about it on the radio. The media not only gives us information; they guide our very experiences, and that is why many are producing fictional and sensualized stories. Our standards of credulity, our standards of reality, tend to be set by these media rather than by our own fragmentary experience. Accordingly, even if the individual has direct, personal experience of events, it is not really direct and primary: it is organized stereotypes. It takes long and skillful trainings to so uproot such stereotypes that an individual sees things freshly, in an unstereotyped manner. One might suppose, for example, that is all the people went through a depression they would all experience it, and in terms of this experience, that they would all debunk or reject or at least refract what the media say about it. However, experience of such a structural shift has to be organized and interpreted if it is to count in the making of opinion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The kind of experience, in short, that might serve as a basis for resistance to mass media is not an experience of the raw events, but the experience of meanings. If we are to use the word experience seriously, the fleck of interpretation must be there in the experience. And the capacity for such experience is socially implanted. The individual does not trust one’s own experience, as I have said, until it is confirmed by others or by the media. If it disturbs loyalties and beliefs that the individual already hold, usually such direct exposure is not accepted. To be accepted, it must relieve or justify the feelings that often are possessed in the back of one’s mind as key features of one’s ideological loyalties. Stereotypes of loyalty underlie beliefs and feelings about given symbols and emblems; they are the very ways in which beings see the social World and in terms of which beings make up their specific opines and views of the event. They are the result of previous experience, which affect present and future experience. It goes without saying that being are often unaware of these loyalties, that often they could not formulate them explicitly. Yet such general stereotypes make for the acceptance or the rejection of specific opinions not so much by the force of logical consistency as by their emotional affinity and by the way in which they relieve anxieties. To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

When ideological stereotypes and specific opinions are linked in this way, there is a lowering of the kind of anxiety which arises when loyalty and belief are not in accord. Such ideologies lead to a willingness to accept a given line of belief; then there is no need, emotionally or rationally, to overcome resistance to give items in that line; cumulative selections of specific opinions and feelings become the pre-organized attitudes and emotions that shape the opinion-life of the person. These deeper beliefs and feelings are not a sort of lens through which beings experience their Worlds, they strongly condition acceptance or rejection of specific opinions, and they set being’s orientation toward prevailing authorities. Eight decades ago, Walter Lippmann saw such prior convictions as biases: they kept beings from defining reality in an adequate way. They are still biased. However, today they can often be seen as good biases; inadequate and misleading as they often are, they are less so than the crackpot realism of higher authorities and opinion-makers. They are first generation to be so exposed. So long as the media are not entirely monopolized, the individual can play one medium off against another; one can compare them, and hence resist what any one of them put out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The more genuine competition there is among the media, the more resistance the individual might be able to command. However, how much is this now the case? So people compare reports on public events or policies, playing one medium’s content off against another’s? The answer is: generally no, very few do: We know that people tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a kind of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as may be found in alternative media offerings. Given radio programs and social media and video streaming and magazines and newspapers often get a rather consistent public, and thus reinforce their messages in the mind of pubic. The idea of playing one medium off against another assumes that the media really have varying contents. It assumes genuine competition, which is not widely true. The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete more in terms of variations on a few standardized themes than of clashing issues. The freedom to raise issues effectively seems more and more to be confined to those few interests that have ready and continual access to these media. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The media have not only filtered into our experience of external realities, they have also entered into our very experience of our own selves. They have provided us with new identities and new aspirations of what we should like to be. They have provided in the models of conduct they hold out to us a new and larger and more flexible set of appraisals of our very selves. In terms of the modern theory of the self, we may say that the media bring the reader, listener, viewer into the sight of larger, higher reference groups—groups, real or imagined, up-close or vicarious, personally known or distractedly glimpsed—which are looking glasses for one’s self-image. They have multiplied the groups to which we look for confirmation of our self-image. More than that: the media tell the being in the mass who he or she is—they give one identity; they tell one what one wants to be—they give one aspirations; they tell one how to get that way—they give one technique; and they tell one how to feel that one is that way even when one is not—they give one an escape. The gaps between the identity and aspirations lead to technique and/or to escape. That is probably the basic psychological formula of a pseudo-World which the media invent and sustain. As they now generally prevail, the mass media, especially television, often encroach upon the small-scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

They are an important reason why they only fail as an educational force, but are a malign force: they do not articulate for the viewer or listener the broader sources of one’s private tensions and anxieties, one’s inarticulate resentments and half-formed hopes. They neither enable the individual to transcend one’s narrow milieu nor clarify its private meeting. The media provide much information and news about what is happening in the World, but they do not often enable the listener or the viewer truly to connect one’s daily life with these larger realities. They do not connect the information they provide on public issues with the troubles felt by the individual. They do not increase rational in identified with the ruing institutions and their agents, who ay use authority explicitly and nakedly. They do not in the extreme case, have to gain or retain power by hiding its exercise. Manipulation becomes a problem wherever beings have power that is concentrated and willful but do not have authority, or when, for any reason, they do not wish to use their power openly. Then the powerful seek to rule without showing their powerfulness. They want to rule, as it were, secretly, without publicized legitimation. It is in this mixed case—as in the intermediate reality of the American today—that manipulation is a prime way of exercising power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Small circles of beings are making decisions which they need to have at least authorized by indifferent or recalcitrant people over whom they do not exercise explicit authority. So the small circle tries to manipulate these people into willing acceptance or cheerful support of their decisions or opinions—or at least to the rejection of possible counter-opinions. Authority formally resides in the people, but the power of initiation is in fact held by small circles of beings. That is why the standard strategy of manipulation is to make it appear that the people, or at least, a large group of them really made the decision. That is why even when the authority is available, beings with access to it may still prefer the secret, quieter ways of manipulation. However, are not the people now more educated? Why not emphasize the spread of the education rather than the increased effects of the mass media? The answer, in brief is that mass education, in many respects, has become another mass medium. It is thought by environmentalists that human behavior is exclusively molded by the influence of the environment. According to this their theory behavior is controlled by social and cultural, as opposed to innate factors. This is particularly true with regard to aggression, one of the main obstacles to human progress. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In its most radical form this view was already presented by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Beings were supposed to be born good and rational, and it was due to bad institutions, bad educations, and bad example that one developed evil strivings. Some denied that there were any physical differences between the genders (L’ame n’a pas de sex) and proposed that whatever differences existed, aside from the anatomical ones, were exclusively due to education and social arrangements. In contrast to behaviorism, however, these philosophers were not concerned with methods of human engineering and manipulation but wit social and political change. They believed that the good society would create the good being, or rather, allow the natural goodness of beings to manifest itself. However, many who accept Neobehaviorism as true believe that to consider human behavior as impelled by intentions, purposes, aims or goals, would be a prescientific and useless way of looking at it. Psychology has to study what reinforcements tend to shape human behavior and how to apply the reinforcements most effectively. B. F. Skinner’s psychology is the science of the engineering of behavior; its aim is to find the right reinforcements in order to produce a desired behavior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Skinner spears of operant conditioning. Briefly, this means that unconditioned behavior, provided it is desirable from the experimenter’s standpoint, is rewarded, for instance, followed by pleasure. (Skinner believes that the rewarding reinforcement to be much more effect than the punishing.) As a result, the subject will eventually continue to behave in the desired fashion. For example, Leo does not like spinach particularly; he eats it, mother rewards him with a praising remark, an affectionate glance, or an extra piece of cake, whichever is most reinforcing for Leo as measured by what works best—for instance, Leo’s mother administers beneficial reinforcements. Leo will eventually love to eat spinach, particularly if the reinforcements are effectively administered in terms of their schedules. In hundreds of experiments, it has been shown that the techniques for this operant conditioning of beneficial reinforcement when used with animals and humans can be altered to an amazing degree, even in opposition to what some would loosely call innate tendencies. To have shown this is undoubtedly the great merit of Skinner’s experimental work; it also supports the views of those who believe that the social structure (or culture in the parlance of most American anthropologists) can shape the being, even though not necessarily through operant conditioning. It is important to add that Skinner does not neglect genetic endowment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

In order to render Skinner’s position correctly, one should say that apart from genetic endowment, behavior is determined entirely by reinforcement. Reinforcement can occur in two ways: it happens in the normal cultural process, or it can be planned, according to Skinnerian teaching and thus lead to a design for culture. The prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of the high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public’s expense. However, educating children and keeping them off the streets is beneficial for parents, society, and the economy. Public education provides society with a facilitator, who educates your children and keep the off the streets and out of trouble while you are at work. This reduces childcare cost, law enforcement costs, medical costs, and keeps your children out of jail, while fostering the tools they will need to become productive members in society. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties, which is why to instill national pride, many Americans think the kids should still pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The training of skills that are of more or less direct use in the vocational life is an important task to perform, but ought not to be mistake for liberal education: job advancement, no matter on what levels, is not the same as self-development, although the two are now systematically confused. Among skills, some are more and some are less relevant to the aims of liberal—that is to say, liberating—education. Skills and values cannot be so easily separated as the academic search for supposedly neutral skills causes us to assume. And especially not when we speak seriously of liberal education. Of course, there is a scale, with skills at one end and values at the others, but it is the middle range of this scale, which one might call sensibilities, that are of most relevance to the classic public. To train someone to operate a lathe or to read and write is pretty much education of skill; to evoke from people an understanding of what they really want out of their lives or to debate with them stoic, Christian and humanist ways of living, is pretty much a clear-cut education of values. However, to assist in the birth among a group of people of those cultural and political and technical sensibilities which would make them genuine members of a genuinely liberal public, this is at once a training in skills in an education of values. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The skills and values include a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of one’s self; it includes the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one’s self, which we call thinking; and with others, which we call not fighting, not arguing, but debate. And the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman. The knowledgeable being in the genuine public is able to turn one’s personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for one’s entire community and one’s community’s relevance for them. One understands that what on thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which one lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society. Beings in masses are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source. Beings in public confront issues, and they are aware of their terms. It is the task of the liberal institutions, as of the liberally educated beings, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual. In the absence of deep and wide political debate, schools for adults and adolescents could perhaps become hospitable frameworks for just such debate. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

In a community of publics the task of liberal education would be to keep the public from being overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible individual that cannot be sunk by the burdens of mass live. However, educational practice has not made knowelegde directly relevant to the human need of the troubled person of the twenty first century or to the social practices of the citizens. This citizen cannot now see the roots of one’s own biases and frustrations, not think clearly about one’s self, nor for that matter about anything else. One does not see the frustration of idea, of intellect, by the present organization of society, and one is not able to meet the tasks now confronting the intelligent citizen. Educational institutions have not done these things and, expect in rare instances, they are not doing them. They have become mere elevators of occupational and social ascent, and, on all levels, they have become politically timid. Moreover, in the hands of professional educators, many schools have come to operate on an ideology of life adjustment that encourages happy acceptance of mass ways of life rather than the struggle for individual and public transcendence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

There is not much doubt that modern regressive educators have adapted their notions of educational content and practice to the idea of the mass. They do not effectively proclaim standards of cultural level and intellectual rigor; rather they often deal in the trivia of vocational tricks and adjustment to life—meaning the slack of life masses. Deomcratic schools often mean the furtherance of intellectual mediocrity, vocational training, nationalistic loyalties, and little else. This is causing people to be frightened by the expanding culture and of its image, and feel threatened by the possible loss of their own theoretical identity because their students are no longer trying as hard to become educated and successful leaders, meanwhile in China, students are going to school six days a week and spend all of their free time studying. America has enjoyed a prosperous lifestyle due to the hard work of our ancestors, which has allowed the youth to slack off, but it is time to make our kids realize how important an education is not just for themselves, but for their family and for the prosperity and security of our nation. By 2020, China will have an affluent population of 280 million people, which is equal to 86 percent of the total American population. That means these people have money and are not worried about their future, they have worked hard enough to take care of all their needs and save money. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Some American cities like Sacramento, California USA are extremely corrupt because of the present painful effects of a too sudden transition from serfdom to industrialization. They were willing to elect a mayor who had a criminal background and to allow an investor from the Middle East with a scandalous history to virtually have control over the entire city. The people in Sacramento are living closer to irrational elements than the older European countries, and, therefore, being more threatened by untamed irrationality, and are not in need of greater effort to control it by regulation. Scientific, economic, moral, as well as political—are threatened by the rampant corruption in the city of Sacramento. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the possible destroyers have control of our nicely ordered systems. “Yea, he saw great inequality among the people, some lifting themselves up with their pride, despising others, turning their backs upon the needy and the vulnerable and those who were hungry, and those who were athirst, and those who were sick and afflicted,” reports Alma 4.12. Many people feed on this thing called the media, as gods are wont to do when they come down to their altars. They feed on its terrible electric violence. Lurid colors flash over their faces, and images accost them. And I wonder sometimes if the endless public talk of the great World is not in itself inspiring an imitation of behavior in the public’s mind causing them to awake with an ugly sense of purpose. That they will rule the World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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

September 10, 2019 2:09 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 31, 2019 1:46 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 29, 2019 12:46 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the Great Boarding-House of Nature, the Cakes and the Butter and the Syrup Seldom Come Out so Even and Leave the Plates so Clean!

August 28, 2019 1:39 am

Well, what human souls see of this is a fragment. I saw the whole. I roamed extensively and fearlessly and regardless of Time, or out of it, though Time always continues to pass, of course, and I went where I chose. There were many, many mansions, to use the Scriptural words. Souls believing in like faiths had come together in desperation and sought to reinforce each other’s beliefs and still each other’s fears. However, the light of Earth was too dim to warm anyone here! And the Light of Heaven simply did not penetrate at all. The first thing I did was listen: I listened to the song of any soul who would sing to me, that is, speak, in my language; I caught up any coherent declaration or question or supposition that struck my ears. What did these souls know? What had become of them? Good beings would have us to believe failure to act in the right way, a failure to do the good one should have done is a sin. If this were sin, a less aggressive and less ugly terms, such as human weakness, could be applied. However, that is just what sin is not. And those of us who have experienced demonic powers within and around ourselves find such a description ludicrous. So we turn to Paul, and perhaps to Anne Rice’s Lestat to the conversation between God, the Memnoch Jesus and Lestat in Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

From the legends and myths, we learn what sin is. And perhaps we may learn in through Picasso’s picture of that small Basque village, Guernica, which was destroyed in an unimaginably horrible way by the demonic powers of tyranny and oppression. And perhaps we learn it through the disrupting sounds in music that does not bring us restful emotions, but the feeling of being torn and split. Perhaps we learn the meaning of sin from the images of evil and guilt that fill our theatres, or through the revelations of unconscious motives so abundant in our novels. It is noteworthy that today, in order to know the meaning of sin, we have to look outside our churches and their average preaching to the artists and writers and ask them. However, perhaps there is still another place where we can learn what sin is, and that is our own heart. Paul seldom speaks of sins, but he often spears of Sin—Sin in the singular with a capital “S,” Sin as a power that controls World and mind, persons and nations. Have you ever thought of Sin in this image? It is the Biblical image. However, how many Christians or non-Christians have seen it? Most of us remember that at home, in school and at church, we were taught that there were many things that one would like to do that one should not. And if one did them, one committed a sin. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

We had lists of prohibitions and catalogues of commands; if we did not follow the, we committed sins. Naturally, we did commit one or more sins every day, although we tried to diminish their number seriously and with good will. This was, and perhaps still is, our image of sin—a poor, petty, distorted image, and the reason for the disrepute into which the word has fallen. The first step to an understanding of the Christian message that is called “good news” is to dispel the image of sin that implies a catalogue of sins. Those who are bound to this image are also those who find it most difficult to receive the message of acceptance of the unacceptable, the good news of Christianity. Their half-sinfulness and half-righteousness makes them insensitive to a message that states the presence of total sinfulness and total righteousness in the same being at the same moment. They never find the courage to make a total judgement against themselves, and therefore, they can never find the courage to believe in a total acceptance of themselves. Those, however, who have experienced in their hearts that sin is more than the trespassing of a list of rues know that all sins are manifestations of Sin, of the power of estrangement and inner conflict. Sin dwells in us, it controls us, and makes us do what we do not want to do. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Sin produces a split in us that makes us lose identity with ourselves. Paul writes of this split twice: “If I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” Those who have suffered this split know how unexpected and terrifying it can be. Thoughts entered our mind, words poured from our mouth, something was enacted by us suddenly and without warning. And if we look at what happened, we feel—“It could not have been I who acted like this. I cannot find myself in it. Something came upon me, something I hardly noticed. However, there it was and here am I. It is I who did it, but a strange I. It is not my real, my innermost self. It is as though I were possessed by a power scarcely knew. However, now I know that it not only can reach me, but that it dwells in me.” Is this something we really know? Or do we, after a moment of shock, repress such knowledge? Do we still rely on our comparatively well ordered life, avoiding situations of moral danger, determined by the rules of family, school and society? For those who are satisfied with such a life, the words of Paul are written in vain. They refuse to face their human predicament. However, something further may happen to them: God Himself may throw them into more sin in order to make them aware of what they really are. This is a bold way of speaking, but it is the way people of the profoundest religious experiences have spoken. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

By God throwing them into more sin, they have felt the awakening hand of God. And awakened, they have seen themselves in the mirror from which they had always turned away. No longer able to hide from themselves, they have asked the question, from the depth of their self-rejection, to which the Christian message is the answer—the power of acceptance that can overcome the despair of self-rejection. In this sense, more sin can be the divine way of making us aware of ourselves. Then maybe people will feel love, maybe they will see love, feel the Love of Men and Women and for one another and for their Children, and understand the willingness to sacrifice for one another, and to grieve for those who are dead, and to seek for their souls in the hereafter, and to think of our Lord, of a hereafter where they might be reconciled with those souls again. It is out of this love and the family, it is out of this rare and unprecedented bloom—so Creative of our Lord, that is seems in His Image of his Creations—that the souls of these beings remain alive after death! What else in Nature can do this? All gives back to the Earth what it has taken. God’s Wisdom is Manifested throughout; and all those that suffer and die beneath the canopy of God’s Heavens are mercifully bathed in brutal ignorance of the scheme which ultimately involved their own deaths. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Then, we ask with Paul—what is it within us that makes a dwelling place for this power? He answers that is it our members in which sin hides. He also calls this place “flesh,” and sometimes he speaks of “our body of death.” However, there are also forces within us that resist the power—our innermost self, our mind, our spirit. With these words, Paul wrestles with the deep mystery of human nature just as we do today. And it is no easier to understand him than our present scholarly language about beings. However, one this is certain: Paul, and with him, the whole Bible, never made our body responsible for our estrangement from God, from our World and from our own self. Body, flesh, members—these are not the only sinful parts of us, while the innermost self, mind and spirit, comprises the other, sinless part. Our whole being, every cell of our body, and every movement of our mind is both flesh and spirit, subjected to the power of sin and resisting its power. The fact that we accuse ourselves shows that we cannot acknowledge our estrangement from out true nature. The fact that we are ashamed shows that we still know what we ought to be. And in their hearts, loving one another as they do, mate with mate, and family with family, they have imagined Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Beings have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kind will be restored to them and to each other, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity because their love demands it. They have conceived of these ideas as they conceive of fleshly children! There is no part of beings that is bad in itself, as there is no part o beings that is good in itself. Any Christian teaching that has forgotten this has fallen short of the height of Christian insight. And here all Christian churches must share the grave guilt of destroying human beings by casting them into despair over their own guilt where there should be no guilt. In pulpits, schools and families, Christians have called the natural strivings of the living, growing and self-propagating body sinful. They concentrate in an inordinate and purely pagan way on the pleases of the flesh differentiation of all life and its possible distortions. Certainly, these distortions are as real as the distortions of our spiritual life—as, for example, pride and indifference. However, to see the power of sin in the power of the pleasures of the flesh of life as such is itself a distortion. Such preaching completely misses the image of sin as Paul depicts it. What is worse, it produces distorted feelings of guilt in countless personalities, that drive them from doubt to anxiety, from anxiety to despair, from despair to escape into mental disease, and thence the desire to destroy themselves altogether. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

And still other consequences of this preaching about sin become apparent. Paul points to the perversions of desires for pleasures of the flesh as an extreme expression of sin’s control of humankind. Have we as Christians ever asked ourselves whether or not, in our defamation of the natural as sin, or at least as a reason for shame, we have perhaps contributed most potently to this state of affairs? For all this results from that petty image of sin, that contradicts reality as much as it contradicts the Biblical understanding of a being’s predicament. It is dangerous to preach about sin, because it may induce us to brood over our sinfulness. Perhaps one should not preach about it at all. I myself have hesitated for many years. However, sometimes it must be risked in order to remove the distortions which increase sin, if, by the persistence of wrong thoughts, wrong ways of living are inevitable. I believer it possible to conquer the dangers implied in the concentration of sin, if we look at it indirectly, in the light of that which enables us to resist it—reunion overcoming estrangement. Sin is our act of turning away from participation in the divine Ground from which we come and to which we go. Sin is the turning towards ourselves, and making ourselves the center of our World and of ourselves. Sin is the drive in everyone, even those who exercise the most self-restraint, to draw as much as possible of the World into oneself #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

However, if we have found a certain level of life above ourselves, we can be fully aware that we should not try to draw too much of the World into ourselves. After one has lost oneself, whoever has found oneself knows how deep one’s loss of self was. If we look at our estrangement from the point of reunion, we are no longer in danger of brooding over our estrangement. We can speak of Sin, because its power over us is broken. It is certainly not broken by ourselves. The attempt to break the power of sin by the power of good will has been described by Paul as the attempt to fulfill the law, the law in our mind, in our innermost self that is the law of God. The result of this attempt is failure, guilt and despair. The law, with its commands and prohibitions, despite its function in revealing and restricting evil, provokes resistance against itself. In a language both poetic and profoundly psychological, Paul says that the sin that dwells in our members is asleep until the moment in which it is awakened by the “thou shalt not.” Sin uses the commandments in order to become alive. Prohibition awakens sleeping desire. It arouses the power and consciousness of sin, but cannot break its power. Only if we accept with our whole being the message that it is broken, is it also broke in us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

This picture of sin is a picture full of ugliness, suffering and shame, and at the same time, drama and passion. It is the picture of us as the battleground of powers greater than we. It does not divide beings into categories of black and white, or good and evil. It does not appear as the threatening finger of an authority urging us—do not sin! However, it is the vision of something infinitely important, that happens on this small planet in, our bodies and minds. It raises humankind to a level in the Universe where decisive things happen in every moment, decisive for the ultimate meaning of all existence. In each of us such decisions occur, in us, and through us. This is our burden. This is our despair. This is our greatness. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did not exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare with worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for beings. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correction brings beings all sorts of other goods which a being’s heart in turn declares. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a World of moral reality, your head will assuredly never makes you believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head’s play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some beings (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete and gullibility on one’s. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of one, one clings to it that one is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which all their with and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with one’s whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one being and another. Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases previous what makes your liking come. However, if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutist say, ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some being that they must love one! one will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here beings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the being in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? One’s faith acts on the powers above one as a claim, and creates its own verification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to one’s own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individual brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if one makes a movement of resistance, one will be shot before any one else backs one up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives! #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Social betterment is a good thing but it is not a substitute for self-betterment. Love of one’s neighbour is an excellent virtue but it cannot displace the best of all virtues, love of the divine soul. The being who is discontented with the World as one finds it and sets out to improve it, must begin with oneself. There is authority for this statement in the life-giving ideas of Jesus as well as in the light-giving Plato. One has enough to do with the discovery and correction of one’s own deficiencies or weaknesses, not to meddle in criticism of other people’s. One can best use one’s critical faculties by turning them on oneself rather than on others. Progress in self-evolvement on the Quest must be due to the individual’s own efforts. It can be encouraged or fostered only in proportion to the same individual’s wishes and needs. Other people, who are not interested in an inner search, are, at present, fulfilling their own karmic need for a particular variety of experience; it is neither advisable nor feasible to urge them to follow this path. It is a worthwhile cause, this, and does not require us to interfere with others, to propagandize them or to reform them. Rather does it as us to do these things to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Few know where really to look for the truth. Most go for it to other beings, to books, or to churches. However, the few who know the proper direction turn around and look in that place where the truth is not only a living dynamic thing but is their own. And this is deep, deep within themselves. It is logical to assert if every individual in a group is made better, the group of which one is a part will be made better. And what is human society but such a group? The best way to help it is to start with the individual who is under one’s actual control—oneself—and better one. Do that, and it will then be possible to apply oneself to the task of bettering the other members of society, not only more easily but with less failure. The Holy Land, flowing with milk and honey, is within us but the wilderness that we have to cross before reaching it, is within us too. The great sources of wisdom and truth, of virtue and serenity, are still within ourselves as they have ever been. Mysticism is simply the art of turning inwards in order to find them. Will, thought, and feeling are withdrawn from their habitual extroverted activities and directed inwards in this subtle search. One understands then what it means to do nothing of oneself, for one feels clearly that the higher power is doing though one whatever has to be done, is doing it rightly, while one oneself is merely watching what is happening. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The experience of enlightenment brings a tremendous feeling of well-being. It is in one’s attitude toward oneself particularly that we see the immense advance one has made beyond ordinary beings. Just as the Illumined State does not prevent one from receiving physical impressions from the World around one, so it does not prevent one from receiving psychic impressions from the people around one. However, one does not cling to any of these impressions, nor does one let one’s emotions get entwined with them. For one there is no split between the spiritual and secular, nothing done that is not done in holy meditation. The serenity of one’s life is a hidden one. It does not depend on fortune’s halting course. The feeling nature of one who attains enlightenment opens itself to purely impersonal reactions. It is a state of tranquil feeling, not of emotional feeling. Both opposites find their place in existence for the unenlightened, the masses, the narrow-horizoned. The tension between them contributes toward development, the conciliation of extremes broadens views. With enlightenment comes equilibrium, harmony, balance, the larger outlook, piercing insight. “And behold, the people did rejoice and glorify God, and the whole face of the land was filled with rejoicing,” reports Helaman 11.18. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

One Possesses a Largeness of Heart at All Times, an Immense Tolerance Towards the Frailty of Faulty Men and Women

August 24, 2019 12:52 am

I mean you no harm. I came from Heaven. I came to learn about you and to love you. And I wish you only all good things under God! The gateway is open to Heaven for all those who gain Understanding and Acceptance of the Harmony of Creation and the Goodness of God while on Earth. Though let me assure you such aged and wounded individuals still have souls, which will at some point cease to be dependent upon their crippled brains. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be reinterpretabled or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic skepticism itself leaves standing,–the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, or systematized experience of the race. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The World is rational through and through,–its existence is an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,–a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical World immediately known,–the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative exists,–obligation is only the resultant desires; a permanent spiritual principle is in every one,–there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes,–there is an absolute first cause; and eternal necessity,–a freedom; a purpose,–no purpose; a primal One,–a primal Many; a universal continuity,–and essential discontinuity in things; an infinity,–no infinity. There is this,–there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while one’s neighbor deemed it absolutely false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

However, please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of one’s system is possessed in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of one’s thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide. It matter not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to one: one may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passions may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what one means by its being true. Primitive life was basically a rich and playful dramatization of life; primitive beings acted out one’s significance as a living creature and as a lord over other creatures. It seems to me like genius, this remarkable intuition of what beings need and want; and primitive beings not only had this uncanny intuition but actually acted on it, set up one’s social life to give oneself what one needed and wanted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

We may know what we lack in modern life, and we brood on it, but twist and sweat as we may we can never seem to bring it off. Perhaps things were simpler and more manageable in prehistoric times and had not gotten out of hand, and so being could act on what one knew. Primitive beings set up society as a stage, surrounded oneself with actors to play different roles, invented gods to address the performance to, and then ran off one ritual drama after the other, raising oneself to the stars and bringing the stars down into the affairs of beings. One staged the dance of life, with oneself at the center. Over and above the satisfaction of these biosocial needs and the individual therapeutic benefits there were other reasons, concessions by the Principium Individuationis, which made beings seek for and submit to absolute collective loyalties. Individual survival as much as group survival dictated close cohesion: the small groups of beings were surrounded by a hostile nature and by an often hostile rivalry of neighboring groups. When the tribes had been welded into states and empires and the preservation of security was no longer a daily anxiety, collective loyalties too on a more diffuse, anemic character or thickened only occasionally in emergencies. Consequently a ritual of communal solidarity was no longer a routine practice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

At the lower level of local groups it lingered on for a while as a rare festivity to be held on a few specified occasions. It is for this reason that the choral dance reached its final form in the prehistoric era and has not changed its basic pattern ever since. Strange as it may sound—since the Stone Age, the dance has taken on as little in the way of new forms as of new content. The history of the creative dance takes place in prehistory. The choral dance as the cultural form of a pre-cultural, biosocial practice survived for a long time. We find chiral dances widely practiced as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These are, however, no longer the comprehensive experiences their pre-cultural predecessors used to be. Even so they continued to fulfill an integrative function in rural communities which were isolated and enslaved by feudal bondage. If there were real peasant communities under feudal lordship these were made possible by integrative practices issuing from the community itself and not by the strictures imposed on the community by feudal rule. The latter could have created only compounds of serfs and not village communities. Towards the end of the feudal era the choral dance began to decline. For some time after the sixteenth century choral dances and couple dances persisted together. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the spread of the waltz, the polka, the Bostin finally ended the popularity of the choral dances. During the intervening centuries there were numerous pointers suggesting the presence of some kind of a transition in this process. The group is broken up into independent couples: the minuet, allemande, passepied, bourrée, gigue are mixed dances with a strong choral framework; the cotillion-quadrille type of so-called square dances represent the link between the choral and couple dances. This later transition is already a historical and not a phylogenetic process; it is not our task to sketch the history of an art form but to examine whether it continues to answer the requirements of a biosocial need. It may be of some advantage, perhaps for the sake of brining a contrast into high relief, to analyze the contemporary function of the dance. This contrast is presented to show the biosocial impoverishment of our species and complete our outline of the phylogenetic process. Today the dance is hardly ever the function of the group as a whole. Going to a dance very often means going out, that is outside the group, preferably in twos. In the age of the tango (1900), the shimmy (1920) or the jitterbug (1950s), or this new fan dance usually women preform with their rear ends, the dance has been reduced to the role of being a medium of courtship, of sexual titillation, and of motor frenzy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The modern dance may serve sexual and matrimonial purposes well, but these purposes can hardly be described as communal. The couple arrive en deux and rarely join others among the dancers. The big city dance halls, and the dance floors of restaurants, night clubs and so on are removed from the community, are outside the community, and it is perhaps this character of such places which makes them eminently suitable for the purposes of present-day dancing. Apart from the popular couple dances, we have spectacular stage dancing, ballet, etc.; but these belong to the split World of performers and audiences, and with these we are not concerned here. After all, the hypertrophy of audiences is just another symptom of desocialization, a symptom which calls for specific study. Today the commercialization of dance activities has largely stabilized the hegemony of the isolate couple dance. The dance has ceased to be an opportunity when participation inertia can be overcome and when an ease in intimate contact can be developed. It is no longer an important formalizer of social skill, of manners, and it has become arid, businesslike or downright erotic, and non-social. The dance palaces hug the central portion of the city where recreational business concentrates and neighborhood relations are almost absent…there is little or no pretence of social control or of intent to regard personal or group relations: there is merely a recognition of a want for a dance place with or without food and drink, and a commercial answer for that want. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

And to think that when Western beings first crashed uninvited into these spectacular dramas, one was scornful of what one saw. That is because Western beings were already a fallen creature who had forgotten how to play, how to impart to a life high style and significance. Western beings wee being given a brief glimpse of the creations of human genius, and like a petulant imbecile bully who feels discomfort at what one does not understand, one proceeded to smash everything in sight. Many people have scoffed at the everyday modern rituals of face-work and status forcing; they have argued that these types of petty self-promotion might be true of modern organization beings hopelessly set adrift in bureaucratic society but these kinds of shallow one-upmanship behaviors could not possibly be true of beings everywhere. Consequently, these critics say, we are definitely not talking about human nature. However, these critics are very wrong, and that is because it is more in context with primitive society. When you set up society to do creation rituals, then you obviously increase geometrically the magnitude of importance that organisms can impart to one another. It is only in modern society that the mutual imparting of self-importance has trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work; there is hardly any way to get a sense of value expect from the boss, the company dinner, or the random social encounters in the elevator or on the way to the executive toilet. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is pretty demeaning, but it is playing out of the historical decadence ritual. Primitive society was a formal organization for the apotheosis of beings. Our own everyday rituals seems shallow precisely because they lack the cosmic connection. Instead of only using one’s fellow being as a mirror to make one’s face shine, the primitive used the work cosmos. I think it is safe to say that primitive organization for ritual was nothing other than in-depth face-work; it related the person to the mysterious forces of the cosmos, gave one an intimate share in them. This is why the primitive seems multidimensional to many present-day anthropologists who are critical of modern mass society. The word aggression crops up in our day-to-day speech in an endless variety of ways. We speak of an aggressive business deal, used as a compliment and meaning a deal that risks a lot to make a lot more money. On the stock market it is the aggressive broker and aggressive way of handling stocks that usually pay off. “We follow an aggressive policy” is generally welcomed in the business World as an indication that these fellows are on their toes and plan to get come place. It is good to have an aggressive lawyer pleading your case because he or she knows how to put your legal opponent at a disadvantage. In the business World the positive use of aggression is widely accepted. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Most aggression is indirect, masked, taking the form of subtle put-downs of the other person. This shows itself in psychotherapy under the guise of civil, friendly cooperation. A patient will say one has to be “honest” and will then let loose with a stream of fault-findings, covering everything from the therapist’s way of working to one’s family and one’s office. When the therapist says something that does not strike the patient as true, the latter finds one negation not enough, but has to say, “No, no, no, no” as though one is surprised that anyone could suggest such an uneducated thing. These techniques of upmanship go on in daily conversation between people of all sorts, especially between married couples. They take the form of an interminable superiority-inferiority struggle, in ways generally not picked up by the “victim” but obvious to everyone else. This indirect kind of aggression is almost always destructive, and I can see no good in whatever. There is another kind of aggression—that within the self or, as it is generally experienced by the person, against the self. I sit down early in the morning to work on this essay. Up till now I have been relaxed, relatively happy, even a bit placid. However, as I sit here thinking of the subject of aggression, I summon up my rambling thoughts, I open my mind to whatever insights may come, I contemplate the topic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

I summon the rebellious parts of myself; inwardly I look for a “fight,” aware that creative power and vision come out of such a struggle. I summon the daimonic—so far as it can be summoned. If I were describing it mythologically, I would say that a swarm of dwarfs, elves, and trolls become embroiled in my mind and refuse to do my bidding. The melee that results until some clear ideas and insights emerge is actually my own self, tearing down conventional ideas and ways of seeing in order to grasp anew being’s life and problems. It is the daimonic in full force. All art must be aggressive in some sense. Artists are not necessarily belligerent people as a group; they are generally the ones who fight their most important battles within themselves and on canvases, typewriters, or some other medium of art. No one can look at Hans Hofmann’s paintings, with their bright colors clashing and half the edges free to form their own boundaries or mixing with other colors, without being aware that one is seeing in action this very daimonic, this plastic aggression before one’s eyes. Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, as they seek to paint the tension and restlessness of our time, splash a black form across a canvas and leave it hanging in air with the rough edges, as though some great object was bodily torn apart right there on the canvas. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The power in conflicting forms is, in these paintings, strained to the breaking point. However, how can we, today, create in any authentic sense without such straining and, indeed, without such aggression? Norman Mailer’s passion is boxing, and Ernest Hemingway not only climbed into the ring whenever he could but described getting ready to write a novel as being similar to getting in shape for a fight. Both of these writer have had a need to assert their power’ and out of this need also springs, at least in part, their ability as writers. And now we must take another step in our attempt to penetrate the riddle of inequality by asking—why do some of us use and increase what was given to us, while other do not and thus lose what was given to them? Why does God say to the prophet in the Old Testament that the ears and eyes of a nation are made insensitive to the divine message? Is it sufficient to answer—because some use their freedom responsibility and do wat they ought to do, while others fail through their own guilt? This answer, which seems so obvious, is sufficient only when we apply it to ourselves. Each one of us must consider the increase or loss of what was given as a matter for one’s own responsibility. Our conscience tells us that we cannot blame anybody or anything other than ourselves for our losses. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, when we consider the plight of others, this answer is not sufficient. We cannot tell somebody who comes to us in great distress about oneself—“Make use of what was given to you,” for one may have come to us precisely because one is unable to do so! And we cannot tell those in despair because of what they are—“Be something else,” for the inability to get rid of oneself is the exact meaning of despair. We cannot tell those who failed to conquer the destructive influences of their surroundings and thence were driven into crime and misery—“You should have been stronger,” for it was just this strength of which they were deprived by heritage or environment. Certainly they are all beings, and freedom is given to them all. However, they are also all subject to destiny. It is not for us to condemn others because they were free, as it is also not for us to excuse them because of the burden of their destiny. We cannot judge them. And when we judge ourselves, we must keep in mind that even this judgment has no finality, because we, like them, stand under an ultimate judgment. In it the riddle of inequality is eternally answered. However, the answer is not ours. It is our predicament that we must ask the question, and we ask with an uneasy conscience—why are they in such misery? Why not we? Thinking of those near to us, we ask—are we partly responsible? #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

However, even though we are, the riddle of inequality is not solved. The uneasy conscience asks also about those most distant from us—why they, why not we? Why did my child, or any one of the millions of children, die before he had the chance to grow out of infancy? Why was my child, or any child born, born with spina bifida when I took my folic acid, and was totally sober and went to prenatal visits? Why has my friend or relative, or anyone’s friend or relative, disintegrated in one’s mind, and thus lost both his or her freedom and his or her destiny? Why has my son or daughter, gifted as they were with many talents, wasted them and been deprived of them? Why do such things happen to any parent at all? And why have the creative powers of this boy or that girl been broken by a tyrannical father or a possessive mother? None of these questions concern our own misery. At present, we are not asking—why did this happen to me? It is not Job’s question that God answered by humiliating one and then elevating one into communion with Him. It is not the old and urgent question—where is divine justice, where is divine love, for me? It is almost an opposite question—why did this not happen to me, while it did happen to another, to innumerable other ones, to whom not even Job’s power to accept the divine answer was given? Why, Jesus asks also, are many called but few elected? #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Jesus does not answer the question, but states simply that this is the human predicament. Shall we therefore cease to ask, and humbly accept a divine judgment that would hurl most human beings out of community with the divine and condemn them to despair and self-destruction? Can we accept the eternal victory of judgment over love? We can not, nor can any human being, though he may preach and threaten in such terms. As long as one is able to visualize oneself with absolute certainty as eternally rejected, one preaching and threats are self-deceptive. For who can see oneself eternally rejected? However, if this is not the solution of the riddle of inequality at its deepest level, may we go outside the boundaries of Christian tradition to listen to those who would tell us that this life does not determine our eternal destiny? There will be other lives, they would say, predicted, like our present life, on previous ones and what we wasted or achieved in them. This is a serious doctrine and not completely strange to Christianity. However, since we do not know and never shall know what each of us was in a previous existence, or will be in a future one, it is not really our destiny developing from life to life, but in each life, the destiny of someone else. Therefore, this doctrine also fails to solve the riddle. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Actually, there is no answer at all to our question concerning the temporal and eternal destiny of a single being separated from the destiny of the whole. Only in the unity of all beings in time and eternity can there be a humanly possible answer to the riddle of inequality. “Humanly possible” does not mean an answer that removes the riddle of inequality, but one with which we can live. There is an ultimate unity in all beings, rooted in the divine life from which they emerge and to which they return. All beings, non-human as well as human, participate in it. And therefore, they all participate in each other. And we participate in each other’s having and in each other’s not having. When we become aware of this unity of all beings, something happens to us. The fact that others do not have changed the character of our having: it undercuts our security and drives us beyond ourselves, to understand, to give, to share, to help. The fact that others fall into sin, crime and misery alters the character of the grace that is given us: it makes us recognize our own hidden guilt; it shows us that those who suffer for their sin and crime suffer also for us, for we are guilty of their guilt and ought to suffer as they suffer. Our becoming aware of the fact that others who could have developed into full human beings did not, changes our state of fully humanity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Their early death, their early or late disintegration, brings to our own personal life and healthy a continuous risk, a dying that is not yet death, a disintegration that is not yet destruction. In every death we encounter, something of us dies, and in every disease, something of us tends towards disintegration. Can we live with this answer? We can to the degree to which we are liberated from oneself unless one is grasped by that power which is present in everyone and everything—the eternal, from which we come and to which we go, and which gives us to ourselves and liberates us from ourselves. It is the greatness and heart of the Christian message that God, as manifest in the Christ on the Cross, totally participates in the dying of a child, in the condemnation of the criminal, in the disintegration of a mind, in starvation and famine, and even in the human rejection of Himself. There is no human condition into which the divine presence does not penetrate. This is what the Cross, the most extreme of all human conditions, tells us. The riddle of inequality cannot be solved on the level of our separation from each other. It is eternally solved through the divine participation in the life of all of us and every being. The certainty of the divine participation gives us the courage to endure the riddle of inequality, although our finite minds cannot solve it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Why should anyone who has come to show beings the interior way proceed to delude them by pointing out an exterior one? In other words, if the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, what use will it be to set up an institution without us? The primary task of a being sent from God is not to found a church which will keep them still looking outward, and hence in the wrong direction, but to shed invisible grace. If one or one’s closer disciples do organize such a church, it is not only as a secondary task and as a concession to human weakness. The only schools worth finding are the schools without disciples. The ordinary beings are aware of one’s surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to one’s own personal self. The illumined egoless being is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities. We have to have a certitude which follows being freed from all doubt. Why then should one be afraid of acknowledging one’s personal-impersonal existence in, and awareness of, the World? “How long shall we suffer these great afflictions, O Lord? O Lord, give us strength according to our faith which is in Christ, even unto deliverance,” reports Alma 14.26. My thoughts behave like circles on water. A little stone makes a dot, from which thoughts spread ever outward until they creak on the shores of the unthinkable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

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