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Our Eternal Life is Useless to Us if We Do Not See the Beauty Around Us, the Creation of Mortals Everywhere!

July 6, 2019 11:12 pm

I think the very name of Paris brought a rush of pleasure to me that was extraordinary, a relief so near to well-being that I was amazed, now only that I could feel it, but that I had so nearly forgotten it. I wonder if you can understand what it meant. My expression cannot convey it now, for what Paris means to me is very different from what it meant then, in those days, at that hour’ but still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I have more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. Yet the name Paris makes me feel it. Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing I felt so hopelessly in the Mediterranean Sea. But Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questioning preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise. It was the mother of New Orleans, understand that first; it had given New Orleans its life, its first populace; and it was what New Orleans had for so long tried to be. However, New Orleans, though beautiful and desperately alive, was desperately fragile. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

There was something forever savage and primitive there, something that threatened the exotic and sophisticated life both from within and without. Not an inch of those wooden streets nor a brick of the crowded Spanish houses had not been bought from the fierce wilderness that forever surrounded the city, ready to engulf it. Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague—and the damp of the Louisiana climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone façade, so that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination of her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious, though unconscious, collective will. However, Paris, Paris was a Universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets—as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the World outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her—and that waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the Earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the Earth and had become Paris. We were alive again. We were in love, and so euphoric was I after those hopeless nights of wandering in Eastern Europe. The estrangement of many late-nineteenth-century artist from prevailing cultural values established a model of rejection; and since their time the alienated hero—if one can be called a hero—has occupied a major place in the World of art and literature. For more than a century the European literary outlook has one constant, always predominant and ever more profoundly rooted characteristic: the consciousness of estrangement and loneliness. This mood colors the poetry of Yeats, Rilke, Pound, Eliot; it figures in the works of Gide, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Alberto Moravia, and Sartre—to name just a few. To the alienated being as seen by these authors, life is essentially meaningless or absurd—the idea of absurdity being another contribution by Kierkegaard to the lexicon of alienation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

A World than can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar World. However, in a Universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, beings feel a stranger. One is an irremediable exile, because one is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as one lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between beings and their life, the actor and one’s setting, truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity. A stranger is unrelated to anything or anyone at all, a being for whom everything is meaningless, a being who murders and feelings nothing, a being who ends one’s tale of nothingness and absurdity by saying, “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howl of execrations.” The idea that the human condition is essentially one of alienation now plays an important part in society. If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside would be so great, that they would turn to ice…so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible. When the fake news media and people in our society are directed toward the atomized World of beings and its values to the point life seems surreal and becomes deliberately nihilistic, meaningless, even anti-art, anti-law and order, anti-truth and ugly, something Biblical is taking place. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The new century is full of such deep antagonisms, the unity of its outlook on life is so profoundly menaced, that the combination of the farthest extremes, the unification of the greatest contradictions, becomes the main them, often the only theme in life. Humanity is caught at a moment of inhumanity, caught at a time of discontinuity, of appalling, invidious, silent horror. Many people find themselves alienated and revolted by the prevailing values of their society. Others too rebel, although more quietly. In a recently study, the decline of utopian thinking in the young generation in the Untied States has been described as a nation unwilling to accept what the culture offers. Alienation, once seen as the conquest of a cruel (but changeable) economic order, has become for many the central fact of human existence, characterizing being’s thrownness into a World in which one has no inherent place. Formerly imposed upon beings by the World around them, estrangement increasingly is chosen by them as their dominant reaction to the World. Where can love be found if your heart will not feel? Indifference is their chief response. Looming over the alienated mass society and its culture is the power of the modern state. Remote from human needs, implacable in its thrust for power, bureaucratic government completes the process of alienation which we have been sketching. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Once again, we are witnessing not the beginning but the culmination of a long development. We can trace the rise of the secular state to Machiavelli. With Machiavelli we stand at the gateway of the modern World. The desired end is attained; the state has won its full autonomy. Yet this result has had to be bought dearly. The state is entirely independent; but at the same time it is completely isolated. The sharp knife of Machiavelli’s thought has cut off all the threads by which in former generations the state was fastened to the organic whole of human existence. The political World has lost its connection not only with religion or metaphysics but also with all the other forms of being’s ethical and cultural life It stands alone in an empty space. Existential psychology (for our purposes) is both complementary to and integrative of other psychological approaches. Not only is it concerned with the psychological influences of biology, environment, cognition, and social relations, but it is also concerned with the full network of relations—including those with cosmic features—that inform and underlie those modalities. Let us take the case of Babette, for example, to illustrate this integrative view. For years, Babette has felt empty inside, hollow—and for years she has masked over those feelings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Babette has consumed herself with barbiturates, for example, forged herself with food, and inflated herself with falsehoods. However, when the shades close at night, or when the partying ceases, the hollowness in Babette returns—and with increasing ferocity. The very latest imports from France and Spain: crystal chandeliers and Oriental carpets, silk screens with painted birds of paradise, canaries singing in great domed, golden cages, and delicate marble Grecian gods and beautifully painted Chinese vases could not keep her happy. Even though the luxury enthralled many, the new flood of art and craft and design, one could start at the intricate pattern of the carpet for hoers, or watch the gleam of the lamplight change the somber colors of a Dutch painting. She even hired a painter to make the walls of her room a magical forest of unicorns and golden birds and laden fruit trees over sparkling streams. An endless train of dressmakers and shoemakers and tailors came to her mansion to outfit her in the best fashions, so that she was always a vision, not just of an heiress beauty, with her curling lashes and her glorious raven black hair, but of the taste of finely trimmed hats and lace gloves, flaring velvet coats and capes, and sheer white puffed-sleeve gowns with gleaming blue sashes. Babette was treated as if she were a magnificent doll. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

And then strange things began to happen. Babette would be found in the arm of her chair reading the work of Aristotle or Boethius or a new novel just come over the Atlantic. Or pecking out the music of Chopin, Bach, and Mozart. We heard the night before with an infallible ear and a concentration that made her ghostly as she sat there hour after hour discovering the music—the melody, then the bass, and finally bringing it together. Babette was a mystery. It was not possible to know what she knew or did not know. Babette was exasperated when she steps into my office on this misty evening. She is 20, depressed, and isolated She has tried many treatments, she tells me bitingly, but they invariably fall short of the mark. To be sure, she is quick to elaborate, they do help to a point. Thy serve to maintain her, or get her through the night. They help her to change habits, for example, or to chemically alter her mood. They give her thought exercises and practical, rational advice. They reward her when appropriate and discourage her when necessary. They help her to learn the reasons for her despair, and the distortions, consequently, of having misunderstood those reasons. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Existential therapy could help to break this pattern, I think to myself as Babette sits across from me. It could work in conjunction with other therapies, deepening her hard-won gains. For example, in addition to helping Babette think more logically about her hollowness, I would also work with her to explore that hollowness—to see what it is about, to immerse herself in it, and to experience its (immediate, kinesthetic, and affective) dimensions. The more she can work with these dimensions, I would propose, the less they will threaten her and the more she can range freely within them. She can then be freed from the vicious cycle of compartmentalized therapies to seek richer meanings of long terms in her life—and she can forgo her compensatory masks. The problems of Babette and her oversimplified cures—indeed the problems of mainstream psychology—are but microcosms of a society wide epidemic. It is an epidemic of part-methods treating part-lives, of quick fixes and easy solutions that console, but fail to genuinely confront, human problems. The signs of the epidemic are legion: The erosion of the environment is traceable to get-rich-quick methods of industrial disposal. Impression management, trickle down economics, and “just say no” to drugs are the new watchwords of presidential politics. Great procurements of revenue are spent on a strong and powerful military (while funds for health care, those without homes, affordable housing, and job training dwindle). #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Divisiveness and violence become increasingly acceptable problem-solving strategies. Given the above, what is our position—the existential-integrative position—in psychology, and how will t be used? First, existential-integrative psychology is a revaluation of the oversimplified and one-dimensional thinking that, in our experience, permeates conventional portrays of human being. We perceive two basic dangers in the conventional approach—a tendency to unduly bot reduce and exaggerate the human condition. On the reductionist side, we see an increasing trend toward conceiving human beings as machines—precise mathematical tools that can readily accommodate to an automated, routinized lifestyle. With respect to exaggeration, we are concerned about trends in our field that depict the human being as a god (one can predict and control both internal and external environments) and trends that shun the challenges of human vulnerability. We are also concerned about more recent trends, such as those of postmodernism, which appear to stridently subvert the (shared) or foundational aspects of human being and leap headlong into relativism. Beyond these critical analyses, however, existential-integrative psychology also proposes a vision. While we have already hinted at this vision psychotherapeutically, we now present a more comprehensive statement. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Whether one be outside in the World or inside in the cloister is not so important to one as whether one’s thoughts and feelings, one’s character and consciousness have right direction. Either of these environments may be a hindrance or a help to one’s spiritual aspirations, depending on its particular nature. Yes, if one uses it for this specific purpose, even the Word may be a means of advancement. It is less important whether or not we live under monastic rules than whether we live faithfully in the purpose which prompted those rules to be formulated. The purification of the mind may be accomplished at home or it may be accomplished in an ashram-monastery. Do not be carried away from truth by the bigots who denounce the one or the other place! People who have stepped out of the World may have stepped into a vocation which is proper and good for the, but it is not necessary and not right to suggest that everyone else should do so. First of all, everyone else could not do so. It is not a matter so much of staying with the Worldings and doing their work nor of fleeing to isolated religious groups and following their disciplines, as of comprehending the mentalist secret and of keeping an inner detachment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Detachment from the World is an absolute necessity for the beings who seek authentic inner peace, and not its imagined counterfeit. However, renouncement of the World is not necessary to any expect those who have an inborn natural vocation for spiritual isolation. There is something deeper than our ordinary thoughts and feelings, something that is our inmost essential self. It is the soul. It is here, if we can reach to it, that we may meet in fellowship with the Divine. Through it the World-Mind reveals something of its own mysterious nature. One has come far when one has come to feel not only that divinity truly is but also that it is as near as one’s own being. One discovers that Consciousness, the very nature of mind under all its aspects, the very essence of be-ing under the personal selfhood, is where beings and God finally meet. One knows that God indisputably exists, not because some religious doctrines which are rigid and strict avers it but because one’s own experience proves it. There is a vital and definite connection between every being’s mind and the Universal Mind, between one’s individual existence and Its existence. Because of this connection one is called upon to worship It to commune with It and to love It. Only as a result of being liberate from oneself, taken out of oneself, can one find the universal being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The illuminated beings of earlier generations, who usually appeared at the beginning of each historical epoch and from whose ranks the great social lawgivers and religion-founders were drawn, had no personal master for none was available at the time. Who taught them? It was none other than the World-Mind, operating directly through each being’s Overself and within one’s human consciousness. Whoever is unable to find an outward master in our own times may still find, when one has worked on oneself sufficiently to be ready for it, this same direct inward help (grace) from the World-Mind if one turns to that Mind. Through the power of the God within the seeker can be led to a higher truth, or what the Greek thinkers called the Logos can help one to find for oneself. If one refuses to seek and cling to the human personality of any master but resolves to keep al the strength of one’s devotion for the divine impersonal Self back of one’s own, that will not bar one’s further progress. It, too, is a way whereby the goal can be successfully reached. However, it is a harder way. Socrates got his wisdom from within himself. He had no master. The teachings of Jesus were not based on any of the ancient doctrines—that is, those of the great Jewish people, Egyptians, or Indians. They were entirely Self-inspired. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The human mind is fortunate in this, that it has a connection with the Divine Mind. It can become one’s spiritual teacher and moral guide. However, one must be careful: first, not to mix one’s own opinion with what one receives; second, and not less but more important, to put oneself through a preparatory and purificatory discipline to make the connection vitalized. After all, it is the Overself which was the real Teacher to all of the teachers. “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. One who does not love remains in death,” reports I John 3.14. In our time, as in every age, we need to see something which is stronger than death. Death has become powerful in our time, in individual human beings, in families, in nations and in living beings as a whole. Death has become powerful—that is to say that the End, the finite, and the limitations and decay of our beings have become visible. For nearly a century this was concealed in Western civilization. We had become masters in our early household. Our control over nature, and our social planning has widened the boundaries of our beings; the affirmation of life had drowned out its negation which no longer dared make itself heard, and which fled into the hidden anxiety of our hearts, becoming fainter and fainter. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

We forgot that we are finite, and we forgot that the abyss of nothingness surrounding us. We had gathered into our barns the fruits of thousands of years of toil. All generations of beings had labored so that we, the generation of fulfillment, might tread death under our feet. It was not death in the sense of the natural end of life which we thought to have destroyed, but death as a power in and over life, as the Lord and master of the soul. We kept the picture of death from our children and when here and there, in our neighborhood and in the World, mortal convulsions and the End became visible, our security was not disturbed. For us these events were merely accidental and unavoidable, but they were not enough to tear off the lid which we had fastened down own the abyss of our being. Lestat possessed the wisdom of a sorcerer, the powers of a witch…I might have come to understand that he had somehow managed to wrest a conscious life from the same forces that governed these monsters. “I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well. The aim and final reason of all music should be none else but the glory of God and refreshing the soul. Where this is not observed there will be no music, but only a devilish hubbub,” reports Johann Sebastian Bach. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

We Seek Truth for Various Reasons—One is Because it Possesses Certitude that Gives Us Anchorage and Rest!

July 4, 2019 12:06 am

The great façade of the cathedral rose in a dark mass opposite the square, but the doors were open and I could see a soft, flickering light within. It was Saturday evening early, and the people were going to confession for Sunday Mass and Communion. Candles burned dim in the crystal chandeliers. At the far end of the nave the altar loomed out of the shadows, laden with white flowers. It was to the old church on this spot that they had brought my brother. Has that solidarity declined? Recent development in the New and Old World suggest that with greater prosperity the militancy of working-class movements has fallen sharply. If not true of the older generation, still loyal to the slogans of yesteryear, it seems to be particularly true of working-class youth. Some young of the World workers today is a new type: apolitical, or democratic, hedonistic, individualistic; in short, a far cry from the militant radicals of their grand father’s generation. However, decay of the working-class culture, which was itself a defense against alienation, has not necessarily led to greater integration. Along with the middle-class contemporaries, young workers face a World without values. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

However, it is not only material possession which divide mortals and other beings. In a heterogenous society like ours there are numerous and sometimes overlapping underrepresented groups or out-groups. Because our is a multi-racial, multi-ethic, and multi-cultural population, we are most likely to think of such groups in terms of color, hair textures, gender, sexuality, and religious affiliation since these distinctions are among the most powerful of all social barriers. However, it seems legitimate to broaden the concept of the underrepresented groups to include other section of the population who, because of some distinguishing characteristic, are rejected by the community. Among these groups are the young, the aged, the physically limited, intellectually disabled, those who are celibate, and homosexuals and transgenders, and it is also changing, too, to include White men (people discriminate against them just because of their status). We do not mean to suggest that all of them face equally serious patterns of prejudice and discrimination. Majority attitudes may range from ill-concealed hate and violence at one extreme to pity at the other; and barriers to solidarity and integration differ. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

African Americans and Black Americans, for example, are segregated in enormous transient communities; while homosexuals inhabit half-Worlds with no physical boundaries. Nevertheless, all such out-groups face a certain degree of isolation from society: they are in the community but not of it. As a result, they tend to form more or less distinct subcultures of their own. Although these subcultures offer some security and protection, common to most of them is a striving for integration with the majority groups on top. Furthermore, it is only natural for underrepresented groups to acquire some of the prevailing attitudes toward them. When this becomes self-hatred for sharing the despised or feared characteristic, we have perhaps the most extreme form which this pattern of alienation takes: alienated from others, they become alienated from themselves. We began by saying that many beings today are estranged from others as well as from themselves. However, others means not only the social communities in which they live; it also refers to the natural and supernatural World beyond. Thus, if we speak of a being’s alienation from nature, we do not mean nature in any metaphysical sense—although fairly serious metaphysical problems are involved; all we mean is that men and women today are not as close to land, air, sea, wind and mountain as their ancestors or their contemporaries who have yet to be blessed with an industrial and urban civilization. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The World is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: little we see in Nature that is ours. However, there is another aspect to this debate. About 70 years ago, there was no social media, communities were small, more intimate and far more conservative. People could leave their doors unlocked and towns were built around corporations. So the people in the communities did not travel far, all new each other, and they could afford to live were they worked. Private business was not disclosed in the streets. But as people became more mobile, new challenges arose, wives went to work and were home less often, husbands traveled father and were exposed to more people. And with social media people are exposed to thousands of more people than they were used to and it seems that everyone is already occupied with someone or your marriage and relationship is harder to maintain because there is now so much more competition. It is not as easy to date because some people like being alone and others are far more selective than in the past. Conversely, in some part of Africa, there are still tribes who hunt and gather and sometimes they eat a lot of meat or a lot of sugar and the diet works for them, they do not have cancers, heart disease or any other diseases that people in developed nations have. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Although conceptions of the external World vary widely, many primitive societies and those areas still influenced by Eastern mysticism, feel themselves in fairly close unity with nature. In the pre-scientific Western World also people and nature were considered related parts of a more or less harmonious whole. Whether nature was considered hostile or friendly, people felt close to it. For leading thinkers in the West however this intimate relationship began to end with the seventeenth-century revolution in science and philosophy, and for ordinary citizens, with the industrial revolution that followed. To understand and control nature—the goals of modern science and technology—people first had to separate or alienate themselves from it. Nature, in scientific thought had its laws formulated without any reference to dependence on individual observers. The radical separation of people (as subject or observer) from nature (as object or external World) is likely due to the dawn of modern scientific discovery. What were the consequences of this division nature and people? First of all, it led to what we now call the scientific attitude, with its spirit of detachment, a spirit which has become the keynote of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

For as science redeveloped, it became more abstract and increasingly remote from common life to the point science is the view of life where everything human is excluded from the prospect. It is of intention inhuman, supposing, strange as it may seem, that the further we travel from ourselves the nearer we approach the truth the further from our deepest sympathies, from all we car for, the nearer we are to reality, the stony heart of the scientific Universe. The flowering of science and technology gave beings enormous power to control nature and thereby transform society. Note the word control; for the language we use offers a clue to the new relationship between mortals and nature. Thus when we speak of our power over nature we reveal a certain antagonism between people and the external World, with nature regarded as something to be conquered—or even destroyed. The greater that power, the more we are alienated from nature and from ourselves. Estrangement from nature is the common experience. Industrialism created the first cities in which nature played little or no part. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The towns are now losing their last glimpse of nature. Formerly men and women who lived in the English town were never far from the open country: their town life was fringed with orchards and gardens like Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. However, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, the towns were growing up in which working people would find it harder and harder to escape out of the wide web of smoke and squalor that enveloped their daily lives. Civilization was rapidly painting the green spaces black on the industrial map. The Angel Meadows were no longer meadows, old Meadowview lost much of its charm, and the only Angel that came near them was the Angel of Death. Life in such a town brought no alleviation of the tyranny of the industrial system; it only made it more real and somber to the mind. There was no change of scene or colour, no delight of form or design to break its brooding atmosphere. Town, tree, building, sky, all have become part of the same unrelieved picture. The men and women who left the mill and passed along the streets to their homes did not become less but more conscious of that system as a universal burden, for the town is so constructed and so governed as to enforce rather than modify, to reiterate rather than soften the impressions of an alien and unaccommodating power. One would call this ancient history need only explore the spreading blight of modern American cities to see that the damage done to nature has been long-lasting, perhaps permanent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

That the damage was not intentional is beside the point. Ironically, contemporary scientists and philosophers today, particularly those of the existentialist school, reject the Cartesian dualism between living beings as subject and nature as object. However, for ordinary citizens, many of them living in grim prisons of concrete and steel, the damage has already been done: the technology that classical science produced has erected almost insurmountable barriers between them and the natural World. We have put many stages of artifice and device, of manufacture and alteration, between ourselves and the rest of nature. The ordinary city-dweller knows nothing of the Earth’s productivity; one does not know the Sunrise and rarely notices when the Sun sets (changes angles in the sky, actually for the Sun does not really rise nor set); ask one in what phase the Moon is, or when the ide in the harbor is high, or even how high the average tide runs, and likely as not one cannot answer you. Seed-time and harvest are nothing to one. If one has never witnessed an Earthquake, a great flush flood, a hurricane, tsunami, blizzard, or heatwave, one probably does not feel the power of nature as a reality surrounding one’s life at all. Nature, as living beings, animated and apparently unanimated, has always known it, knows no more. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

In the Western World most of us are the city dwellers, and one need not be a mystic to recognize that something is missing from our lives. Are we not poorer for it? There is a time, an appointed hour, for all things under Heaven. And in fourteen contrasts one embraces the whole of human existence, showing that everything has its time. What does this mean? This too is vanity and striving for the wind. The fact that everything has its appointed time only confirms one’s tragic view. Things and actions have their time. Then they pass and other things and actions have their time. However, nothing new comes out of this circle in which all life moves. Everything is timed by an eternal law which is above time. We are not able to penetrate into that meaning of this timing. For us, it is mystery and what we see is vanity and frustration. God’s timing is hidden to us, and our toiling and timing are of no ultimate use. Any human attempt to change the rhythm of birth and death, or war and peace, of love and hate and all the other contrast in the rhythm of life is in vain. This is the first but it is not the whole meaning of that statement that everything has appointed hour. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

If the Preacher says that there is a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to speak and a time to be silent, he asks us to be aware of the right time to be silent, he asks us to be aware of the right time, the time to do one thing and not to do another thing. After he has emphasized that everything is timed by an unsurmountable destiny, he asks us to follow this timing from above and to do out own timing according to it. As a teacher of wisdom who gives many wise rules for our acting, he requests right timing. He knows that all our timing is dependent on the timing from above, from the hidden ruler of time; but this does not exclude our acting at the right and not as the wrong moment. The whole ancient World was drive by the belief that for everything we do there is an adequate hour: If you want to build a house or to marry, if want to travel or to begin a war—for any important enterprise—you must ask for the right moment. You must ask somebody who knows—the priest or the astrologer, the seer or the prophet. On the ground of their oracles about the good season you may or may not act. This was a belief of centuries and millennia. It was one of the strongest forces in human history, from generation to generation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

The greatest beings of the past waited for the oracle announcing the appointed hour. Jesus himself says that his hour was not yet come and he went to Jerusalem when he felt that his hour had come. The modern mortals know of the need for timing as much as his predecessors. When in my early years in this country I had to discuss a certain project wit an influential American business man, and he said to me, “Do not forget that the first step to a successful action is the right timing.” Innumerable times, when reading about political or commercial actions, I was reminded of these words. In many conversations about activities and plans the problem of timing came up. It is one of the most manifest patters of our culture, of our industrial civilization. People ask: What about the I-You relationship between beings? Is this always entirely reciprocal? Could it be, is it permitted to be? Is it not, like everything human, subject to the limitations of our inadequacy, and is it not limited further by the inner laws that govern our life with one another? The first of these two obstacles is surely familiar enough. Everything, from your own experience of looking day after day into the eyes of your neighbour who needs you after all but responds with the cold surprise of a stranger, to the melancholy of the holy men who repeatedly offered the great gift in vain—everything tells you that complete mutuality does not inhere in a being’s life with one another. It is a form of grace for which one must always be prepared but on which one can never count. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Yet there are also many I-You relationships that by their very nature may never unfold into complete mutuality if they are to remain faithful to their nature. Elsewhere I have characterized the relationship of a genuine educator to one’s pupil as being of this type. The teacher who wants to help the pupil to realize one’s best potentialities must intend one as this particular person, both in one’s potentiality and in one’s actuality. More precisely, one must know one as a mere sum of qualities, aspirations, and inhibitions; one must apprehend one, and affirm one, as a whole. However, this one can only do if one encounters one as a partner in a bipolar situation. And to give one’s influence unity and meaning, one must live through this situation in all its aspects not only from one’s own point of view but also from that of one’s partner. One must practice the kind of realization that I call embracing. It is essential that one should awaken the I-You relationship in the pupil, too, who should intend and affirm one’s educator as this particular person; and yet the educational relationship could not endure if the pupil also practiced the art of embracing by living through the shared situation from the educator’s point of view. Whether the I-You relationship comes to an end or assumes the altogether different character of friendship, it become clear that specifically educational relationship is incompatible with complete mutuality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Another, no less instructive example of the normative limits of mutuality may be fund in the relationship between a genuine psychotherapist and one’s patient. If one is satisfied to analyze one’s patient—that is, to being to light unconscious factors from one’s microcosm and to apply to a conscious project the energies that have been transformed by this emergence—one my successfully accomplish some repairs. At best, one may help a diffuse soul that is in poor structure to achieve at least some concentration and order. However, one cannot absolve one’s true task, which is the regeneration of a stunted personal center. That can be brought off only by a being who grasps with the profound eye of a physician the buried, latent unity of the suffering soul, which can be done only if one enters as a partner into a person-to-person relationship, but never through the observation and investigation of an object. In order to promote coherently the liberation and actualization of this unity in a new situation in which the other person comes to terms with the World, the therapist, like educator, must stand not only at one’s own pole of the bipolar relationship but also at the other pole, experiencing the effects of one’s own actions. Again the specific healing relationship would end as soon as the patient decided to practice the art of embracing and actually succeeded in experiencing events also from the doctor’s point of view. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Healing, like educating, requires that one lives in confrontation and is yet removed. The most striking example of the normative limits of mutuality could probably be found in the work of those charged with the spiritual well-being of their congregation: here any attempt at embracing from the other side would violate the consecrated authenticity of the mission. Every I-You relationship in a situation defined by the attempt of one partner to act on the other one so as to accomplish some goal depends on a mutuality that is condemned never to become complete. The ultimate Knower is supra-personal, divine pure consciousness, the knowing and understanding of the Self, God who is the Soul’s Creator and only Beatitude. All this is higher than the ego, the person, the individuality, the being. The Omnipresence of the Infinite Mind carries great meaning for us individuality. For it signifies that this Mind is not less present and not less active too. To realize the Self through the householder’s life shall be the grand ideal of the future of the World. It is not by giving up all, but by realizing the Self in all, that one has to realize the object of the World-evolution and be free. #RnandolphHarris 14 of 15

The path is not through negation of the Universe to the affirmation of the Supreme Self, but through affirmation of the Supreme Self to the mergence of the Universe in the Supreme Self. The mission this time is educational and not religious. Spread education in the name of the Highest Truth enshrined in the Bible and religions will grow of themselves on the sure foundation of the Highest Truth. I am weary of arguing with you. Hell is hatred, people living together in eternal hatred. We are not in Hell. You can take the present or not, I do not care. It does not matter. Only let us have an end to all this. The great adventure of our lives. When you can live until the end of the World, what does it mean to die? And what is the end of the World except a phrase, because who knows even what is the World itself? I have now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one utterly shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way that made me a picture of a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately craved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which God made the World before he had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the Universe. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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The Profound Meaning of Life is Not Put Before Our Eyes—We Have to Dig for it With Much Patience and Much Perseverance

July 1, 2019 12:56 am

The reason people do not believe you sometimes, it not because you are a liar, but because of their ego. They feel they are superior to you, and therefore you could not be having experiences that are more advanced than theirs. However, they would likely believe the same experiences if someone else were to have them without question. To the householder taking on a family life is a joy; to the monk it is an encumbrance. Neither person is wrong. It is all in the point of view. Each has inherited one’s own attitude from one’s former selves. One is not abandon the householder’s life unless the divine command tells one to do so. They are not necessarily strong and heroic who stay in the World and disdain flight from it. It may be that pleasures and possession keep them there. Equally, those who has nothing wroth renouncing—the poor, the unlucky, the disappointed, and the frail—make so sacrifice in passing the cloister’s shelter, the monastery’s peace. There are those who flee the World, its futile tumults and doings; they do well. However, we who hold to philosophy may flee or stay, just as we choose. For we can make of it a pathway to the Ever-Peaceful. Closely related to, indeed part of, the consumption process is the way modern mortals use their leisure time, if they have any. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The qualification is overlooked by many writers commenting in contemporary leisure behavior who assume that there have been gains in leisure for all working people. We have an extremely uneven distribution of leisure. The average person’s gain in leisure with economic growth has been exaggerated. Estimates of annual and life-time leisure suggest that the skilled urban worker may have gained the position of their thirteenth century counterpart. Upper strata have, in fact, lost out. Even through their work lives are shorter and vacations longer, these people work many steady hours week after week—sometimes reaching a truly startling total. Many who do have leisure, on the other hand, are forced into it because they are marginal to the economy; and if they could, they would give up their leisure for work. The shorter work-week, instead of increasing opportunities for leisure, has simply encouraged growing numbers of men and women to take on second jobs. Most critical evaluations of leisure and its uses apply more to a beckoning future (when, presumably, all of us will have joined the leisure class) than to the present. Nevertheless, work has declined as a central activity, even if more mortals still work hard; a big split has taken place between work and leisure. Instead of being closely integrated with work, as in the past, the pursuit of leisure has become a desperate escape from work which is increasingly meaningless. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Small wonder that the idols of leisure have replaced the idols of work for so many. However, leisure itself has become meaningless, a packaged mass activity, its values provided by the entertainment industry. And although mortals are trained for work, they are not trained to spend leisure creatively. If some achieve freedom for an hour or a day, many of them find only a great emptiness. Escaping from work, they escape also from themselves. The alienating influences of the modern work force extend far beyond the individual worker; they touch with equal force upon one’s family and one’s community. Of the many effects of the corporate World on the family, perhaps the most important is the breakdown of the extended kinship group which, as we saw, had been the primary productive and social unit in the pre-industrial age. As the old crafts declined, and labor became increasingly divided and specialized, the economic and social base of the large family was destroyed. Lost were the customs and skills that had been passed on from one generation to another. Gone were the close bond between young and old, and especially the respect that youth had previously given to age. Into the new World class cities poured millions who had been cut off from their traditional family roots. These are the most visible consequences for the family in the corporate World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

However, considerably less is known about the more subtle psychological effects of globalization and corporate influence. There are many long-range and hidden influences which may not appear until generations later. It must be remembered that most of the long-industrialized countries of the West are still heavily burdened by the as yet uncompensated disservices of the earlier stages of their economic growth. Viewed in terms of the long-drawn cycle of family life, the violent industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century, the poverty, the unemployment, the social indiscipline, the authoritarianism of people and the cruelties to children, are by no means as remote today in their consequences as some economists and historians would have us believe. Thus the cult of human relations in industry and office to which we referred earlier ignores the fact the morale is not just a function of working conditions; but also of life outside the workplace. Yet what society expects of men and women outside the factory or office is considerably different from what is demanded inside. For example, while “stability” is heavily valued in family life, industrial conditions in the Western World has been marked by unemployment the displacement of old skills, the increasing mechanization of rationalization of work and especially by changes—often loss—of status and self-respect. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

There is fundamental conflict between the values or norms of expected behavior in the workplace and those norms which prevail in the wider society and which are expected to influence the worker or employee in one’s role as a husband and father or wife and mother. In these roles, society tends increasingly to expect one not to submit to life as it happens but to consciously control one’s affairs, to think about their children’s tomorrow, to rationally and not blindly influence their behavior, and to accord to one’s spouse a greater measure of tolerance, respect, and understanding than many partners have given their spouses in the past. However, if workers cannot achieve stability or self-respect on the job, or have little conception of their place in the scheme of things, how can they perform satisfactorily as husbands and fathers or as wives and mothers? The answer is they cannot. With changes in family function, especially the decline of large kinship group as an operating unit, have come significant changes in structure. Perhaps most important, work is now increasingly separated from family life; parents disappear during the day, leaving the children to grow up chiefly with their peers and the television. Related to this break is the enormous suburban trend, distinguished by what sociologist call the nuclear family, that is, the small core unit of two parents and their children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

High divorce rates in countries such as the United States are only the most dramatic evidence of the many serious strains to which the new family is exposed. Most affected by the breakdown of the extended family or kinship group, however, are the aged. That breakdown has been accompanied by a tremendous increase in life expectancy. Just 200 years ago, the average person lived to be 40.5, now people are living to be 80.0 years old. Also, early retirement is causing issues. In North America and Western Europe a growing number of the aged finds itself increasingly cut off from meaningful purists. And sometimes I wonder if these people are happy living so long, only to be parked in a nursing home with other aged people, waiting for whatever is to come next. A recent American survey shows that the overwhelming majority of our citizens oppose the idea of having older persons live with their children. As these trends continue—the prolongation of life, early retirement, breakdown of the extended family—the aged become outcasts in a society like ours that places such emphasis on youth and its energies. Separate housing, even separate cities—this is the lot of our elderly citizens. In their twilight World there is only fleeting contact with the community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

No one can doubt that a new electronic technology is fast revolutionizing our economic and communication systems. Religious practices are also involved in profound change. One age is dead and the other not yet born—ours, which includes both youth and age, is in limbo. To what extent, we must finally ask, is technology used as the scapegoat from our present situation and, therefore, an escape from responsibility? Like, some people only participate in protests and demonstrations, not because they care about the cause, but be they want to voice their anger and destroy things. One young man admitted that during a protest, when one guy shouted: Let’s get the computer!” The young man, who was a student at the time, remarked “All my life I’ve wanted to smash a computer.” Now, on my college tours, when I tell that story, the students unfailingly burst into laughter, and it is the kind of laughter that indicates that some unconscious urge in them has been released, but this behavior also explains why it is so easy to yoke people into attacking people who have never done anything to them, they have never met, and know nothing about. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

So anyway, why this animosity, this spirit of revenge, against technology? For one thing, young people are entirely aware of the disastrous effects of technology—as, for instance, in the galloping pollution of air, Earth, and water. They see that technological progress seems in so many instance to lead straight into disaster; that the proliferation of techniques and machines, far from threatening only certain classes with unemployment, menaces the very existence of whole nations and conceivably of all humankind. This is surely true. However, a serious citing of it would also lead to the opposite statement, that technology has far-reaching values for nations and conceivable all humankind. Why, then, the refusal on the part of young adults to accept, or at least see, the latter? I believe that this refusal us used to protect their own consciousness. Technology consist of a complex system of tools that ought to extend human consciousness. A simple example of this may be illustrated by a chimpanzee fastening two sticks together to pull into his cage a banana that he cannot reach with one stick. However, in our day—so the younger generation feels—technology does just the opposite: it shrinks, dries up, depersonalizes human existence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Young people have discovered in their own bitter experience how the juggernaut of technology overrides them without paying the slightest attention to their protests. They find themselves crying, both silently and aloud: “Stop the machinery!” It is interesting that this metaphor from Charles Reich is identical with that of Mario Savio back in the first rebellion in 1964 in Berkeley: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop…” There are various ways of accomplishing this arresting of the machinery: prayer and movements back to nature. However, most important of all, there has arisen a new understanding of the value of subjectivity, to redress our gross overemphasis upon objectivity. Dedicated to the machine makes us tend to act in a machine-like manner. Whoever does one’s business in the manner of a machine develops a machine heart. Whoever has a machine heart in one’s chest loses one’s simplicity. Whoever loses one’s simplicity becomes uncertain in the impulses of one’s spirit. Uncertainty in the impulses of the spirit is something that is incompatible with truth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

On the one side is the spirit that has already entered the World and now can be perceived in it by means of our senses; on the other, the spirit has not yet entered the World, but is ready to do so and now becomes present to us. This distinction is founded on the fact that I can show you the spiritual forms that have already entered the World, but not the others. The spiritual forms that are at hand in our common World, no less than a thing or natural being, I can point out to you as something actually or potentially accessible to you. If I am asked here, too, in the case of this borderland, where one is supposed to find mutuality, I can only point indirectly to certain scarcely describable events in human life where spirit was encountered; and if this indirect procedure proves inadequate, nothing remains to me in the end but an appeal to the testimony of your own mysteries, which may be buried under debris but are presumably still accessible to you. If, in the power and passion of such an ultimate concern, we can look at our finite concerns. Everything seems the same and yet everything is changed. We are still concerned about all these things but differently—the anxiety is gone! It still exists and tries to return. However, its power is broken; it cannot destroy us any more. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

One who is grasped by the one thing that is needed has the many things under one’s feet. They concern one but not ultimately, and when one loses them one thing one needs and that cannot be taken from one. They will hear a voice, perhaps none too clearly at first, that is identical with the voice that speaks to them through other genuine sayings of the same master. Now they will not ne able any longer to do what they did as long as they treated the saying as an object: they will not be able to separate out content and rhythm; they receive nothing but the indivisible wholeness of something spoken. However, here we are still dealing with a person and the manifestation of a person in one’s words. What I have in mind, however, is not limited to the continued presence of some personal existence in words. Hence I must supplement this account by pointing to an example in which there is no longer anything personal. What has to be achieved was what I was able to achieve: to confront and endure this spiritual form there that has passed through the mind and hand of man and become incarnate. Does the concept of mutuality disappear here? It merely merges into the darkness behind it—or it changes into a concrete state of affairs, coldly rejecting concepthood, but bright and reliable. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

From here we may also look across into that other realm where that which is not at hand belongs, the contact with spiritual beings, the genesis of word and form. Jesus’ use of the metaphor, the Son and the Father, was intended to point out that mortals, in one’s inner self, were born of, and is still in relation to, the Higher power, God. The innermost being of mortals and the cosmos is ever at rest, and single. The incarnate being of both is ever in movement, and dual. The inner is the Real, Changeless; the other is the Appearance, and subject to the play of two opposed but interpenetrating active forces. Because it is the quintessence of consciousness and intelligence, I call the first Mind. It is without shape, infinite and untouchable by mortals, but because it is, universes are able to appear, expand, disintegrate, and reincarnate. This activity is directly due to the agency of the first entity to appear, which I call the World-Mind. From the latter flows ceaselessly the energy which is at the heart of every atom, the life-force which is at the heart of every mortal. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

World-Mind and Mind are for us the twin sides—a crude but simple, understandable metaphor—of God. The human being draws breath, exists, and thinks with awareness only because of this relationship. If one declares oneself an atheist, sees oneself only as an animal, rejects any divine basis to one’s mind, one testifies thereby to a failure on one’s own part: one has failed to seek and find, or because of prejudice—that is, of prejudgment—has sought wrongly. Jesus gave two helps in this matter: seek the kingdom of Heaven first, and seek it within. It is open to anyone to test this truth that one is related to God. However, if one does not bring certain qualities into the work, such as patience and humility, the going may be too hard, the result disappointing. Something of that Mind is in us, as a parent has left some legacy in the child, but at the same time we are also in that Mind. Gospel of John, chapter 17, verse 21: “As thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee.” An ever-active Mind within an ever-still Mind—that is the real truth, not only about God but also about mortals. The World-Mind reproduces something of itself in each individual entity we call the soul, or Overself. The soul in mortals, the Overself, is linked with, or rooted in, the soul in the Universe, the World-Mind. The Infinite Mind is centered within its finite expression, the human ego. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Spirit become word, spirit become form—whoever has been touched by the spirit and did not close oneself off knows to some extent of the fundamental fact: neither germinates and grows in the human World without having been sown; both issue from encounters with the other. Encounters not with Platonic Ideas (of which I have no direct knowledge whatever and which I am incapable of understanding as having any being) but with the spirit that blows around us and inspires us. Again I am reminded of the strange confession of Nietzsche who circumscribed the process of inspiration by saying that one accepts without asking who gives. That may be so—one does not ask, but one gives thanks. Those who know the spirit’s breath commit a transgression if they wish to gain power over the spirit or to determine its nature. However, they are also unfaithful if they ascribe this gift to themselves. Sometimes it seems the devil is rampant. The entire city of Sacramento seems to be under the influence of the devil. It is like nothing will save this city but an exorcism, prayer, and fasting. Because we have all—yes! sinners as well as saints—come forth from the divine substance in our bodies and from the divine mind in our entities, there is something God-like in each of us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

A Passionate Eagerness to Find God is a Necessary Basis for all the Other Qualifications in its Purist

June 30, 2019 1:28 am

We moved slowly across the dark court, my distress almost unbearable. People entering the labor market today not only face the prospect of disorderly work careers, but also of work for no significant reason beyond consumption. Most people no longer produce useful things; they do make wasted and wasteful commodities and services. (In the Untied States today there are actually more people employed in providing services than in the production of goods.) The impact of these conditions on rising generations is that economically and vocationally, a very large proportion of the young people are in a more drastic plight than anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are not enough worthy jobs. However, is our society, being as it is, were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present nearly full employment and there may be for some years, yet a vast number of young people are rationally unemployable, useless. Useless because as crafts and craftsmanship have declined, the job opportunities open to them have increasingly become variations on the theme of boondoggling—whether they become organized people or, more likely, semi-skilled retail operatives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

In any case, the work available to them in unlikely to ennoble them or their society. It is hard to grow up when there is not enough work to sustain a household. Will it be any easier to grow up in the future? As the age of automation is underway, promising untold wealth and leisure, the forces separating humans from the means and end of work will inevitably grow stronger. Indeed, as far as conditions of work are concerned, the submission of workers to machines will be complete. Today, a person can stop a machine or wreck it: one has the remnants of power over it. However, with automation that power will be lost for good, expect perhaps for a small elite of engineers who will be busy designing and tending the machines of the future. Modern mortals have already depersonalized themselves so effectively that they are no longer human enough to stand up to their machines. Looking ahead, by the perfection of the automaton mortal will become completely alienated from their World and reduced to nullity—the kingdom and the power and the glory now belong to the machine. Everyone expects to witness scientific advance made in these modern times, but only a few have the mental courage to expect spiritual advances let alone seek it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Fantasy? Already the uncanny power of machines has entered into the delusions that mark psychotic disturbances. In time past, delusions took either human or superhuman forms; but today what is so new in the hopes and fears of the machine age are that the savior and destroyer are no longer clothed in the image of mortals; no longer are the figure that we imagine can save and destroy us direct projections of our human experiences. What we not hope will save us, and what in our delusions we fear will destroy us, is something that no longer has human qualities. That device or projection is the machine, and not surprisingly psychoanalysts refer to a characteristic delusion, the influencing machine, a device which some insane persons believe exerts an extraordinary and evil power over them against their will. The psychotic person ends up feeling controlled by mechanical devices that no longer resemble anything human or even animal-like. Thus modern mortals, when one is haunted, whether sane or profoundly disturbed, is no longer haunted by other mortals or grandiose projections of mortals, but by machines like Alexa smart home devices, robots replacing TV News anchors, self-check out in the supermarket, and driverless cars. This, while at the same time relying for one’s protection or salvation on machines. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

If we have placed such great stress on our machine age an on the conditions and purposes of work, it is not because we accept the metaphysical view that mortal’s self is most crucially expressed in work-activity. Rather, it is because of the fundamental break in our society between work and other activities. This break has had enormous consequences. Mortals are dehumanized not only by the work situation but also by the ends for which our society uses work, chiefly consumption of its own sake. As capitalism began to accumulate greater surpluses of wealth (especially for those on top) the unproductive acquisition and accumulation of goods became the primary means of achieving social status in the community. Ownership has grown into a human institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the development. Under the regime of individual ownership the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis between mortal and mortal reaches fuller consciousness, the prosperity for achievement—the instinct of workmanship—tend more and more to shape itself into a straining to excel other in pecuniary achievement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

If consumption then becomes conspicuous it was become in an increasingly heterogeneous and differentiated society there is no other ready means of achieving status expect by spending money and acquiring goods. However, such consumption is essentially wasteful and in conflict with what is considered a universal trait in mortals, the instinct of workmanship. The industrial revolution replaced all workmanship with labor and the result has been that the things of the modern World have becomes labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used. The process of consumption, reaching its highest form in the United State, is alienating in still another way. We are surrounded by things whose nature and origin we know nothing. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal. Moreover, the volume of consumption is determined to a large extent by the artificial stimulants of a giant advertising industry; and if consumers learn to manipulate things, they in turn manipulated by the propagandist of commerce. The strategy of planned obsolescence—by which things are made to wear out quickly and then be replaced—may stimulate the economy, but it can hardly be said to serve human needs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Working chiefly to consume, consuming to achieve status, accumulating things that have no meaning, wasting on a gigantic scale—these are the conditions in which we live. The result is a wasteland of junk and of human aspirations. However, what other important forces shape the architecture of our lives? We have to be prepared with rational plans and sensible blueprints to guide progressions of seemingly orderly experiences in the direction of wise decisions. We must look at the very structure of human existence for keys to unlock the resources human beings need to confront the recurring cries in our lives. Those keys are fabricated in the mold of phenomenology. Understanding comes through sharing the perspective of the experiencing person, entering into the life space of the tenant, so to speak, rather than identifying with the authoritative analysis of the landlord. Phenomenology created a subjective, descriptive context for beginning to make sense of the vicissitudes of being and becoming. Its tower of understanding stands alongside the traditional social scientists’ tower of objectivity and quantifiability, deemed essential for erecting a science of prediction and control. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

As psychological science advances models drawn from physics and biology, the phenomenological rush of existentialism is more toward humanities, philosophy, and the arts. The former probes human nature vertically, the latter explores its horizontal connections to illuminate the breadth of humanity. Existential-humanist psychology refuses either to reduce the complexity of human beings to ever more refined variable or to glorify them as masters of their destiny. This approach recognizes that we are all vulnerable to powerful yet subtle situational forces that can bend—and sometimes break—the will of the best and the brightest of us. Interestingly, this view is echoed by social psychologists who contend that social psychology’s major take-home message is that situation exert more powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, vales, and actions than we acknowledge or dare to recognize. This view does not make us pawns of environmental forces or autumn leaves at the mercy of existential winds. Humans are negotiating continually between realities and illusions, old paths and new destinations, given clouds, constraints and freedoms, calibrations and creations. How are human experiences challenged and charged by the perils and the prizes of every day existence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Obviously, no sweeping answer can be given to this question. Instead of considering nature as a single whole, as we usually do, we must consider its different realms separately. Mortals once tamed animals, and they are still capable o bringing off this strange feat. One draws animal into one’s own sphere and moves them to accept them, a stranger, in an elementary manner and to accede to one’s ways. One obtains from them an often astonishing active response to one’s approach, to one’s address—and on the whole this response is the stronger and more direct, the more one’s relation amounts to a genuine You-saying. Not infrequently animals, like children, see through feigned tenderness. However, outside the tamed circles, too, we occasionally encounter a similar contact between mortals and animals: some mortals have deep down in their being a potential partnership with animals—most often persons who are by no means animalic by nature but rather spiritual. Animals are not twofold, like mortals: the twofoldness of the basic words I-You and I-It is alien to them although they can both turn toward another being and contemplate objects. We may say that in them twofoldness is latent. In the perspective of our You-saying to animas, we may call this sphere the threshold of mutuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is altogether different with those realms of nature which lack the spontaneity that we share with animals. It is part of our concept of the plant that it cannot react to our actions upon it, that it cannot reply. Yet this does not mean that we meet with no reciprocity at all in this sphere. We find here not the deed of posture of an individual being but a reciprocity of being itself—a reciprocity that has nothing expect being. The living wholeness and unity of a tree that denies itself to the eye, not matter how keen, of anyone who merely investigates, while it manifest to those who say You, is present when they are present: they grant the tree the opportunity to manifest it, and now the tree that had being manifest it. Our habits of thought make it difficult for us to see that in such cases something is awakened by our attitude and flashes toward us from which has being. What matters in this sphere is that we should do justice with an open mind to the actuality that opens up before us. This huge sphere that reaches from the stones to the stars I should like to designate as the prethreshold, meaning the step that comes before the threshold. #RandolpHarris 9 of 18

The notion that one who marries, has children, lives across the same road, and catches the commuter’s train is unfit to receive the grace of God, whereas a mortal who wear a priest’s dress or a monk’s robe is alone fit, is one of those idea sedulously fostered by priests and monks themselves. The fact is that grace is no respecter of clothes, status, or social activities, that is happens to alight on those whose hearts and minds seek it most, and in the right way; that today Christ is militant, is working inside mortals wherever one may be and whatever garments one wears and however one easily distinguishable by any outer labels, but are easily measurable by their own conscience, in their degree of consciousness. They are not professional exhibitionists eager to display their spirituality, to talk about it and impress other with it. They may be passive in a monastery or in an office—that is not the point. What is going on inside them? There is no special superiority in either of the two conditions of life—the monastic or the householding. Whoever praises the monk’s state as being the highest open to human beings, errs. Whoever praises the householder’s as being the best, also errs. What can right be said is that for certain persons at certain times and under certain circumstances, one or the other state is better. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

For the same person at different times and in different circumstances either may be worse. So it is the setting up of universality, the claiming that one alone is the most spiritual or the mot satisfactory ideal, which is wrong. Each must find the way uniquely ordained for one, and not passively, imitatively, accept the way ordained for another mortal. Although it is true that some have realized the goal while living a normal life in the World, married and active, others have been able to do so only while freed from the World’s ways. It I therefore essential for one to be oneself, an individual, and let one’s own inner voice guide one to the particular path suited on one’s destiny. The common explanation of the contemporary unrest as due to a failure to preserve law and order, the favorite rallying cry of politicians. It illustrates our innocence in two ways. One, that each act of violence or aggression can be dealt with by the tried-and-true method, following the nineteenth-century myth in America, of throwing in more hardware and personnel in the form of police, national guard, and soldiers. The naivete of this is shown by our experience in the Middle East, to continual shock to our own narcissism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The second and more important expression of innocence is possessed in the bland identification of law with the particular order that happens to exist at the moment in the society. My order becomes, therefore, right; it is as eternal as the law with which it is coupled; it is God’s will. Law can also be used, when coupled with injustice, as a creative set of principles unfolding continuously toward greater public good. However, law coupled with order, in the shibboleth law and order, becomes regularly a justification to the status quo. And in a transitional age such as ours, the one thing that must, at all costs, be avoided is rigid adherence to the status quo; for that is just what has to be changed and reformed by the transition. The only way to live out a transitional period is with flexibility to adapt to change—and, unfortunately, that is what most people, in their anxiety at the dizzy speed of change, feel they do not have. Emphasis on law and order can be destructive to a person’s self-esteem and self-respect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

When President proposed a greater effort to get crime off the streets by building a wall along the board of Mexico to halt illegal immigration, he received the largest and loudest ovation of any time in the whole speech; which means that law and order, which is the meaning of Trump’s phrase, appeals tremendously to congressional members of both houses. However, the emphasis on law and order can itself contribute to violence and can be one of the things that makes an ultimate revolution more bloody. Human pride and esteem are offended by a show of force. One of the things that can abet a riot is precisely the lining up of a hundred law enforcement officers on a street. It offends both those who are being protected and those who are protected against; for it makes u all faceless Others.” The bitterness that goes into the phrase law and order often has as one of its sources a reaction formation to one’s own guilt. For example, some may have acquired their money by questionable quasi-legal means, and now they come out as a staunch citizen for law and order to prevent others from taking it away from them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In its best sense and by itself, order ought to mean the forms and conventions by which we live and work together; order ideally is freedom from disturbing interruption of peace, physical safety which in turn gives the psychological security for the pursuit of intellectual, emotional and spiritual aims. However, when coupled with law, it implies a rigid clinging to old forms of acting, a prevention of the very changes made necessary by our transitional age. It is primarily the older generation that adheres to law and order so innocently. However, innocence is obviously used by the new generation as well as a way to avoid facing its powerlessness. There are so many absurd aspect of the so-called battle between the generations—youth’s continuous confession of the sins of teachers and parents, the endless blaming of others, the over thirty shibboleth—that one is in danger of overlooking the deeper meaning of the conflict. Now that the younger generation has not plenty of reason for accusing its elders. People inherited from their parents’ generation the experience of a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics—they learned in high school and in college about concentration and extermination camps, about genocide and torture, about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in war. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

However, does it not confuse the whole picture to make this conflict of youth versus age? What would they have done in their father’s place, given the historical situation in which their fathers were born and working with what they had to use? It is an anti-historical viewpoint to insist that the mere fact of having been born a generation later guarantees any rightness in itself. Furthermore, it is a taking over, in masqueraded form, of one of the least noble of our culture’s myths—the adulation of youth, the falsehood of believing that everything is better in earlier years. However, all our concerns eventually come to an end; they are all finite. The span of our lives many of them have already disappeared and new ones have emerged which also will disappear. Many great concerns of the past have vanished and more will come to an end, sooner or later. The melancholy law of transitoriness governs even our most passionate concerns. The anxiety of the end dwells in the happiness they give. Both the things about which we are concerned and we ourselves come to an end. There will be a moment—and perhaps it is not far away—when we shall no longer be concerned about any of these concerns, when their finitude—of our own end. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, we maintain our preliminary concerns as if the were ultimate. And if we try to free ourselves from them, they keep us in their grasp. When young people are pressed for a statement of their values, and one asks what they would make the center of a new World, one is often left with picayune or self-revolving items like never stepping on insects or never throwing away anything made of plastic. This is a blatant use of innocence. We look—often in vain—for a serious, responsible confrontation with the real problems: power, organization in national groups, fidelity in personal life. One feels that the younger generation gets particular gratification out of simply attacking the establishment as such. Is it a reaction-formation to their own unease at the affluence of their parents and to their own guilt at their dependency on their parents for sustenance? However, if for no other reason than that the establishment is dying anyway, this is an uneasy battle. The present college generation was born in an era when practically all mooring post—for instance, in pleasures of the flesh, in marriage, in religion—are threatened or already lost. We have a new morality, most obviously in the areas of pleasures of the flesh, marriage, and the role of woman. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Every concern is tyrannical and wants our whole heart and our whole mind and our whole strength. Every concern tries to become our ultimate concern, our god. The concern about our work often succeeds in becoming our god, as does the concern about another human being, or about pleasure. The concern about science has succeeded in becoming the god of the whole era in history, the concern about money has become an ever more important god of all. However, these concerns are finite, they conflict with each other, they burden our consciences because we cannot do justice to all of them. We may try to dismiss all concerns and to maintain a cynical unconcern. We determine that nothing shall concern us any more, expect perhaps casually, but certainly not seriously. We try to be unconcerned about ourselves and others, about our work and our pleasures, about necessities and luxuries, about social and political matter, about knowledge and beauty. We may even feel that this unconcern has something heroic about it. And one thing is true: It is the only alternative to having an ultimate concern, Unconcern or ultimate concern—those are the only alternatives. The cynic is concerned, passionately concerned, about one thing, namely, one’s unconcern. This is the inner contradiction of all unconcern. Therefore, there is only one alternative, which is ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Here we get what cannot fail to be recognized as firsthand, insider’s account of that goal which makes sense of spiritual aspiration and inspires continued rational effort, day by day, toward stable and honest self-realization. Here we see a wisdom nourished, rather than challenged, by facts; a serenity comprehending, rather than at odds with, efficient practicality. Here, one can feel a need to complete enlightenment by a vivid updating, from modern mentalities, of what a mind continually attuned to God is like and offers its society, a convincing testimony that much of what the highest attainment means when it is working inside the human being. Power is not our own and is not human and is using us as its human instrument. We see plenty of evidence that the Universe is not mindless, and therefore there is a Universal Mind related to it—that is to say, related to us, who are parts of the whole. It might well be said that I am connected with God on the one hand, with the World on the other hand, but both connections are highly ingenious inventions. God is literally in me. His “I” makes my “I” possible. My own sense of being is immersed in God’s archetypal thought. The individual mind not only exists within the World-Mind, it is born of the World-Mind. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18 D8zFSZBV4AAWYRj

Manifest Destiny—We Have Eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and the United World of America is Our Future!

June 28, 2019 12:51 am

I will see a splendid city where great ideas are born in the minds of the populace, ideas that go forth to illuminate the darkened corners of the World. And I will know people like you, people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we will sit in cafes and we will drink together and we will clash with each other violently in words, and we will talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement. In America, pseudoinnocence has a history as long as the country’s. A “Chosen People” set sail from England, turning its back on a Europe that, for it, stood for sin, injustice, aristocratic exploitation, and religious persecution. These people sought to establish in America a land that would embody the opposites: righteousness, justice, democracy, and freedom of conscience. The very founding of the new nation was an enactment of the myth of the New Jerusalem, not in some distant future but already an actuality before the eyes of the “Chosen.” America began with a belief in perfection, and then it became devoted to progress. However, how do you progress beyond perfection? What about the religious persecution that soon sprang up even in New England? What about the beginning genocide of the Indians? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Necessarily, then, there began the long struggle between ideals and reality, a battle in which the idealistic America, which was the approximate of the perfect state, the new Garden of Eden with no snakes in the grass, was pitted against the reality of persecution and extermination of the Indians. An ethical dilemma, indeed! The confusion and hypocrisy to which this led is shown ironically in Benjamin Franklin’s writings: “If it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that run may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the seacoasts.” Mr. Franklin shows how the citizens identify the design of Providence, the will of God, with their own and their countrymen’s self-interest. Americans are the “cultivators of the Earth,” and genocide of the Indians—an enterprise the guilt for which we have not yet confronted—is the will of God. This is the hallmark of pseudoinnocence: always identify your self-interest with the design of Providence. Probably all nations are given to a kind of historical amnesia or selective recollection that makes unpleasant traumas of the past. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Certainly Americans since the Puritans have historically regarded themselves as a latter-day “Chosen People” sent on a holy errand to the wilderness, there to create a New Jerusalem. The framers of the Constitution were, furthermore, deathly afraid of exploitative power, as Americans have always been. They formulated their Articles with the intention that no group would ever gain this power; so afraid were they of being exploited that, in the Articles, they stretched its meaning to include all power. Americans now had the difficult ethical task of believing overtly that they did not want power, that their capacity for moral thinking and for serving their fellow mortals obviated their need for power. They saw themselves as the saviors of the needy from Europe. The Statue of Liberty still promises, through the inscription on its base: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I life my lamp beside the golden door. However, since America is no longer a population building nation, some believe the statuette of limitations on the invitation from the Statue of Liberty has expired. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

In this country the Garden of Eden myth, along with the open denial of power, has continuously coexisted with a great amount of violence. The homicide rate here is three to ten times that of European countries; we have had one of the bloodiest labor histories of any of the large powers; the majority of Americas in the large cities seem to be afraid nowadays to walk on the streets at night or hand the cashier a one hundred dollar bill. The essential American soul is hard, isolated, stoic and a killer. This violence exists, oddly enough, side by side with a remarkable tenderness and warmth in the American character. We cannot escape the conclusion that some special conflicts must be present in the consciousness of Americans to account for the simultaneous existence of violence and tenderness. I propose that, primarily, the violence and, second, the tenderness are connected with our conscious denial of power and the pseudoinnocence that accompanies this denial. Violence comes from the powerlessness; it is the explosion of impotence. The denial of our desires for power, when it occurs in the endeavor to cover up an actually high degree of power, sets up an inner contradiction: power then does not allay our feelings of powerlessness. It does not lead to the sense of responsibility that actual power ought to entail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

We cannot act upon our power directly, for we always carry an element of guilt at having it. If we were to admit it, we would have to confront our guilt. That is why power is customarily translated into money in America. At least money is external. Cold cash we give to other people and nations; we share it profusely with charities, indicating out guilt in possessing it. So we behave like a nation of wolves in rabbits’ skins. As a nation America has also failed to develop a viable sense of tragedy, which would serve, through making for empathy with our enemies, to mitigate our cruelty. One has only to read the reports of the men who fly the bombers over Indochina (“I do not think of the women and children below,) the fliers say. “I think only I have a job to do, and I get a joy out of doing it well.”) to find proof of our insulation of the evil of the World. “Two World wars have not induced in [Americans] either a sense of sin or that awareness of evil almost instinctive with Old World peoples.” Lacking this sense of our own complicity, most Americas also lack the element of mercy, which may well turn out to be a sine qua non of living in the World with an attitude of humanity. We tend to have sympathy with the aims and the spirits of people who are driven by success for the corporate state is rich and important. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Many rightly see the American dream and even the problem of innocence in the first centuries of America’s history. We can appreciate the manner in which the sense of powerlessness eats away at the confidence of our people and their capacity to act, the willful ignorance in American life, and our tendency to try to get rid of evil by forbidding it. However, ironically, the promise to the young people and to all of us in the second half is pseudoinnocence writ large. “There are no enemies…There is nothing on the other side…Nobody wants war except the machine…And even business people, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the Sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in American.” Woodstock is cited as a myth of the new age now realized in all its ease and splendor, with no recognition at all of its aftermath, namely Altamont, where Hell’s Angels, brought in as bodyguards for singers, committed murder. It is an impressionistic painting of the Garden of Eden, with all of the glow of innocence and the ease and delight of children romping in the fields to rock music, the age before the fall, before the sense of anxiety or guilt intruded. However, alas! It is for children and not for adults. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Far from Consciousness III being an answer, it would be no consciousness at all, for it lacks the dialectic movement between “yes” and “no,” good and evil, which gives birth to consciousness of any sort. The hard questions—if by that it meant political and economic organizations—are insignificant, even irrelevant. All will be done by Consciousness III, which will not require violence. We are then lulled into a blissful ease that is remarkably similar to those pictures on ancient Greek vases of gods lolling on Mount Olympus. Are there really no enemies? Can we call to mind the Berrigan bothers and think of that? Or the Soledad brothers? Or Angela Davis? Or the convicts at Attica, who, after the slaughter, were forced to run the gantlet naked? Or Vietnam—yes, the defoliation and dehumanized cruelty of Vietnam? Some have no understanding of the creeping fascism already discernible in our country: the turning of youth against their fathers, the anti-intellectualism, the growth of violence coupled with the sense of powerlessness of the mass of people, the tendencies of bureaucracies to make decision on the basis of what works mechanically with all human sense drowned in opportunism. It could be that some lack an understanding of the isolation, the loneliness, the despair that motivates many young people, especially in the drug scenes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

At Coachella I once went to a hipster wedding; everybody was colorfully dressed as a stage set for the Beyonce Black Greek life step show along with strolling by pledges. However, I could not escape seeing the isolation in practically everyone’s eyes, each young person seeming alienated and lonely even in the crowd devoted to innocence and joy. With alienation we must be careful to prohibit and reduce violence so that people do not become apathetic. Once I was sitting at breakfast with a young man, one of a group of flower children, perhaps nineteen or twenty, with a clear, open face and guileless blue eyes. In the course of our talk he showed me a letter he had written and was sending to his chancellor at his college. In this confident letter that he composed, Klaus would be thereby excused from the final exams. Addressing the chancellor by his first name, the letter stated: “I do not believe in taking tests”; then several more sentences to the same effect; and finally the signature, “Klaus.” I asked Klaus if he had made a copy of the letter. “No, I don’t think it is necessary—the chancellor will read this one.” As I looked at him now, his eyes and face seemed too clear and too open—I felt the doom toward which he and his comrades were marching; I felt the heavy books under which they felt their brains were being crushed by, crushed like flowers indeed, with the students feeling no more than books could feel. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

I saw how much importance these youngster placed on their academic performance, and although it is for their own good, I felt like crying out: “Harmless as doves you are, but where is your wisdom of serpents?” Some people always equate power to the corporate state, the power of the military; totalitarianism is defined as pure power. They never look at the good power. In their minds it always corrupts. However, it is the misuse of power that is the evil; the very existence of power is a good thing. You need power to get out of bed and use the restroom. You need power to control your own life and get an education. You need power to have control over your own behavior. You need power to have self-esteem to accept yourself and not bother others. Innocence in our day is the hope that there are no enemies, that we can move into a new Garden of Eden, a community characterized by freedom from all want, guilt, and anxiety. However, this also means freedom from responsibility; it means going back prior to the birth f consciousness, for guilt is the only other side of moral consciousness—we have eaten of the tree of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

We valiantly try to persuade ourselves that if we only find the key, we can easily create a society in which vulnerability, guilt, anxiety will all be things of the unmourned past. Unmourned and unstudied—here is possessed the contemporary uninterest in history and the refusal to study it. To hang to this picture of innocence, you must deny this history. For history is the record, among other things, of mortal’s sins and evils, of wars and confrontations of power, and all the other manifestations of mortal’s struggle toward an enlarged and deepened consciousness. Hence so many of the new generation turn their backs on history as irrelevant; they do not like it, they are not part of it, they insist we are in a brand-new ball game with new rules. And they are completely unaware that this is the ultimate act of hubris. Such innocence is particularly tempting in America because we actually ack a long history. We have very little sense of the sacredness of place, of roots, of homeland. In the Untied States of American, many people build houses in which to spend their old age, and they sell them before the roof is on. They settle in a place, which they soon afterwards leave to carry their changeable longings elsewhere. One will travel fifteen hundred miles to shake off one’s happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

This, in contrast to Europeans who have lived in the same city for a thousand years, and whose very walls around the city bespeak the centuries of struggle by which they earned their convictions and their culture. However, the United States is waking up again. Many people want to come to the United States of America because we are a nation of Law and Order and protect our citizen. The cry not to build a wall to protect our boards is only enflaming the nation to make the realize we need one. People are drowning to sneak into the Untied State of America. There are also others who are legally waiting in line to get here and not being allowed entrance because a quota has been met. There are also security concerns when we do not know who is coming into America or where they are living. Why do so many people want to be American? Because they also believe in Manifest Destiny. That Americans are ordained by God to expand their boarders. If some many people want to be American and want Americans to take care of them, it means that they also want our government to expand, so we can institute Law and Order in their countries, create jobs and safe housing for their people so they do not have to flee. Many people would love to go back to their home country, the land they love, the land of their ancestors, but it is not safe for them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

It is important to also understand that it is what we expect from ourselves that will be more effective than what someone else expects from one. Rules and regulations thrust upon them from outside which one is unwilling or unable to enforce will be of much less use. As human beings, one of the things that we do to understand our World is to create systems of meaning that help us organize the sensations, experience, and objects we encounter. However, too often we use these seemingly descriptive systems to determine the worth of others. These human-made hierarchies of value can cause division, contention, and skewed understanding of self-worth. Conversely, God’s system of valuing us promotes connection, compassion, and love. We are God’s children. He loves us unconditionally, eternally, and unchangingly. Our worth is infinite because are his sons and daughters. No one spirit is more valuable then others. There are some people who still use an intricate set of codes, such as the very wealthy, to dictate behavior and measure worth. However, as the children of God we are also expected to abide by certain standards—to be loving, honest, show respect, and be slow to anger. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

We are also supposed to have joy in our lives. Even though we cannot yet control those external forces that impact our lives here on Earth, as we strive to become father disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can find peace, joy, and happiness despite the Worldly troubles that swirl around us. The scriptures teach us that Satan desires to lead people into darkness. His every effort is to shut out the light and truth of Jesus Christ and his gospel. The Devil seeks that all people might be miserable like unto himself. If Heavenly Father’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of men and women, Lucifer’s work is to bring to pass the misery and endless woe of God’s children. Sin and transgression dim the Light of Christ in our lives. That is why our quest is to bask in the Light of Christ, which brings peace, joy, and happiness. The way to full realization of God may be possessed through a monastery or a nunnery for one person and through a family home or a career in the World for another. If any mortal assets that it must be possessed solely through a particular one of these two, one is mistaken. If one insists on forcing this idea on all aspirants, one is sinning. If one claims illumination as authority, it could be only a partial, limited, and incomplete illumination. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

It is Not too Late at Any Period of Life to Obtain the Eye of Faith and Learn to Live Correctly!

June 24, 2019 1:33 am

I went into my chamber and in the incandescent light rising from the sea, I unlocked the violin case and I looked at the Stradivarius violin. Of course I did not know how to play it, but we are powerful mimics. We have superior concentration and superior skills. And I had seen Nicki do it so often. I tightened the bow now and subbed the horsehair with the little piece of resin, as I had seen him do. Now I took it out of its case and I carried it through the house. It made a sound, did it not, that no one had ever heard in the ancient World, a sound so human and so powerfully affecting that people thought the violin the work of the devil and accused its finest players of being possessed. That is what a $16,000,000.00 violin sounds like. It is a 1715 ex-Bazzini – De Vito violin, made by Antonio Stradivari. This 304-year-old instrument can speak and tell something to all the people, not only people who understand the music, but all people. The light of the lamps danced in a thousand tiny specks of gold in the murals. I looked down at the violin and tried to remember my idea, and I ran my fingers along the wood and wondered what this thing looked like to them. In a hushed voice I explained what it was, that I wanted them to hear it, that I did not really know how to pay it but that I was going to try. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

I was not speaking loud enough to hear myself, but surely they could it if they chose to listen. And I lifted the violin to my shoulder, braced it under my chin, and lifted the bow. I closed my eyes and I remembered music, Nicki’s music, the way that his body had moved with it and his fingers came down with the pressure of hammers and he let the message travel to his fingers from his soul. I plunged into it, the music suddenly wailing upwards and ripping down again as my fingers danced. It was a song, all right, I could make a song. The tones were pure and rich as they echoed off the close walls with a resounding volume, an incredible chemistry occurred creating the wailing beseeching voice that only the violin can make. I think every violin has its own soul, and the soul has been imprinted by a previous performer. So I definitely feel the soul of Nicki on this violin. If the violin is not played for a few months, it goes to sleep. I went on madly with it, rocking back, back, fourth, and fourth, forgetting Nicki, forgetting everything but the feel of my fingers stabbing at the soundboard and the realization that I was making this perfect sound that has mystified experts for centuries, and it plummeted and climbed and overflowed ever louder and louder as I bore down upon it with the frantic sawing of the bow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Violins mimic aspects of the human voice, I was singing with it, I was humming and then singing loudly, and all harmonic tones corresponded to resonances in the vocal tract, and the gold of the little room was a blur. This Stradivari violin has a brightness and brilliance, and suddenly it seemed my own voice became louder, inexplicably louder, wit a pure high note which I knew that I myself could not possibly sing. Yet it was there, this beautiful note, steady and unchanging and growing even louder until it was hurting my ears. I played harder, more frantically, and I heard my own gasps coming, and I knew suddenly that I was not the one making this strange high note! It was a tone that rivaled the most perfect female voice. Without out stopping the music, without giving in to the pain that was splitting my head, I looked forward and I saw Akasha had risen and her eyes were very wide and she appeared to be singing, her voice was lively and sweet, and she was moving off the steps of the tabernacle toward me with her arms outstretched and the note pierced my eardrum, and a modern instrument could not compare to the magic of this sound. The moment healed my wounded body and soul. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Sheer will has shaped my experience more than any other human characteristic. God still exists and damnation and salvation have established the boundaries of a small and hopeless World, allowing one to see over the jungle of dark singing treetops at the distant silver curve of the river and the low Heavens where the stars burned through the pearl gray clouds. I was weeping at the sheer sight of it, at the feel of the damp wind against my face. As some may know, the follower of a labelled cause, movement, or part tends to become unfair to competing causes, exaggerating their weak points but minimizing or even shutting one’s eyes to those of one’s own. One who refuses to attach oneself but remains independence is more likely to judge without prejudice and after a genuine investigation of both sides. The advantages of being in a position of intellectual and social, religious and personal independence are several. If it is luckily found, the chance of finding truth and, of expressing it, is surely large. Still, drug addiction is another possible effect of powerlessness. The conviction of powerlessness is especially profound with young people, and this is also where drug addiction is most prevalent. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Their addiction is a form of violence, first of all, in that the individual violates one’s own mind—which, indeed, is the purpose of the drug; and there follows later all the petty crime and greater crime that drug addicts get into. The basis of addiction is a lot of weakness and a blocked anger. The weakness takes the form of I cannot meet the demands of my family; I cannot get a job; I am impotent in pleasures of the flesh; I am a no person. The anger takes the form of the addict’s revenge upon one’s family and the World for forcing one into this painful position of powerlessness. Impotence in pleasures of the flesh is present before taking the drugs; a large majority of addicts report that they had suffered from premature or quick climaxes or had great difficultly in standing at attention at all. Their fear is that they were not man enough to satisfy a woman. The heroin wipes away all this discomfort of perpetually feeling weak. It anesthetizes the person, partly through chemical and partly through psychological means, and gives complete relief in place of the original profound and continuous pain. No more inferiority, no more worry about being a failure in the working World, no more fear of being a coward in battle, no more disappointing one’s parents—all these oppressive feelings evaporate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

A typical case of an affluent drug addict is roughly as follows: he grows up in the lace curtain suburbs, where the scents are so strong you smell the raw green leaves as well as the pink and yellow blossoms. His father works at a white shoe firm, comes from a long line of feudal lords who licked their fingers and threw the bones over their shoulders to the dogs as they dined, and his mother quells her own anxiety by feeding him (the “Eat, baby, eat. It is proof you love me” syndrome). His father is successful financially but otherwise could be stronger; he has two Cadillacs but can only throw his weight around the house by boisterous swearing or some other way of expressing his frustration. The son is enlists and goes to Vietnam. On his way back, he throws his medals into the Pacific as a symbol of freedom. Back home he gets a position as a Criminal Investigator with in the Office of Investigation at the United States Post Office, leading complex federal criminal, civil and administrative investigations. Feeling increasingly social, he meets some new friends in the music scene and they convince him to take a shot of heroin. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Finding it gives him great comfort and that is all his friends do on their spare time, he soon also finds he has to pick up this habit to fit in, as it gives them a purpose in life. His friends start also stealing money from him for the drug. His employers find out and dismiss him from his job, telling him to come back when he is clean. Throughout the whole sorry account, he gets a divorce, his wife gets custody of his daughter and keeps the custom house in the hills, and there emerges most clearly the young man’s powerlessness and loss of purpose. The origin of this sense of powerlessness is generally the young person’s lack of a relationship with a strong father. (Sometimes it is attributable to his relationship with the mother, but not as often.) Having no male figure with whom he can identify, he has no direction, no structure which the father is supposed to bring in from the outside World, no set of values by which to direct oneself or against which to rebel. In less affluent household, this lack of a strong father is taken for granted. Sometimes less affluent people have more realistic reasons for taking heroin—their problems are externalized, and hence drug addiction does not represent such a serious illness as it does for the affluent. The affluent drug addict seems not to have the oedipal motive of striving to surpass his father, which can give a constructive dynamic for development; but the son will take revenge upon the father by means of the addiction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Heroin addiction gives a way of life to the young person. Having suffered under perpetual purposelessness, one’s structure now consists of how to escape the police, how to get the money one needs, where to get one’s next fix—all these give one a new web of energy in place of one’s previous structureless World. The treatment method comes out of this situation of powerlessness. In the home of a good church, a great deal of power is let loose in sessions and Bible study, power that is directed toward the demand for absolute authenticity. These groups are encouraged to be as direct as possible with each other (without being rude or physical violence) in insisting on honesty. The phrase dope fiend is used, for example, because there is no euphemism in it; they insist on not covering up the cold truth in how they handle their affairs. However, when we spend so much time describing the attacking serpent that we fail to see the source of healing, we are no different than a dope fiend. We do not have to focus on the serpents or the pain of their venomous bites or their fear of death in order to be healed. We simply have to look to the source of healing: our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Obviously this gives a structure that cannot be evaded; the strong substitute father comes out in our faith in Christ. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

We know from the scriptures and the teachings of latter-day prophets that genuine repentance requires feeling sincere remorse. However, focusing too much on the negative can lead to fear, loss of hope, and diminishing self-worth—in the words of Nephi, we begin to “droop in sin” (2 Nephi 4.28). Those who struggle with sin sometimes lie and rationalize in an attempt to minimize the consequences of their behavior. However, somewhere inside themselves, they are aware of that they have done and know they are accountable for it. They know they are in spiritual bondage. Almost everyone I have met struggling with addiction suffers from a terrible sense of shame and a belief that he or she is broken, defective, and beyond the love and grace of God. However, this belief, in my experience, is far from the truth. Usually I find that those who struggle with addictions are warriors with tenacity, courage, and a strong desire to be clean. They win far more battles than they lose as they march toward recovery. This seems to boil down to a rediscovery of one’s power and how to use it. The notorious permissiveness that was so completely followed in the Clinton and Obama era is out, and what is in is what gives personal power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

This may be hard for some to comprehend—if people are so strong, why is overcoming addiction so difficult? Addiction is often misunderstood, and some believe that if a person would simply choose to recover or work harder at stopping, he or she would be able to. However, the nature of addiction—and all sin, for that matter—is such that we cannot heal ourselves from it. The children of Israel could not heal themselves from the bites of the fiery serpents, and we cannot simply wish or even work addiction away. We must find our hope of healing in Christ. On the anvil on which the treatment is hammered out, all things are used that will recover some sense of power in the addict, which is necessary for one’s cure. The addict’s anger and one’s energy are connected; the angrier one can becomes—which means direct, not expressed in revenge or in other indirect ways—the more likely one is to get cured. The addict is a person of much energy, but it has been blunted by one’s drugs. When one comes off drugs, one is apt to have a good deal of anger; it is on this angry energy that one’s rehabilitation depends. However, it is the social side of power that is stressed. The desired emphasis seems to Dr. Alfred Adler’s concept of social interest; we all have one basic desire and goal: to belong and to feel significant. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Consider the experience of those who struggle with addiction and how it brings heavy burdens of secrets and pain. Repentance may involve an emotional and physical process. Both repentance and recovery may take time. Even though a person may have some initial success, further emotional healing may be necessary to completely repent and recover. It takes faith, hope, love, support, time, and prayer to heal from the patterns of self-deception. In its panorama of disorder and change, history offers plentiful evidence that mortals in times past also felt no small uncertainty about themselves and their identities, suffered no little anguish of gloom, despair and feelings of detachment. Great and small people are saying they wish they had never been born. No public office stands open where it should, and the masses are like river hogs, eating whatever is insight, without think about their Saviour. Artists have ceases to ply their art. The few slay the many. One who yesterday was indigent I now wealthy, and the sometime rich overwhelm one with adulation. Impudence is rife. Oh that man cease to be, that women should no longer conceive and give birth. Then, at length, the World would find peace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

There was a similar moral collapse in Greece during the Peloponnesian war. As for medieval Europe, Huizinga reminds us that the Middle Ages were essentially violent in character: wars, class struggles, hysterical crowd behavior, vice and crime (on an unparalleled scale, particularly in university towns), plagues, scarcity, superstition, the conviction that the World was coming to an end—such was the “black” background of medieval life. The unattached person during the Middle Ages was one either condemned to exile or domed to death: if alive, one immediately sought to attach oneself, at least to a band of robbers. To exist, one had to belong to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no security expect in association, and no freedom that did not recognize the obligations of a corporate life. One lived and died in the style of one’s class and corporation. People had known a kind of psychological security; they took for granted all the actual insecurity of life in a vale of tears. If one has to analyse problems for oneself and has no one else to do it for one, the endeavour may help one to learn discrimination and good judgement. It is better to make one’s own decisions independently. This is not the case, however, if one feels too incapable of thinking out an issue, or too illiformed about it, or too vacillating to make up one’s mind on its pros and cons. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

If one’s understanding of this teaching delivers one from excessive dependence on another mortal or on external methods, it will clear one’s path and help one’s self-reliance. However, if it outruns itself and makes one cocksure, proud, arrogant, and irreverent towards one’s Saviour, then it has degenerated into misunderstanding. This will block one’s path. Joy is more than pleasure; and it is more than happiness. Happiness is a state of mind which lasts for a longer and shorter time and is dependent on many conditions, external and internal. In the ancient view it is a gift of the gods which they give and take away again. In the American Constitution, “the pursuit of happiness” is a basic human right. In economic theory the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of people is the purpose of human action. In the fairy tale, “they live happily ever after.” Happiness can stand a large amount of pain and lack of pleasure. However, happiness cannot stand the lack of joy. For joy is the expression of our essential and central fulfillment. No peripheral fulfillments and no favorable conditions can be substituted for the central fulfillment. Even in an unhappy state a great joy can transform unhappiness into happiness. What, then is you? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Let us first ask what is its opposite. It is sorrow. Sorrow is the feeling that we are deprived of our central fulfillment, by being deprived of something that belongs to us and is necessary to our fulfillment. We may be deprived of relatives and friends nearest to us, of a creative work and a supporting community which gave us a meaning of life, of our home, of honor, of love, of bodily or mental health, of unity of our person, of a good conscience. All this brings sorrow in manifold forms, the sorrow of sadness, the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of depression, the sorrow of self-accusation. However, it is precisely this kind of situation in which Jesus tells his disciples that his joy shall be with them and that their joy shall be full. Sorrow can be the Sorrow of the World which ends in death of final despair, and it can be Divine sorrow which leads to transformation and joy. For joy has something within itself which is beyond joy and sorrow. This something is called blessedness. Blessedness is the eternal element in joy, that which makes it possible for joy to include in itself the sorrow out of which it arises, and which it takes into itself. In the Beatitudes, Jesus calls the less affluent, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst, those who have been persecuted blessed. And he says unto them: “Rejoice and be glad!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Joy within sorrow is possible to those who are blessed, to those in whom joy has the dimension of the eternal. By its very nature the eternal You cannot become an It; because by its very nature it cannot be placed within measure and limit, not even within the measure of the immeasurable and the limit of the unlimited; because by its very nature it cannot be grasped as a sum of qualities, not even as an infinite sum of qualities that have been raised to transcendence; because it is not to be found either in or outside the World; because it cannot be experienced; because it cannot be thought; because we transgress against it, against that which has being, if we say: “I believe that he is”—even “he” is still a metaphor, while “you” is not. And yet we reduce the eternal You ever again to an It, to something, turning God into a thing, in accordance with our nature. Not capriciously. The history of God as a thing, the way of the God-thing through religion and its marginal forms, through its illuminations and eclipses, the times when it heightened and when it destroyed life, the way from the living God and back to him again, the metamorphoses of the present, of embedment in forms, of objectification, of conceptualization, dissolution, and renewal are one way, the way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Here we must once more reply to those who attack Christianity because they believe that it destroys the joy of life. In the view of the Beatitudes they say that Christianity undercut the joy of life by pointing to and preparing for another life. They even challenge the blessedness in the promised life as a refined form of seeking for pleasure in the future life. Again we must confess that in many Christians, joy in the way is postponed till after death, and that there are Biblical words which seem to support this answer. Nevertheless, it is wrong. Jesus will give his joy to his disciples now. They shall get it after he has left them, which means in this life. And Paul asks the Philippians to have joy now. This cannot be otherwise, for blessedness is the expression of God’s eternal fulfillment. Blessed are those who participate in this fulfillment here and now. Certainly eternal fulfillment must be seen not only as eternal which is present, but also as eternal which is future. However, if it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all. This joy which has in itself the depth of blessedness is asked for and promised in the Bible. It preserves in itself its opposite, sorrow. This blessed joy provides the foundation for happiness and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Blessed joy which is promised in the Bible for this lifetime on Earth presents in all levels of mortal’s striving for fulfillment. It consecrates and directs them. It does not diminish or weaken them. It does not take away the risks and dangers of the joy of life. It makes the joy of life possible in pleasure and pain, in happiness and unhappiness, in ecstasy and sorrow. Where there is joy, there is fulfillment. And were there is fulfillment, there is joy. In fulfillment and joy the inner aim of life, the meaning of creation, and the end of salvation, are attained. The asserted knowledge and the posited action of the religions—whence do they come? The presence and strength of revelation (for all of them necessarily invoke some sort of revelation, whether verbal, natural, or psychic—there are, strictly speaking, only revealed religions), the presence and strength that mortals received through revelation—how do they become a content? The explanation has two levels. The exoteric, psychic level is known when a mortal is considered by oneself, apart from history. The esoteric, factual one, the primal phenomenon of religion, when we afterward place one in history again. Both belong together. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Mortals desires to have God; one desires to have God continually in space and time. One is loath to be satisfied with the inexpressible confirmation of the meaning; one wants to see it spread out as something that one can take out handle again and again—a continuum unbroken in space and times that insures life for one at every point and moment. A mortal can achieve one’s independence by grades without rebellion but one is seldom so wise as to do so. More often, one lacks patience, takes the more foolish violent way, and attains one’s freedom at a cost, to oneself and to others, that could have been much less for the same result by evolutionary ways. The passionate contempt for organized authority, or its complete rejection, may be only a cover for weakness: the inability to undergo a course of discipline, much less undertake it for oneself. The danger of walking alone is also the danger of identifying one’s own private judgments, impulses, desires, and thoughts as intuitions from the higher self. However, independence of mind as its own perils, for it may lead to stubbornness in error, to arrogance in behaviour, and to fanaticism in attitude. One who depends upon one’s own personal intellect and personal strength alone, deprives oneself of the protection which God could give one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The endeavor after independence can achieve only a partial success, never a total one. We find that we are tied to other people. Life’s rhythm of pure relation, the alternation of actuality and a latency in which only our strength to relate and hence also the presence, but not the primal presence, wanes, does not suffice mortal’s thirst for continuity. One thirsts, thirst, pain as clear as light for something spread out in time, for duration. Thus God becomes an object of faith. Originally, faith fills the temporal gaps between the acts of relation; gradually, it becomes a substitute for these acts. The ever new movement of being through concentration and going forth is supplanted by coming to rest in an It in which one has faith. The trust-in-spite-of-all of the fighter who knows the remoteness and nearness of God is transformed ever more completely into the profiteer’s assurance that nothing can happen to one because one has faith that there is One who would not permit anything to happen to one. The life-structure of the pure relation, the lonesomeness of the I before the You, the law that mortals, however one may include the World in one’s encounter, can still go forth only as a person to encounter God—all this also does not satisfy mortal’s thirst for continuity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The magic of faith leaves something stronger than memory of the circuit of the blood of Christ through us. One thirsts for something spread out in space, for the representation in which the community of the faithful is united with God. Thus God becomes a cult object. The cult, too, originally supplements the acts of relation, by fitting the living prayer, the immediate You-saying into a spatial context of great plastic and power and connecting it with the life of the senses. And the cult, too, gradually becomes a substitute, as the personal prayer is no longer support but rather pushed aside by communal prayer; and as the essential deed simply does not permit any rules, it is supplanted by devotions that follow rules. We can fully trust in a loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help us become the person he knows we can become. Our Father in Heaven has given us not only one but two physical eyes. We can see adequately with only one eye, but the second eye provides us with another perspective. When both perspectives are put together in our brains, they produce a three-dimensional image of our surrounding. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. We have a loving Father in Heaven, and we all agreed to come to this Earth as part of a divine plan. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden—At Night He Opens the Window and Looks Out into the Infinite Dark!

June 22, 2019 1:59 am

The World is full of abiding beauty, no soul here is really alone. It did not matter to me. I was getting out of old Egypt, and I had the source of all our power with me. And I was young and foolish and enflamed. There has never been a just place for evil in the Western World. There has never been an easy accommodation of death. No matter how violent have been the centuries since the fall of Rome, no matter how terrible the wars, the persecutions, the injustices, the value placed upon human life has only increase. When we see the effect one person can have, it perhaps is no wonder that the Lord reminded us, “Remember the worth of souls.” It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. And it is the belief in the value of human life that carries mortals now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France. All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to mortals and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the Earth was new to mortals, and wondrous. However, we can always come back to the way the Earth is now. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

When I started work as a psychotherapist, the relationship of powerlessness and psychosis was impressed upon me a number of years ago. In the mentally troubled person psychotherapists are able to see the extremes of the behavior and the experience of us all. All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely. A young musician, Treasure, was one of my first patients. According to the person who administered her Rorschach, she has “one foot in schizophrenia and other on a banana peel.” In her session with me she would give long, involved comparisons of the colors of the musical notes made by the train from Newark in contrast to those made by the train from New Brunswick. I had not the slightest idea about what she was talking much of the time—and she knew it. However, she seemed to need me as a person who listened, wanting and trying to understand her whether I succeeded or not. She was also a woman with considerable dignity and a sense of humor, which helped us immeasurably. However, she could not get angry. Not at me or her parents or anyone else. Her self-esteem was so shaky and vague as to be almost nonexistent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Once a young man in a chorus in a chorus to which Treasure belonged asked her to go to a concert with him. Se accepted. However, the next day, in a surge of self-doubt, she phoned him to say: “If you do not want to, you do not have to take me.” She could not affirm or assert herself enough to conceive that someone might like to go to a concert with her. When, at the age of eight or nine, she would play football with a boy slightly older than she, he would run into her hard enough to hurt her. Another child might have yelled at the boy, or started a fight, or cried, or abandoned the game; these are all, good or bad, ways of coping. However, Treasure could utilize none of these methods; she could only sit there on the ground, looking at him silently thinking that he should not hit her so hard. When she was exploited, as she often was, sexually or financially, she had no defenses, no way of drawing a line beyond which she could firmly say “no,” no anger to support her. (One gets a feeling that such persons almost invite exploitation—it at least gives them some relationship and significance.) Along with her inability to get angry, there went, as a necessary corollary, a deep experience of powerlessness and an almost complete lack of capacity to influence or affect other people in interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

However, such a person has another aide which, as I have confirmed in working with many borderline patients since, is completely different. Treasure’s dreams were of cut-up bodies put in bags, of blood and battles—in short, as violent as her conscious life was docile. Since that time and partly due to this young woman, I have frequently reflected on the relationship between powerlessness and madness. I am purposely stressing both meanings of the word mad: its personal sense of enragedness to the point of violence; and its historical psychiatric sense of psychosis. There is a relationship between the two, and this double use of the term may lead us to the center of the problem. We know that a common characteristic of all mental patients is their powerlessness, and with it goes a constant anxiety which is both cause and effect of the impotence. The patients’ insignificance is so firmly assumed by them that they accept it as a given, often going through life making sad and pitiful gestures to get whatever bit of significance they can. An adolescent girl came to consult me in the middle of the day wearing a crinoline evening dress, possibly one of the prettiest things she had, as a gesture of how much she needed my attention and concern, unaware that it was likely to be regarded as out of place. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

When a person like Treasure can no longer support this way of life, something cracks within her and she may then move into a state in which she is nothing but mad. The person then seems to be the exact opposite of what she had been. The violence of dreams like Treasure’s then becomes the content of her waking life. The person seems all madness, which is surely why psychosis through the centuries was called madness. Mad now at everybody, including herself, the person threatens or attempts to experience death by suicide, cuts her wrists, smears blood over the doors in hospitals to dramatize her need of the attendants and interns. She does overt violence to herself and whoever gets in the range of her projections. We see the same movement in other patients. In the autobiographical novel on her own schizophrenia I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Hannah Green was admitted to Chestnut Lodge at sixteen. She was the epitome of docility and placidity, never showing any anger at all. Whenever she needed to, she withdrew into the mythology of her private spirit World and talked with mythical figures. Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichman, the psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge who treated her, dealt with this mythology with respect, assuring Hannah that she would not take it away as long as the girl needed it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

However, when Dr. Fromm-Reichman went to Europe one Summer, another, younger doctor was assigned to the girl. He charged in, blithely courageous, to break up her mythological World. The results were disastrous. In her explosion of violence, the patient set fire to herself and to her belongings at the Lodge, scarring herself for life. The error of the young doctor was that he did not appreciate that the mythology was what gave significance to Hannah’s existence. The question was not whether it was theoretically right or wrong, but its function for her. This placid patient, who seemed incapable of any aggressive act, swung from docility into outright violence. This may seem and feel like power to the hospital attendants, but it is a pseudopower, an expression of impotence. The patient may now be spoken of as “mad,” which means that she does not fit the accepted criteria in our society which, like all societies, prefer docile, placid “face.” It is important to see that the violence is the end result of repressed anger and rage, combined with constant fear based on the patient’s powerlessness. Behind the pseudopower of the madness we can often find a person struggling for some sense of significance, some way of making a difference and establishing some self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

When Treasure was in treatment with me, she received a newspaper from her home town in which it was reported that a certain man in her village had experienced death by suicide. She said to me: “If only one other person in that town had known him, he would not have experienced death by suicide.” Note that she did not say, “If he had known someone,” but “if someone had known him.” She was telling me, I believed, that she would not put a violent end to her life so long as I was related to her. However, she was also describing something critically important for a human being—the necessity of having somebody listen, recognize, know him. It gives a person the conviction that one counts, that one exists as a part of the human race. It also gives one some orientation, point where one can find meaning in an otherwise meaningless World. It would be a red-letter day when Treasure could get angry with me, for I knew that she could then begin to protect herself in her contacts with other people in the wide World. And what is more, she could dare to live out her considerable capacities as an original and loveable as well as loving human being. “And now, my beloved brethren, behold, I declare unto you that except ye shall repent your houses shall be left unto you desolate,” reports Helaman 15.1. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Yet in all these relations the questions arise: Is our way of having these pleasures right or wrong? Do we use them for pleasure’s sake or because we want to unite in love with all that to which we belong? We never know with certainty. And those of us together with those in the past history of Christianity who have an anxious conscience, prefer to renounce pleasures although they are established as good by creation itself. They hide their anxiety behind parental or social or ecclesiastical prohibitions, calling these prohibitions Divine commands. They justify their fear to affirm the joy of life by appealing to their conscience, calling then the “imitation of Christ.” However Jesus, in contrast to John the Baptist, was called a glutton and a drunkard by his critics. In all these warnings against pleasure, truth is mixed with untruth. Insofar as they strengthen our responsibility, they are true; insofar as they undercut our joy, they are wrong. Therefore let me give another criterion for accepting or rejecting pleasures, the criterion indicted in our text: Those pleasures are good which go together wit joy; those are bad which prevent joy. In the light of this norm we should risk the affirmation of pleasures, even if our risk may prove to have been an error. It is not more Christian to reject than to accept pleasure. Let us not forget that the rejection implies a rejection of creation, or as the Church Fathers called it, a blasphemy of the Creator-God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

And every Christian should be aware of a fact of which many non-Christians are keenly aware: the suppression of the joy of life produces hatred of life, hidden or open. It can lead to a self-destruction, as many physical and mental diseases prove. Such sweeping statements not only need qualification but also translation into recognizable and verifiable terms. Who are the alienated? Is the phenomenon of alienation new in history, or is it age-old? If age-old, are its present-day manifestations more widespread? And if so, how can measure the differences? Should mention alienation par excellence and point to the prevalence of experiencing death by suicide today? Old Testament princes and Roman soldiers, defeated or disgraced, ran upon their spears or hanged themselves from trees. Shall we cite modern rates of homicide? The cave man too could be homicidal. Shall we refer to the numbers of insane, unknown as well as institutionalized? However, mortals have always been mad. So it is not to gross statistics that we look, but to the untold lives of quiet desperation that mark our age—the multitudes of factory and white-collar workers who find their jobs monotonous and degrading; the voters and non-voters who feel hopeless or do not care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

There are also the juveniles who commit senseless acts of violence; the growing army of idle and lonely old people; the African Americas who want to be treated like human beings; the women who want equal pay; the stupefied audiences of mass media; the people who reject the prevailing values of our culture but cannot—or may not—find any alternatives, the escapists, the retreatists, the nihilists, and the desperate citizens who would solve all major political problems by moving our society underground and blowing up the planet. There are few statistics to tell us about them, especially as many continue to function with the appearance of normality. Yet even with indirect evidence it seems safe to assume that there is something in common between them, something that touches the very roots of our social order. There are particular conditions in modern industrial society (especially under capitalism) that have led to mortal’s estrangement, and there are some ways both creative and destructive in which men and women have responded to that estrangement. What is it in our technological and social environment that leads to alienation? How can we so order society and integrate people that they do not merely exchange their unbearable sense of powerlessness and isolation for spurious togetherness or for new forms of coercion? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

What does alienation mean? The word has an ancient history, being used in common discourse to identify feelings of estrangement, or of detachment from self and others; and in law to describe the act of transferring property or ownership to another. An illustration of the second usage is the alienation of church property which, after the Reformation, meant a transfer from religious to secular ownership. The two meanings converge in cases of law, now rare, when one sues some third party for alienating the affections of one’s spouse, the affectionate feelings being regarded as property which has been diverted to the third person’s use. In another common usage, alienation has long meant insanity; and in Europe to this day an alienist is one who treats persons suffering from mental disorders. In modern terms, however, alienation has been used by philosophers, psychologists and sociologists to refer to an extraordinary variety of psycho-social disorders, including loss of self, anxiety states, anomie, despair, depersonalization, rootlessness, apathy, social disorganization, loneliness, atomization, powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, pessimism, and the loss of beliefs or values. Obviously when we speak of alienation, we are dealing with a word that lends itself to many different meanings. To deal with all of them we would truly need an encyclopedia of the social sciences. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The prestige of institutional mysticism, like that of official religion, mesmerizes nearly everyone interested in the subject. The independent mystic, who refuses all affiliation with any sect, school, ashram, monastery, group or society, is suspect and finds oneself left almost in isolation. However, although this may seem unfortunate, it is so only in some ways. In other ways, it leaves one entirely free from the bonds of strict and rigid doctrine, free to remain faithful to truth irrespective of all other considerations, free to speak in a voice whose authority comes not from Worldly power but from spiritual status. One should not change one’s chains by going from one master or one sect to another. Rather should one drop all chains. One is entitled to be set free from one’s former dependence on the church so that one may live one’s own individual inner life. How can one bring oneself to join any group, cult, or sect when one believes all of them to be right, only some are more right than others, and all of them to be wrong, only some are more wrong than others? There is not one whose limitations one does not see. One prefers the truthfulness of being uncommitted to any “ism,” and the freedom of being unjoined to any group. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

One is not likely to be a member of any organized movement because one’s mind is too large to be exclusive. One is outside all organized groups because, in spirit, one is inside all of them. Far from the din and disparagements of jarring sects, one lives unlabeled and free. One belongs to no particular named, classified, and indoctrinated group, and this keeps one’s own freedom while excluding none from one’s general goodwill. At the same time one stays open to truth and avoid the closed mind, fixed only on its own strict and rigid doctrine opinions and beliefs. The only group one is likely to be a member of is the human race! One is unwilling to be tired to any sect or coterie, established orthodoxy or organizational unorthodoxy. One may even refuse to fit into any of the any of the accepted patterns. One has to follow a light of one’s own. Such an anarchistic attitude is likely to provoke hostility and create detractors. It is said further that the religious mortal steps before God as one who is single, solitary, and detached insofar as one has also transcended the stage of the ethical mortal who still dwells in duty and obligation to the World. The latter is said to be still burdened with responsibility for the actions of agents because one is and ought, and into the unbridgeable gap between both one throws, full of grotesquely hopeless sacrificial courage, piece upon piece of one’s heart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

This religious person is supposed to have transcended this tension between World and God; the commandment for one is to leave behind the restlessness of responsibility and of making demands on oneself; for one there is no longer any room for a will of one’s own, one accepts one’s place in the Plan; any ought is dissolved in unconditional being, and the World, while still persisting, has lost its validity; one still has to do one’s share in it but, as it were, without obligation, in the perspective of the nullity of all activity. Thus mortals fancy that God has created his World to be an illusion and one’s mortal to reel. Of course, whoever steps before the countenance has soared way beyond duty and obligation—but not because one has moved away from the World; rather because one has come truly close to it. Duties and obligations one has only toward the stranger: toward one’s intimates one is kind and loving. When mortal steps before the countenance, the World becomes wholly presented to one for the first time in the fullness of the presence, illuminated by eternity, and one can say You in on word to the being of all beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

There is no longer any tensions between World and God but only the one actuality. One is not rid of responsibility: for the pains of the finite version that explores effects one as exchanged the momentum of the infinite kind, the power of loving responsibility for the whole unexplorable course of the World, the deep inclusion in the World before the countenance of God. Ethical judgments, to be sure, one as left behind forever: evil people are for one merely those commended to one for a deeper responsibility, those more in need of love; but decisions one must continue to make in the depths of spontaneity unto death—calmly deciding ever again in favor of right action. Thus action is not null: it is intended, it is commanded, it is needed, it belongs to the creation; but this action no longer imposes itself upon the World, it grows upon it as if it were non-action. “For the Lord worketh not in secret combination, neither doth he will that mortals should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of humanity,” reports Ether 8.19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Whenever I Found the Living, there I Found the Will to Power—I Have Been through All the World and I Will Take You to Safe Places!

June 21, 2019 1:08 am

These demons are mindless, immature, and deviant, but I had studied their conduct and I have learned from all the evidence why it is that they rage. They are maddened that they do not have bodies, that that cannot feel as we feel. They make the innocent scream filth because the rites of love and passion are things that they cannot possibly know. They can work the body parts but not truly inhabit them, and so they are obsessed with the flesh that they cannot invade. And with their feeble powers they bump upon objects, they make their victims twist and jump. This longing to be carnal is the origin of their anger, the indication of the suffering which is their lot. Power is essential for all living things. Mortals in particular, cast on this barren crust of Earth aeons ago with the hope and the requirement that one survive, finds one must use one’s powers and confront opposing forces at every point in one’s struggle with the Earth and with one’s fellows. Insecure as one has been through the ages, buffeted by limitations and weakness, laid low by illness and ultimately by death, one nevertheless asserts one’s powers in creativity. One product of this is civilization. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The word power comes from the Latin posse, meaning to be able. We can see the vicissitudes of the emergence of power as soon as a baby is born into the World—in his cry and in the waving of his arms in demand that he be fed. The cooperative, loving side of existence goes hand in hand with coping and power, but neither the one nor the other can be neglected if life is to be gratifying. Our appreciation of the Earth and the support of our fellows are not gained by abdication of our powers, but by cooperative use of them. The infant’s capacity to cope with necessities becomes, in the growing adult, the struggle for self-esteem and for the sense of significance as a person. This latter is his psychological reason for living in contrast to the infant’s biological one. They cry for recognition becomes the central psychological cry: I must be able to say I am, to affirm myself in a World into which, by my capacity to assert myself, I put meaning, I create meaning. And I must do this in the face of nature’s magnificent indifference to my struggles. It is important that we remind ourselves that we mean neither will nor power in the competitive sense of the modern day, but rather self-realization and self-actualization. If we are freed from thinking of power only in the pejorative sense, we are better able to agree with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Far from treating power only as a term of abuse, one which is to be applied to our enemies (for instance, they are power-driven, but we are motivated only by benevolence, reason, and morality), I use it as a description of a fundamental aspect of the life process. It is not to be identified with life itself; there is much in human existence—like curiosity and love and creativity—that may be and normally is related to power but is not to called power in itself. However, if we neglect the factor of power, as is the tendency in our day of reaction against the destructive effects of the misuse of power, we shall lose values that are essential to our existence as human. A great deal of human life can be seen as the conflict between power on one side (for instance, effective ways of influencing others, achieving the sense in interpersonal relations of the significance of one’s self) and powerlessness on the other. In this conflict our efforts are made much more difficult by the fact that we block out both sides, the former because of the evil connotation of power drives, and the latter because our powerlessness is too painful to confront. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Indeed, the chief reason people refuse to confront the whole issue of power is that if they did, they would have to face their own powerlessness. As soon as powerlessness is referred to by its more personal name, helplessness or weakness, many people will sense that they are heavily burdened by it. Indeed, no social emotion is more widespread today then the conviction of personal powerlessness, the sense of being beset, beleaguered, and persecuted. Majority rule, for which mortals have struggled for centuries, has produced a situation in which mortals are more important, more powerless to influence their government then 200 years ago. The juggernaut of the state grinds on with no attention paid to you or me. And now multitudes are having to get used to living without their usual confidence that America is the World’s most powerful nation, a confidence to which, inadequate as it was, many people clung for their past sense of personal status. To admit our own individual feelings of powerlessness—that we cannot influence many people; that we count for little; that the values to which our parents devoted their lives are to us insubstantial and worthless; that we feel ourselves to be faceless others, insignificant to other people, and therefore, not worth much to ourselves—this is, indeed, difficult to admit. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

I cannot recall a time during the last four decades when there was so much talk about the individual’s capacities and potentialities and so little actual confidence on the part of the individual about one’s power to make a difference psychologically or politically. The talk is at least partially a compensatory symptom for our disquieting awareness of our very loss of power. It is, therefore, understandable in this transitional age, when we have at our fingertips the power to blow each other off the face of the planet, that certain persons should purpose we give up the human experiment. We live in times too dangerous to trust to human individual mood or choice…We can no longer control the people in power, and we therefore must resort to pacifying drugs to control our leaders. We can appreciate this despair, especially when we consider the powerlessness of the Blacks, out of which the impetus for this proposal arises. However, this does not prevent our also realizing, as we read with sinking heart of the new discoveries of chemicals that purport to cure modern mortals of their aggressiveness and develop in one a cooperative personality, that use of them goes with depersonalization and loss of our sense of personal responsibility. This alternative would mean, indeed, a gradual abdication of mortal’s humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Other psychologist, noting that we have not done very well in controlling ourselves, propose to do that controlling for us in the form of operant conditioning. We hear of new methods of bringing up our children which will train out of them aggressive tendencies and make them docile and placid. Have everyone forgotten this despair in which people are polarized into two groups, the majority domesticated into docile, sheeplike passivity, their flesh soft and tender, who are then eaten by a tougher group, the engineers of this social program? The failure of nerve theories arise out of the true observation that the exercise of power has done colossal harm in the modern World. The proposals have the double attraction of expressing the reaction against power and promising a utopia in the same breath. They will have a strong following among people threatened by importance and hoping against hope for some substitute for power. American’s concern about the possible misuse of power verges at times on a neurotic obsession. The important question, however, is not whether these theories are right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Rather it is whether or not we would, by trying to rid ourselves of our tendencies toward aggression, be discarding those values essential to our humanity—our self-affirmation and self-assertion, just to mention two. And would we not then be adding greatly to our feeling of powerlessness and this setting the stage for an eruption of violence that would dwarf everything so far? For violence has its breeding group in impotence and apathy. True, aggression has been so often and so regularly escalated into violence that anyone’s discouragement and fear of it can be understood. However, what is not seen is that the state of powerlessness, which leads to apathy and which can be produced by the above plans for the uprooting of aggression, is the source of violence. As we make people powerless, we promote their violence rather than its control. Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. Regardless of how derailed or wrongly used these motivations may be or how destructive their expression, they are still the manifestations of beneficial interpersonal needs. We cannot ignore the fact that, no matter how difficult their redirection may be, these needs themselves are potentially constructive. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. Violence is the expression of impotence. Confused as to one’s place in the scheme of a World growing each day closer yet more impersonal, more densely populated yet in face-to-face relations more dehumanized; a World appealing ever more widely for one’s concern and sympathy with unknown masses of mortals, yet fundamentally alienating one even from one’s next neighbor, today Western mortals have become mechanized, routinized, made comfortable as an object; but in the profound sense displaced and thrown off balance as a subjective creator and power. This theme of the alienation of modern mortals runs through the literature and drama of two continents; it can be traced in the content as well as the form of modern art; it preoccupies theologians and philosophers, and to many psychologists and sociologists, it is the central problem of our time. In various ways they tell us that ties have snapped that formerly bound Western mortals to themselves and to the World about them. In diverse language they say that mortals in modern industrial societies are rapidly becoming detached from nature, from one’s old gods, from the technology that has transformed one’s environment and now threatens to destroy it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

From one’s work and its products, and from one’s leisure; from the complex social institutions that presumably serve but are more likely to manipulate one; from the community in which one lives; and above all from oneself—from one’s body and one’s gender, from one’s feelings of love and tenderness, and from one’s art—one’s creative and productive potential. The alienated mortal is every mortal and no mortal, drifting in exercises no power, a stranger to oneself and to others. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of mortals to one’s self. An indefinable sense of loss; a sense that life has become impoverished, that mortals are somehow deracinate and disinherited, that society and human nature alike have been atomized, and hence mutilated, above all that mortals have been separated from whatever might give meaning to their work and their lives. Too frequently, there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Mortal’s search for truth cannot be properly carried on unless one as full freedom in it. Where is the religious or religio-mystical institution which is willing to grant that to him? Is there a single one which lets one start out without being hampered by authoritarian doctrines, taboos, limitations, and traditions which it would impose upon one? Lectures, societies, and group-movements are of limited value: they can never replace nor achieve what is gained by one’s own individual efforts made in the right way. The seeker after truth will not find one’s way easy to travel. One may find that an institution, an authority, or an organization is suffocating one mentally or oppressing one emotionally. This may be the hour when one must claim one’s freedom. It is illusory to believe that, by blindly handing or humbly submitting one’s character and credo, one’s standards and values, one’s spiritual purposes and practices, to any organized group or established church, to a teacher, guide, or guru, to form and formulate, a mortal can evade the responsibility of judging them for oneself, accepting or rejecting by oneself. It is required of every fully human being that one be individual, not a parasite, and that one be oneself, not someone else. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

People speak of the religious mortal as one who can dispense with all relations to the World and to beings because the social stage that is allegedly determined from outside is supposed to have been transcended here by a force that works entirely from within. However, two basically different notions are confused when people use the concept of the social: the community built of relation and the amassing of human units that have no relation to one another—the palpable manifestation of modern mortal’s lack of relation. The bright edifice of community, however, for which one can be liberated even from the dungeon of sociability, is the work of the same force that is alive in the relation between mortals and God. However, this is not one relation among others; it is the universal relation into which all rivers pour without drying up for that reason. Sea and rivers—who would make a bold to separate here and define limits? There in only the one flood from I to You, ever more infinite, the one boundless flood of actual life. One cannot divide one’s life between an actual relationship to God and an inactual I-It relationship to the World—praying to God in truth and utilizing the World. Whoever knows the World as something to be utilized knows God the same way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

One’s prayers are a way of unburdening oneself—and fall into the ears of the void. One—and not the atheist who from the night and longing of one’s garret window addresses the nameless—is God. And so we use them for a kind of pleasure which can be called fun. However, it is not the creative kind of fun often connected with play; it is, rather, a shallow, distracting, greedy way of having fun. And it is not by chance that it is that type of fun which can easily be commercialized, for it is dependent on calculable reactions, without passion, without risk, without love. Of all the dangers that threaten our civilization, this is on of the most dangerous ones: the escape from one’s emptiness through a fun which makes joy impossible. Rejoice! This Biblical exhortation is more needed for those who have much fun and pleasure than for those who have little pleasure and much pain. It is often easier to unite pain and joy than to unite fun and joy. Does the Biblical demand for joy prohibit pleasure? Do joy and pleasure exclude each other? By no means! The fulfillment of the center of our being does not exclude partial and peripheral fulfillments. And we must say this with the same emphasis with which we have contrasted joy and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

We must challenge not only those who seek pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but also those who reject pleasure because it is pleasure. Mortals enjoy eating and drinking, beyond the mere terrestrial need of them. It is a partial ever-repeated fulfillment of one’s striving for life; therefore, it is pleasure and gives joy of life. Mortals enjoy playing and dancing, the beauty of nature, and the ecstasy of life. They fulfill some of one’s most intensive strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the power of knowledge and the fascination of art. They fulfill some of one’s highest strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the community of mortals in family, friendship, and the social group. They fulfill some fundamental strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. “And they had power given unto them, insomuch that they could not be confined in dungeons; neither was it possible that any mortal could slay them; nevertheless they did not exercise their power until they were bound in bands and cast into prison. Now, this was done that the Lord might show forth his power in them. And it came to pass that they went forth and began to preach and to prophesy unto the people, according to the spirit and power which the Lord had given them,” reports Alma 8.31-32. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Why Do I Harm the Very Person I Love?

June 10, 2019 10:51 pm

Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? We have said that human freedom gives birth to the human spirit and that spirit is necessary if there is to be freedom. However, are not human spirit and freedom also the sources of evil? What did do we really mean when we say the wrath of God is necessary if there is to be any love of God? In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regret on the part of a clergy member high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do wit the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feelings, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?” When we see the evil we do, scarcely any of us can remain unaffected, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. However, Oscar Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings. The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

There is an inescapable egocentricity in all of us, leading to the absolutizing of our own perceptions, which then become destructive to those closest to us. There is a tendency in each one of us to be absolute in one’s self. Each of us is bound up in one’s own skin, each of us sees life through one’s own eyes, and none of us can escape doing some violence to those we long most to understand. The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do. There is no evading this dilemma. This is the original sin: each of us speaks out of one’s separate individuality and thus inexorably runs roughshod over yearnings and perceptions that are precious to people we love. And if one tried very hard not to do this, if one makes every effort to do good, one succeeds only in adding an element of self-righteousness to the ways one confronts one’s fellows. The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more mysterious of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in this would. However, I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Adolph Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of the government, and before hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increase neck and neck with technological progress, just look at how many of the TV news stations lie, distort facts, and ruin lives for fun. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living. In fact it is thought, people who are terrorized for fun should be beautiful in person so the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Tick is done. When the World of mortals collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains. And why call this Satanic? Why not call it chaos? That is all it is. However, mortals invented Satan, did they not? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which mortals want to life. Satan is mortal’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for mortal’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of Earth? The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the World population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops. There is also another group of philosophers and the theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Sokratis, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom there will be mistake choices, some of the catastrophic. However, to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place. The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientists in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

However, while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer committing goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us. The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the World in their own mass suicides the final evil. Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism: God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the World, in order to increase mortal’s freedom and one’s will to prove one’s moral strength in overcoming. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

However, the question the religious people above ask is simplistic. Let us recall the words of Boehme, above, that God is a fire and it is necessary to confront the wrath of God if the love of God is to have any reality. A Hassidic saying points toward the same thing: God is not nice, God is no uncle. God is an Earthquake. We note that some saints through history have spoken of themselves as the “Chief of sinners.” Obviously, this cannot mean sinner in the sense of committing overt, objective crimes. However, it can mean that the saints, being more highly developed spiritually than ordinary people, have a correspondingly deeper awareness of their pride, vanity, hardness of heart, and obtuseness of understanding. If we look at sin from the inside, we see that there is indeed, sound meaning to their claim. It is impossible to have a sensitive conscience and a good conscience at the same time. If one has a sensitive conscience one will be aware of the evils of the World in which we as human beings participate. Hence, there is no clear, good conscience, but an active concern about the evils. It is not at all surprising, then, that in the Garden of Eden myth, the knowledge of good and evil comes by virtue of the evil of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

If Adam and Eve are to have any freedom, any true autonomy or true independence, they must defy the orders of God; and whether Yahweh is benevolent or destructive does not at that moment matter. This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their own consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be the inert appendage of God. Is this alienating? Anxiety-creating? Guilt-producing? Of course. However, what become available with these “curses” are the blessings of love, responsibility, and the passion and power to create. Still, after meeting with certain people, one may complain about a sense of depression which comes to one’s mind. One should reduce such meetings to the least number possible, and where it is necessary to deal with them, to do so by correspondence as much as one can. It does not matter that such people may have spiritual interests and many also on the Quest. The Quest is an individual matter; it is not a group Quest. One finds God by oneself, alone in the privacy of one’s heart and life, not with the help of a group nor in public associations. Be yourself, your own divine self. Why play a part? Why be an echo? Why follow the World in its pursuit of the trivial, the stupid, the pain bringing? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

One should not permit oneself to be re-entangled by others in past contacts which have out served their purpose and which now will only keep one down. This freedom to search for and find truth as well as to select one’s own path of approach toward it, is a precious prerogative. One refuses to accept a label; one feels oneself to be outside all the common categories. The divergence of opinion among leading individuals on every subject is extraordinary and emphasizes one again the necessity of thinking for oneself. Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of humankind. Only when one is true to one’s own self, real freedom is possible. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit. With this decree one runs up one’s personal declaration of independence. No school can hold one. One’s loyalty is henceforth given to global thought. Nor is this all. The mystic life depends on no institution, no tradition, no sectarianism. It is an independent and individual existence. Without falling into the vacuity of skepticism, the intelligent and independent seeker shuns strict and rigid doctrines sectarian intellectual or emotional positions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

However, this openness of mind, one’s semi-detached stand, do not prevent one’s forming favourable appreciations or accommodating unflattering impressions. “All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to a chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down plays.” If you do not feel any affinity with it, let others follow whatever path attracts them, but do not let them impose their path upon you. The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core, the decisive moment of mortals. However, unlike that immersion, this does not entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion want to preserve only what is pure, essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions as too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished mortal. This concentration aims at and is actuality. The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into thinking the One, that by which the World is thought, the pure subject. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

However, in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived. In the former centuries there was a long-lasting struggle in the Church about the religious significance of hearing and seeing. First, seeing prevailed, but then hearing became more and more significant. Finally, in the days of the Reformation hearing became completely victorious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The typical Protestant church-building bear witness to the victory. They are halls to hear sermons, emptied of everything to be seen of pictures and sculptures, of lights and stained windows, of most of the sacramental activities. Around the desk of the preacher a room was built to listen to the words of the law and gospel. The eye could not find a place to rest in contemplation. Hearing replaced seeing, obedience replaced vision. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to life, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, he offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep his commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. The things of God knoweth no mortal, except one as the Spirit of God for they are spiritually discerned. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Without Pain We Would Become a Nation of Zombies—Some Critics Believe We Have Already Arrived at that State!

June 7, 2019 10:51 pm

Amazing how the mind works kind of like a puzzle and as it grows, as your neurons produce more synapses which have dendrites. My guidance is what you need. You have only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance. We need to understand the function of illness and health in a culture. The disease itself is not the ultimate enemy. It may actually be a blessing in disguise in that it forces the person, as tuberculosis did to me, to take stock of his life and to reform his style of work and play. Having a disease in one way of resolving a conflict situation. Disease is a method of thinking one’s World so that, with lessened responsibilities and concerns, the person has a better chance of coping successfully. Health, on the contrary, is a freeing of the organism to realize its capacities. I believe that people utilize disease in the same way older generations used the devil—as an object on which to project their hated experiences in order to avoid having to take responsibility for them. However, beyond giving a temporary sense of freedom from guilt feeling, these delusions do not help. Health and disease are part and parcel of our continuous process throughout life of making ourselves adequate to our World and our World adequate to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Nor is pain the ultimate enemy. Americans are probably the most pain-conscious people on the face of the Earth. For years we have had it drummed into us—in print, on radio, over television, in everyday conversation—that any hint of pain is to be banished as though it were the ultimate evil. Leprosy is such a dreaded disease because of the fact that the affected person has lost the sense of pain and has no signal to tell one how and when to take care of the infected parts. We consume in this country a fabulous number of tranquilizers in the process of blocking out pain. Has this been the danger all along, the trigger of our fear? Even as we recognize it, we are yielding, and it seems the great lessons of our life have all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear is one again breaking the shell around us so that something else can spring to life. The interplay of pain and pleasure, and the dependence of one on the other–never, never in all our existence, not mortal or immortal, have we been threatened with an intimacy quite like this. Many of us, for example, want to know why beauty exists, why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, the why do they retain for us such a symbolic power. What is the lantern by which we see the Devil’s Road, by what lantern have many traveled it? What have people learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do we know about other humans and how they came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing. How strange would appear to be this thing that mortals call pleasure! And how curiously is it related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a mortal, and yet if you seek one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up. Pain is a sensitizer in life. In running away from pain we lose our vitality, our capacity genuinely to feel and even to love. I am not saying that pain is a good thing in itself. I am saying that pain and the relief from pain paradoxically go together. They are the bow and the string of Heraclitus. Without pain we would become a nation of zombies. Some critics believe we already have arrived at that state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

There is a common illusion that medical technology is wiping out one disease after another—such original lethal scourges as tuberculosis, which supposedly claimed the life 2^nd President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, William Wirt Winchester, in 1880. That is why in memory of her husband, Mrs. Sarah Winchester donated over $1,00,000.00 ($25,053,725.49 adjusted for inflation) to the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still proudly exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. Infantile paralysis along with tuberculosis being among the recent examples—that we need only to wait, hoping we live long enough until medicine vanquishes all diseases. However, this illusion rests on a serious misunderstanding of the functions of illness and health in any human society. However, physicians must resist the idea that technology will some day abolish disease because as long as humans feel threatened and helpless, they will seek the sanctuary that illness provides. And as the population grows and we cure more diseases, other symptoms will pop up to cure the disease that overpopulation is causing the planet to suffer from. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch the people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Not only do physicians need to resist this illusion, but even more do play people, to whom the idea that medical technology will ultimately save them is the most powerful rationalization for evading their own responsibility for their health. For human beings live—it is their destiny to do so—delicately balanced between health and illness, and this balance is what is important. There is no doubt that we, as a race, are getting healthier. However, will I be misunderstood when I affirm that the possibilities of illness get proportionately greater at the same time? Certainly, there is just as much consulting with doctors as there was one hundred years ago. What seems to be occurring is the shift in the kinds of illness from infectious diseases—which attack the person from the outside—to internal diseases like heart attacks, hypertension, and strokes—which are intimately related to anxiety and stress. The latter are the greatest killers of our day. Illness and health are complexly balanced in each of us, and taking responsibility, so far as we can, gives us some possibility of restoring the balance when it goes awry. It is not by accident that so many of our greatest persons have struggled with diseases all their lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Noting the large number of important creative human beings who have had tuberculosis, a physician some years ago wrote a book entitled Tuberculosis and Genius in which he argued that the tubercular bacilli must eject some serum into the blood to produce the genius. This explanation seems to me absurd. It makes much more sense to hold that they way of life of the genius—intensive work, unquenchable enthusiasm, the fire in the brain—puts too much of a strain on the balance, and hence the individual becomes ill as a necessary way of withdrawing into oneself for a times. The struggle between health and illness is part of the source of creativity. Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all suffered severe illness and met in constructively. George Pickering, who suffered from his own osteoarthritic hips as an ally, which he puts to bed when they get painful; and in bed he cannot attend committee meetings or see patients or entertain visitors. However, these the ideal conditions for creative work: freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life. #RandolpHarris 6 of 13

Sometimes when in pain or under the weather, one way to treat it I by becoming aware that you are involved in a fight and to pray for a cure. For ten minutes each day, focusing on your body being healed. That is a way to be conscious of and handle the consciousness of your illness or pain without letting it overcome you. One will be better, but in order to contrive with one’s body, to impose one’s wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will. It is important to devote as much as one can into regulating one’s World, in building the being who you are, and in embellishing one’s life. What am I? Is such an ancient and perennial question only because it has to be answered by each individual for oneself. If one finds the true answer, one will find also that one cannot really transfer it to another person but only its idea, its mental shadow. That too may be valuable to others, but it is not the same. Surely the human race has by this time, by this late century in history found the truth? Why, then, does the mortal who wants it have to make one’s own personal search all over again? It is because one must know it for oneself within oneself. You yourself are your own guru. Be that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

One who seeks the truth about these matters will discover that it is contrary to current opinion, and therefore one will have to discover it by oneself and for oneself. One should verify the truth not by reference to book or bible but by reference to one’s own private experience. There is no room in this school for those who are ready to dispose of life’s problems with secondhand judgment. The need of individual thinking is vital here. Humanity will not be saved in groups or by organizations. It will be saved individual by individual. Being true to oneself brings happiness. Being indifferent to the criticisms of those who misunderstand brings freedom from anxiety on their account. Walking the streets in a spirit of independences, enables us to walk as a billionaire! If they will, let others sacrifice themselves to snobbery; let us be free. Only when the feet rest can we bring the mind to rest—unless we are Attained Ones! We can be devout and dignified but we need not therefore be dull. I do not deny that the drift of several movements which are in the World’s eye today, is toward this idea of greater spirituality. However, whereas they are confined in their search by attachment to a set creed, or a particular philosophy, or even some one person, we propose to pursue an absolutely independent quest—one limited in its width by no qualifications or conditions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

There are not concrete threats against life and well-being, there is not a depressing guilt feeling or a despair about ourselves. There is not a disintegrating doubt or an intolerable emptiness. There is not an extreme situation. Does this mean that there is no desire to ask for a word from the Lord? Are the situations which are not extreme situations, deprived of a word out of the dimension of the eternal? Is God silent if the foundations of our existence are not shaken? A hard question, and answered in many different ways! How would we answer? I shall never forget the word of a wise old man who said to my grandfather when I was still a child, “I need somebody who I can than when a great joy is given to me.” Can we share this experience? Do we remember such moments in which the eternal made itself felt to us through the abundance or greatness or beauty of the temporal? I believe that none of us is completely without such experiences. However, did we not say that a word from the Lord is the eternal cutting into the temporal does not mean negating it. This can mean, and this is does mean whenever we are driven into an ultimate situation. There are in everybody’s life such situations, and they are frequent in mortal’s tragic history. However, the eternal can also cut into the temporal by affirming it, by elevating a piece of it out of the ordinary context of temporal things and events, making it translucent for the Divine glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Without such moments, life would be poor and sad; there would be on creations in which the greatness of life is expressed. However, they exist, and the eternal shines through them; they can become a word from the Lord to us. However, still some of you are thinking: All this may be as you say, but it remains strange to us. Neither in ultimate situations nor in moments of a great elevation has the eternal cut into our temporal existence. We never got a word from the Lord. Maybe you did not hear it. However, certainly it was spoken to you. For there is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The problem of mortals is not that God does not speak to one: God does speak to everyone who has a human countenance. For this is what makes one a human. One who is not able to perceive something ultimate, something infinitely significant, is not a mortal. Mortals are human because one is able to receive a word from the dimension of the eternal. The question is not that humankind has not received any word from the Lord; the question is that it has been received and resisted and distorted. This is the predicament of all of us. Human existence is never without that which breaks vertically into it. Mortals are never without a manifestation of that which is ultimately serious and infinitely meaningful. One is never without a word from the Lord and one never ceases resisting and distorting it, both when one has to hear it and when one has to say it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, should be aware of this: We resist and distort the word from the Lord not only when we hear it, but also when we say it. When we ask why our message of the Word of God is rejected, we often find that one does not reject that for which we stand, but the way in which we stand for it. Many of those who reject the Word of God reject it because the way we say it is utterly meaningless to them. They know the dimension of the eternal, but they cannot accept our names for it. If we cling to their words, we may doubt whether they have received a word from the Lord. If we meet them as persons, we know they have. There is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The Christian Church believes that this word has a central content, and that is has the name Jesus the Christ. Therefore, the Church call not his words but his Being the Word of God. The Church believes that in his Being, the eternal has broken into the temporal in a way which once for all gives us a word, nay, the word from the Lord. It believes that whatever word from the Lord has been said in all history and in every individual life, is implied in this Word, which is not words but reality, a new reality, the reality of the eternal in the temporal, conquering the resistance and the distortions of the temporal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

So we have not a, but the word from the Lord? As Christians we can boast that we have it? Can we really? Did we not receive the message through mortals, and are not we who heard it mortals? And does that not mean that the message, while it went through the mouths of those who said it and through the ears of us who heard it, lost is power to cut into our World and our soul? It is supposed that God will enter the being that ha been freed of I-hood or that at that point one merges into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all selfishness ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that there is no truth in selfishness at all because in truth there is no duality. The first believes in the unification, the second in the identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I and You: for the first this comes to be, perhaps in ecstasy, while for the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the thinking subject beholds its self. Both annul relationship—the first, as it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the soul, which then becomes a united being; the second, as it were statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as the only being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The doctrine of dependence considers the I-supporter of the World-arch of pure relation as so weak and insignificant that one’s ability to support the arch ceases to be credible, while the one doctrine of immersion does away altogether with the arch in its perfection and the other one treats it as a chimera that has to be overcome. The doctrines of immersion invoke the greater epigrams of identification—one of them above all the Johannine “I and the Father are one,” and the other one the doctrine of Sandilya: “The All-embracing is my self in the inner heart.” The paths of these two epigrams are diametrically opposed. The former (after a long subterranean course) had its source in the myth-sized life of a person and then unfolds in a doctrine. The second emerges in a doctrines and culminates (provisionally) in the myth-sized life of a person. On these paths the character of each epigram is changed. The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that has become flesh but once, takes us to Eckhart’s Christ whom God begets eternally in the human soul. The formula of the coronation of the self in the Upanishads—“That is the actual, it is the self, and you are” takes us far more quickly to the Buddhistic formula of deposition: “A self and what pertains to the self are not to be found in truth and actuality.” Beginning and end of both paths have to be considered separately. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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Randolph Harris II International Institute