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

September 23, 2019 12:56 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 19, 2019 2:12 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 18, 2019 12:29 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 31, 2019 1:46 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However Scarce the World May Make this Sense—In Awe One Feels Profoundly the Immense!

August 30, 2019 12:17 am

You simply do not know the flesh. The concept is too complex for you. What do you think taught your souls your souls in Sheol their perfection? Was it not suffering? Yes, they enter perhaps twisted and burnt if they have failed to see beyond suffering on Earth, and some may disappear. But in Sheol, over the centuries of suffering and longing, others are purged and purified. Since we generally think of aggression as being destructive, I shall not need to illustrate this beyond a brief personal example. I was engaged to speak at a conference of the junior executives of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. This conference was part of a six-week training session held on the campus of a New England college and, I assumed, an expression of the humanistic interest of AT&T. I had spoken at such conferences before with gratifying results. However, I found, to my surprise and some bewilderment, that my talk was confronted with strange, invisible barriers. I have always been convinced of the truth of Walt Whiteman’s statement that the “audience makes the speech.” This audience seemed alert and fresh bur, try as I would, I just could not communicate my main ideas. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

At a recess I discovered that, for this part of their training, these young executives (being judged for possible promotion to the few top positions in the corporation) were being trained to be “aggressive,” and that AT&T has retained a couple of professors from college to grade the men and women on how efficiently they could shoot holes in the arguments presented. What I was really facing was not an audience that wanted to learn or even a group present for the pleasures of intellectual stimulation. Its aim was entirely different; the audience was listening not to what I said, but for the errors, the weaknesses in the argument. This was, in short, a sophisticated form of listening geared toward putting down the speaker. The aggression had a weighty competitive reward, namely promotion to high office. This is an example of noncommunication. Such an attitude will successfully inhibit any speaker; you cannot bring forth your ideas unless you feel that they will at least be heard. This does not mean that they will be agreed with; but it does mean that they will be listened to for their own intrinsic merit. If I had known about the purpose of this audience at the outset I could have simply changed the whole theme of my talk to aggression and its purposes and effect; then we would at least have been communicating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Many are wondering, as we speak about communication, how is the mass market formed on which popular culture is sold and perpetuated? In the first place, individual taste has become uneconomic for the purchaser and for the seller, and this effectively stunts its growth. People are prepared accordingly throughout the educational process. Group acceptance, shared taste, takes the place of authority and of individual moral and aesthetic judgment and standards. However, people often move from group to group. Any tastes therefore that cannot be sloughed off—an individual taste, not easily divided from the person in whom it dwells—becomes an obstacle to adaptation. Success is hindered by a discriminating personal taste which expresses or continues an individual personality, and success is fostered by an unselective appetite. Numerous precautions are taken, beginning in nursery school (itself hardly an individualizing institution) to avoid elaboration of personal discernment and to instill fear of separation from the group. Group acceptance is stressed through formal and informal popularity contests, teamwork, and polling. Education altogether stresses group instruction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

For instance, the size of one’s classes and the class average, not the qualities of individual pupils, are often considered the measure of the teacher. The student oneself is so much treated as part of a group that, except in higher education (which is only partly immune), one may be automatically promoted with one’s group regardless of individual achievement or variation. Finally, the surviving individual talent is instructed not to cultivate, but to share, itself. The writer gives a writing course, the scholar lectures and writes popularizations, the beauty models of appears on TV, and the singer deserts the concert hall for the juke box. The aggregate effect of advertising is to bring about wide sharing of tastes. The actual social function of advertising is not to mold tastes in any particular way, nor to debase it. This goes for manufacturers, publishers and movie-makers too. They are quite content to produce and advertise what people want—be it T.S. Eliot or Edgar Guest, Kierkegaard or Norman Vincent Peale, “September Morn” or mobiles. It does not matter what people want to buy as long as they want to buy enough of the same thing to make mas production possible. Advertising helps to unify tastes, to de-individualize it and thus to make mass production possible. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

There is no evidence to support conspiracy theories which hold that wicked capitalists, through advertising and mass media, deliberately (or stupidly) debauch the originally good, natural tastes of the masses. Mass production—capitalist or socialist—demands unified taste; efficiency (or profitableness) is dependent only on its being shared by sizeable groups. Can one say anything about mass tastes beyond saying that they are widely shared? Are they homogenized on the lowest common denominator? There seem to be no good reasons to assume that the lowest tastes are most widespread. One may say something of the sort about some crowds untied temporarily by crude common appetites at the expense of reason, restraint and refinement. However, why consider consumers a crowd? Even the fare offered by the entertainment media is usually consumed by people separately or in very small groups. (Except for movies, but moviegoers are isolated from each other though they are together.) Producers have no interest in lowering tastes or in catering to low rather than high taste. They seek to provide for a modal average of tastes which through advertising they try to make as congruent with the mean average as possible. Neither average can be identical with the lowest common denominator. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Yet in one sense consumers are treated as a crowd: their individual tastes are not catered to. The mass-produced article need not aim low, but it must aim at an average of tastes. In satisfying all (or at least many) individual tastes in some respects, it violates each in other respect. For there are—so far—no average persons having average tastes. Averages are but statistical composites. A mass-produced article, while reflecting nearly everybody’s tastes to some extent, is unlikely to embody anybody’s taste fully. This is one source of the sense of violation which is rationalized vaguely in theories about deliberate debasement of taste. The sense of violation springs from the same thwarting of individuality that makes prostitution (or promiscuity) psychologically offensive. The cost of inexpensive and easy availability, of mass production, is wide appeal; and the cost of wide appeal is de-individualization of the relationship between those who cater and those who are catered to; and of the relationship of both to the object of the transaction. By using each other indiscriminately as impersonal instruments (the seller for profit, the buyer for sensation—or, in promiscuity, both parties for sensation and relief of anxiety) the man or woman of the night and his or her client sacrifice to seemingly more urgent demands the self which, in order to grow, needs continuity, discrimination and completeness in relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Though profit and sensation can be achieved by depersonalization, the satisfaction ultimately sought cannot be, for the very part of personality in which it is felt—the individual self—is stunted and atrophied, at least if de-individualization continues long enough and is comprehensive. Ultimately, the sense of violation too is numbered. Now, the depersonalizing effects of the mass production of some things—say, electric clocks—may be minor as far as consumers are concerned and more than offset by the advantages of affordability. The same cannot be said for mass entertainment or education. And though some individuals may, society cannot have one without the other. The effects of mass production on people as producers and consumers are likely to be cumulative. Besides, even goods that seem purely utilitarian include elements of non-utilitarian, of aesthetic and psychic (for instance, prestige) appeal. Indeed, less than half of consumer expenditure goes for the satisfaction of simple biological needs. (More, perhaps, in the lowest income groups, and much less still in the higher ones.) One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. Whatever helps consciousness come nearer to high moods is a useful spiritual path to someone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Distinctions of this kind are necessarily hazy, but if cigarettes, newspapers, television, drinks, shaving lotion or lipstick, the prestige location of one’s Cresleigh Home, the fashionableness of one’s clothing, and so forth, are taken to satisfy nonbiological needs—and we can do without them biologically—then we are motivated by psychic needs in spending most of our money. This, of course, is not in itself objectionable—except that the processes by which many of these needs now arise and are stilled bring to mind the processes by which bread is now mass produced. In milling and baking, bread is deprived of any taste whatever and of all vitamins. Some of the vitamins are then added again (taste is provided by advertising). Quite similarly with all mass-produced articles. They can no more express the individual tastes of producers than that of consumers. They become impersonal objects, however pseudo-personalized. Producers and consumers go through the mass production mill to come out homogenized and de-characterized—only it does not seem possible to reinject the individualities which have been ground out, the way the vitamins are added to enrich bread. The human relations industry tried to do just that and it doubtlessly supplies a demand and can be helpful, just as chemical sedatives or stimulants can be. However, it seems unlikely that any assembly line—including manned by human relations counselors—can give more than the illusion of individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

To produce more, people work under de-individualizing conditions and are rewarded by high income and leisure. Thus they can and do consume more. However, as consumers, they must once more rid themselves of individual tastes. The benefits of mass production are reaped only by matching de-individualizing work with equally de-individualizing consumption. The more discontinuous income earning and spending become physically, the more continuous they seem to become psychologically. Failure to repress individual personality in or after working hours is costly; in the end the production of standardized things by persons demands also the production of standardized persons. This intellectual preparation and emotional purification is a task that strains being’s faculties to the extreme. Nobody therefore need expect it to be other than a lifetime’s task. Few even succeed in finishing it in a single lifetime—a whole series is required in most cases. Nature has taken a very long time to bring beings to one’s present state, so she is in no hurry to complete their development in any particular reincarnation. Yet such is the mystery of grace, that this is always a grand possibility, always the sublime X-factor in every case. However, the individual aspirant cannot afford to gamble with this chance, which, after all, is a rare one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

One must rely on one’s personal efforts, on one’s own strivings, more than anything else, to being one nearer to the desired goal. In a material sense, this assembly-line shaping, packaging and distributing of persons, of life, occurs already. Most people perch unsteadily in mass-produced, impermanent dwellings throughout their lives. They are born in hospitals, fed in cafeterias, married in churches or castles or mansions or rose gardens. After terminal care they perish in hospitals, are shelved briefly in funeral homes, and are finally incinerated or put in the ground. On each of these occasions—how many others?—efficiency and economy are obtained and individuality and continuity stripped off. If one lives and dies discontinuously and promiscuously in anonymous surroundings, it becomes hard to identify with anything even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything even one’s own individuality. The rhythm of individual life loses autonomy, spontaneity, and distinction when it is tired into a stream of traffic and carried along according to the speed of the road, as we are, in going to work, or play, or in doing anything. Traffic lights signal when to stop and go, and much as we seem to be driving we are driven. To stop spontaneously, to exclaim, Verweile doch Du bist so schoen (Stay, for you are beautiful), may not lose the modern Faust his soul—but it will cause a traffic jam. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The egoism which falsifies our true sense of being and the materialism which distorts our true sense of reality are maladies which can hardly be cured by our own efforts. Only by calling, in trust and love, on a higher power, whether it be embodied in another man or in ourself, can their mesmeric spell ultimately be broken. Yet it is our own efforts which first must initiate the cure. Turning inward upon oneself might be retiring to a fool’s paradise or into a real one. To make progress inwardly is ultimately all that matters, everything else passes except the fruit of our spiritual efforts. Mysticism is the theory and practice of a technique whereby a being seeks to establish direct personal contact with spiritual being. The ideal here may not set at becoming a sinless saint but at becoming an enlightened and balanced human being. The ultimate point to be attained is fully humanity. One alone who has developed on all sides in this way is fully human. It is one sign of the sage who lives in perfect detachment that one does not miss an enjoyable experience which has passed away, and another sign that one is not afraid of this passing while one is enjoying it. What happened in all those earlier years is now veiled history to the enlightened being; what happens now, in the Eternal Now, is the important significant matter. Thus one’s mind is free from old burdens and errors. Yet, if needed, dead events can be resuscitated by intense concentration. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The background of one’s mind is far away from everyday consciousness as if invisible, but it can spring instantly forward if needed. There is no split between higher and lower mind: they are in harmony but the kind of activity is different. It would not be correct to say that one’s consciousness splits itself into two. The proficient can mentally turn inside from the busyness of one’s environment and within a few moments find the divine presence there. One part of one can enter frequently into cerebral thinking but another part can drop out of this into celestial experience. Our work remains active in the foreground of consciousness, while our wisdom remains in the background as its inspirer. One moves in the World of bodily senses and their surrounding objects without losing the Presence, being held by it rather than holding on to it. Primitive society was organized for a certain kind of production of life, a ritual technique of manufacture of the things of the World that used the dimension of the invisible. Beings used their ingenuity to fill one’s stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of one’s organism; this is only logical and natural. However, this stomach-centered characteristic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

One reason is that beings were never content to just stop at food: they wanted more in life in the widest sense of the term—exactly what we would expect an organism to want if it could somehow contrive to be self-conscious about life and death and the need to continue experiencing. Food is only one part of that quest; being quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify for immortality. In this way the simple food quest was transmuted into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity. All of being’s higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power. All morality is fundamentally a matter of power, of the power of organisms to continue existing by reaching for a superhuman purity. It is all right for a being to talk about spiritual aims; what one really means is aims for merits that qualify one for eternity. This too, of course, is the logical development of organismic ambitions. Thus the sacrificial lamb is no longer the young of an ewe slaughtered at the Paschal Feast as the embodiment of some god in order to promote the life of the crops, but a symbol expressing a sum of innocence, purity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, redemption and divinity. Doubtless many will be scandalized at any attempt to derive the cure of souls for the cravings of the stomach. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even so the rising generation may find cause not for anger, but for wonder, in the rapidity with which beings, so late emerged from the brute, has proceeded from the conquest of matter to that of the spirit. No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual emotions that beings are capable of. As a creature one is most attuned to the living miracle of the cosmos and responds to that miracle with a fineness and a nobility that are in themselves wondrous; the whole thing is surely part of a divine mystery. However, the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as some would seem to make it out. The earning of spiritual points is the initial impetus of the search for purity, however much some few noble souls might transmute that in an unselfish direction. For most beings faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organism stomach project. Many people what is going on in the mind that ideas they were pondering should break through at a sudden moment. Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me, incontestable, and traces of it can be found in other cases where it is less evident. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness. The appearance of the illumination is not due to the relief from fatigue—for instance, simply taking a rest. It is more probably that this rest has been filled out wit unconscious work and that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself to the geometer or someone seriously considering the solution to a problem. Only the revelation, instead of coming during a walk or a journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form. When it comes to the conditions of unconscious work, it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never happen expect after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing. The aspirant’s decision to aim for the highest Goal is the governing factor: if one sticks to this decision, one is bound to succeed sooner or later. The question now arises: What is this Goal? It is the fulfilment of the Real Purpose of life, as apart from the lower purposes of earning a livelihood, rearing a family, and so forth. The aspirant will become fully Self-conscious—as aware of the divine Overself as one now is of one’s Earthly body. And this achievement will be perpetual, not just a matter of occasional glimpse or fleeting intuitions. Even though the Quest has become more difficult under modern conditions, it has not become impossible. The timeworn means t this end must simply be brought up to date. What are the means? They are thought, feeling, will, and intuition used in a special way. This constitutes the fourfold path, or Quest. “And now, behold, my joy is great, even unto fulness, because of you, and also this generation; yea, and even the Father rejoiceth, and also the holy Angels, because of you and this generation; for none of them are lost,” reports 3 Nephi 30. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

August 29, 2019 12:46 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 28, 2019 1:39 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My First Act of Free Will Shall be to Believe in Free Will

August 23, 2019 12:38 am

My courtyard banana trees had not been touched by a heatwave this Summer, and grew thick and drowsing as ever against the stucco walls. The wild impatients and lantana were glowing in the overgrown beds, and the fountain, the fountain with its cherub, was making its crystalline music as the water splashed from the cherub’s horn into the basin. And the flowers introduced a profusion of colors which had never been before in nature, expect in the rainbow! Colors we had known in Heaven and thought to be purely celestial and now we saw they were in this beautiful community. Trees rose in their mature fullness; rain came in whispering gusts, full of fragrance. They sky warmed and colors everywhere expanded or deepened. These souls took the invisible fabric of Heaven, whatever it is—energy, essence, the light of God, the Creative Power of God—and in a twinkling surrounded us all with wonderous constructions representing their curiosity, their concepts of beauty and their desires! What was going on at the moment when this breakthrough occurred? Taking this experience of mine as a start, we noticed, first of all, that the insight broke into my conscious mind against what I had been really trying to think rationally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

I had a good, sound thesis and I had been working very hard trying to prove it. The unconscious, so to speak, broke through in opposition to the conscious belief to which I was clinging. There is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness. The relationship is compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality. The compensation also works on specific problems: if I consciously bend too far one way on some issues, my unconscious will lean the other way. This is, of course, the reason why the more we are unconsciously smitten with doubt about an idea, the more strict and rigidly we fight for it in our conscious argument. This is also why persons as different as Saint Paul on the Damascus road and the alcoholic in the Bowery go through such radical conversions—the repressed unconscious side of the dialectic erupts and takes over the personality. The unconscious seems to take delight (if I may so express it) in breaking through—and breaking up—exactly what we cling to most rigidly in our conscious thinking. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

What occurs in this breakthrough is not simply growth; it is much more dynamic. It is not a mere expansion of awareness; it is rather a kind of battle. A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what one consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision. The guilt that is present when this breakthrough occurs has its source in the fact that the insight must destroy something. My insight destroyed my other hypothesis and would destroy what a number of my professors believed, a fact that caused me some concern. Whenever there is a breakthrough of a significant idea in science or a significant new form in art, the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual and spiritual World. This is the source of guilt in genuine creative work. As Picasso remarked, “Every act of creation is first of all an action of destruction.” The breakthrough carried with it also an element of anxiety. For it not only broke down my previous hypothesis, it shook my self-World relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

At such a time I find myself having to seek a new foundation, the existence of which I as yet do not know. This is the source of the anxious feeling that comes at the moment of the breakthrough; it is not possible that there be a genuinely new idea without this shake up occurring to some degree. However, beyond guilt and anxiety, as I said above, the main feeling that comes with the breakthrough is one of gratification. We have seen something new. We have the joy of participating in what the physicists and other natural scientists call an experience of elegance. When the Universe itself runs down and disintegrates given enough time, how can this little and limited being of a person hope to preserve one’s personal consciousness, one’s personality, one’s character just as it is today? Any belief fostered by any kind of authority—religious or metaphysical or any other—which fosters this illusion is a false one. However, this said, let it be counted by that other truth which is needed to complete the thought. If the individualized being must one day part with its limited consciousness, this is only in order to return to its origin in the universal consciousness, for consciousness cannot come out of nothing. It came from and goes back to the universal mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Therefore, if a being loses the little and temporary immortality of the ego, it will only be to gain the greater and true immortality of that mind. The higher individuality is preserved, but the lower personality, with its miserable limitations, is not. The difference between the individual and the universal self persists throughout the incarnations and no mystical emotionalism or metaphysical jugglery can end it. It will end indeed not by the individual transforming oneself into the greater being but by one’s merging oneself into it, that is, by the disappearance of one’s separate consciousness in the pure essence of all consciousness. However, it need not so end unless one wants it. Even if we should surrender it to God, there is no reason why we should not preserve own individuality. When the higher self encloses and absorbs the ego, the goal is achieved. Through one has been caught up into something immensely great than oneself, one still remains an individual—albeit a loosely held one. One’s further life will be a record of discovery rather than speculation, of insights rather than intellections. What will happen to one’s environment after illumination? Nothing. It will not be miraculously transformed so that one sees auras, ghost, and atoms mixed up with its ordinary appearance. It will still look as it did before. The grass will have the same shapes and colour. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

However, the question of inequality has not yet been answered. For now we must ask—why do some of us receive more than others in the very beginning, before using or wasting our talents is even possible? Why does the one servant receive five talents, and the second, two, and the third, one? Why is one person born to desperate less affluence, and another to affluence? To reply that much will be demanded of those to whom much is given, and little of those to whom little is given, is not adequate. For it is just this original inequality, internal and external, that gives rise to the question. Why is the power to gain so much more out of one’s being human given to one human being rather than to another? Why is so much given to one that much can be asked of one, while little can be asked of another, because little was given one? If we consider this problem in relation not only to individual beings, but also to classes, races, and nations, the question of political inequality also arises, and with it the many ways in which beings have tried to abolish inequality. In every revolution and way, the will to solve the riddle of inequality is a driving force. However, neither war nor revolution can answer it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

And even though we may imagine that most social inequalities will be conquered in the future, there remain three realities: the inequality of talents in body and mind, the inequality created by freedom and destiny, and the inequality of justice deriving from the fact that all generations before the time of such equality would by nature be excluded from its blessings. This last would be the greatest inequality possible! No! In the face of one of the deepest and most tormenting problems of life, we cannot permit ourselves to be so shallow or foolish as to try to escae into a social dreamland. We have to live now. We have to live this life. We must face the riddle of inequality today. Let us not confuse the riddle of inequality with the fact that each of us is a unique and incomparable self. Our being individual certainly belongs to our dignity as beings. This being was given to us, and must be made use of an intensified, not drowned in the gray waters of conformity that threaten us so much today. One should defend every individuality and the uniqueness of every human self. However, one should not be deluded into believing that this is a solution to the riddle of inequality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Unfortunately, there are social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion in order to justify social injustice. They are at least as foolish as those who dream of the future abolition of inequality. One who has witnessed hospitals for the ill and insane, prisons, sweat shops, battlefields, people starving, family tragedies, or moral aberrations should be cured of any confusion of the gift of individuality with the riddle of inequality. One should be cured of any sense of easy consolation. If any teacher or organization asks you to swear ceremoniously that you will not reveal to others what you are taught, be sure that you will receive inferior occultism, not philosophic truth. For the truth hides itself from the unready: it does not have to be hidden from them. Do not confuse the necessary secrecy of philosophic presentation with the portentous secrecy of charlatanic cults. It is not necessary to call meetings or to organize societies in order to propagate truth. There is no crowd salvation, no communal redemption. The monasteries and ashrams, the organizations and societies, the institutions and temples have their place and use. However, the one is very elementary and the other is very limited. Whatever is most worthwhile to, and in, a being must come forth from one’s own individual endeavour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Society improves only as, and when, its members improve. This is strikingly shown by the moral failure of some states with dictatorships, and by the half-failure of established religions. Most institutions and organizations have developed in time the fault of an egocentrism which cases them to lose sight of their original higher purpose, and so they join the list of additions to societies which have a mixed selfish and idealistic character. Too many spiritual organizations exist mainly to serve those who create or staff them. When those who direct the affairs of an institution become more concerned about the state of its revenue than about its state of spirituality, when they are more affected by its increasing financial returns than about its increasing materiality, it is time to pick up one’s hat and stick and bid it farewell. Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substances, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The death instinct is directed against the organism itself and this is a self-destructive drive, or it is directed outward, and in this case tends to destroy others rather than oneself. When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. Even though Dr. Freud suggested at various times that the power of the death instinct can be reduced, the basic assumption remained: beings were under the sway of an impulse to destroy either oneself or others, and one could do little to escape this tragic alternative. It follows that, from the position of the death instinct, aggression was not essentially a reaction to stimuli but a constantly following impulse rooted in the constitution of the human organism. The death instinct is a biological force in all living organisms: this should mean that animals, too, express their death instinct either against themselves or against others. Hence one should find more illness or early death in less outwardly aggressive animals and vice versa; but, of course, there are no data supporting this idea. Yet, there is a dualistic concept in which two basic forces are opposed to each other. This dichotomy was at first that between self-preservation and libido, and later that between life and death instincts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

There is a vastness and the precariousness of existing fully and the courage required to preserve in the face of ill health and depression. The organism has a great stake in blowing itself up in size, importance, and durability. Because only if we understand how natural this motive is can we understand how it is only in society tat beings can get the symbolic measures for the degrees of one’s importance, one’s qualification for extradurability. And it is only by contrasting and comparing oneself to like organism, to one’s fellow being, that one can judge if one has some extra claim to importance. Obviously it is not very convincing about one’s ultimate worth to be better than a lobster, or even a fox; but to outshine that fellow sitting over there, the one with the black eyes—now that is something that carries the conviction of ultimacy. The faces beings carry the highest meaning to other beings. Once we understand this, we can see further why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that includes straight men for joking relationships and talented rivals with whom to contend for social honor in games, feats of strength, hunting and warfare. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Sociologist have very nicely described the dynamics of status forcing and similar types of behavior, in which people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in, by playing intricate games of one-upmanship. However, you cannot force your status vis-à-vis someone else unless there is a someone else and there are rules for status and verbal conventions for playing around with status, for coming out of social groups with increases self-inflation. Society almost everywhere provides codes for such self-aggrandizement, for the ability to boast, to humiliate, or just simply to outshine in quiet ways—like displaying one’s superior achievements, even if it is only skill in hunting that feeds everyone’s stomach. A being cannot impart life to oneself but must get it via ritual from one’s fellow being, then we can say even further that beings cannot impart importance to oneself; and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing life: importance equals durability equals life. However, I do not want to seem to be making out that primitive society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self-aggrandizement, or that beings can only expand their sense of self at the expense of others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

This would not be true, even though it is a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. Primitive society also expressed its genius by giving to people much less invidious and competitive forms of self-expansion. People impart to one another the daily sense of importance that each needs, not with rivalry and boasting, but rather with elaborate rules for protecting their insides against social damage and deflation. People do this in their interpersonal encounters by using verbal formulas that express proper courtesies, permit gentle handling, save the other’s face with the proper subtleties when self-esteem is in danger, and so on. Social life is interwoven with salutations foe greeting and taking leave, for acknowledging others with short, standardized conversations which reinforce the sense of well-being of all the members. Beings in society manage to give each other what they need in terms of good organismic self-feeling in two major ways: on one hand, by codes that allow people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outside rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender human feelings that prevent the undermining and deflation that can result from the clash of organismic ambitions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

However, now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature worked—how well it served the actors who played the parts. We can really only get inside primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to pay in the generative rituals. We have so long been stripped of a ritual role to play in creation that we have to force ourselves to try to understand this, to get this into perspective. We do not know what it means to contribute a dance, a chant, or a spell in a community dramatization of the forces of nature—unless we belong to an active religious community. Nr can we feel the immense sense of achievement that follows from such a ritual contribution: the ritualist has done nothing less than enable life to continue; one has contributed to sustaining and renewing the Universe. If rituals generate and redistribute life power, then each person is a generator of life. That is how important a person could feel, within the ritualist view of nature, by occupying a ritual place in a community. Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think that the ritual generation of brown kangaroos is a valid casual affair, but the primitive feels the effect of one’s ability to generate life, one is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

We may console ourselves about our historical demotion from the status of cosmic heroism by saying that at least we know what true religion is, whereas these cosmic creators lived according to immature magic. I will admit that our historical disenchantment is a burden that gives us a certain sober Worldliness, but there is no valid difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books are written to support the distinction. Magic is religion we do not believe in, and religion is magic we believe in. Voila tout. A school should exist not only to teach but also to investigate, not to formulate prematurely a finalized system but to remain creative, to go on testing theories by applying them and validating ideas by experience. The formation of a society of seekers may have a social value but it has little instructional value, for it merely pools their common ignorance. The justification of a society educationally is its possession of a competent teacher—competent because one’s instruction possess intellectual clarity and one’s knowledge possesses justifiable certitude. “I will not show unto the wicked of my strength, to one more than the other, save it be unto those who repent of their sins, and hearken unto my words,” reports Helaman 7.23. The mind passes through a stage, when seeking after truth, it finds out that the World is other than it seems to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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

August 21, 2019 1:44 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 14, 2019 10:32 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: children

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