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Good Health Generally Means the Ability to Resolve Contradictions—It is a Synthesis Like Breathing!

August 6, 2019 12:14 am

God created the Universe and Time. Well, we were astonished, and we were also enthralled! Absolutely enthralled. God said to us, “Watch this, because this will be beautiful and will exceed your conceptions and expectations, as it will Mine.” It is all garbled, in countless texts throughout the World. There are texts which are irretrievable now which contained amazingly accurate information about cosmology; and there are texts that mortals know; and there are texts that have been forgotten but which can be rediscovered in time. “And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone,” reports Matthew 14.23. He was there alone. So are we. Beings are alone because they are mortal! In some way every creature is alone. In majestic isolation every star travels through the darkness of endless space. Each tree grows according to its own law, fulfilling its unique possibilities. Animals live, fight, and die for themselves alone, confined to the limitations of their bodies. Certainly, they also appear as male and female, in families and in flocks. Some of them are gregarious. However, all of them are alone! Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

This is true of every creature, and it is more true of humans than any other creature. One is not only alone; one also knows that one is alone. Aware of what one is, one asks the question of one’s aloneness. One asks why one is alone, and how one can triumph over one’s being alone. For this aloneness one cannot endure. Neither can one escape it. It is one’s destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from one. In the story of paradise we read—“Then the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone.” And as we pondered, as we opened our arms and sang and tried to comfort them, while stepping invisibly and artfully through the material of Earth, something momentous made itself known to us, shocking us out of our explorations. Before our very eyes, the Twelfth Revelation of Physical Evolution was upon us! It struck us like the light from Heaven; it distracted us from the cries of the covert invisible! It shattered our reason. It caused our songs to become laughter and wails. The Twelfth Revelation of Evolution was that of the female of the human species had begun to look more distinctly different from the male of the human species by margin so great that no other anthropoid could compare! #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

The female grew pretty in our eyes, and seductive; the hair left her face, and her limbs grew graceful; her manner transcended the necessities of survival; and she became beautiful as flowers are beautiful, as the wings of birds are beautiful! What had risen, a female tender-skinned and radiant of face. And God created the woman from the body of Adam. Here an old myth is used to show that originally there was no bodily separation between man and woman; in the beginning they were one. Now they long to be one again. However, although they recognize each other as flesh of their own flesh, each remains alone. They look at each other, and despite their longing for each other, they see their strangeness. In the story, God himself makes them aware of this fact when he speaks to each of them separately, when he makes each one responsible for one’s own guilt, when he listens to their excuses and mutual accusations, when he pronounces a separate curse over each, and leave them to experience shame in the face of their nakedness. They are each alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The creation of the woman has not overcome the situation which God describes as not good for man. He remains alone. And the creation of the woman, although it provides a helper for Adam, has only presented to the one human being who is alone another human being who is equally alone, and from their flesh all other beings, each of whom will stand alone. We ask, however—is this really so? Did not God accomplish something better? Is not our aloneness largely removed in the encounter of the genders? Certainly it is during hours of communion and in moments of love. The ecstasy of love can absorb one’s own self in its union with the other self, and separation seems to be overcome. However, after these moments, the isolation of self from self is felt even more deeply than before, sometimes ever to the point of mutual repulsion. We have given too much of ourselves, and now we long to take back what was given. Our desire to protect our aloneness is expressed in the feeling of shame. When our intimate self, mental or bodily is opened, we feel ashamed. We try to cover our vulnerability, as did Adam and Eve when they became conscious of themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other’s innermost center. And if this were not so, they could not be helpers to each other’ they could not have human community. This is why God himself cannot liberate mortals from their aloneness: it is human’s greatness that one is centered within one’s own being. Separated from one’s World, one is thus able to look at it. Only because one can look at it can one know and love and transform it. God, in creating one the ruler of the Earth, had to separate one and thrust one into aloneness. Humans are also therefore able to be spoken to by God and by other beings. One can ask questions and give answers and make decisions. One has the freedom for good or evil. Only one who has an impenetrable center in oneself is free. Only one who is alone can claim to be a human. This is the greatness and this is he burden of being. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” From this primal decree millions of human beings are now liberated. More and more beings have more and more leisure. The working day grows shorter, the week end longer. More and more women are released at an earlier age from the heavier tasks of the rearing of children, in the small family of today, when kindergarten and school and clinic and restaurant come to their assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

More and more people are freed for other things, released from the exhaustion of their energies in the mere satisfaction of elementary wants. No longer is the pattern so simple as that of Longfellow’s blacksmith, who something attempted, something done, had earned a night’s repose. Released from what? When necessity no longer drives, when people own long hors in which to do what they want, what do they want to do? Where necessity is heavy upon beings, they yearn for the joys of leisure. Now many have enough leisure. What are the joy they find? The shorter working day is also a different working day. Nearly all people work for others, not for themselves—not the way a person works who has one’s own little plot of Earth and must give oneself up to its cultivation. For many, work has become a routine—not too onerous, not too rewarding, and by no means engrossing—a daily routine until the bell rings and sets them free again. For what? It is a marvelous liberation for those who learn to use it; and there are many ways. It is the great emptiness for those who do not. People of a placid disposition do not know the great emptiness. When the day’s work done, they betake themselves to their quiet interests, their hobbies, their gardens or their amateur workbenches or their stamp collecting or their games or their affairs or their church activities or whatever it be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

When they need more sting in life, they have a mild “fling,” taking a little “moral holiday.” Some find indulgence enough in the vicarious pleasure of snidely malicious gossip. Their habits are early formed and they keep a modicum of contentment. However, the number of the placid is growing less. The conditions of our civilization do not encourage that mood. For one thing, the old-time acceptance of authority, as God-given or nature-based, is much less common. Religion is for very many an ancient tale, a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong, reduced to ritual or the moral precepts of the Sunday pulpit. There is little allegiance to the doctrine that every being has allotted place. How could there be when competition has become a law of life? There is incessant movement and disturbance and upheaval. And with the new leisure there come new excitations, new stimuli to unrest. So the new leisure has brought its seeming opposite, restlessness. And because these cannot be reconciled the great emptiness comes. Faced with the great emptiness, unprepared to meet it, most people resort to one or another way of escape, according to their kind. Those who are less conscious of their need succeed in concealing it from themselves. They find their satisfaction in the great new World of means without ends. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Those who are more conscious of their need cannot conceal it; they only distract themselves from the thought of it. Their common recourse is excitation, and they seek it in diverse ways. The first kind are the go-getters. When they are efficient or unscrupulous or both, they rise in the World. They amass things. They make some money. They win some place and power. Not for anything, not to do anything with it. Their values are relative, which means they are no values at all. They make money to make more money. They win some power that enables them to seek more power. They are practical beings. They keep right on being practical, until their unlived lives are at an end. If they stopped being practical, the great emptiness would engulf them. They are like planes that must keep on flying because they have no landing gear. The engines go fast and faster, but they are going nowhere. They make good progress to nothingness. They take pride in their progress. They are outdistancing other beings. They are always calculating the distance they have gained. It shows what can be done when you have the know-how. They feel superior and that sustains them. They stay assured in the World of means. What matters is winning. “But what good cam of it at last?” Ouoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ’twas a famous victory.” Victory for the sake of the winning, means for the sake of the acquiring, that is success. So the circle spins forever means without end, World without end. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

One will find that the onset of insight will not be at all like the picture of it which one had previously and erroneously formed. When one awakens to truth as it really is, one will have no occult vision, one will have no astral experience, no ravishing ecstasy. One will awaken to it in a state of utter stillness, and one will realize that truth was always there within one and that reality was always there around one. Truth is not something which has grown and developed through your efforts. It is not something which has been achieved or attained by laboriously adding up those efforts. It is not something which has to be made more and more perfect each year. And once your mental eyes are opened to truth they can never be closed again. The discovery of one’s true being is not outwardly dramatic, and for a long time no one may know of it, except oneself. The World may not honour one for it: one may die as obscure as one lived. However, the purpose of one’s life has been fulfilled; and God’s will has been done. There is nothing melodramatic about realization of Truth. Those who look for marvels look in vain, unless indeed its bestowal of singular serenity is a marvel. No one really knows ho this enlightenment first dawns on one. One moment it was not there, the next moment one was somehow in it. No announcements tell the World that one has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming being’s greatest victory—over oneself. This is in fact the quietest moment of one’s whole life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

To find out that one’s way does lie through cults, in the hope of finding one to suit one, ventures into a danger-beset field, where lunacy is often mistaken for illumination and where exaggerated claims substitute for solid facts. The desire for power over others, for authority, is a form of personal ambition which has, in the past, mixed easily with a spiritual glimpse. A new sect, a new movement, has then come to birth. The seeker after truth who comes in contact with it would be far safer to take some of the teaching without sacrificing one’s freedom, without joining the group. If any work, institution, or organization is centered in the Overself it cannot fall into the base, negative, or selfish currents which, in the historic past, have polluted, poisoned, and sometimes destroyed so many tasks and enterprises. The fears which repression serves to overcome may also be overcome by keeping the hostility under conscious control. However, whether one controls or represses hostility is not a matter of choice, because repression is a reflex-like process. It occurs if in a particular situation it is unbearable to be aware that one is hostile. In such a case, of course, there is no possibility of conscious control. The main reasons why awareness of hostility may be unbearable are that one may love or need a person at the same time that one is hostile toward one, that one may not want to see the reasons, such as envy or possessiveness, which have promoted the hostility or, that it may be frightening to recognize within one’s self hostility toward anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

In such circumstances repression is the shortest and quickest way toward an immediate reassurance. By repression the frightening hostility disappears from awareness, or is kept from entering awareness. I should like to repeat this sentence in other words, because for all its simplicity it is one of those psychoanalytic statements which is but rarely understood: if hostility is repressed the person has not the remotest idea that one is hostile. The quickest way toward a reassurance, however, is not necessarily the safest way in the long run. By the process of repression the hostility—or to indicate its dynamic character we had better use here the term rage—is removed from conscious awareness but is not abolished. Split off from the context of the individual’s personality, and hence beyond control, it revolves within one as an affect which is highly explosive and eruptive, and therefore tends to be discharged. The explosiveness of the repressed affect is all the greater because by its very isolation it assumes larger and often fantastic dimensions. As long as one is aware of animosity its expansion is restricted in a few different ways. First, consideration of the circumstances as they are in a given situation shows one what one can and what one cannot do toward an enemy or alleged enemy. Second, if the anger concerns one whom one otherwise admires or likes or needs, the anger will sooner or later become integrated into the totality of one’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Finally, inasmuch as a being has developed a certain sense of what is appropriate to do or not to do, personality being as it is, this too will restrict one’s hostile impulses. If the anger is repressed, then access to these restricting possibilities is cut off, with the result that the hostile impulses trespass the restrictions from inside and outside, though only in fantasy. If the chemist I mentioned yesterday had followed his impulses he would have wanted to tell others how Kirk had abused his friendship, or to intimate to his superior that Kirk had stolen his idea or kept him from pursuing it. Since his anger was repressed it became dissociated and expanded, as would probably have shown in his dreams; it is likely that in his dream he committed murder in some symbolic form, or became an admired genius, while others went disgracefully to pieces. By its very dissociation the repressed hostility will in the course of time usually because intensified from outside sources. For instance, if a high employee has developed an anger toward his chief, because the chief had made arrangements without discussing them with him, and if the employee represses his anger, never remonstrating against the procedure, the superior will certainly keep on acting over his head. Thereby new anger is constantly generated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The neurotic attitude calls forth a reaction of the environment, by which the attitude itself is reinforced, with the result that the person is more and more caught, and greater and greater difficulty escaping. This phenomenon is called Teufelskreia. Another consequence of repressing hostility arises from the fact that a person registers within oneself the existence of a highly explosive affect which is beyond control. Before discussing the consequences of this we have to consider a question which it suggests. By definition the result of repressing an affect or an impulse is that the individual is no longer aware of its existence, so that in one’s conscious mind ones does not know that one has any hostile feelings toward another. How then can I say that one registers the existence of the repressed affect within oneself? The answer is possessed in the fact that there is no strict alternative between consciousness and unconscious, but that there are several levels of consciousness. Not only is the repressed impulse still effective—one of the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud—but also in a deeper level of consciousness the individual knows about its presence. Reduced to the most simple terms possible this means that fundamentally we cannot fool ourselves, that actually we observe ourselves better than we are aware of doing, just as we usually observe others better than we are aware of doing—as shown, for example, in the correctness of the first impression we ger from a person—but we may have stringent reasons for not taking cognizance of our observations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

For the sake of saving repetitive explanations I shall use the term register when I mean that we know what is going on within us without our being aware of it. These consequences of repressing hostility may themselves be sufficient to create anxiety, provided always that the hostility and its potential danger to other interests are sufficiently great. States of vague anxiety may be built in this way. More often, however, the process does not come to a standstill at this point, because there is an imperative need to get rid of the dangerous affect which from within menaces one’s interest and security. A second reflex-like process sets in: the individual projects one’s hostile impulses to the outside World. The first pretense, the repression, requires a second one: one pretends that the destructive impulses come not from one but from someone or something outside. Logically the person on whom one’s own hostile impulses will be projected is the person against whom they are directed. The result is that this person now assumes formidable proportions in one’s mind, partly because in any danger the degree of potency depends not only on the factual conditions but also on the attitude taken toward them. The more defenseless one is the greater the danger appears. The anxiety with which we react to a danger does not depend mechanically on the realistic greatness of the danger. An individual who has developed mechanically an attitude of helplessness and passivity will react with anxiety to a comparatively small danger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

As by-function the projection also serves the need for self-justification. It is not the individual oneself who wants to cheat, to steal, to exploit, to humiliate, but the others want to do such things to one. A wife who is unaware of her own impulses to ruin her husband and subjectively convince ed that she is most devoted may, because of this mechanism, consider her husband to be a brute wanting to harm her. The process of projection may or may not be supported by another process working to the same end: a retaliation fear may get hold of the repressed impulse. In this case a person who wants to injure, cheat, deceive others has also a fear that they will do the dame to him. How far the retaliation fear is a general characteristic ingrained in human nature, how far it arises from primitive experiences of sin and punishment, how far it presupposes a drive for personal revenge, I leave as an open question. Beyond doubt it plays a great role in the minds of neurotic person. These processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from outside. “Tell them to fear not, for God will deliver them, yea, and also all those who stand fast in that liberty wherewith God hath made them free,” Alma 6.21. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Get thee Behind Me, Satan! God Moves the World Only by Love—For Thine is the Power and the Glory Forever!

July 30, 2019 11:38 pm

We have souls, you and I. We want to know things; we share the same Earth, rich and verdant and fraught with perils. We do not—either of us—know what it means to die, no matter what we might say to the contrary. It is a cinch that if we did, we would not study history and religion. In the early nineties of the twentieth century, Italian fashion had flooded the market with so much shapeless, hangy, bulky, formless attire that one of the most erotic and flattering garments a man could choose was the well-tailored navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit. Remember we talked about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed thing you should not have seen? I had the same experience. And I thought, not many mortals would like to go prowling about this dark building, and the place is not entirely spiritually clean. Little spirits, elementals. Well, there are some gathered about this building, but they are no threat. God and the Devil are arguing about me. And now I have a sleepless mind in my heart because my teacher has a dangerous emotional grip to her lectures. The bureaucrat’s official life is planned for one in terms of a graded career, through the organizational devices of promotion by seniority, pension, incremental salaries, and so forth, all of which are designed to provide incentives for disciplined action and conformity to the official regulations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The official is tacitly expected to and largely does adapt one’s thoughts, feelings and action to the prospect of this career and the benefits that come with it. However, these very devices which increase the probability of conformance also lead to an over-concern with strict adherence to regulations which induces timidity, conservatism, and technicism. Displacement of sentiments from goals onto means is fostered by the tremendous symbolic significance of the means (rules). Another feature of the bureaucratic structure tends to produce much the same result. Functionaries have the sense of a common destiny for all those who work together. They share the same interests, especially since there is relatively little competition insofar as promotion is in terms of seniority. In-group aggression is thus minimized and this arrangement is therefore conceived to be absolutely functional for the bureaucracy. However, the esprit de corps and informal social organization which typically develops in such situations often leads the personnel to defend their entrenched interests rather than to assist their clientele and elected higher officials. If the bureaucrats believe that their status is not adequately recognized by an incoming elected official, detailed information will be withheld from one, leading one to errors for which one is held responsible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Or, if one seeks to dominate fully, and this violates the sentiment of self-integrity of the bureaucrats, one may have documents brought to one in such numbers that one cannot manage to sign them all, let alone read them. This illustrates the defensive informal organization which tends to arise whenever there is an apparent threat to the integrity of the group. It would be much too facile and partly erroneous to attribute such resistance by bureaucrats simply to vested interests. Vested interest opposes any new order which either eliminates or at least makes uncertain their differential advantage deriving from the current arrangements. This is undoubtedly involved in part in bureaucratic resistance to change but another process is perhaps more significant. As we have seen, bureaucratic officials affectively identify themselves with their way of life. They have a pride of craft which leads them to resist change in established routines; at least, those changes which are felt to be imposed by others. This nonlogical pride of craft is a familiar pattern found even—to judge from Sutherland’s Professional Thief—among pickpockets who, despite the risk, delight in mastering the prestige-bearing feat of “beating a left breech” (picking the left front trousers pocket). #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In a stimulating paper, Everett Hughes has applied the concepts of secular and sacred to various types of division of labor; the sacredness of caste and Stande prerogatives contrast sharply with the increasing secularism of occupational differentiation in our society. However, as our discussion suggests, there may ensue, in particular vocations and in particular types of organizations, the process of sanctification (viewed as the counterpart of the process of secularization). This is to say that through sentiment-formation, emotional dependence upon bureaucratic symbols and status, and affective involvement in sphere of competence and authority, there develop prerogatives involving attitudes of moral legitimacy which are established as values in their own right, and are no longer viewed as merely technical means for expediting administration. One may note a tendency for certain bureaucratic norms, originally introduced for technical reasons, to become rigidified and sacred, although they are laique en apparence. In this general process conveyed ate the attitudes and values which persist in the organic solidarity of a highly differentiated society. Another feature of the bureaucratic structure, the stress on depersonalization of relationships, also plays its part in the bureaucrat’s trained incapacity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The personality pattern of the bureaucrat is nucleated about this norm of impersonality. Both this and the categorizing tendency, which develops from the dominant role of general, abstract rules, tend to produce conflict in the bureaucrat’s contacts with the public or clientele. Since functionaries minimize personal relations and resort to categorization, the peculiarities of the individual cases are often ignored. However, the client who, quite understandably, is convinced of the special features of one’s own problem often objects to such categorical treatment. Stereotyped behavior is not adapted to the exigencies of individual problems. The impersonal treatment of affairs which are at times of great personal significance to the client give rise to the charge of arrogance and haughtiness of the bureaucrat. Thus, at the Greenwich Employment Exchange, the unemployed worker who is securing one’s insurance payment resents what he deems to be the impersonality and, at times, the apparent abruptness and harshness of one’s treatment by the clerks. Some beings complain of the superior attitude which the clerks have. Still another source of conflict with the public derives from the bureaucratic structure. The bureaucrat, in part irrespective of one’s position within the hierarchy, acts as a representative of power and prestige of the entire structure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In one’s official role one is vested with definite authority. This often leads to an actually or apparently domineering attitude, which may only be exaggerated by a discrepancy between one’s position within the hierarchy and one’s position with reference to the public. Protest and recourse to other officials on the part of the client are often ineffective or largely precluded by the previously mentioned espirt de corps which joins the officials into a more or less solidary in-group. This source of conflict may be minimized in private enterprise since the client can register an effective protest by transferring one’s trade to another organization within the competitive system. However, with the monopolistic nature of the public organization, no such alternative is possible. Moreover, in this case, tension is increased because of a discrepancy between ideology and fact: the governmental personnel are held to be servants of the people, but in fact they are often superordinate, and release of tension can seldom be afforded by turning to other agencies for the necessary service. This tension is in part attributable to the confusion of the status of bureaucrat and client; the client may consider oneself socially superior to the official who is at the moment dominant. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command that Earth shall be rolled together as a scroll?” (Reports Mormon 5.20). #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Thus, with respect to the relations between officials and clientele, one structural source of conflict is the pressure for formal and impersonal treatment when individual, personalized consideration is desired by the client. The conflict may be viewed, then, as deriving from the introduction of inappropriate attitudes and relationships. Conflict within the bureaucratic structure arises from the converse situation, namely, when personalized relationships are substituted for the structurally required impersonal relationships. This type of conflict may be characterized as follows. The bureaucracy, as we have seen, is organizes as a secondary, formal group. The normal responses involved in this organized network of social expectations are supported by affective attitudes of members of the group. Since the group is orientated toward secondary norms of impersonality, any failure to conform to these norms will arouse antagonism from those who have identified themselves with the legitimacy of these rules. Hence, the substitution of personal for impersonal treatment within the structure is met with widespread disapproval and is characterized by such epithets as graft, favoritism, nepotism, apple-polishing, buttering the bread, and so forth. These epithets are clearly manifestations of injured sentiments. The function of such virtually automatic resentment can be clearly seen in terms of the requirements of bureaucratic structure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Bureaucracy is a secondary group structure designed to carry on certain activities which cannot be satisfactorily performed on the basis of primary group criteria. Hence behavior which runs counter to these formalized norms becomes the object of emotionalized disapproval. This constitutes a functionally significant defense set up against tendencies which jeopardize the performance of socially necessary activities. To be sure, these reactions are not rationally determined practices explicitly designed for the fulfillment of this function. Rather, viewed in terms of the individual’s interpretation of the situation, such as resentment is simply an immediate response opposing the dishonesty of those who violate the rules of the game. However, this subjective frame of reference notwithstanding these reactions serve the latent function of maintaining the essential structural elements of bureaucracy by reaffirming the necessity for formalized, secondary relations and by helping to prevent the disintegreation of the bureaucratic structure which would occur should these be supplanted by personalized relations. This type of conflict may be generically described as the intrusion of primary group attitudes when secondary group attitudes are institutionally demanded, just as the bureaucrat-conflict often derives from interaction on impersonal terms when personal treatment is individually demanded. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

An interesting variation on the theme of power and love is seen in television show Big Little Lies, starring Oscar winning actress Reese Witherspoon. In this portrayal of a small town, the women have no overt power at all—no economic power, no political power. The only power they have is covert, connected with the pleasures of the flesh. They are condemned to innocence. They accept the pretense of their innocence, which takes the form of coyness and pretended modesty, and they trade on it. It is their moral position, and it turns out to be quite immoral. One young lady who wants to lose her virginity to make herself more desirable takes her boyfriend to a hot sheets motel, orders him to perform pleasures of the flesh. When he, understandably for the situation, is important, she heaps scorn upon him. However, she tells the others young ladies waiting outside: “It was so wonderful, I cannot describe it in words.” It turns out that the woman have power over the men at every turn; the men can only do their best to live up to the women’s demands and expectations. All of the drive for these gyrations comes from the women who have been kept powerless and have only their pretense of innocence as their shield. “And after Christ truly has showed himself unto his people he commanded that they should be made manifest,” reports Ether 4. 2. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Another interesting aspect of the problem of power and love is the phenomenon of jealously. I shall not go into the question of whether some element of jealousy, as a function of caring and valuing the other person, is normally and healthy beyond saying that I believe it probably is. However, what is generally called jealousy surely goes far beyond that normal care. It is a possessiveness which arises in direct proportion to the impotence of the individual. That is, the degree to which one feels jealous. One can do nothing; one has not power in oneself to win the loved one back; and one has not power in oneself as left out completely in the cold. In such situations jealousy can become a form of violence. One young man, near the beginning of his analysis, could not reach his sweetheart in Rocklin by phone and was seized with a fit of jealousy. He immediately took a plane to Rocklin which is a city in California USA, half hoping to find her in bed with another man. This young man was threatened greatly because his sense of powerlessness was so great. I put the word hoping in to indicate that jealousy often arises from a special ambivalence in the relationship: the person loves but he also hates—that is, he would almost prefer it if she did force him, by having pleasures of the flesh with another, to break off the relationship. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Jealousy characterizes the relationship in which one seeks more power than love. It occurs when the person has not been able to build up enough self-esteem, enough sense of one’s own power, one’s own right to live, as Mercedes’s declared. Neurotic jealousy, strangely enough, may occur most strongly wen the love is not very solid or well founded. It is a reflection of the person’s feeling of inability to win the other back. This power gone awry and can be very time-consuming and destructive. The jealous person seems to have a need to put all, in this case, of his energy into the jealous fit, partly to prove a love that underneath he feels to be very problematic anyway. “Darling you see now that it was never, we are never what we see. Set you up to let you down, I am afraid. Darling do you see how our lies become the truth. We never said what we meant. Darling it feels good when they let you in. Do not play the fool. They will only let you down if you stay. We cannot all be broken down, I am afraid. Holy Hell, we have hit the bottom running to the ones we love, to the ones we hurt,” reports Broken Down by Tritonal. The boundaries of power and love overlap each other. Love makes the person who loves want to be influenced and want to do what the loved one wishes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The intertwining of love and power is shown in relationships between lovers and between husbands and wife in the concern for the dignity of the other, the preservation of his or her independent self. It is shown in child-rearing in the firm structure that the understanding adult gives to the child. Assertion, affirmation of the self, and even aggression at times are not only unavoidable but healthy in the developing love relationship. Some readers may wish to call nutrient power and integrative power actually forms of love. I agree with their meaning, but I think it best to guard against power and love being swallowed up in each other. Hence I prefer to keep their separate meanings clear. However, we can say that the lower forms of power—exploitative, manipulative—have a very minimum of love in them, while the higher forms—nutrient, integrative—have more. In other words, the higher up the scale we go, the more love we find. Even in the religious realm, the belief that God moves the World only by love is sentimentality. Persons who are of the opinion forget that the first of the General Confession is Almighty, and the Lord’s prayer ends with for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Often the Beatitudes are similarly misinterpreted—“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth”—as well as the story of Jesus saying, when he is offered all power over the Earth: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

However, we need to take into consideration that Christianity was born in a World in which the Roman army occupied the whole known as the globe; and any kind of political power or lack of meekness would have meant that one would get oneself quickly executed. Our problem is now different: we stand in a World dominated by giant technology. If they are to survive at all, men and women must be able to asset the power of their conciseness. Social action—work for radical justice, international peace, helping of the poor, and so on—would not be possible without a combination of power and love. Joy does not come from submission and abnegation, but from assertion. Joy is only a symptom of the feeling of attained power. The essence of joy is an absolute feeling of power. However, if they coincide with culturally approved forms of inhibitions or with existing ideologies, it may be impossible ever to become aware of personal inhibitions. A patient who had serious inhibitions against approaching women was not aware of being inhibited because he saw his conduct in the light of the accepted idea of the sacredness of women. When the glimpse experience has been repeated many times, it will come to be looked upon as a natural experience. The state it induced will seem to be a normal one. The miracle which the beginner makes of it will seem an unnecessary exaggeration to the matured proficient being. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

An inhibition against making demands is easily put on the basis of the strict and rigid doctrines that modesty is a virtue; and inhibition against critical thinking about strict and rigid doctrines dominant in politics or religion or any specific field of interest may escape attention, and we may be entirely unaware of the existence of an anxiety concerning the exposure to punishment, criticism or isolation. In order to judge the situation, however, we must of course know the individual factors in great detail. The absence of critical thought does not necessarily imply the existence of inhibitions, but may be due to a general laziness of mind, to stupidity or to conviction that really coincides with the dominant doctrines of the strict and rigid type. A number of factors may account for the inability to recognize existing inhibitions and for the fact that even experienced psychoanalysts may find it difficult to detect them. However, even assuming that we could recognize all of them, our estimate of the frequency of inhibitions would still be too low. We would have to take into account all those reactions which, although not fully grown inhibitions, are on the way toward that culmination. In the attitudes I have in mind we are still able to do certain things, but the anxiety connected with them exerts certain influences on the activities themselves. When we define creativity, we must make the distinction between its pseudo forms, on the one hand—that is, creativity as a superficial aestheticism. And, on the other, its authentic form—that is, the process of bringing something new into being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The crucial distinction is between art as artificiality (as in artifice or artful) and genuine art. This is distinction that artists and philosophers have struggled all through the centuries to make clear. Plato, for example, demoted his poets and his artist down to the sixth circle of reality because, he said, they deal only with appearances and not with reality itself. He was referring to art as a decoration, a way of making life prettier, a dealing with semblances. However, in his later, beautiful dialogue, the Symposim, he described what he called the true artists—namely, those who give birth to some new reality. These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the World. Now, if our inquiries into creativity are to get below the surface, we must make the above distinction clear. We are thus not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on week ends! The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity rightly indicates a process of making, of bringing into being. So much so that some people believe that science is becoming the new God, and the metaphysical speculations are the cold and calculating path to that goal. Rather than formulaic truths, therefore, or reductionist explanations of how and why we do what we do, and this is why some still advocate inwardness and passion. In reality, neither objectivism, with its emphasis on the publicly measurable and verifiable, nor subjectivism, with its accent on the private and emotional, can, in isolation, provide us with a complete picture of human functioning. Only taken together can they help us to understand our condition. The problem is that (particularly) objectivism has grown so monstrous in recent years and has become so top-heavy that it threatened to crush subjectivism—leaving us to pull levers and push bottoms for many of our needs. We do need rules, regulations, and formulas, but these things do not always help us to comprehend the richer aspects of living, such as the capacity to love, create, and marvel at the stars. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

We need to redress the imbalance that has emerged and forge a broader, more inclusive position. For truth exists only as the individual produces it in action. Away from speculation, away from the system, and back to reality, the more consciousness, the more self. Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. Beings exist on many levels, some of which are contradictory and some of which are fathomless. Our task is to affirm these various facets of our existence and not to reduce or deny them. The difference between the intermediate and the final state is the difference between feeling the Overself to be a distinct and separate entity and feeling it to be the very essence of oneself, between temporary experience of it and enduring union with it. Whereas when it first occurs, the glimpse may be a dramatic experience, being established is natural, simple, pleasant but not rapturous, and continuously aware. We must learn to differentiate between the partial attainment of the mystic who stops short at passive enjoyment of ecstatic states and the perfect attainment of the sage who does not depend on any particular states but dwells in the unbroken calm of the unconditioned Overself. From one’s high point of view all such states are necessarily illusory, however personally satisfying at the time, inasmuch as they are transient conditions and do not pertain to the final result. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

If the illumination itself is to be total pure, and reliable, all aspects of being’s nature needs to be illuminated and equably balanced. The self is a synthesis of infinitude and finitude, that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself. The self is a synthesis of which the finite is the limiting and the infinite the extending factor. When the overemphasize either polarity, when they become too finitized or infinitized, some beings become dysfunctional. The cold, pedantic objectivist, to further illustrate this description, may be understood as excessively finitized; while the fiery, indulgent subjectivist may be viewed as over infinitized. Infiniude’s despair is to lack or avoid finitude. Infinitude’s despair is the fantastic, the unlimited. As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing. The self then leads a fantasized existence moving further and further away from itself. It flounders in possibility until exhausted. Finitude’s despair is to lack or avoid infinitude, to lack infinitude is despairing reductionism, narrowness. Whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, this kind permits itself to be tricked out of itself by other beings. A person in such a state forgets oneself, forgets one’s name, does not dare to believe in oneself, and find it far easier and safer to be like other, to become a copy, a number, a mass being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Good health generally means the ability to resolve contradictions. It is a synthesis like breathing which is an inhaling and exhaling. A passionate-realistic hero, a knight of faith has precisely these qualities. However, ignorance of it is widespread among would-be heroes and mystics and even among real mystics. If there is contradiction between their results, it is because they too often experience the illumination fully through their feelings, to a limited extent through their wills, and hardly at all through their intellects. Many people, however, feel in their youth and inexperience and weakness that at their age there is a need for some kind of support from outside, some group to give then not merely fellowship but also a feeling of solidity and stability, something to learn upon, in short. This can teach others a lesson and make them understand sympathetically that the love of independence to ensure a free search, and the desire for self-reliance do not belong to everybody, and others, certainly most people, have other needs, prefer other ways, for which there is also room in human life. Organizational life can be helpful to our early efforts and guide our early steps. “I am under your spell. Bound and blind and only you can save me. I am tangled up inside, caught in your web. I am hypnotized and only you can wake me. Only you can bring this heart to life,” reports Under Your Spell by Cosmic Gate. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

There is a place for a society of friends, but this place is a preliminary one. If the final work of a seeker is to be done for and upon oneself, that does not displace the necessity of an institution in assisting one to do the preparatory work. Therefore, even the advance mystic, who has no need of its services, cannot in principle be hostile to an institution. One readily admits its necessity and denies only its all-sufficiency. These groups led by a guru (hopefully with all their wires in their brains properly connected) may be quite useful to a beginner who is stumbling in the dark. However, to join one without knowing the limitations and dangers would be foolish. When unled, religious followers begin to organize themselves either quite spontaneously, or when a leader appears, they organize themselves quite obediently for several good understandable reasons. The coming together in a compact group affords some protection, offers them a mode of expression and the teaching a mode of preservation. The strength of such a group must be possessed in its quality and not in its members. It must be the result not of propaganda activities but of the spontaneous association of like-thinking people. It is true that there are many eccentrics among these believers and they are still serious and sensible and well-behaved. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Should I Ever Take Ease Upon a Bed of Leisure, May that Same Moment Mark My End!

July 30, 2019 12:04 am

It is a lust again of time and for the future, for the mysteries of the natural World. For being the watcher that I became that long-ago night in Paris, when I was forced into it. I lost my illusions. I lost my favorite lies. You might say I revisited that moment and was reborn to darkness of my own free will. The transition to a study of the negative aspects of bureaucracy is afforded by the application of Veblen’s concept of trained incapacity, Dewey’s notion of occupational psychosis, or Warnotte’s view of professional deformation. Trained incapacity refers to that state of affairs in which one’s abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills which have been successfully applied in the past may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions. An inadequate flexibility in the application of skills, will, inchanging milieu, result in more or less serious maladjustments. Thus, to adopt a barnyard illustration used in this connection by Kenneth Burke, chickens may be readily conditioned to interpret the sound of a bell as a signal for trained chickens to their doom as they are assembled to suffer decapitation. In general, one adopts measures in keeping with one’s past training and, under new conditions which are not recognized as significantly different, the very soundness of this training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Again, in Burke’s almost echolalic phrase, “people may be unfitted by being fit in an unfit fitness”; their training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures. Dewey’s concept of occupational psychosis rests upon much the same observations. As a result of their day to day routines, people develop special preferences, antipathies, discriminations and emphases. (The term psychosis is used by Dewey to denote a “pronounced character of the mind.”) These psychoses develop through demand put upon the individual by the particular organization of one’s occupational role. The concepts of both Veblen and Dewey refer to a fundamental ambivalence. Any action can be considered in terms of what it attains or what it fails to attain. “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B.” In his discussion, Weber is almost exclusively concerned with what the bureaucratic structure attains: precision, reliability, efficiency. This same structure may be examined from another perspective provided by the ambivalence. What are the limitations of the organizations designed to attain these goals? For reasons which we have already noted, the bureaucratic structure exerts a constant pressure upon the official to be “methodical, prudent, disciplined.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

If the bureaucracy is to operate successfully, it must attain a high degree of reliability of behavior, an unusual degree of conformity with prescribed patterns of actions. Hence, the fundamental importance of discipline which may be as highly developed in a religious or economic bureaucracy as in the army. Discipline can be effective only if the ideal patterns are buttressed by strong sentiments which entail devotion to one’s duties, a keen sense of the limitation of one’s authority and competence, and methodical performance of routine activities. The efficacy of social structure depends ultimately upon infusing group participants with appropriate attitudes and sentiments. As we shall see, there are definite arrangements in the bureaucracy for inculcating and reinforcing these sentiments. At the moment, it suffices to observe that in order to ensure discipline (the necessary reliability of response), these sentiments are often more intense than is technically necessary. There is a margin of safety, so to speak, in the pressure exerted by these sentiments upon the bureaucrat to conform to one’s patterned obligations, in much the same sense that added allowances (precautionary overestimations) are made by the engineer in designing the supports for a bridge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

However, this very emphasis leads to a transference of the sentiments from the aims of the organization onto the particular details of behavior required by the rules. Adherence to the rules, originally conceived as a means, becomes transformed into an end-in-itself; there occurs the familiar process of displacement of goals whereby an instrumental value becomes a terminal value. Discipline, readily interpreted as conformance with regulations, whatever the situation, is seen not as a measure designed for specific purposes but becomes an immediate value in the life-organization of the bureaucrat. This emphasis, resulting from the displacement of the original goals, develops into rigidities and an inability to adjust readily. Formalism, even ritualism, ensures with an unchallenged insistence upon punctilious adherence to formalized procedures. This may be exaggerated to the point where primary concern with conformity to the rules interferes with the achievement of the purposes of the organization, in which case we have the familiar phenomenon of the technicism or red tape of the official. An extreme product of this process of displacement of goals is the bureaucratic virtuoso, who never forgets a single rule binding his or her actions and hence is unable to assist many of one’s clients. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

A case in point, where strict recognition of the limits of authority and literal adherence to rules produced this result, is the pathetic plight of Bernt Balchen, Admiral Byrd’s pilot in the flight over the South Pole. According to a ruling of the department of labor Bernt Balchen cannot receive his citizenship papers. Balchen, a native of Norway, declared his intention in 1927. It is held that he has failed to meet the condition of five years’ continuous residence in the United States of American. The Byrd Antarctic voyage took him out of the country, although he was on a ship carrying the American flag, was an invaluable member of the American expedition, and in a region to which there is an American claim because of the exploration and occupation of it by Americans, this region being Little America. The bureau of naturalization explains that it cannot proceed on the assumption that Little America is American soil. That would be trespass on international questions where is has no sanction. So far as the bureau is concerned, Balchen was out of the country and technically has not complied with the law of naturalization. Such inadequacies in orientation which involve trained incapacity clearly derive from structural sources. The process may be briefly recapitulated. An effective bureaucracy demands reliability of response and strict devotion to regulations. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Such devotion to the rules of an effective bureaucracy leads to their transformation into absolutes; they are no longer conceived as relative to a set of purposes. This interferes with ready adaptation under special conditions not clearly envisaged by those who drew up the general rules. Thus, the very elements which conduce toward efficiency in general produce inefficiency in specific instances. Full realization of the inadequacy is seldom attained by members of the group who have not divorced themselves from the meanings which the rules have for them. These rules in time become symbolic in cast, rather than strictly utilitarian. The usefulness of organizations makes them a necessity. The appointment of people to administer those organizations is unavoidable. In the arrangements of human society, there is a necessary place for human institutions. However, organizations and bureaucracy may lead to anxiety. A way of escaping anxiety that is considered most radical consists in avoiding all situations, thoughts or feelings which might arouse anxiety. This may be a conscious process, as when the person who fear driving or mountain climbing avoids doing these things. More accurately speaking, a person may be aware of the existence of anxiety and aware of avoiding it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

One may also, however, be only dimly or not at all aware of avoiding activities. One may, for instance, procrastinate in matter which, without one’s knowledge, are connected with anxiety, such as making decision, going to the doctor or writing a letter. Or one may pretend, that is, subjectively believe that certain activities one contemplates—such as taking part in a discussion, giving orders to employees, separating oneself from another person—are unimportant. Or one may pretend not to like doing certain things and discard them on that basis. This a young lady whom going to parties involves gears of being neglected may avoid going altogether by making herself believe that she does not like social gatherings. If we go one step farther, to the point where such avoidance operates automatically, we have the phenomenon of an inhibition. An inhibition consists in an inability to do, feel or think certain things, and its function is to avoid the anxiety which would arise if the person attempted to do, feel, or think those things. There is no anxiety present in awareness, and no capacity for overcoming the inhibitions by conscious effort. Inhibitions are present in their most spectacular form in the hysterical losses of functioning: hysterical blindness, speechlessness or paralysis of a limb. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

In the sphere pleasures of the flesh and frigidity and impotence represent such inhibitions, although the structure of these inhibitions may be very complex. In the mental sphere inhibitions in concentration, in forming or expressing opinions, in making contacts with people are well-known phenomena. It might be worth while to spend several pages merely enumerating inhibitions, as to convey a full impression of the variety of their forms and the frequency of their occurrence. I think, however, that I may leave it to the reader to review one’s own observations on that score, because inhibitions are nowadays a well-known phenomenon and easily recognizable, if they are fully developed. Nevertheless it is desirable to consider briefly the preconditions that are necessary in order to become aware that inhibitions exist. Otherwise we should underestimate their frequency because usually we are not aware of how many inhibitions we really have. In the first place, we must be aware of the desire to do something in order to be aware of the inability to do it. For instance, we have to be aware of possessing ambitions before we can realize that we have inhibitions on that score. The question may be asked whether we do not always at least know what we want. Decidedly not. Let us consider, for example, a person listening to a paper and having a critical thought about it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

A minor inhibition would consist in a timidity about expressing the criticism; a stronger inhibition would prevent one from organizing one’s thoughts, with the result that they would occur to one only after the discussion was over or the net morning. However, the inhibition may go so far as not to permit the critical thoughts to come up at all, and in this case, assuming that one really feels critical, one will be inclined to accept blindly what has been said or even to admire it; and one will be quite unaware of having any inhibitions. In other words, if an inhibition goes so far as to check wishes or impulses there can be no awareness of its existence. A second factor that may prevent awareness occurs when an inhibition has such an important function in a person’s life that one prefers to insist that it is an unchangeable fact. If, for instance, there is an overpowering anxiety of some kind connected with any sort of competitive work, resulting in an intense fatigue after every attempt to work, the person may insist that one is not strong enough to do any work; that belief protects one, but if one admitted an inhibition one might have to return to work and thereby expose oneself to the dreaded anxiety. Truth comes after states and ecstasies and then takes it place. It is easier to glimpse the truth than to stay in it. For the first, it is often enough to win a single battle; for the second, it is necessary to win a whole war. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Compensatory trends in an individual will influence the forms of his or her creating will take, but they do not explain the process of creativity itself. Compensatory needs influence the particular bent or direction in culture or science, but they do not explain the creation of the culture or science. Because of this I learned very early in my psychological career to regard with a good deal of skepticism current theories explaining creativity. And I learned always to task the questions: Does the theory deal with creativity itself, or does it deal only with some artifact, some partial, peripheral aspect, of the creative act? The other widely current psychoanalytic theories about creativity have two characteristics. First, they are reductive—that is, they reduce creativity to some other process. Second, they generally make it specifically an expression of neurotic patterns. The usual definition of creativity in psychoanalytic circles is regression in the service of ego. Immediately the term regression indicates the reductive approach. I emphatically disagree with the implication that creativity is to be understood by reducing it to some other process, or that it is essentially an expression of neurosis. Creativity is certainly associated with serious psychological problems in our particular culture—Van Gogh went psychotic, Gaugin seems to have been a schizoid, Poe was an alcoholic, and Virginia Woolf was seriously depressed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Obviously creativity and originality are associated with persons who do not fit into their culture. However, this does not necessarily mean that the creativity is the product of the neurosis. The association of creativity with neurosis presents us with a dilemma—namely, if by psychoanalysis we cured the artists of their neuroses would they no longer create? This dichotomy, as well as many others, arise from the reductive theories. Furthermore, if we create out of some transfer of affect or drive, as implied in sublimation, of if our creativity is merely the by-product of an endeavor to accomplish something else, as in compensation, does not our very creative act then have only a pseudo value? We must indeed take a strong stand against the implications, however they may creep in, that talent is a disease and creativity is a neurosis. We sail on a vast expanse, ever uncertain, ever drifting, hurried from one to the other goal. If we think to attach ourselves firmly to any point, it totters and fails us; if we follow, it eludes our grasp…vanishing forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, yet always the most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find a steadfast place and an ultimate fixed basis whereon we may build a tower to reach the infinite. However, our whole foundation breaks up, and Earth opens to the abysses. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

We may not then look for certainty. Our reason is always deceived by changing shows, nothing can fix the infinite between the two infinities, which at once close and fly from it. The heart has its reason which reason know not. The relationship between power and love is shown in myth. Recall that Eros, god of love, is the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, god of war or strife. In what better way could the ancient Greeks have told us that there is no love without aggression? However, even more surprising is the name of another child which blessed this union, Harmonia. The word means that which is fitting, in proportion, in concord—and it seems paradoxical in the extreme. However, is it not appropriate that harmony should be a dynamic proportion between strife and beauty? The empirical relationship of power and love is illustrated in the closeness of the two in the problem of violence, the converse of power. Violence is most apt to occur between persons who are closely tied emotionally and, therefore, vulnerable to each other. According to a statistical study of homicides in the city of Sacramento, which is in the state of California, the majority of murders are committed against a member of the family. The most dangerous room, again judged in terms of the likelihood of murder occurring there, is the bedroom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

According to M. E. Wolfgang, “If you are a woman over 16, your murderer will most likely be a husband, lover, or relative. When a man is killed, the killer is most likely to be his wife. The bedroom is the most murderous room in the house.” Maybe that is why bad partners are sent to sleep on the couch. In marriage and in relationships between couples we see a similar relationship between love and power. There is a necessity of combining self-assertion (power) with tenderness (love) in the pleasures of the flesh. Without tenderness, the caring and the sensitivity for the feelings and delight of the other is absent; and without self-assertion the capacity to put one’s self fully into the act is missing. When love and power are seen as opposites, love tends to be the abject surrender of one partner and the subtle (or not so subtle) domination by the other. These are often the sadomasochistic marriages. When the aim is to be guided only by love, assertion and aggression are obviously ruled out as being too tainted with power. There results a clinging to one another, an absorption in each other. Missing are the firmness of assertion, the structure and the sense of dignity that guard the rights of each of the partners. Such relationships may swing back and forth, from surrender as a form of love to violence as a form of power. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Everyone is familiar with the news clippings telling how a devoted wife or husband of thirty years suddenly took a hatchet to his or her mate in a peculiarly bloody murder. This extreme example reveals the problem in a love that does not have within it a realistic assertion of power. There is statistical grounds for the common saying that marriage with someone who is undercontrolled—for instance, blows up from time to time—may make for turmoil and frequent fighting, but it does not make for murder. The docile, overcontrolled individual, the one who appears kind all the time, can be the one who releases one’s aggression in one big blowup. This accords with our thesis that violence occurs when a person cannot live out one’s needs for power in normal ways. It is only when one’s intermittent nature becomes obvious, however remarkable and uplifting they may have seemed, that one who experienced them is ready to seek for the higher Truth. This is not only a matter of personal feeling, but also of impersonal intuitive knowledge confirmed by reason and experience. Not everyone will enter into the kingdom of Heaven. Only to a very few is it given to enter and remain stabilized in the kingdom; many more must be content with glimpses only. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The belief is all too common that union with God is experienced as a tremendous uprush of ecstatic emotion. This is true in several cases, but not in all. In any case, only after the excitement has abated and calm has descended on the being will one be able to see whether this is merely another of those temporary glimpses or whether it is really a lasting discovery of one’s divine identity. For the truth is that such a durable discovery of one’s divine identity. For the truth is that such a durable discovery, such an ever-present fulfillment of one’s highest possibilities, comprises much more than this inspired, but still personal experience. It is true that our sins and faults are automatically dispersed by the inrush of Enlightenment, but it is equally true that they will return if we have no prepared our selves to be able to stay in the Light. To gaze upon this great light without sufficient precious training of the inward life is ordinarily not possibly for more than a short time. The few exceptions who were able to stay in the light unbrokenly were beings of special genius and special destiny. Those who have obtained the abiding state are in the sanctuary, but those who have attained the transient one are only at the gate. Visions, mental states, and experiences may succeed each other progressively, but they are not the same as a continuous stabilized awareness of that which is behind all these temporary states. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

In one’s earlier years, if it does not fulfill one’s expectations, the seeker may try one kind of institution of a religious or mystical character and then move to a different one. In this way one may experiment with different creeds and different forms of practice. This may be useful so far as it exposes one to the influences which are needed to balance one another. However, if one ever does, it may be bewildering. Most traditional forms, or the newer organizations which have some sort of spiritual teaching, are useful in the beginning to most people. However, this is not to say that they are going to be useful always. They have their limitations, and at certain stage may prevent further advance. However, those who can stand alone are always smaller in number: most persons will frankly admit that they cannot, certainly most young and elderly persons. This is the justification for the need of organizations, groups, churches, and priesthoods. They offer what seems fixed support in life, stable in doctrine, superior nobler holier and wiser than what the ordinary person finds in oneself. This is why philosophy attracts the few, those who are, or who can be trained to become, strong enough to walk a lonely path. For us, the end is always on the covenant path through the temple to eternal life, the greatest of all gifts of God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

We know this flight in our dreams, perhaps because we knew it in some celestial realm beyond this Earth before we were born. However, sometimes we cannot conceive of the sight of eternal life as Earthly creatures because we have somehow forgotten, or damaged and torn our heart and soul. Seeing darkness where we expect to see light reminds us that one of the fundamental needs we have in order to grow is to stay connected to our source of light—Jesus Christ. He is the source of our power, the Light and Light of the World. Without a strong connection to Christ, we begin to spiritually die. Knowing that, Satan tries to exploit the Worldly pressures we all face. He works to dim our light, short-circuit the connection, cut off the power supply, leaving us alone in the dark. Satan operates a lot like Lestat in Ann Rice’s Tales of the Body Thief. When David is reborn in a new body, tall, with tan skin and blonde hair and lean, Lestat turns him into a Vampire to steal his joy. He was infuriated that David experienced a miracle which allowed him to give up his 74-year-old body and take over the beautiful body of a twenty-six-year-old male. Out of the miracle came youth, rebirth, and Lestat could not stand to see David profit. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Pressures in life are common conditions in morality, but Satan works hard to isolate us and tell us we are the only one experiencing them. When tragedies overtake us, when life hurts so much we cannot breathe, when we have taken a beating like the man on the road to Jericho and been left for dead, Jesus come along and pours blessings into our wounds, lefts us tenderly up, takes us to an inn, looks after us. Jesus will ease the burdens which are put upon our shoulders, that even we cannot feel then upon our backs, that we may know of a surety that the Lord, our God will and does visit his people in our afflictions. It is not intended that we run faster than we have the strength. However, in spite of that many of us run very, very fast and the energy and emotional supply sometimes registers close to being on E—empty. When expectations overwhelm us, we can step back and ask Heavenly Father what to let go of. Part of out life experience is learning what not to do. However, even so, sometimes life can be exhausting. Jesus assures us, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” reports Matthew 11.28. Christ is willing to join with us in the yoke and pull in order to listen our burdens. Christ is rest. Should I ever take ease upon a bed of leisure, may that same moment mark my end! #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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It is a State Which Has Been Attained in its Fullness by Only a Few Persons During Each Century but Glimpsed at Least Once in a Lifetime by Many More!

July 27, 2019 3:13 am

What have the many towers of great Rocklin to do with this endless sprawling World that comes so close to it. Wence came this metropolis of America with its clear blue skies and its vast teeming hillside McMansions? Beauty is beauty where you find it. At night, even these Spanish colonial cottages as they call them—the thousands upon thousands of houses that cover the streets on either side with their beautiful green lawns—are darling, for they have water, landscaping, sewerage, electricity, and they are peaceful and beyond all modern questions healthy and comfortable, and are strung with bright, shining electric lights. Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That is an undeniable and irreducible blessing of God’s grace. However, do the people of the suburbs know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their beauty Cresleigh Homes? It does not matter. We cannot stop ourselves from making beauty. We cannot stop the World. Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assembly-line aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the grandeur and marvelous. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

One of the by-produces of the development of mechanical devices and mechanical standards has been the nullification of skill. What has taken place here within the factory has also taken place in the final utilization of its products. The safety razor, for example, has changed the operation of shaving from a hazardous one, best left to a trained barber, to a rapid commonplace of the day which even the most inept males can perform. The automobile has transformed engine-driving from the specialized take of the locomotive engineer to the occupation of millions of amateurs. The camera has in part transformed the artful reproduction of the wood engraver to a relatively simple photo-chemical process in which anyone can acquire at least the rudiments. As in manufacture the human function first becomes specialized, then mechanized, and finally automatic or at least semi-automatic. When the last stage is reached, the function again takes on some of its original non-specialized character: photography helps recultivate the eye, the telephone the voice, the radio the ear, just as the BMW motor car has restored some of the manual and operative skills that the machine was banishing from other departments of existence at the same time that it has given to the driver a sense of power and autonomous direction—a feeling of firm command in the midst of potentially constant danger—that had been taken away from one in other departments of life by the machine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

So, too, mechanization, by lessening the need for domestic service, has increased the amount of personal autonomy and personal participation in the household. In short, mechanization creates occasions for human effort; and on the whole the effects are more educative than were the semi-automatic services of slaves and menials in the older civilizations. For the mechanical nullification of skill can take place only up to a certain point. It is only when one has completely lost power of discrimination that a standardized Campbells canned soup can, without further preparation, take the place of a home-cooked one, or when one has lost prudence completely that a four-wheel brake or a BMW with XDrive can serve instead of a good driver. Inventions like these increase the province and multiple the interests of the amateur. When automatism becomes general and the benefits of mechanization are socialized, beings will be back once more in the Edenlike state which they have existed in regions of natural increment, like the South Seas: the ritual of leisure will replace the ritual of work, and work itself will become a kind of game. That is, in fact, the ideal goal of a completely mechanized and automatized system of power production: the elimination of work: the universal achievement of leisure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

In pondering slavery, when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief working people would not need helpers nor masters slaves. It is believed that beings were in the process of establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today, this is just a way of justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of being’s interaction with one’s environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. However, the work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which the Athenians so properly despised—work in these degrading forms if the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentiality, still so far from effective achievement for beings at large, is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical development of the last thousand years. From the social standpoint, one final characterization of the machine, perhaps the most important of all, must be noted: the machine imposes the necessity for collective effort and widens its range. To the extent that beings have escaped the control of nature they must submit to the control of society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

As in a serial operation every part must function smoothly and be geared to the right speed in order to ensure the effective working of the process as a whole, so in society at large there must be a close articulation between all its elements. Individual self-sufficiency is another way of saying technological crudeness: as our technics becomes more refined it becomes impossible to work the machine without large-scale collective cooperation, and in the long run a high technics is possible only on a basis of Worldwide trade and intellect intercourse. The machine has broken down the relative isolation—never complete even in the most primitive societies—of the handicraft period: it has intensified the need for collective effort and collective order. The efforts to achieve collective participation have been fumbling and empirical: so for the most part, people are conscious of the necessity in the form of limitations upon personal freedom and initiative—limitations like the automatic traffic signals of a congested center, or like the red-tape in a large commercial organization. The collective nature of the machine process demands a special enlargement of the imagination and special education in order to keep the collective demand itself from becoming an act of external regimentation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

To the extent that the collective discipline becomes effective and the various groups in society are worked into a nicely interlocking organization, special provisions must be made for isolated and anarchic elements that are not included in such a wide-reaching collectivism—elements that cannot without danger be ignored or repressed. However, to abandon the social collectivism imposed by modern technics means to return to nature and be at the mercy of natural forces. The regularization of time, the increase in mechanical power, the multiplication of goods, the contraction of time and space, the standardization of performance and product, the transfer of skill to automata, and the increase of collective interdependence—these, then, are the chief characteristics of our machine civilization. They are the basis of the particular forms of life and modes of expression that distinguish the World, at least in degree, from the various earlier civilization that preceded it. Least anyone think the myth of Prometheus can be brushed aside as merely an idiosyncratic tale concocted by playful Greeks, let me remind you that in the Judeo-Christian tradition almost exactly the same truth is presented. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

I refer to the myth of Adam and Eve. This is the drama of the emerging of moral consciousness. In relation to this myth (and to all myths), the truth that happens internally is presented as though it were external. They myth of Adam is re-enacted in every infant, beginning a few months after birth and developing into recognizable form at the age of two or three, though ideally it should continue enlarging all the rest of one’s life. The eating of the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolize the dawn of human consciousness, moral consciousness and consciousness being at this point synonymous. The innocence of the Garden of Eden—the womb and the dreaming consciousness of gestation and the first month of life—are destroyed forever. The function of psychoanalysis is to increase this consciousness, indeed to help people eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If this experience is as terrifying for many people as it was for Oedipus, it should not surprise us. Any theory of resistance that omits the terror of human consciousness is incomplete and probably wrong. In place of innocent bliss, the infant now experiences anxiety and guilt feelings. Also, as part of the child’s legacy is the sense of individual responsibility, and, most important of all, developing only later, the capacity to love. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The shadow side of this process of individuality is the emergence of repression and, concomitantly, neurosis. A fateful event indeed! If you call this the fall of man, you should join Hegel and other analysts of history who have proclaimed that it was a fall upward; for without this experience there would be neither creativity nor consciousness as we know them. However, again, God was angry. Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden by an Angel with a flaming sword. The troublesome paradox confronts us in that both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian myths present creativity and consciousness as being born in rebellion against an omnipotent force. Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed. The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These the idols of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people. However, this point does not go deeply enough to give us an answer to the riddle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

In my search for some illumination, I read the legends of Anne Rice and discovered that perhaps Lestat gave up his vampire body, to switch places with Raglan James and become a human because he knew that David Talbot was old and could die and was his only true friend, but David refused to take the dark gift. So, Lestat figured if he gave up his body, even with a $20 million reward for the return of it, that Raglan would not want to give it up and David would be the only one willing to help him, and that perhaps that when they performed the body switching the Raglan, instead of going back into the beautiful tall, tan, body with blonde hair that he had stolen, that he would jump into David’s body, forcing David into the beautiful body because Raglan wanted nothing more than to become a vampire. And posing as David, Ragland could then get this dark gift, and have the power and immortality that he wanted. Raglan was really an old man and had stole the body from a young man and once that man was in his body, he hit in the dead to kill him. So the legend is all about Raglan ending his own torture by trading bodies until he could become immortal. This conclusion to the myth, if you can follow, tells us that the riddle of Prometheus is also connected with the problem of death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The same with Adam and Eve. Enraged at their eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God cries out that he is afraid that they will eat of the tree of eternal life and become like one of us. So! Again the riddle has to do with the problem of death, of which eternal life is one aspect. The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle—out of rebellion the creative act is born. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death. Michelangelo’s withering, unfinished statues of slaves, struggling in their prisons of marble, are the most fitting symbols for our human condition. Although the higher consciousness may vary in vividness, before settling down to a fixed evenness of quality, it remains permanent at this stage. All problems vanish from one’s mind as though they have never been. One is under no necessity to concern oneself about anything or anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

God in his Heaven and all is well with the World. There is no tormenting situation to be cleared up, no difficult decision to be made, no quest to be followed through drawn-out struggles and personal self-disciplines, and inevitable disappointments. One has now the secret of it all, the blissful state of enlightenment. Hitherto one has been only partially oneself. Now, with this radiant entry into the eternal, one is completely oneself. Now one can speak to others, move in the World, and work out relationships, solely from one’s centre, straight from one’s core: no distortions, no hypocrisies, no insincerities. Here at last is true normality, existence as it was meant to be but is never found to be. One has attained the delight and freedom of spontaneous living. The savage may have it, to, but on a lower level. When the knowledge of the soul is not merely intellectual, however convincing, not only a matter of belief, however firm, but an unchangeable awareness of its ever-present existence, it is true knowledge authentic revelation, and blissful salvation. We move up from being to Being. It is a state which has been attained in its fullness by only a few persons during each century but which has been glimpsed at least once in a lifetime by many more. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

There is another kind of power called integrative and this power is with the other person. My power then abets my neighbor’s power. A European friend of mine, when he was in this country working on his influential ideas and forming them into a book, would offer them for criticism; but the rest of us, rightly understanding how tender ideas can be when they are being born, would politely hold back any negative reaction. However, our friend would regularly react with impatience, protesting: “I want you to criticize me.” By this he meant that if we proposed an antithesis against his thesis, he would be forced to reform his thinking into a new and better synthesis. If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil’s advocate can conjure up. An audience rarely realizes how valuable its questions are to a speaker after a lecture, for they stimulate and compel one to alter or defend one’s position with renewed insight. I was tempted to call this kind of power cooperative, but I realized it too often beings with the victim having to be coerced into the cooperation. Our narcissism is forever crying out against the wounds of those who would criticize us or point out our weak spots. We forget that the critic can be doing us a considerable favor. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Certainly criticisms are often painful, and one has to brace one’s self in the face of them. We can slide back into manipulative power (by forcefully silencing the critic) or competitive power (by making the critic look silly). Or we can even protect our thin skins by means of nutrient power (patronizing the critic by implying one is confused and needs our care). However, if we do regress in these ways, we are losing an opportunity for new truth that the questioner, hostile or friendly as the case may be, may well be giving us. I recall my own experience in psychoanalysis. When my analyst would point out something about my character structure which I found painful, I would at first deny it out of hand. However, later on, as realized the truth of the insight, I would have to suffer the pain of changing my character structure according to this new truth. This confession is not as dramatic as it sounds, for everyone I have ever met also react in exactly this way in similar situation. Integrative power, I have said, can lead to growth by Hegel’s dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. All growth, even that of molecular structures, proceed in this way: there is one body, then there is its anti-body, and growth proceeds by the repulsion or attraction of these two into a new body. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Integrative power can be used with nonviolent methods on one’s opponents. One way of disarming the opponent is to expose their moral defenses. It weakens their morale and at the same time it works on their conscience. One just does not know how to handle it. No one can deny that this is describing a kind of power. It depends for its success not only on the courage of the nonviolent one, but also upon the moral development and awareness of the persons who are the recipients of the nonviolent power. One must be disciplined and adhere rigidly to nonviolence, it is incontestable that these same methods brought great psychological and spiritual power to bear upon the British rulers. Even if pitted against an entire empire, one can move it with eminent success by one fasting and prayer in a way that never could have been done by military power. It works on the conscience. Nonviolent power depends n memory, which in turn depends on the moral development of the persons against whom this kind of power is directed. The opponent has to live with one’ self, and this puts one in the position of having to remember that he, or she, or they have injured you. There was a judge, who shall remain nameless, who used his power to sentence two men to death. This judge spends his senile years going from person to person trying to explain and justify his act. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

The judge cannot forget, and he cannot integrate his action with his self-image; and the conflict this sets up preys upon him and contributes, if not causes, his senile psychosis. Beings are curious creatures who are afflicted with memory. If one cannot integrate one’s memories into one’s self-image, one must pay for one’s failure by neurosis or psychosis; and one tries, generally in vain, to shake oneself loose from the tormenting memories. Truth exists only as the individual produces it n action. The aim of existential philosophy is so comprehend the human being’s immediate, unfolding situation in the World or, being-in-the-World. Our goal is to clarify the life-designs or experiential perimeters within which we live. What are their shapes, how much freedom, meaning, value and so on do they permit us? How can we optimize them in order to lead fuller, more productive lives? The impetus for existential speculation is almost always a profound crisis. Why else would people ask such poignant questions about who or what they are or where they are head? Such questions are almost invariably a response to individual or collective breakdown—a point at which the old patterns no longer work or lead toward catastrophe. It is precisely this speculation that makes the emergence in the context of crises—points of disruption and alarm—that give existential philosophy its depth. It is precisely complacency against which existential philosophers take their stand. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Existence is beyond the power of words to define: terms may be used but none of them is absolute. Existence by nothing bred, breeds everything, parent of the Universe. A way of escaping anxiety is to deny its existence. In fact, nothing is done about anxiety in such cases except denying it, that is, excluding it from consciousness. All that appears are the physical concomitants of fear or anxiety, such as shivering, sweating, accelerated heart-beat, choking, vomiting, and in the mental sphere, a feeling of restlessness, of being rushed or paralyzed. We may have all these feelings and physical sensations when we are afraid and are aware of being so; they may also be the exclusive expression of an existing anxiety which is suppressed. In the latter cases al that the individual knows about one’s condition is such outward evidence as the fact that one has to urinate frequently in certain conditions, that one becomes nauseated on trains, that at times one has night-sweats, and always without physical cause. It is also possible, however, to make a conscious denial of anxiety, a conscious attempt to overcome it. This is akin to what happens on the normal level, when it is attempted to get rid of fear by recklessly disregarding it. The most familiar example on the normal level is the soldier who, driven by the impulse to overcome a fear, performs heroic deeds. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The fact may be noted without reproach and without antagonism, without surprise and without arrogance, that beings are the victims of the very institutions they have themselves created and maintained. The individual who refuses to be lost in their mesmerized surrender to the false prestige of these institutions must go forth alone into an arid and empty wilderness, must set oneself apart from the World around one. One has entered a World of being where few beings will be able to follow one. Their lack of understanding will be the bar. One will find that few of one’s kind are settled in this World, a discovery which one may meet either with disappointment or with resignation. The being who is travelling this inner way soon finds and feels its loneliness. One may try to get rid of the feeling by joining a group, but this can give only a partial liberation and, in the end, only a temporary one. However, this loneliness need not be a cause of suffering. Rather one may come to enjoy it. The feeling of being isolated, the sense of walking a lonely path, is true outwardly but untrue inwardly. For there one is companioned by the Overself’s gentle ever-drawing love. One has only to grope within sufficiently to know this for oneself, and to know it with absolute certitude. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

You Who Must Guide, Before You Trust Me to that Arduous Passage, Look to Me and Look through Me—Can I be Worthy?

July 24, 2019 1:00 am

I do believe you! Every word you have said. And the literal truth is unimportant. You seek something that the saints sought when they renounced their normal lives, when they blundered into the service of Christ. And never mind that you do not believe in Christ. It is unimportant. What is important is that you have been miserable in the existence you have lived until now, miserable to the point of madness, and that my way would offer you an alternative. Nature is mortal’s inorganic body, that is, nature apart from the human body itself. TO say that beings live on nature means that nature is one’s body, that is, nature apart from the human body itself. To say that beings live on nature means that nature is one’s body with which one must remain in constant and vital contact in order not to die. And to say that being’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature is simply an expression of the interdependence of all natural forces, for beings themselves are part of nature. Just as alienated labor separates beings from nature and from themselves—one’s own active functions and life activity—so too its alienated one from the species, from other beings. What happens in the end is that beings regard their labor—their life-activity, one’s productive life—merely as a means of satisfying one’s drive for physical existence. Yet productive life is the real life of the species. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The whole character of a species is evident in its particular type of life-activity; and free, conscious activity is the genetic character of human beings. However, alienated labor reduces this area of productive life to a mere means of existence. To make us connected to our product and labor, beings design in accordance with the laws of beauty. They produce things that make them happy and use the money they earn from their labor to buy private property, something the love that connects them with their work, and makes it more enjoyable. Just because you do not yet sort memos, do not yet sit in conferences, and do not yet sip martinis from your lunch box, do not let your attitude toward your work be generally compounded of hatred, shame and resignation. I have worked on the line with men who have doubled as mechanics, repairmen, salesmen, contractors, builders, farmers, cab-drivers, lumberyard workers, countermen. I would guess that there are many more of these than show up in the official statistics: often people will work for less if one can be paid under the counter with tax-free dollars. Nor is that all. The factory worker with dependents cannot carry the debt load one shoulders—the middle-class debt load, if you like, of nagging payment on car, washer, dryer, TV, clothing, house itself without family help. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Even if one puts in fifty, sixty, or seventy hours a week at one or two jobs, one has to count on his wife’s paycheck, or his son’s, his daughter’s, his brother-in-law’s; or on his mother’ social security, or his father’s veteran’s pension. The working-class family today is not typically held together by the male wage-earner, but by multiple wage-earners often of several generations who club together to get the things they want and need—or are pressured into believing they must have. It is at best a precarious arrangement; as for its toll on the physical organism and the psyche, that is a question perhaps worthy of further investigation by those who currently pronounce themselves bored with Utopia Unlimited in the Fat Millennium. But what of the worker’s middle-class expectations? If these expectations have changed at all in recent years, they would seem to have narrowed, rather than expanded, leaving a psychological increment of resignation rather than of unbounded optimism (expect among the very young—and even among them the optimism focuses more often on better-paying opportunities elsewhere in the labor market than on illusory hopes of swift status advancement). #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The worker’s expectations are for better pay, more humane working conditions, more job security. As long as one feels that one is going to achieve them through an extension of existing conditions, for that long one is going to continue to be a middle-class conservative in temper. But only for that long. I suspect that what middle-class writers mean by the worker’s middle-class expectations are one’s cravings for commodities—one’s determination to have no only fin-tailed cars and single-unit washer-dryers, but McMansions with butterfly chairs in the rumpus room, African masks on the wall, Greek statues, a gorgeous Monet, a couple of small Picassos, a ruby red egg tempera panel of the medieval period, and power boats in the garage. Before the middle-class intellectual condemn these expectations too harshly, let them consider, first, who has been utilizing every known technique of suasion and propaganda to convert luxuries into necessities, and second, at what cost these new necessities are acquire by American working-class family. Think of the American worker: satisfied, doped by TV, essentially middle class in outlook. This is an image bred not of communication with workers (except as mediated by hired interviewers sent into the field like anthropologist or entomologists), but of contempt for people, based perhaps on self-contempt and on a feeling among intellectuals that the worker has let them down. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

In order to see this clearly, we have to place it again in the intellectual’s changing attitudes toward the worker over the last one hundred and ten years. At the time of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the middle-class intellectual saw the proletarian as society’s figure of virtue—heroic, magnanimous, bearing in one’s loins the seeds of a better future. The glamorization of the worker has been taken over as a function of government. Many intellects, as government employees, found themselves helping to create this portrait of the worker as patriot. However, all workers are doing now is making things that other people buy. That, and participating in the great commodity scramble. The disillusionment, it would seem, is almost too terrible to bear. Word has gotten around among the highbrows that the worker is not heroic or idealistic; public opinion pills prove that they want barbecue pits more than foreign assistance and air-conditioning more than desegregation, that they do not particularly want to go on strike, that they are reluctant to form a Labor Party, they vote for Trump because the economy is good, and they are animated by the same aspirations as drive the middle-class onward and upward in suburbia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Manipulative power may have originally been invited by the person’s own desperation or anxiety. Some people accede to their employer’s demand that they accept being a lady or man of the night because her or his own hopelessness and inability to do anything else. After this initial agreement, there is very little spontaneity or choice left to the person. The shift of exploitative to manipulative power is seen on our own frontier in the superseding of the gunman or woman by the “con” man or woman. If for no other reason than one left his or her victim living, in all of one’s dishonesty and misuse of Protestant ethics, the con person represents a less destructive power than the brute force of the gun person. Manipulative power works gratifyingly with those who are already mentally limited, such as children with intellectual disabilities, some backward psychotics, prisoners, and neurotics in limited spheres. And it works certainly well with pigeons. Some people think it is impowering to be controlled, they want to feel like a possession—a trophy wife with silicone trinkets, or a boy toy with a flashy sports car. These are groups in whom spontaneity has already been largely handicapped or rendered ineffective and for whom the principle of manipulative power is necessary. Much of human life is manipulative and that manipulation is used for socially justifiable aims. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Many beings no longer consciously confront their power needs. It is often pointed out that Americans, in the years before 2007, were in such a state of economic hopelessness and anxiety that they succumbed to the manipulative power of Obama in the hope that “hope and change” would assuage their anxiety. The dangers similarly are, giving the despair and anxiety of men and women living in this time of transition between historical periods, that people today will turn toward the socialism proposals of Obama and other democrats in the hope of escaping their anxiety. Anxiety is synonymous with fear, thereby indicating a kinship between the two. Bother are in fact emotional reactions to danger and both may be accompanied by physical sensations, such as trembling, perspiration, violent heart-beat, which may be so strong that a sudden, intense fear may lead to death. Yet there is a difference between the two. When a mother is afraid that her child will die when it has only a pimple or a slight cold we speak of anxiety; but if she is afraid when the child has a serious illness we call her reaction fear. If someone is afraid whenever he stands on a height or when he has to discuss a topic he knows well, we call his reaction anxiety; if someone is afraid when he loses his way high up in the mountains during heavy thunderstorm we would speak of fear. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Thus far we should have a simple and neat distinction: fear is a reaction that is proportionate to the danger one has to face, whereas anxiety is a disproportionate reaction to danger, or even a reaction to imaginary danger. This distinction has one flaw, however, which is that the decision as to whether the reaction is proportionate depends on the average knowledge existing in the particular culture. However, even if that knowledge proclaims a certain attitude to be unfounded, a neurotic will find no difficulty in giving one’s action a rational foundation. In fact, one might get into hopeless arguments if one told a patient that one’s dread of being attacked by some raving lunatic reporter is neurotic anxiety. He would point out that one’s fear is realistic and would refer to occurrences of the kind he fears. The primitive would be similarly stubborn if one considered certain of one’s fear reactions disproportionate to the actual danger. For instance, primitive man in a tribe which as taboos on eating certain animals in mortally frightened if by any chance he has eaten the tabooed meat. As an outside observer you would call this a disproportionate reaction, in fact an entirely unwarranted one. However, knowing the tribe’s beliefs concerning forbidden meat you would have to realize that the situation represents a real danger to the being, danger that the hunting or fishing grounds may be spoiled or danger of contracting an illness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

There is a difference, however, between the anxiety we find in primitives and the anxiety we consider neurotic in our culture. The content of neurotic anxiety, unlike that of primitive, does not conform with commonly held opinions. In both the impressions of a disproportionate reaction vanishes once the meaning of the anxiety is understood. There are persons, for example, who have a perpetual anxiety about dying; on the other hand, because of their sufferings they have a secret wish to die. Their various fears of death, combined with their wishful thinking with regard to death, create a strong apprehension of imminent danger. If one knows all these factors one cannot help but call their anxiety about dying an adequate reaction. Another, simplified example is seen in persons who become terrified when they find themselves near a precipice or a high window or on a high bridge. Here again from without, the fear reaction seems to be disproportionate. However, such a situation may present to them, or stir up in them, a conflict between the wish to live and the temptation for some reason or another to jump down from the heights. It is this conflict that may result in anxiety. The past cannot be relived but every step one can leave the past behind. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The capacities of the imagination that living beings possess are the hallmark of our paradoxical condemnation and our epiphany as beings. The Green Light God gives us is to lend some balance, some dialectic to us as individuals as well as to America. It is a safeguard against [the unalloyed] arrogance of the chosen people, and it makes clear that no one leads us astray. The legend of the Promised Land requires us to pause in our progression of this promised America-the-beautiful to pray about our purposes and to clarify our aims. Other countries like China are producing Smart Cities which aim to reduce crime and improve the quality of life. The American Dream has not yet collapsed; we can still find the way to an ecstasy which balances our dreams, anxiety, and fears. Available to us is inspiration of a new age in which we can directly confront our despair and use it constructively. We know then that the meaning of human existence is infinitely deeper than the American Dream, no matter how far we are borne back into the past of fatigue and ultimate death, we have harbored some ecstatic thought, we have wondered and experiences some poignancy as well as sadness in our wondering. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Let us not match our petty limited minds against the infinite and incomprehensible World-Mind, and let us not say with some foolish mystic that we are God. Let us say rather what we can truly say, which is that there is something of God in us. And for a while the sadnesses are freed from guilt and the joys are relieved of anxiety. It is not for the philosopher to inflate oneself with the arrogance of such pompous self-deification. One remains humble adorer, the meek suppliant. When eternity breaks into time, as it does in legends, we suddenly become aware of the meaning of human consciousness. We are the servants of God. God is within us and that is very true. Although the mystic’s claim to become one with God is, in the full sense of the term, an unquestionable exaggeration, a splendid illusion, one can certainly claim to have entered into a conscious relationship with God. The mystic proudly declares, “I have attained union with God.” The philosopher mostly says, “I have obtained union with my soul and to that extent drawn nearer to God.” This allows one to make sense of our otherwise senseless efforts; it throws light on the darkness of our routine labors and lends some zest to our monotony. This is true whether push our yachts against a current that blocks progress, or work like a robot in a factory, or struggle say after day to express some recalcitrant thoughts in words that always seem to elude us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The ultimate challenge of the American Dream is that we are required—destined, if you will—to recognize our being stat of consciousness in that we are Divine Incarnations inspired by God. We represent God’s Infinite Consciousness, this affirms that any being may approach nearer to and be uplifted by that Consciousness, even if they are not an American. God is never identified with any particular being, not incarnated for one. For God alone is uniquely the Unindividuated whereas all beings are individualized creatures. Even the highest type of being is a particular light, whereas God is the light itself. Every creative encounter is a new event; every time requires another assertion of courage. Every being must start at the beginning. And to encounter the reality of experience is surely the basis for all creativity. The task is to forge in the smithy of my soul, as arduous as the blacksmith’s task of bending red-hot iron in his smithy to make something of value for human life. The conscience is not something that is handed down ready-made from Mount Sinai, despite reports to the contrary. It is created, first of all, out of the inspiration derived from the artist’s symbols and forms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though one may be unaware of the fact. That the Divine has descended into holy being’s mind and heart is philosophically tenable. That the Divine has actually and specifically incarnated in one is not. The artist is not a moralist by conscious intention, but is concerned only with hearing and expressing the vision within his or her own being. However, out of the symbols the artist sees and creates—as Giotto created the forms for the Renaissance—there is later hewn the ethical structure of the society. Nothing can contain the divine essence although everything can be and is permeated by it. The time has come to repudiate all this foolish worship of human beings and to transfer our reverence and obedience to the pure divine Being alone. The more metaphysical comprehension we develop, the less we shall look to the person of a teacher. We shall then regard the Teaching itself as the essential thing. It is always a profitable game for the priesthood of various religions to maintain superstitions like that of a chosen race or fallacies like that of a divine incarnation. This wrong idea of incarnate Godhood is, however, not a moisture without some rain within it. For it is the corruption of a true idea. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

The REAL is unique and indivisible, sole and unadulterable. It never becomes less than it is, never descends to become human, never mixes with what is mere phenomena. Free from sin or guilt; blameless. When one’s thoughts and action are clean in every way, one becomes pure. Your faith to sustain servants of God has been at the heart of your happiness in this life. When one begins a spiritual quest, it is solely by one’s own strivings that one makes one’s initial progress. The time comes, however, when this progress seems to stop and when one seems to stagnate. One has to come to the end of a stage which was really a preparatory one. The stagnation indicates that the path of self-effort is no longer sufficient and that one must now enter upon the path of reliance upon Grace. This is because in the earlier stage, the Ego was the agent for all one’s spiritual activities, whilst it provided the motives which impelled one into these activities. “Behold, O Lord, their souls are precious, and many of them are our brethren; therefore, give unto us, O Lord, power and wisdom that we may bring these, our brethren, again unto thee,” report Alma 31.35. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

What Do You think Really? Inside of You? Is there a God or a Devil? I Mean Truly, What do You Believe?

July 20, 2019 1:27 am

I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the World. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and fully of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my beautiful house at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. It has an intimate view of the greenbelt and its is a beautiful community. It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away. But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I had worn in Miami, and a new pair of black boots. And ignoring my general weariness—I would have been asleep in the Earth by now, had I been still in Europe—I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town. The person living with an alienated and reified, negative identity concept of oneself closely resembles the hypochondriacal patient, except that one’s unhappy preoccupation concerns not a physical ailment but a reified physical or psychic quality that has become the focal point of one’s self-image. The relief one gains from one’s burdensome preoccupation is due to the fact that the reified bad quality no longer is viewed as part of the on-going process of living and of goal-directed thought and action. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The perceived reified bad quality has been severed from the “I” that acts with foresight and responsibility and is looked upon as an inherent, unalterable, unfortunate something an ossified part of oneself that no longer participates in the flux, growth, and development of life. It is experienced as an unchangeable fate whose bearer is doomed to live and die with it. The relief this brings is that the person no longer feels responsible for the supposed consequences of this fixed attribute; one is not doing anything for which one can be blamed, even though one may feel ashamed and unacceptable for being such and such. The preoccupation with the reified identity directs attention away from what one does to what one supposedly is. Furthermore, one no longer has to do anything about it because, obviously, one cannot do anything about it. Thus, the anxiety, fear, and effort that would be connected with facing and acting upon the real problem is avoided by putting up with the negative, fixed identity which, in addition, may be used to indulge self-pity and to enlist the sympathy of others. Kind of like how in Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is so lonely that he considers killing himself by going into the Sun, but David tells him not to, and he does it anyway and only gets darker. And also when Lestat considers letting the body thief take his body, but David tells him, “You’re going to make another ghastly mistake!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

So far we have discussed mainly negative self-images. However, alienated identity concepts may be beneficial as well as negative. Alienated identity of the beneficial variety occurs in vanity, conceit and—in its more pathological form—in delusions of grandeur, just as in its negative counterpart the “I” of the vain person is severed from a fixed attribute on which the vanity is based. The person feel that one possesses this quality. It becomes the focal point of one’s identity and serves as its prop. Beauty, masculinity or femininity, being born on the right side of the river, success, money, prestige, or being good may serve as such a prop. While in the negative identity feeling a reified attribute haunts the person, such an attribute serves the beneficial self-image as a support. Yet it is equally alienated from the living person. This is expressed nicely in the phrase “a stuffed shirt.” It is not the person in the shirt but some dead matter, some stuffing that is used to bolster and aggrandize the self-feeling. It often becomes apparent in the behavior of the person that one leans on this real or imagined attribute, just as it often is apparent that a person feel pulled down by the weight of some alienated negative attribute. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

When one is weighed down by some alienated negative attribute, it could be similar to how Reglan James behaves in Anne Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief. “David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami,” says Lestat. “That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its…its height. That’s why he almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it!” Instead of being possessed by another entity or being, people’s negative emotions give off such a vibe that they do not seem normal. The way they talk, the way they move, the things they say, it indicates something is wrong with them. They are possessed by darkness. The reliance on an identity, on a self-image based on the prop of some reified attribute remains precarious even where is seems to work, after a fashion, as it does in the self-satisfaction of the vain. This precariousness is inevitable since the beneficial self-evaluation of such a person does not rest on a feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life, in thought, feeling, and deed. One is always threatened with the danger of losing this thing, this possession, or which one’s self-esteem is based. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Today, especially in this country where youth has become a public fetish, many thousands try to preserve its alienated mask while terrified by the prospect of suddenly growing old, when the mask can no longer be worn or will become grotesque. The beautiful picture of youth can alienate beings from their actual life, which effects the internal markup of the being, marking their aura over with years of cruelty, selfishness, and greed, as they advance in age. Their true character is a secret threat that they feel when be exposed as they age because they are superficial and have no substance to go with their beauty. All beauty and no brains. In ever case of alienated identity concepts, there is a secret counterimage. Very often the hidden self announces its presence merely in a vague background feeling that the person would be lost, would be nothing if it were not for the alienated, reified quality on which the feeling of being something, somebody, or the feeling of vanity, is based. In this feeling both a truth and an irrational anxiety find expression. The truth is that no being who looks upon oneself as a thing and bases one’s existence on the support of some reified attribute of this thing has found oneself and one’s place in life. The irrational anxiety is the feeling that without the prop of such an attribute one could not live. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Similarly, in the negative alienated identity concepts there usually is a beneficial counterimage. It may take a generalized, vague form: If it were not for such and such (the reified attribute forming the focus of the negative identity), I would be all right, successful, wonderful, and so forth. Or it may take the more concrete form of some grandiose, exaggerated fantasy about one’s beneficial qualities. These artificial beneficial counterimages, too, express both an irrational hope and a truth. The irrational hope is that one may have some magical quality which will transport one into a state of security, or even superiority, because then one will possess that attribute which, instead of haunting one, will save one. However, actually it is nothing but the equally reified counterpart of what at present drags one down. The truth is that beings have potentialities for overcoming their alienation from oneself and for living without the burden and the artificial props of alienated, reified identity concepts. There is a distinction between helpful self-awareness and futile and self-torment rumination. We should oppose the ascetic interpretation we find among our modern hypochondrists and those who turn their vengeance against themselves. Instead, one sees the real meaning of self-knowledge in taking notice of oneself and becoming aware of one’s relation to other people and to the World. The pseudo self-knowledge against which one speaks foreshadows the widespread present-day self-preoccupation which is concerned, fruitlessly, with an alienated, negative sense of identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

A productive self-knowledge is to pay attention to what one is actually doing in one’s relation to others, to the World and to oneself. A complete understanding of a neurosis is not possible without tracing it back to its infantile conditions, I believe that the genetic approach, if used one-sidedly, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, because it leads then to a neglect of the actually existing unconscious tendencies and their functions and interactions with other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures. Genetic understanding is useful only as long as it helps the functional understanding. Proceeding on this belief I have found in analyzing the most varied kinds of personalities, belonging to different types of neuroses, differing in age, temperament and interests, coming from different social layers, that the contents of the dynamically central conflict and their interrelations were essentially similar in all of them. My experiences in psychoanalytical practice have been confirmed by observations of persons outside the practice and of characters in current literature. If the recurring problems of neurotic persons are divested of the fantastic and abstruse character they often have, it cannot escape our attention that they differ only in quantity from the problems bothering the normal person in our culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The great majority of us have to struggle with problems of competition, fears of failure, emotional isolation, distrust of others and of our own selves, to mention only a few of the problems that may be present in a neurosis. The fact that in general the majority of individuals in a culture have to face the same problems suggests the conclusion that these problems have been created by the specific life conditions existing in that culture. That they do not represent problems common to human nature seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivating forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours. Hence in speaking of a neurotic personality of our time, I not only mean that there are neurotic persons having essential peculiarities in common, but also that these basic similarities are essentially produced by the difficulties existing in our time and culture. As far as my sociological knowledge allows me I shall show later on what difficulties of our culture are responsible for the psychic conflicts we have. The validity of my assumption concerning the relation between culture and neurosis ought to be tested by the combined efforts of anthropologist and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would not only have to study neuroses as they appear in definite cultures, as has been done from formal criteria such as frequency, severity or type of neuroses, but particularly they should study them from the point of view of what basic conflicts are underlying them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The anthropologist would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for the individual. One way in which the similarity of attitudes open to surface observer can discover without the tools of psychoanalytic technique, concerning persons with whom one is thoroughly familiar, such as oneself, one’s friends, members of one’s family or one’s colleagues. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other. This is partially seen in our own day with pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. If they could, people would mold magic gold into gigantic phallus to shock the ladies and gentlemen. In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and one’s relation with the persons who use one’s product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product one helped produce except one’s own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeoisie, pleasures of the flesh becomes separated from the beings; one’s pleasures of the flesh are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

There are some situations of power when force, or coercion, or compulsion is an integral part of power. War is one of them. With sick persons or children, compulsion or coercion has to be used in proportion to the lack of capacity of knowledge of the other person. When my son was three years old, I kept a firm grip on his hand as we walked across Broadway, a condition that was relaxed as he grew and earned the intricacies of traffic enough to be able safely to take on the responsibility of crossing himself. However, there are ultimate limits to the application of force. If a species of animal uses its superior force to kill off all the other animals in its vicinity, it obviously will not have them for food when it needs them. This balance of nature is a delicate interweaving of the force of various animals and plants in relation to each other. When this balance is upset, we are faced with fearful prospects, indeed—as we are learning to our sorrow in modern ecology. Thus, to keep from self-destruction, power can be allied with force only up to the point where it might destroy the identity of the other. In a gun battle of the West, to destroy the identity of the enemy is precisely the goal of shooting. Hence I cite this as an example of the self-destructive effect of power allied with force. The one who is killed, obviously losing one’s being, is no longer present to give what one can to the community, no longer a person to whom to relate; and we are the poorer thereby. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Also the spontaneity of the other person cannot be destroyed without a loss to the destroyer as well. This is the danger in extreme forms of coercion and compulsion in brainwashing, conditioning, and hypnosis. If the person is transformed into something resembling a mechanism, one may still preserve some spontaneity; but if he is transformed into a complete mechanism, one ceases to be a person in the process. Power, therefore, ought to move with the affirmation of the spontaneity of the person it encounters; this will assure it most success in the long run. This is why I permitted Mercedes, an individual with practically no sense of her own power or spontaneity or choice to start with, to decide wen she wished to come to her psychotherapy sessions and when she chose not to. It was a process not only of letting her use her own spontaneity but requiring her to use it. While it is utopian to try to divorce power completely from force, compulsion, and coercion, it is cynical to identity all kinds of power with them. Is a tiny rain drop the same rainstorm? Can it cause a dam to burst as a rain storm? No—although the two are of the same nature, they are not of the same identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

For any being to say “I am God” is incorrect, unless one understands the statement to refer only to the nature of one’s innermost being and only in this way, that one is but an insignificant drop of God with all the limitations that belong to a spark. We have to find our own self before we can find that of God’s. Hence there is real need of the higher self tenet. We are not entitled to aspire towards union with the wholeness of God so long as we still have not attained union with the godlikeness in beings. The mystical quest does not open the inner mysteries of God to our gaze. It opens the inner mysteries of beings. It leads them to one’s own divinity, not to God’s. There was once a less affluent Russian painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friends finds the canvas on which the painter was working. It I blank except for one word, unclearly written and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidarity—living in the market place; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the masses. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

There is no contradiction between advising aspirants at one time to seek a master and follow the path of discipleship, and advising them to seek within and follow the path of self-reliance at another time. The two counsels can be easily reconciled. For if the aspirant accepts the first one, the master will gradually lead one to become increasingly self-reliant. If one accepts the second one, one’s higher self will lead one to a master. When this craving for a guru becomes excessive, inordinate, it is a sign of weakness, an attempt to escape one’s own personal responsibility and to place it squarely on somebody else’s shoulders, a manifestation of inferiority complex such as we are accustomed to see in faces that have long been enslaved by others. Although it is true that one must find one’s own way to the goal, one need not do so as if one exists alone on this planet. One may be helped by drawing creatively on the experience gained by others even while one critically judges it. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of God’s tender mercies over them. And it came to pass the they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

You Really think Angels Will Come in the End and Take Us Away– Human Beings can Reach Heaven Only through Hell?!

July 17, 2019 12:17 am

I did not know what I meant to write, from one sentence to the next, only that I had to tell him in some way that I was sorry for my behavior, and that something had snapped in my soul when I beheld the men in the Rembrandt portrait, and so I wrote, in a hasty and driven fashion, this narrative of sorts. I myself has this theory about Rembrandt. I have spent many hours studying his paintings everywhere—in Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, or wherever I find them—and I do believe as I told you that so many great souls could not have existed as Rembrandt’s paintings would have us to believe. We find in every culture the conflict between routine and the attempt to get back to the fundamental realities of existence. To help in this attempt has been one of the functions of art and of religion, even though religion itself has eventually become a new form of routine. Even the most primitive history of beings shows us an attempt to get in touch with the essence of reality by artistic creations. Primitive beings are not satisfied with the practical function of their tools and weapon, but strives to adorn and beautify them, transcending their utilitarian function. This is my theory, and please bear in mind when you read it that it accommodates all the elements involved. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Aside from art, the most significant way of breaking through the surface of routine and of getting in touch with the ultimate realities of life is to be found in what may be called by the general term of “ritual.” I am referring here to ritual in the broad sense of the word, as we find it in the performance of a Greek drama, for instance, and not only to rituals in the narrower religious sense. What was the function of the Greek drama? Fundamental problems of human existence were presented in an artistic and dramatic form, and participating in the dramatic performance, the spectator—though not as a spectator in our modern sense of the consumer—was carried away from the sphere of daily routine and brought in touch with oneself as a being, with roots of one’s existence. I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. The Devil sent hordes of mortals to Rembrandt for portraits. He gave wealth to Rembrandt, he gave him a charming house in Amsterdam, a wife and later a mistress, because he was sure he would have Rembrandt’s soul in the end. Rembrandt touched ground with his feet, and in this process gained strength by which he was brought back to himself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good? He searched the faces of his subjects for their inner divinity; and to his amazement he was able to see the spark of it in the most unworthy of beings. Many hardly ever get out of the realm of human-made conventions and things, and hardly ever break through the surface of one’s routine, aside from grotesque attempts to satisfy the need for a ritual as we see it practiced in lodges and fraternities. The only phenomenon approaching the meaning of a ritual, is the participation of the spectator in competitive sports; here at least, one fundamental problem of human existence is dealt with: the fight between beings and the vicarious experience of victory and defeat. However, what a primitive and restricted aspect of human existence, reducing the richness of human life to one partial aspect! If there is a fire, or a car collision in a big city, scores of people will gather and watch. Millions of people are fascinated daily by reporting of crimes and by detective stories and artificial news. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Many religiously go to movies in which crime and passion are the two central themes. All this interest and fascination is not simply an expression of bad taste and sensationalism, but of a deep longing for a dramatization of ultimate phenomena of human existence, life and death, crime and punishment, the battle between beings and nature. However, while Greek drama dealt with these problems on a high artistic and metaphysical level, our modern drama and ritual are crude and do not produce any cathartic effect. All this fascination with competitive sports, crime and passion, shows the need for breaking through the routine surface, but the way of its satisfaction shows the extreme poverty of our solution. The marketing orientation is closely related to the fact that the need to exchange has become a paramount drive in modern beings. It is, of course, true that even in a primitive economy based on a rudimentary form of division of labor, beings exchange goods with each other within the tribe or among neighboring tribes. The being who produces cloth exchanges it for grain which one’s neighbor may have produced, or for sickles or knives made by the blacksmith. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

With increasing division of labor, there is increasing exchange of good, but normally the exchange of goods is nothing but a means to an economic end. In the capitalistic society exchanging has become an end in itself. The alienated personality who is for sale must lose a good deal of the sense of dignity which is so characteristic of beings even in most primitive cultures. One must lose almost all sense of self, of oneself as a unique and induplicable entity. The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling my experience is my own, and not an alienated one. Things have no self and being who have become things have no self. Rembrandt’s skills were great—and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with—that not only could he see that goodness in beings, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole. One cannot fully appreciate the nature of alienation without considering one specific aspect of modern life: its routinization, and the repression of the awareness of the basic problems of human existence. We touch here upon a universal problem of life. Beings have to earn their daily bread, and this is always a more or less absorbing task. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

One has to take care of the many time- and energy-consuming tasks of daily life, and one is enmeshed in a certain routine necessary for the fulfillment of these tasks. One builds a social order, conventions, habits and ideas, which help one to perform what is necessary, and to live with one’s fellow beings with a minimum of friction. It is characteristic of all culture that it builds human-made, artificial World, superimposed on the natural World in which a being lives. However, only if one remains in touch with the fundamental facts of one’s existence, if one can experience the exaltation of love and solidarity, as well as the tragic fact of one’s aloneness and of the fragmentary character of one’s existence, then beings cannot fulfill themselves. If one is completely enmeshed in the routine and in the artifacts of life, if one cannot see anything but human-made, commonsense appearance of the World, one loses one’s touch and the grasp of oneself and the World. However, with each portrait Rembrandt understood the grace and goodness of humankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and wisdom which resides in every soul. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

As a result of the harmony Rembrandt possessed, his skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person oneself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work. He taught in many places, said on many occasions, “No one saves us but ourselves; no one can and no one may. Each alone must tread the path.” We can hear and see the echoes of these beliefs that Rembrandt expressed in the faces he painted. They were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become. If we cannot find a genuine indication of the presence of God-consciousness in a person by some fleeting or permanent reflection in the mirror of our own internal experience, then we must perforce abandon our would-be discipleship to the care of the divinity that is possessed hidden somewhere at the back of our minds. This is why the merchants of the Drapers’ Guild look like the oldest and wisest of God’s saints. However, nowhere is this spiritual depth and insight more clearly manifest than in Rembrandt’s self-portraits. And surely you know that he left us one hundred and twenty-two of these. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Why do you think he painted so many? They were his personal plea to God to note the progress of this man who, through his close observation of others like him, had been completely religiously transformed. “This is my vision,” said Rembrandt to God. In the absence of a master let one follow a lone path, welcoming whatever one can learn from competent authorities but attaching oneself to none. The ways of success are still open to aspirants. Nobody should overrate the help which a spiritual guide is able to give and underrate one’s own resources. The quest is a work whose continuity goes on for a whole lifetime, whereas the personal contact which is needed to make a guide’s help effective can only be gotten occasionally at most and then only for limited periods of time. I give the warning because I know from several of my correspondents that this is a common tendency among beginners and even among those who ought to know better. The importance of a teacher is somewhat overrated. If one continues one’s program of study, prayer, community service, and if one appeals to one’s own higher self for guidance, one will certainly continue to progress. Earthly responsibilities will not interfere, for the time spent away from prayer is also part of the spiritual life. Towards the end of Rembrandt’s life, the Devil grew suspicious. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The Devil did not want his minion to be creating such magnificent paintings, so full of warmth and kindness. He had believed the Dutch to be a materialistic and therefore Worldly people. And here in pictures full of rich clothing and expensive possessions gleamed the undeniable evidence that human beings are wholly unlike any other being in the cosmos—they are a precious mingling of the flesh and immortal fire. Although Rembrandt knew his discovery of being born out of, and that he still remained rooted in the Infinite Mind of God, it was a tremendous revelation but it did not make him identical with God. It made the mystical channel only for the cosmic mind, not one with it. He touched the cosmic and did not become entirely transformed into it. Well, Rembrandt suffered all the abuse heaped upon him by the Devil. He lost his fine house in the Jodenbreestraat. He lost his mistress, and finally even his son. Yet on and on he painted, without a trace of bitterness or perversity; on and on he infused his paintings with love. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Human beings can only hope to realize the Overself which is a ray or intermediary, but not the World-Mind itself. For the latter is too vast and infinite and remote. Hence when mystics talk of knowing God or feeling God, this is only partly true for they can never know or feel God in his fullness. The soul is as close as we can approach to that Mind, but surely it is enough. For it reflects something of the Mind’s nature. No being we know of can come to know God as God is in himself, for that is impossible, but all beings can come to know God as God is in relation to us. This is because the Overself is all being’s contact-point with the World-Mind. We are not God but rather an emanation from God. We are still beings but there is something Godlike in the centre of our being. The Deity is inaccessible but that centre is not. Finally, as Rembrandt lay on his deathbed the Devil pranced about, gleefully, ready to snatch Rembrandt’s soul and pinch it between evil little fingers. However, the Angels and saints cried to God to intervene. “In all the World, who knows more about goodness?” they asked, pointing to the dying Rembrandt. “Who has shown more than this painter? We look to his portraits when we would know the divine in man.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

When it is said that the Infinite Being cannot be known by the finite mind it is not meant that the Infinite Being is forever unknowable by human beings. For there is in everyone of us a link between the two, and if a being is willing to let go of one’s Worldly concerns long enough to find one’s way to that link—whether by reflection or by prayer—one will discover that this link—intuition can lead one into the Infinite Presence. At that sacred moment one becomes IT because one forgets the personal self. It exists whether one exists or not, but one exists only in dependence upon it. If the very interesting question be asked, “How did the first mortal come to discover this Presence?” I suggest that we may draw near to the holy of Holies yet never enter it, feel its eternal atmosphere yet never understand it. God alone knows why this manifestation should be. Even the mystic never attains God in its fullness but only that ray of God within oneself, which is the soul. Although such an attainment is imperfect in the conventional mystic, the philosophic one can hope to attain perfection. However, neither can cross the Overself’s farthest boundary—but that is another matter. That which one finds deep within oneself is, one understands intuitively, a reflected ray from that which exists behind the whole Universe but it is still only a ray. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

And so God broke the pact between Rembrandt and the Devil. He took to himself the soul of Rembrandt, and the Devil, so recently cheated of Faust for the very same reason, went mad with rage. Well, he would burry the life of Rembrandt in obscurity. He would see to it that all the man’s personal possessions and records were swallowed by the great flow of time. And that is of course why we know almost nothing of Rembrandt’s true life, or what sort of person he was. Beings may know the soul but not God. They may not see the face, or understand the nature, of the final essential reality—and live. One who claims such experience practices self-deception and is caught in illusion. Nonetheless, the Devil could not control the fate of the paintings. Try as he might, he could not make people burn them, throw them away, nor set them aside for the newer, more fashionable artist. In fact, a curious thing happened, seemingly without a marked beginning. Rembrandt became the most admired of all painters who had ever lived; Rembrandt became the greatest painter of all time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

I took a trip to San Jose, California, the Silicone Valley, to search from lost Rembrandts, before the clever flock of psychics guarding such antiquities sensed my meddlesome telepathic scanning—which they do with remarkable efficiency—and quickly cut me off. Many people wondered where the Winchester Mansion gets its money and somehow thought I knew. There once was a staggering abundance of gold and jewels in its vaults. Its investments in the great banks of Europe are legendary. It owns property in many cities, which alone could sustain it, if it did not possess anything else. And then there are its various treasures—paintings, statues, tapestries, antique furnishings and ornaments—all of which it has acquired in connection with various occult cases and upon which it places no monetary value, for the historical and scholarly value exceeds any appraisal which could be made. The Winchester once has a library alone worth a king’s ransom in any Earthly currency. There were manuscripts in all languages, indeed some from the famous old library of Alexandria burnt centuries ago, and others from the libraries of the martyred Cathars, whose culture is no more. There were texts from ancient Egypt for a glimpse of which archaeologists would have cheerfully committed murder. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

There were texts by preternatural beings of several known species, including vampires. There were letters and archives in these documents supposedly written by me, but which had been authenticated and predated my birth. Some of the documents were also drafted by Mrs. Winchester in the Blue Séance room. When they assert that they have untied with God, they have, if truly attained, united with God’s deputy, their higher self, their own divine soul—which is not the same. And if they have deceived themselves then they have untied only with their conception of God. That is, they have never gone outside the enclosing circle of their own thought. The five senses cannot perceive It and the thinking faculties cannot conceive It. It cannot be brought down to the level of humans nor can human raise themselves to its height. Whoever believes that one experiences the Absolute at any time, experiences only an imagination of one’s own brain. The Overself is so close to God, so akin to the World-Mind that no being need look farther, or aspire higher. Our finite minds cannot lift more than the smallest corner of the smallest corner of the infinite veil behind which the Ultimate Mind eludes us. No one overwhelmed by the experience of Enlightenment has yet said the last word about Absolute Truth; for no words can either exhaust it or even touch it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

I wince to think of how much time has been wasted by intelligent men and women arguing about whether psychotherapy cures and trying to fit psychotherapy into the Western twenty-first century medicine. Our task is to be a guide, friend, and interpreter to persons on their journeys through their private Hells and purgatories. Specifically, our task is to help patients get to the point where they can decide whether to they wish to remain victims—for to be a victim has real benefits in terms of power over one’s family and friends and other secondary gains—or whether they choose to leave this victim-state and venture though purgatory with the hope of achieving some sense of paradise. Our patients often, toward the end, are understandably frightened by the possibility of freely deciding for themselves whether to take their chances by completing the quest they have bravely begun. All though history it is true that only by going through Hell does one have any chance of reaching heave. The journey through Hell is part of the journey that cannot be omitted—indeed, what one learns in Hell is prerequisite to arriving at any good value thereafter. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Homer has Odysseus visit the underworld, and there—and only there—can he get the knowledge that will enable him to get safely back to Ithaca. Virgil has Aeneas go into the netherworld and there talk to his father, in which discussion he gets directions as to what to do and what not to do in the founding of the great city of Rome. How fitting it is that each of these gets a vita wisdom which is learned in the descent into Hell! Without this knowledge there is no success in finding direction by which to go, or achieving the things of paradise—purity of experience purity of heart. Dante makes the journey in person, he himself goes through Hell and then is enabled to discover paradise at the end of his journey. Dante writes his great poem to enable the rest of us also to go ultimately to paradise. Human beings can reach Heaven only through Hell. Without suffering, or without a probing of one’s fundamental aims, one cannot get to Heaven. Even a purely secular Heaven has the same requirements. The agony, the horror, the sadness, are a necessary prelude to self-realization and self-fulfillment. In Europe multitudes go to church on Good Friday to learn the triumphant experience of Easter, the resurrection. They hear testimony that Jesus is crucified, and know that the ascent to Heaven must be preceded by death on Earth. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

In America we seem, by our practice, to act on the wish that we could pass over the despair of mortification and know only the exaltation of ascent. We seem to believe that we can be reborn without ever dying. Such is the spiritual version of the American Dream! We also need to have the courage to relate to other beings, the capacity to risk one’s self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy. It is the courage to invest one’s self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand an increasing openness. Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that is we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected. A common practice in our day is to avoid working up the courage required for authentic intimacy by shifting the issue to the body, making it a matter of simple physical courage. It is easier in our society to be unclothed physically than to be exposed psychologically or spiritually—easier to share our body than to share our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal and the sharing of which is experiences as making us more vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

I Would Gladly Give My Life if it Would Advance the Cause of Truth!

July 16, 2019 12:52 am

Ah, such a circus for the eye—this low-ceilinged cave—chocked-full of every imaginable kind of packageable and preserved foodstuff, toilet article, and hair accoutrement, ninety percent of which existed not at all in any form whatsoever during the century when I was born. We are talking sanitary napkins, medicinal eyedrops, plastic bobby pins, felt-tip markers, creams and ointments for all nameable part of the human body, dishwashing liquid in every color of the rainbow, and cosmetic rinses in some colors never before invented and yet undefined. Imagine Louis XVI opening a noisy crackling plastic sack of such wonders? What would he think of Styrofoam coffee cups, chocolate cookies wrapped in cellophane, or pends that never run out of ink? Well, I am still not entirely used to these items myself, though I have watched the progress of the Industrial Revolution for two centuries with my own eyes. Such drugstores can keep me enthralled for hours on end. Sometimes I become spellbound in the middle of Wal-Mart. And everybody is to everybody else a commodity, always to be treated with certain friendliness, because even if one is not of use now, one may be later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference. There is also a good deal of subtle distrust. When one being says to another, “You speak to Louis Pointe du Lac; he is all right,” it is an expression of reassurance against a general distrust. Even love and the relationships between genders has assumed this character. The great the emancipation of the pleasures of the flesh, as it occurred after the First World War, was a desperate attempt to substitute mutual pleasures of the flesh for a deeper feeling of love. When this turned out to be a disappointment the erotic polarity between the genders was reduced to a minimum and replaced by a friendly partnership, a small combine which has amalgamated its forces to hold out better in the daily batter of life, and to relieve the feeling of isolation and aloneness which everybody has. The alienation between being and being results in the loss of those general and social bonds which characterize medieval as well as most other precapitalist socities. Modern society consists of atoms (if we use the Greek equivalent of individual), little particles estranged from each other but held together by selfish interests and by the necessity to make use of each other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Yet beings are a social entity with a deep need to share, to help, to feel as a member of a group. What has happened to these social strivings in beings? They manifest themselves in the special sphere of the public realm, which is strictly separated from the private realm. Our private dealings with our fellow beings are governed by the principle of egotism, “each for oneself, God for us all,” in flagrant contradiction to Christian teaching. The individual is motivated by egotistical interest, and bot by solidarity with and love for one’s fellow beings. The latter feelings may assert themselves secondarily as private acts of philanthropy or kindness, but they are not part of the basic structure of our social relations. Separated from our private life as individuals is the realm of our social life as citizens. In this realm the state is the embodiment of our social existence; as citizens we are supposed to, and in fact usually do, exhibit a sense of social obligation and duty. We pay taxes, we vote, we respect the laws, and in the case of war we are willing to sacrifice our lives. What clearer example could there be of the separation between private and public existence than the fact that the same being who would not think of spending one hundred dollars to relieve the need of a stranger does not hesitate to risk one’s life to save the stranger when in war they both happen to be soldiers in uniform? The uniform is the embodiment of our social nature—civilian garb, of our egotistic nature. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The division between the community and the political state has led to the projection of all social feelings into the state, which thus becomes an idol, a power standing over and above the being. Beings submit to the state as to the embodiment of one’s own social feelings, which one worships as powers alienated from oneself; in one’s private life as an individual one suffers from the isolation and aloneness which are necessary result of this separation. The worship of the state can only disappear if beings take back the social powers into oneself, and builds a community in which one’s social feelings are not something added to one’s private existence, but in which one’s private and social existence are one and the same. What is the relationship of beings toward oneself? I have described elsewhere this relationship as marketing orientation. In this orientation, beings experience themselves as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. One does not experience oneself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. One is alienated from these powers. One’s aim is sell oneself successfully on the market. One’s sense of self does not stem from one’s activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from one’s socioeconomic role. Our sense of value depends on ourselves: on whether we can sell ourselves favorably, whether we can make more of ourselves that we started out with, whether we are a success. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

One’s body, one’s mind and one’s soul are one’s capital, and one’s task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of oneself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the personality package, conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If one fails in a profitable investment in oneself, one feels that one is a failure; if one succeeds, one is a success. Clearly, one’s sense of one’s own value always depends on factors extraneous to oneself, on fickle judgment of the market, which decides about one’s value as in decides about the value of commodities. Nevertheless, as people begin their journey, they pause in the vestibule of hell, where they hear the cries of anguish from the opportunists. These souls who in life were neither good nor evil but acted only for themselves. They are the outcasts who took no sides in the rebellion of the Angels. In modern psychology these opportunists are called well adjusted; they know how to keep out of trouble! However, they are guilt of the sin of fence-sitting. Hence they are neither in hell nor out of it. They are eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air; and as they run they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets, who sting them and produce a constant flow of blood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Hell enacts the law of symbolic retribution: since these opportunists took no sides they are given no place. As their sin was a darkness, so they move in darkness. As their own guilty conscience pursued them, so they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets. Any being who is neither good nor evil is simply not living an authentic life. The law tends to take care to punish the evil depicted in society, and they understand profoundly the passion that drives beings away from the moral life. They believe that it takes courage to be a real sinner. Many people learn to cope wit their problems (not to cure them) in part by means of religion or a therapist’s superior familiarity with disordered human types. As one journeys deeper into hell, such as the gluttonous, the hoarders, and wasters, the wrathful and the sullen, the important thing is not the specific evils with which one struggles but the journey itself. In any quest-romance the recognition of negative states leads to a purification of the self, a casting of the dead/diseased self in favor for a new life. Likewise the function of psychoanalysis, from one point of view, is a movement toward healthy by traversing the morbid landscape of one’s own past. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Dr. Freud remarks that hysterical patients suffer mainly from reminiscence might be extended to include all those who are inwardly compelled to autobiographical narrative. The Inferno—or hell—consists of suffering and endless torment that produces no change in the soul that endures it and is imposed from without. However, in Purgatorio suffering is temporary, a means of purification, and is eagerly embraced by the soul’s own will. Both must be traversed before arriving at the celestial Paradiso. I think of these three stages as simultaneous—three coexisting aspects of all human experience. Leaving aside the manifest picture and looking at the dynamics effective in producing neuroses, and that is anxieties and the defenses built up against them. Intricate as the structure of a neurosis may be, this anxiety is the motor which sets the neurotic process going and keeps it in motion. Anxieties or fears—let us use these terms interchangeably for a while—are ubiquitous, and so are defenses against them. These reactions are not restricted to human beings. If an animal, frightened by some danger, either makes a counter-attack or takes flight, we have exactly the same situation of fear and defenses. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

If we are afraid of being struck by lightning and put a lightning rod on our roof, if we are afraid of the consequences of possible accidents and take out an insurance policy, the factors of fear and defense are like wise present. Fear and defense are present in various specific forms in every culture, and may be institutionalized, as in the wearing of amulets as a defense against the fear of the evil eye, the observation of circumstantial rites against the fear of the dead, the taboos concerning the avoidance of menstruating women as a defense against the fear of evil emanating from them. These similarities present a temptation to make a logical error. If the factors of fear and defense are essential in neuroses, why not call the institutionalized defenses against fear the evidence of cultural neuroses? The fallacy in reasoning this way is possessed in the fact that two phenomena are not necessarily identical when they have one element in common. One would not call a house a rock merely because it is built out of the same mater as the rock. What, then, is the characteristic of neurotic fears and defenses that makes them specifically neurotic? Is it perhaps that the neurotic fears are imaginary? No, for we might also be inclined to call fear of the dead imaginary; and in both cases we should be yielding to an impression based on a lack of understanding. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

No, for neither does the primitive know why one has a fear of the dead. The distinction has nothing to do with gradations of awareness or rationality, but it consists in the following two factors. First, life conditions in every culture give rise to some fears. They may be caused by external dangers (nature, enemies), by the forms of social relationships (incitement to hostility because of suppression, injustice, enforced dependence, frustrations), by cultural traditions (traditional fear of demons, of violation taboos) regardless of how they may have originated. An individual may be subject more or less to these fears, but on the whole it is safe to assume that they are thrust upon every individual living in a given culture, and that no one can avoid them. The neurotic, however, not only shared the fears common to all individuals in a culture, but because of conditions in one’s individual life—which, however, are interwoven with general conditions—one also has fears which in quantity or quality deviate from those of the cultural pattern. Secondly, the fears existing in a given culture are warded off in general by certain protective devices (such as taboos, rites, customs). As a rule these defenses represent a more economical way of dealing with fears than do the neurotic’s defenses built up in a different way. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Thus the normal person, though having to undergo the fears and defenses of one’s culture, will in general be quite capable of living up to one’s potentialities and of enjoying what life has to offer one. The normal person is capable of making the best of the possibilities given in one’s culture. Expressing it negatively, one does not suffer more than is unavoidable in one’s culture. The neurotic person, on the other hand, suffers invariably more than the average person. The only reason why I did not mention this fact when discussing the characteristics of all neuroses that can be derived from surface observation is that it is not necessarily observable from without. The neurotic oneself may not even be aware of the fact that one is suffering. Reason does not at all mean our contemporary intellectualism, or technical reason, or rationalism. It stands for the brad spectrum of life in which a person reflects on or pauses to question the meaning of experience, especially suffering. In our age reason is taken as logic, as it is mainly channeled through the left hemisphere of the brain. Therefore, if we take it in a broad sense, reason can guide us in our private hells. However, reason even in one’s amplified sense cannot lead us into the celestial paradise. We have the need of other guides on our journey. These guides are revelation and intuition. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The Real is wholly nothing to the five senses and wholly unthinkable to the human intellect. Therefore and to this extent only it is also called the Unknowable. However, there is a faculty latent in beings which is subtler than the sense, more penetrative than the intellect. If one succeeds in evoking it, the Real, the unknowable, will then come within the range of one’s perception, knowledge, and experience. However, although the Absolute in its passive state is unknowable, the Overself as a representative of its active aspect, of the World-Mind, is knowable. If the pure essence of Godhead is too inaccessible for beings, nevertheless one has not been left bereft of all divine communion. For there is a hidden element within oneself which has emanated from the Godhead. It is really one’s higher, better self, one’s soul. The Infinite Mind is beyond human perception but its presence and operation are not. The point in human consciousness where these become known is the Overself. However, although the Absolute is imperceptible to human powers, It has not left us utterly bereft of all means of communion. We are linked to It by something that is possessed hidden in the very deeps of our own being, by Its deputy to beings, the divine Overself. Human power can penetrate to those deeps and discover the hidden treasure. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

This higher self is what the successful mystics of all religious have really achieved union with, despite the widely different names of God downwards, which they have given it. One may know that God is here even though one is incapable of know what God is like. If we cannot know the all of God because we do not have the equipment of God, we can at least know something of God and the way we are related through the Overself. Living through other people is a fine way to evade our own problems and it will also make the other person a first-rate candidate for therapy later one. You have as much as a right to live as any other human being. However, there is a common defense of many people overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness. Some other force must have the power to change things since obviously these people do not; their actions do not really mater. To fill the vacuum left by their failure to act, the powerless frequently rely on the practice of magic rites. Worried about being above average weight, some people ask to be hypnotized to cause them to eat less. However, this only takes away a person own responsibility; and why not learn to be one’s own hypnotist? This dependence on magic stretches back through the centuries of oppression of unrepresented groups, and colonial peoples. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

It is assumed that beings can be made passive, docile, and helpless and can be kept this way by the use of built-in threats and the occasional assignation of a loved or community member. However, in the false calm, we repressed the question we should have been asking: When an individual is rendered unable to stand up for oneself socially or physically, as in slavery, where does one’s power go? No one can accept complete impotence short of death. If one cannot assert oneself overtly, one will do it covertly. Thus magic—a covert, cult force—is an absolute necessity for the powerless. The spread of magic and the reliance on the occult is one symptom of the widespread importance in our transitional age. Sometimes people also lash out at others, paradoxically, against those closet and dearest to one. That is because these individuals represent people in whom one has submerged oneself. In this respect they should be fought (in the individual’s mind) for the sake of one’s own autonomy. It is parallel to the counter-will, the being’s self-assertion in opposition exactly to those upon whom is most dependent. Thus the life-destroying violence becomes also life-giving violence. They are intertwined as the sources of the individual’s self-reliance, responsibility, and freedom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Although it is inevitable, beings do not immediately fight everyone in their lives to assert their own freedom. This occurs partly because the people who are still helping them, they have to surrender temporarily some of the autonomy they do have; partly as a counterbalance to the excessive transference that turns the people helping them (financially and or emotionally) into a god. There is thus a self-affirmation precisely in self-destructive violence. Ultimately the affirmation is expressed in the person’s demonstration of one’s right to die by one’s own hand if one chooses. If, as is our tendency in this country, we condemn all violence out of hand and try to eradicate even the possibility of violence from a human being, we take aware from one an element that is essential to one’s full humanity. For the self-respecting human being, violence is always an ultimate possibility—and it will be resorted to less if admitted than if suppressed. For the free beings it remains in imagination an ultimate exit when all other avenues are denied by unbearably tyranny or dictatorship over the spirit as well as the body. To be alive is power, existing in itself, without a further function, omnipotence enough. The persons I have known, or have known of, who have great moral courage have generally abhorred violence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

We should not allow the crushing of another person, whether physically, psychologically, or spiritually. One’s moral courage stands out more clearly when they become the symbol of a value lost sight of in a confused World. The innate worth of a being must be reversed solely because of one’s humanity and regardless of one’s politics. As long as there exist persons with moral courage, we can be sure that the triumph of the human robot has not yet arrived. Courage often arises not only out of one’s audaciousness, but also out of one’s compassion for the human suffering one witnesses around one. It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that mortal courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with the suffering of one’s fellow beings. I am tempted to call this perceptual courage because it depends on one’s capacity to perceive, to let one’s self see the suffering of other beings. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it. It is a truth, recognizable in all of us, that when we do not want to become involved, when we do not want to confront even the issue of whether or not we will come to the assistance of someone who is being unjustly treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to the other’s suffering, we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Hence the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement, “I did not want to become involved.” When we find our own heart and mind, our own inspiration, our spiritual longings, one senses of being guided by ethereal means, this encounter is compared to the secular resurrection. Resurrection reappears in a radically different landscape in order to restore love and joy to the craving soul. It is as if by helping others, we are coming back for our own salvation. We participate wit the ongoingness of the race. To find out the truth little by little oneself is to make it really one’s own. To be pushed into it with a plunge by a master always entails the likelihood of a return to one’s native and proper level later on. We must find the Overself through our own perceptions, that is, through our own eyes—or never. It will not suffice to believe that we can go on seeing it through the eyes of another being—be one a holy guru, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself; reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. Something more is needed that what books or even gurus, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself: reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

God’s Gift to His Sorrowing Creatures is a Joy Worthy of their Destiny for Harmony is Next to Godliness!

July 9, 2019 11:45 pm

How many people do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their live to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: cars made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, people attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the individual; everything except the person is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immorality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening some people rise and realize what they have feared perhaps for decades, that they simply want no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to one has been swept off the face of the Earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except their children. Otherwise they will have ceased long ago to speak of themselves or of anything. They will vanish. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

I sat back impressed by the obvious truth of it, and yet at the same time, everything in me revolted against that prospect. I became aware of the depth of my hope and my terror; how very different those feelings were from the alienation that he described, how very different from that awful wasting despair. There was something outrageous and repulsive in that despair suddenly. I could not accept it. The alienated being, unable to achieve oneself or reach others, uneasily asks, “Who am I?” What this means in a society like ours is we need tremendous faith, for we have to rely upon the infinite life-power to sustain us henceforth. In taking the vow of obedience, one shows forth one’s great humility, for one confesses that one is unable to guide one’s own life and thought wisely, but will take our guidance henceforth from those who stand nearest to God. As a result, some people take a vow of celibacy, which makes a magnificent gesture of defiance to one’s own lower nature, against which one will henceforth fight and to which one will not willingly succumb. For many, the psychological effects of capitalism do not allow one to experience oneself as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside one’s self, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Under capitalism, much like any other economic system, alienation can become the fate not only of the workers but of managers (or bureaucrats) and owners or capitalists themselves. That is because we are not focused on spirituality, but our focus, primarily, is on money, which is an abstraction living beings use to acquire things we consume, and we are similarly alienated from each other. The relationship of beings to their fellows is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other. Ultimately, therefore, beings are alienated from themselves since their aim is to sell themselves. However, things have no self and beings who have become things can have no self. The idea of being’s making a thing of themselves is the marketing orientation. This is closely linked with one’s sacrifice of all that is distinctive about themselves to win approval of the group. As a result, there is some spontaneous self which one is prevented from achieving. This leads to some people becoming neurotics, as they are unable to achieve a sense of self, and as a consequence accept a paper identity of personality as a substitute. However, this substitute offers little comfort. The central issue of the effects of capitalism on personality is the phenomenon of alienation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences one’s self as an alien. One has become, one might say, estranged from oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s acts and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with one’s own being as one is out of touch with any other person. One, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the sense and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the World outside productively. The older meaning in which alienation was used was to denote an insane person; aliene in French, alienado in Spanish are older words for the psychotic, the thoroughly and absolutely alienated person. (“Alienist,” in English, is still used for the doctor who cares for the insane.) In the last century the word alienation was used by Hegel and Marx, referring not to a state of insanity, but to a less drastic form of self-estrangement, which permits the person to act reasonably in practical matters, yet which constitutes one of the most severe socially patterned defects. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

In Marx’s system alienation is called that condition of a being where one’s own act become to one an alien power, standing over and against one, instead of being ruled by one. However, while the use of the word “alienation” in this general sense is a recent one, the concept is a much older one; it is the same to which the prophets of the Old Testament referred as idolatry. It will help us to a better understanding of “alienation” if we begin by considering the meaning of “idolatry.” The prophets of monotheism did not denounce heathen religious as idolatrous primarily because they worshiped several gods instead of one. The essential difference between monotheism and polytheism is not one of number of gods, but is possessed in the fact of self-alienation. Beings spend their energy, their artistic capacities on building an idol, and then one worships this idol, which is nothing but the result of one’s own human effort. One’s life forces have flown into a thing, and this thing, having become an idol, is not experienced as a result of one’s own productive effort, but as something apart from one’s own being, over and against one, which one worships and to which one submits. As the prophet Hosea says (XIV, 8): “Assur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, you are our gods; for the fatherless finds love.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Idolatrous beings bow down to the work of their own hands. The idol represents one’s own life-forces in an alienated form. However, human experience is characterized by freedom (will, creativity, expressiveness) and by limitation (natural and social restraints, vulnerability, and death). The dread of either freedom or limitation promotes extreme or dysfunctional counterreactions to that dread. These counterreactions often manifest themselves in either fanatical overreaching (if the dread centers on one’s limits) or banal timidity (if the dread centers on one’s freedom). The confrontation with or integration of the polarities promotes psychophysiological resilience. The philosopher is not to be advertised by outward signs. Yet if one feels a personal vocation to follow these customs, one is also free to do so. It is simply that there is no necessity in the general sense. There is a halfway stage in the disintegration of words. This is obscenity. It gets power from the using of words to do violence to our unconscious expectations, to destroy our mooring posts, and to undercut the forms of relationship we are used to. The words threaten us with the insecurity of formlessness. Obscenity expresses what has previously been prohibited, reveals what previously was not revealed. Thus it insists on and gets our attention. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Obscenity is the process of attacking what has been sacred and occurs when the word is losing its holy character. It is often factually true that words have already lost all roots to their meaning and have become nothing but empty forms. The same is true in modern art. By showing blood and gore and using sensational colors that carry these impressions, many painters are crying out: “You must look, you must pay attention, you must see in a new way.” This can, indeed, teach us, shocked as we are, not just to look but to see. The breakdown in language has become very clear to many. Nobody really communicates with words anymore. Words have lost their emotional impact, intimacy, ability to shock and make love. However, there is one word Americans have not destroyed. One word which has maintained its emotional power and purity. As you have guessed already, that word is God. It has kept its purity only because it is a force we all call on in our time of need. People who do not believe in God also call on him in situation of extreme distress. The word God does have emotional power. It is connected with tenderness and gentleness, but can also be aggressive and vengeful. An act of God is usually used to describe a disaster beings are not directly responsible for. A miracle is often used to describe when God makes the impossible possible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

However, a word becomes aggressive as a stage in its deterioration: it loses its original meaning, takes on the aggressive for in obscenity, and then may pass into oblivion, as when a person is upset and says, “God damn!” And that is one reason we are not supposed to take the Lord’s name in vein, we must never let the creator of the Universe pass into oblivion, or else we may cease to exist. When it is used to incite people’s aggressive emotions, language can be as violent as physical force. About 230,000 people recently attended a peaceful, graceful demonstration in Hong Kong, China to protest a bill that would allow Hong Kong people to be extradited to mainland China for criminal prosecution. People want the extradition bill terminated because legislation would mean there is no longer any difference between Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong was guaranteed autonomy until 2047. Because there is so much at stake, tensions did flare up and police had to disperse hundreds. Some are only concerned with getting the word out and are totally oblivious to the fact that if you keep chanting, people will get mad, and this rage will have nothing to do with the extradition bill. It will be because words people use in anger to get their points across. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Obscenity is a form of psychic violence and can be used with great effect, a weapon that can excite people to lethal physical violence. Once should know this when using language. It is a mark of our time that each side in a disagreement uses violent language. This amounts to using violence to defeat violence—which never words, whether it is done by police and administration or by young people themselves. In the stories of the crucifixion the agony and the death of Jesus are connected with a group of events in nature: Darkness covers the land; the curtain of the temple is torn in two; the Earth is shaken and the bodies of saints rise out of their graves. Nature, with trembling, participates in the decisive event of history. The Sun veils its head; the temple makes the gesture of mourning; the foundations of the Earth are moved; the tombs are opened. Nature is in an uproar because of something is happening which concerns the Universe. Since the time of the evangelists, wherever the story of Golgotha has been told as the turning event in the World-drama of salvation, the role of nature played in this drama has also been told. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Painters of the crucifixion have used all their artistic power to express the darkness over the land in almost unnatural color. I remember my own earliest impression of Good Friday—the feeling of the mystery of the divine suffering, first of all, through the compassion of nature. And so did the centurion, the first pagan who witnessed for the Crucified. Filled with awe, with numinous dread, he understood in a naive-profound way that something more had happened than the death of a holy and innocent man. We should not ask whether clouds or a dust storm darkened the Sun on a special day of a special year, whether an Earthquake happened in Palestine just at that hour, whether the curtain before the holy of holies in the temple at Jerusalem had to be repaired or whether the raised bodies of the saints died again. However, we should ask whether we are able to feel with the evangelists and the painters, with the children and the Roman soldiers, that the event at Golgotha is one which concerns the Universe, including all nature and all history. With this question in our mind let us look at the signs reported by our evangelist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The Sun veiled its face because of the depth of evil and shame which it saw under the Cross. However, the Sun also veiled its face because its power over the World had ceased once and forever in these hours of its darkness. The great shining and burning God of everything that lives on Earth, the Sun who was praised and feared and adored by innumerable human beings during thousands and thousands of years, had been deprived of its divine power when one human being in ultimate agony maintained his unity wit that which is greater than the Sun. Since those hours of darkness it is manifest that not the Sun, but a suffering and struggling soul which cannot be broken by all the powers of the Universe is the image of the Highest, and that the Sun can only be praised in the way of St. Francis, who called it our brother, but not our god. The curtain of the temple was torn in two. The temple tore its gown as the mourners did because Christ, to whom the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple—and with it, all temple on Earth—also complained of its own destiny. The curtain which made the temple a holy place, separated from other places, lost is separating power. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

One who was expelled as blaspheming the temple, had cleft the curtain and opened the temple for everybody, for every moment. This curtain cannot be mended any more, although there are priests and ministers and pious people who try to mend it. They will not succeed because Christ, for whom every place was a sacred place, a place where God is present, has been brought on the Cross in the name of the holy place. When the curtain of the temple was torn in two, God judged religion and rejected temples. After this moment temples and churches can only means places of concentration on the holy which is the ground and the meaning of every place. And like the temple, the Earth was judged at Golgotha. Trembling and shaking the Earth participated in the agony of the man on the Cross and in the despair of all those who had seen in him the beginning of the new eon. Trembling and shaking the Earth proved that it is not the motherly ground on which we can safely build our houses and cities, our cultures and religious systems. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Trembling and shaking the Earth pointed to another ground on which the Earth itself rests: the self-surrendering love on which all Earthly powers and values concentrate their hostility and which they cannot conquer. Since the hour when Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last and the rocks were split, the Earth ceased to be the foundation of what we build on her. Only insofar as it has a deeper ground, can it stand; only insofar as it is rooted in the same foundation in which the Cross is rooted, can it last. And the Earth not only ceases to be the solid ground of life; she also ceases to be the lasting cave of death. Resurrection is not something added to the death of him who is the Christ; but it is implied in his death, as the story of the resurrection before the resurrection indicates. No longer is the Universe subjected to the law of death out of birth. It is subjected to a higher law, to the law of life out of death by the death of Christ who represented eternal life. When one man in whom God was present without limited committed his spirit into this Father’s hands, the tombs were opened and bodies were raised. Since this moment the Universe is no longer what it was; nature has received another meaning; history is transformed and you and I are no more, and should not be any more, what we were before. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Living beings are not God. Yet one can approach God so intimately, be suffused by his presence so completely, that the first mystics to call this state union with God may be excused. The telepathic closeness which sometimes exists between two separated lovers, relatives, or friends is a slight hint of the telepathic closeness which exists between the harmonized human ego and its divine soul. In my alleged claim that every human being can develop the divinity within oneself, I do not mean that we humble mortals can ever rise to the stature of the Almighty, and I completely concur with the warning against beings attempting to join partners with God. I mean only that we have within us something that is lined with and related to God: it is our higher self, the discovery of and union with which represents the limit of our possible attainment. If it is wiser and humbler to leave some mystery at the bottom of all our intellectual understanding of life than to indulge in self-deceiving finality about it, then it is no less wiser and humbler to acknowledge the ultimate mystery at the heart of all our immediate mystical experience of life. The mystic’s claim to know God when one knows only the deepest part of one’s own self, is one’s particular kind of vanity. Whatever terminous and transcendental consciousness one may discover there, something ever remains beyond it lost in utter inscrutability. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

The World-Mind is impenetrable by human power. This agnostic conclusion does not, however, touch the validity of the mystic’s more legitimate claim, that the human soul is knowable and that an unshakeable union with it is attainable. The mystic may indeed feel the very stuff of God in one’s rapture but this does not supply one with the whole content of God’s knowledge. If therefore one claims not only to be one with God but also to be one with God’s entire consciousness, it is sheer presumption. The mystical union with God can never be a union of nature and substances, can never achieve a complete identity of the atom with the Infinite. What is possible of achievement is, to speak in terms of spatial symbolism which is the only satisfactory way of treating such a transcendental subject, to unite with a single point within the immeasurable infinite of God. We should learn to discern the truth not only through our rational minds but also through the very still and small voice of the Spirit. We can trust in our loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help be become the person he knows we can become. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

In addition to our rational minds, another dimension to gaining knowledge can give us guidance and understanding. It is the still and soft voice of his Holy Spirit speaking to our hearts and also to our minds. We have been given two sources of information, through our physical and spiritual capacities. When these two perspectives are then combined in our souls, one complete picture shows the reality of things as they truly are. We will find our Father’s voice in many places. We will find it when we pray, study the scriptures, attend church, engage in faithful discussion, or go to the temple. However, answers are sometimes slow to come. Still, if you have made the wrong decision, God will not let you proceed too far without a warning impression. Much grotesque misconception exists among the mystics about this claim to have untied with God, however. Not having passed through the metaphysical discipline and consequently having only a confused notion of what God is, they do not comprehend how exaggerated their claim is. For if they were really untied with God, they should have the power of God too. They would be able to set up as creators of entire Universes, of Suns, Stars, and cosmic systems. This feat is plainly beyond them. Let us hear no more of such babble and let them confine their strivings to realizable aims. God’s gift to his sorrowing creatures is a joy worthy of their destiny. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

July 6, 2019 11:12 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Randolph Harris II International Institute