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

August 28, 2019 1:39 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 24, 2019 12:52 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 23, 2019 12:38 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Struggle itself Toward the Heights is Enough to Fill a Being’s Heart—One Must Imagine Beings Happy!

August 19, 2019 11:39 pm

And think of all the things you did, waking that ancient one Akasha and almost loosing her on humanity. As if we do not have enough monsters created by evolution. And then your adventure with the Body Thief. Coming into the flesh again, having that chance, and rejecting it for what you were before. You know your friend Gretchen is a stain in the jungles, do you not? Well, do not believe what you have read in the papers. Gretchen lost her mind; she is fixed in a state of hysteria and you believe it is your fault. I did not place judgement upon the incident. If we can go back to what I was saying. I was saying that you did everything but ask me to come! You challenged every form of authority; you sought every experience. You have buried yourself alive twice, and once tried to rise into the very Sun to make yourself a cinder. In simple situation neuroses the basic anxiety is lacking. Individuals are constituted by neurotic reactions to actual conflict situations on the part of people whose personal relations are undisturbed. The following may serve as another example of these cases as they frequently occur in a psychotherapeutic practice. A woman of twenty-five complained about heart pounding and anxiety states at night, with profuse perspiration. There were no organic findings, and all the evidence suggested that she was a healthy person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The impression she gave was a warmhearted and straight forward woman. Five years before, for reasons which lay not so much in herself as in the situation, she had married a man twenty-five years older tan she. She had been very happy with him, had been satisfied in the pleasures of the flesh, had three children who had developed exceptionally well. She had been diligent and capable in housekeeping. In the past two or three years her husband had become somewhat cranky and less able to engage in pleasures of the flesh, but she had endured this without any neurotic reaction. The trouble had started seven months before, when a likable, marriageable man of her own age had begun to pay her personal attention. What had happened was that she had developed a resentment against her older husband but had entirely repressed this feeling for reasons that were very strong in view of her whole mental and social background and the basically good married relationship. With a little help in a few interviews she was able to face the conflict situation squarely and thereby rid herself of her anxiety. Nothing can better indicate the importance of basic anxiety than a comparison of individual reactions in cases of character neurosis with those in cases, like the one just cited, which belong to the group of simple situation neuroses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The latter cases of neurosis are found in healthy persons who for understandable reasons are incapable of solving a conflict situation consciously, that is, they are unable to face the existence and the nature of the conflict and hence are incapable of making a clear decision. One of the outstanding differences between the two types of neuroses is the great facility of therapeutic results in the situation neurosis. In character neuroses therapeutic treatment has to proceed under great difficulties and consequently extends over a long period for the patient to wait to be cured; but the situation neurosis is comparatively easily solved. An understanding discussion of the situation is often not only a symptomatic but also a causal therapy. In other cases the causal therapy is the removal of the difficulty by changing the environment. Thus while in the situation neuroses we have the impression of an adequate relation between conflict situation and neurotic reaction, this relation seems to be missing in character neuroses. Because of the existing basic anxiety, the slightest provocation may elicit the most intense reaction, as well shall see later in more detail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Although the range of manifest forms of anxiety, or the protection against it, is infinite and varies with each individual, the basic anxiety is more or less the same everywhere, varying only in extent and intensity. It may be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted, endangered, in a World that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy. One patient of mine expressed this feeling in a picture she drew spontaneously, in which she was sitting in the midst of a scene as a tiny, helpless, undressed baby, surrounded by all sorts of menacing monsters, human and animal, ready to attack her. In psychoses one will often find a rather high degree of awareness of the existence of such an anxiety. In paranoid patients this anxiety is restricted to one or several definite persons; in schizophrenic patients there is often a keen awareness of the potential hostility of the World are them, so much so that they are inclined to take even a kindness shown to them as implying potential hostility. In neuroses, however, there is rarely an awareness of the existence of the basic anxiety, or of the basic hostility, as least not of the weight and significance it has for the entire life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

A patient of mine who saw herself in a dream as a small bird that had to hide in the cabinet in order not to be stepped upon—and thereby gave an absolutely true picture of how she acted in life—had not the remotest idea that factually she was frightened of everyone, and told me she did not know what anxiety was. A basic distrust toward everyone may be covered up by a superficial conviction that people in general are quite likable, and it may coexist with perfunctorily good relations with others; an existing deep contempt for everyone may be camouflaged by a readiness to admire. Although the basic anxiety concerns people it may be entirely divested of its personal character and transformed into a feeling of being endangered by thunderstorms, political events, germs, accidents, canned food, or to a feeling of being doomed by fate. It is not difficult for the trained observer to recognize the basis of these attitudes, but it always requires intense psychoanalytic work before the neurotic person oneself recognizes that one’s anxiety does not really concern germs and the like, but people, and that one’s irritation against people is not, or is not only, an adequate and justified reaction to some actual provocation, but that one has become basically hostile toward others, distrustful of them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

So long as a being, whether one be Duchess Meghan Markle or Tee Grizzly, one had to walk, eat, and work, one must use one’s individuality. What is lost by the scholar is one’s attachment to individuality with desires, hates, angers, and passions. Artistic expressions, even when dilettante, is one of the most satisfactory forms of objectifying and thus projecting inner tensions. The dance is undoubtedly the most ancient form of artistic expression; its unique position among the arts is guaranteed by more than mere seniority: as we have seen, the dance is essentially a cooperative art, an art of the isolated examples of solo and couple dances among ancient peoples, they are not truly solo or couple performances; they presuppose the presence of singing and rhythmically tapping audiences who open the dance or who join in it later. In pre-cultural human society dance must have been a universal form of expressing strong emotions collectively. Admittedly, there have been reports of some danceless peoples, yet so long as we accept testimonies from observers on animal-dances—for instance Dr Kohler’s reports that his apes had danced too—we cannot be far wrong in concluding that the dance was a universal play-form in pre-cultural communities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Ancient people dance for every occasion—birth, initiation, marriage, death, war and so on. Sometimes the motive force appears to be an overflow of vitality and joy, at other times it seems to issue from a craving for the dissolution of the self, or it may be linked with magical practices, for instance, rain-making dances, hunting dances or war dancing. Dr. Oesterley believed that “all dancing was originally religious and was performed for religious purposes.” He insisted that the dance was sacred in origin and that every other type of dance was derived from this original religious dance. Dr. Oesterley sensed that in the dance the individual exerted oneself to reach beyond one’s limited selfhood and merge with a reality larger than one’s self. From the biological point of view this larger reality is the totality of the species, and not much can be gained by saying that a communion wit the community is merely a symbolization of a more significant and higher union, a union with God or with the essential principle of the Universe. A social communion is complete and there is nothing in it which transcends the species. It is, of course, true that a religious symbolization and dramatization of phylic communion can substantially assist the latter when the communal principle of the situation is stressed, but this does not alter the biosocial character of the experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Psychologically, the normal mind is synonymous with the mystical mind. In our unconsciousness we deny the collateral immediacy of our social inclusiveness and for this reason we project the lineal image of indefinite extension composing a being’s dream of a personal life eternal. Denying our organic unity of compass, we compensate in a fanciful unity of duration. What or who is using the body and mind of a self-realized person? Is it God or the being who acts, works, speaks, or writes then? It is true that the ego is kept but subordinated by God? Or does it vanish altogether and only seem present to the outer observer? We do not accept that interpretation of mystic experience which proclaims it to be an extinction of human personality in God’s being. The differences between human beings still remain after illumination. The variations which make each one a unique specimen and the individual that one is, still continue to exist. However, the Oneness behind human beings powerfully counterbalances. Still, the line of demarcation between beings and the World-Mind can be attenuated but not obliterated. It is perfectly possible to become impersonal in attitude and yet remain individual in consciousness. The winning of the one condition does not mean losing of the other. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We beings recoil from the bleak picture of an impersonality without feeling, a life without passion, or survival without ego. Yet it seems bleak because it is rarely known or seen in experience, and also because it is unfamiliar and unrealized. Freed at last from this ever-whirling wheel of birth and death to which one was tied by one’s own desire-nature, what happens to one can only be as opening up to a new better indescribable state, and it is so. One as one was vanishes, not into complete annihilation and certainly not into the Heaven of a perpetuated ego, but into a higher kind of life shrouded in mystery. They must face this dilemma in their thinking, that if their absolutist realization is a fixed and finished state there is no room for an ego in it, however sublimated, refined, and purged the ego may be. The end, then, can only be a merger, a dissolution into self-actualization and a total disappearance of the conscious reality of lack and limitation. This is a kind of death. However, there is another kind of salvation, a living one where unfoldment and growth still continue, albeit on higher levels than any which we now know. The gap between the finite human mind and the infinite World-Mind is absolute. A union between them is not possible unless the first merges and disappears into the second. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Will he have to surrender all conscious life and get in return the problematical advantage of a merger indistinguishable from complete annihilation? True, the possibility of further suffering will then be entirely eliminated. However, so will the possibility of further joy. It is a fallacy to think that this displacement of the lower self brings about its complete substitution by the infinite and absolute Deity. This fallacy is an ancient and common one in mystical circles and leads to fantastic declarations of self-deification. If the lower self is displaced, it is not destroyed. It lives on but in strict subordination to the higher one, the Overself, the divine soul of a being; and it is this latter, not the divine World-principle, which is the true displacing element. One is untied with, but not absorbed by, the infinite Overself. One is a part of it, but only individually so. This is one’s highest condition while still in the flesh. There is some kind of a distinction between one’s higher individual and the Universal Infinite out of which it is rayed. And this distinction remains in one’s higher mystical state, which is not one of total absorption and utter destruction of this individuality but the mergence of its own will in the universal will, the closet intimacy of its own being with the universal being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. What! By such narrow ways? There is but one World, however. Happiness and the absurd are sons of the same Earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. The Overself is one with the World-Mind without however being lost in it. There is no final absorption; the individual continues to exist somehow in the Supreme. The fact that one can pass away into it at will and yet remain again, proves this. Something is there, something must take the place of the absent ego to perform its function and do in the World what needs to be done. The unit of mind is differentiated out and undergoes its long evolution through numerous changes of state, not to merge so utterly in its source again as to be virtually annihilated, but to be consciously harmonized with the source whilst yet retaining its individuality. If on the other hand one is conscious of oneself in the divine being, on the other one is conscious of oneself in the human ego. The two can coexist, and at this stage of advance, do. However, the ego must knit itself to the higher self until they become like a single entity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

When one’s mind is immovably fixed in this state, one’s personal will permanently directed by the higher one, one is said to have attained the true mystical life. All is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this World a God who had comes into it with dissatisfaction and preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among beings. Silent joy is contained therein. One’s fate belongs to one. One’s soul is one’s thing. In the Universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the Earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no Sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd being says yes and one’s effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which one concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, one knows oneself to be the master of one’s days. At that subtle moment when beings glance backward over their life, in that slight pivoting one contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes one’s fate, created by one, combined under one’s memory’s eye and soon sealed by one’s death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a vision impaired being eager to see who knows that the night has no end, one is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. We are left at the foot of Heaven. One always finds one’s burden again. However, it is the higher fidelity that negates God and raises rocks. All is well. This Universe henceforth without a master seems to neither be sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a World. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a being’s heart. One must imagine others happy. The belief that any institution or organization is divine has led to much superstition and unnecessary strife: the true belief that all such things are strictly human, and therefore fallible, as history repeatedly confirms, would have saved humankind much suffering. All observation and experience suggests that when the things of the spirit are brought into organized forms, such as societies and sects, the harm done to members counterbalances the good. Do not look for any group formation created by a philosopher, for you will find none. One is sponsored by no church, no sect, no cult, no organization of any kind, for one needs none. One’s credentials come from within, not from any outside source. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

One requires no one to flatter one’s personal importance. We are also reminded that someday we shall be forgotten. Since we cannot endure the thought we repress it. The literature of humankind is full of stories in which kings as well as beggars are reminded of their having to die. Beings cannot stand the anticipation of death, and so they repress it. In the Vampire Armand by Anne Rice, when Armand is dying he says, “It is not my time. I know it. And such a statement cannot be undone by a mere handful of hours. Smash the ticking clock. They meant, by a soul’s incarnate life, it was not time. Some destiny carved in my infant had will not be so soon fulfilled or easily defeated.” We cannot smash the clock, we cannot ignore fate. The repression does not remove one’s ever present anxiety, and there are moments in life of everyone when such repression is not even slightly effective. Then, we ask ourselves—will there be a time when I shall be forgotten, forever? The meaning of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety that one will be forgotten both now and eternity. “Ah, but what if there are many lands?” says Armand. “What if on the second fall, I find myself on yet another shore, and sulfur rises from the boiling Earth and not the beauty first revealed to me. I hurt. These tears are scalding. So much is lost. I cannot remember. It seems I say those same word so much. I cannot remember.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Every living being resists being pushed into the past without a new presence. A powerful symbol of this state of being forgotten is being buried. Armand goes on to express his feelings about the subject, while he is on his death bed. “These events involved all the other souls whom I never touched; I saw now the hurts I had inflicted, and the words of mine which had brought solace, and I saw the result of the most casual and unimportant things I had done. I saw the banquet hall of the Florentines, and in the midst of them, I saw the blundering loneliness with which they stumbled into death. I saw the isolation and the sadness of their souls as they had fought to stay alive.” Burial means being removed from the realm of awareness, a removal from the surface of the Earth. The meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is intensified by the words in the Creed that he was buried. A rather superficial view of the anxiety of death states that this anxiety is the fear of the actual process of dying, which of course may be agonizing, but which can also be very easy. No, in the depth of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety of being eternally forgotten. Beings have never been able to bear this thought. An expression of one’s utter resistance is the way the Greeks spoke of glory as the conquest of being forgotten. Today, the same thing is called historical significance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

If one can, one builds castles, mansions, memorial halls or creates memorial foundations. It is consoling to think that we might be remembered for a certain time beyond death not only by those who loved us or hated us or admired us, but also by those who never knew us expect now by name. Some names are remembered for centuries. Hope is expressed in the poet’s proud assertion that the traces of one’s Earthly days cannot vanish in eons. However, these traces, which unquestionably exist in the physical Word, are not we ourselves, and they do not bear our name. They do not keep us from being forgotten. Is there anything that can keep us from being forgotten? That we were known from eternity and will be remembered in eternity is the only certainty that can save us from the horror of being forgotten forever. We cannot be forgotten because we are known eternally, beyond past and future. However, although we cannot be forgotten, we can forget ourselves—namely, our true being, that of us that is eternally known and eternally remembered. And whether or not we forget or remember most of those things we experience every hour is not ultimately important. However, it is infinitely important that we not forget ourselves, this individual being, not to be repeated, unique, eternally precious, and delivered into our hands. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Unfortunately, it may then be mistreated, overlooked, and imprisoned. Yet, if we remember it, and become aware of its infinite significance, we realize that we have been known in the past and that we will not be forgotten in the future. For the truth of our own being I rooted in the ground of being, from which it comes and to which it returns. Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity. And I speak now of all individual beings and not solely of humans. Nothing in the Universe is unknown, nothing real is ultimately forgotten. The atom that moves in an immeasurable path today and the atom that moved in an immeasurable path billions of years ago are rooted in the eternal ground. There is no absolute, no completely forgotten past, because the past, like the future, is rooted in the divine life. Nothing is completely pushed into the past. Nothing real is absolutely lost and forgotten. We are together with everything real in the divine life. Only the unreal, in us around us, is pushed into the past forever. This is what last judgment means—to separate in us, as in everything, what has true and final being from what is merely transitory and empty of true being. We are never forgotten, but much in us that we liked and for which we longed may be forgotten forever. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Such judgment goes on in every moment of our lives, but the process is hidden in time and manifest only in eternity. Therefore, let us push into the past and forget what should be forgotten forever, and let us go forward to that which expresses our true being and cannot be lost in eternity. “But behold, this is not all; for ye ought to know as I do know, that inasmuch as ye shall keep to commandments of God ye shall prosper in the land; and ye ought to know also, that inasmuch as ye will not keep the commandments of God ye shall be cut off from his presence. Now this is according to his word,” reports Alma 36.30. A person who seeks God and wants to pursue this quest of truth will have to become a different being—different from what one was in past because the old innate tendencies have to be replaced by new ones, and different from other beings because one must refuse to be led unresistingly into the thoughtlessness, the irreverence, and the coarseness which pervade them. It is not only a moral change that is called for but also a mental one, not only a physical but also a metaphysical one. There is no need to let go of one’s humanness in order to find one’s divine essence, but only of its littleness, its satisfaction with trivial aims. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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

August 14, 2019 10:32 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Full Development of the Individual is Conditioned by the Most Ruthless Struggle of Individuals

August 11, 2019 1:43 am

I was lying still somewhere, in an open place, on the rocky ground. I had the veil. I could feel the bulk of it, but I did not dare to reach inside and draw it out or examine it. Help the souls who are lost! Help them. Do not leave them in the whirlwind, do not leave them on Earth struggling to gain understanding. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of one’s existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive beings has to wage for one’s bodily existence attains in the modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon beings too free themselves of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Being’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of beings and their work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each being the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The full development of the individual is conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how they personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. The psychology basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swifts and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Beings are a differentiating creature. Their minds are stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from beings as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable—as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm uninterrupted habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm events. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Thus the metropolitan type of being—which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants—develops an organ protecting one against the threatening current and discrepancies of one’s external environment which would uproot one. One reacts with one’s head instead of one’s heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative. Metropolitan life, this, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan beings. The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena. The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy. Here the multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange gives an importance to the means of exchange which the scantiness of rural commerce would not have allowed. Money and economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations. In the same manner, the individuality phenomena is not commensurate with the pecuniary principle. Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations beings are reckoned with like a number, like an element which is in itself indifferent. Only the objective measurable achievement is of interest. Thus metropolitan beings reckons with one’s merchants and customers, one’s domestic servants and often even with persons with whom one is obliged to have social intercourse. These features of intellectuality contrast with the nature of the small circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individuality as inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior which is beyond a mere objective balancing of service and return. In the sphere of the economic psychology of the small group it is of importance that under primitive conditions productions serves the customer who orders the goods, so that the producer and the consumer are acquainted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships. The money economy dominates the metropolis; it has displaced the last survivals of domestic production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes from day to day, the amount of work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy, which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former. The metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely by citing the dictum of the most eminent English constitutional historian: throughout the whole course of English history, London has never acted as England’s heart but often as England’s intellect and always as her moneybag! #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

In certain seemingly insignificant traits, which lie upon the surface of life, the same psychic currents characteristically unite. Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy had brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural sciences: to transform the World into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the World by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of the life-elements—just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. However, the conditions of metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of this trait. The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so any people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external factor—long distances—would make all waiting and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule. Here again the general conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious, namely, that from each point on the surface of existence—however closely attached to the surface alone—one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life. Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy and intellectualistic character. These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Even though sovereign types of personality, characterized by irrational impulse, are by no means impossible in the city, they are, nevertheless, opposed to typical city life. The passionate hatred of the metropolis is understandable in these terms. The nature of some beings discover the value of the alone in the unschematized existence which cannot be defined with precision for all alike. From the same source of this hatred of the metropolis surged their hatred of money economy and the intellectualism of modern existence. The idea of introducing Questers to the Quester has generally failed to effect the original purpose and has not seldom had disappointing results. It is better to recognize that this is an individual work, not to be identified with any group effort, even so small a group as two or three, let alone the larger ones of several dozen. People cannot blend so easily as to form a harmonious friendship or group, even if they are Questers. Yet many beginners in their enthusiasm try to create such friendships and have to learn their lessons when the friendship falls apart. It is better to let people find their affinity and form their companionships in a natural way. There is no duty laid upon anyone, whether teacher or taught, to give introductions unless a direct, intuitive bidding points to that duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Even where an organization is not actually obstructive or misleading, it is often cumbersome. Can the inquiring and aspiring person find no better refuge anywhere than some rigid church? Must one join some institution and have the rest of one’s life laid out for one by others even if it does violence to one’s own finer feelings and best reasonings? Must one join a crowd of other aspirants or attach oneself to some persuasive leader? It is a fact that many if not most do this, which shows the lack of strength in their minds and characters; but on the other hand a more popular way is easer and more comfortable. Belonging to an elite group, whether or not it be real as self-claimed, allows its members to feel superior, to be condescending, and to denigrate others. A movement may begin and seek to keep free from organization, administration, and authority, but it is unlikely to remain so. For human beings, fallible or ambitious, frail or emotional, will sooner, or later seek to impose their ideas, will, or themselves on the others. Few are willing to sacrifice their desire for the gregarious support offered by joining an organization and therefore few see how this binds them to its strict and rigid doctrines, imprisons them in its practices or methods, and obstructs their free hearing of the intuitive voice of their own soul. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

With the capacity of hostility to generate anxiety the relation between the two is not exhausted. The process also works the other ways around: anxiety in its turn, when based on a feeling of being menaced, easily provokes a reactive hostility in defense. In this regard it does not differ in any way from fear, which may equally provoke aggression. The reactive hostility too, if repressed, may create anxiety, and this a cycle is created. This effect of reciprocity between hostility and anxiety, one always generating and reinforcing the other, enables us to understand why we find in neuroses such an enormous amount of relentless hostility. When the intensification of hostility through anxiety is realized it seems unnecessary to look for a special biological source for destructive drives. This reciprocal influence is also the basic reason why severe neuroses so often become worse without any apparent difficult conditions from the outside. It does not matter whether anxiety or hostility has been the primary factor; the point this that is highly important for the dynamics of a neurosis is that anxiety and hostility are inextricably interwoven. I am not enamoured overmuch of this modern habit, which forms a society at faint provocation. A being’s own problem stares one alone in the face, and is not to be solved by any association of others. Every new society we join is a fresh temptation to waste time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The great mistake of all spiritual organizations is to overlook the fact that progress or salvation is a highly individual matter. Each person has one’s unique attitude towards life; each must move forward by one’s own expanding comprehension and especially by one’s own personal effort. Some people are held spellbound by others because their statements matter. Some authorities speak out of their own doubt-ridden souls—souls which always existed on the boundary. Many are called to give doubt to the faithful and faith to the doubters. Doubting is the symbol of the growing process, and may lead one into the mist interesting and even thrilling phenomena. To doubt constructively requires that one be well fortified with knowledge; the person who knows very little cannot take the risk the doubting requires. When we bring doubt to the faithful, that means these faithful are soundly based and can stand—and even need to stand—looking into the abyss of doubt. They are the one who can take the risk which confronts anyone who gazes into the Holy Void. It takes more than knowledge to doubt; it takes courage. Richness is a product of prolonged and multitudinous doubting. Doubting in this sense is a rich and adventurous back-packing among the high mountains; one’s knowledge gives one a firm footing on the trail but one’s doubt give the sense of venture. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Doubt opens new trails to the unknown; one learns new paths; one sees new things on the trip; there are fresh winds blowing from different directions. Doubt in this sense is expressive of the courage to venture when one never knows where one will come out. To venture cases anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self. The courage to doubt for the enlightened is one’s quest for the Holy Void and the use of the soul and love as our teacher. It means our lives are far from simple but at the same time they are glorious. Some may accuse one of being an atheist, but it also means that thousands of others will see one as their guide to meaning, to mystery and blessedness. To live in doubt is to live in ecstasy. It means no loner to live life continually under the phrase “in spite of.” As our faith increase, we will unequivocally know it is because we are seeking the truth and not merely because we are told to believe is the right thing to do. When the masculine and feminine temperaments within us are untied, completed, and balanced, when masculine power and feminine passivity are brought together inside the person and knowledge and reverence encircle them both, then wisdom begins to dawn in the soul. The ineffable reality and the mentalist Universe are then understood to be non-different from other another. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Where both unity and diversity are experienced and the individual is able to attain both these levels, one is surely gifted with insight. However, if diversity has to be blotted out before becoming aware of unity, this may be regarded as a penultimate faculty; that is, the insight is genuine but is still not fully mature. Everything depends on the capacity of the individual. When one’s mind moves entirely and wholly into the One Infinite Presence, and when it settles permanently there, the divided existence of glimpse and darkness, of Spirit and matter, of Overself and ego, of Heaven and Earth, will vanish. The crossing over to a unified existence will happens. The state of nonduality is a state of intense peace and perfect balance. It is so peaceful because everything is seen as it belongs—to the eternal order of cosmic evolution; hence, all is accepted, all reconciled. For the heart in inner harmony and for which everything is one, no difference exists between this and that. Why is it that despite all the visible and touchable counter-attractions, despite the innumerable failures and long years of fruitlessness, so many beings have sought through so many ages in so many lands for God, for wat is utterly intangible, unnamable, shapeless, unseen, and unheard? #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Because the simple but astonishing fact is that the Overself, which is the presence of God in them, is part of their nature as human beings is why we search for God! Mysticism is nothing more than the methodical attempt to wake up to this fact. The soul which metaphysics points to in reasoning, mysticism establishes in experience. We all need to feel the divine presence. Even the being who asserts that one does not is no exception. For one indirectly finds it just the same in spite of oneself but under limited forms like aesthetic appreciation or Nature’s inspiration. Even if all contemporary mystics were to die out, even if not a single living being were to be interested in mysticism, even if all mystical doctrines were to disappear from human memory and written record, the logic of evolution would bring back both the teaching and the practice. They are two of those historical necessities which are certain to be regained in the course of humanity’s cultural progress. Because the Overself is already there within one in all its immutable sublimity, beings have not to develop it or perfect it. One has only to develop and perfect one’s ego until it becomes like a polished mirror, held up to and reflecting the sacred attributes of the Overself, and showing openly forth the divine qualities which had hitherto lain hidden behind itself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

The Soul is Still the Activity of thinking, the Emotion of Joy, and the Discrimination Between X and Y

August 7, 2019 9:11 pm

And as we Angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point…souls and nothing but souls…we realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on Earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process. And just as with Angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to Hudegrees of spiritual illumination, which accounts both for the varying outlooks to be found among the mystics and for the different kinds of Glimpse among aspirants. All illumination and all Glimpses free the soul from its negative qualities and base nature, but in the latter case only temporarily. One is able, as a result, to see into one’s higher nature. In the first degree, it is as if a window covered with dirt were cleaned enough to reveal a beautiful garden. One can symbolically look down and see flowers of the World enjoy the petal and the center colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated one may be unsure that our spectrum is even involved. I mean, it is as if out spectrum of color is not the limit! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The soul is still the activity of thinking, the emotion of joy, and the discrimination between X and Y. In the next and higher degree, it is as if the window were still more leaned so that still more beauty is revealed beyond it. Here there are no thoughts to intervene between the seer and the seen. In the third degree, the discrimination is no longer present. In the fourth degree, it is as if the window were thoroughly cleaned. Here there is no longer even a rapturous emotion but only a balanced happiness, a steady tranquility which, being beyond the intellect, cannot properly be described by the intellect. Some soul, for example, knew they were dead, and sought to respond to the prayers of their children, and actively attempted to advise, speaking with all the power they could muster in a spiritual voice. They struggled to appear to their children. Sometimes they broke through for a fleeting seconds, gathering to themselves swirling particles of matter by the sheer force of their invisible essence. Other times they made themselves visible in dreams, when the soul of the sleeping human was opened to other souls. They told their children of the bitterness and darkness of death, and that they must be brave and strong in life. They gave their children advice. And the seemed, in some instance at least, to know that the belief and attention of their sons and daughters strengthened them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

These souls requested prayers and offerings, they reminded the children of their duty. These souls were to some extent the least confused, expect for one thing. They thought they had seen all these was to be seen. There was no hint of Heaven, no light from Heaven penetrated Sheol, nor any music. From Sheol one saw the darkness and the stars, and the people of Earth. Again, mental peace is a fruit of the first and lowest degree of illumination, although thoughts will continue to arise although gently, and thinking in the discursive manner will continue to be active although slowly. However, concentration will be sufficiently strong to detach one from the World and, as a consequence, to yield the happiness which accompanies such detachment. Only those who have attained to this degree can correctly be regarded as “saved” ad only they alone are unable to fall back into illusion, error, sin, greed, or sensuality. In the second degree, there will be more inward absorption and cerebral processed will entirely fade out. Freedom from all possibility of anger is a fruit of the third degree and higher degree. If you think l entirely fade out. Freedom from all possibility of anger is a fruit of the third degree and higher degree. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

If you think you are a god to your children and can still derive strength from the mere sight of the liberation they pour on your grave, the Witness is both an abstract metaphysical concept and a concrete mystical experience. It is not an ultimate one, yielding pure Being, the unsplit Consciousness, but a provisional one. The Witness itself, while witnessing, is being witnessed. Regardless of if the soul’s descendants harken their advice or not, one cannot feel anger toward them, sometimes one will be able to communicate with their descendants with spectacular results. To be the witness is the first stage; to be Witnesses of the witness is the next; but to BE is the final one. For consciousness lets go of the witness in the end. Consciousness alone is itself the real experience. One discovers the presence of this link with World-Mind by a wonderful experience, brief and passing though it be. It is felt intensely and known intuitively. That the divinity is within one is thenceforth one’s certainty even at the times when awareness is absent. However, eventually, if mind develops, one has to asks the question, “What of the World outside?” Until it takes the final leap and transcends itself, human thought can rise to levels of godliness. We may reasonably hope to see God one day but not to be God. The Cosmic Vision of the World-Mind at work can make these souls seem like god to their children. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Astral gods of a certain kind. Not the Creator of All. When they come to mortals, some souls know they are ghost. Others think they are alive and the whole World has turned against them. Others simply drift, seeing and hearing the sound of other living beings but remote from this as if in a stupor or dream. And some souls died. The dying soul will last a week, perhaps a month in human time, after its separation from the human body, retaining its shape, and then begin to fade. The essence will gradually disperse. Gone into the air, returned perhaps to the energy and essence of God. Their energy comes back into the Creator; the light of a candle returns to the eternal fire. Yet, these are spiritual beings, made in our image and in God’s image, and they cling to that image and hunger for a life beyond death. That is the agony. The hunger for life beyond death. The souls who become the strongest are those who perceive themselves as gods, or humans passed into the realm of the good God, and attentive to humans; and these souls gain power even to sway the others and strengthen them sometimes and keep them from fading away. There are various degrees and kinds of trance, ranging from mere oblivion to psychical visions and mental travelling, and higher still to a complete immersion of the soul in cosmic Divinity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

A rare but complete illumination must not only pass from the first to the final degree of intensity, but must also contain a picture of the cosmic order. That is to say, it must be a revelation. It must explain the profounder nature of the Universe, the inner meaning of individual existence, and the hidden relationship between the two. There are some souls who understand things in a different way. They know they are not gods. They know they are dead humans. They know they do not really have the right to change the destiny of those who pray to them; they know that the libations essentially are symbolic. These souls understand the meaning of the concept of symbolic. They know. And they know they are dead and they perceive themselves to be lost. If they could, they would reenter the flesh. For there in the flesh is all the light and warmth and comfort that they have ever known and can still see. And sometimes these souls manage to do exactly that! Two factors account for the differences between individual cosmic illumination. First, there is the human contribution made by the mind itself; second, there are ascending stages in the Illumination or rather in the receptivity to it. Cosmic Vision is of two kinds: a seeing the forms and objects around and feeling one with them, and seeing only the Idea of the Universe. This is called identifying through worship. It is the subtle Universe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

It is an advanced experience, not the ultimate so one ought not to stop there. I have witnessed it in various different fashions. I saw these souls deliberately descend and take possession of a stupefied mortal, take our one’s limbs and brain and live in the individual until the being gained the strength to throw the soul off. You know these things. All beings do—what is involved in possession. There is some confusion on this point in the minds of many students. On attaining enlightenment a being does not attain omniscience. At most, one may receive a revelation of the inner operations of life and Nature, of the higher laws governing life and beings. That is, one may also become a seer and find a cosmogony presented to one’s gaze. However, the actuality in a majority of cases is that one attains enlightenment only, not cosmogonical seership. And what I cannot fail to be frightened by, and horrified by Nature, what I cannot ignore is that these souls do have an effect on living men and women. There are those living humans already who have become oracles. They smoke or drink some potion to render their own minds passive, so that a dead soul might speak with their voice! And because these powerful spirit—for I shall call them spirits now—because these powerful spirits know only what Earth and Sheol can teach them, they might urge human beings on to terrible mistakes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

I have seen these spirits take possession of someone and order people into battle; I have seen them order executions. I have seen them demand blood sacrifice of human beings. Perhaps this is what is wrong with the thugs outside Mitch McConnell’s home who are currently saying, “Stab the expletive in the heart.” Tomi Lahren what is actually going on is called, “liberal privilege, and that is the misguided belief that those on the left and attack and harass anyone on the conservative side, anyone who is republican, anyone who is a Trump supporter because they believe they have the moral authority to do so.” Humans can create anything. Let us not forget Who Created us all. Angels have gathered, exchanged stories in amazement, then they go off again on their own explorations; they are more entangled with the Earth than they have ever been. However essentially, the reactions of Angels varies. Some, the Seraphim mainly, think the whole process of creation and evolution is downright marvelous; that God deserves a thousand anthems in praise that his Creation should lead to a being who can evolve an invisible deity from itself who would then command it to ever greater efforts at survival of war. Then there are those who think, “This is an error, this is an abomination! These are the souls of humans pretending to be Gods! This is unspeakable and must be stopped immediately!” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The deeper one penetrates into the Void the more one is purified of the illusions of personality, time, matter, space, and causality. Between the second and third stages of insight’s unfoldment there are really two further subsidiary stages which are wrapped in the greatest mystery and are rarely touched by the average mystic. For there are stages which lead further downwards into the Void. Some can touch the edge of the Void, as it is, but not its centre. These two stages are purificatory ones and utterly annihilate the last illusions and the last egoisms of the seeker. They are dissolved forever and cannot revive again. Nothing more useful can and may be said about it here. For this is the innermost holy of holies, the most sacred sanctuary accessible to beings. One who touched this grade touches what may not be spoken aloud for sneering ears, nor written down for sneering eyes. Consequently none has ever ventured to explain publicly what must not be so explained. All those of the bene ha Elohim whom I describe to you are alive now. They are immortal. How could you think it would be any other way? Now, there were souls in Sheol at that time who no longer exist, not in any form I know of, but perhaps they do in some form known to God. Tribes pray to different souls. These souls become their gods. Some are stronger than others. Look at the way everywhere, the battle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

All human beings on this planet are imperfect. Perfection is not fully attainable here. However, when a being has striven for it and advanced near to it, one will attain it automatically as soon as one is freed from the body. So long as beings are immured in this Earth place, so long must the enlightenment one attains be an imperfect one, or the fulfilment one experiences is a limited one. The liberation from further reincarnation can be attained while still here in the flesh, but the full completion of its consequent inner peace can come only after final exit from the body. So long as one is held by the finite flesh, so long as existence in the inner human body is continued, the perfect and complete merger of one’s individuality in the cosmic mind is impossible. However, once through the portals of so-called death, it becomes an actuality. It is not that philosophy denies the possibility of escaping from personal consciousness into the universal one; on the contrary, it well admits it. However, it declares that the journey is still not finished. These souls have only begun their evolution. Who knows how strong they may become? Beings have stepped into the invisible. What if they are meant to become Angels? #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Some have sensed the presence of Angels on Earth. They sense it as they sense the presence of a dead soul. It is the same part of the brain which perceives other things invisible; I tell you Angels have been glimpsed and shall now be imagined by these people. “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the Angels in Heaven,” reports Matthew 22.30. Believe in the divinity of your deeper self. Stop looking elsewhere for light, stop wandering hither and tither for power. Your intelligence has become falsified through excessive attention to external living, hence you are not even aware in which direction to look when you seek for the real Truth. You are not even aware that all you need can be obtained by the power within, by the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient Self. You have to change, first of all, the line of thought and faith which pleads helplessly: “I am a weak being; I am unlikely to rise any higher than my present level; I live in darkness and move amid opposing environments that overwhelm me.” Rather should you engrave on your heart the high phrase: “I possess illimitable power within me; I can create a diviner life and truer vision than I now possess. So this and then surrender your body, your heart and mind to the Infinite Power which sustains all. Strive to obey Its inward promptings and then declare your readiness to accept whatsoever lot it assigns you. This is your challenge to God and he will surely answer you. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Your soul will be slowly or suddenly liberated; your body will be granted a freer pathway through conditions. You may have to be prepared for a few changes before the feet find rest, but always you shall find that the Power in which you have placed an abiding trust does not go into default. Because one believes that self-improvement, the bettering of what being’s nature, is quite possible, one believes in the quest. One who learns the essence of spiritual questing and the basic need in practical living, learns that one must come into command of oneself. Who is willing to work upon oneself? Who even fees that one has any duty to do so? Yet this simple acknowledgment could lead to the discovery of God. The student of true philosophy is more intent on growth than on study. Each being should be oneself, not represent a copy of another being. However, one should be one’s best self, not one’s worst, one’s lower, one’s lesser. This calls for growth, aspiration, effort, on one’s part. That is to say, it calls for a quest. Out of one’s present self one is to evolve a better one and to actualize one’s higher possibilities. The divine spirit is always there in beings, has always been there; but until one cultivates one’s capacity to become aware of it, it might as well be non-existent for one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The Overself is always there; it has never left us, but it has to be ardently, lovingly, and subtly searched for. One must carry the idea of “I” to a deeper level of identification. Most groups of human beings, most of their associations, societies, and organizations suffer at some time from trouble caused by human weaknesses and shortcomings. These include divisions, jealousies, malices, and personal dislikes or hostilities. This is true of idealistic and religious groups as of business and professional ones. Those with experience of the cults and organizations know how unsatisfactory they are in the end. The passage of truth from mind to mind has always been a personal matter and cannot be otherwise, just as the training in prayer is equally person. In authentic living is an expression of complacency. It is designed around habit, custom, and the forgetting of life’s temporality. Being-in-the-World, on the other hand, is characterized by presence or responsiveness to the World (with all its possibilities and limits). The authentic person, accordingly, is one who responds, not just to Worldly demands, but to Being itself, or to the call within. What is this call to Being? It is like calling of the poet—passionate, poignant, and welling from the depths. When people live authentically, they have a spontaneous feeling that they are caught up in something above human desires to be achieved. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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

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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Refuse to Cover the Signs of the End in Our Lives and in Our Souls–We Are a Generation of the End and We Should Know What We Are!

July 7, 2019 11:02 pm

I do not know if God exists, and for all I do know, he does not exist. Then no sin matters. No sin achieves evil. However, they may not be true. Because if God does not exist, we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the Universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a singe human life. Whether a person would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually, it does not matter. Because if God does not exist, this life, every second of it, is all we have. And sometimes we can feel the thoughts of others. I know you have heard the saying, “You could can the tension in the room with a knife.” Well thoughts can be a palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power of them. It is good to be respectful. Some do not want power over other because if they exercise such power, then one must protect it. One will make enemies. And one will have forever to deal with their enemies when all they want here is a certain space, a certain peace. Or not to be here at all. The only power that exists is inside ourselves. Of the many consequences of his rupture between state and being, most spectacular is the irrational myth of the state—the setting for modern dictatorship. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

However, dictatorships represent only the most extreme form of the alienation of the state. In democratic societies also government, like so many other social institutions originally designed to serve beings, threatens to become their master. Behind the growing sense of isolation in society, behind the whole quest for community which infuses so many theoretical and practical areas of contemporary life and thought, is possessed in the growing realization that the traditional primary relationships of beings have become functionally irrelevant to our State and economic and meaningless to the moral aspirations of individuals. The state has power to do great good as well as evil; and we are not joining those true reactionaries who dream of dismantling it. What we are suggesting is that the state even when providing necessary services is detached from individual needs. How to redress this imbalance between state and being has become a burning issue for all beings, right and left, who would reorder our society. Meanwhile, armed with ever greater police powers and increasingly effective means of persuasion, the modern state is now in a position to exploit the most terrible anxieties of beings for its own purposes, with the help of the fake news media. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

When the United States Government announced that it was conducting experiments of a death ray or neutron bomb, and 5G internet service, striking examples of this power was provided recently. This exquisitely refined technology will operate selectively, snuffing out human and animal life among the enemy, but leaving things—houses, antiquities, automobiles, aircrafts, shops, factories, furnishings, machines—untouched. A soldier in a tank or an office staff in a building would die, but the tank and the building would remain intact. There would be no lingering radioactivity, o that the attackers could take over and occupy the tank and the building without fear of contamination. Who would say that the alienation of modern beings is not now complete? The sketches of some—by now means all—of the conditions and influences alienating beings in modern society have been pointed out. However, can these conditions be altered and alienation overcome? Answers to this question demand the best thinking and planning of which our civilization is capable; they require thinking from the heart as well as the head; they demand co-operation among many diverse groups and nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The task of healing our alienated community will be difficult, for the very tools of our analysis and planning tend to be alien forces, compelling us to deal with separate aspects of an interrelated set of problems. Being’s inhumanity to other beings is age-old, such as critics say: the oppressed less affluent have always been with us; work has always been drudgery (the fall of beings made it so); cruelty and torment are ever the common lot. As to the danger of nuclear war and mass extermination, the human beast has always lived dangerously, invented new and more terrible weapons, and in short loves hanging and drawing and quartering every bit as well as war and slaughtering. However, the argument runs, though this strange rather likeable human animal may be foolish and destructive, yet somehow one is crafty enough to survive, both as an individual and as a species. Acceptance of things as they are and have always been is the essence of this view. Its proponents consider alienation an inescapable part of the living condition of beings with which one must learn to live—alone. According to this approach, no amount or kind of social planning will succeed in alleviating the situation, and on the contrary may make it worse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

In short, alienation is relative. Anthropology teaches that simpler, more solidaristic communities are not spared the personal disorders which we associate with complex age of information societies. And if citizens of the affluent society feel sorry for themselves, let them remember that most beings on Earth have never tasted any of the fruits of freedom. Our view, however, has been that alienation in modern society represents not a change of degree but of kind. Here we emphasize that what we are concerned with is not inhumanity, which has existed all through history and constitutes part of the human form, but a-humanity, a phenomenon of rather recent date. This a-humanity, this breakdown of distinctively human qualities and values, culminates in such horrors as the A-bomb or the concentration camp, the sudden slump of an overwrought civilization into that strange, systematized bestiality. The horror of the fake news media regime, its use of the most-up-to-date techniques of hacking and data mining, lies and distortion make it one of the lowest, sub-human, indeed sub-bestial kind, and in some way is related to the subtlest political and law enforcement experiences manifesting themselves in society and culture. Overcivilization, too much technology, and concomitant dehumanization are of the most crucial problems of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The deep suspicion of language and the impoverishment of ourselves and our relationships, which are both cause and result, are rampant in our times. We experience the despair of being unable to communicate to others what we feel and what we think, and the even greater despair of being unable to distinguish for ourselves what we feel and are. Underlying this loss of identity is the loss of cogency of the symbols and myths upon which identity and language is based. The breakdown of language is graphically pictured in Orwell’s 1984, in which the people not only go through the doublethink process but use word to mean exactly their opposites—for instance, war means peace. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we are similarly gripped when Pozzo, the industrialist, commands his slave Lucky, the intellectual, to “Think, pig!….Think!” Lucky beings to orate a word salad of lengthy phrases strung together without a period that continues for three full pages. He finally collapses in a faint on the stage. It is a vivid portrayal of the situation that exists when language communicates nothing at all expect empty erudition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The breakdown is shown in the students’ protest against the “words, words, words” to which they must listen, in their sickness of heart at hearing the same things mouthed over and over again, and in their readiness to accuse faculty and others of “word garbage” or “verbal masturbation.” This is generally meant as a criticism of the lecture method, but it also represents what the television news has become. However, what they really are—or ought to be—talking about is a particular kind of lecture that does not communicate being from one person to another. It must be admitted that all too often this has been a characteristic of academic life, which makes the student protest against irrelevant education distinctly more relevant. The shelves of college libraries are weighed down with books that were written because other books were written because still other books were written—the meat of the meal getting thinner and thinner until the books seem to have nothing to do with the excitement of truth but only with status and prestige. And in the academic World, these last two values can be powerful indeed. Small wonder the young poets are disillusioned with talk, and they hold, as they did in the San Francisco love-in, that the best poem is a blank sheet of paper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

At such a time, in our alienation and isolation, we long for a simple, direct expression of our feelings to another, a direct relation to one’s being, such as looking into one’s eyes to see and experience one or standing quietly beside one. We yearn for a direct expression of one’s and our moods and emotions with no barriers. We seek a kind of innocence that is as old as human evolution but some to us as something new, the innocence of children in paradise again. We long for a direct expression through our bodies of intimacy to short-cut the time of knowing the other that intimacy usually takes; we want to speak through our bodies, to leap immediately into identification with the other, even though we know it is only partial. In short, we yearn to bypass the whole symbols/verbal-language hang-up. Thus the great trend toward action therapies in or day in contrast to talking, and the conviction that truth will emerge—if it ever will—when we are able to live out our muscular impulses and experiences rather than get lost in dead concepts. Hence encounter groups, marathons, nude therapy, the use of barbiturates and other illicit substances. This is, in short, the bringing of the body into a relationship when there is no relationship. Whatever relatedness there is is ephemeral: it springs up multicolored and bright today, and often will be but a damp place where sea foam has evaporated on our hand tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

My aim is not to derogate these forms of therapy nor to disparage the use of the body. My body remains one way in which my self can express itself—in this sense I am my body—and surely it is to be appreciated. However, I am my language as well. And I wish to point out the destructive trend represented in action therapies precisely in their implicit attempt to bypass language. For these action therapies are closely related to violence. As they become more extreme, they hover at the edge of violence, both in the activity within the group itself an in the preparation of the participants or anti-intellectualism outside. The longing for them really has its seat in despair—the despondent fact of not being understood, of not being able to communicate or to love. It is the endeavoring to jump over that period of time required for intimacy, the trying to immediately feel and experience the other’s hopes and dreams and fears. However, intimacy requires a history, even though the two people have to create history. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We forget at our peril that beings are a symbol-making creature; and if the symbols (or myths, which are a pattern of symbols) seem arid and dead, they are to be mourned rather than denied. The bankruptcy of symbols should be seen for what it is, a way station on the path of despair. The distrust of language is bred into by experiencing the medium is the message phenomenon. Most of the words coming over TV are lies not in the sense of outright falsehood (that would imply a still remaining respect for the word) but in the sense that the words are used in the service of selling the personality of the speaker rather than in communicating some meaning. This is the more subtle form of emphasizing not the meaning of the word but the public-relations value of it. Words are not used for authentic, humanistic goals: to share something of originality or personal warmth. The medium is then the message with a vengeance; as long as the medium works, there is no message. The phrase “credibility gap,” which is conspicuous in wartime but is present in other times as well, goes much deeper than anyone’s mere intention to deceive. We listen to the news dispatches and find ourselves wondering where the truth really lies and why the reporters and anchors constantly lie, spread rumors, and distort the truth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

In our day it often seems that deception has been accepted as the means of communication. That is why the fake news media pushed their Russia election conspiracy, to cover up the fact the TV news is full of lies and wants to confuse them people and not present the truth so they can influence the elections. In this confusion, there is a more serious aliment in our public life: language bears less and less relationship to the item being discusses. There is a denial of any relationship to underlying logic. The fact that language has its roots in a shared structure is entirely ignored. The way language is used by the fake news media often denies the whole structure of communication. There is relationship in their reports to the question asked. In extreme and persistent form, this is one species of schizophrenia; but in our day it is simply called news and politics. And suddenly the lid is torn off. The picture of Death appears, unveiled, in a thousand forms. As in the late Middle Ages the figure of Death appears in news, pictures, poetry, politics, and the Dance of Death with every living being is painted and sung, so our generation—the generation of World wars, information, technology, revolutions, and mass migrations—rediscovers the reality of death. We have seen millions die in war, hundreds of thousands die illegally migrating all over the World, hundreds of thousands in revolutions, tens of thousands in persecutions and systematic purges of underrepresented groups. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Multitudes as numerous as whole nations still wander over the face of the Earth or perish when they are turned away, in boat or by foot, from the countries they want to enter; in them is embodies a part of these tremendous events in which Death has again grasped the reins which we believed it has relinquished forever. Such people carry in their souls, and often in their bodies, the traces of death, and they will never completely lose them. You who have never taken part yourself in this great migration must receive these others as symbols of a death which is a component element of life. Receive them as people who, by their destiny, shall remind us of the presence of the End in every moment of life and history. Receive them as symbols of the finiteness and transitoriness of every human and living being concern, of every human and living being’s life, and of every created thing. We have become a generation of the End and those of us who have been refugees and exiles in our own communities or in the greater World should not forget this when we have found a new beginning here or in another land. The End is nothing external. It is not exhausted by the loss of that which we can never regain: our childhood homes, the people with whom we grew up, the country, the things, the language which formed us, the goods, both spiritual and material, which we inherited or earned, the friends who were torn away from us by sudden death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The End is more than all this; it is in us, it has become our very being. We are a generation of the End and we should what we are. Perhaps there are some who think that what has happened to the and to the whole World should now be forgotten. Is it not more dignified, truer and stronger to say “yes” to that which is our destiny, to refuse to cover the signs of the End in our lives and in our souls, to let the voice of Death be heard? Amid all the new possibilities offered to us, must we not acknowledge ourselves to be that which destiny has made us? Must we not confess that we are symbols of the End? And this End is of an age which was both great and a lie. It is the End for all finitude which always becomes a lie when it forgets that it is finite and seeks to veil the picture of death. However, who can bear to look at this picture? Only one who can look at another picture behind and beyond it—the picture of Love. For love is stronger than death. Every death means parting, separation, isolation, opposition and not participation. So it is, too, with the death of nations, the end of generations, and the atrophy of souls. Our souls become poor and disintegrate insofar as we want to be alone, insofar as we bemoan our misfortunes, nurse our despair and enjoy out bitterness, and yet turn coldly away from the physical and spiritual need of others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Love overcome separation and creates participation in which there is more than that which individuals involved can bring to it. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. Therefore we love in others, for we d not merely love others, but we love the Love that is in the and which is more than their or our love. In mutual assistance what is most important is not the alleviation of need but the actualization of love. Of course, there is no love which does not want to make the other’s need its own. However, there is also no true help which does not spring from love and create love. Those who fight against death and disintegration through all kinds of relief agencies know this. Often very little external help is possible. And the gratitude of those who receive help is first and always gratitude for love and only afterwards gratitude for help. Love, not help, is stronger than death. However, there is no love which does not become help. Where help is given without love, there new suffering grows from the help. It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generation and in all the horror of our time. Help has become almost impossible in the face of the monstrous powers which we are experiencing. Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our period of history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

However, death is given no power over love. Love is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything. It is at work where the power of death is strongest, in war and persecution and homelessness and hunger and physical death itself. It is omnipresent and here and there, in the smallest and most hidden ways as in the greatest and most visible ones, it rescues life from death. It rescues each of us, for love is stronger than death. Use the power inside you. Do not abhor it anymore. Use that power! And when they see you in the streets above us, use that power to make your face a mask and think as you gaze on them as on anyone: beware. Take that word is if it where an amulet given to you to wear about your neck. And when your eyes meet with your enemy’s eyes, or the eyes of anyone else, speak to them politely what you will, but think of that word and that word only. It is an icon of love. Feel the love. Not physical love, you must understand. True love is what a student and teacher share. Knowledge would never be withheld by a real teacher. No geographical limits ought to be set for the sources whence a being draws spiritual sustenance. Why exclude other lands and remain shut in with India alone? #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Nor should any temporal limits be set for it. Why exclude the modern Word and remain shut in with the ancient one alone? Enlightened individuals have been born all through history, have contributed their ideas beliefs experiences and revelations, and all through the social scales. This is so, must be so, because Truth, Reality, Goodness, and Beauty, in their best sense, are in the end got from within. God is in your very being. To know him as something apart or far-away in time and distance or as an object outside yourself, separate from you—that is not the Way—impossible. Jesus gave away the secret: he is within you. It is surprising how widely people have ignored Jesus’ message (“The kingdom of Heaven is within you”) when its means is so clear, its phrasing so strong. If a being lives in harmony with the divine World-Idea, one may also live in trust that one will receive that which belongs to one. This will be brought about either by guiding one to it or guiding it to one. “All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine.” That which you need is yours now—if only you could raise yourself to the recognition of your true relation to your Overself. The heart, which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind, finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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