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An Architect Builds a House with the Same Feeling as that with which a Criminal Commits a Crime!
The evening sky was a deep shining blue, as it is often in this part of the World, as incandescent as it can be over Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails, and the soft white clouds made the same clean and dramatic panorama on the far edge of the gleaming sea. Entrancing, and this was but one tiny part of the golden state of California. Why do I ever wander in other climes at all? The plain truth is that the more any being is exposed to middle-class values, the more sophisticated one becomes. Many people feel resigned to their fate, however. They are furiously angry at themselves for what they were doing, or desperately hunting other work that would pay as well and in addition offer some variety, some prospect of change and betterment. Some opportunity to obtain the American Dream of owning a beautiful home, having a wife and kids and two nice automobiles, and a saving account to help pay for college, medical bills, home repairs, and maintenance and for family vacations. Beings are sick of being pushed around by harried foremen (themselves more pitied than hated), sick of working like blinkered donkeys, sick of being dependent for their livelihood on maniacal production-merchandising setup, sick of working in a place where there is no spot to relax during the twelve-minute rest period. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The mature people stay put and wait for their vacations. However, since the corporations demands young blood (if you are over thirty-five, you have a hard time getting hired), the corporation in which I work is aswarm with new faces every day; labor turnover was so fantastic and absenteeism so rampant, with the young people knocking off a day or two every week to hunt up other jobs, that the company is forced to over-hire in order to have sufficient workers on hand at the starting siren. Nevertheless, white-collars commuters, too, dislike their work, accept it only because it buy their family commodities, and are constantly on prowl for other work, I can only reply that for me at any rate this is proof not of the disappearance of the working class but of the proletarianization of the middle class. Perhaps it is not taking place quite in the way that Marx envisaged it, but the alienation of the white-collar being (like that of the laborer) from both their tools and whatever one produces, the slavery that chains the exurbanite to the commuting timetable (as the worker is still chained to the timeclock), the anxiety that sends the white-collar being home with one’s briefcase for an evening’s work (as it degrades the working being into pleading for long hours of overtime), the displacement of the white-collar slum from the wrong side of the river to the suburbs (just as the working-class slum is moved from old-law tenements to skyscrapers barracks)—all these mean to me that the white-collar being is entering (though one’s arms may be loaded with commodities) the gray World of the working being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Three quotations from beings with whom I worked may help bring my view into focus: Before starting work: “Come on, suckers, they say the Foundation wants to give away more than half a billion this year. Let us do and die for the old Foundation.” During rest period: “Ever stop to think how we craw here bumper to bumper, and crawl home bumper to bumper, and we have got to turn out mere every minute to keep our jobs, when there is not even any room for them on the highways?” At quitting time (this from the mature foremen, whose job is not only to keep things moving, but by extension to serve as company spokesmen): “You are smart to get out of here…I curse they day I ever started, now I am stuck: any man with brains that stays here ought to have his head examined. This is no place for an intelligent human being.” Such is the attitude towards work. And towards the product? On the one hand it is admired and desire as a symbol of freedom, almost a substitute for freedom, not because the worker participated in making it, but because our whole culture is dedicated to the proposition that the automobile is both necessary and beautiful. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
On the other hand the automobile is hated an disposed—so much that if your new car smells bad it may be due to a banana peel crammed down its gullet and sealed up thereafter, so much that if your dealer cannot locate the rattle in your new car you might ask him or her to open the welds on one of those tail fins and vacuum out the nuts and bolts thrown in by workers sabotaging their own product. Sooner or later, if we want a decent society—by which I do not mean a society glutted with commodities or one maintained in precarious equilibrium by over-buying and forced premature obsolescence—we are going to come face to face with the problem of work. Apparently the Russians have committed themselves to the replenishment of their labor force through automatic recruitment of those intellectually incapable of keeping up with severe scholastic requirements in the public educational system. Apparently we, too, are heading in the same direction: although our economy is not directed, and although college education is as yet far from free, we seem to be operating in this capitalist economy on the totalitarian assumption that we can funnel the underprivileged, undereducated, or just plain underequipped, int a factory, where are can proceed t forget about them once we have posted the minimum fair labour standards on the factory wall. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If this is what we want, let us be honest enough to say so. If we conclude that there is nothing noble about repetitive work, but that it is nevertheless good enough for the lower orders, let us say that, too, so we will at least know where we stand. However, if we cling to the belief that other beings are our brothers and sisters, not just Egyptians, or Israelis, Canadians, or Hungarians, but all beings, including millions of Americans who grind their lives away on an insane treadmill, then we will have to start thinking about how their work and their lives can be made meaningful. That is what I assume the Hungarians, both workers and intellectuals, have been thinking about. Since no one has been ordering us what to think, since no one has been forbidding our intellectuals to fraternize with our workers, should not it be a little easier for us to admit, first, that our problems exist, then to state them and then to see if we can resolve them? Competitive power is power against another. In its negative form, it consists of one person going up not because of anything one does or any merit one has, but because one’s opponent goes down. There are many examples of this in industry and in universities, such as the appointing of a president or chairman when there is only one desire position and many applicants. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Competitive power may also be the kind of power present in student rivalry due to the grading system, which promotes destructive personal influences directly counter to whatever impulses students have toward mutual caring and cooperation. It causes college students to hate transfer students from junior colleges because they believe they are better prepared to handle the curriculum. The chief criticism of this kind of power is its parochialism: it continuously shrinks—although not as drastically as manipulation—the area of human community in which one lives. However, at this point we note a very interesting shift from destructive to constructive power. For competitive power can give zest and vitality to human relations. I refer to the kind or rivalry that is stimulating and constructive. A football game in which one side immediately establishes its superiority is simply not interesting. We want our opponents to test our mettle; pure ease at winning is boring. This kind of competition is much more present in the business World than most people assume; that the achievement (which I include in the realm of power) of businessmen is possessed in their own satisfaction in getting better results, more efficient activity, to which their competition pushes them. #RandolpHarris 6 of 16
It is worthwhile to remind ourselves that the great drama of The Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat, Tale of the Body Thief, and Interview with the Vampire and many of the works of Anne Rice were produced in competitions. The implication is that it is not competition itself that is destructive but only the kind of competitive power. The competition between America and China, in the race to the Moon or to produce more cost efficient and better forms of technology (mousetraps), drains off a great deal of tension that would otherwise go to warfare. This kind of competition in sports is a counteraction to the competitive power that might otherwise lead America and Russian to tear at each other’s throats. Even if such assertions presuppose a too simplistic view of international aggression, they nevertheless do illustrate a beneficial form of competitive power. To have someone against you is not necessarily a bad thing; at least one is not over you or under you, and accepting one’s rivalry may bring out dormant capacities in you. For example, Lestat in The Tales of the Body Thief switched bodies with a human, but found he was unhappy because it was not natural for him. He thought he missed blue skies, green grass, Sunlight, and blue oceans, but being human almost killed him. It brought out the weakness in him and made he see that in his vampire body he was happy, a superior being, and knew that his human adventure had failed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Fear and anxiety are both proportionate reactions to danger, but in the cause of fear the danger is a transparent, objective one and in the case of anxiety it is hidden and subjective. That is, the intensity of the anxiety is proportionate to the meaning the situation has for the person concerned, and the reasons why one is thus anxious are essentially unknow to one. The practical implication of the distinction between fear and anxiety is that the attempt to argue a neurotic out of one’s anxiety—the method of persuasion—is useless. One’s anxiety concerns not the situation as it stands actually in reality, but the situation as it appears to one. The therapeutic task, therefore, can be only that of finding out the meaning certain situations have for one. Having qualified what we mean by anxiety we have to get an idea of the role it plays. The average person in our culture is little aware of the importance anxiety as in one’s life. Usually one remembers only that one had some anxiety in one’s childhood, that one had one or more anxiety dreams, and that one was inordinately apprehensive in a situation outside one’s daily routine, as, for instance, before an important talk with an influential person or before examinations. The information we get from neurotic persons on this score is anything but uniform. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some neurotics are fully aware of being hounded by anxiety. Its manifestations vary immensely: it may appear as diffused anxiety, in the form of anxiety-attacks; it may be attached to definite situations or activities, such as heights, high rise buildings, low income housing, school, streets, public performances; it may have a definite content, such as apprehension about getting married, becoming insane, growing out of your teenage body as an adult, getting cancer, swallowing pins. Others realize that they have anxiety now and then, with or without know the conditions that provoke it, but they do not attribute any importance to it. Finally there are neurotic persons who are aware only of having depressions, feelings of inadequacy, disturbances in pleasures of the flesh, and the like, but they are entirely unaware of ever having or having had anxiety. Closer investigation, however, usually proves their first statement to be inaccurate. In analyzing these persons one invariably finds just as much anxiety beneath the surface as in the first group, if not more. The analysis makes theses neurotic persons conscious of their previous anxiety and they may recall anxiety dreams or situation in which they felt apprehensive. Yet the extent of anxiety acknowledged by them usually does not surpass the normal. This suggests that we may have micro anxiety without knowing it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
When it is put in this way the significance of the problem involved here does not show. It is part of a more comprehensive problem. We have feelings of affection, anger, suspicion, so fleeting that they scarcely invade awareness, and so transitory that we forget them. These feelings may really be irrelevant and transitory; but they may just as well have behind them a great dynamic force. The degree of awareness of a feeling does not indicate anything of its strength or importance. Concerning anxiety this means not only that we may have anxiety without knowing it, but that anxiety may be the determining factor in our lives without out being conscious of it. In fact, we seem to go to any length to escape anxiety or to avoid feeling it. There are many reasons for this, the most general reason being that intense anxiety is one of the most tormenting affects we can have. Patients who have gone through an intense fit of anxiety will tell you that they would rather die than have a recurrence of that experience. Besides, certain elements contained in the affect of anxiety may be particularly unbearable for the individual. One of them is helplessness. One can be active and courageous in the face of great danger. However, in a state of anxiety one feels—in fact, is—helpless. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
To be rendered helpless is particularly unbearable for those persons whom power, ascendancy, the idea of being master of any situation, is a prevailing ideal. Impressed by the apparent disproportion of their reaction they resent it, as if it demonstrated a weakness or a cowardice. Why is creativity so difficult? And why does it require so much courage? Is it not simply a matter of clearing away the dead forms, the defunct symbols and the myths that have become lifeless? No. It is as difficult as forgoing in the smithy of one’s soul. We are faced with a puzzling riddle indeed. Having attended a concert given by Aaliyah, Sully Erna wrote the following letter when he got home:
My dear Mrs. Aaliyah Haughton,
My wife and I were overwhelmed by your beauty and your voice during your concert. If you continue to sing with such grace and beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can sing with such perfection and look so beautiful without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to sing something badly every night before going to bed…. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Beneath Sully Erna’s letter there was a profound truth—creativity provokes the jealousy of the gods. This is why authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is occurring. I cannot give you any complete explanation of why this is so; I can only share my reflections. Although the film Queen of the Damned is based on the legend, one can see the intimidation and disdain when Queen Akasha played by Aaliyah when she walked into the bar. And if you read the novel The Queen of the Damned, by the description of Akasha, you can tell that role was meant for Aaliyah. Her life’s work is probably more significant than most can truly understand. That was a powerful role. It is akin to Meghan Markle being made a duchess, and the struggles she faces carrying and giving birth to a royal heir. Down through the ages, authentically creative figures have constantly found themselves in such a struggle. An architect builds a house with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime. In Judaism and Christianity the second of the Ten Commandments adjures us, “You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the Heavens above or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.” I am aware that the ostensible purpose of this commandment was to protect Jewish people from idol worship in those idol-strewn times. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, the commandment also expresses the timeless fear that every society harbors of its artist, poets, entertainers and saints. For they are the ones who threaten the status quo, which each society is devoted to protecting. It is clearest in the struggles occurring in American to usurp power from President Trump and the republican party. Yet in spite of this divine prohibition, and despite the courage necessary to flout it, countless Jews and Christians through the ages have devoted themselves to painting and sculpting and entertaining and have continued to make graven images and produce symbols in one form or another. Many of then have had the same experience of a battle with the gods. That is because genius and psychosis are so close to each other. Also, creativity carries such an inexplicable guilt feeling. So many entertainers and artist experience death by suicide, or assassination and often at the very height of their achievement, much like Aaliyah. 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 be abysses. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
As result, we have witnessed an explosion of interest in the transcendental dimension of human experience. The recent collapse of traditions has brought an even greater sense of desolation to many clients and even greater impulse to compensate for and deny that desolation. Some have turned to drugs to provide that compensation, others to materialism, and still others to relationships and religion. We have also witnessed an avalanche of studies extolling the transcendental (or transpersonal) dimension of human experience. They have provided a necessary counterweight to the smug, antiseptic traditional psychological theorizing on this topic. Transpersonal psychologist encourage their clients to take guidance not from observed reality or rational thinking, but rather from their intuitive minds and other intangible sources. Some transpersonal theorists, on the other hand, are equally insistent about the virtues of transcendental experience. Such theorists as Ken Wilber unqualifying embrace the notion of an ultimate or godlike human consciousness, totally unrestricted by time and space. The film Queen of the Damned was supervised like no other film anyone knew of. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It appeared to be one of Warner Brothers most important projects, and they obsessed with every detail. Queen of the Damned (2002) is also considered by some—for example, the British critic Robin Wood—to be one of the finest, if not the finest, motions pictures ever made alone with Interview with the Vampire (1994). The theological strict and rigid doctrines that God can take on the nature of living beings constitutes a mystery beyond human understanding. It is unintelligible and unacceptable to philosophy, which can limit God’s unbound being to no particular place, no here or there. The moment we give to finite human beings that which we should give to infinite God alone, in that moment we place Earthen idols in the sacred shrine. We must not give to finite human beings the attributes of Divinity as we must not give to Divinity the attributes of individual beings. There is metaphysically no such thing as a human appearance of God that we know of, as the Infinite Mind brought down into finite flesh. God cannot be born in the flesh, cannot take a human incarnation. If God could so confine himself, he would cease to be God. For how could the Perfect, the Incomprehensible, and the Inconceivable become the imperfect, the comprehensible, and the conceivable? I guess this is why the legend of vampires, who have godly powers, have flaws and are evil by nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
From time to time, someone is born predestined to give a spiritual impulse to a particular people, area, or age. One is charged with a special mission of teaching and redemption and is imbued with special power from the universal intelligence to enable one to carry it out. One must plant seeds which grow slowly into trees to carry fruit that will feed millions of unborn people. In this sense one is different from and, if you like, superior to anyone else who is also inspired by the Overself. However, this difference or superiority does not alter one’s human status, does not make one more than a being still, however divinely used and power-charged one may be. All of this is not to be misunderstood to mean that we suggest that everyone ought to acquire every item of one’s spiritual knowledge afresh through one’s own personal experience, ignoring all the experience of the whole race. On the contrary, we would strongly suggest that one avail oneself of this experience through the form it has taken in great literature throughout the World. A competent spiritual director of one’s way is certainly worth having, but unfortunately the problem of where to find such a being seems insuperable. If an aspirant is lucky enough to solve it without becoming the victim of one’s own imagination one will be lucky indeed. If not, let one exploit one’s own inner resources. Let one appeal to the divine soul within oneself for what one needs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Why Does He Have to Weep to Have His Love? Why Can He Not Enjoy His Love?
Deep drifts of snow lay everywhere. The streets were clearly impassable to traffic, and there were times when I fell on my knees again, arms going deep into the snow, and Nacho liked my face as though he were trying to keep me warm. But I continued, struggling uphill, whatever my state of mind and body, until at last I turned the corner, and saw the lights of the familiar Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails House ahead. In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to increase the price of bread. The pâtissiers sent in support a complete description of a bakery and of its weekly costs. Thirteen people there were in such an establishment: the baker and his wife, four paid employees who were called journeymen, two maid-servants, two apprentices, and the baker’s three children. Food cost more than anything else, more than raw materials, and nearly four times as much as wages. Clothing was charged up, too, not only for man, wife, and children but for the apprentices as well. Even school fees were included in the cost of baking bread for sale. A London bakery was undoubtedly what we should called a commercial or industrial undertaking, turning out loaves by the thousand. Yet it was carried on in the house of the baker himself, an ordinary house with a few extra sheds. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
All these people, moreover, took their meals in the house, every meal of the day. They even slept there at night; indeed they were obliged to do so, expect for the journeymen. In short, universal custom and law of the land obliged these thirteen people to live together as a family. They only word ever used at that time to describe such a group of people was the word “family.” The man at the head of the group, the man we should call the entrepreneur, or the employer or the manager, was then known as the master, or head of the family. He was father in fact to some of its member, in place of father to the rest. There was no distinction between his domestic and his economic functions. His wife was both his partner and his subordinate, a partner because she ran the family, took charge of the food and managed the women servants, a subordinate because she was woman and wife, mother and in place of mother to the rest. The paid servants had their specified and familiar position in the family, as much part of it as the children, but not quite in the position of the children. The apprentices were well fed, obliged to obedience and forbidden to marry, unpaid and absolutely dependent until the age of twenty-one. And if apprentices were workers who were also children, the children themselves, the sons and daughters of the master and mistress, were workers too. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
At the end of the century John Locke laid it down that when they reached three, the children of the poor must begin work for some part of the day. We may see at once, therefore, that the World we have lost, as I have called it, was no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance, and loving-kindness. It is so important that I should not be misunderstood on this point that I will say at once that in my view the coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation with it. It was there already. The patriarchal arrangements which I have begun to describe were not new in the England of Shakespeare and of Elizabeth. These arrangements were as old as the Greeks, as old as European history, and they abused and enslaved people quite as remorselessly as the economic arrangements which had replaced them in the England of Blake and Victoria. However, there were differences in the manner of oppressing and exploiting. The ancient order of society which gave way before the coming of industry was felt by those who supposed, enjoyed, and endured it to be eternal and unchangeable. There was no expectation of reform. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
When economic relationships were domestic relationships, and domestic relationships were rigidly regulated by the social system, by the content of Christianity itself, how could there be expectation of reform? This is in sharp contrast with social expectations in Victorian England, and in all industrial society since. Since the coming of industry, societies have been far less table than their predecessors. They lack the extraordinary influence for cohesiveness which familiar relationships carry with them, that power of reconciling the frustrated and the discontented by emotional means. You have noticed that the roles we have allotted to all the members of the extended family of the master baker of London in 1619 are all, emotionally, highly symbolic and highly satisfactory. In a whole society organized like this, everyone belongs, everyone has one’s circle of affection, every relationship can be seen as a love relationship. It may indeed well be a love relationship. Not so with us. Even if he were a bully and a beater, a usurer and a hypocrite, who could love the name of a limited company as an apprentice could love one’s superbly satisfactory father-figure master? However, if a family is a circle of affection, it can also be the scene of hatred. The true tyrants among beings, the villains and the murderers, are jealous husbands and resentful wives, tyrannical fathers, deprived children. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Concerning aggression, I mean, in contradistinction to the attitudes of self-assertion, acts of going against someone, attacking, disparaging, encroaching, or any form of hostile behavior—disturbances of this kind show themselves in two entirely different ways. One way is a propensity to be aggressive, domineering, over-exacting, to boss, cheat or find fault. Occasionally persons who have these attitudes are aware of being aggressive; more often they are not in the least aware of it and are convinced subjectively that they are just being honest or merely expressing an opinion, or even being modest in their demands, although in reality they are offensive and imposing. In others, however, these disturbances show themselves in the opposite way. One finds on the surface an attitude of easily feeling cheated, dominated, scolded, imposed on or humiliated. These persons, too, are frequently not aware that this is their own attitude, but believe sadly that the whole World is down on them, imposing on them. Peculiarities of another kind, those in the pleasures of the flesh sphere, may be classified roughly as either a compulsive need for activities to please the flesh or inhibitions toward such activities. Inhibitions may appear at any step leading to satisfaction of the flesh. They may set in at the approach of persons of the other gender, in wooing, in the functions of the pleasures of the flesh themselves or in the enjoyment. All the peculiarities describe in the preceding groups will appear also in the attitudes dealing with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
In the traditional patriarchal society of Europe, which I am trying to describe, where everyone lived one’s whole life in a family, often in the same family, such tension must have been incessant and unrelieved, incapable of release except in crisis. Men, women, and children have to be very close together and for a very long time indeed to generate the emotional power which can give rise to a tragedy of Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Racine. Conflict then was between individual people, on the personal scale. Clashes between whole groups, such as those which go to make our twenty-first century society the scene of perpetual revolution as we call it, could arise far less often then. This can only have been so if the little knot of thirteen people making bread was indeed the typical social unit of the old World, typical in size, in scale, in composition. In fact we can take the bakery to be the limiting case for the family which was sovereign in the society of our ancestors, the society of these days before the industrial revolution. We shall see in a moment what form the family took over the great expanse of society which lived on the land. However, our chosen example has other things to tell us. We may notice, for one thing, that our folk-memory of the World we have lost is in much these terms, rather than in rural terms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
We still talk to children about apprentices who marry their master’s daughter, of bakers who really bake, in their houses, in their homes, of spinster who really sit by the fire and spin. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales preserve the language pretty well unaltered. In fact a reliable guide to the subject in hands is Grimm’s Fairy Tales, even Walt Disney. Which means that it is already half known to the historian before one starts, known by rote and not by understanding. Therefore one has neglected it, and neglecting it has failed to set up the correct contrast with the social order which has now succeeded. Without contrast there cannot be understanding, and I submit that we are unable to comprehend our industrial society because the historian whose job it is has not told us what society was like without industry. However, we do know that being a housewife is the true oldest profession in the World, it dates all the way back to the very first human beings, Adam and Eve. The working family of the London baker vividly illustrates the scale of life under the antiquated social order: no group of persons larger than a family, fifteen or twenty at most; no object larger than the London Bridge or St. Paul’s Cathedral; no workaday building larger than an ordinary house. Everything physical was on the human scale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The death of the head of a family in the World of commerce and industry which we have been describing was almost certainly the end to its existence. The hope was that a son would succeed, or, if there was no son, an apprentice instead, which was why I was important that he should marry the master’s own kin. Often, surprisingly often, the widow would herself carry on, though it could not be for long. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire paints accurate picture of what it was like in the eighteenth century for women, when Lestat kills the Freniere boy who was master of the plantation. With the death of Freniere, the plantation would collapse because it was a fragile economy, a life of splendor based on the perennial mortgaging of next year’s crop, and it was in his hands alone. After the death of the Freniere boy, the five Freniere sisters were agonizing. However, another Vampire called Louis convinces Babbette that she can save the plantation as long as she was confident. He told her, “Stop at nothing until you have the answers. And take my visitations to you to be your courage whenever you waver. You must take the reins of your own life. Your brother is dead.” However, later on Babette became the scandal of the neighborhood because she chose to run the plantation on her on. She had scandalized the coast by remaining alone on the plantation without a man in the house, without even an older woman. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Babette’s greatest problem was that she might succeed financially only to suffer the isolation of social ostracism. She has such a sensibility that wealth itself meant nothing to her; family, a long…this meant something to Babette. Though she was able to old the plantation together, the scandal was wearing on her. She was giving up inside. However, as you know jealous people will use your life as if it were oil for a lamp. This, then, was not simply a World without factories; it was a World without firms, a World without economic continuity. Since every activity was limited by what could be organized within a family, and within the lifetime of a family, there as an unending struggle to manufacture continuity, to provide an expectation for the future. “One hundred and twenty family uprising and downlying, whereof you may take out six or seven, and all the rest were servants and retainers”: this was the household of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke in the years before the Civil War, and it illustrates the symbolic function of the aristocratic family—to defy the limitation on size, to build big, to raise up a line which should remain forever. However, what do these words mean? Who was England in, say the year 1650? Not every single person living then within our boundaries no one with historical sense would claim that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
However, only a recognition that people came no in individuals but in clots, in families of the sort I have described, only that recognition makes clear that England in its final definition meant only those grown males who were heads of households, who were literate and who had some degree of individuality. This at once excludes all women, all those under the age of nearly thirty, for all these persons were caught up, so to speak—subsumed is the ugly word I shall use—in the personalities of the heads of the families to which they belonged. England, in fact, meant a far, far smaller number off persons even than this would imply. Historians have not, it seems to me, tended to talk about important qualifications as to the use of the word. However, they seem, of recent years anyway, to be fairly confident that they know what it was that transformed this patriarchal World into the World we live in now. Capitalism did a great deal of it, they say, and it is capitalism which we must contrast with the patriarchal society: capitalism with its new spirit, whatever that dangerous word may be doing in the historian’s vocabulary, was the great disruptive force which broke up the World we have lost and dethroned the family from its sovereignty in society. However, by the seventeenth century capitalism was at least 300 years old, and perhaps much older. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
We have seen, in the example of the way in which the putting-out system of industry came to the rescue of the laborer on the land, that capitalism was perfectly compatible with family economic arrangements. Capitalism, we shall conclude, is an incomplete description: it simply cannot do the historian’s work which has been thrust upon it. The historical distortions which have risen from the word capitalism are a result, I believe, in some degree to a faulty sense of proportion, which we can only bow begin to correct. With the “capitalism-changed-the-World” way of thinking goes a division of history into the ancient feudal, and bourgeois eras or stages. I think that the contrast which we have been trying to draw here between the World we have lost and the World we now inhabit makes all other divisions into subdivisions. European society is of the patriarchal type, and with some variations, of which perhaps the feudal variation went furthest, it was patriarchal in its institutions right up to the coming of the factories, the offices, and the rest. It is now patriarchal no longer, except in a vestigial way, and in its emotional predisposition. It is now time that we divided up history up again in accordance with what is really important. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The word alienation is part of the cant of the twenty-first century, and it began as an attempt to describe the separation of the worker from a World of work. We need not accept all that this expression has come to convey in order to recognize that it does point us the way to realizing something of the first importance to us all in relation to our past. Time was, and it was all time up to 260 years ago, when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. However, there still remains a therapeutic problem; many people possess a sense of emptiness that some clients feel—even when they are convinced that they are full. What they are actually full of are false highs, dreams with no substance, hypomanic reactions, and an array of compulsions. These extravagances lead inexorably to collapse—and the cycle repeats once again. Client need to pause over their emptiness, to explore it, in order to break their dysfunctional cycle. They may be less affluent than other, or deprives or deflated, but they do not have to collapse or overreach. One can find possibilities within their restrictedness, to wonder, for example, and to consciously transcend their despair. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Many beings believe that they can recreate themselves, deny their parentage and their roots and build a new identity. In their imaginations, some have never really accepted their parents as their parents because they are ashamed of where they come from. The heart of the problem this generation faces is that they are haunted by a sense of Sin and Fall, and assume all the weakness and depravity of human nature. While it is important to accept your roots and where you come from as apart of your identity, have complete faith, in typical American fashion, that you can transform your dreams into action. Acknowledging your roots will help to fortify this foundation, and makes it easier to transform dreams into action. Let people see that there is something gorgeous about you, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. It is important to gave an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as no one has never found in any other person and which they know they likely shall never find again. Believe unconditionally in the powerful American myth of the Green Light, a symbol that represents dreams, hopes, and desires. It means we have the clearance to reach our goals. The Green Light is like a symbol from God that he has blessed the path we are on. Everything is ahead; we make anything we choose of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The Green Light beckons us onward and upward with a promise of bigger and better things in higher and higher skyscrapers, interminably rising into infinity. The Green Light turns into our greatest illusion, covering over our difficulties, permitting us to depend on the Light and Power which is there and which, with enough patience, will be found there. Many beings believe that the important thing in the American Dreams has been to get rich, and then those very riches give a sanction to your situation. The fact of your being successful is supposedly proof that God smiles on you and that you are among the saved. It is not hard to see how this, in true Calvinistic tradition, drifted into getting rich as the eleventh commandment. The success and the money may flesh out the vast dream which many hold in its thrall and they take that as the reality of life. Money can buy the vast parties, the glitter of mansions, the freely flowing spirits, the smooth jazz music which floats from the orchestras as the hundred of people flock to the lights like moths at night. These things are important to some because sooner or later these accoutrements of Babylon will draw in true love. Yet we must also keep purity of heart in mind. We must be people who possess complete integrity. Preserving one’s fundamental integrity, one’s spiritual intactness is an essential part, maybe even the very key to life. Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. We are created in the image of God and are given something of that Godliness, but under the most serious and sacred of restrictions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
The only control placed on us is self-control—self-control born of respect for the divine sacramental power this gift God has given us represents. Do not be deceived and do not be destroyed. Unless such powers are controlled and commandments kept, your future may be burned; your World could go up in flames. Penalty may not come on the precise day of transgression, but it comes surely and certainly enough. And unless there is true repentance and obedience to a merciful Go, then someday, somewhere, the morally cavalier and unclean will pray like the rich man who wished Lazarus to “dip my finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” Our bodies are therefore and extension of our spirit and eternal existence and is something to be kept pure and holy. Do not be afraid of soiling its hands to do honest labor. This is not just the Age of Information that we are feeling, but we do not want to lose the old warm World, and pay a high price for living too long with a single dream. Achieving the American Dream takes time and it make mean to progress our lives seem to be a repetition, every day and every act being forever the same in a perpetual monotonous toil and sweat. But that is the crucial meaning, we are in control of our fate. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
With many a weary step, and many a groan, up the high hill we heave a huge round stone: the huge round stone, resulting with a bound, thunders impetus down. Nothing can be more important for human life than these circular journeys of the Sun. For we face monotony in all we do; we draw in and exhale breath after breath in ceaseless succession through every moment of our lives, which is monotony par excellence. However, out of this repetitiveness of breathing many have formed their life plan and found a way of achieving their goals. We then become a model of a hero who always is devoted to creating a better kind of life; one who presses on in spite of his or her despair. Without such a capacity to confront despair we would not have Beethoven, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Dante, Goethe, William and Sarah Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Harriet Tubman, Richard Aoki, Joan Baez, Tawakkol Karman, Anne Rice, Chris Rice, Reese Witherspoon, Aaliyah, Meghan Markle, and Tee Grizzly or any others of the great figures in the development of culture. This is why we are taught the imagination, the purpose of human faiths which we construct, as it gives us courage to move beyond the rock, beyond the monotony of day-to-day experience. If you reply on an external teacher you rely on something which you may have to drop tomorrow or on somebody you may have to change the day after. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
This brings us to the most important kind of courage of all. Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols new patterns on which a new society can be built. Every profession can and does require some creative courage. In our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly teaching, all of these profession and scores of others are in the midst of radical change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change. The need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing. However, those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists—the dramatists, the musicians, the painter, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images—poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations. The symbols only dreamt about my most human beings are expressed in graphic form by the artists. But in our appreciation of the created work—let us say a Mozart quintet—we also are performing a creative act. When we engage a painting, which we have to do especially with modern art if we are authentically to see it, we are experiencing some new moment of sensibility. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Some new vision is triggered in us by our contact with the painting; something unique is born in us. This is why appreciation of the music or painting or other works of the creation person is also a creative act on our part. If these symbols are to be understood by us, we must identity with them as we perceive them. In Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, there are no intellectual discussions of the failure of communication in out time; the failure is simply presented there on the stage. We see it most vividly, for example, when Lucky, who, at his master’s order to “Think,” can only sputter out a long speech that has all the pomposity of a philosophical discourse but is actually pure gibberish. As we involve ourselves more and more in the drama, we see represented on stage, larger than life, our general human failure to communicate authentically. We see on the stage in, Beckett’s play, the lone, bare, tree, symbolic of the lone, bare relationship the two men have as they wait together for a Godot who never appears; and it elicits from us a similar sense of the alienation that we and multitudes of others experience. The fact that most people have no clear awareness of their alienation only makes this condition more powerful. In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, there are no explicit discussions of the disintegration of our society; it is shown as a reality in the drama. The nobility of the human species is not talked about, but is presented as a vacuum on the stage. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Because this nobility is such a vivid absence, an emptiness that fills the play, you leave the theater with a profound sense of the importance of being human, as you do after have seen Macbeth or King Lear and after have reading Interview with the Vampire and Tales of the Body Thief by Anne Rice. O’Neill’s capacity to communicate that experience places him among the significant tragedians of history. Artists can portray these experiences in music or words or clay or marble or on canvas because they express the collective unconscious. This phrase may not be the most felicitous, but we know that each of us carries in buried dimensions of our being some basic forms, partly generic and partly experiential in origin. It is these the artist expresses. Thus the artists—in which term I hereafter include the poets, musicians, dramatists, plastic artists, as well as saints—are a dew line; they give us a distant early warning of what is happening to our culture. In the art of our day we see symbols galore of alienation and anxiety. However, at the same time there is form amid discord, beauty amid ugliness, some human love in the midst of hatred—a love that temporarily triumphs over death but always loses out in the long run. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The artists thus expresses the spiritual meaning of their culture. Our problem is: Can we read their meaning aright? The teaching of a higher individual needs to be correctly understood. It is not that a separate one exists for each physical body. The consciousness which normally identifies itself with the body—that is, the ego—when looking upward in highest devotion or inward in deepest mediation, comes to the point of contact with universal beings, World-Mind. This is its own higher self, the divine deputy within its own being. However, if devotion or prayer is carried still further, to the very utmost possible stretch of consciousness, the point itself merges into its source. At this moment the being is one’s source. However, “Man shall not see My face and live!” One returns eventually to Earth-consciousness, where one must follow out its requirements. Yet the knowledge of what one is in essence remains the presence of the deputy is always there meanwhile, always felt It may fittingly be called one’s higher individuality. The uniqueness of each person, one’s difference from every other person, may be metaphysically explained as due to the effort of Infinite Mind to express itself infinitely within the finite limitations of time and space, form and appearance. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Take Giotto, as a creator to further illustrate this point, in what is called the “little Renaissance” which burgeoned in the fourteenth century. In contrast to the two-dimensional medieval mosaics, Giotto presents a new way of seeing life and nature: gives his paintings three dimensions, and we know see human being and animals expressing and calling forth from us such specific human emotions as care, or pity, or grief, or joy. In the previous, two-dimensional mosaics in the churches of the Middle Age, we feel no human being is necessary to see them—they have their own relationship to God. However, in Giotto, a human being viewing the picture is required; and this human being must take one’s stance as an individual in relation to the picture. Thus the new humanism and the new relation to nature that were to become central in the Renaissance are here born, a hundred years before the Renaissance proper. In our endeavor to grasp these symbols of art, we find ourselves in a realm that beggars our usual conscious thinking. Our task is quite beyond the reach of logic. It brings us to an area in which there are many paradoxes. Take the idea expressed in Shakespeare’s four lines at the end of Sonnet 64: Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose, but weep to have that which it fears to lose. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
If you have been trained to accept the logic of our society, you will ask: “Why does he have to weep to have his love? Why can he not enjoy his love?” Thus our logic pushes us always toward adjustment—and adjustment to a crazy World and to a crazy life. And worse yet, we cut ourselves off from understanding the profound depths of experience that Shakespeare is here expressing. We have all had such experiences, but we tend to cover them over. We may look at an autumn tree so beautiful in its brilliant colors that we feel like weeping; or we may hear music so lovely that we are overcome with sadness. The craven thought then creep into our consciousness that it would have been better not to have seen the tree at all or not to have heard the music. Then we would not be faced with this uncomfortable paradox—knowing that time will come and take my love away, that everything we love will die. However, the essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
That we yearn to stretch the brief moment, to postpone our death a year or so is surely understandable. However, such postponement is bound to be a frustrating and ultimately a losing battle. By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death. Exploitative power is the simplest and, humanly speaking, most destructive kind of power. It is subjecting persons to whatever use they may have to the one who holds the power. Slavery is, of course, the obvious example—when one person has the power over the bodies and, indeed, over the whole organisms of many persons. Exploitative power identifies power with force. In pioneer America the use of bullets to transform others into lifeless hulks, as well as most other example of physical force, fall into this category. In this sense the use of firearms, when employed at the whim of the person who happens to possess a gun, is a form of exploitative power. In everyday life this kind of power is exercised by those who have been radially rejected, whose lies are so barren that they know no way of relating to other people except exploitation. It is sometimes rationalized as the masculine way of dealing with women during pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
It is interesting that courtly love in the Middle Ages guarded against this kind of power—which would otherwise have been rampant in the society of knights and maidens—by the rule that force was never to be used in love. Exploitative power always presupposes violence or the threat of violence. In this kind of power there is, strictly speaking, no choice or spontaneity at all on the part of the victims. It is true that the subject in consciousness cannot make an object of itself, cannot perceive itself, but there is a being another self which knows the subject, is aware of the subject although the subject is not aware of it. However, there is an important difference to be noted here. First, the transcendental self does not know in the same way that the thinking self knows (by thinking self I mean the subject) for its knowledge is immediate, swifter than the swiftest computing machine. Secondly, it is part of the universal mind, the World Mind, yet mysteriously connected with a limited human mind. Union wit the Overself is not the ultimate end but a penultimate one. What we look up to as the Overself looks up in its own turn to another higher entity. God will strengthen you when you waver. He will be your light when it seems most dark. He will take your hand and be your hope when hope seems to have left. God’s compassion and mercy, with all their cleansing and healing powers, are freely given to all who truly wish to complete forgiveness and will take the steps that lead to it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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!
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
Every Difficulty Slurred Over Will be a Ghost to Disturb Your Repose Later on
You are afraid. You do not stand en garde against fear. You do not understand the danger of fear itself. We will know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who have possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the Earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. Although mass society is a political as well as a cultural phenomenon, many of its critics, among them Ortega y Gasset and T. S. Eliot, have concentrated their attack chiefly against what they regard as its vulgar values, its sameness, its threat to high culture. While one may share their concern about the danger of standardized tastes, or about the threat which mass behavior in politics or in culture poses for individual expression, there is far more to the problem than this—indeed, far more than many aristocratically inclined critics of mass society (and of democracy) want to see. For it is not only beings of sensibility who feel crushed by the sheer weight of mass society and its values. In short, what is alienating in mass society is not merely the corruption of art, or the power of the multitudes—a power often exaggerated—but more importantly, the atomization of individuals who make up the mass. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
In that society, there is a tendency for the aggregates of individuals [to be] related to one another only by way of their relation to a common authority, especially the state. That is, individuals are not directly related to one another in a variety of independent groups. A population in this condition is not insulated in any way from the ruling group, not yet from elements within itself. In time the many secondary groups, associations and publics which beings had formed in earlier age tend to lose their role as intermediaries between state (or media) and individual. This tendency was particularly notable in Nazi Germany, which set out to build an elaborate system of mass control through terror and bureaucracy but it is also apparent in our own society, despite our reputation for being a nation of joiners (the fact is that most of our citizens are not joiners). Mass society weakens or destroys traditional human groupings, thus leaving the individual at the mercy of impersonal communication, such as newspapers and radio and fake new media broadcasted on the television. In addition, the process of communication itself, presumably a two-way system, tends to become a one-way street with individuals more on the receiving or taking end than on the giving end. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
How does one talk back to a TV screen? Well, with the invention of social media and hashtags, it is now possible, so the TV could become two-way communication with a two-way street in the future. However, I doubt people want the TV watching them, as it would be a huge invasion of privacy because you did not consent to them entering your home and private life. Nonetheless, as things are now, the formation of opinion is facilitated for those who control the channels of communication—whether they be propagandists in a military dictatorship or the advertising industry or even a political party in our society; the stage is set for manipulation of tastes and opinions as obstacles to mass persuasion are removed. A manipulated mass is alienated to the extent that it is powerless to withstand these pressures. Here we can see why it is not the masses, those dumb beasts who threaten individual excellence, but a powerful elite which monopolizes the means of communication, thereby weakening primary human relations and creating obedient multitudes. However, just because they consider themselves elite and powerful, it does not negate the fact that they may be savages or are immune to prosecution. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
In fact, no one, even politicians, is above the law. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that Scranton Mayor William L. Courtright, age 61, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, plead guilt on 2 July 2019 to a criminal information charging him with three felony public corruption offenses. According to United States Attorney David J. Freed, the criminal information charges Mayor William L. Courtright with engaging in a multi-year conspiracy with unidentified individuals to take bribes from vendors who did business with the City. The information also alleges that other objectives of the conspiracy were to commit the offenses of attempted extortion under color of official right and extortion through use of fear or of economic hard. The undercover investigation by the FBI revealed that the former mayor accepted cash payments from vendors doing business with the city in a pay-to-play scheme. “In this County, in this Commonwealth, in the Country—our elected officials work for us, not the only way around. Using public office for personal financial gain is a crime, plain and simple. All citizens, not just those in law enforcement, should demand that our public officials scrupulously follow the law. And when they do not, no matter how difficult the investigations may be, or how long they may take, the United States Department of Justice and our laws enforcement partners will home them to account,” reports U.S. Attorney Freed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
“Bill Courtright used the city of Scranton. He traded on his office in exchange for money and other valuable favors. He wielded his official powers for his own benefit, when he should’ve been focused on his community. The FBI will never stop seeking to bring to justice corrupt public officials who so badly betray the public trust. To that end, we and our partners at the Pennsylvania State Police and the IRS have launched a task force specifically to take on public corruption in the northeast Pennsylvania region. We’re working on behalf of the people, who expect—and deserve—honest services from all their elected officials,” reports Michael T. Harpster, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. Bill Courtright did plead guilty and faces a maximum penalty under federal law for this offense of 35 years imprisonment, and a term of supervised release following imprisonment, and a fine. Therefore, no one is above the law. Nonetheless, on every side, they [the media audience] feel themselves the object of manipulation. They see themselves as the target for ingenious methods of control, through advertising which cajoles, promises, terrorizes; through propaganda that, utilizing available techniques, guides the unwitting audience into opinions which may or may not coincide with the best interests of themselves or their affiliates; through cumulatively subtle methods of salesmanship which may simulate values common to both salesperson and client for private and self-interested motives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
In the place a sense of Gemeinschaft—genuine community of values—there intrudes pseudo-Gemeinschaft—the feigning of personal concern with the other fellow in order to manipulate one the better. No wonder that in this most alienated of societies the slogan “togetherness” was first promoted by an advertiser. If many are persuaded to accept the spurious values handed down to them, a dissenting few can always be depended on to reject them. In this rejection can be seen still another major form of alienation, reflected at one extreme in the revolt of artists and intellectuals against what they consider the uncongenial and materialistic standards of bourgeois society. Personifying this revolt in their art, as well as in their lives, are writers like Baudelarie (an internal emigrant who longed to escape anywhere out of this World); Rimbaud (who did escape and whose self-imposed exile became a model for many artistic rebels following him) and Dostoyevsky (who regarded the freedom of the atheistic individual, his loneliness and isolation as the greatest evils; and in whose works the twin themes of the atomization of society and self-alienation receive their supreme expression). #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
We are dealing with more than mere disenchantment. The modern Word debases. It debases the state; it debases men. It debases love; it debases women. It debases the race; it debases the child. It debases the nation; it debases the family. It even has succeeded in debasing what is perhaps most difficult in the World to debase—because this is something which has in itself, as in its texture, a particular kind of dignity, like a singular incapacity for degradation—it debased death. The two attitudes we have toward the clock indicate two ways of timing—the one as being timed, the other as timing for the next hour, for today and tomorrow. What does the clock tell you? Does it point to the hour of rising and working and eating and talking and going to sleep? Does it point to the next appointment and the next project? Or does it show that another day, another week have passed, that we have become older, that better timing is needed to use our last years for the fulfillment of our plans, for planting and building and finishing before it is too late? Or does the clock make us anticipate the moment in which its voice does not speak any more for us? Have we, the beings of the information age, the beings who are timing every hour from day to day, the courage and the imagination of the Preacher who looks back at all his time and all timing and calls it vanity? And if so, what about our timing? Does it not lose meaning? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Must we say with the Preacher that it is good for beings to enjoy life as it is given to them from hour to hour, but that it is better not to be born at all? There is another answer to the question of human existence, to the question of timing and being timed. It is summed up in the words of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.” In these words, God’s timing breaks into our human timing. Something new appears, answering the question of the Preacher as well as the question of the business person. We ask with all generations of thinking beings: What is the meaning of the flux of time and the passing away of everything in it? When the end of all our work is the same, what is the meaning of our toiling and planning? Vanity? And this is the answer we get: Within this our time something happens that is not of our time but out of eternity, and this times our time! Here the secrets that have endured the passage of time, which many have only dimly begun to understand. When Jesus says that the right hour has come, that the kingdom of God is at hand, he pronounces the victory over the law of vanity. This hour is not subject to the circle of life and death and all the other circles of vanity. When God himself appears in a moment of time, when God subjects himself to the flux of time, the flux of time is conquered. And if this happens in one moment of time, then all moments of time receive another significance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
When the finger of the clock turns around; not one vain moment is replaced by another vain moment, but each moment says to us: The eternal is at and in this moment. The moment passes, the eternal remains. Whatever in this moment, in this hour, on this day and in this short or long life-time happens has infinite significance. Our timing from moment to moment, our planning today for tomorrow, the toil of our lifetime is not lost. Its deepest meaning lies not ahead where vanity swallows it, but it lies above where eternity affirms it. This is the seriousness of time and timing. “With their wicked words they will try to hold you down. No this is not our fate, the lives in which they are bound. And there is something more we know it has to be found. I know the World will not wait, the tide is turning around, and there is not enough time. And no there is not enough time, In the fallout of the wasted, in the half light I stand before you in the last dance of an old life. Now the cool wind is blowing and we cannot stay, but it is alright. When the night is gone, I will still be here,” reports Emma Hewitt (Not Enough Time). #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
This idea of time stirred my soul as if it were a pool of water longing to be still. I was mesmerized, enchanted. The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing on dark waves. I was sinking into darkness. I was weary of longing. I was turning around and around and around in the street, looking at the stars and thinking. Through our timing God times the coming of his kingdom; through out timing God elevates the time of vanity into the time of fulfillment. The activist who is timing with shrewdness and intuition what one has to do in one’s time and for one’s time, and for our whole activististic civilization cannot give us the answer. And the Preacher, who himself once was a most successful activist, knows that this is not an answer; he knows that vanity of our timing. And let us be honest, the spirit of the Preacher is strong today in our minds. His mood fills our philosophy and poetry. The vanity of human existence is described powerfully by those who call themselves philosopher or poets of existence. They are the children of the Preacher, this great existentialist of his period. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
However, neither they nor the Preacher knows an answer. They know more than people of mere acting. They know the vanity of acting and timing. They know that we are timed. However, they do not know the answer either. Certainly we must act; we cannot help it. We have to time our lives from day to day. Let us do it as clearly and successfully as the Preacher when he still followed the example of King Solomon. However, let us follow him also when he saw through all this and realized its vanity. Then, and then alone, are we prepared for the message of the eternal appearing in time and elevating time to eternity. Then we see in the movement of the clock not only passing of one moment after the other, but also the eternal at hand, threatening, demanding, promising. Then we are able to say: “In spite”! In spite of the fact that the Preacher and all his pessimistic followers today and everywhere and at all times are right, I say yes to time and to toil and to acting. I know the infinite significance of every moment. However, again in saying so we should not relapse into the attitude of the activist, not even of the Christian activist—and there are many of them, men and women in Christendom. The message of the fulfillment of time is not a green light for a new, an assumedly Christian activism. However, it makes us say with Paul: “Through our outer nature is wasting away our inner nature is renewed every day—because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things are unseen. For the thing that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
In these words the message of the Preacher and the message of Jesus are untied. All is vanity but through this vanity eternity shines into us, comes near to us, draws us to itself. When eternity calls in time, then activism vanished. When eternity calls in time, then pessimism vanishes. When eternity times us, then time becomes a vessel of eternity. Then we become vessel of that which is eternal. However, who was to make this revelation when the sky and sea become indistinguishable and neither any longer was chaos? God? Or Satan? It struck me suddenly what consolation it would be to know Satan, to look upon his face, no matter how terrible that countenance was, to know that I belonged to him totally, and thus put to rest forever the torment of this ignorance. To step through some veil that would forever separate me from all that I called human nature. However, even in these moments, when all the World was sleeping, neither Heaven nor Hell seemed more than a tormenting fancy. To know, to believe, in one or the other that was perhaps that only salvation for which I could dream. Any psychology that aims to understand the reality underlying all human beings in crisis is bound to be a bewildering one. Part of the problem, however, rests with us existentialist ourselves. Although we have made valiant theoretical and therapeutic contributions, we have yet to cohesively integrate them for practical, clinical use. We have also spent much of our energy in the reactive rather than proactive mode of discourse, especially in the area of psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Because there would be no rest in damnation, could be no rest; and what was this torment compared to the restless fires of hell? Us living beneath those constant stars—those stars themselves—what has this to do with Satan? And those images which sound so static to us in childhood when we are all so take up with mortal frenzy that we can scarce imagine them desirable: seraphim gazing forever upon the face of God—and the face of God itself—this was rest eternal, of which this gentle, cradling planet was only the faintest promise. The implications of this promise is revolutionary, indeed, for it signals a revised conception of existence. The streets are full of enlightened people. All beings have the possibility of attaining enlightenment because all have the divine self hidden under their narcissism. Each of us is linked with God, the Mover of all this moving Universe. This link must be brought into our field of awareness. There is possessed the highest fulfilment of our lives. The individual consciousness is not alone. It is fathered by a universal consciousness. Between the two there is this link. To awaken one day and discover (in several cases, rediscover) it will be a being’s most satisfying experience. The World-Mind is omnipresent. There is a point where every being touches it. When one attains awareness of this point, one is at last attending the true Holy Communion service. The little centre of consciousness that is myself rests in and lives by the infinite ocean of consciousness that is God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The first momentary discovery of this relationship constitutes genuine religious experience, and its expansion into a final, full disclosure constitutes a philosophic one. If God is everywhere, as he must be, then God is in beings too. This fact makes possible one’s discover, under certain conditions, of a diviner element in one’s being which is ordinarily obscured. In the end, no being can miss being in the presence of, or confronted by, the divine power. It is a fact which, whether one accepts or denies the idea of its existence, one must one day reckon with it. This is because one has never really been separated from it, never been aware of any thing or thought expect by virtue of consciousness derived from it. What we know through sense as forms points to the existence of the mind. What we know through the intellect as thoughts points to the mind. What does the individual mind itself point to? We can find the answer by plunging deep into its core, deeper and ever deeper in the practice of contemplation until we come to its ultimate source. There, where the World vanishes and the id is stilled, we become one with the infinite and eternal Mind behind the Universe. Ordinarily beings cannot directly penetrate that layer of the mind which is continuous with, and contiguous to, God. However, during the deepest state of prayer one may do so. The human mind, finite and limited though it be, can become an inlet to the universal Mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Such a happening is attended by blissful yet tranquil feelings. This little being that is me merges into larger consciousness that is pure infinite Being—until the body calls me back. Must beings take formal vows in order to discipline themselves? Can one not be loyal to one’s ideal, which in the end is self-chosen or one would not have turned one’s back upon the World, without making promises and uttering pledges which it may not be possible to redeem? Are the tonsured head and the coarse robe essential to ensure the practice of self-control in act and thought? If one is to persevere in the purification of character, is it not enough that one one’s self wants it? If one chooses to do so, one is free to live in the normal human relationships, to follow a career in the World, to marry and beget children. Of course this will necessarily entail certain disciplinary conditions. However, one will not be obliged to flee from all possessions into jungles, monasteries, or the like. “Therefore repent ye, repent ye, lest by knowing these things and not doing them ye shall suffer yourselves to come under condemnation, and ye are brought down unto this second death,” reports Helaman 14.19. Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
We Seek Truth for Various Reasons—One is Because it Possesses Certitude that Gives Us Anchorage and Rest!
The great façade of the cathedral rose in a dark mass opposite the square, but the doors were open and I could see a soft, flickering light within. It was Saturday evening early, and the people were going to confession for Sunday Mass and Communion. Candles burned dim in the crystal chandeliers. At the far end of the nave the altar loomed out of the shadows, laden with white flowers. It was to the old church on this spot that they had brought my brother. Has that solidarity declined? Recent development in the New and Old World suggest that with greater prosperity the militancy of working-class movements has fallen sharply. If not true of the older generation, still loyal to the slogans of yesteryear, it seems to be particularly true of working-class youth. Some young of the World workers today is a new type: apolitical, or democratic, hedonistic, individualistic; in short, a far cry from the militant radicals of their grand father’s generation. However, decay of the working-class culture, which was itself a defense against alienation, has not necessarily led to greater integration. Along with the middle-class contemporaries, young workers face a World without values. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, it is not only material possession which divide mortals and other beings. In a heterogenous society like ours there are numerous and sometimes overlapping underrepresented groups or out-groups. Because our is a multi-racial, multi-ethic, and multi-cultural population, we are most likely to think of such groups in terms of color, hair textures, gender, sexuality, and religious affiliation since these distinctions are among the most powerful of all social barriers. However, it seems legitimate to broaden the concept of the underrepresented groups to include other section of the population who, because of some distinguishing characteristic, are rejected by the community. Among these groups are the young, the aged, the physically limited, intellectually disabled, those who are celibate, and homosexuals and transgenders, and it is also changing, too, to include White men (people discriminate against them just because of their status). We do not mean to suggest that all of them face equally serious patterns of prejudice and discrimination. Majority attitudes may range from ill-concealed hate and violence at one extreme to pity at the other; and barriers to solidarity and integration differ. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
African Americans and Black Americans, for example, are segregated in enormous transient communities; while homosexuals inhabit half-Worlds with no physical boundaries. Nevertheless, all such out-groups face a certain degree of isolation from society: they are in the community but not of it. As a result, they tend to form more or less distinct subcultures of their own. Although these subcultures offer some security and protection, common to most of them is a striving for integration with the majority groups on top. Furthermore, it is only natural for underrepresented groups to acquire some of the prevailing attitudes toward them. When this becomes self-hatred for sharing the despised or feared characteristic, we have perhaps the most extreme form which this pattern of alienation takes: alienated from others, they become alienated from themselves. We began by saying that many beings today are estranged from others as well as from themselves. However, others means not only the social communities in which they live; it also refers to the natural and supernatural World beyond. Thus, if we speak of a being’s alienation from nature, we do not mean nature in any metaphysical sense—although fairly serious metaphysical problems are involved; all we mean is that men and women today are not as close to land, air, sea, wind and mountain as their ancestors or their contemporaries who have yet to be blessed with an industrial and urban civilization. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The World is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: little we see in Nature that is ours. However, there is another aspect to this debate. About 70 years ago, there was no social media, communities were small, more intimate and far more conservative. People could leave their doors unlocked and towns were built around corporations. So the people in the communities did not travel far, all new each other, and they could afford to live were they worked. Private business was not disclosed in the streets. But as people became more mobile, new challenges arose, wives went to work and were home less often, husbands traveled father and were exposed to more people. And with social media people are exposed to thousands of more people than they were used to and it seems that everyone is already occupied with someone or your marriage and relationship is harder to maintain because there is now so much more competition. It is not as easy to date because some people like being alone and others are far more selective than in the past. Conversely, in some part of Africa, there are still tribes who hunt and gather and sometimes they eat a lot of meat or a lot of sugar and the diet works for them, they do not have cancers, heart disease or any other diseases that people in developed nations have. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Although conceptions of the external World vary widely, many primitive societies and those areas still influenced by Eastern mysticism, feel themselves in fairly close unity with nature. In the pre-scientific Western World also people and nature were considered related parts of a more or less harmonious whole. Whether nature was considered hostile or friendly, people felt close to it. For leading thinkers in the West however this intimate relationship began to end with the seventeenth-century revolution in science and philosophy, and for ordinary citizens, with the industrial revolution that followed. To understand and control nature—the goals of modern science and technology—people first had to separate or alienate themselves from it. Nature, in scientific thought had its laws formulated without any reference to dependence on individual observers. The radical separation of people (as subject or observer) from nature (as object or external World) is likely due to the dawn of modern scientific discovery. What were the consequences of this division nature and people? First of all, it led to what we now call the scientific attitude, with its spirit of detachment, a spirit which has become the keynote of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
For as science redeveloped, it became more abstract and increasingly remote from common life to the point science is the view of life where everything human is excluded from the prospect. It is of intention inhuman, supposing, strange as it may seem, that the further we travel from ourselves the nearer we approach the truth the further from our deepest sympathies, from all we car for, the nearer we are to reality, the stony heart of the scientific Universe. The flowering of science and technology gave beings enormous power to control nature and thereby transform society. Note the word control; for the language we use offers a clue to the new relationship between mortals and nature. Thus when we speak of our power over nature we reveal a certain antagonism between people and the external World, with nature regarded as something to be conquered—or even destroyed. The greater that power, the more we are alienated from nature and from ourselves. Estrangement from nature is the common experience. Industrialism created the first cities in which nature played little or no part. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
The towns are now losing their last glimpse of nature. Formerly men and women who lived in the English town were never far from the open country: their town life was fringed with orchards and gardens like Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. However, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, the towns were growing up in which working people would find it harder and harder to escape out of the wide web of smoke and squalor that enveloped their daily lives. Civilization was rapidly painting the green spaces black on the industrial map. The Angel Meadows were no longer meadows, old Meadowview lost much of its charm, and the only Angel that came near them was the Angel of Death. Life in such a town brought no alleviation of the tyranny of the industrial system; it only made it more real and somber to the mind. There was no change of scene or colour, no delight of form or design to break its brooding atmosphere. Town, tree, building, sky, all have become part of the same unrelieved picture. The men and women who left the mill and passed along the streets to their homes did not become less but more conscious of that system as a universal burden, for the town is so constructed and so governed as to enforce rather than modify, to reiterate rather than soften the impressions of an alien and unaccommodating power. One would call this ancient history need only explore the spreading blight of modern American cities to see that the damage done to nature has been long-lasting, perhaps permanent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
That the damage was not intentional is beside the point. Ironically, contemporary scientists and philosophers today, particularly those of the existentialist school, reject the Cartesian dualism between living beings as subject and nature as object. However, for ordinary citizens, many of them living in grim prisons of concrete and steel, the damage has already been done: the technology that classical science produced has erected almost insurmountable barriers between them and the natural World. We have put many stages of artifice and device, of manufacture and alteration, between ourselves and the rest of nature. The ordinary city-dweller knows nothing of the Earth’s productivity; one does not know the Sunrise and rarely notices when the Sun sets (changes angles in the sky, actually for the Sun does not really rise nor set); ask one in what phase the Moon is, or when the ide in the harbor is high, or even how high the average tide runs, and likely as not one cannot answer you. Seed-time and harvest are nothing to one. If one has never witnessed an Earthquake, a great flush flood, a hurricane, tsunami, blizzard, or heatwave, one probably does not feel the power of nature as a reality surrounding one’s life at all. Nature, as living beings, animated and apparently unanimated, has always known it, knows no more. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In the Western World most of us are the city dwellers, and one need not be a mystic to recognize that something is missing from our lives. Are we not poorer for it? There is a time, an appointed hour, for all things under Heaven. And in fourteen contrasts one embraces the whole of human existence, showing that everything has its time. What does this mean? This too is vanity and striving for the wind. The fact that everything has its appointed time only confirms one’s tragic view. Things and actions have their time. Then they pass and other things and actions have their time. However, nothing new comes out of this circle in which all life moves. Everything is timed by an eternal law which is above time. We are not able to penetrate into that meaning of this timing. For us, it is mystery and what we see is vanity and frustration. God’s timing is hidden to us, and our toiling and timing are of no ultimate use. Any human attempt to change the rhythm of birth and death, or war and peace, of love and hate and all the other contrast in the rhythm of life is in vain. This is the first but it is not the whole meaning of that statement that everything has appointed hour. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
If the Preacher says that there is a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to speak and a time to be silent, he asks us to be aware of the right time to be silent, he asks us to be aware of the right time, the time to do one thing and not to do another thing. After he has emphasized that everything is timed by an unsurmountable destiny, he asks us to follow this timing from above and to do out own timing according to it. As a teacher of wisdom who gives many wise rules for our acting, he requests right timing. He knows that all our timing is dependent on the timing from above, from the hidden ruler of time; but this does not exclude our acting at the right and not as the wrong moment. The whole ancient World was drive by the belief that for everything we do there is an adequate hour: If you want to build a house or to marry, if want to travel or to begin a war—for any important enterprise—you must ask for the right moment. You must ask somebody who knows—the priest or the astrologer, the seer or the prophet. On the ground of their oracles about the good season you may or may not act. This was a belief of centuries and millennia. It was one of the strongest forces in human history, from generation to generation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The greatest beings of the past waited for the oracle announcing the appointed hour. Jesus himself says that his hour was not yet come and he went to Jerusalem when he felt that his hour had come. The modern mortals know of the need for timing as much as his predecessors. When in my early years in this country I had to discuss a certain project wit an influential American business man, and he said to me, “Do not forget that the first step to a successful action is the right timing.” Innumerable times, when reading about political or commercial actions, I was reminded of these words. In many conversations about activities and plans the problem of timing came up. It is one of the most manifest patters of our culture, of our industrial civilization. People ask: What about the I-You relationship between beings? Is this always entirely reciprocal? Could it be, is it permitted to be? Is it not, like everything human, subject to the limitations of our inadequacy, and is it not limited further by the inner laws that govern our life with one another? The first of these two obstacles is surely familiar enough. Everything, from your own experience of looking day after day into the eyes of your neighbour who needs you after all but responds with the cold surprise of a stranger, to the melancholy of the holy men who repeatedly offered the great gift in vain—everything tells you that complete mutuality does not inhere in a being’s life with one another. It is a form of grace for which one must always be prepared but on which one can never count. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Yet there are also many I-You relationships that by their very nature may never unfold into complete mutuality if they are to remain faithful to their nature. Elsewhere I have characterized the relationship of a genuine educator to one’s pupil as being of this type. The teacher who wants to help the pupil to realize one’s best potentialities must intend one as this particular person, both in one’s potentiality and in one’s actuality. More precisely, one must know one as a mere sum of qualities, aspirations, and inhibitions; one must apprehend one, and affirm one, as a whole. However, this one can only do if one encounters one as a partner in a bipolar situation. And to give one’s influence unity and meaning, one must live through this situation in all its aspects not only from one’s own point of view but also from that of one’s partner. One must practice the kind of realization that I call embracing. It is essential that one should awaken the I-You relationship in the pupil, too, who should intend and affirm one’s educator as this particular person; and yet the educational relationship could not endure if the pupil also practiced the art of embracing by living through the shared situation from the educator’s point of view. Whether the I-You relationship comes to an end or assumes the altogether different character of friendship, it become clear that specifically educational relationship is incompatible with complete mutuality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Another, no less instructive example of the normative limits of mutuality may be fund in the relationship between a genuine psychotherapist and one’s patient. If one is satisfied to analyze one’s patient—that is, to being to light unconscious factors from one’s microcosm and to apply to a conscious project the energies that have been transformed by this emergence—one my successfully accomplish some repairs. At best, one may help a diffuse soul that is in poor structure to achieve at least some concentration and order. However, one cannot absolve one’s true task, which is the regeneration of a stunted personal center. That can be brought off only by a being who grasps with the profound eye of a physician the buried, latent unity of the suffering soul, which can be done only if one enters as a partner into a person-to-person relationship, but never through the observation and investigation of an object. In order to promote coherently the liberation and actualization of this unity in a new situation in which the other person comes to terms with the World, the therapist, like educator, must stand not only at one’s own pole of the bipolar relationship but also at the other pole, experiencing the effects of one’s own actions. Again the specific healing relationship would end as soon as the patient decided to practice the art of embracing and actually succeeded in experiencing events also from the doctor’s point of view. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Healing, like educating, requires that one lives in confrontation and is yet removed. The most striking example of the normative limits of mutuality could probably be found in the work of those charged with the spiritual well-being of their congregation: here any attempt at embracing from the other side would violate the consecrated authenticity of the mission. Every I-You relationship in a situation defined by the attempt of one partner to act on the other one so as to accomplish some goal depends on a mutuality that is condemned never to become complete. The ultimate Knower is supra-personal, divine pure consciousness, the knowing and understanding of the Self, God who is the Soul’s Creator and only Beatitude. All this is higher than the ego, the person, the individuality, the being. The Omnipresence of the Infinite Mind carries great meaning for us individuality. For it signifies that this Mind is not less present and not less active too. To realize the Self through the householder’s life shall be the grand ideal of the future of the World. It is not by giving up all, but by realizing the Self in all, that one has to realize the object of the World-evolution and be free. #RnandolphHarris 14 of 15
The path is not through negation of the Universe to the affirmation of the Supreme Self, but through affirmation of the Supreme Self to the mergence of the Universe in the Supreme Self. The mission this time is educational and not religious. Spread education in the name of the Highest Truth enshrined in the Bible and religions will grow of themselves on the sure foundation of the Highest Truth. I am weary of arguing with you. Hell is hatred, people living together in eternal hatred. We are not in Hell. You can take the present or not, I do not care. It does not matter. Only let us have an end to all this. The great adventure of our lives. When you can live until the end of the World, what does it mean to die? And what is the end of the World except a phrase, because who knows even what is the World itself? I have now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one utterly shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way that made me a picture of a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately craved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which God made the World before he had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the Universe. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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The Spirit’s Beauty Has Lured Mortals on Like a Dream of Unfound Gold for the Heart of Mortals is always Seeking this World of Treasure!
And gradually I realized that I possessed a new concept of loneliness, a new method of measuring a silence that stretched to the end of the World. And all I had to interrupt it were those menacing recorded preternatural voices which carried no images as their virulency increased. It is always and forever the struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to ne borne. It is much more reassuring to see the World in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. However, what is the most innocent place in any country? It is not the insane asylum? The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. Rocklin charmed me, subdued me somewhat. Almost Venetian, it seemed, the somber multicolored mansions rising wall to wall over the narrow black streets. Irresistible the lights sprinkled over hilltop and value; and the brilliant manicured lawns and plush trees shooting up like a fairy-tale forest into a misty blue sky. We live at the end of an era. The age that began with the Renaissance, born out of the twilight of the Middle Ages, is now at a close. The era that emphasized rationalism and individualism is suffering an inner and outer transition; and there are as yet only dim harbingers, only partly conscious, of what the new age will be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Recall those towering individuals of the Renaissance, explorers of the Earth like Columbus and Magellan, and explorers of the Heavens like Copernicus. Our comparable exploration is the recent trips to the Moon and robots deployed on Mars. However, practically no one remembers the names of the astronauts who walked on the Moon. What we do remember is the machinery; the hero of the moon trip was not an individual but a projectile, and the mortals were tenders of this projectile. Let no one conclude from this, however, that in the new age mortals will be subordinate to technology. It may be just the opposite: the development of technology, filling a role similar to that of the ancient slaves, may force us to find intellectual and spiritual content to fill the vacuum of our days and nights. In the present gap between ages, power is disengaged from its hereditary lines, confused, and up for grabs. Those who have occupied the numbing position of subordinate groups—the African Americans, and Chicanos, women, the less affluent, students, mental patients, convicts—are springing to life, announcing their existence, and presenting their demands. Power becomes a new and urgent issue not only for these groups, but for every individual in our culture who is trying to get one’s bearings and fine one’s pace amid the turbulence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Power lessens in such periods—often called by its alternate names, alienation and helplessness—become very painful. There is one way, however, of confronting one’s powerlessness by making it a seeming virtue. This is the conscious divesting on the part of an individual of one’s power; it is then a virtue not to have it. I call this innocence. The word is derived from the Latin in and nocens, literally, not harmful, to be free from guilt or sin, guileless, pure; and in actions it means without evil influence or effect, or not arising from evil intention. To start with, we must distinguish between two kinds of innocence. One is innocence as a quality of imagination, the innocence of the poet or artist. It is the preservation of a childlike clarity in adulthood. Everything has a freshness, a purity, newness, and color. From this innocence spring awe and wonder. It leads toward spirituality: it is the innocence of Saint Francis in his Sermon to the Birds. When Jesus said: “Only as ye become like little children shall ye enter the kingdom of Heaven,” it is assumedly what he had in mind. It is the preservation of childlike attitudes into maturity without sacrificing the realism of one’s perception of evil, one’s complicity with evil. This is authentic innocence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Such innocence can be a real protection in time of need. If one would keep free from influences that would take away the ideals which one has specifically set up for it to follow, one must try to keep one’s own life in one’ own hands. If one values freedom one must refuse to put one’s self in a position where one will be compelled to echo the views of those who do not share one’s ideas. One may have to choose between the trials of sturdy independence and the temptations of enervating security. It does not ask one to make harsh sacrifices but it does ask one to make reasonable ones. If they seem harsh to one that is only because one has been kept until then in a state of so-called normality by the powerful suggestions of organized society. His normality is merely the pooling of common ignorance and the sharing of common weakness. If the mind is to engage with success in the quest for truth, it must be unfettered and then unprejudiced. It requires moral strength or mental power to refuse the gregarious support of the crowd—be it sectarian church, a mystical group, or some other combination. It requires faith in oneself and the courage to resist the pull of others and be an individual. To venture so far afield from the common way and yet keep quite sane and practical, and not become a human oddity, a social freak, is something indeed. One has to pick one’s way through mistaken teachings, among provisional standpoints, and between ambitious gurus. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There is another kind of innocence. A type of innocence which does not lead to spirituality but rather consists of blinders—Pseudoinnocence, in other words. Capitalizing on naivete, it consists of a childhood that is never outgrown, a kind of fixation on the past. It is childishness rather than childlikeness. When we face questions too big and too horrendous to contemplate, such as the dropping of the atomic bomb, we tend to shrink into this kind of innocence and make a virtue of powerlessness, weakness, and helplessness. This pseudoinnocence leads to utopianism; we do not then need to see the real dangers. With unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade our unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade ourselves that we have escaped it. This kind of innocence does not make things bright and clear, as does the first kind; it only makes them seem simple and easy. It wilts before our complicity with evil. It is this innocence that cannot come to terms with the destructiveness in one’s self or others; and hence, it actually become self-destructive. Innocence that cannot include the soul because it becomes evil. This parallels the innocence in neurosis. It is a fixation in childhood, never lived through but clung to as the only protection against hostile, unloving, or dominating parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
A young man in therapy, who had developed an intricate pattern of capitalizing on such weakness, once dreamed himself as a rabbit being chased by wolves. It turned out that he had been a wolf in rabbit’s skin. Often the only strategy available to such persons, learned by necessity in childhood, consists of accepting the overt powerlessness their situation requires and then getting their power by covert means. In this sense, the perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. There in the insane asylum people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. However, it may not be an inability to see into themselves. Nor is it being truly innocent. Only when viewed from the outside it is an innocence. In their detached innocence, they talk with spirit because they cannot find anyone else who is willing and able to understand them. The tremendous growth of mechanical power since the eighteenth century—first steam, then electricity, and now atomic power—made possible a great increase, albeit not necessarily an equitable distribution, of social wealth. While the early stages of the industrial revolution actually improvised millions, by almost any material standards we are today better off then were our ancestors. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
New mechanical power produced new wealth; but it also imposed rigid controls over human behavior. Thorstein Veblen was one of the first sociologist to interpret the broad cultural implications of mechanization: “Within the range of…machine-guided work, and within the range of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine process, the courses of things is given mechanically, impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect.” Most directly affected are people who work with machines. Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that one adjust the natural rhythm of one’s body to their mechanical movement. However, this discipline extends far beyond the workplace, affecting not only factory workers but the whole of society. Indeed, the clock rather than the steam engine became the foundation of the modern industrial system, for once machines were regulated by mechanical, or non-human, time, an impersonal new discipline was imposed on mortals. Today our lives are increasingly regulated by machines which set standards or performance and product, telling us when to start working, when to stop, what to do and how to do it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Also, the measure of our submission to mechanical controls is that we are largely unconscious of their influence. However, of their influence there can be no doubt. Historically, one of the first major results of mechanization was to transform labor: what had formerly been an integral part of human life became a means to an end. To feed and operate the machines of the new civilization required not just raw materials but free labor. Since industrialism was pioneered by capitalist this meant a special kind of freedom. This is described as the working principle of the early capitalist market economy: Production is interaction of mortals and nature; if this process is to be organized through a self-regulating mechanism of barter and exchange, then morals and nature must be brought into its orbit; they must be subject to supply and demand, this is, be dealt with as commodities, as goods produced for sale. However, for mortals to be treated as a commodity, a brutal operation was required: the freeing of labor from traditional bonds of craft, family and community. Thus one of the many tragic ironies of the early capitalist market economy: expected automatically to produce general welfare, it split the community in ways which survive to this day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one. When labor became a mechanically regulated commodity, mortals lost part of themselves. This returns to our major theme of alienation. The worker, having lost control over both the conditions of one’s labor and the fruit of one’s labor, became alienated from their soul. The spirit (or human mind) is at war with itself; in consequence, it has to overcome itself as its own most formidable obstacle. That development which in the sphere of Nature is a peaceful growth, is for the spirit, a severe, a mighty conflict with itself. What spirit really strives for is the realization of its Ideal being; but in doing so, it hides that goal from its own vision, and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation. Therefore, mortal’s own intellectual creations become independent of their creator and hence alienated to one. Human achievement is a dialectical process in which mortals can advance to higher forms only by overcoming or mastering oneself and cultural forces that one creates. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Therefore, the history of mortals is a history of their alienation or frustration, and of one’s self-realization through the conquest of these frustrations. The self-sufficiency of one’s ideal, its remoteness from popular ways, may be boldly and openly expressed in action or kept as an interior and hidden thing. For most the first way may prove to be an imprudent course but for others it may be a necessity. Mentally one cannot fit oneself into any of the accepted categories which the society of one’s place and time provide, so an independent and solitary path attracts one. Physically, one may have to make an uneasy compromise with society, with the result that both benefit by their mutual services. Thus without doing violence to one’s chief principles one yet finds a way to live among those who have no use for them. “Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has eft me to serve along? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about may things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,’” reports Luke 10.38-42. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Before anyone can carry out an independent investigation of truth, one must first possess the capacity to do so. To develop this capacity where it is lacking, the philosophic discipline is prescribed. The words Jesus spoke to Martha belong to the most famous of all the words in the Bible. Martha and Mary have become symbols for two possible attitudes towards life, for two forces in mortal and humankind as a whole, for two kinds of concern. Martha is concerned about many things, but all of them are finite, preliminary, transitory. Mary is concerned about one thing, which is infinite, ultimate, lasting. Martha’s way is not contemptible. On the contrary, it is the way which keeps the World running. It is driving force which preserves and enriches life and culture. Without it Jesus could not have talked to Mary and Mary could not have listened to Jesus. Once I heard a sermon dedicated to the justification and glorification of Martha. This can be done. There are innumerable concerns in our lives and in human life generally which demand attention, devotion, passion. However, they do not demand infinite attention, unconditional devotion, ultimate passion. They are important, often very important for you and for me and for the whole of humankind. However, they are not ultimately important. And therefore Jesus praises not Martha, but Mary. She has chosen the right thing, the one thing mortals need, the only thing of ultimate concern for ever mortal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The hour of a church service and every hour of prayer and reading is dedicated to listening in the way Mary listened. Something is being said to us, to the speaker as well as to the listeners, something about which we may become infinitely concerned. This is the meaning of every sermon. It shall awaken infinite concern. What does it mean to be concerned about something? It means that we are involved in it, that a part of ourselves is in it, that we participate with our hearts. And it means even more than that. It points to the way in which we are involved, namely, anxiously. The wisdom of our language often identifies concern wit anxiety. Wherever we are involved we feel anxiety. There are many things which interest us, which provoke our compassion or horror. However, they are not our real concern; they do not produce this driving, torturing anxiety which is present when we are genuinely and seriously concerned. In out story, Martha was seriously concerned. Let us try to remember what gives us concern in the course f an average day, from the moment of awakening to the last moment before falling asleep, and even beyond that, when our anxieties appear in our dreams. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
We are concerned about our work; it is the basis of our existence. We may love it or hate it; we may fulfill it as a duty or as a hard necessity. However, anxiety grasps us whenever we feel the limits of our strength, our lack of efficiency, the struggle with our laziness, the danger of failure. We are concerned about our relationships to others. We cannot imagine living without their benevolence, their friendship, their love, their communion in body and soul. However, when we think about the indifference, the outbursts of anger and jealousy, the hidden and often poisonous hostility we experience in ourselves as well as those we love, we are worried and often in utter despair. The anxiety about losing them, about having hurt them, about not being worthy of them, creeps into our hearts and makes our love restless. We are concerned about ourselves. We feel responsible for our development towards maturity, towards strength in life, wisdom in mind, and perfection in spirit. At the same time, we are striving for happiness, we are concerned about our pleasures and about having a good time, a concern which ranks very high with us. However, when we look at ourselves in the mirror of self-scrutiny or of the judgments of others, our anxiety strikes us. We feel that we have made the wrong decisions, that we are failing before mortals and before ourselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
We compare ourselves with others and feel inferior to them, and we are depressed and frustrated. We believe that we have wasted our happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness with pleasure or by not being courageous enough to grasp the right moment for a decision which might have brought happiness. We cannot forget the most natural and most universal concern of everything that lives, the concern for the preservation of life—for our daily bread. There was a time in recent history in which large groups in the Western World had almost forgotten this concern. Today, the simple concern for food and clothing and shelter is so overwhelming in the greater part of humankind that it has almost suppressed most of the other human concerns, and it has absorbed the minds of all classes of people. However, there is a qualitative difference between historical ages. There are times of ripening when the true elements of the human spirit, held down and buried, grows ready underground with such pressures and such tensions that it merely waits to be touched by one who will touch it—and then erupts. The revelation that then appears seizes the whole ready element in all its suchness, recasts it and produced a form, a new form of God in the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Ever new regions of the World and the spirit are thus lifted up into form, called divine form, in the course of history, in the transformations of the human element. Ever new spheres become the place of a theophany. It is not mortal’s own power that is at work here, neither is it merely God passing through; it is a mixture of the divine and the human. Whoever is sent forth in a revelation takes with one in one’s eyes an image of God; however supra-sensible it may be, one takes it along in the eyes of one’s spirit, in the altogether not metaphorical but entirely real visual power of one’s spirit. The spirit also answers by beholding. Although we on Earth never behold God without World but only the World in God, by beholding we eternally form God’s form. Form is a mixture of You and It, too. In faith and cult it an freeze into an object; but from the gist of the relation that survives in it, it turns ever again into presence. God is near his forms as long as mortals do not remove them from him. In true prayer, cult and faith are unified and purified into living relation. That true prayer lives in religions testifies to their true life; as long as it lives in them, they live. “And they did remember his words; and therefore they went forth, keeping the commandments of God, to teach the word f God among all the people,” reports Helaman 5.14. #RandolphHarris 15 or 15
All the Rapture and Pain I Had Known in these Past Month Came Together Inside Me–I Never Promised My Soul to the Devil for this!
But no matter, only so many children can be made by one in a century. And new offspring will be weak. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The rule of the old covens had wisdom in it that strength should come with time. And then again, there is the old truth: you might make titans or imbeciles, no one knows why or how. Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company. Make sure before you select a mate that they have some lifetime before you choose them. Never let loneliness drive you to fall in love with someone because their helplessness will be so completely your fault. Remember, beware of that power, and the power you have over those who are dying. Loneliness in us, and that sense of power can be a strong combination. What relation does this pattern of passivity/madness that we have seen in Treasure have to do with the violence in our society, which has become such a critical problem for contemporary men and women? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
A friend of mine, not in analysis or psychotic in any way, tells us how it feels to be in a rage after a quarrel with his wife: How close this rage is to a temporary psychosis! As I walk down the street on a sidewalk that seems very far away, I cannot think; I am in a daze. However, it is foggy only externally—inside I am hyperalive, hyperaware of every thought and feeling, as though I am in an illuminated World, everything very real. The only trouble is that this inner illumination has practically no connection with the outside World. I feel slightly ashamed in relation to the outside World—ashamed and defenseless. If people made fun of me or suddenly demanded something important of me (say an accident occurred on the street). I would not be able to respond. Or if I did respond, I would have to get out of my “mad”; it would be broken through. The streets are foreign; they seem empty though people are walking on them just as always. I do not know the streets very well (though I have seen them thousands of times). I walk on as though I am drunk, picking up my feet and self-consciously putting down. I go into a restaurant, Wan Li at Renaissance Beijing Wangfujing Hotel, afraid the cashier girl will not recognize me—I am in a different skin—or she will think something is wrong. (She does recognize me and is friendly as always. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
I go to the men’s room ; I read the graffiti over the urinal without any emotion. I am still afraid someone will require something of me, attack me, and I could not defend myself. I come back to my seat, staring out the window at the far end of the restaurant. I feel only a vague relation to the World. Food is brought me; I am not much interested in eating or taste; I go vaguely through the motions. I try to recall the details of our quarrel, without much success—two or three things stand out with great vividness; the rest is a jumble. I eat my favorite cuisine, a little chicken egg foo young, with rice and gravy, and a bit of my shrimp egg roll, as I sipped on a little jasmine tea. A waiter comes up, a middle-aged Chinese gentleman, and he says to me: “I can see you think too much,” he pointed to his forehead. “You got some problem?” I smiled and nodded. He went on: “These days everybody got some problem.” His words were strangely comforting. He went away, shaking his head. This was the first breakthrough of the outside World. It made me laugh to myself, and helped me much more than one would think. I could understand how, when this state is relatively permanent, people do themselves harm, step in front of a motor car for example. They do this mostly out of a lack of awareness of the real World about them. They do it also out of revenge. Or they get a gun and shoot somebody. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The experience of being caught up in such a rage is very close to the historical experience of being “mad.” What, for example, is the meaning of “mad” in such statements as the following made by a young African American man in Harlem: The White cops, they have a damn sadistic nature…We do not need them here in Harlem! They start more violence than any other people start…When we’re dancing on the street because we can’t go home, here comes one cop, he’ll want to chase everyone. And he gets mad. I mean he gets mad! He comes into the neighborhood aggravated and mad. In this statement, this African America man is saying that there is a relationship between the “mad” of the policeman and violence in Harlem. Does the policeman, by inciting a violent reaction, use his own rage as a stimulus to preserve what he feels is law and order? Is this one of the reasons a man would choose to become a police officer in the first place? Does he seize upon a culturally accepted psychosis and use it to ally himself with the status quo, thereby giving himself the right, in line of duty, to carry a club and gun with which to let out his own violence? #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
In the verbatim reports in Violent Men, by professor of criminology Hans Toch, we can consider these questions in greater detail. Dr. Toch believes, for example, that: The African American and the European American officers and suspects—their pride, their fear, their isolation, their need to prove themselves, above all their demand for respect—are strangely alike: victims both, prisoners of an escalating conflict they did make and cannot control. As shown by their own reports, the policemen feel they have to uphold “law and order,” and they identify this with their own individual self-esteem and masculinity. Time after time it is clear that the policeman is fighting an impotence-potency battle within himself that he expands and projects on the concept of “law and order.” Affronts to themselves the police interpret as affronts to the law of the land. They have to insist, then, that the suspects respect their authority and power. They feel their manhood or womanhood is being challenged and their reputation, on which their self-respect is based, is at stake. However, this is understandable when you look at the record number of police killings in Brazil’s state of Rio de Janerio. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In 2016, out of 46,000 officers, 147 of them were killed and numbers are expected to climb. Majority of the killings happen in the less affluent areas. These figures help to illustrate an institutional failure to protect police, and they highlight the systematic shortcomings in training and the use of lethal force, which has made Brazil’s police a major actor in violence that plagues that country. Some people say that the conflict starts with a culture of physical and psychological torture in Brazil’s military police training, which has also directly impacted the way in which these officers serve society and in turn are treated by society. Military police officers in Brazil are critical of their training regimen, in which physical, psychological, and disciplinary abuses are allegedly committed by their superiors and are thought to be commonplace. “Sometime, it was lunchtime and my superiors would shout at me that I was a monster, a parasite,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes explains. “It was as if they were training a dog. A soldier is trained to only be afraid of his superiors. The training was just meant to mess with your feelings, so that you leave the barracks as a pit bull, wanting to bite someone.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
“How am I going to serve society being trained like that? It’s ridiculous,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes adds. “Police have to learn quick thinking, the ability to make decisions. But right now they train police as they would a dog for a street fight. The officers can do anything and the soldiers just have to bow their heads. You are only trained to be afraid of the officers, that’s it. A soldier who sees an officer, even from far off, trembles with fear.” The school of hard knocks is the rule rather than the exception when training military police officers. Courses are concerned with imprinting the military culture on the future soldiers, with little theoretical teaching on topics such as criminal law or human rights. Over 21,000 public security personnel from various federal agencies were interviewed, over 50 percent of whom were military police. Of these officers, 83 percent said they received a full year of training before beginning work; 39 percent said they were victims of physical or psychological torture during training; 64 percent stated they had been humiliated or disrespected by their superiors. However, officers are prohibited from talking about negative experiences, and they have little opportunity to report violations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The institutionalization of human rights violations within the military police during training has a direct impact on how police interact with the general population. A typical instance of an officer who, responds to a call of a family fight, sees a man sitting in a car who he thinks can tell him something about the altercation: The officer asks the man to step out of the car. The man response, “You can’t do this to me, I’m on private property.” He seemed obnoxious, the officer reported, his “attitude bothered me.” The man eventually got out of the car, but kept his hands in the pocket of his trench coat. This continued to bother the officer, who asked him to take his hands of out his pocket. Meeting with continued refusal, he called another policeman and they forced the hands out. The policeman sees this as an unforgivable defiance of his authority. He must assert police authority at all costs…(“I felt it was imperative that I take the man’s hands out of his pockets…He became abusive as we took hold of him…We arrested him and put him in the back seat of the patrol car, where he threatened to urinate on the seat, kicked and pounded on the glass.”) Police explain that they go out with batons in hand and wearing shorts and military police shirts, so that they can give the population a sense of security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, on the streets barbarism prevails: petty theft, harassment, weed-smoking, everything you can imagine. “When we got hold of the suspects, it was only beating, beating, beating, and pepper spray, a lot of pepper spray. That was the first time I came into contact with the torture techniques used by the military police,” says Rodrigo Nogueira Batista—a Navy graduate who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for several crimes, including attempted homicide—who had been chosen to participate in a summar operations, two months after joining the military police. The culture of violence is born through the dehumanization of the military police during training. The police are created in order to guarantee a hierarchy and discipline within the community and to create a certain image of the force. Some believe they were not made to protect neither the police nor the population. The man with his hands in his pockets we talked about earlier, saw the police as the arm of the government and the enemy of the people, and he was humiliated. And, indeed, he is right in the sense that the policeman must cow him to preserve his own authority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Blue Power in this instance is the opposite side of the coin of Power to the people. Each is engaged in protecting one’s own self-image, one’s own sense of being a human being. However, the police man, by virtue of one’s identification with law enforcement and one’s gun and badge, has a special advantage. However, there is also a special morality that police officers must follow even in their private lives. An officer cannot do things that most humans do: drink alcohol, tell a lie, fall into debt. An officer can actually be punished for these things. This creates the image of a superhuman that does not exist. The police are also forbidden from speaking in a foreign language, except when it is required as a function of their roles as an officer. The human rights of police officers are frequently violated with these rules. Yet we want them to respect the rights of the citizens when they do not have their own rights respected. Police cannot publish things on social media about the internal workings of the organization without having to respond to them. Some are under investigation and responding to various inquires for having expressed themselves on social media. Sometimes they are sent to Internal Affairs because of a comment that someone made on a website and it can be boring and embarrassing. The military police cannot question a superior. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Because of the way the police are trained and the history of the country, suspects regularly feel that the cards are stacked against them, that no matter what they say they are going to jail, will be found guilty or killed. Their opponent in the dual are protected with a badge and gun, and often the suspect will challenge the officer to take off his or her badge and settle differences “man to man.” The placing on of hands, the physical contact, and the other aspect of touching are especially significant. The suspect has to protect the inviolability of their body. The police officer feels he or she has to assert their authority. And when it comes to asking for identification, it is a highly personal thing. Psychologically, demanding identification is like requiring a person to undress physically; it gives a person who has already been told he or she is inferior an added feeling of personal humiliation. To provokes the suspect’s sense of outrage, and the police officers finds that these situations can sometimes be pushed to the brink of a riot over a simple proof of identity. Noteworthy in these events is that often the mortal who ends up in jail was simply trying, through one’s act, to defend one’s self-image or one’s reputation or one’s rights. Both officer and suspect and almost everyone else is struggling to some for or other to build or protect one’s self-esteem, one’s sense of significance as a person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Both police and suspects are fighting an impotence-potency battle within themselves. Each interprets this in one’s own, though diametrically opposite, way. True, this power battle can be blown up to paranoid proportions, the offense simply being imagined; or it can take the infantile form of bullying or some other deviation. However, in order to see the roots of violence we must go below these psychological dynamics and seek its source in the individual’s struggle to establish and protect one’s self-esteem. This, in essence, a beneficial need—it is potentially constructive. Prisons do not deter criminals. Prisons unman and dehumanize; violence rests on exploitation and exploitativeness, and prison is a power-centered jungle. There seems to be growing evidence that the police and guards on one side and the incarcerated mortals on the other are of the same personality type. Our research indicated that ranks of law enforcement contain their share of violent men and women. The personalities, outlooks and actions of these officers are similar to those of the other people in our lives. They reflect the same fears and insecurities, the same fragile, self-centered perspectives. They display the same bluster and bluff, panic and punitiveness, rancor and revenge, pride and shame as do others. And whereas much police violence springs out of adaptation to police work rather than out of the problems of infancy, the result, in practice, is almost the same. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The need for potency, which is another way of phrasing the struggle for self-esteem, is common to all of us. We see its beneficial form in the rebellion at the Attica, New York, prison, where the leader of the revolting inmates proclaimed: “We don’t want to be treated any longer as statistics, as numbers…We want to be treated as human beings, we will be treated as human beings.” Another inmate, older than the first, took a more realistic view: “If we cannot live as people, we will at least try to die as men.” History records that twenty-eight of them did die several days later when the troopers charged into the prison, shooting. However—such is the strange partnership between guards and prisoners, both being in prison and both being of the same personality types—history records that some prisoner died using their bodies to protect their prison guards from the shots. It seems necessary therefore to distinguish between alienating conditions on the one hand and estranged states on the other, although the distinction may be difficult, there being no question here of a simple stimulus-response situation. It also seems appropriate to limit the term alienation to mean an individual feeling or state of dissociation from self, from others, and from the World at large. Such states, although functions of the conditions that produce them, should not be confused with the conditions themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Alienation refers to different kinds of dissociation, break or rupture between human beings and their objects, whether the later be other persons, or the natural World, or their own creations in art, science and society; and subjectively, the corresponding states of disequilibrium, disturbance, strangeness and anxiety. One of the concepts linked with alienation is the idea of anomie to describe the conditions of normlessness, the collapse of rules of conduct. The notion of anomie, like that of alienation itself, has been used to refer to a wide array of social and personal disorders. Anomie is a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly when there is an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them. The breakdown of values causes people to respond to this conflict between ends and means in various deviant ways; and of those individual adaptations one in particular—retreat from the struggle to get ahead (as in the case of harlots of addicts)—is worth mentioning here. Anomie is a social condition rather than a psychological state, we can identify it as an important cause of alienation, particularly when the response takes the form of retreat; but we should not confuse it with alienation as a state of mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Similar considerations apply to other concepts which are often confused with alienation. For example, social isolation may lead to a state of estrangement, but not all isolates are alienated. Indeed, alienation may result from the social pressures of group, crowd or mass. By the same token alienation should not be confused with social disorganization, since, as we shall see, estrangement may also result in highly organized bureaucracies. Alienation is often associated with loneliness; but again, not all lonely people are estranged. Loneliness can be a creative part of human experience and another form of loneliness is self-rejection which is not really loneliness but anxiety; people who try to overcome or escape loneliness will end only by becoming self-alienated. What we have here are important conditions or correlates of alienation. Any one of these conditions may have different effects on men and women of varying personalities in different social situations, predisposing some more and others less to alienated states. Thus one mortal retreats from life, another rebels; and each of these in turn exhibits many different modes of behavior. Whatever the approach, central to the definition of alienation is that idea that mortals have lost their identity or selfhood. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We acquire a self or identity through interaction with others. However, if one acquires a self by communicating with others, especially through language, then anxiety about or loss of selfhood is a social as well as an individual problem. What this means is that the person who experiences self-alienation is not only cut off from the springs of one’s own creativity, but is thereby also cut off from groups of which one would otherwise be a part; and one who fails to achieve a meaningful relationship with others is deprived of some part of oneself. The self can only be preserved by identification with God, godless mortal’s essential bread at being dominated by an alien power which threatens our dissolution—by which the anxiety that loss of self can be produced is realized. Despair about loss of self is called a sickness unto death. The World dominated by a giant technological and bureaucratic apparatus of one’s own creation has caused much of this alienation. The price we pay for progress is anxiety, a dread of life perhaps unparalleled in its intensity and increasing to such a pitch that the sufferer may feel oneself to be nothing more than a lost point in empty space, inasmuch as all human relationships appear to have no more than a temporary validity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Alienation is defined as loss of identity and is illustrated by men and women who trouble over the simple yet complex question, “Who am I?” In the Untied States of American today the literature of psychoanalysis is rich in its descriptions of such cases. Alienation is the remoteness of the neurotic from one’s own feelings, wishes, beliefs, and energies. It is the loss of the feeling of being an active, determining force in one’s own life. It is the loss of feeling oneself as an organic whole. Or, the alienated mortal is one who does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s act and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with oneself as one is out of touch with any other person. Implicit in most approaches to alienation is the ideal of an integrated mortal and of a cohesive society in which one will find meaning and satisfaction in one’s own productivity and in one’s relations with others. A person in solidarity society will no longer find the only aim of one’s conduct in oneself and, understanding that one is the instrument of a purpose greater than oneself, one will see that one is not without significance. We may well ask, was there ever such a society? Romantic notions about our own past or about primitive culture do not help us here. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
I have an love of spiritual freedom and intellectual independence, and think it is important to keep away from all restrictive, limiting, and narrowing groups, organization, and institutions. I have seen so many lost to the cause of Truth by such constrictions of the mind and heart, so much of its good undone by this harm, that I shrink from the idea of becoming tagged as some one man’s disciple or as a member of some ashram, society, or church. If this man has found the Right, why not let one’s natural expression of it—whether in writing, art, or life—be enough? Why create a myth around one, to befog others and falsify the goal? Why not let well alone? Having no official connection with any group, sect, organization, or church leaves me free to help anyone, anywhere. A strongly individualistic temperament cannot be at ease in the collective membership of an organization where strict and rigid doctrines are set up like the Great Wall of China and where patriotism rejects salvation for those outside. Such a temperament needs the free air of unfettered thinking and uncircumscribed good will. It can sympathize intellectually with many different points of view without losing itself in any one of them, but it can do so only because it belongs to none. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The routine devotions of an institution do not appeal to this type of temperament—sensitive, moody, and independent as it is. The mortal who has seen the light and experienced its warmth will prefer one’s own way of living if it is the consequence of one’s awakening. One’s mind is bound by no religious doctrines, one’s conduct by no prohibitions or commandments. However, this does not mean one is free to do what one pleases. One mortal and one God are all the organizations needed. More is a superfluity. The seeker who cherishes one’s independent path and individual thought cannot comfortably fit into a group where all alike must be pressed into the same shape. It seems historically inevitable that every spiritual movement should sooner or later become organized and institutionalized. In that way it reflects the need and serves the tendency of average human nature. However, where a person is not average and refused to be taken up into it by that means, preferring to keep one’s independence and one’s allegiance, one is just as much entitled to do so. Those who feel tempted to do so, may study the public cults and listen to the public teachers but it would be imprudent to join any of the first or follow any of the second. It would be wiser to remain free and independent or they may be led astray from the philosophical path. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
By rejecting the easy way of joining a particular sect, a labeled group, one rejects at the same time the withdrawal of sympathy or understanding from all other groups which usually or often accompanies the joining. If the universal character of truth requires one to keep one’s mind uncorralled, the personal need of strength confirms the requirement. What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is mortal’s emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as one was when entering into it. The moment of encounter is not a living experience that stirs in the receptive soul and blissfully rounds itself out: something happens to mortals. At times it is like feeling a breath and at times like a wresting match; no matter: something happens. The mortal who steps out of the essential act of pure relation has something More in one’s being, something new has grown there of which one did not know before and for whose origin one lacks any suitable words. Whereever the scientific World orientation in its legitimate desire for a causal chain without gaps may place the origin of what is new here: for us, being concerned with the actual, no subconscious and no other psychic apparatus will do. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Actually, we receive what we did not have before, in such a manner that we know: it has been given to us. In the language of the Bible: “Those who wait for God will receive strength in exchange.” Being faithful one accepts, one does not ask who gives. Mortals receives, and what one receives is not a content but a presence, a presence as strength. This presence and strength includes three elements that are not separate but may nevertheless be contemplated as three. First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of being associated with one is altogether unable to indicate what that is like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any easier for us—it makes life heavier but heavy with meaning. And this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. Questions about the meaning of life has vanished. However, if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your sense. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of another life, but that of this our life, not that of a beyond but of this our World, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this World. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us. The guarantee does not wish to remain shut up within me, it wants to be born into the World by me. However, even as the meaning itself cannot be transferred or expressed as a universally valid generally acceptable piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action cannot be handed on as a valid ought; it is not prescribed, not inscribed on a table that could be put up over everybody’s head. The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of one’s being and in the uniqueness of one’s life. No prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it. Only the acceptance of the presence is required to come to it or, in a new sense, to go from it. As we have nothing but a You on our lips that we are released from it into the World. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
That before which we live, that in which we live, that out of which an into which we life, the mystery—has remained what it was. It has become present for us, and through its presence it has made itself known to us as salvation; we have known it, but we have no knowledge of it that might diminish or extenuate its mysteriousness. We have come close to God, but no closer to an unriddling, unveiling of being. We have felt salvation but no solution. We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in action. And even this is not what we ought to do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. I do not believe in God’s naming himself or in God’s defining himself before mortals. The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
The Dark Night of the Soul–Pain is Followed by Joy, Separation Followed by Reunion, Death Followed by Renewal, Winter Followed by Spring!
I came into a brightly illuminated eighteenth-century Cresleigh Home in Rocklin Trails. The stone walls had been covered in fine rosewood paneling with framed mirrors rising to the ceiling. There were the usual painted chests, upholstered chairs, dark and lush landscapes, porcelain clocks. A small collection of books in the glass-doored bookcases, a newspaper of recent date lying on a small table beside a brocaded wing chair. High narrow French doors opened onto the stone terrace, where banks of white lilies and red roses gave off their powerful perfume. And there, with his back to me, at the stone railing stood an eighteenth-century man. It was Marius, when he turned around and gestured me to come out. Marius told me about this link between despair and joy, and how it is so important that the ancient Greeks, whp devoted one of their central legends to it, that of Persephone and Demeter. Persephone was picking flowers with her friends one day when Hades, god of the Underworld, saw her and was stricken with love. He seized her and carried her off to his underworld. When her mother, Demeter, goddess of fruit and grain and other produce of the fields, heard Persephone’s cries, she rushed around the World trying to find her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Learning that Hades had carried Persephone off to the underworld with Zeus’ connivance, Demeter was filled with a terrible and savage grief. Demeter left Olympus and wandered about the Earth incognito. Meeting two young women who sympathized with her story that she had been captured by pirated and had escaped, Demeter was taken to their home to meet their mother, Metaneira. Demeter continued to be so sad that a long time she sat upon the stool without speaking, never smiling, because of her sorrow…tasting neither food nor drink, because she pinned for her deep-bosomed daughter. Metaneria and her daughters proclaimed to Demeter, “Mother, what the gods send us, we mortals bear perforce though we suffer.” What an acknowledgment of destiny, an adjuring of Demeter to accept fate! Its importance is shown in the fact that it is repeated later to make sure we have heard it. Metaneria then asked Demeter to be nurse to her newborn son. Demeter came to life and bestowed love upon the infant, who then grew amazingly. Meanwhile, in her grief and rage Demeter had caused the land to bear no more fruit and grain, and a cruel famine covered the Earth. Zeus finally was moved to command Hades to let Persephone return to Earth, though Hades fed his shy mate a pomegranate seed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Persephone returned to Demeter who welcomed her with great joy. When Persephone confessed she had unbeknownst eaten a pomegranate seed, Demeter knew that he daughter would have to return to Hades for one-third of each year—the Winter—but could remain on Earth the rest of the time. However, this small flaw was quickly drowned in their joyousness. “So did they then, with hearts at one, greatly cheer each other’s soul and spirit with many an embrace; their hearts had relief from their griefs while each took and gave back joyousness. And straightway made fruit to spring up from the rich lands, so that the whole Earth was laden with leaves and flowers.” Demeter’s great grief, to the extent of speaking to no one, refusing all comfort and all food and drink, pining with longing for her daughter, amounts to a profound despair. It was a despair which carried over to humankind in the cruel famine on Earth. However, Demeter’s despair soon became a creative state, shown in her love for Metaneria’s infant son and his amazing growth. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Demeter’s suffering is followed by this intense joy, which is stronger than she would have felt had the sorrow not preceded it. In other words, despair is a prerequisite to the birth of joy. Persephone’s fearful descent into the underworld is followed not only by joyful ascension, but the Earth’s periods of barrenness is followed by an eruption of fruit and flowers. The legend shows pain followed by joy, separation followed by reunion, death followed by renewal, Winter followed by Spring. Winter—the part of the year Persephone must go back to the underground—is often considered the dreaded part of the year, the time when despair would be most prevalent. However, Winter is the purifier, as the Magee Indians call it. The snow and the ice purify the ground. They cover over the myriad creatures from insects to deer who have lived out their span of life; and the ground, being enriched, springs forth with new life after the purification. This is the gestation before creativity. Out of such abyss, from such severe sickness one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, ore ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childhood and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever seen before. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
A similar linking despair and joy is the death and resurrection in Christian theology—and all resurrections, seen in the prototype of the resurrection of flowers and leaves on the trees in the Spring. This pattern runs through all of life. It is destiny, the design of the Universe, the form in which all of existence is encompassed. In Europe at Easter time, people turn out en masse for the sacrament of Good Friday, since they want to make sure Jesus is dead. The celebration of his death is a necessary precursor to any rising from the tomb. The renewal requires the death beforehand. Only if he has been really does do the fact that Christ has risen have meaning. In America there is a scant attendance on Good Friday, but the churches are filled to capacity on Easter. This is indicative of our lack of belief in tragedy in this country. It is a demonstration of our endeavor to overlook the death that must occur before the resurrection, the suffering that precedes creativity. Henry Miller refers to the same thing in terms of emotional death the resurrection, when he writes “those who are dead may be restored to life.” For Miller this occurs in the emotional release, after despair, of the creative process. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Despair before joy is the meaning of the dark night of the soul of which the mystic Saint John of the Cross writes. Or, it could be the slough of despondence must be gone through before we can arrive at the gates of the Celestial City. If one is determined to achieve the Holy Grail, the hero must be willing to endure trial and dismemberment, even a species of death. Those whom claim to live in a perpetual state of ecstasy or in a never-interrupted state of love are either deluding themselves or settling for a mediocre state of existence. In mystic tradition the state of ecstasy is only second state and by no means the goal. Persons of lesser devotion or commitment often want to slide back into this second stage and have to be cautioned against selling the mystic experience short. Gethsemane is not at all an admission of failure on the part of the ministry of Jesus, but a necessary stage that cannot be avoided. It turns out not to be possible to let this cup pass from me. Without the despair, no resurrection. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
One of the mystics of history encourages would-be explorers of the mystic path to endure the pains and the discomfort. For behind this nothingness, behind this dark and formless shape of evil is Jesus hid in his joy. “Like wise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sights too deep for words. And one who searches the hearts of mortals know what is in the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God,” reports Romans 8.26-27. This passage represents a mysterious saying of St. Paul. It expresses the experience of a mortal who knew how to pray and who, because he knew how to pray, said that he did not know how to pray. Perhaps we may draw from this confession of the apostle the conclusion we could find much evidence in our daily experience. Ministers are used to praying publicly on all kinds of occasions, some of which offer themselves naturally to prayer, other only artificially and against good taste. It is not unimportant to know the right how for praying and the right hour for not praying. This is a warning, on the periphery of what Paul wants to say, but a necessary warning, especially to ministers and laymen who are leaders in the Church. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
The next step leads us nearer to the center of Paul’s problem: There are two main types of prayer, the fixed liturgical and the free spontaneous prayer. Both of them show the truth or Paul’s assertion, that we do not know to pray as we ought. The liturgical prayer often become mechanical or incomprehensible or both. The history of the Church has shown that this was the fate even of the Lord’s prayer. Paul certainly knew the “Our Father” when he wrote that we do not know how to pray when we make a liturgical law out of the example of praying which Jesus gave to his disciples. However, if we turn from the formulated to the spontaneous prayer, we are not better off. Very often the spontaneous prayer is an ordinary conversation with somebody who is called God, but who is actually another mortal to whom we tell things, often at great length, to whom we give thanks and of whom we ask favors. This certainly does not prove that we know how to pray. The liturgical Churches which we use classical formulas should ask themselves whether they do not present the people of our time rom praying as they honestly can. And the non-liturgical Churches who give the freedom to make up prayers at any moment, should ask themselves whether they do not profane prayer and deprive it of its mystery. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
And now let us take a third step, int the center of Paul’s thought. Whether at the right time or not, whether a formulated or a spontaneous prayer, the question is decisive whether a prayer is possible at all. According to Paul it is humanly impossible. When we pray, this we should never forget: We do something humanly impossible. We talk to somebody who is not somebody else, but who is nearer to us than we ourselves are. We address somebody who can never become an object of our address because he is always subject, always acting, always creating. We tell something to him who knows not only what we tell him but also all the unconscious tendencies out of which our conscious words grow. This is the reason why prayer is humanly impossible. Out of this insight Paul gives a mysterious solution to the question of the right prayer: When we pray, it is God himself who prays through us. God himself in us: that is what Spirit means. Spirit is another word for God present, with shaking, inspiring, transforming power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
When we pray something in us, which is not we ourselves, intercedes before God for us. We cannot bridge the gap between God and ourselves even through the most intensive and frequent prayers; the gap between God and ourselves can be bridged only by God. And so Paul gives us the surprising picture of God interceding for us before himself. If taken literally, such symbols—like all symbols concerning God—are absurd. If taken as genuine symbols, they are absurd. They symbol of God interceding before himself for us says that God knows more about us than that of which we are conscious. He searches the hearts of mortals. These are words which anticipate the present-day insight, of which we are rightly proud, that the small light of consciousness rises on a large basis of unconscious drives and images. However, if this is so, who else can bring our whole being before God expect God himself, who alone knows the deep things in our soul? This may help us also to understand the most mysterious part of Paul’s description of prayer, namely, that the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. Just because prayer is humanly impossible, just because it brings deeper levels of our being before God than the level of consciousness, something happens in it that cannot be expressed in words. Words, created by and used in our conscious life, are not the essence of prayer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The essence of prayer is the act of God who is working in us and raises our whole being to himself. The way in which this happens is called by Paul sighing. Sighing is an expression of the weakness of our creaturely existence. Only in terms of wordless sighs can we approach God, and even these sighs are his work in us. This finally answers a question often asked by Christians: Which kind of prayer is most adequate to our relation to God? The prayer in which we thank or the prayer in which we beg, the prayer of intercession or of confession or of praise? Paul does not make these distinctions. They are dependent on words; but the sighing of the Spirit in us is too deep for words and for the distinction of kinds of prayer. The Spiritual prayer is elevation to God in the power of God and it includes all forms of prayer. A last word to those who feel that they cannot find the words of prayer and remain silent towards God. This may be lack of Spirit. It also may be that there is silent prayer, namely, the sighs which are too deep for words. Then God who searches the hearts of mortals, knows and hears. “Wherefore, let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; therefore let us go down to the land of our father’s inheritance, for behold he left gold and silver, and all manner of riches. And all this he hath done because of the commandments of the Lord,” reports 1 Nephi 6.17. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
All that one needs for the management of life can be had from within. The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language. Independent, without any need of the assistance of sounds and gestures, most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance, they express the mystery in its natural captivity, that is, in the anxiety of becoming. This state of the mystery is known only to the animal, which alone can open it up to us—for this state can only be opened up and not revealed. The language in which this is accomplished is what it says: anxiety—the stirring of the creature between the realms of plantlike security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call mortals. However, no speech will ever repeat what the stammer is able t communicate. I sometimes look into the eyes of a cockatiel or a dog. The domesticated animal has not by any means received the gift of the truly eloquent glance from us, as a human conceit suggests sometimes; what it has from us is only the ability—purchased with the loss of its elementary naturalness—to turn this glance upon us brutes. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In this process some mixture of surprise and question has come into it, into its dawn and even its rise—and this was surely wholly absent from the original glance, for all its anxiety. Undeniably, this bird or dog began this glance by asking me with a glance that was ignited by the breath of my glance: “Can it be that you mean me?” Do you actually want that I should not merely do tricks for you? Do I concern you? Am I there for you? And I there? What is it about me? What is that?!” (“I” is here a paraphrase of a word of I-less self-reference that we lack. “That” represents the flood of a mortal’s glance in the entire actuality of its power to relate.) There the glance of the animal, the language of anxiety, had risen hugely—and set almost at once. My glance, to be sure, endured longer; but it no longer retained the flood of mortal’s glance. Once own inner self has the capacity of makings its own revelations to one. These got, one will find oneself increasingly independent of those which come from outside, from the hearsay of other mortals or the writings of strict and religious doctrines. What a number of mortals can no longer get from church or temple, they must get from their own selves through mysticism. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
One needs to realize that one’s greatest power will come to one through one’s own God and not through any other source, such as the overshadowing by spirits, and so on. Through this eventual realization, one will attain to greater progress and render much deeper service. Thus one will fulfill one’s owns highest destiny. Let one stand in one’s own place, and not seek to occupy that of another. Let one find a life that is real, and not copied. However, such admonitions are good only so far as one has already come to communion with God. Ultimately, there is only one real Master for every spiritual seeker, and that is one’s own divine God. The human teacher may assist one to the extent of giving one a temporary emotional uplift or a temporary intellectual perception, but one cannot bestow permanent divine consciousness on another individual. All that the teacher can do is to point out the way through the labyrinth; the journey must be made by the seeker oneself. For example, an individual living alone on a desert island could travel through all the stages of the Quest and attain the highest realization even though one had no visible teacher. God will give one all the guidance and help one needs. However, one is likely to mistakenly believe that one’s own ego is making the progress. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

If the intellectual were to admit that one also has power, although a different kind from that of the politician, the businessman, and the military leader, it would clear the air. Furthermore, modern society clearly needs the intellectuals and their guidance; the corporate power needs to be shared with them as well as with the other disinherited groups of society. It is worthwhile to recall that in The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice, Lestat de Lioncourt, the intellectual vampire appears to be getting ready to be decapitated, but is pulled in by Queen Akasha, the 6,000-year-old most powerful and first vampire in the World. However, later Queen Akasha faces a struggle, when all the vampires turn against her and is herself decapitated by one of the redhead witches the was responsible for bring the dark forces into her life that cursed her with vampirism. This is a graphic allegory of the role of intellectual and the nutrient power that one can express in our day. Be careful who you are willing to die for, as they may not be there to nourish you in your time of need. I have argued against the idea that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between power and the intellectual. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22