Randolph Harris II International Institute

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The Spirit of Liberty is the Spirit Which is Not too Sure that it is Right and Seeks to Understand Minds

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The great want which humankind labours under at this present moment is sleep. The World should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap. Which is a more effective learning strategy: reward or punishment? This question is still undecided. At present, evidence for each side is about equal. The following guidelines, however, can be applied in teaching situations, especially those involving young children. In general, rewarding desired behaviours is more effective than punishing undesired behaviours—you can still catch more files with honey than with vinegar. If punishment is necessary, it is most effective if used immediately after the undesired response. For instance, if a child must be punished, it is best done right after the child has acted incorrectly. If one parents says to the child, “Just wait until your father (or mother) gets home—then, you will get it,” the child learns to fear the arrival of the punisher and, in the process, often forgets the offense for which he or she is being punished. If punishment must be used, the reason for the punishment should be explained. “I am only doing this for your own good,” or “This hurts me more than it does you,” is less likely to teach a child a specific behaviour than saying, “I am not letting you go to the movies because you socked your little brother. This hurts him and makes him cry, and I do not want you to do it again.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

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If it is possible, combine reward and punishment. If necessary, punish the undesired behaviour, but also be sure to reward the desired behaviour. For example, do not just spank a child for playing in the street; also praise and reward the child for playing in the yard instead. Punish the undesired behaviour, not the behaver. For instance, communicate to a child that you feel his or her behaviour is “bad”—not that you think the child is bad. Most punishment do not work on very young children. Under about one year of age, children do not understand that some behaviours are acceptable and some are not and why this is so. They may think they are being punished just for being there, and more often than not they begin to associate the punisher with punishment. When you feel emotionally charged, especially if you are filled with rage, never, never, never punish a child. Adults often forget their own strength. Children are fragile and easily hurt. The only thing a child learns through abuse is hatred and fear. There is a great distinction between negative reinforcement and abusive punishment. In many cases, punishment only suppresses or limits the undesired behaviour; it does not really extinguish it. The self-actualized open to all qualified and eager seekers the mysteries and treasures of one’s own inner experience, that they may profit by one’s past struggles and present success. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

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The self-actualized brings revelations to meet our gropings, inspirations to meet our doubts. One becomes, for those docile enough to receive them, a bearer of grace and a vessel of truth, a bestower of comfort and a dispenser of confidence. Prophets and the self-actualized, teachers and saints receive the urge to share their knowledge and experience with others. Whence does this urge derive? Both lower and higher, personal and nonpersonal sources are possible. However, if from the highest, then we may say that God sends His messages to humankind through these channels. The self-actualized who starts a movement or puts one’s thoughts out, acts as a lighthouse which guides many a fumblings but aspiring soul. If one does not accept disciples individually it is because one serve humans otherwise. Those who try to get such acceptance and find themselves rebuffed may consider one selfish, cold, remote. However, they will be greatly mistaken. One can serve humankind—not each person separately but in groups or masses—and one may do this by lecturing, by writing or simply by directing one’s prayer in the appropriate way. For a writer’s books spread not only one’s ideas but also something of oneself. One can put thought on a high level but the way in which one does this depends upon one’s circumstances. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

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The self-actualized can put thought on a high level personally as a private teacher, impersonally as a public lecturer or writer, or anonymously as a proficient contemplative. All these people who have attained Reality inevitably leave a record for others or for posterity, but not necessarily with their name attached. Has anyone of the self-actualized ever vanished without leaving behind a trace of Power, knowledge, goodness, and inspiration? Even if not in words or deeds, something is left in the unseen atmosphere. They are not usually members of any sect, but circumstances or necessity may sometimes render it desirable that they be such. The self-actualized may or may not descend into the arena of action but if not one will still find ways and means to inspire, guide, or ennoble the actions of other people. One does this by teaching them and travelling among the, or by sitting still and meditating alone, or by disseminating writings among them. Even when one is unheard publicly one can help by the concentrated mind’s great power. One does what one can to introduce here and there into the consciousness of others, through whatever means one possesses, the seeds of higher ideas. These seeds may not grow and certainly may not fructify for many years, but that is not one’s affair. One knows that the vitality in these seeds and depth of mental ground in which they have been sown will inevitably lead to some result. It is enough. One has sown seed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

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One does not have to wait for roots to form, stems to grow, fruits to appear. One’s work is done. In this momentous period the true self-actualized has special work to do in trying to protect the human race from its own folly. One way is intercessory prayer which may help to mitigate the effects of the World crisis. This requires solitude. It is an impersonal contemplation and must not be disturbed by those who break into it, either to unload their personal problems or to offer personal service which in the end has the same result. Yes, some of us are genuinely aware of the soul’s existence and intimately know its freedom and blessedness. Modesty has hitherto imposed silence upon us about the fact, although compassion induced us to break it on occasions. However, we mystics must now stand on our own dignity. It is time that the World, brough to its inevitable and by us expected materialistic dead-end, should realize at last that we are not talking out of our hats but out of a real and impeccable experience. It would be an unpardonable treachery to our duty in the final and terrible World-crisis of this materialistic age if, out of false modesty or fear of intimidation by a cynical society, we who daily feel and commune with the divine presence, who realize its tremendous importance for humanity’s present condition and future life, fail to testify to its existence and reality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

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If today we venture to speak more freely and frequently, our ideas may drop into a few hospitable minds and sublimely penetrate their consciousness. It is not the self-actualizer’s function to tackle the Worldly problems which governments usually deal with: the social, political, economic, and technical ones. One’s particular work is concerned with, first, one’s ordinary duty of professional service through whatever skill one possesses to earn one’s livelihood, and second, making truth available. The mere existence of one who succeeds in identifying oneself with God benefits every sensitive person who meets one, even for a minute or two. Further, it inspires spiritual seekers who never get the chance to meet one but who hear favourably about one and respectfully receive what they hear. Finally, posterity benefits from the records left about one. Each teacher—if one is divinely commissioned—leaves a deposit of truth after he or she dies. The Master who leaves a record of one’s own climb, or a testimony to the goal’s existence, or a path pioneered for those who would follow, or an instructed disciple here and there, leaves something of oneself. Even where help may not directly and outwardly be given when difficult circumstances press on a human, it may yet be indirectly and inwardly given to one’s mind, which has to deal with, or endure, them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

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One can awaken some persons to this divine presence within themselves, but not all. One may do this mysteriously by some unknown process, or one may do it deliberately and with the display of one’s technique. The abstract does not appeal to the masses, because it gives them nothing. However, an embodied human can be seen, heard, and touched, to that extent can be understood, to that extent one gives them something; one can be followed, admired, feared, reverenced, or worshipped. Secure as one is in one’s own peace of mind, it is inevitable that the more sensitive among those who meet one feel it too. However, those who come with hostility, personal or intellectual, will be avoided if possible or find their time cut to the shortest if not. Such a person has a catalytic action on the minds and even on the lives of those who come into sympathetic contact with one. Just by being oneself one makes the philosophic virtues real to others. One does not need to be conscious of a clearly defined mission before one sets about doing something for the enlightenment of others. There is always some means open to one, some little thing one can do to make this knowledge available or to set an example of right living. It is one’s duty to communicate what one feels there, what one finds there, to those who are excluded from it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

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If at times, and with sympathetic auditors, one’s duty becomes one’s joy, at other times and with insensitive auditors it becomes one’s cross. Jesus exemplified this in His own history. The illuminate practices a wiser philanthropy than those who are presented as models of this virtue. One has no wish to take charge of anyone’s life or undertake the management of anyone’s affairs. One is not allowed by the code of ethics corresponding to one’s knowledge to make other people’s decisions for them. Hence one can say neither yes nor no to such highly personal questions. However, one can point out the consequences which are likely to follow in each case. Basically, people are just like children. They need attention. Sometimes people are really nervous when meeting people or dealing with new situations. And some of the troublemakers really just want your attention. The people-as-child analogy can be extended to cover sibling rivalry: You cannot play cards with just one person because the other people will get jealous. Think of unruly people just as you would think of a child and that will widen tolerance of them. If their needs are like those of a child, those needs are supposed to come first. The worker’s right to anger is correspondingly reduced; as an adult one must work to inhibit and suppress anger at children. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

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Should the analogy to children fail to induce the necessary deep acting, surface-acting strategies for handling “irate” can be brought into play. People are urged to “work” the customers name in, as in “Yes, Mr. Camdenski,” it is true construction of your new home is talking a little longer than expected.” This reminds the individual that he is not anonymous, that there is at least some pretension to a personal relation and that some emotion management is owed. Again, workers are told to use terms of empathy. Whatever happens, you are supposed to say, I know just how you feel. Lost your light fixture? I know just how you feel? Late for a walk though? I know just how you feel. Did not get that lot you were counting on? I know just how you feel. Employees reports that such expressions of empathy are useful in convincing people that they have misplaced the blame and misaimed their anger. Remember, to treat people like they are guests in your living room, and guests are to be made comfortable and their emotional outburst are expected to be met by support. Never get super angry with a customer, they are the source of revenue. Supervisors never speak officially of an obnoxious or outrageous customer, only of an uncontrolled customer. The term suggests that a fact has somehow attached itself to this customer—not that the customer has lost control or even had any control to lose. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

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Again, the common phrase “mishandled customer” suggests a bungle somewhere up the line, by someone destined to remain lost in the web of workers that stretched from curbside to architecture. By linguistically avoiding any attribution of blame, the idea of a right to be angry at the customer is smuggled out of discourse. Linguistically speaking, the customer never does anything wrong, so he or she cannot be blamed or made the object of anger. One time, a man was waiting for a special ordered light fixture, and one of the other home buyers sagged it and had it installed in her house. The builder responded by saying politely, “I notice this man’s light fixture was installed in your house.” The dirty deed was done, but, the implication was, by no one in particular. Such implicit reframing dulls a sense of cause of effect. It separates object from verb and verb from subject. The home buyer does not feel accused, and the builder does not feel as if he or she is accusing. Emotion work has been accomplished, but it has hidden its tracks with words. Company language is aimed not only at diffusing anger, but at minimizing fear. As in the case when a refrigerator was specially ordered and delivered to the wrong address. This was labeled an incident. The term incident calms the nerves. How could we be terrified at an incident? #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

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Thus, the words that workers use and do not use help them avoid emotions inappropriate to a living room full of guest. Dealing with difficult people is part of the job. It makes us angry sometimes. And anger is part of stress. So that is why I would like to talk to you about being angry. I am not saying you should do this [work on your anger] for your corporation. I am not saying you should do it for the home buyers. I am saying do it for yourselves. The only question to be seriously discussed is “How do you rid yourself of anger?” From my experience in supervisory work I know that the problem of hopelessness is often not clearly envisaged by the analyst and hence not properly dealt with. Some of my colleagues have been so overwhelmed by the individual’s hopelessness—which they recognized but did not see as a problem—that they became hopeless themselves. This attitude is of course fatal to an analysis, for no matter how good the technique or how brave the effort, the individual senses that the analyst has really given him or her up. The same holds true outside the analytical situation. Nobody can be a constructively helpful friends or mate who does not believe in the possibility of the companion’s fulfilling one’s own potentialities. Sometimes colleagues have made the opposite mistake of not taking the individual’s hopelessness seriously enough. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

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They felt the individual needed encouragement and gave it—which is commendable, but quite insufficient. When this happens, the individual, even if one appreciates the analyst’s good intentions, is quite justified in being annoyed with one, since deep down one knows that one’s hopelessness is not just a mood that can be dissipated by well-meant encouragement. In order to take the bull by the horns and tackle the problem directly, it is necessary first to recognize from indirect indications like the ones cited above that the individual feels hopeless and the extent to which one feels so. Then it must be understood that one’s hopelessness is fully warranted by one’s entanglements. The analyst must realize and explicitly convey to the individual that one’s situation is hopeless only so long as the status quo persists and is regarded as unchangeable. In simplified form, the whole problem is illustrated by a scene from Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. The family, faced with bankruptcy, are in despair at the thought of leaving their estate with its beloved cherry orchard. A man of affairs offers the sound suggestion that they build modest homes for rent on a part of the estate. With their hidebound views, they cannot countenance such a project, and since there is no other solution they remain without hope. They ask helplessly, as if they had not heard the suggestion, whether nobody can advise or help them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

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If their mentor were a good analyst he would say: “Of course the situation is difficult. However, what makes it hopes is your own attitude toward it. If you would consider changing your claims on life there would be no need to feel hopeless.” The belief that the individual can really change, which means essentially that one can really resolve one’s conflicts, is the factor that determines whether or not the therapist dare to tackle the problem and whether one can do it with a reasonable chance of success. It is here that my differences with Dr. Freud come into clear relief. Dr. Freud’s psychology and the philosophy underlying it are essentially pessimistic. This is patent in his outlook on the future of humankind as well as in his attitude toward therapy. And on the basis of his theoretical premises, he cannot be anything but pessimistic. Humans are driven by instincts which at best are only to be modified by “sublimation.” His instinctual drives for satisfaction are inevitably frustrated by society. His “ego” is helplessly tossed about between instinctual drives and the “superego,” which itself can only be modified. The superego is primarily forbidding and destructive. True ideals do not exist. The wish for personal fulfillment is narcissistic. Humans are by nature destructive and a death instinct compels them either to destroy others or to suffer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

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All these theories leave little room for an optimistic attitude toward change and limit the value of the potentially splendid therapy Dr. Freud originated. In contrast, I believe that compulsive trends in neuroses are not instinctual but spring from disturbed human relationships; that they can be changed when these improve and that conflicts of such origin can really be resolved. This does not mean that therapy based on the principles I advocate has no limitations. Much work remains to be done before we can clearly determine these limitations. However, it does mean that we have well-founded reasons for believing in the possibility of radical change. Why, then, is it so important to recognize and tackle an individual’s hopelessness? In the first place, this approach is of value in dealing with special problems like depression and suicidal tendencies. We can, it is true, lift an individual depression by merely uncovering the particular conflicts in which the person is caught at the time, without touching upon one’s general hopelessness. However, if we want to prevent recurring depressions it has to be tackled because it is the deeper source from which the depressions emanate. Nor can insidious chronic depression be coped with unless one goes to this original source. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

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The same hold true for suicidal conditions. We know that such factors as acute despair, defiance, and vindictiveness lead to suicidal impulses; but it is often too late to prevent suicide after the impulse has become manifest. By paying minute attention to the less dramatic signs of hopelessness and by taking up the problem with the patient at the proper time, it is probable that many suicides could be averted. It is not that collective talk determines the mood of the workers. Rather, the reverse is true: the needed mood determines the nature of the worker’s talk. To keep the collective mood stripped of any painful feelings, serious talk of death, divorce, politics, religion, and news is usually avoided. People want to forget about COVID-19 and feel safe in the modest castles, which they imagine to be in a storybook fairytale. On the other hand, when there is time for it, mutual morale raising is common. As one said: “When one sales agent is depressed, thinking, ‘I am ugly, what am I doing as a sales representative?’ other sales representatives, even without quite knowing what they are doing, try to cheer her up. They straighten her collar for her, to get her up and smiling again. I have done it too, and needed it done.” Once established, team solidarity can have two effect. It can improve morale and thus improve service. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

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However, team solidarity can also become the basis for sharing grudges against the homebuyers or the corporation. Perhaps it is the second possibility that manager meant to avoid wen in Recurrent Training they offered examples of “bad” social emotion management. One teacher cautioned her students: “When you are angry with a homebuyer, do not head for the galley to blow off steam with another sales representative.” In the galley, the second sales representative, instead of calming the angry worker down, may further rile him or her up; one may become an accomplice to the aggrieved worker. Then, as the instructor put it, “There will be two of you hot to trot.” The message is, when you angry, go to a trusted therapist who will calm you down. Consider calling him or her for a phone appoint so not to drive while angry. Even if you are not suicidal, but cannot afford a therapist, a suicide hotline may be worth trying out. Support for anger or a sense of grievance—regardless of what inspires it—is bad for service and bad for the corporation. Thus, the informal ways in which workers check on the legitimacy of a grievance or look for support in blowing off steam become points of entry for company suggestions. Corporations sometimes have Ghost-Buyers who occasionally Ghost-Buy a house, and there may be senior representative on the crew, the base supervisor, and the plainclothes company supervisors who occasionally monitor employee behaviour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

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One homebuyer was asked to fill out a company-elicited passenger opinion poll and fill out a questionnaire, and the results were presented by letter to the workers. As one male sales representative, seven years with the corporation describes it: We get told how we are doing twice a year when we are sent homebuyer evaluations. They show how the builder is competing. Oh, the homebuyers are asked to rank sales representatives: “genuinely concerned, made me feel welcome. Spoke to me more than required. Wide awake, energetic, eager to help. Seemed sincere when talking to the potential homebuyers and confirmed homebuyers. Helped established a relaxed community atmosphere. Enjoying their jobs. Treated homebuyers as individuals.” We see how this builder is doing in the competition. We are supposed to really get into it. Supervision is thus more indirect than direct. It relies on the sales representative’s sense of what homebuyers will communicate to management, who will, in turn, communicate to workers. Supervisors do more than oversee workers. Even when people are paid to be nice at all times, and when their efforts succeed, it is a remarkable accomplishment. This is possible because of emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

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A profit motive is slipped in under acts of emotion management, under the rules that govern them, under the gift exchange. Who benefits now, and who pays? The lesson in deep acting—acting “as if the office is your home” and “as if this unruly homebuyer has a traumatic past”—are themselves a new development in deskilling. The mind of the emotion worker, the source of the ideas about what mental moves are needed to settle down an irate, has moved upstairs in the hierarchy so that the worker is restricted to implementing standard procedures. Of more general significance is the fact that the individual’s hopelessness constitutes a hindrance to the cure of any severe neurosis. We have to deal with a counterplay of meticulous and forward-moving forces, with resistance and incentive. Resistance is a collective term for all the forces within the individual that operate to maintain the status quo. One’s incentive, on the other hand, is produced by the constructive energy that urges one on toward inner freedom. This is the motive power with which we work and without which we could do nothing. It is the force that helps that individual overcome resistance. It makes one’s associations productive, there by giving the analyst a chance for better understanding. It gives one the inner strength to endure the inevitable pain of maturing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

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It makes one willing to take the risk of abandoning attitudes that have given one a feeling of safety and to make the leap into the unknown of new attitudes toward oneself and others. The analyst cannot drag the individual through this process; the individual oneself must want to go. It is this invaluable force that is paralyzed by a condition of hopelessness. And in failing to recognize and tackle it the analyst deprives oneself of one’s best ally in the battle against the individual’s neurosis. The individual’s hopelessness is not a problem that can be solved by any single interpretation. There is already a substantial gain if, instead of being engulfed by a feeling of doom that one regards as unalterable, the individual begins to recognize it as a problem that may eventually be solved. This step liberates one sufficiently to go ahead. There will, of course, be ups and downs. One may feel optimistic, even overoptimistic, if one acquires some helpful insight, only to succumb to one’s hopelessness again as soon as one approaches a more upsetting one. Each time the matter must be tackled anew. However, the hold it has on the individual will relax as one realizes that one can really change. One’s incentive will grow accordingly. It may be limited, at the beginning of the analysis, to a mere wish to get rid of one’s most disturbing symptoms. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

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However, the incentive gains strength as the individual becomes increasingly aware of one’s shackles, and as one gets a taste of how it feels to be free. When we shall apprehend the meaning of life, we may discover that it provides its pre-self-actualized in such prodigies. The highest service one can render is in silent contemplation, which inspires so many aspiring souls to a higher life. This is the truth. If one is sensitive, reflective, and penetrative, the mere fact that these prophets, these light-bringers and way-showers have exited at all is enough to change a human’s life. Even if one does no more than open the human mind to its higher possibilities, one does enough. Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost—humans must pray and gain knowledge for themselves from the Holy Ghost. About 559-545 Before Christ. “And now, behold, my beloved brethren, I suppose that ye ponder somewhat in your hearts concerning that which ye should do after ye have entered in by the way. However, behold, why do ye ponder these things in your hearts? Do ye not remember that I said unto you that after ye had received the Holy Ghost ye could speak with the tongue of Angels? And now, how could ye speak with the tongue of Angels save it were by the Holy Ghost? Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore, they speak the words of Christ. Wherefore, I said unto you, feast upon the words of Christ; for behold, the word of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

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“Wherefore, now after I have spoken these words, if ye cannot understand them it will be because ye ask not, neither do ye knock; wherefore, ye are not brought into the light, but must perish in the dark. For behold, again I say unto you that if ye will enter in by the way, and receive the Holy Ghost, it will show unto you all things what ye should do. Behold, this is the doctrine of Christ, and there will be no more doctrine given until after he shall manifest himself unto you in the flesh. And when he shall manifest himself unto you in the flesh, the things which he shall say unto you shall ye observe to do. And now I, Nephi, cannot say more; the Spirit stoppeth mine utterance, and I am left to mourn because of the unbelief, and the wickedness, and the ignorance, and the stiffneckedness of humans; for they will not search knowledge, when it is given unto them in plainness, even as plain as word can be. And now, my beloved brethren, I perceive that ye ponder still in your hearts; and it grieveth me that I must speak concerning this thing. For if ye would hearken unto the Spirit which teacheth a human to pray, ye would know that ye must pray; for the evil spirit teacheth not a human to pray, but teacheth one that one must not pray. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

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“However, behold, I say unto you that ye must pray always, and not faint; that ye must not perform anything unto the Lord save in the first place ye shall pray unto the Father in the name of Christ, that he will consecrate thy performance unto thee, that thy performance may be for the welfare of thy soul,” reports 2 Nephi 32.1-9. Please send forth, O Lord, we beseech Thee, the Holy Spirit, to make these present offerings Thy Sacrament unto us, and purify our hearts for its reception. Privileges—O Lord God, please teach e to know that grace precedes, accompanies, and follows my salvation, that it sustains the redeemed soul, that not one link of its chain can ever break. From Calvary’s cross wave upon wave of grace reaches me, deals with my sin, washes me clean, renews my heart, strengthens my will, draws out my affection, kindles a flame in my soul, rules throughout my inner human, consecrates my every thought, word, work, teaches me Thy immeasurable love. How great are my privileges in Christ Jesus! Without him I stand far off, a stranger, an outcast; in him I draw near and touch his kingly sceptre. Without him I dare not lift up my guilt eyes; in him I gaze upon my Father-God and friend. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

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Without him I hide my lips in trembling shame; in him I open my mouth in petition and praise. Without him all is wrath and consuming fire; in him is all love, and the repose of my soul. Without him is gaping hell below me, and eternal anguish; in him its gates are barred to me by his precious blood. Without him darkness spreads its horrors in front; in him an eternity of glory is my boundless horizon. Without him all within me is terror and dismay, in him every accusation is charmed into joy and peace. Without him all things external call for my condemnation; in him they minister to my comfort, and are to be enjoyed with thanksgiving. Praise be to thee for grace, and for the unspeakable gift of Jesus. Although by the revelation of grace in this life we cannot know of God “what He is,” and thus are united to Him as to one unknown; still we know Him more fully according as many and more excellent of His effects are demonstrated to us, and according as we attribute to Him some things known by divine revelation, to which natural reason cannot reach, as, for instance, that God is Thee and One. For the images either received from sense in the natural order, or divinely formed in the imagination, we have so much more excellent intellectual knowledge, the stronger the intelligible light is in humans; and thus through revelation given by the images a fuller knowledge is received by the infusion of the divine light. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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The Better Part of Valour is Descretion—And Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest!

EN5MisFU0AIvjUkBear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honour it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children. Jurgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere. One of Habermas’s most central concerns has been to lay the philosophical foundation for an expanded conception of rationality that applies to normative claims as well as facts. The positivist spirit appropriately spurned traditional effects to ground normative reason in a theological or metaphysical basis. In so doing, however, the positivist spirit we inherit abandoned entirely the project of providing the rational ground to normative discourse. Thus since norms have been judged to lack an objective basis comparable to that given to scientific reason, moral and political discourse has been reduced either to technical reason or the expressions of preference. In several words Habermas discusses the implications this dominance of technical reason over political life has for the continuance of contemporary forms of domination. He suggests that emancipatory interests can be expressed only if appeals to normative ideals regain a public discourse. Thus the concern to give a rational foundation to normative discourse is not merely theoretical, but practical as well. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageHabermas claims we can find the foundations of all rationality, both normative and non-normative, in the conditions of the possibility of communication which underlie and are presupposed by any speech act. He provides a theory of what he calls “universal pragmatics” to elaborate these conditions. I shall not summarize that theory here, but only touch enough of its outlines to indicate the place of the ideal speech situation in it. Any act of speaking which aims to be understood, according to Habermas, implicitly involves four validity claims. The speaker makes a claim to comprehensibility, that the speech itself makes sense in terms of the grammar and syntax of the speakers; truth, that the asserted relation to the World made by the speech is true; truthfulness, that the speaker himself or herself speaks sincerely and does not deceive or hide his or her motives, feeling, interests, and so forth; rightness, that in speaking the speaker acts in accordance with intersubjectively recognized norms apply in the situation. In situations of ongoing interaction when persons understand each other and act on projects together in harmony, these four validity claims remain entirely implicit. Any one of them, however, open to challenge, at which point they become explicit. A challenge obliges the speaker to make good on the claims. One can make good on claims to comprehensibility and truthfulness by appropriate actions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageOne makes good on claims to truth and rightness, on the other hand, only by entering another level of discourse which calls the claims explicitly into question and in which reasoned justification must be offered for them. The possibility of entering such argumentative discourse, Habermas claims, lies behind any act of speaking insofar as it aims to be understood. It is a condition for the possibility of such speaking. Discourse takes pace within the normative context Habermas describes as the ideal speech situation. This describes the formal conditions of a community of speakers engaged in discourse in which they have removed themselves from the immediacy of action in order to test a claim. The ideal speech situation expresses those conditions of interaction necessary for participants in such a discussion to reach a rationally motivated consensus. In a rationally motivated consensus, the participants assent to a conclusion solely on the grounds that t is most reasonable. Habermas states three conditions which must be met in the ideal speech situations: All those standing in the speaking situation have the same opportunity to speak and to criticize the speeches of others, and there are no limits on the content of speeches; all participants must have the same opportunity to express their attitudes, feelings, intentions, interests and motives; all have the equal opportunity, that is, to require recognition of their individuality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageFurthermore, all the participants have the equal right to give commands to the others and to require others to justify themselves in terms of mutually recognized norms and rules of interaction. Since the ideal speech situation abstracts from all contents of social interaction other than speech, and from all interests other than that of arriving at consensus in discussion, it is necessarily unrealizable. As emptied of all material content and reference to material needs, it is a pure, formal ideal. As such a formal ideal, however, it actually underlies communication as a universal condition. Insofar as any act of speaking aims at being understood and accepted, it anticipates the ideal speech situation as the condition for achieving understanding and acceptance. We would never try to achieve understanding unless we implicitly grasped the conditions required for achieving it. Thus even though the ideal speech situation is unrealizable, it has a real influence on interaction, as the motive of our attempts to achieve understanding. In this way Habermas intends to ground normative reason in the conditions of actual speaking lie. Communication itself depends on the implicit understanding of a situation of interaction guided by norms that participants in discourse appeal to and abide by in order to guarantee the objectivity and freedom of their consensus. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageThese norms that define the ideal speech situation, according to Habermas, embody the universal ideals of truth, freedom and justice. The ideal speech situation represents the idea of justice as a structure of institutionalized relations that are free from domination. The attainment of a rationally motivated consensus requires that the organization of interaction contains relations of equality, mutual recognition of the individuality of each, and reciprocity. Structures of domination create conflicts of interest that prevent commitment to consensus. These structures also prevent individuals from knowing their real interests, or expressing them even if they know them. To the degree that such structural asymmetries exist, an interaction situation declines from the ideal of justice. I have suggested, then, that the ideal speech situation can direct a theory of justice to focus its questioning on forms of social organization and relations of domination. It is important to note, however, that the ideal speech situation can direct a theory of justice to focus its questioning on forms of social organization and relations of domination. It is important to note, however, that the ideal speech situation does not itself constitute a standard or set of principles by which actual social arrangements ought to be evaluated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageThe ideal speech situation expresses the ideal of justice in a purely formal way that abstracts from all particular social and historical content. A very widely employed strategy of the discreditable person is to handle one’s risks by dividing the World into a large group to whom one tells nothing, and a small group to whom one tells all and upon whose help one then relies; one co-opts for one’s masquerade just those individuals who would ordinarily constitute the greater danger. In the case of close relationships one already has at the time of acquiring the stigma one may immediately “bring the relationships up to date,” by means of a quiet confidential talk; thereafter one may be rejected, but one retains one’s standing as someone who relates honourable. Interestingly, this kind of information management is often recommended by medical practitioners, especially when they have to be the first to inform the individual of one’s stigma. Thus, medical officials who discover a cause of COVID-19 may suggest that that new secret be kept among the doctors, the patient, and one’s immediate family, perhaps offering this discretion in order to ensure continued cooperation from the patient. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageIn the case of post-stigma relationship that have gone past the point where the individual should have told, one can stage a confessional scene with as much emotional fuss as the unfairness of one’s past silence requires, and then throw oneself on the other’s mercy as someone doubly exposed, exposed first in one’s differentness and secondly in one’s honesty and untrustworthiness. There are fine records of these touching scenes, and a need to understand the huge amount of forget-and-forgiveness they can call forth. No doubt a factor in the rate of success of these confessions is the tendency for the concealer to feel out the concealed-form to make sure beforehand that the revelation will be received without complete rupture of the relationship. Note that the stigmatized individual is almost foredoomed to these scenes; new relationships are often ones that can easily be discouraged before they take hold, making immediate honesty necessarily costly and hence often avoided. As already implied, a person who is in a position to extort is also often in a position to help the blameworthy individual maintain one’s secret; moreover one is likely to have many motives for doing so. Thus, managers of resort establishments often enforce a privacy policy that protects the martial truants who sometimes stay or play in these places. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageSometimes people who are procuring or pandering the facilitation or provision of a man or woman of the evening in the arrangement of pleasures of the flesh with customers are sometime solicitous: The people rented rooms in respectable hotels, on the first floor above the lobby, so that their customers could use the stairways without being seen by the concierge. As are their colleagues: If their clients are prominent people the girls will not readily identity them or name them in conversation even with each other. Similarly one reads of the role of a hairdresser employed by the girls in a “first-class” house of pleasures of the flesh in exchange for money: Indeed, he was ore than an artist; he was a sincere friend every girl in the house, and “Charlie” heard confidences that were seldom given to others, and gave much common-sense advice. Moreover, in his own home on Michigan Avenue he received the mail of girls who were keeping their profession secret from families and friends, and his house served as a place where the girls could meet relatives who came unexpectedly to Chicago. “The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Image“Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift one has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms,” reports Revelations 4.7-10. Sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say “yes” to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-content disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us. This is the experience of faith: to accept estrangement to the point where it becomes union. It is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name if which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek anything. Simply accept that fact that you are accepted. If that happens to us we experience grace. Faith thus appears to be the accepted of being accepted, and it is analysed as such. In other words, it is the acceptance of estrangement, the acceptance of sin. Sin and grace, or sin and faith, belong together like estrangement and union. Faith is the awareness that they are one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageThen estrangement is reunion: despair is hope; anxiety is peace. Humans have the certainty of total forgiveness in the situation of total guilt. This reversal of values is beautifully illustrated in the sermon, “Is There Any Word from the Lord?” Faith is the word from the Lord which breaks through the human situation and transforms it. It does not add something to our situation, yet it adds a dimension to the dimension in which we ordinarily live. Faith is from above, since it is from the Lord, or at least it seems so to the mythical imagination. In reality the word from the Lord is the word which speaks out of the depth of our situation. It is, one could say, the deepest meaning of the situation. This faith changes nothing in the circumstances and the structure of life. Yet it reverses our attitude. The word from the Lord, the voice out of the depth of our situation, ends the anxiety of the possible and gives the courage to affirm the real with its many questionable elements. At this stage right and wrong may be questionable elements. At this stage right and wrong may be interchanged: If you realize that in relation to God humans are always wrong, your wrong may turn out to be right. Faith is the ecstatic discovery that despair is meaningful; it is the certainty that doubt too is belief. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageJustice was defined as the form in which power of being actualizes itself in the encounter of power with power. Justice is immanent in power, since there is no power of being without its adequate form. However, whenever power of being encounters power of being, compulsion cannot be avoided. The question then is: What is the relation o justice to the compulsory element of power? The answer must be: it is not compulsion which is unjust, but a compulsion which destroys the object of compulsion instead of working towards its fulfilment. If the totalitarian State dehumanizes those for the sake of whom it enforces its laws, their power of being as persons is dissolved and their intrinsic claim is denied. It is not compulsion which violates justice, but a compulsion which disregards the intrinsic claim of being to be acknowledged as what it is within the context of all beings. It may well be that a compulsion which prevents the punishment of a law-breaker destroys one’s power of being and violates one’s claim to be reduced in one’s power of being according to proportional justice. This is the truth in Hegel’s formula that the criminal has a right to punishment. A power structure in which compulsion works against the intrinsic justice of its elements is not strengthened but weakened. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageThe unacknowledged, justified claims, although suppressed, do not disappear. They are effective against the whole in which they are suppressed and they may ultimately destroy a power structure which is neither able to accept them as participants, nor able to throw them out as strange bodies. The intrinsic claim in everything that is cannot be violated without violating the violator. This is equally true of biological, psychological, and sociological structures of power. The mental power of human beings, for instance, can express itself in three forms. It can suppress elements which belong to it, as special desires or hopes or idea. In this case the suppressed elements remain and turn the mind against itself, driving it towards disintegration. Or the mental power of a human being can receive resisting elements which belong to it, elevating them into unity with the whole. Or the mental power can throw them our radically as foreign bodies whose claim to belong to the whole is successfully rejected. In the second and the third case the human mind exercises justice in opposite directions towards the resisting elements. In the first cast it violates the intrinsic claim of a being and endangers itself. This psychological example is also valid for biological and sociological structures of power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageAs in power, justice is immanent in love. A love of any type, and love as a whole if it does not include justice, is chaotic self-surrender, destroying one who loves as well as one who accepts such love. Love is the drive for reunion of the separated. It presupposed that there is something to be reunited, something relatively independent that stand upon itself. Sometimes the love of complete self-surrender has been praised and called the fulfilment of love. However, the question is: What kind of self-surrender is it and what is it that is surrenders? If a self whose power of being is weakened or vanishing surrenders, one’s surrender is worth nothing. One is a self which has not received from oneself the justice to which one is entitled, according to one’s intrinsic claim for justice. The surrender of such an emaciated self is not genuine love because it extinguishes and does not unite what is estranged. The love of this kind is the desire to annihilate one’s responsible and creative self for the sake of participation in another self which by the assumed act of love is made responsible for himself or herself and oneself. The chaotic self-surrender does not give justice to oneself. It is justice to oneself to affirm one’s own power of being and to accept the claim for justice which is implied in this power. Without this justice there is no reuniting love, because there is nothing to unite. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageThis leads to the question of justice towards oneself, a question which is analogous to the questions of self-love and self-control. In both cases we spoke of a metaphorical use of the term. We must do so also in the case of justice towards oneself. There is no independent self which could decide about the claim for justice by another self with which it happens to be identical. However, there is a definite sense in which the sense that the deciding center is just towards the elements of which it is the center. Justice towards oneself in this sense decides, for instance, that puritan form of self-control is unjust because it excludes elements of the self which have a just claim to be admitted to the general balance of strivings. Repression is injustice against oneself, and it has the consequence of all injustice: it is self-destructive because of the resistance of the elements which are excluded. This, however, does not mean that the chaotic admittance of all strivings to the central decision is a demand of the justice toward oneself. It may be highly unjust, in so far as it makes a balanced center impossible and dissolves the self into a process of disconnected impulses. This is the danger of the romantic or open type of self-control. It can become as unjust towards oneself as the puritan or closed type of self-control. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageTo be just towards oneself means to actualize as many potentialities as possible without losing oneself in disruption and chaos. This is a warning not to be unjust towards oneself in the relation of love. For this is always also an injustice towards one who accepts the injustice which we exercise towards ourselves. One is prevented from being just because one is forced to abuse by being abused. Love does not do more than justice demands, but love is the ultimate principle of justice. Love reunites; justice preserves what is to be united. It is the form in which and through which love performs its work. Justice in its ultimate meaning is creative justice, and creative justice is the form of reuniting love. Next you need some quiet. I am well aware that quiet is a relative term in today’s World where there is virtually no silence. Many of us never experience silence during our waking hours. We wake up to the most annoying sound in the World—a leaf blower or two, then our clock radio, shave or put makeup on to the news, drive through grid iron, noisy traffic, enter a noisy, busy office, return home listening to the radio for rush-hour reports, “relax” in front of the TV, and drift off to sleep as the house pulsates with the family stereo speakers slappin’ to some obscene pop music. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageWhat is more, the occasional silence we do encounter can be distracting because it heightens other distracting noises. With the deep quietness of a monastery, a cough repeated at predictable intervals can destroy every possibility of collected thought. Silence is sometimes louder than the noise you are trying to ignore! So one need to choose the situation that works best for one. It may be dominated by road noise, but if that is the atmosphere one need to concentrate, use it. Along with this you must find a place where you will not be disturbed. Early in my ministry, my office was in a one-bedroom apartment. My part-time sectary was on the other side of a thin wall. I could hear everything! If that was not enough, the whole apartment shook when the train came by. My solutions were many, and all off the premises—the beautiful old and always open and empty sanctuary of a neighbouring church, the park, the wonderful anonymity of my car parked at a busy shopping center. Even today, though I now have a quiet office, I often go to similar places for my devotions. The apostle Paul, who of course understood and taught about these things, warned us that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the Word forces of this mobidness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the Heavenly places,” reports Ephesians 6.12. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageThese higher-level powers and forces are spiritual agencies that work with—constantly try to implement and support—the idea systems of evil. These systems are their main tool for dominating humanity. By contrast, we who have been rescued “from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1.13) are to “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2.5). This is an essential way of describing the substance, the underlying reality, of Christian spiritual formation. We are, in Paul’s familiar language, transformed precisely be the “renewing of our mind,” reports Romans 12.2. Zion and her daughters will be redeemed and cleansed in the millennial day—Compare Isaiah 4. About 559-545 Before Christ. “And in that day, seven women shall take hold of one man, saying: We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by thy name to take away our reproach. In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious; the fruit of the Earth excellent and comely to them that are escaped of Israel. And it shall come to pass, they that are left in Zion and remain in Jerusalem shall be called holy, every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem—when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Image“And the Lord will create upon every dwelling-place of mount Zion, and upon her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day and the shinning of a flame fire by night; for upon all the glory of Zion shall be a defence. And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and a covert from storm and from rain,” reports 2 Nephi 14.1-6. Almighty and everlasting God, Who repellest not even the faithless Jews from Thy Mercy; hear our prayers, which we offer unto Thee for that blinded people; that by acknowledging the Light of Thy truth, which is Christ, they may be rescued from their own darkness; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Eternal Father, it is amazing love, that thou hast sent Thy Son to suffer instead in my stead, that Thou hast added the Spirit to teach, comfort, guide, that Thou hast allowed the ministry of Angels to wall me round; all Heaven subserves the welfare of a poor worm. Permit Thy unseen servants to be ever active on my behalf, and to rejoice when grace expands in me. Suffer them never to rest until my conflict is over, and I stand victorious on salvation’s shore. Grant that my proneness to evil, deadness to good, resistance to Thy Spirit’s motions, may never provoke Thee to abandon me. Suffer them never to rest until my conflict is over, and I stand victorious on salvation’s shore. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

ImagePlease Grant that my proneness to evil, deadness to good, resistance to Thy Spirit’s motions, may never provoke Thee to abandon me. May my hard heart awake Thy pity, not Thy wrath, and if the enemy gets an advantage through my corruption, let it be seen that Heaven is mightier than hell, that those for me are greater than those against me. Arise to my help in richness of covenant blessings, keep me feeding in the pastures of Thy strengthening word, searching Scripture to find Thee there. If my waywardness is visited with a scourge, enable me to receive correction meekly, to bless the reproving hand, to discern the motive of rebuke, to respond promptly, and do the first work. Let all Thy fatherly dealings make me a partaker of Thy holiness. Grant that in every fall I may sink lower on my knees, and that when I rise it may be to loftier heights of devotion. May my every cross be sanctified, every loss be gain, every denial be a spiritual advantage, every dark a light of the Holy Spirit, every night of trial a song. Almighty and everlasting God, Who desirest not the death, but always the life of sinners; mercifully receive our prayer, and deliver the Heathen from idolatry, and gather them into Thy holy Church, to the praise and glory of Thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Please Grant, O God, that all the inhabitants of the World may come to be sons and daughters of Abraham, and to hold the dignity of Israelites, through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19Image

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But the Flower-Fed Buffaloes of the Spring Left Us Long Ago!

ImagePlant the seeds of expectation in your mind; cultivate thoughts that anticipate achievement. Believe in yourself as being capable of overcoming all obstacle and weaknesses. There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them come about through encouragement from someone else. Encouragement is oxygen for the soul. There was a brief two-day seminar with Otto Rank, and I found his therapy (not in his theory) he was emphasizing some of the things I had begun to learn. I felt stimulated and confirmed. I employed a social worker, trained in Rankian “relationship therapy” at the Philadelphia School of Social Work, and learned much from her. So my views shifted more an more. At Ohio State University, I was greatly enriched as I presented my views of clinical work to bright and questioning graduate students. Here too, I began to realize that I was saying something new, perhaps even original, about counseling and psychotherapy. My dream of recording therapeutic interviews came true, helping to focus my interest on the effects of different responses in the interview. This led to a heavy emphasis on technique—the so-called nondirective technique. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

ImageHowever, I was finding that this new-found trust in my client and this capacity for exploring and resolving his problems reached out uncomfortably into other areas. If I trusted my clients, why did I not trust my student? If this was fine for the individual in trouble, why not for a staff group facing problems? I found that I had embarked not on a new method of therapy, but a sharply different philosophy of living and relationships. Controversies over the multiculturalism have been bitter and divisive. Proponents claim that a multicultural curriculum, for example, can facilitate an appreciation for diversity, increase tolerance, and improve relations between and among racial and ethic groups. Opponents claim that multicularualists devalue or relativize core national values and beliefs, shamelessly promote “identity politics,” and unwittingly increase racial tensions. Multiculturalism is often posed as the celebration of “differences” and unique form of material culture expressed, for example, in music, food, dance, and holidays. Such an approach tends to level the important differences and contradictions within and among racial and ethnic groups. Different groups possess different forms of power—the power to control resources, the power to push political agenda, and the power to culturally represent themselves and other groups. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

ImageDifferent groups also have distinct perceptions of group position, which are related to, and implicated, in the organization of power. Some scholars and activists have defined racism as “prejudice plus power.” Using this formula, they argue that people of colour cannot be racist because they do not have power. However, things are not that simple. In the post-Civil Rights era, some marginalized racial groups have carved out a degree of power in select urban areas—particularly with respect to administering social services and distributing economic resources. This has led, in cities like Oakland and Miami, to conflicts between different ethnic groups over educational programs, business opportunities, and political power. We need to acknowledge and examine the historical and contemporary differences in power that different groups possess. White Americans do not experience their ethnicity as a definitive aspect of their social identity. Rather, they perceive it dimly and irregularly, picking and choosing among its varied strands that allow them to exercise an “ethnic option.” Ethnicity is flexible, symbolic, and voluntary for most White respondents in ways that it is not for non-White. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

ImageThe loose affiliation with specific European ethnicities does not necessarily suggest the demise of any coherent group consciousness and identity. In the twilight of ethnicity, White racial identity may increase in salience. Indeed, in an increasingly diverse workplace and society. Whites experience a profound racialization. The racialization process foe White is evident on many college/university campuses as White student encounter a heightened awareness of race, which calls their own identity into question as every culture in America tries to define what is the true American race. With national security debates and security measure being put in place, Latino are trying harder to assert their heritage as the true Americans. Some Whites are feeling isolated because they have been taught to be more accepting of other cultures, while they see their heritage being stripped away with antique statues being ripped down and destroyed. Other White see this as a time to ban together and assert their supremacy by joining law enforcement and targeting other ethnic groups to ensure their demise. Blacks feel they never had the choice to be American or not and have been used to support and build this country and are being replaced by preferred immigrants who get treated better and more government support than anyone else. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

ImageFor many Blacks, they have always felt like an outside group, while they understand that Britney Spears is the American Dream. She represents the true American with her blonde hair, blue eyes and red blood. In fact, the colours of the flag establish White identity, the red is for their blood, the white for their blonde hair and the blue for the colour of their eyes. And due to the fact that Britney Spears is one of the most influential and noticeable Americans Worldwide, many believe this is why she has suffered so many hardships. People are mad at Americans and America and took their frustration out of her. However, it is not only because of her heritage, but also because she achieved the American Dream at a young age by working hard, while other face oppression they cannot seem to overcome. Asians are kind of an outlier because their test scores, incomes, and educational levels, on average, tend to the be the highest of any group and their families tend to support each other, which creates a level of envy and people blame them for disasters they may not be responsible for. However, Eastern Europeans are becoming known for appealing to Japan for their IT skills. While America borrows heavily from China, if we are so concerned about national security, would it not make more sense to print our own money and potentially face hyperinflation, than to sell out and give other countries influence in our government? #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

Image Focus group interviews with White students at the University of California, Berkeley, reveals many of the themes and dilemmas of White identity in the current period: the “absence” of a clear culture and identity, the perceived “disadvantages” of being White with respect to the distribution of resources, and the stigma of being perceived as the “oppressors of the nation.” Such comments underscore the new problematic meanings attached to “White,” and debates about the meaning will continue, and perhaps deepen, in the years to come, fueled by such social issues as affirmative action, English-only initiatives, and immigrations policies. President Trump is having such a hard time keep the nation together because democrats are playing the victim cards and trying to seem like they are the saviour or our nation by pretending to care about people who have illegally immigrated to America. When the only reason they are supporting people, who have illegally immigrated, is to get more votes and stay in office. It is the same reason American had its first “Black” president and why Joe Biden is running with a woman. These are gimmicks to appeal to marginalized groups to stay in power. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

ImageRacial meanings are profoundly influenced by state definitions and discursive practices. They are also shaped by interaction with prevailing forms of gender and class formation. An examination of both these topics reveals the fundamental instability of racial categories, their historically contingent character, and the ways they articulate with other axes of stratification and “difference.” Extending this understanding, it is crucial to relate to racial categories and meanings to concepts of racism. The idea of “race” and its persistence as a social category is only given meaning in a social order structured by forms of inequality—economic, political, and cultural—that are organized, to a significant degree, along racial lines. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object is persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Power is a collective. The individual only has power in so far as one ceases to be an individual. Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. However, if one can make a complete, utter submission, if one can escape from one’s identity, if one can merge oneself to a political party so one is that party, the one is all-powerful and immortal. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

ImagePower is power over human beings. Over the body—but, above all, over the mind. Obedience is not enough. Unless one is suffering, how can you be sure he or she is obeying your will and not one’s own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of World we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the Utopias that the old reformers imagined. It is a World of fear, social distance, treachery, and torment. A World of trampling and being trampled upon, a World which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our World will be progress toward more pain. The ancient civilizations were founded upon justice and love. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our World there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which survived from before the Revolution. We have cut links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. Are you beginning to realize what that World will be like? The fictional news media is already playing ticks with reality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

ImageThe process of creating an unreal reality is conscious, or else it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. The media and many politicians use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. The lie is always a leap ahead of the truth. All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grow soft. This is why democrats make illegal immigration seem like it is about helping innocent women and children, but with people coming into this nation without being screened, you have no idea what diseases or viruses they may be carrying nor what their true purposes are. And the same people that support illegal immigration and the same exact people that want to keep Americans locked in their homes to “flatten the curve,” of economic prosperity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

ImageGovernments fail because either they become stupid and arrogant or fail to adjust themselves to the changing circumstances, and were overthrown, or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown.  They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. Manifest destiny tells us that the World will be one big American Dream, and do you want it to be a World with too many government restrictions and social policies or one of Capitalism, where people are allowed to have freedom, work, earn money and achieve success? Or do you want the government to limit your success and make you shared the fruits of your labour with people who sit around eating, sleeping, rolling around in the bed gossiping, and partying all night? Some of these issues I worked out while at Ohio State, and when I was given an opportunity to start a new Counseling Center at the University of Chicago, setting my own policies and selecting my own staff, I was ready to formulate and act on what was for me a new approach to human relationships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

ImageI have come to trust the capacity of persons to explore and understand themselves and their troubles, and to resolve those problems, in any close, continuing relationship where I can provide a climate of real warmth and understanding. I am going to venture to put the same kind of trust in a staff group, endeavouring to build an atmosphere in which each is responsible for the actions of the group as a whole, and where the group has a responsibility to each individual. Authority has been given to me, and I am going to give it completely to the group. I am going to experiment with putting trust in students, in class groups, to choose their own directions and to evaluate their progress in terms of their own choosing. The depth of thought is a part of the depth of life. Most of our life continues on the surface. We are enslaved by the routine of our daily lives, in work and pleasure, in business and recreation. We are conquered by innumerable hazards, both good and evil. We are more drive than driving. We do not stop to look at the height above us, or to the depth below us. We are always moving forward, although usually in a circle, which finally beings us back to the place from which we fist moved. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

ImageWe are in constant motion and never stop to plunge into the depth. We talk and talk and never listen to the voices speaking to our depth and from our depth. We accept ourselves as we appear to ourselves, and do not care what we really are like. Like a tidal wave, we injure our souls by the speed with which we move on the surface; and then we rush away, leaving our bleeding souls alone. We miss, therefore, our depth and our true life. And it is only when the picture that we have of ourselves breaks down completely, only when we find ourselves acting against all the expectations we had derived from that picture, and only when an Earthquake shakes and disrupts the surface of our self-knowledge, that we are willing to look into a deeper level of our being. Rage at oneself is externalized in three main ways. Where giving vent to hostility is uninhibited, anger is easily thrust outward. It is turned then against others and appears either as irritability in general or as a specific irritation directed at the very faults in others that the person hates in oneself. An illustration may make this clear. A patient complained of her husband’s indecision. Since the indecision concerned a trivial matter, her vehemence was directly out of proportion. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

ImageKnowing her own indecision, I suggested that she had revealed how mercilessly she condemned this in herself. Whereupon she suddenly felt an insane rage, with her impulse to tear herself to pieces. The fact that in her idealized image she was a tower of strength made it impossible for her to tolerate any weakness in herself. Characteristically enough, this reaction, in spite of its highly dramatic nature, was completely forgotten at the next interview. She had seen the externalization in a flash but was not yet ready to relinquish it. The second way takes the form of an incessant conscious or unconscious fear or expectation that the faults which are intolerable to oneself will infuriate others. A person may be so convinced that certain behaviour on one’s part will arouse profound hostility that one may be honestly bewildered if no hostile response is encountered. A patient, for instance, whose idealized image contained elements of wanting to be as good as Prince Lestat in Anne Rice’s Blood Canticle, was greatly astonished to find that whenever she took a firm stand or even expressed anger, people like her better than when she acted like a saint. As one would guess from this kind of idealized image, the patient’s predominant tend was compliance. Issuing originally from her need for closeness to others, it was greatly reinforced by her excitation of hostile response. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

ImageIncreased compliance is in fact one of the major consequences of this form of externalization, and illustrates how neurotic trends continually augment each other in a vicious circle. Compulsive compliance is increased because the idealized image, containing in this configuration elements of saintliness, drives the person to greater self-effacement. The resulting hostile impulses then arouse rage against the self. And the externalization of the rage, leading to an increased fear of others, in turn reinforces compliance. The third way of externalizing rage is to focus on bodily disorders. Rage against the self, when not experienced as such, apparently created physical tensions of considerable severity, which may appear as intestinal maladies, headaches, fatigue, and so on. It is illuminating to see how all these symptoms disappear with the speed of lightening as soon as the rage itself is consciously felt. One may be in doubt whether to call these physical manifestations externalization or to regard them merely as physiological consequences of repressed rage. However, one can hardly separate the manifestations from the use patients make of them. As a rule they are more than eager to ascribe their psychic troubles to their bodily ailments and these in turn to some external provocation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

ImageThere is nothing psychically wrong with them, they are interested to prove; they just suffer from intestinal trouble due to wrong diet, or from fatigue due to overwork, or from rheumatism due to damp air, and so on. As to what the neurotic accomplishes by externalizing one’s rage, the same may be said here as in the case of self-contempt. One additional consideration should, however, be mentioned. The lengths to which such patients go will not be fully understood unless one is cognizant of the real danger attached to these self-destructive impulses. The patient cited in the first example had only a momentary impulse to hear herself to pieces, but psychotics may really carry it through and mutilate themselves. There is a self-destructive instinct. If not for externalization, it is probable that many more suicides would occur. It is understandable that Dr. Freud, being aware of the power of self-destructive impulses, should have postulated a self-destructive instinct (death instinct)—though by this concept he barred the way to a real understanding, and so to an effective therapy. The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth, not the road to our death. It has been described in innumerably different ways. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

ImageHowever, all those who have been concerned—mystic and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated people—with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found that they were not what they believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their very lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth. All things are said to be seen in God and all things are judged in Him, because by the participation of His light, we know and judge all things; for the light of natural reason itself is participation of the divine light; as likewise we are said to see and judge of sensible things in the Sun, for example, by the Sun’s light. The lessons of instruction can only be seen as it were by their own Sun, namely God. As therefore in order to see a sensible object, it is not necessary to see the substance of the Sun, so in like manner to see any intelligible object, it is not necessary to see the essence of God. Intellectual vision is of the things which are in the soul by their essence, as intelligible things are in the intellect. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

ImageAnd thus God is in the souls of the blessed; not this is He in our soul, but by presence, essence and power. Jacob recounts Jewish history: the Babylonian captivity and return; the ministry and crucifixion of the Holy One of Israel; the help received from the Gentiles; and the Jews’ latter0day restoration when they believe in the Messiah. About 559-545 Before Christ. “The words of Jacob, the brother of Nephi, which he spake unto the people of Nephi: Behold, my beloved brethren, I, Jacob, having been called of God and ordained after the manner of his holy order, and having been consecrated by my brother Nephi, unto whom ye look as a king or a protector, and on whom ye depend for safety, behold ye know that I have spoken unto you exceedingly many things. Nevertheless, I speak unto you again; for I am desirous for the welfare of your souls. Yea, mine anxiety is great for you; and ye yourselves know that it ever has been. For I have exhorted you will all diligence; and I have taught you the words of my father; and I have spoken unto you concerning all things which are written, from the creation of the World. And now, behold, I would speak unto you concerning things which are, and which are to come; wherefore, I will read you the words of Isaiah. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

Image“And they are the words which my brother desired that I should speak unto you. And I speak unto you for your sakes, that ye may learn and glorify the name of your God. And now, the words which I shall read are they which Isaiah spake concerning all the house of Israel; wherefore, they may be likened unto you, for ye are of the house of Israel. And there are many things which have been spoke by Isaiah which may be likened unto you, because ye are of the house of Israel. And now, these are the words: Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people; and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders. And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their faces towards the Earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord; for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me. And now I, Jacob, would speak somewhat concerning these words. For behold, the Lord has shown me that those who were at Jerusalem, from whence we came, have been slain and carried away captive. Nevertheless, the Lord has shown unto me that they should return again and again. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

Image “And he also has shown unto me that the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, should manifest himself unto them in the flesh; and after he should manifest himself they should scourge him and crucify him, according to the words of the Angel who spoke unto me. And after they have hardened their hearts and stiffened their necks against the Holy One of Israel, behold, the judgments of the Holy One of Israel shall come upon them. And the day cometh that they shall be smitten and afflicted. Wherefore, after they are driven to and fro, for thus saith the Angel, many shall be afflicted in the flesh, and shall not be suffered to perish, because of the prayers of the faithful; they shall be scattered, and smitten, and hated; nevertheless, the Lord will be merciful unto them that when they shall come to the knowledge of their Redeemer, they shall be gathered together again to the lands of their inheritance. And blessed are the Gentiles, they of whom the prophet has written; for behold, if it so be that they shall repent and fight not against Zion, and do not unite themselves to the great and abominable church, they shall be saved; for the Lord God will fulfill his covenants which he has made unto his children; and for this cause the prophet has written these things.  #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

Image“Wherefore, they that fight against Zion and the covenant people of the Lord shall lick of the dust of their feet; and the people of the Lord shall not be ashamed. For the people of the Lord are they who wait for him; for they still wait for the coming of the Messiah. And behold, according to the words of the prophet, the Messiah will set himself again the second time to recover them; wherefore, he will manifest himself unto them in power and great glory, unto the destruction of their enemies, when that day cometh when they shall believe in him; and none will he destroy that believe in him. And they that believe not in him shall be destroyed, both by fire, and by tempest, and by Earthquakes, and by bloodsheds, and by pestilence, and by famine. And they shall know that the Lord is God, the Holy One of Israel. For shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? However, thus saith the Lord: Even the captives of the might shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered; for the Mighty God shall deliver his covenant people. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

Image“For thus saith the Lord: I will content with them that contendeth with thee—and I will feed them that oppress thee, with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood as with sweet wine; and all flesh shall know that I the Lord am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob,” reports 2 Nephi 6.1-18. Lord, have mercy upon your children. Christ, have mercy upon your people. Lord, have mercy upon humanity. O Christ, hear us. Be merciful, please Spare us, O Lord. Be merciful, Deliver us, O Lord. From all evil, O Lord, deliver us. From our sin; from unholy thoughts; from pain and anguish; from the snares of the devil; from the power of demons; from all tribulation at this time; from everlasting damnation; from Thine exceedingly dreadful wrath; by the mystery of Thy holy Incarnation; by Thine Advent; by Thy Nativity; by Thy Baptism; by Thy Passion and Cross; by Thy glorious Resurrection; by Thy wonderful Ascension; by the grace of the Holy Ghost the Comforter; in the hour of his departure; we sinners do beseech Thee to hear us; that Thou remove from us Thy wrath; We beseech Thee to hear us, O Lord. That it may please Thee to give us a humbled and contrite heart; that it may please Thee to give us a fountain of tears, that it may please Thee to give us perfect faith, hope, and love. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

ImageWe beseech thee that Thou wouldest take away from us all murmuring and impatience; that it may please Thee mercifully to raise us from the bed of sickness; that it may please Thee to restore us in health and safety to Thy holy Church; that it may please Thee to give us pardon of all sins; that it may please Thee to give us Thy grace; that it may please Thee to give us eternal life; that it may please Thee to bless us with Thy holy right hand; Son of God; O lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the World; have mercy upon us, and upon the Earth, O Lord. O Lover of Thy people, Thou hast placed my whole being in the hands of Jesus, my redeemer, commander, husband, friend, and carest for me in Him. Keep me holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners; may I not know the voice of strangers, but go to Him where He is, and follow where He leads. Thou hast bathed me once for all in the sin-removing fountain, cleanse me now from this day’s defilement, from its faults, deficiencies of virtue, harmful extremes, that I may exhibit a perfect character in Jesus. O Master, who didst wash the disciples’ feet, please be very patient with me, be very condescending to my faults, go on with me till Thy great work in me is completed. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

ImageI desire to conquer self in every respect, to overcome the body with its affections and lusts, to keep under my flesh, to guard my humahood from all grosser sins, to check the refined power of my natural mind, to live entirely to Thy glory, to be deaf to unmerited censure and the praise of humans. Nothing can hurt my new-born inner human, it cannot be smitten or die; nothing can mar the dominion of Thy Spirit within me; it is enough to have Thy approbation and that of my conscience. Keep me humble, dependent, supremely joyful, as calm and quiet as a nursing child, yet earnest and active. I wish not so much to do as to be, and I long to be like Jesus; if Thou dost make me right I shall be right; Lord, I belong to Thee, make me worthy of Thyself, please. Our natural knowledge begins from sense. Hence our natural know can go as far as it can be led by sensible things. However, our mind cannot be led by sense so far as to see the essence of God; because the sensible effects of God do not equal the power of God as their cause. Hence from the knowledge of sensible things the whole power of God cannot be known; nor therefor can His essence be seen. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

ImageHowever, because they are His effect and depend on their cause, we can be led from them so far as to know of God, whether He exits, and to know of Him what must necessarily belong to Him, as first cause of all things, exceeding all things caused by Him. Hence we know that God’s relationship with creatures so far as to be the cause of them all; also that creatures differ from Him, inasmuch as He is not in any way part of what is caused by Him; and that creatures are not removed from God by reason of any defect on His part, but because He superexceeds them all. Reason cannot reach up to simple form, so as to know “what it is,” but it can know “whether it is.” God is known by natural knowledge through the images of his effects. As the knowledge of God’s essence is by grace, it belongs only to the good; but the knowledge of Hum by natural reason can belong both good and bad; and hence Augustine says, retracting what he had said before: “I do not approve what I said in prayer, ‘God who willest that only the pure should know truth.’ For it can be answered that many who are not pure can know many truths,” for example by natural reason. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24Image

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The best part about living in a Cresleigh home is the #FlexSpace because it’s just that—flexible! 🙌 So while we continue to shelter-in-place, we want to give you some tips to easily use this space as a home gym! 🏋️‍♀️ Check out our blog post to get all the details. Link in bio! https://linktr.ee/cresleighhomes

ImageCatch them doing something right! If you can catch people doing something well, no matter how small it may seem, and beneficially reinforce them for doing it, they will continue to grow in a righteous direction.
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The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?

ImageIt was a drenching storm inside of me. However, I am so very strong. That is a given, is it not? And when you love another as I loved Rowan, you do not strive to hurt. Never. The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul. “O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, all night long crying with a mournful cry, as I lie and listen, and cannot understand the voice of my heart in my side of the voice of the sea, o water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? All night long the water is crying to me. Unresting water, there shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, all life long crying without avail, as the water all night long is crying to me,” says Arthur Symons. Between me and the other World there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter rough it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At theses I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageAnd yet, being a problem is a strange experience—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Tagkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their World by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held al beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the Worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine. However, they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageJust how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head—some way. With other Black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale World about them and mocking distrust of everything White; r wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the Whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on it resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American World—a World which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other World. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a World that looks on in amused contempt and pity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageOne ever feels one’s twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge one’s double self into a better and truer self. In this merging one wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. One would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the World and Africa. One would not bleach one’s Negro soul in a flood of White Americanism, for one knows that Negro blood has a message for the World. One simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be bot a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by one’s fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in one’s face. This, then, is the end of one’s striving: to be co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use one’s best powers and one’s latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single Black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the World has rightly gauged their brightness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageHere in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the Black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made one’s very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the Black artisan—on the one hand to escape White contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making one a poor craftsman, for one had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of one’s people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other World, toward ideal that made one ashamed of one’s lowly tasks. The would-be Black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge one’s people needed was a twice-told tale to one’s White neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the White World was Green to one’s own flesh and blood. The cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageIn those somber forests of one’s striving one’s own soul rose before one, and one saw in oneself, darkly as through a veil; and yet one saw in oneself some faint revelation of one’s power, of one’s mission. One began to have a dim feeling that, to attain one’s place in the World, one must be oneself, and not another. For the first time one sought to analyze the burden one bore upon one’s back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. One felt one’s poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, one had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a less affluent man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of the hardships. One felt the weight of one’s ignorance—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled one’s hands and feet. Nor was one’s burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy which three centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon one’s race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from American adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageA people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the World, but rather allowed to give all its times and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count one’s bastards and one’s women of the evening, they very soul of the toiling, sweating Black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Beings call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the higher against the lower races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, one humbly bows and merely does obeisance. However, before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this one stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything Black, from Toussaint to the Devil—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom “discouragement” is unwritten word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageHowever, some of that is changing. Having a black credit card usually means that you are affluent and have perfect credit. Financially speaking, being in the black is good because it means your company is making a profit or breaking even. Even some designers are starting to pain the trim of houses black, and some walls in the rooms black, and the classic tuxedo is black, and many people love black luxury cars. I have heard authors like Anne Rice talk about how beautiful it was to see a man so dark that his skin looked like polished onyx, and many bodybuilders tan because it makes the muscle glisten more under the light and defines them more. And an African American called Tyler Perry opened a new Atlanta studio location when he purchased 330 acres to make the home of Tyler Perry Studios, which is the largest film production studio in the nation. Tyler Perry is also the first African-American to outright own a major film production studio. Furthermore, Tyler Perry was listed as the highest paid man in entertainment by Forbes, in 2011, earning $130,000,000.00 USD. So the Black history is not as bleak as it may seem. And Tyler Perry actually makes really good Movies, one of my favorites that I have seen was The Family that Preys for it was nice to see a diverse cast, predominantly African-American with women working as heads of the company and wearing the latest fashions, and men opening their own corporations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Image However, the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which every accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! We are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and noting more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the Black man’s ballot, by force or fraud—and behold the suicide of the race! And that is exactly what you are saying to a Black person who was successful and then meets with illegal oppression every time they express their frustration about a system that systemically robs them of what they have earned when you tell them, “Be thankful you are not homeless.” The bottom-line is if you all followed these laws that are in place to protect citizens, some of us would be better off anyway. You can do better and will do better, as did Lindsey in Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds. However, what we are also finding is in reality, Black women are no longer the backbone of the community, they are helping to set up and discourage their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers as they have been infected with racism and self-hate as was Andrea in Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys. They would rather see a White man win at the displacement of their own. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageStill, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and Tyler Perry have become beacons of success and healers of racism for have overcome obstacles and oppression to reach the elite and most highly coveted roles in the World, which some will never obtain no matter how hard they try. Out of the evil came something of Good—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. So dawned the time of Sturm and Drang: storm and stress today rock our yacht on the mad waters of the World-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of the body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong, all false? No, not that, but each alone was oversimple and incomplete—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other World which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need today more than ever—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageThe power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human fraternity, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American sol two World-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether emptyhanded: there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we Black men seem to have the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars, bitcoins, and smartness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageIf she replaces her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hatred but determined Negro humility, will America be poorer? Or coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs? Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this land of their fathers’ father, and in the name of human opportunity. Like the flower children, this kind of character has been set up for the ultimate tragedy. One may be attracted to your beauty and spontaneous grace, and on the other he or she hates you for the very purity and innocence you represent. Innocence expects something from us, demands something, draws out our tendencies for care and sustenance; and many a man or woman hates these tendencies in oneself, and hates more whatever causes one to act on them. When we are confronted by authentic childlike innocence, we are touched by it and want to protect the child, but we hope one will grow to the age when one can protect oneself. However, when this innocence is present in adults—as in some nonviolent or pacifist persons, or flower children—we are attracted by it, our consciences are pricked, but we are also bothered by our own sympathies being drawn out in spite of ourselves, and we vaguely feel that we are being exploited. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

ImageThese innocents are a thorn in the flesh of the World; they threaten to annihilate “law and order,” the police and the authority of government. The innocence threatens to upset the World as we know it. Authentic innocence is a kind of goodness, and this also throws many people into a state of ambivalence. The citizens of ancient Athens, one remembers, voted out of office a candidate known as “Aristides the Good” because they were tired of hearing him always referred to as “the Good.” Goodness makes demands on us, and the naïve belief that people simply love the good is one of our earliest illusions. Many cannot stand such pure innocence in their World. The development of one’s ambivalence is pictured as envy and antipathy that feed upon themselves.  Evil is a force that feels good to people and it grips them beyond even their own needs for survival, that make them challenge the whole Universe to combat; and thus feeding on itself, sooner or later it comes to a tragic end as it seeks to overthrow nature itself. There are people who have the spirit, a pure heart and lack of revenge, but they are rare. We cannot let our judgment or our ethics hinge upon a split-second use of muscles, for that would make us entirely dependent upon the individual’s self-control. We would then end up with a legalism without ethical content. This is the error of all strict and rigid doctrines, whether it is religiously or computer directed, and our primary purpose is to avoid such tyranny. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageInnocence can also be a blinder for many people, which makes them veiled to the true motives of others and only life experience will unveil them. Experience tempers the self, deepens consciousness and awareness, purges and sharpens our sight—where as innocence acts as a blinder and tends to keep us from growing, from new awareness, from identifying with the sufferings of humankind as well as its joys (both being foreign to the innocent person). Theses are two potential poles of experience: to remain innocent, blocking out what does not appeal to you, striving to preserve the Garden of Eden state; or to strive toward spirituality and move to the “deeper music of humanity.” Does a victim have something to do with making oneself the prey? Wha does the interdependence of human beings mean—the fact that we are all bound in a web, which includes unconscious as well as conscious factors, that spreads out from ourselves and our parents and children like rings from a wave to include ultimately whole oceans of humanity? Can one be excused from responsibility for sensing the effect of one’s beauty and innocence—on others around them? What about the blithe existence built on one’s own convictions and one’s own integrity alone, unaware of the outreaching waves from one to others? Is this not a kind of unreal purity—a mortal life fashioned as though one is not a mortal—which can no longer, in our interdependent World, be accepted, let alone praised as righteous? #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageBecause the likelihood is that this kind of innocence has as it purpose to cover up something; it is the innocence of the child when the person is no longer a child. Having the capacity to experience the World, one has at the same time the responsibility for not closing one’s sensibilities to that experience. The choice is clear: we must pay our human sacrifice to the Sphinx outside the city gates, or we must accept guilt and responsibility as realities within ourselves. One who cannot accept one’s guilt with responsibility will find oneself projecting one’s guilt on the Sphinx outside the city. Why so we always sacrifice the innocents? Hey obviously have a special attraction for the human-flesh-eating creature; it loves the tender, the helpless, and the powerless rather than the experiences.  We know that this is true in the fantasies of all of us—the innocent and powerless, the inexperienced, have a special attraction. It is that we can give them the experience, thus augmenting our own self-esteem? We never hear of the dragon devouring an eighty-year old corrupt district attorney, or a haggardly seventy-year old former garden, prompting to news anchor for preying on the innocent. However, it is the youths and virgins that are required to satisfy the taste of the dragon. It is obvious that the establishment is envious of youth, envious of the innocent, whose lives are ahead of them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageThis envy of youth is exacerbated, particularly in America, by the worship of youth; it is usually always better to be young. The older people, those who have lost their innocence long since, declare wars that these virginal youths are required to fight; and we go through the complex ritual of uniforms and bands and songs and disseminating an enormous amount of propaganda which is largely a projection of society’s own aggression and violence. The established people, who represent established ways, are also afraid of the youth. This is particularly obvious in our own day and society. Envy and fear—these are two motives for the sacrifice, and while they do not go very deep, they may help us for the moment. Curiously, but understandably, there seems to be inherent in human life an urge to get over innocence. Is this related, in some curious way, to the urge to get beyond the age when we can be so easily scarified? The normal child wants to grow up, to experience what is about one, to become a man or woman of the World; and although one possesses natural guards against too precipitous experiences, one looks forward to the age when one will be sufficiently self-reliant to let down those guards. There is a tendency for normal innocence to get lost. The flirtatiousness shown by girls just entering into their teen, most of it quite unconscious, is also part of the drama in the age-old urge to get over innocence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageThe temptation of Adam and Eve, symbolized by eating the apple and thus gaining the knowledge of good and evil, was a headlong drive to experience and be experienced, to leave innocence behind, to make it something of the past. It is not by accident that pleasures of the flesh is take as the symbol for the loss of innocence, the attainment of experience. The headlong push to get rid of virginity at an early age can well backfire into a loss of experience rather than a gain. The experience itself is not very momentous (some of my female patients tell of saying to the man who has deflowered them: “Is that all?” or “I was not ready.” or “You make me feel inferior.” “I did not want it.” “I am dirty and shamed.” Even some men get tired of pleasures of the flesh saying, “I got expletive.” or “I am tired of expletive.” If they are ready to leave their innocence behind, the girl/woman and boy/man can be released into a while new dimension of experience, and can present them with infinitely more possibilities for awareness and tenderness than life had before. In rebellions on campus and the by the likes of Greta Thunberg, one can often observe the curious need—generally unconscious—on the part of the student to get themselves caught and in this way to overcome one’s innocence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageFor instance, my friends and his cohorts held students hostage on campus and they were arrested by the police and were promptly dismissed from university for the rest of the year. One of the best students in the university, my friend found himself thrown out of his class and with plenty of leisure on his hands. What did he do? He went up into New England and took the next few weeks to pray. One had the feeling that this was the purpose of it all: he had wanted to be caught. He was calling for a structureless World to give him some structure; a young mand with a steady stream of success behind him, son of a famous father, never anything against which he could test his strength, nothing yet that would stand in one’s path and require him to try his mettle. In such students, this is a cry for experience equivalent to their previous innocence. Young people have already lost their innocence in one sense: concentration camps and atom bombs and 9/11 have rendered their World structureless, but they are without the equivalent experience to go with it. They cry for experience to match their precociously lost innocence. The dragon and the Sphinx are within you. If that is where the dragon and the Sphinx are really located, we must first become aware of them. Out error is not in our myth-making; this is a health, necessary function of the human imagination, a help toward mental health; our denial of it on the basis of rationalistic doctrines only makes the evil in ourselves and our World harder to get at. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageNo, the dragon and the Sphinx are not in themselves the problem. The problem is only whether you project them or confront and integrate them. To admit them in ourselves means admitting that evil and good dwell within the same being, and that potentialities for evil increase in proportion to our capacity for good. The good we seek is an increased sensitivity, a sharpened awareness, a heightened consciousness of both good and evil. Violence has the face of the fallen Angels. However, what are fallen Angels expect human beings; and what are human beings expect fallen Angels? Surely enough. Forgive the humans their violence…for violence has a human face. Through the vision of your intent takes form it originates from darkness and unlimited possibility. This is the manipulation of reality. You have to take back the essence of your creation as your on. This is internal power and the externalization of it to create change in your World. It is the power of counter creation. It is your birthright as a child of God. Remember people bend reality. It something is true for one, another has the opportunity to think otherwise making the others truth a lie. All that exists is within the perception of the observer alone. This paradox is a direct result of the illusion of the limits of creation. All is true and so nothing exists but the lie. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageBeing centered within your own God like power is of utmost importance upon the path. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. “That ye contend no more against the Holy Ghost, but that ye receive it, and take upon you the name of Christ; that ye humble yourselves even to the dust, and worship God, in whatsoever place ye may be in, in spirit and in truth; and that ye live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he doth bestow upon you,” Alma 34.38. We must recognize what is not always recognized, that the growth of mind and character takes time, just as the growth f trunk and limb takes time. A being does not begin to mature and become what one is likely to be until one is past thirty. The young being who has the wisdom to devote some of one’s abundant energies to this quest will one day be the envy of the antiquated being who would devote only one’s slackened forces and shortened days to it. Give substance to your desire so it can take shape upon their spiritual planes and manifest here on the corporeal realm of existence. This process creates a reciprocal gateway of energy which has intense alchemical effects. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Ideal Helps to Hold a Being Back from One’s Weaknesses, a Standard Gives One Indirectly a Kind of Support, as Well as, Directly, Guidance!

ImageNo matter how long we exist, we have our memories—points in time which itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems. Humans portray themselves and what a form is presented in the drama of the modern age! Barrenness here, license there; the two extremes of human decay, and both untied in a single period. It is a culture itself which inflicted this wound on modern humanity. And this wound was inflicted on beings by the division of labor: Gratification is separated from labor, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally fettered only to a single little fragment of the whole, beings fashion themselves only as a fragment. This indictment of modern society reaches it climax in the characterization of love: So jealous is the state for the sole possession of its servants that it would sooner agree (and who could blame it?) to share them with a Venus Cythera than with a Venus Urania. Theses are the two forms of the goddess of love in Plato’s Symposium and thus it identifies Venus Cytherea with venal but Urania with genuine love. What I am describing so impressively is what Hegel and Marx characterized as alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

ImageBy contrasting the polypus nature of the Greek states, where each individual enjoyed an independent existence and, if necessary, could become whole, with modern society which is one of hierarchical division of labor, one can see how modern society produces a fragmentation not only of social functions but of the beings themselves who, as it were, keeps their different faculties in different pigeonholes—love, labor, leisure, culture—that are somehow held together by an externally operating mechanism that is neither comprehended nor comprehensible. Nonetheless, one may consider this analysis of the Greek state as strongly unrealistic and one may, perhaps, even see certain dangers in the glorification of Greece; nevertheless, this analysis of modern beings, points far beyond our age, remains valid and it is perhaps only today that we have become fully conscious of how true this analysis is. If someone tells you that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Image Love is defined as the whole, as a feeling, but not a single feeling. In it, life finds itself as a duplication of its self and as its unity. However, this love is frequently shattered by the resistance of the outside World, the social World of property, a World indeed which beings have created through their own labor and knowledge but which has become an alien, a dead World through property. Beings are alienated from themselves. Since we are here not Hegelian concept of alienation, which recognizes that the experience of alienation may be an undesirable aspect of consciousness’s existence, we may pass over the development of his concept. It is equally unnecessary for us here to develop fully Marx’s concept of alienation. For Marx it is the commodity that determines human activity, that is, the objects which are supposed to serve beings become the tyrant of the being. For according to Marx, humans are a universal being. If they recognize themselves in a World one has themselves made, then they are free. However, that does not happen. Since alienating labor alienates beings from nature, alienates one from themselves, one’s own active function, one’s life’s activity, it alienated one from one’s own species. The separation or labor from the object is thus for one a threefold one: beings are alienated from external nature, from one’s self, and from one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

ImageThe relationships of beings to one another are reified: personal relations appear as objective relations between things (commodities). Jesus said that the way to eternal life is straight and narrow. He could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standards are set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist this attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. We must take care not to fall into the depressing belief that this is too be attained by masters only and that we cannot attain it. Beings, (not only the workers, since the process of alienation affects society as a whole) is thus a mutilated being. However, these theories of alienation are not adequate. While the principles developed by Hegel and Marx must be given up, these theories need supplementation and deepening. Their inadequacy consists in this, that they oppose universal or nearly universal beings to the mutilated beings of the modern World. However, there is no historical form of society in which beings have ever existed as universal beings; for slavery is not compatible with universality. If I distinguish three strata of alienation, my meaning may become clearer. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

ImageIn alienation, the stratum of psychology; that of society; and that of politics are the three strata. Only if we start with a clean separation of the three strata and concepts, in order to bring them together again, we can get at the problem of alienation, and this of anxiety in politics. Neither alienation nor anxiety is to be found only in modern society and only in modern beings, although the different structures of society and the state modify the forms of expression which alienation and anxiety take. The modifications are hard to determine, and I shall not attempt here to undertake a systematic analysis. However, I shall try to point up the problem and to make the theory somewhat more concrete by means of (more or less arbitrary) examples. Dr. Freud’s thesis in his Civilization and its Discontents is this: “The foal toward which the pleasure-principle impels us—of becoming happy—is not attainable”; because for Dr. Freud suffering springs from three sources: external nature, which we can never dominate completely, the susceptibility to illness and the mortality of the body, and social institutions. However, the statement that society prevents happiness, and consequently that every sociopolitical institution is repressive, does not lead to hostility toward civilization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Image For the limitation, which is imposed upon the libidinal as well as the destructive instincts, creates conflicts, inescapable conflicts, which are the very motors of progress in history. However, conflicts deepen with the progress of civilization, for Dr. Freud states that increasing technical progress, which in itself ought to make possible a greater measure of instinct gratification fails to do so. There arises here a psychological lag that grows ever wider—a formulation that I should like to borrow from the cultural lag of American sociology. Thus, every society is built upon the renunciation of instinctual gratifications. Dr. Freud fins that it is “not easy to understand how it can become possible to withhold satisfaction from an instinct. Nor is it by any means without risk to do so; if the deprivation is not made good economically.” To be sure, according to Dr. Freud it is conceivable “that a civilized community could consist of pairs of individuals (who love each other) libidinally satisfied in each other, and linked to all the others by work and common interests. If this were so, culture would not need to levy energy from sexuality.” However, the opposite is true and always has been true. For at bottom Dr. Freud does not believe in this conceivable ideal.” The differences between the different forms of society—which are decisive for us—do not play a decisive role for one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

ImageThe renunciation of instinctual gratification and the cultural tendency toward the limitation of love operate at all levels of society. It is these renunciation and limitations which we characterize as psychological alienation of beings, or perhaps even better as alienation of the ego from the dynamics of instinct. It is unhelpful to put this goal on some Everest-like peak far beyond human climbing. If many are called but few are chosen, it is their own weakness which defers the time of being chosen. In the end, and with much patience, they too will find the way beyond the struggle into peace. It is not enough to find an ideal to help one’s course in life: it should also be based on truth, not fancy. The aspiration must not only be a desirable one, it must also be attainable. There is always a valid reason for disparity between the sought-for objective and the actual performance. Those who begin hopefully and enthusiastically but find themselves disappointed and without results, ought to look first to their understanding of the Quest and correct it, to their picture of the Goal and redraw it. If you want to find out why so many fail to reach the Quest’s objective and so few succeed in doing so, first find out what the Quest really is. Then you will understand that the failures are not failures at all; that so large a project to change human nature and human consciousness cannot be finished in a little time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

ImageIt is only of limited help to the modern being, living under very different conditions as one is, to offer one the saint as a type of imitate or to quote the pastor as an example to follow. One will not waste time in seeking the unattainable or striving for the impossible. For truth, not self-deception, is one’s goal; humility, not arrogance, is one’s guide. That the Overself not only is, but is attainable, is the premise and promise of true philosophy. If the goal is really unattainable, then the Quest is futile. If it is no more than approachable then surely the Quest is well worthwhile. However, in fact the foal is both attainable and approachable. Every being may awaken to the presence of Christ-consciousness within one’s self and thus step out of the merely animal and nominally human existence. It will then be a divinely human one. Immediately after the hanging of Billy Budd, in the cinema version of Melville’s novella, the sailors on this British man-of-war suddenly see a French warship coming around the promontory several miles to port. They all cheer. Why the cheer? These men know that they are going into battle, into the grime and cruelty and death that war represents, yet they cheer. True, a minor part of the cause can be seen as an outlet for the pent-up emotions that have been engendered silently and oppressively as the sailors experienced the hanging of their favorite comrade. However, there is more basic a reason. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

ImageWe turn, then, to another area, the most difficult of all with which to come to terms, that of the violence in war. On the rational level practically everyone rejects and abhors war. When I was in college before World War II, I recall how take aback I was when a professor of English literature remarked that he was fairly sure there would be more wars. If ever such existed, this professor was a soften-spoken, sensitive, unwarlike type; but I silently looked at him as though he were a pariah. How could a man entertain such a thought? Was not it clear that we must refrain from thinking of or believing in war—and certainly from predicting it—if we were to ever attain peace? Several other hundred thousand fellow collegians and I, who were pacifists, were under the illusion that if we only believed in peace strongly enough, we could that much more insure international peace. We have no idea of how close our attitude came to superstition—do not think of the devil or her will already be in your midst. We are so engrossed in blotting war out of everybody’s mind that we completely ignored the points in William James’s provocative essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Written because of his detestation of our “squalid war with Spain,” William James delivered this as a lecture in 1907. It still presents the central problem penetratingly, even if its answers are no longer cogent. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Image“In my remarks, pacifist though I am,” says James, “I will refuse to speak of the bestial side of the war-regime (already done justice by many writers).” He cautions then against the belief that describing the horrors of war will act as a deterrent: “Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect. The horrors make the fascination. When [it is a] question of getting the extremest and supremist out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.” Now for all our opposition to war, we cannot escape the obvious fact that we have been notoriously unsuccessful in our efforts to curtail it. I believe our lack of success is due, at least in part, to our having ignored the central phenomenon: “the horrors make the fascination.” In this century—which began arrogantly as a “century of peace”—we have seen the steady change from a state of relative tranquility to that of revolutions and violence. At this moment we find half a dozen wars going on around the globe, including that war in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the American army has changed from a draft to a volunteer army. Why have we, who are opposed to war, been so ineffectual? It is not time to inquire whether there is something wrong in our approach to this ultimate form of aggression and violence? I propose that we ask directly: What is the allure, the fascination, the attraction of war? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

ImageMany veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle even under the altered conditions of modern war, has been a high point in their lives which they would not want to have missed. For anyone who has not experienced it one’s self, the feeling is hard to comprehend, and for the participant, hard to explain to anyone else. Millions of men and some times children (who change their age to participate) in or day—like millions before us—have learned to live in war’s strange element and have discovered in it a powerful fascination. The Emotional environment of war has always been compelling; it has drawn most beings under its spell. Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it. When the signs of peace were visible, the purgative force of danger which makes beings coarser but perhaps more human will soon be lost and the first months of peace will make some of us yearn for the old days of conflict. What are the sources of war’s allure? One is the attraction of the extreme situation—that is, the risking all in battle. This is the same element that catches people beyond desires. A second is the strengthening effect of being part of a tremendous organization, which relieves a person of individual responsibility and guilt. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

ImageThe declaration of war is thus important as a moral statement, as a moral justification, and enables the soldier to give over one’s moral responsibility to one’s outfit. This point is generally cited in criticism of the war machine; and no one can have the slightest doubt that war does erode individua responsibility and the autonomy of conscience. The My Lai massacre and the Lt. William Calley case prove this in a horrible way. However, what is generally overlooked is that a being has a desire to avoid freedom as well as to seek it; that freedom and choice are also a burden—as Dostoevsky and countless others have known throughout history; and that to give one’s conscious over to the group, as one does in war time, is also a source of great comfort. This is why the great determinism of history—such as Calvinism and Marxism—have also demonstrated great power not only to form people into ranks but to inspire in the degree of active devotion that other movements may not find available. Closely related to this is the feeling of comradeship in the feeling of comradeship in the ranks—that I am accepted not because of any individual merit on my part, but because I am a fellow in the ranks. I can trust my fellow soldier to cover my retreat or my attack because of the role given to me. My merit is the role, and the limits the role places on me give me a species of freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

ImageThe breaking down of this capacity to feel as if one were part of the larger whole is the explanation of how soldiers overcome fear. Indeed, physical courage in whatever scene—judging from my experience in psychotherapy–seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel one is fighting for others as well as one’s self, assuming a bond with one’s fellow, which means one will come to their assistance as they will to one’s. The source of this physical courage appears to be possessed originally in the relationship between the infant and its mother, specifically one’s trust in one’s solidarity with her and, consequently, with the World. Physical cowardice, on the other hand, even in avoiding physical fights as a child, seems to come from an early rejection, and early feeling that the mother will not support her child and may even turn against one in one’s fights; so that henceforth every effort the youngest makes, one makes on one’s own. Such a person finds it inconceivable that others would support one and that one is also fighting for them, and it takes a conscious decision for one to take up their part. This latter type of person may have great moral courage, which one has developed as a loner; but what one lacks is physical courage or courage in the group. There is in ecstasy of violence, furthermore, the lust for destruction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

ImageRemember there was a man named Mark, recall his comment: “All my life I’ve wanted to smash a BMW.” There seems to be a delight in destruction in beings, the atavistic urge to break things and to kill. This is increased in neurotics and others in despair; but it is an increase of a trait that is there anyway, and centuries of the veneer of civilization cannot hide it. It could also be that soldiers know that in their death, they could be saving the lives of others. Anyone who has watched people on the battlefield at work with artillery, or looked into the eyes of the veteran killers fresh from slaughter, or studied the descriptions of bombardiers’ feelings while smashing their targets, find it hard to escape the conclusion that there is a delight in destruction. This evil appears to surpass mere human evil, and to demand explanation in cosmological and religions terms. In this sense, human beings can be devilish in a way animals can never be. In this lust for destruction, the soldier’s ego temporarily deserts one, and one is absurd in what one experiences. It is a deprivation of self for a union with objects that were hitherto foreign. This is technical language for what is referred to in the mystic experience of ecstasy: the ego is dissolved, and the mystic experiences a union with the “Whole,” be it called light or truth or God. Through violence we overcome self-centeredness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

ImageAll of these are elements in the ecstasy of violence. There is a joy in violence that takes the individual out of one’s self and pushes one toward something deeper and more powerful than one has previously experiences. The individual “I” passes insensibly into a “we”; “my” becomes “our.” I give myself to it, let myself go; as I feel my old self slipping away, lo and behold, a new consciousness, a higher degree of awareness, becomes present, a new self, more extensive than the first. Now when we consider contemporary beings—insignificant, lonely, more isolated as mass communication becomes vaster, one’s ears and sensitivities dulled by ever-present transistor radios and by thousands of word hurled at one by TV and newspapers, aware of one’s identity only to the extent that one has lot it, yearning for community but feeling awkward and helpless as one finds it—when we consider this modern being, who will be surprised that one yearns for ecstasy even of the kind that violence and war may bring?  We must also face the fact that, to most people, violence is fun. We watch it on television and in the movies regularly. The barroom fight in a western movie is almost always a matter of comedy or semicomedy. Football players are armored and padded like medieval knights so that they can provide violence with the least damage to themselves. Wrestling, the acting out of violence, commands a wide audience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

ImageThe rollerderbies attract fanatic follwers who look on, not to watch expert rollerskating, but to exult in the fights and near-fights, the elbowing and the falls. Ice hockey is a game in which we simply conceded that fights are a part of the sport. Conflict is a problem that faces not only psychologist, but ever human being everywhere. It is one thing to proclaim, as some psychologist do, that violence is not instinctive in human nature. It is another to demonstrate ways in which aggression can be controlled and eliminated and replaced by cooperation.  Consider this being in society—living year after year in the anonymous anxiety that something might happen; aware of enemy countries that one can destroy in one’s imagination, a fantasy to which one resorts when one is fed up with one’s day-to-day life; existing with a dread that one feels somehow ought to be translated into action but hanging in abeyance, lured on by secret promises of ecstasy and violence, feeling that continuing the vague dread is worse than giving in to the allure, fascination, and attraction of action—is it any wonder that this being goes along with a declaration of war in apparent sheeplike fashion? For the first time in my life I can now, for example, understand the American Legon. That organization has always been, for me, a negative conscience—whatever it was for, I was against, and whatever I was for, it was against. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

ImageWhen I did not have time to figure out on which side justice was, this worked quite well as a pro tempore device. However, I never could understand the motives of the legionnaries or other veterans’ organizations in their saberrattling and their stretching the hunting-under-every-bed-for-Communists to absurd lengths. Now, however, I see that these groups had originally been, by large, young men and women who had held insignificant jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Fords, and Chevrolets when they were called to war. In France they became heroes, the pride of the women; flowers were strewn in their paths, every honor thrust upon them. They were significant, possibly for the first time in their lives. Returning to this country, some could find only the same jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, and those who found better jobs may have experienced a similar despair in the empty life of peacetime. No wonder they hand together, out of their ennui, to recreate the closest experience to that of the war, such as the “search and destroy” anti-communist mission. They hark back in their yearning to find something that will give their lives a significance it intrinsically lacks. That wonderful time when one can look straight into one’s self, through ego to Overself, awaits one’s endeavours. The goal is far-off, it is true; but nevertheless it is reachable by those who will make the requisite effort to overcome self. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

ImageDespite all setbacks, the outcome of this endeavour can be only the fulfilment of hope. For that is God’s will. Even if the goal seems too far off, the attainment too high up for their limited capacities, even if it seems that one would have to be far better than ordinary to have any chance at all, that does not mean they should not embark on this quest. For even if they are able to travel only a modest part of the way the efforts involved are still well worthwhile. “And may the Lord bless your soul, and receive you at the last day into his kingdom, to sit down in peace,” reports Alma 38.15. The history of the Universe is a history of cycles: of birth, development, disintegration, death, and rest endlessly repeated on higher and higher levels. The energy impulses which rise from the Void and accumulate as electrons, only to disperse later, reproduce the same cycles through which the entire Universe itself passes. Do as or as little as you can to advance. If you lack the strength to go all the way then go some of the way. Your spiritual longings and labors will influence your afterlife. Nothing will be lost. If you deserve them, higher capacities and more favorable circumstances will then be yours. Every virtue deliberately cultivated leads to a pleasanter rebirth. Every weakness remedied leads to the cancellation of an unpleasant one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

These People Who are so Significant in My Life Love Me and Consider Me to be of Value

It was peaceful here as we went through the purification. All was beauty around me. Looking at an amazing Sunset, the sky was luminous with two long streaks of light yellow clouds, lending a radiance against which the Sun sank toward the sea. The great red-orange ball, getting larger as it neared the horizon, seemed to reach out too eagerly to make passionate contact with the houses located at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. Just as the Sun seemed ready to dip below the horizon, it hesitated a moment and spread out its radiance as though to remind us of its mastery of our Universe. Then suddenly it was gone, leaving behind a sky and a sea painted with every kind of riotous red and lustrous yellow in every combination. Yes, it is a palace fit for an Emperor. When the Lord made the World, was it not Wisdom who said the new humanity will be universal, and it will have the artist’s attitude; that is, it will recognize that the immense value and beauty of the human being is possessed precisely in the fact that one belongs to the two kingdoms of nature and the spirit. A well-dressed man stood next to me at the rail watching the Sunset. From his tiny tailored moustache and his dark complexion I imagined that he was Turkish. He said something to me I did not understand, and we both smiled a little apologetically because I could speak no Turkish and he apparently knew no English. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Nonetheless, we immediately recovered our dignity nodding toward the same Sunset which captivated us both, a bond between us as we watched nature’s brilliance overflow on to the profligate sea. On the other side of me stood a blondish woman, perhaps in her early twenties, with deep grey eyes and smooth features. I imagined her to be Scandinavian. However, when she also smiled at me and murmured, “Schon, schon,” I knew she was German. It was only later that I began to realize that these two persons, my companions in watching nature’s magnificence, knew that the quest was the most important adventure in the human experience. The strange thing about beauty is that it wipes away all boundaries and inspires us to realize our common humanity. Our destiny interweaves us with each other, and our arts make every war nowadays a civil war, a war against our brothers and sister and cousins no matter what nation they happen to belong to. Beauty overcomes distinctions between all people on this planet. In beauty we have a language common to all of us despite racial or cultural differences—and even despite national and historical enmities. For this very Egypt, to which I was then traveling, later shared with us in America the art objects found in King Tut’s tomb, and crowds of people stood in our twenty first century lines for hours for the privilege of seeing the statues in bronze and gold which had been buried with this king in ancient Egypt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The colorful Turkish and Persian rugs virtually all over the World, came from the same part of the World as the man standing beside me. And when we think of the contribution of German-speaking peoples—from Boehme to Beethoven to Goethe to Hegel, et al.—our words may not be fully understood. All these are our common heritage of beauty, and never has there been any doubt that they belong to all civilized people. No matter how archaic, the things of beauty from African to Alaska, from China to Australia, from New York to India are the language of all beings who call themselves human. One who stands on the threshold of this Pat is about to commence the last and greatest journey of all, one which one will continue until returning to the presence of God. Once begun, there is no turning back or deserting it, except temporarily. And since it is the most important and most glorious activity ever undertaken, its rewards are commensurate. One cannot stake too much on the outcome of such exalted strivings. Even all that the World can offer falls far below what the quest can offer. If outer sacrifices and inner renunciations are called for, the compensation will be more than just. In the end one gains immensely more than one loses. So, if the quest bids one to do so why not let go freely? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The meaning and the end of all such work is to arouse mortals to see certain truths: that the intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual yet just as cultivable if pursued through meditation, that the mystical experience is the most valuable of all experience, and that the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions. If there is anything worth studying by a human being, after the necessary preliminary studies of how to exist and survive in this World healthily and wisely, it is the study of mortal’s own consciousness—not a cataloguing of the numerous thoughts that play within it, but a deep investigation of its nature in itself, its own unadulterated pure self. This is the higher cause that is really worth working for, the spiritual purpose that makes life worth living. The discovery of the Overself, the surrender to it, mortals fulfills the highest purpose of one’s life on this Earth. Each mortal has only a limited fund of life-force, time, and ability. One may squander it on Worldly pleasures or spend it on Worldly ambitions. However, if without neglecting the duties of one’s particular situation, one realizes that these are changing and transient satisfactions and turns instead to the quest of the Overself, one begins to justify one’s incarnation. In our discussion up to now we have taken some long, hard looks at the negative aspects of family relationships and their effects on our children’s lives. We might almost despair of the possibility of having healthy families. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

And it is important to recognize that these emotionally damaging qualities are and always will be to some extent present in our families, for we are all caught up in the dilemma of our human imperfections. The business person who does not know that the true business for which one was put on Earth is to find the Overself, may make a fortune but will also squander away a lifetime. One’s work and mind have been left separate from one’s Overself’s when they might have been kept in satisfying harmony with them. Every mortal has another veiled identity. Until one finds out this mystical self of one’s essence, one has failed to fulfil the higher mission of one’s existence. However, the picture is not totally dismal by any means. Children do grow up in out families learning something about how to experience and express love, and the degree to which this occurs is not immutably fixed. It is possible to become more effective in our ability to love in spite of our fear and also possible to help our children become loving. The New Testament contains a profound psychological insight into the process by which children learn to love. The words are: “We love, because God first loved us,” reports I John 4.19. God is the first cause of love. If we pause to read: “We love, because we first experienced love,” the psychological impact becomes clear. And whether faith leads us to attribute the origin of love to God or not, we can agree that our experience of love comes to us through the imperfect channel of other persons. And the most significant persons for children are usually parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

This experience of learning to love by being loved is much more profound than simply seeing and imitating the behavior of loving persons. It has much more to do with the children’s emerging ideas and feelings about one’s self, which tend either to free one or inhibit one in one’s ability to experience and express love. In the discussion of the rejection cycle it was emphasized that all people experience feelings of rejection that lead to feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. The experience varies greatly in the degree of feelings of rejection, but it is universal. Now, as we look at the beneficial side of the picture, it can be shown that a cycle of acceptance is taking place in children’s lives during the same years the rejection cycle is establishing personality difficulty. The acceptance cycle, too, is a universal experience. Again it is a matter of degree. The acceptance cycle begins with the child’s earliest experiences of love and acceptance. This process, too, beings long before the child can form thoughts. In fact it probably begins within the first few hours of life. The sensation of touch plays a very important role. The gentle, loving, stroking touches of the mother when she is enjoying the baby are undoubtedly enjoyable to the baby. And when the infant, as it nurses from the nourishment of the mother or feeds from the bottle, is cuddled and cooed over, the physical and emotional warmth communicates itself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

When these experiences are contrast with those that sometimes occur when the woman is very frightened of emotional closeness, it becomes very apparent that even these early experiences tend toward a sense of acceptance or rejection. Consider the effect on the child, for example, of the mother who is in strong conflict about her feminine roles, who forces herself to naturally nourish her child because she feels she should do so, although doing it makes experience unpleasant feelings because of her conflicting emotions about it. Her feelings are certain to be reflected in the way she handles the child. Or another woman may be so frightened of the emotional involvement that she cannot permit herself to satisfy her own desires to cuddle the child. So she tends to withdraw and handle the child as little as possible. Still another woman may have a great deal of psychological conflict with eliminative functions and communicate her disgust in the way she changes and cleans the baby. As the child grows older the avenues by which one senses acceptance and love (or rejection) from one’s parents become more numerous and more subtle. When parents enjoy the child, trust the child, and listen to the child, respond to the youth as a human being worthy of respect, and encourages the child to accept increasing responsibly for one’s self without pushing one, one feels acceptance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The sense of touch remains important. And sometimes it becomes more difficult. Some parents who found it relatively easy to enjoy expressing physical affection to their babies find themselves becoming less spontaneously affectionate to them as they grow older. The most important reason for this is probably the growing sense of vulnerability. The risk of being hurt by a baby seems rather remote, apart from the chance passing or catastrophic infirmary. However, as the child grows older and is able to express harsh feelings, we are put on notice in a multitude of ways that the age of innocence is past and that the possibility of emotional hurt is ever present. It is then that physical affection may not seem as natural. One mother, Alice reported it was difficult for her to express affection for her tends by directly hugging them. It is easy for her to smile at them and say nice words. This was probably because it was a relatively safe was of expressing affection. Because of her fears of being hurt and rejected by anyone she feels close, Alice finds this type of contact with her children more comfortable. She satisfies her need for closeness by saying, “I love you,” or “Have a great day.” And if Alice were more free to express affection directly, while it would be more helpful, the nice comments communicates some acceptance to the children and some desire to maintain their well being. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

To the degree that the child experiences the security of parents who are able to communicate their love and acceptance in a relatively open and direct manner, one is likely to react with beneficial feelings towards oneself. The emotional logic of the child must be something like this: “These people who are so significant in my life love me and consider me to be of value. Therefore I must be worthwhile.” The beauty of the World is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation. This perfecting is the creation of beauty; God created the Universe, and his son, our first-born brother, created the beauty of its for us. The beauty of the World is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the Universe. It also is like a sacrament. This is true only of universal beauty. With the exception of God, nothing short of the Universe as a whole can with complete accuracy be called beautiful. All that is in the Universe and is less than the Universe can be called beautiful only if we extend the word beyond its strict limits and apply it to things that share indirectly in beauty, things that are imitations of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

All these secondary kinds of beauty are of infinite value as openings to universal beauty. However, if we stop short at them, they are, on the contrary, veils; then they corrupt. They all have in them more or less of this temptation, but in very different degrees. There are also a number of seductive factors which have nothing whatever to do with beauty but which cause the things in which they are preset to be called beautiful through lack of discernment; for these things attract love by fraud, and all mortals, even the most ignorant, even the vilest of them, know that beauty alone has a right to our love. The most truly great know it too. No mortal is below or above beauty. The words which express beauty come to the lips as soon as they want to praise what they love. Only some are more and some less able to discern it. Beauty is the only finality here below. It is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing wat to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, and enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing and titillating. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

We should like to feed upon beauty, but it is merely something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. When they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it, children feel this trouble already. It may be that nice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating it, should be what is required to save it. Two winged companions, to Angels are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit, the other looks at it. These two Angels are the two parts of our soul. A great light will shine to the ends of the Earth, and many nations will come to you from afar, the peoples of all the Earth, to dwell near to the name of the Lord, bearing in their hands gifts for the King of Heaven. I saw the light in my mind, and I grew sleepy in a beautiful soft sleep in which I could hear the words of the prayer as I lay on my bed, with my arm under my pillow. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

No one is in Eden. There is no one there. No one is in Eden writing down the deeds of the World. However, some people say it is Enoch, but Eden is empty until the Lord should say that all the World will be Eden once again. The Lord does not break his covenants. God will come and his house will last forever. It is because beauty has no end in view that it constitutes the only finality here below. For here below there are no ends. All the things that we take for ends are means. That is an obvious truth. Money is the means of buying, power is the means of commanding. It is more or less the same for all the things that we call good. Only beauty is not the means to anything else. It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. However, beauty only gives itself; it never gives anything else. Nevertheless, as it is the only finality, it is present in all human pursuits. Although they are all concerned with means, for everything that exists here below is only a means, beauty sheds a luster upon them which colors them with finality. Otherwise there could neither be desire, nor, in consequence, energy in the pursuit. For a miser after the style of Harpagon (a character in Moliere’s L’Avare), all the beauty of the World is enshrined in gold. And it is true that gold, as a pure and shinning substance, has something beautiful about it. The disappearance of gold from our currency seems to have made this form of avarice disappear too. Today those who heap up money without spending it are desirous of power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The same crisis of freedom is present in psychotherapy, this curious profession which burgeoned so fantastically in American during the past century. The crisis can best be seen when we ask: What is the purpose of therapy? To be sure, to help people. And the specific purpose differs with the particular condition with which the person is suffering. However, what is the overall purpose that underlies the development of this profession of psychological helpers? Several decades ago, the purpose of the mental-health movement was clear: mental health is living free from anxiety. However, this motto son became suspect. Living free from anxiety in a World of hydrogen bombs and nuclear radiation and food and water shortages, housing crises, lack of funding for education, and rapidly decreasing numbers of high pay jobs? Without anxiety in a World in which death may strike at any moment you cross the street? Without anxiety in a World in which two-thirds of the people are malnourished or starving? The mental health movement, in promising a freedom from anxiety that is not possible, may have had a significant role in the current belief that it is a right to feel good, thus contributing to the burgeoning consumption of alcohol and the and the almost universal prescription of the tranquilizer by physicians. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The mental health movement has emphasized freedom from anxiety as the definition of health. However, finding that is not possible in the general run of life, people have assumed that the quickest way to achieve the freedom is through alcohol and tranquilizing drugs. Furthermore, if we did achieve freedom from all anxiety, we would find ourselves robbed of the most constructive stimulant for life and for simple survival. After many a therapeutic hour which I would call successful, the client leaves with more anxiety than one had when one came in; only now the anxiety is conscious rather than unconscious, constructive rather than destructive. The definition of mental healthy needs to be changed to living without paralyzing anxiety, but living with normal anxiety as a stimulant to a vital existence, as a source of energy, and as life enhancing. Is adjustment the purpose of therapy—that is, should therapy help people adjust to their society? Many people wonder who the psychotic is—the persons to whom the title is given or the society itself? Is the purpose of the therapist to give people relief and comfort? If so, this can also be done more efficiently and economically by drugs. Is the purpose of the therapist to help people to be happy? Happy in a World in which unemployment and inflation burgeon at the same time? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Such happiness can be purchased only at the price of repressing and denying too many of the facts of life, a denial that works directly against what most of us believe is the optimum state of mental health. I propose that the purpose of the psychotherapy is to set people free. Free, as far as possible, from symptoms, whether they be psychosomatic symptoms like ulcers or psychological symptoms like acute shyness. Free from compulsions, again as far as possible, to be workaholics, compulsions to repeat self-defeating habits they have learned in early childhood, or compulsions perpetually to choose partners of the opposite gender who cause continual unhappiness and continual punishment. However, most of all, I believe that the therapist’s function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities. A psychological problem, I have pointed out elsewhere, is like fever; it indicates that something is wrong with the structure of the person and that struggles is going on for survival. This, in turn, is a proof to us that some other way of behaving is possible. Our old way of thinking—that problems are to be gotten rid of as soon as possible—overlooks the most important thing of all: that problems are a normal aspect of living and are basic to human creativity. This is true whether one is constructing things or reconstructing oneself. Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

People rightly come to the therapist because they have become inwardly enslaved and they yearn to be set free. The crucial question is: how is that freedom to be attained? Surely not by a miraculous charming away of all conflicts. The soul that is prevented by circumstances from feeling anything of the beauty of the World, even confusedly, even through what is false, is invaded to its very center by a kind of horror. If you want to know the purpose of life, read Acts 17.2: “God made man [and women] to the end that one should seek the Lord.” It comes to this: Are we to worship mortals or God? Life offers mortals a variety of meanings, but in the end one meaning comes to the top of all the others and that is the meaning which shall reveal the truth about one’s relation to God. When one sees life whole and therefore sees it right, one will understand why Jesus declared, “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and why, if one is to insist upon any single renovation in human life, it must be its own self-spiritualization. If one is to put emphasis anywhere, it must be upon the rediscovery of the divine purpose of one’s Earthly life. If mortals only knew how glorious, how rich, how satisfying this inner life really is, they would not hesitate for a moment to forsake all those things which car their way to it. “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the Earth shall see the salvation of God,” reports 2 Nephi 16.20. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16